Chapter 6
Domestic service is indispensable to society, but so far it has remained in the field of semi-slavery and uncertain barter; in a word, it is still in the feudal stage. The woman gives what she is and has, and nominally she gets protection and support. Sometimes these fail and, on the other hand, she occasionally receives the unearned gifts supposed to befit a potentate or a shrine. As women become educated they find this condition of uncertainty and instability unbearable. They are willing to work, but they must have a chance to think and to plan their lives according to their individual needs. Some degree of economic independence is necessary to intelligent thinking and orderly living. It is not that women are demanding more property; they are demanding some definite individual property as a home for their souls; and they are coming to realize that if this property rests on some one else's feelings and caprices it is no home for the soul; it is only a tavern.
This conception is well illustrated by the case of a woman in western New York, who married about 1850, and went to live on a farm with her husband. They had small means, but she brought seven hundred dollars to the altar, which was more than he possessed in ready capital. Her part was, however, soon swallowed up in the general business, and while there was a tacit agreement, voiced at long intervals, that she had put something into the business, her part never increased, though the man with whom she worked grew well-to-do. Certain feudal rights in the butter the woman made and in the chickens she raised, yielded her small sums, which often escaped her, but which she sometimes secured and put into a few silver spoons and dishes for her table, a square of Brussels carpet, three lace curtains, a marble topped stand, and six horsehair covered chairs for her parlor. These articles were considered in a very special sense her own. The man might have sold them and used the money, but public opinion would have condemned him had he done so.
Meantime the woman cooked for the family and the hired men, scrubbed and washed and mended. She strained and skimmed the milk from a dozen cows, and churned the butter; she fed the calves; cared for the hens; dug in the garden; gathered the vegetables; did the family sewing; and stole fragments of time for her flower-beds. Her hours were from five in the morning until nine at night, three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, with no half-days or Sundays off.
Incidentally she read her Bible, maintained religious exercises in the village, provided the church with a carpet by methods of indirection and kept the church clean. She upheld a moral standard toward which men only weakly struggled; hunted down and drove away all other women who refused equal service to their lords; ministered to the neighboring sick; and doled out alms in winter-time. Her home was a social and industrial microcosm which she conducted as a feudal holding under the protection of her lord. It would be an interesting study to work out the rules of this feudal relation between husband and wife in any agricultural community. They would be found as varied, as unjust and arbitrary, and as generous, as those of the old régime in France.
A woman in a home is supposed to furnish three kinds of service. She must be a housekeeper, a wife and a mother. As housekeeper, her services can be estimated in current values running from three to twenty-five dollars a week with board and lodging. The other two kinds of service have never been reduced to monetary values.
As a wife, a woman is supposed to give her love, her person, her sympathy and inspiration; the personal care of a husband, including his clothes, attention to his relations and friends and general management of his social position and reputation. If she fills this position well, she is mistress, valet, confidential adviser and public entertainer. Possibly these services can be rated except the first, and even here the divorce courts scale alienated affections all the way from five hundred to twenty-five thousand dollars, according to the appearance of the woman and the skill of contending lawyers.
As a mother, the woman is supposed to give children a good heritage, nurse them, care for them, doctor them and train them. We have established values for these services as wet-nurse, nurse-maid, governess, doctor and teacher, but who can estimate a woman's value in giving a child a good heritage?
It is no wonder that such a difficult problem has remained thus far unsolved. Here and there a man gives his wife a household allowance, from the money they earn in common, and she struggles to save from it some fragments for her individual needs; others put their wives on a salary; and some others divide the income on a fractional basis. But the slightest study of existing conditions must convince any one that women are everywhere deeply dissatisfied with their economic relations to the family. On referring recently to this fact before an audience almost equally divided between suffragists and anti-suffragists, I found every woman present applauding the statement. Another time when I asked more than sixty of the wealthiest women in one of our cities how many were dissatisfied with their relations to the family property, explaining that I was not asking how many wanted more money but how many wanted a different relation to the family money, all the women raised their hands except three and they all had private property.
Meantime, economic changes, to be described in the next chapter, have transformed our homes and nearly eight million women have gone outside to earn money. The gladness with which they have gone shows that they were not afraid to work, though at first the money did not belong to them, but to their families. Almost everywhere in the United States the money women now earn is their own; only in Louisiana can the husband collect his wife's wages. Any one who reads Mrs. Gilman's masterly study of the evil effects accompanying woman's economic independence must feel how far-reaching are not only the discontent but also the evil influences of our present system through over-emphasizing sex and through corrupting the public thinking and feeling concerning services and wages in general.[32]
[32] CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, _Woman and Economics_, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898. See, also, _Woman and Labor_, by OLIVE SCHREINER, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.
Yet no one can seriously approach this problem in his own person without feeling that the relations of husband and wife contain elements that not only make it impossible to resolve the woman's service into money values, but that would make it useless to do so even if it could be done. The most distinctive quality of love is its desire to give. Love that seeks to get is not love. If when a woman gives herself she tries to secure individual property it will be only that she may give it to the man she loves. Marriage is a partnership of soul and body, and this includes property. It still remains true, however, that each must have in order that he may give. Besides this, there are always outside obligations, and special needs within the group, that require individual property for their realization.
In the past, the partnership of marriage has been incomplete on the property side; why not complete it? Why not reorganize our laws and our public opinion so that two people who establish a family, putting into it all they have, should pay out of the income the necessary family expenses and divide all else equally between the parties? Property acquired before marriage, and all inherited property, might well be held in individual right since it should never be a prize for prostitution, not even when it is euphemistically termed "a good home."
Under equal suffrage Idaho has passed such a law, and all property gained after marriage belongs equally to husband and wife. If the wife dies, her heirs, in absence of a will, inherit half of the family property. If the two separate, the court, in absence of an outside agreement, settles the property as it does the children. The judge may order that it be divided equally, or he may give it all to either party, according to conditions; but the woman has identical rights with the man. Surely some such solution is demanded by our present unrest. No one will ever be economically independent; but husband and wife should be economically equal.
VI
Women in Industry
In all the animal world one can hardly find a place where orderly effort, planned to secure some future advantage, does not appear. Getting food, defending life, and caring for offspring have all combined to drive not only the descendants of Adam, but his ancestors as well, to sweat-producing effort. Of course this is not definitely planned; getting food often waits on appetite; defense is sometimes merely running away; and the young are frequently left to feed themselves or die. But the fact remains that in digging burrows, building nests, laying up honey and nuts, and in protecting and providing for the young, a vast deal of effort is put forth in forest and field which is not immediately productive of pleasure.
This work is seldom equally shared by all the members of the group. With bees, the drones and the queen are alike exempt from work, and an asexual group has been developed to feed and protect them. Some ants compel others to do their work; and everywhere there seem to be individuals who are constitutionally lazy and others who, because of strength or sex attractiveness, are able to get more than their share of food and protection with less than their share of effort.
From the first, some division of work between male and female grows almost inevitably out of their different relations to reproduction. Following conception, the male can always run away and leave the female to feed and fight for herself and her offspring, and he is very prone to do so. Even when he stays by and shares in the joy of the newly born he generally leaves the female to get ready the nest, and largely she protects and provisions it.
Among domesticated animals, where their working possibilities have been very highly developed, females are much more desirable workers than males. The maternal function partly explains this, as in the case of cows and hens which give us milk and eggs; and even with mares and sheep the offspring adds to the general working value. Still, it seems to be true that even for purposes of draught, the males are of less value than the females, unless reduced to the non-sexual condition of geldings and oxen. The stallion, bull or ram is too katabolic, too much of a consuming, distributing, destroying force to be very valuable in the daily routine of agriculture or commerce. While the female is generally smaller and less powerful than the male, she is quiet, easily enslaved; and, as we have said, her maternal functions can be diverted to our daily use. She produces more workers, and her flesh is more palatable, because less distinctive, than that of the male. Hence, among domesticated animals, selection, based on considerations of work, multiplies females and keeps males only for breeding purposes.
As a quadruped, the female suffers very little handicap from the functions peculiar to her sex, except when actually carrying her young or nursing them. When she stands erect, however, the support for the special organs of reproduction is far from ideal; heavy lifting, or long-continued standing, often leads to disaster, and the periodic functions, even in the healthiest conditions, must always place women at a working disadvantage as compared with men. Add to this the fact that women are smaller, less agile, and far less strong, than men, and, even when not encumbered with young, it is clear that a woman, when confronting physical work in competition with men, needs something more than a fair field and free competition.[33] Idealists and travelers among primitive people love to tell us how easily women meet their special functions, carrying burdens equal to those carried by men when on the march, and dropping out from the caravan for only a few hours to give birth to a child; but the fact remains that women in all primitive societies age quickly and that those who are spoiled are thrown aside and forgotten.[34] Woman's handicap as a working animal in competition with man is too obvious and too deep-seated to be idealized away.
[33] The Supreme Court of the United States, in passing on the "Oregon laundry case," in 1907, declared a bill limiting a woman's working hours constitutional. See the _Brief for the State of Oregon_, prepared by LOUIS D. BRANDEIS, published by The National Consumers' League, 105 East 22d Street, New York.
[34] DUDLEY, _Principles and Practices of Gynecology_, pp. 23-24, says that among Indian women want of care during and after labor leads to numberless evils.
In all savage societies labor is clearly specialized between the sexes. The man, because of his superior strength and mobility, fights, hunts and makes weapons of the chase. The woman fetches and carries, digs and delves, cures the meat, makes the rude huts, clothing and pottery. Gradually she changes wild grasses to domesticated plants, and rears the young animals brought home from the chase, till they follow and serve their human masters. She is truly the mother of industries, and it in no way detracts from her credit that her motherhood is here, as elsewhere, mainly unthinking.
With the exhaustion of the supply of wild animals, man is forced to turn his attention to the world of vegetation and he takes over the direction of the plants and animals which woman has largely domesticated. In his career as fighter and hunter he has learned to coöperate with his fellows to a degree which aids him greatly in dividing the arable land, protecting his crops, and using grazing lands in common with the tribe. He has also learned to make stone hatchets, spears and bows and arrows. Woman has not felt the same necessity to invent in her work; such new tools as she has devised have been helpful, but men who could not invent have been wiped out by those who learned to make stronger spears or better arrow-heads.
It is the same difference in adaptability which one observes to-day between the farmers on the western frontier of America and those who remain in their peasant homes in Europe. The peasant has even greater need of inventing than has his expatriated countryman in Colorado, but he lacks the driving impulse. It was the same with women and men under the conditions of savage life. Thus it came about that man's greater strength and mobility, backed by power of coöperation and invention, gave him the leadership in such primitive life as we find depicted in the pages of Homer or in the epic of the Jews. True, woman was his first lieutenant, but he spoke for her in most of the larger matters of the industrial life.
With settled conditions and accumulation of wealth, the most desirable women were almost entirely freed from physical labor and gradually became luxury-loving parasites and playthings, as we pointed out in the second chapter of this volume. Meantime slaves were multiplying, male and female and, while the most desirable women passed to the harem, the mass of them became drudges in house and field. It is hard for us to realize that it is exactly in those times when a few women are surrounded with great luxury that most of the sex are reduced to heavy labor and wretchedness.
During the early Christian ages, a tradition was gradually formed concerning woman's place in industry, or rather three traditions were formed. The working woman of the lower classes was to be the housekeeper, which meant that she was to care for food, cook, spin, weave, sew and mend, scrub and wash, bear children and nurse and tend them. If she were of the middle class, she was to be a mother, to supervise this range of work, look after dependents, conserve social conditions and be the lady bountiful of her district. The second ideal was the woman of religion, who was to subdue her passions, observe set prayers and other religious exercises, and do the menial work of the convent. The third ideal was the lady of chivalry, who appeared after the tenth century. She was to be cared for and protected from work or anxiety; menials were to prepare her food, clothes and ornaments; gallants were to await her orders and do her bidding.
With the rise of Protestantism, and later with the rise of modern democracy, these ideals were blended, and women found themselves, not indeed slaves and subject to sale, but serfs, entangled in a mass of feudal obligations and bound to the house. Practically, most men still hold this threefold conception of woman's place in the social organism. She is to be a combination of housekeeper, nun and lady. It is the kitchen, church and children ideal of the German Emperor.
Meantime forces were set at work which were to change the economic foundations of the family and enable the woman to emerge from serfdom into some new form of industrial relationship. From the rise of the European cities in the twelfth century, certain industries have tended, especially in the Netherlands and in England, to segregate themselves in farm-houses and towns. Women naturally participated in these activities, generally taking the least desirable parts. With the freeing of the mind, which followed the democratic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, inventions blossomed out and perfected steam engines, cotton gins, spinning jennies, and a thousand other machines driven by steam or water power, which have changed the civilization of Europe and America. Miss Edith Abbott has shown us how this change, involving increasing segregation and specialization, came into America even in the pre-Revolutionary time.[35]
[35] EDITH ABBOTT, _Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic History_, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1910.
Spinning and weaving industries led the way in this movement, but its full force was not felt until the late eighteenth century. Since then, one industry after another has left the home for the factory until to-day, in all large communities, even the preparation of food increasingly goes to the packing-house, the canning establishment, the bakery and the delicatessen-store. These industries needed hands, and so the women followed them to the factories.
As 1870 marks the beginning of higher education for women, so it also marks the beginning of her industrial self-consciousness. The perfecting of such inventions as the typewriter, the telegraph and the telephone, and the creation of a great variety of office appliances, together with the perfecting of highly elaborate means of distribution, like the departmental store, called for thousands of cheap workers possessed of some slight intelligence but not necessarily having any serious preliminary training. Our elementary schools and high schools have increasingly turned out a multitude of girls who could meet these requirements. The increased cost of living, the lessened labor demands of the home, and the attractions of the pay envelope, have called millions to work in industrial plants. In 1890, there were 4,005,532 wage-earning women in the United States; in 1900, 5,319,397; while in 1910, we have probably nearly 8,000,000.
Like most other great changes in civilization, this industrial transformation was neither preceded nor accompanied by any general consciousness of what was happening. Daily necessities were offset by weekly pay envelopes, or the failures fell out of sight, and so the next week and the years followed. Country populations moved away; cities grew enormously, leading to congestion in living which, combined with the daily absence of women, has often transformed the old time homes into communal tiers of tenements occupied, during working hours, only by the young and the infirm.
The children of all ages after a while followed their mothers into the factories; but the evil effects of child labor were so apparent that repressive legislative measures have increasingly raised the age of their admission until now, in the more advanced communities, they must stay outside the factory doors until they are twelve or fourteen years old. Some growing self-consciousness, largely of a police nature, has led us to institute measures for the protection of the children who are not allowed to work. Schools, playgrounds, day nurseries, institutional churches, college settlements and public social centers now bid against the streets and vacant lots, the nickel shows and the dancing halls, for the children's patronage.
Education, however, true to its origin as the assistant of theology, refuses to recognize in any large way the new world into which we have come, and where the next generation of children must follow. Manual training has, here and there, quieted the fears of some who had disturbing visions; and we go on employing an army of unenfranchised, celibate women, with little or no industrial experience, to teach ten million boys how to be good citizens of a republic, and how to serve in a modern industrial army; and ten million girls how to work in shops and factories, and how to live without homes. As a consequence, girls come up to the factories from their schools with ideals,[36] so far as the school has shaped them, founded on unmarried school mistresses and George Washington; and they pass, by way of the altar, into cheerless tenements which the school still thinks of as places where children are cared for, family clothing is made and the family baking is done. Practically, of course, most education is given outside the schools, and there the evils of an unregulated time of transition are multiplied through imitation.
[36] EARL BARNES, Children's Ideals, in _Studies in Education_, Vol. II, p. 237; also School Girls' Ideas of Women's Occupations by SARAH YOUNG, in _Studies in Education_, Vol. II, p. 259.
The wealth and material comfort produced for the fortunate classes by these segregated industries have blinded us to their effects on human life, and we have all been bribed to silence concerning everything which could discourage enterprise or frighten capital. Like most bribes, however, these have largely stopped in the pockets of the exploiters of public opinion.
In the opening years of this new century, public consciousness has had a wonderful awakening.[37] The popular mind, quickened by universal education, and freed from a burden of fixed beliefs, is turning restlessly to inquire about everything that affects human life. Work could not escape this inquisition, and so we are asking not only for a fairer division of the profits of work, but we are also inquiring what occupations are unfit for women, with their special limitations and obligations. When the work is reasonable, how long should a woman work daily? Should she work at night and overtime? Should she work with dangerous machinery? Should she handle substances that endanger health? Should she be required to stand through hours of continuous work? Should she work in bad air, due to dust, moisture, or excessive heat or cold? Should she have a decent retiring-room? Some daring inquirers are even asking whether industrial efficiency, gained through specialization and keying up, may not be purchased at too high a price of mental monotony and nervous strain. Most people are content to learn that the effects are not immediately destructive to the girls and women involved; but some day we shall demand that the barons of industry shall not be allowed to squander the heritage of the unborn generations.
[37] C. HANFORD HENDERSON, _Pay-Day_, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1911.