We may, however, freely concede that some interference may be necessary where, through the helplessness of the employed and the unscrupulousness of the employer, the health and well-being of future generations is jeopardised. In other words, certain restrictions on the labour of children and child-bearing women may be required by the interests of that society of which they are a part; further than this it seems scarcely wise to go in our demand for anything like legislative interference in respect to this matter of “unfitness.” The true remedy lies in the direction of the better organisation of the trades themselves. The same too may be said of the disastrous effect on the market of that increasing supply of cheap labour which is ever swelling to larger and larger proportions through the influx of our women. Instead of encouraging them to enter into competition with men, and by so doing to drag wages down to lower and yet lower levels, the task before us is to teach them that the interests of labour are one, and that wherever they enter a trade they must in self-protection refuse to sell their labour for less than a rate proportional to that demanded by their men.

Increased and effectual organisation would do away with the causes which provoke that clamour for prohibitive legislation which, as in the case of the pit-brow women, calls forth angry protest from those who see their livelihood endangered, and intensifies that bitter spirit of rivalry of sex which is a fatal obstacle to the better and harmonious ordering of the world of industry. The only safe course for women, the only safe course for the community at large, is to consider their industrial position as an essential part of the general problem, not to be dissociated without risk from the organisation of the men. The cardinal points of the programme of the leaders of labour—the shortening of hours, the abolition of overtime, the regulation of wages, the limitation of the number of apprentices in the overcrowded trades—these are matters of chief importance to all workers, matters in which the interests of all, whether they be men or women, precisely coincide. Even where, at first sight, their interests appear to diverge, it will on further consideration be found that such sacrifice of personal freedom as the woman may be, on certain points, called upon to make, she makes for the sake ultimately of her own hearth and of her own children. Those who prefer to regard the interests of men and women as opposed must accept a view of their mutual relations which, involving as it does antagonism of sex, pits the woman against the man in an unregulated competition for employment, which, if forced to its extreme, will end by lowering the whole level of English life far more surely than the immigration of any number of “destitute aliens.”

The difficulties which meet us therefore in adjusting the relations of the sexes in the great field of labour are not insuperable. Once our women workers see how much depends on their co-operation, on their self-restraint, on their standing firm, they will not fail their men, and the difficulties which beset them and their position in the labour movement of the day, once solved in the full light of that which is best for the family, best for our society and best for our national life, we shall assuredly be far on our way towards the settlement of those less pressing grievances which are put forward by the idle classes. The highest interests of women in every sphere of life are indissolubly bound up with those of men, and any attempt to deal with either separately is fraught with danger to the State and to the nation.

This principle lies at the bottom of all reasoned Trades Unionism, which, in so far as it is concerned with the organisation of women’s work, has for its ultimate object the restoration of as many as possible to their post of honour as queens of the hearth.

EMILIA F. S. DILKE.

76, Sloane Street.
May, 1894.

CONTENTS

PAGE
[CHAPTER I.]
Women’s Work: Literary, Professional, and Artistic[1]
[CHAPTER II.]
Women’s Work: Clerical and Commercial[39]
[CHAPTER III.]
Women and Trade Unions[66]
[CHAPTER IV.]
The Textile Trades[93]
[CHAPTER V.]
Miscellaneous Trades[109]
[CHAPTER VI.]
Influence of Occupation on Health[119]
[CHAPTER VII.]
Infant Mortality[140]
[CHAPTER VIII.]
Legislation[150]