Part 18 (1/2)

It was with an appreciation of these complexities that Professor W.I.

Thomas has pointed out that in his opinion suffragists often place too great stress upon primitive woman's political power, and ignore the fact that women held an even more important relation to the occupational than to the political life of those early days, and that in her occupational value is to be traced the true source of her power and therefore her real influence in any age.

While agreeing with Professor Thomas that some suffrage arguments do on the surface appear inconsistent with historical facts, I believe the inconsistency to be more formal than real.

As the centuries pa.s.s a larger and still larger proportion of human affairs pa.s.ses away from individual management and comes under social and community control. As this process goes on, more and more does the individual, whether man or woman, need the power to control socially the conditions that affect his or her individual welfare. In our day political power rightly used, gives a socialized control of social conditions, and for the individual it is embodied in and is expressed by the vote.

To go back only one hundred years. The great bulk of men and women were industrially much more nearly on a level than they are today.

A poor level, I grant you, for with the exception of the privileged cla.s.ses, few and small were the political powers and therefore the social control of even men. But every extension of political power as granted to cla.s.s after cla.s.s of men has, as far as women are concerned, had the fatal effect of increasing the political inequality between men and women, thus placing women, though not apparently, yet relatively and actually upon a lower level.

Again, the status of woman has been crus.h.i.+ngly affected by the contemporaneous and parallel change which has pa.s.sed over her special occupations; so that the conditions under which she works today are decidedly less than ever before by purely personal relations.h.i.+ps and more by such impersonal factors as the trade supply of labor, and interstate and international compet.i.tion. This change has affected woman in an immeasurably greater degree than man. The conditions of industrial life are in our day in some degree controllable by political power so that at this point woman again finds herself civilly and industrially at greater disadvantage than when her status in all these respects depended princ.i.p.ally upon her individual capacity to handle efficiently problems arising within an area limited by purely personal relations.h.i.+ps. To alter so radically the conditions of daily life and industry, and not merely to leave its control in the hands of the old body of voters, but to give over into the hands of an enlarged and fresh body of voters, and these voters inevitably the men of her own cla.s.s who are her industrial compet.i.tors, that degree of control represented by the vote and to refuse it to women is to place women (though not apparently, yet actually and relatively) upon a distinctly lowered level.

So that what suffragists are asking for is in reality not so much a novel power, as it is liberty to possess and use the same new instrument of social control as has been already accorded to men.

Without that instrument it is no mere case of her standing still. She is in very truth retrogressing, as far as effective control over the conditions under which she lives her life, whether inside the home or outside of it. In this instinctive desire not to lose ground, to keep up both with altered social claims of society upon women and with the improved political equipment of their brothers, is to be found the economic crux of women's demand for the vote in every country and in every succeeding decade.

In the course of human development, the gradual process of the readjustment of human beings to changed social and economic conditions is marked at intervals by crises wherein the struggle always going on beneath the surface between the new forces and existing conditions wells up to the surface and takes on the nature of a duel between contending champions. If this is true of one cla.s.s or of one people, how much more is it true when the change is one that affects an entire s.e.x.

There have been occasions in history and there occur still today instances when economic conditions being such that their labor was urgently needed and therefore desired, it was easy for newcomers to enter a fresh field of industry, and give to a whole cla.s.s or even to a whole s.e.x in one locality an additional occupation. Such very evidently was the case with the first girls who went into the New England cotton mills. Men's occupations at that time in America lay for the most part out of doors, and there was therefore no sense of rivalry experienced, when the girls who used to spin at home began to spin on a large scale and in great numbers in a factory.

It is far different where women have been forced by the economic forces driving them from behind to make their slow and painful way into a trade already in the possession of men. Of course the wise thing for the men to do in such a case is to bow to the logic of events, and through their own advantageous position as first in the field and through whatever organizations they may possess use all their power to place their new women rivals on an equal footing with themselves and so make it impossible for the women to become a weakening and disintegrating force in the trade. The women being thus more or less protected by the men from the exploitation of their own weakness it is then for them to accept the position, as far as they are able, stand loyally by the men, meet factory conditions as they find them, being the latest comers, and proceed afterwards to bring about such modifications and improvements as may seem to them desirable.

Unfortunately this in a general way may stand for a description of everything that has not taken place. The bitter and often true complaints made by workmen that women have stolen their trade, that having learnt it, well or ill, they are scabs all the time in their acceptance of lower wages and worse conditions, relatively much worse conditions, and that they are often strike-breakers when difficulties arise, form a sad commentary upon the men's own short-sighted conduct.

To women, driven by need to earn their living in unaccustomed ways, men have all too often opened no front gate through which they could make an honest daylight entrance into a trade, but have left only side-alleys and back-doors through which the guiltless intruders could slip in. Organized labor today, however, is on record as standing for the broader policy, however apathetic the individual unions and the individual trade unionists may often be.

A dramatic presentation of one of these very complicated situations is found in the experience of Miss Susan B. Anthony in the printers'

strike in New York in 1869. By some this incident has been interpreted to show a wide difference of outlook between those women who were chiefly intent on opening up fresh occupational possibilities for women, and those who, coming daily face to face with the general industrial difficulties of women already in the trades, recognized the urgent need of trade organization for women if the whole standard of the trades wherein they were already employed was not to be permanently lowered.

While there is no such general inference to be drawn, the occurrence does place in a very strong light the extreme complexity of the question and the need that then existed, the need that still exists for closer cooperation between workers approaching the problem of the independence of the wage-earning woman from different sides.

The files of the _Revolution_, which Miss Anthony, in conjunction with Mrs. Stanton and Mr. Parker Pillsbury, published from 1868 to 1870, are full of the industrial question. Though primarily the paper stood for the suffrage movement, the editors were on the best of terms with labor organizations and they were constantly urging working-women to organize and cooperate with men trade unionists, and in especial to maintain constantly their claim to equal pay for equal work.

But just about the time of our story, in the beginning of 1869, Miss Anthony seems to have been especially impressed with the need of trade-schools for girls, that they might indeed be qualified to deserve equal pay, to earn it honestly if they were to ask for it; for we find her saying:

”The one great need of the hour is to qualify women workers to _really earn_ equal wages with men. We must have _training-schools for women_ in all the industrial avocations. Who will help the women will help ways and means to establish them.”

Just then a printers' strike occurred and Miss Anthony thought she saw in the need of labor on the part of the employers an opportunity to get the employers to start training-schools to teach the printing trade to girls, in her enthusiasm for this end entirely oblivious of the fact that it was an unfortunate time to choose for making such a beginning. She attended an employers' meeting held at the Astor House and laid her proposal before them.

The printers felt that they were being betrayed, and by one, too, whom they had always considered their friend. On behalf of organized labor Mr. John J. Vincent, secretary of the National Labor Union, made public protest.

Miss Anthony's reply to Mr. Vincent, under date February 3, 1869, published in the New York _Sun_, and reprinted in the _Revolution_, is very touching, showing clearly enough that in her eagerness to supply the needed thorough trade-training for young girls, she had for the moment forgotten what was likely to be the outcome for the girls themselves of training, however good, obtained in such a fas.h.i.+on.

She had also forgotten how essential it was that she should work in harmony with the men's organizations as long as they were willing to work with her. Though not saying so in so many words, the letter is a shocked avowal that, acting impulsively, she had not comprehended the drift of her action, and it amounts to a withdrawal from her first position. She writes:

Sir: You fail to see my motive in appealing to the Astor House meeting of employers, for aid to establish a training school for girls. It was to open the way for a thorough drill to the hundreds of poor girls, to fit them to earn equal wages with men everywhere and not to undermine ”Typographical No. 6.” I did not mean to convey the impression that ”women, already good compositors should work for a cent less per thousand ems than men,” and I rejoice most heartily that Typographical Union No. 6 stands so n.o.bly by the Women's Typographical Union No. 1 and demands the admission of women to all offices under its control, and I rejoice also that the Women's Union No. 1 stands so n.o.bly and generously by Typographical Union No. 6 in refusing most advantageous offers to defeat its demands.

My advice to all the women compositors of the city, is now, as it has ever been since last autumn, to join the women's union, for in union alone there is strength, in union alone there is protection.

Every one should scorn to allow herself to be made a tool to undermine the just prices of men workers; and to avoid this union is necessary. Hence I say, girls, stand by each other, and by the men, when they stand by you.

With this the incident seems to have closed, for nothing more is heard of the employers' training-school.[A]

[Footnote A: This ill.u.s.trates well the cruel alternative perpetually placed before the working-woman and the working-woman's friends. She is afforded little opportunity to learn a trade thoroughly, and yet, if she does not stand by her fellow men workers, she is false to working cla.s.s loyalty.