The Trade Union Woman

by Alice Henry

I do not wish to be understood as accepting either the girl's present economic position or the absorption in purely domestic occupations of the workingman's wife as a finality. It is a transitional stage that we are considering. I look forward to a time, I believe it to be rapidly approaching, when the home of the workingman, like everyone's else home, will be truly the home, the happy resting-place, the sheltering nest of father, mother and children, and when through the rearrangement of labor, the workingman's wife will be relieved from her monotonous existence of unrelieved domestic drudgery and overwork, disguised under the name of wifely and maternal duties, when the cooking and the washing, for instance, will be no more part of the home life in the humblest home than in the wealthiest. The workingman's wife will then share in the general freedom to occupy part of her time in whatever occupation she is best fitted for, and, along with every other member of the community she will share in the benefits arising from the better organisation of domestic work.

However, this blessed change has not yet come to pass, and of all city-dwellers, the wife of the workingman seems to be furthest away from the benefits of the transformation. Therefore, in considering the connection between the girl's factory life and her probable occupational future in married life, I have purposely avoided dwelling upon what is bound to arrive some time in the future, and have tried to face facts as they exist today, dealing as far as possible with the difficulties of the generation of girls now in the factories, those about to enter, and those passing out, remembering only, with a patience-breeding sense of relief, that the conditions of today may not necessarily be the conditions of tomorrow.

I therefore accept in its full meaning domesticity, as practiced by the most domestic woman, and as preached by the domestic woman's most ardent advocate among men. Nor am I expressing resentment at the fact that when a girl leaves the machine-speeded work of the factory, it is only to take up the heavy burden of the workingman's wife, as we know it. She must be wife and mother, and manager of the family income, and cook and laundress and housemaid and seamstress. The improvement of her position and the amelioration of her lot can only come slowly, through social changes, as expressed in the woman movement, and through the widening scope of the principle of specialization.

Even today, without any such radical changes as are foreshadowed above, the gap between schooldays and working years, between working years and married life, can to some extent be bridged over if we plan to do so from the beginning. As has been shown, organized women are already advocating some such orderly plan for the girl's school training, as should blend book-learning with manual instruction and simple domestic accomplishments. But also, in order to deal justly and fairly by the girl, any reasonable scheme of things would also presuppose such strict control of the conditions of industry, that hours would be reasonably short, that in the building and running of machinery there should be borne in mind always the safety and health of the workers, instead of, as today, expecting almost all the adaptation to be on the part of the worker, through pitting the flexible, delicate, and easily injured human organism against the inflexible and tireless machine. Other essential conditions would be the raising of the standard of living, and therefore of remuneration, for all, down to the weakest and least skilled, and the insistence upon equal pay for equal work, tending to lessen the antagonism between men and women on the industrial field. Thus doubly prepared and adequately protected the girl would pass from her wage-earning girlhood into home and married life a fresher, less exhausted creature than she usually is now. Further, she would be more likely to bring to the bearing and rearing of her children a constitution unenfeebled by premature overwork and energies unsapped by its monotonous grind. Again, her understanding of industrial problems would make her a more intelligent as well as a more sympathetic helpmate. Hand in hand, husband and wife would more hopefully tackle fresh industrial difficulties as these arose, and they would do so with some slight sense of the familiarity that is the best armor in life's battle.

Besides there is the other possibility, all too often realized, that lies in the background of every such married woman's consciousness. She may be an ideally domestic woman, spending her time and strength on her home and for the Welfare of her husband and children, yet through no fault of hers, her home may be lost to her, or if not lost, at least kept together only by her own unremitting efforts as a wage-earner. It often happens that marriage in course of time proves to be anything but an assurance of support. Early widowed, the young mother herself may have to earn her children's bread. Or the husband may become crippled, or an invalid, or he may turn out a drunkard and a spendthrift. In any of these circumstances, the responsibility and the burden of supporting the entire family usually falls upon the wife. Is it strange that the group so often drift into undeserved pauperism, sickness and misery, perhaps later on, even into those depths of social maladjustment that bring about crime?

The poorly paid employment of office-cleaning is sadly popular among widows and deserted wives, because, being followed during the evening, and sometimes night hours, it leaves a mother free during the day to attend to her cooking and housework and sewing, and be on the spot to give the children their meals. Free! The irony of it! Free, that is, to work sixteen hours or longer per day, and free to leave her little ones in a locked-up room, while she earns enough to pay the rent and buy the food. Ask any such widowed mother what she is thinking of, as she plies mop and scrubbing-brush after the offices are closed and the office force gone home, and she will tell you how she worries for fear something may have happened to the baby while she is away. She wonders whether she left the matches out of the reach of four-year-old Sammy; and Bessie, who isn't very strong, is always so frightened when the man on the floor above comes home late and quarrels with his wife.

The theory on which the poor woman was paid her wages when as a single girl she used to draw her weekly pay-envelope, that a fair living wage for a woman is what is barely sufficient to support herself, rather falls down when a whole household has to be kept out of a girl's miserable pay.

All these difficulties would be eased for such overburdened ones, if their early training had been such as to leave them equipped to meet the vicissitudes of fortune on fairer terms, and if the conditions of industrial life, allotting equal pay to workers of both sexes, had also included reasonable opportunities for advancement to higher grades of work with proportionately increased pay.

Meanwhile, married women, less handicapped than these, are experimenting on their own account, and are helping to place the work of wives as wage-earners on a more settled basis. The wife of the workingman who has no children, and who lives in a city finds she has not enough to do in the little flat which is their home. The stove in winter needs little attention; there is not enough cooking and cleaning to fill up her time, and as for sewing she can buy most of their clothing cheaper than she can make it. But any little money she can earn will come in useful; so she tries for some kind of work, part-time work, if she can find it. In every big city there are hundreds of young married women who take half-time jobs in our department stores or who help to staff the lunch-rooms or wash up or carry trays, or act as cashiers in our innumerable restaurants. As half-day girls such waitresses earn their three or four dollars a week, besides getting their lunch. Very frequently they do not admit to their fellow-workers that they are married, for the single girl with her own hard struggle on her hands is apt to resent such competition. A worker who is in a position to accept voluntarily a half-time job of this sort is one who must have some other means of meeting part of her living expenses. A home in the background is such an aid. The increasingly large number of part-time workers, lessen, the others reckon, the number of jobs to be had by the ones that have to work all day, and may tend also to lower wages, since any partly subsidized worker can afford to take less than the girl who has to support herself out of her earnings. The latter has never heard of parasitic trades, and yet in her heart she knows there is something not quite right here, something that she blindly feels she would like to put an end to.

She is quite right in resisting any lowering of wages, but she will have to accept this inroad into the trades of these exceptionally placed married women. She will have to throw her efforts into another channel, using organization to raise the position of working-women generally into dignified industrial independence. For this still limited number of half-time married women workers are but the leaf on the stream, showing the direction events are taking. As specialization goes on, as the domestic industries are more and more taken out of our homes, as the gifted and trained teacher more and more shares in the life of the child, more and more will the woman after she marries continue to belong to the wage-earning class by being a part-time worker. To propose eliminating the present (sometimes unfair) competition of the married woman with the single girl, by excluding her from any or every trade is as futile as the resentment of men against all feminine rivals in industry.