Part 17 (1/2)

”I do in pickin' and choppin' times.”

”And you do the housework?'

”There ain't no one else to do it.”

”And the sewing?”

”Yes, ma'am. I make all the clothes for the children and myself. I make everything I wear ever since I was married.”

”Do you make your hats?”

”Yes, ma'am. I make my hats. I had only two since I was married.”

”And how long have you been married?”

”Twenty years.”

”Do you do the milking?”

”Most always when we can afford a cow.”

”What time do you get up in the morning?”

”I usually gits up in time to have breakfast done by 4 o'clock in summer time. In the winter time we are through with breakfast by sun-up.”

”Did you work in the fields while you were carrying your children?”

”Oh, yes, sometimes; sometimes almost nigh to birthin'

time.”

”Is this customary among the tenant farmers' wives you have known?”

The answer was an affirmative nod.

Let us now once more consider the home, and compare factory operations with the domestic arts. There is no doubt that in cooking, for instance, the housewife finds scope for a far higher range of qualifications than the factory girl exercises in preparing tomatoes in a cannery, or soldering the cans after they are filled with the cooked fruit. The housewife has first of all to market and next to prepare the food for cooking. She has to study the proper degree of heat, watch the length of time needed for boiling or baking in their several stages, perhaps make additions of flavorings, and serve daintily or can securely. There is scarcely any division of housework which does not call for resource and alertness. Unfortunately, however, although these qualities are indeed called for, they are not always called forth, because the houseworker is not permitted to concentrate her whole attention and interest upon any one cla.s.s of work, but must be constantly going from one thing to another. Hence women have indeed acquired marvelous versatility, but at what a heavy cost! The houseworker only rarely acquires perfect skill and deftness or any considerable speed in performing any one process. Her versatility is attained at the price of having no standards of comparison established, and worse than all, at the price of working in isolation, and therefore gaining no training in team-work, and so never having an inkling of what organized effort means.

Our factory systems, on the other hand, go to the other extreme, being so arranged that the majority of workers gain marvelous dexterity, and acquire a dizzying rate of speed, while they are apt to lose in both resourcefulness and versatility. They do not, however, suffer, to anything like the same degree, from isolation, and factory life, even where the employers are opposed to organization, does open a way to the recognition of common difficulties and common advantages, and therefore leads eventually in the direction of organization. In the factory trades the workers have to some extent learnt to be vocal. It is possible for an outsider to learn something of the inner workings of an establishment. Upon the highly developed trades, the searchlight of official investigation is every now and then turned. From statistics we know the value of the output. We are also learning a good deal about the workers, the environment that makes for health or invalidism, or risk to life, and we are in a fair way to learn more.

The organized labor movement furnishes an expression, although still imperfect, of the workers' views, and keeps before the public the interests of the workers, even of the unorganized groups.

But with the domestic woman all this is reversed. In spite of the fact that in numbers the home women far exceed the wage-earners, the value of their output has been ignored, and as to the conditions under which it is produced, not even the most advanced and progressive statisticians have been able to arrive at any estimate. Of sentiment tons have been lavished upon the extreme importance of the work of the housewife in the home, sometimes, methinks, with a lingering misgiving that she might not be too well content, and might need a little encouragement to be induced to remain there. What adulation, too, has been expended upon the work of even the domestic servant, with comparisons in plenty unfavorable to the factory occupations into which girls still persist in drifting. Yet in freedom and in social status, two of the tests by which to judge the relative desirability of occupations, the paid domestic employments take inferior ranks.

Again, they offer little prospect of advance, for they lead nowhere.

Further, as noted in an earlier chapter in the census reports all women returning themselves as engaged in domestic duties (not being paid employes), were necessarily not listed as gainfully employed. Yet it is impossible to believe that compared with other ways of employing time and energy, the hours that women spend in cooking and cleaning for the family, even if on unavoidably primitive lines, have no value to the community. Or again, that the hours a mother spends in caring for her baby, later on in helping with the lessons, and fitting the children for manhood or womanhood, have no value in the nation's account book. I will be reminded that this is an unworthy way of reckoning up the inestimable labors of the wife and mother. Perhaps so. Yet personally, I should much prefer a system of social economics which could estimate the items at a fair, not excessive value, and credit them to the proper quarter.

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. The point is an interesting one, but admits of a ready explanation. Every movement follows the line of least resistance, and a movement for the industrial organization of women must first approach those in the most advanced and highly organized industries.

As I have shown, we really know very much more about the conditions of factory workers than of home-workers. The former have, in a degree, found their voice, and are able to give collective expression to their common interests.

The League recently urged upon the Secretary for Labor, the recognition, as an economic factor, of the work of women in the household trades; the cla.s.sification of these occupations, whether paid or unpaid, on a par with other occupations, and lastly, that there be undertaken a government investigation of domestic service.