Working-class woman

“ 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. ”

“ The over-crowding of those occupations that have always been regarded as woman's work brought about such deplorable conditions of endless working hours and v/retched pay that to the great mass of female breadwinners it meant a choice between starvation and the seeking of new means of self-support. Irresistible economic pressure was the force that opened to women this new, great field of employment: trade and transportation. To the more educated women of the middle class it opened that other great field of employment, classified in the census as professional service. ”

“ It is an economic question with them, and they are evidently willing to [Pg 109] fight for this privilege just as the men were at the time of ‘Chartism.’ Ideas of sex propriety have been cast aside, and the working women are standing as a class, who appreciate their economic relation to society without any regard for the prevalent conception of a ‘woman’s sphere’ which long ago became a myth to them. ”

“ There [Pg xviii] 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. ”

“ On the other hand, the life of the married woman in the working class is often extremely hard, taking into account the large amount of work done by them at home, cooking, cleaning, washing, mending and making of clothes, in the North also baking of bread, tendance of children and of the sick, over and above and all but simultaneously with the bringing of babies into the world. Moreover, the working girl is not under illusions as to the facts of life, as her better-off contemporary still is to some extent. ”

“ But the average working girl [Pg 279] puts neither heart nor mind into her labor; she is merely a machine, though the comparison is a libel upon the functions of first-class machinery.
The harsh truth is that, hard as the working girl is "worked," and miserable as her remuneration is, she is usually paid quite as much as she is worth.
For her incompetency she is not entirely to blame; rather is it a matter of heredity and environment. Being a girl, it is not natural to her to work systematically. The working woman is a new product; in this country she is hardly three generations old. ”

“ Ample proof of this assertion can be found in the fact, that wages are lowest in those industries in which the greatest number of women are employed. As female labor can be employed to a great extent in these industries, it becomes a necessity to the working class families that the women should seek employment.” The factory inspector for Coblentz says: “Women usually are more industrious and reliable than young girls. Young working girls generally have an aversion against disagreeable and dirty work, which is accordingly left to the more unassuming married workers. ”

“ Those who are economically handicapped—first of all the working classes in their struggle for better conditions of life and labor. And who among the workers are the weak? Wherever the men have suffered, the women have suffered more.
But I would also like to point out to you how this affects the homekeeping woman, the wife and mother, of the working class, aside from the wage-earning woman. Consider the woman at home who must make both ends meet on a small income. Who better than she knows whether or not the cost of living advances more rapidly than the wage does? ”

“ This depreciation of the woman’s productive value to her family did not greatly influence her position in the seventeenth century, because it was then only visible in the class of wage-earners, and into this position women were forced by poverty alone. The productive efficiency of women’s services in domestic industry remained as high as ever, and every family 305which was possessed of sufficient capital for domestic industry, could provide sufficient profitable occupation for its women without their entry into the labour market. ”

“ The American working-woman has no share in the American privilege given to the poorest male laborer—a growing income, a bank account, and every office of the Republic, if he have brain and courage to win them."
This describes the condition and feelings of not all, but of a large class of women in many of our larger cities, who must earn their own livelihood. But, in the medium classes, as it respects wealth, the unmarried or widowed women feel that they are an incumbrance to fathers and brothers, who often unwillingly support them from pride or duty. ”

“ Women of the working class, especially wage workers, should not have more than two children at most. The average working man can support no more and the average working woman can take care of no more in decent fashion. ”

“ Then, when we speak of the drudgery of the women, we must note the equal division of labour; there is no class of women privileged to sit still while others work. Every squaw makes the clothing, mats, moccasins, and boils the kettle for her own family. Compare her life with the refined leisure of an elegant woman in the higher classes of our society, and it is wretched and abject ”

“ But for women wage-earners the industrial revolution does mean a certain advance in status. The woman-worker in the great industry sells her work per piece or per hour, not her whole life and personality. I shall perhaps be told indignantly that the poor woman in a low-class factory or laundry is as veritable a drudge as the most oppressed serf of mediaeval times, and I do not attempt to deny it. ”

“ She began to realize—vaguely at first, but more clearly as the number of wage-earning women increase—that alone she was weak and helpless, but that as a member of her class, the working class, she could command attention and wield power. ”

“ The working class must be emancipated by the working class.
Woman must be given her true place in society by the working class.
Child labor must be abolished by the working class.
Society must be reconstructed by the working class.
The working class must be employed by the working class.
The fruits of labor must be enjoyed by the working class.
War, bloody war, must be ended by the working class. ”

“ But, after all, the greatest factor in the ultimate development of the working girl as a wage-earning unit—the most potent force for the adjustment of all the difficulties besetting her at every turn, and for the righting of all her wrongs, social, economic, or moral—will be the attitude which she herself assumes toward the dispassionate consideration of those difficulties to be adjusted, and of those wrongs to be righted.
At the present time there is nobody so little concerned about herself and her condition as the working woman herself. ”

“ Of those who reached maturity, many were crippled in mind or body, forming a large class of unemployables destined to be a burthen instead of strength to the community.
This appalling loss and suffering was not due to the excessive work of married women but to their under-feeding and bad housing. Probably the women of the wage-earning class actually accomplished less work than the women of the husbandman class ”

“ Thousands are at work on the problems of higher wage and shorter hours for women of the industrial class, but this problem of the carefully nurtured, wholly untrained, and insecurely protected woman they have so far ignored. To my mind this demands the first consideration and the application of composite woman's highest intelligence. The industrial woman has been trained to work, she learns as she grows to maturity to protect herself and fight her own battles, and in nine cases out of ten she resents the interference of the leisure class in her affairs as much as she would charity. ”

“ The factory girls are happy, are they not? Don't you find them so?"
Is it a satisfaction to the leisure class, to the capitalist and employer, to feel that a woman poorly housed, ill-fed, in imminent moral danger, every temptation rampant over barriers down, overworked, overstrained by labour varying from ten to thirteen hours a day, by all-night labour, and destruction of body and soul, is happy?
Do you wish her to be so? Is the existence ideal?
I can speak only for the shoe manufacturing girl of Lynn and for the Southern mill-hand. ”

“ The value of a woman’s productive capacity to her family was, however, greatly reduced when, through poverty, she was obliged to work for wages, because then, far from being able to feed and clothe her family, her wages were barely adequate to feed herself.
This fact indicates the weakness of women’s position in the labour market, into which they were being forced in increasing numbers by the capitalistic organisation of industry. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As the home centres round the woman, the problem for the working woman has been, and is, one of enormous difficulty, involving considerable restatement of her traditional codes and customs.
Whatever may have been the social misery and disorder brought about by the industrial revolution, one striking result was an increase in the earning power of women. ”

“ The class in which she finally takes rank is seldom recruited from sources that would seem most fruitful. The sewing-woman, the average factory worker, is devitalized to such an extent that even ambition dies and the brain barely responds to even the allurements of the weekly story paper. It is the class but a grade removed, to whom [Pg 184] no training has come from which strength or simplicity or any virtue of honest living could grow, that makes the army of women who have chosen degradation. ”

“ We have noted that women are already in most of the trades followed by men, and that the number of this army of working, wage-earning women is legion; that they are not trained at all, and are so badly paid that as underbidders they perpetually cut the wages of men. Nay, the young working-girl is even "her own worst competitor—the competitor against her own future home, and as wife and mother she may have to live on the wage she herself has cheapened." ”

“ The dangers to which we are exposed from our Women must now be manifest to the meanest capacity in Spaceland. If even the angle of a respectable Triangle in the middle class is not without its dangers; if to run against a Working Man involves a gash; if collision with an officer of the military class necessitates a serious wound; if a mere touch from the vertex of a Private Soldier brings with it danger of death;—what can it be to run against a Woman, except absolute and immediate destruction? ”

“ Now married women, particularly when mothers of young children, are inevitably the least organized and self-defending part of the adult working class. And they have, in fact, suffered both speeding up and the worst rates of wages in their branches of industry. Thus the numbers of married women enabled to continue in industrial employment without breaking down have not necessarily been greatly increased by our one attempt at legislation in behalf of their health. ”

“ Various philanthropic enterprises, such as cheap boarding houses for working women, industrial schools, exchanges for woman's work, etc., came into existence at this time, and early agitators for equal opportunities for women, as Virginia Penny, Gail Hamilton, Catherine Cole and Mathew Carey, helped to arouse the public conscience. The misery of the needlewomen and of other unskilled women workers was a powerful factor in opening to women the skilled trades and learned professions they have since invaded. ”

“ A painter told us that in working in the houses of ill-repute in the vicinity of Twenty-third Street, he was astonished at the number of women whom he recognized as saleswomen in different stores who frequented these houses. But what are they to do? They are women without trade or profession, thrown upon their own resources, obliged to make a good appearance, and unable to do so and yet have sufficient food. We must all concede that virtue and honor in woman are natural, and very few women resort to such ways unless forced to do so ”