THE NEW WAGE ENVELOPE
The baby had been fretful all that hot summer day. Every time he was
passed over to the eldest little girl, he cried. So Mrs. Lewis had to
keep him herself. All the twenty pounds of him rested heavily on her
slender left arm while she went about the kitchen getting supper. With
one hand she managed now and then to stir the potatoes “warming over”
in the pan on the stove. She put the pinch of tea in the pot and set it
steeping. And she fried the ham. She set on the table a loaf of bread,
still warm from the day’s baking and called to the eldest little girl
to bring the butter. “Aren’t we going to have the apple sauce too?” the
child asked. “Oh, yes, bring it,” the mother had answered pettishly.
“I’m that tired I don’t care how quickly you eat everything up.”
You see she had been going around like this with the heavy baby all day
while she baked, and there were the three meals to cook. And she had
done some of the ironing and there was the kitchen floor that had to be
“washed down.” And the second little girl’s dress had to be finished
for Sunday. And Jimmie, aged nine, whose food was always disagreeing
with him, was in bed with one of his sick spells and called frequently
for her to wait on him in the bedroom at the head of the stairs. And
she had been up with the baby a good deal anyhow the night before. So
you see why Mrs. Lewis was what is called “cross.”
Besides, she was just now facing a new anxiety. When her husband came
in from the shop and hung up his hat and she had dished up the potatoes
and the family sat down to the evening meal, there was just one subject
of conversation. The State of New York was making its preparedness
preparation with the military census that was to begin to-morrow, a
detailed inventory of man power and possessions. Hitherto for America
the war had been over in Europe. Now for the first time it was here for
the Lewis family. And other similar supper tables all over the United
States were facing it too. “But you couldn’t possibly go,” the tired
woman said across the table.
“I may have to,” the man answered.
“Then what’ll happen to me and the children?” she returned desperately.
And he didn’t know. And she didn’t know. Hardly anybody knew. We on
this side of the Atlantic are now beginning to find out.
Mr. Lewis was drafted last week. The rent is paid one month ahead.
You can see the bottom of the coal bin. There’s only half a barrel of
flour. And there are seven children to feed. No, there are none of her
family nor his that want to adopt any of them as war work. Well, there
you are. And there Mrs. Lewis is. In her nervous dread of the charity
that she sees coming, she slaps the children twice as often as she used
to and the baby cries all day.
But, Mrs. Lewis, listen. Don’t even ask the Exemption Board to release
your husband. It’s your chance to be a patriot and let him go. And this
war may not be as bad for you as you think. There are women on the
other side could tell you. Suppose, suppose you never had to do another
week’s baking and you were rested enough to love the last baby as you
did the first, and all the children could have shoes when they needed
them, and there was money enough beside for a new spring hat and the
right fixings to make you pretty once more. So that your man coming
back from the front when the war is won, may fall in love with you
all over again. No, it’s not heaven I’m talking about. It’s here in a
war-ridden world. This is no fairy tale. It’s the truth in Britain and
France, as it’s going to be in the United States.
“Somewhere in England” Mrs. Black, when her country took up arms in
1914, was as anxious and concerned as you are to-day. Her man was
a car-cleaner who earned 22 shillings a week on the Great Western
Railway. That seems appallingly little from our point of view. But
thousands of British working class families were accustomed to living
on such a wage. The Blacks had to. It is true there wasn’t much margin
for joy in it. And when the call to the colours came, it was to Mr.
Black an invitation to a Great Adventure. He enlisted. Well, the
first winter had not passed before it was demonstrated that Mrs. Black
and the children—there were five of them—were not going to experience
any new hardship because of the absence of the head of the family in
Flanders. By January she was saying hopefully one morning across the
fence to her neighbour in the next little smoke-coloured brick house in
the long dingy row: “If them that’s makin’ this war’ll only keep it up
long enough, I’ll be on my feet again.”
To-day you may say that Mrs. Black is “on her feet.” There are
Nottingham lace curtains at her front windows as good as any in the
whole row of Lamson’s Walk. The new chest of drawers she’s needed ever
since she was married is a place to put the children’s clothes. And
it’s such a help to keeping the three rooms tidy. Santa Claus came at
Christmas with a graphophone. And you ought to see Mrs. Black’s fur
coat! Three other women who haven’t got theirs yet were in the night
she wore it home “just to feel the softness of it.” Their hands, do you
know, hands that are hard and grimy with England’s black town soot,
had never so much as touched fur before! And they’re going to wear it
soon, if this war keeps up. For they’re all of them these new women in
industry, like Mrs. Black.
Mrs. Black, to begin with, has her “separation allowance” because her
husband’s at the front. That’s 12 shillings and sixpence per week for
herself, 5 shillings for the first child, three shillings sixpence for
the second and 2 shillings for each subsequent child. Well, with the
five children, that makes 27 shillings a week coming in and there’s
none of it going to the Great Boar’s Head on the corner, which always
used to get a look-in on Mr. Black’s weekly wage envelope before Mrs.
Black did. Now, in addition to this 27 shillings a week, which in
itself is 5 shillings more than the family ever had before, Mrs. Black
is at the factory where she is making 30 shillings a week. That’s 57
shillings a week, which is her household income more than doubled. It’s
why 60,000 fewer persons in London were in receipt of poor relief in
September, 1915, than in 1903, the previous most prosperous year known
to the Board of Trade. In the West End of this town titled families
are counting their “meatless” days. In the East End, families are
celebrating meat days that were never known before the war. The Care
Committee used to have to provide boots for over 300 school children in
this district. This year there was only one family, the mother of which
was ill, that needed boots!
RIGHT THIS WAY, LADIES, INTO INDUSTRY
Mrs. Lewis, this is the answer to your anxious inquiry: it’s prosperity
that’s coming to you. In every warring country there are women of the
working classes who have found it. You are going to be mobilised for
the army of industry as your husband for the other army. Only there is
no draft or conscription necessary. The recruiting station is just
down the street at the factory that recently hung out that sign bright
with new paint, “Women Wanted.” See them arriving at the entrance gate.
Fall in line, Mrs. Lewis, and get measured for your new uniform. Yes,
you are to have one. It’s some form of the things they call trousers.
But I’m sure you won’t mind that. Put it on. Put it on quickly. In it
you will find yourself the real new woman whose coming has hitherto
been only proclaimed or prophesied on the waving banners of suffrage
processions you’ve watched parading on the avenues. You are She for
whom the ages have waited. This new garment they are handing you has
the pocket in it for a pay envelope. You who have been toiling for your
board and the clothes you could get after the rest of the family had
theirs, are now a labourer worthy of hire. Economic independence, the
political economists call it, as they take their pen in hand to make
note of the long lines of you going into industry, later to write their
deductions into scientific treatises about you.
Now, it may not particularly interest you that you are like this, a
phenomenon of the 20th century, but there are plainer terms that I am
sure you will understand. Listen, Mrs. Lewis: Every Saturday night
there is going to be money in your own pocket. The convenience of
this is that never again will you under any circumstances have to go
through any one’s else pockets for it. Do you see? Right across those
portals there where they want you so much that every obstacle that
used to be piled in your pathway has been so surreptitiously carted
away overnight, that you would hardly believe it ever was there, lie
all promised opportunities. Susan B. Anthony pioneered for them. Mrs.
Pankhurst smashed windows for them. Mrs. Catt is even now politically
campaigning for them. And you, Mrs. Lewis, are to enter in. What will
happen to you when you’ve joined up with the new woman movement?
Let us look at the advance columns over on the other side. No one met
them with: “Woman, back to your kitchen!” Or, “This is unscriptural and
your habits of marriage and maternity will interfere with shop routine.”
It was one of the most significant decisions of all time since the
day of the Cave Woman, that morning when Mrs. Black got her aunt to
come in to look after the children and, hanging up her gingham apron,
walked out of the kitchen. Women were doing it all over Europe. They
are to be counted now by the hundreds of thousands. Altogether we
know that they number in the millions although we have not the exact
returns from every country. By 1916 England had enrolled in industry
4,086,000 women and Germany 4,793,472 of whom 866,000 in England and
1,387,318 in Germany had never before been gainfully employed outside
their own homes. France, Italy, Russia all have similar battalions. And
the important fact is that these new recruits are going into industry
differently. Women before had to push their way in. Women now are
invited in.
Heretofore there were all the reasons in the world why a woman should
not work outside her own home. Three generations of employment had not
yet sufficed to efface the impression from the minds even of most young
girls themselves who went out to earn their living that it was only a
temporary expedient until they could marry and be supported ever after.
Even when they discovered after marriage that they were still earning
their own living just as much in their husband’s kitchen as anywhere
they had been before, public opinion and the neighbours disapproved
of their working for any one outside their own family. Who, Madam,
would sew on your husband’s buttons? So strong was this sentiment that
it even threatened to crystallise on the statute books. There were
districts in Germany and in the North of England where they talked
about passing a law against the employment of the married woman. Then
fortunately about this time the world came to 1914 and the revolution
of all established thought.
Everybody sees now a reason why Mrs. Black should work. Her country
wants her to. And it has swept aside to the scrap-heap of ancient
prejudice all the other reasons against the industrial employment of
women. Among the rest, the most material reason, the most real reason
of all, that woman’s place was the home and every other place was
man’s. That was true. And it was one of the most incontrovertible
facts that each woman who sought employment came up against. Industry
had never been arranged for her needs or her convenience.
MAKING INDUSTRY OVER FOR HER
Now it’s being made over, actually made over! Already woman wins this
victory in the Great War. Don’t we all of us know industries where
there hasn’t been so much as a nail to hang a woman’s hat on, where
it wouldn’t be spoiled, let alone a room in which she could wash her
hands, or change her working clothes? But go through Europe now and you
will scarcely find any place they haven’t tried the best they could to
fix up for woman’s occupancy. She shall have the nicest hook that they
can find to hang her hat on. She shall have a whole cupboard, a locker
to keep it in, if she’ll only put it there to-day. And oh, ladies, all
of you listen, there’s even a mirror to see if it’s on straight! Just
a little while ago I stood in a factory “somewhere in France,” where
they had built a beautiful retiring room with lavatories and hot and
cold water and a row of shining white enamelled sinks. And one day of
course some thoughtful woman had brought in her handbag a piece from
her cracked looking-glass and fastened it on the wall between two
tacks, you know the way you would? A little later, the superintendent
of the factory saw it there: “I sent right out,” he told me himself
with feeling, “and bought this one.” And he showed me with pride the
full length plate-glass mirror that hung on the wall where the little
old cracked looking-glass used to be. I think every government in
Europe now has mirrors listed among “necessary supplies.” I mention it
as significant of the anxious effort to please the feminine fancy.
But the first most important thing that was done in making over
industry, was opening the door from the inside for Mrs. Black’s
arrival. Every door-keeper to-day has his instructions from higher up
not to keep the lady knocking out in the cold. Her coming was in the
first instance heralded in England, actually heralded with a flourish
of trumpets. That procession of 40,000 women that Mrs. Pankhurst led
down the Strand into industry, under the new standard, “For Men Must
Fight and Women Must Work,” had flags flying and bands playing. And the
English Government paid for the bands. Parliament records show that
this Suffrage procession was financed to the extent of 3,000 pounds,
which is $15,000. Has there ever been a more revolutionary conversion
than this to the Woman’s Cause? For the first time in history, the
woman movement is underwritten by Government. It is with this support
that it’s going strong all over the world to-day.
The place that is being made for Mrs. Black and her contemporaries
is everywhere in the first instance at least, being arranged through
Government intervention. With every new push on the front, the soldiers
that go down in the awful battalions of death have to be replaced by
others, which means that more and more men must be “combed out” of the
shops back home. And to employers governments have said: Hire women in
their places.
To this employers answered as they have so many times to us when we
have asked to be hired: “But women don’t know how.”
You see, it has always been so difficult for us to learn. From the
bricklayers and the printers up to the medical men and the lawyers and
the ministers, there has always been that gentlemen’s agreement in
every trade: “Don’t let her in. And if she gets in, don’t let her up,
any higher up than you have to.”
But now over all the world, to every industry that shows a slackening
in production, there is issued one common government General Order:
“Teach the Women.” And the employer looks questioningly toward the
work bench at the figure in the leather apron there, who in some of
the most highly skilled trades, has always threatened to take off that
apron and walk out of the shop when a petticoat crossed the threshold.
There are shops in which there has never been a woman apprentice,
because he wouldn’t teach her. Would he now?
The skilled workman was summoned in England to the Home Office for a
heart-to-heart talk with the Government. He came from the cotton trade,
the woollen and the worsted trade, the bleachers and dyers’ trade, the
woodworkers and furnishers’ trade, the biscuit trade, the boot and shoe
trade, the engineering trade and a great many others. The Government
spoke sternly of its power under martial law. The skilled workman,
shifting his cap from one hand to the other, began to understand. But
he still stubbornly protested: “Women haven’t the mental capacity for
my work.”
“We shall see,” said Government.
“But it will take so long to learn my trade, five years, six years,
seven years.”
“Ah, so it will. Very well, then, teach the women a part of your trade
at a time, a process in which instruction can be given in the shortest
length of time.”
“But the tools of my trade, they are heavy for a woman’s hands.”
“There shall be special tools made.”
And there have been. So, the now famous “dilution” of labour has been
arranged. Mrs. Black is “in munitions.” I saw her standing at a machine
that is called a capstan lathe, drilling the opening in a circular
piece of brass. There used to be employed in this shop, 1,500 men and
the man power has been now so diluted, that there are 200 men and
1,300 women. There are rows and rows of the capstan lathes and down
each alleyway, as the space between them is called, there are lines of
women like Mrs. Black. They have to start the machine, to feed it, and
control it, and stop it. In three weeks’ time most of them were able
to learn these repetitive operations. But they do not yet know how to
take the machine apart or to fix it if anything breaks. So up and down
each row there goes a skilled man who is still retained for this, a
“setter-up,” he is called in the trade. And to supervise each section
there is a foreman. It was the foreman who called my attention to the
machines. “They are,” he said, “small lathes, specially adapted to the
women. We had them made in America since the war.”
EASY ENOUGH TO ARRANGE
Like that you see, it is done. Sometimes to make over the job for the
woman, there was necessary only the simplest expedient like adding
the “flap” seat in the Manchester tram-cars for the woman-conductor
to rest between rush hours. Even in skilled trades it hasn’t always
been necessary to remodel an entire machine. Sometimes only a lever
has to be shortened. Sometimes it has been done by the addition of
“jigs and fixtures,” so that a process formerly involving judgment
and experience, is now automatically performed at a touch from the
operator. Are there heavy weights to be lifted? The paper factories
met the situation by reducing the size of the parcel. The leather,
tanning and currying trade put in special lifting tackle. The chemical
industries have trucks for transporting the heavy carboys. The
pottery and brick trades have trolleys. And the engineering trade,
for manipulating the heavy shells, has put in electrical cranes and
carriages: they are operated by a woman who sits in a sort of easy
chair from which she only lifts her hand to touch the right lever.
These and other innovations have been made in accordance with a
definite plan. You should hear it just the way a government says it:
“In considering the physical capacity of a woman factory worker,”
the Home Office directs, “it should be remembered that her body is
physiologically different from and less strongly built than that of a
man. It is desirable that the lifting and carrying of heavy weights and
all sudden violent or physically unsuitable movements in the operation
of machines should so far as practicable be avoided. Often a simple
appliance or the alteration of a movement modifies an objectionable
feature when it does not altogether remove it. When standing is
absolutely unavoidable, the hours and spells of employment should be
proportionately short, and seats should be available for use during the
brief pauses that occasionally occur while waiting for material or the
adjustment of a tool.”
There is one further instruction: “The introduction of women into
factories where men only have hitherto been employed will necessitate
some rearrangement in the way of special attention to the fencing of
belts, pulleys and machine tools.”
Well, there are now some ninety-six trades and some 1,701 processes in
which the workshop has been gotten ready like this, and woman labour
has been introduced. You see how easily it has all been brought about
now, when every one, instead of putting their heads together on How can
we keep the women out, is planning eagerly, How can we get the women in.
And do you know that Mrs. Black cannot so much as have a headache
to-morrow morning, without the English Government being sorry about it?
Every industry in the land has received its envelope, black-lettered,
“On His Majesty’s Business” and inside this note: “Care on the part
of employers to secure the welfare of women brought in to take the
place of men in the present emergency will greatly increase the
probability of their employment proving successful.” A nation, you see,
is interested in Mrs. Black’s success. “Who works fights,” announced
the Government when it invited Mrs. Black into industry. The badge, a
triangle of brass, that she wears on the front of her khaki tunic, is
inscribed “On War Service.” The French women in the munitions factories
wear on their left sleeve an armlet with an embroidered insignia, a
bursting bomb, which says the same thing.
Mrs. Black, I believe as a matter of fact, did have a headache one
morning. And her output of munitions fell off. Now that must not
happen. For the lack of the shells, you know, a battle might be lost.
The headache was investigated by the Factory Inspector. And the
Government made a great discovery, I think we may say as important to
us, to every woman who works, as was Watt’s discovery of the principle
of the steam-engine that day he watched the tea kettle. This was what
the factory inspector found out: Last night after Mrs. Black left the
shop, there was the dinner to cook, and it was eight o’clock before she
could get it ready. Then, of course, there were the dishes to wash.
Then she swept all her house through. Then she put the clothes to soak
in the tub over night. Then she worked on the stockings in the piled-up
mending basket until midnight. Then she went to bed, so that she could
be awake next morning at four o’clock. And in the morning she built a
fire under the “copper” and heated the water and washed the clothes
and boiled them and hung them out on the line. And Mrs. Black, having
already done a woman’s work before dawn, went out to fill in the rest
of the day at a man’s work!
BEYOND THE PHYSICAL ENDURANCE OF MEN
This, you should remember, was the woman whom the government had
hesitated about asking to work “overtime” on war orders. Would it be
possible to extend labour’s eight-hour day, they had asked. The Trade
Unions, when asked, had said it would be a great tax on the physique of
men. It was more than they were equal to under ordinary circumstances.
But, well, as an emergency measure, and for the duration of the war
only, Union rules would be suspended to permit of overtime. But even
then the Government decided on the eight-hour limit for women, in
exceptional circumstances permitting twelve hours. But an employer
working women longer should be liable to arrest!
Then came the Factory Inspector’s report laid before the Home Office:
Mrs. Black was working a 20-hour day! Her case was not at all unique.
“Overtime” on home work is, of course, what the great majority of
women who have gotten into industry in the past or into a profession or
a career; have been accustomed to. _Only nobody ever noticed it before!_
Now every War Office saw it as early as the first year of the war: No
woman could do a woman’s work in the home and a man’s work in the shop
and maintain the maximum output. The efficiency experts were summoned
all over Europe. They were shocked at such uneconomic management.
Could you expect any competent workingman to cook his own dinner?
There’d be a strike if you did. Why in thunder, then, should Mrs. Black
be expected to cook hers? And every nation hurried to set up in its
factories the industrial canteen, where meals are prepared and served
to employés at cost price.
At one of these industrial canteens at a factory in the suburbs of
Paris, I sat down to dinner with 600 working people. The chef, who
had shown me with pride through his great store-rooms of supplies,
apologised for the day’s menu: He was humiliated that there would
be neither rabbits nor chicken, but with a war-market one did the
best they could. The _a la carte_ bill of fare proceeded from
_hors-d’œuvres_ through _entrées_ and roasts to salads and to dessert
and cheese, and there was wine on every table. You selected, of course,
what you wished to pay for. Marie, on my right, I noticed, paid for her
dinner, 1 franc fifty. Jacques, on my left, I saw hand the waiter 1
franc seventy-five. My check came to two francs. It was a better dinner
than I was accustomed to for three times the money at the Hotel Regina
in the Rue de Rivoli. In England at the great Woolwich Arsenal, Mrs.
Black gets meat and two vegetables for eightpence, which is 16 cents,
and dessert for 2½ pence which is 5 cents. For an expenditure not to
exceed 25 pence which is 50 cents, you can get at any of the industrial
canteens in England, the four meals for the day for which the following
is a sample menu:
_Cost in Pence_
BREAKFAST: Bacon, 3 rashers 4
Bread, 3 slices, butter and jam 2
Tomato ½
Sugar ⅒
Milk ½
DINNER: Roast beef 4
Yorkshire pudding 1½
Potatoes ¾
Cabbage 1
Apple pie and custard 1½
Baked plum pudding 1
TEA: 2 slices bread, butter and jam 2½
Cake ½
Sugar ⅒
Milk ½
Jam tarts 1
SUPPER: 2 slices bread 2
Cheese 1
Meat 2
Pickles ½
Tea, coffee, cocoa, or milk with above ½—1½
What’s happened from Mrs. Black’s headache is like a tale from the
“Arabian Nights.” A magic wand has been waved over the factory. “It
should be made,” a Frenchman told me in his enthusiasm, “a little
Paradise for woman.” And that seems to be the way they’re feeling
everywhere. Government solicitude in England for the new woman in
industry resulted in 1916 in a new act for the statute books under
which the Home Office is given wide powers to arrange for her comfort.
The scientists of a kingdom have been engaged to study “Woman.” Their
observations and deductions are every little while embodied in a “white
paper.” There have been some fourteen of these “white papers” through
which the discoveries are disseminated to the factories.
There is a staff of great chemists in government laboratories who
arrange the menus just mentioned, which are really formulas for
efficiency. Fat, protein and carbohydrates have been carefully
proportioned to produce the requisite calories of energy for a maximum
output. They emphasise the importance of the canteen with this
announcement: “For a large class of workers, home meals are hurried
and, especially for women, too often consist of white bread and boiled
tea. Probably much broken time and illness result from this cause.”
There is a staff of competent architects who were first called in
that there might be provided a place in which to eat the carefully
prepared meals. “Environment,” it is announced, “has a distinct effect
on digestion.” So a White Paper submitted diagrams for the canteen
building. “The site,” it said, “should have a pleasant, open outlook
and a southern aspect. The interior should present a clean and
cheerful appearance. The colour scheme may be in pink, duck’s-egg green
or primrose grey.” Estimates are furnished. A dining-room to be built
on the basis of 8.5 square feet of space per person may be erected at a
cost not to exceed 7 pounds per place. Table and cookery equipment can
be installed at a rate for 1,000 employés of 30 shillings, 500 employés
32 shillings, and 100 employés 47 shillings per head.
And well, you know how it is when you put so much as a back porch on
the house. You sometimes get so interested in improving, that you can’t
stop. Often you remodel the whole house. Well, the factory had to keep
up with the new dining-room. The White Papers began to say that the
workroom windows had better be washed, and the ceilings whitewashed
and for artificial lighting, shaded arc-lights were recommended. “The
question of lighting,” the report reads, “is of special importance,
now that women are employed in large numbers. Bad lighting affects
the output unfavourably, not only by making good and rapid work more
difficult, but by causing eye-strain.”
The doctors were now being assembled and soon a White Paper admonished:
“The effective maintenance of ventilation is a matter of increasing
importance, because of the large number of women employed, and women
are especially susceptible to the effects of defective ventilation.”
Plumbing came next with a White Paper that went exhaustively into the
subject of lavatory equipment, with illustrations showing the best
fittings: “Fundamental requirements are a plentiful supply of hot and
cold water, soap, nail brushes, and for each worker an individual
towel at least 2 feet square, to be renewed daily. If shower-baths
are installed, it must be recognised that for women the ordinary
shower-bath is not applicable because of the difficulty of keeping her
long hair dry or of drying it after bathing. A horizontal spray, fixed
at the level of the shoulders will overcome this objection.”
EVERY ATTENTION FOR THE WOMAN WHO WORKS
All of this reconstruction was rapidly going on when one day it rained
and Mrs. Black got her feet wet going to work in the morning. And
she was at home in bed for two days away from the lathe. Fortunately
the carpenters were still around. “There must be cloak-rooms,” came
the hurried order in a White Paper. “They should afford facilities
for changing clothing and boots and for drying wet outdoor clothes
in bad weather. Each peg or locker should bear the worker’s name or
work-number. The cloak-rooms should be kept very clean.”
And really now, a woman’s health is a serious matter! Every safeguard
must be adopted for its protection. If Mrs. Black is indisposed, it is
too bad for her to have to go all the way home to go to bed. Immediate
attention might prevent a serious illness. Why was it never thought
of before? Of course, there should be a doctor always around at the
works. So the building plans were enlarged to include a hospital.
The largest building plans I know of have been worked out by one
English factory that recently put up a whole village of wooden houses
for women employés, 700 of whom are provided with board and lodging
at 14 shillings a week. There is a public hall, a club, a chapel, a
restaurant and a hospital. Many factories now have the “hostel” for
lodging women employés who come from a distance. The hospital you will
find now at any factory of good economic standing, and the doctor and
the trained nurse and the “welfare supervisor.” The Government directs:
“At every workshop where 2,000 persons are employed, there shall be
at least one whole-time medical officer and at least one additional
medical officer, if the number exceeds 2,000. A woman welfare
supervisor shall be appointed at all factories and workshops where
women are employed.”
So now Mrs. Black is given a careful medical examination when she first
presents herself for employment. After that, she is looked over at
regular intervals. At any time, if she so much as appears pale, the
doctor is right there to take her pulse. Any little thing that may be
the matter with her is reported at once on the “sickness register.” A
Health of Munition Workers Committee, appointed by Mr. Lloyd George
with the concurrence of the Home Office has directed, “Week by week
the management should scrutinise their chart of sickness returns and
study their rise and fall.” Also any factory employing over 20 women is
required at regular intervals to fill out a questionnaire concerning
the environment and conditions of its employés, and this record is kept
on file at the Home Office.
You see how scientifically the woman in industry is handled? Why,
if the munitions output fell off this afternoon, the whole English
Parliament might rise to demand Mrs. Black’s health record to-morrow
morning.
Mrs. Black must not be allowed to be ill! She ought not even to be
permitted to get tired! Gentlemen, pass her a cup of cocoa or hot milk
in the morning at half-past ten. It is a government order which is
obligatory for factories where she is employed on specially fatiguing
processes. At about four in the afternoon, she should pause for rest
and a cup of tea. If she is engaged on a rush order, the tea may be
passed to her in the workroom. But it is most advisable that she go
to the canteen for it and have a brief period of inactivity in an
easy chair in the adjoining rest room. This isn’t fiction. This is
industrial fact for women to-day. And there is more. The Health of
Munition Workers Committee are now strongly of the opinion that for
women and girls a portion of Saturday and the whole of Sunday should
be available for rest. That Sabbath day commandment, it is discovered,
isn’t only written in the Bible. It is indelibly recorded in the human
constitution. Even if you keep at toil for seven days, you are able
to produce only a six-days’ output. Except for extraordinary, sudden
emergencies, “overtime” is a most wasteful expedient. “The effect of
all overtime should be carefully watched and workers should be at once
relieved from it when fatigue becomes apparent.” Recently in a “General
Order” for the hosiery trade, a condition is included “that every
fourth week must be kept entirely free from overtime.” A White Paper
says: “The result of fatigue which advances beyond physiological limits
(‘overstrain’) not only reduces capacity at the moment, but does damage
of a more permanent kind which will affect capacity for periods far
beyond the next normal period of rest. It will plainly be uneconomical
to allow this damage to be done.”
Oh, Mrs. Lewis, you can see that something has happened, that there’s
an entirely new sort of place in industry for woman on the other
side, as there’s going to be here. In France the gallant government
almost sees her home from work, at least they make sure of her safety
in getting there. When the employés of a factory live at a distance
involving a journey to and from work by trolley or train, it is
permitted for the women to arrive fifteen minutes later in the morning
and to stop work at night fifteen minutes earlier than the men. Thus
they avoid the rush hour and the congestion on the trains.
It was in a factory on the banks of the Seine that I noticed another
thoughtful attention. There were hundreds of women engaged in making
munitions and on the work bench before each operator in a brass
fuse filled with water to serve as a vase, was a flower, fresh and
fragrant! Great beautiful La France roses, splendid roses _de gloire_,
bride roses and spicy carnations made lanes of bloom up and down the
workroom. I turned to the foreman: “Is it some fête day?” He shook
his head: “The flowers are renewed each morning. We do it every day.
Because the women like it.”
In England one of the important duties assigned the Welfare Supervisor
is to teach the employés to play: “Familiarise the working woman with
methods of recreation hitherto unknown to her,” the instructions read.
So they have organised for her dramatic entertainments and choral
classes and they are even teaching her to dance. One factory recently
announced: “We have decided to erect a large theatre as a cinema and
concert hall.” Really, Alice in Wonderland met with no more amazing
surprises than has Mrs. Black.
And to make sure that she misses nothing that is coming to her,
the Home Office arranged its “follow-up” system. A large staff of
women inspectors are travelling up and down England stopping at the
factories. In 1915 alone, they made 13,445 visits. Is there anything
more the working lady needs? the Government always inquires when the
woman factory inspector returns from a trip. And it was the woman
factory inspector who brought word early in the war, “Why, yes, the
lady should have a new dress.”
EVEN THEY DESIGN HER CLOTHES
So the Ministry of Munitions took the matter up and summoned the
designers. As the result, the most charming “creation” was adapted
from the vaudeville stage for industry. The girl “lift” conductors at
Selfridge’s Store in London are the prettiest things you will find out
of a chorus. Theirs are called, I believe, “peg-top” breeches, and
there is a semi-fitted coat, the whole uniform in mauve and beautifully
tailored. Well, the Government has issued a variety of patterns,
some of course, for a much less expensive outfit than this. There is
one uniform that costs not more than 4 shillings: sometimes the firm
even furnishes it and launders it. The costume it is most desired
to introduce is the khaki trousers with the tunic and a round cap,
because it is really a protection for the workers against the revolving
machinery. Factories not yet quite ready for the whole innovation,
begin with the tunic and a cap and a skirt. But when you have convinced
Mrs. Black how well she is going to look in the other things, she’s
ready to put them on.
The situation adjusts itself. This report has been made on it to
the Government. I quote verbatim from the published Proceedings of
Parliament and a member’s speech: “The Ministry has spent a very
considerable amount of time in going into this matter. It would seem to
us as men a simple thing. But at any rate now from all I have heard,
they appear to have solved the difficulties. The women’s uniforms up
and down the country vary, of course, according to the duties they have
to perform, but they must strike all who have observed them not only as
useful and comely, but also as reflecting credit on the fatherly care
which the Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Munitions has
exercised over the many thousands of the daughters of Eve who look to
him as their protector.”
Daughters of Eve in your country’s service, is there anything more that
you require? Yes, one thing more: Parliament, please hold the baby! It
was a response returned from Northumberland to Wales. Every government
summoning its women in industry has sooner or later faced the request.
There were lines of women applying for Poor Relief. But why not go
to work, the authorities would ask. And the child in her arms was
the woman’s answer. Not every woman like Mrs. Black had a maiden
aunt who could be hired to take care of the children. So it happened
that, figuratively speaking, the baby was passed to Parliament. Those
gentlemen, exclaiming “Goodness gracious!” hastily looked about for a
place to lay it down.
And the public _crèche_ has been promptly erected. Sometimes it’s done
by philanthropy, sometimes by the factory, and sometimes at public
expense. “We’ll pay for it,” says perspiring Parliament, “only hurry!”
And they have hurried all over Europe. The baby of a reigning monarch
is scarcely more scientifically cared for to-day than is the working
woman’s baby.
Industry has been made over to adapt it to maternity! A baby used to be
the crowning reason of all against woman’s industrial employment. Even
if you didn’t have one, you might have. And they were very likely to
tell you they couldn’t bother to have you around. If you did succeed
in getting employment, some committee was sure to go “investigating”
while you were away from home, and they’d report that your parlour was
dusty and that your children had a dirty face. You tried to tell the
sociologists, of course, that it wasn’t so bad for children to have a
dirty face as a hungry one, and you’d wash them on Sunday. But no one
would understand and you never could adequately explain. Now you don’t
have to any more.
Every facility for first aid for the housekeeping the woman in industry
has left behind her, is being arranged. They have bought a few more
cups and plates and it has been found that the meals at public schools
that used to be for poor children can just as well be for everybody’s
children. It’s a great help to the maiden aunt. And if you haven’t one,
and you feel that you must go home to dust the parlour or to see that
little Mary puts her rubbers on when she’s out to play, why that can
be arranged. The London Board of Trade, in a special pamphlet on “The
Substitution of Women in Industry,” pointed the way to all nations with
this paragraph: “The supply of women can be frequently increased by
adaptation of the conditions of employment to local circumstances. For
example, one large mill in a certain district where ordinary factory
operatives were scarce, obtained many married women by arranging the
hours of work to suit household exigencies. In one department these
hours were from 10 A. M. to 5 P. M., while another branch was kept
going by two shifts of women, one set working from 7 A. M. to midday,
and the other from 1 P. M. to 6 P. M.” Also a memorandum from the
Health of Munition Workers’ Committee says: “It is the experience of
managers that concessions to married women such as half-an-hour’s grace
on leaving and arriving, or occasional ‘time off’ is not injurious to
output, as the lost time is made good by increased activity.”
EXPERT AT HER JOB
You see now, there is practically no reason left why a woman shouldn’t
work outside her home if she wants to. Such a nice place has been made
for her in industry, and she’s getting along so well. Let’s take the
British Government’s word for it. The Adjutant General to the Forces
in the report on “Women’s War Work in Maintaining the Industries and
Export Trade of the United Kingdom” announces, “Women have shown
themselves capable of successfully replacing the stronger sex in
practically every calling.”
It was before the war that the great feminist, Olive Shreiner, wrote
her book which has been called the Bible of the woman movement. In it
occurs a memorable statement: “We claim all labour for our field.”
Now it is our field. Women to-day are working as longshoremen, as
navvies barrowing coke, as railway porters and conductors and ticket
takers, as postal employés and elevator operators, as brick-settlers’
labourers, attenders in roller mills, workers in 78 processes of boot
and shoe-making, in breweries filling beer casks and digging and
spreading barley, in 19 processes in grain milling, in 53 processes in
paper making, in 24 processes in furniture making, in boiler making,
laboratory work, optical work, aeroplane building, in dyeing, bleaching
and printing cotton, in woollen and velvet goods, in making brick,
glazed and unglazed wear, stoneware, tiles, glass, leather goods and
linoleum. In France a year before the war, it happened in the baking
trade that a committee appointed to take under advisement the question
of admitting women reported adversely that the trade was not “adapted”
to women. To-day there are 2000 women bakers in France. In all
countries the largest number of women are employed in two occupations,
in agriculture and in munitions. England had last spring 150,000 women
at work in the fields and was in process of enrolling 100,000 more.
In munitions the last returns show England with 400,000, Germany with
500,000 and France with 400,000 women.
In this the engineering trade, women have mastered already 500
processes, three-fourths of which had never known the touch of a
woman’s hand before the war. “I consider myself a first class workman
at my trade. It took me seven years to learn it,” said a foreman to me
through the crashing noise of the machines among which we stood, “but,”
and he waved his hand over his domain in which 1700 women were at work,
“these women, at occupations requiring speed and dexterity, already
excel me.”
He led me to the side of a girl who was drilling holes in brass. “See,”
he said, “she does 1000 holes at 50 centimes an hour. No man we were
ever able to employ, ever did more than 500 holes an hour, and we had
to pay him 75 centimes.”’
We came to the gauging department: “Here,” he said, “women are more
expert than men. See how well adapted to the task are their slender,
supple fingers? And they work for 50 centimes an hour, where we should
have to pay men 80.”
Like this the evidence of woman’s efficiency at the work they are
doing, is everywhere in Europe. It has now been written into the
records that cannot be gainsaid. That famous publication, _Women’s War
Work_, in announcing the 1701 jobs at which a woman can be employed,
asserts under the authority of the British War Office that at all of
these jobs a woman is “just as good as a man, and for some of them
she is better.” Then they sent a special commission over to see what
women were accomplishing in French factories. After a conference with
M. Albert Thomas, the French Minister of Munitions, and a wide tour
of inspection, the special commission returned to England with this
report: “The opinion in the French factories is that the output of
females on small work equals and in some cases excels that of men. And
in the case of heavier work, women are of practically the same value as
men, within certain limits (when machinery is introduced to supplement
their muscular limitations).” Italy also presents its evidence. The
_Bolettino dell’ officio del Lavoro_, Journal of the Italian Labour
Department, under date of October 16, 1916, had this to say: “It is
necessary to remove the obstacles to the larger employment of women. As
soon as manufacturers show plenty of initiative and adaptiveness for
this new class of labour, and cease to cherish preconceived opinions as
to the inferiority of woman’s work and as to the low wages it merits,
the labour of women will respond splendidly to the utmost variety of
demands.”
Apparently one controversy is now at rest: Woman knows enough for all
of these things that she has been permitted to do. Thus far, it is
true, it is the unskilled and the semi-skilled processes at which she
is employed in the largest numbers. It was, one might say, the basement
of industry to which she was first admitted. In every land that skilled
workman summoned to receive the government order, “You must let the
women in,” about to take his departure, turned at the door with cap
in hand to make a stipulation. It was the last clause of the ancient
“gentleman’s agreement.”
“All right,” the Government replied, “not any farther up than we have
to.”
ON THE WAY TO THE TOP
To-day at every convention or little district meeting of any skilled
trade, there is one question for heated discussion, “How far are the
women going?” The only answer is the woman movement that keeps on
steadily moving. And it’s moving up. With every year of the war there
are more and more vacant places. More and more of these are places high
up and higher up. And the women who are called, are coming! There is
Henrietta Boardman.
Henrietta Boardman, “somewhere in England” has arrived at one of the
highest skilled operations in munitions, tool-tempering. She sits
before a Bunsen burner and holds the tool in the flame while it turns
all beautiful tints, straw colour, purple, blue or red. She must be
able to distinguish just the right shade for its perfection. She does
it so well that all the tool-fitters in the shop now have the habit
of bringing to her, in preference to any other workman, the tools
they want tempered. Because hers last longer! There sits next to her
a skilled tool-temperer who is a member of the Engineers’ Trade Union
and the tools that he tempers will last for three-quarters of an hour:
they are considered good by the trade if they last three-quarters of
an hour. But the tools that Henrietta Boardman tempers are lasting
sometimes all night!
“It’s curious,” the foreman directing my attention to Henrietta
Boardman’s work commented. “Great colour sense a woman seems to have.
Nothing like it in men. Lots of ’em are even colour blind.”
“So?” I replied. “Then you must be putting in a great many women for
tool-tempering.”
“Hush!” he answered, raising a warning finger. And then he smiled.
“She’s the first woman tool-temperer in England. So far there’s only
one other. You see, it’s a highly technical operation,” he went on to
explain. “By the ‘diluting’ of labour scheme we aim to keep women in
unskilled processes. We admit them to skilled processes only when it’s
unavoidable.”
Now the workshop in which we stood, C-F-5, is the tool-room, confined
to highly skilled processes. The employés, he told me, number 1000 and
of these about 34 are women.
There you have an excellent comparative view of the outlook for women
in the most desirable occupations. The way, it is true, is still a
little steep and difficult. But with my eyes on Henrietta Boardman’s
bright flame, I saw that in making over industry they at least have
set the ladder up: it goes all the way up! And they’ve made room at
the top! Every week of this ghastly war, there is more and more room
made at the top for women! It was in November, 1916, that an English
manufacturer made the statement: “Given two more years of war and we
can build a battleship from keel to aërial in all its complex detail
and ready for trial, entirely by woman labour.”
_Then what will become of the labour of men?_ That skilled workman,
cap in hand, going down the steps of the Government House, met
Gabrielle Duchene coming up. At least her message to the Government has
been carried right to the War Office by the feminists in all lands.
In England, after Mrs. Pankhurst’s great triumphal procession, little
Sylvia Pankhurst, feminist, led another which served as it were as a
postscript to the first: it is in a postscript, you know, that a woman
always put the really important thing she has to say. On the banner
that Sylvia carried in London’s East End was inscribed the feminist
message: “We are willing to work _for a fair wage!_”
Gabrielle Duchene stopped the skilled workman and showed him the
message, which enunciates the demand: For equal work, equal pay. “It’s
your only protection,” she urged. But he only grinned. And he pulled
from his pocket a scrap of paper: “See,” he said, “my government
agreement that woman’s admission into industry is for the duration of
the war only.” And it is true, he has that agreement. It is the basis
on which all over the world the bargain was made: “Teach the woman how.
It is a necessary but temporary expedient. When you return from the
front, you shall have the job back. And the woman will go home again.”
But will she?
The message that went up to the Government House asking equal pay for
equal work is one of the most significant measures in the new woman
movement. Ever since women began to be in industry at all, the wage
envelope for them has been very small, as lady-like an affair as an
early Victorian pocket handkerchief—and just about as practical.
Remarks of protest on the part of the recipient were customarily met
with irritation or derision: Wages? Why, woman, what would you want
with more wages anyhow—to buy a new ribbon to put on your hat? Now a
man, of course, must have all the wages that he can get: he has to
have them to buy the children’s shoes and to pay the grocery bill and
the coal bill and to support a wife who keeps his house and darns his
socks. And, even if he has to have them to buy a cigar or a drink? Oh,
don’t ask foolish questions! A man has to have wages to meet all of his
expenses, a large part of which is Woman. Now run along and be a good
little girl!
But the new woman in industry can’t be dismissed so easily as that.
Especially a feminist in khaki can’t. And she was respectfully saluting
Government and begging to inquire if women were doing men’s work so
well as Government had said they were, when would women be getting
men’s pay?
EQUAL PAY IS COMING
And it was more than a “foolish question.” It was a disturbing
interrogation. Government looked up surprised from its war orders and
statistical investigations to answer: “Why, really, don’t you know,
woman’s work isn’t the same as man’s. You see, we have made over the
machines for her. And sometimes she stops for an hour and goes home to
wash the children’s faces.”
But the feminist said: “Isn’t it the output that counts?” And she
spoke of the better work and the faster work than man that women were
doing for two-thirds men’s pay. See the girl drilling 1000 holes at 50
centimes an hour where a man once drilled 500 holes for 75 centimes an
hour!
And about this time the skilled workman, discovering that the lady
was getting a hearing, came breathlessly running back to interpolate
that men had to be paid more because they knew more. Those women, for
instance, who were “gauging” with such remarkable success knew only
that one process, whereas the men knew the whole trade.
But the lady had only a woman’s logic: “If I wish to buy a dozen
clothespins,” she insisted, “I don’t care how much the person who makes
the clothespins knows, whether his knowledge reaches to mathematics or
Greek. A dozen clothespins just a dozen clothespins are to me. What I
am concerned about is only the delivery of the dozen.”
Well, anyhow, Government everywhere said it would think this matter
over. Meanwhile the walls of Paris began to flame out with a great red
and black poster that Gabrielle Duchene was putting up. It is some four
feet long by three feet wide and at the top in large letters to be
read a long way down the street, it insists: “_A travail egal, salaire
egal._” And in every land the trained workman stopped to stare up at
a lady like this at work in front of a bill-board: “You fool,” she
turned on him in scorn, “can’t you see now that it’s equal pay for
equal work for men’s sakes?”
At last he began to. Mme. Duchene is the wife of a celebrated architect
in Paris. As the chairman of the Labour section of the Conseil National
des Femmes, she had pled ineffectually for equal pay for women’s sakes.
When she cleverly changed the phrase “_for men’s sakes_” it had a new
punch in it. The aroused Bourse de Travail formed the now world-known
Comité Intersyndical d’Action contre l’Exploitation de la Femme to
back the feminist demand. And organised labour in land after land has
begun to sign up its endorsement. For the flaming poster points out in
effect: _If a woman can be had to drill 1000 holes at 50 centimes an
hour, who will hire a man to drill 500 holes at 75 centimes an hour?_
That was the little sum the feminist set labour to work out the answer
to.
And for the Government, there was Mrs. Black’s breakfast. If it takes a
breakfast that includes three rashers of bacon to produce the maximum
output of munitions for a day, how many munitions will be missing if
you don’t get the bacon? Mrs. Black wasn’t getting the bacon. Welfare
supervisors reported that while Mrs. Black ate her dinner with all
its formulated calories at the canteen, she didn’t eat her breakfast
there. In fact Mrs. Black didn’t seem to eat much breakfast anywhere.
It wasn’t the habit of the British working class woman: She usually
started work for the day on merely a piece of bread and a cup of tea.
Mrs. Black couldn’t afford three rashers of bacon for breakfast!
The matter was investigated. The average wage for women in industry in
England, it was found, had been 11 shillings a week: in the textile
trade, before the war the best paid trade in the land, the weekly
wage was 15 shillings 15 pence a week. And women wheeled shells in a
munitions factory for 12 shillings a week, for which a man was paid 25
shillings.
But it began to be arithmetically clear all around that it wasn’t wise
for a woman in England or France or anywhere else to be working for
too little pay to buy a good breakfast! That reliable organ of public
opinion, _The Times_, announced September 25, 1916: “Proper meals for
the workers is, indeed, an indispensable condition for the maintenance
of output on which our fighting forces depend, not only for victory,
but for their very lives.”
What should a woman do with wages to-day? Why, she has to have them
to buy not only a proper breakfast, but to buy the children’s shoes
and to pay the grocery bill and the coal bill and the _crèche_ or the
maiden aunt who keeps her house. Even if she has to have them to buy a
new ribbon for her hat—why, she will go without her bacon to get it!
What does a woman have to have wages for to-day? Oh, don’t ask foolish
questions. At last she has those mysterious expenses, even as a man!
I think that Lloyd George was the first man to see it. Great Britain
led the way with the now famous Orders L-2, which has come to be known
as the Munition Women’s Charter. There is assured to women in the
government factories and government controlled factories equal pay on
piece work, equal pay on time work for one woman doing the work of one
fully skilled man, and a minimum of £1 a week for all women engaged on
work that was formerly customarily done by men. France followed with a
declaration for equal pay for piece work for women. Governments have
now enunciated the principle, have adopted it in practice and have
recommended its justice to the private employer. Watch the skilled
workman himself do the rest! Among the trade unions that have already
stipulated equal pay for equal work for women doing war work in their
craft are these: Engineering, cotton, woollen and worsted, china and
earthenware, bleaching and dyeing, furniture and woodwork, hosiery
manufacturing and the National Union of Railwaymen.
There has begun, like this, the greatest making over of all! Better
than all the bouquets they’ve handed us is the making over of our wage
envelope to man’s size! It isn’t finished yet. Girl lift operators in
London still get 18 shillings a week on the same elevator for which
men were paid 23 shillings. On the tramways of Orleans, France, women
conductors get 2 francs and 2.50 a day for exactly the same work for
which men were paid 4 francs a day. Nevertheless the new wage envelope
is not so lady-like as it used to be. It’s coming out in larger and
larger sizes. The London tailoring trade has increased the women’s
minimum wage from 3½d. to 6d. an hour. In Paris the women conductors
on the suburban lines have been advanced from the former 4 francs a day
to the men’s 5 francs. Glasgow has 1020 women conductors at men’s pay,
27 shillings a week. London has 2000 women omnibus conductors with the
wage formerly paid to men, 38 shillings a week. Even the German brewers
have come to equal pay for women. Thousands of women in munitions in
England are making 30 shillings a week. Some at Woolwich are making £2
to £3 per week, a few up to £4 a week. Henrietta Boardman at a skilled
man’s job gets exactly a man’s pay, 1 shilling 1d. and 1 farthing an
hour, amounting to about £4 a week. At the sixteenth annual congress
of the Labour Party, held in Manchester, England, in January, 1917,
the following resolution was introduced: “That in view of the great
national services rendered by women, during this time of war and of
the importance of maintaining a high level of wages for both men and
women workers, the Conference urges, That all women employed in trades
formerly closed to them should only continue to be so employed at trade
union rates (the wages paid to men).”
For the new woman in industry is too efficient to be countenanced as a
competitor in the labour market to offer herself at a lower wage than
men. Trade unions may even admit her as a comrade, not yet but soon.
For she’s safer to them that way! In England they are giving their
cordial support to Mary McArthur with her organisation, The National
Federation of Women Workers, in which there are already enrolled
350,000 women. In France they are backing Mme. Duchene, who in many
of the little dim-lit cafés of Paris is holding meetings to organise
the women in industry into what the French call “waiting unions.” Why
waiting? Because the men’s trades unions are ready even to make over
their constitutions to admit women to membership if necessary, that
is, _if women stay in industry_. But they are waiting to see. And
every little while they pull out from their pocket a soiled scrap of
paper to look contemplatively at it. It is a government agreement. The
Government has said the women will go home. _But will they?_
WOMEN WANTED AFTER THE WAR
Read the answer in the columns of “Casualties” appearing in the daily
papers from Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London and now New York.
How many millions of men have been drafted from industry into the awful
battalions of death, no government says. But we at least know with too,
too terrible certainty, that the jobs to which no man will ever return
from the front, now number millions and millions. And there is going
to be a world to be rebuilded! Every nation must enlist all of its
resources if it is to hold its own in the international markets of the
future. The new woman in industry, her country is going to keep right
on needing in industry!
Her husband and her children may need her there! After the men that
are dead, there are millions more, the maimed, the halt and the blind,
for whom women must work for at least a generation after the fight is
finished.
And her employer is going to need her! See all the rows and rows of
little capstan lathes made smaller for a woman’s hand? See the slender,
supple fingers so well adapted to, we will say, gauging. See Henrietta
Boardman with her finer colour sense for tool tempering than any man in
C-F-5. _See, oh, see the girl who drills 1000 holes an hour, where the
man drilled 500!_
Listen to Sir William Beardmore, owner of a projectile factory at
Glasgow, in an address before the Iron and Steel Institute: “In the
turning of the shell body, the actual output by girls with the same
machines and working under exactly the same conditions, and for an
equal number of hours, is quite double that of trained mechanics.
In the boring of shells the output is also quite double, and in the
curving, waving and finishing of shell bases, quite 120 per cent. more
than that of experienced mechanics.”
Again, in the workshops of Europe, above the rattle and the roar
of crashing machinery in shop after shop, I hear the echo of some
foreman’s voice: “Here and here and here we shall never again employ
men because we cannot afford to.” In one great factory on the banks
of the Seine where I inquired, “Are you going to keep women after
the war?” an American superintendent who had been brought over from
Bridgeport, Connecticut, answered promptly: “Sure, 9000 of ’em. We’re
going to convert this into an automobile factory and we’re not going to
throw all this specially made-to-measure-to-woman-size machinery on the
scrap-heap, you know.”
And the British Association for the Advancement of Science has
investigated and decided and announced: “Where female labour is either
underpaid or is obviously superior to male labour, a special inducement
offers itself to employers to retain the women.”
Can’t you see the efficiency expert at the elbow of Government, writing
“Void” across the face of that scrap of paper? Industry cannot afford
to let the women go.
And there are all the cloak-rooms with the plate-glass mirrors and the
canteen dining-rooms done in pink, and blue, and duck’s-egg green and
the new uniforms that Parliament made for the woman in industry! Oh,
gentlemen, after all, why should she go home? For the new place in
industry is the most comfortable place in which she has ever been in
the world! Oh, I know the sociologists used to talk about the factory
as so unhealthful for a woman. But you see, that was because no man
knew how hard was domestic labour: he had never done it. And it was
before the experts began to gather data on how unhealthful is the home.
FACTORY WORK EASY COMPARED WITH KITCHEN WORK
There is now a most interesting investigation under way in London. It
is a scientific intensive study of the housewife, who is at last to
be tabulated and indexed, just like any other labourer. The Women’s
Industrial Council, who have undertaken it with the endorsement of
the Government, announce: “It is quite probable the results may
prove that the stretching motions involved in such domestic tasks
as the washing of heavy sheets and blankets are more harmful than
the stretching motions of the shop assistant or the vibrations which
certain engineering employés meet in their work.” I went one day in
London with the sociological investigator who is trying to find this
out. She took me to Acton, which is the district where the washing is
done for the great city. There are probably more laundries here than in
any similar area in the world. We stopped to look at one of them. It is
in a sanitary, new, up-to-date building with plenty of light and air
and every new labour-saving device known to the trade. Then we called
at some of the little cottages where live the women who work at this
laundry. But to-day is Monday, which is the “slack” day of the week in
the laundry business, and on Monday the employés remain at home to do
their own “wash,” with the same appliances that have been used in home
industry for a hundred years! The woman who came to the door when we
knocked had just taken her hands out of the suds. She was still wiping
them on her gingham apron as she talked. Do you know what she said?
At house after house it was this, that Monday at home was her hardest
day of the week. “O, yes, ma’am,” she said, “much harder than any of
the days that I am at the laundry.” Why? Because at the laundry she
has no lifting of any kind to do and no backbreaking scrubbing over a
washboard. It is done by machinery, or if there are heavy sheets that
must be lifted by hand, men are employed to do it. At home even when
she’s so fortunate as to have a faucet, all of the water she must carry
in pails from the sink to the “copper” to be heated.
Do you know, each time as we turned from a cottage door where the woman
in the gingham apron stood wiping her wet hands, I thought of that lady
in the engineering trade who operates an electrical crane from her easy
chair; and the women conductors in Manchester sitting down between
fares on the “flap” seats put in for their comfort. I think I know
what the medical journal, _The Lancet_, means when it announced in the
February, 1917, number that “Factory work, under fitting conditions may
be so beneficial to women that it may lead to permanent benefit to the
race.” And I am not surprised to learn that the Insurance Department
of the English Government has recently discovered that the greatest
percentage of illness among women occurs among domestic workers.
You see, these new tasks are not so much more laborious than the old
as the world feared. And this war has somehow brought about the most
undreamed of readjustments. In a London tube station I came upon one
of them: my startled gaze encountered a man on his knees scrubbing the
floor and a woman at the ticket window taking tickets!
Do you know, the more I see of the woman in industry, the more it looks
to me as if she could stand it. Anyhow, she’s stronger than she used to
be. One insurance society at Manchester with 26,000 members found that
it paid out for sickness benefits in 1915, £300 less than in 1914. The
insurance actuary attributed the improved health to the better food
and better clothing the members were now able to buy through the wages
they were receiving in the munitions factories. The annual report of
Great Britain’s chief inspector of factories and workshops for 1916,
commenting on the good health of the women employés, observes: “There
can be little doubt that the high wages and the better food they have
been able to enjoy in consequence, have done much to bring about this
result.” And you don’t find among employers any more the complaint
that women employés are less reliable than men because of their more
frequent absences on account of illness. Very likely they may once have
been so. Only a very strong woman could have been equal to the old
overstrain of a man’s work in the shop plus a woman’s work in the home.
And there was often a marked lowering of her vitality and efficiency.
But the new improved man’s size wage envelope is proving, you see, the
effectual remedy. Wages enough to buy good food and then to pay for
some one to cook it—that has made a new woman of this woman in industry.
And she doesn’t want to go back to general housework in her own
home, and to the “home” meals of white bread and boiled tea which the
Home Office has specifically pointed out are not good enough on which
to produce shells. She’s accustomed now to her breakfast bacon! The
workingman’s wife at household labour had no Saturday half holidays
in the kitchen. She had something like a sixteen hour day with no laws
against overtime. Nobody bothered about how many hours she worked.
Nobody counted her food calories. Nobody brought her roses. Nobody
taught her to dance. Nobody noticed that she ought to be happy, without
which she couldn’t be efficient. Most of all, gentlemen, there wasn’t
any wage envelope there!
Do you know of any reason why she should wish to go back? Some 3000 of
her were asked about it through a questionnaire recently sent out in
England. And of these 3000, 2500 answered: “I prefer to remain in the
work I am now doing.” I am sure Mrs. Black would.
And I know the world is going to be very much surprised about it. But I
think that Mr. Black, when he returns from the front, will prefer that
she should. For Mr. Black is going to get a better dinner that way! The
industrial canteen can cook better and cheaper for him and Mrs. Black
than she could at home. She can’t make plum pudding in the home, as
they can at the canteen for 2d. a portion. The chef who is buying for
1500 people gets rates that she never could for seven from the huckster
and the fish-monger and the rest. Besides, Mrs. Black never had any
special training for cooking, as she now has for engineering. In the
shop she has learned to do one thing very well indeed. In her home
there wasn’t any one thing she ever had learned to do very well. And
she worked ineffectually and inefficiently at several highly skilled
occupations: child rearing and sewing and cooking and baking and
laundry work and, occasionally, nursing. Isn’t it remarkable at any
stage of the world’s evolution, that woman should have been expected
to carry a schedule like that? You never found Mr. Black attempting to
be a carpenter and a tailor and a plumber and a gardener and a whole
lot of other useful trades all in one. No, Mr. Black’s rule always was,
stick to one trade. Jack-of-all-trades! Why, everybody knows that he
could have been master of none!
And Mrs. Black wasn’t. Now, if after the war, she prefers to stay in
engineering or some other trade, why should Mr. Black worry? The lady
will pay for her own dinner and other things besides. She can send the
wash to the laundry, and the baby will be at the _crèche_ for the day,
and the children will have dinner at school. And at night, the family
will have supper together, which Mr. and Mrs. Black on their way home
from the factory can bring from the communal kitchen. Governments
already have started the fire in the new cookstove in the communal
kitchen which England has set up in London and Germany in Berlin,
because Ministries of Food have decided food can be more scientifically
and efficiently cooked there than in the homes of the working people.
THE NEW IMPROVED HOME
Oh, can there be any one who would still wish to take away the new wage
envelope? Think what it’s already done for the working class home!
Children with shoes on their feet, you know. Women in England are
wearing fur coats. Women in France who once wore sabots are now wearing
shoes for which they have paid 40 francs, which is $8 a pair. In every
warring country working women are shopping, shopping, shopping, as they
never shopped before. O yes, it’s thrift and prudence and all that’s
proper, to put your earnings in war bonds instead. The rainy day, you
know, that’s ahead. And of course one must, for patriotism’s sake, put
some of it in war bonds, but not quite all. You see, when there have
been almost all rainy days behind and you’ve always wanted something
you couldn’t have? Well, Mrs. Black thinks you might as well live in
the sunshine and have it, now you can.
That’s the way affluence seems to have happened to the working class
home all over Europe. Prosperity is fairly gilding over every district
in which a munitions plant has arisen. And, oh, well, what if it is
gilt? Gilt’s good for little cheerless dingy houses. Do you know that,
next to the war trades, the most flourishing trade in all Europe to-day
is the cheap jewelry trade? There are places in London’s East End
where every other shop or two has come to be a jeweller’s shop, with
the windows hung splendidly with all the shining trinkets that bring a
shining light to women’s eyes.
Mr. Black was home on leave a while ago. He stopped the first thing at
the jeweller’s round the corner in Hardwick Row and bought the gold
chain and the locket Mrs. Black’s wearing now with his picture in
it. Do you know, it was so long since he’d given his wife a present,
not since their courting days, that he’d forgotten how? He was a lot
more awkward about it than he is about facing a fusillade of German
gun-fire. The perspiration just stood out on his forehead as he laid
the little package on the kitchen table and said, “Mary, here’s
something I thought you might like.”
There was a note in his voice by which she knew it wasn’t bloaters from
the fish-shop over the way. But she no more expected what it really was
than she hoped for an angel to lean out of the windows of the sky and
say, “Mary Black, here’s a gold crown for you.” The paper crackled in
the silent room while she untied the string. The chain just shimmered
once through her fingers. Her lips trembled. With a little cry, “O
Jim!” she turned to lay her head in the old forgotten place on his
shoulder. And there she sobbed out all the bitterness of seven years’
married hardship and privation with the bearing and rearing of five
children in three rooms on 22 shillings a week.
Oh, there are things that gold chains are good for more than show. The
famous uses of adversity are various. But they have been much oversung.
And after all, God in his heaven perhaps knows that even a war may be
worth while, if it’s the only way. Two wage envelopes are better than
one. The new woman with the old love revived in her heart, I’m sure,
won’t be so often cross and she won’t have to slap the children so much
as she did. Just think of the new home that the man at the front’s
coming back to! Mrs. Black’s saving now for a piano!
Mrs. Lewis, are you ready? The work-whistle calls you. My morning
paper to-day advertises for a New York department store: “To patriotic
women seeking practical means of expressing their earnestness: During
the coming season, women of intelligence will have the greatest
opportunity that was ever offered them to become producing factors
on the nation’s industrial balance sheet. Whether they need to work
or not, they should work, because it will make them happier and give
them a sense of satisfaction as nothing else in the world can under
present circumstances. We can give many women work to do to occupy part
of their time. This part-time work affords a woman, if she has home
duties, plenty of leisure for her own housework—she need not leave her
home in the morning until after the man of the house goes. She may
return in the evening before he does—she will have more money for
her home or for herself and be an independent producing factor in her
community, helping herself, her home, and in this way her country in a
time when this kind of help is most needed.”
An American woman to-day will find opportunities for work on every
hand. The Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company has 1000 women
on the pay roll. At McKee’s Rocks, Pa., the Pressed Steel Car Company
has 100 girls building artillery cars for use on the French front. The
Farrell plant of the American Sheet & Tin-plate Company at Sharon,
Pa., is employing women at $4.50 a day. A munitions factory at Dayton,
Ohio, has 5000 women working at men’s pay. The Detroit Taxicab and
Transfer Company have women operating their electric taxicabs at the
wages formerly paid to men. The United Cigar Stores Company is offering
women salesmen men’s wages. At the July, 1917, Lumbermen’s Convention
at Memphis, Tenn., the Southern Pine Association by a unanimous vote
decided that women employed in men’s places at the lumber camps should
be paid the same salaries formerly paid to men.
And Gabrielle Duchene’s flaming poster has sent a light across the
sea. The American Federation of Labour has voted: “Resolved that we
endorse the movement to obtain from all governments at the time of the
signature of the Treaty of Peace, the establishment of an international
agreement embodying the principle of equal pay for equal work
regardless of sex.”
So? Then no one really expects the new woman in industry to go home
after the war. There is a great High Court of the Ages in which man may
propose the regulation of the Universe, but God Himself disposes. And
that soiled scrap of paper will be, after all, only a scrap of paper in
the great whirlwind of economic law that bloweth where it listeth.