rtance is the wasteful
way in which the health, the lives, and the capacity for future
motherhood of our young girls are squandered during the few brief
years they spend as human machines in our factories and stores. Youth,
joy and the possibility of future happiness lost forever, in order
that we may have cheap (or dear), waists or shoes or watches.

Further, since the young girl is the future mother of the race, it is
she who chooses the father of her children. Every condition, either
economic or social, whether of training or of environment, which in
any degree tends to limit her power of choice, or to narrow its range,
or to lower her standards of selection, works out in a national and
racial deprivation. And surely no one will deny that the degrading
industrial conditions under which such a large number of our young
girls live and work do all of these, do limit and narrow the range of
selection and do lower the standards of the working-girl in making her
marriage choice.

Give her fairer wages, shorten her hours of toil, let her have the
chance of a good time, of a happy girlhood, and an independent, normal
woman will be free to make a real choice of the best man. She will not
be tempted to passively accept any man who offers himself, just
in order to escape from a life of unbearable toil, monotony and
deprivation.

So far, women and girls, exploited themselves, have been used as an
instrument yet further to cheapen and exploit men. In this direction
things could hardly reach a lower level than they have done.

Now the national conscience has at length been touched regarding
women, and we venture to hope that in proportion as women have been
used to debase industrial standards, so in like degree as the nation
insists upon better treatment being accorded her, the results may so
react upon the whole field of industry that men too may be sharers in
the benefits.

But there is a mightier force at work, a force more significant
and more characteristic of our age than even the awakened civic
conscience, showing itself in just and humane legislation. That is the
spirit of independence expressed in many different forms, markedly in
the new desire and therefore in the new capacity for collective action
which women are discovering in themselves to a degree never known
before.

As regards wage-earning working-women, the two main channels through
which this new spirit is manifesting itself are first, their
increasing