Many of the evil effects of mothers being employed in factories is apparent to all, but the crowding of the home with strangers is no less disastrous to family life. The economic goal is the only possible one and the family loses its ethical purpose. The Pittsburgh Survey emphasized the effect of overcrowding the home. “As half of the family use the kitchen for sleeping, there is a close mingling of the lodgers with the family which endangers the children’s morals. In only four instances were there girls over fourteen found in the families taking lodgers, but even the younger children learn evil quickly from the free spoken men. One man in a position to know the situation intimately, spoke of the appalling familiarity with vice among children in these families.”[40]
In the city of York, England, the wages paid for unskilled work are often insufficient to provide food, shelter, and clothing for a family of moderate size, “in a state of bare physical efficiency.” Of the income of those families receiving less than 18s weekly the women contribute 50 per cent and the men 8 per cent. The small proportion contributed by the men of the household is due to a large number of families in which the father is either dead or sick. Where the income is 18s and under 21s per week and the family of a moderate size the male heads of the family contribute 76 per cent and the female head of the household 13.3 per cent. With the increase of the weekly earnings of the men, women contribute less and less.[41]
The investigation of Mr. Rowntree shows conclusively that married women of the poorest classes do not engage in industry outside the home for the sake of pin money. They work because circumstances compel them to do so, and just as soon as the economic pressure is somewhat relieved married women remain in their homes.
The statement is made in Women’s Work and Wages, that “Nearly all the home makers who answered the question as to why they worked gave one of three reasons. The most frequent was that the husband’s wages were either too small or too irregular to keep the home. Fifty-two per cent gave their answer in many varying forms, of which a frequent one was, ‘It is all very well at first, but what are you to do when you have three or four children like little steps around you?’”
“Others had worked all their lives; if the husband is a labourer earning at best 18s. per week and liable to many weeks without work, no other course seems possible.”[42]
Miss Collet says, “I have never yet come across a married woman in the working classes with such eagerness for pocket-money that she would work for it at the rate of 1/2d or 1d an hour. Whenever I found women who said they worked at very low rates they have been working for their living and for that of their children; their husbands have always been men disabled or out of work.”[43]
Frequently the wife of the unskilled worker does not go to the factory; her work is brought to her in her home. This is a great convenience to her for it enables her to remain with her children who are often too small to be left alone and it is impossible to take them to the factory. “The women who take work home from ware-houses, factories, or sub-contracting agents are, with comparatively few exceptions, married or widowed, if we exclude from consideration that large class described as dressmakers or seamstresses. The home workers are to be found in every grade of society among the wage-earning class; in the home of the middle-class clerk and in the room of the dock laborer; rarely, I think, in the tradesmen class, where wives can add to the family income more effectually by assisting in the management of the shop.”[44]
The taking of work into the home is to the advantage of the employer as well as to the immediate advantage of the employee. It saves the employer rent and tools and procures him cheaper labor. Women can afford to work for less under their own roof when it is a question of working for less or not at all. These women do not often compete with men, for their work is the poorest paid and the least skilled. Few men compete with women in the lower grades of work unless they are physically unable to compete with men for the better kinds of employments. On the other hand women usually perform some branch of work which is wholly abandoned to them by the men and they refrain, whether willingly or not, from engaging in the branches monopolized by their male rivals.[45]
The advantages of cheap production do not often fall to this class of laboring women. Says Mrs. Campbell, “The emancipation of women is well under way, when all underwear can be bought more cheaply than it is possible to make it up at home, and simple suits of very good material make it hardly more difficult for women to clothe herself without thought or worry, than it has long been for men. This is the word heard at a woman’s club not long ago, and reinforced within a week by two well-known journals edited in the interests of women at large.”
The emancipation on the one side has meant no corresponding emancipation for the other; and as one woman selects, well pleased, garment after garment, daintily tucked and trimmed and finished beyond any capacity of home sewing, marveling a little that a few dollars can give such lavish return, there arises, from narrow attic and dark, foul basement, and crowded factory, the cry of the women whose life blood is on these garments. Through burning scorching days of summer; through marrow-piercing cold of winter, in hunger and rags with white faced children at their knees, crying for more bread, or, silent from long weakness, looking with blank eyes at the flying needle, these women toil on, twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours even, before the fixed task is done.[46]