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WOMEN WAGE-EARNERS:
_THEIR PAST, THEIR PRESENT,
AND THEIR FUTURE_.
BY
HELEN CAMPBELL,
AUTHOR OF "PRISONERS OF POVERTY," "PRISONERS OF
POVERTY ABROAD," "THE PROBLEM OF THE POOR,"
"MRS. HERNDON'S INCOME," ETC.
With an Introduction
BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH.D., LL.D.
_Professor of Political Economy and Director of the School of Economics,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis._
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1893.
_Copyright, 1893_,
BY HELEN CAMPBELL.
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
A BOOK FOR
Alice,
FRIEND, HELPER, AND COMRADE.
INTRODUCTION
BY RICHARD T. ELY,
DIRECTOR OF SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, POLITICAL SCIENCE, AND HISTORY,
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON.
The importance of the subject with which the present work deals cannot
well be over-estimated. Our age may properly be called the Era of Woman,
because everything which affects her receives consideration quite
unknown in past centuries. This is well. The motive is twofold: First,
woman is valued as never before; and, second, it is perceived that the
welfare of the other half of the human race depends more largely upon
the position enjoyed by woman than was previously understood.
The earlier agitation for an enlarged sphere and greater rights for
woman was to a considerable extent merely negative. The aim was to
remove barriers and to open the way. It is characteristic of the earlier
days of agitation for the removal of wrongs affecting any class, that
the questions involved appear to be simple, and easily repeated formulas
ample to secure desired rights. Further agitation, however, and more
mature reflection always show that what looks like a simple social
problem is a complex one.
"If women's wages are small, open new careers to them." As simple as
this did the problem of women's wages once appear; but when new avenues
of employment were rendered accessible to women, it was found, in some
instances, that the wages of men were lowered. A consequence which can
be seen in different industrial centres is that a man and a wife working
together secure no greater wages than the man alone in industries in
which women are not employed. Now, if the result of opening new
employments to women is to force all members of the family to work for
the wages which the head of the family alone once received, it is
manifest that we have a complicated problem.
Another result of wage-earning by women, which has been observed here
and there, is the scattering of the members of the family and the
break-down of the home. A recent and careful observer among the chief
industrial centres of Saxony, Germany, has told us that factory work has
there resulted in the dissolution of the family, and that family life,
as we understand it, scarcely exists. We have demoralization seen in the
young; and in addition to that, we discover that the employment of
married women outside the home results in the impaired health and
strength of future generations.
The conclusion by no means follows that we should go backward, and try
to restrict the industrial sphere of woman. It has been well said that
revolutions do not go backward; we have to go farther forward to keep
the advantages which have been attained, and at the same time lessen the
evils which the new order has brought with it.
Further action is required; but in order that this action may bring
desired results, it must be based upon ample knowledge. The natural
impulse when we see an evil is to adopt direct methods looking to an
immediate cure; but such direct methods which at once suggest themselves
generally fail to bring relief. The effective remedies are those which
use indirect methods based upon scientific knowledge. If a sympathetic
man takes to heart physical suffering, which he can see on every side,
he must feel inclined to relieve the distressed at once, and feel
impatient if he is hindered in his benevolent impulses; yet we know that
he will accomplish far more in the end, if he patiently devotes years to
study in medical schools and practice in hospitals before he attempts to
give relief to the diseased. We need study quite as much to cure the
ills of the social body; and the present work gives us a welcome
addition to the positive information upon which wise action must depend.
Mrs. Campbell has been favorably known for years on account of her
valuable contributions to the literature of social science, and it gives
the present writer great pleasure to have the privilege of introducing
this book to the public with a word of commendation.
MADISON, WISCONSIN,
_August 29, 1893._
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
The pages which follow were prepared originally as a prize monograph for
the American Economic Association, receiving an award from it in 1891.
The restriction of the subject to a fixed number of words hampered the
treatment, and it was thought best to enlarge many points which in the
allotted space could have hardly more than mention. Acting on this wish,
the monograph has been nearly doubled in size, but still must be counted
only an imperfect summary, since facts in these lines are in most cases
very nearly unobtainable, and, aside from the few reports of Labor
Bureaus, there are as yet almost no sources of full information. But as
there is no existing manual of reference on this topic, the student of
social questions will accept this attempt to meet the need, till more
facts enable a fuller and better presentation of the difficult subject.
NEW YORK, _August, 1893._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 7
CHAPTER
I. A LOOK BACKWARD 25
II. EMPLOYMENTS FOR WOMEN DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD,
AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FACTORY 57
III. EARLY ASPECTS OF FACTORY LABOR FOR WOMEN 77
IV. RISE AND GROWTH OF TRADES UP TO THE PRESENT TIME 95
V. LABOR BUREAUS AND THEIR WORK IN RELATION TO WOMEN 111
VI. PRESENT WAGE-RATES IN THE UNITED STATES 126
VII. GENERAL CONDITIONS FOR ENGLISH WORKERS 142
VIII. GENERAL CONDITIONS FOR CONTINENTAL WORKERS 161
IX. GENERAL CONDITIONS AMONG WAGE-EARNING WOMEN IN THE
UNITED STATES 188
X. GENERAL CONDITIONS IN THE WESTERN STATES 199
XI. SPECIFIC EVILS AND ABUSES IN FACTORY LIFE AND IN
GENERAL TRADES 212
XII. REMEDIES AND SUGGESTIONS 249
APPENDIX.
FACTORY INSPECTION LAW 275
AUTHORITIES CONSULTED IN PREPARING THIS BOOK 291
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WOMAN'S LABOR AND OF THE WOMAN QUESTION 294
INDEX 305
WOMEN WAGE-EARNERS;
THEIR PAST, THEIR PRESENT, AND THEIR FUTURE.
INTRODUCTION
The one great question that to-day agitates the whole civilized world is
an economic question. It is not the production but the distribution of
wealth; in other words, the wages question,--the wages of men and women.
Nowhere do we find any suggestion that capital and the landlord do not
receive a _quid pro quo_. Instead, the whole labor world cries out that
the capitalist and the landlord are enslaving the rest of the world, and
absorbing the lion's share of the joint production.
So long as it is a question of production only, there is perfect
harmony. Both unite in agreeing that to produce as much as possible is
for the interest of each. The conflict begins with distribution. It is
no longer a war of one nation with another; it is internecine war,
destroying the foundations of our own defences, and making enemies of
those who should be brothers.
It is impossible for even the most dispassionate or indifferent observer
to blink these facts. Proclaim as we may that there is no antagonism
between capital and labor,--that their interests are one, and that
conditions and opportunities for the worker are always better and
better,--practical thinkers and workers deny this conclusion. Wealth has
enormously increased, in a far greater ratio than population. Does the
laborer receive his due proportion of this increase? One must
unhesitatingly answer no. In a country whose life began in the search
for freedom, and which professes to give equal opportunity to all, more
startling inequality exists than in any other in the civilized world.
One of our ablest lawyers, Thomas G. Shearman, has lately written:--
"Our old equality is gone. So far from being the most equal people
on the face of the earth, as we once boasted that we were, ours is
now the most unequal of civilized nations. We talk about the wealth
of the British aristocracy and about the poverty of the British
poor. There is not in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland so
striking a contrast, so wide a chasm, between rich and poor as in
these United States of America. There is no man in the whole of
Great Britain and Ireland who is as wealthy as one of some
half-a-dozen men who could be named in this country; and there are
few there who could be poorer than some that could be found in this
country. It is true that there is a larger number of the extremely
poor in Great Britain and Ireland than there is in this country,
but it is not true that there is any more desperate poverty in any
civilized country than ours; and it is unquestionably not true that
there is any greater mass of riches concentrated in a few hands in
any country than this."
This for America. For England the tale is much the same. "The Bitter Cry
of Outcast London," with its passionate demand that the rich open their
eyes to see the misery, degradation, and want seething in London slums,
is but another putting of the words of the serious, scientific observer
of facts, Huxley himself, who has described an East End parish in which
he spent some of his earliest years. Over that parish, he says, might
have been written Dante's inscription over the entrance to the Inferno:
"All hope abandon, ye who enter here." After speaking of its physical
misery and its supernatural and perfectly astonishing deadness, he says
that he embarked on a voyage round the world, and had the opportunity of
seeing savage life in all conceivable conditions of savage degradation;
and he writes:--
"I assure you I found nothing worse, nothing more degrading,
nothing so hopeless, nothing nearly so intolerably dull and
miserable as the life I left behind me in the East End of London.
Were the alternative presented to me, I would deliberately prefer
the life of the savage to that of those people in Christian London.
Nothing would please me better--not even to discover a new
truth--than to contribute toward the bettering of that state of
things which, unless wise and benevolent men take it in hand, will
tend to become worse, and to create something worse than
savagery,--a great Serbonian bog, which in the long run will
swallow up the surface crust of civilization."
In a year and more of continuous observation and study of working
conditions in England and on the Continent, some of which will find
place later, my own conclusion was the same. The young emperor of
Germany, hotheaded, obstinate, and self-willed as he may be, is working
it would seem from as radical a conviction of deep wrong in the
distributive system. The Berlin Labor Conference, whose chief effort
seems to have been against child-labor and in favor of excluding women
from the mines, or at least reducing hours, and forbidding certain of
the heavier forms of labor, is but an echo of the great dock-strikes of
London and the cry of all workers the world over for a better chance.
The capitalist seeks to hold his own, the laborer demands larger share
of the product; and how to render unto each his due is the great
politico-economic question,--the absorbing question of our time.
We have found, then, that the problem is economic, and concerns
distribution only. There is no complaint that the capitalist fails to
secure his share. On the contrary, even among the well-to-do,
deep-seated alarm is evidenced at the rise and progress of innumerable
trusts and syndicates, eliminating competition, which restricts
production and raises prices. They make their own conditions; drive from
the field small tradesmen and petty industries, or absorb them on their
own terms.
Rings of every description in the political and the working world
combine for general spoliation, and the honest worker's money jingles
in every pocket but his own.
Granting all that may be urged as to the capitalists' investment of
brain-power and acquired skill, as well as of money with all the risks
involved, they are the inactive rather than the active factors in
production. They give of their store, while labor gives of its life.
Their view is to be reconstructed, and profit-sharing become as much a
part of any industry as profit-making.
This is a growing conviction; nor can we wonder that realization of its
justice and its possibilities has been a matter of very recent
consideration. An often repeated formula becomes at last ingrained in
the mental constitution, and any question as to its truth is a sharp
shock to the whole structure. We have been so certain of the surpassing
advantages of our own country, so certain that liberty and a chance were
the portion of all, that to confront the real conditions in our great
cities is to most as unreal as a nightmare.
We have conceded at last, forced to it by the concessions of all
students of our economic problems, that the laborer does not yet receive
his fair share of the world's wealth; and the economic thought of the
whole world is now devoted to the devising of means by which he may
receive his due. There is no longer much question as to facts; they are
only too palpable. Distribution must be reorganized, and haste must be
made to discover how.
It is the wages problem, then, with which we are to deal,--the wages of
men and women; and we must look at it in its largest, most universal
aspects. We must dismiss at once any prejudice born of the ignorance,
incompetency, or untrustworthiness of many workers. Character is a plant
of slow growth; and given the same conditions of birth, education, and
general environment it is quite possible we should have made no better
showing. We have to-day three questions to be answered:--
1. Why do men not receive a just wage?
2. Why are women in like case?
3. Why do men receive a greater wage than women?
First, Why do not men receive a greater wage than they do? can be
answered only suggestively, since volumes may be and have been written
on all the points involved. For skilled and unskilled labor alike, the
differences in industrial efficiency go far toward regulating the wage,
and have been grouped under six heads by General Frances A. Walker,
whose volume on the Wages Question is a thoughtful and careful study of
the problem from the beginning. These heads are--1. "Peculiarities of
stock and breeding. 2. The meagreness or liberality of diet. 3. Habits
voluntarily or involuntarily formed respecting cleanliness of the
person, and purity of the air and water. 4. The general intelligence of
the laborer. 5. Technical education and industrial environment. 6.
Cheerfulness and hopefulness in labor, growing out of self-respect and
social ambition and the laborer's interest in his work."
With this in mind, we must accept the fact that the value of the
laborer's services to the employer is the net result of two
elements,--one positive, one negative; namely, work and waste. Under
this head of waste come breakage, undue wear and tear of implements,
destruction or injury of materials, the cost of supervision of idle or
blundering men, and often the hindrance of many by the fault of one.
Modern processes involve so much of this order of waste that often
there is doubt if work is worth having or not, and the unskilled laborer
is either rejected or receives only a boy's wage.
The various schools of political economists differ widely as to the
facts which have formulated themselves in what is known as the iron law
of wages; this meaning that wages are said to tend increasingly to a
minimum which will give but a bare living. For skilled labor the law may
be regarded as elastic rather than iron. For unskilled, it is as
certainly the tendency, which, if constantly repeated and so
intensified, would end as law. Many standard economists regard it as
already fixed; and writers like Lasalle, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx
heap every denunciation upon it.
Were the fact actually established, no words could be too strong or too
bitter to define this new form of slavery. The standard of life and
comfort affects the wages of labor, and there is constant effort to make
the wage correspond to this standard. It is an unending and often bitter
struggle, nowhere better summed up than by Thorold Rogers in his "Six
Centuries of Work and Wages,"--a work upon which economists, however
different their conclusions, rely alike for facts and figures.
We must then admit in degree the tendency of wages to a minimum,
especially those of unskilled labor, and accept it as one more motive
for persistent effort to alter existing conditions and prevent any such
culmination.
Take now, in connection with the six heads mentioned as governing the
present efficiency of labor, the five enumerated by Adam Smith in his
summary of causes for differences in wages: 1. "The agreeableness or
disagreeableness of the employments themselves. 2. The easiness and
cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them. 3. The
constancy or inconstancy of employment in them. 4. The small or great
trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them. 5. The
probability or improbability of success in them."
These are conditions which affect the man's right to large or small
wage; but all of them presuppose that men are perfectly free to look
over the whole industrial field and choose their own employment,--they
presuppose the perfect mobility of labor. Let us see what this means.
The theoretical mobility of labor rests upon the assumption that
laborers of every order will in all ways and at all times pursue their
economic interests; but the actual fact is that so far from seeking
labor under the most perfect conditions for obtaining it, nearly half of
all humankind are "bound in fetters of race and speech and religion and
caste, of tradition and habit and ignorance of the world, of poverty and
ineptitude and inertia, which practically exclude them from the
competitions of the world's industry."
"Man is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported,"
was written by Adam Smith long ago; and this stands in the way of really
free and unhampered competition. Mr. Frederick Harrison, one of the
clearest thinkers of the day, has well defined the difference between
the seller and the producer of a commodity. He says:--
"In most cases the seller of a commodity can send it or carry it
from place to place, and market to market, with perfect ease. He
need not be on the spot; he generally can send a sample; he usually
treats by correspondence. A merchant sits in his counting-room, and
by a few letters and forms transports and distributes the
subsistence of a whole city from continent to continent. In other
cases, as the shopkeeper, the ebb and flow of passing multitudes
supplies the want of locomotion for him. This is a true market.
Here competition acts rapidly, fully, simply, fairly. It is totally
otherwise with a day laborer who has no commodity to sell. He must
himself be present at every market, which means costly, personal
locomotion. He cannot correspond with his employer; he cannot send
a sample of his strength, nor do employers knock at his cottage
door."
It is plain, then, that many causes are at work to depress the wages
even of skilled workers, far more than can be enumerated here. If this
is true for men, how much more strongly can limitations be stated for
women, as we ask, "Why do not women receive a better wage?" Many of the
reasons are historical, and must be considered in their origin and
growth. Taking her as worker to-day, precisely the same general causes
are in operation that govern the wages of men, with the added disability
of sex, always in the way of equal mobility of labor.
Wherever for any reason there is immobility of labor, there is always
lowering of the wage rate. The trades and general industries for which
women are suited are highly localized. They focus in the cities and
large towns, and women must seek them there. Great manufactories drain
the surrounding country; yet even with these opportunities an analysis
of the industrial statistics of the United States by General Walker
showed that the women workers of the country made up but seven per cent
of the entire population. Eagerly as they seek work, it is far more
difficult for them to obtain it than for men. They require to be much
more mobile and active in their move toward the labor market, yet are
disabled by timidity, by physical weakness, and by their liability to
insult or outrage arising from the fact of sex. Men who would secure a
place tramp from town to town, from street to street, or shop to shop,
persisting through all rebuffs, till their end is accomplished. They go
into suspicious and doubtful localities, encounter strangers, and sleep
among casual companions. In this fashion they relieve the pressure at
congested points, and keep the mass fluid.
For women, save in the slight degree included in the country girl's
journey to town or city where cotton or woollen mills offer an opening
for work, this course is impossible. Ignorant, fearful, poor, and
unprotected, the lions in her way are these very facts. Added to this
natural disqualification, comes another,--in the lack of sympathy for
her needs, and in the prejudice which hedges about all her movements. In
every trade she has sought to enter, men have barred the way. In a
speech made before the House of Commons in 1873, Henry Fawcett drew
attention to the persistent resistance of men to any admission of women
on the same terms with themselves. He said:--
"We cannot forget that some years ago certain trade-unionists in
the potteries imperatively insisted that a certain rest for the arm
which they found almost essential to their work should not be used
by women engaged in the same employment. Not long since, the London
tailors, when on a strike, having never admitted a woman to their
union, attempted to coerce women from availing themselves of the
remunerative employment which was offered them in consequence of
the strike. But this jealousy of woman's labor has not been
entirely confined to workmen. The same feeling has extended itself
through every class of society. Last autumn a large number of
post-office clerks objected to the employment of women in the
Post-Office."
Driven by want, they had pressed into agricultural labor as well, and
found equal opposition there also. Mr. Fawcett in the same speech calls
attention to the fact of the non-admission of women to the Agricultural
Laborers' Union, on the ground that "the agricultural laborers of the
country do not wish to recognize the labor of women."
There is more or less reason for such feeling. It arises in part from
the newness of the occasion, since in the story of labor as a whole,
soon to be considered by us in detail, it is only the last fifty years
that have seen women taking an active part. We have already seen that
mobility of labor is one of the first essentials, and that women are far
more limited in this respect than men.
This brings us to the final question,--Why do men receive a larger wage
than women? The conditions already outlined are in part responsible, but
with them is bound up another even more formidable.
Custom, the law of many centuries, has so ingrained its thought in the
constitution of men that it is naturally and inevitably taken for
granted that every woman who seeks work is the appendage of some man,
and therefore, partially at least, supported. Other facts bias the
employer against the payment of the same wage. The girl's education is
usually less practical than the boy's; and as most, at least among the
less intelligent class, regard a trade as a makeshift to be used as a
crutch till a husband appears, the work involved is often done
carelessly and with little or no interest. With unintelligent labor
wastage is greater, and wages proportionately lower; and here we have
one chief reason for the difference. Others will disclose themselves as
we go on.
Unskilled labor then, it is plain, must be in evil case, and it is
unskilled laborers that are in the majority. For men this means pick and
spade at such rates as may be fixed; for women the needle, and its
myriad forms of cheap production; and within these ranks is no sense of
real economic interest, but the fiercest and blindest competition among
themselves. Mere existence is to a large extent all that is possible,
and it is fought for with a fury in strange contrast to the apparent
worth of the thing itself.
It is this battle with which we have to do; and we must go back to the
dawn of the struggle, and discover what has been its course from the
beginning, before any future outlook can be determined. The theoretical
political economist settles the matter at once. Whatever stress of want
or wrong may arise is met by the formula, "law of supply and demand." If
labor is in excess, it has simply to mobilize and seek fresh channels.
That hard immovable facts are in the way, that moral difficulties face
one at every turn, and that the ethical side of the problem is a matter
of comparatively recent consideration, makes no difference. Let us
discover what show of right is on the economist's side, and how far
present conditions are a necessity of the time. It is women on whom the
facts weigh most heavily, and whose fortunes are most tangled in this
web woven from the beginning of time, and from that beginning drenched
with the tears and stained by the blood of workers in all climes and in
every age. As women we are bound, by every law of justice, to aid all
other women in their struggle. We are equally bound to define the
nature, the necessities, and the limits of such struggle; and it is to
this end that we seek now to discover, through such light as past and
present may cast, the future for women workers the world over.
I.
A LOOK BACKWARD.
The history of women as wage-earners is actually comprised within the
limits of a few centuries; but her history as a worker runs much farther
back, and if given in full, would mean the whole history of working
humanity. The position of working women all over the civilized world is
still affected not only by the traditions but by the direct inheritance
of the past, and thus the nature of that inheritance must be understood
before passing to any detailed consideration of the subject under its
various divisions. It is the conditions underlying history and rooted in
the facts of human life itself which we must know, since from the
beginning life and work have been practically synonymous, and in the
nature of things remain so.
In the shadows of that far remote infancy of the world where from
cave-dweller and mere predatory animal man by slow degrees moved toward
a higher development, the story of woman goes side by side with his. For
neither is there record beyond the scattered implements of the stone age
and the rude drawings of the cave-dwellers, from which one may see that
warfare was the chief life of both. The subjugation of the weaker by the
stronger is the story of all time; the "survival of the fittest," the
modern summary of that struggle.
Naturally, slavery was the first result, and servitude for one side the
outcome of all struggle. Physical facts worked with man's will in the
matter, and early rendered woman subordinate physically and dependent
economically. The origin of this dependence is given with admirable
force and fulness by Professor Lester F. Ward in his "Dynamic
Sociology":[1]--
In the struggle for supremacy, "woman at once became property, since
anything that affords its possessor gratification is property. Woman was
capable of affording man the highest of gratifications, and therefore
became property of the highest value. Marriage, under the prevailing
form, became the symbol of transfer of ownership, in the same manner as
the formal seizing of lands. The passage from sexual service to manual
service on the part of women was perfectly natural.... And thus we find
that the women of most savage tribes perform the manual and servile
labor of the camp."
"The basis of all oppression is economic dependence on the oppressor,"
is the word of a very keen thinker and worker in the German Reichstag
to-day; and he adds: "This has been the condition of women in the past,
and it still is so. Woman was the first human being that tasted bondage.
Woman was a slave before the slave existed."
Science has demonstrated that in all rude races the size and weight of
the brain differ far less according to sex than is the case in civilized
nations. Physical strength is the same, with the advantage at times on
the side of the woman, as in certain African tribes to-day, over which
tribes this fact has given them the mastery. Primeval woman, all
attainable evidence goes to show, started more nearly equal in the
race, but became the inferior of man, when periods of child-bearing
rendered her helpless and forced her to look to him for assistance,
support, and protection.
When the struggle for existence was in its lowest and most brutal form,
and man respected nothing but force, the disabled member of society, if
man, was disposed of by stab or blow; if woman, and valuable as breeder
of fresh fighters, simply reduced to slavery and passive obedience.
Marriage in any modern sense was unknown. A large proportion of female
infants were killed at birth. Battle, with its recurring periods of
flight or victory, made it essential that every tribe should free itself
from all _impedimenta_. It was easier to capture women by force than to
bring them up from infancy, and thus the childhood of the world meant a
state in which the child had little place, save as a small, fierce
animal, whose development meant only a change from infancy and its
helplessness to boyhood and its capacity for fight.
Out of this chaos of discordant elements, struggling unconsciously
toward social form, emerged by slow degrees the tribe and the nation,
the suggestions of institutions and laws and the first principles of the
social state. Master and servant, employer and employed, became facts;
and dim suspicions as to economic laws were penetrating the minds of the
early thinkers. The earliest coherent thought on economic problems comes
to us from the Greeks, among whom economic speculation had begun almost
a thousand years before Christ. The problem of work and wages was even
then forming,--the sharply accented difference between theirs and ours
lying in the fact that for Greek and Roman and the earlier peoples in
the Indies economic life was based upon slavery, accepted then as the
foundation stone of the economic social system.
Up to the day when Greek thought on economic questions formulated, in
Aristotle's "Politics" and "Economics," the first logical statement of
principles, knowledge as to actual conditions for women is chiefly
inferential. When a slave, she was like other slaves, regarded as
soulless; and she still is, under Mohammedanism. As lawful wife she was
physically restrained and repressed, and mentally far more so. A Greek
matron was one degree higher than her servants; but her own sons were
her masters, to whom she owed obedience. A striking illustration of this
is given in the Odyssey. Telemachus, feeling that he has come to man's
estate, invades the ranks of the suitors who had for years pressed about
Penelope, and orders her to retire to her own apartments, which she does
in silence. Yet she was honored above most, passive and prompt obedience
being one of her chief charms.
Deep pondering brought about for Aristotle a view which verges toward
breadth and understanding, but is perpetually vitiated by the fact that
he regards woman as in no sense an individual existence. If all goes
well and prosperously, women deserve no credit; if ill, they may gain
renown through their husbands, the philosopher remarking: "Neither would
Alcestis have gained such renown, nor Penelope have been deemed worthy
of such praise, had they respectively lived with their husbands in
prosperous circumstances; and it is the sufferings of Admetus and
Ulysses which have given them everlasting fame."
This is Aristotle's view of women's share in the life they lived; yet
gleams of something higher more than once came to him, and in the
eighth chapter of the "Economics," he adds: "Justly to love her husband
with reverence and respect, and to be loved in turn, is that which
befits a wife of gentle birth, as to her intercourse with her own
husband." Ulysses, in his address to Nausicaa, says:--
"There is no fairer thing
Than when the lord and lady with one soul
One home possess."
Aristotle, charmed at the picture, dilates on this "mutual concord of
husband and wife, ... not the mere agreement upon servile matters, but
that which is justly and harmoniously based on intellect and
prudence."[2]
Side by side with this picture of a state known to a few only among the
noblest, must be placed the lament of "Iphigenia in Tauris":
"The condition of women is worse than that of all human beings. If
man is favored by fortune, he becomes a ruler, and wins fame on the
battlefield; and if the gods have ordained him his fortune, he is
the first to die a fair death among his people. But the joys of
woman are narrowly compassed: she is given unasked, in marriage, by
others, often to strangers; and when she is dragged away by the
victor through the smoking ruins, there is none to rescue her."
Thucydides, who had already expressed the opinion quoted by many a
modern Philistine,--"The wife who deserves the highest praise is she of
whom one hears neither good nor evil outside her own house,"--anticipates
a later verdict, in words that might have been the foundation of
Iphigenia's lament:--
"Woman is more evil than the storm-tossed waves, than the heat of
fire, than the fall of the wild cataract! If it was a god who
created woman, wherever he may be, let him know that he is the
unhappy author of the greatest ills."
This was a summary of the Greek view as a whole. Sparta trained her
girls and boys alike in childhood; but the theories of Lycurgus,
admirable at some points, were brutal and short-sighted at others, and
Sparta demonstrated that the extinction of all desire for beauty or ease
or culture brings with it as disastrous results as its extreme opposite.
It is Athens that sums up the highest product of Greek thought, and that
represents a civilization which from the purely intellectual side has
had no successor. Yet even here was almost absolute obtuseness and
indifference, on the part of the aristocracy, to the intolerable bondage
of the masses. "The people," as spoken of by their historians and
philosophers, mean simply a middle class, the humblest member of which
owned at least one slave. The slaves themselves, the real "masses," had
no political or social existence more than the horses with which they
were sent to the river to drink. In any scheme of political economy
Aristotle's words, in the first book of the "Politics," were the
keynote: "The science of the master reduces itself to knowing how to
make use of the slave. He is the master, not because he is the owner of
the man, but because he knows how to make use of his property."
In fact, according to this chivalrous philosopher, the man was the head
of the family in three distinct capacities; for he says: "Now a freeman
governs his slave in the manner the male governs the female, and in
another manner the father governs his child; and these have the
different parts of the soul within them, but in a different manner. Thus
a slave can have no deliberative faculty; a woman but a weak one, a
child an imperfect one."
That liberty could be their right appears to have been not even
suspected. Yet out from these dumb masses of humanity, regarded less
than brutes, toiling naked under summer sun or in winter cold, chained
in mines, men and women alike, and when the whim came, massacred in
troops, sounded at intervals a voice demanding the liberty denied. It
was quickly stifled. The record is there for all to read; stifled again
and again, from Drimakos the Chian slave to Spartacus at Rome, yet each
protest from this unknown army of martyrs was one step onward toward the
emancipation to come. In each revolution, however small, two parties
confronted each other,--the people who wished to live by the labor of
others, the people who wished to live by their own labor,--the former
denying in word and deed the claim of the latter.
Such conditions, as we proved in our own experience of slavery, benumb
spiritual perception and make clear vision impossible; and it is plain
that if the mass of workers had neither political nor social place,
woman, the slave of the slave, had even less. Her wage had never been
fixed. That she had right to one had entered no imagination. To the end
of Greek civilization a wage remained the right of free labor only. The
slave, save by special permit of the master, had right only to bare
subsistence; and though men and women toiled side by side, in mine or
field or quarry, there was, even with the abolition of slavery, small
betterment of the condition of women. The degradation of labor was so
complete, even for the freeman, that the most pronounced aversion to
taking a wage ruled among the entire educated class. Plato abhorred a
sophist who would work for wages. A gift was legitimate, but pay
ignoble; and the stigma of asking for and taking pay rested upon all
labor. The abolition of slavery made small difference, for the taint had
sunk in too deeply to be eradicated. A curse rested upon all labor; and
even now, after four thousand years of vacillating progress and
retrogression, it lingers still.
The ancients were, in the nature of things, all fighters. Even when
slavery for both the Aryan and Semitic races ended, two orders still
faced each other: aristocracy on the one side, claiming the fruits of
labor; the freeman on the other, rebelling against injustice, and
forming secret unions for his own protection,--the beginning of the
co-operative principle in action.
Thus much for the Greek. Turn now to the second great civilization, the
Roman. During the first centuries after the founding of Rome the Roman
woman had no rights whatever, her condition being as abject as that of
the Grecian. With the growth of riches and of power in the State, more
social but still no legal freedom was accorded. The elder Cato
complained of the allowing of more liberty, and urged that every father
of a family should keep his wife in the proper state of servility; but
in spite of this remonstrance, a movement for the better had begun.
Under the Empire, woman acquired the right of inheritance, but she
herself remained a minor, and could dispose of nothing without the
consent of her guardian. Sir Henry Maine[3] calls attention to the
institution known to the oldest Roman law as the "Perpetual Tutelage of
Women," under which a female, though relieved from her parent's
authority by his decease, continues subject through life. Various
schemes were devised to enable her to defeat ancient rules; and by their
theory of "Natural Law," the jurisconsults had evidently assumed the
equality of the sexes as a principle of their code of equity.
Few more significant words or words more teeming with importance on the
actual economic condition of women have ever been written than those of
the great jurist whose name counts as almost final authority. "Ancient
law," he writes, "subordinates the woman to her blood relations, while a
prime phenomenon of modern jurisprudence has been her subordination to
her husband." Under the modified laws as to marriage, he goes on to
state, there came a time "when the situation of the Roman female,
unmarried or married, became one of great personal and proprietary
independence; for the tendency of the later law, as already hinted, was
to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of
marriage in fashion conferred on the husband no compensating
superiority."
These were the final conditions for the Roman, whose power, sapped by
long excesses, was even then trembling to its fall. Already the
barbarians threatened them, and at various points had penetrated the
Empire, showing to the amazed Romans morals absolutely opposed to their
own. The German races contented themselves with one wife; and Tacitus
wrote of them: "Their marriages are very strict. No one laughs at vice,
nor is immorality regarded as a sign of good breeding. The young men
marry late,--they marry equal in years and in health, and the strength
of the parent is transmitted to the children."
This has a rosier aspect than facts warrant. For the Germans, as for
other barbarians of that epoch, the patriarchal family was the social
order, and the head of the family the lord of the community. Wives,
daughters, and daughters-in-law were excluded from leadership, though in
spite of this there is record of a woman as being occasionally at the
head of a tribe,--a circumstance chronicled by Tacitus with much
disgust.
While from the West this gigantic wave of powerful but uncultured life
was flowing in, from the East had come another. Early Christianity had
already established itself, and its ascetic teachings made another
element in the contradictions of the time. Up to this date slavery had
been the foundation of society, and any amelioration in the condition of
women had applied only to the patrician class. The Carpenter of Nazareth
set his seal upon the sacredness of labor, and taught first not only the
rights but the immeasurable value of even the weakest human soul. Women
were ardent converts to the new gospel. Hoping with all the wretched for
redemption and deliverance from present evils, they became eager and
devoted adherents. Their missionary zeal was a powerful agent in the
early days of Christianity. "In the first enthusiasm of the Christian
movement," says Principal Donaldson, in his notable article on "Women
among the Early Christians," in the "Fortnightly Review," "women were
allowed to do whatever they were fitted to do."
All this within a few generations came to an end. Widows of sixty and
over retained the power which had been given, and a new order
arose,--deaconesses who were not allowed marriage. Neither widows nor
deaconesses could teach, the Church being especially jealous in this
respect and in substantial agreement with Sophocles, who said, "Silence
is a woman's ornament."
Tertullian waxes furious over the thought of a woman learning much, and
still more, venturing to use such acquirement; but heretical Christians
insisted that the respect which Romans had paid to the Vestal Virgin was
her right, and each founder of a new sect had some woman as helper. But
as a rule, her highest post during the first three centuries of
Christianity was that of doorkeeper or message-woman, her economic
dependence upon man being absolute. Social problems remained chiefly
untouched. No objection was made to the existence of slavery. In this
gospel of love the Christian slave became the brother of all, and
kindliness was his right; but their faith demanded contentment with all
present ills, since a glorious future was to compensate them. A
Christian slave-woman was the property of her master, who had absolute
power over her; but no objection seems to have been made to this.
In the mean time many doubts as to marriage seem to have arisen. Paul
had set his seal on the subjection of women, and Peter followed suit.
Antagonism to marriage grew and intensified, till hardly a Father of
the early Church but fulminated against it. Fiercest, loudest, and most
heeded of all, the voice of Tertullian still sounds down the ages. This
is his address to women:
"Do you not know that each one of you is an Eve? The sentence of
God on this sex of yours lives in this age; the guilt must of
necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway; you are the
unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the
divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not
valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man.
On account of your desert, that is, death, even the Son of God had
to die."
Clement of Alexandria supplemented this verdict with one as bitter, and
Cyprian and the rest echoed the general anathema. As marriage grew thus
more and more degraded, the number of the women in the world steadily
increased, and posterity in like ratio deteriorated. The summary of
Principal Donaldson, in the article already referred to, is the keynote
to the whole situation.
"The less spiritual classes of the people, the laymen, being taught
that marriage might be licentious, and that it implied an inferior
state of sanctity, were rather inclined to neglect matrimony for
more loose connections; and it was these people alone that then
peopled the world. It was the survival of the unfittest. The noble
men and women, on the other hand, who were dominated by the
loftiest aspirations and exhibited the greatest temperance,
self-control, and virtue, left no children."
Sir Henry Maine comes to the same conclusion, and deplores the fact of
the loss of liberty for women, adding: "The prevalent state of religious
sentiment may explain why it is that modern jurisprudence, forged in the
furnace of barbarian conquest, and formed by the fusion of Roman
jurisprudence with patriarchal usage, has absorbed among its rudiments
much more than usual of those rules concerning the position of women
which belong peculiarly to an imperfect civilization." And he adds words
which come from a man who is a good Christian as well as a profound
student: "No society which preserves any tincture of Christian
institutions is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty
conferred on them by the middle Roman law."
Passing now to the Middle Ages, we find conditions curiously involved.
The exaltation of celibacy as the true condition for the religious, and
the consequent enormous increase of convents, placed fresh barriers in
the way of marriage; and the Church having attracted the gentle and
devoted among the women and the more intelligent among the men, the
reproduction of the species was for the most part still left to the
brutal and ignorant, thus leading to a survival of the unfittest to aid
in any advancement of the race.
The number of women far exceeded that of men, who died not only from
constant feuds and struggles, but from many pestilences, which
naturally, in a day when sanitary laws were unknown, ravaged the
country. Dr. Karl Bücher, commenting on the relation of this fact to the
life of women at that time, notes that from 1336 to 1400 thirty-two
years of plague occurred, forty-two between 1400 and 1500, and thirty
between 1500 and 1600. In addition to the convents, which received the
well-to-do, many towns established Bettina institutions, houses of God,
where destitute women were cared for; but it was impossible for all who
sought admittance to be provided for.
The feudal system, with its absolute power over its serfs, had driven
thousands into open revolt; and beggars, highwaymen, and robbers made
life perilous and trade impossible.
The towns banded together for protection of life and industry, and thus
developed the guild of the Middle Ages. Relieved from the fear of
free-booting barons, no less dangerous than the hordes of organized
robbers, these guilds grew populous and powerful. Licentiousness did
not, however, lessen. Luther thundered against it, before his own revolt
came; and the Reformation demanded marriage as the right and privilege
of a people falsely taught its debasing and unholy nature.