march 7, 1918
Equal pay for equal work
The refusal of the London County Council to accept the scale of teachers’ salaries drafted by its Education Committee is an incident of more than professional significance. Of the 20,000 teachers employed by the Council a large majority are women, and the proportion has increased during the war. A petition signed by over 10,000 of these women — in other words, a practically unanimous petition — protested against the differentiation made in the proposed scales between the salaries of men and of women, and demanded “equal pay for equal work”. The consequence was that when the proposals came before the Council for approval on Tuesday they were rejected by a large majority.This demand for equal pay has long been a principal plank in the platform of women’s organizations, but hitherto the policy has made little headway. It has not even been endorsed by the National Union of Teachers, the majority of whose 90,000 members are women. The rejection of a scale which embodied the usual differentiation and was proposed by the largest and most powerful education authority in the country was therefore an unexpected and emphatic victory for the women’s claim. The rejection is not an endorsement of that claim, but the claim must now come up for decision. Nor will it escape notice that the success, so far as it goes, synchronizes very closely with the extension of the Parliamentary vote to women.
The merits of the claim to equal pay for equal work have been argued interminably. We do not propose to continue the argument beyond saying that, if logically the claim is difficult to contest, provided that the work be really equal, in practical life a woman earning, for example, £200 a year is normally far better off than a man with the same salary. But there is one question which we have never seen clearly put. If the employer is compelled to pay the same salary to a woman as to a man, will he not choose a man in the majority of appointments open to either sex? If so, women who establish their claim to equal pay at a time when men are scarce will have closed the door to their employment in normal conditions. By an apparent victory they will have done grave disservice to their cause.
march 6, 1918
Bullets instead of food
Yesterday an aeroplane flew over Petrograd and made people rather nervous, lest it might be German. In the evening a report circulated that bombs had been dropped, causing the death of three persons and injuries to five others. During the last four months we have been liable to be hit at any time of the day or night by stray bullets fired by bad marksmen or by drunken rioters. I have a hole in my bedroom window from a bullet that was evidently not aimed either at the window or at me. There are streets which have suffered so severely that Petrograd is called the “City of Broken Windows”. It costs too dear to repair them at the present extortionate prices, and there are no glaziers to do the work.
In all probability the majority of the victims in the two Revolutions were accidentally struck down. In one of the hospitals, in which my daughter was helping with wounded soldiers, a washerwoman who had the temerity to look out of a window during a fusillade in the street below was shot dead. Thousands of bodies have been dragged out of the canals and rivers. A slouching soldier or a drunken hooligan coming in your direction might be meditating how to strip you naked. Wine shops and cellars were broken into every day. When the crowd became very drunk and dangerous “Red Guards” appeared on the scene and shot them down. Fine old wines could be bought from soldiers at high prices.
A number of English refugees from the cotton mills at Narva arrived here a few days ago, en route for the United Kingdom. The route via Finland is now closed, and news from British travellers by way of the Murman coast is not encouraging. A large party of British subjects, with women and children, is held up at Petrosavodsk with hardly anything to eat and unable to proceed farther. The scarcity of food in Petrograd has become a real famine. Two-thirds of the shops are shut up, and the others are empty of goods. The banks, which now all belong to the Socialist Communistic Government, allow clients to draw only a small amount of money once a week, so that we often have no money for food when it can be obtained, or when we have money there is no food. It is not surprising that so many Petrograd Russians look forward to the coming of the Germans as a not altogether unmixed evil.
A number of English refugees from the cotton mills at Narva arrived here a few days ago, en route for the United Kingdom. The route via Finland is now closed, and news from British travellers by way of the Murman coast is not encouraging. A large party of British subjects, with women and children, is held up at Petrosavodsk with hardly anything to eat and unable to proceed farther. The scarcity of food in Petrograd has become a real famine. Two-thirds of the shops are shut up, and the others are empty of goods. The banks, which now all belong to the Socialist Communistic Government, allow clients to draw only a small amount of money once a week, so that we often have no money for food when it can be obtained, or when we have money there is no food. It is not surprising that so many Petrograd Russians look forward to the coming of the Germans as a not altogether unmixed evil.
march 2, 1918
All-night bombing of Venice
Last night saw the greatest air raid of the 45 that Venice has endured. It lasted eight hours and there was not an interval of more than half an hour during all that time of brilliant moonlight in which bombs were not falling on the city. Three hundred were thrown in all, 38 houses were smashed, the Royal Palace struck, a home for old men and women blown to pieces, and three churches damaged — St John and St Paul, St Simeon the Less, and St John Chrysostom, in the last of which an altar with one of Cellini’s last landscapes was wrecked. About 15 civilians were wounded, including two women, seriously. Only one man was killed, thanks to the promptness with which the Venetians now take shelter in refuges and also to the fact that only some 60,000 of the normal population of 160,000 remain.
The same machines returned again and again, bringing fresh cargoes of bombs through the night. Venice is only a few minutes’ flight from the Austrian lines, and the raiders evidently have a bomb dump close behind their trenches. The journey both ways and the taking on board of more bombs seem to require about 25 minutes, which was the average length of the intervals.
As several aeroplanes took part in the raid, the sinister drone of the approaching propellers across the lagoon and the shattering crash of bursting bombs recurred almost every ten minutes. Scattering bombs over inhabited towns is a brutal business anywhere, but in Venice it is sacrilege. For here it is practically impossible to drop bombs without destroying or injuring beyond repair beautiful buildings. The Austrians, and recently their German allies, have thrown in all about a thousand high-explosive bombs upon the city with a cynical disregard of whether they might strike the Doge’s Palace, a tiny shop, or, by an outside chance, some building which could plausibly have some vague military use.
As it is Venice will never lose the scars which the Vandals have made. The Scalzi Church on the Grand Canal was destroyed months ago with its frescoed roof by Tiepolo: a white stone five yards from the doors of St Mark’s records where another bomb just failed to smash those gorgeous golden Byzantine mosaics which no covering with timbers and sandbags can protect, and which cannot be carried to a place of safety.
As several aeroplanes took part in the raid, the sinister drone of the approaching propellers across the lagoon and the shattering crash of bursting bombs recurred almost every ten minutes. Scattering bombs over inhabited towns is a brutal business anywhere, but in Venice it is sacrilege. For here it is practically impossible to drop bombs without destroying or injuring beyond repair beautiful buildings. The Austrians, and recently their German allies, have thrown in all about a thousand high-explosive bombs upon the city with a cynical disregard of whether they might strike the Doge’s Palace, a tiny shop, or, by an outside chance, some building which could plausibly have some vague military use.
As it is Venice will never lose the scars which the Vandals have made. The Scalzi Church on the Grand Canal was destroyed months ago with its frescoed roof by Tiepolo: a white stone five yards from the doors of St Mark’s records where another bomb just failed to smash those gorgeous golden Byzantine mosaics which no covering with timbers and sandbags can protect, and which cannot be carried to a place of safety.
