Chapter 15
It can only be a question of time, and of increasing industrial pressure, when an active trade-union movement will spring up among Canadian women. Among those who advocate and are prepared to lead in such a movement are the President of the Trades and Labor Congress, Mr. J.C. Watters, Mr. James Simpson of the Toronto _Industrial Banner_, Mrs. Rose Henderson of Montreal, Mr. J.W. Wilkinson, President of the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council, and Miss Helena Gutteridge, also of Vancouver.
The President of the National Women's Trade Union League, in her opening address before the New York convention in June, 1915, summed up the situation as to the sweated trades tellingly:
For tens of thousands of girl and women workers the average wage in sweated industries still is five, eight and ten cents an hour, and these earnings represent, on the average, forty weeks' work out of a fifty-two week year. Further, in the report of the New York State Factory Investigation Commission we find that out of a total of 104,000 men and women 13,000 receive less than $5.00 a week, 34,000 less than $7.00 a week, 68,000 less than $10.00 a week and only 17,000 receive $15.00 a week or more. These low wages are not only paid to apprentices either in factories or stores but to large numbers of women who have been continuously in industry for years. Again, the New York State Factory Investigating Commission tells us that half of those who have five years' experience in stores are receiving less than $8.00 a week, and only half of those with ten years' experience receive $10.00 a week. Dr. Howard Woolston of the Commission has pointed out: "Even for identical work in the same locality, striking differences in pay are found. In one wholesale candy factory in Manhattan no male laborer and no female hand-dipper is paid as much as $8 a week, nor does any female packer receive as much as $5.50. In another establishment of the same class in the same borough every male laborer gets $8 or over, and more than half the female dippers and packers exceed the rates given in the former plant. Again, one large department store in Manhattan pays 86 per cent. of its saleswomen $10 or over; another pays 86 per cent. of them less. When a representative paper-box manufacturer learned that cutters in neighboring factories receive as little as $10 a week, he expressed surprise, because he always pays $15 or more. This indicates that there is no well-established standard at wages in certain trades. The amounts are fixed by individual bargain, and labor is 'worth' as much as the employer agrees to pay."
It has been estimated by the Commission that to raise the wages of two thousand girls in the candy factories from $5.75 to $8.00 a week, the confectioners in order to cover the cost will have to charge eighteen cents more per hundred pounds of candy. It is also estimated that if work shirts cost $3.00 a dozen, and the workers receive sixty cents for sewing them we can raise the wages ten per cent. and make the labor cost sixty-six cents. The price of those dozen shirts has been raised to $3.06. The cost of labor in the sweated industries is a small fraction of the manufacturing cost.
In the face of such evidence is there anyone who can still question that individual bargaining is a menace against the social order and that education and equipment in organization and citizenship become a social necessity?
Women unionists, like men in the labor movement, are continually asked to support investigations into industrial conditions, investigations and yet more investigations. They are asked to give evidence before boards and commissions, they are asked to furnish journalists and writers of books with information. They have done so willingly, but there is a sense coming over many of us that we have had investigations a-plenty; and that the hour struck some time ago for at least beginning to put an end to the conditions of needless poverty and inexcusable oppression, which time after time have been unearthed.
No one who heard Mrs. Florence Kelley at the Charities and Corrections Conference in St. Louis in 1910 can forget the powerful plea she made to social workers that they should not be satisfied with investigation. Not an investigation has ever been made but has told the same story, monotonous in its lesson, only varying in details; workers, and especially women workers, are inadequately paid. Further she considers that investigations would be even more thorough and drastic if the investigators, the workers and the public knew that something would come out of the inquiry beyond words, words, words.
Investigation alone never remedied any evil, never righted any injustice. Yet as far as the community are concerned, average men and women seem quite content when the investigation has been made, and stop there. What is wrong? Will no real improvement take place till the workers are strong enough individually and collectively to manage their own affairs, and through organization, coöperation, and political action, or its equivalent insure adequate remuneration, and prevent overwork, speeding up, and dangerous and insanitary conditions?
In a degree investigation has prepared the way for legislation. Legislation will undoubtedly play even a bigger part than it has done in the protection of the workers. Almost all laws for which organized labor generally works affect women as well as men, whether they are anti-injunction statutes, or workmen's compensation acts, or factory laws. But there is another class of laws, specially favoring women, about which women have naturally more decided opinions than men. These are laws as to hours, and more recently as to wages, which are or are to be applicable to women alone. A just and common-sense argument extends special legislative protection to women, because of their generally exploited and handicapped position; but the one strong plea used in their behalf has been health and safety, the health and safety of the future mothers of society. At this point we pause. In all probability such protection will be found so beneficial to women that it will be eventually extended to men.
One group of laws in which labor is vitally interested is laws touching the right of the workers to organize. Many of the most important judicial decisions in labor cases have turned upon this point. In this are involved the right to fold arms, and peacefully to suggest to others to do the same; the right to band together not to buy non-union goods, and peacefully to persuade others not to buy.
One angle from which labor views all law-making is that of administration. A law may be beneficial. It is in danger on two sides. The first the risk of being declared unconstitutional, a common fate for the most advanced legislation in this country; or, safe on that side, it may be so carelessly or inefficiently administered as to be almost useless. In both cases, strong unions have a great influence in deciding the fate and the practical usefulness of laws.
Whether in the making, the confirming, or the administering of laws, the trade unions form the most important channel through which the wishes of the workers can be expressed. Organized labor does not speak only for trade unionists; it necessarily, in almost every case, speaks for the unorganized as well, partly because the needs of both are usually the same, and partly because there is no possible method by which the wishes of the working people can be ascertained, save through the accepted representatives of the organized portion of the workers.
An excellent illustration of how business can and does adjust itself to meet changing legal demands is seen in what happened when the Ten-Hour Law came in force in the state of Illinois in July, 1909.
The women clerks on the elevated railroads of Chicago, who had been in the habit of working twelve hours a day for seven days a week at $1.75 a day, were threatened with dismissal, and replacement by men. But what happened? At first they had to accept as a compromise a temporary arrangement under which they received eleven hours' pay for ten hours' work. Their places were not, however, filled by men, and now, they are receiving for their ten-hour day $1.90 or 15 cents more than they had previously been paid for a twelve-hour day, and in addition they now are given every third Sunday off duty. This showed the good results of the law, particularly when there was a strong organization behind the workers. Mercantile establishments came in under the amended Ten-hour Law two years later.
The new law was, on the whole, wonderfully well observed in Chicago, and as far as I have been able to learn, in the smaller towns as well. There were some violations discovered, and plenty more, doubtless, remained undiscovered. But the defaulting employers must have been very few compared with the great majority of those who met its requirement faithfully and intelligently. The proprietors and managers of the large Chicago department stores, for instance, worked out beforehand a plan of shifts by which they were able to handle the Christmas trade, satisfy their customers, and at the same time, dismiss each set of girls at the end of their ten-hour period. To meet the necessities of the case a staff of extra hands was engaged by each of the large department stores. This was a common arrangement. The regular girls worked from half-past eight till seven o'clock, with time off for lunch. The extra hands came on in the forenoon at eleven o'clock and worked till ten in the evening, with supper-time off. Certain of the stores varied the plan somewhat, by giving two hours for lunch. These long recesses are not without their disadvantages. They mean still a very long day on the stretch, and besides, where is a girl to spend the two hours? She cannot go home, and it is against the law for her to be in the store, for in the eye of the law, if she remains on the premises, she is presumably at work, and if at work, therefore being kept longer than the legal ten hours.
That a law which had been so vigorously opposed should on the whole have been observed so faithfully in the second largest city in the United States, that it should in that city have stood the test, at its very initiation, of the rush season, is a fact full of hope and encouragement for all who are endeavoring to have our laws keep pace with ideals of common justice.
Some time afterwards the constitutionality of the law was tested in the courts. Since then, complaints have died away. There is no record of trading establishments having been compelled to remove to another state, and we no longer even hear of its being a ruinous handicap to resident manufacturers. Even reactionary employers are now chiefly concerned in putting off the impending evil, as they regard it, of an eight-hour day, which they know cannot be very far off, as it has already arrived on the Pacific Coast.
If the acquiescence of Illinois employers was satisfactory, the effect upon the girls was remarkable and exceeded expectations. During that Christmas week, the clerks were tired, of course, but they were not in the state of exhaustion, collapse, and physical and nervous depletion, which they had experienced in previous years. This bodily salvation had been expected. It was what organized women had pleaded for and bargained for, what the defending lawyers, Mr. Louis D. Brandeis and Mr. William J. Calhoun had urged upon the judges, when the Supreme Court of Illinois had been earlier called upon to pass upon the validity of the original ten-hour law, although department-store employés had not been included within the scope of its protection.
But the girls were more than not merely worn-out to the point of exhaustion. Most of them were more alive than they had ever been since first they started clerking. They were happy, and surprised beyond measure at their own good fortune. Those juniors who could just remember how different last Christmas had been, those seniors whose memories held such searing recollections of many preceding Christmases, were one in their rejoicing and wonderment. They caught a dim vision of a common interest. Here was something which all could share. That one was benefited did not mean another's loss.
From girl after girl I heard the same story. I would ask them how they were getting on through the hard time this year. "Oh," a girl would answer, "it wasn't so bad at all. You see we've got the ten-hour law, and we can't work after the time is up. It's just wonderful. Why, I'm going to enjoy Christmas this year. I'm tired, but nothing like I've always been before. Last Christmas Day I couldn't get out of bed, I ached so, and I couldn't eat, either."
And yet, while the girls, thanks to the new law, were having something like decent, though by no means ideal hours of work, the young elevator boys, in the same store were working fourteen hours and a half, day in, day out.
So imperfect yet are the results of much that is accomplished!
There are now two states, Mississippi and Oregon, which have ten-hour laws, applying to both men and women, and including the larger proportion of the workers. There are also federal statutes, state laws and municipal ordinances limiting the hours and granting the eight-hour day to whole groups of workers, either in public or semi-public employ, or affecting special occupations such as mining. Thus it is clear, that for both sexes there is now abundant legal precedent for any shortening of hours, which has its place in a more advanced social and industrial development.
IX
WOMEN AND THE VOCATIONS
The profound impression that has been left upon contemporary thought by the teaching of Lester Ward and those who have followed him, that woman is the race, has been felt far and wide outside the sphere of those branches of science, whose students he first startled with the thought. His idea is indeed revolutionary as far as our immediate past and our present social arrangements and sex relations are concerned, but is natural, harmonious and self-explanatory if we regard life, the life of our own day, not as standing still, but as in a state of incessant flux and development, and if we are at all concerned to discover the direction whither these changes are driving us. It indeed may well have been that the formal enunciation of the primary importance of woman in the social organism has played its own part in accelerating her rise into her destined lofty position, though in the main, any philosophy can be merely the explanation and the record of an evolution wherein we are little but passive factors.
This much is certain, that the insistent driving home by this school of thinkers of woman, woman, woman, as the center and nucleus whence is developed the child and the home, and all that civilization stands for, and whose rights as an independent human being are therefore to be held of supreme importance in the normal evolution of the race, has served as an incessant reminder to practical workers and reformers in the sphere of education as well as to leaders of the woman movement. Especially has this been true when tackling the problems more immediately affecting women, because these are the truly difficult problems. Whatever touches man's side of life alone is comparatively simple and easily understood, and therefore easier of solution. So in the rough and ready, often cruel, solutions which nature and humanity have worked out for social problems, it has always been the man whose livelihood, whose education and whose training have been first considered, and whose claims have been first satisfied. For this there are several reasons. Man's possession of material wealth, and his consequent monopoly of social and political power have naturally resulted in his attending to his own interests first. The argument, too, that man was the breadwinner and the protector of the home against all outside antagonistic influences, which in the past he has generally been, furnished another reason why, when any class attained to fresh social privileges, it was the boy and the man of that class, rather than the woman and the girl, who benefited by them first. The woman and the girl would come in a poor second, if indeed they were in at the dividing of the spoils at all.
There is, however, another reason, and one of profound significance, which I believe has hardly been touched upon at all, why woman has been thus constantly relegated to the inferior position. Her problems are, as I said above, far more difficult of settlement. Because of her double function as a member of her own generation and as the potential mother of the next generation, it is impossible to regard her life as something simple and single, and think out plans for its arrangement, as we do with man's. So in large measure we have only been following the line of least resistance, in taking up men's difficulties first. We have done so quite naturally, because they are not so overwhelmingly hard to deal with, and have attacked woman's problems, and striven to satisfy her needs, only when we could find time to get round to them. This is most strikingly exemplified in the realm of education. Take the United States alone. It was ever to the boy that increasing educational advantages were first offered.
In the year 1639 the authorities of the town of Dorchester, Massachusetts, hesitated as to whether girls should be admitted to the apparently just established school. The decision was left "to the discretion of the elders and seven men." The girls lost. In "Child Life in Colonial Days" Mrs. Annie Grant is quoted. She spent her girlhood in Albany, N.Y., sometime during the first half of the eighteenth century. She says it was very difficult at that time to procure the means of instruction in those districts. The girls learned needlework from their mothers and aunts; they learnt to read the Bible and religious tracts in Dutch; few were taught writing. Similar accounts come from Virginia.
Was it university education that was in question, how many university-trained men had not American colleges turned out before Lucy Stone was able to obtain admission to Oberlin?
Harvard was opened in 1636. Two hundred years elapsed before there was any institution offering corresponding advantages to girls. Oberlin granted its first degree to a woman in 1838. Mount Holyoke was founded in 1837, Elmira in 1855 and Vassar in 1865.
That a perfectly honest element of confusion and puzzle did enter into the thought of parents and the views of the community, it would be vain to deny. These young women were incomprehensible. Why were they not content with the education their mothers had had, and with the lives their mothers had led before them? Why did they want to leave comfortable homes, and face the unknown, the hard, perhaps the dangerous? How inexplicable, how undutiful! Ah! It was the young people who were seeing furthest into the future; it was the fathers and mothers who were not recognizing the change that was coming over the world of their day.
If then, for the combination of reasons outlined, women have always lagged in the rear as increasing educational advantages of a literary or professional character have been provided or procured for boys, it is not strange, when, in reading over the records of work on the new lines of industrial education, trade-training and apprenticeship we detect the very same influences at work, sigh before the same difficulties, and recognize the old weary, threadbare arguments, too, which one would surely think had been sufficiently disproved before to be at least distrusted in this connection. This, however, must surely be the very last stand of the non-progressivists in education as regards the worker. The ideals of today aim at education on lines that will enable every child, boy and girl alike, born in or brought into any civilized country, to develop all faculties, and that will simultaneously enable the community to benefit from this complete, all-round development of every one of its members.
There is one consideration to which I must call attention, because, when recognized, it cannot but serve as the utmost stimulus to our efforts to arrange for vocational education for girls on the broadest lines. It is this. Whatever general, national or state plans prove the most complete and satisfactory for girls, will, speaking generally, at the same time be found to have solved the problem for the boy as well. The double aim, of equipping the girl to be a mother as well as human being, is so all-inclusive and is therefore so much more difficult of accomplishment, that the simpler training necessary for a boy's career will be automatically provided for at the same time. Therefore the boy is not likely to be at a disadvantage under such a coeducational system as is here implied. For it is to nothing short of coeducation that the organized women of the United States are looking forward, coeducation on lines adapted to present-day wants. What further contributions the far-off future may hold for us in the never wholly to be explored realm of human education in its largest acceptance, we know not. Until we have learned the lesson of today, and have set about putting it in practice, such glimpses of the future are not vouchsafed to us.
In such an age of transition as ours, any plan of vocational training intended to include girls must be a compromise with warring facts, and will therefore have to face objections from both sides, from those forward-looking ones who feel that the domestic side of woman's activities is overemphasized, and from those who still hark back, who would fain refuse to believe that the majority of women have to be wage-earners for at least part of their lives. These latter argue that by affording to girls all the advantages of industrial training granted or which may be granted to boys, we are "taking them out of the home." As if they were not out of the home already!
This assumption will appear to most readers paradoxical, if indeed it does not read as a contradiction in terms. A little thought, however, will show that it is just because we are all along assuming the economic primacy of the boy, that the girl has been so disastrously neglected. It is true that the boy is also a potential father, and that his training for that lofty function is usually ignored and will have to be borne in mind, though no one would insist that training for fatherhood need occupy a parallel position with training for motherhood. But popular reasoning is not content with accepting this admission; it goes on to draw the wholly unwarranted conclusion that while the boy ought to be thoroughly taught on the wage-earning side, and while such teaching should cover all the more important occupations, to which he is likely to be called, the girl's corresponding training shall as a matter of course be quite a secondary matter, fitting her only for a limited set of pursuits, many of these ranking low in skill and opportunities of advancement, and necessarily among the most poorly paid; these being all occupations which we choose to assume girls will enter, such as sewing or box-making. Only recently have girls been prepared for the textile trades, though they have always worked in these, first in the home and since then in the factories. Still less is any preparation thought of for the numberless occupations that necessity and a perpetually changing world are all the while driving girls to take up. There were in 1910, 8,075,772 women listed as wage-earners in the United States. Would it not be as well, if a girl is to be a wage-earner, that she should have at least as much opportunity of learning her trade properly, as is granted to a boy?