William Smart

Women's Wages (Large Print) William Smart

Originally published in 1892. Excerpt from WOMEN'S WAGES
It is not necessary to prove that women's wages are, as a rule, much under those of men. In the textile trades of Great Britain, which constitute the largest department of women's work, the average of women's wages is probably - in Scotland it is certainly - about ten shillings per week. This labour is not by any means unskilled, as anyone who has ever seen a spinning or weaving factory knows. Twenty shillings per week, however, is a low average for a man possessing any degree of skill whatever. In a paper read before the British Association at Cardiff, Mr. Sidney Webb gave some valuable statistics on the subject. Women workers he divides into four classes - manual labourers, routine mental workers, artistic workers, and intellectual workers. The two latter classes may be dismissed in a word. Sex has little to do in determining the wages of their work. A novelist, a poet, a writer of any sort, is under no disadvantage that she is a woman, while in many departments of artistic work women have an obvious advantage. But in the third class, that of routine mental workers, Mr. Webb finds that women's earnings are invariably less than men's.