Another serious factor in the working woman’s position is the weakness of the Truck Act, especially in regard to fines and deductions. Deductions, e.g. for spoilt work, are sometimes made on a scale altogether out of proportion to the weekly wages, and fines for being a few minutes late, or for trivial offences of various kinds, are often oppressive to a degree which can only be described as preposterous when compared with the value of the worker’s time and attention measured in the payments they receive. In some cases convictions and fines are secured, and in other cases, even in some which are outside the law, the inspectors are able to obtain the adoption of reforms by employers, but many hard cases remain unredressed owing to the difficulty of interpreting the Acts.
All along the line our social legislation has been characterised by timidity and procrastination. Dr. Thomas Percival’s statement of the case for State interference in factories (1796) was left for six years without notice from the Central Government, and the first Factory Act, 1802, was applied to apprentices only at a time when the apprenticeship system was falling into disuse. Later on, in response to the high-souled agitation of Sadler, Oastler, and Lord Ashley (afterwards Shaftesbury), after years of hesitation and vacillation, various inadequate measures were taken, but never quite the right thing at the right moment, never designed as part of a far-sighted policy that would recreate English industrial life and make it worth living—as it might be made—for the toilers of field and factory, workshop and mine. This weakness and backwardness in the policy of the Home Department is no doubt largely due to the covetousness of the capitalist and the control he is able to exercise on politics. It should be remembered, however, that the capitalist, or rather the capitalist employer, does not present an unbroken front. In point of fact the best manufacturers do not oppose social legislation. They understand the need of a common rule, and the regulations of the Factory Acts have usually been modelled on the existing practice of the better kind of employer. Labour legislation is weakened and kept back by several causes other than the greed of employers. Among these may be mentioned the cumbersome and out-of-date procedure of the House of Commons, and the interminable delays that dog the progress of non-Governmental measures, even when these have the approval of all parties. Other causes are to be found in the class selfishness of the upper strata of society, their indifference to the needs of the people, their ignorance of the whole conditions of the industrial population’s life. With bright exceptions, such as the late Lord Shaftesbury and some now living whose names will occur to the reader, not only the aristocracy and the very rich, but the conservative middle-class, the dwellers in suburbs and watering-places, cling to the idea of a servile class. They object to industrial regulations which give the workers statutory rights amongst their employers; they object to increasing the amenity of factory life and diminishing the supply of domestic servants. Labour legislation remains backward and undeveloped for want of the support of an enlightened public opinion.
The Strain of Modern Industry.—With the ill effects of the present system it is impossible for a non-medical writer to deal fully, but no one can have any talk with a doctor or a sick visitor under the Insurance Committee in a big industrial town without hearing terrible facts about the injury to women from the persistent standing at work. It seems likely also that these injuries are not only due to overstrain among women after marriage and before and after confinement, but result in part from the fatigue endured by adolescent girls. Parents are too anxious to send children to work, and girls of fourteen and upwards are sometimes working in competition with boys, and suffer from trying to do as much. Pressure is put on girls to work three looms or even four, before they are really equal to the effort. It may, of course, be admitted that some of this strain and drive is self-inflicted. It is part of the admirable tenacity, self-reliance, and high standard of life of Lancashire women that they are keen about their earnings, and I have been told of girls who will return to the shed during meal-hours, or even go to work at 5.30 in summer-time, busying themselves in sweeping or making ready for work before the engine starts. These practices are illegal, and the employers often protect themselves by putting up a notice that any woman or young worker found in the shed out of working hours will be dismissed, or by sending an employee to clear the shed at the proper hour. Nevertheless in many cases the employer has a certain moral responsibility for these evasions of the law, although they appear to indicate perversity on the worker’s part. Girls and women are indirectly set to compete one with another, and with boys and men. There is a constant pressure on the weaker to keep pace with the stronger, the immature or old with the worker in the full flower of strength. The overlooker usually receives a small percentage on all the earnings of all the weavers, and has therefore an incentive to keep them at full tension, and the overlooker’s average is again criticised by the manager. Lancashire people are remarkably articulate and also quick in apprehension, and the sarcasms launched at girls who, on pay-day, have earned less than the average are pointed enough to be well understood. The whole system is like an elaborate mechanism to extract the last unit of effort from each worker, and dismissal hangs always over the head of the slower and less competent worker. In the Factory Inspectors’ Report for 1913 Miss Tracey tells how children lose their colour and their youthful energy in the drudgery of their daily toil, how the girls fall asleep at their work and grow old and worn before their time. “Sometimes one feels that one dare not contemplate too closely the life of our working women, it is such a grave reproach.” I have myself been seriously assured that cases of suicide result from the difficulty of maintaining at once the quantity and quality of work under such conditions.
Anaemia is a frequent result of overstrain, not to mention the constant colds and rheumatism due to overheated rooms. The sickness among women from these and other worse evils alluded to above have become apparent for the first time through the serious strain put on sick benefit funds in the first year of the Insurance Act. At one very important centre of the cotton trade, out of 8056 members 2800 received sick benefit in the first twelve months. The Insurance Act, whatever its defects, has at all events given many poor women the chance to take a little rest and nursing that they sorely needed and could not afford. The sneer of “malingering” is easily raised, but it is doubtful whether real malingering has much to do with it. The conditions of industry, greatly improved as they are from the sanitary point of view, are certainly increasing the kind of strain that women are constitutionally least able to bear. The industrial efficiency in the young girl that she and her employer are often so proud of may be paid for later in painful illness and incapacity. Mr. Arthur Greenwood quotes medical opinion to the effect that the industrial strain to which several generations of women in the textile districts have now been subjected is responsible not only for serious disease, but even for sterility among women.[45] So far the subject of the declining birth-rate has been discussed chiefly as a theme for homilies on the “selfishness” of women, who, it is alleged, prefer ease and comfort to unrestricted child-bearing. If Mr. Greenwood is right, the cause, in part at all events, is the force of capitalistic competition feeding on the very life of the people. Surely the subject needs medical study and investigation of a more searching kind than it has yet received.
The Exclusion of Women: A Counsel of Despair.—In view of the tremendous strain incidental to certain kinds of industrial work, as at present organised, there occurs the difficult problem, what kind of work women are to do. In the case of work underground in mines, and also of a few industrial processes specially injurious to women, the State has exercised the right to exclude women altogether, and however undesirable such legislative exclusion may be in the abstract, there can be little doubt that it was justified in the cases referred to, the evils being flagrant and the women concerned as yet unorganised and with no means of demanding adequate regulations for their own safety. There are even those who doubt whether woman should take part in manufacturing industry at all, and hope that ultimately she may disappear from it altogether. Those who take this view should clear their minds as to what exactly they mean by industry. They probably do not wish to exclude women from those occupations which are almost a feminine monopoly, such as dressmaking, needlework and household work. But to restrict any class of workers to a narrow range of occupations undoubtedly has a very depressing effect on their wages. We may also note that improvements in the position and conditions of the woman-worker have begun always outside, not inside; in the factory before the workshop; in the workshop before the home; in industry before needlework. The Wage Census of 1907 shows that women’s wages are higher in the great industry than in the smaller and more old-fashioned establishment. State regulation of factory work in the first half of the nineteenth century led to enquiries into the condition of needlewomen and others, who, as the Children’s Employment Commission showed, were in worse case than factory workers. The factory industry, it was immediately recognised, was more amenable to control either by the State or by Unionism, or both, than was the home worker, or the worker in small workshops. Through the factory, in spite of its many abuses, women have attained not only an improvement in their economic circumstances, but also the experience of comradeship and even of a citizenship which, although incomplete, is very real as far as it goes.
Women have undoubtedly gained on the whole by the widening of their sphere of employment. But women cannot possibly do all kinds of industrial work, and to leave the matter unregulated either by law or by Trade Union action is to leave too much to the discretion of the employer, with whom profit is naturally the first consideration.
If the matter is fought out between the employer and the men’s Unions, the women’s interests are not sufficiently considered. Some years ago at Birmingham the question was being disputed whether women should or should not polish brass in brass-works. The Trade Union pronounced polishing to be filthy and exhausting work, and degrading to women, and declared the employers only wanted to set women on it for the sake of cheapness. The employers on the other hand said the Union only opposed the employment of women because they wanted to keep women out of the trade as much as possible. Probably motives were mixed on both sides.
Such disputes not infrequently arise in manufacturing industry, and the middle-class person arriving on the scene is very apt to take a one-sided view. If he is a mildly reactionary, conservative, sentimental person, he probably wants women to be prevented from doing anything that looks uncomfortable and happens to be under his eyes at the moment. If he (or particularly if she) happens to be burning with enthusiasm for the rights of women as individuals and scornful of old-fashioned proprieties and traditions, he (or she) will most likely jump to the conclusion that the objections raised to the employment of women in the particular process are merely sex-prejudice and sex-domination. Neither the sentimentalist nor the individualist, however, sees the full bearing of the situation. In this connection an article by Mr. Haslam[46] may be studied with advantage as being eminently thoughtful and fair-minded. In the Lancashire cotton trade a peculiarly complicated instance of the woman question occurs in mule-spinning. In this, the best paid and most highly skilled process in the industry, a shortage of boy labour has somehow to be met. The proportion of helpers or “piecers” needed is much larger than the proportion of boys who can hope to find a permanent occupation in mule-spinning. With advancing education, aided, no doubt, by recent good trade and demand for labour in the trades, boys and their parents have become increasingly aware of the disadvantages of “piecing” as a trade, and as a result the deficiency of juvenile labour threatens to become acute. An obvious solution is to introduce girls as piecers, which, as it happens, is not a new idea but the revival of an old one. Girls were formerly employed to some extent at piecing, but were prohibited by the Union twenty-six or twenty-seven years ago, so far as the important centres of cotton-spinning are concerned. The prohibition was removed some years later, but for a long time women showed no inclination to return to this work. Only in quite recent years, with the increasing shortage of boy-labour, have women and girls been induced to go back to the mule-spinning room. Now women never become mule-spinners; the Union will not allow it. A peculiar feature of the occupation is that the operative spinners themselves, who employ and pay their piecers, are thus interested in obtaining a supply of cheap labour, just as any capitalist employer is, or supposes himself to be. They consistently oppose women becoming spinners, usually alleging physical and moral objections to this occupation, but are willing to allow them to become piecers in order to supply the deficiency of boy-labour, and to lessen the prejudice against piecing as a “blind-alley” occupation for boys. Now, as Mr. Haslam points out, the employment of women as piecers is both physically and morally quite as objectionable as their working as spinners.[47] Indeed, granting for the sake of argument that women should be employed in the mule-spinning room at all, by far the least objectionable arrangement would be for them to work two together on a pair of mules, which would diminish the physical strain and obviate the moral dangers which arise from the present plan of subordination to a male spinner in an unhealthy environment. In this case women need organisation and combination to protect their interests from the operative spinners, who are virtually their employers, almost as much as a labouring class needs to be protected from capitalist employers. And, as Mr. Haslam shows in his weighty and temperate statement, it is quite true that there are very great and serious objections to female employment in this trade. The heat, the costume, the attitudes necessitated by this work, all render it a dangerous occupation for girls to work at in company with men. Mr. Haslam gives painful evidence in support of this statement, for which readers can be referred to his article.
The moral of the whole story is by no means that unrestricted freedom of employment for women is the way of salvation. Rather is it that women must not only organise but must take a conscious part in the work of directing their organisation. At present they are too often the shuttlecock between the opposing interests of the employer and the men’s Union. It is not that the Trade Union is always wrong in wanting to keep the women out; or that the employer (whether capitalist or operative) is always right in wanting to take the women on. The point is that each party in these disputes is usually influenced mainly by his own interests and easily persuades himself that what is best for him is best also for the woman-worker concerned. The hardest and most unhealthy work may be done by women without a protest from men’s Unions if it does not bring women evidently into competition with men. Nothing can clear up the situation but the enlightenment and better organisation of women themselves. They must learn not to take their cue implicitly from the employer or from the men’s Union—certainly not from the teaching of women of another class. They must learn—they are fast learning—to think for themselves and to see their needs in relation to society as a whole, to become articulate and take part in the control of their organisation. It is quite likely that when they do so they will not adopt the ideal of complete freedom of competition.
I remember some years ago hearing a lecture on the subject of the mining industry given to a society of women of advanced views, the lecturer, a professional woman, taking the line that women should not have been excluded from work underground in mines, as they were by the Act of 1842, and that the evils of such work had been exaggerated. Some little time afterwards an experienced woman cotton-operative was invited to address the same society, and incidentally remarked in the course of her lecture that card-room work was “not fit for women to do.” The contrast was instructive, especially taking into consideration that card-room work in the twentieth century, whatever its objections, cannot be nearly as dangerous and injurious as underground work in mines was in 1842. Legislative exclusion of women from dangerous and unhealthy occupations, is, we may admit, an undesirable remedy from many points of view—especially perhaps because it affords too easy relief to the conscience of the employer, who may take refuge in the idea that he need not trouble to improve conditions if he employs only men. It is better to make the conditions of industry fit for women than to drive women out of industry; better to strengthen the organisation of women and give them a voice in deciding what processes are or are not suitable to them than to increase the competition for home work.