Our question, however, is not so much what is forbidden women in the way of work, as what women and girls will choose to do of the work which is not forbidden.  Facts as to what women are doing concern us mainly as material from which to deduce information of value to the girls who have not yet chosen.

A serious obstacle to wise choice on the part of young girls who are pushing into industrial occupations is the uncertainty of their continuing as workers outside the home.  The average length of the girl’s industrial life is computed to be only about five years.  She enters upon work at an age when it is often impossible to tell whether she will marry or remain single.  She is usually unable to know whether or not she will desire to marry.  The great majority of girls have therefore no stable conditions upon which to build a choice.  The work girls choose and their instability in the work they enter upon are direct results of these unstable conditions.  Many girls feel the need of little or no training, and apply for any work obtainable, merely because they anticipate that their industrial career will soon be over.

A government report on the condition of woman and girl wage-earners in the United States gives the following facts concerning 1,391 women working in stores: 

     Average length of service 5.17 years
     Average wage: 
       First year $4.69 per week
       Second year 5.28 " "
       Tenth year 9.81 " "

     Among 3,421 factory women investigated: 

     Average length of service 4.46 years
     Average wage: 
       First year $4.62 per week
       Second year 5.34 " "
       Tenth year 8.48 " "

These stores and factories were presumably filled by girls who seized the most available source of a weekly wage regardless of all but the pay envelope.  Few of them remained more than five years, and those who did remain did not receive adequate increase in their pay by the tenth year for workers of ten years’ experience.

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  A cotton-mill worker.  Unfortunately in the factories girls are too often influenced by the pay envelope rather than by any special fitness for the work they are to do]

The whole industrial situation as it concerns women would indicate that women even more than men show lack of discrimination in seeking to place themselves, and that the sources of information for them have been few if not entirely lacking.  Happily these conditions are changing.  We have now to teach girls to avail themselves of the information and the guidance at hand and to learn to discriminate in their choice of work.

Girls must realize that unskillful, mechanical work, done always with a mental reservation that it is merely a temporary expedient, keeps women’s wages low, destroys confidence in female capacity, and has definite bearing not only on the individual woman’s earning capacity, but on her character as well.  Girls must learn to choose in such a way that their work may be an opening into a life career or may be an enlightening prelude to marriage and the making of a home.