To-day you may say that Mrs. Black is “on her feet.” There are Nottingham lace curtains at her front windows as good as any in the whole row of Lamson’s Walk. The new chest of drawers she’s needed ever since she was married is a place to put the children’s clothes. And it’s such a help to keeping the three rooms tidy. Santa Claus came at Christmas with a graphophone. And you ought to see Mrs. Black’s fur coat! Three other women who haven’t got theirs yet were in the night she wore it home “just to feel the softness of it.” Their hands, do you know, hands that are hard and grimy with England’s black town soot, had never so much as touched fur before! And they’re going to wear it soon, if this war keeps up. For they’re all of them these new women in industry, like Mrs. Black.
Mrs. Black, to begin with, has her “separation allowance” because her husband’s at the front. That’s 12 shillings and sixpence per week for herself, 5 shillings for the first child, three shillings sixpence for the second and 2 shillings for each subsequent child. Well, with the five children, that makes 27 shillings a week coming in and there’s none of it going to the Great Boar’s Head on the corner, which always used to get a look-in on Mr. Black’s weekly wage envelope before Mrs. Black did. Now, in addition to this 27 shillings a week, which in itself is 5 shillings more than the family ever had before, Mrs. Black is at the factory where she is making 30 shillings a week. That’s 57 shillings a week, which is her household income more than doubled. It’s why 60,000 fewer persons in London were in receipt of poor relief in September, 1915, than in 1903, the previous most prosperous year known to the Board of Trade. In the West End of this town titled families are counting their “meatless” days. In the East End, families are celebrating meat days that were never known before the war. The Care Committee used to have to provide boots for over 300 school children in this district. This year there was only one family, the mother of which was ill, that needed boots!
RIGHT THIS WAY, LADIES, INTO INDUSTRY
Mrs. Lewis, this is the answer to your anxious inquiry: it’s prosperity that’s coming to you. In every warring country there are women of the working classes who have found it. You are going to be mobilised for the army of industry as your husband for the other army. Only there is no draft or conscription necessary. The recruiting station is just down the street at the factory that recently hung out that sign bright with new paint, “Women Wanted.” See them arriving at the entrance gate. Fall in line, Mrs. Lewis, and get measured for your new uniform. Yes, you are to have one. It’s some form of the things they call trousers. But I’m sure you won’t mind that. Put it on. Put it on quickly. In it you will find yourself the real new woman whose coming has hitherto been only proclaimed or prophesied on the waving banners of suffrage processions you’ve watched parading on the avenues. You are She for whom the ages have waited. This new garment they are handing you has the pocket in it for a pay envelope. You who have been toiling for your board and the clothes you could get after the rest of the family had theirs, are now a labourer worthy of hire. Economic independence, the political economists call it, as they take their pen in hand to make note of the long lines of you going into industry, later to write their deductions into scientific treatises about you.
Now, it may not particularly interest you that you are like this, a phenomenon of the 20th century, but there are plainer terms that I am sure you will understand. Listen, Mrs. Lewis: Every Saturday night there is going to be money in your own pocket. The convenience of this is that never again will you under any circumstances have to go through any one’s else pockets for it. Do you see? Right across those portals there where they want you so much that every obstacle that used to be piled in your pathway has been so surreptitiously carted away overnight, that you would hardly believe it ever was there, lie all promised opportunities. Susan B. Anthony pioneered for them. Mrs. Pankhurst smashed windows for them. Mrs. Catt is even now politically campaigning for them. And you, Mrs. Lewis, are to enter in. What will happen to you when you’ve joined up with the new woman movement?
Let us look at the advance columns over on the other side. No one met them with: “Woman, back to your kitchen!” Or, “This is unscriptural and your habits of marriage and maternity will interfere with shop routine.”
It was one of the most significant decisions of all time since the day of the Cave Woman, that morning when Mrs. Black got her aunt to come in to look after the children and, hanging up her gingham apron, walked out of the kitchen. Women were doing it all over Europe. They are to be counted now by the hundreds of thousands. Altogether we know that they number in the millions although we have not the exact returns from every country. By 1916 England had enrolled in industry 4,086,000 women and Germany 4,793,472 of whom 866,000 in England and 1,387,318 in Germany had never before been gainfully employed outside their own homes. France, Italy, Russia all have similar battalions. And the important fact is that these new recruits are going into industry differently. Women before had to push their way in. Women now are invited in.
Heretofore there were all the reasons in the world why a woman should not work outside her own home. Three generations of employment had not yet sufficed to efface the impression from the minds even of most young girls themselves who went out to earn their living that it was only a temporary expedient until they could marry and be supported ever after. Even when they discovered after marriage that they were still earning their own living just as much in their husband’s kitchen as anywhere they had been before, public opinion and the neighbours disapproved of their working for any one outside their own family. Who, Madam, would sew on your husband’s buttons? So strong was this sentiment that it even threatened to crystallise on the statute books. There were districts in Germany and in the North of England where they talked about passing a law against the employment of the married woman. Then fortunately about this time the world came to 1914 and the revolution of all established thought.
Everybody sees now a reason why Mrs. Black should work. Her country wants her to. And it has swept aside to the scrap-heap of ancient prejudice all the other reasons against the industrial employment of women. Among the rest, the most material reason, the most real reason of all, that woman’s place was the home and every other place was man’s. That was true. And it was one of the most incontrovertible facts that each woman who sought employment came up against. Industry had never been arranged for her needs or her convenience.
MAKING INDUSTRY OVER FOR HER