and a cup of tea. Mrs. Black couldn't afford three rashers of bacon for breakfast!
The matter was investigated. The average wage for women in industry in England, it was found, had been 11 shillings a week: in the textile trade, before the war the best paid trade in the land, the weekly wage was 15 shillings 15 pence a week. And women wheeled shells in a munitions factory for 12 shillings a week, for which a man was paid 25 shillings.
But it began to be arithmetically clear all around that it wasn't wise for a woman in England or France or anywhere else to be working for too little pay to buy a good breakfast! That reliable organ of public opinion, The Times, announced September 25, 1916: "Proper meals for the workers is, indeed, an indispensable condition for the maintenance of output on which our righting forces depend, not only for victory, but for their very lives."
What should a woman do with wages to-day? Why, she has to have them to buy not only a proper breakfast, but to buy the children's shoes and to pay the grocery bill and the coal bill and the crèche or the maiden aunt who keeps her house. Even if she has to have them to buy a new ribbon for her hat why, she will go without her bacon to get it! What does a woman have to have wages for to-day? Oh, don't ask foolish questions. At last she has those mysterious expenses, even as a man!
I think that Lloyd George was the first man to see it. Great Britain led the way with the now famous Orders L-2, which has come to be known as the
