PROCEEDINGS

  OF THE

  ACADEMY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

  IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK


  THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF WOMEN


  THE ACADEMY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK

  1910




  COPYRIGHT, 1910

  BY

  THE ACADEMY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE




CONTENTS


                                                           PAGE

  INTRODUCTION                                                5

  _The Editor_


  I HISTORICAL

  THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN’S WORK
  IN THE UNITED STATES                                        11
  _Helen L. Sumner_


  II PROBLEMS OF WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

  CHANGES IN WOMEN’S WORK IN BINDERIES                        27
  _Mary Van Kleeck_

  THE TRAINING OF MILLINERY WORKERS                           40
  _Alice P. Barrows_

  TRAINING FOR SALESMANSHIP                                   52
  _Elizabeth B. Butler_

  THE EDUCATION AND EFFICIENCY OF WOMEN                       61
  _Emily Greene Balch_

  STANDARDS OF LIVING AND THE SELF-DEPENDENT WOMAN            72
  _Susan M. Kingsbury_

  A NEW SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT                                     81
  _Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch_

  INDUSTRIAL WORK OF MARRIED WOMEN                            90
  _Florence Kelley_

  THE ECONOMICS OF “EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK”
  IN THE SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK CITY                             97
  _John Martin_


  III SOCIAL ACTION

  WOMEN AND THE TRADE-UNION MOVEMENT IN THE
  UNITED STATES                                              109
  _Alice Henry_

  A WOMAN’S STRIKE--AN APPRECIATION OF THE SHIRT-WAIST
  MAKERS OF NEW YORK                                         119
  _Helen Marot_

  VOCATIONAL TRAINING FOR WOMEN                              129
  _Sarah Louise Arnold_

  TRAINING THE YOUNGEST GIRLS FOR WAGE EARNING               140
  _Mary Schenck Woolman_

  EMPLOYMENT BUREAUS FOR WOMEN                               151
  _M. Edith Campbell_

  THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT OF THE PROTECTION OF
  WOMEN IN INDUSTRY                                          162
  _Ernst Freund_

  THE ILLINOIS TEN-HOUR DECISION                             185
  _Josephine Goldmark_


  IV BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

  A SELECT LIST OF BOOKS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
  ON WOMEN IN INDUSTRY                                       188
  _Carola Woerishoffer_




INTRODUCTION


Of all the problems that have come in the train of the industrial
revolution none are more perplexing than those that concern women. It
is a wearisome commonplace that the factory has taken over much of
the industrial work of the home, and that women have followed their
work into the factory; but the fundamental change thus introduced into
their life has not always been clearly seen. Formerly home and industry
were synonymous terms for them; training for industry was training in
household management. To-day industrial work is sharply separated from
the management of the home, and there has come into the occupation of
women a dualism that finds no parallel in the life of men. Most of the
difficulties of women in industry relate themselves in some way to this
fact.

An unregulated competitive system is good only for the strong.
Women, by virtue of their double relation as industrial producers
and as homemakers and mothers, are industrially weak. Most women are
fundamentally interested in the home rather than the factory, and
industrial occupation is only an interlude in their real business.
Working women so-called are mostly mere girls under twenty-five
who go to work with no thought of industry as a permanent career.
Uninterested, untrained, unskilled, they are on a low level of
efficiency, and they have little motive for climbing to a higher level.
In industry a few years, then out of it into the home, they lack the
discipline and solidity that come with a permanent life task. Small
wonder that they crowd the unskilled labor market, and that their work
commands a mere pittance.

Inefficient in their industrial work, they tend to become quite as
inefficient in their function of homekeepers: for during the very
years when they might otherwise be acquiring the household arts,
they are busy in shop or factory, subject to a discipline requiring
obedience to mechanical routine rather than that power of thoughtful
initiative which marks the skilful homemaker. Moreover, they become
accustomed to the stimulus and excitement of the crowd, so that they
do not want to be alone, and home life they too often find monotonous
and uninteresting. The untrained, unskilled factory hand becomes the
untrained, unskilled wife and mother.

Working women are not only untrained and inefficient, but industrially
ignorant and lacking in standards. Hence they put up with whatever
conditions the employer imposes. They do not “make a fuss,” and
therefore they get treatment to which no man would submit. Moreover,
such a large proportion of them are mere “pin-money girls” that there
is no minimum standard of wages, such as is furnished for men by the
necessary cost of maintaining a family. Women’s wages are perhaps in
a majority of cases simply supplementary earnings, and the wages of
all women, self-dependent or not, tend to be fixed on the assumption
that they will live parasitically on their relatives. As a result of
this lack of standards, the whole subject of the pay and conditions
of women’s work is a veritable chaos. Standardization has been well
worked out in many men’s trades, and technical progress has followed.
In women’s occupations it is often easier for an unprogressive employer
to throw the burden of his backwardness on docile women employes by
paying low wages than it is to keep up with the march of improvement in
machinery and methods. So much for the human element in this problem.

On the industrial side we find, as is more than once pointed out in
these papers, that industry as now organized takes no cognizance of the
special needs of the worker. Competitive cheapness must be obtained
at all costs. If the worker does not insist on his rights, he gets
small part of the benefits of progress. Hence changes in machinery and
organization bring little advantage to women workers; such changes,
in fact, are frequently carried through with distinct loss to them,
however great the gain to society in general. But more than this, our
present industry is made for men, and it wants only standard workers,
working standard hours at standard speed. The workers must conform to
this inelastic system or go without a job. Most women are physically
incapable, without permanent injury to themselves and the race, of
enduring for ten hours a day the strain to which modern industry
subjects them; yet they are trying to conform to its mechanical routine
instead of insisting that it be changed to meet their needs. So long as
this change is not made, so long will women’s industrial work continue
a social menace.

We face, then, a double difficulty. In the first place, woman’s
twofold function apparently necessitates a double preparation and a
divided interest and life; in the second place, our industry demands
a standardized worker for the whole of his time. In consequence of
this situation, women throughout the period of factory labor have
been among the greatest sufferers from low wages, long hours, and
unsanitary conditions. They are the very type of worker to whom the
Marxian analysis in all its rigor most nearly applies, uninterested,
inefficient, ignorant, untrained, standardless. With the exception of
children, they constitute the most easily exploited labor force in
existing society, and they are mercilessly exploited. The new social
freedom of industrial life combines with low wages to tempt and drive
working girls to easier means of obtaining the pleasure they normally
must have, and a grave social problem thus emerges. The changed
industrial situation evidently demands a new economic and social
adjustment.

A glance at the state of public opinion throws some light on the
general nature of the adjustment required. Women are paid less then men
primarily because they will take less, not because their work is worth
less or because they need less; and public opinion acquiesces without
protest. If the school pays women less than men simply because it can
get them for less, how much more will the factory do the same. The
public does not object because it thinks of women as dependent on their
male relatives and hence not requiring a living wage. This was natural
enough so long as they earned their living by household management
and production, leaving to men the provision of money income. But
the moment women entered the industrial field the whole situation
changed. Public opinion has not yet taken cognizance of this fact.
Economic conditions and social organization are out of joint. We need
to readjust our ideas and our organization to the new economic facts;
but in consequence of an ignorant public opinion and a sluggish social
conscience the readjustment is delayed and women are suffering sadly
from overwork, underpay, injurious working conditions and neglect of
training for industry and the home.

We are just beginning to feel our way toward this readjustment, which
involves at least four things: 1. Giving women the training necessary
for their home work. 2. Making them efficient industrial producers.
3. Making them “work conscious” and giving them industrial standards.
4. Insuring them proper pay, hours and conditions, by adjusting the
demands of industry to their needs and capacity. To accomplish these
ends three chief means are commonly urged, industrial training, trade
unionism and legislation.

Industrial, or perhaps better vocational training, is as yet scarcely
past the first stages of experimentation, and we do not clearly
understand its proper aims or methods. Apparently we may rightly demand
of the school that it give girls a reasonable training for their work
as mothers and homekeepers, at the same time that it imparts to them
a degree of technical skill in industrial work, and above all, that
power of adaptation to changing conditions so imperatively demanded by
modern economic life. A vague statement of this kind, indeed, means
little, and discussions of industrial training are at present too full
of vague generalizations. What we need is a series of careful studies
of particular trades in particular places, and of the possibilities
of the schools in connection therewith. It is only when we get this
intimate knowledge of economic conditions and build our training on
it, that the training becomes of much value in the large process of
social readjustment. Otherwise we may help a few girls to get better
wages, but that is about all, and even that is problematical. The
combination, however, of an efficient system of trade investigation,
a scientifically organized and conducted employment bureau, and an
intelligent educational scheme is full of promise.

Permanent organization of women workers has hitherto proved difficult,
if not impossible, by reason of the youth, inexperience, ignorance
and short trade life of the young women concerned. Women’s unions have
come and gone, often leaving behind them certain permanent gains. In
making girls industrially self-conscious, in setting standards of work
and pay, in arousing public interest and awaking public conscience,
thus preparing the way for legislation, they have performed valuable
service even when short-lived. Sometimes a situation like that created
by the New York shirtwaist strike gives opportunity to focus public
attention on the condition of women workers. Great as its immediate
services may be, organization at present reaches but a small fraction
of women workers, and its permanent value in the larger view perhaps
lies chiefly in educating working women, employers and the public to
higher standards of employment and pay.

There remains the method of legislation. While law follows in the
wake of public opinion in a democracy, industrial betterment often
lags considerably behind the general progress of public intelligence,
and the law can push the backward employer up to the level of the
more enlightened one. The great advantage of the legal method is its
uniformity; it puts all employers and establishments on the same basis.
Moreover, its gains are usually fairly secure. A standard once embodied
in law is harder to break down than a mere trade standard attained by
union pressure, for example. Hence in the case of women workers, where
conditions for individual improvement are unfavorable, where union
methods are difficult of application, the process of readjustment
will doubtless go forward largely by legal enactment. We shall see an
increasing body of law governing the conditions under which women work.
As the community finds that it has no other way of protecting itself
against the injury it suffers from present conditions of employment of
women, it will more and more resort to the prescribing of minimum legal
limits below which they may not be crowded.

Fortunately for progress in this respect, our courts have generally
looked with relative favor on legislation for women. The right of the
state to exercise the police power to protect the health of women for
the sake of future generations is now clearly established in the court
of last resort. All that is necessary for the incorporation of a
new requirement into the legal standard is to convince the courts of
its relation to health--a method employed with success in the Oregon
and Illinois ten-hour cases. Thus far such legislation has dealt
chiefly with hours, but the principle is capable of almost indefinite
extension. As we approach the question of general working conditions
and the more purely economic consideration of wages, the limitations of
the legal method come more clearly into view; none the less the use of
that method must extend beyond the present limits.

Fortunately also the method of legal enactment can be applied in
some measure to bring about those modifications in the demands of
industry that are necessary for women. Abandoning the fatuous attempt
to keep women out of industrial life, we shall set about the task of
humanizing industry by ridding it of the conditions that make wholesome
life difficult for workers to attain. Realizing the greater needs of
women, we may first set legal standards for them alone; and then,
just as was the case in the early fight for a shorter workday, the
advantage legally conceded to women may be extended to men as well.
Slowly public opinion advances toward more enlightened views, and
social and legal organization gradually improve with it. Following the
economic upheaval that we call the economic revolution, a tremendously
complex and difficult readjustment has been necessary, one made more
difficult by the fact that it must be worked out in a democratic
society. In the peculiarly difficult and trying situation of women
during this readjustment we find abundant justification for social
action to protect them against the dangers to which they are exposed,
and abundant demand for the most thoroughgoing investigation on which
to base such action. The present collection of papers is an attempt to
state some of the manifold aspects of the problem and to discuss some
of the proposed means of solution.

  H. R. M.




THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN’S WORK IN THE UNITED STATES

HELEN L. SUMNER

Washington, D. C.


The history of women’s work in the United States is the story of an
economic and industrial readjustment which is by no means yet complete.
Women have worked since the world began, and at the dawn of history
their labor was probably as important in family or tribal economy as it
is to-day in the industrial world. Since early colonial days in this
country, moreover, women have worked for gain, sometimes selling to
the local storekeeper the products of leisure hours spent in spinning,
weaving, knitting or sewing, sometimes themselves keeping little shops,
and sometimes hiring themselves out to work in the families of their
neighbors. But during the nineteenth century a great transformation
occurred which has materially changed woman’s economic position.

Woman’s work may be divided into five general categories: unpaid
labor, independent gainful labor, domestic service, wage labor in
manufacturing industries and wage labor in trade and transportation.
In all these varieties of work great changes have taken place. In
the first place technical improvements have removed from the home to
the factory and workshop a large part of the labor formerly carried
on almost exclusively by women. Women naturally followed their
occupations, and in doing so changed their economic status from that of
unpaid laborers to that of paid laborers. Though the number gainfully
employed has materially increased, however, the amount of unremunerated
home work performed by women must still be considerably larger than
the amount of gainful labor, for in 1900 only about one fifth of all
females 16 years of age and over were breadwinners.[1]

Not only have unpaid, home-working women been transformed into paid
factory operatives, but both independent home workers and wage-earning
home workers have been transferred to factories and workshops. This
change is especially evident in the comparatively backward clothing
industries, which the sewing machine and artificial power have
gradually driven from the home to the shop and, in some branches, to
the factory. In the early days of wholesale clothing manufacture in
this country all the work, except the cutting, was done for piece wages
in the homes of the workers. Gradually, however, the industry has been
drawn into sweatshops and factories. Independent domestic production,
meanwhile, except in certain lines like dressmaking and to a slight
extent the preserving of fruit and making of jelly, has practically
become a thing of the past. The movement away from home work can hardly
be regretted, however, in view of the fact that the entire history of
women’s work shows that their wage labor under the domestic system
has almost invariably been under worse conditions of hours, wages and
general sanitation than their wage labor under the factory system.

There has probably been, moreover, a material increase in the
proportion of women wage earners as compared with independent
producers. Before the introduction of machinery wage labor generally
meant domestic service. There were, of course, exceptions. Early
instances are well known of women spinners gathered together in groups
and paid fixed sums, and women were early employed to sort and cut
rags in paper mills. But the range of wage-earning occupations open to
them has enormously increased, while it is doubtful whether any larger
proportion are now engaged in independent industry than were so engaged
two centuries ago. In commercial and professional pursuits, it is true,
the opportunities for independent business have very greatly increased,
but in manufacturing industries, as a result of the unprecedented
growth of wholesale production, they have materially narrowed for women
as well as for men.

The wage-earning opportunities of women in the three great groups of
occupations, domestic service, manufacturing industries, and trade and
transportation, have also changed decidedly. Thousands, of course,
have always been employed in domestic service, which has acted as
the complement of the industrial pursuits. The opportunity to “hire
out” has continually confronted the working woman and frequently,
when she complained that her conditions of work were hard and her pay
inadequate, she has been admonished by philanthropists and even by
economists to betake herself to the kitchen, whose homelike conditions,
high wages and pressing need of her labor have always been loudly
proclaimed. The conditions and problems of domestic service, indeed,
have changed far less than those of any other occupation. Nevertheless,
the proportion of all gainfully employed women engaged in domestic and
personal service has steadily decreased.[2]

In the manufacturing industries, on the other hand, great changes
have taken place. The entrance of women into these industries may be
attributed to three principal causes, machinery, artificial power
and division of labor. All of these are in part the cause and in
part the effect of an unprecedented development of wholesale, as
opposed to retail production, and this growth of wholesale trade is
itself primarily the result of improved means of communication and
transportation.

These three factors have also caused a considerable amount of shifting
of occupations. Under the domestic system of labor woman’s work and
man’s work were clearly defined, women doing the spinning, part of
the weaving, the knitting, the sewing and generally the cooking. But
with the introduction of machinery for spinning and weaving thousands
of hand workers were thrown out of employment. It is not surprising
to learn that the first spinners and weavers by machinery were women.
Later, however, mule spindles, operated by men, were introduced for
part of the work. In certain other cases, too, machinery has caused
the substitution of men for women in industries formerly considered
as belonging to woman’s sphere. Women’s suits, for instance, are now
largely made by men tailors, and men dressmakers and milliners are not
uncommon. Men bake our bread and brew our ale and wash our clothes in
the steam laundry. At present men even clean our houses by the vacuum
process.

One result has been that thousands of women who, under the old régime,
would have sat calmly like Priscilla by the window spinning, have
been forced to seek other occupations. When the industrial revolution
transformed the textile industries they naturally turned to the only
other employment for which they were trained, sewing. This, however,
only increased the pressure of competition in the sewing trades,
already sufficiently supplied with laborers. In the middle of the
century, moreover, before any effective readjustment had taken place,
the sewing machine was introduced, greatly increasing productivity and
at the same time further sharpening competition.

Thus the increased productivity due to machinery and the simultaneous
loss, by reason of the greater adaptability of men to certain machines,
of woman’s practical monopoly of the textile trades has caused intense
competition and has forced many women into other industries, not
traditionally theirs. From the beginning, however, their choice of
occupations has been hampered by custom. As early as 1829 a writer in
the _Boston Courier_[3] said:

 Custom and long habit have closed the doors of very many employments
 against the industry and perseverance of woman. She has been taught
 to deem so many occupations masculine, and made only for men, that,
 excluded by a mistaken deference to the world’s opinion, from
 innumerable labors, most happily adapted to her physical constitution,
 the competition for the few places left open to her, has occasioned
 a reduction in the estimated value of her labor, until it has fallen
 below the minimum, and is no longer adequate to present comfortable
 subsistence, much less to the necessary provision against age and
 infirmity, or the every day contingencies of mortality.

Economic necessity, however, with division of labor as its chief tool,
sometimes aided by power machinery and sometimes alone, has gradually
opened up new industries to women. As early as 1832 they were employed
in as many as one hundred different occupations. In many of these, to
be sure, they were as rare as women blacksmiths are today. But in
1836 a committee of the National Trades’ Union, appointed to inquire
into the evils of “female labor,” reported that in the New England
States “printing, saddling, brush making, tailoring, whip making and
many other trades are in a certain measure governed by females,” and
added that of the fifty-eight societies composing the Trades’ Union of
Philadelphia, twenty four were “seriously affected by female labor.”[4]
The census of 1850 enumerated nearly one hundred and seventy-five
different manufacturing industries in which women were employed, and
the number has steadily increased until there is now scarcely an
industry in which they are not to be found.

Usually, however, they have been employed, in the first instance, only
in the least skilled and most poorly paid occupations, and have not
competed directly with men. This has been due in part to custom and
prejudice, perhaps, but primarily it has been due to lack of training
and ambition, and to general irresponsibility. One of the causes, to
be sure, of the lack of training and ambition is the knowledge that
well-paid positions are seldom given to women. A much more vital cause,
however, is to be found in the lack of connection between the work and
the girl’s natural ambitions. Before the industrial revolution women
were probably as skilful and efficient in their lines of industry as
men in theirs. The occupations taught girls at that time were theirs
for life and naturally they took great pride and pleasure in becoming
proficient in work which prepared them for marriage and for the career
which nearly every young girl, with wholesome instincts, looks forward
to as her ideal, the keeping of the home and the care of children. But
when the connection was lost between work and marriage, when girls were
forced by machinery and division of labor to undertake tasks which
had no vital interest to them, there grew up a hybrid class of women
workers in whose lives there is contradiction and internal if not
external discord. Their work no longer fits in with their ideals and
has lost its charm.

Even in industries which, like the textile and sewing trades, belong
to women by long inheritance, machinery and division of labor have so
transformed processes that both the individuality of their work and the
original incentive to industry have been wholly lost in a standardized
product. Moreover, in their traditional sphere of employment and
especially in the sewing trade, competition has been so keen that the
conditions under which they have worked have been, upon the whole, more
degrading and more hopeless than in any other class of occupations.
From the very beginning of the wholesale clothing manufacture in this
country, indeed, five elements, home work, the sweating system, the
contract and sub-contract systems increasing the number of middlemen
between producer and consumer, the exaggerated overstrain due to piece
payment, and the fact that the clothing trades have served as the
general dumping ground of the unskilled, inefficient and casual women
workers, have produced a condition of almost pure industrial anarchy.

It is interesting to note, in this connection, that the greatest
economic success of women wage earners in manufacturing industries
has been attained in occupations in which they have competed directly
with men. Women printers and cigarmakers, who in many cases have been
introduced as the result of strikes, have generally earned higher
wages than their sisters who have made shirts and artificial flowers.
Usually, however, when, as in certain classes of cigar making, they
have entirely displaced men, they have soon lost their economic
advantage. And it is exceedingly doubtful whether, in such cases, women
have gained as much as men have lost. Certainly they have not regained
what they themselves have lost through being displaced by men in their
customary sphere of employment.

The occupations grouped under the title “trade and transportation,”
most of which are new and offer, therefore, no problems of
displacement, have furnished working women, in general, their most
remunerative employments. This, too, is the group of industries in
which, within recent years, the most rapid increase in the number and
proportion of women workers has taken place.[5] Though the number
of saleswomen, stenographers, clerks, bookkeepers, telegraph and
telephone operators, and so forth, is still small as compared with the
number of women textile factory operatives, seamstresses, boot and
shoemakers, paper box makers, and so on, it is rapidly increasing. In
this movement, moreover, there is evident more than anywhere else a
certain hopeful tendency for working women to push up from the level of
purely mechanical pursuits to the level of semi-intellectual labor. The
trade and transportation industries are, roughly speaking, middle-class
employments, as contrasted with the manufacturing industries, which
are, roughly speaking, working-class employments.

Women’s wages have always been excessively low and their hours
excessively long. About 1830 Mathew Carey estimated that in
Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Baltimore there were between 18,000
and 20,000 working women, at least 12,000 of whom could not earn, by
constant employment for 16 hours out of the 24, more than $1.25 per
week. At this rate he figured that, allowing for the loss of one day
a week through sickness, unemployment or the care of children, and
counting lodging at 50 cents and fuel at 12¹⁄₂ cents a week, a woman
would have left for food and clothing just $22.50 per year. A good
seamstress without children and employed all the time he figured could
earn $1.12¹⁄₂ per week or $58.50 per year, out of which she would have
to pay 50 cents per week for rent, 15 cents per week for fuel, 8 cents
per week for soap, candles, etc., and $10 for shoes and clothing--which
would leave her for food and drink 2³⁄₄ cents per day. If she was
hampered by the care of children, was unemployed one day a week, or was
slow or unskilled, he figured that, at the same rates of expenditure,
she would have a yearly deficit of $11.56.[6] The situation of the
working women in the cities of this country during the early decades
of the nineteenth century was, indeed, as characterized by the New
York _Daily Sentinel_, the first daily labor paper in this country,
“frightful, nay disgraceful to our country, ... a gangrenous spot
on the body politic, a national wound that ought to be visited and
dressed, lest it rankle and irritate the whole system.”[7]

Fifteen years later conditions were little better. An investigation
of “female labor” in New York in 1845 led to the assertion by the
_New York Tribune_ that there were in that city about 50,000 working
women, onehalf of whom earned wages averaging less than $2 per week,
and to the further statement that the girls who flocked to that city
from every part of the country to work as shoe binders, type rubbers,
artificial-flower makers, match-box makers, straw braiders, etc., found
competition so keen that they were obliged “to snatch at the privilege
of working on any terms.” “They find,” said the _Tribune_, “that by
working from fifteen to eighteen hours a day they cannot possibly
earn more than from one to three dollars a week, and this, deducting
the time they are out of employment every year, will barely serve to
furnish them the scantiest and poorest food, which, from its monotony
and its unhealthy quality, induces disgust, loathing and disease. They
have thus absolutely nothing left for clothes, recreation, sickness,
books or intellectual improvement.”[8]

In 1863 the average wages paid to women in New York, taking all the
trades together, were said to have been about $2 a week, and the hours
ranged from eleven to sixteen a day.[9] And in 1887 it was stated that
in New York City nine thousand and in Chicago over five thousand women
earned less than $3 per week.[10]

Some of these statements may be exaggerations, but there can be no
doubt that, throughout the entire history of women in industry in this
country, their wages, in thousands of cases, have been inadequate for
decent support. Their wages, too, have been far below those of men. In
1833[11] and again in 1868[12] it was stated that women’s wages were,
on an average, only about one fourth what men received. Moreover, it
has been authoritatively stated that during the civil war period the
wages of women increased less than those of men, while their cost of
living rose out of all proportion.[13]

It is probable that, in general, women’s wages have been less flexible,
more subject to the influence of custom and less to the influence of
demand and supply, than men’s. Unfortunately custom in this case has
furnished a standard of exploitation and not of protection. It is
probable, too, that working women have suffered more than working men
from periods of panic and depression, for such periods, like war, have
thrown upon their own resources thousands of women who in normal times
are supported by their male relatives.

In the textile industries wages, during the first half of the
nineteenth century at least, were higher than in the clothing trades.
The Lowell girls during the so-called “golden era” earned from $1.50
to $2 per week in addition to their board of $1.25. Their day’s work,
however, varied from 11 hours and 24 minutes in December and January
to 13 hours and 31 minutes in April, and averaged 12 hours and 13
minutes, or 73¹⁄₂ hours per week.[14] It must be remembered, moreover,
that there were in this country, during these early years, two distinct
systems of factory labor, the factory boarding-house system of Lowell,
Dover, N. H., and other places in that neighborhood, and the family
system which prevailed in Fall River, throughout Rhode Island, and
generally in New York, New Jersey and Maryland. In the factories
operated on the family system of labor wages were distinctly lower than
in those of the Lowell type, and were frequently paid in store orders.
In these factories, too, hours were longer, being in summer 13³⁄₄
per day and averaging throughout the year 75¹⁄₂ per week[15]. Girls,
moreover, went to work at an earlier age. Child laborers whom the
Lowell manufacturers could not afford to keep in their factory boarding
houses were employed in large numbers.

The general conditions under which women have toiled in this country
have been little if any better than their wages and their hours. During
the years when Lowell is supposed to have been a busy paradise, with
flowers blooming in the factory windows, poetry and hymns pasted on
the walls, and the _Lowell Offering_ furnishing an outlet for the
exuberant literary activities of the operatives, the ventilation, both
of factories and of boarding houses, was absolutely inadequate. In
the boarding houses from four to six and sometimes even eight girls
slept in one room about 14 by 16 ft., and from twelve to sixteen girls
in a hot, ill-ventilated attic. In winter the factories were lighted
by lamps. One woman who testified before the Massachusetts Committee
on Hours of Labor in 1845 stated that, in the room where she worked,
along with about 130 other women, 11 men and 12 children, there were
293 small lamps and 61 large lamps which were sometimes lighted in the
morning as well as in the evening[16]. The lack of ventilation in the
mills and boarding houses of Lowell was in 1849 made the subject of a
report to the American Medical Association by Dr. Josiah Curtis, and
in the same year the physician of the Lowell Hospital, established by
the manufacturing corporations exclusively for the use of operatives,
attributed to lack of ventilation in the cotton mills the fact that,
since the founding of the hospital nine years before, over half the
patients had suffered from typhoid fever.

Typhoid fever, however, was doubtless a far less general result of
these conditions than consumption. Even the _Lowell Offering_, which
found no evils in factory labor except long hours and excused these on
the ground that long hours were universal throughout New England, bears
evidence in practically every number that tuberculosis of the lungs
was the great scourge of the factories. The labor papers, moreover,
as early as 1836, began to point out the direct connection between
factory labor and consumption. In 1845, too the _United States Journal_
published a poem by Andrew McDonald, the first verse of which reads:[17]

  Go look at Lowell’s pomp and gold
  Wrung from the orphan and the old;
  See pale consumption’s death-glazed eye--
  The hectic cheek, and know not why.
  Yes, these combine to make thy wealth
  “Lord of the Loom,” and glittering pelf.

There is no reason to believe that conditions were any better, if as
good, in other manufacturing districts. In the clothing industry,
moreover, which has long been concentrated in cities, overcrowding and
unsanitary housing conditions in horrible variety have furnished the
environment of working women. Whole blocks of tenements, too, have
been rented out to families in New York for the manufacture of cigars.
As early as 1877 the United Cigar Manufacturers’ Association, an
organization of small employers, condemned as unsanitary these tenement
cigar factories where the babies rolled on the floor in waste tobacco,
and the housework, the cooking, the cleaning of children and the trade
of cigar making were all carried on in one room.[18]

From these evil conditions, low wages, long hours and unwholesome
sanitary arrangements, immigrant women have naturally been the greatest
sufferers, for, like their husbands and brothers, they have been
obliged to begin at the bottom. Irish women first entered the factories
of New England, for example, as waste pickers and scrub women. But
their daughters became spinners and weavers. There have been, however,
certain exceptions to this rule. The skilled Bohemian women cigar
makers who came to New York in the seventies, for instance, earned from
the first comparatively high wages. Foreign girls who have gone into
domestic service, moreover, have frequently earned higher wages than
American girls who have chosen to be, for example, saleswomen.

The chief forces which have tended to improve the condition of working
women have been trade unions, industrial education and legislation.
In certain industries, especially shoe making, cigar making, printing
and collar and cuff making, trade unions have brought about higher
wages, shorter hours or better conditions in certain localities.
Women shoe-binders, about one thousand in number, won a strike for
higher wages at Lynn as early as 1834,[19] and during the sixties and
seventies the Daughters of St. Crispin protected the working women
of their craft. Women members were admitted into the Cigar Makers’
International Union in 1867 and were prominent in the great strike of
1877. The International Typographical Union admitted women in 1869.
Probably no organization of women workers, however, has been more
effective than the Collar Laundry Union of Troy, N. Y., the predecessor
of the Shirt, Waist and Laundry Workers’ International Union. During
the sixties the Collar Laundry Union is said to have raised the wages
of its members from $2 or $3 to $14 a week, and to have contributed
$1000 in aid of Troy iron molders on strike against a reduction of
wages, and $500 in aid of striking bricklayers in New York.[20]

The tailoresses of New York, moreover, were organized as early as 1825,
and in 1831 sixteen hundred tailoresses and seamstresses of that city
went on strike for an elaborate wage scale covering a large variety of
work, and remained out for four or five weeks.[21] Considering that the
population of New York in 1830 was under 200,000, this strike bears
comparison with the great shirt-waist workers’ strike of 1909-1910.
Two years later the journeyman tailors of Baltimore were assisting the
tailoresses of that city in a “stand-out” for higher wages,[22] and
in the summer of 1844 the Boston tailors aided a large and apparently
successful strike of sewing women.[23] In 1851 an effort to assist some
six thousand shirt sewers in New York led to the foundation of a shirt
sewers’ coöperative union, which prospered for several years.[24] Many
other organizations of sewing women have been formed and have conducted
strikes, which have sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed.

In the textile industries, too, a long series of efforts by operatives
to improve their own situation began with the picturesque strike
of four hundred women and girls in Dover, N. H., in 1828, when the
operatives paraded the town with flags and inscriptions and the factory
agent advertised for two or three hundred “better-behaved women.”[25]
The long and bitterly contested but successful strike of the Fall River
weavers against a reduction of wages in 1875 was led by women who went
out after the Weavers’ Union, composed of men, had voted to accept the
reduction.[26]

Many other examples of effective trade-union activity among women
workers might be cited. These women’s organizations, moreover, have
proved powerful factors in the fight for ten-hour laws.

The industrial schools and business colleges which began to spring
up in the sixties and seventies have also furnished important aid to
working women. Apprenticeship for girls has always been a farce. Even
in colonial days girl apprentices were rarely taught a trade of any
kind, and early in the nineteenth century apprenticeship for girls,
as well as for boys, came to be generally a means of securing cheap
child labor. After the industrial revolution, indeed, the condition of
working women, as regards skill and efficiency, was probably distinctly
lower than before they became wage earners. Industrial schools,
however, have been very slow of development. Business colleges, on the
other hand, began during the eighties to receive large numbers of
women students, and have materially aided in opening up in the trade
and transportation industries remunerative occupations for women.

Some progress, moreover, has been made through legislation. Laws
compelling seats for women employees have helped wherever they have
been enforced. Sanitary legislation, too, has effected certain
improvements, though it is doubtful whether, on the whole, such
legislation has as yet more than balanced the ill results of the
greater concentration of population and the greater strain of work.

In a number of states legislation has also brought an answer to the
prayer of the “unknown factory girl” of 1846,

  God grant, that, in the mills, a day
  May be but “Ten Hours” long.[27]

But at the same time the speed and intensity of work have been greatly
increased. Until about 1836, for example, a girl weaver tended, as a
rule, only two looms, and if she wished to be absent for half a day,
it was customary for her to ask two of her friends to tend an extra
loom apiece so she should not lose her wages. By 1876 one girl tended
six and sometimes eight looms. Meanwhile, too, the speed had been
increased. In 1873 it was estimated that a girl spinner tended from two
to three times as many spindles as she did in 1849.[28] This tendency
to multiply the amount of work to be performed in a given time has
continued active. Piece wages have meanwhile fallen so that the total
earnings of the operatives have not been increased, but, taking into
consideration the cost of living, have rather been decreased.

In the sewing trades, too, the intensity of work has been very
greatly increased by the use of the sewing machine, particularly when
power-driven, by the resulting minute subdivision of labor, and by the
sweating system. A certain amount of division of labor was practised,
it is true, long before the invention of the sewing machine. Vest
making, for example, was a separate and distinct business. But it was
not until after the introduction of the machine that much progress
was made in dividing the work upon a single garment. The sub-contract
or sweating system, too, appears to have originated at least as early
as 1844,[29] but probably did not assume an important place until
introduced about 1863 by contractors for army clothing. At first,
moreover, the work for the sub-contractors was nearly all done in
the homes. The need, however, for capital to invest in machines and
later in power to run the machines, naturally tended to gather the
workers into sweat shops, into small establishments, and then into
factories where every possible incentive was offered to the most
intense concentration of energies and to excessive speed. As in the
textile factories, too, piece-rate wages have fallen automatically with
productivity so that, whatever the exertion required and the number of
garments turned out, remuneration has remained near the subsistence
level.

The history of women in industry is, in short, the story of the
transfer of women workers from the home to the factory, from labor in
harmony with their deepest ambitions to monotonous, nerve-racking work,
divided and subdivided until the woman, like the traditional tailor who
is called the ninth part of a man, is merely a fraction, and sometimes
an almost infinitesimal fragment, of an artisan. It is a story of long
hours, overwork, unwholesome conditions of life and labor and miserably
low wages. It is a story of the underbidding of men bread winners by
women, who have been driven by dire necessity, by a lower standard of
living, or by the sense of ultimate dependence upon some man, even
if he be only a hypothetical husband, to offer their services upon
the bargain counter of the labor market. It is a story of the futile
efforts of misdirected charity, whether that of fathers and brothers,
of factory boarding houses or of philanthropic organizations, to aid
the oppressed working women by offering them partial support, thereby
enabling them to accept wages below the subsistence level, and still
hold together soul and body. It is, finally, a story of wasted human
lives, some of them wasted in the desperate effort to snatch from the
world a little share of joy, and some of them wasted through disease
and death or through the loss of the powers of body and mind required
for efficient motherhood.

That such has been the history of women in industry is due in part
to their lack of training, skill and vital interest in their work.
In part it is due to excessive competition in their traditional
occupations, combined with a variety of impediments, some of them
rooted in established customs and ideals and some of them perhaps
inherent in woman herself, to their free movement into new occupations,
into the higher paid positions and into less congested communities. In
part, however, it is due to the lack of appreciation of the need for
legislative action.

The four great curses of working women have always been, as they are
today, insufficient wages, intense and often unfair competition,
overstrain due to long hours, heavy work or unhygienic conditions, and
the lack of diversified skill, or of any opportunity or incentive to
acquire and display ability and wisely-directed energy. The story of
woman’s wage labor is, therefore, pitifully sad and in many respects
discouraging. But it is the story of an industrial readjustment which
is not yet near completion, and there is good reason to believe
that the turning point has been reached and that better things are
in store for the working woman. When we realize, however, what the
economic position of women has been in the past and through how many
generations large numbers of them have toiled under conditions which
involved not only terrible suffering to themselves, but shocking waste
to the community, it becomes evident that the present problem will
not solve itself, but demands of our generation the best thought, the
best energy, and the most thorough legislative regulation designed to
conserve the human resources bound up in the mothers of the nation.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] In 1870, the earliest year for which statistics are available,
14.7%, and in 1900 20.6% of the female population 16 years of age and
over were breadwinners.

[2] In 1870, 58.1% and in 1900 only 39.4% of all females 10 years
of age and over engaged in gainful occupations were in the division
“domestic and personal service.”

[3] _Boston Courier_, July 13, 1829.

[4] From the proceedings of the National Trades’ Union, published
in the _National Laborer_, Nov. 12, 1836, and reprinted in the
_Documentary History of American Industrial Society_, vol. vi, pp.
285-6.

[5] In 1870 nearly 20% of all females 10 years of age and over
engaged in gainful occupations were in manufacturing and mechanical
pursuits and only 1% in trade and transportation, but in 1900, while
the proportion of women in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits had
increased to 24.7%, the proportion in trade and transportation had
increased to 9.4%.

[6] Carey, _Miscellaneous Pamphlets_, Phila., 1831, “To the Ladies who
have undertaken to establish a House of Industry in New York,” and “To
the Editor of the New York _Daily Sentinel_,” _Select Excerpta_ (A
collection of newspaper clippings made by Matthew Carey, now in the
Ridgway Branch of the Library Company, Philadelphia), vol. 13, pp.
138-142; _Appeal to the Wealthy of the Land_, 3d ed., p. 15.

[7] Quoted in Carey, _Miscellaneous Pamphlets_, No. 12, Philadelphia,
1831.

[8] _New York Daily Tribune_, July 9, August 19, 1845.

[9] _Fincher’s Trades’ Review_, Nov. 21, 1863.

[10] _Industrial Leader_, July 9, 1887.

[11] _Workingman’s Shield_, Cincinnati, Jan. 12, 1833.

[12] _Workingman’s Advocate_, Chicago, June 6, 1868.

[13] Mitchell, _History of the Greenbacks_, p. 307.

[14] Montgomery, _Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture of the
United States_, 1840, pp. 173-174.

[15] Montgomery, _op. cit._

[16] _Massachusetts House Document_, no. 50, 1845, p. 3.

[17] Quoted in the _Voice of Industry_, a labor paper published in
Lowell, Nov. 28, 1845.

[18] _New York Sun_, Dec. 3, 1877.

[19] _Lynn Record_, Jan. 1, 8, March 12, 1834.

[20] _The American Workman_, Boston, Aug. 7, 1869; _Workingman’s
Advocate_, Chicago, April 28, 1866; _The Revolution_, N. Y., Oct. 8,
1868.

[21] Carey’s _Select Excerpta_, Vol. 4, pp. 11-12.

[22] _Baltimore Republican_, Oct. 2, 1833.

[23] _Peoples’ Paper_, Cincinnati, Sept. 22, Oct. 6, 1844.

[24] _New York Daily Tribune_, July 31, Sept. 11, 1851; June 8, 1853.

[25] _Mechanics’ Free Press_, Phila., Jan. 17, 1829; _New York
American_, Jan. 5, 1829; _National Gazette_, Phila., Jan. 7, 1829.

[26] Baxter, C. H., _History of the Fall River Strike_, 1875.

[27] _Voice of Industry_, Feb. 20, 1846.

[28] Gray, _Argument on Petition for Ten-Hour Law_, 1873, pp. 21-22.

[29] In that year it was said that a man and two women working together
from twelve to sixteen hours a day earned a dollar among them, and that
the women, if they did not belong to the family, received each about
$1.25 a week for their work. _Workingman’s Advocate_, July 27, 1844.




CHANGES IN WOMEN’S WORK IN BINDERIES[30]

MARY VAN KLEECK

Committee on Women’s Work, New York City


“Bookbinding is a very uncertain trade,” said a forewoman who had held
her position fourteen years; “I wouldn’t advise any young girl to go
into it. There is so much machinery now. Where a girl used to make
eight or nine dollars, she now makes five or six, and that’s not a
living. Also you never know when you’ll be laid off. Take the magazine
binderies. They don’t keep the girls a full month. Ten days is their
month. Twelve days is a long month. It’s a bad arrangement to do thirty
days’ work in twelve. You have to pay board every week.”

Remarks like these were made by many girls employed in the bookbinding
trade in New York. For the most part they did not see reasons or
remedies for the conditions which they faced, but by daily experience
they had learned this fact of change as it appeared in numerous
guises, irregular employment, irregular hours, hit-or-miss methods of
learning, cuts in wages, and the displacement of workers by the coming
of machines. If their impressions be correct, more important than any
photographic description of their economic position, regarded as a
static thing, is an account of changes in conditions and their effect
on women workers.

If we attempt to verify the statements of the workers by the official
figures in the census, showing the proportion of men and women employed
in binderies at successive enumerations,[31] we shall be surprised and
somewhat bewildered. In 1870 30% were women, 70% were men; in 1880
39.7% were women, 60.3% were men; in 1890 48.5% were women, 51.5% were
men; in 1900 51.6% were women, 48.4% were men.

This rapid shifting of the relative proportion of men and women would
lead the statistician to suppose that in this trade was to be found a
perfect example of the displacement of men by women. Behind the figures
one seems to read the story of a struggle in which men have been the
losers. Yet the comments of workers and employers, and the conditions
actually witnessed in binderies in New York contradict this reading of
census figures. Evidently more facts are needed in order to understand
what is happening in the trade.

The bindery trade in New York employs about five thousand women, a
third of all the women at work in binderies in the United States. A
few are at work in hand binderies, where craftsmen of two or three
centuries ago would find tools and methods not entirely unfamiliar.
Others work in “edition binderies,” where machines bind books by the
thousands. Others work in pamphlet binderies, or magazine binderies.
The methods and conditions differ in these different branches of the
trade.

Whether a book is bound by hand or machine, whether it is covered with
levant or paper, whether it is sewed with linen thread or stitched with
wire, certain processes are necessary. The sheets must be folded into
portable size, the folded sections must be held together in proper
order, and the whole must be covered. It is in the matter of the
covering that the branches of the trade differ most widely. The making
of the hand-bound book, designed to last longest, demands the most
numerous processes. At the other extreme is the paper-covered pamphlet.

The machine method of binding books omits many processes of hand
binding, and combines others into one simple operation. In hand
binding, one book is the center of attention until it is finished, and
each volume requires slightly different treatment. In machine binding,
the method is to repeat one process thousands of times, adopting the
factory system with its division of processes and its labor-saving
machines. A pamphlet should be folded and its sections placed in
proper order as accurately as a book bound in cloth or morocco, but as
it is to be covered only with heavy paper, it requires no such careful
pressing, trimming, and retrimming, rounding and backing, glueing,
lining-up, drawing-in, and all the other diverse manipulations by
which the artistic binder assures the preservation of the sheets in a
solid and substantial cover made by hand. A periodical is a species
of pamphlet, but it is distinguished by uniformity of size week after
week or month after month. Thus it lends itself admirably to machine
production.

Women are standing on the threshold of the bindery trade. All the work
of preparing the sheets is theirs, folding, placing them in sequence,
and attaching them together with paste, thread or wire. In pamphlet
binding they put on the covers, but in edition binderies, they have
no share at all in the important work of the forwarding department,
and they enter the finishing department only in order to lay the gold
on the covers and to examine and wrap the completed volumes. Will the
process of change give them greater or less opportunities?

The machine is the great fact which looms large before the eyes of
bindery women, when they describe changes in their trade. They accept
it as they would accept a rainy day but it usually spells “out of work”
for someone in the bindery, and the calamity of unemployment is more
immediate and real to the workers than are the advantages of better
methods of production.

The different methods of folding sheets illustrate the development of
machinery. Often these different methods are found together in one
workroom. For example, in an edition bindery in New York the sheets
are fed into one of the six point folding machines or placed in the
automatic folder or, very rarely, folded by hand. In the first case,
girls sitting on high stools feed each separate sheet into the machine,
placing the printed dots on needle-like points, which serve as guides,
while their helpers, the learners, take out the folded sections and
“jog” them straight on tables. If the pages are to be folded by the
automatic machine, they are placed in the proper position under two
rubber knuckles, which push them toward the folding rollers. The
forewoman, in addition to her other work, keeps watch to see that the
folding is properly done, but no hand work is required except to pile
the sheets under the rubber fingers and to lift the folded sections
from the boxes into which the machine delivers them. Between the
“point” machine and the “automatic” was another invention not found
in this bindery. In it the points gave place to automatic gauges, and
the girl who fed it need only flick the sheet from the pile so that
the machine could grip it. By dispensing with the points on which each
sheet must be fitted much time was saved. Obviously the next step was
to supply an automatic feeder.

The stories of displaced workers illustrate what happens when new
machines are introduced. One girl had been employed in bindery work
three years. As a learner, she had “knocked up” sections folded by the
“point” machine. She was paid three dollars a week, and continued the
same process one year. Then when a vacancy occurred, she was given a
chance to operate the machine. It was not easy to learn, nor could it
be done in a day or a week. At first she received a weekly wage of four
dollars and fifty cents, but “advanced rapidly” until she was earning
nine dollars.

One day an automatic machine appeared in the workroom and proved so
successful that it was used in preference to the point folders. This
girl was given hand folding, which is “terrible work.” It is hard to
earn a living wage by hand folding. The worker is paid a cent or a cent
and a half for folding one hundred sheets if one fold is necessary.
If the sheets are large and heavy like those in a dictionary the work
of folding is very exhausting, although the pay may be higher. If one
is paid four cents for one hundred sheets, she must fold nearly three
thousand sheets in a day or seventeen thousand five hundred in a week
to earn seven dollars. Moreover, each sheet must be folded three times,
and each fold creased smooth by drawing the bone folding knife across
the heavy paper. This girl was paid four cents a hundred for folding
the pages of an encyclopedia, but she could not earn more than seven
dollars a week, in spite of her efforts to work rapidly. She left
because she was not needed for hand folding and the forewoman thought
that there would be no more work for “point feeders.” She advised her
to learn some other process.

An employment bureau sent her to a bindery where a point feeder was
needed, but the machine was not the same make as the one which she had
been operating, and therefore she was not employed. After a fruitless
search for work in her trade, she was employed by a manufacturer of
neckwear as a learner without wages. Later, as an experienced operator,
she earned seven to nine dollars a week.

Another girl had operated a point folding machine in a large edition
bindery. Newer inventions were introduced, and gradually more and more
work was transferred to them. This girl was a piece worker, and her
wages were depressed steadily as the machine which she was operating
fell into disuse. She had learned only two other processes, hand
folding and filling the boxes of the gathering machine. There was no
gathering machine in this bindery, and the prices for hand folding were
not high enough to yield a living wage. This girl and her sister, also
a bookbinder, lived alone, and were dependent on their own earnings.
She had decided to look for work in another bindery, when the forewoman
offered to teach her to gather by hand. Gathering is not easy work. “At
first,” she said, “I was so tired at night I could hardly keep my eyes
open at supper. I said yesterday I wished I had one of those things you
put on your feet to measure the distance you walk; I’d like to know
how many miles I walk in a day. There’s no boys to carry our work. The
folding machines are at the other end of the bindery, and we carry
the work the distance from one street to another. That’s a block. If
there are forty sections in a book, we walk it forty times for that one
book.” Nevertheless her experience in handling sheets made it possible
for her to learn the new process easily, so that by the end of six
months she was earning approximately ten to eleven dollars a week piece
work, whereas the point folding machine had yielded her a maximum of
nine or ten dollars.

An expert wirestitcher in a magazine bindery sometimes earned
twenty-four dollars in the busiest week of the month when she worked
overtime. When a combined gathering and wirestitching machine was
introduced for binding small magazines, she was transferred to work on
a weekly periodical whose pages were too large to fit the new machine.
Her work was inserting during part of the week and mailing during the
rest of the time. She earned ten to eleven dollars piece work, and had
steadier employment than if she had continued to stitch the monthly
magazine.

A gatherer, who had had long experience, “made a fuss” when the
gathering machine was introduced, and was given an opportunity to
operate it at a wage of eighteen dollars, the regular rate paid to men
for this work. Young girls were employed to fill the boxes. The other
gatherers were obliged to learn other processes in this establishment
or seek work elsewhere.

The important fact common to these stories is that there was no
systematic effort to prevent the maladjustment which was due not to the
inefficiency of the workers but to change in industrial organization.
The displaced employes had not been in a position accurately to foresee
these changes; the appearance of the machine in the workroom was
usually their first warning that they must seek other occupations. Time
was lost in the effort to make the required readjustments. It does not
appear that this loss of time was a necessary evil. On the other hand,
it is evident that solutions were possible, and that the suffering of
the workers was due to the fact that readjustments were matters of
chance rather than forethought.

There is another fact, almost as important as the introduction of
machinery, and that is the failure to introduce it. Of the 306
binderies visited in the course of this investigation, including
temporary departments of printing offices, lithographing establishments
and other branches of the industry, there were only nine in which no
handworkers were employed.

  In 234 some machine was used.
  In 66 no machines were used.
  In 6 the use of machines was not ascertained.
  In 20 a gathering machine was found.
  In 269 no gathering machine was found.
  In 17 the use of a gathering machine was not ascertained.
  In 112 a folding machine was found.
  In 181 no folding machine was found.
  In 13 the use of a folding machine was not ascertained.

Several employers discussed the use of machinery and gave their reasons
for not introducing it. Small firms could not run the risk of investing
capital in machines which might change soon again. It was better to
be a specialist in one process and give out part of the work to other
establishments. Others did not have large enough orders to keep a
machine for one process in motion all day. High rents prevented others
from providing larger space for machinery. Others were inert. As long
as there were girls willing to take low wages for handwork, it was just
as well to continue in the old way.

This failure to introduce machines brings about a diversity in methods
which is very confusing to the worker. It prevents the establishment
of a standard and makes necessary a different bargain in each factory.
“You see every bindery is a little different,” said one woman; “when
you go to a new place you never can tell what it will be like.” In
so far as machines compel uniformity, they help to standardize both
processes and conditions of work.

The way in which machinery breaks up a trade into establishments making
a specialty of one branch of work has been noted. The other form of
specialization is illustrated in the case of employes who practise only
one process in the workroom. This sort of specialization does not seem
to be inevitable. In a bindery in New York where there were machines
for every process, “all round” workers were in demand, and those who
could turn from one process to another were not laid off. But, however
great may be the demand for employes experienced in more than one line
of work, it is the tendency of machinery to force a worker to practise
only one. If you are a piece-worker, to lose practise means to lose
wages. On the other hand, the machine will not yield its maximum profit
unless it be kept in constant operation. Thus while general practise
in all branches of the trade brings to the worker the desirable power
of adjustment to changing conditions, nevertheless the employer’s
wish to keep his machines in motion, and the piece worker’s eagerness
not to lose the speed which comes from constant practise, both tend to
organize the bindery force in separate departments, whose workers are
not interchangeable. The same demand of the machine, that it be fed
with enough work to keep it in constant motion, forces the employer
either to specialize in one department, or to secure more orders and to
enlarge his establishment.

It is obvious that the larger the establishment, the more successful
will be the attempt to keep every machine in motion throughout
the working day. The feeder of the machine will then have little
opportunity to practise other processes. “Establishments are now so
large that a woman learns only one process,” said one superintendent;
“for example, she becomes a sewer and does nothing but that.” In
the light of this fact, the census figures showing the size of
establishments are significant. In New York State in 1905, 53.9% of
the total number of wage earners were employed in 26 binderies, 8.6%
of the total number of establishments in the trade. There were 6 more
binderies counted in New York State in 1905 than in 1900 (304 in 1905,
298 in 1900) while wage earners increased 11.6% or 832 in number.

Specialization shows itself in another way, namely, in an inability to
turn from one kind of product to another. There is a large bindery in
New York where several periodicals are bound. A girl employed there
complained of the irregularity of her work. “It seems pretty hard on
a girl,” she said, “to have to stay home two days in the week and
then have to work so hard the other days.” Her employment was due to
the different methods of binding different periodicals. Two weekly
magazines were brought to the bindery on Tuesday and must be mailed
on Thursday. Hand folders and wirestitchers were needed to bind them.
An engineer’s magazine must be bound between Tuesday and Friday. The
work on this was hand folding, gathering by machine, and sewing by
machine, instead of wirestitching. Another publication was brought from
the printer on Friday and issued on Monday. It was folded by machine
and wirestitched. On Friday evening and Saturday there was no work
for a hand folder or an operator of the sewing machine. Wednesday was
the busiest day in the bindery; two magazines must be completed for
the mailers on Thursday. Overtime was usual on that day. This girl
could fold by hand, fill the gathering machine and operate the sewing
machine. She worked from Tuesday to Friday. The issues of the magazine
had been smaller than usual and her earnings were reduced. She reported
that at hand folding, if there were plenty of work, she could earn
seventy-five cents or a dollar a day. For filling the gathering machine
the rate was eighteen cents an hour or one dollar fifty-three cents a
day. But there had been so little work that her earnings in the past
three weeks had been:

  January 4th-10th, $3.19;
  January 11th-17th, $7.75;
  January 18th-26th, $3.21.

If she had been steadily employed, she could have earned five or six
dollars a week as a hand folder, or nine dollars and nine cents for
filling the gathering machine. “There isn’t much chance for a sewer
any more in magazine binderies,” she said; “you know nearly all the
magazines used to be sewed, but now they are wirestitched.”

When different kinds of orders demand different processes, the
specialist must be prepared to face not only change in machinery, but
change in the size or character of her employer’s orders. This sort
of change may affect the organization of the workroom. Recently a
magazine, which had been gathered by machine, was enlarged by doubling
the size of its pages. Thereafter a force of inserters was employed,
and there was no work for gatherers. It may affect the process and its
demands on the worker. In one bindery a little girl was employed to
cut off books for one machine, earning four dollars. “I can keep up
with the machine when the books are the right size,” she said; “but
it’s awful when they’re thin.” It may affect wages. One girl who had
been employed to operate the sewing machine in the book department
was transferred to the magazine department where her work was to look
over sheets folded by machine and to fill the boxes of the gathering
machine. Her pay was reduced from ten dollars to a wage varying from
five to seven dollars according to the kind of work assigned to her.
This transfer from work on one product to another requiring different
processes was due to the fact that much of the book work formerly
done by this firm was withdrawn by a large publishing house which had
recently organized its own bindery.

If we trace the history of the folding machine or the gathering machine
we find that with the development of automatic feeding devices the
tendency is to dispense with the work of women and to employ men to
care for the machines. It is not a displacement of women by men; it is
rather the substitution of rubber fingers or other automatic feeders
for women’s hands, and as a result a reorganization of the force.

What then is the meaning of the census figures which tell us that
in 1870 30% of the bookbinders were women and 70% were men, while
in 1900, 51.6% were women and 48.4% were men? In the absence of any
data as to the number employed in different branches of the trade in
1870 and in 1900, the answer must be in part merely hypothetical.
Judging by present tendencies in the trade the cause of change in the
proportion of men and women would appear to be twofold. It has been
pointed out that the share of women in hand binding is relatively
small, that they do only the folding, gathering and sewing, and that
the numerous processes of forwarding and finishing are usually in the
hands of men. Hence in the early days of the trade, when hand binderies
predominated, men were in the majority. In the development of the
industry two important changes have taken place. With the introduction
of machinery, many processes of forwarding and finishing were omitted,
while others were combined in one simple operation. At the same time
there was a great increase in the production of pamphlets, which need
only to be folded, gathered, stitched and covered. The first decreased
the relative number of men needed in edition binderies; the second
increased the demand for the processes always performed by women. Thus
it would appear that without any shifting of the line between men’s
work and women’s work, the proportion of women steadily increased
between 1870 and 1900.

If during the three decades between 1870 and 1900 there was a struggle
between men and women and a transfer of processes to women, it seems to
have left no trace on present trade conditions. The instances of this
kind of transfer are so scattered as to seem the exceptions that prove
the rule. The possibility of carrying on more processes than their
present share in the trade does not appear to be a burning question
among the women. One employer, in charge of an edition bindery, said
that the issue had never been raised. “The women would just say, ‘It’s
men’s work.’” One girl, who had fed a ruling machine, work requiring
no skill, was asked if she had ever wished to learn to operate the
machine. “Oh, no,” she said; “ruling is gentlemen’s work. There are no
lady rulers. The gentlemen have their hands in the ink pots all day,
and no lady wants to get her hands inked like that.” “A woman can learn
to feed the ruling machine in a day,” said another; “she doesn’t need
to bother with managing it.” “The smell of the glue is awful,” said
another, speaking of covering; “it’s men’s work.” Another, describing a
machine which could fold, gather and insert, said, “It’s men’s work,”
although each one of these processes formerly had belonged to women.

Nor do employers appear to have given much thought to the question.
One, an “art binder,” said that the work of women was restricted only
by the trade union, and that they were capable of doing men’s work.
He added, however, that a woman would find it difficult to do the
work fast enough to make it profitable. Another, the superintendent
of an edition bindery, said that the work of women was restricted by
capacity, not by the rule of any organization; they would not have
strength to handle the machines which the men operate. Another, a “job
binder,” said that he employed women for temporary work only, because
they were not strong enough to lift books and be “generally useful.”
“If you employ a woman, you can’t give her anything but sewing,” said
another job binder; “while a man can turn his hand to other things.”

But the superintendent of a magazine bindery said that there was no
process in his workroom which could not be done by women. “I could put
a girl to work operating the cutting machine,” he said, “if I paid her
eighteen dollars a week. I could have a woman tend the large folding
machines if I paid the union scale. I don’t know why I don’t, except
that I don’t see any good reason why I should.”

In the course of the inquiry, there have been more numerous instances
of the transfer of women’s work to men and boys. Men have been found
operating folding machines and sewing machines, feeding the ruling
machines and folding and sewing by hand. Boys have been found emptying
boxes of the folding machine, sewing by hand, cleaning off the books
after they have been stamped, and operating the wirestitching machine.
The development of automatic feeding devices for the folding machine
and the invention of gathering machines and covering machines have
caused these processes to be transferred to men in many binderies.
Indeed, the census of 1905 showed that in the five years since 1900 the
number of bindery women had not increased so rapidly as the number of
men, and that women no longer outnumbered men.

A woman who had fed a point folding machine and was displaced by the
“automatic” tended by a man, remarked, “A man is paid according to what
he knows, and not according to what he does.” It is certainly true that
the tender of a large complex machine, with all the devices for feeding
itself, must be one who knows rather than one who does. Women, without
mechanical training, have small chance of adjusting themselves to new
occupations.

In view of these changes, the future of women’s work in binderies is
hard to predict. In art binding a few well-educated women have proved
themselves capable of performing every process from the folding of
the sheets to the tooling of the cover. There would seem to be an
opportunity for growth in this branch of the trade, and it is the
opinion of some binders that women could be trained to carry on this
work in all its departments. In machine binderies it would seem to be
largely the lack of mechanical skill, or of opportunity to acquire it,
which prevents women’s adjusting themselves to new inventions.

The bookbinding trade is not an example of extraordinary industrial
evils. Its significance is to be found rather in its illustration
of the common lot of women in many occupations. It is not alone in
binderies that conditions of industry change rapidly; that machines
cause a reorganization of work and then give place to new inventions
and new conditions; that speed seems to be the most essential
requirement; that women work exhaustingly long hours in the busy
season; that specialization appears inevitable, although the continual
repetition of one process weakens the power of adjustment which is
most needed in a changing environment; that irregularity of employment
means loss of all or part of the wages in the dull season; and that the
income at best is scarcely sufficient for self support. The experiences
of bindery girls illustrate these conditions, yet they also point to
several possible methods of improvement.

The encouraging facts in connection with women’s work in binderies
in New York are, first, that the state has already begun a policy of
deliberate intervention. It has prohibited the employment of children
under fourteen years of age. It has safeguarded them between the ages
of fourteen and sixteen, limiting their working hours to eight in a
day. It has made increasingly strict demands regarding the sanitary
conditions of factories. It has recognized the principle of limiting
the hours of labor of women, however faulty its provision may be for
this purpose.

Second, there is a growing interest in industrial education in public
schools.

Third, more than twelve hundred bindery women in New York are members
of the women’s local of the bookbinders’ union, while a league of
employers has been formed to deal collectively with the union and
thus to “abolish in the bindery trade the system of making individual
labor contracts, and to introduce the more equitable system of forming
collective labor contracts.”

The bindery girls’ experiences indicate that in so far as adaptation
to change is a matter of chance, women are not profiting by changes or
gaining new opportunities. On the contrary their standard of living
is menaced by uncertainty. The danger to be feared is the danger of
neglect. The remedy would seem to be the substitution of forethought
for chance, the safeguarding of minimum standards by education,
organization and legislation.


FOOTNOTES:

[30] This article is based on a chapter of a report not yet published
on women’s work in binderies in New York. It is the result of an
investigation carried on for the Alliance Employment Bureau of New York
from the autumn of 1907 until the spring of 1909. Every bindery in the
borough of Manhattan was visited, and 205 women employed in the trade
were interviewed at their homes or in the office of the bureau.

[31] _U. S. Census_, 1900. _Occupations_, pp. LII, CXXXVI.




THE TRAINING OF MILLINERY WORKERS

ALICE P. BARROWS

Committee on Women’s Work, New York City


“We have no time for learners.”--“Learning is nothing but running
errands.”--“It’s always experience, experience they want, and I didn’t
have it, so what was the use?”--“Trade schools are no good. It is
altogether different outside.” These were some of the remarks heard
at the beginning of an investigation of workers in the millinery
trade[32] which led to an intensive study of the training of girls for
that occupation. “Industrial education” is a large, general term. What
it meant to the workers in one trade throws much light upon it, and
suggests a method for dealing with a subject which is at present rather
topheavy with theories.

Probably no trade in which girls are employed could illustrate better
than millinery the present status of industrial education for girls in
New York City. There are more women in this trade than in any other
except the clothing trades. There are more classes in millinery than
in any other women’s trade except dress making. It is one of the first
industrial subjects introduced into the school curriculum. Yet an
investigation of workers in millinery showed that these classes were
being formed when there was little information upon the most important
factors in the problem of trade training--that is, the girls, the
schools where they had received their previous instruction, and the
trade in which they worked.

It is not easy to describe the millinery trade clearly because the
essence of the description is to show that it cannot be made clear. If
the next few paragraphs leave the reader with an impression of chaos
then the description has been successful. “The millinery trade is about
twenty-five different trades,” said one employer. This statement does
not give a true impression because it does not show that each branch
overlaps and penetrates into every other in a most confusing manner.
Millinery shops are of all types, in all parts of the city, with all
kinds of work. Broadly speaking, the establishments can be divided into
wholesale and retail, and in general it may be said that in wholesale
shops “it’s speed we want,” and in retail, “careful, neat hand
workers.” Actually, such definitions of the trade are not true to fact.
Every variety of hat is made in all kinds of ways whether manufactured
at wholesale or retail. There are “trimmed hats” and “untrimmed hats,”
“ready-to-wear hats,” “artistic millinery,” “home-made hats,” and
“tailor hats.” At first glance, it would seem that the trade is an
excellent example of the subdivision of labor. The important point to
the worker, however, is that sometimes it illustrates this subdivision
of labor and sometimes it does not. Trimmed hats are found in the same
establishments with untrimmed and ready-to-wear hats, or with only one
or with neither. Artistic millinery is found in exclusive private shops
and in sweatshops. Tailor hats are made in the same establishments with
trimmed and untrimmed hats or in shops by themselves. Home-made hats
are found to be contract work for great factories, or “neighborhood
work for a few friends.”

Naturally, this lack of system and standard is reflected in the demands
made upon workers. In general, it may be said that there are four
stages in making a hat,--designing it, making the frame, covering the
frame, and trimming it. And in general it may be stated that there are
seven kinds of positions open to a girl looking for work in millinery.
She may be a learner, an improver, a preparer, a milliner, a copyist,
a trimmer, or a designer. But when a girl starts to look for work as
preparer, for example, she may turn toward a Fifth avenue shop where
she must be a “neat worker” who can make frames accurately by hand, and
“have an eye for color and form”; here she may advance from preparer to
designer; or she may find her way into a shop a few doors away where
she does not need to make frames because they have two girls who make
all the frames; or she may apply at a department store where in one
department she will have an opportunity to do all the kinds of work
found in the Fifth avenue shop, “only not so particular”; or she may
go into the ready-to-wear department where “you never make a frame but
cover with straw and stick on a rosette”; or she may join the throng
of girls pouring into a Broadway wholesale house, and as she walks
up the stairs she may stop at any one of the five floors and enter a
“millinery establishment.” But in one she will be asked to do straw
operating all day; in another to make dozens of wire frames a day; in
another to trim hats by the dozen and never make frames; in another
to work at nothing but millinery ornaments. In the autumn of 1908 she
finds it difficult to get a position as preparer because “the machines
are driving them out”; and in the spring of 1909 preparers are in great
demand because “the styles have changed this season, and hand work has
come back this month.” In any case, she thinks herself fortunate if she
works more than six months a year at $5 a week in not more than three
or four positions. No prophecy can be made about the kind of skill
which will be demanded in any shop.

But if no two establishments are alike in methods of work, they all
have one characteristic in common. The slack season descends upon
employers and workers alike. Taking the employers’ statements, the
millinery year is at best only seven or eight months long, divided into
fall and spring seasons. The fall season, starting on Division street
and lower Broadway in July, gains headway in August, rushes up Fifth
avenue in September, and then gradually spreads out north and south,
east and west, lingering for the longest time where the current is
least swift. Third avenue and Fifth avenue, Grand street and Harlem
cannot buy early and all at once. In any case, the season disappears
before Christmas. The spring season begins in January, and gains
speed until the Easter rush, after which workers are laid off in great
numbers.

“It is terrifically hard work while it lasts,” said one employer.
If it is terrifically hard work for the employer with some capital,
credit and business shrewdness, it is obvious that to the girl with
no capital, no credit and no knowledge of trade conditions except
as represented by her place, “laid off--slack” means an even more
serious loss. According to census figures, 64% of the women employed
in retail establishments are out of work in January. In August 65%
are unemployed. In September, the busy wholesale month in the autumn,
there is no room for 11% of the number needed in the spring. In June
45% are out of work. Of 639 positions in millinery held by the group of
workers investigated, 447, or more than two-thirds, lasted less than
six months. Although they sometimes found work in other trades when
laid off from millinery, 60% of those who could estimate the time lost
were unemployed more than three months in the year. “Millinery gets on
my nerves,” said one girl, “because there is always the worry about the
seasons.”

The following is a calendar of a girl who had worked in millinery for a
year. She was particularly fortunate in getting subsidiary work.

 August--Worked 3 weeks at millinery on Third avenue. Worked 1 week on
 Broadway. Laid off--slack.

 September--Looked for work.

 October--Worked at millinery on Sixth avenue 4 weeks.

 November--Worked at millinery on Sixth avenue 3 weeks. Laid
 off--slack. Sold candy one week. Left to return to millinery.

 December--Worked 3 weeks at millinery on Sixth avenue until the day
 before Christmas. Laid off--slack. Sold candy one week.

 January--Sold candy one month.

 February--Returned to millinery.

 March--Worked at millinery.

 April--Worked at millinery.

 May--Worked at millinery. Laid off--slack.

 June--Looked for work.

 July--Looked for work.

The season also has its effect upon workroom conditions. “It’s rush,
rush all the time and then nothing to do.” In 62% of the shops
investigated the girls worked nine to nine and a half hours daily. A
large majority had a working week of fifty to fifty-five hours. In
only eight was the week less than fifty hours. In 86% of the shops the
day’s work lasted regularly until six o’clock or later--an important
fact when the question of evening school work is to be considered. 71%
of the girls worked overtime in the busy season. During the overtime
season the total hours varied from less than ten up to fifteen a day.

The wages which workers in millinery receive are not such as to
compensate them for short seasons and long hours. The average wage is
between seven and eight dollars. Considered from the point of view of
yearly income, the weekly average of seven or eight dollars is reduced
25 or even 50% by the slack season. A liberal estimate of the average
wage, allowing for loss of time, would be five dollars. But the keynote
of the wage question in millinery is lack of standard. The workers
have no trade union large enough to sign contracts with employers. The
only bargain is the individual bargain. If the method of payment is
by the piece, “you never know what you are going to get.” As one girl
expressed it: “Piece work is bad because you are always fussing about
the price. At that French place, they said they’d pay you seventeen
cents a hat but at the end of the week you would find they had made it
fourteen cents. It was awful. You had the same fight every season over
the prices. Instead of giving you what you ought to get they’d say to
themselves, ‘We’ll make it $2.50 a dozen, and if they will work for
that, all right; if not we can make it $3.’”

A tabulation of wages received in 738 positions held by 201 workers
shows what a variation in wages there is in positions called by the
same name. The variations are as follows:

  Learners: 0 to $5.
  Improvers: less than $2 to $8.
  Preparers: $2 to $15.
  Milliners: $4 to $12 or $15.
  Makers: $4 to $9.
  Copyists: $4 to $15 or more.
  Trimmers: $6 to $25 or more.

Facts such as these have been used in other countries as an argument
for the establishment of minimum wage boards in millinery. Public
opinion in this country does not yet demand such action.

If these facts about conditions in the millinery trade prove anything
they prove that “learning to make hats” is a very different thing
from “learning the millinery trade.” The experiences of millinery
workers would seem to suggest that in modern times, perhaps even
more than in the days when industrial conditions were less complex,
apprenticeship must include learning the trade as well as one process
in it, if the workers are to be efficient. A milliner who does not
know that millinery means machine work and hand work, speed work and
careful work, that the seasons are irregular, that the wages are
unstandardized, and that conditions are constantly changing, is in no
position to become efficient. Such knowledge is part of her job, and it
is as necessary that she should understand her various relations to the
trade in which she is working as that she should master the technique
of the machine that she is operating. Power to adapt to different types
of establishments, to varied kinds of work, and to fluctuating seasons,
rather than specialization in a particular process, is a practical
necessity for the girl who would earn her own living. According to the
testimony of both workers and employers she does not get this power in
the trade itself; employers have no time for learners, and the girl
finds that “learning is nothing but running errands.” According to the
same testimony, the schools do not know the trade and do not prepare
their pupils to do any one thing well. In order to test the truth of
these criticisms, millinery classes were investigated in the course of
this study, and their graduates were interviewed.

The visits to these classes were profitable in three ways. They
brought out the prevalent ideals in regard to women’s work, the
tendencies in the past with respect to methods of teaching trade
courses, and the possible questions which need to be considered in
plans for the industrial education of girls. Half the group of workers
investigated had attended classes where millinery was taught. There
were sixty-two of these classes in the city, of which only three aimed
specifically to prepare girls for trade. The others gave courses “for
home and trade use”; that is, they aimed primarily to teach women to
make their own hats, but girls could also enter the class if they
wished to prepare for trade.

The three schools which aimed at trade preparation dealt with three
different types of girls. One was founded in order to prepare the
fourteen-year-old girl who is forced to leave school at the earliest
time allowed by law; one would take no girls under sixteen years of
age; the third gave training to immigrant girls of any age. They
were all alike in that they knew little about their pupils’ previous
schooling or their experiences after they went to work. Only one
attempted to make any investigation of trade conditions. In regard to
methods of instruction, only one sifted its applicants by requiring
them to state whether they intended to work at the trade. Only one
tried to eliminate the unfit by taking girls on trial. Only one
attempted any instruction in trade conditions, and that one found it
difficult to give such instruction to the type of girls with whom it
was dealing. The aim of this “academic” work was to supply the lack
in the general education of the fourteen-year-old girl. To do this,
courses in English, arithmetic and civics were given. Civics included
“industrial history, cultivation, manufacture, and transportation of
materials, citizenship, commerce, philanthropics, history of Manhattan
and social ethics.” The time allotted to English, arithmetic and
civics was one hour a week for each. The course was six months long.
All preparation on these subjects had to be done by the pupils during
this one hour in the classroom. The graduates from only one of these
schools had anything favorable to say about the work. After visiting
the schools and following up the experience of the pupils who had
taken courses there, it was easy to understand why the girls thought
that it was “altogether different outside.” On the other hand, daily
indications of the complexities of the conditions “outside” gave us a
sympathetic realization of the size of the task which the schools had
undertaken.

As classes in industrial training will ultimately find their way into
the public school system, not only is it important to understand the
aims and methods of the trade schools, but it is also desirable to
know what has already been done in the way of industrial training in
the public schools. At the time of this investigation millinery was
taught in forty-five evening schools in New York City. Thirty-nine of
these were elementary schools. The investigation of these schools was
profitable because it threw light upon the function of evening schools,
their connection with day schools, their conception of the aim of
industrial courses for girls, and finally the effect of these ideals
upon the actual formation of a trade class in one evening school.

The school buildings are very imposing. One finds no difficulty in
locating them at night even at a distance of two or three blocks. A
great dark building occupying about one-third of the noisy, crowded
block, gives notice to the visitor that she is headed in the right
direction. The school always looks impressively quiet and remote. Few
windows are lighted and only one door is open. After picking her way
through crowded streets, stepping around small children, narrowly
avoiding collisions with innumerable boys and girls darting in and out
among the crowds, the visitor finds the inside of the building quite
deserted, and her footsteps echo in the great, gray, empty basement.
She can find no one to direct her to the principal, but presently
seeing a few girls straggling up the fireproof stairs she follows them
to the assembly room, a waste of empty desks. At one end is a long
desk where the principal is seated. Often she has been teaching all
day in a day school. Soon a girl enters slowly and hesitatingly, and
slips into a chair near the door, where she stays until the principal
turns to her with, “What can I do for you?” Bashfully the girl comes
up to the desk and whispers down into it that she wants “to take up
millinery.”--“Your name?”--“Sadie Schwartz.”--“Address?”--“-- East
----.”--“Age?”--“Fourteen.”--“Have you left school?”--“Yes.” Sometimes
the question is asked, “Are you working? At what occupation?” Sometimes
it is omitted. Then the principal concludes, “Here are two cards. Keep
one and give one to the teacher. The millinery class is down the hall
on the right-hand side.” This is the extent of the consultation before
entering a class.

After the girl has been in the class a short time, she learns that most
of the girls are taking the course so that they can learn to make their
own hats. More and more girls come as Easter approaches. They can stay
as long as they like, and go when they like. They can even keep on
making their own hats for two years or more.

“It is rather unfortunate that the board of education supplies the
materials,” said one teacher; “because I have known of cases where the
girls come simply to get a hat and then leave. For example, I know of
one case where a girl at the end of a few weeks asked to be transferred
from the millinery class and when asked her reason, said that she
wanted to go into dressmaking because ‘I’ve got a hat and now I would
like a dress to match.’”

“You don’t learn anything in evening school,” said a girl who was in
trade; “every night it is a little on a hat, and one hat a year.”

During the year 1908-9, a well-known educator asked the following
question in a course upon social life and the school curriculum: “Upon
what questions in the community would you desire to be informed so as
to adapt a course of study to the social conditions in that community?”
That question sums up the problem of industrial education. The schools
which have just been described exemplify some of the chief methods
advocated at present for making this adaptation. A study of them
also shows what happens when there is little or no information, or
desire for information, about the social conditions of the community
in which such courses are being given. One of the best known city
superintendents of schools writes in a recent report:[33]

“The establishment of trade schools by the public school authorities
is now a matter of discussion in every manufacturing city in the
land. Manufacturers and philanthropists alike are clamoring for the
introduction of industrial training into the public schools.... The
true reason for industrial education lies ... in the fundamental
conception of modern education--to fit the child for his life
environment.... In the public discussion of this subject there has
been much exhortation, much denunciation, much eloquence, but little
practical wisdom or suggestion.”

Such a quotation is itself full of practical wisdom, for it goes to
the root of the difficulty in stating that the object of education
is to fit the child for his environment. Yet if this is the purpose
of schools, it is obvious that accurate knowledge of the environment
is a first essential in educational plans. This raises a fundamental
question in regard to trade-school training. Should we not start a
department of investigation even before we form the trade school,
and should we not continue such a department as long as the school
continues? If the trade schools which everyone is advocating are not
based upon accurate knowledge of the conditions they have to meet, it
seems safe to say that they will result only in the disappointment
of the girls, the increased exasperation of the employers, and the
humiliation of the schools. Familiarity with some establishments, and
“being in touch” with trade is not knowledge of trade conditions. Trade
is complex. Preparing for trade is like preparing for the weather. You
never can tell what is going to happen next. Weather prophets are not
infallible, yet experience has proved that it is desirable at least to
attempt to work out a scientific method of studying weather conditions.
There seems to be no good reason why we should not apply scientific
methods to the study of social as well as physical conditions.

For instance, investigation of the millinery trade proved it to be an
industry in process of transition from home to factory, with all the
confusion in processes that is involved in such transition. Yet only
one of all the schools studied made any attempt to discover the demands
of this trade. Investigation showed that an understanding of industrial
conditions is as necessary for efficiency as ability to make a hat.
Yet only one school tried to give an understanding of those conditions,
and the time given to such study was totally inadequate. Investigation
proved that one cause contributing to short seasons and low wages was
the oversupply of workers. Yet there were more classes in millinery
than in any other trade in the city, except one. Investigation revealed
the fact that instead of specialization, the ability to adapt is
of primary importance to the worker. Yet psychology and practical
experience alike make it clear that such ability cannot be given in a
six months’ course.

This brings us to the second factor in the problem about which there is
little information--the workers themselves. When the whole subject of
industrial training is in such an experimental stage it is unfortunate
that only one school has attempted to keep systematic records of
pupils. To fail to keep such records is like trying to erect a building
with no knowledge of the materials. If such records had been kept it
is probable that the attempt to train immature fourteen-year-old girls
in six months for a trade like millinery would have been abandoned
long ago. It is even possible that the advocates of trade education
would have been driven to realize that efficiency in industry, as
in everything else, depends not upon a desk knowledge of the three
R’s, but upon a sound, vital, general education which gives power of
adaptation. Even a slight acquaintance with women workers in industry
brings out the fact that they lack this power, which comes from
training of the mind. Why have girls been permitted to leave school
without receiving this training? If the first essential for fitness
to survive in modern life is the adaptability which comes from a
well-trained mind, and if the function of the schools is to develop
such fitness, are they giving the required training? If not, can the
curriculum be changed so that the general schooling shall be more
real, more connected with life? It is a matter of concern to school
authorities that so many children leave the grammar school before
graduation. Out of 201 millinery workers, 104 began work when they were
between fourteen and sixteen years of age; eight started before they
were fourteen; twenty left school before they were fourteen. Of these
201 girls, 152 attended school in New York City. Of these 152, eight
attended parochial schools, 144 public schools. Of the 144 who attended
public schools, only thirty-three were graduated. Such facts are used
as arguments for starting trade schools which shall prepare girls and
boys for their life work. To some of us they seem to be cogent reasons
for trying to discover how these grammar schools can be revitalized
so that the graduates will be prepared for life. It is said that the
pupils leave because they do not see that school is preparing them
to earn their own living. The one hundred millinery workers who had
studied in trade classes said that the instruction there did not help
them to earn their living.

Where does the fault lie? A study of one trade in which girls are
working suggests that reorganization of general education is the most
vital factor in industrial training. This suggestion may be mistaken;
for it is based upon knowledge of conditions in only three trades for
women--millinery, and two others investigated at the same time. It
is evident that the question can be conclusively answered only after
exhaustive study of girls, of schools and of trades. From the point
of view of manufacturers, workers and educators, such investigation
is of primary importance. To those who are eager for plans by which
individual girls may get training immediately, the comparatively
slow gathering of information does not appeal. Nevertheless, such
information will have to be obtained sometime. Such investigation
should be systematically made. It is not easy, but it is practicable,
if we reduce the problem to its simplest terms. We should divide up
each city into comparatively small units for investigation, the village
communities, as it were, that make up the city. By taking the schools
as the center of these communities and by studying the pupils--their
personal and family history, their education, and their experiences in
trade,--it would be possible to collect information which would give a
sound basis either for reconstruction of the general school education
or for the formation of a system of trade schools.


FOOTNOTES:

[32] This article is based upon a report not yet published on _women
at work in millinery shops in New York City_. It is the result of an
investigation carried on for the Alliance Employment Bureau of New
York from the autumn of 1907 until the spring of 1909. Two hundred
millinery girls were interviewed at home or in the office of the bureau
and questioned about their wages, hours, trade history, regularity of
employment and training for work. Their names were secured from girls’
clubs, trade classes, employment bureaus, and fellow-workers. More than
two hundred shops, including all in which the two hundred workers had
been employed since July, 1907, were visited and questions asked about
training of learners, wages, hours, seasons, demand and opportunities
for experts, and the employer’s opinion of trade-school training.

[33] _Tenth Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools_, New
York City, July, 1908.




TRAINING FOR SALESMANSHIP

ELIZABETH B. BUTLER

Bureau of Social Research, New York City


Since women began to be employed in mercantile houses, the public
has gradually become accustomed to inefficient service. Since their
employment has been extended from a few departments to most of the
departments, and since public school children and ambitious factory
girls alike have competed by thousands for department-store positions,
the public has gradually accepted this kind of inefficiency as
characteristic of retail employes. Yet at times customers grow restive.
At times the marginal increase in buying which can be stimulated by
intelligent service is abruptly checked by the absence of intelligence.
This is a serious matter to competing concerns. The volume of sales is
influenced not only by the quality of goods and the appearance of the
store, but by fractional differences in courtesy and understanding.
How to acquire employes with such qualities, or how to develop such
qualities in employes, has become a managerial issue.

The acuteness of this issue is illustrated in the everyday experience
of the department-store customer. You go into a store with the intent,
we will say, of buying a linen collar. Having discovered the counter
where such articles are for sale, you make toward it and glance with an
unkindly eye over the stock displayed. Such collars as hang suspended
from the steel display form have eyelet decorations too obviously
machine made, whereas your desire is for something less pretentious
and more genuine. You attract the eye of a young person and make known
your wants. “I don’t wait on collars,” she replies; “the saleslady at
the end of the counter will attend to you.” Thereupon you pursue “the
saleslady at the end of the counter,” who has been conversing with her
friend who “waits on neckwear.” You ask her if she can wait on you,
and somewhat reluctantly she returns. Signifying your taste as to
collars, you casually observe the expression of disapproval with which
she pulls out a box and sets it before you. She waits in silence while
you look over the contents of the box. If you ask her the price, she
tells you but vouchsafes no further information. Then with a desire to
solve the situation rapidly, you seize the first collar that appears
to you at all suitable, order half a dozen like it, look at your watch
and discover that over twenty minutes have passed since you entered the
store, receive your change and depart.

You have your collars, and your unreasoned feeling is that you have
secured them as against the enemy. You have a sense of having been
actively combating a negative opposition to something, an indifference
not fundamentally hostile perhaps, but translated into hostility
because of your too definite intention to purchase a specific article.
You reflect that had you removed two of the much-eyeletted collars from
the steel display form and handed them to the lady with the remark that
you would take them, she might have viewed your interruption of her
conversation with more complacency. But you required her to lift down
a box. Your choice was not to her taste. Your order might perhaps have
been called conservative. The result was a perceptible variation in the
density of the atmospheric waves between the saleslady and yourself.

Yet on further reflection you realize that after all your saleslady
cannot be held accountable for duties which she does not understand.
You have wanted attention, advice, understanding service. After some
difficulty you have secured a collar. The saleslady thought that you
were quite capable of knowing what you wanted and choosing it for
yourself. In the concrete both the saleslady and yourself have meant
the same thing. Where you have differed was in your interpretation of
ways of reaching the concrete. You have wanted an expert; you have met
a “counterserver.”

And what but “counterservice” can we expect of the thousands of young
girls drafted yearly into this occupation? Neither training nor
experience is required of them. They may be and are both casual and
unskilled. Saleswomen longer with the house show the newcomer where
stock is kept, and if kindly disposed, give her suggestions as to the
personal peculiarities of the buyer. Some one tells her the custom
of the house as regards saleschecks and other records, and with this
preliminary information she sallies forth to represent her employer
to his clientele. Her time is occupied by her duties so far as she
understands them. She stays in the department to which she is assigned,
keeps her stock dusted and in order, tries to remember what new stock
comes in, and when customers are around does not converse more than
necessary with her co-workers; if a customer asks for something that is
in stock, she produces it and awaits decision; if a customer asks for
something that is not in stock, she states the fact.

She may not be notably careless and inattentive. Floor-walkers and
department managers seek constantly to eradicate careless employes,
to arouse in their force a feeling of loyalty, a desire to give
conscientious service. It is more difficult to set forth a notion of
adequate service. When a girl is doing her best, it is not always clear
how to suggest to her that her “best” might be higher in standard,
that instead of merely producing an article asked for, she might be
of real service to the customer in suggestions and in information
about the stock, that in other words she might be an expert instead
of a mere counter attendant. To quote from a recent book:[34] “For a
salesperson to know what gives the article its price value, whether it
is style, novelty, utility, bulk, rarity of material, to know under
what circumstances it can best be used as a staple, for beauty, for
use, for occasional service, for steady wear--and many points other
than these--and to adapt this knowledge to each customer--is to become
a specialist and to be sought after for advice as the man or woman in
the private office is, not to be approached as a mere lackey to pass
goods back and forth over the counter.”

But how is this expert knowledge to be obtained? How is the salesperson
to learn to recognize types of personality, to grasp what selling
points make the strongest appeal to each type--to whom she should
emphasize utility, to whom beauty, to whom durability--and by what
personal qualities she may gain the attention of each type, focus
attention till it becomes interest and finally clinch the decision
to buy? How is she to be taught the use of her own personality as a
business asset?

Nothing in the past experience of most saleswomen can give them a
clue as to the “how.” Few have bought extensively, and few have an
environment which would make them judges of quality. Even inborn taste
must suffer through inexperience. The saleswoman cannot rely on her
own judgment for the ability to give expert advice, and who is there
to teach her? Her co-workers are not competent, the floor managers are
not competent, the department buyers are too busy. As to understanding
her customers, she is still more hopelessly without a source of
instruction. She continues to do her best, and her best is ineffective.

Her work is routine, monotonous. She regards it and herself
mechanically. As an unskilled laborer, she can command no more than the
wages of unskilled labor. She finds herself confronted with the need of
dressing and appearing “like a lady,” when her pay, which represents
the worth of her service to her employer, cannot be regarded as more
than a supplementary wage. Advancement is slow, and the limit to
advancement appears to the majority inexorable. Low wages in themselves
tend to chill and depress ambition. The girl’s mechanical attitude
toward her work is intensified. Lack of training, low wages, lack of
opportunity for training: these characteristics of the situation form a
circle within which the saleswoman stands bound.

And not only saleswomen, but customers and merchants suffer from this
state of things. Constantly annoyed by the inadequacy of their force,
some merchants have already made a beginning toward stemming the tide
of unsatisfactory service. Many a store now has classes to instruct
newcomers for an hour or so each morning in making out saleschecks, and
to inform them as to the policy of the store. In some cases regular
morning talks for a half hour every day must be attended by new and old
hands as well, with the idea that matters of common interest may be
freely discussed and that ideas of loyalty may thereby be instilled.
Yet while these classes tend to produce right feeling toward the work
and hence are fundamentally useful, they represent only the germ of
vocational training.

For that is what saleswomen need--training for their particular
occupation, instruction in the definite principles of applied
psychology upon which their day’s work is based. What form such
instruction will ultimately take is still matter for conjecture. No one
will assert that experiments now in the making are final, but simply
that by their initial success they point the way to more conclusive
organization. It may be of interest if a statement is made here about
the training for saleswomen now offered in Boston and New York.

The Boston experiment was begun in 1905 under the auspices of the
Women’s Educational and Industrial Union. A class was started with
eight young girls who were given lectures and some practise selling
in the food salesroom and handwork shop of the Union, but after their
three months’ course those who found store positions had to go in
as stock or cash girls. In January, 1906, when the second class was
started, the coöperation of one store was secured. The Union class
was allowed to sell in the store on Mondays for the experience and a
small compensation, and the firm expressed a willingness to consider
promising candidates for positions in their store. Yet as the school
had nothing definite to offer its pupils, it failed to attract the type
of girl most wanted by the stores.

It was felt that more coöperation with the stores was necessary. The
plans of the course were explained to several of the merchants and the
coöperation of six leading stores was obtained to the extent that the
superintendents formed an advisory committee, meeting once a month
with the president of the Union and the director of the class for
conference. The policy, as planned with the advisory committee, was
that candidates should be sent to the Union class from the stores, and
admitted to the school if approved by the director. After one month
in the class, candidates were promised store experience in the store
which had accepted them, on Mondays, and the stores paid for this
service $1 per day. They were also guaranteed permanent positions in
these stores at the close of the course, if their work was satisfactory
after one month’s probation.[35] On this basis, a class with sixteen
pupils opened in October, 1906. It was found, however, that more store
experience was necessary for the best results, and the time schedule
was accordingly changed so that every day from 8.30 to 11. and from
4.30 to 5.30 the pupils were in school and the rest of the day in the
stores. This half-time work was paid for by the stores at the rate of
three dollars a week.

When the next class opened in February, there were nearly one hundred
applicants, from which the school selected twenty-one, the limit of the
class room. Many applicants gave up positions which they had already
secured, for the sake of the training, and others for whom there was
then no room, filled a waiting list. Since then, the school has been
busy making history. The following statements by Mrs. Prince, director
of the school, explain the most recent changes: “At first, the stores
paid the girls $3 a week for half time, but since last September
(1908), the girls have been given full-time wages and allowed the three
hours each morning for three months of training. The stores found the
graduates so efficient that they cordially made this concession, and at
the same time asked if I would choose candidates from the stores. This
I do now, going to the superintendents’ offices and interviewing the
girls there.

“The girls chosen are usually from the bargain counter, or those who
are to be promoted from cash and bundle work or those who have shown
good spirit, but who have gone to work at fourteen years and lack
training and right standards. Sometimes girls who have just entered the
store are chosen. Wages of candidates range from $5 to $8, but at the
end of the course a graduate is guaranteed $6 as a minimum wage, and
her advance depends upon her own ability.

“The girls are in the school every day from 8.30 to 11.30; then after
an hour for luncheon, they go to the stores for the rest of the day,
that is, from 12.30 to 5.30. My plan with the class is to take one big
subject every day: all lectures are reviewed orally and the girls write
all significant points in note books.”

The subject matter of the class, planned with the view of making
efficient, successful saleswomen, has emphasized five main lines of
study: 1. The development of a wholesome, attractive personality.
Hygiene, especially personal hygiene. This includes study of daily
menus for saleswomen, ventilation, bathing, sleep, exercise,
recreation. 2. The general system of stores: sales-slip practice, store
directory, business arithmetic, business forms and cash accounts,
lectures. 3. Qualities of stock: color, design, textiles. 4. Selling as
a science: discussion of store experiences, talks on salesmanship, such
as attitude to firm, customer, and fellow-employe, demonstration of
selling in class, salesmanship lectures. 5. The right attitude toward
the work.

The following schedule gives the present arrangement of lectures and
talks in the Boston school:

 -----+----------+----------+-------------+----------+---------+--------
      |          |          |             |          |         |
      |  Monday  |  Tuesday |  Wednesday  | Thursday |  Friday |Saturday
      |          |          |             |          |         |
 -----+----------+----------+-------------+----------+---------+--------
      |          |          |             |          |         |
 8:30 |Store     |Hygiene   |Sales slip   |Arithmetic|Sales    |Business
      |discussion|          |             |          | slip    | forms &
      |          |          |             |          |         | cash
      |          |          |             |          |         | acct.
      |          |          |             |          |         |
 9:15 |Salesman- |Outline in|Demonstration|Color     |Outlines |Textiles
      | ship talk| note-book| of sales-   |          |and notes|
      |          |          | manship by  |          |         |
 10:00|Notes     |Lecture   | selling in  |Color     |Lecture  |Textiles
      |          |          | class       |          |         |
      |          |          |             |          |         |
 11:00|Spelling  |Notes     |Notes on     |Spelling  |Review of|Notes
      |English   |          | sales       |English   | Lectures|
      |          |          | observed    |          |         |
      |          |          |             |          |         |
 -----+----------+----------+-------------+----------+---------+--------

The New York experiment is of more recent date, and has shaped itself
differently. Its beginnings in the fall of 1908 are due chiefly to the
efforts of Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, who persuaded the officers of the
board of education to introduce a class in salesmanship in the public
night schools, and to Miss Diana Hirschler, formerly welfare secretary
in Wm. Filene’s Sons Co. of Boston, who conducted the class. The class
was intended primarily for saleswomen already at work who wished to
equip themselves more thoroughly. The first night there was not a
single enrolment, but as news of the course spread, the attendance
reached an average of twenty-five. This in itself--this attendance
night after night of girls already tired by their work during the
day--is evidence of the strong appeal made by the class.

Unlike most other kinds of industrial training, salesmanship classes
require neither tools nor special equipment. They do require teachers
and a text book. While Miss Hirschler was teaching her classes, she
began writing a text book and making plans for training other teachers
so that the value of the class might be extended to more than could be
enrolled for her instruction. The newly-established New York Institute
of Mercantile Training engaged Miss Hirschler and adopted her plans.
Classes for window trimmers and sign writers were already under way.
To them were added offices and staff for a school of salesmanship. It
was a moot point for a while whether classes for salespersons should
actually be held in these offices, or whether the scope of the work
should be extended to reach the present directors of salespersons,--the
store superintendents who now in so many cases hold morning classes for
sections of their force. This latter course, Miss Hirschler decided,
would be the best one to follow. Whereas by the former plan she might
make more efficient a handful out of the thousands of salespeople in
this one city, by the latter plan she would indirectly be reaching
thousands not only in New York, but in as many other American cities as
had stores to coöperate with her. The essential thing, she felt, was to
train teachers. At present there were few even would-be teachers. While
we were waiting for them, we might use the present situation by helping
to make more efficient the involuntary teachers, the men at the head of
stores who now ineffectually seek to grapple with the difficulties of
their selling force.

Accordingly a correspondence school was started for store
superintendents. While the general outline of the text book is
followed, this course is adapted individually to each student. In a
number of cases Miss Hirschler has visited the stores, personally
looked over the situation, and made suggestions as to the organization
of salesmanship classes, the selection of applicants, and the best
methods of securing the coöperation of the salespeople. Enrolled in her
course are store superintendents from New England, the South and the
far West. Each one of these men is in turn reaching hundreds, sometimes
thousands of salespeople.

The next step neither Miss Hirschler nor we who are the consumers can
prophesy with certainty. Yet it seems reasonable to expect that in
time store officials, who at best can give only a small part of their
time to teaching their employes, will wish to be relieved of this task
by professional teachers of salesmanship who, like other vocational
teachers, give all their time to their work. By that time we shall have
passed out of the period of experimentation. We shall have reached a
point where we can say with definiteness what part of the student’s
time should be spent in the study of textiles, what part in the study
of color and design, what part in the study of applied psychology. We
shall have reached a conclusion as to the relative value of lecture
work and practise selling.

Selling goods may thus have become as definite and recognized a
vocation as plumbing or dressmaking. Thus defined and established,
this vocation which could have been taught in the beginning only by
the faith and courage of private interests, may come to its own by
recognition among the vocational day courses now being started in our
system of public instruction.


FOOTNOTES:

[34] _The Art of Retail Selling_, by Diana Hirschler. New York
Institute of Mercantile Training, 1909.

[35] _Training for Saleswomen_, by Lucinda W. Prince. _Federation
Bulletin_, February, 1908.




THE EDUCATION AND EFFICIENCY OF WOMEN[36]

EMILY GREENE BALCH

Wellesley College


Women in modern production are a misfit. They are like the dog that
puzzled the expressman in the classic story. “_He_ don’t know where he
wants to go, and _we_ don’t know where he wants to go; he’s eat his
tag.”

Is not this sense of misadjustment, of being astray, due to the fact
that, industry being arranged to meet its end of private profits, human
nature has to adjust itself as best it can to industrial conditions,
instead of industrial conditions adjusting themselves to human nature?
The troubles that result from this system make themselves felt
everywhere, among men as well as women, but most seriously among the
weakest competitors, and especially among wage-earning children and
women.

My subject is education and efficiency, but I do not propose to go over
the well-worn arguments to show that we ought at once to establish
schools for trade training. It is now pretty generally understood that
this is true. I want to raise a more far-reaching question--can women
be economically efficient in production, production being organized as
it now is?

The lives of both men and women have certain permanent aspects;
whether in the stone age or in the twentieth century they must rear
their descendants, they must between them produce material support for
themselves and for the growing generation, they must lead their own
personal lives and feed and discipline and “invite” their own souls and
minds. There is always this trinity of their racial, their economic,
and their inner life.

But while both men and women have this three-fold function, the
differences in their racial life involve far-reaching economic
consequences. Motherhood is an occupation as fatherhood is not, and
this deeply affects woman’s industry. Even in the primitive world,
where industry is largely a household matter for all, woman’s activity
is bound to the hearthstone more closely than man’s, for the bearing
and rearing of children is intertwined with all her other business,
and conditions it. This makes housework with all its ramifications and
outlying branches the great feminine profession throughout the ages.

Consequently when industry, passing from the control of the worker
to that of the owner of the business, assumed its modern specialized
form and took work and workers out of the home into the factory and
workshop, this change, carried out with no regard for the results on
the workers themselves, affected the lives of women in ways which are
not paralleled in those of men. Besides other consequences, it greatly
lessened woman’s efficiency both as mother and as worker.

Under the old régime there was an effective unity in women’s lives, an
organic harmony of function with function. The claims of motherhood
and of work upon woman harmonized, because she herself was in control
and arranged the conditions of her industry to fit her duties and
disabilities as wife and mother. For herself and for her household
she planned the various tasks with a view to strength, convenience
and training for development. Besides the unity of motherhood and
industry, there was unity of education and industry, of preparation and
practise. The girl was essentially an apprentice of the housekeeper,
whether mother or mistress. Her lessons were indistinguishable from
her labor. From a little child she was working as well as learning,
and also till she was at the head of her own home she was learning as
well as working. Read Solomon’s description, or even better, Xenophon’s
charming sketch in his _Economicus_, for a picture of feminine
household industry on a rather large scale. We need not conceive this
stage as ideal. The point is that there was a natural adjustment of
work to worker which modern industry undermines in three ways--in
separating work from the home, in separating work from education, and
in shaping the conditions and concomitants of work without regard to
the powers, tastes, or needs of the workers.

Before endeavoring to analyze these effects let us consider various
types of modern women in whose lives all the different difficulties
interact, shaping their fate, too often, in most strange and
inharmonious fashion.

First let us take the professional woman. If she leads a single life
she cuts the Gordian knot of the incompatibility of work and marriage.
This is simple, certainly, but quite abnormal. While it is doubtless
a happy solution in many cases, it is certainly undesirable that
large numbers of women should adopt it, especially if we may suppose
that a class of celibate professional women withdraw from the race
the inheritance of some degree of picked intellectual ability. It
has been argued, by Sidney Webb if I remember rightly, that the rule
disqualifying married women for public-school teaching tends to keep
a selected group of women out of marriage; a practical exclusion from
marriage of women who succeed in medicine, law, architecture, art and
business would be, from this point of view, at least an equally serious
loss as regards quality if not quantity.

If a woman is able to combine professional activity with marriage and
motherhood, as some have been so brilliantly successful in doing, this
is because professional work is often more like the old housework than
is factory work as regards elasticity and the possible adjustment of
time and amount of work to personal convenience.

As our second group let us take well-to-do married women who command
domestic service and nursery assistance. Such a woman has the maximum
of freedom in ordering her own life, yet, even so, under the mould
of the general situation, how chaotic her life history is likely to
be. Suppose that she is at a finishing school till she “comes out”
in society, or that she goes to college and at twenty-two comes home
again to live, not choosing a professional career. Although she is only
half conscious of the situation she practically waits for a few years
to see whether or not marriage is to be her lot. Probably her natural
mates are not yet financially able to offer marriage, and, again, more
or less conscious of her rather humiliating situation, she becomes
seriously and definitely interested in some specialized activity. By
distinct preparation or simply by practise she fits herself for the
work that she has found to do; then, just as she is well engaged in
this work, the critical moment arrives and she marries. For some years
her profession is motherhood, though this is the last thing for which
she has thought of fitting herself; and then again her life takes a new
turn. Her children are no longer children; they are at college or at
work or married; or her daughter at home, perhaps without liking to say
so, yearns to be intrusted with the home administration, for a while
at least. Whether or not the mother resigns any of her housekeeping
duties, motherhood is no longer a business that fills her days and
gives adequate employment to her powers; again she seeks for occupation.

Such women, with the unmarried women of leisure, make the most
disposable force in our society, but one very variously disposed. Some
of them, the spenders, live purely parasitic lives, absorbing the
services of others and consuming social wealth without rendering any
return. Others, at the opposite extreme, perform work that is unpaid
and that could not be paid for, work that demands experimentation,
initiative and devotion. The work of a man or woman who combines
with the chance gift of economic freedom the chance gift of genius
consecrated to service--the work of a Charles Darwin, a William Morris,
a Josephine Shaw Lowell, or a Jane Addams--is a pearl beyond price,
but probably common people (that is, most of us) work better under a
reasonable degree of pressure.

Our next social class is the married women who do their own work, as we
say. For them life retains in the main its primitive harmony, except
that they are less likely than women of old to come to their life
work adequately prepared to carry on a household on the highest plane
practicable with the resources available under contemporary conditions.

Our last class is the working women. The woman who does her own work is
not, in the curious development of our phraseology, a working woman,
though we may believe that the mother of a brood of children for whom
she cleans, cooks, sews, washes and nurses does some work. On the
other hand, the working woman is not, in our common phrase, occupied
in “doing her own work,” and truly, the work at which she is set might
appear to be almost anybody’s rather than hers, if its unsuitability
to her needs and powers is any criterion. While her school, however
imperfect it may have been, was designed to meet her needs, was
administered with the object of advancing her interests, her workshop,
on the contrary, seeks quite a different end--the owner’s profits. If
she prospers or suffers through its conditions, that is a wholly alien
consideration. The work is not her own, both because the product is not
hers and because the conditions under which the work is carried on have
no relation to her needs.

The education of the girl who is to enter industry generally fails as
yet, however well intended, to fit her effectively for her working
career. Most working girls, indeed, leave school at fourteen, when they
are in any case too young to be efficient. Then come the proverbial
wasted years of casual and demoralizing employment, till at eighteen
or so the young workers find their footing and for five years, it may
be, rank as working women. Then to most of them comes marriage. They
entered industry untrained, now they enter married life untrained, if
not unfitted, for such life, and at a less adaptable age than earlier.
To a considerable extent the economic virtues of the factory are
virtues that the girl cannot carry over into her housework, and its
weaknesses are weaknesses that lessen her success as wife and mother.
Industry tends to unfit her for home making if it tends to make her a
creature of mechanical routine, unused to self-direction, unplastic,
bored by privacy and not bored by machine monotony; if it accustoms her
to an inapplicable scale and range of expenditure which assigns too
much money to clothes (which are necessary to the status and earning
power of the worker as they are not to mothers and children) and too
little to adequate nourishment which, important to the adult, is
fundamental to the health of children. Worst of all, the employments
of working women tend, as has now been shown, more commonly and more
seriously than has been at all generally understood, to unfit women,
nervously and physically, for bearing children.

When we try to disentangle the confusions illustrated in these varying
types of lives we see that one of the main causes of trouble is the
fact that modern industry is largely incompatible, while work lasts,
with the functions of wife and mother or that at least it militates
against them. We have seen some of the ways in which this simple fact
of the incompatibility of two fundamental functions distracts and
deforms women’s lives.

A result of this divorce of industrial and married life is the fact
that it is impossible to predict whether a given girl will spend her
life in the home or in the working world, commercial, industrial or
professional, and that consequently she commonly fails to prepare
for either. We have indeed some professional training, some business
training, and are just beginning to have some trade training; training
for the home vocations has hardly got commonly beyond some cooking and
sewing in the grades--most desirable as far as it goes. In Utopia,
I dare say that every girl when she becomes engaged to be married,
receives, besides her general education and her trade training,
six months of gratuitous and compulsory vocational preparation for
homemaking, and that this training for the bride, and a course in
the ethics and hygiene of marriage for both bride and groom, is
there required before a marriage license can be issued; moreover, I
imagine that there every woman expecting her first child is given a
scholarship providing instruction and medical advice for some months
before and after the child is born, the conditions depending upon
individual circumstances. In the real world some of our grossest evils
are related to the lack of preparation for the most vital relations of
life. Uncertainty as to her vocation not only prevents a girl’s being
trained for either household or industrial life, but it makes her a
most destructive element in competitive wage earning. She does not care
to make herself efficient in industry, for she hopes soon to marry, and
meanwhile the semi-self-supporting woman drags down the pay of women
wholly dependent on their own earnings and also that of men, perhaps
including that of the man who might marry her but cannot afford it,
thus increasing the chances against her in the lottery of marriage.

While this conflict between the call to industry and the call to
marriage confuses women’s lives but not men’s, the divorce of education
from practise is much the same for men and for women both in its
grounds and in its results. And first as to the causes.

Industry being organized by the employer for his own purposes, the
worker is regarded simply as a means to the commercial end of maximum
cheapness of production. This cheapness is attained, or at any rate has
been commonly supposed to be attained, by the maximum of specialization
and the maximum of routine and uniformity. The specialization of
functions has appeared to the employer to make any education of the
worker unnecessary and to make it possible to eliminate from the
workshop the costly and troublesome business of teaching the trade,
a policy that has had consequences to industry and citizenship that
we are just beginning to realize. Up to this time the school has
not averted these consequences by creating an effective substitute
for apprenticeship. In the old days it could properly devote itself
to academic branches, and even today, largely as a matter of habit
inherited from those days, schooling continues as a general thing to
have no bearing on the productive labor that the pupils engage in
later, but is wholly general, with the marked defects as well as the
merits of education of this type.

Not only has industrial training thus fallen between two stools, having
been dropped from the workroom and not undertaken by the school, but
the whole program of general education is controlled by the industrial
situation. The routine and uniformity of modern production mean that
the worker must work at the standard pace for the standard number of
hours or drop out. This is less true of piece work, at least in theory;
in practise the worker’s need of money is likely to force the pace and
stretch the hours to the limit of possibility. As regards occupation
it is all or nothing; the employer will not accept workers who cannot
give themselves entire. This is, I think, the element of truth in the
emphasis of socialists on their thesis that the worker sells not his
labor, but his labor power. So children once surrendered to competitive
industry are surrendered altogether and for good--they are absorbed and
exhausted.

Because work is so organized that it is not fit for young people
immature in body and mind and that they are not fit for it, we keep
them out of all real work until we are ready to have them do nothing
but work. And conversely, until they go to work once for all they are
occupied with schooling and schooling only. Consequently life is broken
into great indigestible lumps--first all study, then all work,--into
unrelated phases which fail mutually to strengthen each other. Work and
study ought to go on together, work beginning in the kindergarten years
and education continuing to the end of life or at least so long as the
mind remains receptive.

When boys and girls are needed to help at home while they are getting
their schooling the situation is more natural, and if the child is
not under too much pressure, better. But the child of the tenement or
the fashionable apartment house cannot get this training in helpful
labor parallel with his schooling as does the boy on the farm. So all
work is postponed till school days are over and all schooling stops
when work begins. One result is that some of us are busy teaching
subjects fit only for mature minds to immature boys and girls on the
assumption that they will never have another chance at education. I
was once in a French boarding-school where the pupils learned by heart
critical estimates of classical authors whom they had not read. On my
questioning the practise I was told that though these sentences were
not intelligible now they would recur to the pupils’ minds when in
later life they read the authors in question.

We need to study the psychology of intellectual hunger and the history
of the ripening of the human mind. Surely there should be opportunities
for the mature to study history, economics, politics, natural science,
religion, literature and philosophy,--opportunities, I mean, for
intervals of continuous, intensive study by those inclined to it, not
solely opportunities for weary, sleepy men and women in fag ends of
time to hear lectures or to prepare for examinations.

In work planned as employers have planned it not only is education
eliminated from employment and employment deferred to the close of
the generally meager period of education, but the advantage of the
individual is disregarded in the arrangement of the work, to the great
disadvantage of the worker and the community at large, if not, in the
first instance, of the employer.

One of the effects of this is the waste or misuse of all laborers,
like the married woman or child, who cannot give standard work under
standard conditions. In the work of the school or the household,
which is planned with reference to the worker, there is room for the
delicate, the dull, the special student, the child and the elderly
person. No one is unemployable, no portion of strength or capacity is
unusable. In the factory of the Amana community, which is conducted,
as one might say, on family principles, I was struck by the large
number of really old men at the looms. Those who can no longer endure
the hot work in the hay fields find occupation here, and those who can
advantageously work irregularly for a few hours a day, but not more,
are given the employment that they are fit for and that is good for
them. This capacity to use all available labor power is one reason,
perhaps, why the Amana communists wax richer year by year and hire
outside workers to do much of their hardest work; perhaps, too, it
makes for a happier and longer, because more occupied, old age.

But in competitive employment workers who are below the standard, if
not excluded and therefore wasted, are likely to be forced to conform
to unsuitable hours and working arrangements. Moreover they are likely
to drag down wages and to render more difficult the attempts of the
normal workers to improve conditions. The standard minimum wage, with
provision of “sub-minimum” wage scales for the handicapped, seems the
only device to prevent their destructive effect on wage standards. As
regards children, society adopts the policy of complete withdrawal from
industry, not because it is good for a child to spend all his time in
schooling, but because, as has been said, industry will not adapt its
routine to juvenile requirements, and precludes almost all chance for
education after work is once entered upon.

As regards married women in industry, the situation is much the same
as the situation with regard to children. They should stay out wholly
because it is disastrous to the family for them to go in wholly and
unreservedly, because their subsidized competition is likely to be
injurious, and finally because the conditions of work are apt to be
ruinous to their health. And yet for women after marriage to abstain
from all employment outside the household is often wasteful and
altogether undesirable. If married women could work some hours a day,
or some days a week, or some months a year, or some years and not
others, as circumstances indicated (as they conceivably might do under
a more elastic and adaptable organization of employment), and if they
could do so without damage to wage standards or workshop discipline,
it would seem advantageous, in more ways than one, for them not to
drop out of industry at marriage. Both marriage and employment might
become sufficiently universal to make it usual to train every girl
for both, at least in a general way. If marriage did not appear to
girls (quite fallaciously in most cases) as a way of getting supported
without working, their interest in increasing their earning power
would be greater; if wives were normally and properly contributors in
some degree to the money income of the family, marriage would be more
general and, above all, earlier, especially if the giving of allowances
to mothers, of which Mr. Wells dreams, ever came into practice.

All this troubling of the waters of life is so familiar that it is
perhaps not possible for us fully to appreciate or understand it.
The conditions can doubtless be much ameliorated, but no reforms can
make right a system that sins in its foundations. As has been said,
the system sins because it puts production before people, with the
results, so far as women are concerned, that we have seen. Two of the
fundamental parts of their activity are made almost incompatible, so
that we have unmarried workers and unworking wives, and workers and
wives alike untrained because of the paralyzing uncertainty of the
future. Moreover, men and women alike suffer from the separation of
education and work, which makes work dull and education unreal and
gives to the boy and girl more lessons than they can digest and to the
man and woman too few; they both suffer also, if not equally, from the
industrial system which shapes all the conditions of industrial life to
ends extraneous to the welfare of the workpeople.

That our lives are made thus to fit the convenience of industry, not
industry to fit the convenience of human lives, is historically
explicable and even justifiable. So long as there is difficulty in
getting the bare necessities of living every other consideration
must give way. The overriding object must be the amount of product,
not comfort or development by the way. Health and happiness are
then a necessary sacrifice to mammon. They are luxuries which the
poverty-stricken do not afford themselves. Moreover, to do things
pleasantly, or even to do them in the way that is most economical
and effective in the long run requires not only capital but a social
direction of capital that can be the fruit only of a long and painful
evolution. Because our industry is conducted piecemeal by dividend
hunters it is carried on, if we regard it as a whole, in a near-sighted
and extravagant way. Above all, it wastes talent and physical stamina,
beside devastating the private happiness of employes, and nowhere is it
more uneconomical than in its use of women’s strength and capacity and,
above all, in its wastage of her health.

We are just on the eve of being socially conscious enough to perceive
these things and prosperous enough to afford a different policy. Is it
insane to hope that in the fulness of time industry will be so arranged
as to advance human life by its process as well as by its produce; to
hope that we shall have, as one might say, a maternal government acting
on the principles of the mother of a great and busy household who makes
education and work coöperate throughout, who cares for her family
and economizes and develops their powers and makes their complete
welfare her controlling object? My contention is that while we cannot
make women efficient in any complete sense under conditions which so
militate against their efficiency, we can make them less and less
inefficient as we shape education to that end, and as we get increasing
control of industrial conditions in the interests of human life in its
wholeness.


FOOTNOTES:

[36] A paper presented at the meeting of the Academy of Political
Science, December 3, 1909.




STANDARDS OF LIVING AND THE SELF-DEPENDENT WOMAN

SUSAN M. KINGSBURY

Simmons College, and Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, Boston


An investigation of the cost of living may look ultimately toward
minimum wage laws, or it may aim at the creation of opportunities
for industrial education which shall result in ability to earn a
certain desired wage; but the immediate object of all such study is to
determine a desirable standard, and every consideration of the cost of
living is prefaced by a discussion of the importance and difficulty of
fixing standards. The method must be to discover what expenditure the
average family or individual under normal conditions finds actually
necessary; but heretofore essential study of the habits and needs of
self-supporting women has been lacking.

The following significant differences between wage-earning women and
men have become apparent from an examination of census returns and a
study of more than a thousand working women in and around Boston, in
connection with the promotion of savings-bank insurance:

1. A large majority of wage-earning women are under thirty years of
age. In our cities the average age is below twenty-five.

2. The larger part are living at home, or in the families of relatives,
friends or acquaintances.

3. A very large proportion of those living at home turn in all their
earnings to the family purse and receive back only so much as is
necessary, without knowing whether their contribution is above or below
the expenditure on their account. The young men of the family, on the
other hand, are not expected to contribute to the family income, unless
it be to pay board.

4. A woman is not usually responsible for the support of a family, nor
is she looking forward to the carrying of such a burden.

5. She often has obligations for the full or partial support of
members of the family, but these obligations decrease or cease as she
grows older.

6. She enters a gainful occupation with a different point of view from
that of a man. It may be that she has obligations to meet, or it may be
that she is a “pin-money girl”; but in most cases she is not looking
forward to continuous self-support.

How, then, is the standard for women to be set? To attain a certain
standard they may spend much less money, or with a given expenditure
they may reach a much higher standard than would be the case if their
conditions and outlook were the same as men’s. On the other hand, the
obligations resting on women may be, and often are, much greater than
the demands on men of similar age. The income necessary to maintain
a given standard of living may therefore be much less than we should
anticipate, or it may be much greater. One thing seems evident--that
the burdens will probably decrease rather than increase. Therefore
the necessity for advancement and the responsibility for saving is
recognized neither by the worker nor by the public.

These difficulties make intensive investigation the more essential, in
order to discover the actual present cost of living of self-dependent
women and to find out the significance of variations in this cost.
Modern tendencies to reduce wages to the minimum cost of living or to
force them up to meet the demands of increasing luxury may mean too
serious results to permit of continued ignorance. The danger of setting
the standard according to the needs of one group, thus working injury
to another, must be averted.

The studies upon which this paper is based fall into two groups. One,
of college graduates, members of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae,
mostly teachers (317 in number), is easiest to interpret, because it
is the result of study by persons of the same class or thoroughly
conversant with the needs of that class.[37] The material for this
study was secured from schedules filled out by 413 women, who are
graduates of about forty colleges, and who are at present residing
in almost every state in the union. It is furthermore representative
in that it includes women whose homes are in large, medium and small
towns, and whose experience ranges from one to forty-one years of
service.

The other two studies are of women engaged in industrial and commercial
pursuits. One of these is the result of a year’s experience in
preaching the gospel of saving to thirteen hundred women through
savings bank insurance.[38] The women are engaged in unskilled
industries such as laundering, in the semi-skilled industry of
making knitted underwear, and in the skilled industry of straw-hat
manufacture. Naturally in this study the cost of living is approached
through a consideration of ability or inability to save. Savings should
of course be included as a necessary part of living expenses, and where
pay is insufficient to make saving possible, the wage received is
certainly not a living wage. The general responsibility for the support
of the family, whether the girl is living at home or boarding, the
tendency to give all earnings to the mother, the effort to save and its
success or failure--all these conditions are portrayed in this study.

The most important contribution, however, is that which comes from the
research department of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union,
through its fellow, Miss Louise Marion Bosworth,--a study commenced
under Miss Mabel Parton, director.[39] This study by Miss Bosworth
contains a discussion of the general economic history, the income, and
the expenditures for rent, food, clothing, health, savings, and other
purposes, of four hundred fifty working women, thirty of whom kept
account books for Miss Bosworth for a year or more, and two hundred
twenty of whom Miss Bosworth interviewed personally. One hundred fifty
were interviewed by Miss Jane Barclay, a fellow of the department, and
fifty by other research fellows. Miss Bosworth’s study deals with
three hundred fifty women living independently, and presents also the
standards of one hundred living at home. The Women’s Educational and
Industrial Union, working for the betterment of industrial conditions
among self-supporting women by both direct and indirect educational
methods, has unusual opportunities for continuous study of the actual
expenses and the standards of living of such women, together with the
effect of those standards on their efficiency.

A study of the budgets of self-dependent women has a twofold
object: first, to enable the public to know in how far women are
self-supporting; and second, to discover what income is required to
make a woman self-supporting. In other words, such study should show
what income is necessary for each group in order to maintain and
increase its efficiency. Merely to state that a certain number actually
live on a certain income is to neglect the essential question of how
they live. The less educated woman cannot be expected to use the same
ability in spending as her more highly trained sister; nor can the
latter be satisfied with the taste of the less educated woman. The
average demands of the average woman in each group must always be kept
in mind.

It may be well first to present briefly the more pertinent conclusions
of the study of professional women, since the general standards are
more familiar to us. The expenditures reported by college women are
arranged in three groups, minimum, medium and maximum. The total
expenditures of the first group range from $550 to $725, in which an
allowance of $200 to $350 is made for “living expenses,” and $150 to
$175 for clothing. A woman whose income is at this minimum cannot
save; it represents the cost of living of an apprentice. The medium
expenditures are from $785 to $1,075 exclusive of savings, and the
maximum $1,225 to $1,750 exclusive of savings. The medium figures
include $300 to $450 for living, and $200 to $250 for clothing; the
maximum, $500 to $700 for living, and $275 to $350 for clothing.

A woman of experience voices the general opinion that the medium
range of expenditure in the teaching profession today is too low for
thorough efficiency; for in such a budget no account can be made of
many of the essentials of life. Thus it omits:

1. Any peculiar demands upon one’s purse through obligations to one’s
family.

2. Expenses of the vacation season like extra board, extra laundry
bills, railroad fares and extra sundries.

3. Expenses which come from social convention and social relations,
such as Christmas, birthday and wedding gifts, even small ones,
occasional lunching with friends, possible college class reunions, and
the like.

4. Expression of one’s esthetic tastes in concerts and pictures.

5. Recreation of any sort during the working year.

6. Miscellaneous trifling but accumulating expenses which are sure to
occur.

At the present time 72% of the women prepared for teaching by college
training are earning the medium salary or less. Grouping this class
by years of experience, salaries do not reach the medium figure until
a woman has been at work ten to fifteen years. If we accept these
expenditures as a standard, then we find only a small proportion of
college women able to attain it. The unfortunate method of determining
necessary expenditure by estimate is well illustrated by the returns
from these college women. The cost of actual living and clothing is
often accepted as covering the essentials; but in fact the items for
incidentals, carfares, professional expenses and sundries sum up
to almost the same amount as the cost of sustenance, especially in
the smaller budgets. Such an allowance would usually be considered
excessive, but a careful review of the items indicates that this
proportion of expenditure for sundries is legitimate.

In addition to this general but important conclusion that the standard
of living based on the returns quoted above is too low in most cases to
secure efficiency, and hence promotion and advancement, the following
significant conditions must be faced by those concerned with the
problem of salaries:

1. To maintain and increase efficiency and earning capacity in the
teaching profession, women must be prepared to give from two to five
years to graduate study.

2. Independent income ought not to be counted on to supplement earned
income.

3. The relation of cost of living to efficiency should be better
understood in order to lead teachers to insist upon advancement, even
at sacrifice of personal preference for locality and conditions of
living.

4. Although there is no prevailing standard of living, and the relation
between expenditure and income or between the various phases of
expenditure does not seem to be set, college women should try to set a
standard as quickly as possible.

In the study of wage-earning girls made by the research department
of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, the cost of living
of girls who reside with their families is considered separately.
Since the aim is primarily to discover the cost of living of the
self-dependent girl, the number of the other class studied is small,
consisting chiefly of immigrant girls and girls in the suburbs earning
a good salary and living at home or with relatives.

On the other hand, the study of the savings bank insurance committee
deals very largely with girls living at home, so that the two studies
supplement each other. The low contributions to the family reported
by Miss Bosworth show that the girl earning three to five dollars
is barely able to live, but her evidence that the higher-paid girl
contributes a larger sum (about four dollars and a half a week) to the
family, and supplements her payments by labor in the home indicates
that she is really self-supporting, because she is living practically
under a coöperative system. What she thus saves over the girl who
spends five or six dollars a week for sustenance results in a higher
standard of living or an opportunity to save. It is doubtless due to
this lower cost of board and room while living at home that the girl
who in Miss Bosworth’s study does not receive a living wage is in
Miss French’s experience able to begin to save. Here, furthermore, is
doubtless the explanation of the fact that while a girl living alone is
generally not able to live on a satisfactory standard under a wage of
nine dollars a week, the girl living at home, or coöperatively, begins
to save on a six to nine-dollar wage.

Taking up simply the woman living alone, we find ourselves confronted
with a study of factory workers, waitresses, clerks, saleswomen and
kitchen workers. A standard of housing is far easier to determine than
one of food. Size of room and location naturally affect rents; but it
is hard to reach satisfactory conclusions concerning number of windows,
sunlight, heat, bathroom accommodations, and number of roommates.
Provision for food is made in the following ways:

 1. Cooking in one’s own room.

 2. Basement dining rooms.

 3. Working girls’ homes.

 4. Meals included for service in restaurants and hotels.

They are presented in order of excellence. “Home cooking” means serious
danger to health; over-fatigue results in cold meals or no meals rather
than expenditure of the energy necessary for preparation. The basement
dining room serving twenty-one meals for $3 is “invariably poor,”
says Miss Bosworth. Strictly speaking, the subsidized working girls’
home should not be considered in a discussion of the standards of
independent working girls. To calculate a “living wage” on such a basis
does injustice to thousands of girls who could not if they would find
accommodation in working girls’ homes.

What standard, then, are these girls able to attain? Miss Bosworth
says: “Between the three, four and five-dollar woman and the next
higher division there is a big increase in food expenditures,
corresponding to the jump in rent found at this same point. Also
corresponding to the rent, the difference between the six, seven and
eight-dollar group and the next higher is less marked. Either, then,
the increase in wage up to eight dollars goes at once into food and
rent, or as is probable, this marks the point of departure from the
intolerably crowded share in a tenement dweller’s home to the perhaps
equally comfortless but more independent room in a lodging house. In
paying the increased amount of room rent the three advantages the girl
on higher wages gains are a room to herself, heat of some sort, and
sunshine. These advantages come to the majority only when the wage
has reached at least $9.” In securing food, the girl on the higher
wage patronizes the $4 dining rooms, which are “so attractive in
appearance, and so adequate in food as to be thoroughly satisfactory.”

The subject of clothing brings at once two great problems. Here
the measure of the standard of living is apparent. A girl may make
sacrifices in room and board without immediate effect upon her
opportunities to secure employment: but a sacrifice in dress may mean
the loss of position--such is the consensus of opinion. The custom
of instalment buying follows as a natural result. It is in the field
of dress that the individual ability of the girl is most apparent.
Innate taste, knowledge of materials, physical strength and opportunity
to hunt bargains, readiness to forfeit sleep in order to get time
to remodel or make clothes--all these things tell. Home and school
training may help raise standards. Miss Bosworth concludes: “The
average working woman, with only the average ability to manage her
wardrobe economically, with the average trade demands on it, and with
the average amount of time for sewing and mending, cannot dress on less
than $1 a week as a minimum, and does not need as a dress allowance
more than $2 a week.” Elsewhere she states: “The severest strain of
providing clothes comes on incomes under $9; when an income of $12 is
reached, the strain is perceptibly lessened.”

Apparently a satisfactory standard--one which affords a room meeting
reasonable requirements, nourishing food, respectable clothing, medical
attendance, and incidentals of simple type, requires a wage of not less
than $9.

I regret that the shortness of space prevents a glance at the
contributions of the working girl to church, charity and the support
of others, or her expenditures for self-education and recreation.
Suffice it to say that the amount which goes for charity, for necessary
incidentals and for education bears a creditable relation to that
expended for recreation.

The savings bank insurance study is most significant in its
confirmation of the inadequacy of a three to five-dollar or even a six
to eight-dollar wage. Even though the girls whose records were thus
secured came largely from the group living at home, it was only in the
nine to twelve-dollar wage group that real savings became possible.

One scarcely dares accept the conclusion suggested by these facts,
that the minimum wage should be not less than $9, there are so many
modifying circumstances. Nor dares one assert that certain sums
represent the “cost of living”, it is so hard to determine a standard
of living. How can we fix the minimum or average of rent? How can
we place a limit on expenditure for food and clothing? How can we
tell how much of inefficiency is due to inadequacy of food, clothing
and shelter, how much to lack of training, how much to youth? All
results thus far obtained are only indicative; intensive scientific
investigation and cautious interpretation are needed to establish
conclusions that shall command general assent.


FOOTNOTES:

[37] See report on “The Economic Efficiency of College Women,” by the
writer of this paper, published in the _Magazine of the Association of
Collegiate Alumnae_, February, 1910.

[38] Miss Davida C. French was director of the savings bank insurance
committee of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, 1909-1910,
under which this study was made.

[39] The results of the investigation will be published this year.
Information with regard to this publication may be secured from the
Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, 264 Boylston St., Boston,
Mass.




A NEW SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT[40]

MARY KINGSBURY SIMKHOVITCH

Greenwich House, New York City


The entrance of women into industry means that they are going out from
the home. Closely related to the new economic status of women is a new
social adjustment to a larger world. I shall not attempt in this paper
to go beyond the consideration of what is happening before our eyes in
New York.

It is very interesting to see how much more concerned people are about
growing boys in great cities than they are about girls. This is really
illogical, for what is happening to girls is happening in a very
special way to the race. Everyone says glibly enough that the position
of woman in any society is an index of that society’s civilization.
This fact seems to be perceived, however, rather as some sort of
bookish generalization than as a subject of social concern, which ought
to be connected with a positive social purpose.

It would be idle to claim that the situation of the young girl entering
industry in New York to-day is in any way socially satisfactory.
It is not. There is a social--or as some prefer to call it,
moral--instability at the present time that is very serious. The purity
of the working girl is under a terrific strain, and it is criminal to
close our eyes to the fact. Those who know this to be the case seem
almost committed to a policy of silence. While they realize the gravity
of the facts, they are also among the sincerest admirers and friends of
the working girl, and they do not want to create the impression that
there is anything inherently debased about this army of youthful women
workers. It would, in fact, be a total misrepresentation to picture the
working girl as in any way different from any other girl. She is, of
course, the same sort of person as the society girl or the so-called
middle-class girl, but her position at just this juncture is a more
difficult one than that of any other young woman, for she is stepping
out from the most old-fashioned type of family into the newest type
of industry. This new social adjustment is just as inevitable as the
economic adjustments that followed the industrial revolution.

The working girl is stepping out of the most intimate, the most
mutually conscious type of family life that exists, that of humble
people. This old patriarchal family has a strength and an intensive
character that other families lack. Exceptions to the type in no way
alter the general rule. The father is an unremitting toiler but his
pleasures are centered in the home and the family. The mother is the
disburser of the weekly income handed to her intact in the Saturday
night envelope. Her power and influence are supreme as long as the
family holds together. The children early absorb the traditional ideas
of the parents undiluted by the variations presented to families of
larger income where tutors, dancing instructors and music teachers
share or supersede the parents’ care. There is thus built up a solid
structure of tradition, interdependence and loyalty with which the
family life of other economic groups cannot compare. This structure,
seemingly almost absolutely firm, is undergoing under modern city
conditions a strain never met before, and the family is not holding
its own. What cause is at work to alter the ancient type? Undoubtedly
the breakup is a byproduct of the industrial revolution. Many of the
old duties and opportunities of women have been taken from them. The
introduction of a greater variety of diet involving less cooking, the
greater simplicity in decoration involving less cleaning, the communal
care of garbage, the central system of heating and lighting, the
cheapness of ready-made clothing, all these changes have lessened the
burden of housework and to a certain extent have freed the housewife
from drudgery. The care of children is increasingly being taken over by
the community with its kindergartens, its public schools, its parks,
its recreation centers, its nurses and its hospitals. Thus while
the woman is still the dominating figure in the home, the center
of gravity of that home so to speak has shifted; and we find the
life that was once that of the home is now that of the community as
well. It is the old process of differentiation from the homogeneous
to the heterogeneous. It is because there is less to do at home that
the children must of economic necessity find their life outside. The
daughter who would once have stayed at home to help with the children
now becomes the public school teacher and helps many children. The
daughter who would once have made the clothes of her sister is now
making the clothes of other sisters at the dressmaker’s or in the
factory.

The entrance of women into industry is an act of necessity. Women
have in the beginning gone to work in factories and in shops and in
all occupations outside the home, not from choice but because the
industrial revolution has so altered the conditions of life that
such a departure from the home was rendered inevitable. Woman has
entered industry half-heartedly. She is not work-conscious as she is
home-conscious. The old home tradition remains with her as a powerful
sentiment. Her interest is the home. She expects to return to a home
life of her own. Industrial work is a mere interlude. It is this work
interlude that is so fraught with danger from the very fact that it
is a makeshift. It is still unrelated to the deepest conscious or
unconscious purpose of the girl.

When we say the New York working girl whom do we mean? We mean to a
certain extent the American girl, _i. e._, the girl who has drifted to
New York from up state or from other states. Such girls are homeless
here. The difficulty is not the inadequacy of home life, but its
absolute lack. For these girls some substitute must be provided. But
the great bulk of girls in industry in New York are not American, but
Irish, Jewish, and last of all, Italian. Taken as a whole, it cannot
be said that the Irish girl’s entrance into industry has corrupted her
as a woman. Surrounded by temptation, keenly enjoying pleasure, the
Irish girl yet possesses that combination of reserve, good taste and
self-possession that protects her more surely than any mere parental
inhibition. But in addition to the protection of the family, she enjoys
the aid of religion, which constantly inculcates the preservation of
purity. The Irish girl is a religious girl, a devoted Catholic. Ever
before her is a picture of the ideal woman, Mary the Mother of God.
“Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and in the hour of
death,” is said daily by thousands of Irish girls before they go to
work and before they lie down to sleep. Mechanical as this may often
be, it is a mental habit as strong as a physical habit. And habits
serve as a prop to the will when stress comes. It would be near the
truth to say that whatever the reason,--Catholic training, native
chastity, an inborn sense of restraint and good taste, or all these
together, Irish girls form but a small element of the group of women
workers in danger of corruption.

This danger is more intimately connected with Jewish and Italian girls.
The Jewish girl comes from a protected and highly developed family
life. She also has been brought up in a great traditional religion as
her spiritual environment. But the orthodox Jewish religion, though
fundamentally social in character, is often apperceived as merely a
racial custom. The Jewish ideas of the family and of religion are
so intimately connected that the child who is ceasing to be held by
one will not be held by the other. In this respect there is a great
difference between the Catholic and the Jew. The Catholic girl thinks
of her religion as greater than anything else, including the family;
the Jewish girl thinks of her religion as part of her family life, to
stand or fall together with it. Moreover, though in both religions man
is priest--in one as head of the church and in the other as head of
the family--yet in the Jewish religion there is nothing corresponding
to that devotion to the Virgin which naively and almost hypnotically
involves an unconscious idealism of womanhood. The Jewish girl also,
while perhaps not personally so proud as the Irish, is in many ways
more ambitious and purposive. She desires to have all that the world
offers. This purposive characteristic, so noble if devoted to high
ends, and so dangerous if directed to pleasure alone, is seen more
evidently in the Jewish girl than in any other.

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:

[40] 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.

In our textile manufacturing states the men (though a minority of
employes in the industry) have succeeded in so bringing to bear their
trade organizations and their votes as to obtain legal restrictions
upon the working hours of women in industry. For married women the
net result of this palliative measure has, however, proved largely
illusory. Every shortening of the working day tends to be followed by
speeding up of the machinery to keep the output as large as before, or
by a cut in wages due to reduced output if no change is made in the
speed. Now married women, particularly when mothers of young children,
are inevitably the least organized and self-defending part of the
adult working class. And they have, in fact, suffered both speeding up
and the worst rates of wages in their branches of industry. Thus the
numbers of married women enabled to continue in industrial employment
without breaking down have not necessarily been greatly increased by
our one attempt at legislation in behalf of their health.

Because we have never observed or recorded the facts in relation to
the industrial work of married women we have no statutory provision
for rest before and after confinement, yet many textile manufacturing
communities have their body of knowledge (common and appalling
knowledge) of children born in the mill, or of mothers returning to
looms or spinning frames when their babies are but three or four days
old.

Those industrial nations which scorn the fool’s paradise gather the
facts, face the truth, and act upon it. Thus Bavaria, which accepts
as inevitable the factory work of mothers of young children, began in
1908 to encourage employers to establish nurseries in the mills and
permit mothers to go to them at regular intervals. The government
voted 50,000 marks for payment to physicians and nurses who supervise
the nurseries. The avowed object of these institutions is to reduce
the disease which has ravaged bottle-fed babies left to the care of
neighbors and of older brothers and sisters. In Italy, also, for
several years employers have been constrained by law to give to mothers
regular intervals for nursing their babies.

Fourteen nations of Europe, and the state of Massachusetts, have
abolished night work by women in manufacture. This is obviously a boon
to working mothers.

For the protection alike of the community and the workers, England,
Germany, Austria and New York state have all been vainly striving for
twenty years to devise legislation which would minimize the evils
attending homework, yet would not abolish it. During this effort the
tenement houses licensed for homework in New York City alone have
reached the appalling number of twelve thousand.

In England a long agitation has resulted in the enactment of the
trade boards law, in force since January 1st, 1910, providing for the
creation of minimum wage boards and the establishment of minimum wage
scales. How effective this may prove time alone can tell.

Several lines of action are clearly desirable and possible:

1. There must be a body of knowledge which we do not yet possess as to
the number of married women at work and the industries which employ
them, and this must be kept up to date from year to year. Why have the
federal and state bureaus of labor statistics hitherto neglected this
inquiry?

2. Such laws as are already in force against deserting husbands and
fathers can be more rigorously enforced than is common at present, and
their scope can be widened.

3. Orphans and widowed mothers of young children can be pensioned and
removed from the labor market. This is the most useful palliative yet
attempted.

4. The lives and working careers of husbands and fathers can be
prolonged by prevention of accidents and disease. Effort in a large way
to this end is only now beginning.

5. Those legislative measures which make work more endurable for all
women (such as the obligatory provision of seats) can be promoted with
especial reference to the urgent needs of married women.

6. A campaign of education among philanthropists can be carried on to
induce them to cease from their cruelty to widows and deserted wives,
and to lead them to imagine how any one of themselves would feel if she
had to work all day in a mill or factory or laundry and then gather her
babies from the day nursery for the night.

7. Public opinion can be created in favor of a minimum wage sufficient
to enable fathers to support their families without help from
wage-earning wives.

8. Finally, effort to substitute coöperative work for competitive
work can be promoted. And herein lies the ultimate solution of the
problem of married women’s industrial employment. For it is only in
the coöperative commonwealth that they can find just and beneficent
conditions in which to carry on those industries which were theirs from
the foundation of human life.




THE ECONOMICS OF “EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK” IN THE SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK
CITY

JOHN MARTIN

Board of Education, New York City


For some time the Interborough Association of Women Teachers in
New York City has conducted a vigorous agitation under the banner
“Equal pay for equal work”. This motto has won wide acceptance. Taken
literally “Equal pay for equal work” is self-evidently just and
reasonable, and persons or governing bodies who oppose it are put on
the defensive. But in connection with the schools the phrase is not to
be taken literally.

It is a factory phrase. For manual workers equal pay for equal work is
embodied in the piece-work system, a system generally preferred when
the work is of a routine character and when the output of each worker
under exactly the same conditions can be measured with precision. A
fixed piece price is paid for spinning a yard of cotton, for cutting a
dozen coats, for rolling a ton of steel, for making a gross of paper
boxes, for stitching a score of shirtwaists. Though in fact men and
women rarely perform the same process, even when they work in the same
factory, yet the pay per unit is fixed regardless of the age, sex,
color, or competence of the worker. There is equal pay for equal work.
Superior skill means superior speed and increased output, and pay is
proportioned simply to output.

But nobody has ever found a satisfactory way to measure the output of
a teacher. In England one way has been tried. In the early seventies,
when the public schools were made in part an imperial charge, the
manufacturers, who were dominant in Parliament, were anxious lest the
imperial grants should be so awarded as to encourage laziness among
teachers. Somebody hit on the phrase, “Payment by results.” That
settled the matter. The phrase caught the fancy of men who ran woolen
mills and iron works, men who wanted some rule of thumb by which to
measure whether the nation was getting what it paid for. So every
year an imperial inspector visited the schools and put to each boy
and girl a test in reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on. The exact
number of sums worked without mistake, and of misspelt words in the
dictation exercises, the precise number of errors each youngster made
in reading--all were written down, and the money paid by the government
to help that school was proportioned to those returns.

Sometimes a teacher’s salary consisted of the grants so obtained;
always the teacher’s professional standing and promotion were
determined by these miscalled “results.” In consequence the teacher
who was most cruel, who kept children late in school, who sacrificed
most relentlessly the finer parts of education, who drove the helpless
youngsters at the bayonet’s point, as it were, who wasted no precious
moments in merely training the faculties--that teacher got the most
money and the most rapid advancement. To their honor be it said that
the teachers of England for decades combated the hideous system. At
last they convinced legislators that the growth of a child’s mind, the
emanations of a teacher’s spirit, cannot be measured by yard stick or
quart pot, and the system of “payment by results” was relegated to
museums of instruments of torture.

America has been free from any factory method of attempting to gauge
the teacher’s work. Nobody has ever seriously proposed to establish
piecework in schools and so give equal pay for equal work. The battle
cry, like most political catch-words, is inexact and misleading. The
Interborough Association means by the “equal pay” principle the merging
of the salary schedules where the schedules now distinguish between men
and women, so that, whatever other differences of qualification the
schedules take into account, they shall ignore differences of sex in
the teachers.

To determine the economic and pedagogical results which would flow
from the adoption of this principle it is necessary to examine first
the system upon which the existing schedules are constructed. Why are
thirty-one complicated schedules, which group teachers by a variety of
standards, adopted at all? Why is not each teacher judged individually?
Because, in New York, where the army of teachers, instructors,
directors, principals and superintendents numbers 17,073, individual
treatment is physically impossible, and, if it were tried, the schools
would be permeated with politics. Perforce the army is divided into a
few groups and the members of the same group are paid upon principles
which ignore their individual differences of quality.

In constructing salary schedules what elements are taken into account?
A number can be detected, of which the chief are: 1. A living wage. 2.
Years of experience or age. 3. Length and quality of preparation for
the work. 4. Responsibility of the duty performed. 5. Total demand upon
the taxpayer which the schedules entail and willingness of the taxpayer
to meet the demand. 6. Adjustment over a long period of the supply of
teachers to the demand.

Consider these elements separately.

1. A teacher is expected from the first month of work to be
self-supporting and to live in a manner befitting the dignity of the
profession. Not simply a bare subsistence, but refined recreation and
continued culture as well as freedom from economic anxiety about the
future are essential to the discharge of the teacher’s high duties.
On what sum can a young person in New York secure these advantages?
That sum must fix the minimum paid even though stark necessity would
force sufficient unfortunates to accept less, temporarily, if less were
offered. For some years the New York minimum has been $600 for the
first year, an amount, as I shall show later, admitted to be inadequate
at present.

2. Normally, by added experience, a teacher for several years becomes
more valuable year by year. Therefore an annual increase of salary is
granted automatically, falling like the rain upon the just and the
unjust, except that the eighth and thirteenth increments are given
only upon satisfactory reports of the teacher’s work. In practice the
increment is hardly ever withheld. But no attempt is made to determine
at what age a teacher reaches maximum efficiency. Maximum salary
for grade work in the elementary schools is reached by women in 16
years and by men in 12 years, not because the men reach their maximum
efficiency more rapidly than women, but because a more rapid advance
to their highest salary has been judged necessary to hold them in the
profession. Probably most men and women are as efficient after five or
six years’ service as they ever become for grade work.

3. A minimum qualification of scholarship, character and experience is
set for all teachers, but the minimum for a teacher of the graduating
class in the elementary schools is higher than for the lower grades and
for the high schools higher than for the graduating class. Therefore
the salaries for these upper positions are also higher.

Even if additional academic preparation be not requisite for teaching
higher grades, it is desirable to have some “plums” in the schools,
that can be given to the pick of the staff for encouragement. Some
breaks in the monotony of equal pay for equal age stimulate a body of
workers to do their best in competition for the “plums.” Therefore
extra emoluments have been given to teachers of the seventh and eight
years.

4. Further, the greater the responsibility the higher the pay.
Principals are paid more than class teachers, superintendents more than
principals.

5. Schedules must be so adjusted as not to make upon the taxpayer a
larger gross demand than he will honor. Quite properly the cost of
education mounts ever higher; but, in any year, there is a maximum
which the taxpayer will allow without rebellion, a highest measure
compounded of his ability to pay, the value he sets upon education and
the influence of the most enlightened citizens upon him. Presumably if
teachers were paid the salaries of ambassadors the highest talent in
the country would be attracted to the profession. But ambassadorial
emoluments, however desirable they might be both for the nation and for
the teachers, are practically unattainable. Taxpayers will not adopt,
thus far, Froebel’s injunction: “Let us live for our children.”

6. Over a long period the supply of teachers of requisite quality
should equal the demand, and salaries that will attract the supply must
be paid. What is the requisite quality? There’s the rub. Examinations
tell only part of the truth; college training cannot make “silk purses
out of sows’ ears.” Only roughly can the expert superintendent tell
whether the quality among ten thousand teachers is as good today
as it was ten years ago. Teaching is an art for which the elusive
quality of personality--the product of heredity, early surroundings,
home influences, native gifts--is as essential as for painting. Of
two painters who have had precisely the same masters and the same
experience, one may produce masterpieces fit for an imperial gallery
and the other daubs fit for a saloon; just so of two teachers of equal
academic training, one may radiate noble, the other ignoble influences.
Who shall measure the personality of the teacher or compass the growth
of the pupil’s intelligence? No radiometer can register the emanations
of a teacher’s spirit, no X-rays expose the buddings of a child’s mind.

When the refined daughters of Massachusetts left the cotton mills of
Lowell and their places were supplied by peasant immigrants who could
not read the “Lowell Offering” which their predecessors published,
the quality of the cotton sheeting did not deteriorate, because the
character of the operator is not embodied in cotton goods. But, should
the same change occur among teachers, the quality of the children at
graduation would inevitably run down; for the teacher’s spirit, partly
reproduced in the children, is the most precious element of their
education. Therefore, no requirement for the schools is more sternly
peremptory than that salaries for teachers shall be sufficient to
attract a high quality of persons.

At this point we encounter the central claim of the Interborough
Association of Women Teachers. For reasons over which the educational
authorities have no control men teachers of as high a personal quality
as women teachers cannot, over a long period, be secured and held for
the same pay. That fact is demonstrated by the present experience of
the high schools.

After extended investigation Mr. Frederick H. Paine says:

 The board of education appointed during the period September 1909 to
 February 1910, 100 men, of whom 22 refused appointment, leaving a
 total of 78 places filled, while 116 vacancies still exist.

 The eligible list now contains 61 names, of all classes, who will
 accept appointment, but, as experience shows, a large proportion
 will not be available by the time appointment here is offered
 them. Examinations for license have been held frequently. The last
 examination, held in November, 1909, added but sixty-four men to the
 lists, a totally insufficient supply.

 Substitutes, an inexperienced teaching force, must be used in boys’
 schools, and only women can be appointed to mixed high schools.

 An inquiry of the deans of various New England and New York colleges
 shows that the number of graduates of those institutions who enter the
 teaching profession has greatly diminished within ten years. At Yale
 University the decrease is from 12 per cent to less than 2 per cent.

 On the average, private schools pay higher salaries to men than the
 public high schools, although paying lower salaries than do the public
 high schools to women, and, accordingly, women are more attracted to
 the public high schools.

It is plain, therefore, that more is involved in the request of the
Interborough Association than the removal of artificial, irritating
distinctions. The recognition of the element of supply and demand
involves the recognition of sex among teachers.

Before examining the effects, economic and pedagogic, which would
follow upon the adoption of the suggestions of the organized women
teachers it must be reiterated that salary schedules, in point of
fact, are not and cannot be constructed in conformity to any abstract
principle. They are necessarily a resultant of many forces, the
best solution of a vexing problem by the authorities, after due
consideration of all the factors. Salaries are settled by the pragmatic
method. Whatever schedules work out best in practice, not so much for
the teachers as for the children, those schedules are most “just,” most
“moral,” most in harmony with the will of the universe.

That the Interborough Association found the problem insoluble upon
ideal principles is shown by the latest schedules which they themselves
have presented for adoption. These schedules maintain all but one of
the elements which appear in the existing schedules; and, even that
one, sex, is acknowledged by the provision that teachers of boys’
classes shall receive $180 a year more than teachers of girls’ classes.
This acknowledgment strips their contention of that moral quality
with which some have endowed it. “A new commandment I give unto you,
that you pay men and women of the same age the same salary” has been
presented as the twentieth century addition to the decalogue. But if
the priestesses who announce this amendment to the moral law themselves
assert that it is harder to teach boys than girls, perhaps educational
authorities are not altogether wicked when they acknowledge that it is
harder to secure boys than girls as teachers, when they grow up.

Neither do the schedules proposed by the Interborough Association, any
more than the official schedules, “provide but one salary for one and
the same position.” On the contrary, under them any position between
the kindergarten and the seventh grade may be filled by teachers with
salaries varying from $720 to $1,515. One teacher of the graduating
class may receive less than a thousand dollars (the scales are not
definite enough to show the exact minimum), another $2,400. Positions
in high schools of exactly the same character and difficulty may
be filled by assistant teachers at salaries varying from $1,300 to
$2,400. The only positions for which the schedules of the Interborough
Association “provide but one salary for one and the same position” are
the city superintendent of schools, the associate city superintendents,
the members of the board of examiners and some directors of special
branches.

If the principle of the same salary schedules for men and for
women were mandatory, either the women’s salaries might be raised
or the men’s salaries reduced. Either process would have palpable
consequences, economic and pedagogic. Consider the results of each
method separately.

1. To equalize the salaries of all women who were teaching in the same
grades as men, with those of the men employed in such grades, in May
1909, would have entailed a cost that year of $7,837,662. But since
that date men who were teaching in grades below the sixth have been
transferred, so that today, it is estimated, the cost would be below
seven million dollars per annum. A large part of that increase would be
of the nature of a “bonus” to the women, a bonus, say some legislators,
no more justifiable than would be an extra price paid for goods by city
officers to women because they were charming.

If the board of education, when appointing new teachers, would save
no money by appointing women in preference to men, it is certain that
the proportion of men appointed, supposing the rates of pay were high
enough to attract men at all, would be much increased. Men would drive
out women just as women when they were cheaper have driven out men.
Most authorities would agree that such a result would be beneficial
to the schools, which sadly need more men; and some approve the dogma
of “equal pay” because they desire such a result. The same result
could be won at much less cost if the board of education determined to
ignore the savings to be made by appointing women and, for the sake of
keeping the virile elements in the school, should appoint under its own
schedules the dearer men.

2. If the salaries of men were reduced so as to conform to the salaries
of women the effects would be considerable.

The cost for teachers would decrease by an amount which nobody has
cared to waste labor in estimating, because nobody imagines that either
the authorities or the men teachers would permit that experiment and
the women teachers would be no more content than anybody else to see
it tried. Naturally they do not wish the “equal pay” principle to be
applied in a way to put no more money into their pockets. Primarily and
properly they seek higher salaries; they would burn no incense to a
dogma which promised them no increase.

The pedagogical results of lowering the schedules for men would be
disastrous, for, unless the standard of quality in candidates were
shamefully lowered, new men would not enter the system and the little
band of 2,099 men teachers who now add the male influence to the female
influence of their 14,974 women colleagues would fast diminish and soon
approach extinction. Then the schools would be entirely feminized, an
outcome so bad that even enthusiasts for economy hardly dare openly
advocate reducing the men’s pay.

Is the agitation of the women teachers, then, altogether unjustifiable
and doomed to be fruitless? Not at all. Already it has had two good
effects.

1. It has called public attention to what Governor Hughes styled
“glaring inequalities” in the salary schedules. Since the schedules
embody the judgment of their builders on a variety of elements, some of
them, such as “personality”, quite impalpable, none of them measurable
with instruments of precision, the schedules can never satisfy every
critic. Always the critic’s judgment of the relative values of academic
scholarship, experience, technical skill and so on, may differ from the
judgment of the authorities. However, the women teachers have convinced
the board of education that the existing differentials between men
and women are generally too heavy. For example, of the teachers in
elementary schools women start at $600 a year and by yearly increments
of $40 go up to $1,240 and men start at $900 a year and by yearly
increments of $105 go up to $2,150. That difference is not demanded by
the circumstances.

But the differences between salaries of teachers of different ages,
which are conspicuous in the schedules framed by the Interborough
Association, are equally flagrant and open to attack. In fact any
schedules which assume that teachers of different ages who are doing
analogous work should receive pay for their years as well as for their
effort are vulnerable to a logician’s spear.

One teacher of two years’ experience may possibly do better than
another twelve years her senior. The younger may have the divine gift
of teaching which comes only by nature; the older be a mere drudge, a
hewer of wood and a drawer of water. Yet the older, under the schedules
of the Interborough Association, would continue to receive a much
higher salary than the younger. That may be proper, and is certainly
unavoidable, but it mocks at logic and at “equal pay for equal work.”

In a large system like New York’s there is always here and there an old
teacher, who though getting the maximum salary, is well known to be
doing the feeblest work. The logic of equal pay for equal work would
require that the salary of such a veteran be pared down to the bone as
is done in manual industries, where, under the piece-work system, no
account is taken of the age of the worker, but relentlessly the older
man or woman is challenged to keep the pace of colleagues in their
prime. When sorrow, sickness or old age weakens the powers nobody
proposes to increase the rates to make up for lessening speed, but the
worn-out worker is thrown aside.

More humanely and with higher logic the worn-out teacher in New York
is retired upon a pension. It is known that old age gradually brings
weariness and ossification, and the veteran, whose strength has
been sucked by successive generations of youngsters, must yield the
leadership, for the good of the service, to the younger generation
that, in Ibsen’s phrase, is “knocking at the door”. One year the
veteran is assumed to be worth the highest salary; the next year she
is pensioned off, as if from one week to the next her efficiency had
dropped from maximum near to minimum. Actually the powers may have been
declining for some years before the teacher’s withdrawal and the strict
logician would object, therefore, to the size of the salary received.
But abstract logic is no guide. Teachers must be paid and pensioned on
pragmatic principles; whatever system works out best for the schools is
most desirable.

2. The agitation of the Interborough Association has forced part of
the public to admit the need for a general increase of teachers’
salaries, an increase which shall be so distributed as to minimize
the inequalities. After the legislature in 1907 had passed a law
embodying the women teachers’ demands and repassed it over the veto
of Mayor McClellan, Governor Hughes in turn vetoed it, but showed
that he thought the schedules should be revised. In 1907 and again
in 1908 a special committee of the board of education, after careful
deliberation, recommended tentative new schedules, which were approved
by the board. In 1908 and in 1909 the board included in the budget
as presented to the board of estimate and apportionment requests for
appropriations which would enable it to put the amended schedules into
effect. Its request was denied.

Altogether the proposed schedules would entail salary increases for
1910 aggregating $2,639,762 to 14,751 women and aggregating $206,215
to 582 men, a total increment, for the first year of operation, of
$2,845,977. Of all the men educators the salaries of 28 per cent would
be raised. Of all the women educators the salaries of 98 per cent would
be raised. The mass of the women teachers would have their salaries
raised about twenty per cent.

This schedule, like all others, is vulnerable at points. Kindergarten
teachers will complain because they are treated less generously than
grade teachers, for hitherto they have been under the same schedule.
But kindergartners have recently glutted the market and one way to
persuade them to prepare for other work, where they are more needed, is
to make their increases smaller.

The Interborough Association of Women Teachers criticizes the proposed
schedules. The salaries of male teachers should not be raised, says the
Association, “because these men are already receiving higher salaries
than women occupying the same position.”

Since no men are employed in the lower five grades, the so-called
principle does not affect the majority of the women teachers, those
who teach these grades. The board, recognizing that their salaries
are inadequate, proposes to enlarge the salaries generously. But the
Interborough Association says in effect: “We will not approve an
addition of $2,639,762 to the salaries of women, because at the same
time you add $206,215 to the salaries of men. We demand that the women
who, being in the majority and now receiving the smallest salaries,
will receive under the board’s schedules all the increases which they
expect, shall forego these increases until the board approves further
increases exclusively for the better-paid women teachers, aggregating
another three or four million dollars.”

So long as the majority of the women teachers, those in the lower
grades, by their silence approve the assumption that they desire to
sacrifice some two million dollars a year for the sake of the abstract
doctrine which their richer sisters propound, so long the board of
estimate, always vigilantly watched by the organized tax payers, will
have a good excuse for keeping things as they are. Why should any
guardians of the public purse incur the dislike of tax payers for the
sake of teachers who show no eagerness for the attainable and promise
neither gratitude nor contentment? The policy of all or nothing is
heroic, but unbusinesslike.

Should the teachers, men and women in harmony, unite with the board
of education in a campaign of enlightenment in favor of the tentative
schedules, perhaps amended in spots, they might convince the tax
payers that the proposed increases are necessary for the following
reasons:

1. The cost of living has notoriously increased since the present
schedules were established, increased by at least the fifteen to twenty
per cent by which the new schedules would increase most salaries.
Therefore, in reality, the teachers who secure increases would be
getting no higher “purchasing power” than the old schedules were meant
to give them. The 1500 men whose salaries would be unaltered, are
peacefully accepting a reduced purchasing power.

2. While at one time teaching was the most desirable work open to
well-educated women in large numbers, the occupations now open to them
are happily increasing. The schools must now compete with commerce,
law, medicine, literature and journalism, for women of the best type.
Unless the schools offer a career as lucrative as the office, the bar
and the desk, the quality of women entering the teaching profession
will deteriorate and the children suffer.

3. For men and women of the same ability the standard of living, in
all classes, is rising. Each year the nation, and especially New York
City, grows richer, luxuries become comforts and comforts necessities.
Everybody, from immigrant to millionaire, expects to live better today
than he did two or three decades ago. Houses, food, clothing, holidays,
culture, travel--the son demands all of better quality than satisfied
the father. Teachers should share this general rise in the standard of
living, or their profession will lose caste, and the rising generation
will lose the influence of teachers who command public respect.

A survey of the whole situation, then, indicates that the cry “Equal
pay for equal work” is as misleading to the teachers, who understand
its import, as to the casual hearer, who takes it literally. In the
latter it arouses false ideas; in the former false hopes. Like a will
o’ the wisp it lures into a morass. Only those who, ignoring its gleam
and earnest to make whatever advance is practicable, march steadily
along the beaten highway, each year come nearer their goal.




WOMEN AND THE TRADE-UNION MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

ALICE HENRY

Editor Woman’s Department, _Union Labor Advocate_ of Chicago.


The story of woman in the labor movement has yet to be written. In its
completeness no one knows the story, and those who know sections of it
most intimately are too busy living their own parts in that story to be
able to pause long enough to play at being its chroniclers. For to be
part of a movement is more absorbing than to write about it. Whom then
shall we ask? To whom shall we turn for even an imperfect knowledge of
the story, at once great and sordid, tragic and commonplace, of woman’s
side of the labor movement? To whom, you would say, but the worker
herself? And where does the worker speak with such clearness, such
unfaltering steadiness, as through her union, the organization of her
trade?

In the industrial maze the individual worker cannot interpret her own
life story from her knowledge of the little patch of life which is
all her hurried fingers ever touch. Only an organization can be the
interpreter here. Fortunately for the student the organization can act
as interpreter, both for the organized women who have been drawn into
the labor movement and for those less fortunate who are struggling
on single-handed. Organized and unorganized workers almost always
come into pretty close relations in one way and another. Besides, the
movement in its modern developments is still so young among us that
there is scarcely a woman worker in the organizations who has not begun
her trade life as an unorganized toiler.

Speaking broadly, the points upon which the trade-union movement
concentrates are the raising of wages, the shortening of hours, the
diminution of seasonal work, the abolition or reduction of piece
work, with its resultant of speeding-up, the maintaining of sanitary
conditions, the enforcement of laws against child labor and other
industrial abuses, the abolition of taxes for power, thread and
needles, and of unfair fines for petty or unproved offenses. A single
case taken from a non-union trade must serve to suggest the conditions
that make organization a necessity. Seventeen years ago in the bag
and hemp factories of St. Louis, girl experts turned out 460 yards of
material in a twelve-hour day, the pay being 24 cents per bolt (of
from 60 to 66 yards). These girls earned $1.84 per day (on the 60-yard
bolt). Now a girl cannot hold her job under a thousand yards in a
ten-hour day. The fastest possible worker can turn out only 1200 yards,
and the price has dropped to 15 cents per 100 yards as against the old
rate of 24 cents per bolt of from 60 to 66 yards. The workers have to
fill the shuttle every two or three minutes, so that the strain of
vigilance is never relaxed. One year is spent in learning the trade,
and operators last only three years after that.

How successful organization has been is well shown by numerous
examples. In the instances which follow, taken from the convention
handbook of the National Woman’s Trade Union League, the advantages
gained in some of the trades apply to all establishments working under
agreement with any and every local union of the national organization.
In other cases the diminution of hours, the increase of wages and
the improvement of conditions are limited to the factories or shops
in certain cities only. Even bearing this qualification in mind,
these gains, following in the train of collective bargaining, are
sufficiently impressive.


SEWING TRADES

In the sewing trades there are many sub-divisions, including such
varied groups of workers as these: home finishers, coat makers,
pants makers, vest makers, shirt, collar and cuff makers, overall
makers, white goods workers, corset makers, shirtwaist makers, skirt
makers, cloak and suit tailors, button-hole makers, lace makers and
embroiderers. All employed in these occupations can belong to one of
the two great national unions, the United Garment Workers of America
and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers. Wherever these unions
control the trade they have abolished child labor, have established
the eight-hour day and in some cities the forty-four-hour week, have
insisted upon sanitary conditions, and have obtained time and a half in
wages for overtime work. The general wage has been increased over fifty
%.


GLOVE WORKERS

In this trade the union has abolished the practice of compelling a girl
to pay for her sewing machine (perhaps $60 for a $35 machine) or else
to rent it at 50 cents a week. Under non-union conditions she has to
buy her own needles and oil, pay 40 cents a week for power, and stand
the cost of all breakages. The organization has abolished all these
causes of complaint, has reduced hours from twelve to nine and eight
and a half, and has established a Saturday half holiday. This union
has been very successful in eliminating the pacemaker as a factor in
controlling the price of piece work, for the price is now determined by
the speed of the average worker, not the fastest one.


BOOT AND SHOE WORKERS

Here the union has increased wages by 40%. Unionized women shoe workers
are entitled when sick to $5 a week benefit for thirteen weeks in
one year. There is also a death benefit of $50, after six months’
membership, and $100 after a two years’ membership. All members are
entitled to $4 a week strike pay.


LAUNDRY WORKERS

In one city organization has reduced the hours of work from eighteen
and twelve (in the rush season) to nine, and has increased wages 50%.
In another city the union has reduced the hours of work from eighteen
and twelve to nine, and has increased wages from $15 a month to $9 a
week minimum and $15 a week average.


BEER BOTTLERS

The work done by women and girls in breweries involves standing all
day. If they are washers they cannot keep themselves dry, and in winter
the open doors keep the great bottling rooms very cold. Broken glass
and exploding bottles are constantly injuring the faces and cutting the
hands of both washers and labelers. In Chicago organization has reduced
the hours from nine to eight. The wages run from $3.50 to $5.50 in
non-unionized establishments. In one city where the girls are unionized
they are paid $7.20 a week and overtime at the rate of time and a half.
Among men this is a highly unionized trade; consequently girls ought
everywhere to have the protection of a common organization.


CIGAR MAKERS

There is a great contrast between union factories and some non-union
establishments. The union has successfully insisted upon good
ventilation, clean floors, walls and toilets, clean paste in little
individual jars (to fasten the ends of the cigars), an eight-hour
day and no child labor. Among all cigar makers the death rate from
tuberculosis is 61% of all deaths, according to government statistics.
Among union cigar makers according to the last obtainable report (1905)
the tuberculosis death rate was only 24%.


ELECTRICAL WORKERS

The electrical workers’ trade is one into which women are coming in
increasing numbers because, as one foreman said, they receive 40% less
wages than men and do 25% more work. This trade is a long way yet from
the ideal of equal pay for equal work, but the union established for
the girls a minimum wage scale of $5 a week at the very first, and
last year this was increased to $6. Hours have been cut from ten a day
to eight and a half on five days of the week and four and a half on
Saturday.


BINDERY WOMEN

It would be vain for an individual girl to go to the foreman or the
manager in a bindery and refuse to use bronze powder for lettering
because it is deadly to the lungs, or to explain that for a girl
to work on a numbering machine with her foot at the rate of 25,000
impressions a day is dangerous to her health. But this is just what
the locals of bindery women through their delegates are explaining
to employers the country over, and employers are heeding them. These
organized girls have an eight-hour day and wages have increased by 35
and even 50%. Sick members get a $3 benefit for thirteen weeks, and at
death a benefit of $50 is paid.


TEACHERS

The teachers of Chicago in the year 1902 could look forward to a
maximum salary in the primary grades of $800, in the grammar grades
of $825. The efforts of their organization, the Teachers’ Federation,
have raised the maximum salary in the primary grades to $1,075 and in
the grammar grades to $1,100, an increase of $275. The money to meet
this additional expense has been found for the board of education
through the successful tax suit promoted by the Teachers’ Federation
itself. Teachers’ pensions are now on a solid basis. The pension fund
is supported by contributions, with a small addition from the public
funds. The fact of having this small addition, whose validity has been
passed upon by the courts, establishes the right of the public school
teacher to a pension from public funds.


MUSICIANS

The American Federation of Musicians has greatly improved conditions
for its membership, which includes women. A non-union player at a
dance gets from $2 to $4 a night and may have to play until daylight.
Not so union players. They can ask $6 until 2 a. m. and $1 for every
hour thereafter. The Chicago and St. Louis locals have established
regulation uniforms for their members, which is a great economy.


VAUDEVILLE ARTISTS

Vaudeville actresses have to be grateful for the safer and more decent
conditions which their mixed union has brought to them. Separate and
sanitary dressing rooms are now to be found in the unionized five and
ten-cent theaters in Chicago. An act which formerly might have had to
be repeated fifteen times, cannot be asked for more than eight times on
a holiday and four times on other days.


WAITRESSES

Unorganized waitresses often have to work seven days a week and
sometimes fourteen hours a day; they have to provide their own uniform
and pay for its laundering. Organized waitresses have a ten-hour day
and a six-day week. Their wages have risen from $5 and $6 to $7 and $8
per week and meals. Their uniforms and laundry expenses are found for
them. They enjoy a $3 sick benefit for thirteen weeks and the union
pays a $50 death benefit.

There are some trades which have been organized and which yet record
thus far no marked improvement in the condition of the workers. This
may be either because the organization has been in existence too short
a time or because of other reasons. Among such trades are sheepskin
workers, badge, banner and regalia workers, human hair workers and
commercial telegraphers. Even in these trades steady educational and
organizing work is proceeding. Moreover the union may have been an
influence preventing further wage cutting, higher speeding up or the
imposition of more overtime.

The trade union is the great school for working girls. There they
are taught the principles of collective bargaining. They learn to
discuss difficulties with employers, free from the rasping sense of
personal grievance. They learn to give and take with equanimity, to
balance a greater advantage against a lesser one. In union meetings
and conferences where they meet on an equality with their brothers it
is the girl of sober judgment, good humor and ready wit who becomes a
leader, and influences her more inexperienced sister to follow her.

The trade union is educating the community as well as the girl. There
is a growing tendency among men and women of the teaching, clerical
and other non-manual occupations to recognize the common interest of
all workers, and to form under one name or another associations to
affiliate with the labor movement. One of the largest of these is
the Teachers’ Federation of Chicago which has now been many years in
existence. More recently stenographers’ and typists’ associations have
been formed in New York and Chicago. The formation of actors’ and
musicians’ associations is additional proof of the same spirit.

The influence upon the whole community of organized insistence upon
human conditions for the worker is marked. Trade-union standards
tend eventually to become the standards toward which all non-union
establishments that claim to treat their employees well voluntarily
approximate. Trade-union standards are the standards up to which decent
non-union employers keep steadily inching along in respect to hours
and conditions of work, and often even in respect to that most crucial
test of all, wages. Trade-union standards are, in short, always tending
to become in the eyes of the public the normal standards in the whole
world of industry. Indeed everywhere the paradox is to be noticed that
the non-union girl benefits remarkably as the result of the existence
of a union in her trade. Under pressure of competition employers
frequently state that their trade will not bear shorter hours or higher
wages. Curiously enough, such statements are much more frequently made
in unorganized than organized trades, and the employers more frequently
act up to their statements.

Unions, furthermore, have an important indirect influence on
legislation. In trade after trade, the benefits of shorter hours
have been gained through organization in states where there was no
legislation and no prospect of it. This is seen in many branches of
the garment-making industry, among waitresses, tobacco strippers,
printers and bindery women all over the United States. A ten-hour day,
a nine-hour day, an eight-hour day, even a forty-four-hour week, for
different bodies of these workers, have been for them the fruits of
organization. These advantages gained, the evidence of workers who
enjoy shorter hours and the experience of employers who conduct their
establishments under a system of shorter hours form the strongest and
most practical argument by which legislators are influenced to consider
the practicability and desirability of the shorter working day.

Trade unions, indeed, cannot beat back the ocean, though they have
been known to think they could. They cannot raise wages beyond certain
limits, though the obstacles that bar further upward movement in a
particular trade may be quite beyond the ken of the wisest in or out
of the labor movement. They cannot always prevent wages from falling,
whether that fall be expressed in actual cash or measured in purchasing
power. International competition, the introduction of machinery, or the
opening of fresh reservoirs of cheaper foreign labor may press wages
down with irresistible force.

But more and more unions ought to be able to lessen the cruel
abruptness with which such changes fall upon the worker. By no known
means can the action of economic forces be prevented, but their
incidence can and should be altered.

Under our present chaotic no-system every mechanical improvement, every
migration of population, the entrance of women into trades followed by
men, or even the paltriest change of fashion in shirtwaists or hatpins,
may bring in its train frightful suffering and destruction of life
and all that makes life valuable, instead of a peaceful shifting of
workers and re-alloting of tasks. All this might be largely prevented.
The right of the worker, for instance, to demand notice when any
great alteration in a factory process is impending would in itself do
much to make adjustment to social changes smooth and relatively easy.
Great suffering unquestionably resulted from the introduction of the
linotype, but it was nothing to what would have been but for the fact
that the printers were a strongly organized body and were able to make
conditions with employers when the machine was first introduced. What
the printers were able to do on a small scale the organized labor
movement ought to be able to do for all workers.

On another side, moreover, the woman trade unionist comes up against
a dead wall. No matter what her standing in her union, no matter how
justly and fairly she be treated by her men fellow workers in the labor
movement, the fact remains that she is not a voter. One hand is tied.
Till she has the vote she can not as a member of the union have the
same influence upon its policies as if she were a man and a voter, nor
outside can her services be of the same value to the union as if she
were enfranchised.

As regards her special needs as a woman, her organization does not
speak for her, nor can she insist that it shall speak for her as it
would do if she were a man. For instance, badly as striking men are
often treated at the hands of the courts, striking women fare worse. It
was not a trade unionist but a suffragist, Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery,
who drew attention to the widely different treatment meted out to the
striking chauffeurs and the striking shirtwaist makers in New York
City, where the offenses with which the women were charged were far
more trivial than those of which the men were accused. Whether it is
in an industrial dispute, in the legislature, or in the courts, that
woman is struggling for what she considers her rights, it is always
political weapons which in the last resort are turned against her, and
she stands helpless, for she has no political weapon wherewith she may
defend herself and press her claim to attention.

If the trade union be the only audible voice of the worker in any
trade, the association of women’s unions known as the National
Women’s Trade Union League is the expression of the women’s side of
the whole trade-union movement of the United States. It has taken
up the special work of organization among women undistracted by the
much larger mass of general field work that falls to men. The idea
of the league originated with William English Walling, who got the
suggestion from observation of the working of the British Women’s Trade
Union League. Their plan was adapted to suit American conditions. The
American league is a federation of women’s trade unions, which admits
also organizations such as clubs and societies declaring themselves
in sympathy with the cause of labor. It has also a large individual
membership composed of trade unionists (men and women) and of other
sympathizers. In this broad basis of membership lies its strength. It
links into bonds of active practical endeavor after better conditions
persons in every class of society, while any tendency to slip into
unreal or unpractical methods is checked by the provision that on all
boards whether national or local a majority of the members must always
be trade-unionist women.

The league platform demands:

1. Organization of all workers into trade unions.

2. Equal pay for equal work.

3. An eight-hour day.

4. A minimum wage scale.

5. Full citizenship for women.

6. All principles involved in the economic program of the American
Federation of Labor.

In both its national and its local organizations the league spends
much of its energy in the adjustment of labor difficulties among
women workers, in giving active assistance in time of strikes and in
presenting actual industrial conditions through lectures and literature
to universities, churches, clubs and trade unions. It presses home the
increasing dangers of industrial overstrain on the health of women,
the necessity for collective bargaining, wise labor legislation and
full citizenship for women. Through its membership, representing many
thousands of working women, the league is able to obtain for the
use of social workers, investigators and students actual first-hand
information regarding the dangers of wrong industrial conditions.

The reasons why such an organization must be more elastic than a body
like the American Federation of Labor, is because of the very different
relation in which women stand to organized industry. The connection
of the great bulk of women with their trade is not permanent. Seven
years is the average duration of women’s wage-earning life. The average
woman unionist is a mere girl. An organization of men, in which mature
men are the leaders and in which the rank and file join for life, has
a solidity and permanence which unaided groups of young girls, groups
with membership necessarily fluctuating, can never achieve.

What more right and fitting then that the maternal principle in the
community as represented by the motherhood of the country should ally
itself with this movement in support of good conditions and happy
lives for the future mothers of the country? This is strikingly put
in Mrs. Raymond Robins’ address as president at the second biennial
convention of the National Women’s Trade Union League: “It has happily
fallen to the lot of the Women’s Trade Union League to have charge
and supervision of the kindergarten department in the great school of
organized labor. It is for this reason that music and merry-making is
so essential a feature of our league work, with books and story telling
and all that makes for color and music and laughter and that leads to
essential human fellowship--a sure foundation for the industrial union
of our younger sisters. We know that we need them; they will later know
how greatly they needed us.”




A WOMAN’S STRIKE--AN APPRECIATION OF THE SHIRTWAIST MAKERS OF NEW YORK

HELEN MAROT

Women’s Trade Union League, New York City.


The usual object of monographs on strikes which appear in economic
journals is to state impartially both sides of the controversy, so
that students and a public more or less remote from labor struggles
may estimate their merits. Such monographs are presentations of
well-defined facts which are reducible at times to mathematical
certainties. They recognize that passionate human feeling has swayed
action on both sides and the endeavor is to lift labor disputes from
the heat of emotion to intellectual consideration. These monographs may
give correct estimates of strikes in industries thoroughly organized
both as to capital and labor. Strikes in such industries are often
the result of bad business management or a slip in judgment on one
side or the other. But the great number of strikes occur in industries
imperfectly organized; the passion or emotion which swings the battle
is as important a factor as is either an extortionate demand for
wages or a flagrant exploitation of wage earners. It is well that the
public shall estimate this strike and that, but to do so it must also
understand the motive forces.

The present article does not attempt to estimate either the moral or
the economic factors in the recent shirtwaist-makers’ strike of New
York, but to lay before the reader some of those motive forces which
may be counted upon in strikes composed of like elements, especially in
strikes of women in unorganized trades.

The shirtwaist-makers’ “general strike,” as it is called, followed an
eleven years’ attempt to organize the trade. The union had been unable
during this time to affect to any appreciable extent the conditions of
work. In its efforts during 1908-9 to maintain the union in the various
shops and to prevent the discharge of members who were active union
workers, it lost heavily. The effort resolved itself in 1909 into the
establishment of the right to organize. The strike in the Triangle
Waist Company turned on this issue.

The story of the events leading up to the Triangle strike as told by a
leading member of the firm practically agrees with the story told by
the strikers. The company had undertaken to organize its employes into
a club, with benefits attached. The good faith of the company as well
as the working-out of the benefit was questioned by the workers. The
scheme failed and the workers joined the waist-makers’ union. One day
without warning a few weeks later one hundred and fifty of the employes
were dropped, the explanation being given by the employers that there
was no work. The following day the company advertised for workers. In
telling the story later they said that they had received an unexpected
order, but admitted their refusal to re-employ the workers discharged
the day previous. The union then declared a strike, or acknowledged a
lockout, and picketing began.

The strike or lockout occurred out of the busy season, with a large
supply at hand of workers unorganized and unemployed. Practical trade
unionists believed that the manufacturers felt certain of success
on account of their ability to draw to an unlimited extent from an
unorganized labor market and to employ a guard sufficiently strong
to prevent the strikers from reaching the workers with their appeals
to join them. But the ninety girls and sixty men strikers were not
practical; they were Russian Jews who saw in the lockout an attempt at
oppression. In their resistance, which was instinctive, they did not
count their chances of winning; they felt that they had been wronged
and they rebelled. This quick resentment is characteristic of the
Russian Jewish factory worker. The men strikers were intimidated and
lost heart, but the women carried on the picketing, suffering arrest
and abuse from the police and the guards employed by the manufacturers.
At the end of the third week they appealed to the women’s trade union
league to protect them, if they could, against false arrest.

The league is organized to promote trade unions among women, and its
membership is composed of people of leisure as well as of workers.
A brief inspection by the league of the action of the pickets, the
police, the strike breakers and the workers in the factory showed that
the pickets had been intimidated, that the attitude of the police was
aggressive and that the guards employed by the firm were insolent. The
league acted as complainant at police headquarters and cross-examined
the arrested strikers; it served as witness for the strikers in the
magistrates’ court and became convinced of official prejudice in the
police department against the strikers and a strong partisan attitude
in favor of the manufacturers. The activity and interest of women, some
of whom were plainly women of leisure, was curiously disconcerting to
the manufacturers and every effort was used to divert them. At last a
young woman prominent in public affairs in New York and a member of the
league, was arrested while acting as volunteer picket. Here at last was
“copy” for the press.

During the five weeks of the strike, previous to the publicity, the
forty thousand waist makers employed in the several hundred shops in
New York were with a few exceptions here and there unconscious of the
struggle of their fellow workers in the Triangle. There was no means of
communication among them, as the labor press reached comparatively few.
In the weeks before the general strike was called the forty thousand
shirtwaist makers were forty thousand separate individuals. So far were
they from being conscious of their similarity that they might have been
as many individual workers employed in ways as widely separated as
people of different trades, or as members of different social groups.

The arrests of sympathizers aroused sufficient public interest for the
press to continue the story for ten days, including in the reports the
treatment of the strikers. This furnished the union its opportunity.
It knew the temper of the workers and pushed the story still further
through shop propaganda. After three weeks of newspaper publicity and
shop propaganda the reports came back to the union that the workers
were aroused. It was alarming to the friends of the union to see the
confidence of the union officers before issuing the call to strike.
Trade unionists reminded the officers that the history of general
strikes in unorganized trades was the history of failure. They
invariably answered with a smile of assurance, “Wait and see.”

The call was issued Monday night, November 22nd, at a great mass
meeting in Cooper Union addressed by the president of the American
Federation of Labor. “I did not go to bed Monday night;” said the
secretary of the union, “our Executive Board was in session from
midnight until six a. m. I left the meeting and went out to Broadway
near Bleecker street. I shall never again see such a sight. Out of
every shirtwaist factory, in answer to the call, the workers poured and
the halls which had been engaged for them were quickly filled.” In some
of these halls the girls were buoyant, confident; in others there were
girls who were frightened at what they had done. When the latter were
asked why they had come out in sympathy, they said; “How could you help
it when a girl in your shop gets up and says, ‘Come girls, come, all
the shirtwaist makers are going out’?”

As nearly as can be estimated, thirty thousand workers answered the
call, or seventy-five per cent of the trade. Of these six thousand
were Russian men; two thousand Italian women; possibly one thousand
American women and about twenty or twenty-one thousand Russian Jewish
girls. The Italians throughout the strike were a constantly appearing
and disappearing factor but the part played by the American girls was
clearly defined.

The American girls who struck came out in sympathy for the “foreigners”
who struck for a principle, but the former were not in sympathy with
the principle; they did not want a union; they imagined that the
conditions in the factories where the Russian and Italian girls worked
were worse than their own. They are in the habit of thinking that the
employers treat foreign girls with less consideration, and they are
sorry for them. In striking they were self-conscious philanthropists.
They were honestly disinterested and as genuinely sympathetic as were
the women of leisure who later took an active part in helping the
strike. They acknowledged no interests in common with the others, but
if necessary they were prepared to sacrifice a week or two of work.
Unfortunately the sacrifice required of them was greater than they
had counted on. The “foreigners” regarded them as just fellow workers
and insisted on their joining the union, in spite of their constant
protestation, “We have no grievance; we only struck in sympathy.” But
the Russians failed to be grateful, took for granted a common cause
and demanded that all shirtwaist makers, regardless of race or creed,
continue the strike until they were recognized by the employers as a
part of the union. This difference in attitude and understanding was a
heavy strain on the generosity of the American girls. It is believed,
however, that the latter would have been equal to what their fellow
workers expected, if their meetings had been left to the guidance of
American men and women who understood their prejudices. But the Russian
men trusted no one entirely to impart the enthusiasm necessary for the
cause. It was the daily, almost hourly, tutelage which the Russian men
insisted on the American girls’ accepting, rather than the prolongation
of the strike beyond the time they had expected, that sent the American
girls back as “scabs.” There were several signs that the two or three
weeks’ experience as strikers was having its effect on them, and that
with proper care this difficult group of workers might have been
organized. For instance, “scab” had become an opprobrious term to
them during their short strike period, and on returning to work they
accepted the epithet from their fellow workers with great reluctance
and even protestation. Their sense of superiority also had received a
severe shock; they could never again be quite so confident that they
did not in the nature of things belong to the labor group.

If the shirtwaist trade in New York had been dominated by any other
nationality than the Russian, it is possible that other methods of
organizing the trade would have been adopted rather than the general
strike. The Russian workers who fill New York factories are ever
ready to rebel against suggestion of oppression and are of all people
the most responsive to an idea to which is attached an ideal. The
union officers understood this and it was because they understood the
Russian element in the trade that they answered, “Wait and see,” when
their friends urged caution before calling a general strike in an
unorganized trade. They knew their people and others did not.

The feature of the strike which was as noteworthy as the response
of thirty thousand unorganized workers, was the unyielding and
uncompromising temper of the strikers. This was due not to the
influence of nationality, but to the dominant sex. The same temper
displayed in the shirtwaist strike is found in other strikes of women,
until we have now a trade-union truism, that “women make the best
strikers.” Women’s economic position furnishes two reasons for their
being the best strikers; one is their less permanent attitude toward
their trade, and the other their lighter financial burdens. While these
economic factors help to make women good strikers, the genius for
sacrifice and the ability to sustain, over prolonged periods, response
to emotional appeals are also important causes. Working women have been
less ready than men to make the initial sacrifice that trade-union
membership calls for, but when they reach the point of striking they
give themselves as fully and as instinctively to the cause as they give
themselves in their personal relationships. It is important, therefore,
in following the action of the shirtwaist makers, to remember that
eighty per cent were women, and women without trade-union experience.

When the shirtwaist strikers were gathered in separate groups,
according to their factories, in almost every available hall on the
East Side, the great majority of them received their first instruction
in the principles of unionism and learned the necessity of organization
in their own trade. The quick response of women to the new doctrine
gave to the meetings a spirit of revival. Like new converts they
accepted the new doctrine in its entirety and insisted to the last on
the “closed shop”. But it was not only the enthusiasm of new converts
which made them refuse to accept anything short of the closed shop. In
embracing the idea of solidarity they realized their own weakness as
individual bargainers. “How long,” the one-week or two-weeks-old union
girls said, “do you think we could keep what the employer says he will
give us without the union? Just as soon as the busy season is over it
would be the same as before.”

Instructions were given to each separate group of strikers to make out
a wage scale if they thought they should be paid an increase, or to
make out other specific demands before conferring with their employers
on terms of settlement. The uniform contract drawn up by the union,
beside requiring a union shop, required also the abolition of the
sub-contract system; payment of wages once a week; a fifty-two-hour
week; limitation of overtime in any one day to two hours and to not
later than 9 p. m.; also payment for all material and implements by
employers. Important as were the specific demands, they were lightly
regarded in comparison with the issue of a union shop.

Nothing can illustrate this better than the strikers’ treatment of the
arbitration proposal which was the outcome of a conference between
their representatives and the employers. In December word came to
the union secretary that the manufacturers would probably consider
arbitration if the union was ready to submit its differences to a
board. The officers made reply in the affirmative and communicated
their action at once to the strikers. Many of the strikers had no idea
what arbitration meant, but as it became clear to them they asked,
some of them menacingly, “Do you mean to arbitrate the recognition of
the union?” It took courage to answer these inexperienced unionists
and uncompromising girls that arbitration would include the question
of the union as well as other matters. The proposition was met with
a storm of opposition. When the strikers at last discovered that all
their representatives counseled arbitration, with great reluctance
they gave way, but at no time was the body of strikers in favor of it.
A few days later, when the arbitrators who represented them reported
that the manufacturers on their side refused to arbitrate the question
of the union, they resumed their strike with an apparent feeling of
security and relief. Again later they showed the same uncompromising
attitude when their representatives in the conference reported back
that the manufacturers would concede important points in regard to
wage and factory conditions, but would not recognize the union. The
recommendations of the conference were rejected without reservation by
the whole body.

The strikers at this time lost some of their sympathizers. An
uncompromising attitude is good trade-union tactics up to a certain
point, but the shirtwaist makers were violating all traditions. Their
refusal to accept anything short of the closed shop indicated to many
a state of mind which was as irresponsible as it was reckless. Their
position may have been reckless, but it was not irresponsible. Their
sometime sympathizers did not realize the endurance of the women or
the force of their enthusiasm, but insisted on the twenty to thirty
thousand raw recruits becoming sophisticated unionists in thirteen
short weeks.

It was after the new year that the endurance of the girls was put to
the test. During the thirteen weeks benefits were paid out averaging
less than $2 for each striker. Many of them refused to accept benefits,
so that the married men could be paid more. The complaints of hardships
came almost without exception from the men. Occasionally it was
discovered that a girl was having one meal a day and even at times none
at all.

In spite of being underfed and often thinly clad, the girls took upon
themselves the duty of picketing, believing that the men would be more
severely handled. Picketing is a physical and nervous strain under the
best conditions, but it is the spirit of martyrdom that sends young
girls of their own volition, often insufficiently clad and fed, to
patrol the streets in mid-winter with the temperature low and with snow
on the ground, some days freezing and some days melting. After two
or three hours of such exposure, often ill from cold, they returned
to headquarters, which were held for the majority in rooms dark and
unheated, to await further orders.

It takes uncommon courage to endure such physical exposure, but these
striking girls underwent as well the nervous strain of imminent arrest,
the harsh treatment of the police, insults, threats and even actual
assaults from the rough men who stood around the factory doors. During
the thirteen weeks over six hundred girls were arrested; thirteen were
sentenced to five days in the workhouse and several were detained a
week or ten days in the Tombs.

The pickets, with strangely few exceptions, during the first few
weeks showed remarkable self-control. They had been cautioned from the
first hour of the strike to insist on their legal rights as pickets,
but to give no excuse for arrest. Like all other instructions, they
accepted this literally. They desired to be good soldiers and every
nerve was strained to obey orders. But for many the provocations were
too great and retaliation began after the fifth week. It occurred
around the factories where the strikers were losing, where peace
methods were failing and where the passivity of the pickets was taunted
as cowardice. But curiously enough, during this time the arrests in
proportion to the number still on strike were fewer than during the
earlier period and the sentences in the courts were lighter. The
change in the treatment of pickets came with the change in the city
administration. Apparently, peaceful picketing during the first two
months of the strike had been treated as an unlawful act.

The difficulty throughout the strike of inducing the strikers to accept
compromise measures increased as the weeks wore on. However, seventeen
contracts were signed in these latter weeks which did not give the
union a voice in determining conditions of work of all workers in the
factory. During the ten weeks previous, contracts were signed which
covered all the workers in three hundred and twelve factories. Before
the strike every shop was “open” and in most of them there was not a
union worker. In thirteen short weeks three hundred and twelve shops
had been converted into “closed” or full union contract shops.

But the significance of the strike is not in the actual gain to the
shirtwaist makers of three hundred union shops, for there was great
weakness in the ranks of the opposition. Trade-union gains, moreover,
are measured by what an organization can hold rather than by what it
can immediately gain. The shirt-waist makers’ strike was characteristic
of all strikes in which women play an active part. It was marked by
complete self-surrender to a cause, emotional endurance, fearlessness
and entire willingness to face danger and suffering. The strike at
times seemed to be an expression of the woman’s movement rather than
the labor movement. This phase was emphasized by the wide expression
of sympathy which it drew from women outside the ranks of labor.

It was fortunate for strike purposes but otherwise unfortunate that the
press, in publishing accounts of the strike, treated the active public
expression of interest of a large body of women sympathizers with
sensational snobbery. It was a matter of wide public comment that women
of wealth should contribute sums of money to the strike, that they
should admit factory girls to exclusive club rooms, and should hold
mass meetings in their behalf. If, as was charged, any of the women
who entered the strike did so from sensational or personal motives,
they were disarmed when they came into contact with the strikers. Their
earnestness of purpose, their complete abandon to their cause, their
simple acceptance of outside interest and sympathy as though their
cause were the cause of all, was a bid for kinship that broke down all
barriers. Women who came to act as witnesses of the arrests around the
factories ended by picketing side by side with the strikers. These
volunteer pickets accepted, moreover, whatever rough treatment was
offered, and when arrested, asked for no favors that were not given the
strikers themselves.

The strike brought about adjustments in values as well as in
relationships. Before the strike was over federations of professional
women and women of leisure were endorsing organization for working
women, and individually these women were acknowledging the truth of
such observations as that made by one of the strikers on her return
from a visit to a private school where she had been invited to tell
about the strike. Her story of the strike led to questions in regard to
trade unions. On her return her comment was, “Oh they are lovely girls,
they are so kind--but I didn’t believe any girls could be so ignorant.”

The strike was an awakening for working women in many industries, and
it did more to give the women of the professions and the women of
leisure a new point of view and a realization of the necessity for
organization among working women than any other single event in the
history of the labor movement in this country.




VOCATIONAL TRAINING FOR WOMEN

SARAH LOUISE ARNOLD

Dean of Simmons College, Boston


Popular discussions of industrial training are rendered difficult by
the fact that the subject has as yet no fixed vocabulary. Professional
training, vocational training, industrial training, manual training,
are often used interchangeably. We shall use the phrase “vocational
training,” and shall understand it to include such education as aims
to secure efficiency in the occupation followed for self-maintenance,
whether such occupation be the merest task or the complex
administration of a business or a profession.

It is evident that such training involves education for general
intelligence, as well as technical training with a specific end in
view. It is also clear that the training may be brief and elementary if
the task is simple; the trade school, or apprenticeship, or even the
brief course of lessons given by another worker may suffice where the
work calls for little skill and involves little variety. As the task
grows in difficulty, requiring application of principles, demanding
judgment, broad experience, ability to deal with and to direct others,
the training must be proportionately increased. The demand for general
intelligence also grows correspondingly.

The instrument for vocational training, then, may be the shop, in which
knowledge of the art is handed along from one worker to another through
simple apprenticeship; or the trade school, in which a brief course
of instruction is given, with emphasis upon technical details and
swiftness of accomplishment; or the technical college, which provides
longer courses of instruction, combining academic and technical
programs, alternating the lecture room with the shop; or actual
apprenticeship in business; or professional training, superadded to the
ordinary program afforded by school and college.

Is vocational training necessary for women? As a matter of fact,
women are already in trades and professions. For years they have been
filling our factories, stores, offices and schools. We have made public
provision for the preparation of teachers, and many states likewise
train women for the practice of medicine. Hospitals have provided
training schools for nurses. In these fields some provision has been
made for the appropriate education of women for their work. Enough
experience has been accumulated to show that training for the vocation
is always beneficial, and usually essential.

The ordinary woman, however, has little specific training for the
most important work which she has to do in the world. It is left to
her mother alone to teach her how to maintain her home and to meet
the needs of her children. If the mother is ignorant, the daughter is
untaught, and a long train of evils follows in consequence. As this
matter concerns the general welfare the evils should be prevented, if
possible, by general education.

It is generally conceded that in preparing a girl for her work we have
to consider two vocations as probable or possible:--first, maintenance
of the home, with the care and rearing of children; second, the
vocation by which self-maintenance may be assured in the period before
she becomes a homemaker, or during the time when she is obliged to
support herself and her children. Since the first or major vocation
is essential to the general welfare it must always be linked with the
second or minor vocation. Therefore no work for woman can be urged or
defended which tends to lessen her efficiency in her major occupation.

Yet at this point we neither think nor speak clearly. Vocational
training for women would be less complex if their economic contribution
as homemakers were fairly considered. A woman is said to “earn her
living” only when she works outside her own home, receiving money for
her work. The moment her wage-earning power is transferred to her home
she is supposed to be dependent upon father or husband, no matter how
great the compensating service which she renders. A teacher earning
twelve hundred dollars a year resigns her position, marries, cares for
home, husband and children, transferring her income-earning power to
the duties required in the service of the household. Is she not still
self-supporting,--more than self-supporting? Out of the family income,
through her ability, knowledge and skill, she is enabled to save a fair
margin. If the family were bereft of her contribution the margin would
be quickly swallowed by wages paid to housekeeper, nurse, seamstress,
cook and others, who together fail to fill her place. Many a family
becomes a public charge when the mother dies. If it were possible to
fix according to some scale the economic value of woman’s contribution
in the home, it would immediately be evident that the training which
makes her a better and more efficient homemaker is of direct economic
advantage to the community. Vagueness of preparation would probably
disappear with clearer understanding of the relation of her work to the
public good.

One of the first principles of vocational training for women, then, is
that such training should insure greater ability, judgment and skill in
the major vocation, thus securing the intelligent maintenance of the
home. The second principle, or corollary, is that the minor vocation
should be so conducted as not to interfere with the fulfilment of the
first or major task.

The need of vocational training for women presses most heavily
where self-support is imperative in early years. Discussion of the
subject may be clouded by the fact that the obvious need varies
widely--according to the opportunity and environment of the group
under discussion. For the sake of clearness, then, we will consider
three groups. In the first group we count the young girls who are
forced to leave school at the earliest possible or permitted age in
order to engage in some specific occupation for self-support or to
assist in the support of the family. In this large company we find most
of the daughters of recent immigrants, as well as many other girls
whose families have very limited means, or who have suffered stress
through illness or other unusual hardship. The farm, the factory, the
office, the store, are already employing these girls in large numbers,
unskilled in the beginning and often, except as to some small task,
unskilled in the end.

Should such girls be deprived of the essential instruction formerly
accredited to the home, and go from their years of employment to their
future homes as ignorantly as they entered upon their daily task in the
shop? Are they in any sense fitted for the larger responsibility which
the major vocation brings? Are their years of trade experience made
profitable by wise choice and fair preparation, or do they encounter by
chance the immediate demand of some trade, using them for its advantage
as part of a machine demanding swiftness and dexterity in a single
operation, repeated countless times, and considering the salability of
the product and not the welfare of the young worker?

If such conditions exist--and we know that they do--these girls should
be as far as possible protected by suitable education in advance,
which should develop skill and judgment, acquaint them in some measure
with fair trade conditions, make choice of occupation to some degree
possible, and safeguard their health and the interests of their future
homes. Concerning the need of such trade training there is now little
disagreement--the fact is generally conceded. The main question is
whether it should be supplied at public expense, and by what means.
Private philanthropy, by intelligent and generous experiment, has paved
the way.

The second group to be considered may roughly include the girls whose
entrance upon gainful occupations is longer delayed, but who must as a
matter of course look forward to self-maintenance. These girls avail
themselves of the opportunities afforded by the ordinary program of
the graded schools, and may or may not add some portion or all of the
high-school course. They have had a more generous inheritance than
the first group. Their homes are usually better endowed, or they may
be the younger sisters of members of the first group. Their need is
less pressing--but by no means less real. The school should test, and
if need be, supplement their preparation for the responsibilities
centering upon the home. It should also make them to some degree
technically ready for a wholesome occupation, affording a living wage.
Otherwise they too are at the mercy of trade conditions, earning a
scant income at an employment selected by chance.

To the third group will be assigned all women whose opportunities of
education exceed high-school training. For them vocational preparation
may be assigned to the college period or may possibly follow it.

It is often assumed that academic training in itself gives technical
skill, that the young woman who graduates from college is thereby
prepared for any task which may confront her. This is a misconception
of the function of the college. If it does its work well, a good
foundation is laid, certain aptitudes and habits of thought are
developed, which should make progress in any art or craft more rapid,
and judgment more intelligent. On the other hand, long years given
to purely academic work, away from the normal conditions of the
working world, permit certain powers to lie dormant. Students are
trained to deliberation rather than to action. The college woman may
need adjustment to the conditions of the shop, the office, or even
the school. Training which presupposes the task and keeps it in mind
certainly advances the general preparation of any student for her
work. If we acquaint her with the immediate problems of the task the
necessary period of apprenticeship is shortened and rapid advancement
assured. Such training seems reasonable. Why should the education of
the girl lie completely outside her work in the world? Why should so
deep a gulf be fixed between the school and the later task?

The vocational aim need not diminish the so-called cultural value of
a subject. Need the study of bacteriology become less “broadening”
because the nurse-to-be recognizes its relation to her future work,
knowing that she is to apply its truths in sanitation and disinfection,
in antiseptic precautions, in securing surgical cleanliness? Is the
“social worker” of tomorrow a less intelligent student of economics
to-day because she is conscious of the problem with which she
personally is to deal? On the other hand, is a girl more liberally
educated because for four “finishing” years of her education her
program of studies tacitly ignores all reference to the sacred
responsibility which she is so soon to assume--or which she must help
others to meet? Rather, is not the whole course of study enlightened
and informed by recognition of the goal and by conscious endeavor to
reach it? If this be true, education which includes vocational training
is far more liberal than that which ignores or excludes it.

It seems to the writer that the trend of educational thought is in this
direction. The college woman as well as her less favored sister must
be trained, “not simply to be good, but to be good for something”,
not simply to be wise, but to be fully and definitely prepared
for service;--and this conception is perhaps the most important
contribution of higher education to the advancement of vocational
training. Remote as it may seem, it nevertheless influences the general
ideal. We cannot expect the average parent to take pains to insure in
his daughter’s education the thing which the college despises.

If we accept the proposition that the maintenance of the home is
woman’s major vocation, all women are included in the group for whom
vocational training is essential. The responsibility of providing such
instruction is divided between home and school. Exactly as practise
under shop conditions is essential for complete industrial training,
so practise in a home with wise guidance under normal conditions is
indispensable to the best preparation for maintaining a home. Girls who
are so fortunate as to live in homes where this instruction is afforded
are therefore least in need of supplemental instruction in the public
school or other instruction provided for the purpose. The girl who is
most in need of industrial training for self maintenance is also likely
to be in greatest need of training for home-keeping. Unless she is
taught better she will perpetuate the same type of home from which she
has sprung, and this in itself is a menace to the community. There is,
then, a double reason for providing adequate training in home matters
for girls in the more favored homes. Out of their abundance they must
help lift the standard of those who are less favored. Home training,
however, must be supplemented by general school instruction which
approves the higher standard of living, and shows its relation to the
community. It is to the advantage of both these groups that standards
of right living should be set forth in the schools and approved by them.

It follows that the largest possible influence is inherent in the
position of the college woman whose training leads her to recognize
the relation of the home to the community, who fits herself to assume
her own responsibilities intelligently, and who uses her influence in
lifting the standard of the homes which have been less intelligently
administered. The college has an indispensable part to play in the
development of vocational training. As soon as the college for women
incorporates into its accepted program courses which will assist in
conscious preparation for the maintenance of the home, the standard of
living throughout the country will feel its beneficent influence.

The vocational aim being openly and generally accepted, the public
schools will provide for appropriate training. This will include: 1.
Provision of courses tending toward intelligent home administration in
all programs outlined for women and girls. 2. Some means of testing
proficiency in these arts and principles, however acquired, so that at
least a minimum amount of preparation will be exacted of all girls.
3. The establishment of centers where household administration can
be taught by example and practise as well as by precept. By means
of supplementary vacation schools, evening schools and continuation
schools, housekeepers, young mothers and others in need of specific
instruction may receive the necessary help exactly as the plumber may
now reinforce his knowledge through a course in an evening school.

The agencies thus far enumerated will provide the elementary
instruction immediately required. Such instruction, however, will
not be possible unless suitable teachers are provided, and these
must naturally be women of large opportunity and experience. This
presupposes higher courses in technical schools or colleges which
consider the problem in the large and train teachers and workers for
leadership. Again it becomes clear that the college should establish
proper technical courses.

The need of three agencies for vocational training is apparent: for the
immediate need of the young beginner, the trade school; for the middle
group, the technical high school; for the leader, the technical college.

The trade school and the vocational center meet the immediate need
of the young worker. Exactly as the girl from the poor and meager
home must depend upon intelligent instruction to raise her standard
of living, so her judgment and skill must be reinforced when she
confronts the problem of self-maintenance. She is pushed by necessity
into the ranks of wage-earners, knowing nothing of the field she is
entering, and she must make the best terms she can with those who take
advantage of her ignorance. As an unskilled worker she must follow the
crowd and take what she can get. General schooling has left the hand
unskilled and the judgment untrained. She has neither knowledge of
her own ability, nor the immediate advantage of a known employment.
She is entitled to instruction which considers not trade profit alone
but the advantage of the worker, which makes possible intelligent
choice of the best course available and shortens the period of unpaid
apprenticeship. In short, the education which she sorely needs as she
faces self-maintenance is specific preparation for wage earning and the
conditions involved in it.

Two conditions are essential to this training: first, a thread of
manual vocational work throughout the ordinary school program for all
girls, to train hand and eye and develop taste and judgment along
practical lines; second, special schools for industrial training,
with brief, intensive courses, to which girls may be sent for a
preparatory period when facing the necessity of self-maintenance, the
minimum requirement of general training having been covered in the
ordinary school. These centers of industrial or trade training should
be separate from the academic centers and should supply as far as
possible the conditions of apprenticeship. They should be free from
the fixed classifications and grades of the school, and should afford
illustrations and types of vocational experience. To such public
provision as may be made for such centers, private philanthropy will
for a long while bring its aid, for vocational training must be tied to
individual conditions and must ask for coöperation from manufacturer
and employer. Supervised apprenticeship in chosen places of work
will for a time take the place of organized training schools, as for
example, in the case of the hospital dietitian, the house decorator,
and the photographer. But elementary courses, requiring accuracy,
speed, and an ordinary degree of skill, may even now be provided by
the school. The seamstress, the machine operator, the saleswoman, the
typewriter, the clerk, the bookkeeper may be trained in such centers.

The technical high school meets the needs of the second group by
providing courses which develop manual dexterity, and acquaint the
student with the outlines of some practical employment. Notable
examples of such schools in New England are the technical high
schools of Newton, Springfield, and Boston. In these schools the
academic requirement is lessened and courses are arranged in sewing,
dressmaking, millinery, cooking, laundry work, household decoration,
and sanitation, with ample training in commercial subjects and
preparation for clerical work, including stenography, typewriting and
bookkeeping. So far as possible the school product is expected to be
of service just like the ordinary commercial product. In one school
the girls prepare the luncheons which are served to instructors and
classes. In another the garments made are sold to cover the cost of
material. These schools provide adequate instruction in household
arts and at the same time pave the way for a useful vocation. The
numbers that flock to them testify to the demand for such training,
and many girls who otherwise would have withdrawn at the end of the
grammar-school course are glad to remain and profit by the practical
opportunity thus afforded. Already the effect of the instruction is
shown in increased wage-earning power. Those who have followed the
movement are equally sure that the individual homes profit by the
vocational training.

An interesting example of the technical college is afforded by the
recent development of Simmons College in Boston. This college was
endowed by its founder, John Simmons, as an institution through
whose offices women might be prepared for self-maintenance through
appropriate training in art, science and industry. The trustees to whom
the gift was confided made a careful study of the problem of education
for self-maintenance, and eight years ago the college opened its doors.
It provided courses of training for high school graduates, the programs
in every case assuring technical instruction for certain fields of
work, with the related academic training necessitated by the task. The
work attempted is indicated by the various departments--household
economics, library training, secretarial training, training in science
(including preparation for nursing and for the study of medicine), and
training for social service. The regular programs cover four years.

One hundred and twenty-five students appeared the first year; in the
fifth, the college numbered over six hundred. The demand for its
graduates has been constant. The register of graduates indicates this
demand and shows the variety of positions for which the students have
been technically trained and which they are now acceptably filling. The
range of compensation exceeds that of the average college graduate,
and in some fields is far above it. This is particularly true where
executive ability, creative imagination, and the power of directing
others are essential. In such positions technical training shows its
worth.

The work of the secretary illustrates the need of technical training.
The young woman who enters the course arranged for the secretarial
school knows in advance something of the scope and character of
the duties awaiting her. She knows that she must possess technical
skill, that she must become an accurate and expert stenographer and
typewriter, must understand accounts, must be able to file letters
and find them after they have been filed, must transcribe dictation
whatever the vocabulary involved, and must be familiar with business
methods. She cannot follow the prescribed technical courses without
becoming familiar with the personal requirements as well,--dignity,
reserve, professional honor, promptness, patience, courtesy, adherence
to contract, responsibility for service. All these are clearly set
forth in the preparation of the secretary. This technical preparation
is added to academic training, including English, modern languages,
certain courses in science, economics, psychology and ethics, as in the
ordinary college. At the end of the course the student is technically
prepared for a position as college registrar, secretary to president
or professor, to author or publisher, to lawyer or physician. She soon
becomes capable of research or of executive organization. She commands
from the beginning a better compensation than the apprentice could
possibly receive. Already experience has shown the economic value of
the training. Similar experience has proved the wisdom of vocational
courses outlined for managers of institutions, for dietetians in
hospitals, for stewards, for directors of lunchrooms, for visitors to
the poor, for librarians, nurses and social workers.

“What is my work to be? How can I prepare myself to do it successfully
and through it to minister to human need?” These are the questions
which the student is constantly asking as she confronts her task. The
very presence and recognition of the task give point to the preparation
and prevent it from being a mere course of training for one’s own sake.

Conference with parents as well as with students shows the origin of
the demand for vocational training in colleges. The assured expectation
of self-maintenance; the desire to be prepared for self-maintenance,
should necessity arise; the recognition of the necessity of preparation
for home responsibilities; the demand for executive experts with an
understanding of industrial conditions; the dearth of workers properly
trained for their task; the taste and liking for practical affairs; the
desire to be of definite service in the world--all these are factors in
the student’s demand for vocational training. The woman with one talent
emerges from the course prepared to perform some one task well and glad
to meet its demands. It is a privilege and not a burden to be shirked.
The ten-talent woman goes out with the power to modify circumstances,
to improve conditions, to direct enterprises, to assume executive
control. In either case the vocational aim is essential.

Already trade schools, technical high schools and technical colleges
are answering the demand for vocational training, and proving the
existence of the need. Public opinion asks that woman be trained
for her work. The one thing needful is that the school, as a public
servant, shall come to recognize its true relation to this economic
problem.




TRAINING THE YOUNGEST GIRLS FOR WAGE EARNING

SYSTEMS TO BE FOUND AT PRESENT IN EUROPE AND AMERICA

MARY SCHENCK WOOLMAN

Professor of Domestic Art, Teachers College, Columbia University, and
Director of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls


At the present time, even though the work has been but lately begun,
excellent examples of trade and vocational education for girls can be
seen in both Europe and America. The European schools have long since
passed the experimental stage and are usually a regular part of the
system of public instruction, supported by governmental grants. On the
other hand with us this class of training, being new and as yet in a
more or less tentative stage, is chiefly in private hands. The foreign
schools give us valuable suggestions, but the direct copy of their
work, successful as it is according to the special needs of paternal
governments, is not altogether fitted to a growing democracy like the
United States. National desires and needs plus the requirements of
the community where the schools are placed must influence the trades
selected, the course of study and the methods of instruction in every
good school. European systems are adapted to the national and municipal
conditions of their varied peoples.

The majority of the professional schools for girls abroad are planned
for the middle classes who are in fairly comfortable circumstances
and can therefore pay fees and take several years for training. It
is only incidentally that such institutions help the poorer working
people. With us such instruction must be arranged for all classes. It
is no unusual thing to hear those who have visited the professional
schools abroad recommend the incorporation of such instruction into
our educational system to help wage earners, forgetting that four or
five-year trade courses, often with fees and competitive examinations
for entrance, would be impossible for the daughters of the poor
working classes in our large industrial cities. Our problem deals
with the poorest as well as the well-to-do, the foreigner and the
native-born.

The meeting of the need of the lowest-class worker is perhaps more
pressing with us, for in European countries children are apt to
continue in the occupation of their parents, and labor on the farm or
at small home trades or in little shops or markets, as their ancestors
did before them. Lines of class demarcation greatly effect schemes of
education in Europe, and such discrimination is accepted as necessary.
With us on the other hand the workers of the lowest rank are always
struggling to get ahead, hence our schools must allow for such upward
movement. Moreover, the wages of workers in this group are at the
lowest figure, as they are forced by poverty to accept any wage they
can get. The schools, then, must also study the industrial condition of
the group and improve it.

Different types of education have been organized to train the youthful
workers who rush into positions the moment the law will allow them to
obtain working papers. The girls of this type cannot take advantage
of the _Ecoles Professionnelles_ of France, Italy and Belgium, of the
_Frauenarbeitsschulen_ of Germany or of the vocational and technical
high schools of America. They have not the requisite education for
entrance in the majority of cases and they have at best but a few
months or a year to spare for training. The schools which have been
planned to aid them in self-support may be grouped roughly under the
following heads:

1. Elementary Vocational Schools.--Industrial training of a general
character in the last two or three grades of the elementary school,
which sends the pupils into life with a good practical working
foundation.

2. Continuation Schools.--Weekday or Sunday classes for workers
under sixteen years of age, which will help them to obtain a further
practical education while they are working for self-support.

3. Apprenticeship, Trade or Factory Schools.--Special trade training
after the compulsory school age is passed or in the year following
graduation from the elementary school, consisting of shop practice
which can be taken by those who can still give a little additional
time to training and who can thus be prepared to enter some good trade
or business position closed to the untrained. Girls can thus enter
industry with the ability to make a living wage and with the hope of
rising.

1. The elementary vocational school aims to help the poorest and
youngest workers. As large numbers of girls in the great industrial
cities of the world are forced, on account of the poverty of their
families, to go to work as soon as they reach the age when the law
allows them to take out working papers, this class of school aims to
provide them with an education immediately available for use. The
_Volksschulen_ of Germany and the _Ecoles Primaires_ of France and
Belgium have tried to meet this situation by making handwork compulsory
through each year of the school. The American public school has done
this intermittently, but now that the country is awake to the needs of
the working class, severe criticism is heard everywhere of the general
trend of our common schools in helping the few who go on to higher
education, but doing little for the many who do not. Investigation of
the mental and manual condition of the great body of our young wage
earners shows them unable to use their hands well or to utilize their
academic education. The unskilled trades which alone are open to them
do not require much use of their academic education which after a year
or two is almost forgotten. If they manage to get into the better
positions they are unable to hold them, for their education has not
been of the kind to help them practically in trade. The trouble is not
that the education is not good, but that it is not put to practical use
by these young wage earners after they leave school.

Workers of the lowest grade in the large industrial cities of the
United States have to face a difficult economic problem. The father
can seldom make enough to support his family well, so the mother is
compelled to assist. The children as they reach fourteen, usually
before they have completed the elementary school, are forced to take
any position they can get, whether healthful or not, whether offering
opportunities or not. These fourteen-year-old workers are too young to
go to school at night to continue their education, for their strength
is sapped by day work; they are too poor to go to a trade school,
for their wage cannot be given up by their families and the public
school can offer them no more than free education (except in rare
instances). Competitive examinations to obtain a supporting scholarship
are generally beyond their reach, for they are handicapped by foreign
birth, underfeeding and lack of mental acumen. As a consequence they
are easily distanced in scholarship by the children of the middle-class
workers who need the help less. The girls have to meet the most severe
strain of the labor market; they must have money; they underbid their
fellows and overcrowd the unskilled trades. The life itself is harder
on them than on the boys, both physically and spiritually. These little
girls are crowding into the labor market in appalling numbers. Their
parents naturally want them to be self-supporting, but know not how
to help them. They are often willing to sacrifice themselves and keep
the children in school until graduation, but the girls resent the
present course of study as useless and get out of school as quickly
as possible. On the other hand both parents and children appreciate
a curriculum which offers directly available, practical training,
and they will do much to obtain it. Hence lately some of the wiser
educators have offered industrial courses in the last three grades of
the school to induce children to remain longer and to give them a good
foundation adaptable to trade or to home use.

In 1907 the public schools of Boston began experiments in various parts
of the city looking toward special vocational courses in the sixth
and seventh grades. The North Bennett Street school was chosen as
one center for industrial work. A special building was set aside and
furnished with class rooms for sewing, textiles and design and was also
equipped with kitchen, dining room and bedroom, thus giving excellent
opportunity for applied lessons in housekeeping and housefurnishing.
Fifty girls from the Hancock school in the neighborhood are chosen
and are divided into two groups. They alternate with each other in
taking academic and industrial work, both morning and afternoon being
utilized. They have six and a half hours of academic work to three and
a half of industrial. The course of study recognizes woman’s relation
to wage earning and to the home, and the culture and technical work
are well interrelated. The movement, already showing success, aims to
vitalize the regular school studies, to gain the interest of the girls
so they will remain in school until graduation, to enable each girl to
determine intelligently her life work and finally to direct her into
higher grades of occupation.

New York City has also started similar work in the special classes
organized to help pupils who while old enough to have their working
papers have not met the educational requirements. Other cities have
also begun experiments of a like character, handwork and connected
academic study being features in all these schools. Some of our private
schools also are making special investigation of the varied conditions
and needs of the people and are trying to adapt their work to these
needs, so that when boys and girls are forced to leave school they will
have a usable education. Examples of such wise adaptation to conditions
can be found in the Ethical Culture school and the Speyer school in New
York City.

Perhaps the most significant work of this character at the present
time is in Germany. _Stadtschulrat_ Dr. Georg Kerschensteiner of
Munich, realizing that both boys and girls were dropping out of the
_Volksschulen_ at the first opportunity possible, planned a new and
excellent course of practical study elective in the eighth school year.
The work was begun in 1896. Many children remained in school to try
it and so valuable did the experiment prove that the course was later
made compulsory. Dr. Kerschensteiner felt that girls will eventually
fall into one of the following classes: housewives who take charge of
affairs at home, domestic servants, workers in commercial or industrial
positions, governesses, teachers or companions. After the seventh grade
each girl chooses the field for which she would like to prepare, and
in the eighth grade the foundation is laid for future success in her
chosen occupation. The eighth-grade work is not professional but is
broadly vocational. The pupils take the entire course, after which
they are given a “leaving certificate” and can go to work; but formal
education is not yet over, for they must attend a continuation school
for one year at hours allowed by their employers. Each one is thus
prepared for future usefulness, and German life and industries reap the
benefit.

The curriculum of the eighth-grade class is as follows:

 Religion (always given in German schools) 2 hours weekly; household
 management and cookery, 8 hours; needlework, such as is needed in
 the household, 4 hours; German, in business correspondence, moral
 and ethical training, reading lessons, including domestic subjects,
 hygiene and German family life, 6 hours.

 Arithmetic, management of domestic accounts, elements of commercial
 arithmetic, cost of living and the maintenance of the home, 4 hours.

 Gymnastics and singing are also included in the curriculum.

As a part of the training in household management there is instruction
in clothing and housing which covers:

_a._ Study of the body.--Its functions and its care, breathing,
circulation of the blood and properties of heat radiation and
evaporation, and the preservation and regulation of heat through
clothing.

_b._ The textile materials, raw and manufactured.--Their physical
properties and use as clothing, hygienic rules, taste and suitability
in dress, wet and dry cleansing of clothing, the bed and bedding.

_c._ Housing.--The properties of building materials, the position of
the house, heating, lighting, ventilation and disinfection, hygienic
rules in the household, and furnishing.

II. The continuation school helps those girls who are forced by poverty
to go to work without sufficient education by giving them opportunity
for further training in the evening, on Sunday or on weekday
afternoons. Such schools are well developed in Germany. Compulsory day
continuation schools (_Fortbildungsschulen_) are found in Bavaria,
with Baden, Württemberg and Prussia inclined to follow closely. They
aim not only to continue the intellectual and moral culture of the
students, but to prepare them for definite trades and occupations. The
work for girls is less developed along commercial and industrial lines
than that for boys, but in domestic features is very comprehensive.
There are usually three divisions of work for girls--commercial, for
clerks and secretaries; domestic, for training in home occupations;
and industrial, for arts such as dressmaking, millinery, lingerie, art
needlework, machine embroidery, designing, bookbinding and photography.
Germany considers that such schools prevent the waste of life which
occurs when workers are uneducated and unprepared. As these schools
have employers of labor on their boards of management the work is
practical and is kept up to the requirements of industry.

In Bavaria, as has been said before, when a girl legally finishes her
compulsory education she can go to work, but she is not therefore
released from school. She is offered her choice of the following
courses:

 _a._ The eighth-grade class for one year, 30 hours weekly, and the
 Sunday school or weekly continuation class for a year following.

 _b._ A school which meets on Sunday for three years, 3¹⁄₂ hours a week.

 _c._ A commercial or domestic continuation school for three years, 5
 to 10 hours weekly.

 _d._ A division of the three years of required education between these
 various kinds of schools.

Thus the Bavarian girl has a fine opportunity to prepare for her
future and to be ready for her lifework no matter what it is. The
eighth-grade work is duplicated in the continuation class, so that if
the family finances are so straitened that the daughter cannot attend
the eighth-grade class for a year, she can still obtain this valuable
training in afternoon and Sunday classes. The government requirement
that employers must allow their young employes to attend day school
during each week is a wise one, for these girls are too young to profit
by night instruction. The training has been found to give a good
economic return, for the workrooms gradually obtain skilled help and
the worker is enabled to obtain a good position and become a valuable
citizen.

An excellent _Fortbildungsschule_ is the _Frauenarbeitsschule_, carried
on at _Oberangerstrasse 17_, Munich. The building, once a palace, is
large, simple and adequate; the work is excellent and well organized.
The handwork is carried to a high pitch of technical skill and the
domestic instruction offers opportunities for specialists.

One of the earliest continuation schools for girls was the Victoria
_Fortbildungsschule_ in Berlin, opened in 1878. The majority of the
pupils are from the families of artisans and small tradesmen, and
not from those of day laborers and factory hands. Opportunities
for training on all sides of woman’s life are offered, the work is
excellently done and a beautiful spirit of service pervades the school.
Each girl’s characteristics are carefully studied and she is given the
training best adapted to her. From such teaching it is not wonderful
that there is an appearance of thrift and happiness among the German
people.

Continuation classes in America up to the present have not been exactly
like the German ones. Night classes under public instruction have
offered academic, commercial and domestic courses of all kinds; but
the aim has been general helpfulness rather than direct aid to young
wage earners by supplementing with special training their defective
preparation for business positions. The difference between the two
governments is a factor in the situation. The German government can
make such courses compulsory between definite ages and can require
manufacturers to give up their young employes during certain hours
of the day; but with us the wish of the voters of a city must be
considered. The majority of our employers assert that competition is
too close for any one firm to try the experiment unless all do the
same, and to compel all means tedious legislation. It is of interest
to know, however, that this interrelation between factory and school
has already been tried with success for boys in Massachusetts and Ohio,
and that the latter state will make the same experiment for girls. The
following plan is in use in Cincinnati: The manufacturers agree to send
boys from among their employes to attend school and at the same time to
pay them a regular wage. The board of education provides the teachers,
and the work in general is technical with as close application as
possible to the special factory in which the boys are employed. A
period each day is devoted to general shop questions, shop practise,
economic and civic questions. Practise in spelling, writing and reading
in connection with the story of industries is given. It is expected
that it will take four years for the average boy to complete the
course, a period which corresponds to the four years of apprenticeship
demanded by the unions. Reports are sent to employers of the attendance
of their employes. As children under sixteen can work but eight hours
a day, _i. e._, 48 hours a week, the employer gives up four hours of
this for school training. The boy therefore is in the shop for 44 hours
and at school four hours per week. A bill has been introduced into
the Ohio legislature recommending that this kind of instruction be
made compulsory. The fact that a girl’s business life is of uncertain
duration makes more difficult a similar plan for her education, as
employers are less inclined to allow her to take instruction in
business hours. Many of the Cincinnati workrooms, however, have agreed
to try the experiment.

A form of continuation work which promises well in trades employing
boys is the school within the factory. When this education aims to
develop the students broadly and not alone for specific use in one
enterprise, it is the best kind of training. Beginnings of such
instruction for girls have appeared in the training forewomen are
obliged to give green girls, and more orderly courses are already
developing. The social secretary now employed in so many large stores
to look after the women workers has in some cases added the instruction
of new employes to her duties. Courses in salesmanship, elementary
studies, technical and domestic training, are at present being given
as a part of the work of certain department stores. Filene’s in Boston
and the Wanamaker stores in Philadelphia and New York are doing work of
this character for their employes.

III. The short-time trade or factory school offers all-day courses from
a few months to a year in length to those girls who even though they
must go to work early can arrange to give a short period to preparation
for some industrial pursuit. The compulsory school years are over and
the work papers obtained, but the student may or may not have finished
the elementary school work. In a city like New York with so large a
foreign element half the students, at least, will not have completed
the eight grades of school when they go to work. In Boston a larger
proportion have been graduated. The trade-school problem has been
partially met in a few of the cities of the United States. New York
organized trade instruction for girls in 1902 and Boston followed in
1904. Milwaukee, Cleveland, Rochester and Albany have begun or are
about to begin similar work, but as yet their schools have not been
established long enough to show definite results.

In Europe this class of school, reproducing actual trade conditions and
fitted for the poorest girls, is rare. In Belgium there are a few which
are called apprenticeship schools. The one in Maldaghem is extremely
interesting. The town is small and very mediæval. The school is housed
in a new, simple building. The entrance is on the side, and a narrow
long hallway, in which the students put their sabots two by two on both
sides, stretches the length of the building. A steep little staircase
leads to the upper floor where the business offices and workrooms
are to be found. Orders are carried out as in any factory, the work
being fine handwork, the operation of Corneli and single embroidery
machines, beading, and crocheting on net and mousseline. Robe garments
of embroidered net, scarfs, curtains and lace veils of fine character
are produced, some of which come to the American market. The students
are paid nothing while learning, but after their training is finished
can continue to work in the school and receive a regular wage. The
same town has another school for teaching the making of fine varieties
of Brussels lace, the product of which is for the regular market.
The building is an old type of peasant home with stone floors. These
Belgian apprenticeship schools are under government inspection.

The type of apprenticeship school begun in the United States is quite
different. The Manhattan Trade School of New York was the pioneer; the
Boston Trade School was organized later on similar lines. A careful
study of trade conditions in each city preceded the organization of
instruction. Continual close touch with actual conditions is held
by both schools to be necessary in order to keep up to business
requirements. They have thus fitted well into the business life of
their particular cities. The schools differ from each other in the
trades they offer just as the two cities differ. They both believe
that trade conditions must be exactly reproduced in instruction;
consequently they are organized as small factories. To aid the trade
work and to develop a high-class worker, art and academic work adapted
to the specific needs of each of the trades represented in the schools
are given. Wholesale and custom work are taken in all departments.
Systems of business shops headed by trade workers who can teach as well
as conduct workrooms give the students real business organization under
which to work. The results in both schools show that such practical
instruction enables the workers to enter better positions, to gain
higher wages and to continue to rise to more influential positions.
Crude, thoughtless girls have been developed into thoughtful, reliable
workers, and capable girls have been given the opportunity of rapid
rise to positions suited to them.

In both schools stress is laid upon health work. By careful physical
examinations, specific treatment, talks on hygiene, lessons on foods,
and experience in simple lunchroom cookery, the health of students is
brought to a higher level and they know how to keep it there. This
of itself makes better workers, able to stand the strain of business
life. Established health will also react favorably on their homes and
families if they marry.

Training for domestic service is not usually appreciated or desired by
the American girl of the large cities, for the industrial trades offer
her better opportunities. Even Germany finds difficulty in attracting
to her schools for training servants the class for whom the schools
were intended. An excellently planned school for this purpose was
opened some time since in Berne, Switzerland. The servant’s course,
six months in residence, includes the following work: cooking; care of
kitchen, care of the cellar and keeping stores; gardening, including
planting, cultivating, and gathering vegetables; laundry work; mending;
and care of rooms. Rooms with board are rented in the school building
to give practical experience to the student.




EMPLOYMENT BUREAUS FOR WOMEN

M. EDITH CAMPBELL

Director Charlotte R. Schmidlapp Fund, Cincinnati


No other agency stands so little for efficient service as the
employment bureau. Scorned by the scientific because of its
unscientific methods; condemned by the honest and conscientious
because of its unjust earnings and unscrupulous policies; despised by
the employer because of its failure intelligently to meet his needs;
ignored by the seeker for work because of its deceptive guarantees,
the employment bureau is far from commanding the respect of the
industrial world. Consequently, employer and employe usually dispense
with its services, and the woman who is busy molding for herself a new
industrial career gives little thought to so ineffective a method for
determining the direction of that career.

There is, however, in this very tantalizing condition of the employment
agency that which stimulates as well as irritates. For the existence
of an agency which might be a real power, rather than a mere semblance
of one, creates a desire to convert the useless into the useful. The
awakening of such a desire has been demonstrated by the establishment
within the last few years of a number of bureaus[41] which are
attempting to render the real service of which an employment bureau is
capable. Moreover, several excellent studies on the subject have been
published,[42] setting forth the inadequacy of present agencies and
looking toward the development of some plan by which such agencies
could be helpful in solving the problem of the unemployed.

In one of these studies Mr. Devine states that the lack of employment
is due to one of three causes:

1. Unemployableness because of inefficiency.

2. Lack of work.

3. Maladjustment--“The inability of people who want work to get quickly
into contact with opportunities.”

He further states that the employment bureau can offer no remedy for
the first condition, for in that case only education and training will
be effective; neither can it remedy the difficulty due to excess of
supply over demand for labor. It can, however, if properly managed,
help correct the maladjustment.

All the studies above mentioned agree with the opinion of a number of
writers[43] dealing in detail with the question of unemployment, that
the existing agencies have not met this question of maladjustment. Many
commercial agencies resort to “dishonorable practices and fraudulent
methods.” The hunter for a job “becomes, because of his ignorance
and necessities, a great temptation to an honest agent and a great
opportunity to an unscrupulous one.” Only a small proportion of these
agencies have been found efficient, honorable, or even systematic.
The work of charitable employment bureaus--those conducted under
the auspices or management of philanthropic organizations--has been
found extremely “fragmentary, uncoördinated and meagre,” while their
connection with charitable institutions has been of doubtful advantage.
Trade unions also have been unable to deal effectively with their
unemployed, or to attempt the formation of a systematic bureau.

Seemingly one of the simplest methods for employer and employe to
find each other is the want column in the daily newspaper. But this
method has proved too simple to be of more than nominal service. In the
first place, careful investigation has conclusively shown that a large
number of advertisements are either “fakes” or misrepresentations.
The effect upon a girl of looking up several advertisements is
marked. Her wearisome efforts and wanderings are usually rewarded
either by finding the place taken or misrepresented, or by meeting
with inexcusable carelessness and indifference on the part of the
advertiser. Hence she is convinced that there are no real or serious
wants for “Help--Female.” A condition of which much complaint is
made is the insertion of an advertisement and then a failure to give
instructions to those with whom applicants will first come into
contact. Consequently, when a girl appears to inquire for the work
she is often told by an uninterested stenographer that no help is
wanted. It such a case recently it was only by accidentally meeting the
employer on the elevator that the writer discovered that there was an
open position. Another employer had advertised in the morning paper,
but had left his office before nine o’clock. His secretary could give
no idea of the time of his return, or of the work desired. A number of
applicants, she said, had already been there, but would have to come
again. This waste of time, energy and carfare could be easily prevented
by a bit of foresight and consideration. The employer may reply that
the irresponsible girl fails him just as often. But surely the method
of unfairness on both sides will never straighten out the tangle, and
the employer by nature of his position and superior breadth of view, is
the one to set the example of fairness.

The free state employment bureaus which have been established in
several states are described, in the inquiries above referred to, as
involved in politics and hence rendering a service perfunctory and
inefficient. Miss Abbott calls attention to the fact that in these
bureaus “no man is working on the general problem of unemployment
and bringing the entire prestige of the state and its financial
expenditures to bear on its solution.” Also she notes that the
combination of inspection of private bureaus with the duties of the
superintendent of the state employment office prevents both good
inspection and good administration.

These statements concerning employment and employment agencies in
general have been repeated here because they bear upon the specific
problem of the woman worker whose adjustment to present industrial
conditions is so difficult. The difficulties of this problem may be
illustrated by a brief history of the effort to meet it that is being
made in Cincinnati.

In the year 1907, Mr. J. G. Schmidlapp, of Cincinnati, in memory of his
daughter Charlotte, placed in the hands of The Union Savings Bank &
Trust Company securities amounting to something over $250,000, saying
that he wished the income to be used for the benefit of wage-earning
girls, to increase their efficiency and power of self-support. It had
seemed an easy matter “to help girls” before money for that purpose was
available, but with abundant funds in hand, to decide just what to do
proved a hard problem. Letters poured in from young women all over the
country, until the board of trustees finally decided to restrict the
use of the fund to individual young women needing financial assistance
to complete their education. Even after the beneficiaries were limited
to Hamilton County, the task of selecting them from the applicants was
no easy one.

Accordingly the trustees were asked what they intended to do about
the girls to whom assistance must be refused. When they replied that
for these girls the fund was not responsible, the following facts
were brought to their attention: First, we cannot intelligently
assist in educating young women without a more accurate knowledge of
just what lines of work will be open to them when their education
is completed. Second, the number of girls who come to the office of
the Schmidlapp Fund for advice, for information concerning work and
for employment itself, almost equals the number who wish financial
assistance. Third, the applicant who applies to be made more fit in
her present industrial work cannot be assisted because there is no
adequate provision in Cincinnati for industrial training for girls.
Fourth, it is not at all improbable that the Schmidlapp Fund will train
a young woman for a certain line of employment, only to find out later
that the same employment brings to the beneficiary neither health,
reasonable remuneration, nor mental development. Such a mistake will
be due to lack of knowledge. Fifth, a wise expenditure for training
individual girls cannot be made, and a positive waste in expenditure
cannot be prevented without more definite knowledge concerning the
self-supporting life of young women. The board of trustees acknowledged
the seeming consistency of these statements and gave consent to a
further development of these ideas.

Within a radius of a mile of the Schmidlapp Fund’s office are at least
a dozen centers, to some of which for more than twenty years young
women have been going to look for work. One would naturally turn to
these bureaus for a few simple facts regarding the industrial life of
young women in Cincinnati. Perhaps they could advise the Schmidlapp
Fund as to the first step to take toward educating self-supporting
young women. Perhaps they could give some information concerning
the occupations in which women were engaged, not only as to numbers
employed but also as to remuneration, chances for advancement, effect
on health, and general advantages. Because of their unusual opportunity
for coming into contact with practical shop life, they might be able to
state in what way girls could be trained for any special occupation.
They might be able to tell why a girl had changed her occupation a half
dozen times within two years, whether it was her inefficiency or the
irregular, seasonal character of the work. Such information would be
a guide as to whether it was best to hold the girl to ordinary school
life for a longer period, or to try to overcome her inefficiency by
a different course of education. These bureaus had placed hundreds
of girls, and had had constant intercourse with many more. Yet not
a single bureau, even the one on which the state expended $2,500
annually, could give any definite or helpful information. There proved
to be a total lack of records, of systematic knowledge concerning
the applicant and the job, and even of intelligent interest in the
girl’s industrial career. Here was a rich opportunity wholly lost.
The Schmidlapp Fund found the most reliable way to gain the desired
information to be through a bureau of its own. By this time, Mr.
Schmidlapp had become so keenly interested that he decided to finance
such a bureau without encroaching upon the Charlotte R. Schmidlapp
Fund, which could still be used for individual girls. The bank, which
Mr. Schmidlapp had made trustee of the fund and of which he had been
the first president, offered to house the bureau and to allow the work
to enjoy its prestige. Consequently there now appears on the door of
the trust department the following sign:

  The Schmidlapp Bureau for Women and Girls
  Free Employment Department
  Vocation Department
  The Charlotte R. Schmidlapp Fund

We are beginning to attempt to do the things which ought to have been
done for us twenty years ago. In the words of the annual report:

 This Bureau will be based on the work of the Vocation Bureau in
 Boston, the Alliance Employment Bureau in New York, and on the work
 of Mrs. Ogilvie Gordon, of Scotland. It will have a close affiliation
 with all the social centers in Cincinnati, will be confined to work
 for women and girls, and its general scope and usefulness cannot be
 better formulated than in Mrs. Gordon’s Handbook of Employment and in
 a report of the Alliance Employment Bureau:

 1st. By well-planned education and congenial employment to bring as
 favorable influences as possible to bear upon upgrowing girls. If the
 first few working years of the girl can be spent industrially and to a
 good purpose, the parents and public may have confidence in the future
 of the women.

 2d. To form a center of industrial information and a connecting link
 between school training and trade requirements, thus aiding in the
 development of industrial education.

 3d. To make a constructive study of the facts involved in the problem
 of employment.

 4th. To aid by counsel and information as well as by employment the
 girl who must be a wage earner.

Even the short experience of less than a year has demonstrated the
value of such a center in Cincinnati. The carelessness, the ignorance,
and the short-sightedness of parents have been brought to view over
and over again in the case of girls who have been taken from school
and placed in unskilled occupations where there is no chance for
advancement or growth. This is sometimes due to necessity and dire
poverty; but more often parents feel that a year or two more in the
public school will not increase the girl’s wage-earning ability, or
else they cannot discover what work the child is best fitted for, and
do not know in what occupations she can at least attain some growth
and promotion. This persistent withdrawal from school of girls at the
age of fourteen is a cause for serious concern. We shall be guilty of
criminal neglect if we longer refuse to face the situation. The already
overworked teachers cannot supply the necessary guidance in other than
a general way. It must be supplied by an outside agency, and as Miss
Van Kleeck of the Committee on Women’s Work so keenly points out, no
agency for the purpose can be so helpful and efficient as one built on
the needs of the individual girl.

Such a bureau will, in the first place, correct the evils and
deficiencies of the present agencies. In the second place it will
provide the only wise and strong foundation on which to build our
educational and vocational structures for women.

To render the first service, an efficient employment bureau for women
will of necessity attempt to do constructive work based on a knowledge
of the evils and deficiencies which have been mentioned.

1st. Instead of no records, or inadequate ones, full and complete
industrial records will be kept of both employer and employe. The one
will show the conditions under which the girl does her work, and will
give a careful description of the work to be done. The other will
state the girl’s home environment, her education or training, and her
industrial history both before and after application. Both of these
records will be verified by personal visits to the place of work and
the home of the applicant.

2d. Instead of the selfish attitude of the commercial agency based on
greed, and the perfunctory attitude of the state agency controlled by
politics, there will be an attitude of fairness toward both employer
and girl, based upon the sole desire to supply the need of the just
employer with the ability of the responsible worker.

3d. Instead of indifference toward the relation of employer and
employe, there will be an attempt, with a good chance for success,
we believe, to lessen unfairness on both sides. Often a mere word of
explanation, which can be given most effectively by a third party,
brings consideration in place of irresponsibility and injustice.
Employers who complain constantly of the impossibility of securing
steady workers, would be amazed at the reasons why the girls leave, as
brought out in a recent inquiry based on work certificates issued to
girls in 1907. Often through the unintelligent and short-sighted policy
of a foreman--or, I regret to say, more often a forewoman--the employer
loses a worker who proved, in another establishment, to be invaluable.

It may be of interest to note that the work we are trying thus to do
in Cincinnati chanced to come to the notice of Governor Harmon and C.
H. Wirmel, the commissioner of labor of Ohio. Both have evinced the
greatest interest in the experiments and have asked for suggestions
as to how the work of the state bureau in Cincinnati can be made more
effective. Mr. Wirmel will attempt to use our system of records and in
other ways to test the practicability of our methods. While, as Mr.
Devine points out, a state or federal bureau can never do aggressive
work, because the citizen can protest against “discrimination,” public
bureaus can give most valuable coöperation in the matter of records.

A number of such adjustments would go a long way toward righting the
general maladjustment which so evidently exists between the supply and
the demand for labor.

The second justification for the existence of these employment
bureaus is unquestionably to assist in the development of industrial
education--a problem which is now presenting itself in a formidable
manner. That we are still far from adjusting education to woman’s life
is lamentably apparent. The public schools seem averse to training
her for a trade lest they unadvisedly throw her into the employer’s
hands. The plea is still loudly heard that the girl must be trained
for home life and for home life alone. If a girl goes into a trade,
the school will not assume the responsibility of placing her under the
deadening influences she is sure to encounter there. Hence she enters
her trade untrained, with every possibility that trade experience
will make her unfit for the home--not because of the nature of the
occupation, but because of her own lack of intelligence concerning the
occupation. While the trade itself may not be essentially deadening,
to permit a girl to be a purely mechanical worker in the trade, without
an informing mind and a cultivated imagination, as Miss Addams has
expressed it, leads inevitably to mental and moral stupefaction.

Not long since, a man of deep mental and spiritual insight said to the
writer that he considered all legislation for making women’s industrial
life easier a mistake, because intolerable conditions in the factory
and workshop will ultimately force women back into the home. Just where
“back into the home” is, no one seems to know! With the industrial
processes in which woman has worked from time immemorial taken from the
home, the exhortation to stay at home and follow the example of her
industrious grandmother seems a bit hard to follow. This fear, however,
on the part of educators, this restiveness on the part especially of
men concerning women and the trades, should not be altogether ignored,
though part of it is due to plain cowardice in refusing to face things
as they are. The few courageous leaders who are trying to work out an
adequate system of vocational training for women feel that they need
definite knowledge of the effect of industrial work upon her.[44] This
can be supplied only by learning the specific needs and characteristics
of the girl, the actual happenings in her working life, and the wants
and demands of the employer, who, whether we like it or not, is bound
to determine finally all plans for training the wage-earning girl. We
can lessen his injustice and his lordship over conditions by refusing
him skilled workers unless he agrees to reasonable terms; but we can
never lessen his authority as to the actual work to be done and the
method the worker is to pursue. Much patient study is needed. The
immediate task is to bring together the employer and the educator, who
for too long have walked apart when their path, which led to the making
of the worker, should have been a common one.

The need for a mediary to bring about this coöperation is clearly
felt at the present time. After a recent interview dealing wholly
with educational questions, Mr. Hamerschlag, Director of the Carnegie
Technical Schools, said to the writer: “Do you suppose your fund
would consider establishing some center or bureau that would be able
to furnish really definite information concerning the occupations
of girls? Don’t spend your time over present education--spend it in
finding out what we should do! If some one could tell us as much about
trades for women as the Anti-Tuberculosis League can tell us about that
disease, we might accomplish better results. We simply do not know the
effect of our present legislation upon women, or whether this or that
trade means health, mental development, and reasonable pay.”

The employment bureau must become, it seems to me, this mediary; it
must give this help to the educator, to the employer, and above all,
to the girl. It will undoubtedly demonstrate that many occupations in
which women are now engaged are eminently unsuitable, failing entirely
to reach the standard set by Miss Marshall that they shall “develop
that kind of efficiency which will be of value to the woman as a home
maker, and which will not be detrimental physically or morally.”[45]
By careful study authoritative knowledge must be gained of the girl’s
experience, and of the possibility of readjustment of methods by the
employer. The few of us who have attempted such intensive work have
uniformly found the employer willing to discuss such readjustment
with us, because he realizes that we are honestly trying to furnish
him with efficient workers and that we realize the difficulty of
dealing with the individual. The industrial record of a girl covering
a period of three or four years may show that she was a shiftless,
inert, indifferent worker, and hence drifted from job to job. Here
the distinct vocational function of the bureau must be brought into
play, the girl’s school record studied, and her temperament noted. She
may be a “misfit” or she may need a stimulation which no amount of
trade training will give, possibly a stimulation of the imagination
by literature or history. If this girl could be released a few hours
a week, or better, two days a week, from her employment, without
the loss of pay which she cannot afford, she might be made into a
valuable worker. Many employers are not averse to considering such an
experiment. The records may show, however, not a shiftless worker, but
one who has been laid off because of irregular work. This girl must
have training for a skilled trade which is successful enough to give
full employment to efficient workers. It is apparent that the contact
of the bureau with the school must be exceedingly close. Perhaps here
the bureau can help prevent the waste which is now so evident in the
issuing of work certificates; the waste of opportunity for information
concerning the girl and her work.

We are as yet too young in the field to state positively the outcome
of the experiment. It is not an easy experiment and there are many
possibilities of failure. But in any case it is better to fail trying
than to be idly distrustful of the possibility of good coming out of
the present conditions under which woman is living. The ignorant, the
foolish and the cowardly are in despair because she is becoming base
and sordid through the fate laid upon her by industrial evolution.
They refuse to see that if she were assisted to a sane adaptation of
her life to this fate, she would become only a finer and truer type
of womanhood. And perhaps, heretical though it be to say so, it may
be discovered that a woman who has missed opportunity for development
through wifehood and motherhood, has often been able to reach the
full fruition of her womanhood through wisely chosen work. To direct
girls judiciously into vocations which may be theirs not for three
or five years, but for life, and which may enable them, even without
marriage, to fulfil the promise which their girlhood gave of a wise,
tender, courageous womanhood, is in itself no mean task. As a precedent
condition, the employment-vocation bureau, must help us to discover
what is the best work for women to do, and under what conditions they
can do it. It will thus aid them to perform that work intelligently,
efficiently, and enthusiastically. Then, and then only, will come the
just remuneration, the living wage for which women at present struggle
in vain.


FOOTNOTES:

[41] The Alliance Employment Bureau, New York City; the Coöperative
Employment Bureau for Women and Girls, Cleveland; Council of Jewish
Women Employment Bureau, Pittsburg; Schmidlapp Bureau for Women and
Girls, Cincinnati.

[42] _A Handbook of Employments_, by Mrs. Ogilvie Gordon, Aberdeen:
The Rosemount Press; _Report on the Desirability of Establishing an
Employment Bureau in the City of New York_, by Edward T. Devine,
Russell Sage Foundation; _The Chicago Employment Agent and the
Immigrant Worker_, by Grace Abbott, University of Chicago Press;
_Annual Reports_ of the Alliance Employment Bureau, _Reports on
Investigations_, Mary A. Van Kleeck.

[43] An excellent selected bibliography on employment bureaus and
unemployment is contained in the report of Mr. Devine above referred to.

[44] Besides private trade schools, interesting experiments have been
made in continuation and coöperative training in Boston, Chicago and
Cincinnati. In Cincinnati, the coöperative plan inaugurated by Dean
Schneider in the university has been remarkably successful.

[45] Florence M. Marshall: _Industrial Training for Women_, Bulletin
No. 4 National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, p.
17.




THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT OF THE PROTECTION OF WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

ERNST FREUND

University of Chicago


I

A brief survey of the American legislation for the protection of women
in industry will facilitate the discussion of the constitutional
principles by which the action of legislatures is controlled. The
following types of statutes should be distinguished:

1. Those which provide that no person shall be precluded, debarred
or disqualified from any lawful occupation, profession or employment
on account of sex. Illinois and Washington so provide by statute
(making exceptions for military employment and public office), while
California enacts the same principle in the form of an article of her
constitution. A statute of this kind can at most have the effect of
removing some supposed bar existing by virtue of law of custom. The
statute of Illinois was in fact the consequence of a decision of the
supreme court of that state which denied a woman a license to practise
law, and against which the Supreme Court of the United States had been
appealed to in vain.[46] The incorporation of the principle into the
constitution will, on the other hand, control future as well as past
legislation, and may prove an embarrassment in the way of carrying out
other protective policies. The wording of the provisions does not seem
to affect any possible disqualifications by reason of marriage and
coverture.

2. Those which bar women from certain employments altogether. It is
noteworthy that only five days after removing the disabilities of sex
with reference to employment in general, Illinois prohibited the labor
of women in coal mines, and the same prohibition is now found in the
principal mining states (Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington,
West Virginia, Wyoming). The other employment from which women are
sometimes debarred (in about a dozen states) is the dispensing of
intoxicating liquors. So under the liquor-tax law of New York (§31) no
woman not a member of the keeper’s family may sell or serve liquor to
be consumed on the premises. In California, under the constitutional
provision above quoted, an ordinance making it a misdemeanor for a
female to wait on any person in any dance cellar or barroom was held
invalid,[47] but later on an ordinance prohibiting the sale of liquor
in dance cellars or other places of amusement where females attend as
waitresses was sustained,[48] as was also the refusal of licenses to
those employing females,[49] upon the ground that the clause of the
constitution did not prevent the prescribing of conditions upon which
the business of retailing liquor shall be permitted to be carried on.
The court evidently felt that the object to be gained justified a
narrow construction of the constitution.

3. Statutes which prohibit the employment of women in cleaning
machinery while in motion, or in work between moving parts of
machinery. Such legislation, according to the digest of labor laws
prepared by the United States Commissioner of Labor in 1907, is found
in Missouri and West Virginia.

4. Statutes which compel the provision of sanitary and other
conveniences for females in industrial or mercantile establishments.
Beside certain obvious requirements in the interest of decency,
particular mention should be made of the legislation found in the great
majority of states, under which seats must be provided for female
employes and their use permitted when the women are not engaged in
active duty.

5. Statutes which prohibit night work in various kinds of industrial
establishments. They are to be found in about half a dozen states
(Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska). A
corresponding provision of the law of New York was declared
unconstitutional.[50] The only authority cited was the case of Lochner
_v._ New York;[51] and it should be noticed that at the date of the
decision (June, 1907), the supreme court of the United States had not
yet promulgated its very liberal views as to the power to control
women’s work which subsequently appeared in the case of Muller _v._
Oregon.[52] The New York Court treated the prohibition also as a
sanitary measure exclusively, and did not advert to possible moral
considerations. The decision stands, however, unrevoked, and the law of
New York must be treated as annulled.

6. Statutes which in other respects limit the hours of labor of female
employes. The establishments to which the laws apply vary, as they do
in the case of night work, manufacturing establishments being the most
common. The number of states having such laws has rapidly increased in
recent years, there being now over twenty in all parts of the country,
not counting those which apply only to females under age, or those
which forbid only the compelling of work for longer hours. The number
of hours is usually ten per day, often with a reduction for the total
of the week, so as to make a shorter day on one day of the week; but
sometimes also providing only a maximum number for the entire week.


II

When we compare these statutes enacted on behalf of women workers with
the general body of labor legislation, we note the almost total absence
of any interference with purely economic arrangements: there is nothing
analogous to store-order or weekly-payment acts applying to women in
particular, nor any attempt to control the rate of wages. The most
controversial field of labor legislation from the constitutional point
of view has thus been avoided.

Health, safety and morals have always been undisputed titles of the
police power, where it is a question of protecting the public at
large. The control of the internal arrangements of the workshop in the
interest of the employes, who, in theory, entered into it voluntarily,
was the great extension of the power of the law achieved by the English
factory acts. It is a strange anachronism when we find American courts
in the end of the nineteenth century questioning the legitimacy of
restrictive legislation intended only for the benefit of the employed,
who may be willing to assume the risk,[53] but it is true that it was
not until after the middle of the nineteenth century that the English
law sanctioned sanitary requirements on behalf of adult employes, and
the singling out of adult women for the purpose of such protection
met with opposition.[54] At present the validity of the sanitary and
safety provisions of factory acts is, in principle, unquestioned, and
opponents of such acts have to scrutinize them for constitutional
defects in non-essential features. Where such provisions apply to women
in particular it is generally because the danger or evil arises out of
conditions peculiar to the sex.

The limitation of hours of labor is at present the most conspicuous
phase of restrictive labor legislation. As applied to men, it has in
general been confined to special occupations. In some cases the reason
why they were singled out is not apparent. This is true of the laws of
some southern states with regard to the employes of cotton or woolen
mills, which have not been passed upon by the courts of last resort;
in other cases, the inducing motive was the consideration of public
safety, as in the limitation of hours of trainmen; in the remaining
cases--those of miners and bakers--the legislation sought to justify
itself as a measure for the protection of the health of the employes.

It is well known that there is a conflict of judicial opinion
regarding the validity of this legislation, strongly emphasized by the
vacillating attitude of the Supreme Court of the United States, which
sustained an eight-hour day for miners and annulled a ten-hour day for
bakers.[55] The inconsistency of these two rulings is particularly
striking, since it is generally believed that the occupation of bakers
is exceptionally unsanitary, and was singled out as such under the
delegated powers of regulation committed to the federal council by the
German trade code, while the mining of coal under modern conditions is
regarded as remarkably immune from occupational disease. In Colorado
the eight-hour day for miners was declared unconstitutional.[56]

The difficulty which American courts have experienced with regard to
the treatment of hours of labor is easily understood. They assume
the existence of a constitutional principle which protects what is
called the freedom of contract. This means that the state must leave
the economic side of the labor contract to the free bargaining of the
parties concerned; it means from the point of view of the employer
that his business is not to be regulated by law in order to secure
satisfactory terms to the employe, as the railroad business is
regulated to secure fair terms to the shipper or the traveling public;
from the point of view of the employe it means that he is free to make
the most of his earning capacity, and to work as long as he pleases,
or rather, conceding the limited sphere of the police power, as long
as is consistent with proper standards of health and safety. The
movement for the eight-hour day has, generally speaking, been frankly
an economic movement, designed to advance the workman in the social
scale, to give him time for recreation, culture, the enjoyment of
his home, everything, in short, that is supposed to go with rational
leisure, and it has generally been accepted as a principle of American
constitutional law, that this consummation was not to be brought about
by legislative compulsion. The state was to further the movement only
in so far as it had the right to dictate the conditions of employment
on work done for the public.

Notwithstanding the recognition of this constitutional limitation,
there have at all times been large sections of organized labor who
would have been glad to enlist the power of the law in the struggle
for the shorter workday, and who would welcome any reduction on
constitutionally valid grounds as a step in that direction. Hence the
appeal for the eight-hour day on public works; and hence the appeal to
the police power of the state for the purpose of shortening hours of
labor.

There has always been greater difficulty in furnishing legal
protection against the risk of disease in industrial employment than
against the risk of accident. The common-law liability of the employer
for illness contracted by the employe in consequence of defective
arrangements may be regarded as a negligible factor, owing to the
difficulty of legally proving the cause of disease and to the operation
of the doctrine of assumption of risk. It is only since 1906 that
a statutory liability for disease has, within a very narrow range,
been established in England, and such a thing is not even agitated
in this country. For protection against occupational disease and
its consequences our laws rely upon preventive regulation entirely.
No system of protective devices, however, can banish altogether the
baneful effect of certain occupations upon the general health and
strength of the worker, and it is against these inevitable risks that
reliance must be placed upon diminishing the amount of exposure, _i.
e._, reducing the hours of labor. This reduction is, of course, also
the only remedy against the specific evil effects upon the human system
of overexertion and fatigue.

A demand which has generally been understood to serve economic
or social purposes may thus assume the character of a sanitary
requirement, and the confusion of purposes is aggravated by the fact
that of all sanitary risks that of a mere prolongation of effort
under undesirable conditions is the least tangible, as well as the
most variable according to individual constitutions, and that the
legal maximum of duration of work must be more or less haphazard
and arbitrary. The resulting difficulty in the application of
constitutional principles is obvious. If the courts are expected to
protect the freedom of contract, as the legislature is expected to
protect the public welfare, can the mere enactment of a statute be
accepted as conclusive as to the requirements of the public health
and safety? Up to the present time the courts have not succeeded in
evolving any definite theory with reference to this problem; it is a
matter of speculation whether in a given case they will acquiesce in
the legislative judgment or override it.

Toward legislation limiting the hours of labor of women the attitude
of the courts has on the whole been favorable. Ten-hour laws have been
sustained in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Washington and
Oregon, and the Oregon decision has been affirmed by the Supreme Court
of the United States. Against these decisions must be set that of the
supreme court of Illinois, rendered in 1895, declaring an eight-hour
day for women to be unconstitutional. A ten-hour law, modeled upon
that of Oregon, was enacted in Illinois in 1909, and a case involving
its constitutionality is now awaiting the decision of the supreme
court of the state.[57] The decision in the earlier Illinois case has
been much criticized, and the opinion contains statements which at
the present day would find the approval of few courts. Stripped of
superfluous dicta, and reduced to its vital points, the decision stands
for two things: that the adult woman is entitled to the same measure
of constitutional right as the adult man, and that the court did not
believe that an eight-hour day was a sanitary requirement even for
women. “There is no reasonable ground,” the court said, “at least none
which has been made manifest to us in the arguments of counsel, for
fixing on eight hours in one day as the limit within which woman can
work without injury to her physique, and beyond which, if she work,
injury will necessarily follow.”

This skepticism should not cause great surprise or indignation.
Notwithstanding the rapid change of opinion within the last two decades
in favor of restricting the hours of labor of women, an eight-hour
maximum day for women workers is even now unknown in America or in
Europe, and in Germany it took eighteen years, from 1892 to 1910, to
reduce the workday of female factory hands from eleven to ten hours. It
is easy to understand that a compulsory eight-hour day in 1893 or 1895
should have appeared to the court as an unreasonable and even arbitrary
interference with private rights. To say the least the case for such a
measure had not yet been made out.

The limitation of the hours of women workers had become a part of
English factory legislation as early as 1844. A factory report of the
previous year had pointed out that women were physically incapable of
enduring a continuance of work for the same length of time as men,
and that deterioration of their health was attended with far more
injurious consequences to society.[58] The need of hygienic protection
had thus been brought to the attention of the legislature. At the same
time the economic aspect of the measure appears to have been the more
prominent. The men desired shorter hours for themselves, but thought an
appeal to parliament hopeless; thus women and children were put forward
in the hope, which events justified, that the legal reduction of their
worktime would accomplish without legislation the same purpose for
men.[59] The agitation was in fact conducted as one for shorter hours
all around, although the bills as drawn did not include adult men.
There appears on the other hand to have been some apprehension on the
part of women that the men sought to impose restrictions upon them to
make them less desirable employes and thus crowd them out of work, and
for a long time the equal treatment of adult women and men was demanded
by the leaders of the women themselves.

Factory legislation, as first conceived, was to apply only to those
who were not free agents, namely to children. True, the married woman
was not legally a free agent, but she was struggling for emancipation,
which eventually came, and the female sex as such labored under
no disabilities. Prominent economists urged that the state had no
business to dictate to the adult woman the terms of her employment.
But the exclusion of woman from underground mines paved the way for
her subjection to state control, and the act of 1844 put her in the
same class with children and young persons. The separate and distinct
treatment of women thus became an established feature of English
factory legislation.

In America the sanitary or hygienic argument in the movement for
limitation of hours of female labor in factories was prominent from
the beginning. The legislation in Massachusetts enacted in 1874 had
been preceded by official investigations and reports concerning the
detrimental effect of long hours upon the constitution of women.
If woman was to be accorded the fulness of individual liberty and
equality with man,--and barring the denial of the active political
franchise, the tendency as manifested in married women’s legislation
and in admission to business and professional pursuits, was in that
direction--a peculiar danger in her case from overwork and a special
need of protection had to be made out.

In the earlier judicial decisions sustaining the ten-hour laws for
women the existence of this special danger and need was rather assumed
than supported by evidence. The argument for the Oregon law before the
Supreme Court of the United States for the first time laid all stress
and emphasis upon the documentary testimony which had been accumulated
in scientific treatises and official publications, showing the evil
effects of overexertion and overfatigue upon women employed in the
monotonous routine of mechanical labor. In marshaling medical, social
and economic, instead of legal authorities, Mr. Brandeis, the counsel
for the state of Oregon, clearly recognized that if the principle of
freedom of contract is to be accepted as part of the constitution,
the validity of the limitation of hours of labor becomes a question
of fact, which must be answered upon the basis of observation and
experience. The same line of argument was presented still more
elaborately (and again by Mr. Brandeis) in the Illinois case.

Attention was called to the extreme monotony of labor attending the
minute subdivision of manufacturing processes, to the increasing
strain of factory work due to the speeding of machinery, and to the
general baneful effects, moral as well as physical, of overexertion
and overfatigue. It is impossible to glance over the array of extracts
from authoritative sources gathered from different countries without
realizing that an entirely new light is thrown upon the subject of long
hours in industry, with primary and specific reference to the work of
women. A case for the exercise of the police power, even upon its most
conservative basis, is made out such as had never before been presented
when the validity of labor legislation was at issue. A showing of facts
such as this might well induce a court to sanction state interference
with the freedom of contract, while insisting to the fullest extent
upon the same measure of constitutional right for women and men.

It is a remarkable fact that American constitutional law is still
unsettled as to the constitutional equality of women with men, so far
as liability to restrictive legislation is concerned. The few judicial
utterances on the subject are conflicting. Illinois in the first case
of Ritchie _v._ The People[60] made no distinction between men and
women with reference to personal rights and the freedom of contract.
New York is quite explicit: “Under our laws men and women now stand
alike in their constitutional rights, and there is no warrant for
making any discrimination between them with respect to the liberty of
person, or of contract.”[61] On the other hand the supreme court of
Nebraska, in sustaining the ten-hour law, frankly speaks of women as
wards of the state, and the passage in question is quoted with apparent
approval by the supreme court of Oregon; and the Supreme Court of the
United States, instead of planting its decision squarely upon the facts
presented in the brief for the state of Oregon, mingles considerations
drawn from physical conditions with others resting upon the general
status of the female sex in such a way as to give an apparent
preponderance to the latter. The court, speaking through Mr. Justice
Brewer, said:

 Still, again, history discloses the fact that woman has always been
 dependent upon man. He established his control at the outset by
 superior physical strength, and this control in various forms, with
 diminishing intensity, has continued to the present. As minors, though
 not to the same extent, she has been looked upon in the courts as
 needing especial care that her rights may be preserved. Education was
 long denied her, and while now the doors of the school room are opened
 and her opportunities for acquiring knowledge are great, yet even with
 that and the consequent increase of capacity for business affairs,
 it is still true that in the struggle for subsistence she is not an
 equal competitor with her brother. Though limitations upon personal
 and contractual rights may be removed by legislation, there is that in
 her disposition and habits of life which will operate against a full
 assertion of those rights. She will still be where some legislation
 to protect her seems necessary to secure a real equality of right.
 Doubtless there are individual exceptions, and there are many respects
 in which she has an advantage over him; but looking at it from the
 viewpoint of the effort to maintain an independent position in life,
 she is not upon an equality. Differentiated by these matters from
 the other sex, she is properly placed in a class by herself, and
 legislation designed for her protection may be sustained, even when
 like legislation is not necessary for men and could not be sustained.
 It is impossible to close one’s eyes to the fact that she still looks
 to her brother and depends upon him. Even though all restrictions on
 political, personal and contractual rights were taken away, and she
 stood, so far as statutes are concerned, upon an absolutely equal
 plane with him, it would still be true that she is so constituted that
 she will rest upon and look to him for protection; that her physical
 structure and a proper discharge of her maternal functions--having
 in view not merely her own health, but the well-being of the
 race--justify legislation to protect her from the greed as well as
 the passion of man. The limitations which this statute places upon
 her contractual powers, upon her right to agree with her employer as
 to the time she shall labor, are not imposed solely for her benefit,
 but also largely for the benefit of all. Many words cannot make this
 plainer. The two sexes differ in structure of body, in the functions
 to be performed by each, in the amount of physical strength, in the
 capacity for long-continued labor, particularly when done standing,
 the influence of vigorous health upon the future well-being of the
 race, the self-reliance which enables one to assert full rights,
 and in the capacity to maintain the struggle for subsistence. This
 difference justifies a difference in legislation and upholds that
 which is designed to compensate for some of the burdens which rest
 upon her.

 We have not referred in this discussion to the denial of the elective
 franchise in the state of Oregon, for while it may disclose a lack
 of political equality in all things with her brother, that is not of
 itself decisive. The reason runs deeper, and rests in the inherent
 difference between the two sexes, and in the different functions in
 life which they perform.[62]

It is to be noted that the Supreme Court refuses to regard the
non-possession of active political rights as a controlling element.
Under a system which sets constitutional limitations against the
popular will as expressed through the ordinary elective franchise,
the treatment of the latter as relatively indifferent has a certain
plausibility which would be much more doubtful in England or Germany.
If the vote cannot secure shorter hours, it may be argued that the
absence of the vote cannot be a valid reason for allowing the exercise
of the power. If, on the other hand, shorter hours are demanded in
the interest of the public, the bestowal of the franchise should not
forfeit the benefit of the measure.

From a practical point of view, however, political power is an
important, if not in the long run decisive, factor in the economic
struggle, and as long as it is withheld from women they have a claim
to special protection from the state, which they may put forward as
a requirement of justice, without conceding that their status is
naturally one of dependence and inferiority.

There is another argument in favor of a larger state interference with
the freedom of contract in the case of women than in that of men, which
has received little attention, but seems to deserve consideration.

The whole doctrine of freedom of contract is based upon a theory of
constitutional equality which is frequently belied by the facts. What
saves the theory from being altogether a fiction, is the possibility
of contracting on something like equal terms through the power of
collective bargaining. The doctrine of freedom of contract stands
and falls with the efficacy of the organization of labor. If for any
reason, such organization is impossible or ineffective, the right of
the state to exert its power in favor of tolerable economic conditions
cannot in reason be disputed, even though considerations of expediency
or wisdom may make its exercise undesirable.

In the past, women workers have been greatly inferior to men in the
power of effective organization. It remains to be seen whether this
inferiority will be permanent. Considering the fact that most women
enter industrial work as a temporary occupation which they expect to
give up for matrimony, and that the care of the household and family
is still regarded as their normal and proper function, it is not
surprising that there should be much less opportunity and inducement
for organization among women than among men. And if this should prove
to be a necessary limitation, it would constitute a justification for
the exercise of state control, which in the case of men may be found to
be absent or to be confined to particular employments.

When we examine the labor laws of Massachusetts and other states,
in which women are so commonly classed with young persons we might
be tempted to conclude, that as on the one hand the state claims
absolute control over children, and on the other hand is careful to
respect the constitutional rights of adult men, there is manifested a
consciousness of a power, not absolute, but transcending the normal
measure, equally exercisable over those beyond the age of childhood
and below full maturity, and over women. Upon closer scrutiny it will
however appear that there are extremely few cases in which special
legislation for women is of a purely economic character. The provision
of the Massachusetts law[63] forbidding deductions from the wages of
women (and minors) in case of the breakdown of machinery if they are
refused the privilege of leaving the mill while the damage is being
repaired, is one of the rare instances in point. Generally the common
protection accorded to women and young persons is quite capable of
being explained upon the basis of physical differences between adult
men and adult women, and it is not therefore necessary to have recourse
to the greater justification of special economic protection. The case
may be somewhat different in English and German legislation.

From a constitutional point of view it makes a considerable difference
whether the exercise of special power over the individual is based upon
his supposed dependency and inferiority of right, or is due to special
conditions in no way derogatory to his civil status. It is one thing to
quarantine a smallpox patient, another thing to detain an alien at an
immigrant station. When measures shall be proposed for the control of
women in industry upon a principle different from any applied to men,
it will be time to inquire whether she is to be measured by different
and inferior political standards. The laws that have been so far
enacted for women involve, with rare exceptions, no such discrimination.

The specific evil effects of long hours of standing upon female organs
have long been recognized; so there is assumed to be a difference
in nervous structure, and a greater susceptibility, in consequence
of this, to the exhaustion of prolonged work. The indirect danger
of diminished strength and vitality of possible offspring involves
a supreme interest of the community at large, for which there is no
parallel in the case of men, and which must satisfy the demands of the
strictest constitutional constructionist.

The prohibition of night work in factories has in the case of younger
women, at least, the justification of moral protection;[64] and while,
upon an assumed constitutional equality of both sexes, such total
prohibition is less easily explained as regards women of mature age,
it is probably possible to establish a case of social or physical
desirability of the restriction in their favor.

It might be said that the prohibition of women’s work on specially
dangerous machinery presents a case where the tutelary care of the
state is simply pushed one step farther than in the case of men; but
even here a specific danger is traceable; for it appears that the first
provision of that kind in England was due to the suggestions of factory
inspectors who pointed out to the parliamentary committee that the
customary dress of girls and women made them especially liable to be
caught by machinery.[65]

There are undoubtedly other matters in which protective legislation
for women might be extended for reasons not involving any deficiency
of constitutional status. Without indulging in speculation regarding
social needs or moral dangers, we may point to the provisions of
the German trade code, which recognize the special needs of working
women. The right given to women who manage their household, to ask
for an extra half hour at noon, if the period of noon rest is less
than an hour and a half, is probably, like all other privileges made
dependent upon special request, of little practical value. The rule
that women must not be employed after five o’clock in the afternoon
on Saturdays and the eve of holidays, is, however, mandatory, and is
likewise clearly dictated by a regard for household duties. Above all
there is the prohibition of employment before and after confinement,
altogether for eight weeks, the return to work requiring proof that
at least six weeks have elapsed since confinement. In accordance with
the recommendations of the Berlin Conference of 1890, England in 1891
likewise placed a restriction upon the employment of women for four
weeks after childbirth, but the enforcement of the law seems to suffer
from administrative difficulties.[66]

The present scarcity of similar legislation in this country seems to
be due, not so much to constitutional doubts or difficulties, as to
the fact that there does not appear to have been the same demand, or
perhaps, owing to the less common employment of married women, the
same occasion for such a restriction. Should the necessity for such
legislation arise there ought to be no fear that the constitutions
stand in the way of appropriate and adequate protection. Our
present statutes by no means exhaust the permissible field of state
interference.


III

If the validity of some particular form of regulation for a particular
purpose be conceded, another difficulty arises in determining the
proper range and scope of the proposed law. The equal protection of
the laws guaranteed by the fourteenth amendment does not demand a
mechanical equality of treatment of all persons irrespective of the
conditions of their occupation or employment; but this equality is
inconsistent with arbitrary or partial discrimination. Ever since the
Supreme Court of the United States declared the Illinois anti-trust law
unconstitutional, because it made an exception from its prohibitions
with reference to agricultural products or live stock in the hands of
the producer or raiser,[67] there has been a feeling of uncertainty
as to the extent of permissible classification. The tendency of the
federal Supreme Court has been on the whole to concede to state
legislatures a considerable latitude in the selection of objects of
police restraint; but the risk of contest on this ground is a factor
to be reckoned with in framing any restrictive legislation. Some of
the states, as Illinois, are inclined to apply the principle rather
strictly against the singling out by statute of certain groups, when
other groups might be liable to similar dangers or evils.

The categories which we find mentioned in the American statutes
restricting the hours of labor of women, are factories (by this or
some other equivalent designation), mechanical establishments (not
clearly differentiated from factories), mercantile establishments,
laundries, hotels and restaurants. In most of the states having laws
on the subject only some of these are covered. No law has as yet
undertaken to regulate with particular reference to women either
industrial home work or domestic or semi-professional service. Only one
state (Oregon) includes the important transportation and transmission
employments, especially the telephone and telegraph service, in which
so many women are engaged, while Montana confines its restriction to
the public telephone service. Up to the present time no law relating
to women’s work has been declared unconstitutional by reason of the
specification of particular employments; the law sustained by the
Supreme Court of the United States applied to manufacturing and
mechanical establishments and laundries. It seems reasonable enough
to differentiate these employments from those in which there is an
element of personal service, such as waiting on customers or rendering
direct assistance to the employer, and which are therefore free
from the monotonous routine of purely mechanical work. It might be
difficult on the other hand to justify the omission of such work as
dishwashing or scrubbing in restaurants or hotels. Again, where the
restriction applies to employment in mechanical, but not in mercantile
establishments, a question might be raised concerning the clerical
positions of both classes which are filled by women, and which are
subject to different treatment, while not differing in the character
of the work done. The difficulty can perhaps be avoided by construing
the statute as applying only to mechanical employments in mechanical
establishments.

Where, as in Missouri, the law is limited to cities above a certain
size, it may be argued plausibly that the loss of time in going to and
from work in large cities is apt to be considerable and may be taken
into account in determining the territorial application of the law.

Another difficulty is presented by the demands created by conditions of
emergency or an exceptional pressure of business. In condemning the New
York ten-hour law for bakers, the Supreme Court of the United States
referred disapprovingly to the absence of an emergency clause. On the
other hand the constitutionality of the fifty-four-hour law for women
of the state of Michigan is said to have been attacked on the ground
that it makes an exception for employment in preserving perishable
goods in fruit and vegetable canning establishments. Massachusetts
allows a limited amount of excess work in seasonal industries, and the
same is true under the German law.

The following comment by the New York commissioner of labor[68] on
the New York law regulating the hours of women is instructive in this
respect:

 In its original bill form this act made an exception, adopted from
 the English law, in favor of factories manufacturing perishable and
 seasonal articles or the products of such articles, and allowed
 them to employ females over 18 for sixty-six hours a week in not to
 exceed six weeks a year. Similar exceptions are contained in the
 laws of almost all the nations of Europe and are permitted by the
 recent international labor treaty signed at Berne. They are based
 upon necessity and equity and are consonant with health, for the
 reason that in such industries limited overtime during rush periods
 or seasons would be counterbalanced by reduced hours in slack periods
 or seasons. But the provision aroused such a violent public protest
 that it was temporarily abandoned. That was the cause of great regret
 to me, for I believe that the health provisions of our factory laws
 should be limited to the reasonable requirements of health, and that
 particular industries should not be unnecessarily and unreasonably
 embarrassed for the sole purpose of keeping a regulation general and
 uniform. In those industries where the supply of the raw material, the
 fitness of the material or the ability to work is determined by the
 weather, it is impossible to divide the week, the month and the year
 into working days or weeks of approximately equal duration, as our law
 presupposes; and it is not a necessary or even a reasonable health
 regulation that forbids time lost by such cause to be in any degree
 made up when the weather permits. Reasonable variations from the more
 regular limitations imposed upon those industries in which work is or
 can be made regular should be allowed for those in which it cannot.
 I do not want to be understood as condoning the excessive hours per
 day and per week that are now occasionally worked in those factories
 to which such an exception would apply. On the contrary they should
 be sharply restricted according to health requirements. But I believe
 that if those factories were allowed such variations from the general
 rule as would not be injurious to health, it would render the law more
 easily and generally enforcible as to them and would in fact reduce
 their hours of labor, and it would avoid the danger of an adverse
 decision from the courts as to the constitutionality of the provisions
 limiting the hours of women’s labor.

It is not easy to see why any emergency provision should be regarded as
in itself violating the principle of equality, but there may be some
danger in not treating alike different emergencies which are entitled
to equal consideration.

The absence of an emergency clause may expose the law to the charge of
creating unnecessary hardships and thereby creating an unreasonable
interference with liberty. If however in this as in other matters
perfect justice and adaptation of means to the end might be thought to
require a more minute differentiation than our statutes provide, it
should be borne in mind that one very legitimate element in considering
the reasonableness of a statute is the possibility or facility of its
administration. A certain degree of mechanical uniformity of rules
is essential to the successful operation of any act. Experience has
demonstrated that it is extremely difficult to control compliance with
legal limitations of hours of labor, if the permitted number of hours
may be arranged at any time within a range of fourteen or fifteen
hours, or if the employer is permitted to employ two shifts of working
women, or if he is allowed to distribute 54 or 60 hours through the
week as he pleases. On the other hand Dr. Jacobi quotes the labor
commissioner of New York as saying: “Except for the administrative
reason that it makes it easier to enforce the prohibition against
overtime, there is no present necessity in this state for the
prohibition of night work by adult women. On the other hand, if
enforced, it would deprive some mature working women, employed by night
only at skilled trades, for short hours and for high wages, of all
means of support. And the prohibition, in its application to factories
only, seems rather one-sided when we consider that probably the hardest
occupations of women, those of hotel laundresses and cleaners, are not
limited as to hours in any way.”[69] The relevancy of administrative
considerations has received very little judicial discussion in
connection with the problem of discrimination, and deserves serious
consideration. While important rights should not be allowed to be
sacrificed to mere official convenience, effectiveness and even the
cost of administrative supervision should be regarded as legitimate
factors in determining the reasonableness of restrictive measures.

The whole problem of discrimination depends so much upon the varying
conditions of different industries that an intelligent judgment of
what is legitimate and what is arbitrary is possible only upon the
basis of a close study of facts. There ought to be some guaranty that
legislation in this respect shall proceed upon a careful and impartial
survey of all relevant conditions, and in the notorious absence of
such guaranties, the courts may well demand to be convinced that
discriminations are not arbitrary, and that the denial of exemptions
is necessary from an administrative point of view. It is a further
question whether it is possible for the legislature to do full justice
to the varying needs of industries by making direct provision for all
cases, or whether powers of dispensation or permit must not be vested
in administrative authorities. Such powers should not go beyond the
province of what constitutes, properly speaking, administration. As
soon as they assume the character of subsidiary regulations, there
arises a constitutional difficulty in the principle that legislative
powers must not be delegated. A statute of California which left it
to the judgment of the labor commissioner to determine whether the
inhalation of noxious gases could be prevented by the use of some
mechanical contrivance, and if so, to direct its installation, was on
that ground declared unconstitutional.[70] There are also, however,
decisions sustaining the delegation to administrative authorities
of the power to specify standards in pursuance of a general policy
indicated by the legislature.[71] At present it is not clear to what
extent the delegation of powers of regulation can be safely carried,
nor is it probably in accordance with prevailing sentiment that it
should extend to provisions that can be dealt with intelligently and
effectually by legislation.


IV

Attention has been called to the conflicting views of the courts of
New York and Illinois, and the federal Supreme Court, with reference
to the constitutional rights of women. Similar differences may appear
with regard to drawing the line between legitimate and arbitrary
discrimination. It is important to observe that the more liberal view
in favor of the legislative power held by the Supreme Court of the
United States is not binding on the states. It is different where the
state courts take the more liberal view. When the Supreme Court decided
that a ten-hour law for bakers violated the fourteenth amendment, the
New York law fell, and similar legislation in all other states was
invalidated or made impossible. If the Supreme Court should decide, as
it probably would, that the prohibition of night work of women does not
violate the fourteenth amendment, the court of appeals of New York,
while it might revise and overrule its own decision to the effect that
such prohibition is invalid, would not be bound to do so, but would
have the right to insist that the constitution of New York protects
individual right against legislative power more effectually than does
the federal constitution. And so it is well understood that the supreme
court of Illinois, in passing upon the validity of the ten-hour law of
that state, copied from the law of Oregon which the Supreme Court of
the United States sustained, is not bound, though it may be properly
influenced, by that decision; the federal authority is persuasive,
but not controlling. This results from the fact that the fourteenth
amendment was enacted as a protection against the abuse of legislative
power, and is not concerned with legislative inaction or impotence,
induced by the construction which the state courts put upon the state
constitution.

In such cases the people of the state have it in their hands to
remove the opposition of their judiciary, by amending their state
constitution so as to permit the desired legislation. This was done
in New York with reference to legislative control of labor performed
in connection with state and municipal works, and in Colorado, with
regard to hours of labor in specified occupations and other branches
of industry which the legislature might deem injurious to health. So
the new constitution of Michigan provides (art. V, § 29) that the
legislature shall have power to enact laws relative to the hours and
conditions under which women and children may be employed. If such
constitutional amendment is adequately framed and the new legislation
conforms to its provisions--in Colorado the supreme court held that
an eight-hour law for women enacted after the amendment fell short of
satisfying the requirements of the amended constitution[72]--there is
nothing but the federal constitution that can be superior to the new
law. If the federal Supreme Court has held that such a law does not
violate the federal constitution, the construction must be binding upon
the state court. True, if the state court should presume to place upon
the federal constitution a construction more unfavorable to legislative
power than the federal Supreme Court, there would be no possibility,
under the federal statutes, of reviewing or reversing that decision,
but it is almost inconceivable that a state supreme court should take
such a position and override the most authentic and authoritative
interpretation of the highest law of the land, provided by that law. As
a matter of fact, such a course has never been taken, and need not be
apprehended.

It is one of the dominant features of our constitutional system
that the nation, except for the regulation of interstate and foreign
commerce, has debarred itself from the active and positive care of
social and economic interests. The other great federated commonwealths
of the world have more liberal provisions in this respect. Germany
has assigned to the imperial power the whole subject of trade and
industry; the Swiss constitution of 1874 mentions as subjects of
federal legislation hours of labor and the care of health in factories;
in Canada the Dominion is given residuary powers which cover the bulk
of industrial legislation, and Australia by a wise provision allows
any two or more of the states to refer to the federal parliament any
matters to be regulated for the referring states jointly. The United
States has by its constitution undertaken to safeguard individual right
as an immunity from governmental oppression, but not as an immunity
from private exploitation which falls short of reduction to practical
servitude. Congress cannot enact protective measures for women in
industry applicable to the nation at large. Its position is in this
respect the same as with regard to child labor. It has been suggested
that the United States might and should debar products manufactured
by child labor from interstate or foreign commerce, and if this were
practicable, women’s work might be controlled in the same way. Such a
legislative contrivance would violate the spirit, if not the letter,
of the constitution, and on that account would meet with strong and
legitimate opposition.

It is undoubtedly an anomaly, that our arbitrary and artificial state
lines should stand in the way of such uniformity of industrial control
as competitive industrial conditions may demand. A certain measure
of unity may perhaps be achieved by the hitherto untried method of
legislative agreements between several states, subject to the consent
of Congress. But under the limitations of state constitutions, such
unity would be a precarious thing, and its possibility has hardly been
discussed.

Considering the action taken by the International Conference on Labor
Regulation at Berne in 1906 in regard to the night work of women,
the question suggests itself whether the treaty-making power might
not be used for the purpose of securing national protection of women
in industry. The Berne convention provides that the industrial work
of women at night shall be prohibited, with a specification of the
number of hours, and subject to certain exceptions particularly set
forth. Suppose the United States had been a party to this convention,
what would have been the effect? Under the federal constitution, the
treaties are the highest law of the land, and treaties of the United
States sometimes deal with subjects otherwise withdrawn from federal
jurisdiction and belonging to the states, so especially with the right
of aliens to hold land. But these treaty provisions are directly
operative without further legislation. This does not appear to be
true of the Berne Convention. For although the convention regarding
night-work uses the word “shall be prohibited” (_sera interdit_)
while the phosphorus convention says the parties “bind themselves
to prohibit” (_s’engagent à interdire_), yet even the night-work
convention leaves it to the signatory states to define what shall be
regarded as industrial enterprises, and therefore is not operative
without further legislation. For the United States the convention
would therefore have been ineffective without the concurrent action
of each state. Even however if a convention should create immediately
operative restraints, they would probably be ineffective in practice
without appropriate administrative arrangements, and these, under
the constitution, can be provided only by the states. On the whole,
the treaty-making power can hardly be relied upon to break down the
barriers created by state autonomy.

Fortunately, however, the work of agitation and public education knows
no state lines, and the national influences which are thus constantly
operative cannot fail to produce a certain uniformity of legislation
which will increase as the wisdom of restrictive or regulative measures
approves itself by their success. In the work of public enlightenment,
the federal government can and does bear its share, since the
expenditure of national funds is not bound by the same limitations as
the enactment of laws intended to bind private action, and since the
constitution, through the provision for the census, lends a direct
sanction to inquiries into social and economic conditions. For the
present, these non-compulsory agencies must be relied upon as the main
forces in the work of unification.


FOOTNOTES:

[46] _Cf. in re_ Bradwell, 55 Ill. 535, Bradwell v. Illinois, 16
Wallace, 130, 1873.

[47] _In re_ Maguire, 57 Cal. 604.

[48] _Ex parte_ Hayes, 98 Cal. 556.

[49] Foster _v._ Police Commissioners, 102 Cal. 483.

[50] People _v._ Williams, 189 N. Y. 131.

[51] 198 U. S. 45.

[52] 208 U. S. 412.

[53] _In re_ Morgan, 26 Col. 415; _in re_ Jacobs, 98 N. Y. 98.

[54] Hutchins and Harrison, _History of Factory Legislation_, p. 187.

[55] Holden _v._ Hardy, 169 U. S. 366, Lochner _v._ New York, 198 U. S.
45.

[56] _In re_ Morgan, 26 Col. 415.

[57] Since this article was written the Illinois supreme court has
declared the ten-hour law constitutional.--Editor.

[58] Hutchins and Harrison, _History of Factory Legislation_, p. 84.

[59] _Ibid._, p. 186.

[60] 155 Ill. 98.

[61] People _v._ Williams, 189 N. Y. 131, 134.

[62] Muller _v._ Oregon, 208 U. S. 412, 421-423.

[63] R. L., 106, § 69.

[64] “The moral dangers of night work are so obvious that they need
only be mentioned: the danger of the streets at night, going to and
from work, association with all kinds of men employes at late night
hours; the difficulty for women who are away from their families, of
living at respectable places and entering at night hours; the peril
of the midnight recess in establishments that run all night long.”
Josephine C. Goldmark, _Annals American Academy of Political and Social
Science_, v. 28, p. 64.

[65] Hutchins and Harrison, p. 85.

[66] Hutchins and Harrison, pp. 209-211.

[67] Connolly _v._ Union Sewer Pipe Co., 184 U. S. 540.

[68] _Report_ 1907, p. 49.

[69] _Charities and the Commons_, v. 17, p. 839.

[70] Schaezlein _v._ Cabaniss, 135 Cal. 466.

[71] Buttfield _v._ Stranahan, 192 U. S. 470, standards of quality of
tea; Isenhour _v._ State, 157 Ind. 517, minimum standards of food and
drug preparations, defining specific adulterations; Arms _v._ Ayer, 192
Ill. 601, determining number and location of fire escapes.

[72] Burcher _v._ People, 41 Colo. 495. The reasoning of the decision
is in some respects obscure, and the case cannot be regarded as
typical.




THE ILLINOIS TEN-HOUR DECISION[73]

JOSEPHINE GOLDMARK

National Consumers’ League


It was a unique episode in the history of American labor legislation,
when in February, 1910, two distinguished lawyers joined the state
officials of Illinois in a defense of the ten-hour law before the
state supreme court. Both gentlemen--Mr. W. C. Calhoun, the then newly
appointed ambassador to China, and Mr. Louis D. Brandeis of Boston, who
had won prestige in successfully defending a similar law before the
United States Supreme Court two years earlier--gave their services, a
free gift to the wage-earning women of Illinois, and to those of such
other states as may establish by law the ten-hour day in industry, in
consequence of the favorable Illinois decision.

The statute in behalf of which these two public-spirited lawyers
appeared, at great personal sacrifice, was enacted by the legislature
of Illinois in 1910, and restricts to ten hours the working day of
women employed in factories, mechanical establishments and laundries.

Similar legislation has been in force in England since 1847, in
Switzerland since 1877, in Germany since the early nineties, in France
since the beginning of the present century. In our own country,
Massachusetts enacted a ten-hour law as early as 1876, and the supreme
courts of four states--Massachusetts, Nebraska, Washington and
Oregon--as well as the Supreme Court of the United States itself, have
sustained the constitutionality of such laws.

Why then should a measure, so long tested by human experience and so
obviously necessary in Illinois, the third manufacturing state in the
Union, require so earnest and determined a defense? The answer to this
query is found in the favorable decision of the Illinois Supreme Court,
handed down in April, 1910. It was the necessity of putting the case so
strongly before the court that it might reverse its earlier decision
of 1895. Fifteen years ago, the Supreme Court of Illinois in what is
known as the case of Ritchie _v._ The People, held that no restriction
whatever could be placed upon the working hours of adult women employed
in manufacture. The earlier statute had established the eight-hour day
for women employed in manufacture. It was held unconstitutional and
void, as a violation of individual freedom of contract. The present
statute establishes for the same classes of workers the ten-hour day.
The same principle is involved in both laws, namely, that the working
hours of adult women may be restricted by the legislature.

In its recent decision, holding that the ten-hour statute is a valid
exercise of the police power of the state and is not in violation of
the constitution of the state of Illinois, the supreme court lays
stress upon two points: first, that the present statute is a health
measure and is so described in its title and in its text, while neither
the title nor the text of the former eight-hour law, annulled in 1895,
specifically stated its relation to the subject of health; second,
that the present statute permits ten hours’ work in twenty-four,
while the former one permitted but eight hours. These two points call
for scrutiny and consideration. In future every ten-hour bill for
women should be entitled a health measure, as in fact it is. This
precaution costs neither time, money nor effort. Yet it may save the
law when on trial before a court of last resort upon the charge of
unconstitutionality.

The second point is more difficult. If in general the principle
is accepted that statutes restricting the working hours of adult
women must be obviously and convincingly health measures, then the
enactment of future eight-hour bills and nine-hour bills might well
be accompanied by the preparation of briefs showing the necessity
for the statutory shortening of the working day as overwhelmingly
as the Brandeis brief filed in the Illinois case proved the point in
the present instance. The specific statement in the present decision
that what judges know as men, they cannot profess to ignore as judges,
emphasizes the need of presenting to them the underlying social and
medical facts upon which legislation restricting women’s working hours
is fundamentally based.

The effectiveness of this procedure is shown by the experience of
the past two years. In January, 1908, Mr. Brandeis filed with the
Supreme Court of the United States, in defense of the Oregon ten-hour
law, a brief of one hundred and twelve pages, showing the action and
opinion of European nations and some American states governing the
working hours of women in the interest of the public health. His oral
plea on that occasion followed the same lines. The decision of the
court, written by the late Justice Brewer, was unanimous, sustaining
the statute and specifically stating that the court took “judicial
cognizance” of the “facts of common knowledge” brought before them. In
the recent Illinois case, Mr. Brandeis’s brief contained more than six
hundred pages of similar information gathered during the past year by
the writer under an appropriation from the Russell Sage Foundation.

These two decisions pave the way for an immediate nationwide campaign
for the ten-hour day for women employed in factories, mechanical
establishments and laundries in all those industrial states which have
not yet enacted such laws. A similar campaign is sorely needed in many
states in order to extend to women in stores, offices, telegraph and
telephone services, trade and transportation, the benefits already
enjoyed by their sisters employed in manufacture.

The National Consumers’ League has already enlisted for this campaign,
placing well to the fore in its program for the decennial period
1910-1920 the enactment of such laws.


FOOTNOTES:

[73] [By special request of the editor, Miss Goldmark has prepared this
brief comment on the Illinois decision, pointing out its practical
lessons without discussing the legal points involved. As is well known
to students of protective legislation, only the remarkable work of Miss
Goldmark in collecting and marshaling the mass of evidence scattered in
all sorts of documents both in this country and abroad made possible
the briefs that resulted in the sustaining of both the Oregon and the
Illinois law.--EDITOR.]




A SELECTED LIST OF BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ON WOMEN
IN INDUSTRY[74]

COMPILED FOR THE WOMEN’S TRADE UNION LEAGUE BY

CAROLA WOERISHOFFER

EDITED BY

HELEN MAROT


ABBOTT, EDITH. Women in industry; a study of American economic history.
N.Y.: Appleton. 1909.

 [The history of women in industry in the United States. Also the
 cotton, shoe, printing, clothing and cigarmaking trades in their
 relation to women.--Contains a bibliography.]

ABRAHAM, M. E. & DAVIES, A. L. The law relating to factories and
workshops. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. 1901.

 [English law.]

American association for labor legislation. Proceedings of ... annual
meeting, 1907-date. N. Y.

AUSTIN, C. B. Administration of labor laws 1909. N. Y.: Am. assoc. for
labor legislation. 1909.

BAYLES, G. J. Woman and the law. N.Y. Century. 1901.

 [Statements and summaries of different state laws relating to the
 employment of women.]

BLACK, CLEMENTINA. Sweated industry and the minimum wage. London:
Duckworth. 1907.

BOUCHERETTE, JESSIE, and others. Condition of working women and factory
acts. London: Stock. 1896.

 [Purpose of the work is to prove that hardships result to women from
 trade unions and factory acts.]

BRANDEIS, L. D. Women in industry; discussion of the U. S. Supreme
Court in the case of Curt Muller _v._ state of Oregon, upholding the
constitutionality of the Oregon ten-hour law for women and brief for
the state of Oregon. N. Y.: National consumers’ league.

BRANDEIS, L. D. & GOLDMARK, JOSEPHINE. Brief and argument for
appellants in the supreme court of the state of Illinois. N. Y.:
National consumers’ league.

 [Legislation restricting the hours of labor for women, American
 legislation, foreign legislation, dangers of long hours, causes and
 effects of fatigue, effect of hours on health, safety, morals and
 general welfare, benefit of short hours, remedies, regulations and
 restrictions.]

BULLEY, A. A. & WHITLEY, MARGARET. Women’s work. N.Y.: Scribner. 1894.
(Soc. quest. of today ser.)

 [Treats of women and trade unions in the textile and other trades,
 influence of occupation on health, infant mortality, legislation.]

BUTLER, E. B. Women and the trades; Pittsburg 1907-08. N.Y.: Charities
publication committee. 1909.

 [The report of a full investigation of the conditions of work of women
 in Pittsburg.]

CADBURY, EDWARD, and others. Woman’s work and wages. London: T. Fisher
Unwin. 1906.

 [Detailed analysis of conditions and wages of working women in the
 different trades open to them in Birmingham, England; together with
 suggested remedies for existing evils and descriptions of women’s
 trade unions, girls’ clubs, etc., in Birmingham.]

CAMPBELL, HELEN. Prisoners of poverty; women wage-workers, their trades
and their life. Boston: Roberts. 1887.

 [A record taken from life in New York.]

---- (same). Prisoners of poverty abroad. Boston: Roberts. 1889.

 [Women wage-earners in London.]

---- (same). Women wage-earners. Boston: Roberts.

 [Women as wage-earners in the past; conditions and wages in Europe
 and the United States; remedies and suggestions for evils. Includes a
 bibliography.]

Canada. Department of labor. Report of the royal commission on a
dispute respecting hours of employment between the Bell telephone
company of Canada ltd. and operators at Toronto, Ont. Ottawa. 1907.

 [Report on a strike of women telephone operators.]

CANDEE, H. C. How women may earn a living. N.Y.: Macmillan. 1900.

 [Consideration of various industries and the opportunities they afford
 women workers.]

CHAPMAN, S. J. The Lancashire cotton industry. Manchester: University
press. 1904.

 [Deals briefly with women in the weaving and spinning trades, the
 attitude of trade unions, the ratio of women workers in the cotton
 industry in 1838 and 1901.]

COLLET, C. E. Educated working women; essays on the economic position
of women workers in the middle classes. London: P. S. King. 1902.

Fabian society. Life in the laundry. London: Fabian society. 1902.

 [Deals with unsanitary conditions, excessive hours, defects in
 legislation and legislative remedies.]

FORD, I. O. Women’s wages and the conditions under which they are
earned. London: Reeves. 1893. (Humanitarian league pub.)

Great Britain. Board of Trade, Labour Department. Employment of women.
London. Eyre & Spottiswoode. (Great Britain. Parliament. Sessional
Papers.)

 Report on the statistics of employment of women and girls, by Miss
 Collet. 1894.

 Report on changes in the employment of women and girls in industrial
 centres, by Miss Collet. 1898.

Great Britain. Royal Commission on Labour. Employment of women. Reports
on the conditions of work in various industries in England, Wales,
Scotland and Ireland, by the Misses Orme, Collet, Abraham and Irwin.
London. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 1898. (Great Britain. Parliament.
Sessional Papers.)

HANSON, W. C. Report of the work of the Mass. inspector of health,
November 1907-1908. Boston; State board of health.

HARRISON, A. Women’s industries in Liverpool. Liverpool: Liverpool
university press.

HERRON, B. M. The progress of labor organizations among women, together
with some considerations concerning their place in industry. University
of Illinois studies, v. 1. Urbana: University press, 1905.

 [Unions specially considered: bakers’, typographical, bookbinders’,
 teachers’, potters’, lithographers’, also garment, textile, glove,
 cigar, laundry, boot & shoe, building, metal workers’; also label
 leagues and Women’s trade union league.]

HUTCHINS, B. L. Home work and sweating, the causes and the remedies.
London: Fabian society. 1907.

HUTCHINS, B. L. & HARRISON, B. A. A history of factory legislation.
London: P. S. King. 1903.

Illinois. Bureau of labor statistics. Biennial report, 1892.
Springfield.

 [Various statistical details referring to the work, wages and welfare
 of the working women of Chicago, employed in the factories and other
 industrial groups.]

International association for labour legislation. Bulletin of the
international labour office, 1906-date. London: Labour representation,
printing and publishing co.

---- (same). Bulletin of the international labour office. Supplement,
bibliography. Jena: G. Fischer. 1909.

IRWIN, M. H. Home work amongst women. Glasgow: Women’s industrial
council. 1901.

JACOBI, ABRAHAM. Physical cost of women’s work. N. Y.: Charity
organization society. 1907.

KELLY, FLORENCE. Some ethical gains through legislation. N. Y.:
Macmillan. 1905.

 [A chapter on the necessity for and the right to leisure; a chapter on
 shorter working hours through legislation.]

London County Council. Report of the educational committee of the
London county council, submitting report by the chief inspector
presenting reports on women’s trades compiled by the late inspector of
women’s technical classes (Mrs. G. M. Oakeshott). London: P. S. King.
1908.

[Contains reports on artificial flower making, corset making,
dressmaking, lace making and mending, ladies’ tailoring, laundry work,
millinery, photography, ready-made clothing, surgical instrument
making, orthopædic appliances, etc., upholstery and waistcoat making.]

MACDONALD, J. R. (Editor). Women in the printing trades. London: P. S.
King. 1904.

 [General consideration of women in the different branches of the
 printing trade in their relation to men, trade unions, industrial
 training, legislation and wages.]

MACLEAN, A. M. Wage-earning women. N. Y.: Macmillan. 1910.

 [A study of women in leading industries in various parts of the
 country, being results of a national investigation conducted by the
 author under the auspices of the national board of the Y. W. C. A.]

MALLET, C. Dangerous trades for women. London: Reeves. (Humanitarian
league pub.)

 [The white lead trade and match factories.]

MEAKIN, A. M. B. Women in transition. London: Methuen. 1907.

 [General references to women’s economic position and some special
 references to trade unions and the woman wage earner.]

National union of women workers of Great Britain & Ireland. Women
workers; papers read at the conference held in Manchester, October,
1907. London: P. S. King.

 [Women as skilled and unskilled workers; educated and married women;
 trade unions and coöperative movements among women.]

New York (State). Bureau of statistics of labor. 3d annual report,
1885. Albany.

 [Textual and statistical tables on working women compiled from the
 returns received from manufacturers and employers in New York.]

---- Committee of the Assembly. Report and testimony taken before the
special committee of Assembly appointed to investigate conditions of
female labor in the city of New York. Albany, 1896.

OLIVER, THOMAS. (Editor). Dangerous trades; historical, social and
legal aspects of industrial occupations as affecting health. N. Y.:
Dutton. 1902.

 [Many of the trades considered include women workers.]

ORD, HARRISON. The law relating to factories, work rooms and shops in
Victoria. Melbourne: R. S. Brain. 1900.

OSGOOD, IRENE. Review of labor legislation of 1909. Madison: Am. assoc.
for labor legislation. 1909.

---- (same). Women workers in Milwaukee tanneries. Madison: Wisconsin
bureau of labor. 1908.

REDGRAVE, ALEXANDER. (Editor). Factory acts; including the act of 1895,
ed. 6. London: Shaw. 1895.

RICHARDSON, A. S. The girl who earns her own living. N. Y.: Dodge. 1909.

 [Describes different trades and professions for girls: stenography,
 salesmanship, trained and semi-trained nursing, dressmaking, library
 work, millinery, telephone operating, government work, manicuring,
 hairdressing, factory work, proof reading, etc. One chapter considers
 fully expenses of self-supporting girls in big cities.]

RICHARDSON, DOROTHY. The long day. N. Y.: Century. 1907.

 [The experience of a woman in various occupations and her difficulties
 in earning a living.]

ROE, E. M. Factory and workshop acts explained and simplified; with
summaries of the workmen’s compensation act, 1897, and the truck act,
1896. London: Simpkin. 1897.

 [Small hand-book “untechnical guide,” with marginal notes and full
 index.]

Scottish council for women’s trades. Women’s work in laundries; report
of an inquiry conducted by M. H. Irwin. Glasgow: 1904.

---- (same). Women’s work in tailoring and dressmaking; report of an
inquiry conducted by M. H. Irwin. Glasgow. 1900.

SMART, WILLIAM. Women’s wages. Glasgow: James Maclehose. 1892.

 [A consideration of the causes of the difference between wages of men
 and women; advises organization for protection against low wages.]

STIMSON, F. J. Handbook of the labor laws of the United States. N. Y.:
Scribner. 1896.

SWETT, MAUD. Woman’s work; summary of laws in force 1909. N. Y.: Am.
assoc. for labor legislation. 1909.

TAYLOR, R. W. COOKE. Factory system and factory acts. N. Y.: Scribner.
1894. (Soc. quest. of to-day.)

 [A summary account of the acts and the factory system from 1802 to
 1891.]

Trades for London girls. N. Y. Longmans, Green. 1909. [Describes trades
and how to enter them.]

TUCKWELL, GERTRUDE, and others. Women in industry from seven points of
view. London: Duckworth. 1908.

 [Contents: Regulation of women’s work, by G. M. Tuckwell; Minimum
 wage, Constance Smith; Trade unionism, M. R. Macarthur; Infant
 mortality. May Tenant; Child employment and juvenile delinquency,
 Nettie Adler; Factory and workshop laws, G. M. Anderson; Legislative
 proposals, Clementina Black.]

United States. 61st Congress, 2d session. Senate document 380.
Investigation of telephone companies. Washington. 1910.

---- (same). Census department. Statistics of women at work.
Washington. 1900.

---- (same). Commissioner of labor. Labor laws in the various states,
territories and District of Columbia; 2d special report, ed. 2.
Washington. 1896.

---- (same). Working women in large cities; 4th annual report. 1888.
Washington.

 [The report includes 343 industries and relates to 22 representative
 cities in the United States; largely made up of statistical tables
 giving age, nationality, earnings and expenses.]

VAN VORST, BESSIE and MARIE. The woman who toils. N. Y.: Doubleday,
Page. 1903.

 [Popular account of the authors’ experiences as working women in the
 various industries.]

VYNNE, NORA, & BLACKBURN, HELEN. Women under the factory acts. London:
Williams & Norgate. 1903.

 [English factory acts stated and explained with reference to both the
 employers’ and the employes’ point of view.]

WEBB, BEATRICE. (Editor). The case for the factory acts. London:
Richards. 1901.

 [Papers by various authors; deals with factory legislation in England
 and the colonies.]

---- (same). Women and the factory acts. London: Fabian society.
(Fabian Tract.)

WEBB, BEATRICE & SIDNEY. Problems of modern industry. N. Y.: Longmans,
Green. 1902.

 [Diary of an investigator; women’s wages, women and the factory acts,
 regulation of hours of labor, the sweating system.]

WILLETS, GILSON. Workers of the nation. N. Y.: Dodd, Mead. 1903.

WILLET, M. H. Employment of women in the clothing trade. N. Y.:
Columbia university. 1902.

WILSON, MONA. Our industrial laws. Working women in the factories,
workshops, shops and laundries and how to help them. London: Duckworth.
1899.

Women’s industrial council. Publications. London. Annual reports,
1892-date. Pamphlets: The case for and against a legal minimum wage for
sweated workers, 1909; Home industries of women in London, report of
an inquiry by the investigation committee, 1908; Labour laws for women
in Australia and New Zealand, 1906; in France, 1907; in Germany, 1907;
in Italy, 1908; in the United Kingdom, 1909; in the United States,
1907; Report of the national conference on the unemployment of women
dependent on their own earnings, held Oct. 15, 1907; Women’s wages in
England in the nineteenth century, 1906; Working women and the poor
law, 1909.

Women’s trade union league (National). Convention handbook 1909.
Chicago: National women’s trade union league. 1909.

 [Brief description of 32 trades in which women work.]

---- (same). Proceedings, second biennial convention. Chicago: National
women’s trade union league. 1909.

---- (Boston). History of trade unionism among women in Boston. Boston:
Women’s trade union league. 1906.

 [Deals with unions in the following trades: printing, bookbinding,
 laundry, cigar, tobacco stripping, garment, music and telegraphy.]

---- (Chicago). Leaflets. A series for trade union propaganda.

---- (N. Y.) Report of interstate conference 1908. N. Y.: 1908.

 [Report on organization in 43 women’s unions.]

The annual reports of the state bureaus of labor, and state factory
inspection departments; the bulletins of the U. S. dept. of labor; the
economic journals and monthly periodicals contain some of the most
important contributions to the literature of women in industry.


FOOTNOTES:

[74] This list makes no attempt at completeness, the aim being to
include only the most useful works in the field covered not included in
the indices of periodicals.




Transcriber’s Notes

Minor errors in punctuation have been corrected.

Page 25: “infinitesmal fragment” changed to “infinitesimal fragment”

Page 82: “duties and opportunites” changed to “duties and opportunities”

Page 98: “Interborough Associatiod” changed to “Interborough
Association”

Page 105: “analagous work” changed to “analogous work”

Page 136: “hospital dietetician” changed to “hospital dietitian”

Page 139: “dieteticians in hospitals” changed to “dietitians in
hospitals”

Page 193: “trade union legue” changed to “trade union league”