Let us be honest. Do we care for the cherishing of children? Do we want
to preserve the health and help mothers? Are we really concerned with
the prevention of our high infantile death-rate, with all the futile
suffering without any sense of purpose or compensation that it must
entail to children and to mothers? Let us pray to care more
passionately, to see a vision of motherhood such as will force us to
act differently; a vision which, as when the mists clear away among the
mountains, will show a wide world lit by the sun. It would not then be
difficult for us to know what to do; we should decide unhesitatingly as
to the mother in industry, that _she ought not to be there_.
V
Many facts combine in acclaiming our indifference; all of which show our
distressing inability to take a wide view of social problems with our
commercially blinded eyes. We look at everything, even the nation's
children, through spectacles of gold. I cannot wonder at our endless
sicknesses and crime.
A small paper-backed book is now lying upon my desk. It is an inquiry
most carefully made by the Minister of Reconstruction into the
conditions of juvenile employment during the war, and, to me at any
rate, it is pitiless in its revelation of our failure in this period of
stress in knowing how to live.
It would be difficult, indeed, to find a more complete condemnation of
what we have been allowing to go on in our factories and workshops. The
Report reveals an intolerable neglect, a reckless betrayal of young
lives that not even the emergency of war can sanction.[31:1]
Mark what the report tells us:
_Unless those most competent to judge are mistaken, in the
generation which entered industry between 1914 and 1918
vitality has been lowered, morale undermined, and training
neglected...._
_For three years numbers of young persons have been exposed to
almost every influence which could impair health, undermine
character and unfit them, both in body and mind, for regular
industry and intelligent citizenship._
And this passage also:
_From the point of view of the community, the adolescent
worker is a potential parent and a potential citizen ... there
is no doubt whatever what course of action should be
prescribed by consideration for the interests of the nation.
It would be to subordinate the employment of young persons for
their immediate utility to their preparation for more
effective work as men and women.... The danger is not that
there may, in the present, be too few adolescent laborers, but
that there may be too many, and that as a result there may in
the future be too few healthy and well trained adult workers
and intelligent citizens._
The profit-seeking employer, the patriotic maker of munitions, considers
output: he does not think of the girls' or the boys' future, of the
adult employment for which they are being prepared, or not prepared, or
if the occupation leads, as so often is the case, to a blank wall. No
kind of concern is shown of the degree in which the occupation enlarges
the interests of the growing minds, or fritters them away and leaves for
a later use nothing but a dead machine, capable only of spasmodic
excitement; does not think of the effect of long hours or of large wages
and their consequent premature freedom from home restraints on
character.
The last mentioned evil has been greatly accentuated by the absence of
soldier fathers. The indictable offenses committed by the young have
increased markedly during the war, and surely we are responsible for
this lapse of children into crime.
We have permitted heavy and nerve-exhausting work to be done in just the
years when the adolescent was making the always difficult passage of the
boy to the man, of the girl to the woman. And for this reason their
suppressed, not-understood, thwarted instincts have broken out in
unpleasing and often dangerous ways. Is it any wonder if in such
circumstances boys turn to petty robberies and other unsocial acts,
while girls display some of the less estimable characteristics of the
prostitute?
Our ideal is to ignore sex in industry; to deny the strong and necessary
separations that nature's wisdom places as barriers between boy and
girl, between man and woman. We make our sons and daughters compete in
education and in industry. No doubt education and industry are
ill-fitted for males, but at any rate they were intended for males.
Intellectually inferior to the boy or the man, the girl or woman is not.
She is exasperatingly observant, often understands character with
unconsidered quickness, feels spontaneously; but it does not follow that
there is any value for her in the collection of dead facts, stored by
abstract-minded professors--all the futile things we call education,
which show in every direction the most coarse lack of understanding of
the needs of the child and of life. And the girl suffers more than the
boy, for the girl-student does as she is told much more conscientiously
than boys. Similarly in industry: tapping or pushing at a machine until
she taps or pushes on in her dreams; all the more monotonous kinds of
machine-tending will wear feminine nerves, naturally more irritable than
those of men, more than the same work will wear the male nerves. Not
that I believe in subordinating the worker of either sex to the machine.
What I want to prevent is the same stupid sacrifice of girls and women
in industry as has been permitted in the case of boys and men. There has
been in our commercialized society no kind of effective tradition for
the care and guidance of adolescent workers, and, there is no escaping
from the condemning proofs of our neglect: there has been, and, indeed,
is still going on, in many directions a vast range of betrayal and
baseness in the way we have shirked our duties to the young. As the
writer, from whose Report I have quoted, says, with a rather grim irony:
"a strain has been put on the character of young persons which might
have corrupted the integrity of a Washington and have undermined the
energy of Samuel Smiles."