steals the hours she might spend in rest, recreation, and study. Her wish to look attractive induces her to adopt the prevailing modes, to distort her body, and to wear skirts now narrow, now full, now long, now short. A woman's clothes carry a potential danger. They seldom are designed to give her full use of her limbs. Crossing the crowded street, getting on and off street cars, walking on an icy pavement, she runs a greater risk of accident than the man. To such clothes many of the physical ills of women may be traced. The heritage of years of wrong living and lack of physical training, the nervous strain of modern life, the double burden of work which some women must carry, and sexual excesses are likewise reasons for the high morbidity rate of women.

Sickness. In a study of the factory workers in New York in 1919 the sickness rate was 50 per cent higher for women than for men. There were 101 cases of sickness per 1,000 men and 154 per 1,000 women. Each man lost nine-tenths working days, each woman lost one and eight-tenths.12 Doctors recognize the lower health standards of women. A large part of their practice is among females. Yet little is done to remedy this condition. The sex which needs physical culture the most does not have the same incentive or the same opportunities for it. Women are handicapped in economic life by discriminations in wages, in opportunity for advancement, and in training. If engaged in home occupations, the work for those women who have a family and cannot afford outside help is more confining, laborious, and requires longer hours than the work of laboring men. The average married woman who is employed outside the home not only has her outside occupations but housework as well, yet she is more delicate and less fit to bear these burdens than the man.

Marriage. Marriage means for the majority of women the relinquishment of their careers. Development in business or profession is arrested in embryo. The man can have wife, family, calling. The woman must ordinarily make a choice. The man can select his occupation from a variety of different employments; the average married woman seldom has a selection. She must engage in a certain type of work. For this she may have no aptitude. She may have spent time and money in preparation for a profession, when the hard question-love or a career-is presented. In choosing love, her talents are lost to the world in work which a lesser intelligence could do.

In marriage the woman has no economic independence. Her 12 "Women Who Work," Bulletin No. 110, prepared under the direction of the Industrial Commissioner, New York, p. 34.

ECONOMIC DEPENDENCE

198

husband is not obliged to share his income equally with her. Except for the necessaries of life, which the law requires him to provide in accordance with his social position, the wife is dependent on his good will. No matter what her success as wife, mother, housekeeper, it does not bring her added money unless her husband is equally successful in his occupation and is a generous provider. If instead he is mediocre or a failure, the woman, a success in her work, must wear the habiliments of poverty, must perhaps have her own efforts spoiled by her husband's impotence. It is equally true that an inefficient wife can be a great detriment to her husband, but his success is seldom as dependent on hers as is hers on him.

Effect of Husband's Death. The death of the husband ends the wife's job. Unless he has made ample provision, which comparatively few men are able to do, charity alone will permit her to continue in her former occupation of homemaker. In lower and upper class families the blow is not as great as it is in middle class families. In the one the amount received from charity plus the earnings of the mother, who may have been a regular contributor to the family budget, enables the family to proceed in its customary course. In the other, the father usually leaves adequate funds for the family maintenance. In middle class families the loss of the father is a dire emotional and physical catastrophe affecting vitally the family standards and changing the character of the family life. The mother hesitates to apply to charity or relatives. The former would give an amount inadequate for the family needs. The latter might subject the little group to an often unbearable dependence. Her best recourse is outside work, yet sometimes she is totally unfitted by early training to occupy any position. Seldom can she hope, as unskilled worker, to earn a salary commensurate with her deceased husband's. If she has been educated in youth for economic life, the long period of dependence and changed employment has sapped her former skill. The period which might have marked her industrial growth has been devoted to unskilled work. She must often accept a job on the lowest rung of the economic ladder or enter a blindalley occupation. Her success as homekeeper, wife, or mother profits her little when that person for whom her efforts have been made is dead, and her children are too young to be of practical assistance. The educated middle class woman who has worked outside the home after the first period of her children's lives has an advantage over the homekeeper. Though her husband's death would bring great sorrow, the family could pursue its accus

tomed way. The wife's income would still be sufficient to maintain the family in reasonable comfort. The mother would be employed in work of her own choosing and would probably have attained a measure of success in it.

Middle-aged Women. Economic independence would free the wife of a man of modest means from the evils of poverty and upheaval which now attend the husband's death. It would place the successful woman of later middle life in the category of the successful man. He is in his prime, at the peak of his success. As president, senator, judge, lawyer, doctor, trader, business man, he still has years of achievement ahead. But the woman's duties as mother are practically over. If her husband has been prosperous, household labor is at an end. Society, charity, study, or travel may occupy a portion of her time; but they do not furnish the definite aim which most human beings need as an incentive to attainment. If her husband is dead and has not left her a livelihood, she must look to her children or to relatives for support. This may render her pitifully dependent with little to occupy hand or brain but odd tasks about the house. Only the very exceptional woman of this age, particularly if the greater part of her life has been spent in the shelter of the home, has the courage, ability, or opportunity to commence an outside career.

Advantages of Present Customs Accompanying Marriage. The present customs accompanying marriage ordinarily render the woman practically dependent on another person's kindness and generosity. The married woman experiences legal discriminations which give the husband added power. The one occupation in which she does engage tends to decrease in importance as the years go by. It is largely mechanical work which does not stimulate the intellect. On the other hand, both sexes enjoy through marriage-love, companionship, family, and home life. Some women like housework and would elect that occupation were they given a choice. Others would prefer the care of children, either their own or another's, to any calling. These women may be engaged in much less desirable work when marriage offers them their opportunity. Through marriage they may advance further than their own abilities would warrant, may secure the comforts and luxuries of life by the labor of another, may be spared many of its hardships and sufferings, be freed of all necessity to work with leisure for whatever pursuit they fancy. Through their husband, they may exert a wide influence and attain social prominence. Regardless of legal discriminations, of economic dependence, they may rule the household and control the finances. There

are many advantages in woman's present position, but they are often unearned and precarious. They may vanish when they seem most secure. If a life of leisure may be termed an advantage, a comparatively small group of women secure this through marriage. In common phraseology, a wife is "supported" by her husband; but the working wife and mother is actually a producer, a producer of young lives, of edible food, of wearing apparel, of clean living conditions. Her husband does not "support" her. She is entitled to one-half the family income, though she has no guarantee that she will receive it except her husband's goodwill.

Marriage asks a sacrifice of both sexes. The right-minded man wants his wife to share equally with him. She is his partner. He gives up a portion of his freedom and a part of his earnings when he enters the married state. Sometimes, in addition to his own work, he helps his wife in the home. The poor man with a young family has almost as limited a choice of occupation as his wife, for he cannot change his position at will when he has others dependent on him. Marriage demands self-denial of both man and woman, but the woman ordinarily loses the greater measure of independence and self-determination.

XIV

THE DISCRIMINATIONS WOMEN
ENCOUNTER IN THE ECONOMIC

WORLD

"WOMAN'S PLACE IS IN THE HOME"

The fact that the majority of women marry and retire from active business, professional, or industrial life has been a strong influence in determining their position in the outside world. It explains in part the subordinate place occupied by most women workers and the greater interest shown in the training and promotion of men workers. It is often used as an argument to support sex discriminations and to account for abridged opportunities and lower wages. Yet while the majority of women relinquish outside work for home work, there are a minority who spend their lives in earning a living. For some years from one-fifth to one-fourth of the population gainfully employed have been women. They work outside the home, sometimes from necessity, sometimes from choice. Did figures exist showing the number of women who are actually workers and the proportion they form of the total body of workers, the one-fifth to one-fourth might reasonably be expected to reach approximately one-half.1

Women have always borne their share of the world's work. Whether at home or in the world, they have contributed to the advancement and production of the community in which they live. Few have been able or wished to live their lives in idleness. If this is true, the justice of limiting the nature of and opportunity for employment of a large part of the human race is questionable. Yet this is what society does when it insists that "woman's place is in the home." From the practical application of this little phrase many of the sex discriminations in industry

1 The women who exchange economic life for home life do not ordinarily enter a career of idleness. They merely relinquish gainful outside employment for household labor, an occupation not incorporated in the census list of gainful employments.