Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. WOMEN WAGE-EARNERS: _THEIR PAST, THEIR PRESENT, AND THEIR FUTURE_. BY HELEN CAMPBELL, AUTHOR OF "PRISONERS OF POVERTY," "PRISONERS OF POVERTY ABROAD," "THE PROBLEM OF THE POOR," "MRS. HERNDON'S INCOME," ETC. With an Introduction BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH.D., LL.D. _Professor of Political Economy and Director of the School of Economics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis._ BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1893. _Copyright, 1893_, BY HELEN CAMPBELL. University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. A BOOK FOR Alice, FRIEND, HELPER, AND COMRADE. INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD T. ELY, DIRECTOR OF SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, POLITICAL SCIENCE, AND HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON. The importance of the subject with which the present work deals cannot well be over-estimated. Our age may properly be called the Era of Woman, because everything which affects her receives consideration quite unknown in past centuries. This is well. The motive is twofold: First, woman is valued as never before; and, second, it is perceived that the welfare of the other half of the human race depends more largely upon the position enjoyed by woman than was previously understood. The earlier agitation for an enlarged sphere and greater rights for woman was to a considerable extent merely negative. The aim was to remove barriers and to open the way. It is characteristic of the earlier days of agitation for the removal of wrongs affecting any class, that the questions involved appear to be simple, and easily repeated formulas ample to secure desired rights. Further agitation, however, and more mature reflection always show that what looks like a simple social problem is a complex one. "If women's wages are small, open new careers to them." As simple as this did the problem of women's wages once appear; but when new avenues of employment were rendered accessible to women, it was found, in some instances, that the wages of men were lowered. A consequence which can be seen in different industrial centres is that a man and a wife working together secure no greater wages than the man alone in industries in which women are not employed. Now, if the result of opening new employments to women is to force all members of the family to work for the wages which the head of the family alone once received, it is manifest that we have a complicated problem.