It was in keeping with the drab colored experiences of her seventy hard years that her contribution to the long struggle should have been one of inglorious flight, nevertheless she had gallantly recognized the Trades Union organizer as a comrade in a common cause. She cherished in her heart the memory of one golden moment when she had faintly heard the trumpets summon her and had made her utmost response.
When the simple story of a lifetime of sacrifice to family obligations and of one supreme effort to respond to a social claim came to an end, I reflected that for more than half a century the narrator had freely given all her time, all her earnings, all her affections, and yet during the long period had developed no habit of self-pity. At a crucial moment she had been able to estimate life, not in terms of her self-immolation but in relation to a hard pressed multitude of fellow workers.
As she sat there, a tall, gaunt woman broken through her devotion, she inevitably suggested the industrial wrongs and oppressions suffered by the women who, forgotten and neglected, perform so much of the unlovely drudgery upon which our industrial order depends. At the moment I could recall only one of her starved ambitions which to my knowledge had ever been attained. When a friend tenderly placed a pair of white satin slippers upon the coffined feet of her old mother who for more than ninety years had travelled a long hard road and had stumbled against many stones, the loving heart of the aged daughter overflowed. “It is herself would know how I prayed for white satin shoes for the burial, thinking as how they might make it up to mother, she who never knew where the next pair was coming from and often had to borrow to go to Mass.” I remembered that as my friend and I left the spotless bare room wrapped in the mystery of death and walked back to Hull-House together, we passed a little child who proudly challenged our attention to his new shoes, “shiny” in the first moment of joyous possession. We could but recognize the epitome of the hard struggle of the very poor, from the moment they scramble out of their rude cradles until they are lowered into their “partial payment” graves, to keep shoes upon their feet. The rare moments of touching pleasure when the simple desire for “a new pair” is fulfilled are doubtless indicated in the early fairy tales by the rewards of glistening red shoes or glass slippers to the good child; in the religious allegories which turn life itself into one long pilgrimage, by the promises to the faithful that they shall be shod with the sandals of righteousness and to the blessed ones, who having formally renounced the world, forswearing shoes altogether and humbly walking on without them, that their bruised and torn feet shall yet gleam lily-white on the streets of Paradise.
I suddenly saw in this worn old woman who sat before me, what George Sand described as “a rare and austere production of human suffering” and was so filled with a fresh consciousness of the long barren road travelled by the patient mother and daughter, that it merged into the Via Dolorosa of the Poor of the world. It may have been through this suggestion of an actual street that my memory vividly evoked a group of Russian pilgrims I had once seen in Holy Week as they triumphantly approached Jerusalem. Their heads, garlanded in wild flowers still fresh with early dew, were lifted in joyous singing but their broken and bleeding feet, bound in white cloth and thrust into sandals of stripped bark, were the actual sacrifice they were devoutly offering at the Sepulchre.
As my mind swiftly came back from the blossoming fields of Palestine to the crowded industrial district of Chicago, I found myself recalling a pensive remark made by the gifted Rachel Varnhagen, a century ago. “Careless Fate never requires of us what we are really capable of doing.”
This overwhelming sense of the waste in woman’s unused capacity came to me again during a Garment Workers’ strike, when some of the young women involved were sitting in the very chairs occupied so recently by the visitors to the Devil Baby. They brought a curious reminder of the overworked and heavily burdened mothers who had yet been able to keep the taste of life in their mouths and who could not be overborne, because their endurance was rooted in simple and instinctive human affections. During the long strike these young women endured all sorts of privations without flinching; some of them actual hunger, most of them disapprobation from their families, and all of them a loss of that money which alone could procure for them the American standards so highly prized. Through participation in the strike they all took the risk of losing their positions, and yet, facing a future of unemployment and wretchedness, they displayed a stubborn endurance which held out week after week.
Perhaps because of my recent conversations with old women I received the impression that the very power of resistance in such a socialized undertaking as a strike, presents a marked contrast in both its origin and motives to the traditional type of endurance exercised by the mothers and grandmothers of the strikers or by their acquaintances among domestic women living in the same crowded tenements.
When a mother cares for a sick child for days and nights without relief, the long period of solicitude and dread exhausting every particle of her vitality, her strength is constantly renewed from the vast reservoirs of maternal love and pity whenever she touches the soft flesh or hears the plaintive little voice. But such girls as the strikers represent are steadily bending their energies to loveless and mechanical labor, and are obliged to go on without this direct and personal renewal of their powers of resistance. They must be sustained as soldiers on a forced march are sustained, by their sense of comradeship in high endeavor. Naturally, some of the young working women are never able to achieve this and can keep on with the monotony of factory work only when they persuade themselves that they are getting ready, and have not yet begun their own lives, because real living for them must include a home of their own and children to “do for.”
Such unutilized dynamic power illustrates the stupid waste of those impulses and affections, registered in the very bodily structure itself, which are ruthlessly pushed aside and considered of no moment to the work in which so many women are now engaged. My conversations with these girls of modern industry continually filled me with surprise that, required as they are to work under conditions unlike those which women have ever before encountered, they have not only made a remarkable adaptation but have so ably equipped themselves with a new set of motives. The girl who stands on one spot for fifty-six hours each week as she feeds a machine, endlessly repeating the identical motions of her arms and wrists, is much further from the type of woman’s traditional activity than her mother who cooks, cleans, and washes for the household. The young woman who spends her time in packing biscuits into boxes which come to her down a chute and are whirled away from her on a miniature trolley, has never even seen how the biscuits are made, for the factory proper is separated from the packing room by a door with the sign “No Admittance.” She must work all day without the vital and direct interest in the hourly results of her labors which her mother had.
These girls present a striking antithesis to the visitors to the Devil Baby who in their forlorn and cheerless efforts were merely continuing the traditional struggle against brutality, indifference, and neglect that helpless old people and little children might not be trampled in the dust. For these simple women it is the conditions under which the struggle is waged which have changed, rather than the nature of the contest. Even in this unlovely struggle, the older women utilize well-seasoned faculties, in contrast to the newly developed powers required by the multitude of young girls who for the first time in the long history of woman’s labor, are uniting their efforts in order to obtain opportunities for a fuller and more normal living. Organizing with men and women of divers nationalities they are obliged to form new ties absolutely unlike family bonds. On the other hand, these girls possess the enormous advantage over women of the domestic type of having experienced the discipline arising from impersonal obligations and of having tasted the freedom from economic dependence, so valuable that too heavy a price can scarcely be paid for it.