The point is that while there cannot be too much protective legislation for children and youth, the place of adult women in the labor world must not be too firmly and exclusively held by the side of children lest we add to the difficulties women still experience in finding and keeping a place in the world of modern industry.
=Women in War Work.=--In England, we are told, there were one million women employed in war plants during the great struggle with Germany.
In every variety of munitions manufacture women were found in great numbers, often furnishing eighty per cent, or more of the total number employed.

It is a fact that they "made good." It is also a fact that the average of health among the working women of England rose in many localities where women were employed at these unwonted tasks.

The reason given for this by one keen observer being that the higher wages earned enabled many thousands of women, before undernourished because of their poverty, to have "three square meals a day." When we remember that in England there are nearly two million more women than men, and that the men who served in the army and have returned physically and mentally able to take back the jobs they left for army service are clamoring for them, and when we remember that the struggle for a standard of living never goes backward and that women workers once used to good wages will not willingly take poor ones again, we can see what difficulties the war has made in our sister country for both men and women in industry.
In our own country the one and a quarter million women engaged in industrial work directly or indirectly connected with the war service when the first investigation was made in fifteen states, under the auspices of the National League of Women's Service, were but a section of the army of women who were enlisted in war work, paid or unpaid and of various kinds.

Now we have an unemployment problem of our own with something of the same complaint of the men of England that the returned soldier finds a woman in his place, a woman who is still wanted, perhaps, by the employer and who does not wish to relinquish her job.
When Mrs.Muhlhauser Richards took charge of the Woman's Division of the Department of Labor in the effort to make a clearing house of women's work in the interest of help to the government it was not simply a measure for temporary use or of temporary value.

The idea still persists in peace as well as in war, and justly, that the interests of women in industry require a special division of the Labor Department in order that we shall be able to know what is needed for their protection in the interest of family life as well as understand what individual women require in justice when they are wage-earners.