The Trade Union Woman

by Alice Henry

We have been observing, so far, how the lives of women have been modified, often, not for the better, by the industrial revolution. Let us glance now in passing at the old home industries themselves, and note what is still happening. One after another has been taken, not merely out of the home, where they all originated, but out of the hands of the sex who invented and developed them. Trade after trade has thus been taken over from the control of women, and appropriated and placed on a modern business basis by men. I make no criticism upon this transference beyond remarking that you hear no howl about it from the supplanted ones, as you never fail to do over the converse process, when male workers are driven out of occupations to make way for women, whose cheapness makes them so formidable an industrial competitor. But whichever way it works, sex discrimination usually bodes no good to the lasting interest of any of the workers. When a trade passes out of the status of a home industry, and takes on the dignity of an outside occupation, women are rarely in a position to take hold of it in its new guise. We find men following it, partly because they are more accustomed to think in terms of professional skill, and partly because they are in the business swim, and can more easily gain command of the capital necessary to start any new enterprise. Men then proceed to hire the original owners as employés, and women lose greatly in their economic status.

This is the general rule, though it is by no means wholly the sex line that divides the old-fashioned houseworker from the specialized professional, though this habitual difference in standing between groups of different sex does tend to blur fundamental issues. The economic struggle in its bare elements would be easy to follow compared with the complex and perpetually changing forms in which it is presented to us.

But the home industries are not yet fully accounted for and disposed of. Some of the household occupations, essential once to the comfort and well-being of the family, are shrinking in importance, prior to vanishing before our eyes, because now they do not for the most part represent an economical expenditure of energy. Meanwhile, however, they linger on, a survival in culture, and in millions of homes today the patient housewife is striving with belated tools to keep her family fed and clothed and her house spotless.

Take the cleaning process, for example, and watch what is happening. Dr. Helen Sumner draws attention to the fact that we ourselves are witnessing its rapid transformation. It is being taken out of the hands of the individual houseworker, who is wont to scrub, sweep and dust in the intervals between marketing, cooking, laundry-work or sewing, and by whom it is performed well or ill, but always according to the standards of the individual household, which means that there are no accepted standards in sweeping, scrubbing and dusting. House-cleaning is becoming a specialized, skilled trade, performed by the visiting expert and his staff of professionally trained employés. Even if as yet these skilled and paid workers enter an ordinary home only at long intervals, when the mystic process of spring cleaning seems to justify the expense, the day is plainly in sight when the usual weekly cleaning will be taken over by these same visitors. At present the abruptness of the change is broken for us by the introduction into the market, and the use by the house-mother of various hand-driven machines, a vast improvement upon the old-fashioned broom, and accustoming women to the idea of new and better methods of getting rid of dirt. Few realize the tremendous import of this comparatively insignificant invention, the atmospheric cleaner, or what a radical change it is bringing about in the thoughts of the housewife, whose ideas on the domestic occupations so far have been mostly as confused as those of the charwoman, who put up on her door the sign: "Scrubbing and Window-Cleaning Done Here." In the same way the innumerable electric appliances of today are simplifying the labors of the housewife; but their chief value is that through them she is becoming accustomed to the thought of change, and being led on to distinguish between the housework that can be simplified, and still done at home, and the much larger proportion which must sooner or later be relegated to the professional expert, either coming in at intervals or performing the task elsewhere. And this is true, fortunately, of women in the country as well as in the cities.

We have traveled a long way during the last hundred and fifty years or so, and in that time have witnessed the complete transference from home to factory of many home industries, notably spinning and weaving, and soap-and candle-making. Others like the preparation of food are still in process of transference. The factory industries are the direct and legitimate offspring of the primitive home industries, and their growth and development are entirely on the lines of a normal evolution.

[Illustration: Courtesy of The Pine Mountain Settlement Primitive
Industry. Kentucky mountain woman at her spinning-wheel. 1913]

[Illustration: Courtesy of The Chicago School of Civics and
Philanthropy Italian Woman Home Finisher]

But there is another form of industry that is a ghastly hybrid, the "home-work" that has been born of the union of advanced factory methods and primitive home appliances. Such a combination could never have come into existence, had the working classes at the time of the inception of machine-driven industry possessed either an understanding of what was happening, or the power to prevent their own exploitation. The effects of this home-work are in every way deadly. There is not a single redeeming feature about the whole business. Like the spinner or the weaver of olden times, the sewing-machine operator or the shirt-finisher of the present day provides her own workroom, lighting and tools, but unlike her, she enjoys no freedom in their use, nor has she any control over the hours she works, the prices she asks or the class of work she undertakes.

With the home-worker hard-driven by her sister in poverty, and driving her in turn, helpless both in their ignorance under the modern Juggernaut that is destroying them, pushed ever more cruelly by relentless competition, the last stronghold, the poor little home itself, goes down. The mother has no time to care for her children, nor money wherewith to procure for them the care of others. In her frantic desire to keep them alive, she holds the whip over her own flesh and blood, who have to spend their very babyhood in tying feather-flues or pulling out bastings. Home-work, this unnatural product of nineteenth-century civilization, as an agency for summarily destroying the home is unparalleled. Nor do its blighting effects end with homes wrecked, and children neglected, stunted and slain. The proud edifice of modern industry itself, on whose account homes are turned into workshops, children into slaves, and mothers into slave-drivers, is undermined and degraded by this illegitimate competition, the most powerful of all factors in lowering wages, and preventing organization among regular factory hands. The matter lies in a nutshell. Industry which originated in the home could be safely carried on there only as long as it remained simple and the operations thereof such as one individual could complete. As soon as through the invention of power-driven machinery industry reached the stage of high specialization and division of labor, at once it became a danger to the home, and the home a degradation to it. It was at the call of specialized industry that the factory came into existence, and only in the factory can it be safely housed.

A similar and, if it were possible, a worse form of family and group slavery prevails outside of the cities in the poorer farming regions and in the cotton states. It is harder to reach and to handle, and there is cause to fear that it is increasing. Especially in the busy season when the corn has to be harvested or the cotton picked the mother is considered as a toiler first, and she is to have her babies and look after her poor little home and her children as a mere afterthought. The children are contributors to the family support from the time they can toddle and schooling comes a bad second in making the family arrangements. One reason for this growing evil is the threatening degradation and disappearance of the independent farmer class, who made up what would have been called in England formerly the yeomanry of this country, and their replacement by a poor peasantry degraded by the wretched terms upon which they are driven to snatch a bare existence from a patch of land to which they are tied by lease, by mortgage or by wages, and which they have neither the money nor the knowledge to cultivate to advantage.