Brilliant Western Woman Talks
to Canadian Business Women's Club "Business is not a matter of
sex, but of capacity," Mrs. Murphy said, and added: "That work is
yours for which you are best adapted—even if it is to sing bass!"
With regard to the "equal-pay fallacy", she said that although in
their war work woman had equalled man in efficiency, she got 50 to 85
percent less wages. Her present wage scale doesn't depend so much on
her efficiency as on her employer.
The speaker quoted from a Toronto paper an item telling of a girl
receiving $11 a week in a bank where she was "required to dress so
that at all times she shall appear what she is not."
"I don't care who they are who give a girl $44 a month," Mrs. Murphy
said. "They are profiteering in her blood and in her life and in her
soul."
"It used to be considered an awful thing to send girls into offices,
where there were supposed to be wicked employers and other dangers.
But we have found out a wonderful thing. We have found out that this
is not so. The most dangerous profession for women today is domestic
service. Statistics in the United States, and they are probably much
the same in Canada, show that eighty percent of the women who have
gone wrong were in domestic service."
Reprinted by permission of
Women's Press.
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