Already our communities are seeing that girls like boys must be trained for the industry which they are bound to enter. There is a pestilential group among us composed of those people who are insistent that the working classes should be taught “useful” things. All of us who live in settlements know this kind of person only too well. “Do you teach cooking? Do you teach sewing?” they ask. In these things perhaps they will take an interest, but a class for dancing or preparation for a play or an evening’s sing, such persons will regard as frills and not “useful” work. As if there were anything more useful than helping to create a social atmosphere congenial enough to hold a girl’s interest! For it is from such a sympathetic background that enthusiasms spring.
Pleasures are necessary and the community must take the place of the old home by protecting the young in their pleasures and by offering them such pleasures as shall enrich rather than debase the emotional and spiritual life. Dance halls properly controlled, clean cheap theaters, amusement resorts freed from the harpies that too frequently gather there—all these are necessary in a program of social adjustment. A living wage is also essential. But beyond these the girl at work, like all women of every class, must develop a deep self-respect, a regard for herself as an industrial worker, a conviction that she is responsible for the conditions under which she works, a desire to control these conditions through such social or political means as are adequate for that end. She must not take the apologetic position, “I have to go to work,” but rather the proud point of view, “As a worker I am a responsible person with a social purpose.”
The woman movement has sometimes been interpreted by rich women as giving them the privilege of doing what they like and by the respectable middle class as furnishing a means of dignifying leisure. Among working women, however, it has made little headway. I say this realizing that there are thousands of whom this is not true. But the working woman in New York, as I have said, still retains the tradition of home life as her most cherished sentiment, expecting to return from industry to a home of her own. And the very beauty and power of this old ideal obscures the fact that the home of the future must be strong enough to stand all the strain to which in the nature of the case it will be subjected. To stand its ground it needs not the negative submission of dependents, but the co-operation of strong independent individuals. The new working woman’s movement when under way will have within it certain sounder elements than the movement among middle-class and wealthy women. For in industry one learns promptness, order and adaptation to ends—in other words, efficiency. Bringing back this business sense into the home and enlarging it by those spiritual enthusiasms which give a sense of roominess and freedom, no matter what one’s daily task may be, the working woman, when once this new social adjustment has been made, will be a new kind of new woman in whose consciousness the destinies of home, industry and society will be seen as fused into one. Her duties toward society and toward the home will be seen to be indissolubly connected. And when her children are born she will see to it that the old negative protection of the home shall be supplemented by the positive elements of protection, the chief of which is the flame of a positive enthusiasm. But this desirable end, this real social adjustment, will not take place unless society is prepared to adopt a practical program embodying these three elements—proper opportunities for pleasure, a living wage and the cultivation of independence, self-respect and idealism.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] A paper presented at the meeting of the Academy of Political Science, December 4, 1909.
MARRIED WOMEN IN INDUSTRY
FLORENCE KELLEY
General Secretary, National Consumers’ League
Throughout all history married women have carried on productive industry, feeding and clothing the race. And in that coöperative commonwealth which some of us hope to see, they will undoubtedly again participate largely and beneficently in the industrial work of the community.
It is perfectly easy to conceive of a prosperous village in New England or the state of Washington, with coöperative intensive culture of gardens and orchards, with coöperative dairy, laundry, bakery, store and workshops. In such a village the high school might well have as its adjunct a nursery where the oldest girls could learn the art of caring for babies and little children, as the normal school of today has its kindergarten and primary classes for the benefit alike of the children and the teachers in training. The citizens of such a village would obviously be highly enlightened folk, and might be expected to limit their working day to four, five, or six hours. Given these easily conceivable conditions, the industrial work of mothers of children as young as one year might perhaps be an asset for every one concerned.