At one of the ovens I saw a woman half naked drawing the coke from one of the chambers. She had no covering on her head and very little on her person. Her appearance was that of one whose spirit had been broken by hardship and hard work. Her attire consisted of a chemise and a pair of cowhide boots. In a freight car close by stood another woman forking the coke as it came into the car. The woman stood in the doorway and was dressed in a rough, loose-fitting outer garment and an apron. Her person from the waist up was exposed. When she stooped over to handle the coke, she caught her hair between her teeth in order to keep it out of her way. Her babe which she brought to the works with her, lay in front of the car with scarcely any covering except the shadow of a wheel barrow which was turned up in order to protect the child from the rays of the sun.
The suffering of helpless infants and children from privation and neglect through enforced labor of the mother, is one of the most shocking things connected with this degradation of woman in labor. The ownership by the husband of the wife’s services; his power under the Christian law of church and state of compelling her to work for him; the public sentiment of church and state which not alone recognizes absolute authority over the wife as inhering in the husband, but which are the creators of such belief, are the causes of illness, death, moral degradation, insanity, crime and vice of every kind. One year even, of civilized housekeeping with its routine of washing, starching, ironing, scrubbing, cooking, baking, pickling, canning, sewing, sweeping, house-cleaning, etc., etc., with all their accompanying overheating and overlifting; the care of children both night and day, whether sick or well, the constant demands upon her time and strength, thrown upon women of the Christian household, are labors more severe than fell on the old-time savage woman of America during her whole life. Until the customs of civilization reached the Indians, their wives, according to Catlin, Schoolcraft and others, were not called upon to work with half the severity of the women of today, nor had they tradition of children ever born deaf, dumb or blind. Those kinds of labor pointed to as showing the hardships of an Indian woman’s life, Schoolcraft dismisses very lightly. The lodge built by her is not made of heavy posts and carpentry, but of thin poles bent over at the top, such as a child can lift. When a family changed its residence these poles were not removed; only the thin sheets of birch bark covering, were taken to the new rendezvous. The gathering of the fuel by the women, was cutting dry limbs of the forest not over eighteen inches in length, with a hatchet. The tillage of the fields shared alike by the old men, women and the boys, was very light. No oxen to drive, no plough to hold, no wheat to plant or thresh. The same corn hills were used year after year, forming small mounds that were long a puzzle to the antiquarian. The squash and the pumpkin grew luxuriantly, while the children made holidays of gathering nuts and acorns for winter use. And today Africa, “The Dark Continent” is the children’s paradise, says Mrs. French Sheldon, the wonderful woman explorer, who carried peace with her everywhere and whose investigations in that part of the world exceed in value those of Livingstone or Stanley. She says:
In all these months among the children every day, I never saw a child struck and I heard a child cry but twice while on the Dark Continent.
How different from the countries of Christian civilization where children, mere infants of three and four years, are put to the most severe labor or because of the mother’s enslaved condition, die from neglect. It will be said, but these instances, especially in the United States, are exceptional. This is not so, although the work performed may be of a different character. The wife even in this country is expected to understand and perform many kinds of labor. She is cook and baker, laundress and seamstress, nurse for her children and the sick, besides a thousand and one cares which rise before her every hour. One such overworked mother acknowledged to placing the cradle where the sun would shine in the baby’s eyes, thus compelling them to close, when she would push all out of the way underneath the bed. Said a German girl working “as help” in the modern kitchen of a well-to-do American family. “I plowed at home harnessed beside a cow, and the work was not as hard as in your hot kitchen.” The care of children and domestic labor are not compatible with each other. One must be neglected, and she of whom, “meals on time” are demanded, can say where the neglect necessarily falls. A consistent carrying out by man of his “curse” would cause him to take upon himself the entire work of the world; not alone tilling the soil, but all household labor; the baking and brewing, the cooking and cleaning and all the multitudinous forms of work which make such wearisomely incessant demands upon woman’s strength and time. From all sewing, knitting, crocheting, embroidering, she should be freed, and even beyond this, under the principles of his “curse,” upon man should fall all the work of rearing children, as woman’s “curse” so often quoted does not refer to aught but bringing them to life in sorrow and suffering. Custom, which has been defined as unwritten law, adds its force to legislative enactments and soon becomes as binding upon thought as a moral command. People soon cease to question a custom, or a law, accepting both in that conservative spirit so utterly destructive to liberty. For that reason what has long been so, is regarded as right, and even while regretting the neglect of her children so unavoidable to the ordinarily situated mothers, few women give thought to the cause bringing it about. Women are not sufficiently permeated with the meaning of personal liberty. They do not sufficiently investigate the causes of their restricted condition, and the break made within the past twenty-five to forty years against conditions, has rather been in the nature of a blind instinctive revolt, than brought about through philosophic thought except in the minds of a few, who by the protest of speech, opened the way that vast multitudes are now entering upon. Open rebellion against law is ever considered by the majority as rebellion against morality. Speaking of the moral influence of law, Sheldon Amos says:
As soon as a law is made and lifted out of the region of controversy, it begins to exercise a moral influence which is no less intense and widespreading for being almost imperceptible. Though law can never attempt to forbid all that is morally wrong, yet that gets to be held as morally wrong which the law forbids.
No less does unwritten law come to be regarded as morally right. The customs of society build up through teachings of the church, and laws of the state, have destroyed that sense of personal security among women which is the chief value of social life and of law. The very foundation of religion tends to this end even with man, but the division of rights and duties promulgated by the church as between man and woman, the changing form of laws—class legislation—has rendered the position of woman notably insecure. This usurpation is productive of immense loss to the state as France so clearly shows. Take the one article of food alone, the delicacies and the substantials alike are claimed by man. No proof of this statement other than the innumerable saloons and restaurants chiefly supported by men, is required. While the dairyman, the bird-fancier, the horse trainer, and even the pugilist, recognize the value of food as far as a factor of life and strength, where his own immediate money interest is concerned, neither governments, religions nor scientists have to any extent noted the influence of proper food for the mother upon the health and life of the unborn child. Victor Hugo, while upon the island of Guernsey, noted the vastly beneficial effect that even one good meal a week had upon the peasant children. Food, building muscles, nerves, the brain, what can be expected but a deterioration of humanity when mothers eat insufficient or improper food?
The effect of the kind of food eaten has recently been noted in the new industry of ostrich farming, in California, of which it is said: “Ostriches yield the best feathers if the birds are well cared for. The quality of the plumes depends upon the quality of the food. If the ostriches are well fed, their plumes are soft and big. Bad feeding makes the feathers hard and coarse.” Nor are animals from whom the best products are looked for, allowed to labor. Their lives are those of ease and comfort that best results may be obtained. Innutrition and the hard labor of expectant mothers are the two great factors in physical degeneration and infantile mortality. The question is not one of sentiment or of law or of religion, but of physiology. It does not alone involve the destiny of mothers but of the race. There is not a national problem, be it of war or population or finance that is not based upon the condition of woman. Its neglect has depopulated the world in times past, it has lessened intellectual development, it has almost entirely obliterated certain kinds of morality and can no longer be regarded from the standard of either of those great institutions, church or state.
The recent official report of the Factory Inspector of the state of New York upon the condition of working women, showed a condition quite in line with the worst features of foreign lands. Overwork, bad ventilation, low wages, poor food, all combining for their physical and moral destruction. The Churchman under heading of “In Darkest New York” speaks of the condition of the poor in that city, both men and women; but while not forgetting the wrongs of the male laborer, we must ever remember that the condition of woman is still lower, and the results of her severe work and semi-starvation, much more injurious to the world.
We must leave the tenements without attempting to reproduce any of the shocking cases of crowded rooms in which almost incredible numbers of poor wretches are huddled together even in summer, when Mr. Riis has found the thermometer rise to 115 degrees. In some of these places there is more than struggle; there is often starvation. Every once in a while a case of downright starvation gets into the papers and makes a sensation. But this is the exception. Were the whole truth known it would come home to the community with a shock that would arouse it to a more serious effort than the spasmodic undoing of its pursestrings. I am satisfied that hundreds of men, women and children are every day slowly starving to death with my medical friend’s complaint of “improper nourishment.” Within a single week I have had this year three cases of insanity provoked directly by poverty and want. Worse than even that is the evil case of thousands of ill-fated working girls. The average wages of 150,000 of them is 60 cents per day; and that includes the incomes of the stylish “cashiers” who earn $2 a day as well as the pittance of girls who earn 30 cents a day in east-side factories. The lot of the average saleswoman who does not partly depend on her family is hard indeed.
That the average wages of the 150,000 working girls in the city of New York alone are but sixty cents a day, some receiving as little as thirty cents in the east side factories; that 30,000 young girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen employed as cash girls cannot supply themselves with food unless having parents upon whom to partially depend, are no less moral than material questions. Nor are they questions confined to that one city, or to any one portion of the United States, or of christendom, but belong to humanity itself. As all are parts of one great whole, the evil that afflicts one class touches all; all suffer because of the wrong done to even one human being. The population of the city of New York is more largely comprised of women than of men and a great proportion of this class are dependent upon their own labor for a livelihood. Although many foreign-born women emigrate to this country, over two millions having landed upon our shores within the nine years from 1881 to 1890, it is not alone upon them these conditions of severe labor fall, but native-born American women, both within and without the household, suffer from the same kind of oppression. Even upon the Pacific coast where few foreigners except Chinese are found, little girls of five and six years are put to work in the jute mills and factories by side of their drudging mothers, whose wages do not equal those of the men employed. In government clerkships at Washington, women receive but one-half the pay that men receive for the same kind and quality of work. Although the sweating system in the manufactories of clothing has called the nation’s attention to its abuses, yet in the District of Columbia, under sole power of Congress, a system of similar nature exists. Nor are statistics of woman’s severe work in the United States of immediately recent date. The labor Commission report of the state of Connecticut for 1876, declaring that the wives and daughters of the farmer engage in work which he can find no man to do, rising at four o’clock in the morning and working until nine in the evening. Analyzing the statistics of the Massachusetts Labor Bureau for 1891, the Boston Globe showed the greatly inferior payment of women laborers: