Perhaps in the long run, one of the most harmful phases of modern civilization is this very contentment of not only the workers, but the employer and society at large, under conditions which are not building up a wholesome, healthy, intelligent population. Indeed, it is not so much the fault of modern industrialism as such. Perhaps it is because there are so many people in the world and the ability of us human beings, cave men only ten thousand years ago, to care for so many people has not increased with the same rapidity as the population. Our numbers have outrun our capacities. Twentieth century development calls for large-scale organization for which the human mind has shown itself inadequate.
It is well to keep in mind that no situation is the product of its own day. The working woman, for instance, we have had with us since the beginning of women—and they began a good spell ago. The problem of the working woman, as we think of it to-day, began with the beginning of modern industry. Nor is it possible to view her past without realizing that the tendency has ever been, with but few interruptions, toward improvement.
In the early factory days in our country it is known that women rose at four, took their breakfast with them to the mills, and by five were hard at work in badly constructed buildings, badly heated, badly lighted. From seven-thirty to eight-thirty there was an hour for breakfast, at noon half an hour, and from then on steady work until half past seven at night. It would be perhaps eight o'clock before the mill girls reached home, sometimes too tired to stay awake till the end of supper. Later, hours were more generally from five in the morning until seven at night. In Lowell the girls worked two hours before breakfast and went back to the mills again in the evening after supper. By 1850 twelve hours had come to be the average working day.[1]
[1] Abbot, Women in Industry.
Wages were very low—around seventy-five cents or a dollar a week with board. Mills and factories were accustomed to provide room and board in the corporation boarding houses, poorly constructed, ill-ventilated buildings, girls often sleeping six and eight in a room. In 1836 it was estimated that the average wage for women in industry (excluding board) was thirty-seven and one-half cents a day, although one thousand sewing women investigated received on an average twenty-five cents a day. In 1835 the New York Journal of Commerce estimated that at the beginning of the century women's labor brought about fifty cents a week, which was equivalent to twenty-five cents in 1835. In 1845 the New York Tribune reported fifty thousand women averaging less than two dollars a week wages, and thousands receiving one dollar and fifty cents. Another investigation in 1845 found “female labor in New York in a deplorable degree of servitude, privation and misery, drudging on, miserably cooped up in ill-ventilated cellars and garrets.” Women worked fifteen to eighteen hours a day to earn one to three dollars a week.
And yet authorities tell us that some of the mill towns of New England, Lowell in particular, are looked back upon as being almost idyllic as regards the opportunities for working women. On examination it is found that what was exceptional from our point of view was not the conditions, but the factory employees. In those days work in the mills was “socially permissible.” Indeed there was practically no other field of employment open to educated girls. The old domestic labors had been removed from the household—where could a girl with spirit and ability make the necessary money to carry out her legitimate desires? Her brothers “went west”—she went into the factories—with the same spirit. Ambitious daughters of New England farmers formed the bulk of cotton mill employees the first half of the nineteenth century. Their granddaughters are probably college graduates of the highest type to-day. After the long factory hours they found time for reading, debating clubs, lectures, church activities, French, and German classes. Part of the time some of the mill operatives taught school. Many of them looked forward to furthering their own education in such female seminaries as existed in those days, the expense to be met from their mill earnings. Poorly paid as mill hands were, it was often six to seven times what teachers received.
“The mills offered not only regular employment and higher wages, but educational advantages which many of the operatives prized even more highly. Moreover, the girl who had worked in Lowell was looked upon with respect as a person of importance when she returned to her rural neighborhood. Her fashionable dress and manners and her general air of independence were greatly envied by those who had not been to the metropolis and enjoyed its advantages.”[2]
[2] Abbot, Women in Industry.
By 1850 the situation had altered. With the opening of the west, opportunities for women of gumption and spirit increased. The industrial depression of 1848-49 lowered wages, and little by little the former type of operative left the mill, her place being filled largely by Irish immigrants.
The Civil War saw a great change in the world of working women. Thousands of men were taken from industry into war, and overnight great new fields of opportunity were opened to women. The more educated were needed as nurses, for teaching positions, and for various grades of clerical work deserted by men. After the close of the war farmers became more prosperous and their daughters were not forced to work for the wherewithal to acquire advantages. Add to all this the depression caused in the cotton industry due to the war—and the result of these new conditions was that when the mills reopened it was with cheap immigrant labor. What then could have been considered high wages were offered in an attempt to induce the more efficient American women operatives back to the mills, but the cost of living had jumped far higher even than high wages. The mills held no further attractions. Even the Irish deserted, their places being filled with immigrants of a lower type.