again a Malthusian League contributor. You see, it's her own money now, not her husband's.
Up in the north of England there is a factory town where the largest works in November, 1914, hung out a notice that any women who before their marriage had been employed there would be taken back. Mrs. Webber was. The regular weekly wage is so much better than the occasional charing which was all that she had been able to get to supplement her husband's frequent unemployment. Her children are among those who have been since the war transferred at school from the free list to the paid dinners. Before the war there were 11,000 children in this town to be supplied with free school dinners. Now since their mothers work outside the home, this figure has dropped to 2,370. Mrs. Webber also is one of those women who have been shopping. All over Europe they have been doing it. From Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London, delighted shop keepers report that women who never had money before are spending it. The curate in the parish to which Mrs. Webber belongs—Mrs. Webber used to char for his wife, but is no longer available—told me that these working classes have gone perfectly mad about money and the reckless expenditure of it. And I asked him how and he said: "Why cheese, they all of them have it for supper now. And the woman in that house, the third from the end of the row," he pointed it outfrom his study window, "has a fur coat." It was Mrs. Webber's house the curate mentioned.
