In all the animal world one can hardly find a place where orderly
effort, planned to secure some future advantage, does not appear.
Getting food, defending life, and caring for offspring have all combined
to drive not only the descendants of Adam, but his ancestors as well, to
sweat-producing effort. Of course this is not definitely planned;
getting food often waits on appetite; defense is sometimes merely
running away; and the young are frequently left to feed themselves or
die. But the fact remains that in digging burrows, building nests,
laying up honey and nuts, and in protecting and providing for the young,
a vast deal of effort is put forth in forest and field which is not
immediately productive of pleasure.
This work is seldom equally shared by all the members of the group. With
bees, the drones and the queen are alike exempt from work, and an
asexual group has been developed to feed and protect them. Some ants
compel others to do their work; and everywhere there seem to be
individuals who are constitutionally lazy and others who, because of
strength or sex attractiveness, are able to get more than their share of
food and protection with less than their share of effort.
From the first, some division of work between male and female grows
almost inevitably out of their different relations to reproduction.
Following conception, the male can always run away and leave the female
to feed and fight for herself and her offspring, and he is very prone to
do so. Even when he stays by and shares in the joy of the newly born he
generally leaves the female to get ready the nest, and largely she
protects and provisions it.
Among domesticated animals, where their working possibilities have been
very highly developed, females are much more desirable workers than
males. The maternal function partly explains this, as in the case of
cows and hens which give us milk and eggs; and even with mares and sheep
the offspring adds to the general working value. Still, it seems to be
true that even for purposes of draught, the males are of less value than
the females, unless reduced to the non-sexual condition of geldings and
oxen. The stallion, bull or ram is too katabolic, too much of a
consuming, distributing, destroying force to be very valuable in the
daily routine of agriculture or commerce. While the female is generally
smaller and less powerful than the male, she is quiet, easily enslaved;
and, as we have said, her maternal functions can be diverted to our
daily use. She produces more workers, and her flesh is more palatable,
because less distinctive, than that of the male. Hence, among
domesticated animals, selection, based on considerations of work,
multiplies females and keeps males only for breeding purposes.
As a quadruped, the female suffers very little handicap from the
functions peculiar to her sex, except when actually carrying her young
or nursing them. When she stands erect, however, the support for the
special organs of reproduction is far from ideal; heavy lifting, or
long-continued standing, often leads to disaster, and the periodic
functions, even in the healthiest conditions, must always place women
at a working disadvantage as compared with men. Add to this the fact
that women are smaller, less agile, and far less strong, than men, and,
even when not encumbered with young, it is clear that a woman, when
confronting physical work in competition with men, needs something more
than a fair field and free competition.[33] Idealists and travelers
among primitive people love to tell us how easily women meet their
special functions, carrying burdens equal to those carried by men when
on the march, and dropping out from the caravan for only a few hours to
give birth to a child; but the fact remains that women in all primitive
societies age quickly and that those who are spoiled are thrown aside
and forgotten.[34] Woman's handicap as a working animal in competition
with man is too obvious and too deep-seated to be idealized away.
[33] The Supreme Court of the United States, in passing on the "Oregon
laundry case," in 1907, declared a bill limiting a woman's working hours
constitutional. See the _Brief for the State of Oregon_, prepared by
LOUIS D. BRANDEIS, published by The National Consumers' League, 105 East
22d Street, New York.
[34] DUDLEY, _Principles and Practices of Gynecology_, pp. 23-24, says
that among Indian women want of care during and after labor leads to
numberless evils.
In all savage societies labor is clearly specialized between the sexes.
The man, because of his superior strength and mobility, fights, hunts
and makes weapons of the chase. The woman fetches and carries, digs and
delves, cures the meat, makes the rude huts, clothing and pottery.
Gradually she changes wild grasses to domesticated plants, and rears the
young animals brought home from the chase, till they follow and serve
their human masters. She is truly the mother of industries, and it in no
way detracts from her credit that her motherhood is here, as elsewhere,
mainly unthinking.
With the exhaustion of the supply of wild animals, man is forced to turn
his attention to the world of vegetation and he takes over the direction
of the plants and animals which woman has largely domesticated. In his
career as fighter and hunter he has learned to coöperate with his
fellows to a degree which aids him greatly in dividing the arable land,
protecting his crops, and using grazing lands in common with the tribe.
He has also learned to make stone hatchets, spears and bows and arrows.
Woman has not felt the same necessity to invent in her work; such new
tools as she has devised have been helpful, but men who could not invent
have been wiped out by those who learned to make stronger spears or
better arrow-heads.
It is the same difference in adaptability which one observes to-day
between the farmers on the western frontier of America and those who
remain in their peasant homes in Europe. The peasant has even greater
need of inventing than has his expatriated countryman in Colorado, but
he lacks the driving impulse. It was the same with women and men under
the conditions of savage life. Thus it came about that man's greater
strength and mobility, backed by power of coöperation and invention,
gave him the leadership in such primitive life as we find depicted in
the pages of Homer or in the epic of the Jews. True, woman was his first
lieutenant, but he spoke for her in most of the larger matters of the
industrial life.
With settled conditions and accumulation of wealth, the most desirable
women were almost entirely freed from physical labor and gradually
became luxury-loving parasites and playthings, as we pointed out in the
second chapter of this volume. Meantime slaves were multiplying, male
and female and, while the most desirable women passed to the harem, the
mass of them became drudges in house and field. It is hard for us to
realize that it is exactly in those times when a few women are
surrounded with great luxury that most of the sex are reduced to heavy
labor and wretchedness.
During the early Christian ages, a tradition was gradually formed
concerning woman's place in industry, or rather three traditions were
formed. The working woman of the lower classes was to be the
housekeeper, which meant that she was to care for food, cook, spin,
weave, sew and mend, scrub and wash, bear children and nurse and tend
them. If she were of the middle class, she was to be a mother, to
supervise this range of work, look after dependents, conserve social
conditions and be the lady bountiful of her district. The second ideal
was the woman of religion, who was to subdue her passions, observe set
prayers and other religious exercises, and do the menial work of the
convent. The third ideal was the lady of chivalry, who appeared after
the tenth century. She was to be cared for and protected from work or
anxiety; menials were to prepare her food, clothes and ornaments;
gallants were to await her orders and do her bidding.
With the rise of Protestantism, and later with the rise of modern
democracy, these ideals were blended, and women found themselves, not
indeed slaves and subject to sale, but serfs, entangled in a mass of
feudal obligations and bound to the house. Practically, most men still
hold this threefold conception of woman's place in the social organism.
She is to be a combination of housekeeper, nun and lady. It is the
kitchen, church and children ideal of the German Emperor.
Meantime forces were set at work which were to change the economic
foundations of the family and enable the woman to emerge from serfdom
into some new form of industrial relationship. From the rise of the
European cities in the twelfth century, certain industries have tended,
especially in the Netherlands and in England, to segregate themselves in
farm-houses and towns. Women naturally participated in these
activities, generally taking the least desirable parts. With the freeing
of the mind, which followed the democratic revolutions at the end of the
eighteenth century, inventions blossomed out and perfected steam
engines, cotton gins, spinning jennies, and a thousand other machines
driven by steam or water power, which have changed the civilization of
Europe and America. Miss Edith Abbott has shown us how this change,
involving increasing segregation and specialization, came into America
even in the pre-Revolutionary time.[35]
[35] EDITH ABBOTT, _Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic
History_, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1910.
Spinning and weaving industries led the way in this movement, but its
full force was not felt until the late eighteenth century. Since then,
one industry after another has left the home for the factory until
to-day, in all large communities, even the preparation of food
increasingly goes to the packing-house, the canning establishment, the
bakery and the delicatessen-store. These industries needed hands, and so
the women followed them to the factories.
As 1870 marks the beginning of higher education for women, so it also
marks the beginning of her industrial self-consciousness. The perfecting
of such inventions as the typewriter, the telegraph and the telephone,
and the creation of a great variety of office appliances, together with
the perfecting of highly elaborate means of distribution, like the
departmental store, called for thousands of cheap workers possessed of
some slight intelligence but not necessarily having any serious
preliminary training. Our elementary schools and high schools have
increasingly turned out a multitude of girls who could meet these
requirements. The increased cost of living, the lessened labor demands
of the home, and the attractions of the pay envelope, have called
millions to work in industrial plants. In 1890, there were 4,005,532
wage-earning women in the United States; in 1900, 5,319,397; while in
1910, we have probably nearly 8,000,000.
Like most other great changes in civilization, this industrial
transformation was neither preceded nor accompanied by any general
consciousness of what was happening. Daily necessities were offset by
weekly pay envelopes, or the failures fell out of sight, and so the next
week and the years followed. Country populations moved away; cities grew
enormously, leading to congestion in living which, combined with the
daily absence of women, has often transformed the old time homes into
communal tiers of tenements occupied, during working hours, only by the
young and the infirm.
The children of all ages after a while followed their mothers into the
factories; but the evil effects of child labor were so apparent that
repressive legislative measures have increasingly raised the age of
their admission until now, in the more advanced communities, they must
stay outside the factory doors until they are twelve or fourteen years
old. Some growing self-consciousness, largely of a police nature, has
led us to institute measures for the protection of the children who are
not allowed to work. Schools, playgrounds, day nurseries, institutional
churches, college settlements and public social centers now bid against
the streets and vacant lots, the nickel shows and the dancing halls, for
the children's patronage.
Education, however, true to its origin as the assistant of theology,
refuses to recognize in any large way the new world into which we have
come, and where the next generation of children must follow. Manual
training has, here and there, quieted the fears of some who had
disturbing visions; and we go on employing an army of unenfranchised,
celibate women, with little or no industrial experience, to teach ten
million boys how to be good citizens of a republic, and how to serve in
a modern industrial army; and ten million girls how to work in shops and
factories, and how to live without homes. As a consequence, girls come
up to the factories from their schools with ideals,[36] so far as the
school has shaped them, founded on unmarried school mistresses and
George Washington; and they pass, by way of the altar, into cheerless
tenements which the school still thinks of as places where children are
cared for, family clothing is made and the family baking is done.
Practically, of course, most education is given outside the schools, and
there the evils of an unregulated time of transition are multiplied
through imitation.
[36] EARL BARNES, Children's Ideals, in _Studies in Education_, Vol. II,
p. 237; also School Girls' Ideas of Women's Occupations by SARAH YOUNG,
in _Studies in Education_, Vol. II, p. 259.
The wealth and material comfort produced for the fortunate classes by
these segregated industries have blinded us to their effects on human
life, and we have all been bribed to silence concerning everything which
could discourage enterprise or frighten capital. Like most bribes,
however, these have largely stopped in the pockets of the exploiters of
public opinion.
In the opening years of this new century, public consciousness has had a
wonderful awakening.[37] The popular mind, quickened by universal
education, and freed from a burden of fixed beliefs, is turning
restlessly to inquire about everything that affects human life. Work
could not escape this inquisition, and so we are asking not only for a
fairer division of the profits of work, but we are also inquiring what
occupations are unfit for women, with their special limitations and
obligations. When the work is reasonable, how long should a woman work
daily? Should she work at night and overtime? Should she work with
dangerous machinery? Should she handle substances that endanger health?
Should she be required to stand through hours of continuous work? Should
she work in bad air, due to dust, moisture, or excessive heat or cold?
Should she have a decent retiring-room? Some daring inquirers are even
asking whether industrial efficiency, gained through specialization and
keying up, may not be purchased at too high a price of mental monotony
and nervous strain. Most people are content to learn that the effects
are not immediately destructive to the girls and women involved; but
some day we shall demand that the barons of industry shall not be
allowed to squander the heritage of the unborn generations.
[37] C. HANFORD HENDERSON, _Pay-Day_, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co.,
1911.
Women have themselves done much to quicken this public consciousness.
Enrolled in labor unions, they have shown power to stand together and
make sacrifice, as in the shirt-waist makers' strike in New York in
1908, which commanded the admiration of all fair-minded observers. The
more fortunately placed women have aided these movements toward
self-betterment; and, through such organizations as the National
Consumers' League, they have compelled manufacturers and shopkeepers to
observe more reasonable hours, pay better wages, and furnish decent
material conditions for their employees.[38]
[38] See the recent volume, based on investigations made by the National
Consumers' League, _Making Both Ends Meet_, by SUE AINSLIE CLARK and
EDITH WYATT, The Macmillan Co., 1911. See, also, _Saleswomen in
Mercantile Stores_, by ELIZABETH BEARDSLEY BUTLER, published by the
Charities Publication Committee, for the Russell Sage Foundation, 1912.
The solution of woman's present industrial problem is not an easy task,
but out of the present unsettlement certain facts are emerging with a
good deal of clearness. The efficiency in production, secured by
concentration and specialization, make it certain that the old-time home
with its multiplied industries will not return, but that more and more
even of its present lessened activities will be transferred to factories
and to their equivalents. It is also certain that women are not going to
be supported in indolence by men, because when deprived of the
discipline which full participation in life gives, they must always
degenerate. For themselves, and for the sake of their children, they
will demand a chance to live abundantly. It is also clear that our
present chaotic conditions are destructive of health, happy marriages,
effective homes, and the strong line of descendants which must always be
the chief care of an intelligent society.
In the first place, then, we must work to produce an entire change in
our present mental attitude toward organized industries. Our present
worship of industrial products, no matter how obtained, must give way to
a recognition of the fact that the chief asset of a nation is its
people; that a woman is more important than the clothes she makes in
factories or sells in stores; and that to needlessly destroy or
scrapheap a working woman is worse than to needlessly destroy or
scrapheap the finest and most costly machine ever devised by man. Such a
statement seems to carry conviction in its every phrase, but the fact is
that we do not believe it, and until we do believe it, there will be
little help for our present absurd and wretched conditions. Unregulated
competition, backed by greed of individuals and groups, will go on
wasting the wealth of women's lives until we cease to be fascinated and
hypnotized by the display of products which they make possible. Better
fine women and children, and few things, than stores and warehouses
crowded with goods, and the women and children of our present factory
towns. By fixing our attention on people instead of things, we should
almost certainly secure more and better things; but, regardless of cost,
we must change the focus of our attention.
In the second place, girls must get ready to be women. The education of
the home and the school must be unified, and together they must give a
training that will lead girls into the actualities of the life that lies
before them. Our present elementary schools, and still more our high
schools, lead girls neither to intelligent work nor to intelligent
living as women and mothers. Up to at least the age of fourteen, the
education should be general, looking to the development of all the
powers of body, mind and sensibilities. But through all these eight or
ten years of training, two factors should receive constant and
intelligent attention. In the first place, we should realize that we are
not fitting women for drawing-rooms nor for convents, but for a working
world; therefore well graded and interesting manual training should run
through all these years and should furnish a well-developed base for
later special industrial preparation of some kind. In the second place,
the girls should be taught by men and women, married and unmarried, and
fine ideals of actual womanhood, not alone in shops and factories, in
school-rooms, and in professions--but also in homes, should be
constantly held before them. Our present education leaves this training
mainly to the homes, and neither the parasitic rich nor our eight
million wage-earning women, when mothers, can or will attend to it.
After the girl reaches the age of fourteen, she should have at least two
years of further education in which she could master the details of some
necessary work which would enable her to look the world in the face and
offer fair payment for her living. With most girls, this work would be
connected with children and the service of the home; for domestic
service, no matter how organized, must always occupy a multitude of
women. All girls should have at least rudimentary training in these
matters.
During the period of transition from schools to their own family life,
the girls might well give a half dozen years to work in factories and
stores where the conditions should be as good, and as well guarded, as
in our best school buildings--in factories, in a word, where the
employers would be willing that their own daughters should work. This is
surely a fair standard. Work which is not safe or fit for me to do, is
not fit for me to hire done. If this principle fails, then democracy is
but a dream.
But during all this period of preparation we should never forget that,
as Madame Gnauck-Kühne so admirably points out, "women's work has to a
large extent an episodic character."[39] All women confront romantic
love, marriage and children; and any woman who misses them misses the
crowning joy and glory of her life. Vicarious realization may save the
soul, but it can never fill the place of reality. The man fronts these
same experiences, but they are not related to his work as they are
related to the work of women. Surely there can be no doubt that the
ideal solution, in this period, is a man and woman so deeply bound
together by love that there is no question of self-protection, either in
terms of work or money; and the man being freed from the burdens of
maternity, should mainly earn the income. We shall discuss the new type
of home and family in a later chapter, but in any home where there are
children there is need of an intelligent mother's very constant care.
[39] Madame GNAUCK KÜHNE, _Die Deutsche Frau_.
If a happy home were the universal destiny of women, our problem would
be greatly simplified; but this is far from being the case. Not more
than one-half of all women over fifteen are married at any one moment.
From the ages of twenty to thirty-five, one-half are married; but it is
only from thirty-five to fifty-five that as many as three-fourths are
married; over fifty-five there are less than one-half married, and most
of the others are widows.[40] Most of these women who are not married
must work outside the home, and no girl, rich or poor, should be allowed
to reach maturity without being prepared to face this possibility. Work
is not a curse but a blessing; it is an indispensable part of every
well-ordered life; and without it, the individual and the group will
certainly degenerate. Rich and foolish parents, who cannot realize this
basal fact, should nevertheless see that, even as insurance, their
daughters must be able to pay their way in life, if need comes, without
selling themselves either in marriage or out. Even if the woman marries
happily, she is never sure that she may not some day have to face
self-support, and possibly for more mouths than her own.
[40] B.L. HUTCHINS, Woman's Industrial Career in _The Sociological
Review_, October, 1909.
But the woman who marries during her adolescent period, between the ages
of twenty-five and fifty, must also work, and here we meet the hardest
problem of all. More money is often needed than the man can earn; the
wife may bring an industrial or professional equipment which is too
valuable to discard; often the demands of the home, especially where
there are no children, do not call forth the best energies of the
woman, and she needs the larger life of outside work. Hence many married
women must continue to work away from the home. In any of these cases,
the problem is difficult. Bearing and rearing a child should retire a
mother from fixed outside occupation for at least a year. Arguments born
out of conflict cannot change this primitive fact.[41] Women should not
do shop or factory work during the last months of pregnancy, and babies
should be nursed from seven to nine months. A baby should be nursed for
twenty minutes, every two or three hours of its waking time; and since
it does not always waken regularly, the nursing mother is debarred from
most continuous work, even if it does not interfere with her
effectiveness as a milk producer.
[41] Dr. ETHEL VAUGHAN-SAWYER, speaking before the Fabian Women's Group,
in 1910, said: "Fortunately, after the first two or three months, most
children will thrive equally well when artificially fed, so long as the
milk is good and reliable, and is properly prepared." All of our facts
go to disprove this statement.
The question of maternal care for children after they are weaned is more
difficult to settle, but notwithstanding certain statistics gathered in
Birmingham,[42] in February, 1910, which showed that the infant
mortality among working mothers was one hundred and ninety per thousand,
while, among those not industrially employed, it was two hundred and
seventy per thousand, it seems sure that infant mortality is extremely
high in foundling asylums and in factory homes. In Fall River, where out
of every one hundred women, forty-five are at work outside the home,
three hundred and five babies, out of every one thousand born, die
before they are a year old; while even in New York City, but one hundred
and eighty-nine out of a thousand die. The natural location of Fall
River should make it a very healthy city. One remembers, too, the
classic statement that deaths among little children fell off steadily in
Paris during the siege of 1870. Little children seem better off even in
time of war, with the mothers at home, than in time of peace with their
mothers in the factory.
[42] Pamphlet entitled _Report on Industrial Employment of Married Women
and Infant Mortality_, signed by Dr. JOHN ROBERTSON, the Medical Officer
of Health, Birmingham.
A few years ago, we turned to sanitary day nurseries, and to
pasteurized milk and other prepared baby foods, as the solution for
neglected or unhygienic feeding. To-day we know that even a dirty and
ill-conditioned mother secretes better milk for her baby than can be
prepared in any laboratory. We must wash the mother and feed her the
milk, and then let her give it to her baby, instinct with her own life.
It is quite possible that our recent talk of ignorant mother love and of
the necessary substitution of sanitary nurseries, canned care and
pre-digested affection must all go the same way. We shall probably get
our best results by cleaning up the home, enlightening the mother, and
then letting her love her child into the full possession of its human
qualities.
Economically, too, at least with factory workers, it is questionable if
their wages will support sanitary day-nurseries, with intelligent nurses
for small groups of children, and at the same time pay some one to cook
and scrub at home. If the mother must still cook and care for her house,
in addition to her factory work, the burden is too great; and if money
for nurses must come from the state, or from charity, then we all know
the danger of such subsidies to industry, in its effect on wages.
Surely the ideal toward which we must work is for the mother, during the
period when she is bearing and rearing children, to be supported by the
father of her children. Let her do the work meantime which will best
care for her children, and at the same time conserve and strengthen her
powers for the third period of her life.
This period, from fifty to seventy-five years, is now more shamefully
wasted than any other of our national resources. If one attends a State
federation of women's clubs one will find nearly every delegate of this
age. They are women of mature understanding and of ripe judgment, still
possessing abundant health and strength, and where relieved by economic
conditions from the necessity of manual work, they have to live such
irregular and uncertain relations to life as can be maintained by
mothers-in-law, grandmothers, club secretaries, and presidents of town
improvement societies. Remove all restrictions on woman's activity, and
these strong matrons would vitalize our schools, give us decent
municipal housekeeping, supervise the conditions under which girls and
women work in shops and factories, and do much to clean up our politics.
Debarred from direct power as they are, they are still making us decent
in spite of ourselves.
For the future, then, it seems that we must accept working women in
every path of life. We must remove all disabilities under which they
labor, and at the same time protect them by special legislation as
future wives and mothers. All girls must master some line of
self-supporting work; and, except in the cases of those who have very
special tastes and gifts, they should select work which can be
interrupted, without too great loss, by some years of motherhood. During
this time, the mother must be supported so that she can largely care for
her own child, though she must also maintain outside interests through
work, which will keep her in touch with the moving current of her time.
Industries must be humanized and made fit for women. The last third of a
woman's life must be freed from legal limitations and popular
prejudices, so that we may secure these best years of her life for
private and public service. And meantime, it is well to remember that
every step we take in making this a fit world for woman to work in,
makes it a fit world for her father, her brothers, her lover and her
husband to work beside her.