Read Ebook: Women in Modern Industry by Hutchins B L Mallon J J James Joseph Contributor

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Ebook has 1244 lines and 106841 words, and 25 pages

"Massa Dinsmore say you will hab time to read de lettah first, Miss Milly," replied the nurse, dropping a courtesy.

"Then I will do so," Mildred said, re-entering the arbor.

"May mammy and Elsie stay wis you?" asked the baby girl coaxingly.

"Yes indeed, darling," Mildred said, making room for the child to sit by her side.

"Dere now, honey, keep quiet and don't 'sturb yo' cousin while she reads de lettah," cautioned Aunt Chloe, lifting her nursling and settling her comfortably on the bench.

Mildred had broken the seal, and was already too much absorbed in the news from home to hear or heed what her companions might be saying.

Elsie watched her, as she read, with loving, wistful eyes. "Did your mamma write it, cousin?" she asked, as Mildred paused to turn the page.

"Yes, dear; and she sends love and kisses to you, and wishes I could take you home with me when I go. Oh, if I only could!" And Mildred bent down to press another kiss on the sweet baby lips.

"Maybe my papa will let me go, if grandpa will write and ask him," returned the child, with an eager, joyous look up into Mildred's face. "But I couldn't go wisout mammy."

"Oh no! if you should go, mammy would go too; you can't be separated from her, and we would all be glad to have her there," Mildred said, softly caressing the shining curls of the little one, glancing kindly up into the dusky face of the nurse, then turning to her letter again.

It was with mingled feelings that she perused it, for though all was well with the dear ones beneath her father's roof, and the thought of soon again looking upon their loved faces made most welcome the summons home which it brought, there was sorrow and pain in the prospect of soon bidding a long farewell to the darling now seated by her side--the little motherless one over whom her heart yearned so tenderly because of the lack of parental love and care that made the young life seem so sad and forlorn, spite of all the beauty and wealth with which she--the little fair one--was so abundantly dowered.

As she read the last line, then slowly refolded the letter, tears gathered in her eyes. Elsie saw them, and stealing an arm round her neck, said in her sweet baby tones, "Don't cry, Cousin Milly. What makes you sorry? I loves you ever so much."

"And I you, you precious, lovely darling!" cried Mildred, clasping the little form close and kissing the pure brow again and again. "That is just what almost breaks my heart at the thought of--oh why, why don't you belong to us!" she broke off with a half-stifled sob.

A firm, quick step came up the gravel walk, and Mr. Dinsmore stood looking down upon them.

"Why, what is wrong? not bad news from home, I hope, Milly?"

"No, uncle; they are all well, and everything going smoothly so far as I can learn from my letter," she said, brushing away her tears and forcing a smile.

"What then?" he asked, "Elsie has not been troubling you, I hope?"

"Oh no, no, she never does that!"

"Breakfast has been announced; shall we go and partake of it?"

"If you please, sir. I am quite ready," Mildred answered, as she rose and took his offered arm.

"Bring the child," he said to Chloe; then walking on. "What is wrong, Milly? there must have been a cause for the tears you have certainly been shedding."

"I am summoned home, uncle, and glad as I shall be to see it and all the dear ones there, again, I can't help feeling sorry to leave you all."

"I hope not. Dear me, I wish we could keep you always!" he exclaimed. "But when and how are you to go?"

"Mother wrote that a gentleman friend--our minister, Mr. Lord--will be in Philadelphia in the course of three or four weeks, spend a few days there, then go back to Pleasant Plains, and that he has kindly offered to take charge of me. Mother and father think I should embrace the opportunity by all means, as it may be a long time before another as good will offer."

"And doubtless they are right, though I wish it had not come so soon."

"So soon, uncle?" Mildred returned brightly. "Do you forget that I have been with you for nearly a year?"

"A year is a very short time at my age," he answered with a smile.

But they were at the door of the breakfast-room, and the topic was dropped for the present, as by mutual consent.

"O my good lord, the world is but a word; Were it all yours, to giher occupational career which reacts unfavourably on her earnings and conditions of employment.

The tradition of obedience, docility and isolation in the family make it hard for the young girl-worker to assert her claims effectively; both her ignorance and her tradition of modesty make it difficult for her to voice the requirements of decent living, some of the most essential of which are taboo--not to be spoken of to a social superior or an individual of the opposite sex. The whole circumstances of her life make her employment an uncertain matter, contingent upon all sorts of outside circumstances, which have little or nothing to do with her own industrial capacity. In youth, marriage may at any time take her out of the economic struggle and render wage-earning superfluous and unnecessary. On the other hand, the sudden pressure of necessity, bereavement, or sickness or unemployment of husband or bread-winning relative, may throw a woman unexpectedly on the labour market. It is a special feature of women's employment that, unlike the work of men, who for the most part have to labour from early youth to some more or less advanced age, women's work is subject to considerable interruption, and is contingent on family circumstances, whence it comes about that women may not always need paid work, but when they do they often want it so badly that they are ready to take anything they can get. The woman worker also is more susceptible to class influences than are her male social equals, and charity and philanthropy often tend in some degree to corrupt the loyalty and divert the interest of working women from their own class. These are some of the reasons why associations for mutual protection and assistance have been so slow in making way among women workers.

The protection of the State, though valuable as far as it goes, has been inadequate: how inadequate can be seen in the Reports of the Women Factory Inspectors, who, in spite of their insufficient numbers, take so large a share in the administration of the Factory Act. Their Reports, however, do not reach a large circle. The Insurance Act has been the means of a more startling propaganda. The results following the working of this Act shew that although women are longer lived than men, they have considerably more sickness. The claims of women for sick benefit had been underestimated, and many local insurance societies became nearly insolvent in consequence. A cry of malingering was raised in various quarters, and we were asked to believe that excessive claims could be prevented by stricter and more careful administration. This solution of the problem, however, is quite inadequate to explain the facts. There may have been some malingering, but it has occurred chiefly in cases where the earnings of the workers were so low as to be scarcely above the sickness benefit provided by the Act, or even below it. In other cases the excess claims were due to the fact that medical advice and treatment was a luxury the women had previously been unable to afford even when they greatly needed it; or to the fact that they had previously continued to go to work when unfit for the exertion, and now at last found themselves able to afford a few days' rest and nursing; or, finally, to the unhealthy conditions in which they were compelled to live and work. As Miss Macarthur stated before the Departmental Committee on Sickness Benefit Claims, "Low wages, and all that low wages involve in the way of poor food, poor housing, insufficient warmth, lack of rest and of air, and so forth, necessarily predispose to disease; and although such persons may, at the time of entering into insurance, have been, so far as they knew, in a perfectly normal state of health, their normal state is one with no reserve of health and strength to resist disease." Excessive claims may or may not, the witness went on to show, be associated with extremely low wages. Thus the cotton trade, which is the best paid of any great industry largely employing women, nevertheless shows a high proportion of claims. Miss Macarthur made an urgent recommendation , that when any sweeping accusation of malingering is brought against a class of insured persons, medical enquiry should be made into the conditions under which those women work. If the conditions that produce excessive claims were once clearly known and realised, it is the convinced opinion of the present writer that those conditions would be changed by the pressure of public opinion, not so much out of sentiment or pity--though sentiment and pity are badly needed--but out of a clear perception of the senseless folly and loss that are involved in the present state of things. Year by year, and week by week, the capitalist system is allowed to use up the lives of our women and girls, taking toll of their health and strength, of their nerves and energy, of their capacity, their future, and the future of their children after them. And all this, not for any purpose; not as it is with the soldier, who dies that something greater than himself may live; for no purpose whatever, except perhaps saving the trouble of thought. So far as wealth is the object of work, it is practically certain that the national wealth, or indeed the output of war material, would be much greater if it were produced under more humane and more reasonable conditions, with a scientific disposition of hours of work and the use of appropriate means for keeping up the workers' health and strength. A preliminary and most important step, it should be said, would be a considerable reinforcement of the staff of women factory inspectors.

It will appear in the following pages that I see little reason to believe in any decline and fall of women from a golden age in which they did only work which was "suitable," and that in the bosoms of their families. The records of the domestic system that have come down to us are no doubt picturesque enough, but the cases which have been preserved in history or fiction were probably the aristocracy of industry, under which were the very poor, of whom we know little. There must also have been a class of single women wage-earners who were probably even more easy to exploit in old times than they are now, the opportunities for domestic service being much more limited and worse paid. The working woman does not appear to me to be sliding downwards into the "chaos of low-class industries," rather is she painfully, though perhaps for the most part unconsciously, working her way upwards out of a more or less servile condition of poverty and ignorance into a relatively civilised state, existing at present in a merely rudimentary form. She has attained at least to the position of earning her own living and controlling her own earnings, such as they are. She has statutory rights against her employer, and a certain measure of administrative protection in enforcing them. The right to a living wage, fair conditions of work, and a voice in the collective control over industry are not yet fully recognised, but are being claimed more and more articulately, and can less and less be silenced and put aside. The woman wage-earner indeed appears in many ways socially in advance of the middle and upper class woman, who is still so often economically a mere parasite. Woman's work may still be chaotic, but the chaos, we venture to hope, indicates the throes of a new social birth, not the disintegration of decay.

Among much that is sad, tragic and disgraceful in the industrial exploitation of women, there is emerging this fact, fraught with deepest consolation: the woman herself is beginning to think. Nothing else at long last can really help her; nothing else can save us all. There are now an increasing number of women workers who do not sink their whole energies in the petty and personal, or restrict their aims to the earning and spending what they need for themselves and those more or less dependent on them. They are able to appreciate the newer wants of society, the claim for more leisure and amenity of life, for a share in the heritage of England's thought and achievements, for better social care of children, for the development of a finer and deeper communal consciousness. This is the new spirit that is beginning to dawn in women.

SKETCH OF THE EMPLOYMENT OF WOMEN IN ENGLAND BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.

The traces of women in economic and industrial history are unmistakable, but the record of their work is so scattered, casual, and incoherent that it is difficult to derive a connected story therefrom. We know enough, however, to disprove the old misconception that women's industrial work is a phenomenon beginning with the nineteenth century.

Women are also the first architects; the hut in widely different parts of the world--among Kaffirs, Fuegians, Polynesians, Kamtchatdals--is built by women. Women are everywhere the primitive agriculturists, and work in the fields of Europe to-day. Women seem to have originated pottery, while men usually ornamented and improved it. Woman "was at first, and is now, the universal cook, preserving food from decomposition and doubling the longevity of man. Of the bones at last she fabricates her needles and charms.... From the grasses around her cabin she constructs the floor-mat, the mattress and the screen, the wallet, the sail. She is the mother of all spinners, weavers, upholsterers, sail-makers."

The evidence of anthropology thus hardly bears out the assertion frequently made that woman does not originate. A much more telling demonstration of the superiority of man in handicraft would be to show that when he takes over a woman's idea he usually brings it to greater technical perfection than she has done. "Men, liberated more or less from the tasks of hunting and fighting, gradually took up the occupations of women, specialised them and developed them in an extraordinary degree.... Maternity favours an undifferentiated condition of the various avocations that are grouped around it; it is possible that habits of war produced a sense of the advantages of specialised and subordinated work. In any case the fact itself is undoubted and it has had immense results on civilisation."

Man has infinitely surpassed woman in technical skill, scientific adaptation, and fertility of invention; yet the rude beginnings of culture and civilisation, of the crafts that have so largely made us what we are, were probably due to the effort and initiative of primitive woman, engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with the rude and hostile forces of her environment, to satisfy the needs of her offspring and herself.

I do not propose, however, to enter into a discussion of the position of primitive woman, alluring as such a task might be from some points of view. When we come to times nearer our own and of which written record survives, it is remarkable that the further back we go the more completely women appear to be in possession of textile industry. The materials are disappointing: there is little that can serve to explain fully the industrial position of women or to make us realise the conditions of their employment. But as to the fact there can be no doubt. Nor can it be questioned that women were largely employed in other industries also. The women of the industrial classes have always worked, and worked hard. It is only in quite modern times, so far as I can discover, that the question, whether some kinds of work were not too hard for women, has been raised at all.

Thorold Rogers says that in the thirteenth century women were employed in outdoor work, and especially as assistants to thatchers. He thinks that, "estimated proportionately, their services were not badly paid," but that, allowing for the different value of money, women got about as much for outdoor work as women employed on farms get now. After the Plague, however, the wages paid women as thatchers' helps were doubled, and before the end of the fifteenth century were increased by 125 per cent. A statute of 1495 fixed the wages of women labourers and other labourers at the same amount, viz. 2-1/2d. a day, or 4-1/2d. if without board. At a later period, 1546-1582, according to Thorold Rogers, some accounts of harvest work from Oxford show women paid the same as men.

In the sixteenth century the Statute of Apprentices, 5 Eliz. c. 4, gave power to justices to compel women between twelve years old and forty to be retained and serve by the year, week, or day, "for such wages and in such reasonable sort and manner as they shall think meet," and a woman who refused thus to serve might be imprisoned.

Spinning, weaving, dyeing, and embroidering were special features of Anglo-Saxon industry, and were entirely confined to women. King Alfred in his will distinguished between the spear-half and spindle-half of his family; and in an old illustration of the Scripture, Adam is shown receiving the spade and Eve the distaff, after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. This traditional distinction between the duties of the sexes was continued even to the grave, a spear or a spindle, according to sex, being often found buried with the dead in Anglo-Saxon tombs.

In the Church of East Meon, Hants, there is a curious old font with a sculptured representation of the same incident: Eve, it has been observed, stalks away with head erect, plying her spindle and distaff, while Adam, receiving a spade from the Angel, looks submissive and abased.

And wyff, to spinne now must thou fynde Our naked bodyes in cloth to wynde.

What! shall a woman with a Rocke drive thee away!

We'll thwack him thence with distaffs .

Had Helen then sat carding wool, Whose beauteous face did breed such strife, She had not been Sir Paris' trull Nor cause so many lose their life. Or had King Priam's wanton son Been making quills with sweet content He had not then his friends undone When he to Greece a-gadding went. The cedar trees endure more storms Than little shrubs that sprout on hie, The weaver lives more void of harm Than princes of great dignity.

There is also a little French poem quoted and translated by Wright, which runs thus:

Spinning and weaving, as ordinarily carried on in the mediaeval home, were, Mr. Andrews thinks, backward, wasteful, and comparatively unskilled in technique. It is uncertain exactly at what period the spinning-wheel came into existence--certainly before the sixteenth century, and it may be a good deal earlier; but doubtless the use of the distaff lingered on in country places and among older-fashioned people long after the wheel was in use in the centres of the trades. Thus Aubrey speaks of nuns using wheels, and adds, "In the old time they used to spin with rocks; in Somersetshire they use them still." Yet weaving among the Anglo-Saxons had been carried to a considerable degree of excellence in the cities and monasteries. Mr. Warden says that even before the end of the seventh century the art of weaving had attained remarkable perfection in England, and he quotes from a book by Bishop Aldhelm, written about 680, describing "webs woven with shuttles, filled with threads of purple and many other colours, flying from side to side, and forming a variety of figures and images in different compartments with admirable art." These beautiful handiworks were executed by ladies of high rank and great piety, and were designed for ornaments to the churches or for vestments to the clergy. St. Theodore of Canterbury thought it necessary to forbid women to work on Sunday either in weaving or cleaning the vestments or sewing them, or in carding wool, or beating flax, or in washing garments, or in shearing the sheep, or in any such occupations.

It is evident from old accounts that a good deal of weaving was done outside by the piece for these great households, and of course spinning and weaving were largely carried on in cottages as a bye-industry in conjunction with agriculture. B?cher gives a very interesting account of spinning as an opportunity for social intercourse among primitive peoples. In Thibet, he says, there is a spinning-room in each village; the young people, men and girls, meet and spin and smoke together. Spinning in groups or parties is known to have obtained also in Germany in olden times, and girls who now meet to make lace together in the same sociable way still say that they "go spinning." Spinning-rooms exist in Russia. In Yorkshire spinning seems to have been done socially in the open air, in fine weather, down to the eve of the industrial revolution.

Deceit, weeping, spinning God hath given To women kindly, whiles that they may liven.

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