Contemporary with the general acceptance of the sewing-machine, and intensifying the distress of the wage-worker, was the Civil War, which, in 1860, began to decimate the ranks of men and to convert into wage-earners large numbers of women who had been wage-expenders. Delicate women in the South, reared in affluence, waited upon by slaves, were thrown, by losses of male relatives and property, among the bread-winners. Numbers of these journeyed to Northern cities to hide their poverty as well as to gain entrance into the larger field of industries the North was supposed to offer. But here they were met by thousands of other women, native to the North, who, like their sisters of the South, through the death of those who had hitherto fought the battle of life for them, were obliged to become producers in the place of being consumers.
The distress experienced by workers of this class wrought that great revolution in thought which involved the education of women. This is one of the accepted factors of the present period. At that time agitation was rife as to what should be done for the advancement of women as workers. Miss Virginia Penny, in a book called “Think and Act,”[[175]] advocated the entrance of women into the trades and professions that were monopolized by men. “Apprentice,” she says, “ten thousand women to watchmakers; train ten thousand for teachers to the young; make ten thousand good accountants; put ten thousand more to be deaconesses trained by Florence Nightingale; put some thousands in the electric telegraph offices all over the country; educate one thousand lecturers for mechanics’ institutes; one thousand to read the best books to the working-people; train up ten thousand to manage washing-machines, sewing-machines, etc. Then the distressed needle-woman will vanish, the decayed gentlewoman and broken-down governess cease to exist.”
Writers like Gail Hamilton in the North and Catherine Cole in the South urged the higher education of women; their right to be educated the same as man; “to enter the same pursuits, receive the same wages, occupy the same posts and professions, wield the same influence, and, in a word, be independent of man as a means of support.”
These strangely reasonable, though novel propositions, met with as much public condemnation at the time as though, in place of being suggestions for elevating women into skillful, rational workers, they had advocated turning them into gamblers and drunkards. The fact was ignored that the majority of women had always been engaged in carrying on some kind of necessary industry, if only in untaught, helpless ways. Hence it became fashionable to say that “woman as a worker was a product of modern times.” Her entrance into the ranks of wealth-producers and wage-earners was called the “New Departure,” and was deplored by writers as calculated, by thwarting nature’s evident design in making her child-bearer, child-trainer, and house-mother, to rob her of special gifts of grace, beauty, and tenderness. The error of the day, it was argued, lay in the thought that woman should be self-supporting, and she was implored to stop and consider what homes would become,
Where woman reigns, the mother, daughter, wife,
Strews with fresh flowers the narrow way of life,
if “woman was to take her place beside man in every field of coarse, rough toil.”
The peculiarity of these arguments, intended to dissuade women from being workers, was, that while poets, philosophers, and essayists were picturing women as weak, tender creatures, clinging for protection to man as the vine to the oak, the lovely presiding geniuses of homes, the expenders of wealth produced by man, there were, according to the census of 1860, one million women working by the side of men in various domains of “coarse, rough toil.” These writers, clergymen for the most part, made the mistake, common to people in comfortable circumstances, of looking on the small, glittering world of dazzling drawing-rooms and boudoirs, where an elegant, dainty womanhood presides, as “woman’s world.” Living in this, they became blinded to that other, larger world of women without homes, with no time for the cultivation of the graces or personal adornment, who were obliged to work if they would live.
According to the newspapers of 1867 and of 1870, out of seventy thousand women (wage-earners) in the city of New York, not including domestics, twenty thousand were in a constant fight with starvation and pauperism. Seven thousand lived in cellars. Those who got sewing to do worked from seven in the morning until midnight making shirts at six cents apiece. The most rapid workers could scarcely, even with those long hours, make one dozen shirts and thus earn their seventy-two cents per day. The pay for drawers, undershirts, and blouses was in proportion. We read that in Boston there were, in 1868, “twenty thousand women working at starvation rates; eight thousand workers at twenty to twenty-five cents per day, twelve thousand workers for less than fifty cents, and even at these rates there was little work.” These women lived at times, it is said, “on one cracker a day for breakfast, dinner, and supper,” working from “dawn to dawn” to “get one mouthful of food.” In this same year, the New York journals reported thirty thousand girls struggling in that city with starvation and cold, making shirts and furnishing the thread at sixpence each. The condition of seventy-five thousand working women in the city beggared description. The New York Herald described them as living in “nasty tenement houses, in cellars unfit for human habitation, in pools of foulness, where every impurity is matured and every vice flourishes.” Women who could get sewing-machines worked at them for $2.50 per week, and the forty-one cents per day that they earned represented the work, if not the wages, of six other women.
The helplessness, the misery, the degradation of womanhood, laboring and starving on beggarly wages in rich and prosperous cities, arrested the attention of the thinking class to woman’s needs as it has never been arrested before. How to help woman to better her condition became, in 1868, one of the burning questions of the day. Gail Hamilton, Mrs. Stephens, Miss Penny, and others, attributed the distress of the factory and needle-women to the lack of educational training which obliged women to crowd into occupations requiring little, if any, skill. To remedy this, the establishment of industrial schools was advocated. Men, it was reasoned, had their trades’ apprenticeship system, schools, and universities, by which they were educated into a knowledge of many things; and by applying the same method to women, giving some thousands of them a professional training in each of the various trades, arts, and sciences useful to mankind, the ranks of the factory-seekers and needle-women in search of employment would be thinned sufficiently to cause the anomaly to vanish of millions of adult human beings laboring as men for the pay of children, and yet paying as men for whatever they got. Other remedies agitated were those of woman suffrage and the organization of women into societies for mutual protection and benefit.