And I know the world is going to be very much surprised about it. But I think that Mr. Black, when he returns from the front, will prefer that she should. For Mr. Black is going to get a better dinner that way! The industrial canteen can cook better and cheaper for him and Mrs. Black than she could at home. She can’t make plum pudding in the home, as they can at the canteen for 2d. a portion. The chef who is buying for 1500 people gets rates that she never could for seven from the huckster and the fish-monger and the rest. Besides, Mrs. Black never had any special training for cooking, as she now has for engineering. In the shop she has learned to do one thing very well indeed. In her home there wasn’t any one thing she ever had learned to do very well. And she worked ineffectually and inefficiently at several highly skilled occupations: child rearing and sewing and cooking and baking and laundry work and, occasionally, nursing. Isn’t it remarkable at any stage of the world’s evolution, that woman should have been expected to carry a schedule like that? You never found Mr. Black attempting to be a carpenter and a tailor and a plumber and a gardener and a whole lot of other useful trades all in one. No, Mr. Black’s rule always was, stick to one trade. Jack-of-all-trades! Why, everybody knows that he could have been master of none!
And Mrs. Black wasn’t. Now, if after the war, she prefers to stay in engineering or some other trade, why should Mr. Black worry? The lady will pay for her own dinner and other things besides. She can send the wash to the laundry, and the baby will be at the crèche for the day, and the children will have dinner at school. And at night, the family will have supper together, which Mr. and Mrs. Black on their way home from the factory can bring from the communal kitchen. Governments already have started the fire in the new cookstove in the communal kitchen which England has set up in London and Germany in Berlin, because Ministries of Food have decided food can be more scientifically and efficiently cooked there than in the homes of the working people.
THE NEW IMPROVED HOME
Oh, can there be any one who would still wish to take away the new wage envelope? Think what it’s already done for the working class home! Children with shoes on their feet, you know. Women in England are wearing fur coats. Women in France who once wore sabots are now wearing shoes for which they have paid 40 francs, which is $8 a pair. In every warring country working women are shopping, shopping, shopping, as they never shopped before. O yes, it’s thrift and prudence and all that’s proper, to put your earnings in war bonds instead. The rainy day, you know, that’s ahead. And of course one must, for patriotism’s sake, put some of it in war bonds, but not quite all. You see, when there have been almost all rainy days behind and you’ve always wanted something you couldn’t have? Well, Mrs. Black thinks you might as well live in the sunshine and have it, now you can.
That’s the way affluence seems to have happened to the working class home all over Europe. Prosperity is fairly gilding over every district in which a munitions plant has arisen. And, oh, well, what if it is gilt? Gilt’s good for little cheerless dingy houses. Do you know that, next to the war trades, the most flourishing trade in all Europe to-day is the cheap jewelry trade? There are places in London’s East End where every other shop or two has come to be a jeweller’s shop, with the windows hung splendidly with all the shining trinkets that bring a shining light to women’s eyes.
Mr. Black was home on leave a while ago. He stopped the first thing at the jeweller’s round the corner in Hardwick Row and bought the gold chain and the locket Mrs. Black’s wearing now with his picture in it. Do you know, it was so long since he’d given his wife a present, not since their courting days, that he’d forgotten how? He was a lot more awkward about it than he is about facing a fusillade of German gun-fire. The perspiration just stood out on his forehead as he laid the little package on the kitchen table and said, “Mary, here’s something I thought you might like.”
There was a note in his voice by which she knew it wasn’t bloaters from the fish-shop over the way. But she no more expected what it really was than she hoped for an angel to lean out of the windows of the sky and say, “Mary Black, here’s a gold crown for you.” The paper crackled in the silent room while she untied the string. The chain just shimmered once through her fingers. Her lips trembled. With a little cry, “O Jim!” she turned to lay her head in the old forgotten place on his shoulder. And there she sobbed out all the bitterness of seven years’ married hardship and privation with the bearing and rearing of five children in three rooms on 22 shillings a week.
Oh, there are things that gold chains are good for more than show. The famous uses of adversity are various. But they have been much oversung. And after all, God in his heaven perhaps knows that even a war may be worth while, if it’s the only way. Two wage envelopes are better than one. The new woman with the old love revived in her heart, I’m sure, won’t be so often cross and she won’t have to slap the children so much as she did. Just think of the new home that the man at the front’s coming back to! Mrs. Black’s saving now for a piano!
Mrs. Lewis, are you ready? The work-whistle calls you. My morning paper to-day advertises for a New York department store: “To patriotic women seeking practical means of expressing their earnestness: During the coming season, women of intelligence will have the greatest opportunity that was ever offered them to become producing factors on the nation’s industrial balance sheet. Whether they need to work or not, they should work, because it will make them happier and give them a sense of satisfaction as nothing else in the world can under present circumstances. We can give many women work to do to occupy part of their time. This part-time work affords a woman, if she has home duties, plenty of leisure for her own housework—she need not leave her home in the morning until after the man of the house goes. She may return in the evening before he does—she will have more money for her home or for herself and be an independent producing factor in her community, helping herself, her home, and in this way her country in a time when this kind of help is most needed.”
An American woman to-day will find opportunities for work on every hand. The Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company has 1000 women on the pay roll. At McKee’s Rocks, Pa., the Pressed Steel Car Company has 100 girls building artillery cars for use on the French front. The Farrell plant of the American Sheet & Tin-plate Company at Sharon, Pa., is employing women at $4.50 a day. A munitions factory at Dayton, Ohio, has 5000 women working at men’s pay. The Detroit Taxicab and Transfer Company have women operating their electric taxicabs at the wages formerly paid to men. The United Cigar Stores Company is offering women salesmen men’s wages. At the July, 1917, Lumbermen’s Convention at Memphis, Tenn., the Southern Pine Association by a unanimous vote decided that women employed in men’s places at the lumber camps should be paid the same salaries formerly paid to men.