or race or sex may often suffer intensely and go on suffering and
submitting, but not _after_ they have gained a clear perception of the
intensity of those sufferings, for then the first stage of rebellion
has already begun. Not one of us who has grown to middle age but can
remember, looking back to her own girlhood, how meekly and as a matter
of course women of all classes accepted every sort of suffering as
part of the lot of woman, especially of the married woman, whether it
was excessive child-bearing, pain in childbirth, physical overwork,
or the mental suffering arising out of a penniless and dependent
condition, with the consequent absolute right of the husband to the
custody and control of the children of the union. And in all nations
and classes where this state of affairs still continues, the women
have as yet no clear intellectual perception of the keenness and
unfairness of their suffering. They still try to console themselves
with believing and allowing others to suppose that after all, things
are not so bad; they might be worse. These poor women actually
hypnotize themselves into such a belief.
Have you not heard a mother urge a daughter or a friend to submit
uncomplainingly to the most outrageous domestic tyranny, for is not
hers after all the common fate of woman?
No clear perception there!
This argument in no way touches the exceptional woman or man,
belonging to an oppressed class. Such a woman, for instance, as the
Kaffir woman spoken of by Olive Schreiner in this passage, is the rare
exception.
But so far Olive Schreiner is undoubtedly right. When the revolt at
length takes place it is in answer to an immediate and pressing need
of the whole community. When the restrictions upon a class have become
hurtful to the whole, when their removal is called for because society
is in need of the energies thus set free, then takes place a more or
less general uprising of the oppressed and restricted ones, apparently
entirely spontaneous and voluntary, in reality having its origin
partly at least in the claim which society is making upon the hitherto
restricted class to take up fuller social responsibilities.
When observing then the modern change of attitude among women, towards
life, we can therefore only conclude that such an immediate and
pressing need is felt by society today, a claim neither to be ignored
nor denied.
On this reasoning, then, and observing the eager demand of women
everywhere for increased freedom and independence, we can only draw
the conclusion that the whole world is dimly recognizing an immediate
and pressing need for the higher services of women, services which
they cannot render unless freed legally, politically and sexually. It
is this immense and universal social claim which has been responded
to by the whole organized movement among women, industrial as well as
educational and political.
In order to understand the relation of the organized suffrage
movement to the question of improving women's industrial and economic
conditions and status, we have to consider the changed conditions of
society under which we live, and we will have to recognize that the
demand for the vote in different countries and at different times may
or may not coincide with the same social content. Psychologically,
indeed, as well as practically, the vote connotes all sorts of
different implications to the women of today, contemporaries though
they are.
It was with an appreciation of these complexities that Professor W.I.
Thomas has pointed out that in his opinion suffragists often place too
great stress upon primitive woman's political power, and ignore
the fact that women held an even more important relation to the
occupational than to the political life of those early days, and that
in her occupational value is to be traced the true source of her power
and therefore her real influence in any age.
While agreeing with Professor Thomas that some suffrage arguments do
on the surface appear inconsistent with historical facts, I believe
the inconsistency to be more formal than real.
As the centuries pass a larger and still larger proportion of human
affairs passes away from individual management and comes under social
and community control. As this process goes on, more and more does the
individual, whether man or woman, need the power to control socially
the conditions that affect his or her individual welfare. In our day
political power rightly used, gives a socialized control of social
conditions, and for the individual it is embodied in and is expressed
by the vote.
To go back only one hundred years. The great bulk of men and women
were industrially much more nearly on a level than they are today.
A poor level, I grant you, for with the exception of the privileged
classes, few and small were the political powers and therefore the
social control of even men. But every extension of political power
as granted to class after class of men has, as far as women are
concerned, had the fatal effect of increasing the political inequality
between men and women, thus placing women, though not apparently, yet
relatively and actually upon a lower level.
Again, the status of woman has been crushingly affected by the
contemporaneous and parallel change which has passed over her special
occupations; so that the conditions under which she works today are
decidedly less than ever before by purely personal relationships and
more by such impersonal factors as the trade supply of labor, and
interstate and international competition. This change has affected
woman in an immeasurably greater degree than man. The conditions
of industrial life are in our day in some degree controllable by
political power so that at this point woman again finds herself
civilly and industrially at greater disadvantage than when her status
in all these respects depended principally upon her individual
capacity to handle efficiently problems arising within an area limited
by purely personal relationships. To alter so radically the conditions
of daily life and industry, and not merely to leave its control in the
hands of the old body of voters, but to give over into the hands of an
enlarged and fresh body of voters, and these voters inevitably the men
of her own class who are her industrial competitors, that degree of
control represented by the vote and to refuse it to women is to place
women (though not apparently, yet actually and relatively) upon a
distinctly lowered level.
So that what suffragists are asking for is in reality not so much
a novel power, as it is liberty to possess and use the same new
instrument of social control as has been already accorded to men.
Without that instrument it is no mere case of her standing still. She
is in very truth retrogressing, as far as effective control over the
conditions under which she lives her life, whether inside the home or
outside of it. In this instinctive desire not to lose ground, to keep
up both with altered social claims of society upon women and with the
improved political equipment of their brothers, is to be found the
economic crux of women's demand for the vote in every country and in
every succeeding decade.
In the course of human development, the gradual process of the
readjustment of human beings to changed social and economic conditions
is marked at intervals by crises wherein the struggle always going on
beneath the surface between the new forces and existing conditions
wells up to the surface and takes on the nature of a duel between
contending champions. If this is true of one class or of one people,
how much more is it true when the change is one that affects an entire
sex.
There have been occasions in history and there occur still today
instances when economic conditions being such that their labor was
urgently needed and therefore desired, it was easy for newcomers to
enter a fresh field of industry, and give to a whole class or even
to a whole sex in one locality an additional occupation. Such very
evidently was the case with the first girls who went into the New
England cotton mills. Men's occupations at that time in America lay
for the most part out of doors, and there was therefore no sense of
rivalry experienced, when the girls who used to spin at home began to
spin on a large scale and in great numbers in a factory.
It is far different where women have been forced by the economic
forces driving them from behind to make their slow and painful way
into a trade already in the possession of men. Of course the wise
thing for the men to do in such a case is to bow to the logic of
events, and through their own advantageous position as first in the
field and through whatever organizations they may possess use all
their power to place their new women rivals on an equal footing
with themselves and so make it impossible for the women to become a
weakening and disintegrating force in the trade. The women being thus
more or less protected by the men from the exploitation of their own
weakness it is then for them to accept the position, as far as they
are able, stand loyally by the men, meet factory conditions as they
find them, being the latest comers, and proceed afterwards to bring
about such modifications and improvements as may seem to them
desirable.
Unfortunately this in a general way may stand for a description
of everything that has not taken place. The bitter and often true
complaints made by workmen that women have stolen their trade, that
having learnt it, well or ill, they are scabs all the time in their
acceptance of lower wages and worse conditions, relatively much worse
conditions, and that they are often strike-breakers when difficulties
arise, form a sad commentary upon the men's own short-sighted conduct.
To women, driven by need to earn their living in unaccustomed ways,
men have all too often opened no front gate through which they could
make an honest daylight entrance into a trade, but have left only
side-alleys and back-doors through which the guiltless intruders could
slip in. Organized labor today, however, is on record as standing for
the broader policy, however apathetic the individual unions and the
individual trade unionists may often be.
A dramatic presentation of one of these very complicated situations
is found in the experience of Miss Susan B. Anthony in the printers'
strike in New York in 1869. By some this incident has been interpreted
to show a wide difference of outlook between those women who were
chiefly intent on opening up fresh occupational possibilities for
women, and those who, coming daily face to face with the general
industrial difficulties of women already in the trades, recognized the
urgent need of trade organization for women if the whole standard
of the trades wherein they were already employed was not to be
permanently lowered.
While there is no such general inference to be drawn, the occurrence
does place in a very strong light the extreme complexity of the
question and the need that then existed, the need that still exists
for closer coöperation between workers approaching the problem of the
independence of the wage-earning woman from different sides.
The files of the _Revolution_, which Miss Anthony, in conjunction with
Mrs. Stanton and Mr. Parker Pillsbury, published from 1868 to 1870,
are full of the industrial question. Though primarily the paper stood
for the suffrage movement, the editors were on the best of terms with
labor organizations and they were constantly urging working-women to
organize and coöperate with men trade unionists, and in especial to
maintain constantly their claim to equal pay for equal work.
But just about the time of our story, in the beginning of 1869, Miss
Anthony seems to have been especially impressed with the need of
trade-schools for girls, that they might indeed be qualified to
deserve equal pay, to earn it honestly if they were to ask for it; for
we find her saying:
"The one great need of the hour is to qualify women workers to _really
earn_ equal wages with men. We must have _training-schools for women_
in all the industrial avocations. Who will help the women will help
ways and means to establish them."
Just then a printers' strike occurred and Miss Anthony thought she saw
in the need of labor on the part of the employers an opportunity to
get the employers to start training-schools to teach the printing
trade to girls, in her enthusiasm for this end entirely oblivious of
the fact that it was an unfortunate time to choose for making such a
beginning. She attended an employers' meeting held at the Astor House
and laid her proposal before them.
The printers felt that they were being betrayed, and by one, too, whom
they had always considered their friend. On behalf of organized labor
Mr. John J. Vincent, secretary of the National Labor Union, made
public protest.
Miss Anthony's reply to Mr. Vincent, under date February 3, 1869,
published in the New York _Sun_, and reprinted in the _Revolution_, is
very touching, showing clearly enough that in her eagerness to supply
the needed thorough trade-training for young girls, she had for the
moment forgotten what was likely to be the outcome for the girls
themselves of training, however good, obtained in such a fashion.
She had also forgotten how essential it was that she should work in
harmony with the men's organizations as long as they were willing to
work with her. Though not saying so in so many words, the letter is a
shocked avowal that, acting impulsively, she had not comprehended the
drift of her action, and it amounts to a withdrawal from her first
position. She writes:
Sir: You fail to see my motive in appealing to the Astor House
meeting of employers, for aid to establish a training school for
girls. It was to open the way for a thorough drill to the hundreds
of poor girls, to fit them to earn equal wages with men everywhere
and not to undermine "Typographical No. 6." I did not mean to
convey the impression that "women, already good compositors should
work for a cent less per thousand ems than men," and I rejoice
most heartily that Typographical Union No. 6 stands so nobly by
the Women's Typographical Union No. 1 and demands the admission of
women to all offices under its control, and I rejoice also
that the Women's Union No. 1 stands so nobly and generously by
Typographical Union No. 6 in refusing most advantageous offers to
defeat its demands.
My advice to all the women compositors of the city, is now, as it
has ever been since last autumn, to join the women's union, for in
union alone there is strength, in union alone there is protection.
Every one should scorn to allow herself to be made a tool to
undermine the just prices of men workers; and to avoid this union
is necessary. Hence I say, girls, stand by each other, and by the
men, when they stand by you.
With this the incident seems to have closed, for nothing more is heard
of the employers' training-school.[A]
[Footnote A: This illustrates well the cruel alternative perpetually
placed before the working-woman and the working-woman's friends. She
is afforded little opportunity to learn a trade thoroughly, and yet,
if she does not stand by her fellow men workers, she is false to
working class loyalty.
That the women printers of New York were between the devil and the
deep sea is evidenced by the whole story told in Chapter XXI of "New
York Typographical Union No. 6," by George Stevens. In that is related
how about this time was formed a women printers' union, styled
"Women's Typographical No. 1," through the exertions of a number of
women compositors with Augusta Lewis at their head. Miss Lewis voiced
the enthusiastic thanks of the women when, a few months later, the
union received its charter from the International Typographical Union
at its next convention in June, 1869. A different, and a sadder note
runs through Miss Lewis's report to the convention in Baltimore in
1871, in describing the difficulties the women labored under.
"A year ago last January, Typographical Union No. 6 passed a
resolution admitting union girls in offices under the control of No.
6. Since that time we have never obtained a situation that we could
not have obtained if we had never heard of a union. We refuse to take
the men's situations when they are on strike, and when there is no
strike, if we ask for work in union offices we are told by union
foremen 'that there are no conveniences for us.' We are ostracized
in many offices because we are members of the union; and though the
principle is right, the disadvantages are so many that we cannot
much longer hold together.... No. 1 is indebted to No. 6 for great
assistance, but as long as we are refused work because of sex we
are at the mercy of our employers, and I can see no way out of our
difficulties."
In 1878 the International enacted a law that no further charter be
granted to women's unions, although it was not supposed to take effect
against any already in existence. Women's Typographical No. 1, already
on the downward grade, on this dissolved. But not till 1883 did the
women printers in New York begin to join the men's union, and there
have been a few women members in it ever since. But how few in
proportion may be judged from the figures on September 30, 1911. Total
membership 6,969, of whom 192 were women. I believe this to be typical
of the position of the woman compositor in other cities.]
I have given large space to this incident, because it is the only one
of the kind I have come across in Miss Anthony's long career. Page
after page of the _Revolution_ is full of long reports of workingmen's
conventions which she or Mrs. Stanton attended.[A] At these they were
either received as delegates or heard as speakers, advocating the
cause of labor and showing how closely the success of that cause was
bound up with juster treatment towards the working-woman. Many indeed
must have been the labor men, who gained a broader outlook upon their
own problems and difficulties through listening to such unwearied
champions of their all but voiceless sex.
[Footnote A: Mrs. Stanton's first speech before the New York
legislature, made in 1854, was a demand that married working-women
should have the right to collect their own wages. She and the workers
with her succeeded in having the law amended. Up till then a married
woman might wash all day at the washtub, and at night the law required
that her employer should, upon demand, hand over her hard-earned money
to her husband, however dissolute he might be.]
To the more conservative among the workingmen the uncompromising views
of these women's advocates must have been very upsetting sometimes,
and always very unconventional. We find that in a workingmen's
assembly in Albany, New York, when one radical delegate moved to
insert the words "and working-women" into the first article of the
Constitution, he felt bound to explain to his fellow-delegates that it
was not his intention to offer anything that would reflect discredit
upon the body. He simply wanted the females to have the benefit
of their trades and he thought by denying them this right a great
injustice was done to them. The speaker who followed opposed the
discussion of the question. "Let the women organize for themselves."
The radicals, however, rose to the occasion.
Mr. Graham in a long speech said it was a shame and a disgrace for
this body, pretending to ask the elevation of labor to neglect or
refuse to help this large, deserving, but down-trodden class.
Mr. Topp said he would be ashamed to go home and say he had attended
this assembly if it overlooked the claims of the female organizations.
The resolution to include the women was carried with applause.
At the National Labor Congress held in Germania Hall, New York, the
_Revolution_ of October 1, 1868, had noted the admission of four women
delegates as marking a new era in workingmen's conventions. These
were: Katherine Mullaney, president of the Collar Laundry Union of
Troy, N.Y.; Mrs. Mary Kellogg Putnam, representing Working Women's
Association No. 2 of New York City; Miss Anthony herself, delegate
from Working Women's Association No. 1, New York City; and Mary A.
Macdonald, from the Working Women's Protective Labor Union, Mount
Vernon, New York.
Mrs. Stanton, after a long and exciting debate, was declared a
delegate, but the next day, to please the malcontents, the National
Labor Congress made clear by resolution that it did not regard itself
as endorsing her peculiar ideas or committing itself to the question
of female suffrage, but simply regarded her as a representative
from an organization having for its object "the amelioration of the
condition of those who labor for a living." "Worthy of Talleyrand" is
Miss Anthony's sole comment.
The connection between the woman movement and the labor movement is
indeed close and fundamental, but that must not be taken to imply that
the workingman and the woman of whatever class have not their own
separate problems to handle and to solve as each sees best. The
marriage relation between two individuals has often been wrecked by
assuming as the basis of their common life that man and wife are one
and that the husband is that one. And so the parallel assumption that
all the working-woman's wrongs will naturally be righted by redress if
their righting is left in the hands of her working brother for many
years led to a very curious and unfortunate neglect of suffrage
propaganda among working-women, and on the part of working-women and
to a no less unfortunate ignorance of industrial problems, also, on
the part of many suffragists, whether those affecting workingmen and
women alike or the women only.
It was not so in the early days. The instances given above show how
close and friendly were the relations between labor leaders and
suffrage pioneers. What has been said of Miss Anthony applied equally
to the other great women who carried the suffrage banner amid
opprobrium and difficulty.
The change came that comes so often in the development of a great
movement. One of the main objects which the pioneers had had in view
somehow slipped out of the sight of their successors. The earliest
move of the advanced women of America had been for equal rights of
education, and there success has been greatest and most complete and
thorough. But it was almost exclusively the women who were able to
enter the professions who gained the benefits of this campaign for
equal educational and consequently equal professional opportunities.
The next aim of the leaders in the woman movement of the last century
had been to accord to woman equality before the law. This affecting
primarily and chiefly woman in her sex relations, had its permanent
results in reference to the legal status of the married woman and
the mother, bearing at the same time secondarily upon the safety and
welfare of the child; hence in the different states a long series of
married women's property acts, equal guardianship acts, modifications
of the gross inequalities of the divorce law, and the steady raising
of the age of protection for girls.
At least that was the position ten years ago. But today the tide has
turned. Partly is this due to the growth of industrial organization
among women, a development that has followed the ever-increasing
need of mutual protection. Trade unionism has helped to train the
working-woman to listen to the suffrage gospel, though therein she has
often been slower than the workingman, her better educated brother. On
the other hand a great many influences have combined to wake up the
suffragist of our day to the true meaning and value of what she was
asking. Especially has the work of the National Women's Trade Union
League and the campaign of publicity it has conducted on behalf of
the working-woman, both within and without its membership, focused
attention upon the woman in industry as a national responsibility.
Then again the tremendous strikes in which such large numbers of women
and girls have been involved were an education to others than the
strikers--to none more than to the suffrage workers who coöperated
with the ill-used girl strikers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and
Chicago.