The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

In the old order the worker owned his tool, selected his material, controlled the process of his task, and often was master of the sale of the finished product. Hence, as has so often been shown, the character of a man was so obviously a part of the stock-in-trade of the worker, his judgment, probity and skill were so clearly causes of his success in handicraft, that the ethical training of life came definitely through the exercise of work-power. Now, as we are often reminded, the worker is divorced from the management and control of his work-process and is a "hand," merely attached to a machine that others must choose, buy and install, the product of which is in only an infinitesimal part his responsibility and of the profit from which another takes the lion's share. This has made many feel that ethical training in life must come to the worker from his leisure hours only, and that his task must be always merely a routine one, to be got through with as soon as possible each day in order that he may "live" in the hours left from work. This idea cannot be accepted by anyone who realizes the character-drill that may inhere in any form of useful labor. The need is to permeate the methods of modern industry with the creative spirit, to mix the management of all business and manufacturing with the brains of workmen as well as of directors and to make a new connection, strong, obvious, and thought-compelling, between the worker and the control and responsibility of his work. While this is being accomplished the results of the change from handicraft to machine work in the family order must be understood and unsocial elements in that change minimized. It must be remembered that among the opportunities of character-training in work lost by the man, the woman and the child and youth, by the change in industrial methods, is the constant influence of the home life while at work. The old industries clustered about the fireside. It made the household a work-place, and some feel that this was a detriment to home life and that we have a better chance to make real centres of love and happiness now that we have taken out of the domestic field almost all the elements of manufacture and of trade. However that may be, this much is sure, that when father and mother worked together, and children learned how to work while still within the family influence, it was easier than it is now to make the daily task one of mutual coöperation and mutual service within the family circle.

The Old Household a Work-place.—We have passed laws now, forbidding "home industries" because so many "sweated trades" find their last and often impregnable fortress in the crowded rooms of the tenement living-places. This may be necessary and may be well to do, but the fact remains that something inhered in the old domestic training of children and youth in useful work within the home which was lost when the factory was built and the young workers had to seek their jobs outside the family circle. And that something of work-drill and habit-forming in the interest of self-support and family usefulness we are now trying to reintroduce into the education of children and youth by elaborate and costly "manual training," "Pre-vocational and Vocational courses" and similar departments in the schools.

Welfare Managers in Modern Times.—The fact that hours of work and conditions affecting the workers can be standardized more easily when those workers are massed in large numbers under one recognized owner and manager of a great industry has sometimes blinded us to the need of each young person to have constantly near at hand a personal representative of society's interest in the development of his character; some interpreter of social customs and ideals to follow which will make for his advantage. We are trying now to get "Welfare Managers," paid chaperons, nurses and teachers, into business concerns to take the place of older forms of social direction and care for youthful workers. These functionaries often do much good and are recognized expressions of the social interest of employers. Since they are installed avowedly for the purpose of making conditions better for the younger, weaker, less trained and more needy of the workers, "Welfare Managers" often find a hostile or at least indifferent attitude toward their efforts on the part of the higher paid, the better established, and more competent women workers, especially those organized in Trade Unions with the slogan of "Not Charity, but Justice." They do, however, reach with light and leading some of the darker sides of modern industry as related to the younger workers.

Child-labor.—The student of industrial history knows that child-labor is not a new evil. Children were often overworked and cruelly driven when parents, guardians, and those to whom they were "bound out" as apprentices were the only taskmasters and their labor was wholly within the household. Indeed, Hutchins and Harrison, in their History of Factory Legislation, declare that "it is not easy to say whether children were really worked harder in the early factories than under the domestic system which they replaced." Edith Abbott, in her excellent summary of The Early History of Child Labor in America, shows clearly that at the bottom of the ancient desire to use very young persons in industry was a conviction that work, constant and hard work, is the only safeguard against evil. "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" was not a figure of speech to our ancestors, it was statement of a sober fact. This feeling led naturally to the conditions that gave Samuel Slater, the pioneer in textile manufacture in New England, a collection of child workers in his first mill as his only laborers and at ages between seven and twelve years.

We are now able to see and remedy some evils of child-labor in the factory system which passed unnoticed and for which no prohibitive law was in existence in the handicraft stage. It is true, however, as all must recognize, that the modern specialization of labor and modern use of machines allows a wholesale exploitation of youth and of physical weakness impossible in older forms of industry. Hence the facts of modern industry justify and make necessary the "Child Labor Movement." Yet vital and strong as that movement is, we have to-day, as has been stated in another connection, a misuse of children by millions in industry. We have also a dangerous overuse of youth in industry, and we have a reckless waste of mothers and of potential mothers in unsuitable work. We have also certain dangers to family life in the turning of attention and of ambition of young people away from family interests into fields of industrial activity which are inimical to family success. This makes the problem of the family and the workers one of great difficulty and one to be given the most serious attention on the part of those who are themselves above the economic conditions which operate to complicate that problem among the poor and struggling.

Increase in Women Wage-earners.—In the first place, we must note the tendency toward rapid increase of the numbers of women listed by the census as in "gainful occupations." Without noting in this connection the conditions just before and during the Great War, conditions not at all indicative of normal increase in the numbers of working-women, we trace in the period from 1880 to 1910 a rise from 2,647,157 to 8,075,772 of the number of women in receipt of salary or wages for work outside their own homes. The estimate of 1920, now given, of nearly 41,609,192 "persons of both sexes and of ten years old and over engaged in gainful occupations" shows us 8,549,399 "females." Of these, over a million are engaged in "Professional service" (a larger proportion than of men so listed and, of course, indicating the great majority of women in the teaching profession). More than two millions are listed in "Domestic and Personal service." That leaves over three millions working in "agriculture, forestry, animal industry, manufacture and mechanical industries," and nearly a million and a half in "clerical occupations." The use of ten years of age in such lists is now obsolete as an indication of custom in employment of youth. Fourteen years of age is the norm in the listing of youthful workers and the age limits should be revised to suit that rise in the legal age of the child wage-earner as generally practised now in the United States. With that understanding, the statistics for "Child Labor Certificates" issued by the large manufacturing cities of our country show an army of young workers, more than twenty thousand in New York City alone, annually entering the competitive industrial field with full consent of society. This all means that millions of women and very young persons who under the earlier forms of industrial life would have been employed (however steadily or with whatever handicaps or even cruelty) within some family circle, are now under the full control of mass-direction, mass-standardization, and mass-influence in their daily work.

Social Pressure on the Individual Worker.—This pressure is in itself almost a sufficient reason for the family instability now seen. To divorce all the working-time, and all the work-tendency, and most of the work-training from home life is to weaken the hold of the family upon the average worker. Members of a family in which each has definite and firm relation to some different requirement and control connected with a daily task are likely to acquire an independent relation to society in general. In such eases it requires a far more vital and enduring affection, a distinctly superior mutual understanding and sense of justice, and a far larger natural equipment of tact and power of adjustment than was required in other economic conditions, in order to make the family life enduring and happy. The economic self-interest of each member of the family in the domestic circle was obviously that of every other member when the household was a workshop. Even, the land and all which it implied was a family possession in primitive days. And the worker's equipment, owned privately, was limited in the early days. We read that "tools, weapons, slaves and captured women and the products of some special skill were generally private possession, but products of group-work, such as the capture and killing of buffalo, salmon, and all larger game among the North American Indians, and the maize which individual women tended but which belonged to the household or the tribe in common, were all shared as community property." When to this communal possession of products of group-activity were added control over marriage portions, however those might be appropriated, and the management of all property thought to be of group-value, we can see that all of economic weight of influence now so individualized once went into the family asset.

In the mediæval times, when laborers were gaining slowly a class consciousness outlined by Guilds and Unions of special groups of workers, the family was still the main centre of work-direction and of united profit from work, and hence it was evident to the dullest mind and the coldest heart that members of a family should work and save together. Now the whole trend of industrial relationship is toward making independent and individualistic connection between the worker and his job outside of family unity. Even movements for legal protection of the worker against exploitation by masters in industry often take little account of family relationship or the varying inherited family ideals. Setting the well-being of one member of the family against what is supposed to be the well-being of other members of the family, as in the case of some child-labor laws, may be necessary and socially wise, but it surely does not lead to family stability.

Demands of Family Life Upon Industry and Labor Legislation.—The demands of family life should at least be stated and have some weight in any further attempts to make the lot of the individual worker better, and should be considered in any drastic attempts to enforce labor legislation which sets the parent and the child against each other in the courts, or which hampers a mother in what she deems of vital necessity in the carrying out of her parental duty.

"The Code for Women in Industry," issued by the division of Women in Industry of the Department of Labor, in coöperation with the "War Labor Board" and the "War Labor Policies Board," when the questions concerning standards for employment of women in war plants were acute, as published in the Survey of January 4, 1919, is in brief summary as follows: No woman employed or permitted to work more than eight hours a day or forty-eight hours a week. One day of rest a week demanded for all and no night work for minors or women. The basis of the wage-scale to be form of occupation, not sex; and no lesser wage for women permitted unless it can be proved that their employment lessens the output of work. A legal minimum wage for all women, which should include cost of living of dependents as well as of individuals. All work conditions to be good and safety adequately secured. Women to be prohibited from working in occupations where exposure to heat or cold or to poisonous substances, or where bad position or too great muscular strain, endanger health. Home work prohibited.