Working With the Working Woman

by Cornelia Stratton Parker

The third day my feet are not so weary, and while I iron I mull over ideas on women in industry. After all, have not some of us with the good of labor at heart been a bit too theoretical? Take the welfare idea so scoffed at by many. After all, there is more to be said for than against. Of course, provided—It is all very well to say labor should be allowed to look after itself, and none of this paternalism. Of course, the paternalism can be overdone and unwisely done. But, at least where women workers are concerned, if we are going to wait till they are able to do things for themselves we are going to wait, perhaps, too long for the social good while we are airing our theories. It is something like saying that children would be better off and have more strength of character if they learned to look after themselves. But you can start that theory too young and have the child die on your hands, or turn into a gutter waif. The child needs entire looking after up to a point where he can begin little by little to look after himself. And after he has learned to dress himself it does not necessarily mean he can select his own food, his hour of retiring, his habits of cleanliness and hygiene.

I look about at the laundry workers and think: Suppose we decide nothing shall be done for these girls until they demand it themselves and then have charge of it themselves. In other words, suppose we let welfare work and social legislation wait on organization. The people who talk that way are often college professors or the upper crust of labor. They have either had no touch or lost touch with the rank and file of women workers. It is going to be years and years and years, if ever, before women in this country organize by and large to a point where they can become permanently effective. What organization demands more than any other factor is, first, a sense of oppression; second, surplus energy. Women have been used to getting more or less the tag end of things for some thousands of years. Why expect them suddenly, in a second of time, as it were, to rear up and say, “We'll not stand for this and that”? If we are going to wait for working women to feel oppressed enough to weld themselves together into a militant class organization, capable of demanding certain conditions and getting them, we shall wait many a long day. In the meantime, we are putting off the very situation we hope for—when women, as well as men, shall have reached the point where they can play a dignified part in the industrial scheme of things—by sending them from work at night too weary and run down to exert themselves for any social purpose. I say that anything and everything which can be done to make women more capable of responsibility should be done. But the quickest and sanest way to bring that about is not to sit back and wait for factory women to work out their own salvation. Too few of them have the intelligence or gumption to have the least idea how to go about it, did it ever occur to them that things might be radically improved. (And the pity of it is that so often telling improvements could be made with so little effort.)

Nor is it anything but feminist sentimentality, as far as I can see, to argue against special legislation for women. What women can do intellectually as compared with men I am in no position to state. To argue that women can take a place on a physical equality with man is simply not being honest. Without sentimentalizing over motherhood, it seems allowable to point out the fact that women are potential mothers, and this fact, with every detail of its complexities, feminists or no to the contrary, is a distinct handicap to women's playing a part in the industrial field on a par with man. And society pays more dearly for a weary woman than for a tired man.

Therefore, why not lunch rooms, and attractive lunch rooms, and good food, well cooked? Yes, it is good business, and besides it puts a woman on a much more efficient level to herself and society. At our tables the girls were talking about different lunch-room conditions they had come across in their work. One girl told of a glass company she had worked for that recently was forced to shut down. She dwelt feelingly on the white lunch room and the good food, and especially the paper napkins—the only place she had worked where they gave napkins. She claimed there was not a girl who did not want to cry when she had to quit that factory. “Everybody loved it,” she said. I tried to find out if she felt the management had been paying for the polished brass rails, the good food, and the napkins out of the workers' wages. “Not on your life!” she answered. She had been a file clerk.

Take dental clinics in the factories. Four teeth on our floor were extracted while I was at the laundry. For a couple of days each girl moaned and groaned and made everybody near her miserable. Then she got Miss Cross's permission to go to some quack dentist, and out came the tooth. Irma had two out at one dollar each. It was going to cost her forty dollars to get them back in. A person with his or her teeth in good condition is a far better citizen than one suffering from the toothache.

If I had my way I should like to see a rest room in every factory where women are employed, and some time, however short, allowed in the middle of the afternoon to make use of it.

Eight hours is long enough for any woman to do sustained physical work, with no possibility for overtime.

Nor have we so much as touched on what it means to live on thirteen dollars or fourteen dollars a week.

“But then you have taken away all the arguments for organization!”

Should organization be considered as an end in and of itself, or as one possible means to an end?