WOMEN’S MEMORIES--INTEGRATING INDUSTRY
If it has always been the mission of literature to translate the
particular act into something of the universal, to reduce the element
of crude pain in the isolated experience by bringing to the sufferer a
realization that his is but the common lot, this mission may have been
performed through such stories as that of the Devil Baby for simple,
hardworking women who at any given moment compose the bulk of the women
in the world.
Certainly some of the visitors to the Devil Baby attempted to
generalize and evidently found a certain enlargement of the horizon,
an interpretation of life as it were, in the effort. They exhibited
that confidence which sometimes comes to the more literate person
when, finding himself morally isolated among those hostile to his
immediate aims, his reading assures him that other people in the world
have thought as he does. Later when he dares to act on the conviction
his own experience has forced upon him, he has become so conscious of
a cloud of witnesses torn out of literature and warmed into living
comradeship, that he scarcely distinguishes them from the likeminded
people actually in the world whom he has later discovered as a
consequence of his deed.
In some of the reminiscences related by working women I was surprised,
not so much by the fact that memory could integrate the individual
experience into a sense of relation with the more impersonal aspects
of life, as that the larger meaning had been obtained when the
fructifying memory had had nothing to feed upon but the harshest and
most monotonous of industrial experiences.
I held a conversation with one such woman when she came to confess that
her long struggle was over and that she and her sister had at last
turned their faces to the poorhouse. She clearly revealed not only
that she had caught a glimpse of the great social forces of her day,
but that she had had the ability to modify her daily living by what she
had perceived.
Perhaps, under the shadow of a tragic surrender, she had obtained a
new sense of values, or at least had made up her mind that it was not
worth while any longer to conceal her genuine experiences, for she
talked more fully of her hard life than I had ever heard her before
in the many years I had known her. She related in illuminating detail
an incident in her long effort of earning, by ill-paid and unskilled
labor, the money with which to support her decrepit mother and her
imbecile sister. For more than fifty years she had never for a moment
considered the possibility of sending either of them to a public
institution, although it had become almost impossible to maintain such
a household after the mother, who lived to be ninety-four years old,
had become utterly distraught.
She was still sharing her scanty livelihood with the feeble-minded
sister, although she herself was unable to do anything but wash
vegetables and peel potatoes in a small restaurant of her neighborhood.
The cold water necessary to these processes made her hands, already
crippled with rheumatism, so bad that on some days she could not hold
anything smaller than a turnip, although the other people in the
kitchen surreptitiously helped her all they could and the cooks gave
her broken food to carry home to the ever hungry sister.
She told of her monotonous years in a box factory, where she had always
worked with the settled enmity of the other employes. They regarded her
as a pace setter, and she, obliged to work fast and furiously in order
to keep three people, and full of concern for her old mother’s many
unfulfilled needs, had never understood what the girls meant when they
talked about standing by each other.
She did not change in her attitude even when she found the prices of
piece work went down lower and lower, so that at last she was obliged
to work overtime late into the night in order to earn the small amount
she had previously earned by day. She was seventy years old when the
legality of the Illinois Ten Hour Law was contested, and her employer
wanted her to testify in court that she was opposed to the law because
she could not have supported her old mother all those years unless
she had been allowed to work nights. She found herself at last dimly
conscious of what it was that her long time enemies, the union girls,
had been trying to do, and a subconscious loyalty to her own kind made
it impossible for her to bear testimony against them. She did not
analyze her motives but told me that, fearing she might yield to her
employer’s request, in sheer panic she had abruptly left his factory
and moved her helpless household to another part of the city on the
very day she was expected to appear in court. In her haste she left
four days unpaid wages behind her, and moving the family took all the
money she had painstakingly saved for the coming winter’s coal. She had
unknowingly moved into a neighborhood of cheap restaurants, and from
that time on she worked in any of them which would employ her until now
at last she was too feeble to be of much use to anybody.
Although she had never joined the Union which finally became so
flourishing in the box factory she had left, she was conscious that in
a moment of great temptation she had refrained from seeking her own
advantage at the expense of others. As she bunglingly tried to express
her motives, she said: “The Irish--you know I was ten years old when we
came over--often feel like that; it isn’t exactly that you are sorry
after you have done a thing, nor so much that you don’t do it because
you know you will be sorry afterwards, nor that anything in particular
will happen to you if you do it, but that you haven’t the heart for it,
that it goes against your nature.”
When I expressed my admiration for her prompt action she replied:
“I have never told this before except to one person, to a woman who
was organizing for the garment workers and who came to my house one
night about nine o’clock, just as I was having my supper. I had it
late in those days because I used to scrub the restaurant floor after
everybody left. My sister was asleep back of the stove, I looked sharp
not to wake her up and I don’t believe the Union woman ever knew that
she wasn’t just like other people. The organizer was looking for some
of the women living in our block who had been taking work from the
shops ever since the strike was on. She was clean tired out, and when
I offered her a cup of tea she said as quick as a flash, ‘You are not
a scab, are you?’ I just held up my poor old hands before her face,
swollen red from scrubbing and full of chilblains, and I told her that
I couldn’t sew a stitch if my life depended on it.
“When I offered her the second cup of tea--a real educated-looking
woman she was, and she must have been used to better tea than mine
boiled out of the old tea leaves the restaurant cook always let me
bring home--I said to her, ‘My hands aren’t the only reason I’m not
scabbing. I see too much of the miserable wages these women around here
get for their sweatshop work, and I’ve done enough harm already with
my pace setting, and my head so full of my poor old mother that I never
thought of anybody else.’ She smiled at me and nodded her head over my
old cracked cup. ‘You are a Union woman all right,’ she said. ‘You have
the true spirit whether you carry a card or not. I am mighty glad to
have met you after all the scabs I have talked to this day.’”
The old woman repeated the words as one who solemnly recalls the great
phrase which raised him into a knightly order, revealing a secret pride
in her unavowed fellowship with Trades Unions, for she had vaguely
known at the time of the Ten Hour trial that powerful federations of
them had paid for the lawyers and had gathered the witnesses. Some
dim memory of Irish ancestors, always found on the side of the weak
in the unending struggle with the oppressions of the strong, may have
determined her action. She may have been dominated by a subconscious
suggestion “from the dust that sleeps,” a suggestion so simple, so
insistent and monotonous that it had victoriously survived its original
sphere of conduct.
It was in keeping with the drab colored experiences of her seventy hard
years that her contribution to the long struggle should have been one
of inglorious flight, nevertheless she had gallantly recognized the
Trades Union organizer as a comrade in a common cause. She cherished in
her heart the memory of one golden moment when she had faintly heard
the trumpets summon her and had made her utmost response.
When the simple story of a lifetime of sacrifice to family obligations
and of one supreme effort to respond to a social claim came to an
end, I reflected that for more than half a century the narrator had
freely given all her time, all her earnings, all her affections, and
yet during the long period had developed no habit of self-pity. At a
crucial moment she had been able to estimate life, not in terms of her
self-immolation but in relation to a hard pressed multitude of fellow
workers.
As she sat there, a tall, gaunt woman broken through her devotion, she
inevitably suggested the industrial wrongs and oppressions suffered by
the women who, forgotten and neglected, perform so much of the unlovely
drudgery upon which our industrial order depends. At the moment I could
recall only one of her starved ambitions which to my knowledge had ever
been attained. When a friend tenderly placed a pair of white satin
slippers upon the coffined feet of her old mother who for more than
ninety years had travelled a long hard road and had stumbled against
many stones, the loving heart of the aged daughter overflowed. “It is
herself would know how I prayed for white satin shoes for the burial,
thinking as how they might make it up to mother, she who never knew
where the next pair was coming from and often had to borrow to go to
Mass.” I remembered that as my friend and I left the spotless bare room
wrapped in the mystery of death and walked back to Hull-House together,
we passed a little child who proudly challenged our attention to his
new shoes, “shiny” in the first moment of joyous possession. We could
but recognize the epitome of the hard struggle of the very poor, from
the moment they scramble out of their rude cradles until they are
lowered into their “partial payment” graves, to keep shoes upon their
feet. The rare moments of touching pleasure when the simple desire for
“a new pair” is fulfilled are doubtless indicated in the early fairy
tales by the rewards of glistening red shoes or glass slippers to the
good child; in the religious allegories which turn life itself into
one long pilgrimage, by the promises to the faithful that they shall
be shod with the sandals of righteousness and to the blessed ones, who
having formally renounced the world, forswearing shoes altogether and
humbly walking on without them, that their bruised and torn feet shall
yet gleam lily-white on the streets of Paradise.
I suddenly saw in this worn old woman who sat before me, what George
Sand described as “a rare and austere production of human suffering”
and was so filled with a fresh consciousness of the long barren road
travelled by the patient mother and daughter, that it merged into the
Via Dolorosa of the Poor of the world. It may have been through this
suggestion of an actual street that my memory vividly evoked a group
of Russian pilgrims I had once seen in Holy Week as they triumphantly
approached Jerusalem. Their heads, garlanded in wild flowers still
fresh with early dew, were lifted in joyous singing but their broken
and bleeding feet, bound in white cloth and thrust into sandals of
stripped bark, were the actual sacrifice they were devoutly offering at
the Sepulchre.
As my mind swiftly came back from the blossoming fields of Palestine to
the crowded industrial district of Chicago, I found myself recalling
a pensive remark made by the gifted Rachel Varnhagen, a century ago.
“Careless Fate never requires of us what we are really capable of
doing.”
This overwhelming sense of the waste in woman’s unused capacity came
to me again during a Garment Workers’ strike, when some of the young
women involved were sitting in the very chairs occupied so recently
by the visitors to the Devil Baby. They brought a curious reminder of
the overworked and heavily burdened mothers who had yet been able to
keep the taste of life in their mouths and who could not be overborne,
because their endurance was rooted in simple and instinctive human
affections. During the long strike these young women endured all
sorts of privations without flinching; some of them actual hunger,
most of them disapprobation from their families, and all of them a
loss of that money which alone could procure for them the American
standards so highly prized. Through participation in the strike they
all took the risk of losing their positions, and yet, facing a future
of unemployment and wretchedness, they displayed a stubborn endurance
which held out week after week.
Perhaps because of my recent conversations with old women I received
the impression that the very power of resistance in such a socialized
undertaking as a strike, presents a marked contrast in both its
origin and motives to the traditional type of endurance exercised by
the mothers and grandmothers of the strikers or by their acquaintances
among domestic women living in the same crowded tenements.
When a mother cares for a sick child for days and nights without
relief, the long period of solicitude and dread exhausting every
particle of her vitality, her strength is constantly renewed from the
vast reservoirs of maternal love and pity whenever she touches the
soft flesh or hears the plaintive little voice. But such girls as the
strikers represent are steadily bending their energies to loveless
and mechanical labor, and are obliged to go on without this direct
and personal renewal of their powers of resistance. They must be
sustained as soldiers on a forced march are sustained, by their sense
of comradeship in high endeavor. Naturally, some of the young working
women are never able to achieve this and can keep on with the monotony
of factory work only when they persuade themselves that they are
getting ready, and have not yet begun their own lives, because real
living for them must include a home of their own and children to “do
for.”
Such unutilized dynamic power illustrates the stupid waste of those
impulses and affections, registered in the very bodily structure
itself, which are ruthlessly pushed aside and considered of no moment
to the work in which so many women are now engaged. My conversations
with these girls of modern industry continually filled me with surprise
that, required as they are to work under conditions unlike those
which women have ever before encountered, they have not only made a
remarkable adaptation but have so ably equipped themselves with a new
set of motives. The girl who stands on one spot for fifty-six hours
each week as she feeds a machine, endlessly repeating the identical
motions of her arms and wrists, is much further from the type of
woman’s traditional activity than her mother who cooks, cleans, and
washes for the household. The young woman who spends her time in
packing biscuits into boxes which come to her down a chute and are
whirled away from her on a miniature trolley, has never even seen how
the biscuits are made, for the factory proper is separated from the
packing room by a door with the sign “No Admittance.” She must work all
day without the vital and direct interest in the hourly results of her
labors which her mother had.
These girls present a striking antithesis to the visitors to the Devil
Baby who in their forlorn and cheerless efforts were merely continuing
the traditional struggle against brutality, indifference, and neglect
that helpless old people and little children might not be trampled
in the dust. For these simple women it is the conditions under which
the struggle is waged which have changed, rather than the nature of
the contest. Even in this unlovely struggle, the older women utilize
well-seasoned faculties, in contrast to the newly developed powers
required by the multitude of young girls who for the first time in the
long history of woman’s labor, are uniting their efforts in order to
obtain opportunities for a fuller and more normal living. Organizing
with men and women of divers nationalities they are obliged to form new
ties absolutely unlike family bonds. On the other hand, these girls
possess the enormous advantage over women of the domestic type of
having experienced the discipline arising from impersonal obligations
and of having tasted the freedom from economic dependence, so valuable
that too heavy a price can scarcely be paid for it.
This clash between the traditional conception of woman’s duty narrowed
solely to family obligations and the claims arising from the complexity
of the industrial situation, manifests scarcely a suggestion of
the latent war so vaguely apprehended from the earliest times as a
possibility between men and women. Even the restrained Greeks believed
that when the obscure women at the bottom of society could endure no
longer and “the oppressed women struck back, it would not be justice
which came but the revenge of madness.” My own observation has
discovered little suggesting this mood, certainly not among the women
active in the Labor Movement.
I recall the recent experience of an organizer whom I very much admire
for her valiant services in the garment trades and whom I have known
from her earliest girlhood. Her character confirms the contention that
our chief concern with the past is not what we have done, nor the
adventures we have met, but the moral reaction of bygone events within
ourselves.
As an orphaned child she had been cared for by two aunts who owned
between them a little shop which pretended to be a tailoring
establishment, but which in reality was a distributing centre for home
work among the Italian women and newly immigrated Russian Jews living
in the neighborhood. Her aunts, because they were Americans, superior
in education and resources to the humble home workers, by dint of much
bargaining both with the wholesale houses from which they procured the
garments, and with the foreign women to whom they distributed them,
had been able to secure a very good commission. For many years they
had made a comfortable living, and in addition had acquired an exalted
social position in the neighborhood, for they were much looked up to by
those so dependent upon them for work.
Although my friend was expected to help in the shop as much as
possible, she was sent regularly to school and had already “graduated
from the eighth grade,” when a law was passed in the Illinois
legislature, popularly known as the Anti Sweat-shop Law, which, within
a year, had ruined her aunts’ business. After they had been fined in
court for violating the law, a case which obtained much publicity
because smallpox was discovered in two of the tenement houses in
which the home finishers were living, the aunts were convinced that
they could not continue to give out work to the Italian and Russian
Jewish women. Reluctantly foregoing their commissions they then tried
crowding their own house and shop with workers, only to be again taken
into court and fined when the inspector discovered their kitchen and
bedrooms full of half-finished garments. They both flatly refused to
go into a factory to work, and after a futile attempt to revive the
tailoring business, never very genuine, they were finally reduced
to the dimensions of the tiny shop itself, which, under the new
regulations as to light and air could accommodate but three people. My
friend was at once taken from school and made one of these ill-paid
workers and the little household was held together on the pittance the
three could earn.
It was but natural, perhaps, that as these displaced proprietors became
poorer they should ever grow more bitter against the reformers and
the Trades Unionists who, between them, had secured the “high-brow”
legislation which had destroyed their honest business.
The niece was married at eighteen to a clerk in a neighboring
department store who worked four evenings a week and every other Sunday
in his determination to get on. The bride moved into a more prosperous
neighborhood and I saw little of her husband or herself for ten
years, during which time they made four payments on the little house
they occupied fully three miles from the now abandoned sweat-shop. Her
husband worked hard with a consuming desire to rear his children in
good surroundings as much as possible unlike the slums, as he somewhat
brutally designated the neighborhood of his own youth. Through his
unrelieved years in the cheap department store where, however, he had
always felt a great satisfaction in being well dressed and had resisted
any attempts of his fellow clerks to shorten their preposterous hours
by trades-union organization, his health was gradually undermined and
he finally developed tuberculosis. He was unable to support his family
during the last decade of his life, and in her desperate need my friend
went back to the only trade she had, that of finishing garments. During
these years, although she sold the little house and placed her boy in
a semi-philanthropic institution, she steadily faced the problem of
earning insufficient wages for the support of the family, the pang
of her failure constantly augmented by the knowledge that, in spite
of her utmost efforts, the invalid never received the food and care
his condition required. The clothing factory in which she then worked
illustrated the lowest ebb in the fortune of the garment workers in
American cities when, the sweat shop having been largely eliminated
through the efforts of the factory inspectors, the workers from every
land were crowded into the hastily organized factories. Separated by
their diverse languages and through their long habits of home work,
they had become too secretive even to tell one another the amount
of wages each was receiving. It was as if the competition had been
transferred from the sweat shop contractors to the individual workers
themselves, sitting side by side in the same room, and perhaps it was
not surprising that the workers felt as if they had been hunted down
into their very kitchens and their poverty cruelly exposed to public
view.
My friend shared this wretchedness and carried into it the bitterness
of her early experience. She says now that she never caught even a
suggestion that this might be but a transitional period to a more
ordered sort of industrial life.
She did not tell me just when and how she had come to the conclusion
that wages must be higher, that legal enactment for better conditions
must be supplemented by the efforts of the workers themselves, but it
was absolutely clear that she had independently reached that conclusion
long before a strike in the clothing industry brought her into contact
with the organized Labor Movement. It was certainly not until the year
of her husband’s death that she became aware of the industrial changes
which had been taking place during the twenty-two years since her
aunts’ business had been ruined.
She was grateful that the knowledge had first come to her through
an Italian girl working by her side, for, as she explained, her old
attitude toward the “dagoes,” as a people to be exploited, had to be
thoroughly changed before she could be of much real use in organizing a
trade in which so many Italians were engaged. Even during the strike
itself, to which she was thoroughly committed, having been convinced
both of its inevitability and of the justice of its demands, she
resented the fact that the leadership was in the hands of Russian Jews
and, secure in her Americanism, she felt curiously aloof from the group
with which she was so intimately identified.
A few months after the strike my friend fortunately secured a place in
a manufactory of men’s clothing, in which there had been instituted
a Trade Board for the adjustment of grievances, and where wages and
hours were determined by joint agreement. When she was elected to
the position of shop representative she found herself in the midst
of one of the most interesting experiments being carried on in the
United States, not only from the standpoint of labor but from that of
applying the principles of representative government in a new field.
She felt the stimulus of being a part in that most absorbing of all
occupations--the reconstruction of a living world.
One evening, at Hull-House, as she came out of a citizenship class
she had been attending, she tried to express some of the implications
of the great undertaking in which more than ten thousand clothing
employes are engaged. She repeated the statement made by the leader
of the class that it was the solemn duty and obligation of the United
States not only to keep a republican form of government alive upon
the face of the earth and to fulfill the expectations of the founders
but to modify and develope that type of government as conditions
changed; he had said that the spirit of the New England town meeting
might be manifested through a referendum vote in a large city, and
that it must find some such vehicle of expression if it would survive
under changed conditions. Her eyes were quite shining as she made her
application to the experiment being carried on in the great clothing
factory, with its many shops and departments unified in mutual effort.
Evidently her attention had been caught by the similarity between the
town meeting in its relation to a more elaborated form of government
and the small isolated sweat-shop such as that formerly managed by
her aunts, in its relation to the “biggest clothing factory in the
world.” She had heard her fellow workers say that the “greenhorn” often
found much friendliness in a small shop where his own language was
spoken, and where he could earn at least a humble living until he grew
accustomed to the habits of a new country, whereas he would have been
lost and terrified in a factory. She felt very strongly the necessity
of translating this sense of comradeship and friendliness into larger
terms, and she believed that it could be done by the united workers.
As she sat by my desk, this woman who had not yet attained her fortieth
year looked much older, as if illustrating the saying that hard labor
so early robs the poor man of his youth that it makes his old age too
long. She seemed to me for the moment to have gathered up in her own
experience the transition from old conditions to new and to be standing
on the threshold of a great development in the lives of working women.
As if she were conscious that I was recalling her past with which I
had been so familiar, she began to speak again. “You know that I have
both of my children with me now; the girl graduates from the Normal
School in June and hopes to put herself through the University after
she has taught for a few years. She reminds me of her father in her
anxiety to know people of education, to get on in the world, and I am
sure she will succeed. The boy has caught the other motive of pulling
up with his own trade and of standing by the organized Labor Movement.
Of course, sewing was too dull for him, and besides he grew ambitious
to be a machinist when he was in the Industrial School where I put
him with such a breaking of the heart when he was only ten years old.
He has to admit, however, that even his own Machinists’ Union, with
its traditional trade agreements and joint boards, is far behind our
experiment. He went with me to the banquet on May Day. We had marched
through the Loop in celebration of our new agreement and had stirring
speeches at the Auditorium in the afternoon, but it was in the evening
that we really felt at home with each other. When he saw the tremendous
enthusiasm for our beloved leader--my boy, I am sorry to say, is a
little inclined to despise foreigners and also tailors because they
aren’t as big and brawny as the members of his dear Machinists’
Union--and really caught some notion of the statesmanlike ability
required for the successful management of such a complicated and
difficult industrial experiment, and when he realized that the ten per
cent increase provided for in the new agreement was to go in greater
proportion to those at the lower end of the scale, he suddenly forgot
his prejudices and I saw him applauding with his hands and feet as if
he had really let loose at last.
“Of course, it hasn’t been easy for me even during these later years
to keep Helen in school and to support my aunt who is now too old and
broken even to keep house for us. But we have got on, and quite aside
from everything else I am thankful to have had a small share in this
forward step in American democracy--at least, that’s what they called
it at the banquet,” she ended shyly.
The experience of my friend bore testimony that in spite of all their
difficulties and handicaps, something of social value is forced out
of the very situation itself among that vast multitude of women whose
oppression through the centuries has typified a sense of helpless and
intolerable wrongs. Many of them, even the older ones, are being made
slowly conscious of the subtle and impalpable filaments that secretly
bind their experiences and moods into larger relations, and they are
filled with a new happiness analogous to that of little children when
they are first taught to join hands in ordered play.
Is such enthusiastic participation in organized effort but one
manifestation of that desire for liberty and for a larger participation
in life, found in great women’s souls all over the world?
In pursuance of such a desire the working women have the enormous
advantage of constant association with each other, an advantage dimly
perceived even by pioneer women two hundred years ago.
The hostesses of the famous drawing-rooms of the eighteenth century
laid great stress on human intercourse as the individual’s best means
of cultivation. Certain French women gave as a _raison d’etre_ for
their brilliant salons that “people must come together in order to
exercise justice,” and they became enormously proud of the fact that by
the end of the century “all Europe was thrown into a state of agitation
if injustice were committed in any corner of it.”
This hypothesis was gallantly laid down a hundred years before the
industrial revolution which, in its consummation, has congregated
millions of women into factories all over the world. These myriad
women, most of them young and untrained and all of them working under
new industrial conditions, are gradually learning to “exercise justice”
if only because they have “come together.” Their association has been
accomplished under the stress of a common necessity, and they have
been tutored in a mass at the hard school of bitter experience.
Were the sheltered drawing-room ladies the forerunners of such
contemporary advocates of industrial justice or do we find a better
prototype in those simple old women who, having reared their own
children and having come to be regarded as a depository for domestic
wisdom, dispense sound advice to bewildered mothers which always
contains the admonition, “Never be partial to any one of them, always
be as just as you know how.”
Possibly women’s organizations of all types are but providing
ever-widening channels through which woman’s moral energy may flow,
revivifying life by new streams fed in the upper reaches of her
undiscovered capacities. In either case, we may predict that to
control old impulses so that they may be put to social uses, to serve
the present through memories hoarding woman’s genuine experiences,
may liberate energies hitherto unused and may result in a notable
enrichment of the pattern of human culture.