Women Wage Earners by Helen Campbell

H >> Helen Campbell >> Women Wage Earners

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

WOMEN WAGE-EARNERS:

_THEIR PAST, THEIR PRESENT,
AND THEIR FUTURE_.

BY
HELEN CAMPBELL,

AUTHOR OF "PRISONERS OF POVERTY," "PRISONERS OF
POVERTY ABROAD," "THE PROBLEM OF THE POOR,"
"MRS. HERNDON'S INCOME," ETC.

With an Introduction
BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH.D., LL.D.

_Professor of Political Economy and Director of the School of Economics,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis._

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1893.

_Copyright, 1893_,

BY HELEN CAMPBELL.

University Press:

JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

A BOOK FOR

Alice,

FRIEND, HELPER, AND COMRADE.

INTRODUCTION

BY RICHARD T. ELY,

DIRECTOR OF SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, POLITICAL SCIENCE, AND HISTORY,
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON.

The importance of the subject with which the present work deals cannot
well be over-estimated. Our age may properly be called the Era of Woman,
because everything which affects her receives consideration quite
unknown in past centuries. This is well. The motive is twofold: First,
woman is valued as never before; and, second, it is perceived that the
welfare of the other half of the human race depends more largely upon
the position enjoyed by woman than was previously understood.

The earlier agitation for an enlarged sphere and greater rights for
woman was to a considerable extent merely negative. The aim was to
remove barriers and to open the way. It is characteristic of the earlier
days of agitation for the removal of wrongs affecting any class, that
the questions involved appear to be simple, and easily repeated formulas
ample to secure desired rights. Further agitation, however, and more
mature reflection always show that what looks like a simple social
problem is a complex one.

"If women's wages are small, open new careers to them." As simple as
this did the problem of women's wages once appear; but when new avenues
of employment were rendered accessible to women, it was found, in some
instances, that the wages of men were lowered. A consequence which can
be seen in different industrial centres is that a man and a wife working
together secure no greater wages than the man alone in industries in
which women are not employed. Now, if the result of opening new
employments to women is to force all members of the family to work for
the wages which the head of the family alone once received, it is
manifest that we have a complicated problem.

Another result of wage-earning by women, which has been observed here
and there, is the scattering of the members of the family and the
break-down of the home. A recent and careful observer among the chief
industrial centres of Saxony, Germany, has told us that factory work has
there resulted in the dissolution of the family, and that family life,
as we understand it, scarcely exists. We have demoralization seen in the
young; and in addition to that, we discover that the employment of
married women outside the home results in the impaired health and
strength of future generations.

The conclusion by no means follows that we should go backward, and try
to restrict the industrial sphere of woman. It has been well said that
revolutions do not go backward; we have to go farther forward to keep
the advantages which have been attained, and at the same time lessen the
evils which the new order has brought with it.

Further action is required; but in order that this action may bring
desired results, it must be based upon ample knowledge. The natural
impulse when we see an evil is to adopt direct methods looking to an
immediate cure; but such direct methods which at once suggest themselves
generally fail to bring relief. The effective remedies are those which
use indirect methods based upon scientific knowledge. If a sympathetic
man takes to heart physical suffering, which he can see on every side,
he must feel inclined to relieve the distressed at once, and feel
impatient if he is hindered in his benevolent impulses; yet we know that
he will accomplish far more in the end, if he patiently devotes years to
study in medical schools and practice in hospitals before he attempts to
give relief to the diseased. We need study quite as much to cure the
ills of the social body; and the present work gives us a welcome
addition to the positive information upon which wise action must depend.

Mrs. Campbell has been favorably known for years on account of her
valuable contributions to the literature of social science, and it gives
the present writer great pleasure to have the privilege of introducing
this book to the public with a word of commendation.

MADISON, WISCONSIN,

_August 29, 1893._

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

The pages which follow were prepared originally as a prize monograph for
the American Economic Association, receiving an award from it in 1891.
The restriction of the subject to a fixed number of words hampered the
treatment, and it was thought best to enlarge many points which in the
allotted space could have hardly more than mention. Acting on this wish,
the monograph has been nearly doubled in size, but still must be counted
only an imperfect summary, since facts in these lines are in most cases
very nearly unobtainable, and, aside from the few reports of Labor
Bureaus, there are as yet almost no sources of full information. But as
there is no existing manual of reference on this topic, the student of
social questions will accept this attempt to meet the need, till more
facts enable a fuller and better presentation of the difficult subject.

NEW YORK, _August, 1893._

CONTENTS.

PAGE
INTRODUCTION 7

CHAPTER

I. A LOOK BACKWARD 25

II. EMPLOYMENTS FOR WOMEN DURING THE COLONIAL PERIOD,
AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FACTORY 57

III. EARLY ASPECTS OF FACTORY LABOR FOR WOMEN 77

IV. RISE AND GROWTH OF TRADES UP TO THE PRESENT TIME 95

V. LABOR BUREAUS AND THEIR WORK IN RELATION TO WOMEN 111

VI. PRESENT WAGE-RATES IN THE UNITED STATES 126

VII. GENERAL CONDITIONS FOR ENGLISH WORKERS 142

VIII. GENERAL CONDITIONS FOR CONTINENTAL WORKERS 161

IX. GENERAL CONDITIONS AMONG WAGE-EARNING WOMEN IN THE
UNITED STATES 188

X. GENERAL CONDITIONS IN THE WESTERN STATES 199

XI. SPECIFIC EVILS AND ABUSES IN FACTORY LIFE AND IN
GENERAL TRADES 212

XII. REMEDIES AND SUGGESTIONS 249

APPENDIX.

FACTORY INSPECTION LAW 275

AUTHORITIES CONSULTED IN PREPARING THIS BOOK 291

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WOMAN'S LABOR AND OF THE WOMAN QUESTION 294

INDEX 305

WOMEN WAGE-EARNERS;

THEIR PAST, THEIR PRESENT, AND THEIR FUTURE.

INTRODUCTION

The one great question that to-day agitates the whole civilized world is
an economic question. It is not the production but the distribution of
wealth; in other words, the wages question,--the wages of men and women.
Nowhere do we find any suggestion that capital and the landlord do not
receive a _quid pro quo_. Instead, the whole labor world cries out that
the capitalist and the landlord are enslaving the rest of the world, and
absorbing the lion's share of the joint production.

So long as it is a question of production only, there is perfect
harmony. Both unite in agreeing that to produce as much as possible is
for the interest of each. The conflict begins with distribution. It is
no longer a war of one nation with another; it is internecine war,
destroying the foundations of our own defences, and making enemies of
those who should be brothers.

It is impossible for even the most dispassionate or indifferent observer
to blink these facts. Proclaim as we may that there is no antagonism
between capital and labor,--that their interests are one, and that
conditions and opportunities for the worker are always better and
better,--practical thinkers and workers deny this conclusion. Wealth has
enormously increased, in a far greater ratio than population. Does the
laborer receive his due proportion of this increase? One must
unhesitatingly answer no. In a country whose life began in the search
for freedom, and which professes to give equal opportunity to all, more
startling inequality exists than in any other in the civilized world.
One of our ablest lawyers, Thomas G. Shearman, has lately written:--

"Our old equality is gone. So far from being the most equal people
on the face of the earth, as we once boasted that we were, ours is
now the most unequal of civilized nations. We talk about the wealth
of the British aristocracy and about the poverty of the British
poor. There is not in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland so
striking a contrast, so wide a chasm, between rich and poor as in
these United States of America. There is no man in the whole of
Great Britain and Ireland who is as wealthy as one of some
half-a-dozen men who could be named in this country; and there are
few there who could be poorer than some that could be found in this
country. It is true that there is a larger number of the extremely
poor in Great Britain and Ireland than there is in this country,
but it is not true that there is any more desperate poverty in any
civilized country than ours; and it is unquestionably not true that
there is any greater mass of riches concentrated in a few hands in
any country than this."

This for America. For England the tale is much the same. "The Bitter Cry
of Outcast London," with its passionate demand that the rich open their
eyes to see the misery, degradation, and want seething in London slums,
is but another putting of the words of the serious, scientific observer
of facts, Huxley himself, who has described an East End parish in which
he spent some of his earliest years. Over that parish, he says, might
have been written Dante's inscription over the entrance to the Inferno:
"All hope abandon, ye who enter here." After speaking of its physical
misery and its supernatural and perfectly astonishing deadness, he says
that he embarked on a voyage round the world, and had the opportunity of
seeing savage life in all conceivable conditions of savage degradation;
and he writes:--

"I assure you I found nothing worse, nothing more degrading,
nothing so hopeless, nothing nearly so intolerably dull and
miserable as the life I left behind me in the East End of London.
Were the alternative presented to me, I would deliberately prefer
the life of the savage to that of those people in Christian London.
Nothing would please me better--not even to discover a new
truth--than to contribute toward the bettering of that state of
things which, unless wise and benevolent men take it in hand, will
tend to become worse, and to create something worse than
savagery,--a great Serbonian bog, which in the long run will
swallow up the surface crust of civilization."

In a year and more of continuous observation and study of working
conditions in England and on the Continent, some of which will find
place later, my own conclusion was the same. The young emperor of
Germany, hotheaded, obstinate, and self-willed as he may be, is working
it would seem from as radical a conviction of deep wrong in the
distributive system. The Berlin Labor Conference, whose chief effort
seems to have been against child-labor and in favor of excluding women
from the mines, or at least reducing hours, and forbidding certain of
the heavier forms of labor, is but an echo of the great dock-strikes of
London and the cry of all workers the world over for a better chance.
The capitalist seeks to hold his own, the laborer demands larger share
of the product; and how to render unto each his due is the great
politico-economic question,--the absorbing question of our time.

We have found, then, that the problem is economic, and concerns
distribution only. There is no complaint that the capitalist fails to
secure his share. On the contrary, even among the well-to-do,
deep-seated alarm is evidenced at the rise and progress of innumerable
trusts and syndicates, eliminating competition, which restricts
production and raises prices. They make their own conditions; drive from
the field small tradesmen and petty industries, or absorb them on their
own terms.

Rings of every description in the political and the working world
combine for general spoliation, and the honest worker's money jingles
in every pocket but his own.

Granting all that may be urged as to the capitalists' investment of
brain-power and acquired skill, as well as of money with all the risks
involved, they are the inactive rather than the active factors in
production. They give of their store, while labor gives of its life.
Their view is to be reconstructed, and profit-sharing become as much a
part of any industry as profit-making.

This is a growing conviction; nor can we wonder that realization of its
justice and its possibilities has been a matter of very recent
consideration. An often repeated formula becomes at last ingrained in
the mental constitution, and any question as to its truth is a sharp
shock to the whole structure. We have been so certain of the surpassing
advantages of our own country, so certain that liberty and a chance were
the portion of all, that to confront the real conditions in our great
cities is to most as unreal as a nightmare.

We have conceded at last, forced to it by the concessions of all
students of our economic problems, that the laborer does not yet receive
his fair share of the world's wealth; and the economic thought of the
whole world is now devoted to the devising of means by which he may
receive his due. There is no longer much question as to facts; they are
only too palpable. Distribution must be reorganized, and haste must be
made to discover how.

It is the wages problem, then, with which we are to deal,--the wages of
men and women; and we must look at it in its largest, most universal
aspects. We must dismiss at once any prejudice born of the ignorance,
incompetency, or untrustworthiness of many workers. Character is a plant
of slow growth; and given the same conditions of birth, education, and
general environment it is quite possible we should have made no better
showing. We have to-day three questions to be answered:--

1. Why do men not receive a just wage?
2. Why are women in like case?
3. Why do men receive a greater wage than women?

First, Why do not men receive a greater wage than they do? can be
answered only suggestively, since volumes may be and have been written
on all the points involved. For skilled and unskilled labor alike, the
differences in industrial efficiency go far toward regulating the wage,
and have been grouped under six heads by General Frances A. Walker,
whose volume on the Wages Question is a thoughtful and careful study of
the problem from the beginning. These heads are--1. "Peculiarities of
stock and breeding. 2. The meagreness or liberality of diet. 3. Habits
voluntarily or involuntarily formed respecting cleanliness of the
person, and purity of the air and water. 4. The general intelligence of
the laborer. 5. Technical education and industrial environment. 6.
Cheerfulness and hopefulness in labor, growing out of self-respect and
social ambition and the laborer's interest in his work."

With this in mind, we must accept the fact that the value of the
laborer's services to the employer is the net result of two
elements,--one positive, one negative; namely, work and waste. Under
this head of waste come breakage, undue wear and tear of implements,
destruction or injury of materials, the cost of supervision of idle or
blundering men, and often the hindrance of many by the fault of one.
Modern processes involve so much of this order of waste that often
there is doubt if work is worth having or not, and the unskilled laborer
is either rejected or receives only a boy's wage.

The various schools of political economists differ widely as to the
facts which have formulated themselves in what is known as the iron law
of wages; this meaning that wages are said to tend increasingly to a
minimum which will give but a bare living. For skilled labor the law may
be regarded as elastic rather than iron. For unskilled, it is as
certainly the tendency, which, if constantly repeated and so
intensified, would end as law. Many standard economists regard it as
already fixed; and writers like Lasalle, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx
heap every denunciation upon it.

Were the fact actually established, no words could be too strong or too
bitter to define this new form of slavery. The standard of life and
comfort affects the wages of labor, and there is constant effort to make
the wage correspond to this standard. It is an unending and often bitter
struggle, nowhere better summed up than by Thorold Rogers in his "Six
Centuries of Work and Wages,"--a work upon which economists, however
different their conclusions, rely alike for facts and figures.

We must then admit in degree the tendency of wages to a minimum,
especially those of unskilled labor, and accept it as one more motive
for persistent effort to alter existing conditions and prevent any such
culmination.

Take now, in connection with the six heads mentioned as governing the
present efficiency of labor, the five enumerated by Adam Smith in his
summary of causes for differences in wages: 1. "The agreeableness or
disagreeableness of the employments themselves. 2. The easiness and
cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them. 3. The
constancy or inconstancy of employment in them. 4. The small or great
trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them. 5. The
probability or improbability of success in them."

These are conditions which affect the man's right to large or small
wage; but all of them presuppose that men are perfectly free to look
over the whole industrial field and choose their own employment,--they
presuppose the perfect mobility of labor. Let us see what this means.

The theoretical mobility of labor rests upon the assumption that
laborers of every order will in all ways and at all times pursue their
economic interests; but the actual fact is that so far from seeking
labor under the most perfect conditions for obtaining it, nearly half of
all humankind are "bound in fetters of race and speech and religion and
caste, of tradition and habit and ignorance of the world, of poverty and
ineptitude and inertia, which practically exclude them from the
competitions of the world's industry."

"Man is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported,"
was written by Adam Smith long ago; and this stands in the way of really
free and unhampered competition. Mr. Frederick Harrison, one of the
clearest thinkers of the day, has well defined the difference between
the seller and the producer of a commodity. He says:--

"In most cases the seller of a commodity can send it or carry it
from place to place, and market to market, with perfect ease. He
need not be on the spot; he generally can send a sample; he usually
treats by correspondence. A merchant sits in his counting-room, and
by a few letters and forms transports and distributes the
subsistence of a whole city from continent to continent. In other
cases, as the shopkeeper, the ebb and flow of passing multitudes
supplies the want of locomotion for him. This is a true market.
Here competition acts rapidly, fully, simply, fairly. It is totally
otherwise with a day laborer who has no commodity to sell. He must
himself be present at every market, which means costly, personal
locomotion. He cannot correspond with his employer; he cannot send
a sample of his strength, nor do employers knock at his cottage
door."

It is plain, then, that many causes are at work to depress the wages
even of skilled workers, far more than can be enumerated here. If this
is true for men, how much more strongly can limitations be stated for
women, as we ask, "Why do not women receive a better wage?" Many of the
reasons are historical, and must be considered in their origin and
growth. Taking her as worker to-day, precisely the same general causes
are in operation that govern the wages of men, with the added disability
of sex, always in the way of equal mobility of labor.

Wherever for any reason there is immobility of labor, there is always
lowering of the wage rate. The trades and general industries for which
women are suited are highly localized. They focus in the cities and
large towns, and women must seek them there. Great manufactories drain
the surrounding country; yet even with these opportunities an analysis
of the industrial statistics of the United States by General Walker
showed that the women workers of the country made up but seven per cent
of the entire population. Eagerly as they seek work, it is far more
difficult for them to obtain it than for men. They require to be much
more mobile and active in their move toward the labor market, yet are
disabled by timidity, by physical weakness, and by their liability to
insult or outrage arising from the fact of sex. Men who would secure a
place tramp from town to town, from street to street, or shop to shop,
persisting through all rebuffs, till their end is accomplished. They go
into suspicious and doubtful localities, encounter strangers, and sleep
among casual companions. In this fashion they relieve the pressure at
congested points, and keep the mass fluid.

For women, save in the slight degree included in the country girl's
journey to town or city where cotton or woollen mills offer an opening
for work, this course is impossible. Ignorant, fearful, poor, and
unprotected, the lions in her way are these very facts. Added to this
natural disqualification, comes another,--in the lack of sympathy for
her needs, and in the prejudice which hedges about all her movements. In
every trade she has sought to enter, men have barred the way. In a
speech made before the House of Commons in 1873, Henry Fawcett drew
attention to the persistent resistance of men to any admission of women
on the same terms with themselves. He said:--

"We cannot forget that some years ago certain trade-unionists in
the potteries imperatively insisted that a certain rest for the arm
which they found almost essential to their work should not be used
by women engaged in the same employment. Not long since, the London
tailors, when on a strike, having never admitted a woman to their
union, attempted to coerce women from availing themselves of the
remunerative employment which was offered them in consequence of
the strike. But this jealousy of woman's labor has not been
entirely confined to workmen. The same feeling has extended itself
through every class of society. Last autumn a large number of
post-office clerks objected to the employment of women in the
Post-Office."

Driven by want, they had pressed into agricultural labor as well, and
found equal opposition there also. Mr. Fawcett in the same speech calls
attention to the fact of the non-admission of women to the Agricultural
Laborers' Union, on the ground that "the agricultural laborers of the
country do not wish to recognize the labor of women."

There is more or less reason for such feeling. It arises in part from
the newness of the occasion, since in the story of labor as a whole,
soon to be considered by us in detail, it is only the last fifty years
that have seen women taking an active part. We have already seen that
mobility of labor is one of the first essentials, and that women are far
more limited in this respect than men.

This brings us to the final question,--Why do men receive a larger wage
than women? The conditions already outlined are in part responsible, but
with them is bound up another even more formidable.

Custom, the law of many centuries, has so ingrained its thought in the
constitution of men that it is naturally and inevitably taken for
granted that every woman who seeks work is the appendage of some man,
and therefore, partially at least, supported. Other facts bias the
employer against the payment of the same wage. The girl's education is
usually less practical than the boy's; and as most, at least among the
less intelligent class, regard a trade as a makeshift to be used as a
crutch till a husband appears, the work involved is often done
carelessly and with little or no interest. With unintelligent labor
wastage is greater, and wages proportionately lower; and here we have
one chief reason for the difference. Others will disclose themselves as
we go on.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15