Part 11 (2/2)
The commonest complaint of all is that women members of a trade union do not attend their meetings. It is indeed a very serious difficulty to cope with, and the reasons for this poor attendance and want of interest in union affairs have to be fairly faced.
At first glance it seems curious that the meetings of a mixed local composed of both men and girls, should have for the girls even less attraction than meetings of their own s.e.x only. But so it is. A business meeting of a local affords none of the lively social intercourse of a gathering for pleasure or even of a cla.s.s for instruction. The men, mostly the older men, run the meeting and often are the meeting. Their influence may be out of all proportion to their numbers. It is they who decide the place where the local shall meet and the hour at which members shall a.s.semble. The place is therefore often over a saloon, to which many girls naturally and rightly object.
Sometimes it is even in a disreputable district. The girls may prefer that the meeting should begin shortly after closing time so that they do not need to go home and return, or have to loiter about for two or three hours. They like meetings to be over early. The men mostly name eight o'clock as the time of beginning, but business very often will not start much before nine. Then, too, the men feel that they have come together to talk, and talk they do while they allow the real business to drag. Of course, the girls are not interested in long discussions on matters they do not understand and in which they have no part and naturally they stay away, and so make matters worse, for the men feel they are doing their best for the interests of the union, resent the women's indifference, and are more sure than ever that women do not make good unionists.
Among the remedies proposed for this unsatisfactory state of affairs is compulsory attendance at a certain number of meetings per year under penalty of a fine or even losing of the card. (A very drastic measure this last and risky, unless the trade has the closed shop.)
Where the conditions of the trade permit it by far the best plan is to have the women organized in separate locals. The meetings of women and girls only draw better attendances, give far more opportunity for all the members to take part in the business, and beyond all question form the finest training ground for the women leaders who inconsiderable numbers are needed so badly in the woman's side of the trade-union movement today.
Those trade-union women who advocate mixed locals for every trade which embraces both men and women are of two types. Some are mature, perhaps elderly women, who have been trade unionists all their lives, who have grown up in the same locals with men, who have in the long years pa.s.sed through and left behind their period of probation and training, and to whose presence and active cooperation the men have become accustomed. These women are able to express their views in public, can put or discuss a motion or take the chair as readily as their brothers. The other type is represented by those individual women or girls in whom exceptional ability takes the place of experience, and who appreciate the educational advantages of working along with experienced trade-union leaders. I have in my mind at this moment one girl over whose face comes all the rapture of the keen student as she explains how much she has learnt from working with men in their meetings. She ardently advocates mixed locals for all. For the born captain the plea is sound. Always she is quick enough to profit by the men's experience, by their ways of managing conferences and balancing advantages and losses in presenting a wage-scale or accepting an agreement. At the same time she is not so overwhelmed by their superiority, born of long practice in handling such situations, but that she retains her own independence of judgment and clearness of vision, and at the fitting moment will rise and place the woman's point of view before her male co-workers. Oh yes, for herself she is right, and for the coming woman she is right, too. But the risk is rather that she and such as she pressing on in their individual advancement will outstep the rank and file of their sisters at the present stage while trade unionism among women is still so young a movement, and one which under the most hopeful circ.u.mstances will have to fulfill for many years the task of receiving, teaching and a.s.similating vast numbers of young and quite untrained, in many cases non-English-speaking girls.
The mixed local for all mixed trades is, I believe, the ultimate goal which women trade unionists ought to keep in mind. But with the average girl today the plan does not work. The mixed local does not, as a general rule, offer the best training-cla.s.s for new girl recruits, in which they may obtain their training in collective bargaining or cooperative effort. To begin with, they are often so absurdly young that they stand in the position of children put into a cla.s.s at school two or three grades ahead of their capacity and expected to do work for which they have had no preparation through the earlier grades. Many of the discussions that go on are quite above the girls' heads. And even when a young girl has something to say and wishes to say it, want of practice and timidity often keep her silent.
It is to be regretted, too, that some trade-union men are far from realizing either the girls' needs in their daily work or their difficulties in meetings, and lecture, reprove or bully, where they ought to listen and persuade.
The girls, as a rule, are not only happier in their own women's local, but they have the interest of running the meetings themselves. They choose their own hall and fix their own time of meeting. Their officers are of their own selecting and taken from among themselves.
The rank and, file, too, get the splendid training that is conferred when persons actually and not merely nominally work together for a common end. Their introduction to the great problems of labor is through their practical understanding and handling of those problems as they encounter them in the everyday difficulties of the shop and the factory and as dealt with when they come up before the union meeting or have to be settled in bargaining with an employer.
But there are other and broader reasons still why it is women who should in the main be the leaders and teachers of women in the trade union, that newest and best school for the working-women. Women have always been the teachers of the race. It was in the far-back ages with motherhood as their normal school that primitive women learnt their profession and handed on to their daughters their slowly acquired skill. Whenever woman has been left to self-development on her own lines her achievements have always been in the constructive direction.
Always she has been busy helping to make some young thing grow, whether the object of her solicitous attention were a wild gra.s.s, a baby, or an art. What does education mean but the drawing forth of latent qualities? Is not the best teacher the one who calls these forth? Are not women teachers, trained, wise, and patient, urgently needed in the labor movement of our day? Just now, when the number of young girls in industry is so great, the girls need them, we know.
Possibly the men also would be the gainers through their influence.
The labor movement is a constant fight, it is true, but it is also a school of development. In the near future we hope it will mean to all workers even more than a discipline, a storehouse of culture, a provider of joy and of pleasure, of care in sickness, of support in adversity, and best of all, a preparation for and a hastener on of that cooperative commonwealth for which more and more of us ever watch and pray.
The need for the woman organizer admitted, the demand for women organizers becomes pressing. And where are they to be found? The reply is that they are not to be found, not yet. If the organizers were to be obtained such requests would be increased fourfold. But the material is ready to hand. The born organizer, with initiative, resource, courage and patience exists in every trade, in every city, and she comes of every race. But on the one hand she is untrained, and on the other cannot stop to receive training unless for a little while she is relieved from the pressing necessity of earning her living.
The problem of how to provide women organizers in response to the demand for such workers, with its solution, was admirably put by Mrs.
Raymond Robins, in her presidential address before the Fourth Biennial Convention of the National Women's Trade Union League in St. Louis, in June, 1913, when she said:
The best organizers without question are the trade-union girls. Many a girl capable of leaders.h.i.+p and service is held within the ranks because neither she as an individual nor her organization has money enough to set her free for service. Will it be possible for the National Women's Trade Union League to establish a training-school for women organizers, even though in the beginning it may be only a training-cla.s.s, offering every trade-union girl a scholars.h.i.+p for a year?
The course finally outlined included a knowledge of the principles of trade unionism, and their practical application in field-work, a knowledge of labor legislation, of parliamentary law, and practice in writing and speaking.
In the following year, 1914, the League was able to give several months of training to three trade-union girls. Cordial cooperation was received from both the University of Chicago and North-western University. For the present no further students have been received, because of the need of larger financial resources to maintain cla.s.ses in session regularly.
The need for a training-school is attested by the constant demands for women organizers received at the headquarters of the League from central labor bodies and men's unions, and by the example of the thorough training given to young women taking up work in other fields somewhat a.n.a.logous. Such a school for women might very well prove in this country the nucleus of university extension work in the labor movement for both men and women, similar to that which has been so successfully inaugurated in Great Britain, and which is making headway in Canada and in Australia.
At the Seattle Convention of the American Federation of Labor held in November, 1914, a resolution was pa.s.sed levying an a.s.sessment of one cent upon the entire members.h.i.+p to organize women. Efforts were mainly concentrated upon workers in the textile industry, to which special organizers, both men and women, were a.s.signed. There is no trade which has worse conditions, and consequently wages and regularity of employment are immediately affected adversely by any industrial depression.
Women in the labor movement will have to make their own mistakes and earn their own experience. I have dwelt elsewhere upon the many advantages that accrue to women and girls from belonging to an organization so vital and so bound up with some of our most fundamental needs, as the trade union. On the very surface it is evident that in such a body working-women learn to be more business-like, to work together in harmony, to share loyally the results of their united action, whether these spell defeat or success.
If they err, they promptly learn of their mistakes from their, fellow-workers, men or women, from employers, and from their families.
Here, however, is perhaps the place to call attention to one markedly feminine tendency, which should be discouraged in these early days lest in process of time it might even gain the standing of a virtue, and that is the inclination among the leaders to indulge in unlimited overwork in all their labor activities. Labor men overwork too, but not, as a rule, to the same degree, nor nearly so frequently as women.
Do not mistake. Women do not fall into this error because they are trade unionists, or because they are inspired by the labor movement or by the splendid ideals or by the aspiration after a free womanhood.
No! Trade-union and socialist and suffrage women overwork because they are women, because through long ages the altruistic side has been overdeveloped. They have brought along with them into their public work the habit of self-sacrifice, and that overconscientiousness in detail which their foremothers acquired during the countless generations when obedience, self-immolation and self-obliteration were considered women's chief duties. Personally these good sisters are blameless. But that does not in the least alter the hard fact that such overdevotion is an uneconomical expenditure of nervous energy.
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