§ 14. If the above analysis is correct it is not difference of sex which is the chief factor in determining the industrial position of woman. Machinery knows neither sex nor age, but chooses the labour embodied in man, woman, or child, which is cheapest in relation to the degree of its efficiency. Thus the causes which depress woman's industry are chiefly the same which depress the industry of low-skilled men and children. In each case the limits of productivity and "wants" are lower than for skilled men workers, while the terms of their competition keep their wages to the lower level and check the full incentive to efficiency. Setting aside the case of children, who are protected in some degree from the full effects of competition upon the conditions of their employment, the industrial case of women is closely analogous to that of low-skilled men. The physical weakness of the one corresponds with the technical weakness of the other so far as efficiency is concerned; in both cases the low standard of wants gives a low minimum wage, while the excessive supply of labour, rendering concerted action almost impossible, keeps wages close to the minimum.
§ 15. The displacement of male adult labour which is going on by female, and, when permitted, by child labour, does not necessarily imply that women and children are doing more work and men less than they used to do. Before the industrial revolution women were quite as busily and numerously engaged in industry as now, and the children employed in textile and other work were often worked in their own homes with more cruel disregard to health and happiness than is now the case. Even now the longest hours, the worst sanitary conditions, the lowest pay, are in the domestic industries of towns which still survive under modern industry. But though the regular factory women and the half-timers are generally better off in all the terms of their industry than the uninspected women and children who still slave in such domestic industries as the trimmings and match-box trades, the growing tendency of modern industry to engage women and children away from their homes is fraught with certain indirect important consequences. When industry was chiefly confined to domestic handicrafts, the claims of home life constantly pressed in and tempered the industrial life. The growth of factory work among women has brought with it inevitably a weakening of home interests and a neglect of home duties. The home has suffered what the factory has gained. Even the shortening of the factory day, accompanied as it has been by an intensification of labour during the shorter hours, does not leave the women competent and free for the proper ordering of home life. Home work is consciously slighted as secondary in importance and inferior, because it brings no wages, and if not neglected is performed in a perfunctory manner, which robs it of its grace and value. This narrowing of the home into a place of hurried meals and sleep is on the whole the worst injury modern industry has inflicted on our lives, and it is difficult to see how it can be compensated by any increase of material products. Factory life for women, save in extremely rare cases, saps the physical and moral health of the family. The exigencies of factory life are inconsistent with the position of a good mother, a good wife, or the maker of a home. Save in extreme circumstances, no increase of the family wage can balance these losses, whose values stand upon a higher qualitative level.
The direct economic tendency of machine-industry to take women and children away from the home to work must be looked upon as a tendency antagonistic to civilisation.[265] In the case of children, factory legislation of increasing severity has been necessary to prevent the spread or continuance of the evil.[266] The factory regulations restricting and protecting women are directly continuous with this policy, and may be regarded in the light of a protection of the home against the undue encroachments of the machine. How far further restrictions may be left to voluntary action and the growth of a saner estimate of values, or how far further legal protection of the home may be required, it remains for history to determine.
APPENDIX.
The following Table of Factory Legislation is constructed to illustrate the lines along which State protection of labour has advanced in this century in England. Four laws of development are clearly discernible:—
1. Movement along the line of strongest human feeling. Weakest workers are protected first, pauper children who are the least "free" parties in a contract, then protection advances to other children, young persons, women, men.
2. Protective legislation moves from the more highly organised to the less highly organised structures of industry. Cotton-mills are sole subjects of earliest Factory Acts, then woollen, then other textile trades, trades subsidiary to textile industries, non-textile factories, larger workshops, domestic workshops, retail trade, domestic service.
3. Growing complexity of aims and of legislative machinery. Primarily Factory Acts aim at regulation of quantity of labour. Reductions of the working-day forms a backbone of this legislation. A twelve-hour day, ten, nine, eight, covering wider classes of workers and applied to a larger number of industries, marks the line of movement. With each advance the basis of protection is broadened, other considerations of machine-fencing, sanitation, education, etc., entering more largely into the Acts.
4. Increased effectiveness of legislation with growth of centralised control. Local initiative and control proves ineffective, yields to State inspection, the number of inspectors growing, and their power increasing. Improvements in the mechanism of central control, an increased number of inspectors, working men and women inspectors, are the distinguishing features of recent State protection of labour.