Woman worker

“ In the first place, woman’s twofold function apparently necessitates a double preparation and a divided interest and life; in the second place, our industry demands a standardized worker for the whole of his time. In consequence of this situation, women throughout the period of factory labor have been among the greatest sufferers from low wages, long hours, and unsanitary conditions. ”

“ She will have to throw her efforts into another channel, using organization to raise the position of working-women generally into dignified industrial independence. For this still limited number of half-time married women workers are but the leaf on the stream, showing the direction events are taking. As specialization goes on, as the domestic industries are more and more taken out of our homes, as the gifted and trained teacher more and more shares in the life of the child, more and more will the woman after she marries continue to belong to the wage-earning class by being a part-time worker. ”

“ Nor am I expressing resentment at the fact that when a girl leaves the machine-speeded work of the factory, it is only to take up the heavy burden of the workingman's wife, as we know it. She must be wife and mother, and manager of the family income, and cook and laundress and housemaid and seamstress. The improvement of her position and the amelioration of her lot can only come slowly, through social changes, as expressed in the woman movement, and through the widening scope of the principle of specialization. ”

“ The working woman, for instance, we have had with us since the beginning of women—and they began a good spell ago. The problem of the working woman, as we think of it to-day, began with the beginning of modern industry. Nor is it possible to view her past without realizing that the tendency has ever been, with but few interruptions, toward improvement.
In the early factory days in our country it is known that women rose at four, took their breakfast with them to the mills, and by five were hard at work in badly constructed buildings, badly heated, badly lighted. ”

“ The tendency of these movements is to create an atmosphere of permanency and professionalism for woman as a wage-earner, especially among women in the better-paid occupations, which in time may markedly change her attitude toward industrial life. ”

“ And there are all the cloak-rooms with the plate-glass mirrors and the canteen dining-rooms done in pink, and blue, and duck's-egg green and the new uniforms that Parliament made for the woman in industry! Oh, gentlemen, after all, why should she go home? For the new place in industry is the most comfortable place in which she has ever been in the world! Oh, I know the sociologists used to talk about the factory as so unhealthful for a woman. But you see, that was because no man knew how hard was domestic labour: he had never done it. ”

“ The most snuffle-nosed little mailing-girl on the office floor felt superior to all of the factory workers, even the foremen, quite as negro house-servants look down on poor white trash.
Jealousy of position, cattishness, envy of social standing—these were as evident among the office-women as they are in a woman’s club; and Una had to admit that woman’s cruelty to woman often justified the prejudices of executives against the employment of women in business; that women were the worst foes of Woman. ”

“ The hand that knows how to stir with a spoon and to sew with a needle has got to forget its cunning if women are to live successfully and engage in business and the professions. The woman of the present generation has struggled to do her own work in the office and, after hours that of the woman of yesterday in the home. ”

“ But now over all the world, to every industry that shows a slackening in production, there is issued one common government General Order: "Teach the Women." And the employer looks questioningly toward the work-bench at the figure in the leather apron there, who in some of the most highly skilled trades, has always threatened to take off that apron and walk out of the shop when a petticoat crossed the threshold. There are shops in which there has never been a woman apprentice, because he wouldn't teach her. ”

“ It is melancholy to see, in all mechanical trades where woman’s labour is available, how many thousands are following pursuits, many of them injurious to health and to morals, and none of them qualifying a woman, in any respect, for future domestic duties. ”

“ Many of the difficulties and dangers surrounding the working-woman affect the workingman also, but on the other hand, there are special reasons, springing out of the ancestral claims which life makes upon woman, arising also out of her domestic and social environment, and again out of her special function as mother, why the condition of the wage-earning woman should be the subject of separate consideration. It is impossible to discuss intelligently wages, hours and sanitation in reference to women workers unless these facts are borne in mind. ”

“ Domestic servants, accustomed to luxurious living and comparative ease as professional servants, willingly consent to marry artisans on 25s. a week, and to work harder than any maid-of-all-work would be asked to do. In factory districts a considerable percentage of the married women go out to work; and there is no greater slave to her husband than the woman who receives no support from him. ”

“ Every man who enlists at that tent near the post office is going to leave a job somewhere whether it's at the factory or the doctor's office or the school teacher's desk, or whether it's your husband. That job will have to be taken by a woman. It's what happened in Europe. It's what now we may see happen here. A great many women will have a wage envelope who never had it before. ”

“ Our hands sometimes work twelve or fourteen hours, at their pleasure. Small girls, of whom we employ but five or six, seldom work ten hours. The number of women and girls employed in our establishment heretofore has been variable, averaging perhaps thirty. We are using improved machinery, which has already reduced the number, and will reduce it still more. Our work is peculiarly adapted to female labor. Nearly all our hands are American born. In twenty-two years' business, we have seldom, if ever, had an adult woman employed who was unable to sign her name to the pay roll. ”

“ The home has, of course, been burdened by these industries, and women made drudges to them, and we all bid Godspeed to their exodus. But for what reason? That woman may be released from exhausting, unfeminine occupations, togive more strength to the proper performance of her legitimate duties as wife, mother, and household administrator. Weaving, cheese-making, and domestic manufactures stand in no relation to the essential nature and characteristic duties of woman. ”

“ A well-known woman publicist recently drew attention to the vast number of the women engaged in domestic life, and expressed regret that organizations like the National Women's Trade Union League confined their attention so exclusively to the women and girls employed in factories and stores, who, even today, fall so far short numerically of their sisters who are working in the home or on the farm. ”

“ It is necessary to remove the obstacles to the larger employment of women. As soon as manufacturers show plenty of initiative and adaptiveness for this new class of labour, and cease to cherish preconceived opinions as to the inferiority of woman's work and as to the low wages it merits, the labour of women will respond splendidly to the utmost variety of demands. ”

“ There was no need for women to seek employment outside the home, because there was a superabundance of work to be done within. There was no economic necessity that impelled women to compete with men in those occupations traditionally regarded as man's work, because woman's field of work was so large and so important that it required the services of all women. ”

“ Here, too, it has been seen that working women confide more readily in members of their own sex, and that female factory inspectors have been able to obtain much information that was denied to their male colleagues. ”

“ Already there are signs that the woman's labor organizations are willing to recognize the inherent dignity of household service. And this is as it should be. The woman who labors should be the one to recognize that all labor is per se equally honorable—that there is no stigma in any honestly performed, useful service. ”

“ Burnishing the back of the plates could be done by women also, but it is somewhat dirty work. Women would have to work in the room with the men, for while the foreman was employed, he would like to keep an eye on the employees. The work is rather heavy for women, but not more so than some in which they are engaged. ”

“ We never lose sight of a woman that shows any business capacity, but of course that’s only as a rule in heads of departments. A saleswoman gets about the same right along. Two thirds of the girls here are public-school girls and live at home. ”

“ One Friday I asked a group of girls at lunch if they weren't glad the next day was Saturday and the afternoon off. Four of them weren't glad at all, because they had to go home and clean house Saturday afternoons, and do other household chores. “Gee! don't you hate workin' round the house?”
I wonder how much of the women-in-industry movement is traceable to just that.
The first day I was at the dress factory a very dirty but pleasant-faced little Jewish girl said to me, “Ever try workin' at home? Ain't it just awful?” ”

“ For instance, the subject of the organization of wage-earning women is indeed bound up with the industrial history of the United States, with the legal and social position of women, with the handicaps under which the colored races suffer, and with the entire labor problem. ”

“ True enough,—due to the ever more widespread employment of female labor in agriculture, industry, commerce and the trades—the family life of the workingman is destroyed, and the degenerating effects of the double yoke of work for a living, and of household duties, makes rapid progress in the female sex. ”

“ The girl too ignorant to reckon figures, too dull-witted to learn by observation, takes refuge in sewing in some of its many forms as the one thing [Pg 12] possible to all grades of intelligence; and the woman with drunken or otherwise vicious husband, more helpless often than the widow who turns in the same direction, seeks the same sources of employment. If respectably dressed and able to furnish some reference, employment is often found by her in factory or some large establishments where regular workers have place. ”

“ I look about at the laundry workers and think: [97] Suppose we decide nothing shall be done for these girls until they demand it themselves and then have charge of it themselves. In other words, suppose we let welfare work and social legislation wait on organization. The people who talk that way are often college professors or the upper crust of labor. They have either had no touch or lost touch with the rank and file of women workers. It is going to be years and years and years, if ever, before women in this country organize by and large to a point where they can become permanently effective. ”

“ At all events, from the imperfectly concealed triumph with which such people, particularly the female working-woman leaders, will tell you that in 1923 700,000 of the 5,020,560 women-workers were directly replacing males in industry alone, it is impossible not to read the signs of hostility to the male in their general outlook ”

“ The fact remains that the great bulk of women in industry work because they have to work—they enter industrial life to make absolutely necessary money. The old tasks at which a woman could be self-supporting in the home are no longer possible in the home. She earns her bread now as she has earned it for thousands of years—spinning, weaving, sewing, baking, cooking—only to-day she is one of hundreds, thousands in a great factory. ”

“ Well, I might spend two or three nights dealing with the industrial situation as it affects women, with the legal position of women, with the social position of women. I want very briefly to say a few words about all. First of all there is the condition of the working woman. ”

“ And yet these same married women are considered by their employers as desirable workers. They tend to be steadier than their unmarried sisters, and show greater concentration in their work. The secretary of one of the large glove maker’s union said of the factory in which she was employed. “When a good worker marries, her place is kept open for her for several weeks so that she can return within a reasonable time if she so desires. ”

“ Married women form a large percentage of working women and their number is steadily increasing, which means a serious problem in regard to the family life of the working class. In 1899, German factory inspectors were instructed to investigate the work of married women and to inquire into the causes which lead them to seek employment. ”

“ The tendency of women at the present day to undertake certain forms of labour, proves only that in the crabbed, walled-in, and bound conditions surrounding woman at the present day, these are the lines along which action is most possible to her. ”

“ We can expect an increasing assertion of the rights of females in every branch of industry, commerce, and the professions, accompanied by such a multiplication of ready workers that competition between the sexes will become acute. The first moment of violent strain will occur when women employers and women labour-leaders, both working under Feminist guidance, appropriate certain industries wholly to female labour. ”

“ Industrial depressions throw men out of work, and also women, and in the financial pressure following, women turn to any sort of work at any sort of pay, and perhaps open a new wedge for women's work in a heretofore untried field, desirable or undesirable. ”