intendents are not paid at all
for overtime. The only reason, apparently, for the limitation is that
the salaries are so close that if shorthand-typists were paid for
more overtime than 15 hours they would be earning more than the
superintendents."

It seems impossible to tell as yet how the working of the National
Insurance Act will affect women clerks. The secretary of the
Information Bureau of the Woman's Institute says that, as far as she
knows, good offices continue to pay their clerks their salaries in
cases of illness, only making a deduction of the 7s. 6d. paid as
insurance money.

To sum up, there is urgent need for better organisation among clerks
and secretaries. They should be graded in some way, so that the
efficient who are out of work may easily be brought in touch with
employers. The societies reach only a small proportion of the
workers, many of whom do not even know of their existence. It must
be remembered that a difficulty in the way of men and women clerks
combining, is that women of good education, sometimes in possession of
degrees, find themselves in competition with men of an inferior social
class. A large proportion of the best secretaries are the daughters
of professional men. The average woman clerk is invariably a person of
better education and manners than the male clerk at the same salary.

In the next place, better sanitation and better working conditions
must be secured. Only last year, a firm employing hundreds of men and
a dozen women, had no separate lavatory for the women. It is to the
interest of the employer of women clerks to look after their health
and to provide rest rooms. Anti-feminists are positive as to women's
"inferior physique," but their practice as employers is too often
inconsistent with their opinions.

Most important of all, women clerks and secretaries want more scope.
After ten years of clerking and secretarying they find that they are
up against a dead wall. There is no prospect of advancement, and no
call on their initiative. In private secretarial work this is not
always the fault of the employer; it is often inherent in the nature
of the work. Unless the secretary has, say, literary or journalistic
ability and develops in that way, she is worth little more to her
chief, if he is a literary man, after fifteen years than she was at
the end of ten. There may be progress from a less desirable to a more
desirable post, but there can be no advancement in the wor