Mobilizing Woman-Power

by Harriot Stanton Blatch

This woman was not discussing the value of shorter working hours, she was pointing out that "equal pay" cannot rule for an entire group of workers when restrictions apply to part of the group and not to the whole body. We meet here, not a theory, but an incontrovertible fact. Pay is not equal, and cannot be, where conditions are wholly unequal. Protection for the woman worker means exactly what it would mean for the alien man if by law he were forbidden to work Saturday afternoon, overtime or at night, while the citizen worker was without restriction. The alien would be cut off from advancement in every trade in which he did not by overwhelming numbers dominate the situation, he would be kept to lower grade processes, he would receive much lower pay than the unprotected worker.

What common sense would lead us to expect in the hypothetical case of an alien man, has happened for the woman worker. Oddly enough she has not herself asked for this protection, but it has been urged very largely by women not of the industrial class. Women teachers, doctors, lawyers, women of leisure are the advocates of special legislation for industrial women. And yet in their own case they are entirely reasonable, and ask no favors. The woman teacher, and quite truly, insists that she works as hard and as long hours as the man in her grade of service, and on that sound foundation she builds her just demand for equal pay. Women doctors and lawyers have never asked for other than a square deal in their professions.

It would be well, perhaps, if industrial women were permitted to guide their own ship. They have knowledge enough to reach a safe harbor. There was a hint that they were about to assume the helm when the rank and file of union workers voted down at the conference of the Women's Trade Union League the resolution proposing a law to forbid women acting as conductors. It was also suggestive when a woman rose and asked of the speaker on dangerous trades, whether "men did not suffer from exposure to fumes, acids and dust."

Women have so long been urging that they are people, that they have forgotten, perchance, that men are people also. Men respond to rest and recreation as do human beings of the opposite sex. All workers need, and both sexes should have, protection. But if only one sex in industrial life can have bulwarks thrown up about it, men should be the favored ones just now. They are few, they are precious, they should be wrapped in cotton wool.

The industrial woman should stand unqualifiedly for the exclusion of children from gainful pursuits. Many years ago the British government had Miss Collett, one of the Labor Correspondents of the Board of Trade, make a special study of the influence of the employment of married women on infant mortality. The object was to prove that there was direct cause and effect. The investigator, after an exhaustive study covering many industrial centers, brought back the report, "Not proven." But the statistics showed one most interesting relation. In districts where the prevailing custom permitted the employment of children as early as the law allowed, infant mortality was high, and in districts where few children were employed, infant mortality was low. No explanation of this striking revelation was made in the report, but many who commented on the tables, pointed out that the wide-spread employment of the population in its early years sapped the vitality of the community to such an extent that its offspring were weakened. In other words, the employment of the immature child, more than the employment of that child when grown and married, works harm to the race.

The woman with a pay envelope must not, then, be willing to swell the family budget by turning her children into the wage market. For if she does, she creates a dangerous competitor for herself, and puts in certain jeopardy the virility of her nation. But in this war time women have secured more than new and larger pay envelopes, for each belligerent has reckoned up the woman's worth as mother in coin of the realm. It is enough to turn Eve's head--pay and pensions accorded her all at once.

Allowances to dependents are more, however, than financial expedients. They are part of the psychological stage-setting of the Great War. The fighting man must be more than well-fed, well-clothed, well-equipped, more than assured of care if ill or wounded; he must have his mind undisturbed by conditions at home. Governments now know that there must be no just cause for complaint in the family at the rear, if the man at the front is to be fully effective. In the interest of the fighting line, governments dare not leave the home to the haphazard care of charity.

And so the great belligerents have adopted systems for an uninterrupted flow of money aid to the hearthstone. The wife feels dependence on the nation for which she and her man are making sacrifices, the soldier has a sense of closer relationship with the country's cause for which he fights. Content at home and sense of gratitude in the trenches build up loyalty everywhere. The state allowance answers an economic want and a psychological necessity.

It is part of our national lack of technique that we were slow to make provision for the dependents of enlisted men, and even then were not whole hearted. It may have been our inherited distrust of the conscript that led us to feel that only by his volunteering something will a precious antidote be administered to the spirit of the drafted man. To protect his individualism from taint, the United States soldier must bear part of the financial burden. Europe, on the other hand, is working on a basis of reciprocity. The nation exacts service from the man and gives complete service to his dependents. In America the man is bound to serve the community, but the community is not bound to serve him. And yet in our case there is peculiar need of this even exchange of obligations. The care of parents in the United States falls directly upon their children, while some of our allies had, even before the war, carefully devised laws regulating pensions to the aged.

But first let us get the simple skeleton of the various allowance laws in mind. The scale of the allowance in different countries adapts itself to national standards and varying cost of living. The Canadian allowance seems the most generous. At least one-half of the soldier's pay is given directly to his dependents. The government gives an additional twenty dollars and the donations of the Patriotic Fund bring up the monthly allowance of a wife with three children to sixty dollars. The allowance, as might be expected, is low in Italy. The soldier's wife gets eight-tenths of a lira a day, each child four-tenths lira, and either a father or mother alone eight-tenths lira, or if both are living, one and three-tenths lire together. The British allowance is much higher, the wife getting twelve shillings and sixpence a week. If she has one child, the weekly allowance rises to nineteen and sixpence; if two children, to twenty-four and sixpence; if three, to twenty-eight shillings; and if there are four or more children, the mother receives three shillings a week for each extra child.