WAGE-EARNING WIVES

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 92, 12 January 1929, Page 16

WAGE-EARNING WIVES

WHY WOMEN WORK. Between IS9O and 1920 in the United States the proportion of married women working for wages or salaries rose 100 per cent. To-day one quarter of America’s “occupied” women are shown by the census to be married. The numbers of the unoccupied are still considerably in excess of the workers, but nine married women in every hundred are reported as breadwinners. The majority of these two million wageearning wives are, of course, still to be found in industry, or in minor secretarial positions. Many are obliged to enter domestic service, though the American woman will avoid this type of work until she has tried everything else. But a small number, which increases every year, have made good in business or profession, and are at least as responsible as their husbands for the upkeep of home and family. At the top of every tree a few. womeil possess independently-earned incomes, which sound fantastic, even to the successful business man (writes a wellknown English woman novelist). One such woman, Mrs. Higleston, is a member of the New York Stock Exchange. A leading authority, on Government securities in the United States, she is said to have traded iu the last ten years the immense total of £6,000,000 worth of Liberty Bonds. She belongs to a little group of women financiers in Wall Street, who are regarded as at least the equals of any man engaged in that branch of business.

English women company directors, many of them married, to-day amount to about 300. of whom over 50 are ou the boards of big business concerns? Now that the working wife has begun to be accepted as a matter of course in business and the professions, it is unlikely that she will disappear, for there are two reasons to account for her which are as old as society. The first of these reasons is purely economic. “The bare necessity of living, or the craving for a higher standard of living.” wrote Mr. George Johnson, in his “Evolution of Woman,” drives hosts of women, including many married women, into the labour market, and no philosophic theories of the ideal family life, unless accompanied by some radical economic reorganisation of industry, will bring them back to their homes.” The second reason —the spirit of adventure —has often been interpreted and unnecessarily condemned as a craving for scented soap in one walk of life, or for pearls and fur coats in another. Pearls and fur coats, like scented soap, are all to the good, for nothing so surely leads to self-respect as the ability to pay from one’s own earnings for the luxuries of life. ... .

But the spirit of adventure is something more than a longing for luxury. The making of money, as men know so well, has attractions quite apart from its expenditure. It requires those special qualities of courage and enterprise which women were never able to develop so long as only the lower posts in business and the professions were accessible to them.