Statistics show that in 1890 just 4.6 per cent. of married women went to work. The figures had expanded to 5.6 per cent. ten years later, and in 1910 had reached 10.7 per cent.
It may be safely assumed that in the years which have elapsed between then and now the increase has more than kept pace with earlier figures. And it is equally certain that once men have been replaced by women under war conditions neither they nor employers will be inclined to restore ante-bellum conditions. The problem is one to give economists grave concern.
CHILD LABOR
MARY ALDEN HOPKINS, Harper’s Weekly, 1915.
“Too many children is as great a danger to family life as too few children,” said Mr. Owen Lovejoy, General Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee. A secretary of this Committee, working for the abolition of child labor, the improvement of the compulsory education laws, and the raising of the standards of education in backward states, Mr. Lovejoy has first knowledge of the condition of children in every state in the Union.
“How many are too many?” he was asked. “I should say any more than the mother can look after and the father earn a living for. There are always too many children in a family if they have to go to work before they get their growth and schooling. It may be that some day the state will help support the children, but under present conditions, as soon as there are too many children for the father to feed, some of them go to work in the mine or factory or store or mill near by. In doing this they not only injure their tender growing bodies, but indirectly they drag down the father’s wage. They go to work to help the family, but they really injure it. The wage tends to become an individual wage, the father receiving only enough for his personal maintenance, the mother working both at home and outside, and the children supporting themselves as soon as they can toddle into the cotton fields or hang onto the back of a delivery wagon. Thus the home is dissolved into constituent parts and the burden of the struggle for existence is laid on each. The more that children work, the lower the father’s wages become; the lower the father’s wages become, the more the children must work. So we evolve the vicious circle. The home becomes a mere rendezvous for the nightly gathering of bodies numb with weariness and minds drunk with sleep. No fine spiritual relation can exist between parents and children where the children are an economic asset to the parents. There are people who approve this state of affairs, but no one can who really cares for the welfare of children. We fight this condition with Child Labor Laws. If the children stay out of industry, the fathers have more work and make more money in the end. But one of the strongest factors against getting laws passed or enforced after they are passed, is the families’ immediate need of the children’s pitiful earnings. If there were fewer children in these families, it would be possible to keep them in school and leave the mines and factories to the fathers. There is another aspect to the matter. Not only do these unfortunate children drag down the physique and mentality of the race, but they keep many children of more thoughtful parents from being born at all. Just as long as there are many families that are too large, there will be other families that are too small. Yet these small families are potentially the best families of all. Serious-minded laboring people whose trades are being captured by child laborers are reluctant to bring offspring into a world which cannot promise a life of the simplest comforts in reward for hard labor. Here is the real danger of that race suicide so vigorously condemned by Ex-President Roosevelt and others; for while the man of virtue and strength is deterred from propagating his kind because of the jeopardy in which his children would stand, the vicious and the ignorant, the physically unfit and the discouraged are not deterred by any such consideration, but, regardless of consequences, continue to propagate their kind and swell the proportion of those who will be from birth to death a heavy liability against society. We regard the family—one father, one mother, a group of children to be fed, clothed, and educated during the years that precede maturity—as the fundamental institution of our civilization and the glory, thus far, of all social evolution. One of the causes out of which the family grew has direct bearing upon this matter—that to which Professor Fisk called attention as his chief contribution to the evolutionary theory—the prolonged period of infancy. The evolutionary trend has been to prolong infancy and adolescence, and thus to launch upon society better individuals. This is impossible where the older children in a family are crowded out of the home into the workshop.”
The Child Labor Bulletin, November, 1912, contains special articles on the child workers in New York tenement houses. Record after record shows a two-child income supporting a six-child family.
In connection with Mr. Lovejoy’s statement that a high birth rate encourages child labor, it is significant to find from the Galton Laboratories of the University of London, the statement that drastic child labor laws directly lower the birth rate. In “The Report on the English Birth Rate,” from the Eugenics Laboratory, Memoir XIX, Part 1, England, North of the Humber, Ethel M. Elderton, after touching on the influence of the raised standard of decency and comfort, lays the responsibility of the change chiefly upon the lessened economic value of the child to its parents.
Miss Elderton says, “Between 1871 and 1901 the number of children employed largely diminished. Neo-Malthusianism spread and the child ceased largely to be born, because it was no longer an economic asset. The Compulsory Education Act of 1876, the Factories and Workshops Act of 1878, and the Bradlaugh-Besant Trial of 1877 (concerning the lawfulness of publishing pamphlets on contraception) are not unrelated movements; they are connected with the lowered economic value of the child, and with the corresponding desire to do without it.” The relation which Miss Elderton traced between the higher ideals of protection to childhood and the lowered birth rate is the more interesting because she is deeply, passionately alarmed at England’s falling birth rate.
Mr. Lovejoy does not regard the falling birth rate as a wholly undesirable phenomenon. He says: “Children should be born when the parents are in good health, at intervals that will allow the mother to recover her strength, and only as many should be born as the parents can care for. There is no deeper sorrow than to know that a child has died for causes that might have been prevented if the parents had had more wisdom and foresight. The ideals of care and education which we have for our own children should be our ideals for all children. I shall not consider it a calamity if the birth rate falls to a point where every child is so precious to the nation that not one will be allowed to work in a factory or workshop or mine or store under the age of sixteen, and up to that time every one will have proper food and clothes and education. Our race-suicide danger is a danger, nor of quantity, but of quality.”