One of the effects of this is the waste or misuse of all laborers, like the married woman or child, who cannot give standard work under standard conditions. In the work of the school or the household, which is planned with reference to the worker, there is room for the delicate, the dull, the special student, the child and the elderly person. No one is unemployable, no portion of strength or capacity is unusable. In the factory of the Amana community, which is conducted, as one might say, on family principles, I was struck by the large number of really old men at the looms. Those who can no longer endure the hot work in the hay fields find occupation here, and those who can advantageously work irregularly for a few hours a day, but not more, are given the employment that they are fit for and that is good for them. This capacity to use all available labor power is one reason, perhaps, why the Amana communists wax richer year by year and hire outside workers to do much of their hardest work; perhaps, too, it makes for a happier and longer, because more occupied, old age.
But in competitive employment workers who are below the standard, if not excluded and therefore wasted, are likely to be forced to conform to unsuitable hours and working arrangements. Moreover they are likely to drag down wages and to render more difficult the attempts of the normal workers to improve conditions. The standard minimum wage, with provision of “sub-minimum” wage scales for the handicapped, seems the only device to prevent their destructive effect on wage standards. As regards children, society adopts the policy of complete withdrawal from industry, not because it is good for a child to spend all his time in schooling, but because, as has been said, industry will not adapt its routine to juvenile requirements, and precludes almost all chance for education after work is once entered upon.
As regards married women in industry, the situation is much the same as the situation with regard to children. They should stay out wholly because it is disastrous to the family for them to go in wholly and unreservedly, because their subsidized competition is likely to be injurious, and finally because the conditions of work are apt to be ruinous to their health. And yet for women after marriage to abstain from all employment outside the household is often wasteful and altogether undesirable. If married women could work some hours a day, or some days a week, or some months a year, or some years and not others, as circumstances indicated (as they conceivably might do under a more elastic and adaptable organization of employment), and if they could do so without damage to wage standards or workshop discipline, it would seem advantageous, in more ways than one, for them not to drop out of industry at marriage. Both marriage and employment might become sufficiently universal to make it usual to train every girl for both, at least in a general way. If marriage did not appear to girls (quite fallaciously in most cases) as a way of getting supported without working, their interest in increasing their earning power would be greater; if wives were normally and properly contributors in some degree to the money income of the family, marriage would be more general and, above all, earlier, especially if the giving of allowances to mothers, of which Mr. Wells dreams, ever came into practice.
All this troubling of the waters of life is so familiar that it is perhaps not possible for us fully to appreciate or understand it. The conditions can doubtless be much ameliorated, but no reforms can make right a system that sins in its foundations. As has been said, the system sins because it puts production before people, with the results, so far as women are concerned, that we have seen. Two of the fundamental parts of their activity are made almost incompatible, so that we have unmarried workers and unworking wives, and workers and wives alike untrained because of the paralyzing uncertainty of the future. Moreover, men and women alike suffer from the separation of education and work, which makes work dull and education unreal and gives to the boy and girl more lessons than they can digest and to the man and woman too few; they both suffer also, if not equally, from the industrial system which shapes all the conditions of industrial life to ends extraneous to the welfare of the workpeople.
That our lives are made thus to fit the convenience of industry, not industry to fit the convenience of human lives, is historically explicable and even justifiable. So long as there is difficulty in getting the bare necessities of living every other consideration must give way. The overriding object must be the amount of product, not comfort or development by the way. Health and happiness are then a necessary sacrifice to mammon. They are luxuries which the poverty-stricken do not afford themselves. Moreover, to do things pleasantly, or even to do them in the way that is most economical and effective in the long run requires not only capital but a social direction of capital that can be the fruit only of a long and painful evolution. Because our industry is conducted piecemeal by dividend hunters it is carried on, if we regard it as a whole, in a near-sighted and extravagant way. Above all, it wastes talent and physical stamina, beside devastating the private happiness of employes, and nowhere is it more uneconomical than in its use of women’s strength and capacity and, above all, in its wastage of her health.
We are just on the eve of being socially conscious enough to perceive these things and prosperous enough to afford a different policy. Is it insane to hope that in the fulness of time industry will be so arranged as to advance human life by its process as well as by its produce; to hope that we shall have, as one might say, a maternal government acting on the principles of the mother of a great and busy household who makes education and work coöperate throughout, who cares for her family and economizes and develops their powers and makes their complete welfare her controlling object? My contention is that while we cannot make women efficient in any complete sense under conditions which so militate against their efficiency, we can make them less and less inefficient as we shape education to that end, and as we get increasing control of industrial conditions in the interests of human life in its wholeness.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] A paper presented at the meeting of the Academy of Political Science, December 3, 1909.
STANDARDS OF LIVING AND THE SELF-DEPENDENT WOMAN
SUSAN M. KINGSBURY