The community must make use of various agencies in bringing about the proper relations between women and their work. It may use legislation, thereby securing, for example, factory inspectors to improve the sanitary and moral conditions in the places where women and girls are employed. It may use the school, the library, and various civic improvement forces to inform both girls and their parents as to conditions under which girls should work. It may employ vocational guides to make proper connections between women and their work.
For all these agencies to do satisfactory work, the first requisite is knowledge of conditions. This means skillful work upon a vast and rapidly increasing body of facts, and wide dissemination of the results of such work.
by Underwood & Underwood
Unemployed utilizing their spare time to make themselves more efficient. The community may make use of the schools for such purposes
We may not stop here to consider what legislatures have done and are doing to improve conditions, other than to mention that the number of hours that women may work is restricted in some states, as is night work, and that a minimum wage is required in some.
Our question, however, is not so much what is forbidden women in the way of work, as what women and girls will choose to do of the work which is not forbidden. Facts as to what women are doing concern us mainly as material from which to deduce information of value to the girls who have not yet chosen.
A serious obstacle to wise choice on the part of young girls who are pushing into industrial occupations is the uncertainty of their continuing as workers outside the home. The average length of the girl's industrial life is computed to be only about five years. She enters upon work at an age when it is often impossible to tell whether she will marry or remain single. She is usually unable to know whether or not she will desire to marry. The great majority of girls have therefore no stable conditions upon which to build a choice. The work girls choose and their instability in the work they enter upon are direct results of these unstable conditions. Many girls feel the need of little or no training, and apply for any work obtainable, merely because they anticipate that their industrial career will soon be over.
A government report on the condition of woman and girl wage-earners in the United States gives the following facts concerning 1,391 women working in stores:
| Average length of service | 5.17 years |
| Average wage: | |
| First year | $4.69 per week |
| Second year | 5.28 per week |
| Tenth year | 9.81 per week |