Concerning Women

by Suzanne La Follette

The range of their opportunities has been considerably restricted by prejudices arising from the traditional sexual division of labour in European society. “In the developed barbarism of Europe, only a few simple household industries were on the whole left to women.”[26] It was natural, then, when women followed industry into the larger field of machine-production, that it should be assumed that the industries in which they might fittingly engage would be those most nearly akin to the occupations which European society has regarded as peculiarly feminine. Before the World War, according to the Women’s Bureau, “over seventy-five per cent of all women engaged in manufacture were concentrated in the textile and garment-making industries”; and we have the same authority for the statement that “except for certain branches of food-manufacture—such as flour making ... women constitute from a third to two-thirds of the working forces in the industries concerned with the business of clothing and feeding both the fighting and the civilian population.” The new opportunities opened up by the exigency of the war-period widened considerably the scope of women’s activity; they were employed in machine-shops and tool-rooms, in steel- and rolling-mills, in instrument-factories, in factories manufacturing sewing machines and typewriters, in utensil-factories, in plants working in rubber and leather, in wood-working industries.

In some of these industries women continue to be employed. In others they were discharged to make room for men when the emergency was over. But even where they continue to be employed their opportunities for training are not equal to those of men. The Women’s Bureau in 1922 issued a valuable bulletin on “Industrial Opportunities and Training for Women and Girls.” According to this bulletin, the war-experience of women in new employments made it apparent that the most promising future for craftswomen in these fields lies in (a) machine-shops where light parts are made, (b) wood-product factories where assembling and finishing are important processes, (c) optical- and instrument-factories, (d) sheet-metal shops. The survey made by the Bureau to discover how many of the country’s industrial training schools were fitting women for these trades disclosed the fact that in nine States where women, because of industrial conditions, are most in need of training for machine-shop, sheet-metal, furniture, or optical work, they are either excluded by public vocational schools from the courses in such works, or they are not encouraged, as men are, to enter those courses. In Ohio, for example, women were enrolled in only five of the fifty-three public vocational schools reporting, and in these five schools they were taught dressmaking, costume-design, dress-pattern making, embroidery, power-machine sewing, and pottery making. Men on the other hand, received instruction in the following courses which women needed: machine-shop practice, tool-making, shop mathematics, mechanical drafting, blue-print reading, metallurgy, pattern-making, sheet-metal work, welding, auto-mechanics and repair, motor-cycle mechanics, gas engineering, cabinet-making and woodworking. Women were not debarred by rule or law from entering these courses, but they were not encouraged to do so. The courses, as one superintendent wrote, were “designed for men.” The situation in Ohio is more or less the same as that in the other eight States. Women are either not admitted to vocational courses designed to prepare workers for the industries cited, or they are not encouraged to enroll. Yet, as the Bureau points out, these institutions are operated at the expense of the taxpayers, women as well as men, and their equipment should be used to serve women as well as men. “It is obvious,” says the Bureau, “that the public vocational school authorities, with few exceptions, think of trade for women only in terms of dressmaking and millinery, and are as yet quite oblivious to the fact that these trades, except in certain clothing centers, are not the big employers of woman labour, nor are they always the best trades at which to earn a livelihood. It is the semi-public school that is beginning first to recognize the new position which woman occupies in industry as a result of the war and is opening to her its doors and guiding her into courses leading to efficiency in the new occupations.”

This blindness of the school authorities to the vocational needs of women goes to prove how strong is the force of traditional prejudices. The making of clothing has been largely in the hands of women for so long that even in cities where the only industries employing women are mechanical or woodworking, the public schools offer them courses in sewing and millinery. Prepossession does not yield all at once to established fact. If women can make a permanent place for themselves in their new occupations, public officials will eventually come to associate them with these occupations and follow the lead of the semi-public schools in fitting girls to engage in them on an equal footing with boys. But it will take time; and meanwhile women will continue to be at a disadvantage in entering these occupations. So will they be at a disadvantage in entering any occupation where they have not before been employed, or where they are employed only in insignificant numbers, so long as prejudice or conservatism continues to debar them, and the necessary training is not as freely available to them as it is to men.

Above all, so long as their industrial status continues to be, as the Women’s Bureau expresses it, “subsidiary to their home status,” they can never be on a really secure footing in the industrial world. While employers assume that all male workers have families to support and that all female workers are in industry rather through choice than necessity and may, in periods when work is slack, fall back on the support of male relatives, so long will women be the first workers to suffer from any slowing down of industry. This was strikingly illustrated during the period of unemployment which succeeded the intense industrial activity made necessary by the war, when women were discharged in great numbers to make room for men, and much resentment was voiced against their retention in places which might be filled by men. “Back to the home,” says the Women’s Bureau, “was a slogan all too easily and indiscriminately flung at the wage-earning woman by those who had little conception of the causes which forced her into wage-earning pursuits.” In periods of industrial depression it appears to be the regular practice to lay off the married women workers first, then the single women, and the men last.

How unjust to the woman worker, and how little justified by actual facts, is this survival of the idea that woman’s place is the home, has been shown through investigations undertaken by the Women’s Bureau and other agencies. The results of these investigations, published in Bulletin No. 30 of the Women’s Bureau, show that the woman in industry is not merely working for pin-money, as thoughtless people assume, but that she is more often not only supporting herself on her inadequate wage, but contributing materially to the support of dependents. “Contributing all earnings to the family fund,” says the Bureau, “is a very general practice among wage-earning women.” This of course means, as the Bureau remarks, that however much or little her contribution may mean to the family, for the woman herself it means a surrender of economic independence. The contrast between single men and single women in this respect is significant. In an investigation conducted among workers in the shoe-making industry of Manchester, New Hampshire, the Bureau found that “comparing single men and women, the women contributed (to the family income) more extensively, both actually and relatively.” The percentage of earnings contributed by sons and daughters is particularly interesting. The Bureau found that “in the families with per capita earnings of less than $500, 49.3 per cent of the sons and 71.6 per cent of the daughters contributed all their earnings, while in families with per capita earnings of $500 or more, 36.8 per cent of the sons and 53.4 per cent of the daughters contributed all earnings.” When one remembers that the wage paid to women was so much lower than that paid to men that the Bureau pronounced them to be scarcely comparable, the fact that “the daughters contributed a somewhat larger proportion of the family earnings than did the sons” takes on added significance. The sons contributed almost as much in actual money as the daughters, but out of their higher wages they retained something for themselves, “thus assuring themselves of a degree of independence and an opportunity to strike out for themselves which is denied the daughters.”

It is evident, then, that women, even in the “emancipation” of the industrial world, are continuing their immemorial self-sacrifice to the family, and that it is not the married woman alone, but the single woman as well, who makes this sacrifice. The conditions of the sacrifice have changed with the changes in industry, but the sacrifice continues. The productive labour of women appears to be quite as indispensable to their families as it was in the days when they spun and wove and sewed and baked at home. This being the case, there is obviously no other ground than prejudice for the assumption that men, as the natural providers, should have preference in the labour-market. According to the census of 1920, thirty-five per cent of the men in the country are single; therefore it is fair to assume that thirty-five per cent of the men in industry are single. Two-thirds of the women in industry are single, but the available figures show that a much larger percentage of these women than of single men are contributing all or most of their earnings to their families, while married women workers are contributing all of their earnings. In view of these figures, there is patent injustice in the assumption that all men and no women have dependents to support.

So is there injustice in the assumption that women are naturally at least partly dependent on male workers, and therefore may fairly be forced to accept a smaller wage than men. This assumption is not only grossly unfair to the woman worker, but it does not tally with fact. A fine example of the kind of defence for the practice of sweating women workers that can be based on this assumption is quoted by the Women’s Bureau from an unnamed commercial magazine. “Eighty-six per cent of women workers,” runs this masterpiece of sophistry, “live at home or with relatives. [So, in all likelihood, do eighty-six per cent of male workers.] It is immaterial in these cases whether the earnings of each measure up to the cost of living scheduled for a single woman living alone, so that the theory of the need of a sufficient wage to support a single woman living alone does not apply to eighty-six per cent of the entire population [sic].” This quotation, says the Bureau, is typical of the attitude of the employer who pays his women employees less than a living wage on the plea that they live at home and therefore have few expenses. It is equally remarkable in its ruthless disregard of the just claim of the woman worker to the same share in the product of her toil that the male worker is allowed; and in its disregard of the fact that so long as eighty-six per cent of women workers are forced to accept a starvation-wage because they live at home, the other fourteen per cent who do not live at home will be forced by the pressure of competition to accept the same starvation-wage. The question how this fourteen per cent will eke out a living—whether through overwork, begging or prostitution—does not of course concern the employer; for it is one of the striking differences between chattel-slavery and wage-slavery that the owner of the wage-slave is under no obligation to keep his workers from starving. That is, presumably, their own lookout.

If employers are not given to concerning themselves with this question, however, communities are. Thirteen States have enacted laws fixing a minimum wage for women, three have fixed minimum wages in specified occupations, one has fixed a minimum wage which its industrial welfare commission has power to change, and nine have created boards or commissions with power to fix minimum wage-rates. It may be noted that in those States where the rate is fixed by law, it has not responded to the rising cost of living. In Utah and Arkansas, for example, the minimum wage for an experienced woman is $7.50 a week. There is constant effort by interested individuals and organizations to get similar laws enacted in other States, in spite of the fact that in 1923 the Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional the minimum wage-law of the District of Columbia. Such efforts, of course, are in reality efforts to secure class-legislation, as are all attempts to secure special enactments designed to benefit or protect women.

Of such enactments there is an ever increasing number. So rapidly do they increase, indeed, that women may be said to be in a fair way to exchange the tyranny of men for that of organized uplift. They are sponsored by those well-meaning individuals who deplore social injustice enough to yearn to mitigate its evil results, but do not understand it well enough to attack its causes; by women’s organizations whose intelligence is hardly commensurate with their zeal to uplift their sex; and by men’s labour-organizations which are quite frankly in favour of any legislation that will lessen the chances of women to compete with men in the labour-market.[27] Given the combined suasion of these forces, and the inveterate sentimentalism which makes it hard for legislators to resist any plea on behalf of “the women and children,” almost anything in the way of rash and ill-considered legislation is possible, and even probable. There is on the statute-books of the various States an imposing array of laws designed to “protect” women workers. There are only four States which do not in some way limit the hours of work for women; there are eleven which limit the number of successive days that they may work; fourteen have fixed the amount of time that shall be allowed them for their midday meal; twelve have ruled that a woman may work only a given number of hours without a rest-period. Sixteen States prohibit night-work in certain industries or occupations; two limit her hours of night-work to eight. There is also a tendency to extend to women special protection against the hazards of industry. In seventeen States the employment of women in mines is prohibited. Two States prohibit their employment in any industry using abrasives. In four States they are not allowed to oil moving machinery. Three regulate their employment in core-making; and four regulate the amount of the weight that they may be required to lift—the maximum ranging, oddly enough, from fifteen pounds in Ohio and Pennsylvania to seventy-four pounds in Massachusetts. In addition to those regulations which prohibit women from working in certain occupations or under certain conditions, “each State,” says the Women’s Bureau, “has many laws and rulings which prescribe the conditions under which women should work, covering such matters as the lifting of weights, provision of seats, and proper provision for sanitation and comfort.” In six States, industrial commissions have power to make regulations for the health and welfare of workers. In three, the commissions have power to make regulations for women and minors only, and in one, for women, minors, learners, and apprentices.