The EnslavedBy The Countess of Warwick(English contemporary. Once said to be the most beautiful woman in England. Socialist, writer and speaker on labor and other modern problems. From “Why I Became a Socialist.” In “Hearst’s Magazine.”)
By The Countess of Warwick
(English contemporary. Once said to be the most beautiful woman in England. Socialist, writer and speaker on labor and other modern problems. From “Why I Became a Socialist.” In “Hearst’s Magazine.”)
At present women are the most enslaved part of the human race. They are paid lower wages even than the average working man. When they are not in the wage market as industrial workers, or clerks or civil servants, then they are usually in the unsatisfactory position of being a wife who is, economically speaking, a dependent on the wishes and purse of her father or husband. They may work all day at the management of the children and the home—much harder often, than the worker in the factory—but in return these wives and mothers do not get, in the ordinary case, a fixed salary or wage which they can call their own. Neither are the working hours of the wife and mother fixed, as even in the case of factory workers. There is in the life of the housewife of the manual laboring class scarcely an hour a day when she is entirely free to go where she pleases or do what she pleases. The woman who has not a private income of her own is, in the general case, the economic dependent of the man, and in that class is the large majority of my sex.