Territories which have conferred the franchise on women in some form,
from the petition-vote of Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas, to the full
suffrage exercised by the women of Wyoming for twenty years. This has
been accomplished not by the fanaticism of a few abnormal and unbalanced
women, as many superficial objectors declare. It is the legitimate
outgrowth of the principles of Republican government, and has come
naturally from the evolution of woman as a human being, which has
proceeded through the ages. No one who has studied the question can lack
faith in its ultimate success, and the beneficent results it is sure to
accomplish. For the ballot in the hands of woman is the synonym of her
legal equality with man, and legal justice has always preceded social
equity. Woman has wrought more of good than evil in the world during her
ages of ignorance, bondage, and degradation. What then may not be
expected from her in righteousness and helpfulness, when she is accorded
freedom, equity, and opportunity!
XI.
WOMAN IN INDUSTRY.
BY
ALICE HYNEMAN RHINE.
In treating of woman’s industrial career in America the subject falls
naturally into periods, each one of which seems to possess some distinct
characteristic. These periods can in no sense be considered arbitrary
divisions, for the changes in woman’s industrial position in America
have been the result of slow transitions from one state to another. The
fact that is emphasized is, that certain causes can be observed which
had the effect at stated times of forcing old conditions to give way to
new. By taking up in their order each of these epoch-shaping factors, we
can discern most easily the part women have played in the progress of
American industries.
The first of these periods embraces those years of primitive social
conditions when people labored to supply the simplest needs of life;
when men were engaged principally in agriculture and commerce, and women
carried on the work of manufacturing clothing, and attending to the
wants of the household. In those days, almost every family owned a loom,
spinning-wheel, reel and knitting-needles, and the family comfort
depended largely on the degree of skill and industry with which these
manufacturing implements were handled. In some homes, hundreds of yards
of “homespun” were made yearly. The New York _Mercury_ for 1768 credits
one family, living in Newport, Rhode Island, with having within four
years “manufactured nine hundred and eighty yards of woolen cloth,
besides two coverlids (coverlets), and two bed-ticks, and all the
stocking yarn of the family.”
In those days neither wealth nor position afforded women an excuse for
idleness. Nor did their labors cease with the home. It was considered so
unbecoming to be unemployed that even hours of social enjoyment were
devoted to useful occupations. During the enforcement of the
non-importation acts, when, among other things, cloth and stockings were
prevented from coming into this country from England, a letter written
from Newport tells of a social gathering where “it was resolved that
those who could spin ought to be employed in that way, and those who
could not, should reel.” At a similar meeting in Boston, “a party of
forty or fifty young women, calling themselves ‘Daughters of Liberty,’”
amused themselves at the house of their pastor with spinning, during one
day, “two hundred and thirty-two skeins of yarn, some very fine.” No
woman considered herself too elegant
To guide the spindle and direct the loom,
or knit the stockings which, since stocking-frames were interdicted as
articles of import, had to be made for the whole people by slow process
of hand. As indicative of the simple and industrial habits of Mrs.
Washington, it is related that when, in 1780, a party of the leading
ladies of Morristown called upon her by appointment at her husband’s
headquarters, Mrs. Washington appeared before them in a plain gown of
“linsey woolsey,” and, while she entertained them with pleasant
conversation, her busy fingers never ceased plying the knitting-needles.
Prior to and long after the Revolution, stocking knitting was an
industry large enough to claim most of what were termed woman’s “spare
moments.” With the assistance of child and slave labor, large quantities
were made for sale or exchange. Legislators, to stimulate busy fingers
to fresh exertions, offered bounties for their increased production. In
Virginia, prizes of fifty pounds of tobacco (the currency then) were
given “for every five hundred pairs of men’s and women’s stockings
produced, worth from three to five shillings the pair, with the
privilege of buying them at an advance of seventy-five per cent. on
those prices.”
Except among a few German settlers in Pennsylvania, no attempt was made
for many years to change stocking-making from a domestic into a factory
industry. Until 1826 the manufacture of stockings remained woman’s
almost exclusive province. Then knitting-machines were set up in several
of the States, but, as if there was some peculiar fitness in this
remaining woman’s department, the employees in knitting-works have
always been, even down to 1889, “nearly all women and children.”
Never did women work harder than during this domestic period of labor.
The slave women of the South, in addition to going through all the
processes of manufacturing woolen and cotton cloth, which they afterward
cut and made into garments, attended to both in and out-of-door labor.
They tilled the rice fields, planted tobacco, sowed the cotton seed, and
helped with the harvesting. The women in the North, though not “put into
the ground,” as the early adventurers termed field-work, engaged
energetically in other industries. History tells of women who helped
build their own homes, wielding the ax and carrying the water to mix
mortar with which to build chimneys. On the farms, it was women who
raised the garden truck of vegetables and herbs, attended to poultry
breeding, milked the cows, made butter and cheese, did the sewing, and
performed all the household chores now classed in industrial statistics
as “domestic service.”
Outside the strictly necessary occupations of manufacture, household
service, clothing, and garden-work, from quite early times women in
America turned their attention to speculative labor and to trade. When
James the First, thinking to utilize mulberry trees that were indigenous
to our soil, forwarded silkworm cocoons to America, when dazzling dreams
of wealth to come from the successful culture of the silkworm were
indulged in by people on both sides of the Atlantic, and when bounties
of money and tobacco were offered for spun and woven silk, according to
its weight and width, most of these prizes were obtained by women. The
success obtained by women in feeding the worms, and reeling, spinning,
and weaving the silk, caused this industry, during the varying fortunes
that preceded the establishment of silk-weaving as a factory industry,
to be carried on mainly by them. History has preserved the names of
three women famous before the Revolution as silk-growers and weavers:
Mrs. Pinckney, Grace Fisher, and Susanna Wright. While silkworm culture
was a failure in spite of all the fostering care bestowed upon it, and
none of the pioneers realized any of the golden visions of rivaling the
productions of Spain and the Indies, the efforts made by them paved the
way for future cultivation.
Along with the silk industry, another of scarcely less importance was
growing up quietly in New England. This was the manufacture of straw
goods, the products of which now amount to many millions annually.
Straw, applied to so many purposes to-day, owes its origin as an article
of manufacture to a young Massachusetts girl. In 1789 Miss Betsy Metcalf
discovered the secret of bleaching and braiding the meadowgrass of her
native town of Dedham, and of ingeniously making this braid into a
bonnet. Although scarcely more than a child, the chronicles tell that
she taught others to do what she had done, and started a business by
which the want of bonnets and hats for summer-wear was supplied. From
using straw for head-gear, its manufacture spread to other things, and
developed an industry that, in 1880, employed nearly eleven thousand
operatives. Of these over seven thousand were women.
Whether it was the active out-door life led by the American women of the
eighteenth century, or the wide-awake interest circumstances obliged
them to take in the concerns of the family and of men; whether the
stirring times in which they moved, or the deferential attitude of men
stimulated them to do things that the women of other nations were not
doing, it is certain that the American women of a century ago were far
in advance of their times in all things except a knowledge of light
literature, which the circulating libraries of Europe placed within the
reach of women there, and a scarcity of books denied them here. That
this was more of a gain than loss, by giving women time to think, is
shown in the energy with which they went to work in helping to build up
the nation. They engaged in mercantile affairs with such success that,
it is said, “many Boston fortunes owed their rise to women.” The active
interest taken by them in politics gave, even before the Revolution,
some representative women to journalism. Out of the seventy-eight
newspapers published in the colonies, sixteen were edited by women, and
all but two of them championed the cause of liberty and justice. The
first paper to publish the Declaration of Independence was edited and
printed by a Mrs. Reid. In medicine, women confined themselves into
distilling herbs into remedies which it was said “could kill or cure
with any of the faculty.” In the practice of midwifery, history has
preserved the name of a Mrs. Robinson, of New London, who continued to
practice to an advanced age, and who “delivered twelve hundred mothers
without losing a patient.”
The inventive faculty, so distinctive a trait in the character of the
American man, was also a gift of the American woman. How many women were
inventors will never be known, as they timidly shielded their identity
behind men. This is said to have been the case with the cotton-gin.
Credited through all the years to Eli Whitney, modern writers claim that
it was the fruit of the inventive powers of Mrs. Nathaniel Green,[172]
widow of Gen. Green of revolutionary fame. The story runs that Mrs.
Green, a native of Rhode Island and familiar with the working of the
anchor forge belonging to her husband’s father, set her wits to work
while visiting her Georgia plantations, to lessen the labor of cleansing
the cotton. When this difficulty was solved, she permitted Mr. Whitney
to claim the patent, through fear of the ridicule of her friends and
loss of social position recognition of her work might have entailed.
By whomever invented, no other instrument has been so fruitful of
consequences. In 1793, when the cotton-gin was made, cotton, instead of
being King, was a humble garden plant, grown for home consumption in the
regions from Georgia to New Jersey. When its snowy blossoms ripened,
women gathered them, plucked the seeds from the fiber, and got it ready
for spinning. So difficult was this process, that to remove the seed
from one pound was considered a good day’s work. By the operation of the
cotton-gin, in the time it had taken to cleanse one pound, three
hundred-weight could be got ready for market. By this, cotton was
transformed at once into a valuable commercial product that required for
its successful cultivation an enormous increase of land and labor. It
instilled such new life into the almost dying institution of slavery
that the cotton-gin may well be said to have been the foster-mother of
slavery in America.
As the immediate effect of the cotton-gin in the South was to give an
enormous value to the slave, its invention was followed in the North by
the cotton factory. The cotton factory was the northern complement of
the cotton-gin. To women it had the momentous results of transferring
them from the home to the factory; of taking them out of the family
farm-house to the manufacturing towns and villages, and, by making them
for the first time the wage-earning competitors of men, altering their
whole status in the labor market of America.
With the factory came a new epoch for women in America. The War of the
Revolution and the War of 1812 had been ended long enough to induce a
general feeling of security concerning the future of the republic. For a
large number of people, the hard work and deprivations of the past were
as a dream; peace and plenty promised to abound. Wealth came flowing
from all directions in a steady stream into the country through the
various channels of commerce and agriculture. Numerous business
enterprises were undertaken, principal among which were the factories
for weaving cotton and wool into cloth. The earliest of these was built
in Massachusetts, where numerous swift-flowing rivers abound, capable of
being utilized for moving machinery. Through the energetic, progressive
spirit of the descendants of the Puritans, it was not long before New
England began to rival Old England in manufacturing the increased
production of cotton grown in the United States. The first cotton mill
erected in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1822, was followed so quickly by
others, that by 1839 there were in Lowell ten companies incorporated
with a capital of $13,000,000. These produced 2,463,000 yards of cloth
per week, of which all but 91,000 were cotton. The number of operatives
employed were 12,507, and in the cotton mills the majority of these were
women. From the amount of capital invested and the number of operatives
employed, Lowell was termed, in the period between 1840 and 1850, “the
Manchester of America.”
But in nothing—except that Lowell and Manchester were places filled with
the hum of machinery tended by human workers for their own livelihood
and the profits of others—was there any resemblance between Manchester
and Lowell. The recorded condition of the English operatives, especially
women, at that time reads like a page torn from some canto of Dante’s
“Inferno;” while that of Lowell, pictured by women who worked as
ordinary mill-hands in the Lowell factories, seems in comparison like a
Utopian idyl evolved from the brain of dreamers.
According to writers, the women operatives who entered the Lowell mills
came from the New England farms, not from stress of circumstances, but
to get wage-money to help lift a mortgage from the family farm, or to
assist some son or brother in obtaining an otherwise impossible
university education. A large majority entered the mills to secure
independence, or household and dress adornments. Not a few entered so as
to be near circulating libraries and schools, with the opportunities for
self-culture which these afforded. Coming from the agricultural class,
which considered itself among the aristocracy of America,[173] no class
distinctions were made, and the factory young women were welcomed into
the best social circles of Lowell. Well but simply dressed, as was the
fashion of the times, they were to be seen at church, Sunday-schools,
and social gatherings at the parsonages and elsewhere, receiving the
same consideration as those whom circumstances had placed above the need
of work. The girls themselves felt no loss of caste or diminution of
self-respect. Most of them expected to marry—many did—and withdraw from
the factory, and failing this, when factory work became disagreeable, to
retire to the family home. The factory was an episode, not, as it later
became too frequently elsewhere, the burden of this chapter in woman’s
life.
The factories _per se_ were as remarkable as the women who operated
them. Kept as clean as the nature of the work would admit, with plants
growing in the windows trained to shade the glass, the rooms seemed
redolent of the country. Fronting one side of the building were the
banks and waters of the swift-flowing Merrimac, which, as it hastened on
to meet the sea, turned the wheels of the machinery, ignorant as yet of
steam. On the other was the bright, new village, looking, as Dickens
said in 1843, “as if every kind of store had taken down its shutters for
the first time and started in business yesterday.” Standing on the hill
was the prettiest building in the place, which was the hospital where
girls when sick were tenderly cared for. Those unable to pay the weekly
charge of three dollars, had it provided for them by the corporations.
Seldom were the latter put to this expense, for Yankee girls had a
horror of being placed under money obligations. Boarding-houses, erected
by the mill-owners, were given in charge of reputable women. The charge
for board in them, including the mid-day meal,—which was taken in
civilized fashion at the boarding-house tables,—and washing to a certain
extent, was fixed at the small sum of $1.50. Wages, counting in those of
the little doffers, averaged $3.75 per week. Weavers, drawing-in girls,
warpers, and spinners, who tended extra work, could earn from six to
eight dollars per week. These wages, with the low price of board and the
economical style of dress common in those days, enabled the mill
operatives to place a large part of their earnings in the savings bank
established for their use by the corporations. In 1841, one hundred
thousand dollars, a sum which was a source of pride to all concerned,
was deposited to the credit of the girls of Lowell.
Happy in their social position, and in the good feeling existing between
employers and employed, free from pecuniary care for the necessities of
life and in command of some of the best luxuries, the Lowell girls
reached an intellectual height unique in the history of industrial
workers. When the twelve or fourteen hours that then constituted a day’s
work were ended, buoyant with the health of generations of out-door
workers, the Lowell women were fresh enough to enjoy in various ways
what was left of their evenings. In most of the boarding-houses there
were pianos, the joint property of the girls. Some played, others sang.
Books were read, topics discussed, and poems, stories, and essays
written. These formed the pages of the “Lowell Offering,” a monthly
magazine composed entirely of articles by the girls. The literary merit
of these articles astonished people from abroad. Harriet Martineau
republished some of them in England under the title of “Mind among the
Spindles,” while Dickens claimed that, independent of the fact that the
articles were written by girls after a long, hard day’s work in
factories, they “compared favorably with those of many English
periodicals.” In character, the stories differed from the sentimental
love-tales common to women’s writings of that period. Simple in style,
they were mostly descriptive of human life and the beauties of nature
that the girls had left behind them, and what was best in their Lowell
environments. Among the contributors, who attained national reputation,
were Lucy Larcom, the poet; Margaret Foley, the sculptor, and Mrs. H. H.
Robinson, the author.[174] These women always spoke with affectionate
respect of their factory experiences. Mrs. Robinson, at the
International Council of Women, held at Washington in 1888, after
telling how she had entered the Lowell mills as a “doffer” when a child,
and remained there until she married in 1848, said: “I consider the
Lowell mills my _alma mater_, and am as proud of them as most girls of
the colleges in which they have been educated.”
When factory towns sprang up in the suburbs of the large cities of New
York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, etc., they did so under conditions
different from those of Lowell, and, of course, had other results. There
was no need in these places for corporations to offer exceptional wages
and treatment to women to induce them to enter the mills. Already at
hand, and eager to accept any conditions, were the thousands of women
who had been deposited on the shores of America by the tidal wave of
immigration, which set in from Europe during the decade of 1845–55. For
these women, who labored for bread and butter and not for knick-knacks,
no effort was made, as in Lowell, to surround them with a favorable
social atmosphere. How women spent their evenings, what were their
pleasures or sorrows and how they lived, in a country where the
necessities of life were dear, on their weekly wages of $2.63 to $4.99
per week (the average wages of factory women from 1850 to 1860), was
inquired into by none. Employers and employed both felt that all
responsibilities began and ended with the money given and received on
pay-days.
This indifference concerning working-women was not confined to the
factory, but was so general that even the National Census Report did not
take the trouble to classify woman’s work separately from man’s, until
it was found that in some departments of industry women exceeded men in
point of numbers almost in the ratio of two to one. In the cotton
factories of twenty-five States, in 1850, the number of women employed
was 62,661, against 32,295 men. In 1860, the average number employed in
the cotton factories was, according to official returns, 75,169 women
against 46,859 men. It was computed that in the woolen goods
manufactories of the six New England States, there were 29,886 men and
51,517 women employed. Hosiery, an industry belonging to women since
days when Homer wrote of
The knitters in the sun,
And the free maids who weave their thread with bones,
employed in 1860 almost three times as many women as men. Large numbers
of women made rubber clothing. Half as many women as men were engaged in
the manufacture of paper. Women filled places in bookbinderies, printing
offices, and newspaper establishments. The number of women engaged in
domestic service (never an exactly ascertainable quantity) formed a bulk
equal to the factory population; while the ranks of needle-women were,
as usual, larger than all of those industries combined, excepting
domestic service. In 1850, the number of women engaged in the making of
men’s and boys’ clothing alone numbered 61,500; the number of men being
35,061. In 1860, owing to the invention of the sewing-machine, these
figures were partially reversed; the number of women employed was
diminished and that of men increased.
The sewing-machine was one of several factors that about 1860
inaugurated for women another industrial period. From its invention by
Elias Howe the sewing-machine properly belonged to 1846, but the
business of making and selling them was not fairly started before 1853.
Then the sales of all the manufacturers amounted to only 2529. In 1860
they had reached to about 50,000. This increase showed that the
sewing-machine results must be dated from the year of its acceptance
into popular favor. Mr. Howe’s invention, like all other labor-saving
machines, intended to be a blessing by lightening the burdens of
workers, proved a curse by taking away their accustomed pursuit from
those who depended on the skill by which they drove
The patient needle through the woven threads.
Brought into competition with machines that could do more and better
work in one day than was possible for six women, working twenty hours
apiece, to accomplish, these had either to starve, or force their way
into some other wage-earning industry. An example of how this
displacement affected needle-women can be gleaned from Appleton’s
Cyclopædia for 1862, which cites a single establishment in New York,
employing four hundred machines and producing about ten thousand shirts
a week, whose estimated savings (in wages) were about $240,000 per
annum. In the same year, the following sums were saved in wage-time by
the sewing-machines in the manufacturing industries:
Men’s and boys’ clothing in New York City $7,500,000
Hats and caps 462,500
Shirt bosoms 832,750