Your vote and how to use it

by Gertrude Foster Brown

An eight-hour working-day has been given to men in many States and in many occupations, but in only a few of the Western States has it been given to women. After three or four years in most industries, young women begin to wear out, the speeding up and the strain put on their youth begin to tell, their capacity lessens, and their output diminishes. Although the effect of long hours and monotonous occupation is harder on them than it is on men, the protection of the law has been extended to them to a far less extent. In these new industries there is none. Women may work in them twelve hours a day and all night. The demand of some of the street railways is for a twelve-hour night for women conductors (with two hours off for supper). Elevator operators work twelve hours a day, in day and night shifts, and girls employed all night are subject to insult if not actual danger.

Since boys have been difficult to get, girls, including some under sixteen, have been delivering letters and packages in messenger service. The State law prohibits boys under twenty-one being employed as messengers at night, because of the dangers of contamination from the night life of a city. Under present conditions a girl employed as messenger has no protection, and may even be sent to houses of doubtful character.

The new industries for women also include manual work that has heretofore been considered too heavy for them. The high wages paid them, while lower than would have to be paid now to men for the same work, are still high enough to attract women from other occupations where wages have not had the same advance.

While there is an increasing demand that women shall be paid the same wages as a man would be paid for exactly the same work, the idea still prevails that it is only fair to pay men more than women because they have families to support, while women support only themselves. This is not true. On the backs of many women rests the sole support of aged parents, or of younger brothers and sisters. A large proportion of them give up all their earnings to the family needs.

It is no longer a question of the ability of women to do many kinds of work formerly held to be the exclusive province of men; but of the effect of her so doing on the future health and welfare of the race.

Women, like men, must work in order to live, but society and the State owe it to themselves, as a vital matter of self-protection, to safeguard that work, so that future generations shall not suffer from its effects.

The whir of machinery, the noise, the constant standing or the close bending over work, the meager wages, have been the conditions woman has had to meet for years in her struggle for a livelihood; to them are now added the dangers and excessive hours of these new occupations, with their further call on her strength and endurance.

These new industries for women should be included in the laws regulating the hours and condition of women’s work. Public messenger service is too dangerous for young girls to be employed in it.

If the eight-hour working-day is right for men, it is even more needed by women. Laws regulating factory conditions are of little value unless there is sufficient inspection to enforce them, and the number of inspectors employed is always inadequate. Women inspectors are needed for factories in which women are employed; but there are only four women factory inspectors in the entire State.

Several years ago the New York State Factory Investigating Commission made an exhaustive investigation of women’s wages, and found that women and girls were so underpaid as to endanger their health and productiveness. Since then the cost of living has advanced prodigiously, with no corresponding increase in wages, especially among young unorganized women.