Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism

by Floyd Dell

The factory already gives women a certain independence. It may yet give them pleasure, the joy of creation. Indeed, it must, when the workers require it; and those who are most likely to require it are the women workers.

It is well known that with the ultra-development of the machine, the subdivision of labor, the régime of piecework, it has become practically impossible for the worker to take any artistic pleasure in his product. It is not so well known how necessary such pleasure in the product is to the physical well-being of women—how utterly disastrous to their nervous organization is the monotony and irresponsibility of piecework. This method—which men workers have grumbled at, but to which they seem to have adjusted themselves—bears its fruits among women in neurasthenia, headaches, and the derangement of the organs which are the basis of their different nervous constitution. It is sufficiently clear to those who have seen the personal reactions of working girls to the piecework system, that when women attain, as men in various industries have attained, the practical management of the factory, piecework will get a setback.

But not merely good conditions, not merely a living wage, not merely a ten or an eight hour day—all that self-government in the shop can bring is the object of the Women's Trade Union League.

"The chief social gain of the union shop," says Mrs. Robins, "is not its generally better wages and shorter hours, but rather the incentive it offers for initiative and social leadership, the call it makes, through the common industrial relationship and the common hope, upon the moral and reasoning faculties, and the sense of fellowship, independence and group strength it develops. In every workshop of say thirty girls there is undreamed of initiative and capacity for social leadership and control—unknown wealth of intellectual and moral resources."

It is, in fact, this form of activity which to many thousands of factory girls makes the difference between living and existing, between a painful, necessary drudgery and a happy exertion of all their faculties. It can give them a more useful education than any school, a more vital faith than any church, a more invigorating sense of power than any other career open to them.

To do all these things it must be indigenous to working-class soil. No benefaction originating in the philanthropic motives of middle-class people, no enterprise of patronage, will ever have any such meaning. A movement, to have such meaning, must be of the working class, and by the working class, as well as for the working class. It must be imbued with working-class feeling, and it must subserve working-class ideals.

It is the distinction of Mrs. Robins that she has seen this. She has gone to the workers to learn rather than to teach—she has sought to unfold the ideals and capacities latent in working girls rather than impress upon them the alien ideals and capacities of another class.

"Just"—it is Mrs. Robins that speaks—"as under a despotic church and a feudal state the possible power and beauty of the common people was denied expression, so under industrial feudalism the intellectual and moral powers of the workers are slowly choked to death, with incalculable loss to the individual and the race. It is easy to kill; it requires a great spirit as well as a great mind to arouse the dormant energies, to vitalize them and to make them creative forces for good."

One is reminded of the words of John Galsworthy, addressed to workingwomen: "There is beginning to be a little light in the sky; whether the sun is ever to break through depends on your constancy, and courage, and wisdom. The future is in your hands more than in the hands of men; it rests on your virtues and well-being, rather than on the virtues and the welfare of men, for it is you who produce and mold the Future."

There are 6,000,000 working women in the United States, and half of them are girls under 21. One may go out any day in the city streets, at morning or noon or evening, and look at a representative hundred of them. The factories have not been able to rob them of beauty and strength and the charm of femininity, and in that beauty and strength and charm there is a world of promise. And that promise already begins to be unfolded when to them comes Mrs. Robins with a gospel germane to their natures, saying, "Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams."