Henrietta Boardman, “somewhere in England” has arrived at one of the highest skilled operations in munitions, tool-tempering. She sits before a Bunsen burner and holds the tool in the flame while it turns all beautiful tints, straw colour, purple, blue or red. She must be able to distinguish just the right shade for its perfection. She does it so well that all the tool-fitters in the shop now have the habit of bringing to her, in preference to any other workman, the tools they want tempered. Because hers last longer! There sits next to her a skilled tool-temperer who is a member of the Engineers’ Trade Union and the tools that he tempers will last for three-quarters of an hour: they are considered good by the trade if they last three-quarters of an hour. But the tools that Henrietta Boardman tempers are lasting sometimes all night!
“It’s curious,” the foreman directing my attention to Henrietta Boardman’s work commented. “Great colour sense a woman seems to have. Nothing like it in men. Lots of ’em are even colour blind.”
“So?” I replied. “Then you must be putting in a great many women for tool-tempering.”
“Hush!” he answered, raising a warning finger. And then he smiled. “She’s the first woman tool-temperer in England. So far there’s only one other. You see, it’s a highly technical operation,” he went on to explain. “By the ‘diluting’ of labour scheme we aim to keep women in unskilled processes. We admit them to skilled processes only when it’s unavoidable.”
Now the workshop in which we stood, C-F-5, is the tool-room, confined to highly skilled processes. The employés, he told me, number 1000 and of these about 34 are women.
There you have an excellent comparative view of the outlook for women in the most desirable occupations. The way, it is true, is still a little steep and difficult. But with my eyes on Henrietta Boardman’s bright flame, I saw that in making over industry they at least have set the ladder up: it goes all the way up! And they’ve made room at the top! Every week of this ghastly war, there is more and more room made at the top for women! It was in November, 1916, that an English manufacturer made the statement: “Given two more years of war and we can build a battleship from keel to aërial in all its complex detail and ready for trial, entirely by woman labour.”
Then what will become of the labour of men? That skilled workman, cap in hand, going down the steps of the Government House, met Gabrielle Duchene coming up. At least her message to the Government has been carried right to the War Office by the feminists in all lands. In England, after Mrs. Pankhurst’s great triumphal procession, little Sylvia Pankhurst, feminist, led another which served as it were as a postscript to the first: it is in a postscript, you know, that a woman always put the really important thing she has to say. On the banner that Sylvia carried in London’s East End was inscribed the feminist message: “We are willing to work for a fair wage!”
Gabrielle Duchene stopped the skilled workman and showed him the message, which enunciates the demand: For equal work, equal pay. “It’s your only protection,” she urged. But he only grinned. And he pulled from his pocket a scrap of paper: “See,” he said, “my government agreement that woman’s admission into industry is for the duration of the war only.” And it is true, he has that agreement. It is the basis on which all over the world the bargain was made: “Teach the woman how. It is a necessary but temporary expedient. When you return from the front, you shall have the job back. And the woman will go home again.” But will she?
The message that went up to the Government House asking equal pay for equal work is one of the most significant measures in the new woman movement. Ever since women began to be in industry at all, the wage envelope for them has been very small, as lady-like an affair as an early Victorian pocket handkerchief—and just about as practical. Remarks of protest on the part of the recipient were customarily met with irritation or derision: Wages? Why, woman, what would you want with more wages anyhow—to buy a new ribbon to put on your hat? Now a man, of course, must have all the wages that he can get: he has to have them to buy the children’s shoes and to pay the grocery bill and the coal bill and to support a wife who keeps his house and darns his socks. And, even if he has to have them to buy a cigar or a drink? Oh, don’t ask foolish questions! A man has to have wages to meet all of his expenses, a large part of which is Woman. Now run along and be a good little girl!
But the new woman in industry can’t be dismissed so easily as that. Especially a feminist in khaki can’t. And she was respectfully saluting Government and begging to inquire if women were doing men’s work so well as Government had said they were, when would women be getting men’s pay?