Gabrielle Duchene stopped the skilled workman and showed him the message, which enunciates the demand: For equal work, equal pay. “It’s your only protection,” she urged. But he only grinned. And he pulled from his pocket a scrap of paper: “See,” he said, “my government agreement that woman’s admission into industry is for the duration of the war only.” And it is true, he has that agreement. It is the basis on which all over the world the bargain was made: “Teach the woman how. It is a necessary but temporary expedient. When you return from the front, you shall have the job back. And the woman will go home again.” But will she? The message that went up to the Government House asking equal pay for equal work is one of the most significant measures in the new woman movement. Ever since women began to be in industry at all, the wage envelope for them has been very small, as lady-like an affair as an early Victorian pocket handkerchief—and just about as practical. Remarks of protest on the part of the recipient were customarily met with irritation or derision: Wages? Why, woman, what would you want with more wages anyhow—to buy a new ribbon to put on your hat? Now a man, of course, must have all the wages that he can get: he has to have them to buy the children’s shoes and to pay the grocery bill and the coal bill and to support a wife who keeps his house and darns his socks. And, even if he has to have them to buy a cigar or a drink? Oh, don’t ask foolish questions! A man has to have wages to meet all of his expenses, a large part of which is Woman. Now run along and be a good little girl! But the new woman in industry can’t be dismissed so easily as that. Especially a feminist in khaki can’t. And she was respectfully saluting Government and begging to inquire if women were doing men’s work so well as Government had said they were, when would women be getting men’s pay? EQUAL PAY IS COMING And it was more than a “foolish question.” It was a disturbing interrogation. Government looked up surprised from its war orders and statistical investigations to answer: “Why, really, don’t you know, woman’s work isn’t the same as man’s. You see, we have made over the machines for her. And sometimes she stops for an hour and goes home to wash the children’s faces.” But the feminist said: “Isn’t it the output that counts?” And she spoke of the better work and the faster work than man that women were doing for two-thirds men’s pay. See the girl drilling 1000 holes at 50 centimes an hour where a man once drilled 500 holes for 75 centimes an hour! And about this time the skilled workman, discovering that the lady was getting a hearing, came breathlessly running back to interpolate that men had to be paid more because they knew more. Those women, for instance, who were “gauging” with such remarkable success knew only that one process, whereas the men knew the whole trade.