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 othergirl. 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 centerof 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 inculcatesthe 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 thelarger 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 pleasurewas 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 regardas 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. Bringingback 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.
[40]A paper presented at the meeting of the Academy of Political Science, December 4, 1909.
[40]A paper presented at the meeting of the Academy of Political Science, December 4, 1909.