The teaching profession in Canada offers an excellent career to trained teachers from the Old Country. Magnificent primary, secondary, and normal schools are springing up like mushrooms everywhere, and it is impossible to create teachers fast enough to meet the needs. A trained girl teacher with a good recommendation will be greedily snapped up in scores of towns of any of the Provinces and will have a career before her infinitely more promising than is possible under the conditions of the Old Country.
As to married women accompanying their husbands, there is no reason why they should not add materially to the family income. A woman on the land is a most valuable asset. She can raise chickens, sell eggs, collect and sell cream, attend to the garden, do needlework and laundry work for the farmers and others, and in many other ways find occupation at high rates of pay. If there is a daughter or two capable of doing anything, they also can earn from 10s. to 20s. a week to add to the family exchequer.
Girls are employed in newspaper offices and other printing works as linotype operators. I was told that in some cities girls skilled in the manipulation of the linotype are earning from $20 to $25 a week. Altogether, there is no country in the world that so fully appreciates the value of women’s work and is so cheerfully prepared to pay for it as Canada.
One class of woman worker that Canada has no use for is the barmaid. The employment of women in drink shops is absolutely forbidden. It may be added that for a woman to enter a public-house in Canada is to write herself down as a pariah. No Canadian woman could enter a public-house without being regarded as outside the ranks of decent society. As a matter of fact, except perhaps in Vancouver and one or two other cosmopolitan ports, no woman does enter a public-house. There is less drunkenness, perhaps, in Canada than in any other country of the world, and the attitude of Canadians with regard to women and drink contributes undoubtedly towards the general sobriety of the country. In Ontario entire prohibition of the drink trade prevails in many towns under the Local Option Law. Public-houses are closed, as in Scotland, from Saturday to Monday. Most of the great hotels are run on temperance lines. Canada realises that its greatest asset is the working capacity, the alert intelligence, and the moral character of its people. It sets its face against drunkenness and other vices that depreciate the value of its human assets.
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO. LD., PRINTERS, LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.
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