ing conductresses
of the 'buses seem healthy, though their work has been done only
recently by women. I would make the influence of an occupation on
woman's health--considering first and as most important her primary
biological function as a potential mother--the test of its womanliness.
But the health of women will never be protected while we are content to
accept the valuations and suffer the defilements of this commercial age.

III

Only this morning I have been reading the newly issued _Report of the
War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry_, a large book of 340 pages,
packed with information, in particular as to "the increased employment
of women owing to the development of automatic machinery." What I read
fills me with dismay and indignation. I was not prepared--and I thought
I was prepared for anything--for such blindness of outlook.

To prove this, let me quote directly from the Report. The Committee
urges rightly the importance to the health of the workers of good food,
clothing and domestic comfort, and the necessity of good wages to
maintain this standard. But _why are these improved conditions
recommended_? Listen to what is said:

_Properly nourished women have a much greater reserve of
energy than they have usually been credited with, and under
suitable conditions they can properly and advantageously be
employed upon more arduous occupation than has been considered
desirable in the past, even when these involve considerable
activity and physical strain...._

And a little further:

_It is desirable that women's wide employment should be made
permanent._

In another passage the Committee report _that on piece work a woman will
always beat a man_. And again further on: _On mass production she will
come first every time.... Men will never stand the monotony of a fast
repetition job like women; they will not stand by a machine pressing all
their lives, but a woman will._[27:1]

Nothing that I can say, or any writer could say, could be more vividly
condemning than are these passages. They have filled me with so deep a
protest that really I can hardly trust myself to write any comment. This
is the ideal now set before us for the industrial woman "to stand by a
machine pressing all her life." I ask, Is it for this that the sons of
these women have died? Marriage is spoken of as "one of women's
industrial drawbacks," "it makes her less ambitious and enterprisin