MISS EMILIE BULLOWA.
There is a current belief, often expressed, that in the United States every avenue of industry is open to women on equal terms with men. This is not quite true. In some States a married woman may not engage in any business without permission from the courts. In Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia this is the case.In Wyoming, where women vote, but where they are in such minority that their votes count for little, a married woman must satisfy the court that she is under the necessity of earning her living.
If you are a woman, married or unmarried, and wish to practice law, you are barred from seven of the United States. The legal profession is closed to women in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Delaware, Tennessee, and South Carolina.
In some States they discourage women from aspiring to the learned professions by refusing them the advantages of higher education which they provide for their brothers.
Four state universities close their doors to women, in spite of the fact that women's taxes help support the universities. These States are Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. The last-named admits women to post-graduate courses.
You can hold no kind of an elective office, you cannot be even a county superintendentof schools in Alabama or Arkansas, if you are a woman. In Alabama, indeed, you may not be a minister of the gospel, a doctor of medicine, or a notary public. Florida likewise will have nothing to do with a woman doctor.
Only a few women want to hold office or engage in professional work. Every woman hopes to be a mother. What then is the legal status of the American mother? When the club women began the study of their position before the law they were amazed to find, in all but ten of the States and territories, that they had absolutely no control over the destinies of their own children. In ten States only, and in the District of Columbia, are women co-guardians with their husbands of their children.
In Pennsylvania if a woman supports her children, or has money to contribute to their support, she has joint guardianship. Under somewhat similar circumstances Rhode Island women have the same right.
In all the other States and territories children belong to their fathers. They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother. That this almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule, no one except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it.
It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice are growing reluctant to administer such archaic laws.
The famous Tillman case is an example. Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina has one son,—a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogether disreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of married life, left him, taking with her their two little girls. South Carolina allows no divorce for any cause. The sanctity of the marriage tie is held so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abused at will by the veriest brute or libertine. Mrs. Tillman could not divorce her husband, so she took her children and went to live quietly at her parent's home in the city of Washington.
One day the father of the children, youngTillman, appeared at that home, and in a fit of drunken resentment against his wife, kidnapped the children. He could not care for the children, probably had no wish to have them near him, but he took them back to South Carolina, andgavethem to his parents, made a present of a woman's flesh and blood and heart to people who hated her and whom she hated in return.
Under the laws of South Carolina, under the printed statutes, young Tillman had a perfect right to do this thing, and his father, a United States Senator, upheld him in his act. Young Mrs. Tillman, however, showed so little respect for the statutes that she sued her husband and his parents to recover her babies. The judge before whom the suit was brought was in a dilemma. There was the law—but also there was justice and common sense. To the everlasting honor of that South Carolina judge, justice and common sense triumphed, and he ruled thatthe law was unconstitutional.
There are other hardships in this law denying to mothers the right of co-guardianship of their children. Two names signed to a child's working papers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens that selfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work, when the mothers know they are far too young. A woman in Scranton, Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her children had been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they were tall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman. "What could I say about it, when he went and got the papers?" she sighed.
The father—not the mother—controls the services of his children. He can collect their wages, and he does. Very, very often he squanders the money they earn, and no one may interfere.
A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay day at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her pay envelope, unopened. It washis regular day for getting drunk and indulging in an orgy of gambling. Often more than half of the girls' wages would have vanished before night. Twice the entire amount was wasted in an hour. This kept on until the girls passed their childhood and were mature enough to rebel successfully.
It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potential services of a child.
Many times have these unjust laws been protested against. In every State in the Union where they exist they have been protested against by organized groups of intelligent women. But their protests have been received with apathy, and, in some instances, with contempt by legislators. Only last year a determined fight was made by the women of California for a law giving them equal guardianship of their children. The women's bill was lost in the California Legislature, and lost by a large majority.
What arguments did the California legislators use against the proposed measure?Identically the same that were made in Massachusetts and New York a quarter of a century ago. If women had the guardianship of their children, would anything prevent them from taking the children and leaving home? What would become of the sanctity of the home, with its lawful head shorn of his paternal dignity? In California a husband is head of the family in very fact, or at least a law of the State says so.
At one time the law which made the husband the head of the home guaranteed to the family support by the husband. It does not do that now. There are laws on the statute books of many States obliging the wife to support her husband if he is disabled, and the children, if the husband defaults. There are no laws compelling the husband to support his wife. The husband is under an assumed obligation to support his family, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty. Family desertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most baffling of modernsocial problems. Everybody is appalled by its prevalence, but nobody seems to know what to do about it. The Legal Aid Society of New York City reports about three new cases of family desertion for every day in the year. Other agencies in other cities report a state of affairs quite as serious.
Laws have been passed in most States making family desertion a misdemeanor, and in New York a recent law has made it a felony. Unfortunately there has been devised no machinery to enforce these laws, so they are practically non-existent. It is true that if the deserting husband is arrested he may be sent to jail or to the rock pile.
But that does not cure him nor support his family. Mostly he is not arrested. He has only to take himself out of the reach of the local authorities. In New York a deserting husband, though he is counted a felon, needs only to cross the river to New Jersey to be reasonably safe. Imagine the State of New York spending good money to chase a manwhom it does not want as a citizen, and whom it can only punish by sending to jail for a short period. The State is better off without such a man. To bring him back would not even benefit his deserted family.
Women, far more law abiding than men, insist that a system which evolved out of feudal conditions, and has for its very basis the assumption of the weakness, ignorance, and dependence of women, has no place in twentieth century civilization.
American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent. The present social order, in which military force is subordinated to industry and commerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and women physically on much the same plane. As for women's intellectual ability to decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over, rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher grammar grades. Fewer women thanmen are numbered among illiterate. As for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less, but their general intelligence is not less than men's.
Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical support. Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves as independent human beings. Their work of bearing and rearing children, of managing the household, begins to assume a new dignity, a real value, in their eyes.
In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shall determine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband's income. American women may not need such a law, but they insist that they need something to take the place of that one which in eleven States makes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife's income.
The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual discomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, and recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: "Corsets, millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants' wear, and ladies' shoes, second floor; no ma'am, carpets and rugs on the third floor; this car don't go to the restaurant; take the other side; groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs, men's shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor."
Buying and selling, serving and being served—women. On every floor, in every aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, which covers several acres, women.Waiting their turn at the long line of telephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Down in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer frocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts, attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan department store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floors between, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks, running back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling the aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk, and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.
To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the United States are working outside of the home for wages is a simple, unanalyzed fact. You grasp it as an intellectual abstraction, without much appreciation of its human significance. The mere reading of statistics does not help you to realize the changed status of women, and of society. You need to see the thing with your own eyes.
Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, when the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city's great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. From factory, office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousands of girls. Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of the electric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting of hucksters, the laughter and oathsof men, their voices float, a shrill, triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil.
You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of the interdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrate into the operating-room of a telephone exchange. Any hour will do. Any day in the week. There are no nights, nor Sundays, nor holidays in a telephone exchange. The city could not get along for one single minute in one single hour of the twenty-four without the telephone girl. Her hands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long, silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes of the switch board. The wires cross and recross, until the switch board is like a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of the telephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of a city.
What would happen if this army of women was suddenly withdrawn from the telephone exchanges? Men could not take their places.That experiment has been tried more than once, and it has always failed.
Having seen how well women serve industry, go back to the department store and see how they dominate it also.
The department store apparently exists for women. The architect who designed the building studied her necessities. The makers of store furniture planned counters, shelves, and seats to suit her stature. Buyers of goods know that their jobs are forfeit unless they can guess what her taste in gowns and hats is going to be six months hence.
Woman dominates the department store for the plain reason that she supports it. Whoever earns the income, and that point has been somewhat in question lately, there is no doubt at all as to who spends it. She does. Hence, she is able to control the conditions under which this business is conducted.
You can see for yourself that this is so.Walk through any large department store and observe how much valuable space is devoted to making women customers comfortable. There is always a drawing-room with easy-chairs and couches; plenty of little desks with handsome stationery where the customer may write notes; here, and in the retiring-room adjoining, are uniformed maids to offer service. But these things are not all that the women who support industry demand of the men in power. They demand that industry be carried on under conditions favorable to the health and comfort of the workers.
Not until the development of the department store were women able to observe at close range the conduct of modern business. Not unnaturally it was in the department store that they began one of the most ambitious of their present-day activities,—that of humanizing industry.
It was just twenty years ago that New York City was treated to a huge joke. It was such a joke that even the miserable ones with whomit was concerned were obliged to smile. An obscure group of women, calling themselves the Working Women's Society, came out with the announcement that they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a labor union.
These women said that the girls in the department stores were receiving wages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign woman in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a half.
They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for saleswomen was habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand from ten to fourteen hours a day. They said that sanitary conditions in the cloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as to endanger health and life. They said that the whole situation was so bad that no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years. Mostly they were used up in twoyears. They proposed a labor union of retail clerks as the only possible resource. Their effort failed.
The trades union idea at that time had not reached the girl behind the counter. As a matter of fact it has not reached her yet, and it probably never will. The department-store clerk considers herself a higher social being than the ordinary working-girl, and in a way she is justified. The exceptionally intelligent department-store clerk has one chance in a thousand of rising to the well-paid, semi-professional post of buyer. Also the exceptionally attractive girl has possibly one chance in five thousand of marrying a millionaire. It is a long chance now, and it was a longer chance a dozen years ago, because there were fewer millionaires then than now, but it served well enough to cause the failure of the trades union plan.
There is one thing that never fails, however, and that is a righteous protest. Out of the protest of that little, obscure group ofworking women in New York City was born a movement which has spread beyond the Atlantic Ocean, which has effected legislation in many States of the Union, which has even determined an extremely important legal decision in the Supreme Court of the United States.
A group of rich and influential women, prominent in many philanthropic efforts, became interested in the Working Women's Society. They investigated the charges brought against the department stores, and what they discovered made them resolve that conditions must be changed.
In May, 1890, the late Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. Frederick Nathan, and others, called a large mass meeting in Chickering Hall. Mrs. Nathan had a constructive plan for raising the standard in shop conditions, especially those affecting women employees.
If women would simply withdraw their patronage from the stores where, during the Christmas season, women and children toiledlong hours at night without any extra compensation, sooner or later the night work would cease. A few stores, said Mrs. Nathan, maintained a standard above the average. It was within the power of the women of New York to raise all the others to that standard, and afterwards it might be possible to go farther and establish a standard higher than the present highest.
"We do not desire to blacklist any firm," declared Mrs. Nathan, "but we canwhitelistthose firms which treat their employees humanely. We can make and publish a list of all the shops where employees receive fair treatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops. By acting openly and publishing our White List we shall be able to create an immense public opinion in favor of just employers."
Thus was the Consumers' League of New York ushered into existence. Eight months after the Chickering Hall meeting the committee appointed to co-operate with the Working Women's Society in preparing its list of fair firms had finished its work and made its report. The new League was formally organized on January 1, 1891.
Mrs. Frederick Nathan
The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm names. The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew the conditions. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the other firms to their outcast position. Far from evincing a desire to earn a place on the White List, they cast aspersions on a "parcel of women" who were trying to "undermine business credit," and scouted the very idea of an organized feminine conscience.
"Wait until the women want Easter bonnets," sneered one merchant. "Do you think they will pass up anything good because the store is not on their White List?"
Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for. Even as far back as1891 a few women had begun to doubt the efficacy of that indirect influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What was the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the Mercantile Employers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory Department.
The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, and still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it. A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into conditions of working women in New York City.
The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in two large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified to employing grown women at a salary ofthirty-three cents a day. They confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended, on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.
The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite of the merchants' protests the women's bill was passed without a dissenting vote.
The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which it placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of seats,—one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of children, except those holding working certificates from the authorities. These, and other minor provisions, affected all retail stores, as far as the law was obeyed.
As a matter of fact the Consumers' League's bill carried a "joker" which made its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter of inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health, supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it proved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after a year of this inadequate inspection, political forces werebrought to bear, and then there were no store inspectors.
Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers' League tried to persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed inspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a year ago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores under factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants' Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto what they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. Governor Hughes, however, signed the bill.
In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. No less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were sent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Consumers' League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been justified.
To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To women capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition, a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterly fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply business men, with the business man's contracted vision. They could think only in terms of money profit and money loss.
In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the stores supported by their patronage.
The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League would concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season. Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one. The League stands firm on the point,and up to the present so do the stores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the custom wherebythousands of young girls and women are compelled every holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of uncompensated labor.
No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extorted in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to five months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchase after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six o'clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in the bookkeeping and auditing departments.
That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it seems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified.
I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of one of the largest andmost respectable stores in New York. In this store, and, according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the accounting force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school, ignorant and incapable—but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day's sales are posted and audited before the close of the day following, the business force has to work until nine and ten o'clock several nights in the week. In some cases they work every night.
Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the Consumers' League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.
The Consumers' League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in this early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. City after city, State after State, formed Consumers' Leagues, until, in 1899, a National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was organized. The National League, far from being a philanthropic society, has become a scientific association for the study of industrial economics.
When the original Consumers' League undertook its first piece of legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their claim. The New York League and all of the others have been collecting reasons ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized collection of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they should not work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in tenements; why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speed of machines should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should be extended; why minimum wage rates should be established.
In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group of trained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body of facts concerning the human sideof industry. It is ammunition which tells. One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry in Portland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of blowing a large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of women in factories and laundries should be ten hours long. The law was constantly violated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland. One night a factory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and found working there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher. The inspector promptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller.
The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars. Instead of paying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the other laundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for women workers was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendmentto the Constitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the right freely to contract. A man or a woman may contract with an employer to work as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whatever dangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions,unless"there is fair ground to say that there is material danger to the public health or safety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the general welfare...." This is the legal decision on which most protective legislation in the United States has been based.
Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day for women was declared unconstitutional because nobody's health or safety was endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New York law forbidding all-night employment of women.
So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had reason to believe that they could attack the Oregon law. The case was appealed, and appealed again, by thelaundrymen, and finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States. Then the Consumers' League took a hand.
The brief for the State of Oregon, "defendant in error," was prepared by Louis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of the most effective workers in the League's New York headquarters. This brief is probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence. It consists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a few paragraphs were written by the attorney for the State. All the rest was contributed, under Miss Goldmark's direction, from the Consumers' League's wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should be protected.
The League's reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to work their women employees far into the night was, "The World's Experience upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is Based." It is simply a mass oftestimony taken from hearings before the English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical books; from reports of boards of health.
The brief included a short and interesting chapter, containing a number of things the League had collected on the subject of laundries. Supreme Court judges cannot be expected to know that laundry work is classed by experts among the dangerous trades. That washing clothes, from a simple home or backyard occupation, has been transformed into a highly-organized factory trade full of complicated and often extremely dangerous machinery; that the atmosphere of a steam laundry is more conducive to tuberculosis and the other occupational diseases than cotton mills; that the work in laundries, being irregular, is conducive to a general low state of morals; that, on the whole, women should not be required to spend more time than necessary in laundries; all this was set forth.
Medical testimony showed the physical differences between men and women; the lesser power of women to endure long hours of standing; the heightened susceptibility of women to industrial poisons—lead, naphtha, and the like. A long chapter of testimony on the effect of child-bearing in communities where the women had toiled long hours before marriage, or afterwards, was included.
The testimony of factory inspectors, of industrial experts, of employers in England, Germany, France, America, revealed the bad effect of long hours on women's safety, both physical and moral. It revealed the good effect, on the individual health, home life, and general welfare, of short hours of labor.
Nor was the business aspect of the case neglected. That people accomplish as much in an eight-hour day as in a twelve-hour dayhas actually been demonstrated. The brief stated, for one instance, the experience of a bicycle factory in Massachusetts.
In this place young women were employed to sort the ball bearings which went into the machines. They did this by touch, and no girl was of use to the firm unless her touch was very sensitive and very sure. The head of this firm became convinced that the work done late in the afternoon was of inferior quality, and he tried the experiment of cutting the hours from ten to nine. The work was done on piece wages, and the girls at first protested against the nine-hour day, fearing that their pay envelopes would suffer. To their astonishment they earned as much in nine hours as they had in ten. In time the employer cut the working day down to eight hours and a half, and in addition gave the girls ten-minute rests twice a day. Still they earned their full wages, and they continued to earn full wages after the day became eight hours long. The employer testified before theUnited States Industrial Commission of 1900 that he believed he could successfully shorten the day to seven hours and a half and get the same amount of work accomplished.
What can you do against testimony like that? The Consumers' League convinced the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Oregon ten-hour law was upheld.
The importance of this decision cannot be overestimated. On it hangs the validity of nearly all the laws which have been passed in the United States for the protection of women workers. If the Oregon law had been declared unconstitutional, laws in twenty States, or practically all the States where women work in factories, would have been in perpetual danger, and the United States might easily have sunk to a position occupied now by no leading country in Europe.
Great Britain has had protective legislation for women workers since 1844. In 1847 the labor of women in English textile mills was limited to ten hours a day, the period we arenow worrying about, as being possibly contrary to our Constitution. France, within the past five years, has established a ten-hour day, broken by one hour of rest. Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy, limit the hours of women's labor. In several countries there are special provisions giving extra time off to women who have household responsibilities. What would our Constitution-bound law makers say to such a proposition, if any one had the hardihood to suggest it?
If this law had not been upheld by the United States Supreme Court the women of no State could have hoped to secure further legislation for women workers. As it is, women in many States are preparing to establish what is now known as "The Oregon Standard," that is, a ten-hour day for all working women.
Nothing in connection with the woman movement is more significant, certainly nothing was more unexpected, than the voluntary abandonment, on the part of women, of classprejudice and class distinctions. Where formerly the interest of the leisured woman in her wage-earning sisters was of a sentimental or philanthropic character, it has become practical and democratic.
The Young Women's Christian Association has had an industrial department, which up to a recent period concerned itself merely with the spiritual welfare of working girls. Prayer meetings in factories, clubs, and classes in the Association headquarters, working-girls' boarding homes, and other philanthropic efforts were the limits of the Association's activities. The entire policy has changed of late, and under the capable direction of Miss Annie Marian MacLean, of Brooklyn, New York, the industrial department of the Association is doing scientific investigation of labor conditions of women.
In a cracker factory I once saw a paid worker in the Young Women's Christian Association pause above a young girl lying on the floor, crimson with fever, and apparentlyin the throes of a serious illness. With angelic pity on her face the Association worker stooped and slipped a tract into the sick girl's hand. The kind of industrial secretary the Association now employs would send for an ambulance and see that the girl had the best of hospital care. She would inquire whether the girl's illness was caused by the conditions under which she worked, and she would know if it were possible to have those conditions changed.
Nearly every state federation of women's clubs has its industrial committee, and many large clubs have a corresponding department. It is these industrial sections of the women's clubs which are such a thorn in the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr., the new president of the National Manufacturers' Association. In his inaugural address Mr. Kirby warned his colleagues that women's clubs were not the ladylike, innocuous institutions that too-confidingman supposed them to be. In those clubs, he declared, their own wives and daughters were listening to addresses by the worst enemies of the Manufacturers' Association, the labor leaders. By which he meant that the club women were inviting trade-union men and women to present the worker's side of industrial subjects. "Soon," exclaimed Mr. Kirby, "we shall have to fight the women as well as the unions."
The richest and most aristocratic woman's club in the country is the Colony Club of New York. The Colony Club was organized by a number of women from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the manner of men's clubs. The women built a magnificent clubhouse on Madison Avenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderful roof-garden. For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing more than a beautiful toy which its members played with. But soon it began to develop into a sort of a woman's forum, where all sorts of social topics were discussed.Visiting women of distinction, artists, writers, lecturers, were entertained there.
Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course in industrial economics. The women did not invite lecturers from Columbia University to address them. They asked John Mitchell and many lesser lights of the labor world. They wanted to learn, at first hand, the facts concerning conditions of industry. Most of them are stockholders in mills, factories, mines, or business establishments. Many own real estate on which factories stand.
"It is not fair," they have openly declared, "that we should enjoy wealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death. We do not want wealth on such terms."
The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to the National Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in the working and living conditions of wage earners in industries and in governmental institutions. A few conscientious employershave spent a part of their profits to make their employees comfortable. They have given them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, and comfortable seats. They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacation houses, and the like.
No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers. Equally, no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem. Nor should they be used as a substitute for justice.
Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed, untactfully administered. Too often it has been instituted, not to benefit the workers, but to advertise the business. Too often its real object was a desire to play the philanthropist's role, to exact obsequience from the wage earner.
MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New York, the most exclusive Women's Club in the country
I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of the perfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected, the girls are required to stop work and clean the rooms. Since they work on a piece-work scale, the "perfect sanitary conditions" exist at their expense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday. This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their employers. It always fails.
It seems to the women who have studied these things that proper sanitary conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision for rest, vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wage earner's due. They are a part of the laborer's hire, and should be guaranteed by law, exactly as wages are guaranteed. An employer deserves gratitude for overtime pay no more than for fire escapes.
Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers' League, women's clubs, and women's labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that good working conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastly increase the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits of the employers.
The New York Telephone Company does not set itself up to be a benevolent institution. Its directors know that its profits depend on the excellence of its service. There is one exchange in the Borough of Brooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic. This traffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summer resorts along the coast. In the fall and winter the traffic is very light. Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work only half the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round. "We cannot afford to do anything else," explains the traffic manager. "We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages."
MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY
The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his business would suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen. He believed that he would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks human working conditions. Then came the Consumers' League and mercantile laws, and a new pressure ofpublic opinion, and the dry-goods merchant found out that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than one that is exhausted and uncomfortable.
The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has proved itself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligent employers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws will provide for it.
It used to be the invariable custom in stores—it is so still in a few—to lay off many clerks during the dull seasons. Now the best stores find that they can better afford to give all their employees vacations with pay. A clerk coming home after a vacation can sell goods, even in dull times. More and more employers are coming to appreciate the money value of the Saturday half-holiday in summer. Hearn, in New York, closes his department store all day Saturday during July and August. The store sells more goods in five days than it previously sold in six.
There is one department store which has demonstrated that it is profitable to pay higher wages than its competitors, and that it pays to allow the employees to fix the terms of their own employment. This is the Filene store in Boston, which has developed within the past ten years from a conservative, old-fashioned dry-goods business into an extremely original and interesting experiment station in commercial economics.
The entire policy of the Filene management is bent on developing to the highest possible point the efficiency of each individual clerk. The best possible material is sought. No girl under sixteen is employed, and no girl of any age who has not graduated with credit from the grammar schools. There are a number of college-bred men and women in the Filene employ.