abor, not sex, shall set the wage-scale; and the
legal requirement for sanitary, safe, and moral conditions in
workshops and factories, all are vital to sound social demand in the
interest of women workers. Are these not also demands for just labor
conditions of men? The eight-hour day is now fixed as a standard for
men and women alike, with the forty-eight hour a week definition. A
minimum wage, including cost of living for dependents as well as for
individuals involved, has justice at its base, but requires for its
application less a blanket sum indicated by law than a wages-board or
other form of discriminating commission with power to adjust flexibly,
with due consideration of place and of quality of work, the wages to
the task. Conditions of labor should be "good" in all cases, and what
is good should be fixed by disinterested persons. Physical safety and
moral protection must be secured at all hazards, and in the case of
women special protection, particularly for those under twenty-one
years of age, is needed. Any work which is peculiarly a menace to
health and to the race-life for mothers or potential mothers may well
be forbidden by law. The absolute prohibition of night work and of
home work to adult women may well be left in the background, however,
until the industrial situation is clearer for all women workers. The
evils of night work for the "sweated" woman, untrained for any
lucrative labor and who has to catch on to the labor wheels at any
point open to her effort at middle age, must not blind us to the fact
that one of the most precious things in the inheritance of brave and
loyal natures is the determination to earn for one's own support and
for that of one's dearest. The tenement labor, which is such an evil
in many of our cities and one so impossible to deal with adequately by
ordinary inspectorship provision, is not all there is to "home work."
It may well be that, as has been before indicated, the new uses of
electrical power may return to the home, and in ways to the advantage
of the family, some of the processes now wholly under factory control
and provision. The point is that while there cannot be too much
protective legislation for children and youth, the place of adult
women in the labor world must not be too firmly and exclusively held
by the side of children lest we add to the difficulties women still
experience in finding and keeping a place in the world of modern
industry.

=Women in War W