The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

The Family Demand upon Unmarried Women.—The social demand upon women who are at work in any field of personal endeavor, whether that be professional, clerical, manual or artistic, has been outlined before in this treatment of the relation of the home to society in general as involving sortie special consideration of family needs. This may seem a negligible quantity to many women, unmarried, with relatives all self-supporting or well-to-do. There is no reason why a daughter should be called "undutiful" or "selfish" who is absorbed in her own work than why a son should be so esteemed when there is no special reason why other members of the family should hold that daughter's time and effort at their disposal. The selfishness may be on the other side, and often is where parents or near relatives within the family bond try to burden the young woman with odds and ends of family service, which others might as well assume, and leave her with no ambition or opportunity for personal achievement. There are, however, in this complicated life of ours many contingencies of family experience which still demand from daughters a share in time and strength which sons may more easily concentrate upon their own work. This fact, often operating unconsciously, leads many young women to choices of types of work which have fixed hours and easy adjustment to frequent absences from work. These give little chance for rising in wage or position and often give low wages from the start. This tendency keeps many women from success in work and is often a reason why men distrust and oppose their entrance into a new field of industry.

The first essential of character, it must be insisted, is the power of self-support, of self-direction, of self-achievement. This is, now seen to be an essential for women as for men. The only adequate solution of problems of commercialized prostitution includes for each girl capable of that attainment the power of easy and complete self-support. Hence, the family has no right to take from its members some present advantage which will handicap potential workers, either boys or girls, in their struggle to meet adult responsibilities of economic life. Hence, again, the whole question of vocational preparation for girls, as well as for boys, has right-of-way as against any temporary or easily dispensed-with helping in family emergencies which may seriously hamper the future wage-earner. This is now being seen clearly; and the consequence is that parents do without for themselves both luxuries and often comforts, in order that their children shall have a chance in general education and in vocational training to fit them for later economic success. This fact, so honorable to parents, often leads away from family unity by increasing a chasm of culture and of condition between parents and children. This, again, indicates that the modern standardization of child-care and of parental duty has in it elements that demand far more developed character in all the members of a family in order to hold together by affection, justice, and higher compulsions of tenderness those who have by virtue of the self-sacrifice of the older ones lost touch on many of the common fields of effort.

Farming and the Farmer's Wife.—There is one great area both of man's work and of woman's work which supremely needs better understanding and more efficient organization in the interest of family life. That is the basic industry of all civilized life, farming, and woman's service in the farm home. We now generally place our farm houses far apart from each other, and we have usually but one house on the place and that for the owner and his family. We have no adequate provisions by which the seasonal nature of agricultural work can be so arranged by ingenious dovetailing with other forms of labor as to furnish an all-the-year employment to men who wish to marry and bring up families and yet do not own but work upon farms. We have few means for easing the burdens of household labor for the farmer's wife, and hence the larger the farm, the more property it represents, the more men laborers it demands for the owner's successful conduct of the business, the more unbearable the pressure upon health, strength, time, and energy of the woman who is the farmer's helpmate. These are some of the fundamental reasons for the drift away from farm life to the cities and the towns, a drift seen to be ominous and if not checked socially destructive of national prosperity when the Great War forced us to take account of social conditions in the United States more seriously than ever before.

The girls of the farms want to go away from home to find easier work than their mother's kitchens afford quite as much as do the boys who wish to get away from the summer drudgery and the winter dulness of the isolated farmstead; and now the girls can get away easily and often do. It is the lack of workers to adequately aid those in command of agricultural life which is more than all things else the difficulty that must be faced, wrestled with, and overcome if we would keep adequate numbers on the farms. The effect of the drift away from the country upon general family life is too evidently bad to need any intensive statement here. The congestion of cities, the street life of children which makes legal offenses of acts natural and necessary to free play, the walking of city streets by armies of unemployed fathers and those who might be fathers while harvests are lost for want of laborers, the lack of food in one stratum of society while in another there are no people to eat what nature provides so abundantly—all this and more rises in the mind of everyone who understands that in the right adjustment of agriculture to the people's needs lies the best interests of all. The sorry picture of the haggard woman, widow, deserted, or divorced, scrubbing on her knees all night long the marble floors of a vast office-building, to hurry back to her locked-in children in the early morning hours, to fall exhausted on the bed until the call of the alarm clock to get breakfast and send the little ones to school—this picture has been portrayed often to Consumer's League and Women's Club audiences and has made many women of position and of influence call for drastic prohibition of such overwork of mothers. It has also made women work diligently until they secured forms of help from the public purse to subsidize such mothers and give them state aid until the children were able to earn something for themselves. There are many who can visualize that scrubwoman, and who can place beside her as needing social aid the sewing-machine operator, the garment-finisher or the flower-maker in the tenement sweatshop, who can not see that the farm-house mother is often subjected to labor conditions that sap life and health and doom her children to weakness. These opposite poles of woman's work both call for better social understanding and more intelligent and devoted social work. The scrubwoman, or the poverty-bound tenement worker may be proper subjects for public or private philanthropy; the farm-house mother is or should be the prime object of social justice and social engineering for ends of social well-being. Upon the farmer and his wife and also upon the miner and his wife and the forest worker and his wife rest the very foundations of economic stability and industrial security. Those who procure at first hand the raw material of manufacture and of commerce are too precious to social order for any neglect of conditions in their work. In many foreign countries the land seems to shrink dangerously as population grows. In our vast country and in the stretches of Canada, North America seems, as Lowell said, to have "room beside her hearth for all mankind." And yet, in New York City and in other centres of population, there are swarms of people, many of them of foreign birth, of varying races and of different nationalities, crowding each other to suffocation and many of them holding out hands for charity, who might, if rightly aided toward a different environment, work to full support of themselves and their families in the fresh air and healthful surroundings of the country. The need is to transfer city advantages to the country in far greater extent, and to transfer the people who cannot find or make a human chance in the city to the wide spaces and work needs of the country. Rural life must be urbanized, city life must be relieved of those who hinder the making of a beautiful and noble civic life, not because they are incapable but because there are too many of them who have not yet arrived at full capacity for vocational achievement and cannot do so in the crowd with which they have to contend.

Domestic Help and Family Life.—For the relief of family life in the matter of domestic help there must be an intelligent and an earnest attack of educated women upon the problems involved. The admirable suggestions of Professor Lucy Salmon in her Democracy in the Household[16] indicate the chief difficulty in getting and keeping the right sort of domestic worker. The personal relation is not that of equals but of superior to inferior, and the helper in the home is isolated socially from the group he or she serves. This is felt peculiarly in cases where but one helper is employed within the household. The petition of many housewives recently sent to Washington to beg that "the restriction upon immigration now in force may be lifted in the case of women who seek to enter the United States to engage in domestic labor" on the ground of a household need, dire and widespread, is an indication that many women, perhaps most, look forward to a continuance of the present conditions of domestic work but with ever-new sets of domestic workers from other lands. Their attitude in this particular is wholly mistaken. Even if the races from all the ends of the earth should one by one troop through the kitchens of American housewives, most of them would not stay long enough to even learn how to do good work in those kitchens. The first chance they got the factory or shop or even the canning shed or the open field of harvest would take them away. And this is not because the work in the home is too hard, or the room and food not so good as elsewhere, but because domestic service is the last stronghold of aristocracy and no one brought in touch with democratic ideas will long accept it. Miss Salmon's ideas, if carried out, would stay the rapidity of the current away from domestic service. But a quite new approach to the whole problem must be defined and realized by women of light and leading if we would have adequate and efficient help In household work. The fact that most professional or business women find it far easier to get good help where but one domestic worker is kept, than do most women who have no outside duties, gives one key to the situation. As one woman of character and education far above that of most household workers said, "I do housework for Mrs. So and So, for she teaches and there is a reason why she needs help. I would not take a place where there were women in the family who could do the housework themselves perfectly well and wait upon them."

The absurd hypocrisy that in one breath praises all work done for the comfort of the family as the highest form of service and in the next demands that the family "servant" accept all manner of inherited insignia of social inferiority must be outgrown. In the city and suburban towns the hour-service and the various forms of commercial aids to household tasks may work, as has been before indicated, to gradually do away with the servant class, in the old sense of those words and without much social consciousness of the change. In the small towns and in the rural districts, where is now the most acute suffering and need of housemothers, there must be a conscious and a wholesale movement to reinstate domestic service on a plane compatible with democracy and amenable to high standards of intelligence and efficiency. When one thinks of the rural need for teachers, for nurses, for doctors, for kindergartners, for recreation managers, for community leaders, one is tempted to call for a social conscription that shall make all graduates from normal and teacher-training schools, from all schools for social work, and all hospitals, from all playground classes and settlements, serve for a period of one year or two in the country districts as their part in social organization. Surely if a government has the moral right to force youth to serve in war for purposes of destruction of enemies, it has a right to compel youth to serve in peace for purposes of human conservation and for the just sharing of social advantages by all the people of a common country!

The Application of Democratic Principles to Life.—Finally, the problems which inhere in work as related to the family have at their base the same great demand for equality of educational and economic opportunities which inhere in all that relates to the application of democratic principles to actual living. This is not an essay on economic theory or a statement of the results of special studies of economic condition. Still less is it an attempt to make an appeal for one or another type of economic reform. It is simply a partial view of certain work conditions as they come closest to family life. There is to this writer no more merit or demerit in any form of economic dogmatism than in any special theologic creed. We may all differ, and with reasons sufficient to our thought and without blame, on questions of how we can best attain a true democratization of the industrial order. We cannot now be of two minus as to the righteousness of such democratization. We must all believe in giving all human beings a fair chance at the best things of life; security against want, homes that offer conditions for family well-being, educational entrance into our common social inheritance, and leisure to enjoy the things that make for happiness. The baptism of religious idealism by the social spirit is now accomplished. As Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch, that great prophet of a new social order, well says in his last thought-compelling book, "The social gospel has become orthodox."

Women Must be More Democratic.—Women have been so long held within family interests that they, less than men, have had the discipline of democratic life within the labor world. They are often the vicarious expressions of man's remaining aristocratic feeling, as Veblen has acutely outlined in his Theory of the Leisure Class. Husbands still wish their wives to be more "select" than they find it wise longer to be themselves and more tenacious of inherited conventional forms than business or inclination longer allow for themselves. Hence, women have not, as a rule, organized their households on as democratic principles and methods as men have organized their own work. Women, now that they have attained the democratic position in the state which they have long worked for must apply the principles they have preached in that crusade for political equality in the very stronghold of social caste and rigid class-feeling, the family life itself. And even if they have to educate their husbands in the process.

Woman may do this, first, by wiping out and forever the stigma that attaches or has attached to any woman who earns money outside her own home. They may do it, second, by so relating themselves to professional, clerical, manual workers among their own sex as to show that they really believe in equality of rights and mutuality of duties among all classes. They may do it, third, by taking hold of the household service problem radically and from the basis of actual knowledge of its importance to personal and family well-being. They may show actual regard for the dignity of the functions implied, by the treatment accorded the competent, faithful, and often indispensable domestic helper. There is a big social job waiting for women in matters concerning the work of their own sex both within and without the family circle; and the social power of women will be best shown, perhaps, in settling the worst problems of domestic service by the wiser and more efficient use of better educated, more socially respected, and more definitely standardized workers within the home.

The Social Effect of Trade Unions.—No study of the relation of modern industry to family life, however brief and inadequate, can ignore the question, "How has the Trade Union organization of wage-earners affected the home?" The immediate and direct effect has often been disastrous when strikes and lockouts marked the course of industrial warfare. All war is bad for family life and especially injurious to the development of children. And economic war lacks the appeal to the imagination and the ceremonial prestige of war between nations or of civil war in one country. We have had in our race-experience for untold ages the linking of military training with military defence of political ideas and of the fatherland. To fight for one's country seems highly honorable. This lift of the sense of community unity into the area of supreme struggle gives to men often what no other experience so far accomplishes, namely, a feeling of spiritual union with all other men who also struggle for what they believe to be right. In labor wars; in the strife between employer and employed, that sense of race unity even when struggling against a national enemy, that which gives what Professor James well called the "mystic element in militarism," is lacking. It is a fight between men who have and those who have not and feel themselves defrauded of just due. Hence, although the fight may be bitter even unto death, and the sacrifices of immediate comfort for ultimate ends beyond measure heroic and even wise, there can be little of the pomp and circumstance that accompany national and international warfare. The Decoration Days when heroes of past conflicts are praised and receive from all the reverence which patriotism pays to those believed to have saved some precious inheritance from harm do not yet, perhaps will never, include heroes of labor struggles for equal right and mutual justice. Yet the history of industrial changes shows beyond cavil or doubt that in this field, as in others, he who would be free himself must win his freedom. The basic principle of the Trade Union, the right and usefulness of collective bargaining, inheres in the conditions of machine-dominated and capitalized industry. In this form of labor organization the individual worker cannot bargain individually; his place in the factory is too infinitesimal and his power measured by that of his employer too invisible for such personal alignment. This fact is now not questioned by any but those so enamoured of old methods of control of the worker by those who hire him that they cannot see what has really happened both to the employer and the employed. The labor struggle had to come. The right of workers to combine and to work together for what seems to them their best interests is as inherent a part of modern democratic ideals as is the right of all citizens to vote. And since modern industry has given enormous power to a few master leaders and requires so many wage-earners to carry out its enterprises the struggle has necessarily been hard and long. No one can justly place all good behavior on one or the other side in this conflict. No one can fail to see that power attained by the Trade Unions has at times been used as selfishly as the power of the employers has been. But when we remember that until the first quarter of the nineteenth century combinations of workmen, even to respectfully ask an increase of wages or a bettering of work conditions in lessening of hours and in sanitary and moral provisions in work-places, was legally a "conspiracy," and liable to harsh punishments, we must be glad that at any temporary cost the main army of laborers has been organized from a mob of oppressed individual workers. But what a cost to the family has been often paid! Mothers already overworked and under-nourished still further starved by the "strike relief" that only serves to maintain wretchedness, not to abolish it. The sufferings of children who miss even the meagre family comfort which the too small pay of the father when at work was able to supply. The greater suffering of children shunned and ill-treated by school mates when the father is called a "scab." The deeper tragedy of experience of men who take work that their labor comrades have refused because of the claim of wife and children, and are abused, both in body and in denial of sympathy and respect, because they are thought to be traitors to their striking fellows. What is hinted at in these few words could be made into one of the great dramas of the ages if only the social imagination could take into understanding and show without partiality both sides of the picture. The time may come when it will be seen that in all wars some heroes fall on the side that is called wrong and have right to meed of deferred praise. When that time comes, the history of labor conflicts will show that in the struggle between the father's duty to his children and the wife who shares his service to them, and his duty toward the democratizing of labor by force of battle for justice and a fair chance for all his class, heroes and martyrs have fallen on both sides of the line. Meanwhile, the encouraging thing is that Labor Commissions and permanent Boards of Investigation and Arbitration and many government devices for securing a more even justice all around the circle of wage-earning activity are increasing in evidence as a sign that we are on the way to bring the common need for peace and order in industry to bear upon its warring elements. It only needs that the great consuming public, the final and the worst sufferer when labor wars are waged, shall understand and use its overmastering social power to bring order out of the chaos of opposing interests.