At present the various woman's organizations of the United States as well as of other countries aim at the following issues:
1. To limit the working day for women to eight hours.
2. To demand for women equal pay with men for equal work.
3. To establish for all the various occupations minimum wage scales, sufficient to grant all women workers an adequate living.
4. To secure safe and sanitary working conditions, and clinics for the treatment of diseases resulting from certain industrial occupations.
5. To secure industrial insurance laws.
6. To secure for all women full citizenship with the right to vote in all municipal and national elections.
As woman's future position will depend on the realization of these demands, their discussion is of utmost importance.
THE MOVEMENT FOR AN EIGHT-HOUR DAY.
As has been shown in a former chapter, innumerable valuable lives of workmen, women and, in former years, children have been sacrificed through the unreasonable exploitation by employers, who in their greed for profits had lost all consideration for the welfare of their fellowmen. Hundreds of thousands of laborers have been slowly worked to death as no sufficient amount of time for recuperation was granted them.
The only possible excuse for such incredible waste of human lives is that neither the employers nor the law-makers of those bygone days realized that the physical and mental abilities of the large laboring classes belong to the resources of a nation just as truly as do the water-power, the soil, the mineral deposits, the forests, and other natural means. Moreover, nobody was aware of the fact that it is one of the supreme duties of a wise government to guard these resources, so fundamentally necessary to the prosperity of a nation, from unscrupulous exploitation and possible destruction.
The danger of the reckless exploitation of laborers, especially of women workers, has increased considerably with the improvement of many machines, the greater speed and output of which demand far greater attention and strain than before on the part of the men or women operating them.
This is what Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War, said in 1917 at the annual meeting of the National Consumers' League:
"Machinery has given us one great delusion. People
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