modified, often, not for the better, by the industrial revolution. Let
us glance now in passing at the old home industries themselves, and
note what is still happening. One after another has been taken, not
merely out of the home, where they all originated, but out of the
hands of the sex who invented and developed them. Trade after trade
has thus been taken over from the control of women, and appropriated
and placed on a modern business basis by men. I make no criticism upon
this transference beyond remarking that you hear no howl about it
from the supplanted ones, as you never fail to do over the converse
process, when male workers are driven out of occupations to make way
for women, whose cheapness makes them so formidable an industrial
competitor. But whichever way it works, sex discrimination usually
bodes no good to the lasting interest of any of the workers. When a
trade passes out of the status of a home industry, and takes on the
dignity of an outside occupation, women are rarely in a position to
take hold of it in its new guise. We find men following it, partly
because they are more accustomed to think in terms of professional
skill, and partly because they are in the business swim, and can
more easily gain command of the capital necessary to start any new
enterprise. Men then proceed to hire the original owners as employés,
and women lose greatly in their economic status.
This is the general rule, though it is by no means wholly the sex
line that divides the old-fashioned houseworker from the specialized
professional, though this habitual difference in standing between
groups of different sex does tend to blur fundamental issues. The
economic struggle in its bare elements would be easy to follow
compared with the complex and perpetually changing forms in which it
is presented to us.
But the home industries are not yet fully accounted for and disposed
of. Some of the household occupations, essential once to the comfort
and well-being of the family, are shrinking in importance, prior to
vanishing before our eyes, because now they do not for the most part
represent an economical expenditure of energy. Meanwhile, however,
they linger on, a survival in culture, and in millions of homes today
the patient housewife is striving with belated tools to keep her
family fed and clothed and her house spotless.
Take the cleaning process, for example, and watch what is happening.
Dr. Helen Sumner draws attention to the fact that we ourselves are
witnessing its rapid transformation. It is being taken out of the
hands of the individual houseworker, who is wont to scrub, sweep and
dust in the intervals between marketing, cooking, laundry-work or
sewing, and by whom it is performed well or ill, but always according
to the standards of the individual household, which means that
there are no accepted standards in sweeping, scrubbing and dusting.
House-cleaning is becoming a specialized, skilled trade, performed by
the visiting expert and his staff of professionally trained employés.
Even if as yet these skilled and paid workers enter an ordinary home
only at long intervals, when the mystic process of spring cleaning
seems to justify the expense, the day is plainly in sight when the
usual weekly cleaning will be taken over by these same visitors.
At present the abruptness of the change is broken for us by the
introduction into the market, and the use by the house-mother
of various hand-driven machines, a vast improvement upon the
old-fashioned broom, and accustoming women to the idea of new and
better methods of getting rid of dirt. Few realize the tremendous
import of this comparatively insignificant invention, the atmospheric
cleaner, or what a radical change it is bringing about in the thoughts
of the housewife, whose ideas on the domestic occupations so far have
been mostly as confused as those of the charwoman, who put up on her
door the sign: "Scrubbing and Window-Cleaning Done Here." In the same
way the innumerable electric appliances of today are simplifying the
labors of the housewife; but their chief value is that through them
she is becoming accustomed to the thought of change, and being led on
to distinguish between the housework that can be simplified, and still
done at home, and the much larger proportion which must sooner or
later be relegated to the professional expert, either coming in
at intervals or performing the task elsewhere. And this is true,
fortunately, of women in the country as well as in the cities.
We have traveled a long way during the last hundred and fifty years
or so, and in that time have witnessed the complete transference from
home to factory of many home industries, notably spinning and weaving,
and soap-and candle-making. Others like the preparation of food are
still in process of transference. The factory industries are the
direct and legitimate offspring of the primitive home industries, and
their growth and development are entirely on the lines of a normal
evolution.
[Illustration: _Courtesy of The Pine Mountain Settlement_ Primitive
Industry. Kentucky mountain woman at her spinning-wheel. 1913]
[Illustration: _Courtesy of The Chicago School of Civics and
Philanthropy_ Italian Woman Home Finisher]
But there is another form of industry that is a ghastly hybrid, the
"home-work" that has been born of the union of advanced factory
methods and primitive home appliances. Such a combination could never
have come into existence, had the working classes at the time of the
inception of machine-driven industry possessed either an understanding
of what was happening, or the power to prevent their own exploitation.
The effects of this home-work are in every way deadly. There is not a
single redeeming feature about the whole business. Like the spinner
or the weaver of olden times, the sewing-machine operator or the
shirt-finisher of the present day provides her own workroom, lighting
and tools, but unlike her, she enjoys no freedom in their use, nor has
she any control over the hours she works, the prices she asks or the
class of work she undertakes.
With the home-worker hard-driven by her sister in poverty, and driving
her in turn, helpless both in their ignorance under the modern
Juggernaut that is destroying them, pushed ever more cruelly by
relentless competition, the last stronghold, the poor little home
itself, goes down. The mother has no time to care for her children,
nor money wherewith to procure for them the care of others. In her
frantic desire to keep them alive, she holds the whip over her own
flesh and blood, who have to spend their very babyhood in tying
feather-flues or pulling out bastings. Home-work, this unnatural
product of nineteenth-century civilization, as an agency for summarily
destroying the home is unparalleled. Nor do its blighting effects end
with homes wrecked, and children neglected, stunted and slain. The
proud edifice of modern industry itself, on whose account homes
are turned into workshops, children into slaves, and mothers into
slave-drivers, is undermined and degraded by this illegitimate
competition, the most powerful of all factors in lowering wages, and
preventing organization among regular factory hands. The matter lies
in a nutshell. Industry which originated in the home could be safely
carried on there only as long as it remained simple and the operations
thereof such as one individual could complete. As soon as through the
invention of power-driven machinery industry reached the stage of high
specialization and division of labor, at once it became a danger to
the home, and the home a degradation to it. It was at the call of
specialized industry that the factory came into existence, and only in
the factory can it be safely housed.
A similar and, if it were possible, a worse form of family and group
slavery prevails outside of the cities in the poorer farming regions
and in the cotton states. It is harder to reach and to handle, and
there is cause to fear that it is increasing. Especially in the busy
season when the corn has to be harvested or the cotton picked the
mother is considered as a toiler first, and she is to have her babies
and look after her poor little home and her children as a mere
afterthought. The children are contributors to the family support from
the time they can toddle and schooling comes a bad second in making
the family arrangements. One reason for this growing evil is the
threatening degradation and disappearance of the independent farmer
class, who made up what would have been called in England formerly the
yeomanry of this country, and their replacement by a poor peasantry
degraded by the wretched terms upon which they are driven to snatch a
bare existence from a patch of land to which they are tied by lease,
by mortgage or by wages, and which they have neither the money nor the
knowledge to cultivate to advantage.
The Federal Commission on Industrial Relations has brought to light
some startling facts in this phase of our social life, as in many
others. I can refer to the evidence of but one witness. She speaks for
many thousands. This is as it is quoted in the daily press.
Picture for the moment the drama staged at Dallas.
Mrs. I. Borden Harriman of New York is presiding over
the commission. Mrs. Levi Stewart, the wife of a tenant
farmer, is on the witness stand. Mrs. Stewart is a shrinking
little woman with "faded eyes and broken body." She wears
a blue sunbonnet. Her dress of checkered material has lost
its color from long use. In a thin, nervous voice she
answers the questions of the distinguished leader of two
kinds of "society."
"Do you work in the fields?" Mrs. Harriman began.
"Yes, ma'am."
"How old were you when you married?"
"Fifteen."
"How old was your husband?"
"Eighteen."
"Did you work in the fields when you were a child?"
"Oh, yes'm, I picked and I chopped."
"Have you worked in the fields every year?"
"I do in pickin' and choppin' times."
"And you do the housework?'
"There ain't no one else to do it."
"And the sewing?"
"Yes, ma'am. I make all the clothes for the children
and myself. I make everything I wear ever since I was
married."
"Do you make your hats?"
"Yes, ma'am. I make my hats. I had only two since I
was married."
"And how long have you been married?"
"Twenty years."
"Do you do the milking?"
"Most always when we can afford a cow."
"What time do you get up in the morning?"
"I usually gits up in time to have breakfast done by 4
o'clock in summer time. In the winter time we are through
with breakfast by sun-up."
"Did you work in the fields while you were carrying your
children?"
"Oh, yes, sometimes; sometimes almost nigh to birthin'
time."
"Is this customary among the tenant farmers' wives you
have known?"
The answer was an affirmative nod.
Let us now once more consider the home, and compare factory operations
with the domestic arts. There is no doubt that in cooking, for
instance, the housewife finds scope for a far higher range of
qualifications than the factory girl exercises in preparing tomatoes
in a cannery, or soldering the cans after they are filled with the
cooked fruit. The housewife has first of all to market and next to
prepare the food for cooking. She has to study the proper degree of
heat, watch the length of time needed for boiling or baking in their
several stages, perhaps make additions of flavorings, and serve
daintily or can securely. There is scarcely any division of housework
which does not call for resource and alertness. Unfortunately,
however, although these qualities are indeed called for, they are
not always called forth, because the houseworker is not permitted to
concentrate her whole attention and interest upon any one class of
work, but must be constantly going from one thing to another. Hence
women have indeed acquired marvelous versatility, but at what a heavy
cost! The houseworker only rarely acquires perfect skill and deftness
or any considerable speed in performing any one process. Her
versatility is attained at the price of having no standards of
comparison established, and worse than all, at the price of working
in isolation, and therefore gaining no training in team-work, and so
never having an inkling of what organized effort means.
Our factory systems, on the other hand, go to the other extreme, being
so arranged that the majority of workers gain marvelous dexterity, and
acquire a dizzying rate of speed, while they are apt to lose in both
resourcefulness and versatility. They do not, however, suffer, to
anything like the same degree, from isolation, and factory life, even
where the employers are opposed to organization, does open a way to
the recognition of common difficulties and common advantages, and
therefore leads eventually in the direction of organization. In the
factory trades the workers have to some extent learnt to be vocal. It
is possible for an outsider to learn something of the inner workings
of an establishment. Upon the highly developed trades, the searchlight
of official investigation is every now and then turned. From
statistics we know the value of the output. We are also learning a
good deal about the workers, the environment that makes for health or
invalidism, or risk to life, and we are in a fair way to learn more.
The organized labor movement furnishes an expression, although still
imperfect, of the workers' views, and keeps before the public the
interests of the workers, even of the unorganized groups.
But with the domestic woman all this is reversed. In spite of the fact
that in numbers the home women far exceed the wage-earners, the value
of their output has been ignored, and as to the conditions under
which it is produced, not even the most advanced and progressive
statisticians have been able to arrive at any estimate. Of sentiment
tons have been lavished upon the extreme importance of the work of the
housewife in the home, sometimes, methinks, with a lingering misgiving
that she might not be too well content, and might need a little
encouragement to be induced to remain there. What adulation, too,
has been expended upon the work of even the domestic servant, with
comparisons in plenty unfavorable to the factory occupations into
which girls still persist in drifting. Yet in freedom and in social
status, two of the tests by which to judge the relative desirability
of occupations, the paid domestic employments take inferior ranks.
Again, they offer little prospect of advance, for they lead nowhere.
Further, as noted in an earlier chapter in the census reports all
women returning themselves as engaged in domestic duties (not being
paid employés), were necessarily not listed as gainfully employed. Yet
it is impossible to believe that compared with other ways of employing
time and energy, the hours that women spend in cooking and cleaning
for the family, even if on unavoidably primitive lines, have no value
to the community. Or again, that the hours a mother spends in caring
for her baby, later on in helping with the lessons, and fitting the
children for manhood or womanhood, have no value in the nation's
account book. I will be reminded that this is an unworthy way of
reckoning up the inestimable labors of the wife and mother. Perhaps
so. Yet personally, I should much prefer a system of social economics
which could estimate the items at a fair, not excessive value, and
credit them to the proper quarter.
A well-known woman publicist recently drew attention to the vast
number of the women engaged in domestic life, and expressed regret
that organizations like the National Women's Trade Union League
confined their attention so exclusively to the women and girls
employed in factories and stores, who, even today, fall so far short
numerically of their sisters who are working in the home or on
the farm. The point is an interesting one, but admits of a ready
explanation. Every movement follows the line of least resistance,
and a movement for the industrial organization of women must first
approach those in the most advanced and highly organized industries.
As I have shown, we really know very much more about the conditions of
factory workers than of home-workers. The former have, in a degree,
found their voice, and are able to give collective expression to their
common interests.
The League recently urged upon the Secretary for Labor, the
recognition, as an economic factor, of the work of women in the
household trades; the classification of these occupations, whether
paid or unpaid, on a par with other occupations, and lastly, that
there be undertaken a government investigation of domestic service.
In this connection a long step forward has just been taken through
the inquiries, which during the last two years, the Department of
Agriculture has been making as to the real position of women on the
farm, and has been making them of the women themselves. This came
about through a letter addressed to the Secretary from Mr. Clarence
Poe, Raleigh, North Carolina, under date of July 9, 1913, in which he
said: "Have some bulletins for the farmer's wife, as well as for the
farmer himself. The farm woman has been the most neglected factor
in the rural problem, and she has been especially neglected by the
National Department of Agriculture. Of course, a few such bulletins
are printed, but not enough."
A letter was accordingly sent out from Washington to the housewives of
the department's 55,000 volunteer crop correspondents, on the whole a
group of picked women. They were invited to state both their personal
views and the results of discussions with women neighbors, their
church organization or any women's organization to which they might
belong. To this letter 2,225 relevant replies were received, many
of these transmitting the opinions of groups of women in the
neighborhood.
The letter asked "how the United States Department of Agriculture can
better meet the needs of farm housewives." Extracts from the replies
with comments have been published in the form of four bulletins. Many
of the letters make tragic reading: the want of any money of their
own; the never-ending hours; the bad roads and poor schools; neglect
in girlhood and at times of childbirth. A great many thoughtless
husbands will certainly be awakened to a sense of neglected
opportunities, as well as to many sins of commission.
The bulletins contain appendices of suggestions how farm women can
help one another, and how they may gain much help from the certainly
now thoroughly converted Department of Agriculture, through farmer's
institutes for women, through demonstrations and other extension
work under the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, and through the formation of
women's and girls' clubs.
It is of the utmost importance to society, as well as to herself, that
the whole economic status of the married woman, performing domestic
duties, should be placed upon a sounder basis. It is not as if the
unsatisfactory position of the average wife and mother could confine
its results to herself. Compared with other occupations, hers fulfills
none of the conditions that the self-respecting wage-earner demands.
The twenty-four-hour day, the seven-day week, no legal claim for
remuneration, these are her common working conditions. Other claims
which a husband can and usually does make upon her I leave unnoticed;
also the unquestioned claim of her children upon her time and
strength. Marital duties, as they are evasively termed, could not
be exacted from any wage servant. Moreover, the very existence of
children whom the married pair have called into being is but an
argument, on the one hand, for the father taking a larger share in
their care, and on the other, for the lightening of the mother's
multifarious burden by the better organization of all household work,
as well as everything that belongs to child culture and care.
The poor working conditions she suffers under, and the uncertainty of
her position, reduce many a woman's share in the married partnership
to that of an employé in a sweated trade. This kind of marriage,
therefore, like all other sweated trades tends to lower the general
market value of women's work. This is casting no reflection upon the
hundreds of thousands of husbands who do their part fairly, who share
and share alike whatever they have or earn with their wives. How many
a workingman regularly hands over to his wife for the support of the
home the whole of his earnings with perhaps the barest deduction,
a dollar or two, or sometimes only a few cents, for small personal
expenditures. Many wives enjoy complete power over the family purse.
Or the married pair decide together as to how much they can afford to
spend on rent and food and clothing, and when sickness or want of work
face them, they meet the difficulty together. The decisions made, it
is the wife who has the whole responsibility for the actual spending.
But though so often a man does fulfill in spirit as in letter his
promise to support, as well as to love and honor the girl he has
married, there is very little in the laws of any country to compel
him. And because the man can slip the collar more easily than the
woman can, the woman's position is rendered still more uncertain.
If she were an ordinary wage-worker, we should say of her that her
occupation was an unstandardized one, and that individually she was
too dependent upon the personal goodwill of another. Therefore,
like all other unstandardized callings, marriage, considered as an
occupation, tends to lower the general market value of woman's work.
Conversely, Cicely Hamilton in "Marriage as a Trade," points out that
the improvements in the economic position of the married woman, which
have come about in recent years, are partly at least due to the
successful efforts of single women to make themselves independent and
self-supporting.
But during the process of transition, and while single women are
forging farther and farther ahead, many a married woman is finding
herself between the upper and the nether millstone. And unfortunately
precisely in the degree that the paid domestic worker is able to make
better arrangements in return for her services, whether as resident or
as visiting employé, many housemothers are likely for a time to find
conditions press yet more severely upon themselves. They will soon
have no one left upon whom they can shift their own burdens of
overwork, as they have so frequently done in the past. Sooner or later
they will be driven to take counsel with their fellows, and will then
assuredly plan some method of organizing housewives for mutual help
and coöperation, and for securing from society some fairer recognition
of the true value of the contribution of the domestic woman to the
wealth of the community.
It is not strange that she with whom industry had its rise and upon
whom all society rests should be the last to benefit by the forces
of reorganization which are spiritually regenerating the race and
elevating it to a level never before reached. The very function of
sex, whose exercise enters into her relation with her husband, has
complicated what could otherwise have been a simple partnership. The
helplessness of her children and their utter dependence upon her,
which should have furnished her with an additional claim for
consideration, have only tied her more closely and have prevented her
from obtaining that meed of justice from society which a less valuable
servant had long ago won. But in the sistership of womanhood, now
for the first time admitted and hopefully accepted, fortunate and
unfortunate clasp hands, and go forward to aid in making that future
the whole world awaits today.
XII
THE WORKING WOMAN AND THE VOTE
Olive Schreiner, in "Woman and Labor," lays it down as almost
axiomatic that "the women of no race or class will ever rise in revolt
or attempt to bring about a revolutionary readjustment of their
relation to society, however intense their suffering, and however
clear their perception of it, while the welfare and persistence of
society requires their submission; that whenever there is a general
attempt on the part of the women of any society to readjust their
position in it, a close analysis will always show that the changed
or changing conditions of society have made women's acquiescence no
longer necessary or desirable."
If this be so, it can only be accepted as the application to women of
a statement which could be made equally of all the down-trodden races
and classes of humanity. The one reason that makes me hesitate about
accepting it as a complete explanation of the age-long submission
of the oppressed is that we are all rather too ready to accept an
explanation that explains away (shall I say?) or at least justifies
the suffering of others. The explanation fits so well. Does it not
fit too well? Probably Olive Schreiner did not intend it to cover the
whole ground.