THE WOMEN WHO WORK IN EUROPE
Several times during my stay in London I observed, standing on a corner
in one of the most crowded parts of the city, a young woman selling
papers. There are a good many women, young and old, who sell papers in
London, but any one could see at a glance that this girl was different.
There was something in her voice and manner which impressed me, because
it seemed to be at once timid, ingratiating, and a little insolent, if
that is not too strong a word. This young woman was, as I soon learned,
a Suffragette, and she was selling newspapers--"Votes for Women."
This was my first meeting with the women insurgents of England. A day
or two later, however, I happened to fall in with a number of these
Suffragette newspaper-sellers. One of them, in a lively and amusing
fashion, was relating the story of the morning's happenings. I could
hardly help hearing what she said, and soon became very much interested
in the conversation. In fact, I soon found myself so entertained
by the bright and witty accounts these young women gave of their
adventures that it was not long before I began to enter with them into
the spirit of their crusade and to realize for the first time in my
life what a glorious and exciting thing it was to be a Suffragette,
and, I might add, what a lot of fun these young women were having out
of it.
It had not occurred to me, when I set out from America to make the
acquaintance of the man farthest down, that I should find myself in any
way concerned with the woman problem. I had not been in London more
than a few days, however, before I discovered that the woman who is
at the bottom in London life is just as interesting as the man in the
same level of life, and perhaps a more deserving object of study and
observation.
In a certain way all that I saw of the condition of woman at the bottom
connected itself in my mind with the agitation that is going on with
regard to woman at the top.
Except in England, the women's movement has not, so far as I was able
to learn, penetrated to any extent into the lower strata of life, and
that strikes me as one of the interesting facts about the movement. It
shows to what extent the interests, hopes, and ambitions of modern life
have, or rather have not, entered into and become a force in the lives
of the people at the bottom.
Thus it came about that my interest in all that I saw of workingwomen
in Europe was tinged with the thought of what was going to happen when
the present agitation for the emancipation and the wider freedom of
women generally should reach and influence the women farthest down.
In my journey through Europe I was interested, in each of the different
countries I visited, in certain definite and characteristic things.
In London, for example, it was some of the destructive effects of a
highly organized and complicated city life, and the methods which the
Government and organized philanthropy have employed to correct them,
that attracted my attention. Elsewhere it was chiefly the condition of
the agricultural populations that interested me. In all my observation
and study, however, I found that the facts which I have learned about
the condition of women tended to set themselves off and assume a
special importance in my mind. It is for that reason that I propose to
give, as well as I am able, a connected account of them at this point.
What impressed me particularly in London were the extent and effects
of the drinking habit among women of the lower classes. Until I went
to London I do not believe that I had more than once or twice in my
life seen women standing side by side with the men in order to drink
at a public bar. One of the first things I noticed in London was the
number of drunken, loafing women that one passed in the streets of
the poorer quarters. More than once I ran across these drunken and
besotted creatures, with red, blotched faces, which told of years of
steady excess--ragged, dirty, and disorderly in their clothing--leaning
tipsily against the outside of a gin-parlour or sleeping peacefully on
the pavement of an alleyway.
In certain parts of London the bar-room seems to be the general meeting
place of men and women alike. There, in the evening, neighbours gather
and gossip while they drink their black, bitter beer. It is against the
law for parents to take their children into the bar-rooms, but I have
frequently observed women standing about the door of the tap-room with
their babies in their arms, leisurely chatting while they sipped their
beer. In such cases they frequently give the lees of their glass to the
children to drink.
In America we usually think of a bar-room as a sort of men's club, and,
if women go into such a place at all, they are let in surreptitiously
at the "family entrance." Among the poorer classes in England the
bar-room is quite as much the woman's club as it is the man's. The
light, the warmth, and the free and friendly gossip of these places
make them attractive, too, and I can understand that the people in
these densely populated quarters of the city, many of them living in
one or two crowded little rooms, should be drawn to these places by the
desire for a little human comfort and social intercourse.
In this respect the bar-rooms in the poorer parts of London are like
the beer halls that one meets on the Continent. There is, however, this
difference--that the effect of drink upon the people of England seems
to be more destructive than it is in the case of the people on the
Continent. It is not that the English people as a whole consume more
intoxicating drink than the people elsewhere, because the statistics
show that Denmark leads the rest of Europe in the amount of spirits,
just as Belgium leads in the amount of beer, consumed per capita of the
population. One trouble seems to be that, under the English industrial
system, the people take greater chances, they are subject to greater
stress and strain, and this leads to irregularities and to excessive
drinking.
While I was in Vienna I went out one Sunday evening to the Prater, the
great public park, which seems to be a sort of combination of Central
Park, New York, and Coney Island. In this park one may see all types of
Austrian life, from the highest to the lowest. Sunday seems, however,
to be the day of the common people, and the night I visited the place
there were, in addition to the ordinary labouring people of the city,
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of peasant people from the country there.
They were mostly young men and women who had evidently come into the
city for the Sunday holiday. Beside the sober, modern dress of the city
crowds these peasant women, with their high boots, the bright-coloured
kerchiefs over their heads, and their wide, flaring, voluminous skirts
(something like those of a female circus-rider, only a little longer
and not so gauzy), made a strange and picturesque appearance.
Meanwhile there was a great flare of music of a certain sort; and a
multitude of catchpenny shows, mountebanks, music halls, theatres,
merry-go-rounds, and dancing pavilions gave the place the appearance
of a stupendous county fair. I do not think that I ever saw anywhere,
except at a picnic or a barbecue among the Negroes of the Southern
States, people who gave themselves up so frankly and with such entire
zest to this simple, physical sort of enjoyment. Everywhere there were
eating, drinking, and dancing, but nevertheless I saw no disorder;
very few people seemed to be the worse for drinking, and in no instance
did I see people who showed, in the disorder of their dress or in the
blotched appearance of their faces, the effects of continued excesses,
such as one sees in so many parts of London. Individuals were, for the
most part, neatly and cleanly dressed; each class of people seemed to
have its own place of amusement and its own code of manners, and every
one seemed to keep easily and naturally within the restraints which
custom prescribed.
I do not mean to say that I approve of this way of spending the
Sabbath. I simply desire to point out the fact, which others have
noticed, that the effect of the drinking habit seems to be quite
different in England from what it is in countries on the Continent.
I had an opportunity to observe the evil effects of the drinking habit
upon the Englishwomen of the lower classes when I visited some of
the police courts in the poorer parts of London. When I remarked to
a newspaper acquaintance in London that I wanted to see as much as I
could, while I was in the city, of the life of the poorer people, he
advised me to visit the Worship Street and Thames police stations. The
Worship Street station is situated in one of the most crowded parts
of London, in close proximity to Bethnal Green and Spitalfields, which
have for many years been the homes of the poorer working classes, and
especially of those poor people known as houseworkers and casuals, who
live in garrets and make paper boxes, artificial flowers, etc., or pick
up such odd jobs as they can find. The Thames station is situated a
little way from London Dock and not far from the notorious Ratcliffe
Highway, which until a few years ago was the roughest and most
dangerous part of London.
Perhaps I ought to say, at the outset, that two things in regard to
the London police courts especially impressed me: first, the order
and dignity with which the court is conducted; second, the care with
which the judge inquires into all the facts of every case he tries,
the anxiety which he shows to secure the rights of the defendant, and
the leniency with which those found guilty are treated. In many cases,
particularly those in which men or women were charged with drunkenness,
the prisoners were allowed to go with little more than a mild and
fatherly reprimand.
After listening for several hours to the various cases that came up
for hearing, I could well understand that the police have sometimes
complained that their efforts to put down crime were not supported by
the magistrates, who, they say, always take the side of the culprits.
In this connection I might mention a statement which I ran across
recently of a man who had served at one time as a magistrate in both
the Worship Street and Thames police courts. He said that there was a
great deal of drunkenness among certain of the factory girls of East
London, although they were seldom arrested and brought into court for
that offence.
He added: "It must not be forgotten that the number of convictions
for drunkenness is not by any means a proper measure of insobriety.
If a policeman sees a drunken man conducting himself quietly or
sleeping in a doorway, he passes on and takes no notice. Those who
are convicted belong, as a rule, to the disorderly classes, who, the
moment liquor rises to their heads, manifest their natural propensities
by obstreperous and riotous conduct. For one drunkard of this order
there must be fifty who behave quietly and always manage to reach their
homes, however zigzag may be their journey thither."
That statement was made a number of years ago, but I am convinced that
it holds good now, because I noticed that most of the persons arrested
and brought into court, especially women, were bloodstained and badly
battered.
In the majority of these cases, as I have said, the persons were
allowed to go with a reprimand or a small fine. The only case in which,
it seemed to me, the judge showed a disposition to be severe was in
that of a poor woman who was accused of begging. She was a pale,
emaciated, and entirely wretched appearing little woman, and the charge
against her was that of going through the streets, leading one of her
children by the hand, and asking for alms because she and her children
were starving. I learned from talking with the officer who investigated
the case that the statement she made was very likely true. He had known
her for some time, and she was in a very sad condition. But then, it
seems, the law required that in such circumstances she should have gone
to the workhouse.
I think that there were as many as fifteen or twenty women brought into
court on each of the mornings I visited the court. Most of them were
arrested for quarrelling and fighting, and nearly all of them showed in
their bloated faces and in their disorderly appearance that steady and
besotted drunkenness was at the bottom of their trouble.
I have found since I returned from Europe that the extent of
drunkenness among Englishwomen has frequently been a matter of
observation and comment. Richard Grant White, in his volume "England
Within and Without," says:
I was struck with horror at the besotted condition of so many
of the women--women who were bearing children every year, and
suckling them, and who seemed to me little better than foul human
stills through which the accursed liquor with which they were
soaked filtered drop by drop into the little drunkards at their
breasts. To these children drunkenness comes unconsciously, like
their mother tongue. They cannot remember a time when it was
new to them. They come out of the cloudland of infancy with the
impression that drunkenness is one of the normal conditions of
man, like hunger and sleep.
This was written thirty years ago. It is said that conditions
have greatly improved in recent years in respect to the amount of
drunkenness among the poor of London. Nevertheless, I notice in the
last volume of the "Annual Charities Register" for London the statement
that inebriety seems to be increasing among women, and that it prevails
to such an alarming extent among women in all ranks of society that
"national action is becoming essential for the nation's very existence."
The statistics of London crime show that, while only about half as many
women as men are arrested on the charges of "simple drunkenness" and
"drunkenness with aggravations," more than three times as many women as
men are arrested on the charge of "habitual" drunkenness. Another thing
that impressed me was that the American police courts deal much more
severely with women. This is certainly true in the Southern States,
where almost all the women brought before the police courts are Negroes.
The class of people to whom I have referred represent, as a matter
of course, the lowest and most degraded among the working classes.
Nevertheless, they represent a very large element in the population,
and the very existence of this hopeless class, which constitutes the
dregs of life in the large cities, is an indication of the hardship and
bitterness of the struggle for existence in the classes above them.
I have attempted in what I have already said to indicate the situation
of the women at the bottom in the complex life of the largest and, if
I may say so, the most civilized city in the world, where women are
just now clamouring for all the rights and privileges of men. But there
are parts of Europe where, as far as I have been able to learn, women
have as yet never heard that they had any rights or interests in life
separate and distinct from those of their husbands and children. I have
already referred to the increasing number of barefoot women I met as I
journeyed southward from Berlin. At first these were for the most part
women who worked in the fields. But by the time I reached Vienna I
found that it was no uncommon thing to meet barefoot women in the most
crowded and fashionable parts of the city.
Experience in travelling had taught me that the wearing of shoes is a
pretty accurate indication of civilization. The fact that in a large
part of southern Europe women who come from the country districts have
not yet reached the point where they feel comfortable in shoes is an
indication of the backwardness of the people.
What interested and surprised me more than the increasing absence of
shoes among the countrywomen was the increasing number of women whom I
saw engaged in rough and unskilled labour of every kind. I had never
seen Negro women doing the sort of work I saw the women of southern
Europe doing. When I reached Prague, for example, I noticed a load of
coal going through the streets. A man was driving it, but women were
standing up behind with shovels. I learned then that it was the custom
to employ women to load and unload the coal and carry it into the
houses. The driving and the shovelling were done by the man, but the
dirtiest and the hardest part of the work was performed by the women.
In Vienna I saw hundreds of women at work as helpers in the
construction of buildings; they mixed the mortar, loaded it in tubs,
placed it on their heads, and carried it up two or three stories to men
at work on the walls. The women who engage in this sort of labour wear
little round mats on their heads, which support the burdens which they
carry. Some of these women are still young, simply grown girls, fresh
from the country, but the majority of them looked like old women.
Not infrequently I ran across women hauling carts through the streets.
Sometimes there would be a dog harnessed to the cart beside them. That,
for example, is the way in which the countrywomen sometimes bring their
garden truck to market. More often, however, they will be seen bringing
their garden products to market in big baskets on their heads or swung
over their shoulders. I remember, while I was in Budapest, that, in
returning to my hotel rather late one night, I passed through an open
square near the market, where there were hundreds of these market women
asleep on the sidewalks or in the street. Some of them had thrown down
a truss of straw on the pavement under their wagons and gone to sleep
there. Others, who had brought their produce into town from the country
on their backs, had in many cases merely put their baskets on the
sidewalk, lain down, thrown a portion of their skirts up over their
heads, and gone to sleep. At this hour the city was still wide awake.
From a nearby beer hall there came the sounds of music and occasional
shouts of laughter. Meanwhile people were passing and repassing in the
street and on the sidewalk, but they paid no more attention to these
sleeping women than they would if they had been horses or cows.
In other parts of Austria-Hungary I ran across women engaged in
various sorts of rough and unskilled labour. While I was in Cracow,
in Austrian Poland, I saw women at work in the stone quarries. The
men were blasting out the rock, but the women were assisting them in
removing the earth and in loading the wagons. At the same time I saw
women working in brickyards. The men made the brick, the women acted
as helpers. While I was in Cracow one of the most interesting places
I visited in which women are employed was a cement factory. The man
in charge was kind enough to permit me to go through the works, and
explained the process of crushing and burning the stone used in the
manufacture of cement. A large part of the rough work in this cement
factory is done by girls. The work of loading the kilns is performed
by them. Very stolid, heavy, and dirty-looking creatures they were.
They had none of the freshness and health that I noticed so frequently
among the girls at work in the fields.
While I was studying the different kinds of work which women are doing
in Austria-Hungary I was reminded of the complaint that I had heard
sometimes from women in America, that they were denied their rights
in respect to labour, that men in America wanted to keep women in the
house, tied down to household duties.
In southern Europe, at any rate, there does not seem to be any
disposition to keep women tied up in the houses. Apparently they are
permitted to do any kind of labour that men are permitted to do; and
they do, in fact, perform a great many kinds of labour that we in
America think fit only for men. I noticed, moreover, as a rule, that
it was only the rough, unskilled labour which was allotted to them.
If women worked in the stone quarries, men did the part of the work
that required skill. Men used the tools, did the work of blasting the
rock. If women worked on the buildings, they did only the roughest and
cheapest kinds of work. I did not see any women laying brick, nor did I
see anywhere women carpenters or stone-masons.
In America Negro women and children are employed very largely at
harvest time in the cotton-fields, but I never saw in America, as I
have seen in Austria, women employed as section hands on a railway, or
digging sewers, hauling coal, carrying the hod, or doing the rough work
in brickyards, kilns, and cement factories.
In the Southern States of America the lowest form of unskilled labour
is that of the men who are employed on what is known as public
works--that is to say, the digging of sewers, building of railways,
and so forth. I was greatly surprised, while I was in Vienna, to see
women engaged side by side with men in digging a sewer. This was such a
novel sight to me that I stopped to watch these women handle the pick
and shovel. They were, for the most part, young women, of that heavy,
stolid type I have referred to. I watched them for some time, and I
could not see but that they did their work as rapidly and as easily as
the men beside them. After this I came to the conclusion that there was
not anything a man could do which a woman could not do also.
In Poland the women apparently do most of the work on the farms. Many
of the men have gone to Vienna to seek their fortune. Many, also, have
gone to the cities, and still others are in the army, because on the
Continent every able-bodied man must serve in the army. The result is
that more and more of the work that was formerly performed by men is
now done by women.
One of the most interesting sights I met in Europe was the market in
Cracow. This market is a large open square in the very centre of the
ancient city. In this square is situated the ancient Cloth Hall, a
magnificent old building, which dates back to the Middle Ages, when
it was used as a place for the exhibition of merchandise, principally
textiles of various kinds. On the four sides of this square are some of
the principal buildings of the city, including the City Hall and the
Church of the Virgin Mary, from the tall tower of which the hours are
sounded by the melodious notes of a bugle.
On market days this whole square is crowded with hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of market women, who come in from the country in the early
morning with their produce, remain until it is sold, and then return to
their homes.
In this market one may see offered for sale anything and everything
that the peasant people produce in their homes or on the farms. Among
other things for sale I noted the following: geese, chickens, bread,
cheese, potatoes, salads, fruits of various sorts, mushrooms, baskets,
toys, milk, and butter.
What interested me as much as anything was to observe that nearly
everything that was sold in this market was carried into the city on
the backs of the women. Practically, I think, one may say that the
whole city of Cracow, with a population of 90,000 persons, is fed on
the provisions that the peasant women carry into the city, some of them
travelling as far as ten or fifteen miles daily.
One day, while driving in the market of Cracow, our carriage came up
with a vigorous young peasant woman who was tramping, barefoot, briskly
along the highway with a bundle swung on her shoulder. In this bundle,
I noticed, she carried a milk-can. We stopped, and the driver spoke
to her in Polish and then translated to my companion, Doctor Park, in
German. At first the woman seemed apprehensive and afraid. As soon as
we told her we were from America, however, her face lighted up and she
seemed very glad to answer all my questions.
I learned that she was a widow, the owner of a little farm with two
cows. She lived something like fourteen kilometres (about ten miles)
from the city, and every day she came into town to dispose of the milk
she had from her two cows. She did not walk all the way, but rode half
the distance in the train, and walked the other half. She owned a
horse, she said, but the horse was at work on the farm, and she could
not afford to use him to drive to town. In order to take care of and
milk her cows and reach the city early enough to deliver her milk she
had to get up very early in the morning, so that she generally got back
home about ten or eleven o'clock. Then, in the afternoon, she took care
of the house and worked in the garden. This is a pretty good example, I
suspect, of the way some of these peasant women work.
All day long one sees these women, with their bright-coloured peasant
costumes, coming and going through the streets of Cracow with their
baskets on their backs. Many of them are barefoot, but most of them
wear very high leather boots, which differ from those I have seen worn
by peasant women in other parts of Austria and Hungary in the fact that
they have very small heels.
I had an opportunity to see a great many types of women in the course
of my journey across Europe, but I saw none who looked so handsome,
fresh, and vigorous as these Polish peasant women.
It is said of the Polish women, as it is said of the women of the
Slavic races generally, that they are still living in the mental and
physical slavery of former ages. Probably very few of them have ever
heard of women's rights. But, if that is true, it simply shows how
very little connection such abstract words have with the condition,
welfare, and happiness of the people who enjoy the freedom and
independence of country life. At any rate, I venture to say that there
are very few women, even in the higher ranks of labouring women in
England, whose condition in life compares with that of these vigorous,
wholesome, and healthy peasant women.
How can work in the stifling atmosphere of a factory or in some crowded
city garret compare with the life which these women lead, working in
the fields and living in the free and open country?
The emigration to America has left an enormous surplus of women in
Europe. In England, for instance, the women stand in the proportion of
sixteen to fifteen to the men. In some parts of Italy there are cities,
it is said, where all the able-bodied men have left the country and
gone to America. The changes brought by emigration have not, on the
whole, it seems to me, affected the life of women favourably. But the
same thing is true with regard to the changes brought about by the
growth of cities and the use of machinery. Men have profited by the use
of machinery more than women. The machines have taken away from the
women the occupations they had in the homes, and this has driven them
to take up other forms of labour, of more or less temporary character,
in which they are overworked and underpaid.
Everywhere we find the women in Europe either doing the obsolete things
or performing some form of unskilled labour. For example, there are
still one hundred thousand people, mostly women, in East London, it
is said, who are engaged in home industries--in other words, sweating
their lives away in crowded garrets trying to compete with machinery
and organization in the making of clothes or artificial flowers, and in
other kinds of work of this same general description.
The movement for women's suffrage in England, which began in the upper
classes among the women of the West End, has got down, to some extent,
to the lower levels among the women who work with the hands. Women's
suffrage meetings have been held, I have learned, in Bethnal Green and
Whitechapel. But I do not believe that voting alone will improve the
condition of workingwomen.
There must be a new distribution of the occupations. Too many women in
Europe are performing a kind of labour for which they are not naturally
fitted and for which they have had no special training. There are too
many women in the ranks of unskilled labour. My own conviction is
that what the workingwomen of Europe need most is a kind of education
that will lift a larger number of them into the ranks of skilled
labour--that will teach them to do something, and to do that something
well.
The Negro women in America have a great advantage in this respect.
They are everywhere admitted to the same schools to which the men are
admitted. All the Negro colleges are crowded with women. They are
admitted to the industrial schools and to training in the different
trades on the same terms as men. One of the chief practical results of
the agitation for the suffrage in Europe will be, I imagine, to turn
the attention of the women in the upper classes to the needs of the
women in the lower classes. In Europe there is much work for women
among their own sex, for, as I have said elsewhere, in Europe the man
farthest down is woman.