Eight-Hour Day

Women told President Coolidge last week what he should do so that posterity might rank his name along with Lincoln's.. The deed essential for such fame was his getting behind the proposed Lucretia Mott Amendment (giving women equal rights with men) and securing its passage by Congress. So said a delegation from the "National Woman's Party, guests at the Summer White House. State laws which "restrict the economic freedom of women" are objectionable, said Miss Gail Laughlin, lawyer of Portland, Me., first vice chairman of the Party. It took men long years of fighting to get a standard eight-hour day, but it is the eight-hour day for women that the Woman's Party is vigorously opposing. The obvious difference between male and female eight-hour days is that a man with an eight-hour day can make extra money working extra hours, but a woman in an eight-hour-day-for-women state is prohibited from toiling a minute beyond the alloted period. "Such restrictions, said Miss Laughlin" have been camouflaged under the name of 'welfare legislation,' but . . . relegate women to jobs so undesirable and poorly paid that men do not want them. President Coolidge told the delegation that when a majority of U. S. women were unmistakably in favor wiping out all legal differentiation between the sexes, they would undoubtedly carry their point. He said, smiling, that men have a habit of giving women what they want.