respectable to live on a man’s wages without marrying him; but it is
possible. If a man says to a destitute woman “I will not take you
until death do us part, for better for worse, in sickness and in
health and so forth; nor will I give you my name and the status of
my legal wife; but if you would like to be my wife illegally until
tomorrow morning, here is sixpence and a drink for you, or, as the
case may be, a shilling, or a pound, or ten pounds, or a hundred
pounds, or a villa with a pearl necklace and a sable mantle and a
motor car”, he will not always meet with a refusal. It is easy to ask
a woman to be virtuous; but it is not reasonable if the penalty of
virtue be starvation, and the reward of vice immediate relief. If you
offer a pretty girl twopence halfpenny an hour in a match factory,
with a chance of contracting necrosis of the jawbone from phosphorus
poisoning on the one hand, and on the other a jolly and pampered
time under the protection of a wealthy bachelor, which was what the
Victorian employers did and what employers still do all over the world
when they are not stopped by resolutely socialistic laws, you are
loading the dice in favor of the devil so monstrously as not only to
make it certain that he will win, but raising the question whether
the girl does not owe it to her own self-respect and desire for wider
knowledge and experience, more cultivated society, and greater grace
and elegance of life, to sell herself to a gentleman for pleasure
rather than to an employer for profit. To warn her that her beauty
will not last for ever only reminds her that if she takes reasonable
care of her beauty it will last long past the age at which women, “too
old at twenty-four”, find the factory closed to them, and their places
filled by younger girls. She has actually less security of respectable
employment than of illicit employment; for the women who sell labor
are often out of work through periods of bad trade and consequent
unemployment; but the women who sell pleasure, if they are in other
respects well conducted and not positively repulsive, are seldom
at a loss for a customer. The cases which are held up as terrible
warnings of how a woman may fall to the lowest depths of degradation by
listening to such arguments are pious inventions, supported by examples
of women who through drink, drugs, and general depravity or weakness
of character would have fallen equally if they had been respectably
married or had lived in the strictest celibacy. The incidental risks
of venereal diseases are unfortunately not avoidable by respectable
matrimony: more women are infected by their husbands than by their
lovers. If a woman accepts Capitalist morality, and does what pays her
best, she will take what district visitors call (when poor women are
concerned) the wages of sin rather than the wages of sweated labor.
There are cases, too, where the wedding ring may be a drawback instead
of a makeweight. Illicit unions are so common under the Capitalist
system that the Government has had to deal with them; and the law at
present is that if an unmarried woman bears a child she can compel its
father to pay her seven-and-sixpence a week for its support until it is
sixteen, at which age it can begin to help to support her. Meanwhile
the child belongs to her instead of to the father (it would belong to
him if they were married); and she is free from any obligation to keep
his house or do any ordinary drudgery for him. Rather than be brought
into court he will pay without demur; and when he is goodnatured and
not too poor he will often pay her more than he is legally obliged
to. The effect of this is that a careful, discreet, sensible,
pleasant sort of woman who has not scrupled to bear five illegitimate
children may find herself with a legally guaranteed steady income of
thirty-seven-and-sixpence a week in addition to what she can earn by
respectable work. Compared to a widow with five legitimate children
she was on velvet until the Government, after centuries of blind
neglect, began to pension widows.
In short, Capitalism acts on women as a continual bribe to enter into
sex relations for money, whether in or out of marriage; and against
this bribe there stands nothing beyond the traditional respectability
which Capitalism ruthlessly destroys by poverty, except religion and
the inborn sense of honor which has its citadel in the soul and can
hold out (sometimes) against all circumstances.
It is useless to pretend that religion and tradition and honor always
win the day. It is now a century and a half since the poet Oliver
Goldsmith warned us that “Honor sinks where commerce long prevails”;
and the economic pressure by which Capitalism tempts women grew fiercer
after his time. We have just seen how in the case of the parents
sending their children out to work in their infancy to add a little to
the family income, they found that their wages fell until what they and
the children between them could earn was no more than they had been
able to earn by themselves before, so that in order to live they now
had to send their children to work whether they liked it or not. In
the same way the women who occasionally picked up a little extra money
illicitly, presently found themselves driven to snatch at employment
by offering to take lower wages and depending on the other resource to
make them up to subsistence point. Then the women who stood on their
honor were offered those reduced wages, and, when they said they could
not live on them, were told as usual that others could, and that they
could do what the others did.
In certain occupations prostitution thus became practically compulsory,
the alternative being starvation. Hood’s woman clad in unwomanly rags,
who sang the Song of the Shirt, represents either the woman who would
starve rather than sell her person or the woman neither young enough
nor agreeable enough to earn even the few pence she could hope for from
the men within her reach. The occupations in which prostitution is
almost a matter of course are by no means the sensationally abject and
miserable ones. It is rather in the employments in which well-dressed
and goodlooking but unskilled women are employed to attract the
public, that wages are paid on which they cannot possibly keep up the
appearance expected from them. Girls with thirty shillings a week
come to their work in expensive motor cars, and wear strings of pearls
which, if not genuine, are at least the best imitations. If one of them
asks how she can dress as she is expected to on thirty shillings a week
she is either met with the old retort, “If you wont take it there are
plenty who will”, or else told quite frankly that she is very lucky
to get thirty shillings in addition to such a splendid advertisement
and show-case for her attractions as the stage or the restaurant, the
counter or the showroom, afford her. You must not, however, infer from
this that all theatres, restaurants, showrooms and so forth exploit
prostitution in this way. Most of them have permanent staffs of
efficient respectable women, and could not be conducted in any other
way. Neither must it be inferred that the young gentlemen who provide
the motor cars and furs and jewels are always allowed to succeed in
their expensive courtship. Sir Arthur Pinero’s play Mind the Paint is
instructively true to life on this point. But such relations are not
made edifying by the plea that the gentlemen are bilked. It is safe to
assume that when women are employed, not to do any specially skilled
work, but to attract custom to the place by their sex, their youth,
their good looks and their smart dressing, employers of a certain
type will underpay them, and by their competition finally compel more
scrupulous employers to do the same or be undersold and driven out of
the business. Now these are extremities to which men cannot be reduced.
It is true that smart ladies can and do hire dancing partners at fifty
francs an evening on the Riviera; but this quite innocent transaction
does not mean that Capitalism can as yet say to a man, “If your wages
are not enough to live on, go out into the streets and sell pleasures
as others do”. When the man deals in that commodity he does so as a
buyer, not as a seller. Thus it is the woman, not the man, who suffers
the last extremity of the Capitalist system; and this is why so many
conscientious women are devoting their lives to the replacement of
Capitalism by Socialism.
But let not anyone imagine that men escape prostitution under
Capitalism. If they do not sell their bodies they sell their souls.
The barrister who in court strives “to make the worse appear the
better cause” has been held up as a stock example of the dishonesty
of misrepresenting for money. Nothing could be more unjust. It is
agreed, and necessarily agreed, that the best way of learning the truth
about anything is not to listen to a vain attempt at an impartial and
disinterested statement, but to hear everything that can possibly be
said for it, and then everything that can possibly be said against
it, by skilled pleaders on behalf of the interested parties on both
sides. A barrister is bound to do his utmost to obtain a verdict for a
client whom he privately believes to be in the wrong, just as a doctor
is bound to do his utmost to save the life of a patient whose death
would, in his private opinion, be a good riddance. The barrister is an
innocent figure who is used to distract our attention from the writer
and publisher of lying advertisements which pretend to prove the worse
the better article, the shopman who sells it by assuring the customer
that it is the best, the agents of drugging and drink, the clerk making
out dishonest accounts, the adulterator and giver of short weight,
the journalist writing for Socialist papers when he is a convinced
Liberal, or for Tory papers when he is an Anarchist, the professional
politician working for his party right or wrong, the doctor paying
useless visits and prescribing bogus medicines to hypochondriacs who
need only Abernethy’s advice, “Live on sixpence a day, and earn it”,
the solicitor using the law as an instrument for the oppression of the
poor by the rich, the mercenary soldier fighting for a country which he
regards as the worst enemy of his own, and the citizens of all classes
who have to be obsequious to the rich and insolent to the poor. These
are only a few examples of the male prostitutions, so repeatedly and
vehemently denounced by the prophets in the Bible as whoredoms and
idolatries, which are daily imposed on men by Capitalism.
We see, then, that when the reproach of prostitution is raised neither
woman nor man dares cast the first stone; for both have been equally
stained with it under Capitalism. It may even be urged by special
pleaders on behalf of women that the prostitution of the mind is more
mischievous, and is a deeper betrayal of the divine purpose of our
powers, than the prostitution of the body, the sale of which does not
necessarily involve its misuse. As a matter of fact nobody has ever
blamed Nell Gwynne for selling her body as Judas Iscariot for selling
his soul. But whatever satisfaction the pot may have in calling the
kettle blacker than itself the two blacks do not make a white. And
the abstract identity of male and female prostitution only brings out
more strongly the physical difference, which no abstract argument can
balance. The violation of one’s person is a quite peculiar sort of
outrage. Anyone who does not draw a line between it and offences to
the mind ignores the plain facts of human sensitiveness. For instance,
landlords have had the power to force Dissenters to send their children
to Church schools, and have used it. They have also had a special power
over women to anticipate a husband’s privilege, and have either used
it or forced the woman to buy them off. Can a woman feel about the one
case as about the other? A man cannot. The quality of the two wrongs is
quite different. The remedy for the one could wait until after the next
general election. The other does not bear thinking of for a moment. Yet
there it is.
49
TRADE UNION CAPITALISM
Now we must go into the history of the resistance offered by the
proletariat to the capitalists. It was evident, to begin with, that no
woman or man could do anything against the employers single-handed.
The stock retort, “If you will not take the wage offered, and do
the work put upon you, there are plenty who will”, checkmated the
destitute solitary bargainer for a decent living wage and a reasonable
day’s work. The first necessity for effective resistance was that
the employees should form some sort of union and stand together. In
many cases this was impossible, because the employees did not know
oneanother, and had no opportunities of coming together and agreeing
on a joint course of action. For instance, domestic servants could not
form unions. They were in private kitchens all over the country, more
or less imprisoned in them, and working singly, or at most in groups of
two or three, except in the houses of the very rich, where the groups
might be as large as thirty or forty. Or take agricultural laborers.
It is very difficult to organize them into unions, and still more
difficult to keep their unions together for any length of time. They
live too far apart. The same thing is true more or less of almost every
kind of labor except labor in factories and mines or on railways.
In some callings there are such differences of pay and social position
that even if all their members could be brought together they would not
mix. Thus on the stage an actor may be a highly accomplished gentleman
with a title, who plays Hamlet, or a lady who is an aristocrat and a
Dame of the British Empire, and plays Portia: both of them receiving
weekly salaries counted in hundreds of pounds. With them are working
every night actors and actresses who never utter a word, because, if
they did, their speech would betray the fact that, far from being the
court lords and ladies they are dressed up to look like, they are not
earning as much as the carpenters who shift the scenes. It is even
possible for an acrobat or clown to be more highly paid than Hamlet,
and yet in private life be so illiterate, and have such shocking table
manners, that the titled Hamlet could endure neither his conversation
nor his company at dinner. For this reason a union of actors is
difficult: a class split is inevitable. Union is possible only in
trades where the members work together in large bodies; live in the
same neighborhoods; belong all to the same social class; and earn about
the same money. The miners in the coalfields, the cotton spinners in
the factory towns of Lancashire, the metal smelters and fitters in the
Midlands, were the first to form enduring and powerful unions. The
bricklayers, masons, carpenters, and joiners who come together in the
building trades were also early in the field with attempts at unionism.
Under the stress of some intolerable oppression they would combine to
make the employers see their situation in some particular point; and
when they had carried that point, or were defeated, the union would
dissolve until another emergency arose. Then they began to subscribe to
form little insurance funds against unemployment, which obliged them to
keep the union together; and in this way the unions grew from momentary
rebellions into permanent Trade Unions of the kind we know.
We now have to consider what a union of proletarians can do to defend
their livelihood from the continual encroachments of Capitalism. First,
when the union is sufficiently complete, it enables them to face the
employer without any risk of being told that if they will not submit
to his terms others will. If nearly all the bricklayers in a town
form a union, and each pays into it week by week a small contribution
until they have a little fund to fall back on, then, if their employers
attempt to reduce their wages, they can, by refusing to work and living
on their fund, bring the employers’ business to a dead stop for weeks
or months, according to the size of the fund. This is called a strike.
They can strike not only against a reduction of wages but for an
increase, or for a reduction of their working hours, or for anything
that may be in dispute between them and the employers. Their success
will depend on the state of the employers’ business. The employers
can practically always wait if they choose until the strike fund is
exhausted, and thus starve the strikers into submission. But if trade
is so flourishing at the moment, and the employers consequently in such
a hurry to get on with their profit making, that they would lose more
by an interruption to their business than by giving the strikers what
they demand, then the employers will give in.
But the employers will bide their time for a counterstrike. When trade
gets slack again, and they have little or nothing to lose by shutting
up their works for a while, they reduce the wage, and lock out all the
workers who will not submit to the reduction. This is why an employers’
strike is called a lock-out. The newspapers use the word strike for
strikes and lock-outs indiscriminately, because their readers blame the
workers instead of the employers for a strike; but some of the greatest
so-called strikes should have been called lock-outs. A boom in trade
always produces a series of strikes which are generally successful. A
falling-off in trade produces a series of lock-outs; and they, too, are
generally successful, the one series undoing the work of the other in a
dreary see-saw. After the war we went through a gigantic boom followed
by a disastrous slump, with strikes and lock-outs all complete. Your
own experience of these civil wars of strike and lock-out must have
left you convinced that they are public disasters which would have no
sort of sense in a well ordered community. But let that pass for the
moment. We have not yet finished our study of primitive Trade Unionism,
nor seen what it led to besides saving up for a strike and then
“downing tools”.
The first necessity of the situation was that everybody in the trade
should join the union, as outsiders could be used by employers to
break the strike by taking on the work that the strikers refused.
Consequently a fierce hatred of the men who would not join the unions
grew up. They were called scabs and blacklegs, and boycotted in every
possible way by the unionists. But vituperation and boycotting were
not sufficient to deter the scabs. The unions, when they declared a
strike, stationed bodies of strikers at the gates of the works to
persuade the scabs not to enter. No Intelligent Woman will need to be
told that unless there was a strong force of police on the spot the
persuasion was so vigorous that the scabs felt lucky when they survived
it without broken bones. At last there came a time in Sheffield and
Manchester when scabs working at furnaces found bombs there that blew
them to pieces; when machinery and tools were tampered with so as to
make them dangerous to those who used them (this was called rattening);
and when factory chimneys were shattered by explosives like fulminate
of mercury, so risky to handle that only very ignorant and desperate
men would venture on their use. This was stopped less by punishing the
perpetrators than by forcing the employers to relax the provocation.
For instance, the Sheffield sawgrinders died prematurely, and suffered
miserably during their lifetimes, because the air they breathed was
half steel dust. It was quite easy to prevent this by using vacuum
cleaners (as we call them) to suck away the deadly dust; but the
employers would not fit them, because, as they cost extra capital on
which there was no extra profit, an employer who fitted them could
be undersold by those who did not. At that time a Sheffield steel
worker of fifty (when he was lucky enough to reach that age) looked
like a weedy and very unhealthy lad of seventeen. In the face of such
murderous conditions, persisted in for a hundred years, the burst of
outrage on the part of the victims seems trifling enough. At last the
Government had to come to the rescue and force all the employers to fit
suction fans. Sheffielders’ lungs are now no worse than most people’s,
and better than those of many who are not so carefully protected by the
law.
But accepting a lower wage than that demanded by the union was not the
only way in which an employee could drag down his fellows. In many
trades it was not much use fixing the wage the worker was to receive
unless the quantity of work he gave for it was also fixed. You must
be tired by this time of the silly joking of the Capitalist newspapers
about bricklayers who are not allowed by their unions to lay more than
three bricks a day. A bricklayer has clearly as much right to charge
a day’s wages for laying three bricks as his employer has to sell the
house when it is built for the biggest price he can get for it. Those
who condemn either of them are condemning the Capitalist system, like
good Bolshevists. The three-brick joke is only a comic exaggeration of
what actually occurs. The employers, to find out how much work can be
got out of a man, pick out an exceptionally quick and indefatigable man
called a slogger, and try to impose what he can do in a day on all the
rest. The unions naturally retort by forbidding any of their members to
lay a brick more than he must do if he is to be worth employing at all.
This practice of deliberately doing the least they dare instead of the
most they can is the ca’canny of which the employers complain so much,
though they all do the same thing themselves under the more respectable
name of “restricting output” and selling in the dearest market. It is
the principle on which the Capitalist system is avowedly founded.