m and the general health of the women-workers.

Other evils, incident on woman's industrial work, do not require
elaboration, though their cumulative effect is often very real. Many
women-workers, the locality of whose home depends on the work of their
husband or father, are obliged to travel every day long distances to and
from their work. The waste of time, the weariness, and sometimes the
expense of 'bus or train thus imposed on them, is in thousands of cases
a heavy tax upon their industrial life. Women working in factories, or
taking work home, suffer also many wrongs by reason of their "weaker
sex," and their general lack of trade organization. Unjust and arbitrary
fines are imposed by harsh employers so as to filch a portion of their
scanty earnings; their time is wasted by unnecessary delay in the giving
out of work, or its inspection when finished; the brutality and
insolence of male overseers is a common incident in their career. In a
score of different ways the weakness of women injures them as
competitors in the free fight for industrial work.

Sec. 7. Causes of the Industrial Weakness of Women.--This brief summary of
the industrial condition of low-skilled women-workers will suffice to
bring out the fact that the "sweating" question is even more a woman's
question than a man's. The question which rises next is, Why do women as
industrial workers suffer more than men?

In the first place, as the physically weaker sex, they do on the average
a smaller quantity of work, and therefore receive lower wages. In
certain kinds of work, where women do piece-work along with men, it is
found that they get as high wages as men for the same quantity of work.
The recent report upon Textile Industries establishes this fact so far
as those trades are concerned. But this is not always, perhaps not in
the majority of instances, the case. Women-workers do not, in many
cases, receive the same wages which would be paid to men for doing the
same work. Why is this? It is sometimes described as an unfair advantage
taken of women because they are women. There is a male prejudice, it is
urged, against women-workers, which prevents employers from paying them
the wages they could and would pay to men.

Now this contention, so far as it refers to a sentimental bias, is not
tenable. A body of women-workers, equally skilled with male workers, and
as strongly organized, would be able to extract the same rate of wages
in any trade. Every