WOMEN AND CHILDREN
Going through the London streets during the last two years all of us
have seen motor-cars driven by ladies and loaded with wounded soldiers.
It is a great sight, which brings home to all of us the fact that the
woman who drives the car and the woman who, in many cases, accompanies
her as a kind of general servant have, for the time being, banished
from their minds all thought of class distinction; they are publicly
demonstrating that, so far as the war is concerned, there is an attempt
at unity of aim among the rich and wealthy in an effort to lighten the
load of suffering and pain endured by those men who, propertyless and
poor, possessing nothing of material wealth, possessing not even a
single yard of the land millions of them are fighting and dying for,
have proved they possess things of _real_ worth--have demonstrated
it by deeds of heroic valour on the battlefields of Europe.
The spirit that has impelled rich people to do this sort of thing is
good and well worth preserving, but as I have looked at them in their
comfortable cars, enjoying the pleasure of service, the thought has
always come into my mind: “Why do not these people understand that
in days of peace there is just as insistent a call to them for this
kind of service?” These soldiers are the same men who till the fields,
weave our raiment, dig our coal, and, in fact, provide us with all
we need; but when they are doing that no rich women desire to give
them joy rides. It makes one ask: Are the favours poured out on the
_soldier_ or the _man_? There are also tens of thousands of
mothers hidden away in the back streets of our great cities who would
be benefited by the light and air and cheerful surroundings of a motor
drive in the country on a fine summer day--women who have risked no
less than the men, have suffered no less, and deserve no less, women
who have not killed but have borne. Hundreds of thousands of these
women never get a change of scene or a real country holiday away from
the grinding poverty of their everyday life. These mothers of England
endure the trouble and agony of giving birth to children without that
comfort and care of leisure, food, clothing, and surroundings which
are at least palliatives for the comfortable classes. They lead lives
which are simply one long story of mean, sordid drudgery; their daily
life is the common round, the daily task of just living, working,
toiling for the bread that perisheth, with very little of joy, and
always with a heavy load of care and anxiety. The soldier’s wife or
mother has the added worry--“Will he come back? And, if he does return,
in what condition will he be brought home again?” Into the lives of
these women only occasionally comes the delight of a trip in a crowded
tramcar with children, or perhaps a ’bus ride. Even on such days the
care and worry of the children mar the whole pleasure of the day’s
holiday. There are no nurses or governesses to relieve these mothers;
they must just keep on at the same task, day after day, with no chance
of relief. I wonder how many of the women who devote so much time to
the soldiers realise the cheerless, drab life endured by these heroic
mothers.
Writing these things down may seem a very commonplace kind of start
for my chapter, but I start thus because I desire to make good people,
whose hearts are touched, and rightly touched, by the spectacle
presented to us all of convalescent soldiers and sailors needing fresh
air and recreation, understand that in days of peace, as in days of
war, multitudes of women need rest and comfort, sympathy and love,
just as much as the men we are all desirous of honouring. The women
of the industrial centres under present circumstances need friends
who will be to them just the same kind of fairy godmothers as many
rich women have proved to be to the wounded men home from the war.
Society women must understand that a working-class mother does need
the same kind of health-giving recreation as they themselves need,
and that the denial of this recreation, the thoughtless indifference
to the needs of these mothers, which are typical of the attitude of
mind that prevails among many sections of society, ought to be swept
away, and a true comradeship and fellowship amongst men and women of
all classes established. It has needed a war to break down the laws
and customs of class with regard to soldiers. The rich and well-to-do
take the labourer and artisan as soldiers into their homes, and for a
brief period caste and class are abolished. I have never heard that
after a big industrial accident on a railway or in a factory or mine
anything of the kind has ever been done; but why not? The shareholders
or proprietors of industrial concerns ought to feel as much comradeship
for the people who earn their bread and luxuries for them as is now
felt for the men who fight for Britain. Surely it is as honourable to
be wounded or killed working for the health and well-being of a nation
as it is to fight for it; and, if so, is it not time we gave as much
appreciation to the workers as to the soldiers, and as much to the
mothers of Britain as to the sons they bear? Is it only the fighting
machine that moves you to compassion, or will it be the human being?
The soldier wounded in the war needs attention, needs all the care that
can be bestowed upon him. The mothers need attention just as much.
Without them there would be no soldiers--without them there could
be no nation; and it is here that I think the governing class makes
its greatest mistake. Its standard of values is so false that it has
needed a great war, a horrible catastrophe of death and destruction,
to make us understand how valuable an able-bodied man is. The war has
made the worker appear to other classes as quite a new sort of man.
Men whom rich people would never meet in private life are now in some
ways treated as human beings, to be made much of and granted little
attentions. It is not only right, it is the duty, of us all to give
all the joy and happiness that is possible to the men who have made
so great a sacrifice; but what I am anxious to point out is that if
the well-to-do women who are so willing to give their services for
the soldiers would but think a little, they would easily understand
that it is of just as great importance that their sisters in the slums
should receive some of this attention, some of this care. They should
strive to bridge the great gulf which separates the condition of life
enjoyed by the well-to-do woman from the comfortless condition of life,
destitute of all the social amenities so necessary for the well-to-do,
which the working-class woman must endure.
No one connected with the upper classes (except that tiny handful of
women who forsake their class and live amongst the people in social
settlements) can have any idea of the very meagre comforts of life
that the working women enjoy. And even the women who leave comfortable
town and country houses to dwell amongst the poor cannot quite
understand, because always their rooms are nicely kept, and furnished
at least with the requisites of cleanliness and comfort. It is all so
different with the tiny homes of the workers. We have got accustomed
to thinking working people do not need the same conveniences of life
as we do for ourselves. You may go through the length and breadth
of the land and find that the vast majority of the homes in which
working-class women are expected to bring up their children are just
tiny congested places where rich people could never exist. I have seen
racing stables and the homes of prize cattle nicely tiled, warmed, and
ventilated. It is a marvel that the people who own these places do
not understand that on their own estates human beings need at least
the same amount of breathing space and sanitary arrangements as prize
animals. I wish the great land-owners of Britain, the great merchant
princes and manufacturers, could, day by day, have placed before their
eyes pictures of the mean dwelling-places thought good enough as homes
for the miners of Scotland--the notorious Colliers’ Rows. These are
tenements of one floor, sometimes just two rooms for man, wife, and
children, and in these places all the bathing has to take place in
the living-rooms, and often the beds are slept in the twenty-four
hours round because, in order to find accommodation, father and sons
work on different shifts of eight hours each. On the hillsides of
Wales, made hideous by the grime and filth of commercialism, I have
seen whole districts living under conditions which create nothing but
disease and death. In great cities in the Potteries, in the Midlands,
in parts of London, the same thing applies. I once stood on top of the
kitchen and living-rooms of some houses in Scotland, and alongside me
were pig-styes--which meant that the pigs lived on top of the homes of
human beings: these working-class dwellings were situated outside the
palace of one of Scotland’s ducal families! I felt miserable and sick
as I stood there, because it seemed to me dishonouring to our whole
conception of human values. What impressed me most, and what impresses
me to-day, is the fact that that Duke was a really good man in his own
way; kind, and, in a way, generous. It never struck him that he himself
could not live with pigs, and that, therefore, no other human being
should be expected to do so; neither did he realise that his lovely
palaces were the direct result of the outstanding fact that all these
tenants contributed to his income a portion of each day’s earnings;
that no penny came to them of which he did not exact his share; that it
was only of their deprivations, their dirt and half-hunger and disease,
that his palace walls were built. It is a saddening thought, too, that
the poor people themselves so humbly accepted these conditions of life
as a direct ordinance from God.
The simple thing always lacking in almost all working-class homes is
the bath-room. I lay stress on this because I have experienced both
the lack of a bath-room and the joy and convenience of one. Some rich
people talk very glibly of the dirt and want of general cleanliness
amongst the working class. Such people seem to forget that we all need
space for cleanliness; that in tiny poky rooms, especially where there
are children, it is quite impossible to preserve anything like healthy
conditions. In many villages and in parts of some towns people are
obliged to pump and carry every drop of water they use. I wonder how
many rich women could endure living, for a single day, packed away in
one room with two or three children. I wonder what many of them would
do if they were obliged to live in the same room with a husband and
children while giving birth to another child. There are multitudes of
people existing under such conditions. I called the other day at a
soldier’s home. It was one of those one-roomed places. A little child
of four years of age, a man and his wife lived in it. Two days after
I called another baby came. There was nowhere for the man to live
except in this room, so the woman who nursed his wife just came in
occasionally and went away again. To me the marvel is that people are
able to breathe at all in such places. It was not dirty in the ordinary
sense, but there was too much breathing in the one place, too much
furniture, too much of everything, and as I sat there I felt I wanted
to blow the windows out in order to let in more light and air. And
now after a week or two of struggle the baby is dead. It has joined
the great multitude of children murdered by bad social conditions.
Poor mite, it is happier now. For it there is no care or poverty; but
_we_ are all poorer, for it is one more of God’s good gifts to man
slain and driven out because of man’s worship of Mammon, because of
man’s inhumanity to man.
There is no reason except selfishness and indifference why little
ones like this should perish. Rents are so high and wages are so low
that the workers cannot live in better places. The man I visited
is invalided out of the Army, and just exists on the very mean and
paltry allowance--just enough to starve on--granted him, partly by the
National Insurance Commissioners, and partly by a grateful country
which can no longer use him as part of its fighting machine. The man
in his day has been a good worker, and would still work if his health
were not wrecked by service in the Army. Even when working he would not
have been able to secure much more than one extra room, and according
to the standard of the district this would have been considered
comparative comfort.
I do not understand how it is that the clergy and social workers are
so quiet on this question. They always seem to me to have good homes
for themselves, even if sometimes small; there is always light and
air for them; yet many of them teach contentment, and talk of present
conditions of life as if they were instituted by God for the benefit of
those who belong to that multitude known by many pious people as God’s
poor.
Contrast the housing and home conditions I have spoken of with
the sort of attention the middle or upper class woman receives at
times of maternity. Nothing is too good either for her or for the
new-born child; night- and day-nurses, skilled medical attendance,
everything that can lighten the burden of child-bearing. It is the
same all through; and somehow each of us must understand that the
poverty-stricken condition in the one case is under present social
conditions the necessary accompaniment of the comfortable, luxurious
surroundings in the other, and each one of us is directly or indirectly
responsible. To me this is so obvious that I can hardly realise that
other people do not see it as clearly as I do. Let any woman or man who
doubts my statement sit down for a few minutes and by hard thinking try
to discover where her or his money comes from. Money can come to any
of us in only one of two ways. Either we earn our own bread, or someone
else earns it for us; and people with only ordinary intelligence can
very soon decide which class they represent. One quite simple test will
tell you where incomes come from. When a strike is on or a mill is
stopped, no wages are paid; and neither are dividends earned. Both are
dependent on _labour_. Only land grows in value when unused, and
that only because of pressure of labouring population.
None of us can free ourselves of responsibility. Not one of us lives
separate or apart from his fellows. Our daily bread comes to us because
of long hours of heavy toil by old and young in many parts of the
world. Our luxuries come because of our ability to use the labour
power of others to supply us with reservoirs of material wealth, which
they themselves never dream of demanding. And so it all goes on, and
produces a struggle which as the years pass grows more and more bitter.
A friend of mine in America who takes a great interest in social
affairs was once very indignant because a certain big railway company
would not pay proper wages to its employees, who had struck work for
better conditions. She joined the agitation in support of the strikers.
Having occasion to see her lawyer on business she was horrified to find
that most of her income came from shares in the very company she was
denouncing. She was a sleeping partner in the robbery and exploitation
she had denounced. She thought things out and decided to spend her life
with the workers in an effort to bring about a complete change in the
relationships between men and women of all classes.
How many people realise the struggle to live which children of the
working classes are called upon to endure? Dr. Saleeby and other
writers have done a great work in calling public attention to the
wicked waste of child life, most of which is preventable. Mr. Herbert
Samuel, in his preface to “Maternity” (letters from working women,
collected by the Women’s Co-operative Guild), says: “How quickly
social evils will yield to treatment is seen in the fact that in ten
years the campaign against infant mortality has reduced the death
rate among infants under one year of age by nearly one third.” How
terrible conditions were and how fearful they now are is proved
by statisticians, who tell us that we murder by our foul social
arrangements 100,000 babies in the first year after birth, and that
another 120,000 are killed before birth because we neglect their
mothers. In fact, all poor children have but a precarious chance of
living. Many of those who manage to survive are defective in one form
or another; there are now one million such children, Sir George Newman
tells us, attending the elementary day schools. These children are not
mentally but physically defective, and in the main they are in that
condition because of insufficient nourishment and bad conditions of
home life, both before and after birth. When milk was 4d. per quart it
was difficult enough for the poor to obtain, but the present price of
6d. per quart is a real prohibition. Even when milk is bought it is not
always either clean or pure: this is so well known that Parliament,
in June, 1914, passed the “Clean Milk Bill,” which would have secured
that milk, so far as it was humanly possible, should be free from
disease and dirt. This same Parliament, on the outbreak of war a few
weeks later, was so callously indifferent to the welfare of mothers and
children that it agreed to postpone the operation of this beneficent
law till after the war. No madder thing could possibly have been done
by a Government composed of lunatics. This and many similar incidents
prove that the Government is in the grip of those whose sole thought in
life is to get rich, even if little children are murdered in order to
satisfy their greed.
During the war we have thought so little of our children that we have
tumbled them out to work at the early age of twelve years in ever
increasing numbers, solely to enable employers and others to get cheap
labour. The Board of Agriculture has published figures which show that
300 boys and girls under twelve years of age, 6,400 between twelve
and thirteen, and 4,300 between thirteen and fourteen have been thus
robbed of their education. In this, Great Britain has shown herself
less careful of her children than France. In the very early days of the
war the French Minister of Education called upon the local education
authorities throughout France to take extra care that the children of
the soldiers were properly cared for and educated, because, as he said,
while their fathers are fighting it would be a disgrace to France if
the nation allowed the children to suffer. Wealthy England, on the
other hand, has neglected her babies, has allowed profiteers to plunder
the mothers, has taken boys and girls from school and thus robbed them
of their very birthright. This is only a little worse than what we do
in normal times, when throughout Lancashire we allow children to become
“half-timers,” and, in even our best education districts, a child can
go to full work at fourteen years of age, and so little care is taken
in the choice of occupation that multitudes of boys and girls, after
a few years at work, find themselves in a blind-alley--that is, an
occupation which leads nowhere in after life, and which leaves young
people on the industrial scrap-heap just when they arrive at years of
maturity.
I should like well-to-do mothers to contrast this with the training
of their own children. First of all the home life, the nursery and
the nurses, governesses and assistants to take care of the child and
surround it with everything that it needs for its bodily and mental
development. No care is too great for the child of a great house. The
boy or girl who is lucky enough to be born of wealthy parents is sent
to school, then to college, or to some institution where thorough
training is given in order that a future in life may be secured. It
is not expected that the boy or girl whose parents have money should
go to work at fourteen years of age, and it is only sheer necessity
which drives the children of the working classes into industrial and
commercial life. Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Winchester, Oxford and
Cambridge, and the other great schools and Universities of the land,
are filled up mainly by those who can afford to pay to go there, and
who are kept there because it is considered that education is of
primary importance for these children of the well-to-do. It is worthy
of note that neither in peace time nor in war time are the boys who
attend the great public schools expected to go to work half-time. This
patriotic privilege is reserved for the children of the working classes.
I may be told that there are scholarships and bursaries for the
children of the working classes who are clever enough to win them.
This is true, but only an infinitesimal fraction of these children can
secure them. The great bulk of them must just go through life with
only a tiny scrap of education, which to many of us appears to be no
education at all. I maintain that the nation has adopted the wrong line
in giving scholarships and bursaries, and in establishing continuation
schools, for clever children only. I believe clever people get through
anyhow, and I never bother myself much about them. In my opinion public
money would be much better spent in giving bursaries and scholarships
to the children who are not clever, but to whom good food and healthy
surroundings would be of real service in enabling them to develop their
minds.
Let us then consider the difference in the upbringing of the children
of well-to-do parents and the children of a working man, and, when we
have done this, let us try and understand that every privilege which
can be paid for, and which is the possession of the children of wealthy
parents, comes to them only because some other child is robbed of its
chance, because the fruits of its parents’ labour have been bestowed on
the children of other people instead of on their own.
This is the fact which I again ask my readers to grasp and understand.
I ask them to realise that, if justice were done, it is the worker’s
child who should attend school until eighteen or twenty years of age,
because it is the working classes who make such education at all
possible. But no one wants to rob any child of its chance. It is not
a change of places which is desired, but an equal chance for all. Much
more might be said, but I think I have said enough to show that there
is a very unequal condition of life existing as between the mothers and
children of one class and those of another. And this inequality cannot
be bridged by charitable doles, cannot be bridged even by sympathy.
It will only be bridged when we each understand that the things which
are of essential importance for ourselves are also needed by others,
that for all of us there is the same need for a full life, full in
the sense of containing leisure and opportunity to think, to read,
and to recreate. Without these things life is a miserable, sordid
make-believe. We must understand that when Someone in wisdom said: “Man
does not live by bread alone,” He gave expression to an eternal truth.
The mass of the people are unable to live in the best sense of the word
because they are forced to slave and toil for so meagre a reward and
for such long hours that they have neither the time nor the energy for
anything more than work and sleep. In saying this I am not unmindful of
the fact that many workmen receive relatively high wages, but at the
outside these will in normal times seldom exceed £200 a year, whereas
the professional and salaried classes consider such an income only a
very poor one indeed. Sometimes workmen spend their money away from
their wives and families. I think this is mainly due to the hard,
exhausting nature of their work, which leaves them without energy for
anything but stupid excitement. Anyone who has seen men stripped to
the waist working before the blast furnaces on the North-East coast
will readily understand what I mean. But always remember that the one
place provided for the workman’s recreation is the gin palace and
public-house, and quite nice people get very big incomes from such
places, which often bring ruin to both men and women.
It is undeniable that for the average woman in the working class, home
life is represented by small petty pieces of work which few outside the
poorer classes understand or appreciate. I have already mentioned baths
as being absent; how many people understand that even the homes of the
men who make baths are not supplied with this necessary equipment for
a decent life? Electric light, although it is getting cheaper, costs
the workman, in the very few places where it is installed, more than
it costs other classes. But, of course, it is denied to the great bulk
of the workers. If you go through the apartments or houses of the
working classes you will find that for them most of the amenities of
life are absent. I labour this rather because it seems to me that it
is just there that the whole difference in our lives comes in. Rich
women imagine that working women do not need the things they themselves
need, and it is this idea which I want to break down and destroy. It
is no use telling me that the working women are content; that they
do not want anything more. If they are content, and if they have not
the spirit to desire better conditions, this fact alone--if it is a
fact--is the greatest condemnation of the social conditions of our
time. Normal people _ought_ to want better conditions, and I ask
those women who really desire to help their poorer sisters to preach
to the poor the glorious gospel of discontent with dirt and insanitary
surroundings; I ask them never to tell them to be satisfied, but always
to preach dissatisfaction with bad social conditions. As a matter of
fact the well-to-do women ought to preach the gospel of discontent
amongst their own class as well. There should be no satisfaction in
life for any of us while the comforts we ourselves enjoy are not shared
by others. No woman ought to be content to live and go through her life
knowing that some sisters of hers have not the means to live decently
as she herself would like to live, and yet making no effort to get
better conditions of life for those who need them. Each of us is his
brother’s keeper, and we are in our present plight because we refuse
to act and live up to our responsibilities. What is wrong is that
throughout the ages poor mothers have been taught to endure hardships
and poverty as God-ordained institutions.
In the struggle for civil and political freedom rich women must
understand that the possession of these privileges will involve
an entire revision of our standard of relationships. A vote for a
working-class mother will be of value to her only if it makes her
understand her place in society as an important human being who helps
to give to humanity the means to “carry on.” I should like to see a new
sort of Mothers’ Union formed, consisting of women of all ranks, all
classes, and all creeds, who would meet together as equals and together
hammer out the problems of life. I have always felt that this might
have been done at the beginning of the war, that officers’ wives might
have met the wives of privates, and that together they could have tried
to discover how better to live. The old Mothers’ Meetings are played
out. Educated women who want true reform must give up trying to buy the
poor happiness by gifts of blankets or bread, and must help the mothers
of the nation themselves to demand better conditions, conditions which
will bring freedom from worry, not conditions which necessitate a whole
crowd of officials to teach people how to live. As a temporary thing,
those who have means may have to aid the poor to get some relief from
their sordid surroundings by giving help in various forms. We may for
some time yet be called upon to endure officials and officialdom as
a kind of purgatory, but the schools for mothers--the necessity for
which, I consider, is the greatest condemnation of modern methods of
living--should not much longer be tolerated as a necessity; every girl
should be so trained, have so good a chance of acquiring knowledge,
that when she married she would refuse at any time to submit to any
condition of life which lowered self-respect. In a word, it is a gospel
of desire and want which needs preaching to the mothers of England.
Divine discontent! And the women young or old who will embark on that
campaign will be doing a great and lasting service to humanity.
Home-making, the rearing and care of children, is work which has been
slighted and looked down upon. No wages are paid for it, and people
when speaking of house-work talk of it as something menial. Married
women with large families have been made to feel the enormity of their
offence in following what we are told is the Divine command, “Be
fruitful and multiply,” until nowadays women are declining motherhood,
are refusing to be mere machines for producing unwanted children; and
in consequence on all sides we hear direful prophecies of the evil
which must befall the nation unless we mend our ways.
The Bishop of London denounces the checks and preventive measures taken
by women of all classes, but especially the more comfortable classes,
for preventing child-birth. His Lordship touches only the fringe of a
great subject. Why does he not denounce great landlords who extract
huge ground rents from every district in every great city, or those
owners of houses who refuse to let their premises to those who have
children, and in many instances stipulate there shall be no children
at all? These are economic causes which no amount of mere talking or
preaching will put right. The working-class mother bears children, and
as each one comes she dreads its coming. I marvel that under present
conditions there is not much more prevention; that is, I marvel that
women do not tell men that, until proper means for maintaining and
rearing children under healthy conditions are organised, they will
refuse to bring children into the world. The wife of the business man
or Government official is in another category. She refuses motherhood
because she dreads sinking lower and lower in the social scale. The
rich woman refuses motherhood because it interferes with her pleasures
in society. There is no royal road out of this. The population of
England will go down unless we are prepared to re-establish motherhood
and womanhood on a loftier plane, unless we are willing to maintain
that empire building shall take a second place to home building. The
prevalent idea that children are only a nuisance to be tolerated must
be superseded by a love and reverence for mother and child as God’s
greatest gift to mankind. The present system by which people with
families are not allowed to live in certain homes and flats, the
restrictions which are made in some of the great model dwellings for
the poor, controlled sometimes by philanthropists and sometimes by
municipalities, must be swept away, and a woman, as her family grows,
instead of being driven out, must be given more and more accommodation.
In the case of a working-class woman it must always be remembered
that her husband’s wages are fixed, not according to his family, but
according to a particular rate set for his job, and as each new baby
comes his wife’s struggle to live grows harder and harder: it is she
who always is the worst sufferer; it is the mother who is served last
at the table and takes what is left. Women who belong to the upper
classes get out of motherhood, as I say, because they want a pleasure
of another kind; working-class women or middle-class women because of
economic reasons.
So far I have been dealing with women in the home. But there are many
thousands of women in our land for whom there is no chance of marriage
and to whom the joy of motherhood is denied. Some day we shall be wiser
in our sex arrangements, because we shall discover that if monogamy
is to continue we must find a means of stopping the slaughter of boy
babies. It is these which provide the greater part of the toll of
death which babies pay for the privilege of being born in Christian,
monopolist-ridden Britain. We must, however, think of the present,
and, doing so, shall soon discover that there exists not only a class
war but something like a sex war also, since in every department of
industry and commerce women are being used to bring down wages, to
lower conditions, and to give to the possessing classes an abundance of
cheap labour. I am not complaining of the fact that women are proving
themselves capable of doing men’s work; I am calling attention to the
fact that women’s labour has been used, and in many instances is still
being used, and will be even more used after the war, for the sole
purpose of bringing down wages. If anyone doubts this the evidence can
easily be supplied by the Board of Trade and Ministry of Munitions.
Apart from these, let any of my readers who wish to know the facts go
into an industrial district and themselves inquire into the wages and
conditions of labour prevailing amongst girls and women; they will very
soon discover what a very low standard of value is set on female labour.
The cry of “equal pay for equal work” has so far fallen on deaf ears,
except in very exceptional cases; and this is true not only of trades
and callings followed by the working classes, but in many professions
also. The teaching profession gives us one of the best examples of this
inequality of remuneration. Women teachers, both head teachers and
assistants, are always paid much lower salaries than men. It is this
kind of thing which sets the standard of value. It is a fact denied
by no one with knowledge that low wages for girls and women result
in producing the “social evil” of our time. Thousands of women live
their lives through in penury and want, facing hardship and grinding
poverty in a heroic endeavour to preserve personal virtue and honour.
Others succumb to the call of the streets, and either make up their
scanty wages to a living standard or give up the struggle and sink down
and down into the whirlpool of vice which is to be found in all great
cities. I am told, by those who profess to know, that some women prefer
to live under such conditions. It may be so, but I am not concerned
with that problem here. It is the vast army of involuntary victims
for whom I ask consideration and compassion. When we read of women
working long hours at hard laborious work for paltry pittances of a
few shillings a week, we need not wonder that prostitution, the most
ancient of trades for women, thrives in our great cities, and that its
accompanying evils of venereal disease become like an avenging scourge.
It is strange indeed that the splendid men and women who give money
and work to rescue women from the streets do not understand that until
the causes of prostitution are tackled all their labour and effort is
in vain; and the causes are vouched for, in the main, by the police
authorities, and by all students of industrial conditions.
In every garrison town, in most of our seaports where the Navy has
headquarters, low-paid industries are established for women. It is
impossible not to connect the two things. And even in such a matter as
this there is a great difference between the poor and the rich--the
daughters of the rich seldom endure the torment of the lock hospital.
These places are reserved for the children of the workers. It is they
who are betrayed when working under conditions which make them easy
victims of the lust of the rich, or driven to sell their bodies because
society refuses them decent conditions of life and has placed so low a
value on woman’s life and service.
It all seems to me to start in the home. Woman’s work there is
not properly valued, and this false standard of values goes right
through life. In addition, there is the double standard of morals
which prevails, and which allows a man to commit adultery without
any penalty, but punishes a woman guilty of the same offence with
relentless severity. This question needs thinking out on straight clear
lines. If, as some people say, men are so constructed that prostitution
of women is a necessity of modern life (which I do not for one moment
accept), it logically follows that the society which accepts this
must accept all the consequences of such an admission, and we must
all cheerfully allow our daughters to minister to the common need of
men by becoming members of the great army of fallen women. If it is
a necessity for the man, it is a duty for the woman. If it is a duty
for the working-class woman, it is a duty for the daughters and wives
and sisters of the comfortable classes. I am not now thinking of the
isolated sexual lapses of which any man or woman may, under stress of
temptation, be guilty, but of the wretched victims of our social order,
who like dumb driven cattle earn their bread on the streets of the
great cities, and who, some doctors tell us, are necessary in order to
safeguard the honour and virtue of our wives and daughters.
Honour bought and virtue maintained at such a cost are not worth
preserving. We must all unite in protest against such a doctrine, must
insist on conditions of life for men and women which will make the
exercise of virtue, if not easy, at any rate practicable and possible;
and a condition precedent of all reform is for each of us to accept
the principle that each other man’s daughter, wife, and sister are as
valuable as our own, and that the dishonouring of either our own body
or another’s is an outrage against God and humanity.
We must also set our faces against all theories of inferiority where
women are concerned: we must declare with unceasing insistence that
motherhood and home-making are great services; above all, that woman’s
life and work together with man’s shall be recognised as of value to
the State, and organised in co-operation on lines of equality and
service for the good of the whole community.