UTILIZATION OF WOMEN IN CITY GOVERNMENT
We are told many times that the industrial city is a new thing upon the
face of the earth, and that everywhere its growth has been phenomenal,
whether we look at Moscow, Berlin, Paris, New York, or Chicago. With or
without the mediaeval foundation, modern cities are merely resultants
of the vast crowds of people who have collected at certain points which
have become manufacturing and distributing centres.
For all political purposes, however, the industrial origin of the city
is entirely ignored, and political life is organized exclusively in
relation to its earlier foundations.
As the city itself originated for the common protection of the people
and was built about a suitable centre of defense which formed a
citadel, such as the Acropolis at Athens or the Kremlin at Moscow,
so we can trace the beginning of the municipal franchise to the time
when the problems of municipal government were still largely those of
protecting the city against rebellion from within and against invasion
from without. A voice in city government, as it was extended from the
nobles, who alone bore arms, was naturally given solely to those who
were valuable to the military system. There was a certain logic in
giving the franchise only to grown men when the existence and stability
of the city depended upon their defence, and when the ultimate value
of the elector could be reduced to his ability to perform military
duty. It was fair that only those who were liable to a sudden call to
arms should be selected to decide as to the relations which the city
should bear to rival cities, and that the vote for war should be cast
by the same men who would bear the brunt of battle and the burden of
protection. We are told by historians that the citizens were first
called together in those assemblages which were the beginning of
popular government, only if a war was to be declared or an expedition
to be undertaken.
But rival cities have long since ceased to settle their claims by force
of arms, and we shall have to admit, I think, that this early test of
the elector is no longer fitted to the modern city, whatever may be
true, in the last analysis, of the basis for the Federal Government.
It has been well said that the modern city is a stronghold of
industrialism, quite as the feudal city was a stronghold of militarism,
but the modern city fears no enemies, and rivals from without and
its problems of government are solely internal. Affairs for the most
part are going badly in these great new centres in which the quickly
congregated population has not yet learned to arrange its affairs
satisfactorily. Insanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated
water, infant mortality, the spread of contagion, adulterated food,
impure milk, smoke-laden air, ill-ventilated factories, dangerous
occupations, juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding, prostitution,
and drunkenness are the enemies which the modern city must face and
overcome would it survive. Logically, its electorate should be made up
of those who can bear a valiant part in this arduous contest, of those
who in the past have at least attempted to care for children, to clean
houses, to prepare foods, to isolate the family from moral dangers, of
those who have traditionally taken care of that side of life which, as
soon as the population is congested, inevitably becomes the subject of
municipal consideration and control.
To test the elector’s fitness to deal with this situation by his
ability to bear arms, is absurd. A city is in many respects a
great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged
housekeeping. If American cities have failed in the first, partly
because office holders have carried with them the predatory instinct
learned in competitive business, and cannot help “working a good thing”
when they have an opportunity, may we not say that city housekeeping
has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have
not been consulted as to its multiform activities? The men of the city
have been carelessly indifferent to much of this civic housekeeping, as
they have always been indifferent to the details of the household. They
have totally disregarded a candidate’s capacity to keep the streets
clean, preferring to consider him in relation to the national tariff or
to the necessity for increasing the national navy, in a pure spirit of
reversion to the traditional type of government which had to do only
with enemies and outsiders.
It is difficult to see what military prowess has to do with the
multiform duties, which, in a modern city, include the care of parks
and libraries, superintendence of markets, sewers, and bridges,
the inspection of provisions and boilers, and the proper disposal
of garbage. Military prowess has nothing to do with the building
department which the city maintains to see to it that the basements be
dry, that the bedrooms be large enough to afford the required cubic
feet of air, that the plumbing be sanitary, that the gas-pipes do not
leak, that the tenement-house court be large enough to afford light
and ventilation, and that the stairways be fireproof. The ability to
carry arms has nothing to do with the health department maintained by
the city, which provides that children be vaccinated, that contagious
diseases be isolated and placarded, that the spread of tuberculosis be
curbed, and that the water be free from typhoid infection. Certainly
the military conception of society is remote from the functions of the
school boards, whose concern it is that children be educated, that they
be supplied with kindergartens and be given a decent place in which to
play. The very multifariousness and complexity of a city government
demands the help of minds accustomed to detail and variety of work, to
a sense of obligation for the health and welfare of young children, and
to a responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of others.
Because all these things have traditionally been in the hands of
women, if they take no part in them now, they are not only missing the
education which the natural participation in civic life would bring to
them, but they are losing what they have always had. From the beginning
of tribal life women have been held responsible for the health of
the community, a function which is now represented by the health
department; from the days of the cave dwellers, so far as the home
was clean and wholesome, it was due to their efforts, which are now
represented by the bureau of tenement-house inspection; from the period
of the primitive village, the only public sweeping performed was what
they undertook in their own dooryards, that which is now represented by
the bureau of street cleaning. Most of the departments in a modern city
can be traced to woman’s traditional activity, but in spite of this,
so soon as these old affairs were turned over to the care of the city,
they slipped from woman’s hands, apparently because they then became
matters for collective action and implied the use of the franchise.
Because the franchise had in the first instance been given to the man
who could fight, because in the beginning he alone could vote who could
carry a weapon, the franchise was considered an improper thing for a
woman to possess.
Is it quite public spirited for women to say, “We will take care of
these affairs so long as they stay in our own houses, but if they go
outside and concern so many people that they cannot be carried on
without the mechanism of the vote, we will drop them. It is true that
these activities which women have always had, are not at present being
carried on very well by the men in most of the great American cities,
but because we do not consider it ‘ladylike’ to vote shall we ignore
their failure”?
Because women consider the government men’s affair and something
which concerns itself with elections and alarms, they have become so
confused in regard to their traditional business in life, the rearing
of children, that they hear with complacency a statement made by the
Nestor of sanitary reformers, that one-half of the tiny lives which
make up the city’s death rate each year might be saved by a more
thorough application of sanitary science. Because it implies the use of
the suffrage, they do not consider it women’s business to save these
lives. Are we going to lose ourselves in the old circle of convention
and add to that sum of wrong-doing which is continually committed
in the world because we do not look at things as they really are?
Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a
snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.
It is so easy to believe that things that used to exist still go
on long after they are passed; it is so easy to commit irreparable
blunders because we fail to correct our theories by our changing
experience. So many of the stumbling-blocks against which we fall are
the opportunities to which we have not adjusted ourselves. Because it
shocks an obsolete ideal, we keep hold of a convention which no longer
squares with our genuine insight, and we are slow to follow a clue
which might enable us to solace and improve the life about us.
Why is it that women do not vote upon the matters which concern them
so intimately? Why do they not follow these vital affairs and feel
responsible for their proper administration, even though they have
become municipalized? What would the result have been could women
have regarded the suffrage, not as a right or a privilege, but as a
mere piece of governmental machinery without which they could not
perform their traditional functions under the changed conditions of
city life? Could we view the whole situation as a matter of obligation
and of normal development, it would be much simplified. We are at the
beginning of a prolonged effort to incorporate a progressive developing
life founded upon a response to the needs of all the people, into the
requisite legal enactments and civic institutions. To be in any measure
successful, this effort will require all the intelligent powers of
observation, all the sympathy, all the common sense which may be gained
from the whole adult population.
The statement is sometimes made that the franchise for women would be
valuable only so far as the educated women exercised it. This statement
totally disregards the fact that those matters in which woman’s
judgment is most needed are far too primitive and basic to be largely
influenced by what we call education. The sanitary condition of all
the factories and workshops, for instance, in which the industrial
processes are at present carried on in great cities, intimately affect
the health and lives of thousands of workingwomen.
It is questionable whether women to-day, in spite of the fact that
there are myriads of them in factories and shops, are doing their
full share of the world’s work in the lines of production which have
always been theirs. Even two centuries ago they did practically all
the spinning, dyeing, weaving, and sewing. They carried on much of the
brewing and baking and thousands of operations which have been pushed
out of the domestic system into the factory system. But simply to keep
on doing the work which their grandmothers did, was to find themselves
surrounded by conditions over which they have no control.
Sometimes when I see dozens of young girls going into the factories of
a certain biscuit company on the West Side of Chicago, they appear for
the moment as a mere cross-section in the long procession of women who
have furnished the breadstuffs from time immemorial, from the savage
woman who ground the meal and baked a flat cake, through innumerable
cottage hearths, kitchens, and bake ovens, to this huge concern in
which they are still carrying on their traditional business. But always
before, during the ages of this unending procession, women themselves
were able to dictate concerning the hours and the immediate conditions
of their work; even grinding the meal and baking the cake in the ashes
was diversified by many other activities. But suddenly, since the
application of steam to the processes of kneading bread and of turning
the spindle, which really means only a different motor power and not
in the least an essential change in her work, she has been denied the
privilege of regulating the conditions which immediately surround her.
In the census of 1900, the section on “Occupations” shows very clearly
in what direction the employment of women has been tending during the
last twenty years. Two striking facts stand out vividly: first, the
increase in the percentage of workingwomen over the percentage of men,
and second, the large percentage of young women between sixteen and
twenty years old in the total number of workingwomen as compared with
the small percentage of young men of the same ages in the total number
of workingmen. Practically one-half of the workingwomen in the United
States are girls--young women under the age of twenty-five years. This
increase in the number of young girls in industry is the more striking
when taken in connection with the fact that industries of to-day differ
most markedly from those of the past in the relentless speed which
they require. This increase in speed is as marked in the depths of
sweat-shop labor as in the most advanced New England mills, where the
eight looms operated by each worker have increased to twelve, fourteen,
and even sixteen looms. This speed, of course, brings a new strain into
industry and tends inevitably to nervous exhaustion. Machines may be
revolved more and more swiftly, but the girl workers have no increase
in vitality responding to the heightened pressure. An ampler and more
far-reaching protection than now exists, is needed in order to care
for the health and safety of women in industry. Their youth, their
helplessness, their increasing numbers, the conditions under which
they are employed, all call for uniform and enforceable statutes. The
elaborate regulations of dangerous trades, enacted in England and on
the Continent for both adults and children, find no parallel in the
United States. The injurious effects of employments involving the use
of poisons, acids, gases, atmospheric extremes, or other dangerous
processes, still await adequate investigation and legislation in this
country. How shall this take place, save by the concerted efforts of
the women themselves, those who are employed, and those other women who
are intelligent as to the worker’s needs and who possess a conscience
in regard to industrial affairs?
It is legitimate and necessary that women should make a study of
certain trades and occupations. The production of sweated goods,
from the human point of view, is not production at all, but waste.
If the employer takes from the workers week by week more than his
wages restore to them, he gradually reduces them to the state of
industrial parasites. The wages of the sweated worker are either being
supplemented by the wages of relatives and the gifts of charitable
associations, or else her standard of living is so low that she is
continually losing her vitality and tending to become a charge upon the
community in a hospital or a poorhouse.[15]
Yet even the sweat-shops, in which woman carries on her old business
of making clothing, had to be redeemed, so far as they have been
redeemed, by the votes of men who passed an anti-sweat-shop law; by
the city fathers, who, after much pleading, were induced to order
an inspection of sweat-shops that they might be made to comply with
sanitary regulations. Women directly controlled the surroundings of
their work as long as their arrangements were domestic, but they
cannot do this now unless they have the franchise, as yet the only
mechanism devised by which a city selects its representative and by
which a number of persons are able to embody their collective will in
legislation. For a hundred years England has been legislating upon
the subject of insanitary workshops, long and exhausting hours of
work, night work for women, occupations in which pregnant women may
be employed, and hundreds of other restrictions which we are only
beginning to consider objects of legislation here.
So far as women have been able, in Chicago at least, to help the
poorest workers in the sweat-shops, it has been accomplished by women
organized into trades unions. The organization of Special Order Tailors
found that it was comparatively simple for an employer to give the
skilled operatives in a clothing factory more money by taking it away
from the wages of the seam-sewer and button-holer. The fact that it
resulted in one set of workers being helped at the expense of another
set did not appeal to him, so long as he was satisfying the demand of
the union without increasing the total cost of production. But the
Special Order Tailors, at the sacrifice of their own wages and growth,
made a determined effort to include even the sweat-shop workers in the
benefits they had slowly secured for themselves. By means of the use
of the label they were finally able to insist that no goods should be
given out for home-finishing save to women presenting union cards, and
they raised the wages from nine and eleven cents a dozen for finishing
garments, to the minimum wage of fifteen cents. They also made a
protest against the excessive subdivision of the labor upon garments, a
practice which enables the manufacturer to use children and the least
skilled adults. Thirty-two persons are commonly employed upon a single
coat, and it is the purpose of the Special Order Tailors to have all
the machine work performed by one worker, thus reducing the number
working on one coat to twelve or fourteen. As this change will at the
same time demand more skill on the part of the operator, and will
increase the variety and interest in his work, these garment-makers
are sacrificing both time and money for the defence of Ruskinian
principles--one of the few actual attempts to recover the “joy of
work.” Although the attempt was, of course, mixed with a desire to
preserve a trade from the invasion of the unskilled, and a consequent
lowering of wages, it also represented a genuine effort to preserve to
the poorest worker some interest and value in the work itself. It is
most unfair, however, to put this task upon the trades unionists and to
so confuse it with their other efforts that it, too, becomes a cause
of warfare. The poorest women are often but uncomprehending victims of
this labor movement of which they understand so little, and which has
become so much a matter of battle that helpless individuals are lost in
the conflict.
A complicated situation occurs to me in illustration. A woman from
the Hull-House Day Nursery came to me two years ago asking to borrow
twenty-five dollars, a sum her union had imposed as a fine. She gave
such an incoherent account of her plight that it was evident that
she did not in the least understand what it was all about. A little
investigation disclosed the following facts: The “Nursery Mother,”
as I here call her for purposes of identification, had worked for a
long time in an unorganized overall factory, where the proprietor,
dealing as he did in goods purchased exclusively by workingmen, found
it increasingly difficult to sell his overalls because they did not
bear the union label. He finally made a request to the union that the
employees in his factory be organized. This was done, he was given the
use of the label, and upon this basis he prospered for several months.
Whether the organizer was “fixed” or not, the investigation did
not make clear; for, although the “Nursery Mother,” with her
fellow-workers, had paid their union dues regularly, the employer was
not compelled to pay the union scale of wages, but continued to pay
the same wages as before. At the end of three months his employees
discovered that they were not being paid the union scale, and demanded
that their wages be raised to that amount. The employer, in the
meantime having extensively advertised his use of the label, concluded
that his purpose had been served, and that he no longer needed the
union. He refused, therefore, to pay the union scale, and a strike
ensued. The “Nursery Mother” went out with the rest, and within a few
days found work in another shop, a union shop doing a lower grade of
manufacturing. At that time there was no uniform scale in the garment
trades, and although a trade unionist working for union wages, she
received lower wages than she had under the non-union conditions in
the overall factory. She was naturally much confused and, following
her instinct to get the best wages possible, she went back to her
old place. Affairs ran smoothly for a few weeks, until the employer
discovered that he was again losing trade because his goods lacked
the label, whereupon he once more applied to have his shop unionized.
The organizer, coming back, promptly discovered the recreant “Nursery
Mother,” and, much to her bewilderment, she was fined twenty-five
dollars. She understood nothing clearly, nor could she, indeed, be made
to understand so long as she was in the midst of this petty warfare.
Her labor was a mere method of earning money quite detached from her
European experience, and failed to make for her the remotest connection
with the community whose genuine needs she was supplying. No effort
had been made to show her the cultural aspect of her work, to give her
even the feeblest understanding of the fact that she was supplying a
genuine need of the community, and that she was entitled to respect
and a legitimate industrial position. It would have been necessary to
make such an effort from the historic standpoint, and this could be
undertaken only by the community as a whole and not by any one class in
it. Protective legislation would be but the first step toward making
her a more valuable producer and a more intelligent citizen. The whole
effort would imply a closer connection between industry and government,
and could be accomplished intelligently only if women were permitted to
exercise the franchise.
A certain healing and correction would doubtless ensue could we but
secure for the protection and education of industrial workers that
nurture of health and morals which women have so long reserved for
their own families and which has never been utilized as a directing
force in industrial affairs.
When the family constituted the industrial organism of the day, the
daughters of the household were carefully taught in reference to the
place they would take in that organism, but as the household arts have
gone outside the home, almost nothing has been done to connect the
young women with the present great industrial system. This neglect has
been equally true in regard to the technical and cultural sides of that
system.
The failure to fit the education of women to the actual industrial
life which is carried on about them has had disastrous results in two
directions. First, industry itself has lacked the modification which
women might have brought to it had they committed the entire movement
to that growing concern for a larger and more satisfying life for each
member of the community, a concern which we have come to regard as
legitimate. Second, the more prosperous women would have been able to
understand and adjust their own difficulties of household management in
relation to the producer of factory products, as they are now utterly
unable to do.
As the census of 1900 showed that more than half of the women
employed in “gainful occupations” in the United States are engaged
in households, certainly their conditions of labor lie largely in
the hands of women employers. At a conference held at Lake Placid by
employers of household labor, it was contended that future historical
review may show that the girls who are to-day in domestic service
are the really progressive women of the age; that they are those
who are fighting conditions which limit their freedom, and although
they are doing it blindly, at least they are demanding avenues of
self-expression outside their work; and that this struggle from
conditions detrimental to their highest life is the ever-recurring
story of the emancipation of first one class and then another. It was
further contended that in this effort to become sufficiently educated
to be able to understand the needs of an educated employer from an
independent standpoint, they are really doing the community a great
service, and did they but receive co-operation instead of opposition,
domestic service would lose its social ostracism and attract a more
intelligent class of women. And yet this effort, perfectly reasonable
from the standpoint of historic development and democratic tradition,
receives little help from the employing housekeepers, because they know
nothing of industrial development.
The situation could be understood only by viewing it, first, in the
relation to recent immigration and, second, in connection with the
factory system at the present stage of development in America. A review
of the history of domestic service in a fairly prosperous American
family begins with the colonial period, when the daughters of the
neighboring farmers came in to “help” during the busy season. This was
followed by the Irish immigrant, when almost every kitchen had its Nora
or Bridget, while the mistress of the household retained the sweeping
and dusting and the Saturday baking. Then came the halcyon days of
German “second girls” and cooks, followed by the Swedes. The successive
waves of immigration supply the demand for domestic service, gradually
obliterating the fact that as the women became more familiar with
American customs, they as well as their men folk, entered into more
skilled and lucrative positions.
In these last years immigration consists in ever-increasing numbers
of South Italians and of Russian, Polish, and Rumanian Jews, none of
whom have to any appreciable extent entered into domestic service. The
Italian girls are married between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, and
to live in any house in town other than that of her father seems to an
Italian girl quite incomprehensible. The strength of the family tie,
the need for “kosher” foods, the celebration of religious festivities,
the readiness with which she takes up the sewing trades in which her
father and brother are already largely engaged, makes domestic service
a rare occupation for the daughters of the recent Jewish immigrants.
Moreover, these two classes of immigrants have been quickly absorbed,
as, indeed, all working people are, by the increasing demand for the
labor of young girls and children in factory and workshops. The paucity
of the material for domestic service is therefore revealed at last, and
we are obliged to consider the material for domestic service which a
democracy supplies, and also to realize that the administration of the
household has suffered because it has become unnaturally isolated from
the rest of the community.
The problems of food and shelter for the family, at any given
moment, must be considered in relation to all the other mechanical
and industrial life of that moment, quite as the intellectual life
of the family finally depends for its vitality upon its relation to
the intellectual resources of the rest of the community. When the
administrator of the household deliberately refuses to avail herself
of the wonderful inventions going on all about her, she soon comes
to the point of priding herself upon the fact that her household is
administered according to traditional lines and of believing that the
moral life of the family is so enwrapped in these old customs as to
be endangered by any radical change. Because of this attitude on the
part of contemporary housekeepers, the household has firmly withstood
the beneficent changes and healing innovations which applied science
and economics would long ago have brought about could they have worked
naturally and unimpeded.
These moral and economic difficulties, whether connected with the
isolation of the home or with the partial and unsatisfactory efforts
of trades unions, could be avoided only if society would frankly
recognize the industrial situation as that which concerns us all,
and would seriously prepare all classes of the community for their
relation to the situation. A technical preparation would, of course,
not be feasible, but a cultural one would be possible, so that all
parts of the community might be intelligent in regard to the industrial
developments and transitions going on about them. If American women
could but obtain a liberating knowledge of that history of industry
and commerce which is so similar in every country of the globe, the
fact that so much factory labor is performed by immigrants would
help to bring them nearer to the immigrant woman. Equipped with “the
informing mind” on the one hand and with experience on the other, we
could then walk together through the marvelous streets of the human
city, no longer conscious whether we are natives or aliens, because
we have become absorbed in a fraternal relation arising from a common
experience.
And this attitude of understanding and respect for the worker is
necessary, not only to appreciate what he produces, but to preserve
his power of production, again showing the necessity for making that
substitute for war--human labor--more aggressive and democratic. We
are told that the conquered races everywhere, in their helplessness,
are giving up the genuine practise of their own arts. In India, for
instance, where their arts have been the blossom of many years of
labor, the conquered races are casting them aside as of no value in
order that they may conform to the inferior art, or rather, lack of
art, of their conquerors. Morris constantly lamented that in some parts
of India the native arts were quite destroyed, and in many others
nearly so; that in all parts they had more or less begun to sicken.
This lack of respect and understanding of the primitive arts found
among colonies of immigrants in a modern cosmopolitan city, produces
a like result in that the arts languish and disappear. We have made
an effort at Hull-House to recover something of the early industries
from an immigrant neighborhood, and in a little exhibit called a
labor museum, we have placed in historic sequence and order methods
of spinning and weaving from a dozen nationalities in Asia Minor and
Europe. The result has been a striking exhibition of the unity and
similarity of the earlier industrial processes. Within the narrow
confines of one room, the Syrian, the Greek, the Italian, the Russian,
the Norwegian, the Dutch, and the Irish find that the differences in
their spinning have been merely putting the distaff upon a frame or
placing the old hand-spindle in a horizontal position. A group of women
representing vast differences in religion, in language, in tradition,
and in nationality, exhibit practically no difference in the daily
arts by which, for a thousand generations, they have clothed their
families. When American women come to visit them, the quickest method,
in fact almost the only one, of establishing a genuine companionship
with them, is through this same industry, unless we except that
still older occupation, the care of little children. Perhaps this
experiment may claim to have made a genuine effort to find the basic
experiences upon which a cosmopolitan community may unite at least on
the industrial side. The recent date of the industrial revolution and
our nearness to a primitive industry are shown by the fact that Italian
mothers are more willing to have their daughters work in factories
producing textile and food stuffs than in those which produce wood and
metal. They interpret the entire situation so simply that it appears
to them just what it is--a mere continuation of woman’s traditional
work under changed conditions. Another example of our nearness to early
methods is shown by the fact that many women from South Italy and from
the remoter parts of Russia have never seen a spinning-wheel, and
look upon it as a new and marvelous invention. But these very people,
who are habitually at such a disadvantage because they lack certain
superficial qualities which are too highly prized, have an opportunity
in the labor museum, at least for the moment, to assert a position in
the community to which their previous life and training entitles them,
and they are judged with something of a historic background. Their very
apparent remoteness gives industrial processes a picturesque content
and charm.
Can we learn our first lesson in modern industry from these humble
peasant women who have never shirked the primitive labors upon which
all civilized life is founded, even as we must obtain our first
lessons in social morality from those who are bearing the brunt of
the overcrowded and cosmopolitan city which is the direct result of
modern industrial conditions? If we contend that the franchise should
be extended to women on the ground that less emphasis is continually
placed upon the military order and more upon the industrial order of
society, we should have to insist that, if she would secure her old
place in industry, the modern woman must needs fit her labors to the
present industrial organization as the simpler woman fitted hers to the
more simple industrial order. It has been pointed out that woman lost
her earlier place when man usurped the industrial pursuits and created
wealth on a scale unknown before. Since that time women have been
reduced more and more to a state of dependency, until we see only among
the European peasant women as they work in the fields, “the heavy,
strong, enduring, patient, economically functional representative of
what the women of our day used to be.”
Cultural education as it is at present carried on in the most advanced
schools, is to some extent correcting the present detached relation
of women to industry but a sense of responsibility in relation to the
development of industry would accomplish much more. As men earned
their citizenship through their readiness and ability to defend their
city, so perhaps woman, if she takes a citizen’s place in the modern
industrial city, will have to earn it by devotion and self-abnegation
in the service of its complex needs.
The old social problems were too often made a cause of war in the
belief that all difficulties could be settled by an appeal to arms. But
certainly these subtler problems which confront the modern cosmopolitan
city, the problems of race antagonisms and economic adjustments, must
be settled by a more searching and genuine method than mere prowess
can possibly afford. The first step toward their real solution must
be made upon a past experience common to the citizens as a whole and
connected with their daily living. As moral problems become more and
more associated with our civic and industrial organizations, the
demand for enlarged activity is more exigent. If one could connect the
old maternal anxieties, which are really the basis of family and tribal
life, with the candidates who are seeking offices, it would never be
necessary to look about for other motive powers, and if to this we
could add maternal concern for the safety and defence of the industrial
worker, we should have an increasing code of protective legislation.
We certainly may hope for two results if women enter formally into
municipal life. First, the opportunity to fulfill their old duties and
obligations with the safeguard and the consideration which the ballot
alone can secure for them under the changed conditions, and, second,
the education which participation in actual affairs always brings.
As we believe that woman has no right to allow what really belongs
to her to drop away from her, so we contend that ability to perform
an obligation comes very largely in proportion as that obligation is
conscientiously assumed.
Out of the mediaeval city founded upon militarism there arose in the
thirteenth century a new order, the middle class, whose importance
rested, not upon birth or arms, but upon wealth, intelligence, and
organization. This middle class achieved a sterling success in the
succeeding six centuries of industrialism because it was essential to
the existence and development of the industrial era. Perhaps we can
forecast the career of woman, the citizen, if she is permitted to bear
an elector’s part in the coming period of humanitarianism in which
government must concern itself with human welfare. She will bear her
share of civic responsibility because she is essential to the normal
development of the city of the future, and because the definition
of the loyal citizen as one who is ready to shed his blood for his
country, has become inadequate and obsolete.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] A Case for the Factory Acts. Mrs. Sidney Webb.