Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/81

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medals, enameling, etc., employ women and pay good salaries, while women are succeeding not only as assistants, but as independent architects and interior decorators.

It is almost as hard to give a scale of salaries or earnings for art workers as it is to state how much time they must expend in preparation. With both questions the answer depends upon the girl. There are patient, conscientious, but mechanical workers, drawing fashion designs in New York art rooms at twenty dollars a week, while less conscientious workers with more originality and that rare offering to a harried editor, an idea, are drawing fifty, sixty or even seventy-five dollars a week, making near-caricatures of their own sex or drawing charmingly impossible little ladies for metropolitan dailies.

There are girls patiently redrawing plans and specifications for men architects with ideas, for fifteen dollars a week, while right across the street a woman who can conceive, as well as reproduce, ideas earns her ten thousand a year designing depots and business blocks of the most utilitarian sort.

There are girls who studied interior decoration from composition and color to sanitary science and electricity, but, because they lack originality and business or administrative ability, they are working on a salary of fifteen dollars a week, while a fellow-student with ex-