The economic position of women

by Academy of Political Science in the City of New York

The education of the girl who is to enter industry generally fails as yet, however well intended, to fit her effectively for her working career. Most working girls, indeed, leave school at fourteen, when they are in any case too young to be efficient. Then come the proverbial wasted years of casual and demoralizing employment, till at eighteen or so the young workers find their footing and for five years, it may be, rank as working women. Then to most of them comes marriage. They entered industry untrained, now they enter married life untrained, if not unfitted, for such life, and at a less adaptable age than earlier. To a considerable extent the economic virtues of the factory are virtues that the girl cannot carry over into her housework, and its weaknesses are weaknesses that lessen her success as wife and mother. Industry tends to unfit her for home making if it tends to make her a creature of mechanical routine, unused to self-direction, unplastic, bored by privacy and not bored by machine monotony; if it accustoms her to an inapplicable scale and range of expenditure which assigns too much money to clothes (which are necessary to the status and earning power of the worker as they are not to mothers and children) and too little to adequate nourishment which, important to the adult, is fundamental to the health of children. Worst of all, the employments of working women tend, as has now been shown, more commonly and more seriously than has been at all generally understood, to unfit women, nervously and physically, for bearing children.

When we try to disentangle the confusions illustrated in these varying types of lives we see that one of the main causes of trouble is the fact that modern industry is largely incompatible, while work lasts, with the functions of wife and mother or that at least it militates against them. We have seen some of the ways in which this simple fact of the incompatibility of two fundamental functions distracts and deforms women’s lives.

A result of this divorce of industrial and married life is the fact that it is impossible to predict whether a given girl will spend her life in the home or in the working world, commercial, industrial or professional, and that consequently she commonly fails to prepare for either. We have indeed some professional training, some business training, and are just beginning to have some trade training; training for the home vocations has hardly got commonly beyond some cooking and sewing in the grades—most desirable as far as it goes. In Utopia, I dare say that every girl when she becomes engaged to be married, receives, besides her general education and her trade training, six months of gratuitous and compulsory vocational preparation for homemaking, and that this training for the bride, and a course in the ethics and hygiene of marriage for both bride and groom, is there required before a marriage license can be issued; moreover, I imagine that there every woman expecting her first child is given a scholarship providing instruction and medical advice for some months before and after the child is born, the conditions depending upon individual circumstances. In the real world some of our grossest evils are related to the lack of preparation for the most vital relations of life. Uncertainty as to her vocation not only prevents a girl’s being trained for either household or industrial life, but it makes her a most destructive element in competitive wage earning. She does not care to make herself efficient in industry, for she hopes soon to marry, and meanwhile the semi-self-supporting woman drags down the pay of women wholly dependent on their own earnings and also that of men, perhaps including that of the man who might marry her but cannot afford it, thus increasing the chances against her in the lottery of marriage.

While this conflict between the call to industry and the call to marriage confuses women’s lives but not men’s, the divorce of education from practise is much the same for men and for women both in its grounds and in its results. And first as to the causes.

Industry being organized by the employer for his own purposes, the worker is regarded simply as a means to the commercial end of maximum cheapness of production. This cheapness is attained, or at any rate has been commonly supposed to be attained, by the maximum of specialization and the maximum of routine and uniformity. The specialization of functions has appeared to the employer to make any education of the worker unnecessary and to make it possible to eliminate from the workshop the costly and troublesome business of teaching the trade, a policy that has had consequences to industry and citizenship that we are just beginning to realize. Up to this time the school has not averted these consequences by creating an effective substitute for apprenticeship. In the old days it could properly devote itself to academic branches, and even today, largely as a matter of habit inherited from those days, schooling continues as a general thing to have no bearing on the productive labor that the pupils engage in later, but is wholly general, with the marked defects as well as the merits of education of this type.

Not only has industrial training thus fallen between two stools, having been dropped from the workroom and not undertaken by the school, but the whole program of general education is controlled by the industrial situation. The routine and uniformity of modern production mean that the worker must work at the standard pace for the standard number of hours or drop out. This is less true of piece work, at least in theory; in practise the worker’s need of money is likely to force the pace and stretch the hours to the limit of possibility. As regards occupation it is all or nothing; the employer will not accept workers who cannot give themselves entire. This is, I think, the element of truth in the emphasis of socialists on their thesis that the worker sells not his labor, but his labor power. So children once surrendered to competitive industry are surrendered altogether and for good—they are absorbed and exhausted.

Because work is so organized that it is not fit for young people immature in body and mind and that they are not fit for it, we keep them out of all real work until we are ready to have them do nothing but work. And conversely, until they go to work once for all they are occupied with schooling and schooling only. Consequently life is broken into great indigestible lumps—first all study, then all work,—into unrelated phases which fail mutually to strengthen each other. Work and study ought to go on together, work beginning in the kindergarten years and education continuing to the end of life or at least so long as the mind remains receptive.

When boys and girls are needed to help at home while they are getting their schooling the situation is more natural, and if the child is not under too much pressure, better. But the child of the tenement or the fashionable apartment house cannot get this training in helpful labor parallel with his schooling as does the boy on the farm. So all work is postponed till school days are over and all schooling stops when work begins. One result is that some of us are busy teaching subjects fit only for mature minds to immature boys and girls on the assumption that they will never have another chance at education. I was once in a French boarding-school where the pupils learned by heart critical estimates of classical authors whom they had not read. On my questioning the practise I was told that though these sentences were not intelligible now they would recur to the pupils’ minds when in later life they read the authors in question.

We need to study the psychology of intellectual hunger and the history of the ripening of the human mind. Surely there should be opportunities for the mature to study history, economics, politics, natural science, religion, literature and philosophy,—opportunities, I mean, for intervals of continuous, intensive study by those inclined to it, not solely opportunities for weary, sleepy men and women in fag ends of time to hear lectures or to prepare for examinations.

In work planned as employers have planned it not only is education eliminated from employment and employment deferred to the close of the generally meager period of education, but the advantage of the individual is disregarded in the arrangement of the work, to the great disadvantage of the worker and the community at large, if not, in the first instance, of the employer.