grades of work with proportionately increased pay.

Meanwhile, married women, less handicapped than these, are
experimenting on their own account, and are helping to place the work
of wives as wage-earners on a more settled basis. The wife of the
workingman who has no children, and who lives in a city finds she has
not enough to do in the little flat which is their home. The stove
in winter needs little attention; there is not enough cooking and
cleaning to fill up her time, and as for sewing she can buy most of
their clothing cheaper than she can make it. But any little money she
can earn will come in useful; so she tries for some kind of work,
part-time work, if she can find it. In every big city there are
hundreds of young married women who take half-time jobs in our
department stores or who help to staff the lunch-rooms or wash up or
carry trays, or act as cashiers in our innumerable restaurants. As
half-day girls such waitresses earn their three or four dollars a
week, besides getting their lunch. Very frequently they do not admit
to their fellow-workers that they are married, for the single girl
with her own hard struggle on her hands is apt to resent such
competition. A worker who is in a position to accept voluntarily a
half-time job of this sort is one who must have some other means of
meeting part of her living expenses. A home in the background is such
an aid. The increasingly large number of part-time workers, lessen,
the others reckon, the number of jobs to be had by the ones that have
to work all day, and may tend also to lower wages, since any partly
subsidized worker can afford to take less than the girl who has to
support herself out of her earnings. The latter has never heard of
parasitic trades, and yet in her heart she knows there is something
not quite right here, something that she blindly feels she would like
to put an end to.

She is quite right in resisting any lowering of wages, but she will
have to accept this inroad into the trades of these exceptionally
placed married women. She will have to throw her efforts into another
channel, using organization to raise the position of working-women
generally into dignified industrial independence. For this still
limited number of half-time married women workers are but the leaf on
the stream, showing the direction events are taking. As specialization
goes on, as the domestic industries are more and more taken out of our
homes, as the gifted and trai