Mobilizing Woman-Power Part 5

But everywhere I gathered the impression that the men are a bit uneasy.

A foreman in one factory pointed out a man who "would not have voted for suffrage" had he guessed that women were "to rush in and gobble everything up." I tried to make him see that it wasn't the vote that gave the voracious appet.i.te, but necessity or desire to serve. And in any case, women do not push men out, they push them up. In not a single instance did I hear of a man being turned off to make a place for a woman. He had left his job to go into the army, or was advanced to heavier or more skilled work.

As to how many women have supplanted men, or poured into the new war industries, no figures are available. One guess has put it at a million.

But that is merely a guess. I have seen them by the tens, the hundreds, the thousands. The number is large and rapidly increasing. We may know that something important is happening when even the government takes note. The United States Labor Department has recognized the new-comers by establishing a Division of Women's Work with branches in every State.

It looks as if these bureaus of employment would not be idle, with a showing of one thousand, five hundred applicants the first week the New York office was opened. It is to be hoped that this government effort will save the round pegs from getting into the square holes.

But even the round peg in the round hole brings difficulties. When Adam Smith a.s.serted that of all sorts of luggage man was the most difficult to move, he forgot woman! The instant women are carried into a new industry, they bring with them puzzling problems. Where shall we put their coats and picture hats, how shall we cover up their hair, what shall we feed them with? They must have lockers and rest rooms, caps and overalls, and above all, canteens. The munition workers, the conductors, in fact, all women in active work, get prodigiously hungry.

They have made a regiment of diet.i.tians think about calories. Here is what one of the street railways in New York City offered them on a given day:--

Tomato soup 10c. or with an order 5c.

Roast leg of veal 16c.

Beef 16c.

Lamb frica.s.see 16c.

Ham steak 16c.

Liver and onions 16c.

Sirloin steak 30c.

Small steak 20c.

Ham and eggs 20c.

Ham omelet 20c.

_Regular dinner_ Soup, meat, Vegetable, Dessert, coffee 25c.

Rice pudding 5c.

Pie 5c.

Cake 5c.

Banana or orange 5c.

The canteen is open every hour of the twenty-four, and the women conductors at the end of each run usually take a bite, and then have a substantial meal during the long break of an hour and a half in the middle of the ten-hour day.

Another problem brought to us by women in industry is, how can we house them? The war industries have drawn large numbers to new centers. The haphazard accommodation which men win put up with, won't satisfy women.

They demand more, and get more. To attract the best type of women the munition plants are putting up dormitories to accommodate hundreds of workers, and are making their plants more attractive, with rest rooms and hospital accommodation. Take, for instance, the Briggs and Stratton Company, which in order to draw high grade workers built its new factory in one of the best sections of Milwaukee. The workrooms are as clean as the proverbial Dutch woman's doorstep. From the top of the benches to the ceiling the walls are gla.s.s to ensure daylight in every corner, and by night the system of indirect lighting gives such perfectly diffused light that not a heavy shadow falls anywhere. And the hospital room and nurse--well, one would rejoice to have an accident daily!

The factory may become the exemplar for the home. The professional woman is going over the top, and with a good opinion of herself. "I can do this work better than any man," was the announcement made by a young woman from the Pacific Coast as she descended upon the city hall in an eastern town, credentials in her hand, and asked for the position of city chemist. There was not a microbe she did not know to its undoing, or a deadly poison she could not bring from its hiding place. The town had suffered from graft, and the mayor, thinking a woman might scare the thieves as well as the bacteria, appointed the chemist who believed in herself. And she is just one of many who have been taking up such work.

Formerly two-thirds of the positions filled by the New York Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations were secretarial or teaching positions; now three-fourths of its applicants have been placed as physicists, chemists, office managers, sanitary experts, exhibit secretaries, and the like. The temporary positions used to outnumber the permanent placements; at present the reverse is true. Of the women placed, four times as many as formerly get salaries ranging above eighteen hundred dollars a year.

The story told at the employment bureaus in connection with professional societies and clubs such as the Chemists' Club is the same. Women are being placed not merely as teachers of chemistry or as routine laboratory workers in hospitals, but also as experimental and control chemists in industrial plants. In the great rolling mills they are testing steel, at the copper smelters they are found in the laboratories. The government has thrown doors wide open to college-trained women. They are physicists and chemists in the United States Bureaus of Standards, Mines, and Soils, sanitary experts in military camps, research chemists in animal nutrition and fertilizers at state experiment stations.

But the industrial barrier is the one most recently scaled. Women are now found as a.n.a.lytical, research or control chemists in the canneries, in dye and electrical works, in flour and paper mills, in insecticide companies, and cement works. They test the steel that will carry us safely on our journeys, they pa.s.s upon the chemical composition of the flavor in our cake, as heads of departments in metal refining companies they determine the kind of copper battery we shall use, and they have a finger in our liquid glues, household oils and polishes.

And the awakened spirit of social responsibility has opened new callings. The college woman not only is beginning to fill welfare positions inside the factory, but is acting as protective officer in towns near military camps. Perhaps one of the newest and most interesting positions is that of "employment secretary." The losing of employees has become so serious and general that big industries have engaged women who devote their time to looking up absentees and finding out why each worker left.

And so we see on all hands women breaking through the old accustomed bounds.

Not only as workers but as voters, the war has called women over the top. Since that fateful August, 1914, four provinces of Canada and the Dominion itself have raised the banner of votes for women. Nevada and Montana declared for suffrage before the war was four months old, and Denmark enfranchised its women before the year was out. And when America went forth to fight for democracy abroad, Arkansas, Michigan, Vermont, Nebraska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, began to lay the foundations of freedom at home, and New York in no faltering voice proclaimed full liberty for all its people. Lastly Great Britain has enfranchised its women, and surely the Congress of the United States will not lag behind the Mother of Parliaments!

The world is facing changes as great as the breaking up of the feudal system. Causes as fundamental, more wide-spread, and more cataclysmic are at work than at the end of the Middle Ages. Among the changes none is more marked than the intensified development in what one may call, for lack of a better term, the woman movement. The advance in political freedom has moved steadily forward during the past quarter of a century, but in the last three years progress has been intense and striking.

The peculiarity in attainment of political democracy for women has lain in the fact that while for men economic freedom invariably preceded political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, in the case of women the conferring of the vote in no single case was related to the stage which the enfranchised group had attained in the matter of economic independence. Nowhere were even those women who were entirely lacking in economic freedom, excluded on that account from any extension of suffrage. Even in discussions of the right of suffrage no reference has ever been made, in dealing with women's claim, to the relation, universally recognized in the case of men, of political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt to economic status. Serfdom gave way to the wage system before democracy developed for men, and the colored man was emanc.i.p.ated before he was enfranchised. For this reason the coming of women as paid workers over the top may be regarded as epoch-making.

In any case, self-determination is certainly a strong element in attaining any real political freedom.

Complete service to their country in this crisis may lead women to that economic freedom which will change a political possession into a political power. But the requirement is readiness to do, and to do well, the task which offers. Man-power must give itself unreservedly at the front. Women must show not only eagerness but fitness to subst.i.tute for man-power. It will hearten the nation, help to make the path clear, if individual women declare that though the call to them has not yet come for a definite service, the time of waiting will not be spent in complaint, nor yet in foolish busy-ness, but in careful and conscientious training for useful work.

Each woman must prepare so that when the nation's need arises, she can stand at salute and say, "Here is your servant, trained and ready."

Women are not driven over the top. Through self-discipline, they go over it of their own accord.

VII

EVE'S PAY ENVELOPE

No woman is a cross between an angel and a goose. She is a very human creature. She has many of man's sins and some virtues of her own.

Moving up from slavery through all the various forms of serfdom--attachment to the soil, confinement to a given trade, exclusion from citizenship, payment in kind, on to full economic freedom, men have shown definite reactions at each step. Women respond to the same stimuli.

The free man is a better worker than slave or serf. So is the free woman. All the old gibes at her inept.i.tudes have broken their points against the actualities of her ability as a wage worker. The free man is more alert to obligation, more conscientious in performance, than the bond servant. So is the free woman. With pay envelope, or pension, Eve is a better helpmate and mother than ever before.

The free man carries a lighter heart than the villain. So does the free woman. Men have always borne personal grief more easily than women; observers remarked the fact. The reason is the same. An absorbing occupation, ordered and regarded as important, which brings a return allowing the recipient to patronize what he or she thinks wise, that brings happiness, not boisterous, but dignified. It may be a holocaust through which Eve gains that pay envelope, but the material possession brings gratification nevertheless. It is a tiny straw showing the set of the wind that leisure cla.s.s British women, however large their unearned bank account, show no reluctance to accept pay for their work, and full responsibility in their new position of employee.

Women are supposed to have liked to serve for mere love of service, for love of child, love of husband. There is, of course, many a subtle relation which can't be weighed and paid for; but toil, even for one's very own hearthstone, can be valued in hard cash. The daughters of Eve, no less than the sons of Adam, react happily to a recognition that expresses itself in a fair wage.

The verdict comes from all sides that women were never more content. Of course they are content. The weight of suppression is being lifted. For many their drudgery is for the first time paid for. Is not that invigorating? The pay envelope is equal to that of men. Is not that a new experience giving self-respect? Eve often finds her pay envelope heavier than that of the man working at her side. Right there in her hand, then, she holds proof that the old prejudice against her as an inferior worker is ill-founded.

Women are finding themselves. Even America's Eve discovers that pains and aches are not "woman's lot." She is under no curse in the twentieth century. With eighteen dollars a week for ringing up fares, and a possible thirty-five for "facing" fuse-parts, nothing can persuade her to be poor-spirited. She radiates the atmosphere, "I am needed!" Doors fly open to her. She is welcome everywhere. No one seems to be able to get too many of her kind. Politicians compete for her favor, employers quarrel over her. It makes her breathe deep to have the Secretary of the Navy summon her to the United States a.r.s.enals, pay her for her work, and call her a patriot.

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the well-lighted factory of the Briggs and Stratton Company, Milwaukee, the girls are comfortably and becomingly garbed for work.]

And with the pay envelope women remain clearly human. Their purchases often reflect past denials, rather than present needs or even tastes.

When set free one always buys what the days of dependence deprived one of. One of Boston's leading merchants told me that Selfridge in London was selling more jaunty ready-to-wear dresses than ever before. It was part of John Bull's discipline in ante-bellum dependent days to keep his women folk dowdy. The Lancashire la.s.s with head shawl and pattens, the wearer of the universal sailor hat, in these days of independence and pounds, shillings and pence, are taking note of the shop windows. And John is not turning his eyes away from his women folk in their day of self-determination.

But it is not to be concluded that it is all beer and skittles for Eve.

With a pay envelope and a vote come responsibilities. Public sympathy has backed up laws cutting down long hours of work for women. The trade unions, with a thought to possible compet.i.tors, have favored protecting them from night work. Has Eve been a bit spoiled? Has she let herself too easily be cla.s.sed with children and allowed a line to be drawn between men and women in industry? Is it a bit of woman's proverbial logic to demand special protection, and at the same time insist upon "equal pay for equal work"?

The hopelessness of attaining the promise of the slogan is well ill.u.s.trated in the case of a gray haired woman I once met in a London printing shop. In her early days she had been one of the women taken on by the famous printing firm of McCorquodale. That was before protective legislation applied to women. She became a highly skilled printer, earning more than any man in the shop. When there was pressure of work she was always one of the group of experts chosen to carry through the rush order. That meant on occasion overtime or night work. Then she went on to tell me how her skill was checked in her very prime. Regulations as to women's labor were gradually fixed in the law. All the printers in the shop, she said, favored the laws limiting her freedom but not theirs. Soon her wages reflected the contrast. Her employer called her to his office one day and explained, "I cannot afford to pay you as much as the men any longer. You are not worth as much to me, not being able to work Sat.u.r.day afternoon, at night, or overtime." She was put on lower grade work and her pay envelope grew slight.

This woman was not discussing the value of shorter working hours, she was pointing out that "equal pay" cannot rule for an entire group of workers when restrictions apply to part of the group and not to the whole body. We meet here, not a theory, but an incontrovertible fact.

Pay is not equal, and cannot be, where conditions are wholly unequal.

Protection for the woman worker means exactly what it would mean for the alien man if by law he were forbidden to work Sat.u.r.day afternoon, overtime or at night, while the citizen worker was without restriction.

The alien would be cut off from advancement in every trade in which he did not by overwhelming numbers dominate the situation, he would be kept to lower grade processes, he would receive much lower pay than the unprotected worker.

What common sense would lead us to expect in the hypothetical case of an alien man, has happened for the woman worker. Oddly enough she has not herself asked for this protection, but it has been urged very largely by women not of the industrial cla.s.s. Women teachers, doctors, lawyers, women of leisure are the advocates of special legislation for industrial women. And yet in their own case they are entirely reasonable, and ask no favors. The woman teacher, and quite truly, insists that she works as hard and as long hours as the man in her grade of service, and on that sound foundation she builds her just demand for equal pay. Women doctors and lawyers have never asked for other than a square deal in their professions.

It would be well, perhaps, if industrial women were permitted to guide their own ship. They have knowledge enough to reach a safe harbor. There was a hint that they were about to a.s.sume the helm when the rank and file of union workers voted down at the conference of the Women's Trade Union League the resolution proposing a law to forbid women acting as conductors. It was also suggestive when a woman rose and asked of the speaker on dangerous trades, whether "men did not suffer from exposure to fumes, acids and dust."

Women have so long been urging that they are people, that they have forgotten, perchance, that men are people also. Men respond to rest and recreation as do human beings of the opposite s.e.x. All workers need, and both s.e.xes should have, protection. But if only one s.e.x in industrial life can have bulwarks thrown up about it, men should be the favored ones just now. They are few, they are precious, they should be wrapped in cotton wool.

The industrial woman should stand unqualifiedly for the exclusion of children from gainful pursuits. Many years ago the British government had Miss Collett, one of the Labor Correspondents of the Board of Trade, make a special study of the influence of the employment of married women on infant mortality. The object was to prove that there was direct cause and effect. The investigator, after an exhaustive study covering many industrial centers, brought back the report, "Not proven."