positions of authority in the State cluded 3,452 women and showed a departments of labor in 15 States and in minor positions in 19 States for the purpose of looking atter the interests of wage-earning women. median of $13, and one in Delaware covering 2,995 women whose median was $11.05. In 1925 two State studies of wages have been completed. The first was made in Mis OCCUPATIONS TABLE. IN WHICH 50,000 OR MORE WOMEN 10 YEARS OF AGE AND OVER WERE EMPLOYED IN 1920 AND NUMBER OF WOMEN EMPLOYED IN EACH, 1920 AND 1910.* Occupation Wages. Comprehensive wage data for women workers for any one period are not available However, figures which have been collected by the Women's Bureau in 14 State investigations of women's earnings in factories, stores, and laundries-surveys made during the past 5 yearsshow very definitely that although some women workers are paid a fair return for their labors, thousands fail to receive a living wage and are forced to eke out an existence, often doing without the barest necessities Farmers, general farms. of life. Of all the States in which Farm laborers, general surveys have been made, Rhode Island showed the highest wages, if median earnings are used as a measure The median of week's earnings of 7,780 Rhode Island women whose earnings were recorded was $16.85; that is, one-half of these women earned more than this sum and onehalf earned less. The survey in this State, however, was made in 1920 when wages were uniformly high as the result of the war activities, and are not representative of the present time. A study of the wages of 4,138 women in Kansas in 1920 showed a median of only $11.95. The median of week's earnings of 6,666 women included in the Georgia survey in 1920 and 1921 were $12.95, this period covering the time when wages were at the peak as well as the beginning of the industrial depression of 1921. The figures for the two studies made entirely in 1921 are probably affected to some degree by this slump; the median for 7,426 women in Kentucky was $10.75, and the median for 8,595 women in South Carolina was $9.50. For the five studies conducted in 1922 the medians varied as follows: $14.95 for 34,655 women in New Jersey, $13.80 for 30,568 women in Ohio, $12.65 for 15.364 women in Missouri, $11.60 for 1,793 women in Arkansas, and $8.80 for 4,868 women in Alabama. No wage studies were made by the bureau in 1923 and only two in 1924-one in Oklahoma which in farms t dealers Clothing industries Food industries Iron and steel industries] Cotton mills Knitting mills sissippi during January and Febru ary and comprised only 2,136 women, the median for this group being $8.60. A similar investigation was made in Tennessee in the spring. Wage records collected for 14,642 women revealed a median of $11.10. Absenteeism of women in textile mills. Women who toil at night. Industrial accidents among women. Effects of special legislation upon women. It is also important to call attention to the survey of foreign-born women in industry, the field work of which has very recently been completed. Women's Government Publications. In addition to the publications already referred to, the Women's Bureau during 1925 has published or sent to press several other reports of considerable interest. One of these deals with the This survey was undertaken at the home environment and employment urgent requests of organizations and opportunities of women in coal-mine persons interested in the establishoperatives' families; the immediate ment of greater opportunity and betsource of this information was the ter understanding of American life material collected by the U. S. Coal among the foreign-born population of Commission in 1922-1923. Another the United States. eport entitled The Effects of Applied Research Upon the Employment Opportunities of American Women contains descriptions of conspicuous changes which have occurred in such opportunities in certain industries as a result of the application of scientific research in the industrial field. A third study consists of a discussion of women workers in the fruitgrowing and canning industries in the State of Washington, the field investigation of which was made in the summer of 1923. Other studies of significance which have been handled by the bureau during 1925, but the reports of which have not yet been published, are as follows: Bureau. That the Women's Bureau has been unable to collect during any one year extensive material on all subjects which come under its supervision has been due to the fact that it has been limited in appropriation and personnel. That it has been able to accomplish as much as it has in its brief history is due partly to the aid of the organi zations of interested women in all parts of the country desirous of bettering conditions for women workers, to the assistance of State authorities, and to the coöperation of employers through whose efforts the collection of data, in so many instances, has bee made possible. WOMEN'S WORK FOR PEACE CHAIRMAN, INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION TO PREVENT WAR Significance. The most outstanding question of foreign policy in 1925 has been the proposed entry of the United States into the World Court. The movement has been transformed from the increasing support of a measure; it has become an adoption of A Cause; and this although the party in power under its leader, President Coolidge, has supported the Cause. The churches, the women's groups, and the universities have emphasized its specific and limited function in the cause of Peace. A been reformers and statesmen. Educational Process.-What part have the Women of this country played for Peace in 1925? Soon after 1920 two women, both statesmen in a real sense, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt and Maud Wood Park, deter Most of the woman saints have mined that women must do their duty as citizens in behalf of a sane foreign policy for Peace. That an active constructive Foreign Policy was a new necessity for this country, and that women everywhere must learn to be intelligent about foreign affairs. The state of affairs in 1925 is in part the result of a three-year educational process carried on by the League of Women Voters, the Young Women's Christian Associations, the American Association of University Women, the Federation of Women's Clubs and other associations. and not because they are opposed and As Organization. In January, 1925, the climax was reached and the nine largest national women's organizations met in Washington under Mrs. Catt's leadership and discussed the Causes and Cures of War with informed speakers for a week. This this lesson. meeting registered the great progress already made in popular under-ican women have accepted as one first standing; and it went on record for the World Court and the elimination of the causes of war. In all parts of the country the women of the United States have united with their churches for Peace. They have joined with their universities, they have joined with public schools, they have lunched, tea'd, dined and radio'd for it. They have held talkers' schools and round tables everywhere—and all for Peace and the World Court. Arousing Influence.-"How far is 1925 really different in this respect from any other year, have not women always loved Peace, and haven't they always talked about it?" The great game of 1925 is to illustrate the big truth that movements which coincide with strong human currents of belief and with normal action do succeed World Court.-To this end Amer measure the World Court, and have worked for it as citizens should strive for political ends-openly through accepted channels. Early 1926 will doubtless give many American women a deeper confidence in representative government by the passage of the measure permitting the United States to become a member of the Permanent Court of International Justice. "If the world is to go forward along the line of regional pacts for Disarmament and Security, how about a Locarno Pact for the Pacific as a next step forward?" asks Mrs. Catt in November, 1925. This year women have instituted new anniversaries-August 26, the fifth anniversary of suffrage, where old suffragists throughout the country spoke and wrote for the World Court and Peace. LITERARY ACHIEVEMENTS OF AMERICAN WOMEN EDITOR, READERS GUIDE, SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE Prizes. - If we are to measure rish's The Perennial Bachelor; Marachievement by reward, American tha Ostenso's first novel, Wild Geese, women writers have a good record won $13,500 offered by a combination for 1925. The Pulitzer Prize for fic- of publishing and cinema interests tion was won by Edna Ferber's So and Fannie Hurst's Mannequin carBig, the Harper Prize by Anne Par-ried off Liberty's $50,000 for a novel to serve as serial and as scenario. | appraisers of her part in our literaWomen won three out of four of the ture. This novel invests a situation first prizes offered by Harper's Maga- more popular with French writers zine in its series of short story com- than with American readers with a petitions: Alice Brown for "The Girl pathetic dignity that sets it over her in the Tree," Fleta Campbell Springer average of production. Two novelfor "Legend," Ada Jack Carver for ists have this year more than main"Redbone." Two of the second prizes tained their averages: Ellen Glasgow in these competitions were won by in Barren Ground, the story of a women, Lisa Ysaye Tarleau and Ed-woman's lifelong struggle toward wina Stanton Babcock, and two third | reconciliation with life, reaches the prizes, by Margaret Culkin Banning highest point in what has been for and Phoebe H. Gilkyson. In the annual O. Henry Short Story Competition Inez Haynes Irwin's "The Spring Flight" took first prize; and the third was won by Frances Newman (who has this year produced a scholarly work on the development of the short story) for "Rachel and Her Children"; while of the fifteen stories selected, for special merit, to appear in the volume resulting from this coming altogether from an inner compul petition, six were by women. Poetry awards, or at least a part of them, are separately noted, and in these as well as in the many smaller competitions women's names appear often enough upon the lists of awards. the most part a steadily mounting development; Willa Cather, in The Professor's House, has given us what may well be the outstanding novel of the year in the United States. It is now comfortingly clear that Miss Cather has cut loose from the pressure of the public, even of the unusually intelligent public which has from the first been hers, and is writ sion, concerned only that her form of expression shall be appropriate. Family chronicles and problems of society affecting family life continue to interest the greater number of Women writers of fiction. Inez Haynes Irwin, in Gertrude Haviland's Divorce, gives sound, sane and sympathetic treatment to a subject usually clogged with sentimentality. To illustrate the range of novels of this general nature a list might well include: Kathleen Norris, Little Ships; Ruth Suckow, The Odyssey of Novels. Of the novels so decorated, So Big is less important as a work of art than as a sign of the times: its tremendous and prolonged popularity is another evidence of the number of Americans who at the height of a period of prosperity have become dissatisfied with their own standards of success. The distinction a Nice Girl; Dorothy Speare, The of The Perennial Bachelor, however, Girl who Dared; Edith O'Shaughis less in theme than in technique: nessy, "Married Life" (a group of a family history stretching over sixty novelettes); Nalbro Bartley, Bread years, in which four women immolate and Jam; Margaret Wilson, The Kenthemselves to rear one futile man, orthys (by the winner of last year's might easily have been not only Pulitzer Prize); Helen Hull, The gloomy but heavy; but Mrs. Parrish Surry Family; Janet Fairbanks, The deftly permits the reader to discover Smiths; Marjorie Barkley McClure, that this man is not so much a crea- The Bush That Burned; Isabella tion of God as a masterpiece of four Holt, The Low Road; Fannie Kilwomen, and that to justify its exist-bourne, Mrs. William Horton Speakence a masterpiece need not satisfying. In this field several newcomers the public or the critics but only the have distinguished themselves, espeartist: hence there is no over-cially Rose Franken with Pattern, whelming tragedy of frustration. It Helen Woodbury with The Misty is quite likely that this novel will be Flats (both of these are studies of a one of the few of the year that will be here in ten years' time. So will The Mother's Recompense, if only because all that Edith Wharton writes must be taken into account by future relationship lately much under fire, that of mother and daughter) and Mathilde Eiker, whose extraordinary study of three women in Mrs. Mason's Daughters is as representative in its own way of an American social prob-published letters of Edgar Allan Poe lem as Brieux's Three Daughters of but published a biographical study of M. Dupont or Chehov's Three Sisters, him as The Dreamer, and Corra Hardealing with corresponding situations ris set down, in As a Woman Thinks, in France and Russia. Prairie Fires, the conclusions reached by an author by Lorna Doone Beers, outgrows the whose life has called for, and proframe of a family novel, involves the duced, а red-blooded philosophy. fortunes of farming in the Northwest, Women figure in all sorts of lifeand stands out as one of the most studies: Janet Scudder's Modelling promising first novels in years. My Life, is the autobiography of a Historical Fiction. This list is sculptor; many an American actress headed by Honoré Willsie Morrow's appears in Mary C. Crawford's RoRomance of the Winning of Oregon, mance of the American Theatre, and told with the ingratiating honesty Mary A. Best presents Quaker biogof the new type of historian, with raphies in Rebel Saints. There is a Mary Johnston's The Slave Ship, of new, re-written version of Mary Ausnovels of this class. We have had tin's The Man Jesus, now called A besides, Bernie Babcock's addition to Small Town Man. Mary Lawton preLincoln apocrypha, Booth and the serves Katy Leary's memories of a Spirit of Lincoln; Julia Flisch's Old happy American home in A Lifetime Hurricane; Alice P. Smith's Kindred, with Mark Twain, which though not and other romances concerned with the counterblast to Van Wyck Brooks past time. Such for that matter is for which it may have been intended, one of the most distinctive of our is for all that an invaluable addition novels, Elinor Wylie's The Venetian to Twainiana. In Catherine the Glass Nephew, but this delicate fan- Great, Katherine Anthony exercises tastic escapes altogether from time a technique exhibited in her earlier and categories. Comparatively few life of Margaret Fuller, upon a subwomen are writing successful detec- ject that gives it plenty of exercise. tive stories, but the most popular one this year by man or woman was undoubtedly The Red Lamp, by Mary Roberts Rinehart, which twines two mysteries, crime and ghosts. Women continue to produce cowboy fiction, of which the entertaining tales of B. M. Bower (Meadowlark is the latest) are easily first. Literary Criticism. Some of the works of literary criticism are noteworthy, especially the arrangement of material and running commentary with which Frances Newman presents a robust subject in The Short Story's Mutations, and the contribution to our source material of social and literary history made by Jeannette R. Literary Biography and Auto- Tandy in Crackerbox Philosophers. biography. The outstanding achieve- This list might well include Elizament in literary biography for Amer- beth H. Haight's Horace and His Art ica this year is Amy Lowell's John of Enjoyment; Ruth Phelp's Earlier Keats, and her loss is the greatest and Later Forms of Petrarchs Canloss to American literary criticism. coniere, and Edith Wharton's Writing Late in the season came two un- of Fiction. While Dorothy Scarborusually important works, not only as ough's On the Trail of Negro Folk literary biography but for the stu-Songs, is an important contribution dent of woman's part in our literary to a subject just now being widely life; The Diary and Letters of Josephine Preston Peabody, edited by Christine H. Baker; and Kate Doug las Wiggin as Her Sister Knew Her, by Nora Archibald Smith. Earlier appeared The Life and Letters of Mary Putnam Jacobi, edited by Ruth Putnam; Ida Tarbell's Life of Judge Gary, and Clara Barrus's Boswellian record of The Life of John Burroughs. Mary N. Stanard not only edited un discussed. Everyman's Genius, by Mary Austin, is valuable not only for its ideas but for its careful documentation; this is true also of an uncommonly valuable contribution phonetics, Euphon-English, by Margaret De Witt. to Travel books have quite lately become a favorite form of literary expression for women; women have written plenty of them all along; but |