In woman, so long secluded in the sphere of the family, the social feeling of solidarity has been very slowly awakened. Therefore, organisation which could prevent the competition just mentioned has only in the last decade made great progress everywhere among working women. In the middle-class vocations this is almost entirely lacking. Among the working women slowness of organisation is natural, for the more wretched their position was, the more difficult was it for them to organise. But among middle-class women the reason was partly their individualism, partly their anti-socialism, partly the lack of feeling of solidarity just referred to.
Home work for profit and pleasure in one’s own family or in service of the applied arts has become a means for the “sweat system,” the facts of which belong to the darkest side of modern working life. These facts alone would be sufficient to prove that working women have little to gain from the luxury of the rich, an assertion with which luxury often vindicates itself. There is still for the women working at home as well as for the women working in the factory, beside their professional work, also the duty of caring for the children and managing the home. However insufficient this may be yet it still claims a great part of their already meagre leisure; and the more tender and conscientious the mothers are, the more they wear themselves out, and the sooner must society, after night-watching, lack of light and hunger have ruined them, maintain them as infirm or paupers. The life of these women passed in the factory often from childhood has made them moreover, generation after generation, more unfitted for household work. What does it profit to attempt to remedy the evil by housekeeping schools and instruction in the care of children? For where time and strength are lacking the home has lost its right.
What can be expected of women who three or four days after confinement must again stand at the machine, who are compelled to leave their children behind them, shut in at home, exposed to all conceivable accidents? What can be expected of mothers, who have become mothers against their will,—mothers of children, who because of the conditions of their parents’ work have become scrofulous, rickety, idiotic—children who contract degeneration of the liver because the harassed, ignorant mother quieted them with brandy, ill-treated them,—herself a physical and psychic ruin who spreads destruction about her!
The feminists are accustomed to rage over the custom which formerly condemned the Indian widows to be burned upon the funeral pyre—a custom which is only an innocent sport in comparison with the woman slavery which Europe has even brought to a system and which the woman movement long ignored.
To these general facts, which apply also to women employed in hard agricultural labour, there is also added an entirely new series of evils associated with occupations dangerous to health—for example those in which lead, quicksilver, phosphorus or tobacco poison the workers,[[2]] or those branches of work where inhaling dust at the weaving loom or in spinning, breathing gas and coal smoke, exposed to heat, smoke and damp, they contract tuberculosis and other diseases; to say nothing of the physical and moral misery in which miners and stevedores live. But the worst begins only when the women are to become mothers. Either the embryo is killed by an abortion, intentional or caused by the occupation; or it comes into the world dead or sick or crippled; or it dies in the first weeks or wastes away under artificial nourishment—in England for example only one out of eight children is nursed. The mothers either cannot or will not. Next to the labour conditions, alcohol plays the greatest part in this indirect massacre of infants.
If one turns from the women engaged in industrial work to the servant class, then female drudgery reaches perhaps its height among the girls employed in bars, cafés, and similar establishments. What physical and psychic results this work entails can be divined from the fact that, in England, half of all women suicides are such waitresses under 30 years of age. That family servant girls are allowed to sleep in closets and to work far beyond the present customary factory time; that in the class of saleswomen, especially in cigar shops, the longest working hours together with the most paltry starvation wages are found—all this, as every one knows, is the fundamental reason why the path is so short from all these occupations to the lowest—to prostitution. The servant girl corrupted by the master of the house, the half-starved, overworked shop girl, the night-watching cigar worker, and many, many others are found here as sacrifices of a shameless exploitation. Herewith we stand before that “woman question” in which both elementary instincts have united for that captivity of woman from which the woman movement has found no means of emancipation; against which the means sought in these and other quarters prove fruitless. For only a radical transformation of society and sexual ethics can here provide a remedy.
Every one in face of these facts, touched upon thus superficially, must be astounded that women could oppose laws for the protection of women. Fortunately these progress-impeding emancipation women had no influence when, in England and other countries, certain night work began to be prohibited to women, their working hours limited, certain employments barred out, and a time of rest assured to the woman recently confined. Still very small steps only, but in the right direction. At the same time the organisation of working women advances so that by labour unions and strikes here and there they have succeeded in enforcing better wages, shorter working hours, and better labour conditions. And so long as the woman movement of the upper classes has no solidarity with that of the lower, the female factory inspector can accomplish very little, as a result of the fear of the working women to give facts and the adroitness of the employers in veiling these. But if women of the upper class begin to compete with the slave-driving, sweat-system employers through well-organised co-operative enterprises, especially for the revival of artistic handwork, whereby a profitable work is made for mothers at home under good working conditions; and if they boycott all shops where the working hours of the women exceed the due measure, while their wages are below the standard; then the woman movement would be able to hasten certain reforms in the field of industry, just as so many mistresses of girls’ private schools have hastened the reform of public schools: they simply availed themselves of the improvements arising from feminine initiative.
The married woman as family provider beside the man, often also in place of the man, but always however subservient to the man’s dominion—this is the worst form of woman slavery our time has created. The woman movement purposes indeed to make the wife “of age,” in every respect, and free from the husband’s guardianship. But within the woman movement all are not yet entirely agreed that the work of the mother outside the home in and for itself is an evil. Attempts are indeed being made to alter the conditions which are most to blame for the deterioration of mothers and children. But a large faction in the woman movement wishes still, as was said, to cling to the immediately remunerative work of the mother and remedy the resulting lack of home by social institutions for care of children, housekeeping, etc.