age of socialism if we were to give the millions of
wage-earning women to understand that we did not intend to let
them continue earning their own living, but proposed to compel
them to become dependent upon men. They price what little
independence they have, and they want more of it.

It would be equally fatal to our prospects of reaching the women
with the message of socialism if we were to give the married women
to understand that they must remain dependent upon men. It is one
of the most hopeful signs of the times that they are chafing under
the galling chains of dependence.

* * * * *

Far from shutting women out of the industries, socialism will do
just the opposite.

It will open up to every woman a full and free opportunity to earn
her own living and receive her full earnings.

This means the total cessation of marrying for a home.

The degree of irritation that so many men show when expressing
themselves on the subject of women in the trades is the measure of
their own sense of incompetence to handle it. The mingled apathy and
impatience with which numbers of union men listen to any proposal to
organize the girls with whom they work arises from the same mental
attitude. "These girls have come into our shop. We can't help it.
We didn't ask them. They should be at home. Let them take care of
themselves."

The inconsistency of such a view is seen when we consider that in the
cities at least an American father (let alone a foreign-born father)
is rarely found nowadays objecting to his own girls going out to work
for wages. He expects it, unless one or more are needed by their
mother at home to help with little ones or to assist in a small family
store or home business. He takes it as a matter of course that his
girls go to work as soon as they leave school, just as his boys do.
And yet the workman in a printing office, we will say, whose own
daughter is earning her living as a stenographer or teacher, will
resent the competition of women type-setters, and will both resent and
despise those daughters of poorer fathers, who have found their way
into the press or binding-rooms. Unionists or non-unionists, such men
ignore the fact that all these girls have just as much right to earn
an honest living at setting type, or folding or tipping and in so
doing to receive the support and protection of any organization there
is,