THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(1) THE WAGE-EARNER
“And here I’ll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets:
Ay, and amid this hurly, I intend,
That all is done in reverent care of her;
And, in conclusion, she shall watch all night;
And, if she chance to nod, I’ll rail and brawl,
And with the clamour keep her still awake.
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness.”
_The Taming of the Shrew_, IV. i.
The day of the rule of man’s physical force over women is over in what
are called the civilised countries—a relative term! There are, of course,
very many unacknowledged relics of it, but they are disappearing, partly
through the growth of reason, partly through the insistent hammering
of the women and their men champions. But there is another source of
dominance of man over woman, more insidious, more penetrating, much more
difficult to abolish: this is the dominance of man by economic force.
It is difficult to believe in the intellectual honesty of those feminists
who declare that women must fight men on an equality in the economic
world. I have read articles insisting that women must not only bear
the child, but make provision for the child, unaided by men, either
individually or collectively. Such proposals depend on the evolution
of a race of Superwomen unlike any the world has seen, and no one has
demonstrated, or even suggested, how such a race is to be formed. The
women who dream these dreams are very attractive visionaries, but I do
not propose to follow them into their Utopia, for the reason that I am
more interested in the world of reality. In this world of reality, we
must face the fact that women, for every child they bear in health and
strength, are made less capable of producing exchange value (called
wealth), and that not only motherhood, but potential motherhood, affects
and always will affect the market value of a woman’s work. The people
who do not admit this are exceedingly few; but those who do admit it are
sharply divided in their views as to how the resultant evils are to be
met, and even those who believe most earnestly in the women’s movement,
differ in their solutions of the economic problem. Yet the economic
slavery of women is worse and more difficult to deal with than any other
slavery, and it cannot be met by machinery only; it must be met by a
change of heart, a change as needful in women themselves as in men. Women
must have pride and belief in themselves and their work, and men must
leave off applying to women a cash standard wholly inappropriate to that
part of the community whose work is so largely work for the future.
I have preferred to begin with this statement of the women’s economic
handicap, because I find the great and ineluctable weight of it more
often under-rated by women in the movement than by those I have called
reactionaries. The queer thing is, that the reactionaries who make such
play with the burden of woman, are those who propose to pile on to the
necessary burden of the child the totally unnecessary additional burdens
of ignorance and lack of training, and a thousand restrictions of law and
custom, while still making no serious attempt to remove all necessity
for earning. Analogies are often misleading, but, in modern England, the
picture is fairly correct which shows woman with a baby at her breast,
one hand tied behind her by trade and legal restrictions, her eyes closed
with the bandage of ignorance, her mouth gagged by the refusal of voting
rights, hampered by the skirt of custom, having to struggle over the same
rock-encumbered ground as man, unburdened, with head erect and limbs free.
Women are notoriously paid less than men, and the reactionaries are very
fond of giving us a somewhat superfluous lesson in elementary economics,
to account for these lower wages. They say that wages depend on the
demand for, and supply of, labour, and that these depend on the amount
of skill required, the pleasantness and healthiness of the work, the
amount and the cost of training for it, and so forth. They say that
women’s work is less efficient than men’s, partly on account of their
essential inferiority (one instance of this being their greater liability
to sickness), and partly because of their expectation of matrimony, which
makes their work less constant and makes their parents less willing
to expend money in training them. Finally, they say that women have
other sources of income than their labour, and that their wages being
supplemented from these sources, they are able and willing to take lower
wages than men, able and willing in many cases to accept wages upon which
one woman cannot live. These sources are twofold: their male relations
partly keep them, so that their wage is only a pocket-money wage; or
other men partly keep them, in return for their favours.
With the exception of the somewhat sweeping assertions about the
essential inferiority of women’s work, I am prepared to admit all these
statements as being manifestly in accordance with facts as they are. This
does not increase my enthusiasm for facts as they are; on the contrary,
it makes me cast about for means of changing them, and some of them seem
to be already in course of rapid change. As for the greater incidence
of sickness among women making their work less valuable, it would be
interesting to inquire how much of that sickness is due to the low
standard of living, caused by low wages: by overwork from having to do
housework and needlework when the day’s wage-work is done, by poor food,
lack of rational pleasures, and the depression of knowing that, however
hard they work, there is no future before them; a woman cannot rise.
There is another cause of depression, in the nature of the “dependents”
a woman generally has. A man’s “dependents” mostly include a wife, who
nurses and looks after him, and children, in whom he can have hope and
pride. A woman’s dependents are the crippled husband, the old mother,
the invalid sister for whom there is no hope. When a woman falls sick,
there is frequently no one to give her the little comforts and help
which may prevent the sickness from becoming serious. It is more than
doubtful whether women’s greater liability to sickness is not simply the
result of conditions too hard and depressing for the health of anyone,
man or woman. Perhaps men would break down far sooner than women, under
the strain of a life as joyless as that which most women are expected to
endure.
Of the essential inferiority of women’s work, I will only say that,
except in the matter of muscular power, it is entirely unproven. Many
employers prefer women, saying they are quieter, cleaner, more sober,
more trustworthy, than men; others disagree. The willingness of parents
to allow time and money for the training of their girls is being
considerably modified, and it is in the power of public opinion to
modify it much further. The liability of women to marry and pass out of
wage-earning is a drawback which will always exist to some extent, but
which would be greatly reduced by better organisation. The existence of
a class of pocket-money workers has been very much exaggerated, and there
is no reason why women should not, by judicious combination, practically
eliminate this peculiarly obnoxious type of blackleg. The supplementing
of wages by prostitution is a more difficult problem, to which I will
return in a later chapter.
Are there no other causes for women’s low wages? Let us see. Demand and
Supply regulate wages, they say. Then anything that tends to restrict the
field of labour wherein a group of persons may compete, lowers the wages
of that group of persons. So long as by law women cannot be lawyers,
chartered accountants, or clergymen of the Church of England; so long as,
by administrative action, women are excluded from all the well-paid posts
in the Civil Service, and married women tied out from teaching and the
post office; so long as, by custom and the action of men’s trade unions,
women are either directly refused admission into trades or indirectly
refused by being denied apprenticeship; so long as all these artificial
restrictions of women’s labour exist, will the supply of women’s labour
in other directions be artificially increased and their wages lowered.
So at the present day it is by no means true to say that wages are
determined by Supply and Demand acting without restriction; Supply and
Demand are artificially affected by all sorts of forces, not least of
these being political forces, which have established fair wages clauses
for men in Government employ, and are establishing trade-boards for many
of the sweated industries in which women were the victims. We abandoned
the principle of _laissez-faire_ some half a century ago, and most of us
have no desire to return to it, for under a system of absolutely free
industrial competition, women must go under. But what we do desire is
that protection shall be given to women in ways that will help them and
not in ways that hinder them, and that wage-earning employments shall
not be taken away from them without any equivalent. Experience has shown
that men alone cannot be trusted to judge of women’s employment fairly.
A gentleman is shocked to see a woman with her face covered with coal
dust; but it is healthier to have coal dust on your face than cotton
or lead dust in your lungs. They do not like to see a woman tip a coal
waggon with a twist of her loins; they do not watch the overdone mother
of a family carrying water up and down steep stairs on the eve of her
confinement or a week or two after it. Three times has Parliament been
invited to put a stop to the employment of women at the pit-brow, all
for their good, of course. And the reason given is that it is bad for
their health. The country was scoured to find a doctor or a nurse who
would give evidence of cases of strain or injury, but all they found
was evidence that consumptive girls from the cotton mills became robust
and healthy at the pit-brow. The climax of absurdity was reached when
gentlemen of the House of Commons pleaded that the women ought to be
protected from hearing the bad language of the colliers. As if these same
colliers spoke, in the home, quite a different, and only a parliamentary,
language! And as if, when you come to think of it, a man’s right to swear
were a more precious thing than a woman’s right to work! The fact is
that, in this instance, as in many others, the work was to be taken away
from the women because some men wanted it, and they were not ashamed to
use their political power to try to filch the work from the women, though
they were ashamed to own up to the reason. Their intention was thwarted,
because there were men in Parliament and out who refused to be convinced
by the pretension that the restriction was for the women’s good, and
because the women made a tremendous fuss, came up to London, held
meetings of protest, and roused the country and the press. But this was
the third battle over this one position; and why should women be called
upon to defend their right to earn their livelihood in honest, necessary
labour? If women were to demand legislation to prohibit men from
following the “unmanly” and “unhealthy” occupation of selling sarsanet
over a counter, or writing accounts in a book, and “taking the bread out
of the mouths of the women,” there would be more to be said for it than
there has been for many restrictions men have made on women’s work.
What the women in the movement want is the opening up of trades and
professions to women. We should then find what women could do, and it
would be unnecessary to prohibit them from doing what they could not
do. If, further, a living wage were insisted on, those who did the work
best, whether men or women, would be employed, and those who were not
worth a living wage to any employer would drop out of employment and be
dealt with by the State. It is bad business for man to treat woman as a
competitor in the labour market, whom he will grind down and grind out
altogether if he can. A sweated and degraded womanhood is as great a
danger to the community as a sweated and degraded manhood.