“But the tools of my trade, they are heavy for a woman’s hands.”
“There shall be special tools made.”
And there have been. So, the now famous “dilution” of labour has been arranged. Mrs. Black is “in munitions.” I saw her standing at a machine that is called a capstan lathe, drilling the opening in a circular piece of brass. There used to be employed in this shop, 1,500 men and the man power has been now so diluted, that there are 200 men and 1,300 women. There are rows and rows of the capstan lathes and down each alleyway, as the space between them is called, there are lines of women like Mrs. Black. They have to start the machine, to feed it, and control it, and stop it. In three weeks’ time most of them were able to learn these repetitive operations. But they do not yet know how to take the machine apart or to fix it if anything breaks. So up and down each row there goes a skilled man who is still retained for this, a “setter-up,” he is called in the trade. And to supervise each section there is a foreman. It was the foreman who called my attention to the machines. “They are,” he said, “small lathes, specially adapted to the women. We had them made in America since the war.”
EASY ENOUGH TO ARRANGE
Like that you see, it is done. Sometimes to make over the job for the woman, there was necessary only the simplest expedient like adding the “flap” seat in the Manchester tram-cars for the woman-conductor to rest between rush hours. Even in skilled trades it hasn’t always been necessary to remodel an entire machine. Sometimes only a lever has to be shortened. Sometimes it has been done by the addition of “jigs and fixtures,” so that a process formerly involving judgment and experience, is now automatically performed at a touch from the operator. Are there heavy weights to be lifted? The paper factories met the situation by reducing the size of the parcel. The leather, tanning and currying trade put in special lifting tackle. The chemical industries have trucks for transporting the heavy carboys. The pottery and brick trades have trolleys. And the engineering trade, for manipulating the heavy shells, has put in electrical cranes and carriages: they are operated by a woman who sits in a sort of easy chair from which she only lifts her hand to touch the right lever.
These and other innovations have been made in accordance with a definite plan. You should hear it just the way a government says it: “In considering the physical capacity of a woman factory worker,” the Home Office directs, “it should be remembered that her body is physiologically different from and less strongly built than that of a man. It is desirable that the lifting and carrying of heavy weights and all sudden violent or physically unsuitable movements in the operation of machines should so far as practicable be avoided. Often a simple appliance or the alteration of a movement modifies an objectionable feature when it does not altogether remove it. When standing is absolutely unavoidable, the hours and spells of employment should be proportionately short, and seats should be available for use during the brief pauses that occasionally occur while waiting for material or the adjustment of a tool.”
There is one further instruction: “The introduction of women into factories where men only have hitherto been employed will necessitate some rearrangement in the way of special attention to the fencing of belts, pulleys and machine tools.”
Well, there are now some ninety-six trades and some 1,701 processes in which the workshop has been gotten ready like this, and woman labour has been introduced. You see how easily it has all been brought about now, when every one, instead of putting their heads together on How can we keep the women out, is planning eagerly, How can we get the women in.
And do you know that Mrs. Black cannot so much as have a headache to-morrow morning, without the English Government being sorry about it? Every industry in the land has received its envelope, black-lettered, “On His Majesty’s Business” and inside this note: “Care on the part of employers to secure the welfare of women brought in to take the place of men in the present emergency will greatly increase the probability of their employment proving successful.” A nation, you see, is interested in Mrs. Black’s success. “Who works fights,” announced the Government when it invited Mrs. Black into industry. The badge, a triangle of brass, that she wears on the front of her khaki tunic, is inscribed “On War Service.” The French women in the munitions factories wear on their left sleeve an armlet with an embroidered insignia, a bursting bomb, which says the same thing.
Mrs. Black, I believe as a matter of fact, did have a headache one morning. And her output of munitions fell off. Now that must not happen. For the lack of the shells, you know, a battle might be lost. The headache was investigated by the Factory Inspector. And the Government made a great discovery, I think we may say as important to us, to every woman who works, as was Watt’s discovery of the principle of the steam-engine that day he watched the tea kettle. This was what the factory inspector found out: Last night after Mrs. Black left the shop, there was the dinner to cook, and it was eight o’clock before she could get it ready. Then, of course, there were the dishes to wash. Then she swept all her house through. Then she put the clothes to soak in the tub over night. Then she worked on the stockings in the piled-up mending basket until midnight. Then she went to bed, so that she could be awake next morning at four o’clock. And in the morning she built a fire under the “copper” and heated the water and washed the clothes and boiled them and hung them out on the line. And Mrs. Black, having already done a woman’s work before dawn, went out to fill in the rest of the day at a man’s work!