ork.=--In England, we are told, there were one million
women employed in war plants during the great struggle with Germany.
In every variety of munitions manufacture women were found in great
numbers, often furnishing eighty per cent, or more of the total number
employed. It is a fact that they "made good." It is also a fact that
the average of health among the working women of England rose in many
localities where women were employed at these unwonted tasks. The
reason given for this by one keen observer being that the higher wages
earned enabled many thousands of women, before undernourished because
of their poverty, to have "three square meals a day." When we remember
that in England there are nearly two million more women than men, and
that the men who served in the army and have returned physically and
mentally able to take back the jobs they left for army service are
clamoring for them, and when we remember that the struggle for a
standard of living never goes backward and that women workers once
used to good wages will not willingly take poor ones again, we can see
what difficulties the war has made in our sister country for both men
and women in industry.

In our own country the one and a quarter million women engaged in
industrial work directly or indirectly connected with the war service
when the first investigation was made in fifteen states, under the
auspices of the National League of Women's Service, were but a section
of the army of women who were enlisted in war work, paid or unpaid and
of various kinds. Now we have an unemployment problem of our own with
something of the same complaint of the men of England that the
returned soldier finds a woman in his place, a woman who is still
wanted, perhaps, by the employer and who does not wish to relinquish
her job.

When Mrs. Muhlhauser Richards took charge of the Woman's Division of
the Department of Labor in the effort to make a clearing house of
women's work in the interest of help to the government it was not
simply a measure for temporary use or of temporary value. The idea
still persists in peace as well as in war, and justly, that the
interests of women in industry require a special division of the Labor
Department in order that we shall be able to know what is needed for
their protection in the interest of family life as well as understand
what individual women require in justice when they are wage-earners. A
minimum wage is demanded and in several st