a few today, to accept at its face value the girl's own
argument: "What's the use of our joining the union? We'll be getting
married presently." It is much the same feeling, although unspoken,
that underlies the ordinary workingman's unwillingness to see women
enter his trade and his indifference to their status in the trade once
they have entered it. The man realizes that this rival of his is but a
temporary worker, and he often, too often, excuses himself tacitly,
if not in words, from making any effort to aid her in improving her
position or from using his influence and longer experience to secure
for her any sort of justice, forgetting that the argument, "She'll
soon get married" is a poor one at best, seeing that as soon as one
girl does marry her place will immediately be filled by another, as
young, as inexperienced as she had been, and as utterly in need of the
protection that experienced and permanent co-workers could give her.
The girl, although she guesses it not, is only too frequently made the
instrument of a terrible retribution; for the poor wage, which was
all that she in her individual helplessness was able to obtain for
herself, is used to lower the pay of the very man, who, had he stood
by her, might have helped her to a higher wage standard and at the
same time preserved his own.

Again, the probability of the girl marrying increases on all sides the
difficulties encountered in raising standards alike of work and of
wages. Bound up with direct payment are those indirect elements of
remuneration or deduction from remuneration covered by length of
working-hours and by sanitary conditions, since whatever saps the
girl's energy or undermines her health, whether overwork, foul air,
or unsafe or too heavy or overspeeded machinery, forms an actual
deduction from her true wages, besides being a serious deduction from
the wealth-store, the stock of well-being, of the community.

Up till comparatively recent times the particular difficulties I
have been enumerating did not exist, since, under the system of home
industries universal before the introduction of steam-power, there was
not the same economic competition between men and women, nor was there
this unnatural gap between the occupation of the woman during her
girlhood and afterwards in her married life. In the majority of cases,
indeed, she only continued to carry on under her husband's roof the
very trades which she had learned and practiced in the hom