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Better education of women in domestic work and the requirements of wifehood and motherhood; the growth of a juster and more wholesome feeling in the man, that he may refuse to demand that his wife add wage-work to her domestic drudgery; and above all, a clearer and more generally diffused perception in society of the value of healthy and careful provision for the children of our race, should build up a bulwark of public opinion, which shall offer stronger and stronger obstruction to the employment of married women, either outside or inside the home, in the capacity of industrial wage-earners.
The inferior quality of wage-work, the terrible waste of human energy in modern agricultural and industrial labour, the ever-growing quantity of pleasure-seekers, who shift their burden on to others' shoulders, the absence of a certain animation in production that is becoming more and more apparent; all this is beginning to preoccupy the economists of the "classical" school.
Let us first note the incredible levity with which this objection is raised, without even realizing that the real question raised by this objection is merely to know, on the one hand, whether you effectively obtain by wage-work, the results that are said to be obtained, and, on the other hand, whether voluntary work is not already now more productive than work stimulated by wages.
There is no need to quote here to the contrary the long and sustained toil of the pioneer, the eager labor of the student, unmindful of the silent hours, or the fierce acquisitive activity of the money-maker that knows no pause. Activities such as these differ with a whole sky from the wage-work of the modern industrial worker. The task in one case is done for its own sake. It is life itself.
In estimating the quantity of work which falls to the lot of industrial women-workers, we must not forget to add to the wage-work that domestic work which few of them can wholly avoid, and which is represented by no wages.
But a steady pressure of public opinion, making for the closer restriction of the wage-work of married women, would be of incomparable value to the movement to secure better industrial conditions for those women who are obliged to work for a living. A fuller, clearer realization of the importance of this subject is much needed at the present time.
In certain industries production is limited so as to keep up high prices, and sometimes the pass-word, "Go-canny," is given, which signifies, "Bad work for bad pay!" Wage-work is serf-work; it cannot, it must not, produce all that it could produce. And it is high time to disbelieve the legend which represents wagedom as the best incentive to productive work.
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