And the British Association for the Advancement of Science has investigated and decided and announced: “Where female labour is either underpaid or is obviously superior to male labour, a special inducement offers itself to employers to retain the women.”
Can’t you see the efficiency expert at the elbow of Government, writing “Void” across the face of that scrap of paper? Industry cannot afford to let the women go.
And there are all the cloak-rooms with the plate-glass mirrors and the canteen dining-rooms done in pink, and blue, and duck’s-egg green and the new uniforms that Parliament made for the woman in industry! Oh, gentlemen, after all, why should she go home? For the new place in industry is the most comfortable place in which she has ever been in the world! Oh, I know the sociologists used to talk about the factory as so unhealthful for a woman. But you see, that was because no man knew how hard was domestic labour: he had never done it. And it was before the experts began to gather data on how unhealthful is the home.
FACTORY WORK EASY COMPARED WITH KITCHEN WORK
There is now a most interesting investigation under way in London. It is a scientific intensive study of the housewife, who is at last to be tabulated and indexed, just like any other labourer. The Women’s Industrial Council, who have undertaken it with the endorsement of the Government, announce: “It is quite probable the results may prove that the stretching motions involved in such domestic tasks as the washing of heavy sheets and blankets are more harmful than the stretching motions of the shop assistant or the vibrations which certain engineering employés meet in their work.” I went one day in London with the sociological investigator who is trying to find this out. She took me to Acton, which is the district where the washing is done for the great city. There are probably more laundries here than in any similar area in the world. We stopped to look at one of them. It is in a sanitary, new, up-to-date building with plenty of light and air and every new labour-saving device known to the trade. Then we called at some of the little cottages where live the women who work at this laundry. But to-day is Monday, which is the “slack” day of the week in the laundry business, and on Monday the employés remain at home to do their own “wash,” with the same appliances that have been used in home industry for a hundred years! The woman who came to the door when we knocked had just taken her hands out of the suds. She was still wiping them on her gingham apron as she talked. Do you know what she said? At house after house it was this, that Monday at home was her hardest day of the week. “O, yes, ma’am,” she said, “much harder than any of the days that I am at the laundry.” Why? Because at the laundry she has no lifting of any kind to do and no backbreaking scrubbing over a washboard. It is done by machinery, or if there are heavy sheets that must be lifted by hand, men are employed to do it. At home even when she’s so fortunate as to have a faucet, all of the water she must carry in pails from the sink to the “copper” to be heated.
Do you know, each time as we turned from a cottage door where the woman in the gingham apron stood wiping her wet hands, I thought of that lady in the engineering trade who operates an electrical crane from her easy chair; and the women conductors in Manchester sitting down between fares on the “flap” seats put in for their comfort. I think I know what the medical journal, The Lancet, means when it announced in the February, 1917, number that “Factory work, under fitting conditions may be so beneficial to women that it may lead to permanent benefit to the race.” And I am not surprised to learn that the Insurance Department of the English Government has recently discovered that the greatest percentage of illness among women occurs among domestic workers.
You see, these new tasks are not so much more laborious than the old as the world feared. And this war has somehow brought about the most undreamed of readjustments. In a London tube station I came upon one of them: my startled gaze encountered a man on his knees scrubbing the floor and a woman at the ticket window taking tickets!
Do you know, the more I see of the woman in industry, the more it looks to me as if she could stand it. Anyhow, she’s stronger than she used to be. One insurance society at Manchester with 26,000 members found that it paid out for sickness benefits in 1915, £300 less than in 1914. The insurance actuary attributed the improved health to the better food and better clothing the members were now able to buy through the wages they were receiving in the munitions factories. The annual report of Great Britain’s chief inspector of factories and workshops for 1916, commenting on the good health of the women employés, observes: “There can be little doubt that the high wages and the better food they have been able to enjoy in consequence, have done much to bring about this result.” And you don’t find among employers any more the complaint that women employés are less reliable than men because of their more frequent absences on account of illness. Very likely they may once have been so. Only a very strong woman could have been equal to the old overstrain of a man’s work in the shop plus a woman’s work in the home. And there was often a marked lowering of her vitality and efficiency. But the new improved man’s size wage envelope is proving, you see, the effectual remedy. Wages enough to buy good food and then to pay for some one to cook it—that has made a new woman of this woman in industry.
And she doesn’t want to go back to general housework in her own home, and to the “home” meals of white bread and boiled tea which the Home Office has specifically pointed out are not good enough on which to produce shells. She’s accustomed now to her breakfast bacon! The workingman’s wife at household labour had no Saturday half holidays in the kitchen. She had something like a sixteen hour day with no laws against overtime. Nobody bothered about how many hours she worked. Nobody counted her food calories. Nobody brought her roses. Nobody taught her to dance. Nobody noticed that she ought to be happy, without which she couldn’t be efficient. Most of all, gentlemen, there wasn’t any wage envelope there!
Do you know of any reason why she should wish to go back? Some 3000 of her were asked about it through a questionnaire recently sent out in England. And of these 3000, 2500 answered: “I prefer to remain in the work I am now doing.” I am sure Mrs. Black would.