Woman and Labor
WOMAN AND LABOR
The Housewife
By Angela Morgan
(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
It is she who makes ready the army when day is at hand,
When the bugle of labor is blowing its mighty command,
Oh, fierce are the feet of the workers who answer the call,
But swifter and fiercer the toil that hath weaponed them all.
Do we boast of their brawn? Do we trumpet the cause of the fighter
Who marches at rise of sun?
Lo! Look at the woman! The heat of her labor is whiter;
Ere the work of the world has begun
She is up, and her banners are flying from yard and from alley,
The roofs are a-flutter with eloquent streamers of snow.
Oh, not for a moment her passionate fingers may dally,
Till the soldier is shod and is fed and made ready to go.
Oh, weary the heart of the host when the battle is done,
But the woman is laboring still with the set of the sun!
Does the worker return? She is able and eager with bread.
Does he faint? There is cheer for his soul and delight for his head.
Do we trumpet our gain? Do we sing of our land and its thunder
Of factory, query and mill?
Lo! look to the woman! Her love, her love, it hath compassed the wonder,
And the army swings on at her will.
For hers is the whip, and her spur is the fighter’s salvation—
In the strength of Jehovah she comes.
Her faith is the sword and her thrift is the shield of the nation,
And her courage is greater than drums.
March, march, march, to your victories, O man!
Fight, fight, fight, as you’ve fought since time began.
For she who hath wed you, and fed you and sped you,
Fulfilling Eternity’s laws,
Is she who hath soldiered the Cause!
Woman in the Home
By Carrie W. Allen
(In “The Progressive Woman.”)
It is generally conceded that woman lives in a state of subordination to
man, and nowhere is this more apparent than in that sphere which is said
to be distinctly her own, the home.
The woman in the home renders service which the male wage-earner could
not buy. She is the family economist. She mends and makes the garments,
buys the food and clothing, and by her intelligence and thrift maintains
the head of the house in a state of physical efficiency which enables him
to go out and sell his labor power. The service she renders is priceless.
But, because she brings in no actual money, she is considered an economic
dependent, and treated as a subordinate because of this dependence.
The lot of this woman is desolately pitiable, much worse in many cases
than that of the woman who has gone out into industry.
Morality and Woman in Industry
By Clara E. Laughlin
(See page 68)
There seemed to be a widely prevailing idea that modern industrial
conditions, which take women and girls out of the home are responsible
for a great increase in criminality and immorality. The Government
investigation shows that exactly the reverse is true. The traditional
pursuits of women—housework, sewing, laundry work, nursing, and the
keeping of boarders furnish more than four-fifths of all the feminine
criminals, compared with only about one-tenth furnished by all the
newer pursuits, including mills, factories, shops, offices, and the
professions; and the number of criminals who have never been wage-earners
in any pursuit, but who come directly from their own homes into the
courts and penal institutions, is more than twice as large as that coming
from all the newer industrial pursuits together.
Wasted Energy and Talent
By M. Olivia (Mrs. Russell) Sage
(American contemporary. Millionaire philanthropist. From “The North
American Review.”)
There is an immense amount of feminine talent and energy wasted in the
world every day. This is not due to the indifference or the laziness of
woman, for she is eager to do, to accomplish, to go out into the field of
life and achieve for herself and her kind. But she simply does not know
how. One of the most important movements of the day, therefore, is the
reawakening of woman, the building her up on a new basis of self-help and
work for others. That movement will set loose an amount of talent that
will revolutionize our social life.
Sisterhood in Labor
By Ida C. Hultin
(American contemporary. From speech delivered at the 80th anniversary of
Susan B. Anthony.)
Women have failed to see that the work of every woman touched that of
every other woman. The woman who works with the hand helps her who works
with the brain. Today we know there could be no choice of work until
there was freedom of choice to work.
Women Are Going to Work
By Elsie Clews Parsons
(From “Penalizing Marriage.” In “The Independent.”)
Women are going to work, and they are not going to limit their work to
house service. Let us cease to attempt to make marriage and childbearing
a check upon their work, thereby strengthening their tendencies toward
celibacy and race suicide.... Let us rather adjust work and marriage and
childbearing to a minimum of incompatibility by lifting inherited taboos
on education in sex facts.
Development Through Choice of Work
By Florence Kiper
(In “The Forum.”)
More and more must we demand that woman be freed from unmeaning
drudgery—and from the enervating influences of support in return for sex,
in marriage or out of it. Only by self-assertion and by self-development
through the work which she may elect, will woman come into her own.
Woman’s Place
By Gertrude Breslau Fuller
(See page 36)
A woman’s place is like a man’s place. It is where her work is, wherever
she can do the most good; wherever she serves herself best without
invading any one else.
Woman’s Demand for Work
By Josephine Butler
(From “Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture.”)
(See page 157)
The demand of the women of the humbler classes for bread may be more
pressing, but it is not more sincere than that of the women of the
leisure classes for work. And these two demands coming together, it seems
to me, point to an end so plainly to be discerned, that I marvel that
any should remain blind to it. The latter demand is the attestation of
the collective human conscience that God does not permit any to live
as cumberers of the earth, and that the very conditions of their moral
existence is, that efforts and pains taken by them should answer to some
part of the needs of the community.
The Left-Over Women
By Ethel Maud Colquhoun
(English contemporary. Author “The Vocation of Women,” “Two on Their
Travels,” etc. From “The Vocation of Women.”)
It is practically certain that every discussion on the vocation of woman,
whether among feminists or their opponents, will ultimately lead to the
following problem: woman was obviously intended by nature to become a
mother; modern social requirements make it obligatory that she should
be legally married before doing so; there are not enough husbands to go
round. What do you propose to do with the women who are left over?
Sex-Parasitism
By Olive Schreiner
(From “Woman and Labor.”)
The position of the unemployed modern female is one wholly different.
The choice before her, as her ancient fields of domestic labor slip from
her, is not generally or often at the present day the choice between
finding new fields of labor, or death; but one far more serious in its
ultimate reaction on humanity as a whole—it is the choice between finding
new forms of labor or sinking slowly into a condition of more or less
complete and passive _sex parasitism_!
Again and again in the history of the past, when among human creatures
a certain stage of material civilization has been reached, a curious
tendency has manifested itself for the human female to become more or
less parasitic; social conditions tend to rob her of all forms of active
conscious social labor, and to reduce her, like the field-bug, to the
passive exercise of her sex functions alone. And the result of this
parasitism has invariably been the decay in vitality and intelligence of
the female, followed by a longer or shorter period by that of her male
descendants and her entire society.
The Changed Conditions of Tomorrow
By Margaret O. B. Wilkinson
(From “Parents and Their Problems.”)
We must accustom ourselves to another new idea that as marriage is no
longer a duty, for all women, so it is no longer a trade or profession,
requiring all the time and labor of all married women. Some confusion has
arisen on this point because certain labors have been associated with
marriage in the popular mind. But these labors may, in the near future,
come to be considered as trades in themselves, not inseparably connected
with marriage, and the wives of the days to come may be found performing
diverse tasks. For we know that in our own times women may be the best
of wives and good mothers, but with small knowledge of spinning, weaving,
basket-making, pottery-making, agriculture or even baking, although
all of these trades used to be inseparably connected with the lives of
married women. And tomorrow, owing to changed conditions, the woman
doctor or lawyer may seem to be as desirable of a mate as the cook or
seamstress today. So much is possible!
Woman’s Work in Woman’s Way
By Lida Parce
(American contemporary. Educator. Author of “Economic Determinism,” etc.
From “The Progressive Woman.”)
If the economic interest is the important one, then woman’s work has
always been the important work. The loom and the hand mill were strictly
feminine implements, so long as their product was used only to supply
the wants of the people. Only when the products of the loom and the mill
became useful in competition did man take them up; and then for purposes
of exploitation. For thousands of years man has devastated the earth and
drenched it in blood to further that exploitation. Now he is beginning to
find out that, after all, the only safe and proper use that can be made
of goods is in supplying the needs of the people. Man has not yet begun
to learn humility, but he will learn it.
Isn’t it time for women to begin to defend their work, and their way of
doing it? And to make a sober and critical estimate of the part that man
has played in history? I think that women may well take pride in doing
their work in a woman’s way.
Women Workers in New England
By Annie Marion MacLean, Ph. D.
(Professor of Sociology in Adelphi College. From “Wage-Earning Women.”)
It was in New England that women and girls first went out in large
numbers to work with their husbands and fathers and brothers in the
mill. They followed the industries from the fireside to the factory. It
was a natural movement stimulated in many cases by necessity. At that
time public opinion frowned on the idle girl, and work was considered a
crowning virtue; so the factory girl was not commiserated but commended.
Things have changed in the last century, and now we find most people of
humanitarian instincts looking with regret at the spectacle of young
girls marching to the mills. The procession is a long one in the old New
England towns, and it is growing longer with the years....
When Charles Dickens came to America, it was to Lowell he went to see
the cotton-mills in operation, and it was of those mills he wrote his
glowing picture of factory life for women. “They look like human beings,”
he said, “not like beasts of burden.” If he were to come to us to-day
to see the cotton workers, he would, in all probability, be taken to
Fall River first and asked to behold the product of the evolution of two
generations. He would see no beautiful window boxes, no smiling girls
making poetry as they worked, or moving about with songs on their lips.
Life is grim in the Fall River mills, and the women come perilously near
having the mien of “beasts of burden.” The semi-idyllic conditions of the
early New England cotton-mill have given way to a system brutalized by
greed and the exigencies of modern industry.
Women Who Sit at Ease
By Grace Fallow Norton
(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
I know a lady in this land
Who carries a Chinese fan in her hand;
But in her heart does she carry a thought
Of her Chinese sister who carefully wrought
The dainty, delicate, silken toy
For her to admire and enjoy?
To shield my lady from chilling draught
Is a Japanese screen of curious craft.
She takes the comfort its presence gives,
But in her heart not one thought lives,
Not even one little thought—ahem!—
For her Japanese sister from over the sea!
One-Fifth of the Women Population at Work
By M. Carey Thomas
(See page 10)
Unheralded, with no blare of trumpets, reluctantly emerging into the
light, are millions of women wage-earners thronging every trade and
profession, multiplying themselves beyond all calculation from census
to census in every country of the civilized world. Even in the United
States where fewer women are at work than in any other country about five
millions of women, or about one-fifth of all women of working age, are
supporting themselves outside the home. It is because this industrial
revolution has taken place in our own lifetime that we do not as yet
realize it. Women of my own age, however, need only refer to their own
experience. I can remember when no women at all were employed in business
offices, when the business streets of New York and Philadelphia and
Baltimore were practically deserted by women. Now all the great office
buildings are like rabbit hutches swarming with women typewriters, women
bookkeepers, women secretaries, and business women of every sort, kind
and description. Already everyone who studies the subject is compelled
to recognize that whether we wish it or not the economic independence
of women is taking place before our eyes. Men of the poorer classes
have long been unable to care for their families without the assistance
of women, and men of the classes which formerly supported their wives
and daughters in comfort are now unable to do so and are becoming
increasingly unwilling to marry and assume responsibility which they
cannot meet....
Woman’s Awakening
By Josephine Conger
(Editor “Home Life Magazine.” Formerly editor and publisher “The
Progressive Woman.”)
She wrought, and the world wore on its back the cloth her nimble fingers
wove.
And as she wrought her mind lay blank beneath the thick-coiled tresses
of her hair,
For man had relegated to her that one task of weaving.
And while her mind lay blank, the rulers of the earth reached forth,
and (clad in cloth she wove)
Built for them cities, kingdoms, empires, laws,
And ruled within them to their hearts’ content.
And Woman dreamed and wove, and dreamed and wove,
Monotonously for ages dreamed and wove, apparently content.
Then took the rulers of the earth from out her hands her weaving;
Left the Woman empty-handed in her home;
Gave her universal task to vast machines, to mills, to factories;
Took the dignity of social service from her hearth;
No longer in her handiwork was clad the world.
Then Woman sat in brooding silence, or she served,
Growing dark-browed in rebellion, the wheels that spun the cloth she
erstwhile wove.
Served machines in mills and factories.
Then saw her children serve; the girl-child, tender, soft;
And the small boy who should have played in freedom with his kind.
And when she saw herself who once had clothed the world in dignity
Turned slave to whirring wheels, to harsh, unsympathetic steel and iron,
When the soft children of her mortal agony were murdered inch by inch
and year by year
Before her eyes—when the Woman, bereft, defeated,
Or brooding at her task saw this,
No longer lay her mind asleep. No longer dreamed she
As when she sat beside her ancient tasks at home,
Her children playing near her in the sun.
Awaked the Woman then in every land where slavery to the harsh machine
had come.
Awaked and brushed the cobwebs of tradition from her brain.
Spoke of the unfairness of the rulers in the busy marts.
Asked for place beside them in the making of the laws;
In their execution. Asked for justice for the race,
Including women and the children which they bear.
Awaked the Woman when the pressure of the system
Grew too heavy on her heart, and cried: “We must
Abolish this, O Brother Man;
Together you and I must build a better day, a universal humanhood,
a superworld.”
Awaked the Woman, and the passion of her cry envelopes all the world
today,
As once enveloped human kind the cloth she wove.
The Simple Right to Live
By Margaret Dreier Robins
(American contemporary. Writer and speaker on labor problems, especially
those concerning the woman and child. President of the National Women’s
Trade Union League. In “Life and Labor.”)
Why must young girls pay the price of their youth and forfeit their right
of motherhood at the machine—why must thousands of men and women endure
hardships and sufferings to secure the primitive demands of a living wage
and the right to self-government, to which we as a people stand pledged?
What power makes necessary these terrible struggles for the simple right
to live?
Woman’s Wages
By Emmaline Pethick-Lawrence
(Editor of “Votes for Women,” London. In “Life and Labor.”)
Woman’s industrial life is inseparable from her civic and social status.
The only way to earn equal pay for equal work is to win equal political
rights, equal influence with the legislature.
Song of the Working Girls
By Harriet Monroe
(American contemporary. Editor “Poetry.” In “Life and Labor.”[13])
Sisters of the whirling wheel
Are we all day;
Builders of a house of steel
On Time’s highway,
Giving bravely, hour by hour,
All we have of youth and power.
Oh, lords of the house we rear,
Hear us, hear!
Green are the fields in May-time,
Grant us our love-time, play-time.
Short is the day and dear.
Fingers fly and engines boom
The livelong day,
Through far fields when roses bloom
The soft winds play.
Vast the work is—sound and true
Be the tower we build for you!
Oh, lords of the house we rear,
Hear us, hear!
Green are the fields in May-time,
Grant us our love-time, play-time.
Short is the day and dear.
Ours the future is—we face
The whole world’s needs.
In our hearts the coming race
For life’s joy pleads.
As you make us—slaves or free—
Oh, lords of the house we rear,
Hear us, hear!
Green are the fields in May-time,
Grant us our love-time, play-time.
Short is the day and dear.
[13] Copyright by the “Poetry Publishing Co.”
Economics and the Home
By Ethel Maud Colquhoun
(See page 172)
If woman is to be normally the economic partner of man in the home, it is
a question of first importance that she should be his economic equal.
How Is She Housed?
By Mary Higgs
(From her book, “Practical Housekeeping.”)
(See page 65)
Upon how the woman worker of today is housed, depends, very largely, the
efficiency and productiveness of her work. But, more impelling still,
upon how she is housed depends the efficiency and productiveness of the
future generation. For we must not forget that we have many married and
widowed industrial women, and that large numbers of our working girls
will rear the children of the coming race.
Orchards
By Theodosia Garrison
(In “Everybody’s Magazine.”)
Orchards in the Spring-time! Oh, I think and think of them—
Filmy mists of pink and white above the fresh, young green,
Lifting and drifting—how my eyes could drink of them!
_I’m staring at a dirty wall behind a big machine._
Orchards in the Spring-time! Deep in soft, cool shadows,
Moving all together when the west wind blows
Fragrance upon fragrance over road and meadows—
_I’m smelling heat and oil and sweat, and thick, black clothes._
Orchards in the Spring-time! The clean white and pink of them
Lifting and drifting with all the winds that blow.
Orchards in the Spring-time! Thank God I can think of them!
_You’re not docked for thinking—if the foreman doesn’t know._
The Exploitation of Workingwomen
By Kate Richards O’Hare
(See page 119)
Woman labor in itself is not bad; it is good. It is woman wage-labor
which is the curse. It is not labor, but exploited labor that is a menace
to the womankind of the race.
Success Through Work
By Madame Nordica
(Lillian Norton)
If you work five minutes, you succeed five minutes’ worth; if you work
five hours, you succeed five hours’ worth. Plenty have natural voices
equal to mine, _but I have worked_.
Woman and Social Betterment
By Ellen H. Richards, A. M.
(Author of “The Cost of Living.” From Introduction to “The Woman Who
Spends.”)
Social economics is preeminently a woman’s problem, especially if
Münsterberg’s assertion is widely true that in America it is the women
who have the leisure and the cultivation to direct the development
of social conditions. With this opportunity comes corresponding
responsibilities.
Woman and the Dinner Pail
By Eva Gore-Booth
(From “The Case for Woman Suffrage.”)
The rich may say that women should stay at home and cook the dinner; the
poor know that if women did stay at home there would often be no dinner
to cook.
The Lady
By Emily James Putnam
(American contemporary. The following is from her book, whose title is
self-explanatory—“The Lady.”)
The typical lady everywhere tends to the feudal habit of mind.... She can
renounce the world more easily than she can identify herself with it.
A lady may become a nun in the strictest and poorest order without the
moral convulsion, the destruction of false ideas, the birth of character
that would be the preliminary steps toward becoming an effective
stenographer.
Unequal Distribution of Labor
By Honnor Morton
Obviously, if all women did their share of the world’s work, there would
be no need for the seamstress to slave sixteen hours at a stretch; there
would be no starvation among the poor, and no hysteria among the rich.
The Working Woman Speaks
By Emily Taplin Royle
(In “The Woman’s Journal.” Mrs. John Martin, speaking at an anti-suffrage
meeting in New York, says that women normally need a great deal of
solitude, quiet and sleep and they suffer physically, mentally and
morally, if they do not get it.)
“Solitude, quiet and sleep!”
I stand by the roaring loom
And watch the growth of the silken threads,
That glow in the bare, gray room.
I hurry through darkling streets
In the chill of the wintry day,
That women who talk from their cloistered ease
May rustle in colors gay.
“Solitude, quiet and sleep!”
In the dripping, humid air
I whiten the flimsy laces
That women may be fair;
I clothe my orphan children
With the price my bare hands yield,
That the idle women may walk as fair
As the lilies of the field.
“Solitude, quiet and sleep!”
Is it given to me today,
When I march in the ranks with those who fight
To keep the wolf at bay?
Do my daughters rest in peace
Where a myriad needles yield
Their bitter bread or a sheet of flame,
And the rest of the Potter’s Field?
“Solitude, quiet and sleep!”
To factory, shop and mill,
The feet of the working women go,
While their leisure sisters still
Boast of the home they have never earned,
Of the ease we can never share,
And bid us go back to the depths again,
Like Lazarus to his lair.
Bondwomen
By Dora Marsden
(English contemporary. Editor “The Freewoman,” a brilliant, radical
feminist journal. In “The Freewoman.”)
Feminists would hold that it is neither desirable nor necessary for
women, when they become mothers, to leave their chosen, money-earning
work for any length of time. The fact that they do so, largely rests on
tradition which has to be worn down. In wearing it down vast changes must
take place in social conditions in housing, nursing, kindergarten—in the
industrial world and in the professional.
By Belle Lindner Israels
(From Introduction to “The Upholstered Cage.”)
We know now that the girl without occupation is the girl without mental
growth.