PROCEEDINGS
OF THE
ACADEMY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK
THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF WOMEN
THE ACADEMY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK
1910
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY
THE ACADEMY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 5
_The Editor_
I HISTORICAL
THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN’S WORK
IN THE UNITED STATES 11
_Helen L. Sumner_
II PROBLEMS OF WOMEN IN INDUSTRY
CHANGES IN WOMEN’S WORK IN BINDERIES 27
_Mary Van Kleeck_
THE TRAINING OF MILLINERY WORKERS 40
_Alice P. Barrows_
TRAINING FOR SALESMANSHIP 52
_Elizabeth B. Butler_
THE EDUCATION AND EFFICIENCY OF WOMEN 61
_Emily Greene Balch_
STANDARDS OF LIVING AND THE SELF-DEPENDENT WOMAN 72
_Susan M. Kingsbury_
A NEW SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT 81
_Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch_
INDUSTRIAL WORK OF MARRIED WOMEN 90
_Florence Kelley_
THE ECONOMICS OF “EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK”
IN THE SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK CITY 97
_John Martin_
III SOCIAL ACTION
WOMEN AND THE TRADE-UNION MOVEMENT IN THE
UNITED STATES 109
_Alice Henry_
A WOMAN’S STRIKE--AN APPRECIATION OF THE SHIRT-WAIST
MAKERS OF NEW YORK 119
_Helen Marot_
VOCATIONAL TRAINING FOR WOMEN 129
_Sarah Louise Arnold_
TRAINING THE YOUNGEST GIRLS FOR WAGE EARNING 140
_Mary Schenck Woolman_
EMPLOYMENT BUREAUS FOR WOMEN 151
_M. Edith Campbell_
THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT OF THE PROTECTION OF
WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 162
_Ernst Freund_
THE ILLINOIS TEN-HOUR DECISION 185
_Josephine Goldmark_
IV BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
A SELECT LIST OF BOOKS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
ON WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 188
_Carola Woerishoffer_
INTRODUCTION
Of all the problems that have come in the train of the industrial
revolution none are more perplexing than those that concern women. It
is a wearisome commonplace that the factory has taken over much of
the industrial work of the home, and that women have followed their
work into the factory; but the fundamental change thus introduced into
their life has not always been clearly seen. Formerly home and industry
were synonymous terms for them; training for industry was training in
household management. To-day industrial work is sharply separated from
the management of the home, and there has come into the occupation of
women a dualism that finds no parallel in the life of men. Most of the
difficulties of women in industry relate themselves in some way to this
fact.
An unregulated competitive system is good only for the strong.
Women, by virtue of their double relation as industrial producers
and as homemakers and mothers, are industrially weak. Most women are
fundamentally interested in the home rather than the factory, and
industrial occupation is only an interlude in their real business.
Working women so-called are mostly mere girls under twenty-five
who go to work with no thought of industry as a permanent career.
Uninterested, untrained, unskilled, they are on a low level of
efficiency, and they have little motive for climbing to a higher level.
In industry a few years, then out of it into the home, they lack the
discipline and solidity that come with a permanent life task. Small
wonder that they crowd the unskilled labor market, and that their work
commands a mere pittance.
Inefficient in their industrial work, they tend to become quite as
inefficient in their function of homekeepers: for during the very
years when they might otherwise be acquiring the household arts,
they are busy in shop or factory, subject to a discipline requiring
obedience to mechanical routine rather than that power of thoughtful
initiative which marks the skilful homemaker. Moreover, they become
accustomed to the stimulus and excitement of the crowd, so that they
do not want to be alone, and home life they too often find monotonous
and uninteresting. The untrained, unskilled factory hand becomes the
untrained, unskilled wife and mother.
Working women are not only untrained and inefficient, but industrially
ignorant and lacking in standards. Hence they put up with whatever
conditions the employer imposes. They do not “make a fuss,” and
therefore they get treatment to which no man would submit. Moreover,
such a large proportion of them are mere “pin-money girls” that there
is no minimum standard of wages, such as is furnished for men by the
necessary cost of maintaining a family. Women’s wages are perhaps in
a majority of cases simply supplementary earnings, and the wages of
all women, self-dependent or not, tend to be fixed on the assumption
that they will live parasitically on their relatives. As a result of
this lack of standards, the whole subject of the pay and conditions
of women’s work is a veritable chaos. Standardization has been well
worked out in many men’s trades, and technical progress has followed.
In women’s occupations it is often easier for an unprogressive employer
to throw the burden of his backwardness on docile women employes by
paying low wages than it is to keep up with the march of improvement in
machinery and methods. So much for the human element in this problem.
On the industrial side we find, as is more than once pointed out in
these papers, that industry as now organized takes no cognizance of the
special needs of the worker. Competitive cheapness must be obtained
at all costs. If the worker does not insist on his rights, he gets
small part of the benefits of progress. Hence changes in machinery and
organization bring little advantage to women workers; such changes,
in fact, are frequently carried through with distinct loss to them,
however great the gain to society in general. But more than this, our
present industry is made for men, and it wants only standard workers,
working standard hours at standard speed. The workers must conform to
this inelastic system or go without a job. Most women are physically
incapable, without permanent injury to themselves and the race, of
enduring for ten hours a day the strain to which modern industry
subjects them; yet they are trying to conform to its mechanical routine
instead of insisting that it be changed to meet their needs. So long as
this change is not made, so long will women’s industrial work continue
a social menace.
We face, then, a double difficulty. In the first place, woman’s
twofold function apparently necessitates a double preparation and a
divided interest and life; in the second place, our industry demands
a standardized worker for the whole of his time. In consequence of
this situation, women throughout the period of factory labor have
been among the greatest sufferers from low wages, long hours, and
unsanitary conditions. They are the very type of worker to whom the
Marxian analysis in all its rigor most nearly applies, uninterested,
inefficient, ignorant, untrained, standardless. With the exception of
children, they constitute the most easily exploited labor force in
existing society, and they are mercilessly exploited. The new social
freedom of industrial life combines with low wages to tempt and drive
working girls to easier means of obtaining the pleasure they normally
must have, and a grave social problem thus emerges. The changed
industrial situation evidently demands a new economic and social
adjustment.
A glance at the state of public opinion throws some light on the
general nature of the adjustment required. Women are paid less then men
primarily because they will take less, not because their work is worth
less or because they need less; and public opinion acquiesces without
protest. If the school pays women less than men simply because it can
get them for less, how much more will the factory do the same. The
public does not object because it thinks of women as dependent on their
male relatives and hence not requiring a living wage. This was natural
enough so long as they earned their living by household management
and production, leaving to men the provision of money income. But
the moment women entered the industrial field the whole situation
changed. Public opinion has not yet taken cognizance of this fact.
Economic conditions and social organization are out of joint. We need
to readjust our ideas and our organization to the new economic facts;
but in consequence of an ignorant public opinion and a sluggish social
conscience the readjustment is delayed and women are suffering sadly
from overwork, underpay, injurious working conditions and neglect of
training for industry and the home.
We are just beginning to feel our way toward this readjustment, which
involves at least four things: 1. Giving women the training necessary
for their home work. 2. Making them efficient industrial producers.
3. Making them “work conscious” and giving them industrial standards.
4. Insuring them proper pay, hours and conditions, by adjusting the
demands of industry to their needs and capacity. To accomplish these
ends three chief means are commonly urged, industrial training, trade
unionism and legislation.
Industrial, or perhaps better vocational training, is as yet scarcely
past the first stages of experimentation, and we do not clearly
understand its proper aims or methods. Apparently we may rightly demand
of the school that it give girls a reasonable training for their work
as mothers and homekeepers, at the same time that it imparts to them
a degree of technical skill in industrial work, and above all, that
power of adaptation to changing conditions so imperatively demanded by
modern economic life. A vague statement of this kind, indeed, means
little, and discussions of industrial training are at present too full
of vague generalizations. What we need is a series of careful studies
of particular trades in particular places, and of the possibilities
of the schools in connection therewith. It is only when we get this
intimate knowledge of economic conditions and build our training on
it, that the training becomes of much value in the large process of
social readjustment. Otherwise we may help a few girls to get better
wages, but that is about all, and even that is problematical. The
combination, however, of an efficient system of trade investigation,
a scientifically organized and conducted employment bureau, and an
intelligent educational scheme is full of promise.
Permanent organization of women workers has hitherto proved difficult,
if not impossible, by reason of the youth, inexperience, ignorance
and short trade life of the young women concerned. Women’s unions have
come and gone, often leaving behind them certain permanent gains. In
making girls industrially self-conscious, in setting standards of work
and pay, in arousing public interest and awaking public conscience,
thus preparing the way for legislation, they have performed valuable
service even when short-lived. Sometimes a situation like that created
by the New York shirtwaist strike gives opportunity to focus public
attention on the condition of women workers. Great as its immediate
services may be, organization at present reaches but a small fraction
of women workers, and its permanent value in the larger view perhaps
lies chiefly in educating working women, employers and the public to
higher standards of employment and pay.
There remains the method of legislation. While law follows in the
wake of public opinion in a democracy, industrial betterment often
lags considerably behind the general progress of public intelligence,
and the law can push the backward employer up to the level of the
more enlightened one. The great advantage of the legal method is its
uniformity; it puts all employers and establishments on the same basis.
Moreover, its gains are usually fairly secure. A standard once embodied
in law is harder to break down than a mere trade standard attained by
union pressure, for example. Hence in the case of women workers, where
conditions for individual improvement are unfavorable, where union
methods are difficult of application, the process of readjustment
will doubtless go forward largely by legal enactment. We shall see an
increasing body of law governing the conditions under which women work.
As the community finds that it has no other way of protecting itself
against the injury it suffers from present conditions of employment of
women, it will more and more resort to the prescribing of minimum legal
limits below which they may not be crowded.
Fortunately for progress in this respect, our courts have generally
looked with relative favor on legislation for women. The right of the
state to exercise the police power to protect the health of women for
the sake of future generations is now clearly established in the court
of last resort. All that is necessary for the incorporation of a
new requirement into the legal standard is to convince the courts of
its relation to health--a method employed with success in the Oregon
and Illinois ten-hour cases. Thus far such legislation has dealt
chiefly with hours, but the principle is capable of almost indefinite
extension. As we approach the question of general working conditions
and the more purely economic consideration of wages, the limitations of
the legal method come more clearly into view; none the less the use of
that method must extend beyond the present limits.
Fortunately also the method of legal enactment can be applied in
some measure to bring about those modifications in the demands of
industry that are necessary for women. Abandoning the fatuous attempt
to keep women out of industrial life, we shall set about the task of
humanizing industry by ridding it of the conditions that make wholesome
life difficult for workers to attain. Realizing the greater needs of
women, we may first set legal standards for them alone; and then,
just as was the case in the early fight for a shorter workday, the
advantage legally conceded to women may be extended to men as well.
Slowly public opinion advances toward more enlightened views, and
social and legal organization gradually improve with it. Following the
economic upheaval that we call the economic revolution, a tremendously
complex and difficult readjustment has been necessary, one made more
difficult by the fact that it must be worked out in a democratic
society. In the peculiarly difficult and trying situation of women
during this readjustment we find abundant justification for social
action to protect them against the dangers to which they are exposed,
and abundant demand for the most thoroughgoing investigation on which
to base such action. The present collection of papers is an attempt to
state some of the manifold aspects of the problem and to discuss some
of the proposed means of solution.
H. R. M.
THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN’S WORK IN THE UNITED STATES
HELEN L. SUMNER
Washington, D. C.
The history of women’s work in the United States is the story of an
economic and industrial readjustment which is by no means yet complete.
Women have worked since the world began, and at the dawn of history
their labor was probably as important in family or tribal economy as it
is to-day in the industrial world. Since early colonial days in this
country, moreover, women have worked for gain, sometimes selling to
the local storekeeper the products of leisure hours spent in spinning,
weaving, knitting or sewing, sometimes themselves keeping little shops,
and sometimes hiring themselves out to work in the families of their
neighbors. But during the nineteenth century a great transformation
occurred which has materially changed woman’s economic position.
Woman’s work may be divided into five general categories: unpaid
labor, independent gainful labor, domestic service, wage labor in
manufacturing industries and wage labor in trade and transportation.
In all these varieties of work great changes have taken place. In
the first place technical improvements have removed from the home to
the factory and workshop a large part of the labor formerly carried
on almost exclusively by women. Women naturally followed their
occupations, and in doing so changed their economic status from that of
unpaid laborers to that of paid laborers. Though the number gainfully
employed has materially increased, however, the amount of unremunerated
home work performed by women must still be considerably larger than
the amount of gainful labor, for in 1900 only about one fifth of all
females 16 years of age and over were breadwinners.[1]
Not only have unpaid, home-working women been transformed into paid
factory operatives, but both independent home workers and wage-earning
home workers have been transferred to factories and workshops. This
change is especially evident in the comparatively backward clothing
industries, which the sewing machine and artificial power have
gradually driven from the home to the shop and, in some branches, to
the factory. In the early days of wholesale clothing manufacture in
this country all the work, except the cutting, was done for piece wages
in the homes of the workers. Gradually, however, the industry has been
drawn into sweatshops and factories. Independent domestic production,
meanwhile, except in certain lines like dressmaking and to a slight
extent the preserving of fruit and making of jelly, has practically
become a thing of the past. The movement away from home work can hardly
be regretted, however, in view of the fact that the entire history of
women’s work shows that their wage labor under the domestic system
has almost invariably been under worse conditions of hours, wages and
general sanitation than their wage labor under the factory system.
There has probably been, moreover, a material increase in the
proportion of women wage earners as compared with independent
producers. Before the introduction of machinery wage labor generally
meant domestic service. There were, of course, exceptions. Early
instances are well known of women spinners gathered together in groups
and paid fixed sums, and women were early employed to sort and cut
rags in paper mills. But the range of wage-earning occupations open to
them has enormously increased, while it is doubtful whether any larger
proportion are now engaged in independent industry than were so engaged
two centuries ago. In commercial and professional pursuits, it is true,
the opportunities for independent business have very greatly increased,
but in manufacturing industries, as a result of the unprecedented
growth of wholesale production, they have materially narrowed for women
as well as for men.
The wage-earning opportunities of women in the three great groups of
occupations, domestic service, manufacturing industries, and trade and
transportation, have also changed decidedly. Thousands, of course,
have always been employed in domestic service, which has acted as
the complement of the industrial pursuits. The opportunity to “hire
out” has continually confronted the working woman and frequently,
when she complained that her conditions of work were hard and her pay
inadequate, she has been admonished by philanthropists and even by
economists to betake herself to the kitchen, whose homelike conditions,
high wages and pressing need of her labor have always been loudly
proclaimed. The conditions and problems of domestic service, indeed,
have changed far less than those of any other occupation. Nevertheless,
the proportion of all gainfully employed women engaged in domestic and
personal service has steadily decreased.[2]
In the manufacturing industries, on the other hand, great changes
have taken place. The entrance of women into these industries may be
attributed to three principal causes, machinery, artificial power
and division of labor. All of these are in part the cause and in
part the effect of an unprecedented development of wholesale, as
opposed to retail production, and this growth of wholesale trade is
itself primarily the result of improved means of communication and
transportation.
These three factors have also caused a considerable amount of shifting
of occupations. Under the domestic system of labor woman’s work and
man’s work were clearly defined, women doing the spinning, part of
the weaving, the knitting, the sewing and generally the cooking. But
with the introduction of machinery for spinning and weaving thousands
of hand workers were thrown out of employment. It is not surprising
to learn that the first spinners and weavers by machinery were women.
Later, however, mule spindles, operated by men, were introduced for
part of the work. In certain other cases, too, machinery has caused
the substitution of men for women in industries formerly considered
as belonging to woman’s sphere. Women’s suits, for instance, are now
largely made by men tailors, and men dressmakers and milliners are not
uncommon. Men bake our bread and brew our ale and wash our clothes in
the steam laundry. At present men even clean our houses by the vacuum
process.
One result has been that thousands of women who, under the old régime,
would have sat calmly like Priscilla by the window spinning, have
been forced to seek other occupations. When the industrial revolution
transformed the textile industries they naturally turned to the only
other employment for which they were trained, sewing. This, however,
only increased the pressure of competition in the sewing trades,
already sufficiently supplied with laborers. In the middle of the
century, moreover, before any effective readjustment had taken place,
the sewing machine was introduced, greatly increasing productivity and
at the same time further sharpening competition.
Thus the increased productivity due to machinery and the simultaneous
loss, by reason of the greater adaptability of men to certain machines,
of woman’s practical monopoly of the textile trades has caused intense
competition and has forced many women into other industries, not
traditionally theirs. From the beginning, however, their choice of
occupations has been hampered by custom. As early as 1829 a writer in
the _Boston Courier_[3] said:
Custom and long habit have closed the doors of very many employments
against the industry and perseverance of woman. She has been taught
to deem so many occupations masculine, and made only for men, that,
excluded by a mistaken deference to the world’s opinion, from
innumerable labors, most happily adapted to her physical constitution,
the competition for the few places left open to her, has occasioned
a reduction in the estimated value of her labor, until it has fallen
below the minimum, and is no longer adequate to present comfortable
subsistence, much less to the necessary provision against age and
infirmity, or the every day contingencies of mortality.
Economic necessity, however, with division of labor as its chief tool,
sometimes aided by power machinery and sometimes alone, has gradually
opened up new industries to women. As early as 1832 they were employed
in as many as one hundred different occupations. In many of these, to
be sure, they were as rare as women blacksmiths are today. But in
1836 a committee of the National Trades’ Union, appointed to inquire
into the evils of “female labor,” reported that in the New England
States “printing, saddling, brush making, tailoring, whip making and
many other trades are in a certain measure governed by females,” and
added that of the fifty-eight societies composing the Trades’ Union of
Philadelphia, twenty four were “seriously affected by female labor.”[4]
The census of 1850 enumerated nearly one hundred and seventy-five
different manufacturing industries in which women were employed, and
the number has steadily increased until there is now scarcely an
industry in which they are not to be found.
Usually, however, they have been employed, in the first instance, only
in the least skilled and most poorly paid occupations, and have not
competed directly with men. This has been due in part to custom and
prejudice, perhaps, but primarily it has been due to lack of training
and ambition, and to general irresponsibility. One of the causes, to
be sure, of the lack of training and ambition is the knowledge that
well-paid positions are seldom given to women. A much more vital cause,
however, is to be found in the lack of connection between the work and
the girl’s natural ambitions. Before the industrial revolution women
were probably as skilful and efficient in their lines of industry as
men in theirs. The occupations taught girls at that time were theirs
for life and naturally they took great pride and pleasure in becoming
proficient in work which prepared them for marriage and for the career
which nearly every young girl, with wholesome instincts, looks forward
to as her ideal, the keeping of the home and the care of children. But
when the connection was lost between work and marriage, when girls were
forced by machinery and division of labor to undertake tasks which
had no vital interest to them, there grew up a hybrid class of women
workers in whose lives there is contradiction and internal if not
external discord. Their work no longer fits in with their ideals and
has lost its charm.
Even in industries which, like the textile and sewing trades, belong
to women by long inheritance, machinery and division of labor have so
transformed processes that both the individuality of their work and the
original incentive to industry have been wholly lost in a standardized
product. Moreover, in their traditional sphere of employment and
especially in the sewing trade, competition has been so keen that the
conditions under which they have worked have been, upon the whole, more
degrading and more hopeless than in any other class of occupations.
From the very beginning of the wholesale clothing manufacture in this
country, indeed, five elements, home work, the sweating system, the
contract and sub-contract systems increasing the number of middlemen
between producer and consumer, the exaggerated overstrain due to piece
payment, and the fact that the clothing trades have served as the
general dumping ground of the unskilled, inefficient and casual women
workers, have produced a condition of almost pure industrial anarchy.
It is interesting to note, in this connection, that the greatest
economic success of women wage earners in manufacturing industries
has been attained in occupations in which they have competed directly
with men. Women printers and cigarmakers, who in many cases have been
introduced as the result of strikes, have generally earned higher
wages than their sisters who have made shirts and artificial flowers.
Usually, however, when, as in certain classes of cigar making, they
have entirely displaced men, they have soon lost their economic
advantage. And it is exceedingly doubtful whether, in such cases, women
have gained as much as men have lost. Certainly they have not regained
what they themselves have lost through being displaced by men in their
customary sphere of employment.
The occupations grouped under the title “trade and transportation,”
most of which are new and offer, therefore, no problems of
displacement, have furnished working women, in general, their most
remunerative employments. This, too, is the group of industries in
which, within recent years, the most rapid increase in the number and
proportion of women workers has taken place.[5] Though the number
of saleswomen, stenographers, clerks, bookkeepers, telegraph and
telephone operators, and so forth, is still small as compared with the
number of women textile factory operatives, seamstresses, boot and
shoemakers, paper box makers, and so on, it is rapidly increasing. In
this movement, moreover, there is evident more than anywhere else a
certain hopeful tendency for working women to push up from the level of
purely mechanical pursuits to the level of semi-intellectual labor. The
trade and transportation industries are, roughly speaking, middle-class
employments, as contrasted with the manufacturing industries, which
are, roughly speaking, working-class employments.
Women’s wages have always been excessively low and their hours
excessively long. About 1830 Mathew Carey estimated that in
Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Baltimore there were between 18,000
and 20,000 working women, at least 12,000 of whom could not earn, by
constant employment for 16 hours out of the 24, more than $1.25 per
week. At this rate he figured that, allowing for the loss of one day
a week through sickness, unemployment or the care of children, and
counting lodging at 50 cents and fuel at 12¹⁄₂ cents a week, a woman
would have left for food and clothing just $22.50 per year. A good
seamstress without children and employed all the time he figured could
earn $1.12¹⁄₂ per week or $58.50 per year, out of which she would have
to pay 50 cents per week for rent, 15 cents per week for fuel, 8 cents
per week for soap, candles, etc., and $10 for shoes and clothing--which
would leave her for food and drink 2³⁄₄ cents per day. If she was
hampered by the care of children, was unemployed one day a week, or was
slow or unskilled, he figured that, at the same rates of expenditure,
she would have a yearly deficit of $11.56.[6] The situation of the
working women in the cities of this country during the early decades
of the nineteenth century was, indeed, as characterized by the New
York _Daily Sentinel_, the first daily labor paper in this country,
“frightful, nay disgraceful to our country, ... a gangrenous spot
on the body politic, a national wound that ought to be visited and
dressed, lest it rankle and irritate the whole system.”[7]
Fifteen years later conditions were little better. An investigation
of “female labor” in New York in 1845 led to the assertion by the
_New York Tribune_ that there were in that city about 50,000 working
women, onehalf of whom earned wages averaging less than $2 per week,
and to the further statement that the girls who flocked to that city
from every part of the country to work as shoe binders, type rubbers,
artificial-flower makers, match-box makers, straw braiders, etc., found
competition so keen that they were obliged “to snatch at the privilege
of working on any terms.” “They find,” said the _Tribune_, “that by
working from fifteen to eighteen hours a day they cannot possibly
earn more than from one to three dollars a week, and this, deducting
the time they are out of employment every year, will barely serve to
furnish them the scantiest and poorest food, which, from its monotony
and its unhealthy quality, induces disgust, loathing and disease. They
have thus absolutely nothing left for clothes, recreation, sickness,
books or intellectual improvement.”[8]
In 1863 the average wages paid to women in New York, taking all the
trades together, were said to have been about $2 a week, and the hours
ranged from eleven to sixteen a day.[9] And in 1887 it was stated that
in New York City nine thousand and in Chicago over five thousand women
earned less than $3 per week.[10]
Some of these statements may be exaggerations, but there can be no
doubt that, throughout the entire history of women in industry in this
country, their wages, in thousands of cases, have been inadequate for
decent support. Their wages, too, have been far below those of men. In
1833[11] and again in 1868[12] it was stated that women’s wages were,
on an average, only about one fourth what men received. Moreover, it
has been authoritatively stated that during the civil war period the
wages of women increased less than those of men, while their cost of
living rose out of all proportion.[13]
It is probable that, in general, women’s wages have been less flexible,
more subject to the influence of custom and less to the influence of
demand and supply, than men’s. Unfortunately custom in this case has
furnished a standard of exploitation and not of protection. It is
probable, too, that working women have suffered more than working men
from periods of panic and depression, for such periods, like war, have
thrown upon their own resources thousands of women who in normal times
are supported by their male relatives.
In the textile industries wages, during the first half of the
nineteenth century at least, were higher than in the clothing trades.
The Lowell girls during the so-called “golden era” earned from $1.50
to $2 per week in addition to their board of $1.25. Their day’s work,
however, varied from 11 hours and 24 minutes in December and January
to 13 hours and 31 minutes in April, and averaged 12 hours and 13
minutes, or 73¹⁄₂ hours per week.[14] It must be remembered, moreover,
that there were in this country, during these early years, two distinct
systems of factory labor, the factory boarding-house system of Lowell,
Dover, N. H., and other places in that neighborhood, and the family
system which prevailed in Fall River, throughout Rhode Island, and
generally in New York, New Jersey and Maryland. In the factories
operated on the family system of labor wages were distinctly lower than
in those of the Lowell type, and were frequently paid in store orders.
In these factories, too, hours were longer, being in summer 13³⁄₄
per day and averaging throughout the year 75¹⁄₂ per week[15]. Girls,
moreover, went to work at an earlier age. Child laborers whom the
Lowell manufacturers could not afford to keep in their factory boarding
houses were employed in large numbers.
The general conditions under which women have toiled in this country
have been little if any better than their wages and their hours. During
the years when Lowell is supposed to have been a busy paradise, with
flowers blooming in the factory windows, poetry and hymns pasted on
the walls, and the _Lowell Offering_ furnishing an outlet for the
exuberant literary activities of the operatives, the ventilation, both
of factories and of boarding houses, was absolutely inadequate. In
the boarding houses from four to six and sometimes even eight girls
slept in one room about 14 by 16 ft., and from twelve to sixteen girls
in a hot, ill-ventilated attic. In winter the factories were lighted
by lamps. One woman who testified before the Massachusetts Committee
on Hours of Labor in 1845 stated that, in the room where she worked,
along with about 130 other women, 11 men and 12 children, there were
293 small lamps and 61 large lamps which were sometimes lighted in the
morning as well as in the evening[16]. The lack of ventilation in the
mills and boarding houses of Lowell was in 1849 made the subject of a
report to the American Medical Association by Dr. Josiah Curtis, and
in the same year the physician of the Lowell Hospital, established by
the manufacturing corporations exclusively for the use of operatives,
attributed to lack of ventilation in the cotton mills the fact that,
since the founding of the hospital nine years before, over half the
patients had suffered from typhoid fever.
Typhoid fever, however, was doubtless a far less general result of
these conditions than consumption. Even the _Lowell Offering_, which
found no evils in factory labor except long hours and excused these on
the ground that long hours were universal throughout New England, bears
evidence in practically every number that tuberculosis of the lungs
was the great scourge of the factories. The labor papers, moreover,
as early as 1836, began to point out the direct connection between
factory labor and consumption. In 1845, too the _United States Journal_
published a poem by Andrew McDonald, the first verse of which reads:[17]
Go look at Lowell’s pomp and gold
Wrung from the orphan and the old;
See pale consumption’s death-glazed eye--
The hectic cheek, and know not why.
Yes, these combine to make thy wealth
“Lord of the Loom,” and glittering pelf.
There is no reason to believe that conditions were any better, if as
good, in other manufacturing districts. In the clothing industry,
moreover, which has long been concentrated in cities, overcrowding and
unsanitary housing conditions in horrible variety have furnished the
environment of working women. Whole blocks of tenements, too, have
been rented out to families in New York for the manufacture of cigars.
As early as 1877 the United Cigar Manufacturers’ Association, an
organization of small employers, condemned as unsanitary these tenement
cigar factories where the babies rolled on the floor in waste tobacco,
and the housework, the cooking, the cleaning of children and the trade
of cigar making were all carried on in one room.[18]
From these evil conditions, low wages, long hours and unwholesome
sanitary arrangements, immigrant women have naturally been the greatest
sufferers, for, like their husbands and brothers, they have been
obliged to begin at the bottom. Irish women first entered the factories
of New England, for example, as waste pickers and scrub women. But
their daughters became spinners and weavers. There have been, however,
certain exceptions to this rule. The skilled Bohemian women cigar
makers who came to New York in the seventies, for instance, earned from
the first comparatively high wages. Foreign girls who have gone into
domestic service, moreover, have frequently earned higher wages than
American girls who have chosen to be, for example, saleswomen.
The chief forces which have tended to improve the condition of working
women have been trade unions, industrial education and legislation.
In certain industries, especially shoe making, cigar making, printing
and collar and cuff making, trade unions have brought about higher
wages, shorter hours or better conditions in certain localities.
Women shoe-binders, about one thousand in number, won a strike for
higher wages at Lynn as early as 1834,[19] and during the sixties and
seventies the Daughters of St. Crispin protected the working women
of their craft. Women members were admitted into the Cigar Makers’
International Union in 1867 and were prominent in the great strike of
1877. The International Typographical Union admitted women in 1869.
Probably no organization of women workers, however, has been more
effective than the Collar Laundry Union of Troy, N. Y., the predecessor
of the Shirt, Waist and Laundry Workers’ International Union. During
the sixties the Collar Laundry Union is said to have raised the wages
of its members from $2 or $3 to $14 a week, and to have contributed
$1000 in aid of Troy iron molders on strike against a reduction of
wages, and $500 in aid of striking bricklayers in New York.[20]
The tailoresses of New York, moreover, were organized as early as 1825,
and in 1831 sixteen hundred tailoresses and seamstresses of that city
went on strike for an elaborate wage scale covering a large variety of
work, and remained out for four or five weeks.[21] Considering that the
population of New York in 1830 was under 200,000, this strike bears
comparison with the great shirt-waist workers’ strike of 1909-1910.
Two years later the journeyman tailors of Baltimore were assisting the
tailoresses of that city in a “stand-out” for higher wages,[22] and
in the summer of 1844 the Boston tailors aided a large and apparently
successful strike of sewing women.[23] In 1851 an effort to assist some
six thousand shirt sewers in New York led to the foundation of a shirt
sewers’ coöperative union, which prospered for several years.[24] Many
other organizations of sewing women have been formed and have conducted
strikes, which have sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed.
In the textile industries, too, a long series of efforts by operatives
to improve their own situation began with the picturesque strike
of four hundred women and girls in Dover, N. H., in 1828, when the
operatives paraded the town with flags and inscriptions and the factory
agent advertised for two or three hundred “better-behaved women.”[25]
The long and bitterly contested but successful strike of the Fall River
weavers against a reduction of wages in 1875 was led by women who went
out after the Weavers’ Union, composed of men, had voted to accept the
reduction.[26]
Many other examples of effective trade-union activity among women
workers might be cited. These women’s organizations, moreover, have
proved powerful factors in the fight for ten-hour laws.
The industrial schools and business colleges which began to spring
up in the sixties and seventies have also furnished important aid to
working women. Apprenticeship for girls has always been a farce. Even
in colonial days girl apprentices were rarely taught a trade of any
kind, and early in the nineteenth century apprenticeship for girls,
as well as for boys, came to be generally a means of securing cheap
child labor. After the industrial revolution, indeed, the condition of
working women, as regards skill and efficiency, was probably distinctly
lower than before they became wage earners. Industrial schools,
however, have been very slow of development. Business colleges, on the
other hand, began during the eighties to receive large numbers of
women students, and have materially aided in opening up in the trade
and transportation industries remunerative occupations for women.
Some progress, moreover, has been made through legislation. Laws
compelling seats for women employees have helped wherever they have
been enforced. Sanitary legislation, too, has effected certain
improvements, though it is doubtful whether, on the whole, such
legislation has as yet more than balanced the ill results of the
greater concentration of population and the greater strain of work.
In a number of states legislation has also brought an answer to the
prayer of the “unknown factory girl” of 1846,
God grant, that, in the mills, a day
May be but “Ten Hours” long.[27]
But at the same time the speed and intensity of work have been greatly
increased. Until about 1836, for example, a girl weaver tended, as a
rule, only two looms, and if she wished to be absent for half a day,
it was customary for her to ask two of her friends to tend an extra
loom apiece so she should not lose her wages. By 1876 one girl tended
six and sometimes eight looms. Meanwhile, too, the speed had been
increased. In 1873 it was estimated that a girl spinner tended from two
to three times as many spindles as she did in 1849.[28] This tendency
to multiply the amount of work to be performed in a given time has
continued active. Piece wages have meanwhile fallen so that the total
earnings of the operatives have not been increased, but, taking into
consideration the cost of living, have rather been decreased.
In the sewing trades, too, the intensity of work has been very
greatly increased by the use of the sewing machine, particularly when
power-driven, by the resulting minute subdivision of labor, and by the
sweating system. A certain amount of division of labor was practised,
it is true, long before the invention of the sewing machine. Vest
making, for example, was a separate and distinct business. But it was
not until after the introduction of the machine that much progress
was made in dividing the work upon a single garment. The sub-contract
or sweating system, too, appears to have originated at least as early
as 1844,[29] but probably did not assume an important place until
introduced about 1863 by contractors for army clothing. At first,
moreover, the work for the sub-contractors was nearly all done in
the homes. The need, however, for capital to invest in machines and
later in power to run the machines, naturally tended to gather the
workers into sweat shops, into small establishments, and then into
factories where every possible incentive was offered to the most
intense concentration of energies and to excessive speed. As in the
textile factories, too, piece-rate wages have fallen automatically with
productivity so that, whatever the exertion required and the number of
garments turned out, remuneration has remained near the subsistence
level.
The history of women in industry is, in short, the story of the
transfer of women workers from the home to the factory, from labor in
harmony with their deepest ambitions to monotonous, nerve-racking work,
divided and subdivided until the woman, like the traditional tailor who
is called the ninth part of a man, is merely a fraction, and sometimes
an almost infinitesimal fragment, of an artisan. It is a story of long
hours, overwork, unwholesome conditions of life and labor and miserably
low wages. It is a story of the underbidding of men bread winners by
women, who have been driven by dire necessity, by a lower standard of
living, or by the sense of ultimate dependence upon some man, even
if he be only a hypothetical husband, to offer their services upon
the bargain counter of the labor market. It is a story of the futile
efforts of misdirected charity, whether that of fathers and brothers,
of factory boarding houses or of philanthropic organizations, to aid
the oppressed working women by offering them partial support, thereby
enabling them to accept wages below the subsistence level, and still
hold together soul and body. It is, finally, a story of wasted human
lives, some of them wasted in the desperate effort to snatch from the
world a little share of joy, and some of them wasted through disease
and death or through the loss of the powers of body and mind required
for efficient motherhood.
That such has been the history of women in industry is due in part
to their lack of training, skill and vital interest in their work.
In part it is due to excessive competition in their traditional
occupations, combined with a variety of impediments, some of them
rooted in established customs and ideals and some of them perhaps
inherent in woman herself, to their free movement into new occupations,
into the higher paid positions and into less congested communities. In
part, however, it is due to the lack of appreciation of the need for
legislative action.
The four great curses of working women have always been, as they are
today, insufficient wages, intense and often unfair competition,
overstrain due to long hours, heavy work or unhygienic conditions, and
the lack of diversified skill, or of any opportunity or incentive to
acquire and display ability and wisely-directed energy. The story of
woman’s wage labor is, therefore, pitifully sad and in many respects
discouraging. But it is the story of an industrial readjustment which
is not yet near completion, and there is good reason to believe
that the turning point has been reached and that better things are
in store for the working woman. When we realize, however, what the
economic position of women has been in the past and through how many
generations large numbers of them have toiled under conditions which
involved not only terrible suffering to themselves, but shocking waste
to the community, it becomes evident that the present problem will
not solve itself, but demands of our generation the best thought, the
best energy, and the most thorough legislative regulation designed to
conserve the human resources bound up in the mothers of the nation.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In 1870, the earliest year for which statistics are available,
14.7%, and in 1900 20.6% of the female population 16 years of age and
over were breadwinners.
[2] In 1870, 58.1% and in 1900 only 39.4% of all females 10 years
of age and over engaged in gainful occupations were in the division
“domestic and personal service.”
[3] _Boston Courier_, July 13, 1829.
[4] From the proceedings of the National Trades’ Union, published
in the _National Laborer_, Nov. 12, 1836, and reprinted in the
_Documentary History of American Industrial Society_, vol. vi, pp.
285-6.
[5] In 1870 nearly 20% of all females 10 years of age and over
engaged in gainful occupations were in manufacturing and mechanical
pursuits and only 1% in trade and transportation, but in 1900, while
the proportion of women in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits had
increased to 24.7%, the proportion in trade and transportation had
increased to 9.4%.