ABSTRACT
The British workwoman is in even greater danger than we anticipated when we wrote on this subject in the last issue of this Review, for since then the new Factory and Workshops Bill has been printed, and we now know that it proposes to pursue further the policy of treating adult women as children—which has been the blemish on all factory legislation hitherto—and also that it proposes to put new powers in the hands of the Home Secretary, which, though in so many words extending equally to men, would in fact press much more hardly on women. With the recent experience of the efforts made to stop the work of the pit-brow women and the nail and chain makers fresh in our memory, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Home Secretary would have much pressure brought to bear on him to declare as dangerous, and to forbid trades in which women work, wholly irrespective of the needs and wishes of the workers themselves, and that the pressure of the voting portion of the community might easily outweigh any opposition which women—at least as 146long as they lack the power of the vote—could bring to bear.
