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LOS ANGELES, March 1. -- (To the Editor of The Times:) The continued discussion of proposed laws to regulate the hours of labor for women seems to eliminate any consideration of the wishes of women who work. Beautiful theories are propounded by the advocates of the Lyon bill, which would operate on all females employed on salary or wages. One of the sex opposing the drastic regulations of that bill has been accused of believing that women wanted to work long hours just for the fun of work.

Womankind is a species of being that enjoys indolence, pleasure and easy passage through life just the same as any other being.

Do we attain anything by being indolent? Do we get to the top rung of the ladder by sitting with our hands folded and afraid to move because we have already put in eight hours of labor? Do we get to the pinnacle of fame by being stagnated and hampered because a few people (and some of these people have never been wage earners) think that by their having superficial knowledge of the trials of both the employer and employee, they can make themselves Czars and have people obey their dictates? Is it constitutional to take away our liberty? By all means I am in favor of an eight-hour law. Women know by their own physical ability whether they can take more work on or not. Let them be the judges. The employers who demand more than eight hours are in the minority, and why sacrifice 17,000 of the 37,000 working women of this State (I believe that the other 20,000 include the number working in laundries, canneries, factories and restaurants) to a state of inertia -- to state of stagnation? Take for instance an employer, who has a competent secretary, stenographer or executive and needs her services after she has put in her eight hours. All he has to do is to ask her to go to his home and take down the notes, and in the meantime a typewriter has been sent to her home and she goes home and works six or seven hours to have the work ready for the morning. Take a woman who is a secretary of a company. Meetings of the company are held in the evening: she has already worked eight hours in the office or some department and it will be necessary to spend a couple of hours taking down the minutes, only it will not be in the office she usually works.

A bookkeeper who is getting a good salary and wants to keep her position finds she can't complete her work in eight hours, takes her books home and works two or three nights a week for four or five hours each night.

A woman who gives music lessons for a school for eight hours gives more lessons in her home or plays at a church or club or dancing class.

A typist who has worked eight hours on her machine plays the piano for two or three hours a night in a moving-picture show.

The paternal form of government is lovely in theory. The business woman dependent on her own resources finds it frequently difficult to make both ends meet. She has made her way into many vocations of profit where an arbitrary limit of forty-eight hours per week and eight hours per day would make her employment impossible for many positions.

Shall such women be forbidden to perform such duties -- which any employer has the right to expect? Shall women with sufficient brains to hold such positions be compelled to make way for men, and to accept places where eight hours of physical effort will be all they may do toward keeping up their end of the business world?

The office woman is an essential to the present-day business.

Some of our good people in California, who have never been employers or wage earners, but who like to hold State jobs, are ever agitating more exaggerated reform in the laws regulating female labor. Let them be fair with us. If we are to have an eight-hour law for all women, let it also extend to all men and begin it now. Women in the past have been handicapped by every obstacle that masculine mind could conceive. These bars to progress have been slowly and steadily displaced.

Please do not take from us the right to go forward and that too in an equal suffrage State.

MAE GENTLEMAN,
No. 1249 West Sixth street.