And she doesn’t want to go back to general housework in her own home, and to the “home” meals of white bread and boiled tea which the Home Office has specifically pointed out are not good enough on which to produce shells. She’s accustomed now to her breakfast bacon! The workingman’s wife at household labour had no Saturday half holidays in the kitchen. She had something like a sixteen hour day with no laws against overtime. Nobody bothered about how many hours she worked. Nobody counted her food calories. Nobody brought her roses. Nobody taught her to dance. Nobody noticed that she ought to be happy, without which she couldn’t be efficient. Most of all, gentlemen, there wasn’t any wage envelope there! Do you know of any reason why she should wish to go back? Some 3000 of her were asked about it through a questionnaire recently sent out in England. And of these 3000, 2500 answered: “I prefer to remain in the work I am now doing.” I am sure Mrs. Black would. And I know the world is going to be very much surprised about it. But I think that Mr. Black, when he returns from the front, will prefer that she should. For Mr. Black is going to get a better dinner that way! The industrial canteen can cook better and cheaper for him and Mrs. Black than she could at home. She can’t make plum pudding in the home, as they can at the canteen for 2d. a portion. The chef who is buying for 1500 people gets rates that she never could for seven from the huckster and the fish-monger and the rest. Besides, Mrs. Black never had any special training for cooking, as she now has for engineering. In the shop she has learned to do one thing very well indeed. In her home there wasn’t any one thing she ever had learned to do very well. And she worked ineffectually and inefficiently at several highly skilled occupations: child rearing and sewing and cooking and baking and laundry work and, occasionally, nursing. Isn’t it remarkable at any stage of the world’s evolution, that woman should have been expected to carry a schedule like that? You never found Mr. Black attempting to be a carpenter and a tailor and a plumber and a gardener and a whole lot of other useful trades all in one. No, Mr. Black’s rule always was, stick to one trade. Jack-of-all-trades! Why, everybody knows that he could have been master of none!