the few, not the many; for the mass of women was still the utter
degradation of a barbarous past, and the burden of grinding laws
resulting from it. With the Reformation, Germany ceased to be the centre
of European traffic; and Spain, Portugal, Holland, and England took the
lead in quick succession, England retaining it to the present time.
German commerce and trade steadily declined; and as the guilds saw their
importance and profits lessen, they made fresh and more stringent
regulations against all new-comers. Competitors of every order were
refused admission. Heavy taxes on settlement, costly master-examinations,
limitations of every trade to a certain number of masters and journeymen,
forced thousands into dependence from which there was no escape.
Looking at the time as a whole, one sees clearly how old distinctions
had become obliterated. Wealth found new definitions. The Church had
made poverty the highest state, and insisted, as she does in part
to-day, that the suffering and deprivation of one class were ordained of
God to draw out the sympathies of the other. The rich must save their
souls by alms and endowments, and contentment and acquiescence were to
be the virtues of the poor.
Insensibly this view was modified. Charlemagne, whose extraordinary
personal power and common-sense moulded men at will, set an example no
monarch had ever set before. He ordered the sale of eggs from his hens
and the vegetables from his gardens; and, scorn it as they might, his
sneering nobles insensibly modified their own thought and action.
Commerce brought the people and products of new countries face to face.
The lines of caste, as sharply defined within the labor world as
without, were gradually dimmed or obliterated. The practice of credit
and exchange, largely the creation of the persecuted Jews, made easy the
interchange of commodities. Saint Louis himself organized industry, and
divided the trades into brotherhoods, put under the protection of the
saints from the tyranny of the barons and of the feudal system which had
weighted all industry.
Reform began in the year 1257, in the "Institutions" of Saint Louis,--a
set of clear and definite rules for the development of public wealth and
the general good of the people. In their first joy at this escape from
long-continued oppression, many of the towns of the Middle Ages had
admitted women to citizenship on an equal footing with men. In 1160
Louis le Jeune, of France, granted to Theci, wife of Yves, and to her
heirs, the grand-mastership of the five trades of cobblers, belt-makers,
sweaters, leather-dressers, and purse-makers. In Frankfort and the
Silesian towns there were female furriers; along the middle Rhine many
female bakers were at work. Cologne and Strasburg had female saddlers
and embroiderers of coats-of-arms. Frankfort had female tailors,
Nuremburg female tanners, and in Cologne were several skilled female
goldsmiths.
Twelve hundred years of struggle toward some sort of justice seemed
likely at this point to be lost, for with the opening of the thirteenth
century each and all of the guilds proceeded to expel every woman in the
trades. It is a curious fact in the story of all societies approaching
dissolution, that its defenders adopt the very means best adapted to
hasten this end. Each corporation dreaded an increase of numbers, and
restricted marriages, and reduced the number of independent citizens.
Many towns placed themselves voluntarily under the rule of princes who
in turn were trying to subjugate the nobility, and so protected the
towns and accorded all sorts of rights and privileges.
The Thirty Years' War, from 1618 to 1648, decimated the German
population, and reduced still further the possibility of marriage for
many. Forced out of trades, women had only the lowest, most menial forms
of trade labor as resort, and their position was to all appearance
nearly hopeless.
In spite of this, certain trades were practically woman's. Embroidery of
church vestments and hangings had been brought to the highest
perfection. Lace-making had been known from the most ancient times; and
Colbert, the famous financier and minister for Louis XIV., gave a
privilege to Madame Gilbert, of Alençon, to introduce into France the
manufacture of both Flemish and Venetian Point, and placed in her hands
for the first expenses 150,000 francs. The manufacture spread over every
country of Europe, though in 1640 the Parliament of Toulouse sought to
drive out women from the employment, on the plea that the domestic were
her only legitimate occupations. A monk came to the rescue, and
demonstrated that spinning, weaving, and all forms of preparing and
decorating stuffs had been hers from the beginning of time, and thus for
a season averted further action.
The monk had learned his lesson better than most of the workmen who
sought to curtail woman's opportunities. In the chronicles of that time
there is full description of the workshops which formed part of every
great estate, that known as the _gynæceum_ being devoted to the women
and children, who spun, wove, made up, and embroidered stuffs of every
order. The Abbey of Niederalteich had such a _gynæceum_, in which
twenty-two women and children worked, while that of Stephenswert
employed twenty-four; co-operation in such labor having been found more
advantageous than isolated work. Before the tenth century these
workshops had been established at many points. If part of a feudal
manor, the wife of its lord acted often as overseer; if attached to some
abbey, a general overlooker filled the same place. In the convents
manual labor came into favor; and the spinning, weaving, and dyeing of
stuffs occupied a large part of the life.
Apprenticeship for both male and female was finally well established,
and many women became the successful heads of prosperous industries. The
wage was, as it is to-day, the merest pittance; but any wage whatever
was an advance upon the conditions of earlier servitude.
Life had small joy for women in those days we call the "good old
times." Take the married woman, the house-mother of that period. She not
only lived in the strictest retirement, but her duties were so complex
and manifold that, to quote Bebel, "a conscientious housewife had to be
at her post from early in the morning till late at night in order to
fulfil them. It was not only a question of the daily household duties
that still fall to the lot of the middle-class housekeeper, but of many
others from which she has been entirely freed by the modern development
of industry, and the extension of means of transport. She had to spin,
weave, and bleach; to make all the linen and clothes, to boil soap, to
make candles and brew beer. In addition to these occupations, she
frequently had to work in the field or garden and to attend to the
poultry and cattle. In short, she was a veritable Cinderella, and her
solitary recreation was going to church on Sunday. Marriages only took
place within the same social circles; the most rigid and absurd spirit
of caste ruled everything, and brooked no transgression of its law. The
daughters were educated on the same principles; they were kept in
strict home seclusion; their mental development was of the lowest order,
and did not extend beyond the narrowest limits of household life. And
all this was crowned by an empty and meaningless etiquette, whose part
it was to replace mind and culture, and which made life altogether, and
especially that of a woman, a perfect treadmill of labor."
How was it possible that a condition as joyless and fruitless as this
should be the accepted ideal of womanhood? Already the question is
answered. For ages her identity had been merged in that of the man by
whose side she worked with no thought of recompense. She toiled early
and late, filling the office of general helper on the same terms; and
even to-day, under our own eyes, the wife of many a farmer goes through
her married life often not touching five dollars in cash in an entire
year.
Submissiveness, clinging affection, humility, all the traits accounted
distinctively feminine, and the natural and ever-increasing result of
steady suppression of all stronger ones stood in the way of any
resistance. Intellectual qualities, forever at a discount, repressed
development save in rarest cases. The mass of women had neither power
nor wish to protest; and thus the few traces we find of their earliest
connection with labor show us that they accepted bare subsistence as all
to which they were entitled, and were grateful if they escaped the
beating which the lower order of Englishman still regards it as his
right to give. Even in our own country and our own time this theory is
not altogether extinct. The papers only recently contained an account of
the brutal beating of a woman by a man. The woman in remonstrating
cried, "You have no right to beat me! I am not your wife!"
During the Middle Ages, and indeed well into the nineteenth century,
possession of property by women was confined to the unmarried, the
entire control and practical ownership passing to the husband upon
marriage.
Change comes at last to even the most fossilized thought. One by one,
social institutions clung to with fiercest tenacity fell away. Barbaric
independence had followed Greek and Roman slavery, which in turn was
succeeded by feudal servitude, to reappear once more in the
affranchised communes. Each experiment had its season, and sunk into the
darkness of the past, to give place to a new one, which must transmit to
posterity the principal and interest of all preceding ones. But though
progress when taken in the mass is plain, the individual years in each
generation show small trace of it. Even as late as the sixteenth
century, the workman fared little better than the brutes. Erasmus tells
us that their houses had no chimneys, and their floors were bare ground;
while Fortescue, who travelled in France at the same time, reports a
misery and degradation which have had vivid portraiture in Taine's
"Ancien Régime."
A flood of wealth poured in on the discovery of the New World. The
invention of gunpowder put a new face upon warfare, and that of printing
made possible the cheap and wide dissemination of long-smouldering
ideas. Economic problems perplexed every country, and on all sides
methods of solving them were put in action. Sully, who found in Henry
IV. of France an ardent supporter of his wishes for her prosperity, had
altered and systematized taxes, and introduced a multitude of reforms in
general administration; and later, Colbert did even more notable work.
The Italian Republics had made their noble code of commercial rules and
maxims. The Dutch had given to the world one of the most wonderful
examples of what man may accomplish by sheer pluck and persistent hard
work, and commercial institutions founded on a principle of liberty; and
neither the terror of the Spanish rule nor the jealousy of England had
destroyed her power. Credit, banking, all modern forms of exchange were
coming into use; and agriculture, which the feudal system had kept in a
state of torpor, awakened and became a productive power.
Side by side with this were gigantic speculations, like that of John Law
and the East India Company, with the helpless ruin of its collapse. The
time was ripe for the formulation of some system of economic laws; and
two men who had long pondered them, De Gournay and Quesnay, made the
first attempt to explain the meaning of wealth and its distribution.
After Quesnay and his system, still holding honorable place, came
Turgot; after Turgot, Adam Smith; and thenceforward halt is impossible,
and economic science marches on with giant strides.
In all this progress woman had shared many of the material benefits, but
her industrial position had altered but slightly. Driven from the
trades, she had passed into the ranks of agricultural laborers; and
Thorold Rogers, in his "Work and Wages," records her early work in this
direction. France held the most enlightened view, and even then women
took active part in business, and had a position unknown in any other
country; but they had no place in any system of the economists, nor did
their labor count as a force to be enumerated. Slowly machinery was
making its way, feared and hated by the lower order of workers, eyed
distrustfully and uncertainly by the higher. Men and women struggling
for bare subsistence had become active competitors, till, in 1789, a
general petition entitled "Petition of Women of the Third Estate to the
King" was signed by hundreds of French workers, who, made desperate by
starvation and underpay, demanded that every business which included
spinning, weaving, sewing, or knitting should be given to women
exclusively. Side by side with the wave of political revolution,
strongest for France and America, came the industrial revolution; and
the opening of the nineteenth century brought with it the myriad changes
we are now to face.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Dynamic Sociology, or Applied Social Science as based upon Statical
Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences. By Lester F. Ward, A.M., vol.
i. p. 649.
[2] Economics, book i. chap. ix.
[3] Ancient Law, p. 147.
II.
EMPLOYMENTS FOR WOMEN DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
THE FACTORY.
For nearly a century and a half, dating from the landing of the Pilgrims
on Plymouth Rock, the condition of laboring women was that of the same
class in all struggling colonies. There were practically no women
wage-earners, save in domestic service, where a home and from thirty to
a hundred dollars a year was accounted wealth, the latter sum being
given in a few instances to the housekeepers in great houses. Each
family represented a commonwealth, and its women gave every energy to
the crowding duties of a daily life filled with manifold occupations.
The farmer--for all were farmers--was often blacksmith, shoemaker, and
carpenter, and more or less proficient in every trade whose offices were
called for in the family life. The farmer's wife spun and wove the
cloth he wore and the linen that made his household furnishing, and was
dyer and dresser, brewer and baker, seamstress, milliner, and
dressmaker. The quickness, adaptiveness to new conditions, and the
fertility of resource which are recognized as distinguishing the
American, were born of the colonial struggle, especially of the final
one which separated us forever from English rule.
The wage of the few women found in labor outside the home was gauged by
that which had ruled in England. For unskilled labor, as that employed
occasionally in agriculture, this had been from one shilling and
sixpence for ordinary field work to two shillings a week paid in haying
and harvest time. For hoeing corn or rough weeding there is record of
one shilling per week, and this is the usual wage for old women. To this
were added various allowances which have gradually fallen into disuse. A
full record of these and of rates in general will be found in "Six
Centuries of Work and Wages."[4]
Unskilled labor during the whole colonial period--meaning by this such
labor as that of the men who sawed wood, dug ditches, or mended roads,
mixed mortar for the mason, carried boards to the carpenter, or cut hay
in harvest time--brought a wage of seldom more than two shillings a day,
fifteen shillings a week making a man the envy of his fellows, while six
or seven was the utmost limit for women of the same order.
On this pittance they lived as they could. Sand did duty as carpet for
the floor. The cupboard knew no china, and the table no glass. Coal and
matches were unknown; they had never seen a stove. The meals of coarsest
food were eaten from wooden or pewter dishes. Fresh meat was seldom
eaten more than once a week. A pound of salt pork was tenpence, and corn
three shillings a bushel. Clothing was as coarse as the food, and
imprisonment for the slightest debt was the shadow hanging over every
family where illness or any other cause had hindered earning. Boys and
girls in the poorer families were employed by the owners of cattle to
watch and keep them within bounds, countless troubles arising from their
roaming over the unfenced fields. Andover, Mass., being from the
beginning of a thrifty turn of mind, passed, soon after the founding of
the town, an ordinance which still stands on the town records:--
"The Court did herupon order and decree that in every towne the
chosen men are to take care of such as are sett to keep cattle,
that they may be sett to some other employment withall, as spinning
upon the rock, knitting and weaving tape, &c."
Spinning-classes were also formed; the General Court of Massachusetts
ordering these in 1656, this being part of the general effort to begin
some form of manufactures. But fishing to load ships, and shipbuilding
to carry cured fish absorbed the energies of the growing population; and
these vessels brought textiles and manufactured goods from the cheapest
markets everywhere and anywhere.[5]
These "homespun" industries soon showed a tendency toward division. By
1669 much weaving was done outside the home as custom work; and there is
record of one Gabriel Harris who died in 1684 leaving four looms and
tacklings and a silk loom as part of the small fortune he had
accumulated in this way.[6] His six children and some hired women
assisted in the work. In 1685 Joseph, the son of Roger Williams, entered
in an account book now extant,[7] a credit to "Sarah badkuk [Babcock],
for weven and coaming wisted." This work was, however, chiefly in the
hands of men.
The records of Pepperell, Mass., show that many women saved their pin
money, and sent out little ventures in the ships built at home and
sailing to all ports with fish. These ventures included articles of
clothing, embroideries, and anything that it seemed might be made to
yield some return. There were also women of affairs, some of whom took
charge of large industries. Thus Weeden, in his "Economic and Social
History of New England," quotes from an interesting memorandum left by
Madam Martha Smith, a widow of St. George's Manor, Long Island,[8] which
shows her practical ability. In January, 1707, "my company" killed a
yearling whale, and made twenty-seven barrels of oil. The record gives
her success for the year, and the tax she paid to the authorities at New
York,--fifteen pounds and fifteen shillings, a twentieth part of her
year's gains.
Other women oversaw the curing of the fish; but there is no record of
the wage beyond the general one which for the earliest days of the
colony gives rates for women as from four to eight pence a day without
food. These rates followed almost literally those of England at that
time. Half of the day's earnings were accounted an equivalent for diet,
and contractors for feeding gangs in agriculture, among sailors, or
wherever the system was adopted, allowed seven and one-half pence per
day a head for men and women alike. Women servants received ten
shillings a year wages, and an allowance of four shillings additional
for clothing. The working day still remained as fixed by the law late in
the fifteenth century,--from five A.M. to eight P.M., from March to
September, with half an hour for breakfast, and an hour and a half for
dinner.
These rates gradually altered, but for women hardly at all, the wages
during the eighteenth century ranging from four to six pounds a year.
The colony, however, gave opportunities unknown to the mother country,
and gardening and the cultivation of small vegetables seem to have
fallen much into the hands of women.[9] They had studied the best
methods for hotbeds, and grew early vegetables in these, the first
record of this being in 1759.
Gloves were by this time made at home, buttons covered, and many small
industries conducted, all connected with the manufacture and making up
of clothing. Patriotic spinning occupied many; and the "Boston
News-Letter" has it that often seventy linen-wheels were employed at one
gathering. The agitation caused by the Stamp Act turned the attention of
all women to the production of cloth as a domestic business. Worcester,
Mass., in 1780 formed an association for the spinning and weaving of
cotton, and a jenny was bought by subscription.[10]
Prices by this time had risen, and in 1776 the Andover records mention
that a Miss Holt was paid eighteen shillings for spinning seventy-two
skeins, and seven shillings eleven pence for weaving nineteen yards of
cloth. Women generally could spin two skeins of linen yarn a day; but
there is record of one, a Miss Eleanor Fry of East Greenwich, R.I., who
spun seven skeins and one knot in one day,--an amount sufficient to
make twelve large lawn handkerchiefs such as were then imported from
England.
Within four years another Rhode Island family of Newport are recorded in
1768 as having "manufactured nine hundred and eighty yards of woolen
cloth, besides two coverlids (coverlets), and two bed-ticks, and all the
stocking yarn of the family."
The Council of East Greenwich fixed prices at that time at rates which
seem purely arbitrary and are certainly incomprehensible. Thus for
spinning linen or worsted, five or six skeins to the pound, the price
was not to exceed sixpence per skein of fifteen knots, with finer work
in proportion. Carded woollen yarn was the same per skein. Weaving plain
flannel or tow or linen brought fivepence per yard; common worsted and
linen, one penny a yard; and other linens in like proportion.[11]
Silk growing and weaving had been the result of the silkworm cocoons
sent over by James the First, who offered bounties of money and tobacco
for spun and woven silk according to weight. Three women were famous
before the Revolution as silk growers and weavers,--Mrs. Pinckney, Grace
Fisher, and Susanna Wright; and at all points where the mulberry-tree
was indigenous or could be made to grow, fortune was regarded as
assured. The project failed; but the efforts then made paved the way for
present experiment, and even better success than that already attained.
The manufacture of straw goods, amounting now to many million dollars
yearly, owes its origin to a woman,--Miss Betsey Metcalf, who in 1789,
when hardly more than a child, discovered the secret of bleaching and
braiding the meadow grass of Dedham, her native town. Others were
taught, and a regular business of supplying the want for summer hats and
bonnets was organized, and has grown to its present large proportions.
At this period women widowed by the fortune of war or forced by the
absence of all the male members of the family on the field, were often
found in business. The mother of Thomas Perkins of Salem, one of the
great American merchants, left widowed in 1778, took her husband's place
in the counting-house, managed business, despatched ships, sold
merchandise, wrote letters, all with such commanding energy that the
solid Hollanders wrote to her as to a man.[12] The record of one day's
work of Mary Moody Emerson, born in 1777, reads:--
"Rose before light every morn; read Butler's Analogy; commented on
the Scriptures; read in a little book Cicero's Letters--a few
touches of Shakespeare--washed, carded, cleaned house and
baked."[13]
There is another woman no less busy, a member of the distinguished Nott
family, who did work in her house and helped her boys in the fields. In
midwinter, with neither money nor wool in the house, one of the boys
required a new suit. The mother sheared the half-grown fleece from a
sheep, and in a week had spun, wove, and made it into clothing, the
sheep being protected from cold by a wrappage made of braided straw.
Details like this would be out of place here did they not serve to
accent the fact of the concentration of industries under the home roof,
and the necessity that existed for this. But a change was near at hand,
and it dates from the first bale of cotton grown in the country.
In the early years of the eighteenth century not a manufacturing town
existed in New England, and for the whole country it was much the same.
A few paper-mills turned out paper hardly better in quality than that
which comes to us to-day about our grocery packages. In a foundry or two
iron was melted into pigs or beaten into bars and nails. Cocked hats and
felts were made in one factory. Cotton was hardly known.[14] De Bow, in
his "Industrial Resources of the United States," tells us that a little
had been sent to Liverpool just before the battle of Lexington; but
linen took the place of all cotton fabrics, and was spun at every hearth
in New England.