the habit of working twelve hours a day for seven days a week at $1.75
a day, were threatened with dismissal, and replacement by men. But
what happened? At first they had to accept as a compromise a temporary
arrangement under which they received eleven hours' pay for ten hours'
work. Their places were not, however, filled by men, and now, they are
receiving for their ten-hour day $1.90 or 15 cents more than they had
previously been paid for a twelve-hour day, and in addition they now
are given every third Sunday off duty. This showed the good results of
the law, particularly when there was a strong organization behind the
workers. Mercantile establishments came in under the amended Ten-hour
Law two years later.
The new law was, on the whole, wonderfully well observed in Chicago,
and as far as I have been able to learn, in the smaller towns as well.
There were some violations discovered, and plenty more, doubtless,
remained undiscovered. But the defaulting employers must have been
very few compared with the great majority of those who met its
requirement faithfully and intelligently. The proprietors and managers
of the large Chicago department stores, for instance, worked out
beforehand a plan of shifts by which they were able to handle the
Christmas trade, satisfy their customers, and at the same time,
dismiss each set of girls at the end of their ten-hour period. To meet
the necessities of the case a staff of extra hands was engaged by each
of the large department stores. This was a common arrangement. The
regular girls worked from half-past eight till seven o'clock, with
time off for lunch. The extra hands came on in the forenoon at eleven
o'clock and worked till ten in the evening, with supper-time off.
Certain of the stores varied the plan somewhat, by giving two hours
for lunch. These long recesses are not without their disadvantages.
They mean still a very long day on the stretch, and besides, where is
a girl to spend the two hours? She cannot go home, and it is against
the law for her to be in the store, for in the eye of the law, if she
remains on the premises, she is presumably at work, and if at work,
therefore being kept longer than the legal ten hours.
That a law which had been so vigorously opposed should on the whole
have been observed so faithfully in the second largest city in the
United States, that it should in that city have stood the test, at
its very initiation, of the rush season, is a fact full of hope and
encouragement for all who are endeavoring to have our laws keep pace
with ideals of common justice.
Some time afterwards the constitutionality of the law was tested in
the courts. Since then, complaints have died away. There is no record
of trading establishments having been compelled to remove to another
state, and we no longer even hear of its being a ruinous handicap to
resident manufacturers. Even reactionary employers are now chiefly
concerned in putting off the impending evil, as they regard it, of
an eight-hour day, which they know cannot be very far off, as it has
already arrived on the Pacific Coast.
If the acquiescence of Illinois employers was satisfactory, the effect
upon the girls was remarkable and exceeded expectations. During that
Christmas week, the clerks were tired, of course, but they were not in
the state of exhaustion, collapse, and physical and nervous depletion,
which they had experienced in previous years. This bodily salvation
had been expected. It was what organized women had pleaded for and
bargained for, what the defending lawyers, Mr. Louis D. Brandeis and
Mr. William J. Calhoun had urged upon the judges, when the Supreme
Court of Illinois had been earlier called upon to pass upon the
validity of the original ten-hour law, although department-store
employés had not been included within the scope of its protection.
But the girls were more than not merely worn-out to the point of
exhaustion. Most of them were more alive than they had ever been since
first they started clerking. They were happy, and surprised beyond
measure at their own good fortune. Those juniors who could just
remember how different last Christmas had been, those seniors
whose memories held such searing recollections of many preceding
Christmases, were one in their rejoicing and wonderment. They caught
a dim vision of a common interest. Here was something which all could
share. That one was benefited did not mean another's loss.
From girl after girl I heard the same story. I would ask them how they
were getting on through the hard time this year. "Oh," a girl would
answer, "it wasn't so bad at all. You see we've got the ten-hour law,
and we can't work after the time is up. It's just wonderful. Why, I'm
going to enjoy Christmas this year. I'm tired, but nothing like I've
always been before. Last Christmas Day I couldn't get out of bed, I
ached so, and I couldn't eat, either."
And yet, while the girls, thanks to the new law, were having something
like decent, though by no means ideal hours of work, the young
elevator boys, in the same store were working fourteen hours and a
half, day in, day out.
So imperfect yet are the results of much that is accomplished!
There are now two states, Mississippi and Oregon, which have ten-hour
laws, applying to both men and women, and including the larger
proportion of the workers. There are also federal statutes, state
laws and municipal ordinances limiting the hours and granting the
eight-hour day to whole groups of workers, either in public or
semi-public employ, or affecting special occupations such as mining.
Thus it is clear, that for both sexes there is now abundant legal
precedent for any shortening of hours, which has its place in a more
advanced social and industrial development.
IX
WOMEN AND THE VOCATIONS
The profound impression that has been left upon contemporary thought
by the teaching of Lester Ward and those who have followed him, that
woman is the race, has been felt far and wide outside the sphere of
those branches of science, whose students he first startled with the
thought. His idea is indeed revolutionary as far as our immediate past
and our present social arrangements and sex relations are concerned,
but is natural, harmonious and self-explanatory if we regard life,
the life of our own day, not as standing still, but as in a state of
incessant flux and development, and if we are at all concerned to
discover the direction whither these changes are driving us. It
indeed may well have been that the formal enunciation of the primary
importance of woman in the social organism has played its own part in
accelerating her rise into her destined lofty position, though in the
main, any philosophy can be merely the explanation and the record of
an evolution wherein we are little but passive factors.
This much is certain, that the insistent driving home by this school
of thinkers of woman, woman, woman, as the center and nucleus whence
is developed the child and the home, and all that civilization stands
for, and whose rights as an independent human being are therefore to
be held of supreme importance in the normal evolution of the race, has
served as an incessant reminder to practical workers and reformers in
the sphere of education as well as to leaders of the woman movement.
Especially has this been true when tackling the problems more
immediately affecting women, because these are the truly difficult
problems. Whatever touches man's side of life alone is comparatively
simple and easily understood, and therefore easier of solution. So in
the rough and ready, often cruel, solutions which nature and humanity
have worked out for social problems, it has always been the man
whose livelihood, whose education and whose training have been first
considered, and whose claims have been first satisfied. For this there
are several reasons. Man's possession of material wealth, and his
consequent monopoly of social and political power have naturally
resulted in his attending to his own interests first. The argument,
too, that man was the breadwinner and the protector of the home
against all outside antagonistic influences, which in the past he has
generally been, furnished another reason why, when any class attained
to fresh social privileges, it was the boy and the man of that class,
rather than the woman and the girl, who benefited by them first. The
woman and the girl would come in a poor second, if indeed they were in
at the dividing of the spoils at all.
There is, however, another reason, and one of profound significance,
which I believe has hardly been touched upon at all, why woman has
been thus constantly relegated to the inferior position. Her problems
are, as I said above, far more difficult of settlement. Because of her
double function as a member of her own generation and as the potential
mother of the next generation, it is impossible to regard her life as
something simple and single, and think out plans for its arrangement,
as we do with man's. So in large measure we have only been following
the line of least resistance, in taking up men's difficulties
first. We have done so quite naturally, because they are not so
overwhelmingly hard to deal with, and have attacked woman's problems,
and striven to satisfy her needs, only when we could find time to get
round to them. This is most strikingly exemplified in the realm of
education. Take the United States alone. It was ever to the boy that
increasing educational advantages were first offered.
In the year 1639 the authorities of the town of Dorchester,
Massachusetts, hesitated as to whether girls should be admitted to
the apparently just established school. The decision was left "to the
discretion of the elders and seven men." The girls lost. In "Child
Life in Colonial Days" Mrs. Annie Grant is quoted. She spent her
girlhood in Albany, N.Y., sometime during the first half of the
eighteenth century. She says it was very difficult at that time to
procure the means of instruction in those districts. The girls learned
needlework from their mothers and aunts; they learnt to read the
Bible and religious tracts in Dutch; few were taught writing. Similar
accounts come from Virginia.
Was it university education that was in question, how many
university-trained men had not American colleges turned out before
Lucy Stone was able to obtain admission to Oberlin?
Harvard was opened in 1636. Two hundred years elapsed before there was
any institution offering corresponding advantages to girls. Oberlin
granted its first degree to a woman in 1838. Mount Holyoke was founded
in 1837, Elmira in 1855 and Vassar in 1865.
That a perfectly honest element of confusion and puzzle did enter into
the thought of parents and the views of the community, it would be
vain to deny. These young women were incomprehensible. Why were they
not content with the education their mothers had had, and with the
lives their mothers had led before them? Why did they want to leave
comfortable homes, and face the unknown, the hard, perhaps the
dangerous? How inexplicable, how undutiful! Ah! It was the young
people who were seeing furthest into the future; it was the fathers
and mothers who were not recognizing the change that was coming over
the world of their day.
If then, for the combination of reasons outlined, women have always
lagged in the rear as increasing educational advantages of a literary
or professional character have been provided or procured for boys, it
is not strange, when, in reading over the records of work on the new
lines of industrial education, trade-training and apprenticeship
we detect the very same influences at work, sigh before the same
difficulties, and recognize the old weary, threadbare arguments, too,
which one would surely think had been sufficiently disproved before to
be at least distrusted in this connection. This, however, must surely
be the very last stand of the non-progressivists in education as
regards the worker. The ideals of today aim at education on lines that
will enable every child, boy and girl alike, born in or brought
into any civilized country, to develop all faculties, and that will
simultaneously enable the community to benefit from this complete,
all-round development of every one of its members.
There is one consideration to which I must call attention, because,
when recognized, it cannot but serve as the utmost stimulus to our
efforts to arrange for vocational education for girls on the broadest
lines. It is this. Whatever general, national or state plans prove the
most complete and satisfactory for girls, will, speaking generally, at
the same time be found to have solved the problem for the boy as well.
The double aim, of equipping the girl to be a mother as well as human
being, is so all-inclusive and is therefore so much more difficult of
accomplishment, that the simpler training necessary for a boy's career
will be automatically provided for at the same time. Therefore the
boy is not likely to be at a disadvantage under such a coeducational
system as is here implied. For it is to nothing short of coeducation
that the organized women of the United States are looking forward,
coeducation on lines adapted to present-day wants. What further
contributions the far-off future may hold for us in the never wholly
to be explored realm of human education in its largest acceptance,
we know not. Until we have learned the lesson of today, and have set
about putting it in practice, such glimpses of the future are not
vouchsafed to us.
In such an age of transition as ours, any plan of vocational training
intended to include girls must be a compromise with warring facts, and
will therefore have to face objections from both sides, from those
forward-looking ones who feel that the domestic side of woman's
activities is overemphasized, and from those who still hark back, who
would fain refuse to believe that the majority of women have to be
wage-earners for at least part of their lives. These latter argue
that by affording to girls all the advantages of industrial training
granted or which may be granted to boys, we are "taking them out of
the home." As if they were not out of the home already!
This assumption will appear to most readers paradoxical, if indeed it
does not read as a contradiction in terms. A little thought, however,
will show that it is just because we are all along assuming the
economic primacy of the boy, that the girl has been so disastrously
neglected. It is true that the boy is also a potential father, and
that his training for that lofty function is usually ignored and will
have to be borne in mind, though no one would insist that training
for fatherhood need occupy a parallel position with training for
motherhood. But popular reasoning is not content with accepting this
admission; it goes on to draw the wholly unwarranted conclusion that
while the boy ought to be thoroughly taught on the wage-earning
side, and while such teaching should cover all the more important
occupations, to which he is likely to be called, the girl's
corresponding training shall as a matter of course be quite a
secondary matter, fitting her only for a limited set of pursuits, many
of these ranking low in skill and opportunities of advancement, and
necessarily among the most poorly paid; these being all occupations
which we choose to assume girls will enter, such as sewing or
box-making. Only recently have girls been prepared for the textile
trades, though they have always worked in these, first in the home and
since then in the factories. Still less is any preparation thought
of for the numberless occupations that necessity and a perpetually
changing world are all the while driving girls to take up. There were
in 1910, 8,075,772 women listed as wage-earners in the United States.
Would it not be as well, if a girl is to be a wage-earner, that
she should have at least as much opportunity of learning her trade
properly, as is granted to a boy?
Setting aside for the moment the fact that girls are already engaged
in so many callings, it is poor policy and worse economy to argue that
because a girl may be but a few years a wage-earner, it is therefore
not worth while to make of her an efficient, capable wage-earner. That
is fair to no one, neither to the girl herself nor to the community.
The girl deserves to be taken more seriously. Do this, and it will
then be clear that a vocational system wide enough and flexible enough
to fit the girl to be at once a capable mother-housekeeper, and a
competent wage-earner, will be a system adequate to the vocational
training of the boy for life-work in any of the industrial pursuits.
It is self-evident that the converse would not hold.
And first, to those readers of advanced views who will think that I
am conceding even too much in thus consenting apparently to sink
the human activities of the woman in those of the mother during the
greater part of maturity. Touching the question of personal human
development, I concede nothing, as I assert nothing, but I accept
present-day facts, and desire to make such compromise with them as
shall clear the way for whatever forms of home and industrial life
shall evolve from them most naturally and simply. We may observe
with satisfaction and hopefulness that the primitive collection of
unrelated industries which have so long lingered in the home to the
detriment of both and which have confused our thoughts as to which
were the essential and permanent, and which the merely accidental and
temporary functions of the home, are gradually coming within the range
of the specialized trades, and as such are freeing the home from
so much clutter and confusion, and freeing the woman from so many
fettering bonds. But the process is a slow one, and again, it may
not even go on indefinitely. There may be a limit in the process of
specializing home industries. So far as it has gone, different classes
of women are very unequally affected by it. In the United States,
where these changes have gone on faster and further than anywhere
else, the two classes whose occupations have been most radically
modified have been, first and chiefly, the young girl from fourteen to
twenty-four, of every class, and next the grownup woman, who has taken
up one of the professions now for the first time open to women, and
this almost irrespective of whether she is married or single.
As to the young girl, the transformation of the home plus industries
to the home, pure and simple, a place to live in and rest in, to love
in and be happy in, has so far already been effected, that in the home
of the artisan and the tradesman there is not now usually sufficient
genuine, profitable occupation for more than one growing or grown girl
as assistant to her mother. For two reasons the other daughters will
look out of doors for employment. The first reason is that under
rearranged conditions of industry, there is nothing left for them
to do at home. The second is not less typical of these altered
conditions. The father cannot, even if he would, afford to keep them
at home as non-producers. If the processes of making garments and
preparing food are no longer performed by the members of the
family for one another, the outsiders who do perform them must be
remunerated, and that not in kind, as, for example, with board and
lodging and clothing, but in money wages, in coin. And their share of
the money to enable this complicated system of exchange of services to
be carried out, must be earned by the unmarried daughters of the house
through their working in turn at some wage-earning occupation, also
outside.
The young woman who has entered medicine, or law, or dentistry, who
paints pictures or writes books, is on very much the same economic
basis as the young working-girl. She, too, is accepted as part of the
already established order of things, and the present generation has
grown up in happy ignorance of the difficulties experienced by the
pioneers in all these professions in establishing their right to
independent careers. The professional woman who has married finds
herself so far on a less secure foundation. Every professional woman
who has children has to work out for herself the problem of the mutual
adjustment of the claims of her profession and her family, but so many
have solved the difficulties and have made the adjustment that it
seems only a question of time when every professional woman may accept
the happiness of wifehood and motherhood when it is offered to her
without feeling that she has to choose once for all between a happy
marriage and a successful professional career.
Not a few professional women, writers, and speakers, have gone on to
infer that a similar solution was at hand for the working-girl on her
marriage. Not yet is any such adjustment or rather readjustment of
domestic and industrial activities in sight for her. Whatever changes
may take place in the environment of the coming American woman, the
present generation of working-girls as they marry are going to find
their hands abundantly filled with duties within the walls of their
own little homes. We know today how the health and the moral welfare
of children fare when young mothers are prematurely forced back into
the hard and exhausting occupations from which marriage has withdrawn
them.
Again, the factory conditions of modern industry have been brought to
their present stage with one end in view--economy of time and material
with the aim of cheapening the product. The life and the smooth
running of the human machine, when considered at all, has been thought
of last, and in this respect America is even one of the most backward
of the civilized nations. Hence factory life is hard and disagreeable
to the worker. Especially to the young girl is it often unendurable.
A girl who has been some years in a factory rarely wants her young
sister to come into it, too. She herself is apt to shift from one shop
to another, from trade to trade, always in the hope that some other
work may prove less exhausting and monotonous than that with which she
is familiar by trying experience. Two forces tend to drive girls early
out of industrial life: on the one hand, the perfectly normal instinct
of self-protection in escaping from unnatural and health-ruining
conditions and on the other the no less normal impulse leading
to marriage. But oftener than we like to think, the first is the
overmastering motive.
Let us now take up the objections of those far more numerous to whom
the provision of trade-training for girls seems superfluous, when not
harmful, and who especially shrink from the suggestion of coeducation.
To satisfy them, let us marshal a few facts and figures.
Of every kind of education that has been proposed for girls, whether
coeducational or not, we have always heard the same fears expressed.
Such education would make the girl unwomanly, it would unfit her for
her true functions, a man could not wish to marry her, and so on. The
first women teachers and doctors had indeed a hard time. After being
admitted to the profession only at the point of the sword, so to
speak, they had to make good, and in face of all prejudice, prove
their ability to teach or to cure, so as to keep the path open for
those who were to follow after them. No similar demand should be
logically made of the working-girl today when she demands coeducation
on industrial lines. For she is already in the trades from which you
propose so futilely to exclude her, by denying her access to the
technical training preparatory to them, and for fitting her to
practice them.
Take some other occupations which employ women in great numbers:
textile mill operatives, saleswomen, tobacco-workers, cigar-workers,
boot-and shoe-workers, printers, lithographers, and pressmen, and
book-binders. You can hardly say that these are exceptions, for here
are the figures, from the occupational statistics of the census of
1910.[A]
[Footnote A: The statement that appeared in the report on
"Occupations" in the census returns of 1910, that there were but
nine occupations in which women were not employed, has been widely
commented upon.