difficulty, any need of financial help, the appeal, in the first instance, is nearly always made to those women of the family who are understood to be in a position to respond to it; it is tacitly assumed that they must be the first to suffer and sacrifice themselves, the men of the family being appealed to only when the women are unable or unwilling to meet the demand. My experience may be unusual, but I have met very few working-women of any class who, earning a decent livelihood at their trade or profession, were not called upon to share their livelihood with others.
It is not, therefore, on the ground that she has no one but herself to support that a woman is almost invariably paid at a rate far lower than the wage which would be given to a man for the performance of the same work. A good many causes have combined to bring about the sweating of women customary in most, if not all, departments of the labour market; but it seems to me that not the least of those causes is the long-established usage of regarding the work of a wife in the home as valueless from the economic point of view—a thing to be paid
