Page:Women Wanted.djvu/179

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THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE
163

great majority of women who have gotten into industry in the past or into a profession or a career, have been accustomed to. Only nobody ever noticed it before!

Now every War Office saw it as early as the first year of the war: No woman could do a woman's work in the home and a man's work in the shop and maintain the maximum output. The efficiency experts were summoned all over Europe. They were shocked at such uneconomic management. Could you expect any competent workingman to cook his own dinner? There'd be a strike if you did. Why in thunder, then, should Mrs. Black be expected to cook hers? And every nation hurried to set up in its factories the industrial canteen, where meals are prepared and served to employés at cost price.

At one of these industrial canteens at a factory in the suburbs of Paris, I sat down to dinner with 600 working people. The chef, who had shown me with pride through his great store-rooms of supplies, apologised for the day's menu: He was humiliated that there would be neither rabbits nor chicken, but with a war-market one did the best they could. The a la carte bill of fare proceeded from hors d'œuvres through entrées and roasts to salads and to dessert and cheese, and there was wine on every table. You selected, of course, what you wished to pay for. Marie, on my right, I noticed, paid for her dinner, 1 franc fifty. Jacques, on my left, I saw hand the waiter 1 franc seventy-five. My check came to two francs. It was a better dinner than I was accus-