marriage upon organization is not confined to those girls who leave
the trade, and of course the union, if they have belonged to one,
after they have married. The possibility of marriage and especially
the exaggerated expectations girls entertain as to the improvement in
their lot which marriage will bring them is one of the chief adverse
influences that any organization composed of women or containing many
women members has to reckon with, an influence acting all the time on
the side of those employers who oppose organization among their girls.
It has been the wont of many men unionists in the past and is the
custom of not a few today, to accept at its face value the girl's own
argument: "What's the use of our joining the union? We'll be getting
married presently." It is much the same feeling, although unspoken,
that underlies the ordinary workingman's unwillingness to see women
enter his trade and his indifference to their status in the trade once
they have entered it. The man realizes that this rival of his is but a
temporary worker, and he often, too often, excuses himself tacitly,
if not in words, from making any effort to aid her in improving her
position or from using his influence and longer experience to secure
for her any sort of justice, forgetting that the argument, "She'll
soon get married" is a poor one at best, seeing that as soon as one
girl does marry her place will immediately be filled by another, as
young, as inexperienced as she had been, and as utterly in need of the
protection that experienced and permanent co-workers could give her.
The girl, although she guesses it not, is only too frequently made the
instrument of a terrible retribution; for the poor wage, which was
all that she in her individual helplessness was able to obtain for
herself, is used to lower the pay of the very man, who, had he stood
by her, might have helped her to a higher wage standard and at the
same time preserved his own.
Again, the probability of the girl marrying increases on all sides the
difficulties encountered in raising standards alike of work and of
wages. Bound up with direct payment are those indirect elements of
remuneration or deduction from remuneration covered by length of
working-hours and by sanitary conditions, since whatever saps the
girl's energy or undermines her health, whether overwork, foul air,
or unsafe or too heavy or overspeeded machinery, forms an actual
deduction from her true wages, besides being a serious deduction from
the wealth-store, the stock of well-being, of the community.
Up till comparatively recent times the particular difficulties I
have been enumerating did not exist, since, under the system of home
industries universal before the introduction of steam-power, there was
not the same economic competition between men and women, nor was there
this unnatural gap between the occupation of the woman during her
girlhood and afterwards in her married life. In the majority of cases,
indeed, she only continued to carry on under her husband's roof the
very trades which she had learned and practiced in the home of her
parents. And this applied equally to the group of trades which we
still think of as part of the woman's natural home life, baking and
cooking and cleaning and sewing, and to that other group which have
become specialized and therefore are now pursued outside the home,
such as spinning and weaving. It was true also in large part of the
intrinsically out-of-door employments, such as field-work.
In writing about a change while the process is still going on, it is
extremely difficult to write so as not to be misunderstood. For there
are remote corners, even of the United States, where the primitive
conditions still subsist, and where woman still bears her old-time
relation to industry, where the industrial life of the girl flows on
with no gap or wrench into the occupational life of the married woman.
Through wifehood and motherhood she indeed adds to her burdens, and
complicates her responsibilities, but otherwise she spends her days
in much the same fashion as before, with some deduction, often, alas,
inadequate, to allow for the bearing and rearing of her too frequent
babies. Also in the claims that industry makes upon her in her
relation to the productive life of the community, under such primitive
conditions, her life rests upon the same basis as before.
As a telling illustration of that primitive woman's occupations, as
she carries them on among us today, the following will serve. Quite
recently a friend, traveling in the mountainous regions of Kentucky,
at the head of Licking Creek, had occasion to call at a little
mountain cabin, newly built out of logs, the chinks stopped up
with clay, evidently the pride and the comfort of the dwellers. It
consisted of one long room. At one end were three beds. In the center
was the family dining-table, and set out in order on one side a number
of bark-seated hickory chairs made by the forest carpenters. On the
other a long bench, probably intended for the younger members of the
family. Facing the door, as the visitor entered, was a huge open
fireplace, with a bar across, whence hung three skillets of kettles
for the cooking of the food. The only occupant of the cabin at that
hour in the afternoon was an old woman. She was engaged in combing
into smoothness with two curry-combs a great pile of knotted wool,
washed, but otherwise as it came off the sheep's back. The wool was
destined to be made into blankets for the household. The simple
apparatus for the carrying-out of the whole process was there at hand,
for the spinning-wheel stood back in a corner of the room, while the
big, heavy loom had, for convenience' sake, been set up on the porch.
That old woman's life may be bare and narrow enough in many ways, but
at least she is rich and fortunate in having the opportunity for the
exercise of a skilled trade, and in it an outlet for self-expression,
and even for artistic taste in the choice of patterns and colors.
Far different the lot of the factory worker with her monotonous and
mindless repetition of lifeless movements at the bidding of the
machine she tends. The Kentucky mountain woman was here practicing in
old age the art she had acquired in her girlhood. Those early lessons
which had formed her industrial education, were of life-long value,
both in enriching her own life, and by adding to her economic and
therefore social value, alike as a member of her own household, and as
a contributor to the wealth of the little community.
We once had, universally, and there still can be found in such
isolated regions, an industrial arrangement, soundly based upon
community and family needs, and even more normally related to the
woman's own development, better expressing many sides of her nature
than do the confused and conflicting claims of the modern family and
modern industry render possible for vast numbers today. And this,
although wide opportunity for personal and individual development was
so sadly lacking, and the self-abnegation expected from women was so
excessive, that the intellectual and emotional life must often have
been a silent tragedy of repression.
Among our modern working-women in urban localities, we find today no
such settled plan for thus directing the activities of women to meet
modern needs and conditions. Neither home nor school furnishes our
girls with a training fitting them for a rich and varied occupational
life. The pursuits into which most of them drift or are driven, do
indeed result in the production of a vast amount of manufactured
goods, food, clothing, house and personal furnishings of all sorts,
and of machinery with which may be manufactured yet more goods. Much
of this product is both useful and beneficial to us all, but there
are likewise mountains of articles fashioned, neither useful nor
beneficial, nor resulting in any sort of use, comfort or happiness to
anyone: adulterated foods, shoddy clothes, and toys that go to pieces
in an hour.
Certainly the girl worker of this twentieth century produces per head,
and with all allowances made for the cost of the capital invested in
factory and machinery, and for superintendence, far and away more in
amount and in money value than did her girl ancestor of a hundred
years ago, or than her contemporary girl ancestor of today in the
Kentucky and Tennessee mountains, or than her other sister, the
farmer's daughter in agricultural regions, who still retains hold of
and practices some of the less primitive industries.
But the impulse to congratulate ourselves upon this vastly increased
product of labor is checked when we take up the typically modern
girl's life at a later stage. We have observed already that her life
during her first fourteen years is utterly unrelated to the next
period, which she spends in store or factory. The training of her
childhood has been no preparation for the employments of her girlhood.
She is but an unskilled hand, the last cog in a machine, and if these
prove but seven lean years for her, it is only what we might expect.
When they are ended, and married life entered upon, we are again
struck by the absence of any relation between either of these two
life-periods and the stage preceding, and by the fact that at no time
is any intelligent preparation made either for a wage-earning or
a domestic career. This means an utter dislocation between the
successive stages of woman's life, a dislocation, the unfortunate
results of which, end not with the sex directly affected, but bring
about a thousand other evils, the lowering of the general wage
standard, the deterioration of home life, and serious loss to
the children of the coming generation. As far as we know, such a
dislocation in the normal development of women's lives never took
place before on any large scale. I am speaking of it here solely in
relation to the sum of the well-being of the whole community. As it
affects the individual girl and woman herself it has been dealt with
under other heads.
The cure which the average man has to propose is pithily summed up in
the phrase: "Girls ought to stay at home." The home as woman's
sole sphere is even regarded as the ultimate solution of the whole
difficulty by many men, who know well that it is utterly impracticable
today. A truer note was struck by John Work, when addressing himself
specially to socialist men:
It would be fatal to our prospects of reaching the women with
the message of socialism if we were to give the millions of
wage-earning women to understand that we did not intend to let
them continue earning their own living, but proposed to compel
them to become dependent upon men. They price what little
independence they have, and they want more of it.
It would be equally fatal to our prospects of reaching the women
with the message of socialism if we were to give the married women
to understand that they must remain dependent upon men. It is one
of the most hopeful signs of the times that they are chafing under
the galling chains of dependence.
* * * * *
Far from shutting women out of the industries, socialism will do
just the opposite.
It will open up to every woman a full and free opportunity to earn
her own living and receive her full earnings.
This means the total cessation of marrying for a home.
The degree of irritation that so many men show when expressing
themselves on the subject of women in the trades is the measure of
their own sense of incompetence to handle it. The mingled apathy and
impatience with which numbers of union men listen to any proposal to
organize the girls with whom they work arises from the same mental
attitude. "These girls have come into our shop. We can't help it.
We didn't ask them. They should be at home. Let them take care of
themselves."
The inconsistency of such a view is seen when we consider that in the
cities at least an American father (let alone a foreign-born father)
is rarely found nowadays objecting to his own girls going out to work
for wages. He expects it, unless one or more are needed by their
mother at home to help with little ones or to assist in a small family
store or home business. He takes it as a matter of course that his
girls go to work as soon as they leave school, just as his boys do.
And yet the workman in a printing office, we will say, whose own
daughter is earning her living as a stenographer or teacher, will
resent the competition of women type-setters, and will both resent and
despise those daughters of poorer fathers, who have found their way
into the press or binding-rooms. Unionists or non-unionists, such men
ignore the fact that all these girls have just as much right to earn
an honest living at setting type, or folding or tipping and in so
doing to receive the support and protection of any organization there
is, as their own daughters have to take wages for the hours they spend
in schoolroom or in office. The single men but echo the views of the
older ones when such unfortunately is the shop tone, and may be even
more indifferent to the girls' welfare and to the bad economic results
to all workers of our happy-go-lucky system or no-system.
I do not wish to be understood as accepting either the girl's present
economic position or the absorption in purely domestic occupations of
the workingman's wife as a finality. It is a transitional stage that
we are considering. I look forward to a time, I believe it to be
rapidly approaching, when the home of the workingman, like everyone's
else home, will be truly the home, the happy resting-place, the
sheltering nest of father, mother and children, and when through the
rearrangement of labor, the workingman's wife will be relieved from
her monotonous existence of unrelieved domestic drudgery and overwork,
disguised under the name of wifely and maternal duties, when the
cooking and the washing, for instance, will be no more part of
the home life in the humblest home than in the wealthiest. The
workingman's wife will then share in the general freedom to occupy
part of her time in whatever occupation she is best fitted for, and,
along with every other member of the community she will share in the
benefits arising from the better organisation of domestic work.
However, this blessed change has not yet come to pass, and of all
city-dwellers, the wife of the workingman seems to be furthest away
from the benefits of the transformation. Therefore, in considering
the connection between the girl's factory life and her probable
occupational future in married life, I have purposely avoided dwelling
upon what is bound to arrive some time in the future, and have tried
to face facts as they exist today, dealing as far as possible with the
difficulties of the generation of girls now in the factories, those
about to enter, and those passing out, remembering only, with a
patience-breeding sense of relief, that the conditions of today may
not necessarily be the conditions of tomorrow.
I therefore accept in its full meaning domesticity, as practiced by
the most domestic woman, and as preached by the domestic woman's most
ardent advocate among men. Nor am I expressing resentment at the fact
that when a girl leaves the machine-speeded work of the factory, it is
only to take up the heavy burden of the workingman's wife, as we know
it. She must be wife and mother, and manager of the family income, and
cook and laundress and housemaid and seamstress. The improvement of
her position and the amelioration of her lot can only come slowly,
through social changes, as expressed in the woman movement, and
through the widening scope of the principle of specialization.
Even today, without any such radical changes as are foreshadowed
above, the gap between schooldays and working years, between working
years and married life, can to some extent be bridged over if we plan
to do so from the beginning. As has been shown, organized women are
already advocating some such orderly plan for the girl's school
training, as should blend book-learning with manual instruction and
simple domestic accomplishments. But also, in order to deal justly
and fairly by the girl, any reasonable scheme of things would also
presuppose such strict control of the conditions of industry, that
hours would be reasonably short, that in the building and running of
machinery there should be borne in mind always the safety and health
of the workers, instead of, as today, expecting almost all the
adaptation to be on the part of the worker, through pitting the
flexible, delicate, and easily injured human organism against the
inflexible and tireless machine. Other essential conditions would be
the raising of the standard of living, and therefore of remuneration,
for all, down to the weakest and least skilled, and the insistence
upon equal pay for equal work, tending to lessen the antagonism
between men and women on the industrial field. Thus doubly prepared
and adequately protected the girl would pass from her wage-earning
girlhood into home and married life a fresher, less exhausted creature
than she usually is now. Further, she would be more likely to bring to
the bearing and rearing of her children a constitution unenfeebled
by premature overwork and energies unsapped by its monotonous grind.
Again, her understanding of industrial problems would make her a more
intelligent as well as a more sympathetic helpmate. Hand in hand,
husband and wife would more hopefully tackle fresh industrial
difficulties as these arose, and they would do so with some slight
sense of the familiarity that is the best armor in life's battle.
Besides there is the other possibility, all too often realized, that
lies in the background of every such married woman's consciousness.
She may be an ideally domestic woman, spending her time and strength
on her home and for the Welfare of her husband and children, yet
through no fault of hers, her home may be lost to her, or if not
lost, at least kept together only by her own unremitting efforts as a
wage-earner. It often happens that marriage in course of time proves
to be anything but an assurance of support. Early widowed, the young
mother herself may have to earn her children's bread. Or the husband
may become crippled, or an invalid, or he may turn out a drunkard and
a spendthrift. In any of these circumstances, the responsibility and
the burden of supporting the entire family usually falls upon the
wife. Is it strange that the group so often drift into undeserved
pauperism, sickness and misery, perhaps later on, even into those
depths of social maladjustment that bring about crime?
The poorly paid employment of office-cleaning is sadly popular among
widows and deserted wives, because, being followed during the evening,
and sometimes night hours, it leaves a mother free during the day to
attend to her cooking and housework and sewing, and be on the spot to
give the children their meals. Free! The irony of it! Free, that is,
to work sixteen hours or longer per day, and free to leave her little
ones in a locked-up room, while she earns enough to pay the rent and
buy the food. Ask any such widowed mother what she is thinking of, as
she plies mop and scrubbing-brush after the offices are closed and the
office force gone home, and she will tell you how she worries for fear
something may have happened to the baby while she is away. She wonders
whether she left the matches out of the reach of four-year-old Sammy;
and Bessie, who isn't very strong, is always so frightened when the
man on the floor above comes home late and quarrels with his wife.
The theory on which the poor woman was paid her wages when as a single
girl she used to draw her weekly pay-envelope, that a fair living wage
for a woman is what is barely sufficient to support herself, rather
falls down when a whole household has to be kept out of a girl's
miserable pay.
All these difficulties would be eased for such overburdened ones, if
their early training had been such as to leave them equipped to meet
the vicissitudes of fortune on fairer terms, and if the conditions of
industrial life, allotting equal pay to workers of both sexes, had
also included reasonable opportunities for advancement to higher
grades of work with proportionately increased pay.
Meanwhile, married women, less handicapped than these, are
experimenting on their own account, and are helping to place the work
of wives as wage-earners on a more settled basis. The wife of the
workingman who has no children, and who lives in a city finds she has
not enough to do in the little flat which is their home. The stove
in winter needs little attention; there is not enough cooking and
cleaning to fill up her time, and as for sewing she can buy most of
their clothing cheaper than she can make it. But any little money she
can earn will come in useful; so she tries for some kind of work,
part-time work, if she can find it. In every big city there are
hundreds of young married women who take half-time jobs in our
department stores or who help to staff the lunch-rooms or wash up or
carry trays, or act as cashiers in our innumerable restaurants. As
half-day girls such waitresses earn their three or four dollars a
week, besides getting their lunch. Very frequently they do not admit
to their fellow-workers that they are married, for the single girl
with her own hard struggle on her hands is apt to resent such
competition. A worker who is in a position to accept voluntarily a
half-time job of this sort is one who must have some other means of
meeting part of her living expenses. A home in the background is such
an aid. The increasingly large number of part-time workers, lessen,
the others reckon, the number of jobs to be had by the ones that have
to work all day, and may tend also to lower wages, since any partly
subsidized worker can afford to take less than the girl who has to
support herself out of her earnings. The latter has never heard of
parasitic trades, and yet in her heart she knows there is something
not quite right here, something that she blindly feels she would like
to put an end to.
She is quite right in resisting any lowering of wages, but she will
have to accept this inroad into the trades of these exceptionally
placed married women. She will have to throw her efforts into another
channel, using organization to raise the position of working-women
generally into dignified industrial independence. For this still
limited number of half-time married women workers are but the leaf on
the stream, showing the direction events are taking. As specialization
goes on, as the domestic industries are more and more taken out of our
homes, as the gifted and trained teacher more and more shares in the
life of the child, more and more will the woman after she marries
continue to belong to the wage-earning class by being a part-time
worker. To propose eliminating the present (sometimes unfair)
competition of the married woman with the single girl, by excluding
her from any or every trade is as futile as the resentment of men
against all feminine rivals in industry.