CONCERNING WIVES' WAGES

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 2, 2 July 1926, Page 13

CONCERNING WIVES' WAGES

KO OVER-WORK PAY.

If the wives in Great Britain were wise in their own. interests they would at once hand themselves together into a Married Women's Trade Union. They would compel men to recognise that housekeeping is quite as important an industry as the laying of bricks' or the getting of coal. They would insist that the husbands who will not tolerate "sweating" in the workshop must cease to practise it in the home, writes Horace J. Simpson in a London journal. For it is undeniable that thousands of husbands do "sweat" their wives; some with deliberate selfishness, but many more with blind thoughtlessness. And it is an astonishing anomaly that men who would not tolerate the slightest infringement of trade union principles—who would immediately go on strike against the most trivial injustice suffered by a comrade in the matters of working hours, holidays, or pay—appearto see no injustice in allowing their own wives to slave "round the clock" for no pay at all. No woman—particularly the woman married to a man who earns but a small salary—ever expects to have as much money for her personal use after marriage as when she was earning wages of her own. Women in the main ] are not unreasonable. A considerate husband and affectionate children are compensations that more than reward a -woman for her financial sacrifice. But no wife can be really happy if she never has a penny to spend on herself. ■ Yet thousands of wives get nothing at all. .. No wonder so many of them quickly degenerate from happy, well-, dressed maidenhood to dowdiness and ill-temper. How can a woman remain happy when, she can never spend a sixpence on a little pleasure for herself, how can she retain her attractiveness for the man who married her when she is allowed nothing with which to buy herself a decent irock? It is intolerably humiliating for a woman to have to badger her husband for the price of a new hat. It is contemptibly mean of a husband to compel his wife to have to screw a few coppers a week from her meagre housekeeping allowance in order to save up to buy a pair of stockings. Yet many a man who forces his wife to these humiliations^ will be very generous to himself and open-handed with his friends. He would think it a hard thing indeed if he had to work all the week with never a penny of pocket-money to jingle on Saturday afternoons. It is essential to his happiness that, he shall have a shilling or two in his pocket so that he may pay admission io a football match, buy toblceo, ,or stand treat to his pals. Certainly that man is entitled to his little pleasures, for ho has honestly earned them. But has not his wife earned her little pleasures, too? Does she not work early and late to keep his home clean and comfortable, toil incessantly in the care, of hia children? Surely she is entitled to a little pocket money as well. Every husband on marriage should promise his wife a fixed allowance for her personal" use, and only financial disability should induce him to break that promise. The young wife should insist on such an arrangement if the husband does not make it voluntarily. It is her right.