Part 13

A high purpose saves. Among the prostitutes of this city, I doubt if you can find one who is either a revolutionist, a socialist, a Zionist, a good trade unionist, or an ardent suffragist. Most of those poor girls are they who in their innocent natural desire for pleasure, unchecked by high enthusiasm for anything else, are finally dragged down to a terrible payment for the pleasures they so normally demand. Why is it that among the Jewish girls who have gone wrong we find no socialists, no revolutionists, no trade unionists? Obviously because devotion to a cause gives rise to a consuming self-respect. The compelling power of a great cause brings the same results as the sanctions of religion. A cause that becomes a passion ennobles one. Personal indulgence is obliterated and pleasure becomes identified with devotion to this cause or is incidental to it. We cannot expect that all working girls will be drawn to any of these particular causes which I have enumerated, but some spiritual interest they must have--something bigger than themselves and their own pleasures.

With the Italian girl just now beginning to enter industry in large numbers the situation again is different. Though Catholic, she seems not to have the purposive character in her religious life that marks the Irish girl. Religion is not so full of conscious meaning for her. In her home life she has thus far been and still is probably the most carefully chaperoned girl in America. From the protection of her father she goes straight to that of her husband. Never standing on her own feet, she fails to develop that independence without which as mother she loses control of her children, to their serious loss. They refuse obedience to her authority. But now at last this charming girl who has hitherto known only the controlled existence of the home is leaving it for the uncontrolled life of that larger world which she enters as industrial worker. How is she to learn to feel safe in this bigger world when her parents and her brothers do not think her so? She can never feel safe until she is safe, and she will not be safe until she learns the self-reliance and independence that come from the double security bestowed by some large spiritual enthusiasm and by economic independence. The old-fashioned girl living and working exclusively in the home was safe in a negative way. She was safe because she had no opportunity for anything but safety. This negative safely breaks down when one leaves the home. Safety in the larger world is secured only by some positive force that enables a girl to prefer the higher to the lower. These positive safeguards are, as we have seen, of various kinds; they are religion, or socialism, or trade unionism, or any compelling form of social or political development. They all involve an individual direct relationship between the girl and her desire. She is a person with her own hopes. She is freed from entanglements. She attains a purity very different from that feeble inhibited negative thing which comes from outward protection alone.

But there is another side to this question. It is nonsense to suppose that any spiritual enthusiasm, no matter how powerful, will be adequate to protect the girl whose wage it is impossible to live on. I take it for granted that this economic aspect of the case is clear to everyone. It is silly, not to say criminal, for us to suppose that girls are going to starve or go without decent clothes or deprive themselves of all pleasures because they cannot pay their own way. There will be cases of heroism always. I think now of a poor little restaurant-worker friend of mine, who with $4 a week with two meals a day pays for room and clothing and yet keeps straight, though with never a penny for any kind of pleasure. All honor to her, but no credit to us that we allow such strain. Thousands of girls are living in New York, on less than a living wage, not eating enough, not having proper room or clothing and yet keeping straight. But others--and these too are doubtless in the thousands--are too normal to deprive themselves of their rights in the world. Their perfectly innocent love of pleasure becomes transmuted through gradual corrupting relationships into a life of degradation. Inextricably bound together in the life of the young girl are her impulses and her ideals. Free play for both and training for both are demanded for the flowering of her womanhood. To grow, to play, to have friends, to make love, are all normal elements that go to make up the life of the young. Not only is pleasure their right but it is a racial necessity. In the old home the family life itself was the center of all the social gatherings, or if social pleasures were to be found elsewhere it was in other affiliated homes, so that in that network of home life a sort of tribal pleasure was developed where free play to all these youthful emotions could be granted. But in the life of the great city the young girl can find little within the narrow confines of her crowded home to hold her ardent attention. In the midst of the ever-intensifying excitement with which she is surrounded she can find nothing appealing enough to attract her interest except those great congregate forms of enjoyment which center about the dance hall, the theater and the brilliant amusement resort. These commercialized pleasure places are far lighter, airier and more beautiful than any small home can be. They represent roominess, freedom, grandeur, all of which appeal to the blossoming passion of the young. There is something almost terrible in the careless way in which society both indulges and neglects the young girl. The over-stimulation of all this excitement is dangerous enough in itself but when coupled with so little that safeguards the ardor of youth it forms an appeal almost impossible of resistance. And these pleasures cannot be had for nothing. Where the girls cannot pay their cost, there are attendant circumstances which turn the natural channels of joy into debasement. The young men of the big cities today are not gallantly paying the way of these girls for nothing. Though the price may not be that which leads to despair, it often involves a lowering of the finer instinct and a gradual deterioration of the appreciation of personal purity which is one of the most beautiful flowers of civilization. The fathers and mothers of this great army of girls in industry can no longer furnish the pleasures the girls want. If then they seek them outside the home, the community itself must become the foster father and mother.

Already our communities are seeing that girls like boys must be trained for the industry which they are bound to enter. There is a pestilential group among us composed of those people who are insistent that the working classes should be taught “useful” things. All of us who live in settlements know this kind of person only too well. “Do you teach cooking? Do you teach sewing?” they ask. In these things perhaps they will take an interest, but a class for dancing or preparation for a play or an evening’s sing, such persons will regard as frills and not “useful” work. As if there were anything more useful than helping to create a social atmosphere congenial enough to hold a girl’s interest! For it is from such a sympathetic background that enthusiasms spring.

Pleasures are necessary and the community must take the place of the old home by protecting the young in their pleasures and by offering them such pleasures as shall enrich rather than debase the emotional and spiritual life. Dance halls properly controlled, clean cheap theaters, amusement resorts freed from the harpies that too frequently gather there--all these are necessary in a program of social adjustment. A living wage is also essential. But beyond these the girl at work, like all women of every class, must develop a deep self-respect, a regard for herself as an industrial worker, a conviction that she is responsible for the conditions under which she works, a desire to control these conditions through such social or political means as are adequate for that end. She must not take the apologetic position, “I have to go to work,” but rather the proud point of view, “As a worker I am a responsible person with a social purpose.”

The woman movement has sometimes been interpreted by rich women as giving them the privilege of doing what they like and by the respectable middle class as furnishing a means of dignifying leisure. Among working women, however, it has made little headway. I say this realizing that there are thousands of whom this is not true. But the working woman in New York, as I have said, still retains the tradition of home life as her most cherished sentiment, expecting to return from industry to a home of her own. And the very beauty and power of this old ideal obscures the fact that the home of the future must be strong enough to stand all the strain to which in the nature of the case it will be subjected. To stand its ground it needs not the negative submission of dependents, but the co-operation of strong independent individuals. The new working woman’s movement when under way will have within it certain sounder elements than the movement among middle-class and wealthy women. For in industry one learns promptness, order and adaptation to ends--in other words, efficiency. Bringing back this business sense into the home and enlarging it by those spiritual enthusiasms which give a sense of roominess and freedom, no matter what one’s daily task may be, the working woman, when once this new social adjustment has been made, will be a new kind of new woman in whose consciousness the destinies of home, industry and society will be seen as fused into one. Her duties toward society and toward the home will be seen to be indissolubly connected. And when her children are born she will see to it that the old negative protection of the home shall be supplemented by the positive elements of protection, the chief of which is the flame of a positive enthusiasm. But this desirable end, this real social adjustment, will not take place unless society is prepared to adopt a practical program embodying these three elements--proper opportunities for pleasure, a living wage and the cultivation of independence, self-respect and idealism.

FOOTNOTES:

A paper presented at the meeting of the Academy of Political Science, December 4, 1909.

MARRIED WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

FLORENCE KELLEY

General Secretary, National Consumers’ League

Throughout all history married women have carried on productive industry, feeding and clothing the race. And in that coöperative commonwealth which some of us hope to see, they will undoubtedly again participate largely and beneficently in the industrial work of the community.

It is perfectly easy to conceive of a prosperous village in New England or the state of Washington, with coöperative intensive culture of gardens and orchards, with coöperative dairy, laundry, bakery, store and workshops. In such a village the high school might well have as its adjunct a nursery where the oldest girls could learn the art of caring for babies and little children, as the normal school of today has its kindergarten and primary classes for the benefit alike of the children and the teachers in training. The citizens of such a village would obviously be highly enlightened folk, and might be expected to limit their working day to four, five, or six hours. Given these easily conceivable conditions, the industrial work of mothers of children as young as one year might perhaps be an asset for every one concerned.

It is, indeed, one serious charge in the indictment against the present competitive organization of industry that the industrial employment of married women to-day does harm and only harm. With the increasing industrial work of married women in our competitive industry comes increase in the number of children who are never born. In industrial centers, the world over, wherever records are kept, the decreasing birth rate manifests itself. Where this is due to drugs or surgery it is of the gravest social significance. Childless working wives are a permanently demoralizing influence for husbands. If these are inclined to idleness they can idle the more because the wives work. However disposed to hard work the men may be, the presence in the market of a throng of unorganized and irregular workers (and married women are both more unorganized and more irregular than others) presses upon the wage rate of men. Whether the wife leaves home to work in cotton mill or laundry, or whether she stays at home working under the sweating system, she suffers the disadvantage of carrying the double burden and enduring the twofold strain of home maker and wage earner. And she presses upon the wage scale of her competitors as the subsidized or presumably subsidized worker must always do.

Aside from childless wives, married women wage earners consist of deserted mothers, widowed mothers and women who have both children and husband. All these are ordinarily subsidized workers, the deserted and widowed receiving charitable relief, and the women with husbands having, at least in the theory which underlies their wages, some support from them.

The heaviest strain of all falls upon the wife who has husband and children and is still herself a wage earner; for she has usually child-bearing as well as wage-earning duties. Even where her wage earning is due to the husband’s tuberculosis, or epilepsy, or other disability, this does not ordinarily end the growth in number of mouths for which the industrially working mother attempts to provide.

Here and there, even in the great cities, an exceptional woman may be found who has endured to middle life, or even longer, this double strain, and has brought up children creditable in every way. Such rare women are usually immigrants of peasant stock, fresh from rural life in the old country, and merely serve, exceptions as they are, to prove the rule.

Whether the wage-earning mother leaves home, or brings her work into the home, her children pay the penalty. If she is away, they are upon the street or locked into their rooms. From the street to the court is but a short step. From the locked room to the grave has been for unknown thousands of children a step almost as short, many having been burned and others reduced by the long intervals between feedings to that exhaustion in which any disease is fatal. Most dangerous of all to the young victims of their mothers’ absence, are the unskilled ministrations of older sisters, those hapless little girls ironically known as “little mothers.” These keep neither the babies nor the nursing bottles clean; nor do they keep the milk cool and shielded from flies. They have no regular hours for feeding or naps. They let the baby fall, or tumble down stairs with it. And in all the cruel process their own backs grow crooked and they are robbed of school life and of the care-free hours of play. Even where the mother does her industrial work at home, the older girl suffers from the delegated care of the younger children, and there is a strong tendency for the dwelling to be dirty and neglected, and for all the children to be pressed into service at the earliest possible moment, at cost of school attendance and of play.

Homework, which is peculiarly the domain of married women, forces rents up, because the worker must be near the factory. This promotes congestion of population, to the advantage of no one but the landowner.

Even the employer is injured by the presence in the market of a body of homeworking women. By their cheapness he is tempted to defer installing the newest machines and most up-to-date methods. Enlightened employers who do make such provision have competing against them the parasite employers who drag out an incompetent existence because they can extort from their homeworking employes the contribution to their running expenses of rent, heat, light and cleaning.

In the employment of married women, as in all other industrial evils, it is ultimately the whole community which pays. Whether the children die before or after birth, the moral tone of the population suffers and hearts are hardened by acquiescence in cruelty and law breaking. Whether the surviving children (by reason of their mother’s absence or her neglect in her overwrought and harassed presence) become invalids or criminals, they do not suffer without sending in their bill to the community which tolerates their sufferings. In the growth of vice, crime and inefficiency, and in the spread of communicable disease, consciously or unconsciously, the whole community pays its bill to the children whom it has deprived of their mothers.

In this country we do not know the number of wage-earning mothers either at home or elsewhere. Our records, official and unofficial, are as defective in this regard as in all others. We cherish a general impression, as pleasing as it is erroneous, that the old usage persists under which, in the early days of the republic, the father commonly maintained his family until the children had had some share of school life, and thereafter father and children supported the mother.

In the textile and needle trades, however, even this tradition never prevailed, and of late a contingent of the washerwomen of yore seem to have moved bodily into the steam laundries of today.

Now cities which are centers of the textile industry are, and for sixty years notoriously have been, the centers also of the labor of women and children, of infant mortality, tuberculosis, immorality and drink. This was the thesis of Friedrich Engels’ volume on The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Even today in Saxon Chemnitz and in New England Fall River, wage-earning mothers away from their homes and children are a characteristic and sorrowful feature of the dominant local industry.

A perverse element in the problem, which would be humorous if it were not tragic, is the encouragement persistently given by philanthropists to the wage-earning labor of married women. Day nurseries, charity kindergartens, charity sewing rooms, doles of home sewing, cash relief contingent upon the recipient’s taking whatever work she may be offered, are all still in vogue in the year 1910.

The monstrous idea has been seriously advocated (without editorial denunciation) in the columns of Charities that a night nursery might enable women to work at night after they have cared for their children by day! A shameful spectacle visible every night in our cities is the army of widowed mothers on their knees scrubbing the floors of railway stations, stores and office buildings. This noxious task is sacred to them because the work is so ill paid and so loathsome that men will not do it. The opportunity to enlist in this pitiable cohort of night toilers is commonly obtained for the widowed mothers by their influential philanthropic friends.

And in all these cases the obvious fact is overlooked that such charitable effort is inevitably self-defeating. Overworked mothers, like other overworked human beings, break down and are added to that burden of the dependent sick which society perpetually creates for itself.

We have preferred to live in a fool’s paradise, ignoring the social implications of our stupendous industrial development. We have, therefore, adopted only one of all the palliatives with which other industrial nations have been experimenting during the past sixty years.