governmental attention has not elsewhere been called to the condition
produced, yet twenty years since, _Frazer’s Magazine_ in an article
on “Field Farming Women in England” in reference to the poor food and
overwork of women of this class, said of their children: “The boys
are always very short for their age, those of fifteen being no larger
than town boys of ten; girls are thin and skinny, angular and bony.”
Eight years ago, Dr. Rochad, who has given much time to this question,
prophesied that the population of France would become stationary before
the end of the century. At that time his words carried no weight; he
was ridiculed as a vague theorizer, but this result has been reached in
one half the time he gave and the results are even of graver character
than Dr. Rochad assumed them to be. The balance has already fallen upon
the opposite side and in a single year the deaths have outnumbered the
births nearly 40,000. Two hundred and fifty thousand infants annually
die in France because of the impoverished blood, hard work and general
innutrition of French mothers. “These lives are the more precious to
France which can no longer afford to lose them, since in a single
year the death rate outnumbered the birth rate 40,000.” Through the
effort of Dr. Rochad, a society has been organized, rules for feeding
infants formulated with penalties attached, and like futile methods for
effecting a change suggested; while the real cause of the lessening
population is left untouched. Until the condition of the mother as
life-giver is held as sacred under Christianity as it was among the
Greeks and Romans; until man taking his own “curse” upon himself
frees woman from its penalties; until she and her young children are
supplied with nourishing food and woman secures pure air to breathe and
freedom from the hardships so supremely her lot under existing laws and
customs, not until then will a change take place. Parker Pillsbury in
_Popular Religion_, says:
Once I journeyed among the magnificent fields, villages and
vineyards in the south of France. Women tanned, browned,
almost bronzed by the sun, wind and much exposure, weary and
worn, many of them mothers, or soon to become such, spaded,
shoveled, plowed, harrowed, often drawing harrows themselves
across furrowed fields; they mowed, raked, pitched, loaded and
unloaded the hay of the meadows; they harvested the crops and
then hastened to haul manure and prepare the ground for other
crops, rising early and toiling late, doing almost all kinds
of work men do anywhere, and some kinds which neither man or
woman should ever do.
Germany, whose women were revered in the centuries before Christianity,
now degrades them to the level of beasts. Women and dogs harnessed
together are found drawing milk carts in the streets; women and cows
yoked draw the plough in the fields; the German peasant wife works
on the roads or carries mortar to the top of the highest buildings,
while her husband smokes his pipe at the foot of the ladder until she
descends for him to again fill the hod. To such extent is woman a
laborer that she comes in competition with the railroad and all public
methods of traffic. Eight-tenths of the agricultural laborers are
women; they plow and sow, and reap the grain and carry immense loads
of offal for fertilizing the land. As street cleaners they collect the
garbage of towns, work with brooms and shovels to cleanse roadways; and
harnessed alone, or with cows or dogs, perform all the most repulsive
labors of the fields and streets. Nor for a knowledge of their work are
we dependent upon the statements of travelers, but official documents
corroborate the worst. An American consul says of a Circular Upon Labor
recently issued by the German government:
An important factor in the labor of Germany is not enquired
of in the circular, viz., the labor of dogs. I have heard
it estimated that women and dogs harnessed together do more
hauling than the railroads and all other modes of conveyance
of goods united. Hundreds of small wagons can be seen every
day on all the roads leading to and from Dresden, each having
a dog for the “near horse” harnessed, while the “off horse” is
a woman with her left hand grasping the wagon tongue to give
it direction, and the right hand passed through a loop in the
rope which is attached to the axle, binding the shoulder;
the harnessed woman and dog trudge along together, pulling
miraculous loads in all sorts of weather.
The pay of woman for this strange, degrading labor is from ten to
twenty-five cents a day. Nor is that of sewing more remunerative. In
March, 1892, a libel suit against an embroidery manufacturer brought
to light the fact that women in his employ received but five cents a
day. No burden in Germany is considered too heavy for woman until the
failing strength of old age necessitates a change of occupation, when
amid all varieties of weather they take the place of the newsboys of
our own country, selling papers upon the streets. Munich, the capital
of Bavarian Germany, is famed for its treasury of art; paintings,
ancient and modern sculptures, old manuscripts of inestimable value,
large libraries and splendid architecture make it the seat of the
fine arts. But its women are still victims of Christian civilization.
Dresden is another city whose art treasures and architectural beauty
has rendered it famous among European cities as the “German Florence.”
Yet both of these cities employ women in the same kinds of work under
the same repulsive conditions that are found in other portions of that
empire.
Bavarian men wearing heavy wooden shoes drive their bare-footed wives
and daughters before the plough in the field, or harnessed with dogs
send them as carriers of immense loads of merchandise through the
cities. Says a writer:
Women become beasts of burden; still they do not grumble; they
do not smile either—they simply exist. The only liberty they
have is liberty to work; the only rest they have is sleep. The
existence of a cow or a sheep is a perpetual heaven, while
theirs is a perpetual hell.
In addition to all this out-of-door labor performed by the German
women, they have that of the house and the preparation of clothing
for the family. They industriously knit upon the street while doing
errands; they cook, they spin and make clothing which takes them afar
into the night, rearing their children amid labor so severe as forever
to drive smiles from their faces, bringing the wrinkles of premature
old age in their place. Switzerland, whose six hundredth anniversary
was celebrated in 1888, the oldest republic, sees its women carrying
luggage and blacking boots as porters at inns; propelling heavily
laden barges down its romantic lakes; swinging the scythe by the side
of men in the fields; bringing great baskets of hay strapped to their
shoulders down the mountain side; carrying litters containing travelers
up the same steep mountain top; bringing heavy baskets of fagots from
the forests, and carrying in the more pleasant cutting of grapes at the
vineyard harvest. From five o’clock in the morning till eight in the
evening is the peasant woman’s day of work. A stolid expressionless
face, eyes from which no soul seems to look, a magnificent body as
strong as that of the man by her side, is the result of the Swiss
woman’s hardships and work. It is but a few years since the laws of
Switzerland compelled division of the paternal estate with sisters as
well as brothers, this change provoking intense opposition from the
men. On the Alps, husbands borrow and lend their wives, one neighbor
not scrupling to ask the loan of another’s wife to complete some
farming task, which loan is readily granted with the understanding that
the favor is to be returned in kind. Says one writer:
The farmers in the Upper Alps, though by no means wealthy,
live like lords in their houses, while the heaviest portion of
agricultural labors devolves upon the wife. It is no uncommon
thing to see a woman yoked to a plough with an ass, while
her husband guides it. An Alpine farmer counts it an act of
politeness to lend his wife to a neighbor who has too much
work, and the neighbor in return lends his wife for a few days
labor whenever requested.
In Vienna, women lay the brick in building, while throughout Austria
young girls carry mortar for such work. They also work in the fields,
in the mines, pave and clean the streets, or like their German sisters,
harnessed with dogs, drag sprinklers for the street or serve milk at
the customer’s door. Prussian women are also to be found working the
mines, in quarries in foundries, building railroads, acting as sailors
and boatmen, or like those of Holland, dragging barges in place of
horses on the canals, or like those of other European countries,
performing the most severe and repulsive agricultural labors. A
correspondent of the _Cincinnati Commercial_ traveling through
Belgium, said: “No work seems to be done except by woman and dogs.
With few exceptions women do the harvesting, working like oxen.” The
physiological fact that the kind of labor and the kind of food affect
the physical frame is noticeable in Belgium the same as in France
and England. Women of all ages from fourteen to sixty, work in the
coal mines, married women sometimes carrying babies strapped to their
backs into the pit, laying the infants near them while digging coal,
some mine owners refusing to employ a miner unless he can bring one
or more members of his family into the pit with him. Employers prefer
girls and women because of their lower wages and greater docility;
for twelve hours work a woman receives but thirty cents. Even in
little Montenegro, husbands lend their wives to each other during
the harvest season, and an exceptionally strong or quick-moving wife
finds exceptional demand for her services. This little state degrades
woman to still greater extent than her sister countries, as they there
form the beasts of burden in war, and are counted among the “animals”
belonging to the prince.
The Russian peasant woman under the Greek church, finds life equally
a burden, and is even to greater extent than in most countries the
slave of her husband and the priest, no form of labor or torture being
looked upon as too severe to impose upon her. The woman are much more
industrious than the men and the hardest work is done by them. As
Russia is primarily an agricultural country it possesses immense fields
of hay, oats and wheat, the work largely performed by women. The wheat
sown broadcast is either harvested with sickles or the old-fashioned
scythe with a broad blade. Women do the entire work of gathering up,
binding and stacking the wheat, neighbors during harvest helping each
other. Women of every age from the young girl to the aged grandmother,
take part, assembling at daybreak. Horses are also there in number for
carrying food, water, extra implements, and the men and boys of the
conclave. The women however aged, walk; the day’s work lasting over
eighteen hours or from daybreak until dark; in that northern land at
harvest time it continues light from 3 a. m. to 9:30 p. m. Nor are
mothers with young infants excused from this toil. Babies are carried
into the fields where they lie all day under trees, or partially
sheltered by a bough over them, covered with insects from which the
mother can find no time to relieve them. Under such circumstances of
neglect, it is not surprising that infant mortality is excessive.
Nor do the children of a slightly larger growth receive the care
requisite for their tender years and it is estimated that eight out of
every ten children in Russia die under ten years of age. But no one
form of Christianity monopolizes the wrong. Everywhere, under every
name and sect, man has thrown the carrying out of his “curse” on to
woman. Italy, the center of Catholicism, under a careful analysis of
statistics, showing that the wages of the Italian working woman do not
exceed four pence a day. In Venice a traveler was recently shown some
wonderfully beautiful articles of clothing; scarfs, shawls, mantles,
handkerchiefs, many of them requiring six months for the production;
expressing amazement at the astonishingly low price demanded for such
exquisite fabrics he was told, “we pay our young girls but seven cents
a day.” A correspondent of the _Philadelphia Press_, writing from
abroad in 1885, declared the debasement of woman to be more thorough
and complete in Protestant Stockholm than in any city of northern
Europe, as there she supplanted the beasts of burden. He spoke of her
as doing all the heavy work on buildings and paid only one kroner
(equivalent to a trifle over twenty-six cents) for a hard day of this
toil. He found women sweeping the streets, hauling rubbish, dragging
hand-carts up the hills and over the cobble-stones, unloading bricks at
the quays, attending to the parks, doing the gardening and rowing the
numerous ferries which abound in that city. The entire dairy business
of the city is in their hands and here they have the help of neither
horses nor dogs but take the entire place of the beasts, carrying the
heavy cans of milk on their shoulders from door to door; he said:
I am not altogether unfamiliar with woman’s work in Europe;
I have seen her around the pit mouth, at the forge, and bare
foot in the brick yards of “merrie” England; filling blast
furnaces and tending coke ovens in “sunny France.” I have
sadly watched her bearing the heat and burden of the day in
the fields of the “fatherland” and in Austria-Hungary doing
the work of man and beast on the farm and in the mine. I have
seen women emerge from the coal pits of “busy Belgium” where
little girls and young women were underground bearers of coal
and drawers of carts. Aged, bent and sunburned, I have seen
women with rope over shoulder toiling on the banks of canals
and over dykes in “picturesque Holland.” Having witnessed all
this, I was yet surprised to find in a city so beautiful and
seemingly so rich as Stockholm, women even more debased.
In the Connellsville coke region of Pennsylvania, United States, the
Hungarian woman workers are found engaged in the severest labor under
authority of the husband or father, half nude women drawing the hot
coke from the chambers. Master Workman Powderly visiting the place
early one morning, said of it:
At one of the ovens I saw a woman half naked drawing the coke
from one of the chambers. She had no covering on her head and
very little on her person. Her appearance was that of one
whose spirit had been broken by hardship and hard work. Her
attire consisted of a chemise and a pair of cowhide boots. In
a freight car close by stood another woman forking the coke as
it came into the car. The woman stood in the doorway and was
dressed in a rough, loose-fitting outer garment and an apron.
Her person from the waist up was exposed. When she stooped
over to handle the coke, she caught her hair between her teeth
in order to keep it out of her way. Her babe which she
brought to the works with her, lay in front of the car with
scarcely any covering except the shadow of a wheel barrow
which was turned up in order to protect the child from the
rays of the sun.
The suffering of helpless infants and children from privation and
neglect through enforced labor of the mother, is one of the most
shocking things connected with this degradation of woman in labor. The
ownership by the husband of the wife’s services; his power under the
Christian law of church and state of compelling her to work for him;
the public sentiment of church and state which not alone recognizes
absolute authority over the wife as inhering in the husband, but which
are the creators of such belief, are the causes of illness, death,
moral degradation, insanity, crime and vice of every kind. One year
even, of civilized housekeeping with its routine of washing, starching,
ironing, scrubbing, cooking, baking, pickling, canning, sewing,
sweeping, house-cleaning, etc., etc., with all their accompanying
overheating and overlifting; the care of children both night and day,
whether sick or well, the constant demands upon her time and strength,
thrown upon women of the Christian household, are labors more severe
than fell on the old-time savage woman of America during her whole
life. Until the customs of civilization reached the Indians, their
wives, according to Catlin, Schoolcraft and others, were not called
upon to work with half the severity of the women of today, nor had they
tradition of children ever born deaf, dumb or blind. Those kinds of
labor pointed to as showing the hardships of an Indian woman’s life,
Schoolcraft dismisses very lightly. The lodge built by her is not made
of heavy posts and carpentry, but of thin poles bent over at the top,
such as a child can lift. When a family changed its residence these
poles were not removed; only the thin sheets of birch bark covering,
were taken to the new rendezvous. The gathering of the fuel by the
women, was cutting dry limbs of the forest not over eighteen inches
in length, with a hatchet. The tillage of the fields shared alike by
the old men, women and the boys, was very light. No oxen to drive, no
plough to hold, no wheat to plant or thresh. The same corn hills were
used year after year, forming small mounds that were long a puzzle to
the antiquarian. The squash and the pumpkin grew luxuriantly, while the
children made holidays of gathering nuts and acorns for winter use. And
today Africa, “The Dark Continent” is the children’s paradise, says
Mrs. French Sheldon, the wonderful woman explorer, who carried peace
with her everywhere and whose investigations in that part of the world
exceed in value those of Livingstone or Stanley. She says:
In all these months among the children every day, I never saw
a child struck and I heard a child cry but twice while on the
Dark Continent.
How different from the countries of Christian civilization where
children, mere infants of three and four years, are put to the most
severe labor or because of the mother’s enslaved condition, die from
neglect. It will be said, but these instances, especially in the United
States, are exceptional. This is not so, although the work performed
may be of a different character. The wife even in this country is
expected to understand and perform many kinds of labor. She is cook
and baker, laundress and seamstress, nurse for her children and the
sick, besides a thousand and one cares which rise before her every
hour. One such overworked mother acknowledged to placing the cradle
where the sun would shine in the baby’s eyes, thus compelling them to
close, when she would push all out of the way underneath the bed. Said
a German girl working “as help” in the modern kitchen of a well-to-do
American family. “I plowed at home harnessed beside a cow, and the
work was not as hard as in your hot kitchen.” The care of children
and domestic labor are not compatible with each other. One must be
neglected, and she of whom, “meals on time” are demanded, can say where
the neglect necessarily falls. A consistent carrying out by man of his
“curse” would cause him to take upon himself the entire work of the
world; not alone tilling the soil, but all household labor; the baking
and brewing, the cooking and cleaning and all the multitudinous forms
of work which make such wearisomely incessant demands upon woman’s
strength and time. From all sewing, knitting, crocheting, embroidering,
she should be freed, and even beyond this, under the principles of
_his_ “curse,” upon man should fall all the work of rearing children,
as woman’s “curse” so often quoted does not refer to aught but bringing
them to life in sorrow and suffering. Custom, which has been defined
as unwritten law, adds its force to legislative enactments and soon
becomes as binding upon thought as a moral command. People soon cease
to question a custom, or a law, accepting both in that conservative
spirit so utterly destructive to liberty. For that reason what has long
been so, is regarded as right, and even while regretting the neglect
of her children so unavoidable to the ordinarily situated mothers,
few women give thought to the cause bringing it about. Women are not
sufficiently permeated with the meaning of personal liberty. They do
not sufficiently investigate the causes of their restricted condition,
and the break made within the past twenty-five to forty years against
conditions, has rather been in the nature of a blind instinctive
revolt, than brought about through philosophic thought except in the
minds of a few, who by the protest of speech, opened the way that vast
multitudes are now entering upon. Open rebellion against law is ever
considered by the majority as rebellion against morality. Speaking of
the moral influence of law, Sheldon Amos says:
As soon as a law is made and lifted out of the region of
controversy, it begins to exercise a moral influence which
is no less intense and wide-spreading for being almost
imperceptible. Though law can never attempt to forbid all that
is morally wrong, yet that gets to be held as morally wrong
which the law forbids.
No less does unwritten law come to be regarded as morally right. The
customs of society build up through teachings of the church, and
laws of the state, have destroyed that sense of personal security
among women which is the chief value of social life and of law. The
very foundation of religion tends to this end even with man, but the
division of rights and duties promulgated by the church as between man
and woman, the changing form of laws—class legislation—has rendered
the position of woman notably insecure. This usurpation is productive
of immense loss to the state as France so clearly shows. Take the one
article of food alone, the delicacies and the substantials alike are
claimed by man. No proof of this statement other than the innumerable
saloons and restaurants chiefly supported by men, is required. While
the dairyman, the bird-fancier, the horse trainer, and even the
pugilist, recognize the value of food as far as a factor of life
and strength, where his own immediate money interest is concerned,
neither governments, religions nor scientists have to any extent noted
the influence of proper food for the mother upon the health and life
of the unborn child. Victor Hugo, while upon the island of Guernsey,
noted the vastly beneficial effect that even one good meal a week had
upon the peasant children. Food, building muscles, nerves, the brain,
what can be expected but a deterioration of humanity when mothers eat
insufficient or improper food?
The effect of the kind of food eaten has recently been noted in the
new industry of ostrich farming, in California, of which it is said:
“Ostriches yield the best feathers if the birds are well cared for.
The quality of the plumes depends upon the quality of the food. If the
ostriches are well fed, their plumes are soft and big. Bad feeding
makes the feathers hard and coarse.” Nor are animals from whom the
best products are looked for, allowed to labor. Their lives are those
of ease and comfort that best results may be obtained. Innutrition
and the hard labor of expectant mothers are the two great factors in
physical degeneration and infantile mortality. The question is not one
of sentiment or of law or of religion, but of physiology. It does not
alone involve the destiny of mothers but of the race. There is not a
national problem, be it of war or population or finance that is not
based upon the condition of woman. Its neglect has depopulated the
world in times past, it has lessened intellectual development, it has
almost entirely obliterated certain kinds of morality and can no longer
be regarded from the standard of either of those great institutions,
church or state.
The recent official report of the Factory Inspector of the state of
New York upon the condition of working women, showed a condition
quite in line with the worst features of foreign lands. Overwork, bad
ventilation, low wages, poor food, all combining for their physical
and moral destruction. _The Churchman_ under heading of “In Darkest
New York” speaks of the condition of the poor in that city, both men
and women; but while not forgetting the wrongs of the male laborer, we
must ever remember that the condition of woman is still lower, and the
results of her severe work and semi-starvation, much more injurious to
the world.
We must leave the tenements without attempting to reproduce
any of the shocking cases of crowded rooms in which almost
incredible numbers of poor wretches are huddled together
even in summer, when Mr. Riis has found the thermometer rise
to 115 degrees. In some of these places there is more than
struggle; there is often starvation. Every once in a while a
case of downright starvation gets into the papers and makes
a sensation. But this is the exception. Were the whole truth
known it would come home to the community with a shock that
would arouse it to a more serious effort than the spasmodic
undoing of its pursestrings. I am satisfied that hundreds of
men, women and children are every day slowly starving to death
with my medical friend’s complaint of “improper nourishment.”
Within a single week I have had this year three cases of
insanity provoked directly by poverty and want. Worse than
even that is the evil case of thousands of ill-fated working
girls. The average wages of 150,000 of them is 60 cents per
day; and that includes the incomes of the stylish “cashiers”
who earn $2 a day as well as the pittance of girls who earn
30 cents a day in east-side factories. The lot of the average
saleswoman who does not partly depend on her family is hard
indeed.