Women Wage-Earners | Page 5

treats by correspondence. A merchant sits in his counting-room, and by a few letters and forms transports and distributes the subsistence of a whole city from continent to continent. In other cases, as the shopkeeper, the ebb and flow of passing multitudes supplies the want of locomotion for him. This is a true market. Here competition acts rapidly, fully, simply, fairly. It is totally otherwise with a day laborer who has no commodity to sell. He must himself be present at every market, which means costly, personal locomotion. He cannot correspond with his employer; he cannot send a sample of his strength, nor do employers knock at his cottage door."
It is plain, then, that many causes are at work to depress the wages even of skilled workers, far more than can be enumerated here. If this is true for men, how much more strongly can limitations be stated for women, as we ask, "Why do not women receive a better wage?" Many of the reasons are historical, and must be considered in their origin and growth. Taking her as worker to-day, precisely the same general causes are in operation that govern the wages of men, with the added disability of sex, always in the way of equal mobility of labor.
Wherever for any reason there is immobility of labor, there is always lowering of the wage rate. The trades and general industries for which women are suited are highly localized. They focus in the cities and large towns, and women must seek them there. Great manufactories drain the surrounding country; yet even with these opportunities an analysis of the industrial statistics of the United States by General Walker showed that the women workers of the country made up but seven per cent of the entire population. Eagerly as they seek work, it is far more difficult for them to obtain it than for men. They require to be much more mobile and active in their move toward the labor market, yet are disabled by timidity, by physical weakness, and by their liability to insult or outrage arising from the fact of sex. Men who would secure a place tramp from town to town, from street to street, or shop to shop, persisting through all rebuffs, till their end is accomplished. They go into suspicious and doubtful localities, encounter strangers, and sleep among casual companions. In this fashion they relieve the pressure at congested points, and keep the mass fluid.
For women, save in the slight degree included in the country girl's journey to town or city where cotton or woollen mills offer an opening for work, this course is impossible. Ignorant, fearful, poor, and unprotected, the lions in her way are these very facts. Added to this natural disqualification, comes another,--in the lack of sympathy for her needs, and in the prejudice which hedges about all her movements. In every trade she has sought to enter, men have barred the way. In a speech made before the House of Commons in 1873, Henry Fawcett drew attention to the persistent resistance of men to any admission of women on the same terms with themselves. He said:--
"We cannot forget that some years ago certain trade-unionists in the potteries imperatively insisted that a certain rest for the arm which they found almost essential to their work should not be used by women engaged in the same employment. Not long since, the London tailors, when on a strike, having never admitted a woman to their union, attempted to coerce women from availing themselves of the remunerative employment which was offered them in consequence of the strike. But this jealousy of woman's labor has not been entirely confined to workmen. The same feeling has extended itself through every class of society. Last autumn a large number of post-office clerks objected to the employment of women in the Post-Office."
Driven by want, they had pressed into agricultural labor as well, and found equal opposition there also. Mr. Fawcett in the same speech calls attention to the fact of the non-admission of women to the Agricultural Laborers' Union, on the ground that "the agricultural laborers of the country do not wish to recognize the labor of women."
There is more or less reason for such feeling. It arises in part from the newness of the occasion, since in the story of labor as a whole, soon to be considered by us in detail, it is only the last fifty years that have seen women taking an active part. We have already seen that mobility of labor is one of the first essentials, and that women are far more limited in this respect than men.
This brings us to the final question,--Why do men receive a larger wage than women? The conditions already outlined are in part responsible, but with them is bound