In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shall determine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband’s income.  American women may not need such a law, but they insist that they need something to take the place of that one which in eleven States makes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife’s income.

CHAPTER V

WOMEN’S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY

The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual discomfort, contained only one man.  He wore a white-duck uniform, and recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward:  “Corsets, millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants’ wear, and ladies’ shoes, second floor; no ma’am, carpets and rugs on the third floor; this car don’t go to the restaurant; take the other side; groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs, men’s shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor.”

Buying and selling, serving and being served—­women.  On every floor, in every aisle, at every counter, women.  In the vast restaurant, which covers several acres, women.  Waiting their turn at the long line of telephone booths, women.  Capably busy at the switch boards, women.  Down in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer frocks, women.  Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts, attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan department store, women.  Behind most of the counters on all the floors between, women.  At every cashier’s desk, at the wrappers’ desks, running back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women.  Filling the aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing throng of shoppers, women.  Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk, and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.

To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the United States are working outside of the home for wages is a simple, unanalyzed fact.  You grasp it as an intellectual abstraction, without much appreciation of its human significance.  The mere reading of statistics does not help you to realize the changed status of women, and of society.  You need to see the thing with your own eyes.

Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, when the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city’s great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change.  Of the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls.  From factory, office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousands of girls.  Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of the electric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting of hucksters, the laughter and oaths of men, their voices float, a shrill, triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil.