oken
families.

Among native white women one in ten is separated from her husband by
death, divorce, or desertion. Among Negroes the ratio is one in seven.
Is the cause racial? No, it is economic, because there is the same high
ratio among the white foreign-born. The breaking up of the present
family is the result of modern working and sex conditions and it hits
the laborers with terrible force. The Negroes are put in a peculiarly
difficult position, because the wage of the male breadwinner is below
the standard, while the openings for colored women in certain lines of
domestic work, and now in industries, are many. Thus while toil holds
the father and brother in country and town at low wages, the sisters and
mothers are called to the city. As a result the Negro women outnumber
the men nine or ten to eight in many cities, making what Charlotte
Gilman bluntly calls "cheap women."

What shall we say to this new economic equality in a great laboring
class? Some people within and without the race deplore it. "Back to the
homes with the women," they cry, "and higher wage for the men." But how
impossible this is has been shown by war conditions. Cessation of
foreign migration has raised Negro men's wages, to be sure--but it has
not only raised Negro women's wages, it has opened to them a score of
new avenues of earning a living. Indeed, here, in microcosm and with
differences emphasizing sex equality, is the industrial history of labor
in the 19th and 20th centuries. We cannot abolish the new economic
freedom of women. We cannot imprison women again in a home or require
them all on pain of death to be nurses and housekeepers.

What is today the message of these black women to America and to the
world? The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and
the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When, now, two of these
movements--woman and color--combine in one, the combination has deep
meaning.

In other years women's way was clear: to be beautiful, to be petted, to
bear children. Such has been their theoretic destiny and if perchance
they have been ugly, hurt, and barren, that has been forgotten with
studied silence. In partial compensation for this narrowed destiny the
white world has lavished its politeness on its womankind,--its chivalry
and bows, its uncoverings and courtesies--all the accumulated homage
disused for courts and kings and craving exercise. The revolt of white
women against this preor