Miss Catherine Robinson was a student at Radcliffe in 1911; graduated from Miss Wheelock's Kindergarten Training School in 1915; has worked two winters among the children in the cotton mills of Georgia, and has been affiliated with Neighborhood House in East Boston, and with the Associated Charities in the Co-operative Workrooms. She is now connected with the Social Service Department of the Massachusetts General Hospital, her work being in the Orthopaedic Clinic for Children. Miss Robinson was formerly a suffragist, but after studying the question decided that the suffragists' claims are illusions which never become realities. She says: "Everything I do along these lines (Social Service) convinces me more than ever what a detriment the vote would be to our sex."
J. A. H.
Not long ago I heard Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the President of the National Woman Suffrage Association, say at Springfield:
"Laws have nothing to do with this question of woman suffrage; facts have nothing to do with it. I shall not answer facts. We do not promise to do great things for women; why should we? All we ask is the right to vote."
All suffrage speakers are not so frank about their inability to answer facts as Dr. Shaw is, nor do they cease from claiming that good laws for women exist chiefly in suffrage states.
Massachusetts gives to her women the best protection of any state in the Union. In January, 1915, New York ranked first, but since our legislative enactments of 1915, Massachusetts is again in the lead. We have, in the first place, the Maternity Act. Then we have the law prohibiting women in industry from working more than fifty-four hours per week. We have the absolute prohibition of night-work for our women in textile, mercantile, and manufacturing establishments. We are one of the five states in the Union to have such a law. All the five states are male suffrage states. Not a single woman suffrage state prohibits the night employment of its women; and yet among the laws safeguarding the health of women workers, the prohibition of night work is of the most fundamental importance.
Some women suffrage states do not even set a limit to the hours a woman may work. In Wyoming, Nevada, and Kansas—all woman suffrage states, you note—there is no limitation of hours of labor and no prohibition of night work. Some one may say that Colorado, California, Oregon and Washington have an eight-hour limitation. They have; but in each case the canneries are excepted, so that in those states where the cannery business is of vast importance, the women therein employed may work any number of hours and any time of the day or night. Not long ago in New York a similar law was proposed, allowing women and children to work seventy-two hours a week in canneries, but the bill was defeated. Colorado, to be sure, has the eight-hour law, but it does not prohibit night work for women, so that the eight hours can be at night; neither does Colorado require one day of rest in every seven. In Massachusetts and New York there is a law specifically requiring one day of rest in every seven for employees in factories, workshops, and all mercantile establishments.
Another way in which we can protect women is by early closing hours, and prohibition of work before a certain hour in the morning. Again we find that it is in the male suffrage states that women have acquired such protection, for New York sets an early closing hour of 5 p. m. for her women in factories, mercantile, and manufacturing establishments, and Massachusetts sets 6 p. m. Fourteen other male suffrage states set 10 p. m. as the closing hour; and all these states prohibit work before 6 a. m. What do we find in the woman suffrage states? Simply that out of the eleven suffrage states, one state, California, sets a 10 p. m. limit, but it does not apply to canneries.