The sewing-machine had thrown women out of employment, as with it one woman could do the work of many. The number of work-seekers was enlarged by the influx, from the desolated South, of women whose entire living had been swept away. This army of uneducated workers from all sections were compelled not only to compete with men but with themselves as well. They sought, and could seek, only the lighter employments. Suffragists had their wish in regard to man's relinquishment of the "profitable employments," but not in the way they intended. The women for whose sake those profitable employments had been "monopolized" were now not only allowed by law but compelled by circumstance to toil from sun to sun at the best they could find to do; their frailer organizations were forced to bear "the double curse of work and pain." A nobler army of martyrs never turned their sorrows into blessings by the spirit in which they met them, than the American women who put their shoulders to the wheels of business that were moving in a hundred ways.
In 1843 a humble beginning at industrial education for girls had been made by the Female Guardian Society. In 1854 Peter Cooper established the Cooper Union with its generous facilities for women in industry and the arts. The Young Women's Christian Association was founded in Normal, Illinois, in 1872, and its work in the industrial branch spread, before many years, to every city and town in the land. Men originated for women the first "Woman's Protective Union." In twenty-five years it had reported legal suits won for 12,000 women, and $41,000 collected. In 1869 the great organization of the Knights of Labor was founded, and in its body of rules was one "to secure for both sexes equal pay for equal work." Failure proves that labor cannot, any more than paper, be coined into money by the mere fiat of a government or an organization.
But the great impulse to industrial education came through the Centennial Exposition held at Philadelphia in 1876. While the land was filled with the hum of preparation, as their contribution to that indication of peaceful progress, the Suffrage Associations were rolling up another petition in which to set forth their wrongs. After General Hawley, manager of the Exposition, had courteously refused to receive it in a public meeting, it was "pressed upon the Nation's heart" by delegates who pushed their way into Independence Hall. Outside that historic building, under the broiling sun, with Matilda Joslyn Gage to hold an umbrella over her, Miss Anthony read aloud a "Declaration of Independence" that re-echoed the sentiments of their first Declaration. It began by saying: "While the nation is buoyant with patriotism, and all hearts are attuned to praise, it is with sorrow we come to strike the one discordant note"—a typical and prophetic sentence.
From 1876 girls, as well as boys, received manual training in the public schools, and when that proved impracticable, the way was found to open industrial schools that should include classes for girls. Every State, and almost every city and town of any size, had them. It was not long ere multitudes of societies and organizations furnished means for women's education in business and mechanic arts. The growth of the philanthropy of self-help is one of the wonders of the past twenty-five years, and women, without the ballot, have largely assisted in developing it.
John Graham Brooks, in a lecture delivered in New York in the winter of 1895-6, on "Some Economic Aspects of the Woman Question," said: "Woman who used to do her work in the house now does it in the factory, and the same work, doing her work under absolutely new and different conditions, a change so great that it closes finally one argument that I hear again and again by those opposed to woman suffrage—namely, that the place for woman is in the home."
One condition under which she works that is not "absolutely new and different" is that of sex. Whatever as a woman she could not do in the home she cannot do abroad as a working-woman. She is in business as a business woman, not as a business man. Economic equality in such things as she can do is as unlike to a similarity in work which ignores sex conditions as a business corporation is to the government under whose laws it exists and by which its rights are defended. But even the external conditions are not so changed as might at first appear. The statistical proof of the youth of the majority of workers, the comparatively small number out of the whole population who go into business, and the fact that the domestic work for these very workers must be done by women, all show this.
The United States Census of 1890 shows that not quite four million women are "engaged in gainful occupations." Of these more than one and a half million are in domestic service, and nearly half a million in professional service, mainly as teachers. The most striking gain has been made in the lighter forms of profitable labor—by stenographers, typewriters, telegraph and telephone operators, cashiers, bookkeepers, etc. In 1870 there were 19,828 of these; in 1890, there were 228,421. The invention of the type-writing machine appears to be the ballot that has mainly produced this result. Carrol D. Wright says that in twenty cities examined in the United States he found, among 17,000 working-women, that 15,887 were single, 1,038 were widows, and 745 were married. This tells the same story. The mass of these women, like the mass of men, are working, not for public influence or station, but for the owning and holding of a home. The latest effort in self-help for the working class is the wise one of building them good homes. The best renting property has been found to be that which gives privacy and those distinctions that mark the family.
The latest report of the New York Bureau of Statistics of Labor shows that of 8,040 persons who registered for employment in New York city, 6,458 were men, and 1,582 were women. Of these, the foreign-born numbered 4,804, of whom 3,674 were men and 1,140 were women. The native-born numbered 3,234, of whom 2,796 were men, and 442 were women. The list included every trade and profession, from that of day laborer to that of clergyman, from that of school teacher to that of domestic servant, and showed that in the city where more women are employed than in any other place, the proportion of women to men was less than one fifth, and of native American to foreign-born women two fifths.
Mr. Brooks would favor suffrage because "in this new career there are reasons for every whit of protection." He mentions, as proof of woman's changed attitude as an industrial unit, that the Supreme Courts of Illinois and California have decided against special legislation for women. They did so on the ground that "they were now earning their livelihood under men's conditions, and should not have special legislation in business relations." If Mr. Brooks thinks that women wish the ballot to restore the special legislation, he does not know the Suffrage demand for equality. In England, when the laws were under discussion that forbid the employment of women more than a certain number of hours, and of children under certain ages, the Woman Suffrage leaders protested against the former as an infringement of personal rights and the ability to make contracts. But the special legislation for business women goes on, because, after all, the State knows that they are business women, and not business men, and the Suffrage quarrel in regard to privilege versus right goes on also.
Before the Committee of the Constitutional Convention, Mrs. Ecob, of Albany, said: "You speak of chivalry. We scorn the word! What has your chivalry done for the weaker sex? Women are the unpaid laborers of the world—outcasts in government." Mrs. Hood, of Brooklyn, on the same occasion said: "Who dares insult our American manhood by declaring that men will be less courteous to mother, wife, and sister, because they are political equals? Woman's equality in the industrial world has to-day produced a nobler, better chivalry than was ever conceived by the knights of old."