itory, is
due to her _inferior_ position. One Feminist, C. Gascoigne Hartley, in
_The Truth About Women_, outlines a bold hypothesis: "What, then, is the
real cause of the lowness of remuneration offered to women for work
when compared with men? Thousands of women and girls receive wages that
are insufficient to support life. They do not die, they live; but how?
The answer is plain. Woman possesses a marketable value attached to her
personality which man has not got. The woman's sex is a saleable thing."
Briefly, if a woman works less well than a man, less fast, less
continuously, it is because she is inadequately rewarded. They reverse
the common position that woman is not well paid because woman is not
competent, basing themselves on the parallel that liberty alone fits men
for liberty. They argue that woman is not competent because she is not
well paid; consequently, those Feminists who are inclined toward
Radicalism in politics demand a minimum wage in all trades, which shall
be the same for women and men.
The economic change will be brought about by revolutionary methods, by
sex strikes and sex wars. The gaining of the vote is, in the Feminist's
view, nothing but an affair of outposts. Conscious propagandists do not
intend to allow the female vote to be split as it might recently have
been between Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Taft. They intend to use
the vote to make women vote as women, and not as citizens; that is to
say, they propose to sell the female vote _en bloc_ to the party that
bids highest for it in the economic field. To the party that will, as a
preliminary, pledge itself to level male and female wages in government
employ, will be given the Feminist vote; and if no party will bid, then
it is the Feminist intention to run special candidates for all offices,
to split the male parties, and to involve them in consecutive disasters
such as the one which befell the Republican party in the last
presidential election in the United States.
Side by side with this purely political action, Feminists intend to use
industrial strikes in exactly the same manner as do the Syndicalist
railwaymen, miners, and postmen of Europe; well aware that they have
captured a number of trades, such as millinery, domestic service,
restaurant attendance, and so forth, and large portions of other trades,
such as cotton-spinning in Lancashire, they propose to use as a basis
the vote and the political education that follows th
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