Page:Women Wanted.djvu/169

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THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE
153

that every obstacle that used to be piled in your pathway has been so surreptitiously carted away overnight, that you would hardly believe it ever was there, lie all promised opportunities. Susan B. Anthony pioneered for them. Mrs. Pankhurst smashed windows for them. Mrs. Catt is even now politically campaigning for them. And you, Mrs. Lewis, are to enter in. What will happen to you when you've joined up with the new woman movement?

Let us look at the advance columns over on the other side. No one met them with: "Woman, back to your kitchen!" Or, "This is unscriptural and your habits of marriage and maternity will interfere with shop routine."

It was one of the most significant decisions of all time since the day of the Cave Woman, that morning when Mrs. Black got her aunt to come in to look after the children and, hanging up her gingham apron, walked out of the kitchen. Women were doing it all over Europe. They are to be counted now by the hundreds of thousands. Altogether we know that they number in the millions although we have not the exact returns from every country. By 1916 England had enrolled in industry 4,086,000 women and Germany 4,793,472 of whom 866,000 in England and 1,387,318 in Germany had never before been gainfully employed outside their own homes. France, Italy, Russia all have similar battalions. And the important fact is that these new