The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

Except in England, the women's movement has not, so far as I was able to learn, penetrated to any extent into the lower strata of life, and that strikes me as one of the interesting facts about the movement. It shows to what extent the interests, hopes, and ambitions of modern life have, or rather have not, entered into and become a force in the lives of the people at the bottom.

Thus it came about that my interest in all that I saw of workingwomen in Europe was tinged with the thought of what was going to happen when the present agitation for the emancipation and the wider freedom of women generally should reach and influence the women farthest down.

In my journey through Europe I was interested, in each of the different countries I visited, in certain definite and characteristic things. In London, for example, it was some of the destructive effects of a highly organized and complicated city life, and the methods which the Government and organized philanthropy have employed to correct them, that attracted my attention. Elsewhere it was chiefly the condition of the agricultural populations that interested me. In all my observation and study, however, I found that the facts which I have learned about the condition of women tended to set themselves off and assume a special importance in my mind. It is for that reason that I propose to give, as well as I am able, a connected account of them at this point.

What impressed me particularly in London were the extent and effects of the drinking habit among women of the lower classes. Until I went to London I do not believe that I had more than once or twice in my life seen women standing side by side with the men in order to drink at a public bar. One of the first things I noticed in London was the number of drunken, loafing women that one passed in the streets of the poorer quarters. More than once I ran across these drunken and besotted creatures, with red, blotched faces, which told of years of steady excess—ragged, dirty, and disorderly in their clothing—leaning tipsily against the outside of a gin-parlour or sleeping peacefully on the pavement of an alleyway.

In certain parts of London the bar-room seems to be the general meeting place of men and women alike. There, in the evening, neighbours gather and gossip while they drink their black, bitter beer. It is against the law for parents to take their children into the bar-rooms, but I have frequently observed women standing about the door of the tap-room with their babies in their arms, leisurely chatting while they sipped their beer. In such cases they frequently give the lees of their glass to the children to drink.

In America we usually think of a bar-room as a sort of men's club, and, if women go into such a place at all, they are let in surreptitiously at the "family entrance." Among the poorer classes in England the bar-room is quite as much the woman's club as it is the man's. The light, the warmth, and the free and friendly gossip of these places make them attractive, too, and I can understand that the people in these densely populated quarters of the city, many of them living in one or two crowded little rooms, should be drawn to these places by the desire for a little human comfort and social intercourse.

In this respect the bar-rooms in the poorer parts of London are like the beer halls that one meets on the Continent. There is, however, this difference—that the effect of drink upon the people of England seems to be more destructive than it is in the case of the people on the Continent. It is not that the English people as a whole consume more intoxicating drink than the people elsewhere, because the statistics show that Denmark leads the rest of Europe in the amount of spirits, just as Belgium leads in the amount of beer, consumed per capita of the population. One trouble seems to be that, under the English industrial system, the people take greater chances, they are subject to greater stress and strain, and this leads to irregularities and to excessive drinking.

While I was in Vienna I went out one Sunday evening to the Prater, the great public park, which seems to be a sort of combination of Central Park, New York, and Coney Island. In this park one may see all types of Austrian life, from the highest to the lowest. Sunday seems, however, to be the day of the common people, and the night I visited the place there were, in addition to the ordinary labouring people of the city, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of peasant people from the country there. They were mostly young men and women who had evidently come into the city for the Sunday holiday. Beside the sober, modern dress of the city crowds these peasant women, with their high boots, the bright-coloured kerchiefs over their heads, and their wide, flaring, voluminous skirts (something like those of a female circus-rider, only a little longer and not so gauzy), made a strange and picturesque appearance.

Meanwhile there was a great flare of music of a certain sort; and a multitude of catchpenny shows, mountebanks, music halls, theatres, merry-go-rounds, and dancing pavilions gave the place the appearance of a stupendous county fair. I do not think that I ever saw anywhere, except at a picnic or a barbecue among the Negroes of the Southern States, people who gave themselves up so frankly and with such entire zest to this simple, physical sort of enjoyment. Everywhere there were eating, drinking, and dancing, but nevertheless I saw no disorder; very few people seemed to be the worse for drinking, and in no instance did I see people who showed, in the disorder of their dress or in the blotched appearance of their faces, the effects of continued excesses, such as one sees in so many parts of London. Individuals were, for the most part, neatly and cleanly dressed; each class of people seemed to have its own place of amusement and its own code of manners, and every one seemed to keep easily and naturally within the restraints which custom prescribed.

I do not mean to say that I approve of this way of spending the Sabbath. I simply desire to point out the fact, which others have noticed, that the effect of the drinking habit seems to be quite different in England from what it is in countries on the Continent.