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Updated: June 10, 2025
Emma Patterson, the wife of an English trade unionist and herself deeply impressed with the deplorable condition of women wage-earners everywhere, was on a visit to the United States.
Suppose it turns out to be the case that a man always following one occupation throughout his lifetime, working regularly day after day for so many hours, as most wage-earners do at the present time, does not do nearly so much or nearly so well as he would do if he followed first one occupation and then another, or if he worked as hard as he possibly could for a definite period and then took holiday?
In plainer words, our great firms will not make money, wages will fall, and wage-earners will be out of work .
Only recently have girls been prepared for the textile trades, though they have always worked in these, first in the home and since then in the factories. Still less is any preparation thought of for the numberless occupations that necessity and a perpetually changing world are all the while driving girls to take up. There were in 1910, 8,075,772 women listed as wage-earners in the United States.
If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy; though there are a few other things that are great among us including our drink-bill, which is a billion and a quarter of dollars a year, and doubling itself every decade.
The pressing necessity of the wage-earner to sell his labor at once on any terms and of the small capitalist to dispose of his product was the means by which the great capitalists were able steadily to force down the rate of wages and the prices paid for their product to the first producers." "And was it only among the wage-earners and the small producers that this glut of men existed?"
But out of more than a million men whose services the employers have thus temporarily dispensed with, some nine hundred thousand are being clothed, or are going to be clothed, in khaki, and given Government pay. Very different is the situation of the women wage-earners. Of these apparently half a million are now unemployed, and twice as many are working only short time.
If we wish to know the special demands of working-women there is no way so certain as to consult the organized women. They alone are at liberty to express their views, while the education they have had in their unions in handling questions vital to their interests as wage-earners, and as leaders of other women gives clearness and definiteness to the expression of those views.
Or should the State have its hierarchy, its privileges, its ministry, so that it may carry on a trade in mining, canals, or railways, may speculate on the Stock Exchange, grant leases for ninety-nine years, and leave the building of streets, bridges, dams, water-ways, excavations, sluices, etc., to a legion of contractors, speculators, usurers, destroyers of morality, and extortioners, who live upon the public wealth by the exploitation of workmen and wage-earners, and upon the folly of the State?
The labor reports for the State of Missouri for 1889 and 1890 do not deal directly with the question of women wage-earners; but indirectly much light is thrown by the investigation, in that for 1889, into the cost of living and the home conditions of many miners and workers in general trades; while that for 1890 covers a wider field, and gives, with general conditions for all workers, detailed information as to many frauds practised upon them.
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