Since the stirring years of the American War of Independence and of the
French Revolution the question of woman’s rights and woman suffrage has
remained constantly before the public. Its significance greatly
increased when with the invention of steam-engines, with the rapid
growth and extension of trade and commerce, and with the introduction of
modern methods all conditions of industrial life likewise became
revolutionized. Many of those industries in which women participated,
were transferred from the homes to factories, where the workmen and
women were placed at machines, producing within one day greater
quantities of goods than the laborers formerly had manufactured within
weeks or months.
With this industrial revolution came, however, also many evils. The
laborers remained no longer masters of their own time and efforts. While
hitherto they had been the owners of their little industry, now the
factory owners and the great industries began to own them. They found
themselves bound by strict rules, not of their own making, but
prescribed and enforced by their employers, many of whom had not the
slightest consideration for the people that worked for them. Just as
soulless as their machines, and thinking only of gain, they abused their
employees wherever possible, and in doing so often resorted to the
meanest tricks.
Nowhere did such evils become so appalling as in England, where the
politicians subordinated all other considerations to industry. It was
here that in order to reduce the small wages of the workman cheap woman-
and child-labor was first introduced on a large scale, and feeble,
defenseless creatures, without experience and organization, were
subjected to the most cruel oppression and exploitation.
At the end of the 18th and during the first half of the 19th Century
large numbers of women and pauper children were shipped from the
agricultural districts of Southern England to the northern districts to
work in the factories which had been established there in consequence of
the superior water-power.
Tender women and girls, and even children from six to ten years were
placed in cotton mills, where they were compelled to work in overcrowded
rooms thirteen to fourteen hours daily. Robert Mackenzie in his book
“The Nineteenth Century,” p. 77, states, that the accommodations
provided for these people were of the most wretched nature. “If such
children became over-tired and fell asleep they were flogged. Sometimes
through exhaustion they fell upon the machinery and were
injured—possibly crushed,—an occurrence which caused little concern to
any except the mothers, who had learned to bear their pangs in silence.
These children, who were stunted in size and disposed to various acute
diseases, were often scrofulous and consumptive.”
The Encyclopædia Britannica, in an article on Socialism, describes the
conditions of the working people in England at that time as follows:
“The English worker had no fixed interest in the soil. He had no voice
either in local or national government. He had little education or none
at all. His dwelling was wretched in the extreme. The right even of
combination was denied him. The wages of the agricultural laborer were
miserably low. The workman’s share in the benefits of the industrial
revolution was doubtful. Great numbers of his class were reduced to
utter poverty and ruin by the great changes consequent to the
introduction of improved machinery; the tendency to readjustment was
slow and continually disturbed by fresh change. The hours of work were
mercilessly long. He had to compete against the labor of women, and of
children brought frequently at the age of five or six from the
workhouses. These children had to work the same long hours as the
adults, and they were sometimes strapped by the overseers till the blood
came. Destitute as they so often were of parental protection and
oversight, with both sexes huddled together under immoral and unsanitary
conditions, it was only natural that they should fall into the worst
habits and that their offspring should to such a lamentable degree be
vicious, improvident, and physically degenerate.”
A report, delivered at the “International Congress of Women,” held in
July, 1899, at London, states that the weak legs of those children,
which were not strong enough to support the body for hours, were
sustained by boots of wood and lead, in which they were obliged to
stand. Hence the high scale of mortality among the children.
Most revolting conditions prevailed in the English coal mines. Married
women, girls and children worked here, harnessed to trucks and nearly
naked, dragging on their hands and knees loads of coal through long low
galleries to the pit mouth.
When some philanthropists made complaints about these conditions,
Parliament instituted a commission to inquire into the state of working
women in these mines and the wages paid them. From its official report
we quote the following: “Betty Harris, one of the numerous persons
examined, aged thirty-seven, drawer in the coal-pit, said: ‘I have a
belt around my waist and a chain between my legs to the truck, and I go
on my hands and feet. The road is very steep and we have to hold by a
rope, and when there is no rope, by anything we can catch hold of. There
are six women and about six boys and girls in the pit I work in; it is
very wet, and the water comes over our clog-tops always, and I have seen
it up to my thighs; my clothes are always wet.’—
“Margaret Hibbs, aged eighteen, said: ‘My employment after reaching the
wall-face (the place where the coal is broken) is to fill my bagie or
stype with two and a half or three hundred-weight of coal; I then hook
it on to my chain and drag it through the seam, which is from twenty-six
to twenty-eight inches high, till I get to the main road, a good
distance, probably two hundred to four hundred yards. The pavement I
drag over is wet, and I am obliged at all times to crawl on my hands and
feet with my bagie hung to the chain and ropes. It is sad, sweating,
sore and fatiguing work, and frequently maims the women.’
“Robert Bald, the government coal-viewer, stated: In surveying the
workings of an extensive colliery underground a married woman came
forward groaning under an excessive weight of coal, trembling in every
nerve, and almost unable to keep her knees from sinking under her. On
coming up she said in a plaintive and melancholy voice: ‘Oh sir, this is
sore, sore, sore work!’
“And a sub-commissioner said: ‘It is almost incredible that human beings
can submit to such employment—crawling on hands and knees, harnessed
like horses, over soft, slushy floors, more difficult than dragging the
same weight through our lowest sewers.’”—
Mackenzie, in his above mentioned book, states that “there was no
machinery in these English coal-pits to drag the coal to the surface,
and women climbed long wooden stairs with baskets of coal upon their
backs. Children of six were habitually employed. Their hours of labor
were fourteen to sixteen daily. The horrors among which they lived
induced disease and early death. Law did not seem to reach to the depths
of a coal-pit, and the hapless children were often mutilated and
occasionally killed with perfect impunity by the brutalized miners among
whom they labored.”
Other authorities state that the women were paid less than 20 cents per
day! For the same kind of work men got three times as much pay; but the
employers preferred girls and women to do the work “because of their
lower wages and greater docility!” In the iron districts of the Midlands
women earned for very hard work 4 to 5 shillings a week, (=$1.25) while
the men received 14 shillings.
These small wages, which forced upon the laborers the most barren mode
of living, were, however, taken away again from them through the meanest
tricks, devised by the employers particularly through the so-called
Truck System. Under this abominable system the employers, instead of
paying the wages in cash, forced their employees to take checks or
orders, redeemable in all kinds of necessities and goods, but valid only
in those “truck stores” or “tommy shops” run by the employers, or in
which they had an interest. By cheating the workmen with goods of
inferior quality, by overcharging them at the same time, by pressing
them to take goods far beyond their need and wages, and by making long
intervals—often from 40 to 60 days—between the real pay days, they
forced the laborers into debt and absolute slavery.
The situation of many thousands of those women who tried to make a
living as seamstresses was also desperate. Always put off with wages far
below the demands of a modest existence, they were real martyrs of
labor. Thomas Hood, one of the foremost English poets of the first half
of the 19th Century, gave in his famous “Song of the Shirt” a most
touching picture of such woman’s toil and misery, of woman in her wasted
life and in her hurried death. His poem reads:
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread—
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
She sang the “Song of the Shirt!”
“Work! work! work!
While the cock is crowing aloof!
And work—work—work,
Till the stars shine through the roof!
It’s Oh! to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save,
If this is Christian work!
“Work—work—work
Till the brain begins to swim;
Work—work—work
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Till over the button I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream!
“Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!
Oh, Men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you’re wearing out,
But human creatures’ lives!
Stitch—stitch—stitch,
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A Shroud as well as a Shirt.
“But why do I talk of Death?
That Phantom of grisly bone,
I hardly fear his terrible shape,
It seems so like my own,
Because of the fasts I keep;
Oh, God! that bread be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!
“Work—work—work!
My labor never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
A crust of bread—and rags.
That shatter’d roof—and this naked floor—
A table—a broken chair—
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there!
“Work—work—work!
From weary chime to chime,
Work—work—work—
As prisoners work for crime!
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Till the heart is sick, and the brain benumb’d
As well as the weary hand.
“Work—work—work,
In the dull December light,
And work—work—work,
When the weather is warm and bright—
While underneath the eaves
The brooding swallows cling,
As if to show me the sunny backs
And twit me with the spring.
“Oh! but to breathe the breath
Of the cowslip and primrose sweet—
With the sky above my head,
And the grass beneath my feet,
For only one short hour
To feel as I used to feel,
Before I knew the woes of want
And the walk that costs a meal.
“Oh! but for one short hour!
A respite however brief!
No blessed leisure for Love or Hope,
But only time for Grief!
A little weeping would ease my heart,
But in their briny bed
My tears must stop, for every drop
Hinders needle and thread!”
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread thread—
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch,
Would that its tone could reach the Rich!
She sang the “Song of the Shirt!”
Constantly struggling with want and poverty and seeing health menaced by
the machines, the working classes of England were filled with
bitterness, when they found that their complaints brought no relief,
while the law-makers, sitting in Parliament, favored any demands of the
employers and of the big interests. To forget for a few hours their
hopeless existence, large numbers of men and women resorted to liquor,
hereby hastening their final collapse and ruin.
Such was the life led by English laborers during the greater part of the
Nineteenth Century. Feeble attempts to improve these deplorable
conditions were made through a series of “Factory Acts,” the immediate
cause for which was the fearful spread of epidemic diseases which
wrought dreadful havoc among the laborers, especially among the women
and children. If we glance over these factory acts, as they are sketched
in the Encyclopædia Britannica, we find that even under these acts
children below the age of nine were permitted in silk factories, and
that they were required to work twelve hours a day, exclusive of an hour
and a half for meal times. An act of 1833 provided that young persons
from thirteen to eighteen and women were restricted to 68 hours a week.
Ten years later a mining act was passed which prohibited underground
work for children under ten and for women. In 1867 the Workshop
Regulation Act fixed the working day for children from 6 a. m. to 8 p.
m. = 14 hours, and for young persons and women from 5 a. m. to 9 p. m. =
16 hours! After having made such sad disclosures, the Encyclopædia
Britannica dared to say: “By these various enactments the state has
emphatically taken under its protection the whole class of children and
young persons employed in manufacturing industries. It has done this in
the name of the moral and physical health of the community.”
* * * * *
The despicable methods employed by the British mine and factory owners
in their dealings with the working classes spread to the Continent as
well as to America. In France, Germany and Austria they led to those
desperate struggles between capital and labor, out of which was born
that most remarkable movement of the 19th Century called “Socialism.”
In the United States soon enough attempts were made to imitate the
detestable methods of the British mine and factory owners. But as the
character of the population was quite different, the abuse of the
working men and women never became so appalling as in Great Britain.
The first industry to be established in factories was the weaving of
cotton in the New England States, where a number of rapid streams, among
them the Merrimac, the Connecticut and the Housatonic, furnished
excellent water-power. And as during the pioneer and colonial times the
housewives and daughters had spun and woven all the cloth and linen for
family use, there was an ample number of expert workers at hand. After
the first weaving machines were brought over from Europe, in 1814,
Dover, Lowell, Waltham, Great Falls and Newmarket became the principal
centers of the cotton industry.
Here the daughters of the farmers and settlers did the work that
formerly their mothers had done at home. Only they did it faster, by
tending the machines all day long. At first the girls did not know that
the employers might try to make the people in the factories work longer
hours without any rest and adequate pay. Soon enough they found this
out. But as the girls had inherited the independent spirit of their
fathers and grandfathers, trouble began to brew. In December, 1828, four
hundred girls in Dover, New Hampshire, formed a procession and marched
out of the factory, in order to show their indignation at the growing
oppression by their employers. They clad their complaints in verses, one
of which ran:
“Who among the Dover girls could ever bear
The shocking fate of slaves to share!”
Unorganized as they were at that time, they did not succeed in gaining
all they desired. But five years later they walked out again, eight
hundred strong, adopting resolutions stating that they had not been
treated as “daughters of freemen” by their employers and the unfriendly
newspapers. At the same time in Lowell, Mass., at a signal given by a
Dover girl, two thousand girls, who had formed a “=Factory Girls’
Association=,” joined in a sympathy strike, marched around town and
issued the following proclamation:
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