THE RIGHT OF WOMEN TO THE BALLOT
It is now generally accepted that that legislation has proved wholly
beneficent which has, during the past half century, afforded to women
and girls their present wide-spread opportunity for education. Indeed,
we are so accustomed to it that we realize with difficulty the fact
that such provision on so large a scale is new to human experience.
As a result of this far-reaching movement there is present in the
community an element of distinctive intelligence available for social
and civic usefulness such as never before existed. That we are far
from getting the full benefit of the virtue and intelligence stored
up in the community; that the leisure and culture which have come to
home-keeping women might be utilized on a far larger scale than we
have yet attained; that an ethical gain has been made whenever the
new intelligence of women has become available in the body politic;
and, finally, that other important gains may reasonably be expected in
proportion as its availability is extended by conferring the franchise
upon women, it is the object of this chapter to indicate.
It has been urged by opponents of the enfranchisement of women, that
there are other methods by which this intelligence may be utilized
without active participation in political life, and this is not
denied. Indeed, men who are faithful in the performance of their duty
as voting citizens carry on, in addition thereto, many lines of social
and civic activity. They do not, however, appear to believe that
they would be more valuable in the performance of these voluntarily
assumed tasks if relieved of their political duties. It is not members
of philanthropic and civic committees who absent themselves from the
polls; on the contrary. Why, then, should not women follow both lines
of activity and prove even more effective in their philanthropic and
educational work, by reason of their added powers as voting citizens?
Does anyone believe that the efforts of the Public Education
Association of New York would have been less effective during the
past ten years, if they had been reënforced by the presence in the
electorate of the mothers, the teachers, and the other interested
women, including the members of the Association itself?
The fear lest the votes of ignorant women may outweigh those of
the intelligent could be met by the imposition of an educational
requirement such as is already in force in Massachusetts. The utterly
unreasonable fear that the votes of the depraved may outnumber those
of the righteous scarcely needs mention. The balance of virtue and
depravity among women compares at least fairly with that of the present
electorate.
=Women’s Opportunities on Public Boards and Commissions.=--Naturally,
the first tentative step in the direction of securing for the
community the benefit of the newly attained intelligence embodied in
educated women, took the form of appointment of women upon public
bodies having to do with women and children. In this connection,
however, there must be noticed the curious phenomenon that some women,
whose valuable services entitle them to a respectful hearing, have
expressed the opinion that, in such positions, women may be of greater
value by reason of their non-political position, which gives assurance
of disinterestedness not thought attainable by voting citizens. It
seems to indicate a not unnatural loss of the sense of proportion that
these faithful servants of the community, deeply impressed with the
great need for work such as they have been doing, should forget that
their number is so insignificant as to weigh but lightly in comparison
with the disadvantage arising from the loss out of the voting mass of
the accumulated intelligence of the vast body of women, including all
the teachers. Indeed, these alleged, exceptional cases of advantage
arising from the non-political position of women serving in public
capacities must be regarded as fully offset by those other cases
in which able women, also serving on boards, have found themselves
shelved by being placed on committees and sub-committees whose work was
unimportant; and far more than offset by the exceedingly small number
of women serving at all in such capacities compared with the great
numbers who are qualified by nature and education for this work.
In general, the statement is true that in states in which women do not
vote, they are not appointed to salaried positions on public boards and
commissions, unless it is expressly provided in the statute creating
the public body that a certain proportion of the members _shall_ be
women. Where the word _may_ is used, there is a strong tendency towards
the gradual replacement of non-voting women by voting men. And in many
cases this involves a distinct loss to the dependent persons in whose
interests such public bodies exist. Nor is this disparity confined to
salaried positions. It is also most unusual to find an equal number of
men and women on unpaid boards and commissions, even when the duties
required are such as women are preëminently fitted for, and where the
number of available women of intelligence is very large, as in New York
and Massachusetts.
The precarious nature of the opportunity for public service open to
women, where they have not been admitted to the electorate, is well
illustrated by an episode in the recent history of Illinois. During his
term of office, 1893-1897, Governor Altgeld appointed fifteen women to
state boards of education, health, charities, factory inspection and
the management of penal and reformatory institutions, among them women
of such well-known philanthropic activity as Miss Julia C. Lathrop,
Mrs. Alzina Stevens, and Dr. Sarah Hackett Stevenson. All these
appointees served the state faithfully and several with distinction.
The succeeding governor, however, continued the appointment of only two
of the fifteen, replacing the remainder with men, who were voters.
A more recent example of the same precarious opportunity for service
is afforded by the experience of the women members of the London
School Board. From 1870 to 1902, women both voted for the members of
the board and were eligible for election to it, several women having
served long and usefully. But in 1902, Parliament legislated the School
Board out of existence and, in 1903, relegated its duties to the County
Council, for election to which women are not eligible. In this case
a twofold right,--that of voting for the members of the School Board
and of serving upon it,--was legislated out of existence after having
been exercised for more than thirty years. Parliament, which used its
powers to this end, is, of course, wholly independent of women, since
they possess only the municipal franchise and the right of voting
for members of the School Board. Obviously those minor forms of the
franchise, and the right of serving on boards for public purposes, are
held by an insecure tenure until the full power, the Parliamentary
franchise, confirms their possession.
Despite the unstable nature of their opportunities, however, women
have begun to work out interesting and suggestive changes in certain
branches of the local governments. Thus, in connection with the police
department, which was formerly regarded as utterly alien to them,
women now serve as police matrons and probation officers, regularly
recognized as officers of the court. Women attendance agents connected
with the schools prevent many children from needing the attention of
the men officers, and may be regarded as in a sense preventive or
substitute police. Reformatories for women and girls, established
and maintained out of the public funds, and conducted by women,
are beneficent manifestations of the same tendency to utilize the
fund of new intelligence for communal purposes. In the same line of
modification of the courts and their personnel is the activity of
women lawyers as counsel for Societies for the Legal Protection of
Women and Children. This is perhaps the most gracious form of activity
yet accessible to the growing number of women who have read law; and
the marked improvement in the attitude of the Bench towards women and
minors in both civil and criminal cases of importance, observable
during the past fifteen years, is believed by the writer to be directly
due to the patient efforts of many such societies.
Women who serve as inspectors of immigrant women and children, both
meeting incoming vessels at the Atlantic ports and awaiting the
arrivals at Ellis Island, are filling posts of duty of the highest
value both to the immigrants and to the society of which they may
become a part; as are the women acting as factory inspectors, sanitary
inspectors and inspectors of tenements. The addition of nurses who
have received hospital training to the federal army and to the public
schools of the city of New York, is another form of enrichment of the
resources of the community by reason of the newly acquired intelligence
among women. Unfortunately, the small number and insecure tenure
of office of these valuable servants of the public still deprive
the community of a vast deal of useful service which cannot become
available until the constituency attains its full complement of women
voters as much interested in these human affairs as the present
constituency is absorbed in manufacture, commerce and transportation.
=Need of Women in Educational Work.=--By nature, by training, and by
the accepted usage of the national life, women are chiefly occupied
with the care, nurture and education of the young. Moreover, for
reasons economic as well as pedagogic, the teachers in the public
schools are largely women. It was, therefore, in following the line
of least resistance that women have, in many places, become eligible
for appointment or election to the school-boards; or enfranchised
sufficiently to vote for the members of the boards of education. It is
the belief of the writer that the results of such enfranchisement are
conspicuously beneficial; that a broad line divides the communities
in which women perform the duties of voting citizens in all matters
relating to the schools, from those in which they are prevented from
exercising those functions. It is the commonly accepted division of
labor throughout the Republic that men are occupied with business
and professional duties, and women take care of the children. In the
administration of the schools this division of labor expresses itself
in the fact that the teaching staff, which comes into daily contact
with the children and is intimately acquainted with their needs,
is composed chiefly of women, but the business of the schools, the
work of the board of education, is conducted either wholly by men
or by boards on which men constitute the majority of members. The
consequences of this division, in communities in which women do not
vote, are conspicuous. Business principles (keeping down the tax-rate),
modified by political interest (corrupt awards of contracts, the
spoils system in the appointment of teachers, etc.), exercise an undue
influence,--greater than the consideration of the interests of the
children, which do not readily become known to the business-men who
compose the boards of education.
A case in point is the experience of the children in the schools of
the city of Chicago. It is stated by citizens of Chicago, long and
intimately acquainted with the Board of Education, that the membership
of the board has in recent years, been composed with reference to
the industrial and sectarian interests of the city rather than with
exclusive reference to the welfare of the children. The railroad and
traction companies (eager to keep down taxation), the real-estate and
building interests, (alert in the matter of buildings and sites), the
book-trust (ardently opposed to the introduction of free text-books),
the school furniture companies, and certain ecclesiastical interests
(keen to secure the appointment of teachers each after its own faith),
are all said to have been represented by men of excellent ability upon
the Board of Education. But the children and the teachers appear to
have been somewhat lost sight of in the general concentration of zeal
for the interests of manufacture, commerce and sectarian religion.
While it is true that there have been, for a number of years, one
or more women members of the Board of Education in Chicago, they
constituted a mere vanishing minority of the whole number of members,
not sustained by a constituency of voting mothers, teachers, and other
interested women, but appointed by the mayor of the city, apparently
as a concession to the demand that the Board of Education shall not be
wholly devoid of women. Their influence has, therefore, been of the
slightest and seriously disappointing to such friends of the children
and the teachers as have hoped unduly much from the mere presence in
the membership of the board of women, unsustained by the power of an
interested voting constituency.
Some of the results of the preponderant interest of the Board of
Education in subjects apart from the welfare of the children of the
city of Chicago, are picturesquely shown by the experience of a young
neighbor of the writer. This Italian girl entered the public schools
in early childhood, attending irregularly after the fashion of Italian
children and with the connivance of an incompetent truancy department.
In the course of eight years devoted chiefly to the study of language,
she acquired the least possible broken and ungrammatical English.
Seeing on the wall of the settlement a picture of Washington, she said
confidently, “I know him, first man!” Being asked his name she said
with certainty in her tone: “I learn him in school. First in peace,
first in war, first in hearts of countrymen! Eyetalian man.” Being
pressed for his name, this product of the schools said, “Garibaldi!”
Such was the foundation of English, history, and intelligent devotion
to the ideals of the American Republic with which this adopted citizen
left school, and entered upon the serious business of education in a
neighboring bakery belonging to the biscuit trust. There she learned at
once that her continued employment depended upon her becoming one of
the Lady Cracker Packers, whose ideals she found it easy to understand
and appreciate. Within a year she learned to vote as to the amount
of dues which she and her fellow workers should pay, and how these
dues were to be expended, for what purposes and by what officers,
in the election of whom she naturally participated. She attended
meetings, at which the objects of the organization were explained,
and was taught that her short working day depended upon the strength
of the organization. To this organization she devoted the fervor of
the Latin temperament, which had never been aroused by the daily
perfunctory salute to Old Glory at the opening of the sessions of that
school which had left her to believe that George Washington’s name
was Garibaldi. At the age of sixteen years this girl was thoroughly
accustomed to exercising in the union of her trade all those functions
which at twenty-one she will still be unqualified for in the larger
life of the commonwealth. The union looms correspondingly large in her
consciousness.
The state of Illinois, through the decision of the supreme court, tells
this girl that it is powerless to restrict the hours of daily work
which the biscuit trust requires of her; but the union confidently
undertakes the task by means of organization and its label, with the
possibility of a strike in the background. When the state tells her
through another decision of the court that it is powerless to constrain
the biscuit trust or any other employer to pay her wage weekly in money
of the United States, the union performs this function effectively by
the same means,--organization, the use of the label and the possibility
of strikes.
When the lads with whom she works reach the age of twenty-one years,
their interests are broadened and their allegiance to the union
divided by the demands of the political parties upon their attention.
Even on the most sordid plane of their immediate self-interest, the
city council and the state legislature claim their thoughts. But the
girl on reaching twenty-one years will have escaped from all farther
educational influences; will have been long married and actively
engaged in bringing up in the most unreasonable manner the large family
which continues to the second generation in the Italian colonies. She
will feed her infants bananas, bologna, beer and coffee; and many of
these potential native citizens will perish during their first year,
poisoned by the hopeless ignorance of their school-bred mother. She,
however, will always remain a faithful ally of the union as the only
institution which has ever invited her intelligent participation.
However convinced one may be of the value of the trade union in the
community, it is hardly reassuring that, in the presence of the vast
machinery of public education, the union should be, in practise, the
chief educational agency vitally affecting the children and young girls
in the immigrant colonies of the great manufacturing centers.
This girl is only one of thousands who are carried on the rolls of the
public schools for years, but whose lives are so little touched by the
work of the schools that, after two or three years in the factory,
they have forgotten how to read unless, indeed, they are gathered
into some union which carries forward their education in a one-sided
manner, wholesome enough if balanced by other broadening and deepening
experiences, but sadly inadequate as a substitute for the education
supposedly afforded by the public schools to all the children.
Wherever a powerful business interest is involved, laws are readily
enforced in its behalf and the administration of local government rises
to meet its requirements. This has been strikingly illustrated in the
efficiency of the fire department of Chicago throughout all the years
of the uttermost political corruption of the city, when every other
department reached the deepest depths of incompetence and inefficiency.
The fire marshal of the underwriters arrives at the scene of every
conflagration, large or small, as soon as the city’s firemen, if not
sooner;--and woe betide the man, or beast, or machine that falls below
the highest achievement possible in every given case.
It is the contention of this chapter that women, all women, of a
given community have the same interest in the children that the
underwriters have in the conflagrations and the administration of the
fire department. But, while the underwriters are voters, contributors
to campaign funds, and representatives of the keenest interests of the
business men, and have for all these reasons, very great local power
to constrain the municipality to keep its fire department up to the
highest point of efficiency, the women of Chicago have no corresponding
power of making felt their interest in the schools. The community is,
therefore, denied a reënforcement of moral power, and of educational
interest, which it sorely needs to counterbalance the excessive
pressure of business interest.
To the preponderance of the interests of business over the interests
of the children, expressed in the majority of business men and the
minority of women on boards of education, is due, doubtless, in other
cities as well as in Chicago, the idiosyncrasy of the curriculum
whereby the daughters of working-people are taught just those things
which tend to make them valuable as stenographers, typewriters, cheap
bookkeepers, clerks, copyists,--if they stay in school throughout the
years of compulsory attendance. If they drop out earlier, they have
still acquired habits valuable for factory hands of low grade and
miserable pay. They have been taught punctuality, obedience, working
in crowds, listening to instructions. What more does a cheap factory
hand need for beginning work? But of the qualities which fit girls
for home-making and intelligent motherhood, what preparation for the
development of these have our business men been able to imagine and
introduce into the curriculum? True it is that, in rare cases, a
woman serving upon a school board has carried weight enough, by reason
of unusual personality, to override the adverse pressure of other
influences and secure the introduction of some slight beginnings of
domestic science into the schools. But this has occurred in those
schools which needed it least, _i. e._, in the upper grades, which
are not reached by the children of day laborers. For the general
introduction of domestic science into the lower grades, in which the
children of the immigrants spend their sadly few school years, the lack
of space and the cost of equipment on the necessary large scale have
hitherto been effectively deterrent. It is here that Boston stands
forth as a fine example of the effects of admitting to the electorate
in the matter of the schools those who know most of the children’s
needs, the women of the community, including the mothers and the
teachers.
In London, too, for more than a quarter of a century, the women elected
to the School Board have assured to the girls in the board-schools at
least instruction in cooking. As long ago as 1879 the writer enjoyed
the privilege of visiting, with Miss Hill, a member of the board, one
of the cooking-centers in a London board-school to which little girls
came from neighboring schools; and the memory abides quite fresh after
the lapse of so many years, of one little girl who, after cooking peas,
carefully wrapped them in a copy of the London Times to carry them home
to a family whose tastes evidently needed cultivation in the matter of
vehicles for the transportation of soft, moist, warm vegetables.
Due to the preponderance of the interests of business over the
interests of the children in the composition of school boards including
few or no women, is the almost universal absence of adequate school
accommodations. It is not an accident, but a fact of the highest
significance that the two important cities in the United States which
afford school accommodations for all the children throughout the period
of compulsory attendance at school are Boston, where women vote for the
members of the Board of Education, and Denver, where women vote for
all officials. Does anyone doubt that the enlightened policy of Boston
and of Denver is due, in large measure, to the influence of the women
teachers in the electorate? Granted that, in Boston, the Buildings
and Grounds Commission is separate from the Board of Education, the
interest in school questions engendered by the annual election of
members of the Board of Education, and the general participation of
women voters both in the election and in the annual lively campaign
which precedes it, keep the tax-paying public apprised of the inner
condition and life of the schools to an extent impossible by any other
means and actually not approached in other cities.
By reason of the rapid growth of American cities, the provision of
adequate seating facilities for the increasing number of children
constitutes one of the most difficult problems with which boards
of education have to deal. Families move from older portions of a
city where school buildings are first erected, and it is not easy to
foresee and provide for the sudden expansion of one suburb or another.
Moreover, there are influences at work uninterruptedly, bringing to
bear silent pressure adverse to the expenditure of funds sufficient to
provide seats and equipment for all the children. Taxpayers desire a
low tax-rate, not perceiving that cheap primary schools involve in the
long run costly reformatories, and jails, accompanying an untrained and
unintelligent working class. Corporations desire an abundant supply of
available children to work at trivial wages. Children for whom there
is no school room begin to work earlier in New York City despite the
excellent new statutes, than children in Denver or in Boston who are
kept in school to the age nominally required in New York. In New York
city, where the Board of Education is appointed by the Mayor, who in
turn is elected by the suffrages of men only and who does not usually
appoint even one woman to the central board, the deficit in school
seating accommodations has not for many years been less than fifty
thousand. Indeed, no administration ventures to take a school census,
because no administration can afford to let the actual deficit be
accurately ascertained and definitely located. It is politically safer
to pooh! pooh! the estimates of the friends of the unfortunate excluded
children and the children in half-day sessions, than to face the facts
as they would be recorded by a school census.
The inability of boards composed wholly or chiefly of business men to
deal adequately with the business of the board, _i. e._, the education
of the children of the city, is revealed on a vast scale in the case
of the children who fail of promotion. The most overcrowded classes
are the lower ones, and these are congested largely by reason of the
presence in them of children who have been in school long enough to
have been moved on into higher and less crowded classes _if_ they had
been ready for promotion in due order. In London, where women have
voted for the School Board and have served on it for thirty years, the
scope and gravity of the problem of the children who fail of promotion
have long been recognized, and comprehensive efforts to deal with it
are persistently made. In New York, where the same problem has existed
since the foundation of the public schools, it was not discovered, and
then by a woman superintendent, until the year 1903, when the new law
took effect which requires that children, before beginning work in
manufacture and commerce, must be fourteen years of age and must also
have accomplished as much of the work of the curriculum as a child
of twelve years who had failed of no promotions. Several causes of
the failure of children to move forward in due order are removable by
the Board of Education, _e. g._, the half-time classes arising from
insufficient school accommodations; the excessive number of children
carried on the roll of one teacher; the suspension of unruly boys who,
until very recently, were not brought before a magistrate and committed
to a school, but merely turned into the street to waste their school
years in idle mischief or to go to work in violation of the child-labor
law; the dismissal of children by visiting physicians (before the very
recent appointment of nurses who now follow up the children and get
them back into school with the least possible loss of time). Other
causes of the failure of children to be promoted are municipal defects
curable if the Board of Education made effective demand for cure. Among
these is the insufficient provision for hospital care of infectious and
contagious disease. Because scarlet fever and measles are left to be
nursed in the tenements, healthy children of the family spend weeks and
months in banishment from school and fail of promotion through no fault
of their own.
Does anyone doubt that American cities which should follow the example
of London and enlist women of discretion and leisure as school visitors
would make short work of the clogging of the lowest grades by children
who are wasting their own time, that of the teachers, and that of
the children who properly belong in these grades? Could there be a
more unbusinesslike procedure than this defeat of the purpose of the
schools, for want of the personal contact of women with the children,
in work supplementing that of the schoolroom tasks of the teachers? It
is clearly due to the passive rôle assigned to all women except those
professionally engaged in the schoolroom.
The consequences of this clogging of the lowest classes are many and
evil. Among them is the truancy of children discouraged by failing of
promotion, with the attendant probability of arrival in the juvenile
court under the charge of playing ball in the street, or some similar
anti-social offense, or of arrival at the legal age for beginning work
without having accomplished the meager amount of school work required
by the law, an experience which bears most heavily upon those families
in which it is most liable to occur,--those of the very poor.
In this relation, the interests of the teachers and the children are
strictly identical; it is most desirable for the teachers that school
accommodations should be abundant and wholesome; that the children
in one class should not exceed thirty; that salaries for teachers
should be such as to enlist in the profession able and well-trained
persons. To enfranchise the teachers is to give to the children the
best informed possible advocates in the electorate, and to strengthen
every effort made on behalf of the unfortunate children who now fail of
promotion year after year and finally defeat the object of the schools
either by falling out without completing even the required minimum of
work, or else cover each stage long after they have passed the age to
which it is appropriate, and when it has lost all real value for them.
=Protection of Children in Colorado.=--Compared with the children of
New York City the children of Denver appear to be singularly fortunate
in the protection which they receive by means of legislation. A child
in Denver is required to attend school regularly to the age of sixteen
years, unless he is released from this duty by the joint action of the
superintendent of schools and the county judge; and in that case he
must complete the work of the first eight years of the curriculum of
the public schools. A boy released from school attendance is subject to
the supervision of the two authorities mentioned, and can work only on
condition that his record continues satisfactory to them, being kept
on the roll of the juvenile court, not as an offender, but as a ward
of the court. If he should be required or permitted by an employer to
work longer than eight hours in a day, or at an occupation injurious
to his health, it is within the power, and is clearly the duty of the
superintendent and the judge to cancel his permit and return him to
school or require a change of his occupation.
Where the great body of children in a city are kept in school until
they reach the age of sixteen years, and all must finish the work of
the first eight grades of the public schools, the rising generation
goes into the bread-winning occupations with an unusually high level of
efficiency of mind and body; and where all the wage-earning children
under the age of sixteen years are virtually wards of the court, the
exploitation or demoralization of children by means of their work
becomes almost impossible.
In Colorado, children under the age of sixteen years enjoy, also, an
unusual degree of protection by reason of that brief and comprehensive
statute which renders any person who contributes to the delinquency
of a child liable to a fine or imprisonment not exceeding one year.
Under this recent statute, the dealer who sells a cigarette to a boy,
the mother who sends a child to fetch beer, or who permits him to read
dime novels so that he is led to run away, the telegraph operator who
sends a boy to a disreputable house to deliver a telegram or message,
the coal-train conductor who permits a child to “hop a train” or to
pilfer coal,--one and all may be brought into court, placed under a
suspended fine for the first offense, and sent to jail for a year if
any continue to offend. In practise, more than a score of fathers were
sent to jail during the first half of the year 1904, for contributing
to the delinquency of their children. Hardship to their unoffending
wives arising from loss of the earnings of the breadwinner was obviated
by arranging to have the offender in jail only from Saturday noon to
Monday morning, the remainder of the sentence being suspended.
It is the common experience that statutes of exceptional rigor for the
protection of children are apt to remain dead letters, and this has
been sadly true of child-labor laws, where powerful corporations have
secured the removal of officials who were conscientious and efficient
in enforcing such measures. How, then, is it to be accounted for that
the county judge of Denver has for years enforced penalties upon saloon
keepers, cigarette dealers (irrespective of their relation to the
brewers, the whiskey trust and the cigar trust), telegraph operators
(agents of two of the most powerful corporations, and the largest
single employers of boys in the Republic); and has, nevertheless, not
only not been retired from office but, on the contrary, was the only
candidate upon whom every political party in Denver united at the last
election? Citizens of Denver assert that this significant fact is due
to the voting mothers, teachers and other interested women in Denver.
It is a part of the recent history of the city that, when the corrupt
political machine found Judge Lindsey unbending in his opposition,
it dropped his name from the proposed list of nominees for the next
election. But when the women of Denver heard of this, they held
meetings and made known their will in such effective manner that, when
the day came, no other name appeared as candidate for the office of
county judge upon the ballots of any of the seven political parties
which complicate elections in that lively city.
Opponents of the extension of the franchise to women have pointed out
that political corruption in Colorado still exists, despite the fact
that women have for ten years been admitted to the electorate. But
in so doing, they mistake the direction in which ethical gain is to
be expected to result from the enfranchisement of women. Political
corruption is not a matter of sex; it results from the unethical basis
of our business activities, and cannot be abolished until that basis is
altered and made ethically sound. The ethical gain which may reasonably
be expected from admitting women to the electorate is the extended
activity of those members of the community who are primarily interested
in the nurture and safeguarding of the young.
A suggestive comparison is that between the cherishing and nurture
afforded to the children of Colorado by means of legislation due to the
voting constituency of women, and the unsheltered state of the children
of Georgia, where women are in every way excluded from public life, and
where boys and girls at any tender age are wholly without protection
from the demands and the cruel neglect of cotton-mill owners, as is
indicated in the decision of the Supreme Court of Georgia in the case
of the Canton Cotton Mills.
Equally suggestive is the comparison of the defenseless position of
girls in South Carolina, where women have no political power and the
age of consent is ten years, with the careful safeguarding of girls
in Colorado. It is not accidental that one of the first measures
introduced into the legislature of Colorado after women were elected
to that body, was the bill successfully carried by a woman senator,
raising the age of consent to eighteen years, at that time higher
than the corresponding law of any other state. Such a law affords
protection to the boys and youths of the community which they are
wholly unable to estimate. It saves them those temptations which beset
youth in communities in which, as in North Carolina, the offense of
tempting girls carries but a slight penalty, if any, with no certainty
of enforcement against a white man. When the age of consent is raised
to eighteen years, this is a protection not only to all the young
girls and boys in the community, it is a protection to the community
itself against the children of ruined girls. Denver needs no foundling
asylum like that institution which confesses the disgrace of New York
City. It is at the opposite pole from the legally sanctioned and
medically supervised vice of the cities of Continental Europe, with the
accompaniment of lock hospitals and foundling asylums. It now remains
for Colorado to deal effectively with the quacks and their newspaper
advertisements, and to substitute for their polluting influence wise
instruction in physiology, biology and morals, in the public schools.
Never before in human history has the right of the young to pure
living, the claim of the adolescent to guidance and restraint, the need
of the child for nurture at the hands of father, mother, school and
the community been recognized as in Colorado to-day. Never have the
good influences of good homes received such reënforcement by means of
legislation.
These gains have not been made because the subject matter ever
developed political issues. Elections have not hinged upon them. But
the accent has been shifted; the emphasis is different. It appears
that, on the whole, the interests of children and youths are unusually
well guarded in a community whose affairs are all carried on by men and
women together.
=Advantages of the Recognition of the Right of Women to the
Ballot.=--The slight contribution of time, thought and effort required
of all the voting citizens, if spent by all, not merely as at present
by men, may reasonably be expected to prevent the need of much of
the remedial and reformatory work now demanded of individuals for
individuals. Infancy, old age and the misfortunes of congenital
defectives, constitute a legitimate claim upon the leisure and charity
of women, as of men. But the endless, cheerless task of attempting
to repair by philanthropic methods the wreckage due to bad laws,
which women have no part in making, and the lax enforcement of good
laws, is a burden which should no more be inflicted upon women than
the task of enforcing demands for industrial improvements in the
lot of workingwomen arbitrarily disfranchised should be saddled upon
workingmen.
Reference has been made to the value of the addition of the women
teachers to the electorate. It remains to point out a distinct
disadvantage arising from their continued disfranchisement. It is, for
instance, an anomaly not likely to remain permanent that many able and
successful teachers of civics and political and industrial history
to boys and young men are women who are themselves not voters. The
effect upon the minds of the pupils must be highly confusing. They seem
forced to the inference that these subjects are of minor importance,
since they can be taught by persons who are not permitted to perform
the duties and functions which form the real content of the teaching.
But what could be more unfortunate for the Republic than to inculcate
in the minds of coming voters any idea calculated to minimize the
importance of the subjects of civic duties and political and industrial
history?
In an essay strongly adverse to the admission of women to the
electorate, published in 1893 by Mr. Goldwin Smith, there occurs the
following passage: “Woman’s Suffrage is a change fraught with the most
momentous results, not only to the commonwealth but to the household.
Let Wyoming and New Zealand try it, say for ten years. The success
of the Wyoming experiment is publicly proclaimed and the universe is
exhorted to do likewise by Wyoming, whose voice is now that of the
female voters. Private accounts are not so favorable, nor have the
neighboring states, which must have the clearest view of the results,
been induced to follow the example. To Wyoming for the present, Woman’s
Suffrage in the United States remains confined. The New Zealand
experiment will be more satisfactory, though New Zealand, having no
warlike neighbors, does not run the same risk of emasculating her
government which is run by a European State. If at the end of ten years
it appears from the two experiments that legislation and government
have become wiser, more far-sighted, and more just, without detriment
to the peace and order of the home, let the world follow the example,
and be grateful to those by whom the first experiment was made.”
It is worthy of note in this connection that, according to the latest
census of the United States, Wyoming heads the list of all the states
when they are graded according to the number of children between the
ages of ten and fourteen years who are illiterate. Including the
Indians, Wyoming is charged with but 72 such children. Inquiry has
elicited the fact that this is due directly to the efforts of the women
voters, who long since worked out a plan by which traveling teachers
are sent to remote portions of the state, where scattered children are
gathered from ranges and ranches until they can read, when the teacher
proceeds to another post and the process is repeated with another
gathering of children. In order that the children may not forget what
they have learned, traveling libraries are sent in the wake of the
teachers.
It is respectfully submitted that the period suggested by Professor
Goldwin Smith has elapsed; that the three neighboring states,
Colorado, Utah and Idaho have now all followed the example of Wyoming;
that legislation has become wiser, more far-sighted and more just
without detriment to the peace and order of the home. Moreover, the
Australian Federation and South Australia have followed the example of
New Zealand. What is to be gained by farther delay?
Within the family an interesting and ennobling modern relation
due to the education of women is the mutual sympathy, respect and
understanding between the college-going youth and his college-bred
mother. The unconscious contempt, mitigated by affection, felt by
Pendennis at Oxford for Helen at home in the country, is alien to the
experience of sons whose preparation for college has been guided by the
joint counsels of both parents. On a larger scale the same seriousness
of respect of adult sons for their mothers may be noted even by casual
travelers in states in which women vote on all subjects. Something
of this greater unity of interest between mothers and their adult
sons and daughters in the performance of a common duty of the highest
importance, may reasonably be expected in humbler walks of life with
the extension of the ballot to women in the great industrial states.
At present, this form of common interest exists among the members of a
family of working-people chiefly where the wife has, before marriage,
been a wage-earner and member of a trade-union, and after marriage
continues her interest as an active member of the Union Label League or
the Women’s Trade Union League. It would surely be more wholesome for
the family and the Republic, to extend the common interest of mother
and adult sons and daughters to the affairs of the whole commonwealth,
than to leave it confined exclusively to the industrial affairs of life.
It is now more than twenty years since the writer printed in the
_International Review_ a paper on “The Law and the Child” in which
it was pointed out that the two agencies which had chiefly modified
the life of the children of the working class during the nineteenth
century were the development of steam-driven machinery, which had made
the labor of children available on a large scale in manufacture, and
the emergence of women from the exclusively domestic life of former
centuries to a participation, first in the education, and later in
the philanthropic and educational work of modern times. During the
intervening years since the publication of that paper the task of
obtaining or promoting legislation on behalf of workingwomen, girls
and children, or of securing its enforcement, has never ceased to be
one of the deepest interest. The progress achieved, however, is so
slight, the obstacles in the way of any real protection for young
children are still so great, in all the industrial states, that it
has become the settled conviction of the writer that, until women are
universally admitted to the franchise, direct measures involve almost
certain illusion and disappointment. This conviction is confirmed, not
merely by the affirmative experience of Colorado, but by the negative
experience connected with the effort to establish by statute the right
to leisure of women and children in Illinois, where women vote only
for the trustees of the state university. It is still farther confirmed
by the overwhelming disparity between the advantages gained for
themselves by workingmen who are voters, compared with the excessive
difficulty involved in making any gain whatever, during the same period
of twenty-years, on behalf of workingwomen and children.
For years the friends of the young clerks in retail stores have striven
to obtain for them the poor privilege of being seated when at work,
and with what success? In many states, laws have been enacted making
diverse provisions for seats in stores. In New York City, for instance,
the law has required, since 1896, that one seat be provided for every
three clerks. In some stores the seats have been supplied for the third
floor, because the clerks were chiefly employed upon the first. In
many stores chairs are abundantly supplied in the fitting-rooms of the
cloak, tailoring and dressmaking departments, for the use of customers,
and are included in the general reckoning according to which there are,
on the premises, chairs in the proportion of one to three clerks. In
still other cases, chairs or seats are wholly absent from the notion
counters and from the counters or tables in the aisles of the stores
where half-grown girls serve as sales-clerks. The absence of the seats
is suavely explained by the fact that the employees are there only
temporarily. But their employment lasts day after day, and the pretext
is utterly transparent. In still other places, seats are provided
ostentatiously, but girls who use them are censured or dismissed. All
these variations of the art of evading the statute have been found by
the writer in reputable establishments in New York City.
It has been shown in another chapter that the power of the Retail
Dealers’ Association is such as to prevent the appointment of special
mercantile inspectors as provided for by the mercantile employees’
law. That classic example illumines the whole subject. On one side are
wealth, the prestige of the large employers, and the effective control
of the enforcement or non-enforcement of laws;--for the employers
not only vote, but exercise power as large potential contributors to
campaign funds. On the other side are youth, ignorance, inexperience,
poverty, and that irresponsibility which arises from the hope of
marriage and resultant escape from the inconveniences, great and small,
which attend any given occupation. It may be said that the men who
are clerks represent the interests of the women and girls and should
be able to secure inspection of mercantile institutions and stores.
But they are increasingly hampered by the pressure of competition of
the very women and girls whom they are thus asked to protect. They
have their hands more than full with their own difficulties, and
cannot reasonably be asked by the community to fight the battles of
their arbitrarily disfranchised female competitors. Nor do competing
workingmen by any means always recognize an identity of interest with
the women beside whom they work. It is only very recently that they
have gone so far as to welcome them to the trade unions.
The slow and ineffectual steps towards the establishment of an adequate
force for mercantile inspection, in a state in which the principle of
state inspection is so long established and clearly recognized as in
New York, are obviously due to the absence of a voting constituency
behind the demand for such inspection.
Because, in all great industrial states, women are disfranchised,
except for certain strictly limited powers in connection with
educational affairs, the industrial disadvantages of the minor
wage-earners are aggravated by this powerlessness of the adult
workingwomen to make the needs of the whole class felt, by those
methods which are slowly and gradually but surely improving the
position of workingmen; and are no less aggravated by the equal
political impotence of those other women who are the natural friends
and protectors of the young workers,--the women of wealth, leisure,
intelligence, and philanthropic interest.
It has been made sufficiently clear in the foregoing chapters that the
exertions of the Retail Clerks’ Protective Association, the Working
Women’s Societies, the Consumers’ League, and Church Association for
Improving the Condition of Labor, and the League of Women Workers
have availed little for changing industrial conditions affecting
workingwomen and children compared with what voting workingmen have
been able to do for themselves.
The burden of the tale of this book is the difficulty of enforcing
legislation on behalf of children and minor workers. Their position is
zero minus. The element which, under normal conditions, is primarily
concerned with their interests consists of the adult wage-earning
women, the mothers and the teachers, with philanthropic women of
education and leisure. So long as these either shirk the duty of
securing and using the opportunity to vote, or are debarred from doing
so, the difficulty of enforcement of protective laws must continue.
The exceptional disadvantage attaching to the position of minor working
girls is such as to call for humane exertion on the part of all who
can in any way contribute to their welfare. And the response is
found in the rapidly growing series of philanthropic undertakings of
which working girls are the objects. While the Young Men’s Christian
Associations aim to enhance the efficiency of their beneficiaries, by
furnishing instruction and facilities for systematic exercise, bathing
and wholesome recreation, the corresponding organization dealing with
minor working-girls provides, not only these aids to efficiency, but a
variety of sustaining and curative measures in addition. What is the
meaning of the homes for convalescent working-girls which are springing
up in so many directions? Is it not that working-girls are being worn
out and used up at a rate such that no savings of their own brief
working period could possibly provide for their needs? And these homes
are without exception overcrowded (or burdened with waiting-lists)
largely by sufferers from nervous prostration or pelvic disorders
induced by long hours of work and needless standing arbitrarily imposed
in connection with their work. Boarding houses for working girls,
furnishing board at four and five dollars a week and supplying a
modicum of comforts paid for by philanthropic subscribers, exist in a
score of states. Why all this provision for which nothing corresponding
is asked on behalf of young men? Is it not due to the general feeling
that the morals of working-girls must be buttressed, their wages eked
out in the interest of society itself? Rescue homes and shelters
tell their own chapter of the story of insufficient pay coupled with
overwork and temptation; and this chapter is supplemented by the rapid
growth of foundling asylums, and committees for finding places in
friendly families for mothers with one infant each.
It may be many years before any of the efforts now made on behalf of
working-girls can be safely relaxed. But why should all this effort
be confined, in their case more than in that of young workingmen and
boys, to the forms of philanthropy? Why should not effort on their
behalf go forward on two feet, the philanthropic and the political
together, as the movement of workingmen goes forward? Why should it
limp haltingly along upon the one foot of philanthropy? Is it not quite
possible that, with the extension of political power to all the women
in the community, such improvement in the conditions of employment must
result that the minor wage-earners will be more nearly self-supporting,
less often placed in the humiliating position of working and yet being
objects of charity? For any body of wage-earners to be disfranchised
is to be placed at an intolerable disadvantage in all matters of
legislation.
It has been shown that in states in which women have been admitted to
the electorate, certain substantial advantages have accrued to the
schools and the children. It is entirely reasonable to infer that
with a farther extension of the franchise to women, a similar gradual
improvement in the lot of the minor wage-earners will come about, and
that these improvements cannot be achieved so promptly or so lastingly
in any other way.
While leisure has been increasing in the class of prosperous,
home-keeping women, the need of their help, sympathy and protection
has been growing among the young workers. Since the leisure of
prosperous women is due largely to the labor of young wage-workers
(who are engaged chiefly in the food and garment trades, the textile
industries and that retail commerce which lives by the patronage of
home-keeping women), it behooves the fortunate to assume their full
share of the duty of making and enforcing laws for the protection of
these young wage-workers. But this they can do only when they perform
all the duties of citizenship, voting and serving on public boards and
commissions when elected or appointed to them. It is because women are
less under the stress of competitive business, because they do, in
fact, represent children and youth, that their vote is needed.
One alleged form of philanthropic work in behalf of working girls would
certainly go out of existence if women were added to the electorate,
namely those so-called reformatory institutions under sectarian
management in which for years at a stretch girls are detained without
trial, kept at work for the benefit of the institution or of the
ecclesiastical organization under whose auspices it is conducted. Only
the members of a disfranchised class can be subjected to treatment such
as this.
=Right of Women to a Share in the Enactment of Marriage and Divorce
Laws.=--A subject of the highest ethical importance is kept effectively
under discussion by the unwearied efforts of the Divorce Reform League
to obtain the enactment by Congress of a uniform law dealing with
marriage and divorce throughout the Republic. No other law touches
in the same manner the welfare of every man, woman and child in the
nation, as the law governing marriage and divorce. No other law,
therefore, so peremptorily requires the assent of every citizen. Men
and women are alike affected by the legal basis of family life; and
since the points of view from which the subject is approached by
men and women are fundamentally different, that law alone can be an
essentially just and righteous one which is so framed as to satisfy the
needs of both men and women and to rest upon their agreement.
For a federal law, at the present time, there is no machinery by which
the assent of women can be obtained. Such a law, therefore, if enacted
while the present suffrage restrictions remain, must be the product
of the will of far less than half of the adults whom it would affect.
However wise the measure recommended might appear in the abstract
to be, the manner of its adoption would constitute an intolerable
injustice.
It is sometimes urged by the advocates of the congressional measure
that the method of securing the adoption of legislation by the action
of the separate states is injuriously slow; that evils attending the
present variety of legislation are such that haste is required. To
this it may, however, be replied that the machinery of legislation in
the states responds more quickly and sensitively to the will of the
people than does the machinery of federal legislation. If, therefore,
the people of the various states are slow to alter their laws governing
marriage and divorce, this may arise from the fact that the existing
laws are more or less adapted to the life of the people in the states.
If they are not so adapted, the first preliminary change should
logically be the extension of the electorate to include the non-voting
elements of the population now silently affected by the laws. That
being done, a just basis would have been formed upon which to proceed
with farther changes in legislation in the individual states. If it
be true that the evils arising from the existing chaos of legislation
affecting marriage and divorce in the different states have become, or
are becoming intolerable, surely it is fair to infer that these evils
may be due to the enforced silence in matters of legislation of half
the people affected by them.
The need of haste is a strange reason to assign for the transfer of
the power to legislate upon the most intimate relation of human life,
from those governments which are most easily controlled by the people
affected, to that which is farthest removed from them.
Four states are now in a position to deal with this or any other
question on a basis of entire justice, namely those states in which
men and women alike vote; many other states possess all the needed
machinery for submitting important measures to the vote of the people;
and it is perfectly easy to provide, in any given case, that women may
vote on the question submitted. There is obviously more need for such
submission in the case of a bill dealing with marriage and divorce than
in the case of any other subject. Not until the responsibility for the
change can be shared by the whole adult population should so grave
a change be undertaken as the transfer of the power of legislation
upon this most vital of all subjects from the states to the federal
government.