EQUAL PAY IS COMING
And it was more than a “foolish question.” It was a disturbing interrogation. Government looked up surprised from its war orders and statistical investigations to answer: “Why, really, don’t you know, woman’s work isn’t the same as man’s. You see, we have made over the machines for her. And sometimes she stops for an hour and goes home to wash the children’s faces.”
But the feminist said: “Isn’t it the output that counts?” And she spoke of the better work and the faster work than man that women were doing for two-thirds men’s pay. See the girl drilling 1000 holes at 50 centimes an hour where a man once drilled 500 holes for 75 centimes an hour!
And about this time the skilled workman, discovering that the lady was getting a hearing, came breathlessly running back to interpolate that men had to be paid more because they knew more. Those women, for instance, who were “gauging” with such remarkable success knew only that one process, whereas the men knew the whole trade.
But the lady had only a woman’s logic: “If I wish to buy a dozen clothespins,” she insisted, “I don’t care how much the person who makes the clothespins knows, whether his knowledge reaches to mathematics or Greek. A dozen clothespins just a dozen clothespins are to me. What I am concerned about is only the delivery of the dozen.”
Well, anyhow, Government everywhere said it would think this matter over. Meanwhile the walls of Paris began to flame out with a great red and black poster that Gabrielle Duchene was putting up. It is some four feet long by three feet wide and at the top in large letters to be read a long way down the street, it insists: “A travail egal, salaire egal.” And in every land the trained workman stopped to stare up at a lady like this at work in front of a bill-board: “You fool,” she turned on him in scorn, “can’t you see now that it’s equal pay for equal work for men’s sakes?”
At last he began to. Mme. Duchene is the wife of a celebrated architect in Paris. As the chairman of the Labour section of the Conseil National des Femmes, she had pled ineffectually for equal pay for women’s sakes. When she cleverly changed the phrase “for men’s sakes” it had a new punch in it. The aroused Bourse de Travail formed the now world-known Comité Intersyndical d’Action contre l’Exploitation de la Femme to back the feminist demand. And organised labour in land after land has begun to sign up its endorsement. For the flaming poster points out in effect: If a woman can be had to drill 1000 holes at 50 centimes an hour, who will hire a man to drill 500 holes at 75 centimes an hour? That was the little sum the feminist set labour to work out the answer to.
And for the Government, there was Mrs. Black’s breakfast. If it takes a breakfast that includes three rashers of bacon to produce the maximum output of munitions for a day, how many munitions will be missing if you don’t get the bacon? Mrs. Black wasn’t getting the bacon. Welfare supervisors reported that while Mrs. Black ate her dinner with all its formulated calories at the canteen, she didn’t eat her breakfast there. In fact Mrs. Black didn’t seem to eat much breakfast anywhere. It wasn’t the habit of the British working class woman: She usually started work for the day on merely a piece of bread and a cup of tea. Mrs. Black couldn’t afford three rashers of bacon for breakfast!
The matter was investigated. The average wage for women in industry in England, it was found, had been 11 shillings a week: in the textile trade, before the war the best paid trade in the land, the weekly wage was 15 shillings 15 pence a week. And women wheeled shells in a munitions factory for 12 shillings a week, for which a man was paid 25 shillings.
But it began to be arithmetically clear all around that it wasn’t wise for a woman in England or France or anywhere else to be working for too little pay to buy a good breakfast! That reliable organ of public opinion, The Times, announced September 25, 1916: “Proper meals for the workers is, indeed, an indispensable condition for the maintenance of output on which our fighting forces depend, not only for victory, but for their very lives.”