A PLEA FOR THE WORKING WOMAN
'There are too many men in the world,' once exclaimed H. Taine. This
was only a joke, but there is a great deal of truth in it. There are,
in France especially, far too many men engaged in official Government
offices, in professional occupations, and in stores; too many doctors
without patients; too many lawyers without briefs; too many
functionaries, each doing little or nothing, and the others seeing that
he does it; too many men in stores showing women dresses, silks, and
gloves.
And the woman hater exclaimed: 'No wonder men cannot find a living to
make; all the occupations that once were filled by men are now
monopolized by women. The hearth is deserted, the street crowded--that's
the triumph of modern feminism.'
On the other hand some feminists, more royalist than the King, exclaim:
'Woman should be kept in clover, the protegee of humanity, and never be
allowed to work.'
And, taken between two fires, poor women are ready to shout at the top
of their voices, 'Save us from our friends as well as from our enemies!'
It is a fact that at a recent congress of Socialists an orator declared
himself in favour of the suppression of work for women.
But women do want to work, and many of them married, too. If what
husbands earn is not enough to maintain the family or keep it in
comfort, they are partners, and they wish to contribute to the revenue.
If they are not married, they want to support themselves or help to keep
aged parents. Many of them prefer their independence to matrimony, which
not uncommonly turns out to be about the hardest way for a woman to get
a living.
Women have a right to work as they have a right to live, and every work
which is suitable for women should be open to them. And when I see
Lancashire make girls work in the coal-mines I may ask, 'What work is
there that women cannot do?'
God forbid that I should be in favour of women working in the mines, but
this is not necessary. There are so many men who do a kind of work that
women should do, and could do just as well, if not better, that there
should be no question of any kind of work done by women which men could
do better.
The earth was meant to keep her children, and she would if everybody,
man or woman, was in his or her right place. The supply is all there and
all right, but it is its distribution which is all wrong. The same may
be said of work.
There should be in this world work for all and bread for all, men or
women, only the poor inhabitants of this globe have not yet been able to
obtain a proper division of the goods which they have inherited from
nature.
Thanks to the discoveries of science and the openings of new markets,
opportunities for work increase every day, but men and women are like
children in a room full of toys--they all make a rush for those which
tempt them most, and fight and die in order to obtain them. In the
presence of all the careers open to them, they rush toward the most easy
to follow or the most brilliant.
Agriculture is forsaken by men who prefer swaggering in towns with
top-hats and frock-coats, instead of imitating in their own country the
virile, valiant men of the new worlds who fell forests, reclaim the
land, and are the advanced pioneers of civilization. They prefer being
clerks or shop assistants.
Instead of taking a pickaxe, working a piece of land and making it their
own, they prefer taking a pen and adding from 9 a.m. till 5 or 6 p.m.
pounds and shillings which do not belong to them. The result is that
they overcrowd the cities, and women can often obtain no work except on
condition that they accept it for a smaller remuneration than would be
offered to men, or, in other words, submit to being sweated.
Is it a manly occupation to be assistant in a draper's store, to be a
hairdresser, copyist, to make women's dresses, hats, corsets? When I see
in dry goods stores a great big man over six feet high measure ribbons
or lace, instead of tilling the soil or doing any other kind of manly
work, I want to say to him, 'Aren't you a man?'
Europe is full of men doing such work. I know America is not, although I
have many times seen in the United States positions filled by men which
would be filled equally well by women, and often better.
Many writers maintain that woman was intended to tread on a path of
roses, to be tended, petted--I may have been myself guilty of holding
views somewhat in this direction--but women are not all born in
'society'; millionaires are very few, and people whom you may call rich
form after all but a very small minority in the whole community. The
path of roses can only exist for the very few, and, besides, there are
women whose aim in life is not to be petted. In fact, some absolutely
object to being petted.
I tell you the time is coming, and coming at giant strides, when every
child--boy or girl--will be made early to choose the kind of work he or
she best feels ready to undertake to make a living. The time is coming
when no poverty will stare in the face the woman who can and is willing
to work.
Maybe the time is coming when a woman who bravely earns a good living
will be considered not only most respectable--she is that now--but will
be envied for her 'social standard' by the frivolous, useless women who,
from morning to night, yawn and wonder how they could invent anything to
make them spend an hour usefully for their good or the good of their
fellow-creatures.