[60] We have heard since this was written that women are employed on linotype machines in a prosperous provincial newspaper and general printing office.
Here again we have had evidence of the most conclusive nature to show that the work of women is special in its simplicity, and that the craftswoman is hardly to be found anywhere. And they seem to have accepted the position, and make no attempt to move out of it.[61]
[61] This note is typical of a good many which occur in the reports of the investigators. "There are two girls now on the black-bordering machine whom the forewoman has offered to teach to place out by hand, but they won't learn it; it is too much trouble."
2. WHY WOMEN DO NOT TRAIN.
Some explanation is required for the fact that women have so little ambition to become skilled, especially seeing that their lack of technical knowledge and their willingness to remain at work which is merely mechanical, i.e., folding, etc., explain their low wages, casual employment, and careless organisation.
Marriage as an industrial influence.
The physiological differences between men and women have sociological results. These differences have no doubt been exaggerated and emphasised by traditions of propriety, and the change of opinion indicated generally by the expression, "the woman movement," has done a great deal to bring down those differences to their natural proportions and relations. If certain claims of equality, such as women's suffrage, were generally accepted, men and women might tend to occupy a much more equal industrial status. But when all false emphasis and exaggeration have been removed, a considerable residuum of difference must remain.
The special status of the married woman will no doubt survive all readjustment of traditional modes of thought, and will tend to withdraw her mind from the steady pursuit of industrial efficiency, because she will never consider wage earning to be her special task in the world. That has tempted her hitherto to steer off from the currents in the mid-stream of industrial life, and float upon those that flow more sluggishly by the margin. Hence she has entered industry, not with expectations of long employment, but with hopes of a speedy release, and she has therefore been in haste to earn money at once, and unwilling to sink capital (either in time or money) in making herself efficient. She is found in the more mechanical and more easily acquired branches of work, and also in those which provide no future for men,[62] and her willingness to take low wages has been her great protection against competing machinery. She has preferred to remain incompetent. "Out of twenty-six girls," is the report from the manager of a well-known firm for high-class artistic bookbinding, "not one could he trust as a forewoman."
[62] An interesting illustration of this is afforded by the recent employment of women in typefounding in London. London has not been a place where women were much employed in this industry. For twenty or thirty years girls have been employed in Edinburgh typefoundries, at certain processes through which the type, when cast, has to go, but they have been introduced only within the last year or two in London, to take the place of boys who could not be got because the work offers no very satisfactory prospects for them, and because the introduction of the linotype and mono-type threatens the future of the typefounding industry. Cf. Aberdeen, p. 47, Manchester and Birmingham, p. 50.