Newspaper report, "Brilliant Western Woman Talks to
Canadian Business Women's Club" c. 1915.
"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. |