So at the present day it is by no means true to say that wages are determined by Supply and Demand acting without restriction; Supply and Demand are artificially affected by all sorts of forces, not least of these being political forces, which have established fair wages clauses for men in Government employ, and are establishing trade-boards for many of the sweated industries in which women were the victims. We abandoned the principle of laissez-faire some half a century ago, and most of us have no desire to return to it, for under a system of absolutely free industrial competition, women must go under. But what we do desire is that protection shall be given to women in ways that will help them and not in ways that hinder them, and that wage-earning employments shall not be taken away from them without any equivalent. Experience has shown that men alone cannot be trusted to judge of women’s employment fairly. A gentleman is shocked to see a woman with her face covered with coal dust; but it is healthier to have coal dust on your face than cotton or lead dust in your lungs. They do not like to see a woman tip a coal waggon with a twist of her loins; they do not watch the overdone mother of a family carrying water up and down steep stairs on the eve of her confinement or a week or two after it. Three times has Parliament been invited to put a stop to the employment of women at the pit-brow, all for their good, of course. And the reason given is that it is bad for their health. The country was scoured to find a doctor or a nurse who would give evidence of cases of strain or injury, but all they found was evidence that consumptive girls from the cotton mills became robust and healthy at the pit-brow. The climax of absurdity was reached when gentlemen of the House of Commons pleaded that the women ought to be protected from hearing the bad language of the colliers. As if these same colliers spoke, in the home, quite a different, and only a parliamentary, language! And as if, when you come to think of it, a man’s right to swear were a more precious thing than a woman’s right to work! The fact is that, in this instance, as in many others, the work was to be taken away from the women because some men wanted it, and they were not ashamed to use their political power to try to filch the work from the women, though they were ashamed to own up to the reason. Their intention was thwarted, because there were men in Parliament and out who refused to be convinced by the pretension that the restriction was for the women’s good, and because the women made a tremendous fuss, came up to London, held meetings of protest, and roused the country and the press. But this was the third battle over this one position; and why should women be called upon to defend their right to earn their livelihood in honest, necessary labour? If women were to demand legislation to prohibit men from following the “unmanly” and “unhealthy” occupation of selling sarsanet over a counter, or writing accounts in a book, and “taking the bread out of the mouths of the women,” there would be more to be said for it than there has been for many restrictions men have made on women’s work.
What the women in the movement want is the opening up of trades and professions to women. We should then find what women could do, and it would be unnecessary to prohibit them from doing what they could not do. If, further, a living wage were insisted on, those who did the work best, whether men or women, would be employed, and those who were not worth a living wage to any employer would drop out of employment and be dealt with by the State. It is bad business for man to treat woman as a competitor in the labour market, whom he will grind down and grind out altogether if he can. A sweated and degraded womanhood is as great a danger to the community as a sweated and degraded manhood.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
(2) The Mother
“In the dark womb where I began
My mother’s life made me a man;
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth;
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,