The women who suffer most from low wages are probably the teachers in our primary schools. They start usually on a salary of about three hundred and fifty dollars a year. For this each teacher performs all the minute labour and bears all the nervous strain of instructing sixty pupils six and a half hours a day and of correcting dozens of papers far into the night. And when crime increases or the pupils are not universally successful in business, the school teacher has the added pleasure of getting blamed for it, being told that she ought to have trained them better. These facts lend some colour to Mark Twain's sage reflection that God at first made idiots--that was for practice; then he made school boards.
One of the most interesting examples of recent evolution in the industrial status of women is the decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois in the so-called Ritchie Case. The last Legislature of Illinois passed a law limiting to ten hours the working day of women in factories and stores. Now, as far back as 1893, the Legislature had passed a similar law limiting woman's labour to _eight_ hours; but the Supreme Court in 1895 declared it unconstitutional on the ground that it was an arbitrary and unreasonable interference with the right of women to contract for the sale of their labour. When, therefore, this year a ten-hour bill was tried, W.C. Ritchie, who had secured the nullification of the act of 1893, again protested. The decision of the Court, rendered April 21, 1910, is an excellent proof of the great advance made within two decades in the position of women. Reversing completely its judgment of 1895, the Court left far behind it mere technicalities of law and found a sanction for its change of front in the experience of humanity and of common sense. These are its conclusions:
"It is known to all men, and of what we know as men we cannot profess to be ignorant as judges:
"That woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a great disadvantage in the battle of life.
"That while a man can work for more than ten hours a day without injury to himself, a woman, especially when the burdens of motherhood are upon her, cannot.
"That while a man can work standing upon his feet for more than ten hours a day, day after day, without injury to himself, a woman cannot.