The Trade Union Woman Part 18

It was with an appreciation of these complexities that Professor W.I.

Thomas has pointed out that in his opinion suffragists often place too great stress upon primitive woman's political power, and ignore the fact that women held an even more important relation to the occupational than to the political life of those early days, and that in her occupational value is to be traced the true source of her power and therefore her real influence in any age.

While agreeing with Professor Thomas that some suffrage arguments do on the surface appear inconsistent with historical facts, I believe the inconsistency to be more formal than real.

As the centuries pa.s.s a larger and still larger proportion of human affairs pa.s.ses away from individual management and comes under social and community control. As this process goes on, more and more does the individual, whether man or woman, need the power to control socially the conditions that affect his or her individual welfare. In our day political power rightly used, gives a socialized control of social conditions, and for the individual it is embodied in and is expressed by the vote.

To go back only one hundred years. The great bulk of men and women were industrially much more nearly on a level than they are today.

A poor level, I grant you, for with the exception of the privileged cla.s.ses, few and small were the political powers and therefore the social control of even men. But every extension of political power as granted to cla.s.s after cla.s.s of men has, as far as women are concerned, had the fatal effect of increasing the political inequality between men and women, thus placing women, though not apparently, yet relatively and actually upon a lower level.

Again, the status of woman has been crushingly affected by the contemporaneous and parallel change which has pa.s.sed over her special occupations; so that the conditions under which she works today are decidedly less than ever before by purely personal relationships and more by such impersonal factors as the trade supply of labor, and interstate and international compet.i.tion. This change has affected woman in an immeasurably greater degree than man. The conditions of industrial life are in our day in some degree controllable by political power so that at this point woman again finds herself civilly and industrially at greater disadvantage than when her status in all these respects depended princ.i.p.ally upon her individual capacity to handle efficiently problems arising within an area limited by purely personal relationships. To alter so radically the conditions of daily life and industry, and not merely to leave its control in the hands of the old body of voters, but to give over into the hands of an enlarged and fresh body of voters, and these voters inevitably the men of her own cla.s.s who are her industrial compet.i.tors, that degree of control represented by the vote and to refuse it to women is to place women (though not apparently, yet actually and relatively) upon a distinctly lowered level.

So that what suffragists are asking for is in reality not so much a novel power, as it is liberty to possess and use the same new instrument of social control as has been already accorded to men.

Without that instrument it is no mere case of her standing still. She is in very truth retrogressing, as far as effective control over the conditions under which she lives her life, whether inside the home or outside of it. In this instinctive desire not to lose ground, to keep up both with altered social claims of society upon women and with the improved political equipment of their brothers, is to be found the economic crux of women's demand for the vote in every country and in every succeeding decade.

In the course of human development, the gradual process of the readjustment of human beings to changed social and economic conditions is marked at intervals by crises wherein the struggle always going on beneath the surface between the new forces and existing conditions wells up to the surface and takes on the nature of a duel between contending champions. If this is true of one cla.s.s or of one people, how much more is it true when the change is one that affects an entire s.e.x.

There have been occasions in history and there occur still today instances when economic conditions being such that their labor was urgently needed and therefore desired, it was easy for newcomers to enter a fresh field of industry, and give to a whole cla.s.s or even to a whole s.e.x in one locality an additional occupation. Such very evidently was the case with the first girls who went into the New England cotton mills. Men's occupations at that time in America lay for the most part out of doors, and there was therefore no sense of rivalry experienced, when the girls who used to spin at home began to spin on a large scale and in great numbers in a factory.

It is far different where women have been forced by the economic forces driving them from behind to make their slow and painful way into a trade already in the possession of men. Of course the wise thing for the men to do in such a case is to bow to the logic of events, and through their own advantageous position as first in the field and through whatever organizations they may possess use all their power to place their new women rivals on an equal footing with themselves and so make it impossible for the women to become a weakening and disintegrating force in the trade. The women being thus more or less protected by the men from the exploitation of their own weakness it is then for them to accept the position, as far as they are able, stand loyally by the men, meet factory conditions as they find them, being the latest comers, and proceed afterwards to bring about such modifications and improvements as may seem to them desirable.

Unfortunately this in a general way may stand for a description of everything that has not taken place. The bitter and often true complaints made by workmen that women have stolen their trade, that having learnt it, well or ill, they are scabs all the time in their acceptance of lower wages and worse conditions, relatively much worse conditions, and that they are often strike-breakers when difficulties arise, form a sad commentary upon the men's own short-sighted conduct.

To women, driven by need to earn their living in unaccustomed ways, men have all too often opened no front gate through which they could make an honest daylight entrance into a trade, but have left only side-alleys and back-doors through which the guiltless intruders could slip in. Organized labor today, however, is on record as standing for the broader policy, however apathetic the individual unions and the individual trade unionists may often be.

A dramatic presentation of one of these very complicated situations is found in the experience of Miss Susan B. Anthony in the printers'

strike in New York in 1869. By some this incident has been interpreted to show a wide difference of outlook between those women who were chiefly intent on opening up fresh occupational possibilities for women, and those who, coming daily face to face with the general industrial difficulties of women already in the trades, recognized the urgent need of trade organization for women if the whole standard of the trades wherein they were already employed was not to be permanently lowered.

While there is no such general inference to be drawn, the occurrence does place in a very strong light the extreme complexity of the question and the need that then existed, the need that still exists for closer cooperation between workers approaching the problem of the independence of the wage-earning woman from different sides.

The files of the _Revolution_, which Miss Anthony, in conjunction with Mrs. Stanton and Mr. Parker Pillsbury, published from 1868 to 1870, are full of the industrial question. Though primarily the paper stood for the suffrage movement, the editors were on the best of terms with labor organizations and they were constantly urging working-women to organize and cooperate with men trade unionists, and in especial to maintain constantly their claim to equal pay for equal work.

But just about the time of our story, in the beginning of 1869, Miss Anthony seems to have been especially impressed with the need of trade-schools for girls, that they might indeed be qualified to deserve equal pay, to earn it honestly if they were to ask for it; for we find her saying:

"The one great need of the hour is to qualify women workers to _really earn_ equal wages with men. We must have _training-schools for women_ in all the industrial avocations. Who will help the women will help ways and means to establish them."

Just then a printers' strike occurred and Miss Anthony thought she saw in the need of labor on the part of the employers an opportunity to get the employers to start training-schools to teach the printing trade to girls, in her enthusiasm for this end entirely oblivious of the fact that it was an unfortunate time to choose for making such a beginning. She attended an employers' meeting held at the Astor House and laid her proposal before them.

The printers felt that they were being betrayed, and by one, too, whom they had always considered their friend. On behalf of organized labor Mr. John J. Vincent, secretary of the National Labor Union, made public protest.

Miss Anthony's reply to Mr. Vincent, under date February 3, 1869, published in the New York _Sun_, and reprinted in the _Revolution_, is very touching, showing clearly enough that in her eagerness to supply the needed thorough trade-training for young girls, she had for the moment forgotten what was likely to be the outcome for the girls themselves of training, however good, obtained in such a fashion.

She had also forgotten how essential it was that she should work in harmony with the men's organizations as long as they were willing to work with her. Though not saying so in so many words, the letter is a shocked avowal that, acting impulsively, she had not comprehended the drift of her action, and it amounts to a withdrawal from her first position. She writes:

Sir: You fail to see my motive in appealing to the Astor House meeting of employers, for aid to establish a training school for girls. It was to open the way for a thorough drill to the hundreds of poor girls, to fit them to earn equal wages with men everywhere and not to undermine "Typographical No. 6." I did not mean to convey the impression that "women, already good compositors should work for a cent less per thousand ems than men," and I rejoice most heartily that Typographical Union No. 6 stands so n.o.bly by the Women's Typographical Union No. 1 and demands the admission of women to all offices under its control, and I rejoice also that the Women's Union No. 1 stands so n.o.bly and generously by Typographical Union No. 6 in refusing most advantageous offers to defeat its demands.

My advice to all the women compositors of the city, is now, as it has ever been since last autumn, to join the women's union, for in union alone there is strength, in union alone there is protection.

Every one should scorn to allow herself to be made a tool to undermine the just prices of men workers; and to avoid this union is necessary. Hence I say, girls, stand by each other, and by the men, when they stand by you.

With this the incident seems to have closed, for nothing more is heard of the employers' training-school.[A]

[Footnote A: This ill.u.s.trates well the cruel alternative perpetually placed before the working-woman and the working-woman's friends. She is afforded little opportunity to learn a trade thoroughly, and yet, if she does not stand by her fellow men workers, she is false to working cla.s.s loyalty.

That the women printers of New York were between the devil and the deep sea is evidenced by the whole story told in Chapter XXI of "New York Typographical Union No. 6," by George Stevens. In that is related how about this time was formed a women printers' union, styled "Women's Typographical No. 1," through the exertions of a number of women compositors with Augusta Lewis at their head. Miss Lewis voiced the enthusiastic thanks of the women when, a few months later, the union received its charter from the International Typographical Union at its next convention in June, 1869. A different, and a sadder note runs through Miss Lewis's report to the convention in Baltimore in 1871, in describing the difficulties the women labored under.

"A year ago last January, Typographical Union No. 6 pa.s.sed a resolution admitting union girls in offices under the control of No.

6. Since that time we have never obtained a situation that we could not have obtained if we had never heard of a union. We refuse to take the men's situations when they are on strike, and when there is no strike, if we ask for work in union offices we are told by union foremen 'that there are no conveniences for us.' We are ostracized in many offices because we are members of the union; and though the principle is right, the disadvantages are so many that we cannot much longer hold together.... No. 1 is indebted to No. 6 for great a.s.sistance, but as long as we are refused work because of s.e.x we are at the mercy of our employers, and I can see no way out of our difficulties."

In 1878 the International enacted a law that no further charter be granted to women's unions, although it was not supposed to take effect against any already in existence. Women's Typographical No. 1, already on the downward grade, on this dissolved. But not till 1883 did the women printers in New York begin to join the men's union, and there have been a few women members in it ever since. But how few in proportion may be judged from the figures on September 30, 1911. Total membership 6,969, of whom 192 were women. I believe this to be typical of the position of the woman compositor in other cities.]

I have given large s.p.a.ce to this incident, because it is the only one of the kind I have come across in Miss Anthony's long career. Page after page of the _Revolution_ is full of long reports of workingmen's conventions which she or Mrs. Stanton attended.[A] At these they were either received as delegates or heard as speakers, advocating the cause of labor and showing how closely the success of that cause was bound up with juster treatment towards the working-woman. Many indeed must have been the labor men, who gained a broader outlook upon their own problems and difficulties through listening to such unwearied champions of their all but voiceless s.e.x.

[Footnote A: Mrs. Stanton's first speech before the New York legislature, made in 1854, was a demand that married working-women should have the right to collect their own wages. She and the workers with her succeeded in having the law amended. Up till then a married woman might wash all day at the washtub, and at night the law required that her employer should, upon demand, hand over her hard-earned money to her husband, however dissolute he might be.]

To the more conservative among the workingmen the uncompromising views of these women's advocates must have been very upsetting sometimes, and always very unconventional. We find that in a workingmen's a.s.sembly in Albany, New York, when one radical delegate moved to insert the words "and working-women" into the first article of the Const.i.tution, he felt bound to explain to his fellow-delegates that it was not his intention to offer anything that would reflect discredit upon the body. He simply wanted the females to have the benefit of their trades and he thought by denying them this right a great injustice was done to them. The speaker who followed opposed the discussion of the question. "Let the women organize for themselves."

The radicals, however, rose to the occasion.

Mr. Graham in a long speech said it was a shame and a disgrace for this body, pretending to ask the elevation of labor to neglect or refuse to help this large, deserving, but down-trodden cla.s.s.

Mr. Topp said he would be ashamed to go home and say he had attended this a.s.sembly if it overlooked the claims of the female organizations.

The resolution to include the women was carried with applause.

At the National Labor Congress held in Germania Hall, New York, the _Revolution_ of October 1, 1868, had noted the admission of four women delegates as marking a new era in workingmen's conventions. These were: Katherine Mullaney, president of the Collar Laundry Union of Troy, N.Y.; Mrs. Mary Kellogg Putnam, representing Working Women's a.s.sociation No. 2 of New York City; Miss Anthony herself, delegate from Working Women's a.s.sociation No. 1, New York City; and Mary A.

Macdonald, from the Working Women's Protective Labor Union, Mount Vernon, New York.

Mrs. Stanton, after a long and exciting debate, was declared a delegate, but the next day, to please the malcontents, the National Labor Congress made clear by resolution that it did not regard itself as endorsing her peculiar ideas or committing itself to the question of female suffrage, but simply regarded her as a representative from an organization having for its object "the amelioration of the condition of those who labor for a living." "Worthy of Talleyrand" is Miss Anthony's sole comment.

The connection between the woman movement and the labor movement is indeed close and fundamental, but that must not be taken to imply that the workingman and the woman of whatever cla.s.s have not their own separate problems to handle and to solve as each sees best. The marriage relation between two individuals has often been wrecked by a.s.suming as the basis of their common life that man and wife are one and that the husband is that one. And so the parallel a.s.sumption that all the working-woman's wrongs will naturally be righted by redress if their righting is left in the hands of her working brother for many years led to a very curious and unfortunate neglect of suffrage propaganda among working-women, and on the part of working-women and to a no less unfortunate ignorance of industrial problems, also, on the part of many suffragists, whether those affecting workingmen and women alike or the women only.

It was not so in the early days. The instances given above show how close and friendly were the relations between labor leaders and suffrage pioneers. What has been said of Miss Anthony applied equally to the other great women who carried the suffrage banner amid opprobrium and difficulty.

The change came that comes so often in the development of a great movement. One of the main objects which the pioneers had had in view somehow slipped out of the sight of their successors. The earliest move of the advanced women of America had been for equal rights of education, and there success has been greatest and most complete and thorough. But it was almost exclusively the women who were able to enter the professions who gained the benefits of this campaign for equal educational and consequently equal professional opportunities.

The next aim of the leaders in the woman movement of the last century had been to accord to woman equality before the law. This affecting primarily and chiefly woman in her s.e.x relations, had its permanent results in reference to the legal status of the married woman and the mother, bearing at the same time secondarily upon the safety and welfare of the child; hence in the different states a long series of married women's property acts, equal guardianship acts, modifications of the gross inequalities of the divorce law, and the steady raising of the age of protection for girls.

At least that was the position ten years ago. But today the tide has turned. Partly is this due to the growth of industrial organization among women, a development that has followed the ever-increasing need of mutual protection. Trade unionism has helped to train the working-woman to listen to the suffrage gospel, though therein she has often been slower than the workingman, her better educated brother. On the other hand a great many influences have combined to wake up the suffragist of our day to the true meaning and value of what she was asking. Especially has the work of the National Women's Trade Union League and the campaign of publicity it has conducted on behalf of the working-woman, both within and without its membership, focused attention upon the woman in industry as a national responsibility.

Then again the tremendous strikes in which such large numbers of women and girls have been involved were an education to others than the strikers--to none more than to the suffrage workers who cooperated with the ill-used girl strikers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago.

An influence of even more universal appeal, if of less personal intensity, has been the suffrage movement in Great Britain. That movement has educated the public of this country, as they never would have been educated by any movement confined to this country alone.

Inside the ranks of enrolled suffragists it has been an inspiration, showering upon their cause a new baptism of mingled tears and rejoicing. In calmer mood we have learned from our British sisters much regarding policies adapted to modern situations, and they have a.s.suredly shown us all sorts of new and original methods of organization and education. The immense and nation-wide publicity given by the press of the United States to the more striking and sensational aspects of the British movement and all the subsequent talk and writing in other quarters has roused to s.e.x-consciousness thousands of American women of all cla.s.ses who had not been previously interested in the movement for obtaining full citizenship for themselves and their daughters. These women also aroused, and men, too, have furnished the huge audiences which have everywhere greeted such speakers as Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Philip Snowden, when in person they have presented the mighty story of the transatlantic struggle. There is no difficulty nowadays in gathering suffrage audiences anywhere, for the man and the woman walking along the street supply them to the open-air speaker in the large city and the little country town as one by one city and town take up the new methods.

Even more close to lasting work for all the issues that affect the community through placing upon women an ordered civic responsibility are the plans for the organizing under different names of woman suffrage parties and civic leagues which blend the handling of local activities everywhere with a demand for the ballot in keeping with the needs of the modern community. No clear-eyed woman can work long in this sort of atmosphere without realizing how unequally social burdens press, how unequally social advantages are allotted, whether the burdens come through hours of work, inadequate remuneration, sanitary conditions, whether in home or in factory, and whether the advantages are obtainable through public education, vocational training, medical care, or in the large field of recreation.

So important does work through organization, appear to me that, remembering always that tendencies are more important than conditions, it would seem in some respects a more wholesome and hopeful situation for women to be organized and working for one of their common aims, even though that aim be for the time being merely winning of the vote, rather than to have the vote, and with it working merely as isolated individuals, and with neither the power that organization insures nor the training that it affords.

But with what we know nowadays there should be no need for any such unsatisfactory alternative. It would be much more in keeping with the modern situation if the object of suffrage organizations were to read, not "to obtain the vote" but "to obtain political, legal and social equality for women."

Then as each state, or as the whole country (we hope by and by) obtains the ballot, so might the organizations go on in a sense as if nothing had happened. And nothing would have happened, save that a great body of organized women would be more effective than ever. The members would individually be equipped with the most modern instrument of economic and social expression. The organizations themselves would have risen in public importance and esteem and therefore in influence.

Moreover, and this is the most important point of all, they would be enrolled among those bodies, whose declared policy would naturally help in guiding the great bulk of new and untrained feminine voters.