"Use and wont."
Moreover, a curious fact has to be kept in mind. Women workers are so lethargic that they are largely governed by use and wont. No remark is more frequent in the investigators' reports, than one to this effect, "That is men's work. Why? We do not know, but it is men's work, and we do not think about it." In some instances this use and wont is based on experience; in others, as in the backwardness of London employers in putting women to feed lithographic machines, its rational explanation is not obvious.[50] In this respect the women themselves are very "loyal." "Once the employer wanted her," writes an investigator, "to varnish books, and offered her 5s. a book: she has a steady hand and could have done it quite well. It meant following a delicate zig-zag pattern with a paint brush. She refused indignantly, and said, 'I know my place and I'm not going to take men's work from them.'" And, again, a rigid sense of propriety, based on a certain amount of good reason, seems to determine many employers to separate male from female departments without further question.[51]
[50] Except perhaps, as has been suggested, that the premises where lithographic work is done are generally so unsuitable for the employment of women.
[51] A similar division exists in women's work; certain kinds are done by women of an inferior social grade, e.g., machine-feeding, and these are strictly kept at arm's length by women working in different departments in the same factory.
Girls v. Women.
So much is heard of women as rivals of men that we forget that women themselves are often preyed upon by still cheaper rivals, and the real value of technical training for women seems to lie in the fact that such training might protect them against these. Owing to the unskilled nature of their work, however, even technical education can afford to them only an unsatisfactory security against younger and cheaper persons. One of the investigators, for instance, reports:—
"It is the regular custom in A.'s now to have little girls at 3s. and 4s. a week doing work which women at 11s. and 12s. ought to do. They put a little girl beside a regular hand, and as soon as the little one masters the work [show-card mounting is being reported upon], they discharge the big one. When the little one asks for a rise, they give her 6d. or 1s. more, and when she wants still more, she goes." Figures follow showing that just under one-ninth of the women employed in this department at A.'s are "old hands." Then the report proceeds: "A. discharged about forty hands on the plea of slackness a little while ago, and then put up bills for learners." The investigators found that amongst the employées there was a very widespread opinion that "the learners always get all the best work," and that one of the regular features of the trade is, that it employs a large fluctuating number of learners, whilst a smaller number of skilled hands are kept in tolerably regular work.[52]
[52] This, however, is not a problem special to women's work, but is one of general industrial conditions, although it is marked with special distinctness in the case of women.
The old hands occasionally object to teach the young ones, but nothing comes of their opposition to a system by which they are compelled to train their own executioners.