What eight million women want Part 8

The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. The Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable opportunity to get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the Illinois State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years later the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that it was unconst.i.tutional.

The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without precedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States, until it had become almost a principle of American law that protective legislation for working women was invalid.

The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusion that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody of his const.i.tutional rights, and at the same time rule that women would be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may appear obscure.

The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men, and they know something--not much, but still something--about the men of the working cla.s.ses. They know, for example, something about the conditions under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor, twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these are bad things,--bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of labor comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.

The learned judges, I say this with all due respect, do not know anything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts of their decisions, denying the const.i.tutionality of protective measures, are amazing in the ignorance they display,--ignorance of industrial conditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects of certain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect of women's arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions in trades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the home resulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, the learned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, the happiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about the inhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display of the real facts.

We have seen how the women of the Consumers' League taught the United States Supreme Court something about working women; showed them a few of the calamities resulting from the unrestricted labor of women and immature girls. The Supreme Court's decision forever abolished the old fallacy that the American Const.i.tution _forbids_ protective legislation for women workers. It remains for women's organizations in the various States to educate local courts up to the knowledge that community interest _demands_ protective legislation.

Following the decision of the Supreme Court in the Oregon case, which flatly contradicted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, the working women of Illinois began their educational campaign. They had now, for the first time, a fighting chance to secure the restoration of their shortened work day. The women of fifteen organized trades in the city of Chicago determined to take that chance.

The women first appealed to the Industrial Commission, appointed early in 1908 by Governor Dineen, to investigate the need of protective legislation for workers, men and women alike.

The women were given a courteous hearing, but were told frankly that limited hours of work for women was not one of protective measures to be recommended by the Commission.

The Waitresses' Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists, led by a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary of the union. Miss Maloney and her a.s.sociates drafted and introduced into the Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day for every woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store, laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for enforcing the measure.

The "Girls' Bill," as it immediately became known, was the most hotly contested measure pa.s.sed by the Illinois Legislature during the session. Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing on the bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek and tired women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their working day made shorter. Another presented a pet.i.tion signed by his women employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven hours a day!

Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after learned counsel for the Manufacturers' a.s.sociation had argued against the measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers'

a.s.sociation presented the business aspect of the question, the girls confined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of the Glove Makers' Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two girls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea: Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses' Union, was the other speaker.

They described details in the daily lives of working women not generally known except to the workers themselves. Among these was the piece-work system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speed is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage.

The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand st.i.tches a minute; to consider how many st.i.tches the operator's hand must guide in a week, a month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease of earning power.

"I am a waitress," said Miss Maloney, "and I work ten hours a day. In that time a waitress who is tolerably busy _walks_ ten miles, and the dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred to two thousand pounds. Don't you think eight hours a day is enough for a girl to walk?"

Only one thing stood in the way of the pa.s.sage of the bill after that day. The doubt of its const.i.tutionality proved an obstacle too grave for the friends of the workers to overcome. It was decided to subst.i.tute a ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the "Oregon Standard"

established by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle of limitation upon the hours of women's work once established in Illinois, the workers could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.

The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a law of the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers' a.s.sociation, through the W.C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suit to test the const.i.tutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Their appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hours to earn their bread, and that their const.i.tutional rights freely to contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them by the ten-hour law.

There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature years--one of the pet.i.tioners had been an expert box maker for over thirty years--are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?

There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the real meaning of that pet.i.tion of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department, forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.

Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up in the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers'

League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois Circuit Court, this doc.u.ment might well have been called. It was simply a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on the succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three pages of law.

The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was the testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.

"Medical Science has demonstrated," says this most important paragraph, "that while fatigue is a normal phenomenon ... excessive fatigue or exhaustion is abnormal.... It has discovered that fatigue is due not only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue, entirely a.n.a.logous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that when artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin causes death. The fatigue toxin in normal quant.i.ties is said to be counteracted by an antidote or ant.i.toxin, also generated in the body.

But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the ant.i.toxin is not produced fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin."

The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the American Const.i.tution was never intended to shield manufacturers in their willingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. The ten-hour law was sustained.

That the "Girls' Bill" pa.s.sed, or that it was even introduced, was due in large measure to an organization of women, more militant and more democratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women's Trade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, the League consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organized trades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of these latter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-union principle, but more are women who work in the professional ranks,--teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlement workers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, who ever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federation of Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners, to appear in Labor Day parades.

The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities,--New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland,--is to educate women wage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains and supports organizers among all cla.s.ses of workers. As quickly as a group in any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. It raises funds to a.s.sist women in their trade struggles. It acts as arbitrator between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes.

The Women's Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factory trades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until lately believed themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundred and fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventy stenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers' Federation of Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before the Women's Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated.

The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized.

The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League was brilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-waist makers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story of this strike will bear retelling.

On the evening of November 22, 1909, there was a great ma.s.s meeting of workers held at Cooper Union in New York. Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, presided, and the stage was well filled with members of the Women's Trade Union League. The meeting had been called by the League in conjunction with Shirt-Waist Makers' Union, Local 25, to consider the grievances of shirt-waist makers in general, and especially of the shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, who had been, for more than two months, on strike.

The story of the strike, the causes that led up to it, and the bitter injustice which followed it were rehea.r.s.ed in a dozen speeches. It was shown that for four to five dollars a week the girl shirt-waist makers worked from eight in the morning until half-past five in the evening two days in the week; from eight in the morning until nine at night four days in the week; and from eight in the morning until noon one day in the week--Sunday.

The shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, in hope of bettering their conditions, had formed a union, and had informed their employers of their action. The employers promptly locked them out of the shop, and the girls declared a strike.

The strike was more than two months old when the Cooper Union meeting was held, and the employers showed no signs of giving in. It was agreed that a general strike of shirt-waist makers ought to be declared. But the union was weak, there were no funds, and most of the shirt-waist makers were women and unused to the idea of solidarity in action. Could they stand together in an industrial struggle which promised to be long and bitter?

President Gompers was plainly fearful that they could not.

Suddenly a very small, very young, very intense Jewish girl, known to her a.s.sociates as Clara Lemlich, sprang to her feet, and, with the a.s.sistance of two young men, climbed to the high platform. Flinging up her arms with a dramatic gesture she poured out a flood of speech, entirely unintelligible to the presiding Gompers, and to the members of the Women's Trade Union League. The Yiddish-speaking majority in the audience understood, however, and the others quickly caught the spirit of her impa.s.sioned plea.

The vast audience rose as one man, and a great roar arose. "Yes, we will all strike!"

"And will you keep the faith?" cried the girl on the platform. "Will you swear by the old Jewish oath of our fathers?"

Two thousand Jewish hands were thrust in air, and two thousand Jewish throats uttered the oath: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither and drop off from this arm I now raise."

Clara Lemlich's part in the work was accomplished. Within a few days forty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike.

The Women's Trade Union League, under the direction of Miss Helen Marot, secretary, at once took hold of the strike.

There were two things to be done at once. The forty thousand had to be enrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing to accept the terms of the strikers had to be "signed up." Clinton Hall, one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, and for several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the street outside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and women strikers, anxious and perspiring "bosses," and busy, active a.s.sociates of the Women's Trade Union League.

The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied the League members undertook the work of picketing the shops. Picketing, if this activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling the neighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakers are going to and from their nefarious business, and importuning them to join the strike.

Peaceful picketing is legal. The law permits a striker to speak to the girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on the other's arm or shoulder, this const.i.tutes technical violence.

Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a little of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence.

After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girls who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members.

Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's Superintendent of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a millionaire father, leader of her cla.s.s, of 1909, in Va.s.sar College, Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the a.s.sociation of Collegiate Alumnae. These young women went out day after day with girl strikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered arrest on more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation of magistrates who--well, who did not understand.

The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and organizations of women other than the Women's Trade Union League began to take an interest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss Gertrude Barnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial world of women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike.

They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women in person.

The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest social eminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan and several others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the president of the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the strikers'

own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. More than thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozen women promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers.

A week later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, mother of the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough, leader of a large Woman Suffrage a.s.sociation, engaged the Hippodrome, and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators.

Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting.