SEX WARFARE.

An excellent address on the position of women after the war was given by Mrs Creighton, at the summer meeting now taking place at Hampstead Garden Suburb, to discuss the problems of reconstruction. Mrs Creighton said it was clear that the position of women after the war would be changed from what it was in pre-war days through four causes – the increased liberty women had won during the war, the new, and in many cases, quite unexpected capacity they had shown in many spheres of work, their enfranchisement, and the fact that a far larger number of them would remain unmarried in the future than in the past.

Their immensely modified position in industry would produce a new kind of competition with men which had to be very seriously considered. She was not as sure as Miss Mcarthur that all talk of sex warfare was futile, because when, in addressing large industrial gatherings of men, she had said she could not believe that men in the future would be ungenerous in their treatment of women, and would not be ready to seek unfair conditions, such remarks had always been very coldly received. She regarded that as ominous. The success of the taxi-cab men in preventing women driving cabs was a species of sex warfare. If women were to maintain a fair position in industry it was necessary they should be organised, and it was to be hoped that the men’s unions would admit women far more largely than they had hitherto done, and admit them also to a share in the management.

When obtaining concessions from trade unions, the Government had always promised a return after the war to pre-war conditions, yet authorities now told us that the conditions of industry had been so modified by the war that it would be practically impossible to return to pre-war conditions according to the letter. In this state of things it was to be hoped that no question of sex would be introduced to modify the difficulty. Women must be very careful not to undersell men in regard to their work. (Hear, hear.) Possibly there might be an increased temptation for women of the middle class to undertake work at pocket-money wages. That must be resisted; women should not take work in any direction so as to undersell men.

At a recent women’s conference it was said that suitability of work, not cheapness, should be the test to be applied to women’s work. Who was to decide what was suitability? If it was to be decided by the suggested inter-departmental committee, of doctors, inspectors, and so on, we should get into a new form of slavery. The only way of finding out what work was suitable for women was by experiment. So the doors of all kinds of work should be open to them; but as all girls were possible wives and mothers, care must be taken that they did nothing which would unfit them for such positions.