o have eyes to see, of gentlewomen
struggling, snatching, importuning, begging for work. No one knows,
who has not looked into the field, how crowded it is, and how sad a
sight it presents.

For my own part I think it is a shame that a lady should ever have to
stand in the labour market for hire like a milkmaid at a statute fair.
I think that the rush of women into the labour market is a most
lamentable thing. Labour, and especially labour which is without
organization or union, has to wage an incessant battle--always getting
beaten--against greed and injustice: the natural enemy of labour is
the employer, especially the impecunious employer; in the struggle
women always get worsted. Again, in whatever trade or calling they
attempt, the great majority of women are hopelessly incompetent. As in
the lower occupations, so in the higher, the greatest obstacle to
success is incompetence. How should gentlewomen be anything but
incompetent? They have not been taught anything special, they have not
been 'put through the mill'; mostly, they are fit only for those
employments which require the single quality that everybody can
claim--general intelligence. Hopeless indeed is the position of that
woman who brings into the intellectual labour market nothing but
general intelligence. She is exactly like the labourer who knows no
trade, and has nothing but his strong frame and his pair of hands. To
that man falls the hardest work and the smallest wage. To the woman
with general intelligence is assigned the lowest drudgery of
intellectual labour. And yet there are so many clamouring for this, or
for anything. A few months ago a certain weekly magazine stated that
I, the writer, had started an Association for Providing Ladies with
Copying Work--all in capitals. The number of letters which came to me
by every post in consequence of that statement was incredible. The
writers implored me to give them a share of that copying work; they
told terrible, heart-rending stories of suffering. Of course, there
was no such Association. There is, now that typewriting is fairly
established, no copying work left to speak of. Even now the letters
have not quite ceased to arrive.

The existence of this army of necessitous gentlewomen is a new thing
in the land. That is to say, there have always been ladies who have
'come down in the world'--not a seaside lodging-housekeeper but has
known better days. There have always been girls who never expected to