Part 5 (1/2)

Under equal suffrage Idaho has pa.s.sed such a law, and all property gained after marriage belongs equally to husband and wife. If the wife dies, her heirs, in absence of a will, inherit half of the family property. If the two separate, the court, in absence of an outside agreement, settles the property as it does the children. The judge may order that it be divided equally, or he may give it all to either party, according to conditions; but the woman has identical rights with the man. Surely some such solution is demanded by our present unrest. No one will ever be economically independent; but husband and wife should be economically equal.

VI

Women in Industry

In all the animal world one can hardly find a place where orderly effort, planned to secure some future advantage, does not appear.

Getting food, defending life, and caring for offspring have all combined to drive not only the descendants of Adam, but his ancestors as well, to sweat-producing effort. Of course this is not definitely planned; getting food often waits on appet.i.te; defense is sometimes merely running away; and the young are frequently left to feed themselves or die. But the fact remains that in digging burrows, building nests, laying up honey and nuts, and in protecting and providing for the young, a vast deal of effort is put forth in forest and field which is not immediately productive of pleasure.

This work is seldom equally shared by all the members of the group. With bees, the drones and the queen are alike exempt from work, and an as.e.xual group has been developed to feed and protect them. Some ants compel others to do their work; and everywhere there seem to be individuals who are const.i.tutionally lazy and others who, because of strength or s.e.x attractiveness, are able to get more than their share of food and protection with less than their share of effort.

From the first, some division of work between male and female grows almost inevitably out of their different relations to reproduction.

Following conception, the male can always run away and leave the female to feed and fight for herself and her offspring, and he is very p.r.o.ne to do so. Even when he stays by and shares in the joy of the newly born he generally leaves the female to get ready the nest, and largely she protects and provisions it.

Among domesticated animals, where their working possibilities have been very highly developed, females are much more desirable workers than males. The maternal function partly explains this, as in the case of cows and hens which give us milk and eggs; and even with mares and sheep the offspring adds to the general working value. Still, it seems to be true that even for purposes of draught, the males are of less value than the females, unless reduced to the non-s.e.xual condition of geldings and oxen. The stallion, bull or ram is too katabolic, too much of a consuming, distributing, destroying force to be very valuable in the daily routine of agriculture or commerce. While the female is generally smaller and less powerful than the male, she is quiet, easily enslaved; and, as we have said, her maternal functions can be diverted to our daily use. She produces more workers, and her flesh is more palatable, because less distinctive, than that of the male. Hence, among domesticated animals, selection, based on considerations of work, multiplies females and keeps males only for breeding purposes.

As a quadruped, the female suffers very little handicap from the functions peculiar to her s.e.x, except when actually carrying her young or nursing them. When she stands erect, however, the support for the special organs of reproduction is far from ideal; heavy lifting, or long-continued standing, often leads to disaster, and the periodic functions, even in the healthiest conditions, must always place women at a working disadvantage as compared with men. Add to this the fact that women are smaller, less agile, and far less strong, than men, and, even when not enc.u.mbered with young, it is clear that a woman, when confronting physical work in compet.i.tion with men, needs something more than a fair field and free compet.i.tion.[33] Idealists and travelers among primitive people love to tell us how easily women meet their special functions, carrying burdens equal to those carried by men when on the march, and dropping out from the caravan for only a few hours to give birth to a child; but the fact remains that women in all primitive societies age quickly and that those who are spoiled are thrown aside and forgotten.[34] Woman's handicap as a working animal in compet.i.tion with man is too obvious and too deep-seated to be idealized away.

[33] The Supreme Court of the United States, in pa.s.sing on the ”Oregon laundry case,” in 1907, declared a bill limiting a woman's working hours const.i.tutional. See the _Brief for the State of Oregon_, prepared by LOUIS D. BRANDEIS, published by The National Consumers' League, 105 East 22d Street, New York.

[34] DUDLEY, _Principles and Practices of Gynecology_, pp. 23-24, says that among Indian women want of care during and after labor leads to numberless evils.

In all savage societies labor is clearly specialized between the s.e.xes.

The man, because of his superior strength and mobility, fights, hunts and makes weapons of the chase. The woman fetches and carries, digs and delves, cures the meat, makes the rude huts, clothing and pottery.

Gradually she changes wild gra.s.ses to domesticated plants, and rears the young animals brought home from the chase, till they follow and serve their human masters. She is truly the mother of industries, and it in no way detracts from her credit that her motherhood is here, as elsewhere, mainly unthinking.

With the exhaustion of the supply of wild animals, man is forced to turn his attention to the world of vegetation and he takes over the direction of the plants and animals which woman has largely domesticated. In his career as fighter and hunter he has learned to cooperate with his fellows to a degree which aids him greatly in dividing the arable land, protecting his crops, and using grazing lands in common with the tribe.

He has also learned to make stone hatchets, spears and bows and arrows.

Woman has not felt the same necessity to invent in her work; such new tools as she has devised have been helpful, but men who could not invent have been wiped out by those who learned to make stronger spears or better arrow-heads.

It is the same difference in adaptability which one observes to-day between the farmers on the western frontier of America and those who remain in their peasant homes in Europe. The peasant has even greater need of inventing than has his expatriated countryman in Colorado, but he lacks the driving impulse. It was the same with women and men under the conditions of savage life. Thus it came about that man's greater strength and mobility, backed by power of cooperation and invention, gave him the leaders.h.i.+p in such primitive life as we find depicted in the pages of Homer or in the epic of the Jews. True, woman was his first lieutenant, but he spoke for her in most of the larger matters of the industrial life.

With settled conditions and acc.u.mulation of wealth, the most desirable women were almost entirely freed from physical labor and gradually became luxury-loving parasites and playthings, as we pointed out in the second chapter of this volume. Meantime slaves were multiplying, male and female and, while the most desirable women pa.s.sed to the harem, the ma.s.s of them became drudges in house and field. It is hard for us to realize that it is exactly in those times when a few women are surrounded with great luxury that most of the s.e.x are reduced to heavy labor and wretchedness.

During the early Christian ages, a tradition was gradually formed concerning woman's place in industry, or rather three traditions were formed. The working woman of the lower cla.s.ses was to be the housekeeper, which meant that she was to care for food, cook, spin, weave, sew and mend, scrub and wash, bear children and nurse and tend them. If she were of the middle cla.s.s, she was to be a mother, to supervise this range of work, look after dependents, conserve social conditions and be the lady bountiful of her district. The second ideal was the woman of religion, who was to subdue her pa.s.sions, observe set prayers and other religious exercises, and do the menial work of the convent. The third ideal was the lady of chivalry, who appeared after the tenth century. She was to be cared for and protected from work or anxiety; menials were to prepare her food, clothes and ornaments; gallants were to await her orders and do her bidding.

With the rise of Protestantism, and later with the rise of modern democracy, these ideals were blended, and women found themselves, not indeed slaves and subject to sale, but serfs, entangled in a ma.s.s of feudal obligations and bound to the house. Practically, most men still hold this threefold conception of woman's place in the social organism.

She is to be a combination of housekeeper, nun and lady. It is the kitchen, church and children ideal of the German Emperor.

Meantime forces were set at work which were to change the economic foundations of the family and enable the woman to emerge from serfdom into some new form of industrial relations.h.i.+p. From the rise of the European cities in the twelfth century, certain industries have tended, especially in the Netherlands and in England, to segregate themselves in farm-houses and towns. Women naturally partic.i.p.ated in these activities, generally taking the least desirable parts. With the freeing of the mind, which followed the democratic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, inventions blossomed out and perfected steam engines, cotton gins, spinning jennies, and a thousand other machines driven by steam or water power, which have changed the civilization of Europe and America. Miss Edith Abbott has shown us how this change, involving increasing segregation and specialization, came into America even in the pre-Revolutionary time.[35]

[35] EDITH ABBOTT, _Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic History_, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1910.

Spinning and weaving industries led the way in this movement, but its full force was not felt until the late eighteenth century. Since then, one industry after another has left the home for the factory until to-day, in all large communities, even the preparation of food increasingly goes to the packing-house, the canning establishment, the bakery and the delicatessen-store. These industries needed hands, and so the women followed them to the factories.

As 1870 marks the beginning of higher education for women, so it also marks the beginning of her industrial self-consciousness. The perfecting of such inventions as the typewriter, the telegraph and the telephone, and the creation of a great variety of office appliances, together with the perfecting of highly elaborate means of distribution, like the departmental store, called for thousands of cheap workers possessed of some slight intelligence but not necessarily having any serious preliminary training. Our elementary schools and high schools have increasingly turned out a mult.i.tude of girls who could meet these requirements. The increased cost of living, the lessened labor demands of the home, and the attractions of the pay envelope, have called millions to work in industrial plants. In 1890, there were 4,005,532 wage-earning women in the United States; in 1900, 5,319,397; while in 1910, we have probably nearly 8,000,000.

Like most other great changes in civilization, this industrial transformation was neither preceded nor accompanied by any general consciousness of what was happening. Daily necessities were offset by weekly pay envelopes, or the failures fell out of sight, and so the next week and the years followed. Country populations moved away; cities grew enormously, leading to congestion in living which, combined with the daily absence of women, has often transformed the old time homes into communal tiers of tenements occupied, during working hours, only by the young and the infirm.