WHICH TREATS OF WAR WORKERS, AND THE CHANGES THAT HAVE COME IN WOMEN'S
IDEALS
"The turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the
prosperity of fools shall destroy them."--Prov. i. 32.
I
I have lying upon my study table, on the chairs and even spreading over
upon the floor, a heaped-up litter of documents. Board of Trade
inquiries, Government reports, newspaper cuttings, recent books,
articles from the reviews and popular magazines--all dealing, in one
manner or another, with women's labor and their position as workers in
the immediate past and in the future. Woman, eternally surprising, has
established her power in new fields.
During the five war years a revolution has taken place in the industrial
position of women. But the war was not the cause of the revolution. It
only afforded an opportunity for forces to display themselves which
already were in action. It hurried women forward, running at top speed,
along paths where before their feet had slowly walked. War hastened the
action of forces existing already. The wage-earning woman came in with
the forties with the factory system, and every year she has increased in
numbers, but during the five years of war her ranks have gained an
enormous influx; moreover, a different class of girls and women have
come to seek different kinds of work. And what marks the permanent
importance of this is that a change of occupations has brought with it a
startling change of behavior and outlook.
Just as the militarist has regarded war, not as a means of preventing
the enslavement of peoples and their subjection to foreign rule, but
rather as in itself a source of virtue and blessing, of progress and
civilization; so too the feminist teachers have told us, not that the
entrance of women into munition works was necessary to enable our
country to arm for its terrible war, but have hailed the successive
appearances of women in factories, foundries, and railway-stations as
in itself a great step forward; as a goal long strived for that has been
gained. What has been going on is a continuance of the process by which
women are led more and more to escape from any specialization of
function and are brought into competition with men in every kind of
occupation. Now, let us be clear about it: this is a process which makes
the excitement and experience and possible good of the individual woman
outweigh in importance the safeguarding of the perpetual stream of man.
A confusion of values has led women astray. Being a woman _is_ a
handicap. For the true carrying out of the duties of the wife and mother
physical and mental quiet and sound nerves are needed. The industrial
field has become the ideal place of action for the feminists, who
persistently romanticize the independent commercial or industrial
career, trampling heedlessly on the wisdom of the past, bent on living
their own little lives and all that kind of egoistic futility; holding
up as admirable cheap achievements in the hell of modern competitive,
beggar-your-fellow-worker, sell-at-a-profit industrialism; blackening as
sacrifice, as a limiting of character, woman's service to her husband
and her children, her work in the home and in the nursery.
I tell you women everywhere among us are being starved of sacrifice and
service. Sacrifice lives in the soul of a woman, and not alone in the
separate spirit of the individual woman to whom it is communicated only
through a losing of herself, which marks her union with the greatest
powers of life. It is, I think, one of the most destroying tragedies of
our industrial society that women are denied this sustenance in a fixed
and regulated unison of sacrifice, are forced away from service to life,
excited to do violence to their deepest instinct, by engaging in the
deadly and futile rivalry, where the greatest successfulness must bring
to them the greatest destruction.
There has been much happening to bring fear. Something has gone wrong
with the women of this land. In saying this, I am not forgetting the
splendidness of their work; what I complain of is that their womanly
vision has failed. In France, as is evident to all, the attitude of
women has been very different. The French women also worked hard during
the war to save their country, but they did not as our women have done,
_like war-work for its own sake_. They never transferred their
affections from their homes to the factories of war, they were too
certain of themselves, too content with their power as women to do
anything so foolish. What is the explanation of this profound difference
in attitude? Why has the vision of English women failed? That is the
question to which we have to try to find an answer.