It is undoubtedly true that the numerical excess of women in Great Britain, with other economic facts, intensifies most heavily upon woman the grinding pressure of our present industrial system. All rescue workers seeking to help their fallen sisters are constantly confronted with the appalling answer, ‘Give me work; I cannot starve.’ The awful extent of woman’s industrial misery would now be more fully realized, had not well-meant benevolent efforts called in the harsh hand of the police to suppress begging, and thus crush it out of sight.
The increasing and perplexing flood of women in the streets, begging to be bought, is a strange commentary on the effect of the stern repression of begging for alms. If in the future, in addition to the suppression of ordinary begging by men and women, another edict goes forth forbidding women to present themselves for sale, but not forbidding men to purchase them, gross injustice to women will be added to a cruel abuse of power, and fresh impulse given to male vice. Certainly, if it were in the nature of women to become murderous criminals, any increasingly harsh and unjust attempts to crush their misery and degradation out of sight, would drive them into violent crime.
But it is not the seamstress slowly starving in her garret, nor the mass of struggling poverty that is alone, or even chiefly, beset by the fiery temptations of gain, and the enticing pleasures which money can provide. The deterioration of character, which is the gravest result of a false system of political economy, extends to much wider circles of society. This serious fact is sufficient to prove the error of those who look to the industrial independence of women, as the chief means of destroying licentiousness. Although freedom to obtain decent remunerative employment will secure an important condition for checking social evil, it will be a means only, it can never attain the end.
The great army of domestic servants, whether in public or private dwellings, are surrounded by constant temptations to supplement their wages or relieve their monotonous labour by selling themselves. When we remember the conditions under which the vast mass of servants have grown up, the exposures and privations of their homes, their undeveloped mental state in relation to social duties, the exhausting work upon which the majority of them enter in hotels, lodging-houses, struggling households, or the special danger of rich, careless establishments, and realize both the condition under which their service drags on and the natural instincts of the human being, then it is easy to understand why to a frightfully increasing extent they yield to the solicitations to which they are exposed. The five shillings secretly gained at night becomes an important addition to scanty wages, the stolen pleasures an intoxicating relief to drudgery. The economic effect of thus bringing the lightly-earned wages of vice into competition with the hard-earned wages of honest industry is to discredit the latter, and to produce discontent and careless, unwilling service in industries for which women are naturally better fitted than men; for the same state of things that is injuring domestic service, exists in dress-making, millinery, and all peculiarly feminine industries.
If we take the wider range of labour in which women compete more directly with men in the labour market, it will be found that this practice of purchasing women introduces an unfair element in remuneration of labour. The introduction of the slave principle (the purchase of the human body) in cheapening women’s labour, has a formidable effect in depressing the wages of working-men. In all systems of industry carried on by slaves the cost of maintenance is, as a rule, the limit of expenditure, the equivalent of wages. Also in the industrial systems of so-called free industry, the maintenance of the labourer again forms a limit beyond which profit cannot be extracted, for no man will consent to labour for less wages than will keep him alive. But this is not the case in regard to women’s labour. As was proved a generation ago in France, and can be amply verified in other civilized countries, women’s wages are forced down below subsistence point.
This important fact, with its cause, has evidently not been fully realized even by so close and impartial an observer as Mill. He says: ‘The wages at least of single women must be equal to their support, but need not be more than equal to it; the minimum in their case is the pittance absolutely requisite for the sustenance of one human being. Now, the lowest point to which the most superabundant competition can permanently depress the wages of a man is always somewhat more than this. The ne plus ultra of low wages can hardly occur in any occupation which the person employed has to live by, except the occupation of a woman.’ Mill is evidently uncertain as to the causes of the under-payment of women in cases of equal efficiency with men, and is inclined to attribute it to injustice and to overcrowding in a few employments. He remarks: ‘When the efficiency is equal but the pay unequal, the only explanation that can be given is custom, which, making almost every woman an appendage of some man, enables men to take the lion’s share of whatever belongs to both.’
But in this generation, which has thrown open the broad gates of education to women, and which has enormously extended the range of employments into which they are invited to enter, the causes which Mill suggests (overcrowding, injustice, etc.) do not seem to give a sufficient economic reason. One powerful and growing cause of derangement in the natural rewards of labour has been overlooked—viz., the unequal competition with male labour which must result, when the wages given by vice are allowed to supplement the under-payment for honest work, and the street-door key makes up for the deficient salary. Whilst this phase of human slavery exists, and the female body remains an article of merchandise, the increasing competition with male labour will make itself more severely felt as wider fields of industry are extended to women and they develop increasing ability to enter them. The wages of women can never permanently rise to a just scale of labour value, until this slavish principle is eliminated, because this purchase introduces an uneconomical element into the remuneration of labour which destroys any legitimate effect of demand and supply. It enables competitive employers solely intent on profit to beat down the price of male as well as female labour indefinitely. Indeed, we have by no means reached the limits of this injustice. The practice of purchase is still more dangerous in an economic point of view, because whilst the labour of all women tends to sink to the lowest point of remuneration, this lowest point can be reached in the labour of the young and strong, who are most eagerly sought for as merchandise.
The increasing employment of less remunerated female labour while male labour stands idle, is an alarming fact. The family is barely held together by the earnings, of a daughter, whilst father and brother lounge about the pot-house. The results of any sudden stoppage of a factory where large amounts of this cheap labour has been employed (as in the Barking jute factory, where 800 girls were suddenly thrown out of employment) is an object-lesson in the suicidal policy of degrading women.
The natural order of industry by which the man is the chief material support of the family, is disturbed and destroyed by this unnatural practice.
The purchase of young women adds cruelty to fraud. Youth must always fail to realize results which are only known through the experience of age. No amount of cautious or theoretic teaching given to the young can ever place them on an equality with the experienced adult. Moreover, it is Nature’s law for youth that sexual attraction is quite out of proportion to intellectual development. The fact of this great natural law of slower mental growth is the Creator’s imperative command laid upon the older generation, to protect and guide the youth of both sexes. The corruption of the young by the adult is not only fraud, it is dastardly cruelty.