This clash between the traditional conception of woman’s duty narrowed solely to family obligations and the claims arising from the complexity of the industrial situation, manifests scarcely a suggestion of the latent war so vaguely apprehended from the earliest times as a possibility between men and women. Even the restrained Greeks believed that when the obscure women at the bottom of society could endure no longer and “the oppressed women struck back, it would not be justice which came but the revenge of madness.” My own observation has discovered little suggesting this mood, certainly not among the women active in the Labor Movement.
I recall the recent experience of an organizer whom I very much admire for her valiant services in the garment trades and whom I have known from her earliest girlhood. Her character confirms the contention that our chief concern with the past is not what we have done, nor the adventures we have met, but the moral reaction of bygone events within ourselves.
As an orphaned child she had been cared for by two aunts who owned between them a little shop which pretended to be a tailoring establishment, but which in reality was a distributing centre for home work among the Italian women and newly immigrated Russian Jews living in the neighborhood. Her aunts, because they were Americans, superior in education and resources to the humble home workers, by dint of much bargaining both with the wholesale houses from which they procured the garments, and with the foreign women to whom they distributed them, had been able to secure a very good commission. For many years they had made a comfortable living, and in addition had acquired an exalted social position in the neighborhood, for they were much looked up to by those so dependent upon them for work.
Although my friend was expected to help in the shop as much as possible, she was sent regularly to school and had already “graduated from the eighth grade,” when a law was passed in the Illinois legislature, popularly known as the Anti Sweat-shop Law, which, within a year, had ruined her aunts’ business. After they had been fined in court for violating the law, a case which obtained much publicity because smallpox was discovered in two of the tenement houses in which the home finishers were living, the aunts were convinced that they could not continue to give out work to the Italian and Russian Jewish women. Reluctantly foregoing their commissions they then tried crowding their own house and shop with workers, only to be again taken into court and fined when the inspector discovered their kitchen and bedrooms full of half-finished garments. They both flatly refused to go into a factory to work, and after a futile attempt to revive the tailoring business, never very genuine, they were finally reduced to the dimensions of the tiny shop itself, which, under the new regulations as to light and air could accommodate but three people. My friend was at once taken from school and made one of these ill-paid workers and the little household was held together on the pittance the three could earn.
It was but natural, perhaps, that as these displaced proprietors became poorer they should ever grow more bitter against the reformers and the Trades Unionists who, between them, had secured the “high-brow” legislation which had destroyed their honest business.
The niece was married at eighteen to a clerk in a neighboring department store who worked four evenings a week and every other Sunday in his determination to get on. The bride moved into a more prosperous neighborhood and I saw little of her husband or herself for ten years, during which time they made four payments on the little house they occupied fully three miles from the now abandoned sweat-shop. Her husband worked hard with a consuming desire to rear his children in good surroundings as much as possible unlike the slums, as he somewhat brutally designated the neighborhood of his own youth. Through his unrelieved years in the cheap department store where, however, he had always felt a great satisfaction in being well dressed and had resisted any attempts of his fellow clerks to shorten their preposterous hours by trades-union organization, his health was gradually undermined and he finally developed tuberculosis. He was unable to support his family during the last decade of his life, and in her desperate need my friend went back to the only trade she had, that of finishing garments. During these years, although she sold the little house and placed her boy in a semi-philanthropic institution, she steadily faced the problem of earning insufficient wages for the support of the family, the pang of her failure constantly augmented by the knowledge that, in spite of her utmost efforts, the invalid never received the food and care his condition required. The clothing factory in which she then worked illustrated the lowest ebb in the fortune of the garment workers in American cities when, the sweat shop having been largely eliminated through the efforts of the factory inspectors, the workers from every land were crowded into the hastily organized factories. Separated by their diverse languages and through their long habits of home work, they had become too secretive even to tell one another the amount of wages each was receiving. It was as if the competition had been transferred from the sweat shop contractors to the individual workers themselves, sitting side by side in the same room, and perhaps it was not surprising that the workers felt as if they had been hunted down into their very kitchens and their poverty cruelly exposed to public view.
My friend shared this wretchedness and carried into it the bitterness of her early experience. She says now that she never caught even a suggestion that this might be but a transitional period to a more ordered sort of industrial life.
She did not tell me just when and how she had come to the conclusion that wages must be higher, that legal enactment for better conditions must be supplemented by the efforts of the workers themselves, but it was absolutely clear that she had independently reached that conclusion long before a strike in the clothing industry brought her into contact with the organized Labor Movement. It was certainly not until the year of her husband’s death that she became aware of the industrial changes which had been taking place during the twenty-two years since her aunts’ business had been ruined.
She was grateful that the knowledge had first come to her through an Italian girl working by her side, for, as she explained, her old attitude toward the “dagoes,” as a people to be exploited, had to be thoroughly changed before she could be of much real use in organizing a trade in which so many Italians were engaged. Even during the strike itself, to which she was thoroughly committed, having been convinced both of its inevitability and of the justice of its demands, she resented the fact that the leadership was in the hands of Russian Jews and, secure in her Americanism, she felt curiously aloof from the group with which she was so intimately identified.
A few months after the strike my friend fortunately secured a place in a manufactory of men’s clothing, in which there had been instituted a Trade Board for the adjustment of grievances, and where wages and hours were determined by joint agreement. When she was elected to the position of shop representative she found herself in the midst of one of the most interesting experiments being carried on in the United States, not only from the standpoint of labor but from that of applying the principles of representative government in a new field. She felt the stimulus of being a part in that most absorbing of all occupations—the reconstruction of a living world.