The long road of woman's memory

by Jane Addams

One evening, at Hull-House, as she came out of a citizenship class she had been attending, she tried to express some of the implications of the great undertaking in which more than ten thousand clothing employes are engaged. She repeated the statement made by the leader of the class that it was the solemn duty and obligation of the United States not only to keep a republican form of government alive upon the face of the earth and to fulfill the expectations of the founders but to modify and develope that type of government as conditions changed; he had said that the spirit of the New England town meeting might be manifested through a referendum vote in a large city, and that it must find some such vehicle of expression if it would survive under changed conditions. Her eyes were quite shining as she made her application to the experiment being carried on in the great clothing factory, with its many shops and departments unified in mutual effort. Evidently her attention had been caught by the similarity between the town meeting in its relation to a more elaborated form of government and the small isolated sweat-shop such as that formerly managed by her aunts, in its relation to the “biggest clothing factory in the world.” She had heard her fellow workers say that the “greenhorn” often found much friendliness in a small shop where his own language was spoken, and where he could earn at least a humble living until he grew accustomed to the habits of a new country, whereas he would have been lost and terrified in a factory. She felt very strongly the necessity of translating this sense of comradeship and friendliness into larger terms, and she believed that it could be done by the united workers.

As she sat by my desk, this woman who had not yet attained her fortieth year looked much older, as if illustrating the saying that hard labor so early robs the poor man of his youth that it makes his old age too long. She seemed to me for the moment to have gathered up in her own experience the transition from old conditions to new and to be standing on the threshold of a great development in the lives of working women.

As if she were conscious that I was recalling her past with which I had been so familiar, she began to speak again. “You know that I have both of my children with me now; the girl graduates from the Normal School in June and hopes to put herself through the University after she has taught for a few years. She reminds me of her father in her anxiety to know people of education, to get on in the world, and I am sure she will succeed. The boy has caught the other motive of pulling up with his own trade and of standing by the organized Labor Movement. Of course, sewing was too dull for him, and besides he grew ambitious to be a machinist when he was in the Industrial School where I put him with such a breaking of the heart when he was only ten years old. He has to admit, however, that even his own Machinists’ Union, with its traditional trade agreements and joint boards, is far behind our experiment. He went with me to the banquet on May Day. We had marched through the Loop in celebration of our new agreement and had stirring speeches at the Auditorium in the afternoon, but it was in the evening that we really felt at home with each other. When he saw the tremendous enthusiasm for our beloved leader—my boy, I am sorry to say, is a little inclined to despise foreigners and also tailors because they aren’t as big and brawny as the members of his dear Machinists’ Union—and really caught some notion of the statesmanlike ability required for the successful management of such a complicated and difficult industrial experiment, and when he realized that the ten per cent increase provided for in the new agreement was to go in greater proportion to those at the lower end of the scale, he suddenly forgot his prejudices and I saw him applauding with his hands and feet as if he had really let loose at last.

“Of course, it hasn’t been easy for me even during these later years to keep Helen in school and to support my aunt who is now too old and broken even to keep house for us. But we have got on, and quite aside from everything else I am thankful to have had a small share in this forward step in American democracy—at least, that’s what they called it at the banquet,” she ended shyly.

The experience of my friend bore testimony that in spite of all their difficulties and handicaps, something of social value is forced out of the very situation itself among that vast multitude of women whose oppression through the centuries has typified a sense of helpless and intolerable wrongs. Many of them, even the older ones, are being made slowly conscious of the subtle and impalpable filaments that secretly bind their experiences and moods into larger relations, and they are filled with a new happiness analogous to that of little children when they are first taught to join hands in ordered play.

Is such enthusiastic participation in organized effort but one manifestation of that desire for liberty and for a larger participation in life, found in great women’s souls all over the world?

In pursuance of such a desire the working women have the enormous advantage of constant association with each other, an advantage dimly perceived even by pioneer women two hundred years ago.

The hostesses of the famous drawing-rooms of the eighteenth century laid great stress on human intercourse as the individual’s best means of cultivation. Certain French women gave as a raison d’etre for their brilliant salons that “people must come together in order to exercise justice,” and they became enormously proud of the fact that by the end of the century “all Europe was thrown into a state of agitation if injustice were committed in any corner of it.”

This hypothesis was gallantly laid down a hundred years before the industrial revolution which, in its consummation, has congregated millions of women into factories all over the world. These myriad women, most of them young and untrained and all of them working under new industrial conditions, are gradually learning to “exercise justice” if only because they have “come together.” Their association has been accomplished under the stress of a common necessity, and they have been tutored in a mass at the hard school of bitter experience.

Were the sheltered drawing-room ladies the forerunners of such contemporary advocates of industrial justice or do we find a better prototype in those simple old women who, having reared their own children and having come to be regarded as a depository for domestic wisdom, dispense sound advice to bewildered mothers which always contains the admonition, “Never be partial to any one of them, always be as just as you know how.”