Chapter IX: Pin-Money Women

After health, women’s great obstacle in work, comes the pin-money woman. There must be something fundamentally unnatural in a system that makes women disloyal to one another, yet it is pin-money women who are the hardest on those who must work.

When the proprietor of a girl’s magazine can obtain a Girton Honours student as editor for thirty shillings to three pounds a week; or when another University graduate, with five years linguistic training in Germany, France and Italy, will work in a Government office for three pounds a week, how is the woman who absolutely depends on her own efforts to compete with her? Thirty shillings is the price of a none too luxurious room in London, without a meal; it is, therefore, very wrong of qualified women with enough to live on, to accept three pounds a week. A competent woman secretary may be satisfied with one hundred and fifty pounds a year, because she has a handsome allowance from her father so that she need not live with her step-mother. She has two incomes. Work keeps her from getting bored and gives her a certain _raison d’être_. But it is her low salary that helps to kill all possibility of women’s work being taken seriously.

Apply for the post which Miss X. has given up for another hobby, and ask for a living wage. You will be stared at in amazement. “Miss X. with her exceptional qualifications did it for so much,” they say, “we must find another Miss X.”

How do pin-money women come into existence? And why do they increase? “It is useless having more than one or two daughters at home,” says the father of four daughters. “Supposing my daughter can earn only one hundred pounds a year, that will keep her in clothes and pin-money and save me that amount in allowance.” But her work cannot be considered either a career or an independence. She does not even supply her own “bread and butter,” whereas most of the salary of the serious worker goes on that alone.

The head of the house supposes, and continues to hope, that his daughters will marry, and his responsibility come to an end. With this in view, he thinks that a little office experience will do her no harm. It will teach her at least the value of money. And so, year in, year out, the army of pin-money women, marking time, make it more and more impossible for those who must work to earn their living. One sometimes wonders whether these pin-money women have any idea of the sorrow and hardship they bring to other women; only the wearer feels the shoe pinch. The amateur, who is not forced to work and can give it up at any time, so easily becomes slipshod. Hence arises the tendency to class even the best women’s work as amateur.

Amongst those who are making the professional woman’s career more difficult, we can now also count the Society women.

The number of Society women who, since the war, have pushed their way into literature, art, films and the business world, is bewildering. It frequently means that the poor girl, who naturally cannot compete with the beautiful and much advertised fine lady, has to serve as “ghost” and rewrite the Countess’s articles, for which she gets a mere pittance. The Countess is paid for her name: and the “ghost” must submit, as she knows that hundreds of other women are ready to take the work.

In business there may be nothing against a combination by which the Countess X supplies the capital and Miss X does the work. Men lend their noble names to help along financial schemes, and women may do the same, if only a fair share of the profits be allowed to the worker.

One must admit that nowadays many Society women are out to make money, and generally succeed, thus doing far less mischief than the pin-money women who are qualified to make money and yet work for a pittance.

There were days when the middle-class professional worker was considered the backbone of the nation. Are those days past?

Democracy, with its blundering fingers, has shuffled the cards so badly that it is difficult to see where things will right themselves. It is as useless to sigh for the days when a countess was a countess, and an actress an actress, and a worker a worker, as to weep for the fine men of England who are asleep amongst the Flanders poppies. No competent worker fears competition; lack of competition means stagnation. There is a great difference, however, between _competition_ and _under-cutting_, which is what the pin-money women are systematically creating. Competition builds the edifice, under-cutting makes it fall. And no words are sufficiently harsh for the amateur worker who, to avoid _ennui_, does not hesitate to ruin her poorer sisters, actually lowering men’s wages in the process, and—indirectly—forcing more women into the labour market. There is great importance in the distinction between the woman who works in collaboration with her husband, and the woman who works to help keep the household. The latter is always a dangerous experiment, and one which often ends in the wife having to keep the whole house. When a woman is able to earn money, the man so easily falls into the habit of letting her do it, till gradually his efforts become slacker and slacker and he often leaves off working altogether. _An energetic, wage-earning wife always demoralises a man._

An able-bodied man who allows his wife to keep the family is a poor being; yet in these days of women’s work, it is becoming more and more frequent, the energetic, clever woman attracting a weak, lazy type of man. Women ought to let men understand from the first that husbands are responsible for the family expenses. In the day of misfortune, of course, normal rules do not apply.

At the same time, the married worker may be as great an obstacle to the single woman as the pin-money woman. Under the shelter of her husband’s roof, she can do work for a comparatively low figure which must injure her less fortunate rival.

Work has been done from mere vanity! In fact, as one man said about his wife’s work: “One requires a really large income to be the husband of a literary woman.”