Page:Women Wanted.djvu/199

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE
183

sometimes she stops for an hour and goes home to wash the children's faces."

But the feminist said: "Isn't it the output that counts?" And she spoke of the better work and the faster work than man that women were doing for two-thirds men's pay. See the girl drilling 1000 holes at 50 centimes an hour where a man once drilled 500 holes for 75 centimes an hour!

And about this time the skilled workman, discovering that the lady was getting a hearing, came breathlessly running back to interpolate that men had to be paid more because they knew more. Those women, for instance, who were "gauging" with such remarkable success knew only that one process, whereas the men knew the whole trade.

But the lady had only a woman's logic: "If I wish to buy a dozen clothespins," she insisted, "I don't care how much the person who makes the clothespins knows,whether his knowledge reaches to mathematics or Greek. A dozen clothespins just a dozen clothespins are to me. What I am concerned about is only the delivery of the dozen."

Well, anyhow, Government everywhere said it would think this matter over. Meanwhile the walls of Paris began to flame out with a great red and black poster that Gabrielle Duchene was putting up. It is some four feet long by three feet wide and at the top in large letters to be read a long way down the street, it insists: "A travail egal, salaire egal." And in every land the trained workman stopped to stare up at a lady like this at work in front of a bill-