e upon questions of taxation is practically the first
shred of suffrage which those of any Southern State have secured, and
they have used it well. They deserve another scrap, and I think they
will get it before some of us do who have been asking for half a
century."

Miss Gail Laughlin, a graduate of Wellesley and of the Law Department
of Cornell University, discussed Conditions of the Wage-Earning Women
of Our Country, saying in part:

"Wage-earner" among women is used in a broad sense. All women
receiving money payment for work are proud to be called
wage-earners, because wage-earning means economic independence.
The census of 1890 reports nearly 400 occupations open to women,
and nearly 4,000,000 women engaged in them. But government
reports show the average wages of women in large cities to be
from $3.83 to $6.91 per week, and the general average to be from
$5.00 to $6.68. In all lines women are paid less than men for the
same grade of work, and they are often compelled to toil under
needlessly dangerous and unsanitary conditions. If the people of
this country want to advance civilization, they have no need to
go to the islands of the Pacific to do it.

How are these evils to be remedied? By organization, suffrage,
co-operation among women, and above all, the inculcation of the
principle that a woman is an individual, with a right to choose
her work, and with other rights equal with man. Our law-makers
control the sanitary conditions and pay of teachers. Here is work
for the women who have "all the rights they want." When one of
these comfortably situated women was told of the need of the
ballot for working women, she held up her finger, showing the
wedding ring on it, and said, "I have all the rights I want." The
next time that I read the parable of the man who fell among
thieves and was succored by the good Samaritan, methought I could
see that woman with the wedding ring on her finger, passing by on
the other side.

It is said that every woman who earns her living crowds a man
out. That argument is as old as the trade guilds of the
thirteenth century, which tried to exclude women. The Rev. Samuel
G. Smith of St. Paul, who has recently declared against women in
wage-earning occupations, stands to-day just where they did seven
hundred years ago....[122]