work--some of it. But she has never before been seen in America
employed, for instance, as a section hand on a railway. The gangs are
few and small as yet, but there the women are big and strong specimens
of foreign birth. They "trim" the ballast and wield the heavy "tamping"
tool with zest. They certainly have muscles, and are tempted to use them
vigorously at three dollars a day.
In the machine shops where more skill than strength is called for, the
American element with its quick wits and deft fingers predominates.
Young women are working at the lathe with so much precision and accuracy
that solicitude as to what would become of the world if all its men
marched off to war is in a measure assuaged. In the push and drive of
the industrial world, women are handling dangerous chemicals in making
flash lights, and T.N.T. for high explosive shells. The American college
girl is not as yet transmuting her prowess of the athletic field into
work on the anvil, as is the university woman in England, but she has
demonstrated her manual strength and skill on the farm with plough
and harrow.
Women and girls answer our call for messenger service, and their
intelligence and courtesy are an improvement upon the manners of the
young barbarians of the race. Women operate elevators, lifting us with
safety to the seventh heaven, or plunging us with precision to the
depths. There were those at first who refused to entrust their lives to
such frail hands, and there are still some who look concerned when they
see a woman at the lever; but on the whole the elevator "girl" has
gained the confidence of her public, and has gained it by skill, not by
feminine wiles, for even men won't shoot into space with a woman at the
helm whose sole equipment is charm. With need of less skill than the
elevator operator, but more patience and tact in managing human nature,
the woman conductor is getting her patrons into line. We are still a
little embarrassed in her presence. We try not to stare at the
well-set-up woman in her sensible uniform, while she on her part tries
to look unconscious, and with much dignity accomplishes the common aim
much more successfully than do we. She is so attentive to her duties, so
courteous, and, withal, so calm and serious that I hope she will abide
with us longer than the "duration of the war."
In short, America is witnessing the beginning of a great industrial and
social change, and even those who regard the situation as temporary
cannot doubt that the experience will have important reactions. The
development is more advanced than it was in Great Britain at a
corresponding time, for even before the United States entered the
conflict women were being recruited in war industries. They have opened
up every line of service. There is not an occupation in which a woman is
not found.
When men go a-warring, women go to work.
A distinguished general at the end of the Cuban War, enlarging upon the
poet's idea of woman's weeping rôle in wartime, said in a public speech:
"When the country called, women put guns in the hands of their soldier
boys and bravely sent them away. After the good-byes were said there was
nothing for these women to do but to go back and wait, wait, wait. The
excitement of battle was not for them. It was simply a season of anxiety
and heartrending inactivity." Now the fact is, when a great call to arms
is sounded for the men of a nation, women enlist in the industrial army.
If women did indeed sit at home and weep, the enemy would soon conquer.
The dull census tells the thrilling story. Before our Civil War women
were found in less than a hundred trades, at its close in over four
hundred. The census of 1860 gives two hundred and eighty-five thousand
women in gainful pursuits; that of 1870, one million, eight hundred and
thirty-six thousand. Of the Transvaal at war, this story was told to me
by an English officer. He led a small band of soldiers down into the
Boer country, on the north from Rhodesia, as far as he dared. He "did
not see a man," even boys as young as fifteen had joined the army. But
at the post of economic duty stood the Boer woman; she was tending the
herds and carrying on all the work of the farm. She was the base of
supplies. That was why the British finally put her in a concentration
camp. Her man could not be beaten with her at his back.
War compels women to work. That is one of its merits. Women are forced
to use body and mind, they are not, cannot be idlers. Perhaps that is
the reason military nations hold sway so long; their reign continues,
not because they draw strength from the conquered nation, but because
their women are roused to exertion. Active mothers ensure a virile race.
The peaceful nation, if its women fall victims to the luxury which
rapidly increasing wealth brings, will decay. If there come no spiritual
awakening, no sense of responsibility of service, then perhaps war alone
can save it. The routing of idleness and ease by compulsory labor is the
good counterbalancing some of the evil.
The rapidly increasing employment of women to-day, then, is the usual,
and happy, accompaniment of war. But the development has its opponents,
and that is nothing new, either. Let us look them over one by one. The
most mischievous objector is the person, oftenest a woman, who says the
war will be short, and fundamental changes, therefore, should not be
made. This agreeable prophecy does not spring from a heartening belief
in victory, but only from the procrastinating attitude, "Why get ready?"
To prepare for anything less certain than death seems folly to many of
the sex, over-trained in patient waiting.
Then there is the official who constantly sees the seamy side of
industrial life and who concludes--we can scarcely blame him--that "it
would be well if women were excluded entirely from factory life." The
bad condition of industrial surroundings bulks large in his mind, and
the value of organized work to us mortals bulks small. We are all too
inclined to forget that the need for work cannot be eliminated, but the
unhealthy process in a dangerous trade can. Clean up the factory, rather
than clean out the women, is a sound slogan.
And then comes the objector who is exercised as to the effect of paid
work upon woman's charm. Solicitude on this score is often buried in a
woman's heart. It was a woman, the owner of a large estate, who when
proposing to employ women asked how many men she would have to hire in
addition, "to dig, plough and do all the hard work." On learning that
the college units do everything on a farm, she queried anxiously, "But
how about their corsets?" To the explanation, "They don't wear any,"
came the regret, "What a pity to make themselves so unattractive!"
I have heard fear expressed, too, lest sex attraction be lost through
work on army hats, the machinery being noisy and the operative, if she
talk, running the danger of acquiring a sharp, high voice. One could but
wonder if most American women work on army hats.
Among the women actually employed, I have found without exception a fine
spirit of service. So many of them have a friend or brother "over
there," that backing up the boys makes a strong personal appeal. But
some of the women who have left factory life behind are adopting an
attitude towards the present industrial situation as lacking in vision
as in patriotism. Throughout a long discussion in which some of these
women participated I was able to follow and get their point of view. To
them a woman acting as a messenger, an elevator operator, or a trolley
conductor, was anathema, and the tempting of women into these
employments seemed but the latest vicious trick of the capitalist. The
conductor in her becoming uniform was most reprehensible, and her
evident satisfaction in her job suggested to her critics that she merely
was trying to play a melodramatic part "as a war hero." In any case, the
conductor's occupation was one no woman should be in, "crowded and
pushed about as she is." It was puzzling to know why it was regarded as
right for a woman to pay five cents and be pushed, and unbecoming for
another woman to be paid eighteen dollars and ninety cents a week and
run the risk of a jolt when stepping outside her barrier.
But the ideals of yesterday fail to make their appeal. It is not the
psychological moment to urge, on the ground of comfort, the woman's
right to protection. The contrast between the trenches and the street
car or factory is too striking. But it is, however, the exact moment to
plead for better care of workers, both women and men, because their
health and skill are as necessary in attaining the national aim as the
soldiers' prowess and well-being. It is the time to advocate the
protection of the worker from long hours, because the experience of
Europe has proved that a greater and better output is achieved when a
short day is strictly adhered to, when the weekly half-holiday is
enjoyed, and Sunday rest respected. The United States is behind other
great industrial countries in legal protection for the workers. War
requirements may force us to see in the health of the worker the
greatest of national assets. Meantime, whether approved or not, the
American woman is going over the top. Four hundred and more are busy on
aeroplanes at the Curtiss works. The manager of a munition shop where
to-day but fifty women are employed, is putting up a dormitory to
accommodate five hundred. An index of expectation! Five thousand are
employed by the Remington Arms Company at Bridgeport. At the
International Arms and Fuse Company at Bloomfield, New Jersey, two
thousand, eight hundred are employed. The day I visited the place, in
one of the largest shops women had only just been put on the work, but
it was expected that in less than a month they would be found handling
all of the twelve hundred machines under that one roof alone.
The skill of the women staggers one. After a week or two they master the
operations on the "turret," gauging and routing machines. The best
worker on the "facing" machine is a woman. She is a piece worker, as
many of the women are, and is paid at the same rate as men. This woman
earned, the day I saw her, five dollars and forty cents. She tossed
about the fuse parts, and played with that machine, as I would with a
baby. Perhaps it was in somewhat the same spirit--she seemed to
love her toy.
Most of the testers and inspectors are women. They measure the parts
step by step, and weigh the completed fuse, carrying off the palm for
reliability. The manager put it, "for inspection the women are more
conscientious than men. They don't measure or weigh just one piece,
shoving along a half-dozen untouched and let it go at that. They test
each." That did not surprise me, but I was not prepared to hear that the
women do not have so many accidents as men, or break the machines so
often. In explanation, the manager threw over an imaginary lever with
vigor sufficient to shake the factory, "Men put their whole strength on,
women are more gentle and patient."
Nor are the railways neglecting to fill up gaps in their working force
with women. The Pennsylvania road, it is said, has recruited some seven
hundred of them. In the Erie Railroad women are not only engaged as
"work classifiers" in the locomotive clerical department, but hardy
Polish women are employed in the car repair shops. They move great
wheels as if possessed of the strength of Hercules. And in the
locomotive shops I found women working on drill-press machines with
ease and skill. Just as I came up to one operator, she lifted an engine
truck-box to the table and started drilling out the studs. She had been
at the work only a month, and explained her skill by the information
that she was Swedish, and had always worked with her husband in their
auto-repair shop. All the other drill-press hands and the "shapers,"
too, were Americans whose husbands, old employees, were now "over
there." Not one seemed to have any sense of the unusual; even the little
blond check-clerk seated in her booth at the gates of the works with her
brass discs about her had in a few months' time changed a revolution
into an established custom. She and the discs seemed old friends. Women
are adaptable.
[Illustration: _Copyright by Underwood and Underwood_
The daily round in the Erie Railroad workshops.]
But everywhere I gathered the impression that the men are a bit uneasy.
A foreman in one factory pointed out a man who "would not have voted for
suffrage" had he guessed that women were "to rush in and gobble
everything up." I tried to make him see that it wasn't the vote that
gave the voracious appetite, but necessity or desire to serve. And in
any case, women do not push men out, they push them up. In not a single
instance did I hear of a man being turned off to make a place for a
woman. He had left his job to go into the army, or was advanced to
heavier or more skilled work.
As to how many women have supplanted men, or poured into the new war
industries, no figures are available. One guess has put it at a million.
But that is merely a guess. I have seen them by the tens, the hundreds,
the thousands. The number is large and rapidly increasing. We may know
that something important is happening when even the government takes
note. The United States Labor Department has recognized the new-comers
by establishing a Division of Women's Work with branches in every State.
It looks as if these bureaus of employment would not be idle, with a
showing of one thousand, five hundred applicants the first week the New
York office was opened. It is to be hoped that this government effort
will save the round pegs from getting into the square holes.
But even the round peg in the round hole brings difficulties. When Adam
Smith asserted that of all sorts of luggage man was the most difficult
to move, he forgot woman! The instant women are carried into a new
industry, they bring with them puzzling problems. Where shall we put
their coats and picture hats, how shall we cover up their hair, what
shall we feed them with? They must have lockers and rest rooms, caps
and overalls, and above all, canteens. The munition workers, the
conductors, in fact, all women in active work, get prodigiously hungry.
They have made a regiment of dietitians think about calories. Here is
what one of the street railways in New York City offered them on a
given day:--
Tomato soup 10c. or with an order 5c.
Roast leg of veal 16c.
Beef 16c.
Lamb fricassee 16c.
Ham steak 16c.
Liver and onions 16c.
Sirloin steak 30c.
Small steak 20c.
Ham and eggs 20c.
Ham omelet 20c.
_Regular dinner_
Soup, meat,
Vegetable,
Dessert, coffee 25c.
Rice pudding 5c.
Pie 5c.
Cake 5c.
Banana or orange 5c.
The canteen is open every hour of the twenty-four, and the women
conductors at the end of each run usually take a bite, and then have a
substantial meal during the long break of an hour and a half in the
middle of the ten-hour day.
Another problem brought to us by women in industry is, how can we house
them? The war industries have drawn large numbers to new centers. The
haphazard accommodation which men win put up with, won't satisfy women.
They demand more, and get more. To attract the best type of women the
munition plants are putting up dormitories to accommodate hundreds of
workers, and are making their plants more attractive, with rest rooms
and hospital accommodation. Take, for instance, the Briggs and Stratton
Company, which in order to draw high grade workers built its new factory
in one of the best sections of Milwaukee. The workrooms are as clean as
the proverbial Dutch woman's doorstep. From the top of the benches to
the ceiling the walls are glass to ensure daylight in every corner, and
by night the system of indirect lighting gives such perfectly diffused
light that not a heavy shadow falls anywhere. And the hospital room and
nurse--well, one would rejoice to have an accident daily!
The factory may become the exemplar for the home. The professional
woman is going over the top, and with a good opinion of herself. "I can
do this work better than any man," was the announcement made by a young
woman from the Pacific Coast as she descended upon the city hall in an
eastern town, credentials in her hand, and asked for the position of
city chemist. There was not a microbe she did not know to its undoing,
or a deadly poison she could not bring from its hiding place. The town
had suffered from graft, and the mayor, thinking a woman might scare the
thieves as well as the bacteria, appointed the chemist who believed in
herself. And she is just one of many who have been taking up such work.
Formerly two-thirds of the positions filled by the New York
Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations were secretarial or teaching
positions; now three-fourths of its applicants have been placed as
physicists, chemists, office managers, sanitary experts, exhibit
secretaries, and the like. The temporary positions used to outnumber the
permanent placements; at present the reverse is true. Of the women
placed, four times as many as formerly get salaries ranging above
eighteen hundred dollars a year.
The story told at the employment bureaus in connection with professional
societies and clubs such as the Chemists' Club is the same. Women are
being placed not merely as teachers of chemistry or as routine
laboratory workers in hospitals, but also as experimental and control
chemists in industrial plants. In the great rolling mills they are
testing steel, at the copper smelters they are found in the
laboratories. The government has thrown doors wide open to
college-trained women. They are physicists and chemists in the United
States Bureaus of Standards, Mines, and Soils, sanitary experts in
military camps, research chemists in animal nutrition and fertilizers at
state experiment stations.
But the industrial barrier is the one most recently scaled. Women are
now found as analytical, research or control chemists in the canneries,
in dye and electrical works, in flour and paper mills, in insecticide
companies, and cement works. They test the steel that will carry us
safely on our journeys, they pass upon the chemical composition of the
flavor in our cake, as heads of departments in metal refining companies
they determine the kind of copper battery we shall use, and they have a
finger in our liquid glues, household oils and polishes.
And the awakened spirit of social responsibility has opened new
callings. The college woman not only is beginning to fill welfare
positions inside the factory, but is acting as protective officer in
towns near military camps. Perhaps one of the newest and most
interesting positions is that of "employment secretary." The losing of
employees has become so serious and general that big industries have
engaged women who devote their time to looking up absentees and finding
out why each worker left.
And so we see on all hands women breaking through the old accustomed
bounds.
Not only as workers but as voters, the war has called women over the
top. Since that fateful August, 1914, four provinces of Canada and the
Dominion itself have raised the banner of votes for women. Nevada and
Montana declared for suffrage before the war was four months old, and
Denmark enfranchised its women before the year was out. And when America
went forth to fight for democracy abroad, Arkansas, Michigan, Vermont,
Nebraska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, began to lay the foundations of
freedom at home, and New York in no faltering voice proclaimed full
liberty for all its people. Lastly Great Britain has enfranchised its
women, and surely the Congress of the United States will not lag behind
the Mother of Parliaments!
The world is facing changes as great as the breaking up of the feudal
system. Causes as fundamental, more wide-spread, and more cataclysmic
are at work than at the end of the Middle Ages. Among the changes none
is more marked than the intensified development in what one may call,
for lack of a better term, the woman movement. The advance in political
freedom has moved steadily forward during the past quarter of a century,
but in the last three years progress has been intense and striking.
The peculiarity in attainment of political democracy for women has lain
in the fact that while for men economic freedom invariably preceded
political enfranchisement, in the case of women the conferring of the
vote in no single case was related to the stage which the enfranchised
group had attained in the matter of economic independence. Nowhere were
even those women who were entirely lacking in economic freedom, excluded
on that account from any extension of suffrage. Even in discussions of
the right of suffrage no reference has ever been made, in dealing with
women's claim, to the relation, universally recognized in the case of
men, of political enfranchisement to economic status. Serfdom gave way
to the wage system before democracy developed for men, and the colored
man was emancipated before he was enfranchised. For this reason the
coming of women as paid workers over the top may be regarded as
epoch-making.
In any case, self-determination is certainly a strong element in
attaining any real political freedom.
Complete service to their country in this crisis may lead women to that
economic freedom which will change a political possession into a
political power. But the requirement is readiness to do, and to do well,
the task which offers. Man-power must give itself unreservedly at the
front. Women must show not only eagerness but fitness to substitute for
man-power. It will hearten the nation, help to make the path clear, if
individual women declare that though the call to them has not yet come
for a definite service, the time of waiting will not be spent in
complaint, nor yet in foolish busy-ness, but in careful and
conscientious training for useful work.
Each woman must prepare so that when the nation's need arises, she can
stand at salute and say, "Here is your servant, trained and ready."
Women are not driven over the top. Through self-discipline, they go over
it of their own accord.
VII
EVE'S PAY ENVELOPE
No woman is a cross between an angel and a goose. She is a very human
creature. She has many of man's sins and some virtues of her own.
Moving up from slavery through all the various forms of
serfdom--attachment to the soil, confinement to a given trade, exclusion
from citizenship, payment in kind, on to full economic freedom, men have
shown definite reactions at each step. Women respond to the
same stimuli.
The free man is a better worker than slave or serf. So is the free
woman. All the old gibes at her ineptitudes have broken their points
against the actualities of her ability as a wage worker. The free man is
more alert to obligation, more conscientious in performance, than the
bond servant. So is the free woman. With pay envelope, or pension, Eve
is a better helpmate and mother than ever before.
The free man carries a lighter heart than the villain. So does the free
woman. Men have always borne personal grief more easily than women;
observers remarked the fact. The reason is the same. An absorbing
occupation, ordered and regarded as important, which brings a return
allowing the recipient to patronize what he or she thinks wise, that
brings happiness, not boisterous, but dignified. It may be a holocaust
through which Eve gains that pay envelope, but the material possession
brings gratification nevertheless. It is a tiny straw showing the set of
the wind that leisure class British women, however large their unearned
bank account, show no reluctance to accept pay for their work, and full
responsibility in their new position of employee.
Women are supposed to have liked to serve for mere love of service, for
love of child, love of husband. There is, of course, many a subtle
relation which can't be weighed and paid for; but toil, even for one's
very own hearthstone, can be valued in hard cash. The daughters of Eve,
no less than the sons of Adam, react happily to a recognition that
expresses itself in a fair wage.
The verdict comes from all sides that women were never more content. Of
course they are content. The weight of suppression is being lifted. For
many their drudgery is for the first time paid for. Is not that
invigorating? The pay envelope is equal to that of men. Is not that a
new experience giving self-respect? Eve often finds her pay envelope
heavier than that of the man working at her side. Right there in her
hand, then, she holds proof that the old prejudice against her as an
inferior worker is ill-founded.