THE FAMILY AND THE WORKERS
"It is all work, and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed,
articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred world. For the
thistle a blade of grass, later a drop of nourishing milk, later a
nobler man. Man perfects himself as well as the world by
working."--CARLYLE.
"Every man's task is his life preserver."--EMERSON.
"What was his name? I do not know his name.
No form of bronze and no memorial stones
Show me the place where lie his mouldering bones.
Only a cheerful city stands,
Builded by his hardened hands;
Only ten thousand homes,
Where every day
The cheerful play
Of love and hope and courage comes;
These are his monuments, and these alone,--
There is no form of bronze and no memorial stone."
--EDWARD EVERETT HALE.
"Let us now praise the artificer and the workmaster
Who is wakeful to finish his work.
These put their trust in their hands
And each becometh wise in his own work.
Though they sit not in the seat of the judge,
Nor understand the covenant of judgment;
Though they declare not instruction nor utter dark sayings
Yet without these shall not a city be inhabited
Nor shall men sojourn therein.
For these maintain the fabric of the world
And in the handiwork of their craft is their prayer."
--ECCLESIASTICUS.
=Changes from Ancient to Modern Forms of Labor.=--The change from the
domestic and handicraft stage in industry to the capitalized,
power-driven, machine-dominated, and highly specialized work-system of
the present day has been often described and is a part of all the
economic problems of modern times. We do not need here to rehearse the
details of that change or to speak of its effect upon workers in
general. What we must do, however, is to trace specifically some of
the results of that industrial change in the constitution and in the
development of family life.
In the old order the worker owned his tool, selected his material,
controlled the process of his task, and often was master of the sale
of the finished product. Hence, as has so often been shown, the
character of a man was so obviously a part of the stock-in-trade of
the worker, his judgment, probity and skill were so clearly causes of
his success in handicraft, that the ethical training of life came
definitely through the exercise of work-power. Now, as we are often
reminded, the worker is divorced from the management and control of
his work-process and is a "hand," merely attached to a machine that
others must choose, buy and install, the product of which is in only
an infinitesimal part his responsibility and of the profit from which
another takes the lion's share. This has made many feel that ethical
training in life must come to the worker from his leisure hours only,
and that his task must be always merely a routine one, to be got
through with as soon as possible each day in order that he may "live"
in the hours left from work. This idea cannot be accepted by anyone
who realizes the character-drill that may inhere in any form of useful
labor. The need is to permeate the methods of modern industry with the
creative spirit, to mix the management of all business and
manufacturing with the brains of workmen as well as of directors and
to make a new connection, strong, obvious, and thought-compelling,
between the worker and the control and responsibility of his work.
While this is being accomplished the results of the change from
handicraft to machine work in the family order must be understood and
unsocial elements in that change minimized. It must be remembered that
among the opportunities of character-training in work lost by the man,
the woman and the child and youth, by the change in industrial
methods, is the constant influence of the home life while at work. The
old industries clustered about the fireside. It made the household a
work-place, and some feel that this was a detriment to home life and
that we have a better chance to make real centres of love and
happiness now that we have taken out of the domestic field almost all
the elements of manufacture and of trade. However that may be, this
much is sure, that when father and mother worked together, and
children learned how to work while still within the family influence,
it was easier than it is now to make the daily task one of mutual
coöperation and mutual service within the family circle.
=The Old Household a Work-place.=--We have passed laws now, forbidding
"home industries" because so many "sweated trades" find their last and
often impregnable fortress in the crowded rooms of the tenement
living-places. This may be necessary and may be well to do, but the
fact remains that something inhered in the old domestic training of
children and youth in useful work within the home which was lost when
the factory was built and the young workers had to seek their jobs
outside the family circle. And that something of work-drill and
habit-forming in the interest of self-support and family usefulness we
are now trying to reintroduce into the education of children and youth
by elaborate and costly "manual training," "Pre-vocational and
Vocational courses" and similar departments in the schools.
=Welfare Managers in Modern Times.=--The fact that hours of work and
conditions affecting the workers can be standardized more easily when
those workers are massed in large numbers under one recognized owner
and manager of a great industry has sometimes blinded us to the need
of each young person to have constantly near at hand a personal
representative of society's interest in the development of his
character; some interpreter of social customs and ideals to follow
which will make for his advantage. We are trying now to get "Welfare
Managers," paid chaperons, nurses and teachers, into business concerns
to take the place of older forms of social direction and care for
youthful workers. These functionaries often do much good and are
recognized expressions of the social interest of employers. Since they
are installed avowedly for the purpose of making conditions better for
the younger, weaker, less trained and more needy of the workers,
"Welfare Managers" often find a hostile or at least indifferent
attitude toward their efforts on the part of the higher paid, the
better established, and more competent women workers, especially those
organized in Trade Unions with the slogan of "Not Charity, but
Justice." They do, however, reach with light and leading some of the
darker sides of modern industry as related to the younger workers.
=Child-labor.=--The student of industrial history knows that
child-labor is not a new evil. Children were often overworked and
cruelly driven when parents, guardians, and those to whom they were
"bound out" as apprentices were the only taskmasters and their labor
was wholly within the household. Indeed, Hutchins and Harrison, in
their _History of Factory Legislation_, declare that "it is not easy
to say whether children were really worked harder in the early
factories than under the domestic system which they replaced." Edith
Abbott, in her excellent summary of _The Early History of Child Labor
in America_, shows clearly that at the bottom of the ancient desire to
use very young persons in industry was a conviction that work,
constant and hard work, is the only safeguard against evil. "Satan
finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" was not a figure of
speech to our ancestors, it was statement of a sober fact. This
feeling led naturally to the conditions that gave Samuel Slater, the
pioneer in textile manufacture in New England, a collection of child
workers in his first mill as his only laborers and at ages between
seven and twelve years.
We are now able to see and remedy some evils of child-labor in the
factory system which passed unnoticed and for which no prohibitive law
was in existence in the handicraft stage. It is true, however, as all
must recognize, that the modern specialization of labor and modern use
of machines allows a wholesale exploitation of youth and of physical
weakness impossible in older forms of industry. Hence the facts of
modern industry justify and make necessary the "Child Labor Movement."
Yet vital and strong as that movement is, we have to-day, as has been
stated in another connection, a misuse of children by millions in
industry. We have also a dangerous overuse of youth in industry, and
we have a reckless waste of mothers and of potential mothers in
unsuitable work. We have also certain dangers to family life in the
turning of attention and of ambition of young people away from family
interests into fields of industrial activity which are inimical to
family success. This makes the problem of the family and the workers
one of great difficulty and one to be given the most serious attention
on the part of those who are themselves above the economic conditions
which operate to complicate that problem among the poor and
struggling.
=Increase in Women Wage-earners.=--In the first place, we must note
the tendency toward rapid increase of the numbers of women listed by
the census as in "gainful occupations." Without noting in this
connection the conditions just before and during the Great War,
conditions not at all indicative of normal increase in the numbers of
working-women, we trace in the period from 1880 to 1910 a rise from
2,647,157 to 8,075,772 of the number of women in receipt of salary or
wages for work outside their own homes. The estimate of 1920, now
given, of nearly 41,609,192 "persons of both sexes and of ten years
old and over engaged in gainful occupations" shows us 8,549,399
"females." Of these, over a million are engaged in "Professional
service" (a larger proportion than of men so listed and, of course,
indicating the great majority of women in the teaching profession).
More than two millions are listed in "Domestic and Personal service."
That leaves over three millions working in "agriculture, forestry,
animal industry, manufacture and mechanical industries," and nearly a
million and a half in "clerical occupations." The use of ten years of
age in such lists is now obsolete as an indication of custom in
employment of youth. Fourteen years of age is the norm in the listing
of youthful workers and the age limits should be revised to suit that
rise in the legal age of the child wage-earner as generally practised
now in the United States. With that understanding, the statistics for
"Child Labor Certificates" issued by the large manufacturing cities of
our country show an army of young workers, more than twenty thousand
in New York City alone, annually entering the competitive industrial
field with full consent of society. This all means that millions of
women and very young persons who under the earlier forms of industrial
life would have been employed (however steadily or with whatever
handicaps or even cruelty) within some family circle, are now under
the full control of mass-direction, mass-standardization, and
mass-influence in their daily work.
=Social Pressure on the Individual Worker.=--This pressure is in
itself almost a sufficient reason for the family instability now seen.
To divorce all the working-time, and all the work-tendency, and most
of the work-training from home life is to weaken the hold of the
family upon the average worker. Members of a family in which each has
definite and firm relation to some different requirement and control
connected with a daily task are likely to acquire an independent
relation to society in general. In such eases it requires a far more
vital and enduring affection, a distinctly superior mutual
understanding and sense of justice, and a far larger natural equipment
of tact and power of adjustment than was required in other economic
conditions, in order to make the family life enduring and happy. The
economic self-interest of each member of the family in the domestic
circle was obviously that of every other member when the household was
a workshop. Even, the land and all which it implied was a family
possession in primitive days. And the worker's equipment, owned
privately, was limited in the early days. We read that "tools,
weapons, slaves and captured women and the products of some special
skill were generally private possession, but products of group-work,
such as the capture and killing of buffalo, salmon, and all larger
game among the North American Indians, and the maize which individual
women tended but which belonged to the household or the tribe in
common, were all shared as community property." When to this communal
possession of products of group-activity were added control over
marriage portions, however those might be appropriated, and the
management of all property thought to be of group-value, we can see
that all of economic weight of influence now so individualized once
went into the family asset.
In the mediæval times, when laborers were gaining slowly a class
consciousness outlined by Guilds and Unions of special groups of
workers, the family was still the main centre of work-direction and of
united profit from work, and hence it was evident to the dullest mind
and the coldest heart that members of a family should work and save
together. Now the whole trend of industrial relationship is toward
making independent and individualistic connection between the worker
and his job outside of family unity. Even movements for legal
protection of the worker against exploitation by masters in industry
often take little account of family relationship or the varying
inherited family ideals. Setting the well-being of one member of the
family against what is supposed to be the well-being of other members
of the family, as in the case of some child-labor laws, may be
necessary and socially wise, but it surely does not lead to family
stability.
=Demands of Family Life Upon Industry and Labor Legislation.=--The
demands of family life should at least be stated and have some weight
in any further attempts to make the lot of the individual worker
better, and should be considered in any drastic attempts to enforce
labor legislation which sets the parent and the child against each
other in the courts, or which hampers a mother in what she deems of
vital necessity in the carrying out of her parental duty.
"The Code for Women in Industry," issued by the division of Women in
Industry of the Department of Labor, in coöperation with the "War
Labor Board" and the "War Labor Policies Board," when the questions
concerning standards for employment of women in war plants were acute,
as published in the _Survey_ of January 4, 1919, is in brief summary
as follows: No woman employed or permitted to work more than eight
hours a day or forty-eight hours a week. One day of rest a week
demanded for all and no night work for minors or women. The basis of
the wage-scale to be form of occupation, not sex; and no lesser wage
for women permitted unless it can be proved that their employment
lessens the output of work. A legal minimum wage for all women, which
should include cost of living of dependents as well as of individuals.
All work conditions to be good and safety adequately secured. Women to
be prohibited from working in occupations where exposure to heat or
cold or to poisonous substances, or where bad position or too great
muscular strain, endanger health. Home work prohibited.
=Should Adult Women and Children be Listed Together in Labor
Laws?=--There is grave question whether some of these items listed as
essentials in the protection of women in industry, and certainly
useful in the peculiar conditions of munition manufacture into which
women rushed in such vast numbers in answer to the call of war, should
form a permanent outline of the relation of law to women workers.
Some of them have, and clearly, a place in any future code in peace
time. The requirement for one day of rest in seven; the demand that
quality and power of labor, not sex, shall set the wage-scale; and the
legal requirement for sanitary, safe, and moral conditions in
workshops and factories, all are vital to sound social demand in the
interest of women workers. Are these not also demands for just labor
conditions of men? The eight-hour day is now fixed as a standard for
men and women alike, with the forty-eight hour a week definition. A
minimum wage, including cost of living for dependents as well as for
individuals involved, has justice at its base, but requires for its
application less a blanket sum indicated by law than a wages-board or
other form of discriminating commission with power to adjust flexibly,
with due consideration of place and of quality of work, the wages to
the task. Conditions of labor should be "good" in all cases, and what
is good should be fixed by disinterested persons. Physical safety and
moral protection must be secured at all hazards, and in the case of
women special protection, particularly for those under twenty-one
years of age, is needed. Any work which is peculiarly a menace to
health and to the race-life for mothers or potential mothers may well
be forbidden by law. The absolute prohibition of night work and of
home work to adult women may well be left in the background, however,
until the industrial situation is clearer for all women workers. The
evils of night work for the "sweated" woman, untrained for any
lucrative labor and who has to catch on to the labor wheels at any
point open to her effort at middle age, must not blind us to the fact
that one of the most precious things in the inheritance of brave and
loyal natures is the determination to earn for one's own support and
for that of one's dearest. The tenement labor, which is such an evil
in many of our cities and one so impossible to deal with adequately by
ordinary inspectorship provision, is not all there is to "home work."
It may well be that, as has been before indicated, the new uses of
electrical power may return to the home, and in ways to the advantage
of the family, some of the processes now wholly under factory control
and provision. The point is that while there cannot be too much
protective legislation for children and youth, the place of adult
women in the labor world must not be too firmly and exclusively held
by the side of children lest we add to the difficulties women still
experience in finding and keeping a place in the world of modern
industry.
=Women in War Work.=--In England, we are told, there were one million
women employed in war plants during the great struggle with Germany.
In every variety of munitions manufacture women were found in great
numbers, often furnishing eighty per cent, or more of the total number
employed. It is a fact that they "made good." It is also a fact that
the average of health among the working women of England rose in many
localities where women were employed at these unwonted tasks. The
reason given for this by one keen observer being that the higher wages
earned enabled many thousands of women, before undernourished because
of their poverty, to have "three square meals a day." When we remember
that in England there are nearly two million more women than men, and
that the men who served in the army and have returned physically and
mentally able to take back the jobs they left for army service are
clamoring for them, and when we remember that the struggle for a
standard of living never goes backward and that women workers once
used to good wages will not willingly take poor ones again, we can see
what difficulties the war has made in our sister country for both men
and women in industry.
In our own country the one and a quarter million women engaged in
industrial work directly or indirectly connected with the war service
when the first investigation was made in fifteen states, under the
auspices of the National League of Women's Service, were but a section
of the army of women who were enlisted in war work, paid or unpaid and
of various kinds. Now we have an unemployment problem of our own with
something of the same complaint of the men of England that the
returned soldier finds a woman in his place, a woman who is still
wanted, perhaps, by the employer and who does not wish to relinquish
her job.
When Mrs. Muhlhauser Richards took charge of the Woman's Division of
the Department of Labor in the effort to make a clearing house of
women's work in the interest of help to the government it was not
simply a measure for temporary use or of temporary value. The idea
still persists in peace as well as in war, and justly, that the
interests of women in industry require a special division of the Labor
Department in order that we shall be able to know what is needed for
their protection in the interest of family life as well as understand
what individual women require in justice when they are wage-earners. A
minimum wage is demanded and in several states made a legal
requirement, but to name a definite sum per week puts a stated figure
where a movable and changeable condition inheres in the situation.
Experts in labor reform, therefore, urge the passage of legislative
bills providing for "wage commissions to determine living wages for
women and minors," and such have been secured in several states.
The linking of women of all ages with minors may be necessary for
protection of individual women from exploitation, but again, it must
be insisted that such a blanket cover for women workers of all ages
may not be for the ultimate good of the adult, competent yet
struggling women, who are trying to compete with men for a place in
the world of labor. The fact is that we often approach the problems of
work and wages and general labor conditions from the angle of the most
needy, the most exploited, the least trained, and the poorest in
opportunity. This may be the highway of philanthropy and to be
travelled in the interest of social helpfulness, but it is not all the
roads labor reform must use.
=Minimum Wage for Fathers of Families Real Need.=--When we study
questions of labor as related to family well-being we must begin with
an ideal of what the normal family requires of its members, men,
women, and older children, and place in the first position of economic
requirement the family demand upon the husband and father. He must, we
have said, be in position to be a "good provider" for his group. That
means he must be trained to be a worker, faithful, efficient,
intelligent, who does something which society needs to have done and
for which employers can and will pay adequate wages. That means
vocational training, guidance, and opportunity. That means, also, an
economic system not easily convulsed by bad times and ups and downs in
the industrial world. That means, again, ease and cheapness of
transportation in order that families may live in decent homes and yet
the chief wage-earner go back and forth to his work without too great
strain of strength or purse. That means some social control of housing
facilities, food supply, public sanitation, and educational facilities
which will secure the essential of human living to all workers and
their families. To work harder to secure these vital elements of
family well-being is the task of all. If we were as anxious as
citizens to secure opportunity for the men and women who make up the
great army of average workers, self-supporting but at cost of struggle
often too severe, as we are anxious as philanthropists to ease the
burden and protect the weakness of the more backward members of the
industrial army, the current of upward movement of all in gainful
occupations would be stronger and more socially helpful. The family is
most of all concerned with the minimum wage of adult men who marry and
have children.
=The Attitude of Women Toward Labor Problems.=--The family is
concerned next with the attitude of women who are wives and mothers,
or daughters partially supported from the family purse, toward the
whole area of industrial problems. It may be always right, as it is
often necessary, for married women, even when mothers of young
children, to earn in the outside labor world. It is, however, always a
social crime for women who try simply to piece out an insufficient
family income to do it in ways to bring down or to keep down wages in
the specialty of work they take part in, especially to bring down or
keep down the wages of men in that specialty of work. It may be best
(it usually is) for young daughters to earn wages even if they do
kinds of work which in the labor market will not secure a return
adequate for full self-support. The work may be educational in its
quality; much that young girls do in department stores is of that
character; but wages too low for full self-support must be reckoned as
part pay for a work-opportunity mixed of training and service, not one
that lists the worker in full competitive position.
=Necessary Protection for Children and Youth in Labor.=--Where young
boys or young girls enter into the industrial world they should step
from either a Trade School, and if so, with the guidance and care of
some representatives of that school to aid them in making physically,
morally, and vocationally helpful alignment, or else should be given
half-time employment in the factory or shop that takes them on as
helpers and find in some "Continuation School" a right use of the rest
of the work-day. The right sort of protective aid to boys and girls
between the ages of fourteen, when the law allows some form of
wage-earning, and that of sixteen to eighteen years, when they may
safely shift for themselves, should halve the wage-earning hours (four
instead of eight each day or twenty-four instead of forty-eight a week
or alternate weeks at work or study); should double the numbers set to
each stated task in shop or factory; should treble the supervisory
control of society, in a union of Health Board, School Board, and
Employers' and Employees' Council; and should quadruple the fitly
trained teachers, the school sittings, the adequately equipped
recreation centres and all incitements to higher uses of leisure time.
The early years of every child should be held sacredly apart from the
whir of wheels and the din of machinery; he should then rehearse in
some degree, as will be later shown, the handicraft age of industry
and its personalizing influence. His entrance into the world of modern
labor should be not a plunge or a tumble but along a regulated highway
of well-outlined endeavor, with social influences on either side to
make his passage into wage-earning safe for himself and useful to
others.
Social protection should be less a club marked, "Thou shalt not," and
more an opportunity inscribed, "Chances to rise, win them!" For the
woman, married and a mother, there must be not so many new ways of
enforcing prohibitions of what are deemed for her harmful forms of
labor, as more ingenuity in providing half-time work, better
adjustments of earning facilities to domestic duties, far more
coöperative machinery for reducing the cost of living and for securing
the family against economic exploitation in food, clothing, and
shelter.
=Women and the Cost of Living.=--There is a field of family
conservation which has been until lately almost wholly neglected by
women; a field which must be mastered by them, the field of
combination of all family interests in behalf of each family need. The
attitude of the new voters among women who have organized into a
League to enable them to become better and more efficient citizens is
eminently encouraging. When the League of Women Voters takes hold
definitely, consciously, and with intelligent devotion of the problems
of cost of living, market supply, distribution of essentials of life
and the whole range of economic interests which lie next to family
well-being, it means that women are taking into the electorate a new
and vitally needed form of social control and social service. That in
itself, alone, would justify the struggle of women to obtain the
franchise. More and more men in political life will come to understand
what a League of women, for the most part "home-women" and
family-serving-women, will demand of officials in the area of basic
essentials of comfort and security in the home.
=The Family Demand upon Unmarried Women.=--The social demand upon
women who are at work in any field of personal endeavor, whether that
be professional, clerical, manual or artistic, has been outlined
before in this treatment of the relation of the home to society in
general as involving sortie special consideration of family needs.
This may seem a negligible quantity to many women, unmarried, with
relatives all self-supporting or well-to-do. There is no reason why a
daughter should be called "undutiful" or "selfish" who is absorbed in
her own work than why a son should be so esteemed when there is no
special reason why other members of the family should hold that
daughter's time and effort at their disposal. The selfishness may be
on the other side, and often is where parents or near relatives within
the family bond try to burden the young woman with odds and ends of
family service, which others might as well assume, and leave her with
no ambition or opportunity for personal achievement. There are,
however, in this complicated life of ours many contingencies of family
experience which still demand from daughters a share in time and
strength which sons may more easily concentrate upon their own work.
This fact, often operating unconsciously, leads many young women to
choices of types of work which have fixed hours and easy adjustment to
frequent absences from work. These give little chance for rising in
wage or position and often give low wages from the start. This
tendency keeps many women from success in work and is often a reason
why men distrust and oppose their entrance into a new field of
industry.
The first essential of character, it must be insisted, is the power of
self-support, of self-direction, of self-achievement. This is, now
seen to be an essential for women as for men. The only adequate
solution of problems of commercialized prostitution includes for each
girl capable of that attainment the power of easy and complete
self-support. Hence, the family has no right to take from its members
some present advantage which will handicap potential workers, either
boys or girls, in their struggle to meet adult responsibilities of
economic life. Hence, again, the whole question of vocational
preparation for girls, as well as for boys, has right-of-way as
against any temporary or easily dispensed-with helping in family
emergencies which may seriously hamper the future wage-earner. This is
now being seen clearly; and the consequence is that parents do without
for themselves both luxuries and often comforts, in order that their
children shall have a chance in general education and in vocational
training to fit them for later economic success. This fact, so
honorable to parents, often leads away from family unity by increasing
a chasm of culture and of condition between parents and children.
This, again, indicates that the modern standardization of child-care
and of parental duty has in it elements that demand far more developed
character in all the members of a family in order to hold together by
affection, justice, and higher compulsions of tenderness those who
have by virtue of the self-sacrifice of the older ones lost touch on
many of the common fields of effort.
=Farming and the Farmer's Wife.=--There is one great area both of
man's work and of woman's work which supremely needs better
understanding and more efficient organization in the interest of
family life. That is the basic industry of all civilized life,
farming, and woman's service in the farm home. We now generally place
our farm houses far apart from each other, and we have usually but one
house on the place and that for the owner and his family. We have no
adequate provisions by which the seasonal nature of agricultural work
can be so arranged by ingenious dovetailing with other forms of labor
as to furnish an all-the-year employment to men who wish to marry and
bring up families and yet do not own but work upon farms. We have few
means for easing the burdens of household labor for the farmer's wife,
and hence the larger the farm, the more property it represents, the
more men laborers it demands for the owner's successful conduct of the
business, the more unbearable the pressure upon health, strength,
time, and energy of the woman who is the farmer's helpmate. These are
some of the fundamental reasons for the drift away from farm life to
the cities and the towns, a drift seen to be ominous and if not
checked socially destructive of national prosperity when the Great War
forced us to take account of social conditions in the United States
more seriously than ever before.
The girls of the farms want to go away from home to find easier work
than their mother's kitchens afford quite as much as do the boys who
wish to get away from the summer drudgery and the winter dulness of
the isolated farmstead; and now the girls can get away easily and
often do. It is the lack of workers to adequately aid those in command
of agricultural life which is more than all things else the difficulty
that must be faced, wrestled with, and overcome if we would keep
adequate numbers on the farms. The effect of the drift away from the
country upon general family life is too evidently bad to need any
intensive statement here. The congestion of cities, the street life of
children which makes legal offenses of acts natural and necessary to
free play, the walking of city streets by armies of unemployed fathers
and those who might be fathers while harvests are lost for want of
laborers, the lack of food in one stratum of society while in another
there are no people to eat what nature provides so abundantly--all
this and more rises in the mind of everyone who understands that in
the right adjustment of agriculture to the people's needs lies the
best interests of all. The sorry picture of the haggard woman, widow,
deserted, or divorced, scrubbing on her knees all night long the
marble floors of a vast office-building, to hurry back to her
locked-in children in the early morning hours, to fall exhausted on
the bed until the call of the alarm clock to get breakfast and send
the little ones to school--this picture has been portrayed often to
Consumer's League and Women's Club audiences and has made many women
of position and of influence call for drastic prohibition of such
overwork of mothers. It has also made women work diligently until they
secured forms of help from the public purse to subsidize such mothers
and give them state aid until the children were able to earn something
for themselves. There are many who can visualize that scrubwoman, and
who can place beside her as needing social aid the sewing-machine
operator, the garment-finisher or the flower-maker in the tenement
sweatshop, who can not see that the farm-house mother is often
subjected to labor conditions that sap life and health and doom her
children to weakness. These opposite poles of woman's work both call
for better social understanding and more intelligent and devoted
social work. The scrubwoman, or the poverty-bound tenement worker may
be proper subjects for public or private philanthropy; the farm-house
mother is or should be the prime object of social justice and social
engineering for ends of social well-being. Upon the farmer and his
wife and also upon the miner and his wife and the forest worker and
his wife rest the very foundations of economic stability and
industrial security. Those who procure at first hand the raw material
of manufacture and of commerce are too precious to social order for
any neglect of conditions in their work. In many foreign countries the
land seems to shrink dangerously as population grows. In our vast
country and in the stretches of Canada, North America seems, as Lowell
said, to have "room beside her hearth for all mankind." And yet, in
New York City and in other centres of population, there are swarms of
people, many of them of foreign birth, of varying races and of
different nationalities, crowding each other to suffocation and many
of them holding out hands for charity, who might, if rightly aided
toward a different environment, work to full support of themselves and
their families in the fresh air and healthful surroundings of the
country. The need is to transfer city advantages to the country in far
greater extent, and to transfer the people who cannot find or make a
human chance in the city to the wide spaces and work needs of the
country. Rural life must be urbanized, city life must be relieved of
those who hinder the making of a beautiful and noble civic life, not
because they are incapable but because there are too many of them who
have not yet arrived at full capacity for vocational achievement and
cannot do so in the crowd with which they have to contend.
=Domestic Help and Family Life.=--For the relief of family life in the
matter of domestic help there must be an intelligent and an earnest
attack of educated women upon the problems involved. The admirable
suggestions of Professor Lucy Salmon in her _Democracy in the
Household_[16] indicate the chief difficulty in getting and keeping
the right sort of domestic worker. The personal relation is not that
of equals but of superior to inferior, and the helper in the home is
isolated socially from the group he or she serves. This is felt
peculiarly in cases where but one helper is employed within the
household. The petition of many housewives recently sent to Washington
to beg that "the restriction upon immigration now in force may be
lifted in the case of women who seek to enter the United States to
engage in domestic labor" on the ground of a household need, dire and
widespread, is an indication that many women, perhaps most, look
forward to a continuance of the present conditions of domestic work
but with ever-new sets of domestic workers from other lands. Their
attitude in this particular is wholly mistaken. Even if the races from
all the ends of the earth should one by one troop through the kitchens
of American housewives, most of them would not stay long enough to
even learn how to do good work in those kitchens. The first chance
they got the factory or shop or even the canning shed or the open
field of harvest would take them away. And this is not because the
work in the home is too hard, or the room and food not so good as
elsewhere, but because domestic service is the last stronghold of
aristocracy and no one brought in touch with democratic ideas will
long accept it. Miss Salmon's ideas, if carried out, would stay the
rapidity of the current away from domestic service. But a quite new
approach to the whole problem must be defined and realized by women of
light and leading if we would have adequate and efficient help In
household work. The fact that most professional or business women find
it far easier to get good help where but one domestic worker is kept,
than do most women who have no outside duties, gives one key to the
situation. As one woman of character and education far above that of
most household workers said, "I do housework for Mrs. So and So, for
she teaches and there is a reason why she needs help. I would not take
a place where there were women in the family who could do the
housework themselves perfectly well and wait upon them."
The absurd hypocrisy that in one breath praises all work done for the
comfort of the family as the highest form of service and in the next
demands that the family "servant" accept all manner of inherited
insignia of social inferiority must be outgrown. In the city and
suburban towns the hour-service and the various forms of commercial
aids to household tasks may work, as has been before indicated, to
gradually do away with the servant class, in the old sense of those
words and without much social consciousness of the change. In the
small towns and in the rural districts, where is now the most acute
suffering and need of housemothers, there must be a conscious and a
wholesale movement to reinstate domestic service on a plane compatible
with democracy and amenable to high standards of intelligence and
efficiency. When one thinks of the rural need for teachers, for
nurses, for doctors, for kindergartners, for recreation managers, for
community leaders, one is tempted to call for a social conscription
that shall make all graduates from normal and teacher-training
schools, from all schools for social work, and all hospitals, from all
playground classes and settlements, serve for a period of one year or
two in the country districts as their part in social organization.
Surely if a government has the moral right to force youth to serve in
war for purposes of destruction of enemies, it has a right to compel
youth to serve in peace for purposes of human conservation and for the
just sharing of social advantages by all the people of a common
country!
=The Application of Democratic Principles to Life.=--Finally, the
problems which inhere in work as related to the family have at their
base the same great demand for equality of educational and economic
opportunities which inhere in all that relates to the application of
democratic principles to actual living. This is not an essay on
economic theory or a statement of the results of special studies of
economic condition. Still less is it an attempt to make an appeal for
one or another type of economic reform. It is simply a partial view of
certain work conditions as they come closest to family life. There is
to this writer no more merit or demerit in any form of economic
dogmatism than in any special theologic creed. We may all differ, and
with reasons sufficient to our thought and without blame, on questions
of how we can best attain a true democratization of the industrial
order. We cannot now be of two minus as to the righteousness of such
democratization. We must all believe in giving all human beings a fair
chance at the best things of life; security against want, homes that
offer conditions for family well-being, educational entrance into our
common social inheritance, and leisure to enjoy the things that make
for happiness. The baptism of religious idealism by the social spirit
is now accomplished. As Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch, that great prophet
of a new social order, well says in his last thought-compelling book,
"The social gospel has become orthodox."
=Women Must be More Democratic.=--Women have been so long held within
family interests that they, less than men, have had the discipline of
democratic life within the labor world. They are often the vicarious
expressions of man's remaining aristocratic feeling, as Veblen has
acutely outlined in his _Theory of the Leisure Class_. Husbands still
wish their wives to be more "select" than they find it wise longer to
be themselves and more tenacious of inherited conventional forms than
business or inclination longer allow for themselves. Hence, women have
not, as a rule, organized their households on as democratic principles
and methods as men have organized their own work. Women, now that they
have attained the democratic position in the state which they have
long worked for must apply the principles they have preached in that
crusade for political equality in the very stronghold of social caste
and rigid class-feeling, the family life itself. And even if they have
to educate their husbands in the process.
Woman may do this, first, by wiping out and forever the stigma that
attaches or has attached to any woman who earns money outside her own
home. They may do it, second, by so relating themselves to
professional, clerical, manual workers among their own sex as to show
that they really believe in equality of rights and mutuality of duties
among all classes. They may do it, third, by taking hold of the
household service problem radically and from the basis of actual
knowledge of its importance to personal and family well-being. They
may show actual regard for the dignity of the functions implied, by
the treatment accorded the competent, faithful, and often
indispensable domestic helper. There is a big social job waiting for
women in matters concerning the work of their own sex both within and
without the family circle; and the social power of women will be best
shown, perhaps, in settling the worst problems of domestic service by
the wiser and more efficient use of better educated, more socially
respected, and more definitely standardized workers within the home.
=The Social Effect of Trade Unions.=--No study of the relation of
modern industry to family life, however brief and inadequate, can
ignore the question, "How has the Trade Union organization of
wage-earners affected the home?" The immediate and direct effect has
often been disastrous when strikes and lockouts marked the course of
industrial warfare. All war is bad for family life and especially
injurious to the development of children. And economic war lacks the
appeal to the imagination and the ceremonial prestige of war between
nations or of civil war in one country. We have had in our
race-experience for untold ages the linking of military training with
military defence of political ideas and of the fatherland. To fight
for one's country seems highly honorable. This lift of the sense of
community unity into the area of supreme struggle gives to men often
what no other experience so far accomplishes, namely, a feeling of
spiritual union with all other men who also struggle for what they
believe to be right. In labor wars; in the strife between employer and
employed, that sense of race unity even when struggling against a
national enemy, that which gives what Professor James well called the
"mystic element in militarism," is lacking. It is a fight between men
who have and those who have not and feel themselves defrauded of just
due. Hence, although the fight may be bitter even unto death, and the
sacrifices of immediate comfort for ultimate ends beyond measure
heroic and even wise, there can be little of the pomp and circumstance
that accompany national and international warfare. The Decoration Days
when heroes of past conflicts are praised and receive from all the
reverence which patriotism pays to those believed to have saved some
precious inheritance from harm do not yet, perhaps will never, include
heroes of labor struggles for equal right and mutual justice. Yet the
history of industrial changes shows beyond cavil or doubt that in this
field, as in others, he who would be free himself must win his
freedom. The basic principle of the Trade Union, the right and
usefulness of collective bargaining, inheres in the conditions of
machine-dominated and capitalized industry. In this form of labor
organization the individual worker cannot bargain individually; his
place in the factory is too infinitesimal and his power measured by
that of his employer too invisible for such personal alignment. This
fact is now not questioned by any but those so enamoured of old
methods of control of the worker by those who hire him that they
cannot see what has really happened both to the employer and the
employed. The labor struggle had to come. The right of workers to
combine and to work together for what seems to them their best
interests is as inherent a part of modern democratic ideals as is the
right of all citizens to vote. And since modern industry has given
enormous power to a few master leaders and requires so many
wage-earners to carry out its enterprises the struggle has necessarily
been hard and long. No one can justly place all good behavior on one
or the other side in this conflict. No one can fail to see that power
attained by the Trade Unions has at times been used as selfishly as
the power of the employers has been. But when we remember that until
the first quarter of the nineteenth century combinations of workmen,
even to respectfully ask an increase of wages or a bettering of work
conditions in lessening of hours and in sanitary and moral provisions
in work-places, was legally a "conspiracy," and liable to harsh
punishments, we must be glad that at any temporary cost the main army
of laborers has been organized from a mob of oppressed individual
workers. But what a cost to the family has been often paid! Mothers
already overworked and under-nourished still further starved by the
"strike relief" that only serves to maintain wretchedness, not to
abolish it. The sufferings of children who miss even the meagre family
comfort which the too small pay of the father when at work was able to
supply. The greater suffering of children shunned and ill-treated by
school mates when the father is called a "scab." The deeper tragedy of
experience of men who take work that their labor comrades have refused
because of the claim of wife and children, and are abused, both in
body and in denial of sympathy and respect, because they are thought
to be traitors to their striking fellows. What is hinted at in these
few words could be made into one of the great dramas of the ages if
only the social imagination could take into understanding and show
without partiality both sides of the picture. The time may come when
it will be seen that in all wars some heroes fall on the side that is
called wrong and have right to meed of deferred praise. When that time
comes, the history of labor conflicts will show that in the struggle
between the father's duty to his children and the wife who shares his
service to them, and his duty toward the democratizing of labor by
force of battle for justice and a fair chance for all his class,
heroes and martyrs have fallen on both sides of the line. Meanwhile,
the encouraging thing is that Labor Commissions and permanent Boards
of Investigation and Arbitration and many government devices for
securing a more even justice all around the circle of wage-earning
activity are increasing in evidence as a sign that we are on the way
to bring the common need for peace and order in industry to bear upon
its warring elements. It only needs that the great consuming public,
the final and the worst sufferer when labor wars are waged, shall
understand and use its overmastering social power to bring order out
of the chaos of opposing interests.
=Women's Trade Unions.=--The entrance of women into the Trade Union
field is a significant feature of modern industry. Denied in many
men's Unions the right of membership and in many fields of work
competing only with those of their own sex, yet obviously in need of
the same declaration of rights and the same class support of each
other in securing better conditions of labor that men realized before
them, the Women's Trade Union members have much the same spirit and
many of the same methods that men have used in similar bodies. They,
as a rule, stand, however, for more protective legislation for women
than men demand for themselves and have one element unique in such
bodies. That element is the membership within Women's Trade Unions of
women of social position, of financial security and even of wealth and
of broadest culture. These women who join the Trade Union League not
to benefit their own class, which is usually the professional or the
employing class, but to help wage-earning women to better conditions,
have often been the laboring oar in the organization and maintenance
of such Unions. Nothing analogous to this is found in the Men's Trade
Union movement in the United States. It bears witness to two elements,
one that women of the so-called privileged classes are growing very
sensitive to the claims of social justice as these are related to
wage-earning women, and the other that the average age of wage-earning
women is so much younger than that of men employed in similar work
that the need for help from without in any effective effort for relief
from bad conditions is more apparent. The transitory character of much
of women's work makes the permanent personnel of any Trade Union
League of women a smaller minority of its membership than in the case
of men. It is said that in any trade where both the men and the women
are well organized the membership of the men's Union will be fairly
stable for twenty years, that of the women's Union will show a radical
change each five years, making almost a complete turn-over in the
twenty years' count. That is, of course, due to the fact that most
women use for wage-earning only the period between leaving school and
marrying, usually about four and a half years. That makes the term
"working-girls" most appropriate and is a contrast to the working
man's longer hold upon his trade.
=The New Solidarity of Women.=--The fact that women of all types of
social advantage and disadvantage are already linked together in the
Women's Trade Union movement, has, however, deep social significance,
especially as wage-earners' organizations relate themselves to family
life. No woman who has had right opportunities for education and
family life in her own experience can work in intimate comradeship
with those who have been denied such advantages without aiming
directly for social arrangements in labor which will no longer cheat
any young life of its joy, its culture, or chance for its possibility
of right relation in the home. The signs are full of hope that more
and more members of each class will feel that society as a whole has
claims upon them above all that any group may attain by working only
for its own advantage. No law of justice will stand the test of time
save that which ordains an order in which "Each for All, and All for
Each" will be the rule in industry as in the nobler state!
QUESTIONS ON THE FAMILY AND THE WORKERS
1. What is most important to the success of the modern family, a
minimum wage for working women or a minimum wage for men which
can supply decent living for a man, his wife, and at least
three children?
2. What effect has the wage-earning of married women and mothers
in gainful employments outside the home had upon the stability
and happiness of the family?
3. What effect have the laws protecting women and children in
industry had upon family life?
4. What effect would the proposed increase of legislation placing
men and women, married and single women, and unionized and
non-unionized labor upon an identical legal plane be likely to
have upon family life? As, for example, in the case of
"deserting husbands," or in work especially inimical to women's
health?
5. How can the admitted evil of industrial exploitation of
children be best and most surely prevented?
FOOTNOTES:
[16] See _American Journal of Sociology_ for January, 1912.