Newer ideals of peace

by Jane Addams

Because women consider the government men’s affair and something which concerns itself with elections and alarms, they have become so confused in regard to their traditional business in life, the rearing of children, that they hear with complacency a statement made by the Nestor of sanitary reformers, that one-half of the tiny lives which make up the city’s death rate each year might be saved by a more thorough application of sanitary science. Because it implies the use of the suffrage, they do not consider it women’s business to save these lives. Are we going to lose ourselves in the old circle of convention and add to that sum of wrong-doing which is continually committed in the world because we do not look at things as they really are? Old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled. It is so easy to believe that things that used to exist still go on long after they are passed; it is so easy to commit irreparable blunders because we fail to correct our theories by our changing experience. So many of the stumbling-blocks against which we fall are the opportunities to which we have not adjusted ourselves. Because it shocks an obsolete ideal, we keep hold of a convention which no longer squares with our genuine insight, and we are slow to follow a clue which might enable us to solace and improve the life about us.

Why is it that women do not vote upon the matters which concern them so intimately? Why do they not follow these vital affairs and feel responsible for their proper administration, even though they have become municipalized? What would the result have been could women have regarded the suffrage, not as a right or a privilege, but as a mere piece of governmental machinery without which they could not perform their traditional functions under the changed conditions of city life? Could we view the whole situation as a matter of obligation and of normal development, it would be much simplified. We are at the beginning of a prolonged effort to incorporate a progressive developing life founded upon a response to the needs of all the people, into the requisite legal enactments and civic institutions. To be in any measure successful, this effort will require all the intelligent powers of observation, all the sympathy, all the common sense which may be gained from the whole adult population.

The statement is sometimes made that the franchise for women would be valuable only so far as the educated women exercised it. This statement totally disregards the fact that those matters in which woman’s judgment is most needed are far too primitive and basic to be largely influenced by what we call education. The sanitary condition of all the factories and workshops, for instance, in which the industrial processes are at present carried on in great cities, intimately affect the health and lives of thousands of workingwomen.

It is questionable whether women to-day, in spite of the fact that there are myriads of them in factories and shops, are doing their full share of the world’s work in the lines of production which have always been theirs. Even two centuries ago they did practically all the spinning, dyeing, weaving, and sewing. They carried on much of the brewing and baking and thousands of operations which have been pushed out of the domestic system into the factory system. But simply to keep on doing the work which their grandmothers did, was to find themselves surrounded by conditions over which they have no control.

Sometimes when I see dozens of young girls going into the factories of a certain biscuit company on the West Side of Chicago, they appear for the moment as a mere cross-section in the long procession of women who have furnished the breadstuffs from time immemorial, from the savage woman who ground the meal and baked a flat cake, through innumerable cottage hearths, kitchens, and bake ovens, to this huge concern in which they are still carrying on their traditional business. But always before, during the ages of this unending procession, women themselves were able to dictate concerning the hours and the immediate conditions of their work; even grinding the meal and baking the cake in the ashes was diversified by many other activities. But suddenly, since the application of steam to the processes of kneading bread and of turning the spindle, which really means only a different motor power and not in the least an essential change in her work, she has been denied the privilege of regulating the conditions which immediately surround her.

In the census of 1900, the section on “Occupations” shows very clearly in what direction the employment of women has been tending during the last twenty years. Two striking facts stand out vividly: first, the increase in the percentage of workingwomen over the percentage of men, and second, the large percentage of young women between sixteen and twenty years old in the total number of workingwomen as compared with the small percentage of young men of the same ages in the total number of workingmen. Practically one-half of the workingwomen in the United States are girls—young women under the age of twenty-five years. This increase in the number of young girls in industry is the more striking when taken in connection with the fact that industries of to-day differ most markedly from those of the past in the relentless speed which they require. This increase in speed is as marked in the depths of sweat-shop labor as in the most advanced New England mills, where the eight looms operated by each worker have increased to twelve, fourteen, and even sixteen looms. This speed, of course, brings a new strain into industry and tends inevitably to nervous exhaustion. Machines may be revolved more and more swiftly, but the girl workers have no increase in vitality responding to the heightened pressure. An ampler and more far-reaching protection than now exists, is needed in order to care for the health and safety of women in industry. Their youth, their helplessness, their increasing numbers, the conditions under which they are employed, all call for uniform and enforceable statutes. The elaborate regulations of dangerous trades, enacted in England and on the Continent for both adults and children, find no parallel in the United States. The injurious effects of employments involving the use of poisons, acids, gases, atmospheric extremes, or other dangerous processes, still await adequate investigation and legislation in this country. How shall this take place, save by the concerted efforts of the women themselves, those who are employed, and those other women who are intelligent as to the worker’s needs and who possess a conscience in regard to industrial affairs?

It is legitimate and necessary that women should make a study of certain trades and occupations. The production of sweated goods, from the human point of view, is not production at all, but waste. If the employer takes from the workers week by week more than his wages restore to them, he gradually reduces them to the state of industrial parasites. The wages of the sweated worker are either being supplemented by the wages of relatives and the gifts of charitable associations, or else her standard of living is so low that she is continually losing her vitality and tending to become a charge upon the community in a hospital or a poorhouse.[15]

Yet even the sweat-shops, in which woman carries on her old business of making clothing, had to be redeemed, so far as they have been redeemed, by the votes of men who passed an anti-sweat-shop law; by the city fathers, who, after much pleading, were induced to order an inspection of sweat-shops that they might be made to comply with sanitary regulations. Women directly controlled the surroundings of their work as long as their arrangements were domestic, but they cannot do this now unless they have the franchise, as yet the only mechanism devised by which a city selects its representative and by which a number of persons are able to embody their collective will in legislation. For a hundred years England has been legislating upon the subject of insanitary workshops, long and exhausting hours of work, night work for women, occupations in which pregnant women may be employed, and hundreds of other restrictions which we are only beginning to consider objects of legislation here.

So far as women have been able, in Chicago at least, to help the poorest workers in the sweat-shops, it has been accomplished by women organized into trades unions. The organization of Special Order Tailors found that it was comparatively simple for an employer to give the skilled operatives in a clothing factory more money by taking it away from the wages of the seam-sewer and button-holer. The fact that it resulted in one set of workers being helped at the expense of another set did not appeal to him, so long as he was satisfying the demand of the union without increasing the total cost of production. But the Special Order Tailors, at the sacrifice of their own wages and growth, made a determined effort to include even the sweat-shop workers in the benefits they had slowly secured for themselves. By means of the use of the label they were finally able to insist that no goods should be given out for home-finishing save to women presenting union cards, and they raised the wages from nine and eleven cents a dozen for finishing garments, to the minimum wage of fifteen cents. They also made a protest against the excessive subdivision of the labor upon garments, a practice which enables the manufacturer to use children and the least skilled adults. Thirty-two persons are commonly employed upon a single coat, and it is the purpose of the Special Order Tailors to have all the machine work performed by one worker, thus reducing the number working on one coat to twelve or fourteen. As this change will at the same time demand more skill on the part of the operator, and will increase the variety and interest in his work, these garment-makers are sacrificing both time and money for the defence of Ruskinian principles—one of the few actual attempts to recover the “joy of work.” Although the attempt was, of course, mixed with a desire to preserve a trade from the invasion of the unskilled, and a consequent lowering of wages, it also represented a genuine effort to preserve to the poorest worker some interest and value in the work itself. It is most unfair, however, to put this task upon the trades unionists and to so confuse it with their other efforts that it, too, becomes a cause of warfare. The poorest women are often but uncomprehending victims of this labor movement of which they understand so little, and which has become so much a matter of battle that helpless individuals are lost in the conflict.

A complicated situation occurs to me in illustration. A woman from the Hull-House Day Nursery came to me two years ago asking to borrow twenty-five dollars, a sum her union had imposed as a fine. She gave such an incoherent account of her plight that it was evident that she did not in the least understand what it was all about. A little investigation disclosed the following facts: The “Nursery Mother,” as I here call her for purposes of identification, had worked for a long time in an unorganized overall factory, where the proprietor, dealing as he did in goods purchased exclusively by workingmen, found it increasingly difficult to sell his overalls because they did not bear the union label. He finally made a request to the union that the employees in his factory be organized. This was done, he was given the use of the label, and upon this basis he prospered for several months.