44 



make, in their report, what I think is the best suggestion on this 

 matter. They propose " the appointment of an Inter-departmental 

 Committee, consisting of representatives of Trade Unionists (including 

 women), of doctors (including women doctors), and persons experienced 

 in the inspection of factories and the employment of women. This 

 Committee would consider what employments may be harmful to 

 women workers, and make recommendations thereon to the Govern- 

 ment, through the Ministry of Labour and the Home Office. The 

 Committee would become a permanent advisory committee, its reports, 

 where suitable, forming the basis of legislation." This has also been 

 agreed to in a resolution unanimously passed by the Labour Party 

 Conference in January last. 



Probably after the recommendations of this Committee had been 

 made it would be sufficient to adopt Trade Union rules and not to have 

 legislation ; for clearly the matter is a changing one new processes 

 and new conditions may from time to time alter entirely the point 

 of the decision. The Committee would be needed to revise its 

 decisions as circumstances might be shown to have changed. 



But the chief cause of exclusion, even when it has been expressed 

 in other ways, has been the fear of woman as a wage cutter. There 

 is good reason for this fear in the industrial history of the last hundred 

 years. There can be no doubt that women have been the weapon 

 by which over and over again wages have been lowered and processes 

 altered to the workers' disadvantage. The woman and the unskilled 

 male worker have stood in much the same position, but women have 

 been even worse bargainers than the unskilled men. It is not because 

 women are less capable as workers, but less capable as bargainers, 

 less capable as organisers, less capable as industrial fighters, that they 

 have been used to undercut the wages of men. And the reasons are 

 not inherent in women ; they have been the result of innumerable 

 forces working against their economic, social, and political emancipation. 

 The ideas of men about women which have been shared by women have 

 weakened women's strength as industrial units. There has also been 

 the whole group of facts which we sum up in the one word of mother- 

 hood, but which are many of them only the result of bad social and 

 economic arrangements of the nation's life and in no way inseparable 

 from the position both of wife and mother. I have a belief that so 

 soon as we understand the causes we can set to work to bring about 

 different results. For none of these disadvantages under which 

 women have laboured as wage-earners are unsusceptible of modification. 

 The will to alter them is the only thing needful, and the necessity 

 under which that will shall find itself forced to act is now upon us. 

 For the time has arrived when united action on behalf of men and women 

 wage-earners can prevent the old reproach of blackleg being used to 

 women in the future. 



The chief difficulty, little recognised by the male trade unionist in 

 general, has been the very low wages paid to women in the majority 

 of trades in which she was employed. Sweated trades have been 



