MARGARET DREIER ROBINS
The work of Margaret Dreier Robins has been done in the National Women's
Trade Union League. It might be supposed that the aim of such an
organization is sufficiently explicit in its title: to get higher wages
and shorter hours. But I fancy that it would be a truer thing to say
that its aim is to bring into being that ideal of American womanhood
which Walt Whitman described:
They are not one jot less than I am,
They are tann'd in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike,
retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,
They are ultimate in their own right--they are
calm, clear, well-possessed of themselves.
When Whitman made this magnificent prophecy for American womanhood the
Civil War had not been fought and its economic consequences were
unguessed at. The factory system, which had come into England in the
last century, bringing with it the most unspeakable exploitation of
women and children, had hardly gained a foothold in this country. In
1840, of the seven employments open to women (teaching, needlework,
keeping boarders, working in cotton mills, in bookbinderies, typesetting
and household service) only one was representative of the new industrial
condition which today affects so profoundly the feminine physique. And
to the daughters of a nation that was still imbued with the pioneer
spirit, work in cotton mills appealed so little that they undertook it
only for unusually high pay. Anyone of that period seeing the
red-cheeked, robust, intelligent, happy girl operatives of Lowell might
have dismissed his fears of the factory as a sinister influence in the
development of American womanhood and gone on to dream, with Walt
Whitman, of a race of "fierce, athletic girls."
But two things happened. With the growing flood of immigration, the
factories were abandoned more and more to the "foreigners," the
native-born citizens losing their pride in the excellence of working
conditions and the character of the operatives. And all the while the
factory was becoming more and more an integral part of our civilization,
demanding larger and larger multitudes of girls and women to attend its
machinery. So that, with the enormous development of industry since the
Civil War, the factory has become the chief field of feminine endeavor
in America. In spite of the great opening up of all sorts of work to
women, in spite of the store, the office, the studio, the professions,
still the factory remains most important in any consideration of the
health and strength of women.
If the greatest part of our womankind spends its life in factories, and
if it further appears that this is no temporary situation, but
(practically speaking) a permanent one, then it becomes necessary to
inquire how far the factory is hindering the creation of that ideal
womanhood which Walt Whitman predicted for us.
As opposed to the old-fashioned method of manufacture in the home (or
the sweatshop, which is the modern equivalent), the factory often shows
a gain in light and air, a decrease of effort, an added leisure; while,
on the other hand, there is a considerable loss of individual freedom
and an increase in monotony. But child labor, a too long working day,
bad working conditions, lack of protection from fire, personal
exploitation by foremen, inhumanly low wages, and all sorts of petty
injustice, though not essential to the system, are prominent features of
factory work as it generally exists.
People who consider every factory an Inferno, however, and have only
pity for its workers, are far from understanding the situation. Here is
a field of work which is capable of competing successfully with domestic
service, and even of attracting girls from homes where there exists no
absolute necessity for women's wages. Yet at its contemporary best, with
a ten-hour law in operation, efficient factory inspection, decent
working conditions and a just and humane management, the factory remains
an institution extremely perilous to the Whitmanic ideal of womanhood.
But there are women who, undaunted by the new conditions brought about
by a changing economic system, seize upon those very conditions to use
them as the means to their end: such a woman is Mrs. Robins. Has a new
world, bounded by factory walls and noisy with the roar of machinery,
grown up about us, to keep women from their heritage? She will help them
to use those very walls and that very machinery to achieve their
destiny, a destiny of which a physical well-being is, as Walt Whitman
knew it to be, the most certain symbol.
The factory already gives women a certain independence. It may yet give
them pleasure, the joy of creation. Indeed, it must, when the workers
require it; and those who are most likely to require it are the women
workers.
It is well known that with the ultra-development of the machine, the
subdivision of labor, the regime of piecework, it has become practically
impossible for the worker to take any artistic pleasure in his product.
It is not so well known how necessary such pleasure in the product is to
the physical well-being of women--how utterly disastrous to their
nervous organization is the monotony and irresponsibility of piecework.
This method--which men workers have grumbled at, but to which they seem
to have adjusted themselves--bears its fruits among women in
neurasthenia, headaches, and the derangement of the organs which are the
basis of their different nervous constitution. It is sufficiently clear
to those who have seen the personal reactions of working girls to the
piecework system, that when women attain, as men in various industries
have attained, the practical management of the factory, piecework will
get a setback.
But not merely good conditions, not merely a living wage, not merely a
ten or an eight hour day--all that self-government in the shop can bring
is the object of the Women's Trade Union League.
"The chief social gain of the union shop," says Mrs. Robins, "is not
its generally better wages and shorter hours, but rather the incentive
it offers for initiative and social leadership, the call it makes,
through the common industrial relationship and the common hope, upon the
moral and reasoning faculties, and the sense of fellowship, independence
and group strength it develops. In every workshop of say thirty girls
there is undreamed of initiative and capacity for social leadership and
control--unknown wealth of intellectual and moral resources."
It is, in fact, this form of activity which to many thousands of factory
girls makes the difference between living and existing, between a
painful, necessary drudgery and a happy exertion of all their faculties.
It can give them a more useful education than any school, a more vital
faith than any church, a more invigorating sense of power than any other
career open to them.
To do all these things it must be indigenous to working-class soil. No
benefaction originating in the philanthropic motives of middle-class
people, no enterprise of patronage, will ever have any such meaning. A
movement, to have such meaning, must be of the working class, and by the
working class, as well as for the working class. It must be imbued with
working-class feeling, and it must subserve working-class ideals.
It is the distinction of Mrs. Robins that she has seen this. She has
gone to the workers to learn rather than to teach--she has sought to
unfold the ideals and capacities latent in working girls rather than
impress upon them the alien ideals and capacities of another class.
"Just"--it is Mrs. Robins that speaks--"as under a despotic church and
a feudal state the possible power and beauty of the common people was
denied expression, so under industrial feudalism the intellectual and
moral powers of the workers are slowly choked to death, with
incalculable loss to the individual and the race. It is easy to kill; it
requires a great spirit as well as a great mind to arouse the dormant
energies, to vitalize them and to make them creative forces for good."
One is reminded of the words of John Galsworthy, addressed to
workingwomen: "There is beginning to be a little light in the sky;
whether the sun is ever to break through depends on your constancy, and
courage, and wisdom. The future is in your hands more than in the hands
of men; it rests on your virtues and well-being, rather than on the
virtues and the welfare of men, for it is you who produce and mold the
Future."
There are 6,000,000 working women in the United States, and half of
them are girls under 21. One may go out any day in the city streets, at
morning or noon or evening, and look at a representative hundred of
them. The factories have not been able to rob them of beauty and
strength and the charm of femininity, and in that beauty and strength
and charm there is a world of promise. And that promise already begins
to be unfolded when to them comes Mrs. Robins with a gospel germane to
their natures, saying, "Long enough have you dreamed contemptible
dreams."