Working With the Working Woman

by Cornelia Stratton Parker

Since the Civil War look at us—8,075,772 women in industry, as against 2,647,157 in 1880. Almost a fourth of the entire female population over ten years of age are at work, as against about one-seventh in 1880. The next census figures will show a still larger proportion. Those thousands of women the World War threw into industry, who never had worked before, did not all get out of industry after the war. Take just the railroads, for example. In April, 1918, there were 65,816 women employed in railroad work; in October, 1918, 101,785; and in April, 1919, 86,519. In the 1910 census, of all the kinds of jobs in our country filled by men, only twelve were not also filled by women—and the next census will show a reduction there: firemen (either in manufacturing or railroads), brakemen, conductors, plumbers, common laborers (under transportation), locomotive engineers, motormen, policemen, soldiers, sailors, and marines. The interesting point is that in only one division of work are women decreasing in proportion to men—and that was women's work at the beginning—manufacturing. In agriculture, in the professions, in domestic and personal service, in trade and transportation, the number of women is creeping up, up, in proportion to the number of men. From the point of view of national health and vitality for this and the next generation, it is indeed a hopeful sign if women are giving way to men in factories, mills, and plants, and pushing up into work requiring more education and in turn not demanding such physical and nervous strain as does much of the machine process. Also, since on the whole as it has been organized up to date, domestic service has been one of the least attractive types of work women could fill, it is encouraging (though not to the housewife) to find that the proportion of women going into domestic and personal service has fallen from forty-four and six-tenths per cent, in 1880, to thirty-two and five-tenths per cent, in 1910.

Women working at everything under the sun—except perhaps being locomotive engineers and soldiers and sailors. Why?

First, it is part of every normal human being to want to work. Therefore, women want to work. Time was when within the home were enough real life-sized jobs to keep a body on the jump morning and night. Not only mother but any other females handy. There are those who grumble that women could find enough to do at home now if they only tried. They cannot, unless they have young children or unless they putter endlessly at nonessentials, the doing of which leaves them and everybody else no better off than before they began. And it is part of the way we are made that besides wanting to work, we need to work at something we feel “gets us some place.” We prefer to work at something desirable and useful. Perhaps what we choose is not really so desirable and useful, looked at in the large, but it stacks up as more desirable and more useful than something else we might be doing. And with it all, if there is to be any real satisfaction, must go some feeling of independence—of being on “one's own.”

So, then, women go out to work in 1921 because there is not enough to do to keep them busy at home. They follow in part their age-old callings, only nowadays performed in roaring factories instead of by the home fireside. In part they take to new callings. Whatever the job may be, women want to work in preference to the nonproductiveness of most home life to-day.

Graham Wallas, in his Great Society, quotes the answers given by a number of girls to a woman who held their confidence as to why they worked. He wished to learn if they were happy. The question meant to the girls evidently, “Are you happier than you would have been at home?” and practically every answer was “Yes.”

In a “dismal and murky,” but fairly well-managed laundry, six Irish girls all answered they were happy. One said the work “took up her mind, she had been awfully discontented.” Another that “you were of some use.” Another, “the hours went so much faster. At home one could read, but only for a short time. Then there was the awful lonesome afternoon ahead of you.” “Asked a little girl with dyed hair but a good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It made her feel she was worth something.”

At another laundry, the first six girls all answered they were happy because the “work takes up your mind,” and generally added, “It's awful lonesome at home,” or “there is an awful emptiness at home.” However, one girl with nine brothers and sisters was happy in the collar packing room just because “it was so awful lonesome”—she could enjoy her own thoughts. An Irishwoman at another laundry who had married an Italian said, “Sure I am always happy. It leaves me no time to think.” At a knitting plant one girl said “when she didn't work, she was always thinking of dead people, but work always made her cheer up directly.”

The great industrial population comes from crowded tenements. It is inconceivable that enough work could be found within those walls to make life attractive to the girls and young women growing to maturity in such households.

So much for the psychological side. The fact remains that the great bulk of women in industry work because they have to work—they enter industrial life to make absolutely necessary money. The old tasks at which a woman could be self-supporting in the home are no longer possible in the home. She earns her bread now as she has earned it for thousands of years—spinning, weaving, sewing, baking, cooking—only to-day she is one of hundreds, thousands in a great factory. Nor is she longer confined to her traditional tasks. Men are playing a larger part in what was since time began and up to a few years ago woman's work. Women, in their need, are finding employment at any work that can use unskilled less physically capable labor.