Working woman

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The perfect woman, you see, was a working woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who used her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others. ”

“ The great industrial revolution, which began in the last century, and has progressed with such rapid strides, has had its special bearing on the position of women. The material improvements brought about by machinery and developing trade, have lifted the middle-class woman out of the purely domestic sphere by lessening her household duties, and so leaving her free for other occupations. She hasxii ceased to be a producer. But the working woman has been simply drawn more and more from family life, to be absorbed into the ranks of outside workers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In a world where so many odd jobs which ought to be done are left undone, because all the experienced workers are permanently employed, the married woman with experience and judgment comes in as the right person in the right place. She is perhaps the only skilled casual worker. If there is no need for money, she should prove the best philanthropic worker, her position as mistress of a house making it possible for her to give a personal service in her own home which the official philanthropist must often regret she is unable to offer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the factory girl, or the teacher, or the professional woman who seeks the fulfilment of all of life in the factory, the school or the consulting-room, will soon tire and clamor for relief. The housewife, or the mistress of a home, must likewise seek life away from her work if she is to love it and wake each morning with a desire to continue it. Luckily we have reached a place where working women in the home are seeking supplementary life outside, and they seem to be quite as successful in their search as are factory girls or teachers. ”

“ I set out to surmount physical fatigue and revulsion, to place my intellect and sympathy in contact as a medium between the working girl who wants help and the more fortunately situated who wish to help her. In the papers which follow I have endeavoured to give a faithful picture of things as they exist, both in and out of the factory, and to suggest remedies that occurred to me as practical. My desire is to act as a mouthpiece for the woman labourer. ”

“ How natural it was for a woman to regard herself as her husband’s partner will be seen when the conditions of family industry are considered. Before the encroachments of capitalism the members of the Craft Gilds were masters, not of other men, but of their craft. The workshop was part of the home, and in it, the master, who in the course of a long apprenticeship had acquired the technical mastery of his trade, worked with his apprentices, one or two journeymen and his wife and children. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Year by year, day by day, there is a silently working but determined tendency for the sphere of woman’s domestic labours to contract itself; and the contraction is marked exactly in proportion as that complex condition which we term “modern civilisation” is advanced. ”

“ Indeed there was practically no other field of employment open to educated girls. The old domestic labors had been removed from the household—where could a girl with spirit and ability make the necessary money to carry out her legitimate desires? ”

“ 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. ”

“ And here lies the great difference between men and women in the labour market. All that the average man demands is that his work should be honest and remunerative. It need not be interesting, or elevating, or heroic. Most women, on the other hand, who look forward to a long working career must have an occupation to which they can give both heart and mind. The reason is simple. The woman is living an isolated life; unless her work involves the exercise of what may be termed her maternal faculties, she is living an unnatural life. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Another fact, too, must be remembered—that although high pay may compensate for uninteresting work, a woman will never be worth high pay if the work does not interest her. And we find, therefore, the paradoxical result that, generally speaking, the women who earn the highest incomes are the women who have chosen their work for the work’s sake. ”

“ Of girls in retail stores living at home in New York City, 84 per cent paid their entire earnings to the family. Work, then, for the majority of women, is more apt to be cold economic necessity—not only for herself, but for her family. ”

“ Not a few professional women, writers, and speakers, have gone on to infer that a similar solution was at hand for the working-girl on her marriage. Not yet is any such adjustment or rather readjustment of domestic and industrial activities in sight for her. Whatever changes may take place in the environment of the coming American woman, the present generation of working-girls as they marry are going to find their hands abundantly filled with duties within the walls of their own little homes. ”

“ In the meantime, we are putting off the very situation we hope for—when women, as well as men, shall have reached the point where they can play a dignified part in the industrial scheme of things—by sending them from work at night too weary and run down to exert themselves for any social purpose. ”

“ So working women came into the labor movement at a time when there was as yet no organized woman movement. Years before middle class women began to struggle for woman's right to a higher education, her right to learn and practice the liberal professions, her right to equality before the law and, finally, her right to political equality, working women were struggling for a living wage, a reasonable working day, and decent conditions of toil. ”

“ She was a woman with a working brain and no work. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ A woman, herself a worker, but large-brained and large-hearted beyond the common endowment, wrote recently of the dangers put in the way of the average shop or factory girl, imploring happy women living at ease to adopt simpler forms, or at least to ask what form of living went on below them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And it is this principle—that woman's work is the kind of work which man prefers not to do—which regulates and defines not only the labour of a woman in her own household, but the labour of women generally. ”

“ If Grasshopper labour-spurts starve the poor Ant.
If well-to-do woman work helps to spread want,
This new-born blind zeal sense should bridle.
There's fit work for all, some with spade, some with tabor;
But Madam, if feminine "playing at Labour,"
Whilst needless to you, wrecks one workwoman neighbour,
By Jove, you had better be idle!
[A] "In every branch of work we see well-to-do women crowding into the ranks of competition, in consequence of which wages are lowered, and women who really want work are left to starve." ”

“ These women, who had given up the power to work for themselves, and had devoted themselves to working for their husbands and children, were left penniless. There was nothing for them to do but to go into the workhouse. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The increasing specialization in industry, drawing more and more of the household arts out of the home and into factory, mill and shops, and the following of the jobs by women into the mills and factories, thus freeing woman from economic dependence on man, has already colored every branch of our social fabric. ”

“ It is sufficiently clear to those who have seen the personal reactions of working girls to the piecework system, that when women attain, as men in various industries have attained, the practical management of the factory, piecework will get a setback. ”

“ I have had to listen to bitter complaints of the careless way in which ladies execute work that is entrusted to them, of their want of punctuality and business habits, and their ineradicable conviction that they are conferring a favour upon their employers by working for them at all. ”