Women's Part In Industrial Welfare Commission
By Mrs. Charles Farwell Edson

Member of the Commission

As the woman member of the Industrial Welfare Commission I will say that our aim is to provide a real living wage for the working in women of this State and to safeguard the learners during their apprenticeship. So that they really may be taught a trade and not put into blind alley occupations, to be used and exploited and then thrown out unskilled and unprepared for life as it is. We hope to co-operate with our commissioner of vocational education and slowly try to develop in California an industrial condition that will be as much the envy of other parts of the nation as our glorious State in other respects--a pretty high ideal, but one worthy of any one's highest endeavors. California has succeeded in getting a well-enforced eight-hour law for women and children, a good child labor law, and one of the best workman's compensation acts in the Union. Our commission hopes to supplement this work with the administration of our minimum wage law for women and minors so that we will help solve the serious industrial problem not only of our own State but also of more highly complex industrial States of the East.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Industrial Welfare Commission of California of which Judge Frank J. Murasky of San Francisco is chairman, is composed of five commissioners and a secretary. One of the five commissioners is a woman--Mrs. Charles Farwell Edson (Katherine Phillips Edson) of Los Angeles--without whose name no roster of California's distinguish women would be complete. Mrs. Edson is now serving her second term as chairman of the social and industrial department of the California Federation of Women's Clubs. She is serving her third year as the woman of the Council of the National Municipal League.

Source: California's Magazine, New Call Building, San Francisco, 1915, Pages 382-383.