here to consider what legislatures have done and are
doing to improve conditions, other than to mention that the number of
hours that women may work is restricted in some states, as is night
work, and that a minimum wage is required in some.

Our question, however, is not so much what is forbidden women in the
way of work, as what women and girls will choose to do of the work
which is not forbidden. Facts as to what women are doing concern us
mainly as material from which to deduce information of value to the
girls who have not yet chosen.

A serious obstacle to wise choice on the part of young girls who are
pushing into industrial occupations is the uncertainty of their
continuing as workers outside the home. The average length of the
girl's industrial life is computed to be only about five years. She
enters upon work at an age when it is often impossible to tell whether
she will marry or remain single. She is usually unable to know whether
or not she will desire to marry. The great majority of girls have
therefore no stable conditions upon which to build a choice. The work
girls choose and their instability in the work they enter upon are
direct results of these unstable conditions. Many girls feel the need
of little or no training, and apply for any work obtainable, merely
because they anticipate that their industrial career will soon be
over.

A government report on the condition of woman and girl wage-earners in
the United States gives the following facts concerning 1,391 women
working in stores:

Average length of service 5.17 years
Average wage:
First year $4.69 per week
Second year 5.28 " "
Tenth year 9.81 " "

Among 3,421 factory women investigated:

Average length of service 4.46 years
Average wage:
First year $4.62 per week
Second year 5.34 " "
Tenth year 8.48 " "

These stores and factories were presumably filled by girls who seized
the most available source of a weekly wage regardless of all but the
pay envelope. Few of them remained more than five years, and those who
did remain did not receive adequate increase in their pay by the tenth
year for workers of ten years' experience.

[Illustration: Photograph by Brown Bros.
A cotton-mill worker. Unfortunately in the factories girls are too
often influenced by the pay env