Now cities which are centers of the textile industry are, and for sixty years notoriously have been, the centers also of the labor of women and children, of infant mortality, tuberculosis, immorality and drink. This was the thesis of Friedrich Engels’ volume on The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Even today in Saxon Chemnitz and in New England Fall River, wage-earning mothers away from their homes and children are a characteristic and sorrowful feature of the dominant local industry.
A perverse element in the problem, which would be humorous if it were not tragic, is the encouragement persistently given by philanthropists to the wage-earning labor of married women. Day nurseries, charity kindergartens, charity sewing rooms, doles of home sewing, cash relief contingent upon the recipient’s taking whatever work she may be offered, are all still in vogue in the year 1910.
The monstrous idea has been seriously advocated (without editorial denunciation) in the columns of Charities that a night nursery might enable women to work at night after they have cared for their children by day! A shameful spectacle visible every night in our cities is the army of widowed mothers on their knees scrubbing the floors of railway stations, stores and office buildings. This noxious task is sacred to them because the work is so ill paid and so loathsome that men will not do it. The opportunity to enlist in this pitiable cohort of night toilers is commonly obtained for the widowed mothers by their influential philanthropic friends.
And in all these cases the obvious fact is overlooked that such charitable effort is inevitably self-defeating. Overworked mothers, like other overworked human beings, break down and are added to that burden of the dependent sick which society perpetually creates for itself.
We have preferred to live in a fool’s paradise, ignoring the social implications of our stupendous industrial development. We have, therefore, adopted only one of all the palliatives with which other industrial nations have been experimenting during the past sixty years.
In our textile manufacturing states the men (though a minority of employes in the industry) have succeeded in so bringing to bear their trade organizations and their votes as to obtain legal restrictions upon the working hours of women in industry. For married women the net result of this palliative measure has, however, proved largely illusory. Every shortening of the working day tends to be followed by speeding up of the machinery to keep the output as large as before, or by a cut in wages due to reduced output if no change is made in the speed. Now married women, particularly when mothers of young children, are inevitably the least organized and self-defending part of the adult working class. And they have, in fact, suffered both speeding up and the worst rates of wages in their branches of industry. Thus the numbers of married women enabled to continue in industrial employment without breaking down have not necessarily been greatly increased by our one attempt at legislation in behalf of their health.
Because we have never observed or recorded the facts in relation to the industrial work of married women we have no statutory provision for rest before and after confinement, yet many textile manufacturing communities have their body of knowledge (common and appalling knowledge) of children born in the mill, or of mothers returning to looms or spinning frames when their babies are but three or four days old.
Those industrial nations which scorn the fool’s paradise gather the facts, face the truth, and act upon it. Thus Bavaria, which accepts as inevitable the factory work of mothers of young children, began in 1908 to encourage employers to establish nurseries in the mills and permit mothers to go to them at regular intervals. The government voted 50,000 marks for payment to physicians and nurses who supervise the nurseries. The avowed object of these institutions is to reduce the disease which has ravaged bottle-fed babies left to the care of neighbors and of older brothers and sisters. In Italy, also, for several years employers have been constrained by law to give to mothers regular intervals for nursing their babies.
Fourteen nations of Europe, and the state of Massachusetts, have abolished night work by women in manufacture. This is obviously a boon to working mothers.
For the protection alike of the community and the workers, England, Germany, Austria and New York state have all been vainly striving for twenty years to devise legislation which would minimize the evils attending homework, yet would not abolish it. During this effort the tenement houses licensed for homework in New York City alone have reached the appalling number of twelve thousand.