not stop at making mothers commit perjury for the sake of bread; it
rifled the eleemosynary institutions of little ones left there for safe
keeping, and sent them in ship or car loads to the West.[186] The claim
was made in New York in 1888 that[187] “during the last forty years not
less than two hundred thousand children had been sent into the Western
States, many of whom had been sold outright,” by managers of asylums,
who refused to allow the names of these little ones to be known, for
fear that parents or relatives, who had surrendered them in seasons of
distress, might wish to reclaim them when fortunate enough to procure
work. These children, not sold in the open market as their black
brothers and sisters had been, but disposed of in the name of _Charity_,
had their identity concealed by change of name; cases are on record
where brothers and sisters have grown up, met, and married, and “after
marriage learned to their horror that they were children of the same
parents.”
Thus factory and farm-house had begun to stand in the United States as
they had in England from Queen Elizabeth’s days—as the fabled ogre’s
castles of ancient legend, which drew women and children into them to
serve and suffer hopelessly, unless relieved from captivity and death by
a stronger power. History repeated itself in this exploitation of women
and children and in the plans made for their relief. The broad system of
factory legislation, inspired in England by the revelations of the
cruelty practiced upon the most hapless portions of its population,
began to be imitated in the United States. Massachusetts, the pioneer
State in introducing salutary reforms, took the initiative, and in 1874
forced its Legislature to recognize that it was the duty of the State to
regulate the hours of labor of women and children engaged in the
manufactures. In that year, after a long series of discussions between
radicals and conservatives, the Ten-hour Factory Bill was passed. It is
doubtful if the radicals would have triumphed even then, had they not
been able to demonstrate that there was “a limit to human endurance,
which, once transgressed, was not only disastrous to the operative but
unprofitable to the mill-owners.”
Having once committed itself to the precedent of interfering to protect
the weak against the strong, Massachusetts had no alternative but to
advance in the same direction. By degrees, twenty-four distinct points
were covered by factory legislation.[188] Nine other States followed
Massachusetts in the enaction of factory laws, and all made provision
for bureaus of factory inspection to see that the laws were obeyed.
These factory laws, as far as they concerned women, besides limiting the
hours of labor, obliged “employers to provide seats for women and grant
them permission to use them when not actively engaged in the duties for
which they were employed.” Fire-escapes were to be provided, and proper
safeguards thrown around machinery. Women under twenty-one years were
not to be allowed to clean machinery while in motion. Suitable
wash-rooms and other conveniences were to be furnished them. Forty-five
minutes were to be given for the noon-day meal at a uniform and proper
time. Locking of doors—that travesty upon free labor—was prohibited
during working-hours. Sanitary regulations of workrooms and weekly
payments were to be enforced. The trusteeing of wages was abolished.
Cellars were forbidden to be used as workrooms. “No plea,” it was said,
“and no subterfuge should be permitted to justify the use of any
underground apartment for purposes of human habitation.”
Delegating to States the privileges of exercising supervision over
manufactories, etc., for the benefit of labor, was a long step forward
in the path of progress; a signal triumph of radicalism over
conservative obstructionists denying the right of the State to protect
its citizens. But if the reformer gained his points, the manufacturer
contrived, as far as possible, to make the victory an empty one. Only so
far as employers could not prevent was labor legislation effective. With
the ten-hour working day, while employers complied with the letter of
the law, a large majority defied the spirit. No fact was better known
than that the ten-hour law for women and children was disregarded
whenever possible. In factories where notice was given that ten hours
would constitute a day’s work, the clause “unless otherwise ordered,”
usually accompanied it; and the “otherwise ordered” came whenever the
manufacturer’s convenience demanded it. Other factory legislation fared
little better. When, according to law, seats were placed in mills,
factories, shops, and stores, women were, in general, forbidden to use
them, under penalty of discharge. Locking of doors, when employees were
at work, although less common, was still continued. Labor commissioners,
wishing to enter factories employing many women, “had much difficulty in
getting inside, so securely was every gate and door locked and barred.”
Sanitary workrooms remained the exceptions; underground places continued
to be used for human habitations, workshops, and salesrooms. Cellars
were converted into bazaars in which hundreds of women and children were
employed, and where they lived the year round in the glare of electric
lights, never seeing daylight except in the morning hours, on Saturday
half-holidays, and Sundays. One obvious reason why factory laws were
disregarded so flagrantly was that the working force of factory
inspectors in every State but Massachusetts was so limited as to make it
impossible for them to visit even once during the year half the
factories under their supervision. In many cases their powers were so
restricted that when they caught an offender against the laws, they had
to act on Dogberry’s advice “to take no note of him, but let him go.”
Despite the fact that laws, made for the protection of women in the
industries, were not always enforced,—enough good resulted from them to
increase the tendency everywhere of looking to the State for further
legislation. In the pages of the labor reports containing the replies
made by working-women to the question of what, in their opinion, would
remedy the wrongs of industrial workers, one response was, “The power to
vote, as the right of suffrage, will place the services of women on an
economic basis with those of men.” Women working in factories asked to
have inspectors appointed of their own sex, on the ground that women
could understand and protect the interests of women better than men. In
States where the statutory age for protection under the eight or ten
hour factory law was below twenty-one, women over twenty-one desired the
law extended so as to embrace those of all ages. Employees in mercantile
houses doing duty as clerks, cashiers, saleswomen, etc., desired “that
the same protection given to women in factories be extended to them, as
their duties are fully as onerous as those of the average female in the
mill or factory.”
As almost all reforms have originated with the educated, and have
gathered strength for fruition by rolling onward among the people, the
value of these suggestions was enhanced by reason of being the
expression of the most intelligent of the working-women interviewed by
the Labor Bureau agents. Private philanthropic efforts of all kinds had
yielded no effectual help to women, and it was small wonder if the more
thoughtful among them turned to the power of the State as the only
adequate means for relief from conditions which new inventions of
machinery—dispensing with men and employing women and children as
guides—and a mania for money-getting at the expense of the proletariat,
had rendered intolerable. Though a few stenographers, telegraphers,
typewriters, teachers, with some workers in the industrial arts, had
gained better breathing-places upon the middle rungs of what was called
the “social ladder,” the struggle for life had been constantly growing
fiercer among those crowded _en masse_ at the bottom. Everywhere
production was carried on with less regard for the life, health, and
comfort of the working-women. Women were employed in even greater
numbers in the poisonous, dusty, dangerous, and laborious industries,
all of which were much more injurious to them, as child-bearers, than to
men. The long hours of exhaustive work, destructive of family ties; the
starvation wages obtained during seasons of work; the misery of seasons
of lock-outs from work, led too frequently to the chaffering of their
bodies on the street corners for bread, or the finding of a refuge from
starvation in a leap from some house-top or a plunge into the river. The
stories of the suffering endured by women engaged in the industrial
occupations of the country, as told by capable investigators like Helen
Campbell, proved that everything made by women, not excepting the
whitest, daintiest robes, had crimson spots on them,—the blood-splashes
of the toilers,—that, although unseen, no cleansing could wash away. Not
a shop-made garment, a web of silk, cotton, or flax, or wool, a pair of
gloves, shoes or stockings, any knitted thing,—machine or hand-made,—a
woven carpet or piece of furniture, an artificial flower, feather, or
piece of lace, a hat for a man or bonnet for a woman, a piece of
table-glass, pottery, or cutlery, a lucifer match, an article of
jewelry, or even a printed book, but over them all flitted the ghosts of
women twice murdered in their making: once by their own pangs, and again
by the sufferings of the little children, flesh of their own flesh, who
toiled beside them wearily—
Weeping (working) in the play-time of the others,
In the country of the free.
The publication of Helen Campbell’s “Prisoners of Poverty,” with
frequent repetitions, from other sources, of the wrongs endured by
industrial women, caused a great wave of indignation to sweep over
society. Many good men and women carried on crusades against the
purchase of ready-made garments—sad misnomer for things so hardly made.
One of their war-cries was, “An honest woman’s back is not the place for
a dishonestly manufactured article,” and another that, “It is better for
a woman to wear a coat with a hole in it than one with the stain on it
of blood-guiltiness.” Economically unwise and impossible of success as
this crusade was, it was important as showing that a higher ideal of
Justice had begun to enter into woman’s mind. Hitherto people had
partaken of the fruits of labor unthinkingly. Now the time was seen to
have come when an awakened public began to question the propriety of
purchasing and using things made through the abuse of their
fellow-beings. As Emerson said of his charity-given dollar that “it was
a wicked dollar he would yet learn to withhold,” so women were teaching
themselves to withstand desires for articles which helped to perpetuate
wicked systems of work.
To the political economist, the part that woman was taking in the
country’s industries became a subject of national importance. After
frequent investigations into the nature of their occupations, the
question was propounded, “Whether it would not be expedient, for the
good of the State, to altogether forbid the employment of women in
factories?” The position taken by Mr. Wright, the leading authority in
American labor statistics,—not prominent, however, as an advanced
reformer,—was “that married women ought not to be tolerated in the mills
at all,” as “the employment of mothers is the most harmful wrong done to
the race.” “Vital science,” he observes, “will one day demand their
exclusion, as the effect of such employment is an evil that is sapping
the life of our operative population and must, sooner or later, be
regulated, or more probably, stopped.”[189]
It will be seen at once that this suggestion of Mr. Wright lies directly
on the plane of modern socialism or nationalism. To advocate taking two
million women forcibly from certain harmful occupations is a tacit
admission that the individual has no right to dispose of herself to the
disadvantage of the State. Physicians had long sounded notes of warning
of a race deterioration that was going on in consequence of the
employment of women under bad conditions of labor, and the claim was
made that “at all hazards the State must protect itself.” To do this,
however, involved consequences that the advisers, perhaps, foresaw. As
legislation excluding women and children from factories would interfere
directly with their support, the logical conclusion would be that the
State, to keep them from actual starvation, would be bound to interfere
again to the extent of furnishing them with such means of living as
would make them—what the State wanted—happy, healthy, capable mothers of
the race. And, as it would be obviously impossible to discriminate
between those engaged in one pursuit at the expense of those employed in
others, it would follow that the State, by supporting the factory
workers, would place itself under obligations to clothe, feed, shelter,
and educate all women.
This second proposition is so necessary a corollary of the first as to
make Mr. Wright’s suggestion almost conclusive evidence that his
investigations had led him to accept the nationalistic theory of State
interference with the liberty of labor, as the sole remedy for the evils
sapping the life of our female operative population. And as no student
of practical economics would consent to the entire withdrawal from the
productive industries of so large and capable a body of workers as the
three millions women now engaged in them, Mr. Wright must have also
given acceptance to that other part of the nationalistic creed—growing
so fast into popular favor—of its being the duty of the State to
regulate the hours of labor so that work may be the promoter of health
in women in place of being its destroyer.
Even if the results of Mr. Wright’s investigations into the hard facts
of woman’s industrial condition in America had been to throw him into
accord with what is termed “scientific socialism,”[190] his experience
would have been simply that of most honest investigators. Helen
Campbell, converted to socialism while gathering material for her books
illustrative of women as workers, claimed in her latest volume that “In
socialism ... in its highest interpretation, lies the only solution for
every problem on either side the great sea, between the eastern and
western worker.” Instances of similar experience might be multiplied,
but are rendered unnecessary by the rapidity with which the doctrine has
spread in the past ten years throughout Europe and America, and the
honored names which have become identified with its support. According
to its adherents, one phase of applied socialism will consist in a
consolidation of the splendid processes of organization and co-operation
inaugurated by the various labor societies and speculative enterprises
of to-day. In its results, it aims to benefit woman: (1) by recognizing
woman as the perfect equal of man, politically and socially; (2) by
fixing woman’s means of support by the State so as to render her
independent of man, and thus insure her that freedom and dignity which
is hers of right as the mothers of the race; (3) by permitting them to
withdraw from maleficent industries; (4) by shortening the legal working
day so as to afford her leisure for the higher things of life. As women
are also in greatest measure the teachers of the race, socialism
victorious would secure for them a complete system of technical, art,
and professional schools, so as to make the education of women universal
and rounded in place of partial and incomplete. To-day, scarcely
one-third of the population has been taught so much as to read and write
understandingly.
The students of woman’s present position in and outside the named
industries make the claim that nothing less radical than such reforms as
are contemplated by the socialists will avail to better their condition.
A charge made and sustained by them is that existing labor legislation,
as well as charitable donations of schools, libraries, etc., built by
bourgeois manufacturers out of the “skimped” wages of employees, have
all been futile. Whatever has been done, the fact remains, as Victor
Hugo tersely put it, “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell
of the poor.” Dives grows richer with the years, the purple and linen of
his wives and daughters more costly, their fare more sumptuous. While
Lazarus, with his women, whose toil supplies the fine raiment and choice
delicacies, crouches outside the gates in rags, grown more beggarly, and
whose food becomes daily more loathsome and scant.
Nationalism proposes to call this injustice to a halt. With Herbert
Spencer it says, that “One [woman] will not be suffered to enjoy without
working that which another produces without enjoying.” It preaches the
brotherhood of man, the sisterhood of women; the creed heroic in its
grandeur of the abolition of alms-giving Charity, and the substitution
for this outgrown goddess of past ages a divine spirit of Justice, whose
fiat is to be obeyed though the heavens fall. “The growth within the
mass of the population of these principles is,” says a recent writer in
the _Forum_, “one of the most formidable symptoms of the ‘times.’” In
this remark there lies all the pungency of truth. Earnest men and women
are preaching the doctrines of Nationalism with all that intensity of
faith which characterized the disciples of the anti-chattel slavery
movement. To most, its tenets have become a religious as well as a
political belief. To hasten the time of its adoption, women’s voices are
being heard in lecture halls and wayside inns, in meeting-houses, in the
school-room, at the hearth-stone, and through the medium of the
printing-press—speaking with the same enthusiasm for the redemption of
the white slave as the Lucy Stones and Harriet Beecher Stowes did before
1866 for the enfranchisement of the black slave. That woman’s duty to
woman is taking this noble shape of pleading the cause of humanity, as
though every industrial worker in factory, field, mill, and shop were
her own mother, children, sisters, brothers, is the light in the heavens
showing that the darkest hour before dawn has been reached, and is
passing away from the horizon of the industrial population.
XII.
CHARITY.
BY
JOSEPHINE SHAW LOWELL.
To make even a superficial study of the work done and being done by
American women to help their suffering fellow-beings must fill the heart
with gratitude for the wisdom and devotion displayed, and with a
rejoicing hope for the future. To know that all over this vast
continent, intelligent and unwearying women are thinking and working and
praying for the needy, the wicked, the ignorant, the weak, and the
down-trodden, is a joy and an inspiration.
Necessarily, everything that is attempted is not accomplished, nor are
all the attempts wise, but, nevertheless, it is encouraging to find, in
looking over the whole field, that it has been very uncommon for any
women, in this country, to rest content to feed the body of their
suffering fellow-creatures, ignoring the wants of the brain, the heart,
and the soul. However imperfectly accomplished, there always seems at
least an attempt to reach beyond the material need and minister to some
higher want; to add at least a little to the character of those they
have sought to help, and where the ministering to the higher wants has
been made the real aim of the work, where the command, “Seek ye first
the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness,” has been followed, the
results are, as I have said, full of encouragement.
It would be impossible in this article to give a detailed history of the
charitable work of American women, nor would it be especially useful,
because in each community very much the same course is followed, and
nothing would be gained by describing what is so well known. I shall,
therefore, attempt nothing beyond a general sketch of the usual fields
of women’s work, pausing to give a more careful description only of such
enterprises as seem to me to contain something original, and which may
serve as an inspiration and example. Nor can I dwell at length even upon
these.
Apart from those who compose our own circle of family and friends, there
are four classes of our fellow-men upon whom we may exercise our
“Charity,”—that is, whom we may serve.
I. Those who have already reached the lowest depths, who have given up
even the pretense of independence, who are housed in “public
institutions,” in poorhouses, prisons, insane asylums. Much may be done
for these to render their lives more bearable, to help them to accept
the hard lessons of their purgatory, and to learn, before they die, that
one lesson which no other experience of life has succeeded in teaching
them, the lesson of self-control. This has been recognized by women for
years, and they have carried comfort and help, both physical and
spiritual, to these unhappy beings. It has not been common, however, for
women, until within a few years, to concern themselves with the
management of the public institutions themselves, and although Miss
Dorothea Dix began very early to devote herself to this work and spent
her life in bringing about reforms in the insane asylums of many
different States, still it is scarcely twenty years since such work has
been generally considered to be within the sphere of women. There are
now four States, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Wisconsin, in
which women have accepted positions on the State Boards of Charity, and
they have in these positions been very useful in bringing their critical
and criticising powers and their knowledge of detail to bear upon the
management of State and County institutions, besides forcing into
prominence the moral aspects of the questions dealt with by the official
Boards of which they are members.
The first volunteer association established to visit and improve the
public institutions (as distinguished from the individual inmates), and
the agency which first turned the attention of women generally to their
duty in this direction, and convinced men that it was one which women
were competent to perform, was the State Charities Aid Association of
New York, founded in 1872 by a woman, who, during the war, had
discovered and proved the working powers of women in the societies
auxiliary to the Sanitary Commission. The Association consists of a
central body of men and women, giving much time and thought to the study
of the theory and history of all questions relating to the public care
of the suffering and dependent, and of an associated committee in each
county of the State, engaged in active inspection of the local method of
caring for these unfortunates. These County Committees appeal to the
central body for advice and instruction as to the best means to overcome
the evils they discover, and furnish it with facts and figures to aid
its study of general principles.
An immense good has been accomplished all through the State of New York
by the Association by means of the public opinion aroused in relation to
matters concerning which, before its formation, the public conscience
seemed to be dead. All matters relating to the causes and prevention of
pauperism are dealt with by it; it deserves the thanks of the whole
country for having been the means of establishing the first
training-school for nurses ever opened here, and it was very active in
securing the passage of the New York law forbidding the detention of
children between the ages of two and sixteen years in poorhouses.
In New Jersey there is a similar association, working upon very much the
same plan, and modeled upon that of New York.
In Pennsylvania the saving of children from the contamination of the
vile associations of the poorhouse was also due to women, and they have
founded a society to take charge of those children who would, but for
their labors, be public dependents.
The following extracts from the reports for 1885 and 1886 of the
Pennsylvania Children’s Aid Society will suffice to show its objects and
methods, and also, let us hope, to incite other women in other States,
where it is still neglected, to take up the work of gathering together
and turning into the noble river of working humanity the little rills,
which, if left to trickle into the great slough of pauperism and vice,
only serve to increase its slimy foulness, and require deep and
expensive channels to carry them off after they have become corrupt and
poisonous in its depths.