XI. WOMAN IN INDUSTRY. (continued 2)

Despite the fact that laws, made for the protection of women in the industries, were not always enforced,—enough good resulted from them to increase the tendency everywhere of looking to the State for further legislation. In the pages of the labor reports containing the replies made by working-women to the question of what, in their opinion, would remedy the wrongs of industrial workers, one response was, “The power to vote, as the right of suffrage, will place the services of women on an economic basis with those of men.” Women working in factories asked to have inspectors appointed of their own sex, on the ground that women could understand and protect the interests of women better than men. In States where the statutory age for protection under the eight or ten hour factory law was below twenty-one, women over twenty-one desired the law extended so as to embrace those of all ages. Employees in mercantile houses doing duty as clerks, cashiers, saleswomen, etc., desired “that the same protection given to women in factories be extended to them, as their duties are fully as onerous as those of the average female in the mill or factory.”

As almost all reforms have originated with the educated, and have gathered strength for fruition by rolling onward among the people, the value of these suggestions was enhanced by reason of being the expression of the most intelligent of the working-women interviewed by the Labor Bureau agents. Private philanthropic efforts of all kinds had yielded no effectual help to women, and it was small wonder if the more thoughtful among them turned to the power of the State as the only adequate means for relief from conditions which new inventions of machinery—dispensing with men and employing women and children as guides—and a mania for money-getting at the expense of the proletariat, had rendered intolerable. Though a few stenographers, telegraphers, typewriters, teachers, with some workers in the industrial arts, had gained better breathing-places upon the middle rungs of what was called the “social ladder,” the struggle for life had been constantly growing fiercer among those crowded en masse at the bottom. Everywhere production was carried on with less 318regard for the life, health, and comfort of the working-women. Women were employed in even greater numbers in the poisonous, dusty, dangerous, and laborious industries, all of which were much more injurious to them, as child-bearers, than to men. The long hours of exhaustive work, destructive of family ties; the starvation wages obtained during seasons of work; the misery of seasons of lock-outs from work, led too frequently to the chaffering of their bodies on the street corners for bread, or the finding of a refuge from starvation in a leap from some house-top or a plunge into the river. The stories of the suffering endured by women engaged in the industrial occupations of the country, as told by capable investigators like Helen Campbell, proved that everything made by women, not excepting the whitest, daintiest robes, had crimson spots on them,—the blood-splashes of the toilers,—that, although unseen, no cleansing could wash away. Not a shop-made garment, a web of silk, cotton, or flax, or wool, a pair of gloves, shoes or stockings, any knitted thing,—machine or hand-made,—a woven carpet or piece of furniture, an artificial flower, feather, or piece of lace, a hat for a man or bonnet for a woman, a piece of table-glass, pottery, or cutlery, a lucifer match, an article of jewelry, or even a printed book, but over them all flitted the ghosts of women twice murdered in their making: once by their own pangs, and again by the sufferings of the little children, flesh of their own flesh, who toiled beside them wearily—

Weeping (working) in the play-time of the others,

In the country of the free.

The publication of Helen Campbell’s “Prisoners of Poverty,” with frequent repetitions, from other sources, of the wrongs endured by industrial women, caused a great wave of indignation to sweep over society. Many good men and women carried on crusades against the purchase of ready-made garments—sad misnomer for things so hardly made. One of their war-cries was, “An honest woman’s back is not the place for a dishonestly manufactured article,” and another that, “It is better for a woman to wear a coat with a hole in it than one with the stain on it of blood-guiltiness.” Economically unwise and impossible of success as this crusade was, it was important as showing that a higher ideal of Justice had begun to enter into woman’s mind. Hitherto people had partaken of the fruits of labor unthinkingly. Now the time was seen to have come when an awakened public began to question 319the propriety of purchasing and using things made through the abuse of their fellow-beings. As Emerson said of his charity-given dollar that “it was a wicked dollar he would yet learn to withhold,” so women were teaching themselves to withstand desires for articles which helped to perpetuate wicked systems of work.

To the political economist, the part that woman was taking in the country’s industries became a subject of national importance. After frequent investigations into the nature of their occupations, the question was propounded, “Whether it would not be expedient, for the good of the State, to altogether forbid the employment of women in factories?” The position taken by Mr. Wright, the leading authority in American labor statistics,—not prominent, however, as an advanced reformer,—was “that married women ought not to be tolerated in the mills at all,” as “the employment of mothers is the most harmful wrong done to the race.” “Vital science,” he observes, “will one day demand their exclusion, as the effect of such employment is an evil that is sapping the life of our operative population and must, sooner or later, be regulated, or more probably, stopped.”^[189]

It will be seen at once that this suggestion of Mr. Wright lies directly on the plane of modern socialism or nationalism. To advocate taking two million women forcibly from certain harmful occupations is a tacit admission that the individual has no right to dispose of herself to the disadvantage of the State. Physicians had long sounded notes of warning of a race deterioration that was going on in consequence of the employment of women under bad conditions of labor, and the claim was made that “at all hazards the State must protect itself.” To do this, however, involved consequences that the advisers, perhaps, foresaw. As legislation excluding women and children from factories would interfere directly with their support, the logical conclusion would be that the State, to keep them from actual starvation, would be bound to interfere again to the extent of furnishing them with such means of living as would make them—what the State wanted—happy, healthy, capable mothers of the race. And, as it would be obviously impossible to discriminate between those engaged in one pursuit at the expense of those employed in others, it would follow that the State, by supporting the factory workers, 320would place itself under obligations to clothe, feed, shelter, and educate all women.

This second proposition is so necessary a corollary of the first as to make Mr. Wright’s suggestion almost conclusive evidence that his investigations had led him to accept the nationalistic theory of State interference with the liberty of labor, as the sole remedy for the evils sapping the life of our female operative population. And as no student of practical economics would consent to the entire withdrawal from the productive industries of so large and capable a body of workers as the three millions women now engaged in them, Mr. Wright must have also given acceptance to that other part of the nationalistic creed—growing so fast into popular favor—of its being the duty of the State to regulate the hours of labor so that work may be the promoter of health in women in place of being its destroyer.

Even if the results of Mr. Wright’s investigations into the hard facts of woman’s industrial condition in America had been to throw him into accord with what is termed “scientific socialism,”^[190] his experience would have been simply that of most honest investigators. Helen Campbell, converted to socialism while gathering material for her books illustrative of women as workers, claimed in her latest volume that “In socialism ... in its highest interpretation, lies the only solution for every problem on either side the great sea, between the eastern and western worker.” Instances of similar experience might be multiplied, but are rendered unnecessary by the 321rapidity with which the doctrine has spread in the past ten years throughout Europe and America, and the honored names which have become identified with its support. According to its adherents, one phase of applied socialism will consist in a consolidation of the splendid processes of organization and co-operation inaugurated by the various labor societies and speculative enterprises of to-day. In its results, it aims to benefit woman: (1) by recognizing woman as the perfect equal of man, politically and socially; (2) by fixing woman’s means of support by the State so as to render her independent of man, and thus insure her that freedom and dignity which is hers of right as the mothers of the race; (3) by permitting them to withdraw from maleficent industries; (4) by shortening the legal working day so as to afford her leisure for the higher things of life. As women are also in greatest measure the teachers of the race, socialism victorious would secure for them a complete system of technical, art, and professional schools, so as to make the education of women universal and rounded in place of partial and incomplete. To-day, scarcely one-third of the population has been taught so much as to read and write understandingly.

The students of woman’s present position in and outside the named industries make the claim that nothing less radical than such reforms as are contemplated by the socialists will avail to better their condition. A charge made and sustained by them is that existing labor legislation, as well as charitable donations of schools, libraries, etc., built by bourgeois manufacturers out of the “skimped” wages of employees, have all been futile. Whatever has been done, the fact remains, as Victor Hugo tersely put it, “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” Dives grows richer with the years, the purple and linen of his wives and daughters more costly, their fare more sumptuous. While Lazarus, with his women, whose toil supplies the fine raiment and choice delicacies, crouches outside the gates in rags, grown more beggarly, and whose food becomes daily more loathsome and scant.

Nationalism proposes to call this injustice to a halt. With Herbert Spencer it says, that “One [woman] will not be suffered to enjoy without working that which another produces without enjoying.” It preaches the brotherhood of man, the sisterhood of women; the creed heroic in its grandeur of the abolition of alms-giving Charity, and the substitution for this outgrown goddess of past ages a divine spirit of Justice, whose fiat is to be obeyed though the heavens fall. “The growth within the 322mass of the population of these principles is,” says a recent writer in the Forum, “one of the most formidable symptoms of the ‘times.’” In this remark there lies all the pungency of truth. Earnest men and women are preaching the doctrines of Nationalism with all that intensity of faith which characterized the disciples of the anti-chattel slavery movement. To most, its tenets have become a religious as well as a political belief. To hasten the time of its adoption, women’s voices are being heard in lecture halls and wayside inns, in meeting-houses, in the school-room, at the hearth-stone, and through the medium of the printing-press—speaking with the same enthusiasm for the redemption of the white slave as the Lucy Stones and Harriet Beecher Stowes did before 1866 for the enfranchisement of the black slave. That woman’s duty to woman is taking this noble shape of pleading the cause of humanity, as though every industrial worker in factory, field, mill, and shop were her own mother, children, sisters, brothers, is the light in the heavens showing that the darkest hour before dawn has been reached, and is passing away from the horizon of the industrial population.

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