What Can a Woman Do; Or, Her Position in the Business and Literary World (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. T is a common wish among young and inexperienced women about to enter the arena of public labor to find situations in a large city such as New York, Boston or Chicago, but they must remember that while there are many situations in a large town, there are also many competitors, and these always out-rate the positions in the ratio of fifty applicants to one appointment. This is the case in business situations for men, as well, only on a still more discouraging scale, there being frequently a hundred applicants to one vacancy. With this excess of demand on the wrong side prices must be low, but there are always exceptions to every rule, and there may be fortunate circumstances to give the last new comer immediate compensation, and if that is not possible, months of waiting may bear good fruit in an added experience, a knowledge of the city, and other beneficial results. In answer to enquiries in a New York paper, whether there is any position open to a woman except that of a teacher, where she can earn more than $800 a year, the following list of prices is furnished, with the comment1 that women, as a rule, received from twenty to thirty per centum less than men for the same or equivalent services. Just here I would say that no woman need feel aggrieved or discouraged by this statement, or imagine that it is an injury which she must avenge by recourse to the ballot. It is one of the barriers which men themselves erected to defend women, from behind which they purposed to earn bread for both, unforeseeing the coming army of women who have no one to work for them, and who must of necessity work not only for themselves but for those dependent on them. But even with this statement, a canvass of our large stores and city business houses would show a large percentage of men wo...