Part 9

From the first, some division of work between male and female grows almost inevitably out of their different relations to reproduction. Following conception, the male can always run away and leave the female to feed and fight for herself and her offspring, and he is very prone to do so. Even when he stays by and shares in the joy of the newly born he generally leaves the female to get ready the nest, and largely she protects and provisions it.

Among domesticated animals, where their working possibilities have been very highly developed, females are much more desirable workers than males. The maternal function partly explains this, as in the case of cows and hens which give us milk and eggs; and even with mares and sheep the offspring adds to the general working value. Still, it seems to be true that even for purposes of draught, the males are of less value than the females, unless reduced to the non-sexual condition of geldings and oxen. The stallion, bull or ram is too katabolic, too much of a consuming, distributing, destroying force to be very valuable in the daily routine of agriculture or commerce. While the female is generally smaller and less powerful than the male, she is quiet, easily enslaved; and, as we have said, her maternal functions can be diverted to our daily use. She produces more workers, and her flesh is more palatable, because less distinctive, than that of the male. Hence, among domesticated animals, selection, based on considerations of work, multiplies females and keeps males only for breeding purposes.

As a quadruped, the female suffers very little handicap from the functions peculiar to her sex, except when actually carrying her young or nursing them. When she stands erect, however, the support for the special organs of reproduction is far from ideal; heavy lifting, or long-continued standing, often leads to disaster, and the periodic functions, even in the healthiest conditions, must always place women at a working disadvantage as compared with men. Add to this the fact that women are smaller, less agile, and far less strong, than men, and, even when not encumbered with young, it is clear that a woman, when confronting physical work in competition with men, needs something more than a fair field and free competition. Idealists and travelers among primitive people love to tell us how easily women meet their special functions, carrying burdens equal to those carried by men when on the march, and dropping out from the caravan for only a few hours to give birth to a child; but the fact remains that women in all primitive societies age quickly and that those who are spoiled are thrown aside and forgotten. Woman's handicap as a working animal in competition with man is too obvious and too deep-seated to be idealized away.

The Supreme Court of the United States, in passing on the "Oregon laundry case," in 1907, declared a bill limiting a woman's working hours constitutional. See the Brief for the State of Oregon, prepared by LOUIS D. BRANDEIS, published by The National Consumers' League, 105 East 22d Street, New York.

DUDLEY, Principles and Practices of Gynecology, pp. 23-24, says that among Indian women want of care during and after labor leads to numberless evils.

In all savage societies labor is clearly specialized between the sexes. The man, because of his superior strength and mobility, fights, hunts and makes weapons of the chase. The woman fetches and carries, digs and delves, cures the meat, makes the rude huts, clothing and pottery. Gradually she changes wild grasses to domesticated plants, and rears the young animals brought home from the chase, till they follow and serve their human masters. She is truly the mother of industries, and it in no way detracts from her credit that her motherhood is here, as elsewhere, mainly unthinking.

With the exhaustion of the supply of wild animals, man is forced to turn his attention to the world of vegetation and he takes over the direction of the plants and animals which woman has largely domesticated. In his career as fighter and hunter he has learned to coöperate with his fellows to a degree which aids him greatly in dividing the arable land, protecting his crops, and using grazing lands in common with the tribe. He has also learned to make stone hatchets, spears and bows and arrows. Woman has not felt the same necessity to invent in her work; such new tools as she has devised have been helpful, but men who could not invent have been wiped out by those who learned to make stronger spears or better arrow-heads.

It is the same difference in adaptability which one observes to-day between the farmers on the western frontier of America and those who remain in their peasant homes in Europe. The peasant has even greater need of inventing than has his expatriated countryman in Colorado, but he lacks the driving impulse. It was the same with women and men under the conditions of savage life. Thus it came about that man's greater strength and mobility, backed by power of coöperation and invention, gave him the leadership in such primitive life as we find depicted in the pages of Homer or in the epic of the Jews. True, woman was his first lieutenant, but he spoke for her in most of the larger matters of the industrial life.

With settled conditions and accumulation of wealth, the most desirable women were almost entirely freed from physical labor and gradually became luxury-loving parasites and playthings, as we pointed out in the second chapter of this volume. Meantime slaves were multiplying, male and female and, while the most desirable women passed to the harem, the mass of them became drudges in house and field. It is hard for us to realize that it is exactly in those times when a few women are surrounded with great luxury that most of the sex are reduced to heavy labor and wretchedness.

During the early Christian ages, a tradition was gradually formed concerning woman's place in industry, or rather three traditions were formed. The working woman of the lower classes was to be the housekeeper, which meant that she was to care for food, cook, spin, weave, sew and mend, scrub and wash, bear children and nurse and tend them. If she were of the middle class, she was to be a mother, to supervise this range of work, look after dependents, conserve social conditions and be the lady bountiful of her district. The second ideal was the woman of religion, who was to subdue her passions, observe set prayers and other religious exercises, and do the menial work of the convent. The third ideal was the lady of chivalry, who appeared after the tenth century. She was to be cared for and protected from work or anxiety; menials were to prepare her food, clothes and ornaments; gallants were to await her orders and do her bidding.

With the rise of Protestantism, and later with the rise of modern democracy, these ideals were blended, and women found themselves, not indeed slaves and subject to sale, but serfs, entangled in a mass of feudal obligations and bound to the house. Practically, most men still hold this threefold conception of woman's place in the social organism. She is to be a combination of housekeeper, nun and lady. It is the kitchen, church and children ideal of the German Emperor.

Meantime forces were set at work which were to change the economic foundations of the family and enable the woman to emerge from serfdom into some new form of industrial relationship. From the rise of the European cities in the twelfth century, certain industries have tended, especially in the Netherlands and in England, to segregate themselves in farm-houses and towns. Women naturally participated in these activities, generally taking the least desirable parts. With the freeing of the mind, which followed the democratic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, inventions blossomed out and perfected steam engines, cotton gins, spinning jennies, and a thousand other machines driven by steam or water power, which have changed the civilization of Europe and America. Miss Edith Abbott has shown us how this change, involving increasing segregation and specialization, came into America even in the pre-Revolutionary time.

EDITH ABBOTT, Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic History, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1910.

Spinning and weaving industries led the way in this movement, but its full force was not felt until the late eighteenth century. Since then, one industry after another has left the home for the factory until to-day, in all large communities, even the preparation of food increasingly goes to the packing-house, the canning establishment, the bakery and the delicatessen-store. These industries needed hands, and so the women followed them to the factories.

As 1870 marks the beginning of higher education for women, so it also marks the beginning of her industrial self-consciousness. The perfecting of such inventions as the typewriter, the telegraph and the telephone, and the creation of a great variety of office appliances, together with the perfecting of highly elaborate means of distribution, like the departmental store, called for thousands of cheap workers possessed of some slight intelligence but not necessarily having any serious preliminary training. Our elementary schools and high schools have increasingly turned out a multitude of girls who could meet these requirements. The increased cost of living, the lessened labor demands of the home, and the attractions of the pay envelope, have called millions to work in industrial plants. In 1890, there were 4,005,532 wage-earning women in the United States; in 1900, 5,319,397; while in 1910, we have probably nearly 8,000,000.

Like most other great changes in civilization, this industrial transformation was neither preceded nor accompanied by any general consciousness of what was happening. Daily necessities were offset by weekly pay envelopes, or the failures fell out of sight, and so the next week and the years followed. Country populations moved away; cities grew enormously, leading to congestion in living which, combined with the daily absence of women, has often transformed the old time homes into communal tiers of tenements occupied, during working hours, only by the young and the infirm.

The children of all ages after a while followed their mothers into the factories; but the evil effects of child labor were so apparent that repressive legislative measures have increasingly raised the age of their admission until now, in the more advanced communities, they must stay outside the factory doors until they are twelve or fourteen years old. Some growing self-consciousness, largely of a police nature, has led us to institute measures for the protection of the children who are not allowed to work. Schools, playgrounds, day nurseries, institutional churches, college settlements and public social centers now bid against the streets and vacant lots, the nickel shows and the dancing halls, for the children's patronage.

Education, however, true to its origin as the assistant of theology, refuses to recognize in any large way the new world into which we have come, and where the next generation of children must follow. Manual training has, here and there, quieted the fears of some who had disturbing visions; and we go on employing an army of unenfranchised, celibate women, with little or no industrial experience, to teach ten million boys how to be good citizens of a republic, and how to serve in a modern industrial army; and ten million girls how to work in shops and factories, and how to live without homes. As a consequence, girls come up to the factories from their schools with ideals, so far as the school has shaped them, founded on unmarried school mistresses and George Washington; and they pass, by way of the altar, into cheerless tenements which the school still thinks of as places where children are cared for, family clothing is made and the family baking is done. Practically, of course, most education is given outside the schools, and there the evils of an unregulated time of transition are multiplied through imitation.

EARL BARNES, Children's Ideals, in Studies in Education, Vol. II, p. 237; also School Girls' Ideas of Women's Occupations by SARAH YOUNG, in Studies in Education, Vol. II, p. 259.

The wealth and material comfort produced for the fortunate classes by these segregated industries have blinded us to their effects on human life, and we have all been bribed to silence concerning everything which could discourage enterprise or frighten capital. Like most bribes, however, these have largely stopped in the pockets of the exploiters of public opinion.

In the opening years of this new century, public consciousness has had a wonderful awakening. The popular mind, quickened by universal education, and freed from a burden of fixed beliefs, is turning restlessly to inquire about everything that affects human life. Work could not escape this inquisition, and so we are asking not only for a fairer division of the profits of work, but we are also inquiring what occupations are unfit for women, with their special limitations and obligations. When the work is reasonable, how long should a woman work daily? Should she work at night and overtime? Should she work with dangerous machinery? Should she handle substances that endanger health? Should she be required to stand through hours of continuous work? Should she work in bad air, due to dust, moisture, or excessive heat or cold? Should she have a decent retiring-room? Some daring inquirers are even asking whether industrial efficiency, gained through specialization and keying up, may not be purchased at too high a price of mental monotony and nervous strain. Most people are content to learn that the effects are not immediately destructive to the girls and women involved; but some day we shall demand that the barons of industry shall not be allowed to squander the heritage of the unborn generations.

C. HANFORD HENDERSON, Pay-Day, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1911.

Women have themselves done much to quicken this public consciousness. Enrolled in labor unions, they have shown power to stand together and make sacrifice, as in the shirt-waist makers' strike in New York in 1908, which commanded the admiration of all fair-minded observers. The more fortunately placed women have aided these movements toward self-betterment; and, through such organizations as the National Consumers' League, they have compelled manufacturers and shopkeepers to observe more reasonable hours, pay better wages, and furnish decent material conditions for their employees.

See the recent volume, based on investigations made by the National Consumers' League, Making Both Ends Meet, by SUE AINSLIE CLARK and EDITH WYATT, The Macmillan Co., 1911. See, also, Saleswomen in Mercantile Stores, by ELIZABETH BEARDSLEY BUTLER, published by the Charities Publication Committee, for the Russell Sage Foundation, 1912.

The solution of woman's present industrial problem is not an easy task, but out of the present unsettlement certain facts are emerging with a good deal of clearness. The efficiency in production, secured by concentration and specialization, make it certain that the old-time home with its multiplied industries will not return, but that more and more even of its present lessened activities will be transferred to factories and to their equivalents. It is also certain that women are not going to be supported in indolence by men, because when deprived of the discipline which full participation in life gives, they must always degenerate. For themselves, and for the sake of their children, they will demand a chance to live abundantly. It is also clear that our present chaotic conditions are destructive of health, happy marriages, effective homes, and the strong line of descendants which must always be the chief care of an intelligent society.

In the first place, then, we must work to produce an entire change in our present mental attitude toward organized industries. Our present worship of industrial products, no matter how obtained, must give way to a recognition of the fact that the chief asset of a nation is its people; that a woman is more important than the clothes she makes in factories or sells in stores; and that to needlessly destroy or scrapheap a working woman is worse than to needlessly destroy or scrapheap the finest and most costly machine ever devised by man. Such a statement seems to carry conviction in its every phrase, but the fact is that we do not believe it, and until we do believe it, there will be little help for our present absurd and wretched conditions. Unregulated competition, backed by greed of individuals and groups, will go on wasting the wealth of women's lives until we cease to be fascinated and hypnotized by the display of products which they make possible. Better fine women and children, and few things, than stores and warehouses crowded with goods, and the women and children of our present factory towns. By fixing our attention on people instead of things, we should almost certainly secure more and better things; but, regardless of cost, we must change the focus of our attention.

In the second place, girls must get ready to be women. The education of the home and the school must be unified, and together they must give a training that will lead girls into the actualities of the life that lies before them. Our present elementary schools, and still more our high schools, lead girls neither to intelligent work nor to intelligent living as women and mothers. Up to at least the age of fourteen, the education should be general, looking to the development of all the powers of body, mind and sensibilities. But through all these eight or ten years of training, two factors should receive constant and intelligent attention. In the first place, we should realize that we are not fitting women for drawing-rooms nor for convents, but for a working world; therefore well graded and interesting manual training should run through all these years and should furnish a well-developed base for later special industrial preparation of some kind. In the second place, the girls should be taught by men and women, married and unmarried, and fine ideals of actual womanhood, not alone in shops and factories, in school-rooms, and in professions--but also in homes, should be constantly held before them. Our present education leaves this training mainly to the homes, and neither the parasitic rich nor our eight million wage-earning women, when mothers, can or will attend to it.

After the girl reaches the age of fourteen, she should have at least two years of further education in which she could master the details of some necessary work which would enable her to look the world in the face and offer fair payment for her living. With most girls, this work would be connected with children and the service of the home; for domestic service, no matter how organized, must always occupy a multitude of women. All girls should have at least rudimentary training in these matters.