“We cannot forget that some years ago certain trade-unionists in the potteries imperatively insisted that a certain rest for the arm which they found almost essential to their work should not be used by women engaged in the same employment.  Not long since, the London tailors, when on a strike, having never admitted a woman to their union, attempted to coerce women from availing themselves of the remunerative employment which was offered them in consequence of the strike.  But this jealousy of woman’s labor has not been entirely confined to workmen.  The same feeling has extended itself through every class of society.  Last autumn a large number of post-office clerks objected to the employment of women in the Post-Office.”

Driven by want, they had pressed into agricultural labor as well, and found equal opposition there also.  Mr. Fawcett in the same speech calls attention to the fact of the non-admission of women to the Agricultural Laborers’ Union, on the ground that “the agricultural laborers of the country do not wish to recognize the labor of women.”

There is more or less reason for such feeling.  It arises in part from the newness of the occasion, since in the story of labor as a whole, soon to be considered by us in detail, it is only the last fifty years that have seen women taking an active part.  We have already seen that mobility of labor is one of the first essentials, and that women are far more limited in this respect than men.

This brings us to the final question,—­Why do men receive a larger wage than women?  The conditions already outlined are in part responsible, but with them is bound up another even more formidable.

Custom, the law of many centuries, has so ingrained its thought in the constitution of men that it is naturally and inevitably taken for granted that every woman who seeks work is the appendage of some man, and therefore, partially at least, supported.  Other facts bias the employer against the payment of the same wage.  The girl’s education is usually less practical than the boy’s; and as most, at least among the less intelligent class, regard a trade as a makeshift to be used as a crutch till a husband appears, the work involved is often done carelessly and with little or no interest.  With unintelligent labor wastage is greater, and wages proportionately lower; and here we have one chief reason for the difference.  Others will disclose themselves as we go on.

Unskilled labor then, it is plain, must be in evil case, and it is unskilled laborers that are in the majority.  For men this means pick and spade at such rates as may be fixed; for women the needle, and its myriad forms of cheap production; and within these ranks is no sense of real economic interest, but the fiercest and blindest competition among themselves.  Mere existence is to a large extent all that is possible, and it is fought for with a fury in strange contrast to the apparent worth of the thing itself.