BEYOND THE PHYSICAL ENDURANCE OF MEN
This, you should remember, was the woman whom the government had hesitated about asking to work “overtime” on war orders. Would it be possible to extend labour’s eight-hour day, they had asked. The Trade Unions, when asked, had said it would be a great tax on the physique of men. It was more than they were equal to under ordinary circumstances. But, well, as an emergency measure, and for the duration of the war only, Union rules would be suspended to permit of overtime. But even then the Government decided on the eight-hour limit for women, in exceptional circumstances permitting twelve hours. But an employer working women longer should be liable to arrest!
Then came the Factory Inspector’s report laid before the Home Office: Mrs. Black was working a 20-hour day! Her case was not at all unique. “Overtime” on home work is, of course, what the great majority of women who have gotten into industry in the past or into a profession or a career; have been accustomed to. Only nobody ever noticed it before!
Now every War Office saw it as early as the first year of the war: No woman could do a woman’s work in the home and a man’s work in the shop and maintain the maximum output. The efficiency experts were summoned all over Europe. They were shocked at such uneconomic management. Could you expect any competent workingman to cook his own dinner? There’d be a strike if you did. Why in thunder, then, should Mrs. Black be expected to cook hers? And every nation hurried to set up in its factories the industrial canteen, where meals are prepared and served to employés at cost price.
At one of these industrial canteens at a factory in the suburbs of Paris, I sat down to dinner with 600 working people. The chef, who had shown me with pride through his great store-rooms of supplies, apologised for the day’s menu: He was humiliated that there would be neither rabbits nor chicken, but with a war-market one did the best they could. The a la carte bill of fare proceeded from hors-d’œuvres through entrées and roasts to salads and to dessert and cheese, and there was wine on every table. You selected, of course, what you wished to pay for. Marie, on my right, I noticed, paid for her dinner, 1 franc fifty. Jacques, on my left, I saw hand the waiter 1 franc seventy-five. My check came to two francs. It was a better dinner than I was accustomed to for three times the money at the Hotel Regina in the Rue de Rivoli. In England at the great Woolwich Arsenal, Mrs. Black gets meat and two vegetables for eightpence, which is 16 cents, and dessert for 2½ pence which is 5 cents. For an expenditure not to exceed 25 pence which is 50 cents, you can get at any of the industrial canteens in England, the four meals for the day for which the following is a sample menu:
| Cost in Pence | ||
| Breakfast: | Bacon, 3 rashers | 4 |
| Bread, 3 slices, butter and jam | 2 | |
| Tomato | ½ | |
| Sugar | ⅒ | |
| Milk | ½ | |
| Dinner: | Roast beef | 4 |
| Yorkshire pudding | 1½ | |
| Potatoes | ¾ | |
| Cabbage | 1 | |
| Apple pie and custard | 1½ | |
| Baked plum pudding | 1 | |
| Tea: | 2 slices bread, butter and jam | 2½ |
| Cake | ½ | |
| Sugar | ⅒ | |
| Milk | ½ | |
| Jam tarts | 1 | |
| Supper: | 2 slices bread | 2 |
| Cheese | 1 | |
| Meat | 2 | |
| Pickles | ½ | |
| Tea, coffee, cocoa, or milk with above | ½—1½ |
What’s happened from Mrs. Black’s headache is like a tale from the “Arabian Nights.” A magic wand has been waved over the factory. “It should be made,” a Frenchman told me in his enthusiasm, “a little Paradise for woman.” And that seems to be the way they’re feeling everywhere. Government solicitude in England for the new woman in industry resulted in 1916 in a new act for the statute books under which the Home Office is given wide powers to arrange for her comfort. The scientists of a kingdom have been engaged to study “Woman.” Their observations and deductions are every little while embodied in a “white paper.” There have been some fourteen of these “white papers” through which the discoveries are disseminated to the factories.
There is a staff of great chemists in government laboratories who arrange the menus just mentioned, which are really formulas for efficiency. Fat, protein and carbohydrates have been carefully proportioned to produce the requisite calories of energy for a maximum output. They emphasise the importance of the canteen with this announcement: “For a large class of workers, home meals are hurried and, especially for women, too often consist of white bread and boiled tea. Probably much broken time and illness result from this cause.”
There is a staff of competent architects who were first called in that there might be provided a place in which to eat the carefully prepared meals. “Environment,” it is announced, “has a distinct effect on digestion.” So a White Paper submitted diagrams for the canteen building. “The site,” it said, “should have a pleasant, open outlook and a southern aspect. The interior should present a clean and cheerful appearance. The colour scheme may be in pink, duck’s-egg green or primrose grey.” Estimates are furnished. A dining-room to be built on the basis of 8.5 square feet of space per person may be erected at a cost not to exceed 7 pounds per place. Table and cookery equipment can be installed at a rate for 1,000 employés of 30 shillings, 500 employés 32 shillings, and 100 employés 47 shillings per head.
And well, you know how it is when you put so much as a back porch on the house. You sometimes get so interested in improving, that you can’t stop. Often you remodel the whole house. Well, the factory had to keep up with the new dining-room. The White Papers began to say that the workroom windows had better be washed, and the ceilings whitewashed and for artificial lighting, shaded arc-lights were recommended. “The question of lighting,” the report reads, “is of special importance, now that women are employed in large numbers. Bad lighting affects the output unfavourably, not only by making good and rapid work more difficult, but by causing eye-strain.”