THE WOMAN AND DEMOCRACY
The one notion that democracy has succeeded in planting firmly in the
mind of the average American citizen is his right and duty to rise in
the world. Tested by this conception the American woman is an ideal
democrat. Give her a ghost of a chance and she almost never fails to
better herself materially and socially. Nor can she be said to do it
by the clumsy methods we describe as "pushing." She does it by a
legitimate, if rather literal, application of the national formula for
rising,--get schooling and get money.
The average American man reverses the order of the terms in the
formula. He believes more in money. The time that boys and girls are
kept in school after the fourteen-or sixteen-year-age limit is
generally due to the insistence of the mother, her confidence that the
more education, the better the life chance. What it amounts to is that
the man has more faith in life as a teacher, the woman more faith in
schools. Both, however, seek the same goal, pin their faith to the
same tools. Both take it for granted that if they work out the
formulas, they thereby earn and will receive letters patent to the
aristocracy of the democracy!
The weakness of this popular conception of the democratic scheme is
that it gives too much attention to what a man gets and too little to
what he gives. Democracy more than any other scheme under which men
have tried to live together depends on what each returns--returns not
in material but in spiritual things. Democracy is not a shelter, a
garment, a cash account; it is a spirit. The real test of its
followers must be sought in their attitude of mind toward life, labor,
and their fellows.
Where does the average American woman come out in applying this test?
Take her attitude toward labor,--where does it place her? Labor
according to democracy is a badge of respectability. You cannot poach
or sponge in a democracy; if you do, you violate the fundamental right
of the other man. You cannot ask him to help support you by indirect
or concealed devices; if you do, you are hampering the free
opportunity the scheme promises him.
Moreover, the kind of work you do must not demean you. Nothing useful
is menial. It is in the quality of the work and the spirit you give it
that the test lies. Poor work brings disrespect and so hurts not only
you but the whole mass. Contempt for a task violates the principle
because it is contempt for a thing which the system recognizes as
useful. Classification based on tasks falls down in a democracy. A
poor lawyer falls below a good clerk, a poor teacher below a good
housemaid, since one renders a sound and the other an unsound service.
Now this ideal of labor it was for the woman to work out in the
household. To do this she must reconstruct the ideas to which she and
all her society had been trained. In the nature of the task there
could be no rules for it. It could be accomplished only by creating in
the household a genuine democratic spirit. This meant that she must
bring herself to look upon domestic service as a dignified employment
in no way demeaning the person who performed it. Quite as difficult,
she must infuse into those who performed the labor of the household
respect and pride in their service.
What has happened? Has the woman democratized the department of labor
she controls? If we are to measure her understanding of the system
under which she lives by what she has done with her own particular
labor problem, we must set her down as a poor enough democrat. This
great department of national activity is generally (though by no means
universally) in a poorer estate to-day than ever before in the history
of the country; that is, tested by the ideals of labor toward which we
are supposed to be working, it shows less progress.
Instead of being dignified, it has been demeaned. No other honest work
in the country so belittles a woman socially as housework performed
for money. It is the only field of labor which has scarcely felt the
touch of the modern labor movement; the only one where the hours,
conditions, and wages are not being attacked generally; the only one
in which there is no organization or standardization, no training, no
regular road of progress. It is the only field of labor in which there
seems to be a general tendency to abandon the democratic notion and
return frankly to the standards of the aristocratic régime. The
multiplication of livery, the tipping system, the terms of address,
all show an increasing imitation of the old world's methods. Unhappily
enough, they are used with little or none of the old world's ease.
Being imitations and not natural growths, they, of course, cannot be.
More serious still is the relation which has been shown to exist
between criminality and household occupations. Nothing, indeed, which
recent investigation has established ought to startle the American
woman more. Contrary to public opinion, it is not the factory and
shop which are making the greatest number of women offenders of all
kinds; it is the household. In a recent careful study of over 3000
women criminals, the Bureau of Labor found that 80 per cent came
directly from their own homes or from the traditional pursuits of
women![2]
The anomaly is the more painful because women are so active in trying
to better the conditions in trades which men control. Feminine circles
everywhere have been convulsed with sympathy for shop and factory
girls. Intelligent and persistent efforts are making to reach and aid
them. This is, of course, right, and it would be a national calamity
if such organizations as the Woman's Trade Union League and the
Consumer's League should lose anything of their vigor. But the need
of the classes they reach is really less than the need of household
workers. In the first place, the number affected is far less.
It is customary, in presenting the case of the shop and factory girl,
to speak of them as "an army 7,000,000 strong." It is a misleading
exaggeration. The whole number of American women and girls over ten
years of age earning their living wholly or partially is about
7,000,000.[3] Of this number from 20 per cent to 25 per cent belong
to the "army" in shops and factories; moreover, a goodly percentage of
this proportion are accountants, bookkeepers, and stenographers,--a
class which on the whole may be said to be able to look after its own
needs. The number in domestic service is nearly twice as great,
something like 40 per cent of the 7,000,000.
There are almost as many dressmakers, milliners, and seamstresses as
there are factory operators in this 7,000,000. There are nearly twice
as many earning their living in dairies, greenhouses, and gardens as
there are in shops and offices.
The greater number in domestic service is not what gives this class
its greater importance. Its chief importance comes from the fact that
it is in a _permanent_ woman's employment; that is, the household
worker becomes on marriage a housekeeper and in this country
frequently an employer of labor. The intelligence and the ideals which
she will give to her homemaking will depend almost entirely on what
she has seen in the houses where she has worked; that is, our domestic
service is _self-perpetuating_, and upon it American homes are in
great numbers being annually founded. In sharp contrast to this
permanent character of housework is the transientness of factory and
shop work. The average period which a girl gives to this kind of labor
is probably less than five years. What she learns has little or no
relation to her future as a housekeeper--indeed, the tendency is
rather to unfit than to fit her for a home.
But why is the American woman not stirred by these facts? Why does she
not recognize their meaning and grapple with her labor problem? It is
certain that at the beginning of the republic she did have a pretty
clear idea of the kind of household revolution the country needed. Our
great-grandmothers, that is, the serious ones among them, made a brave
dash at it. There is no family, at least of New England tradition, who
does not know the methods they adopted. They changed the nomenclature.
There were to be no more "servants"--we were to have helpers. There
were to be no divisions in the household. The helper was to sit at the
table, at the fireside. (They thought to change the nature of a
relation as old as the world by changing its name and form.) It was
like the French Revolutionists' attempt to make a patriot by taking
away his ruffles and shoe buckles and calling him "citizen"!
Of course it failed. The family meal, the fireside hour, are personal
and private institutions in a home. Much of the success of the family
in building up an intimate comradeship depends upon preserving them.
We admit friends to them as a proof of affection, strangers as a proof
of our regard. The notion that those who come into a household solely
to aid in its labor should be admitted into personal relations which
depend for their life upon privacy and affection, was always
fantastic. It could not endure, because it violated something as
important as the dignity of labor, and that was the sacredness of
personal privacy. Moreover, it was bound to fail because it made the
dignity of labor depend on artificial things--such as the name by
which one is called, the place where one sits.
The good sense of the country might very well have regulated whatever
was artificial in the attempt, if it had not been for the crushing
interference of slavery. In the South all service was performed by
slaves. In many parts of the North, at the founding of the republic,
in Connecticut, in New York, New Jersey, slaves were held. It was
practically impossible to work out a democratic system of domestic
service side by side with this institution.
Slavery passed, but we were impeded by the fact that, liberated, the
slave was still a slave in spirit and that his employer, North and
South, was still an aristocrat in her treatment of him. With this
situation to cope with, the woman's labor problem was still further
complicated by immigration.
For years we have been overrun by thousands of untrained girls who are
probably to be heads of American homes and mothers of American
citizens. Most of them are of good, healthy, honest, industrious
stock, but they are ignorant of our ways and ideas. The natural place
for these girls to get their initiation into American democracy is in
the American household. The duty of American women toward these
foreign girls is plainly to help them understand our ideals. The
difficulty of this is apparent; but the failure to accomplish it has
been due less to its difficulty than to the fact that not one woman in
a thousand has recognized that she has an obligation to make a fit
citizen of the girl who comes into her home.
Generally speaking, the foreign servant girl has been exploited in
this country almost if not quite as ruthlessly and unintelligently as
the foreign factory girl and the foreign steel mill worker. Domestic
service, which ought to be the best school for the newcomer, has
become the worst; exploited, she learns to exploit; suspected, she
learns to suspect. The result has been that the girl has soon
acquired a confused and grotesque notion of her place. She soon
becomes insolent and dissatisfied, grows more and more indifferent to
the quality of her work and to the cultivation of right relations.
What we have lost in our treatment of the immigrant women can never be
regained. We forget that almost invariably these girls have the habit
of thrift. They have never known anything else. Thrift as a principle
is ingrained in them. But the American household is notoriously
thriftless. As a rule it destroys the quality in the untrained
immigrant girl. It is American not to care for expense--and she
accepts the method--as far as her mistress' goods are concerned--if
not her own.
The general stupid assumption that because the immigrant girl does not
know our ways she knows nothing, has deprived us of much that she
might have contributed to our domestic arts and sciences. It is with
her as it is with any newcomer in a strange land of strange
tongue--she is shy, dreads ridicule. Instead of encouraging her to
preserve and develop that which she has learned at home, we drive her
to abandon it by our ignorant assumption that she knows nothing worth
our learning. The case of peasant handicraft is in point. It is only
recently that we have begun to realize that most women immigrants know
some kind of beautiful handicraft which they have entirely dropped for
fear of being laughed at.
A very frequent excuse for the lack of pains that the average woman
gives to the training of the raw girl is that she marries as soon as
she becomes useful. But is it not part of the woman's business in this
democracy to help the newcomer to an independent position? Is it not
part of her business to help settle her servants in matrimony?
Certainly any large and serious conception of her business must
include this obligation.
It is the failure to recognize opportunities for public service of
this kind that makes the woman say her life is narrow. It is parallel
to her failure to understand the relation of household economy to
national economy. She seems to lack the imagination to relate her
problem to the whole problem. She will read books and follow lecture
courses on Labor and come home to resent the narrowness of her life,
unconscious that she personally has the labor problem on her own hands
and that her failure to see that fact is complicating daily the
problems of the nation. It is the old false idea that the interesting
and important thing is somewhere else--never at home--while the truth
is that the only interesting and important thing for any one of us is
in mastering our own particular situation,--moreover, the only real
contribution we ever make comes in doing that.
The failure to dignify and professionalize household labor is
particularly hard on the unskilled girl of little education who
respects herself, has pretty clear ideas of her "rights" under our
system of government, and who expects to make something of herself.
There are tens of thousands of such in the country; very many of them
realize clearly the many advantages of household labor. They know that
it _ought_ to be more healthful, is better paid, is more interesting
because more varied. They see its logical relation to the future to
which they look forward.
But such a girl feels keenly the cost to herself of undertaking what
she instinctively feels ought to be for her the better task. She
knows the standards and conditions are a matter of chance; that, while
she may receive considerate treatment in one place, in another there
will be no apparent consciousness that she is a human being. She knows
and dreads the loneliness of the average "place." "It's breaking my
heart I was," sobbed an intelligent Irish girl, serving a term for
drunkenness begun in the kitchen, "alone all day long with never a one
to pass a good word." She finds herself cut off from most of the
benefits which are provided for other wage-earning girls. She finds
girls' clubhouses generally are closed to her. She is the pariah among
workers.
What is there for this girl but the factory or the shop? Yet her
presence there is a disaster for the whole labor system, for she is a
_cheap laborer_--cheap not because she is a poor laborer--she is not;
generally she is an admirable one--quick to learn, faithful to
discharge. Her weakness in trade is that she is a transient who takes
no interest in fitting herself for an advanced position. The
demonstration of this statement is found in a town like Fall River,
where the admirable textile school has only a rare woman student,
although boys and men tax its capacity. There is no object for the
average girl to take the training. She looks forward to a different
life. The working girl has still to be convinced of the "aristocracy
of celibacy"!
No more difficult or important undertaking awaits the American woman
than to accept the challenge to democratize her own special field of
labor. It is in doing this that she is going to make her chief
contribution to solving the problem of woman in industry. It is in
doing this that she is going to learn the meaning of democracy. It is
an undertaking in which every woman has a direct individual part--just
as every man has a direct part in the democratization of public life.
Individual effort aside, though it is the most fundamental, she has
various special channels of power through which she can work--her
clubs, for instance. If the vast machinery of the Federation of
Woman's Clubs could be turned to this problem of the democratization
of domestic service, what an awakening might we not hope for! Yet it
is doubtful if it will be through the trained woman's organizations
that the needed revolution will come. It will come, as always, from
the ranks of the workers.
Already there are signs that the woman's labor organizations are
willing to recognize the inherent dignity of household service. And
this is as it should be. The woman who labors should be the one to
recognize that all labor is _per se_ equally honorable--that there is
no stigma in any honestly performed, useful service. If she is to
bring to the labor world the regeneration she dreams, she must begin
not by saying that the shop girl, the clerk, the teacher, are in a
higher class than the cook, the waitress, the maid, but that we are
all laborers alike, sisters by virtue of the service we are rendering
society. That is, labor should be the last to recognize the canker of
caste.[4]
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners in the
United States, Vol. XV. Relation between Occupation and
Criminality of Women. 1911.
[3] The number of people in 1910 in what is called "gainful
occupations" has not as yet been compiled by the Census Bureau.
This figure of 7,000,000 is arrived at by the following method,
suggested to the writer by Director Durand. It is known that there
are about 44,500,000 females in the present population. Now in
1900 there were about 14½ per cent of all the girls and women in
the country over ten years of age at work a part or all of the
time. Apply to the new figure this proportion, and you have
between six and seven millions, which is called 7,000,000 here, on
the supposition that the proportion may have increased. The
percentage of women in each of the various occupations in 1900 is
assumed still to exist.
[4] The National Women's Trades Union League has domestic workers
among its members, though not as yet, I believe, in any large
numbers. Its officials are strong believers in a Domestic Workers'
Union. There are several such unions in New Zealand, and they have
done much to regulate hours, conditions, and wages.