CHAPTER VIII
About the time that the three in the Chelsea flat were leave-taking, a stream of women-clerks in the long passages of the General Post Office proclaimed that pressure of work had again meant “overtime” to these energetic City-workers.
In consequence, there was a lack of elasticity in the many passing feet, and the suggestion of a tired silence in the cloak-room; for though the girls hastened to get away from the dreary monotony of the huge building, they were, many of them, too tired to depart as joyfully as was their wont.
Yet most of them, behind the tiredness, looked out upon the world with clear, capable eyes, and strong, self-reliant faces, that spoke well for the spirit of their set. Up there in the big office-rooms, year in year out, these refined, well-educated women kept ledgers and accounts and did the general office work of the Civil Service with a precision and neatness and correctness equal to the work of any men, and invariably to the astonishment of any interested visitor who was permitted to inquire into the system.
Yet the majority of their salaries ranged from £90 a year to £210, and they were obliged to pas an examination of no mean stamp to attain a post. Small wonder that many of them, having to help support others as well as keep themselves, had the delicate, listless, anaemic appearance of underfed women badly in need of fresh air, good food, and wholesome exercise.
The policy of Great Britain towards her women workers is surely one of the greatest contradictions of our enlightened age. Even putting aside the vexed question of suffragism, how little has she ever done to try and cope with the needs of working womanhood?
In some Government departments, as, for instance, the Army Clothing Department, it is a known fact that the women are actually sweated; and that in the higher branches, employing gentlewomen, they pay them the lowest possible wage, not because the work is ill-done, but because, owing to present conditions, plenty of gentlewomen are found to accept the offer.
Many of these gentlewomen lose their health in their struggle to obtain good food, decent lodging, and a neat appearance on Government salaries, knowing full well that the moment they fall out of the ranks numbers will be waiting to fill their places.
And in the meantime enlightened authors and politicians write articles, and make speeches, holding forth upon the charm and beauty of the Home Woman, and drawing unflattering comparisons between her and the worker.
Comfortable elderly gentlemen, who have had successful careers and can now afford to dine unwisely every night, and keep their daughters in well-dressed indolence, self-satisfied, self-aggrandising, self-advertising young politicians, who, having obtained an attentive public, delight to cant about the rights of the citizen and the good of the Empire, clever, intuitive, charming novelists, who apparently possess an unaccountable vein of dense non-comprehension on some points—all harp upon this theme of the Home Woman, and the Home Sphere, and the infinite superiority, in their own lordly eyes, of the gentle, domesticated scion of the family hearth.