There has begun, like this, the greatest making over of all! Better than all the bouquets they’ve handed us is the making over of our wage envelope to man’s size! It isn’t finished yet. Girl lift operators in London still get 18 shillings a week on the same elevator for which men were paid 23 shillings. On the tramways of Orleans, France, women conductors get 2 francs and 2.50 a day for exactly the same work for which men were paid 4 francs a day. Nevertheless the new wage envelope is not so lady-like as it used to be. It’s coming out in larger and larger sizes. The London tailoring trade has increased the women’s minimum wage from 3½d. to 6d. an hour. In Paris the women conductors on the suburban lines have been advanced from the former 4 francs a day to the men’s 5 francs. Glasgow has 1020 women conductors at men’s pay, 27 shillings a week. London has 2000 women omnibus conductors with the wage formerly paid to men, 38 shillings a week. Even the German brewers have come to equal pay for women. Thousands of women in munitions in England are making 30 shillings a week. Some at Woolwich are making £2 to £3 per week, a few up to £4 a week. Henrietta Boardman at a skilled man’s job gets exactly a man’s pay, 1 shilling 1d. and 1 farthing an hour, amounting to about £4 a week. At the sixteenth annual congress of the Labour Party, held in Manchester, England, in January, 1917, the following resolution was introduced: “That in view of the great national services rendered by women, during this time of war and of the importance of maintaining a high level of wages for both men and women workers, the Conference urges, That all women employed in trades formerly closed to them should only continue to be so employed at trade union rates (the wages paid to men).” For the new woman in industry is too efficient to be countenanced as a competitor in the labour market to offer herself at a lower wage than men. Trade unions may even admit her as a comrade, not yet but soon. For she’s safer to them that way! In England they are giving their cordial support to Mary McArthur with her organisation, The National Federation of Women Workers, in which there are already enrolled 350,000 women. In France they are backing Mme. Duchene, who in many of the little dim-lit cafés of Paris is holding meetings to organise the women in industry into what the French call “waiting unions.” Why waiting? Because the men’s trades unions are ready even to make over their constitutions to admit women to membership if necessary, that is, _if women stay in industry_. But they are waiting to see. And every little while they pull out from their pocket a soiled scrap of paper to look contemplatively at it. It is a government agreement. The Government has said the women will go home. _But will they?_ WOMEN WANTED AFTER THE WAR