Women Who Work

...The lot of the American woman, even if she holds her job after marriage, is not necessarily difficult as compared with that of her feminine forbears...

...Moralists widely lauded the new factories as offering employment to great numbers of girls and women, and as enabling small tots, whose size and inexperience formerly prevented them from engaging in useful labor, an opportunity to escape from the sin of idleness...

...To be sure, the open spaces were all around...

...We should not degrade a pretty word by identifying it with the back-breaking efforts by which many American men seek to make parasites of their women by depriving them of responsibilities...

...The inadequacy of all statistics, especially in sociological study, lies in the need of interpreting them after their compilation...

...The sixteenth tabulation lists the numbers and percentages of women of various occupations, such as "teachers in Minneapolis" and "women earning less than $18 in Arkansas," who contribute to dependents, and finds that the highest relative number of those having dependents is among the "industrial home workers in Wisconsin...

...This has resulted in a limitation of the size of families and therefore in even another lessening of the married woman's work...

...The European custom of a dowry, like the European convention of a double-ring marriage ceremony, is becoming increasingly old-fashioned to us...

...They will be better off when the prejudice against public kindergartens for the very young goes the way of the old prejudice against high schools...

...Puritan New England, whose traditions of the surpassing virtue of industry were accentuated by the pressure of few hands and many tasks, made toil a paramount qualification for present comfort and respectability and a necessary evidence of election to future bliss...

...Man, in the period of our history that seemed to be fading out about 1850, was in most cases still the producer of raw materials...

...This Puritan emphasis on economic virtue was readily transferred to an appreciation of material success, which now persists in our tendency to confuse goodness and greatness with financial achievement...

...The idea of joint responsibility in married life is but slowly filtering back to its former place in our social ideals...

...But when we inquire into the past we must look hard and long for the roseate days when women did not labor, for the times when man produced and his mate adorned...

...It also gives the family status and the family responsibility of working women, and the age groups of their children, in several representative cities...

...The authority of its numerical tabulations is beyond question...

...It is noteworthy that the latter idea of marital duties seems to be held yet by the natives...

...The notion that the entire family wage must come from the man is a comparatively recent one, and one which often multiplies out of all proportion the burden of the man...

...was engaging herself to be not merely the lifelong consumer of a man's goods and the mother of his offspring, but the partner in his labor, contributing an equal or greater share to the support of the family...

...As in the noble origins of its name, chivalry has always been a leisure-class phenomenon, in a society where the possession of a useless, beautiful woman is an indubitable evidence of affluence...

...Although some women work merely to escape the tedium of small-time housekeeping and of unwonted thrift, most working mothers are balancing better food and clothing for their child against uninterrupted personal care...

...sometimes for days at a time, she left the home to go only as far as the barn...

...Women's work in those days was done in drafty, ill-ventilated, ill-heated, smoky dwellings, often very small, and almost always unbearable according to modern standards...

...His love was of man for man, or of man for God...

...Hence a number of maids-"spares" from England-were imported to make homes, food, apparel and families for the men...

...Unless the wages of the male laborer can be raised forcibly without a corresponding rise in prices, the woman wage-earner is probably not a temporary phenomenon, whose existence as such ceases at the bow of the prince charming...

...First, they show that the number and the proportion of women gainfully occupied has increased since 1880, and that the percentage of married women employed shows a greater gain than that of single women...

...We find chivalry also in story-books, and in romantic youths whose allowances are ample...

...This high consideration for women has in the main worked powerfully and beneficially toward the improvement of conditions in factories and other establishments where potential mothers are employed...

...The pamphlet shows the sex distribution, and the age distribution by sex, of persons gainfully occupied, and the marital condition of women gainfully occupied, throughout the country...

...In the less rigorous South, also, it was early found that the Virginia settlers could not prosper without women...

...Everywhere in America, prior to 1850, woman did a great part of the labor now accomplished in factories...

...When her duties, like spinning and weaving, moved away from the home under the inspiration of labor-saving machinery, she naturally left her home and followed her work...

...Thus the labor of this country, less than a century ago, was clearly divided between the agricultural male and the manufacturing female, while the child was made to put both hands into the struggle as soon as he could...

...During the past few decades, as farming has come to demand fewer hands and as manufacturing has become more complex, man has been partially displacing woman in woman's age-old occupations...

...Coupled with these statements we may cite the oft-echoed complaints that woman is being taken out of her proper domain, and suffering under a gross inequality in wages...

...Plato seemed as antisocially revolutionary in giving her a share in managing things as in advocating communism of property and wives...

...The recent bulletin of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, which brought this matter to a more prominent place in the news, represented a tremendous effort of statistical research...

...Her sisters who had remained in England were, at the same time, regularly hiring themselves out for mowing, reaping and hay-making, and thinking it nothing unusual...

...Then come long stretches of data detailing the marital condition of employed women, and the proportions having children between certain ages...

...This feeling of economic solidarity in the family, lacking in the native American, may partially explain the preference of the foreign-born for small retail establishments where a couple can alternate in serving customers while Bobby delivers...

...The inferences, direct or implied, that were drawn from them by the bulletin and that are readily read into them by the emotionally prejudiced, are that woman is now heroically accepting a ponderous burden of labor brought about by new economic selfishness, and that the man's responsibility is diminishing at the expense of woman...

...Moreover, because of the child-labor restrictions inherent in compulsory school-attendance laws, and because of the rising American standard of living, of which we are so proud, it has become increasingly difficult for parents to support large families until such time as the offspring ceases to be a heavy economic burden...

...They can represent only a part of the pertinent cases, and a few of the conditioning details, and they are commonly restricted, as in this instance, to concrete external phenomena, making scant or no allowance for the nature of the various human subjects with whom they deal...

...It seems that since our age is one of concentrated production and ever-increasing demands in the living standard, women will continue to work outside the home even after marriage with sufficient steadiness to warrant their preparing themselves for an industrial existence of some duration...

...Women who seek gainful occupation outside of the home do so because basically they realize that it is not a law of nature that man should chivalrously supply all the funds, do all the productive labor, while his life partner confines herself to personal service only...

...Even he, the boldest idealist of many centuries, could not conceive of an attraction of intellect, of soul, between man and woman...

...A busy childhood was esteemed above a happy one...

...We search in vain in the middle-class annals for footmarks of this far-lauded chivalry whose demise is so loudly lamented by the middle class...

...They leave the home for part of the day because they can spend some time to greater advantage elsewhere...

...In a study of working conditions made in Philadelphia, most of the women who said they worked "to help husband"-as opposed to those who named only economic pressure -were foreign-born, coming from countries where the family is still the unit of production...

...The woman who said, "I will," in those days...

...The tables in this latest, most complete United States bulletin on wage-earning women indicate several facts conclusively...

...when ideals of sanitation are more rigidly applied in factories...

...Once we venture beyond the simple facts portrayed by the statistics as outlined above, we must have with us a full background of industrial history and of changing domestic conditions before we can extract further conclusions from the given data...

...As an indication of certain facts, it is most valuable...

...They usually work outside of the home for the betterment of the family, just as they once worked in it...

...The average American girl would be quite wary of wedding a continental...

...Since this notion is, however, prevalent in our America, we can easily understand why the son gives less in many cases to the paternal establishment than the daughter...

...In the middle of the nineteenth century, it was disgraceful to be a male weaver...

...Women under this regime were not infrequently jailed for idleness...

...Foreigners continue to marvel, with some dread of contamination, at the devotion of the American male to his spouse...

...It is Jack who must send chocolates to the daughter of some other family, must pay her way to the movies, must buy the ring, furnish the home, supply the funds for the trip to Niagara or New York, and ultimately pay the rent and try to build up a reserve against emergencies...

...yet the duties of the housewife kept her indoors, behind shut windows, for long hours...

...Its only limitations as a picture of conditions-and the limitations must not be overlooked- are those notably inherent in statistics dealing with human beings...

...But the American house of a century ago was not the idyllic log cabin nor the colonial mansion that the cinema would paint it...

...With all these tasks, the women of that busy period still found hours here and there for going to meeting, and for acting as improvised nurses when misfortune visited a neighbor...

...Hence the proportion of married women engaged in profitable industry outside the home was necessarily small, to the financial detriment of many a home...

...In the colonial days, and down to the time when machinery and factories became prominent in American production, almost all the manufacturing in our country was done by women, with the help of the children of the family...

...and the outdoors, especially to the pioneer wife, meant only an inclement contact with the elements after the relative coziness of her kitchen workshop...

...It has sometimes been in danger of overstepping bounds by protecting women to the restriction of their economic advantage and their growth in stamina and solidarity...

...The mathematical trend in such data may be obvious...

...and when women improve the quality of their work and lengthen their tenure of positions so as to warrant greater consideration from even the most selfish employers...

...yet the causal and modifying factors and the valid conclusions must be sought diligently, and even then must not be pedestaled too everlastingly...

...WOMEN WHO WORK By HELEN M. McCADDEN FOR the strong prejudice which many men have against permitting, or admitting, that their wives earn wages, the restrictive idolization to which women in American have recently been subjected may well be held accountable...

...Women seek employment because the birth rate is kept low by economic smallness of families, the shrinking of the size of the home, the day-long absence of their working husbands, the disappearance of all manufacture from the home, and the increasingly numerous and popular labor-savers for housewives, such as canned foods, patented cleaners, electric irons, more efficacious soaps, laundries, and such comparatively recent necessities as running water and gas stoves...

...In the most enlightened country of ancient days, the Greece of Pericles, the woman was a body-mate and a household drudge...

...She also cooked for the farm hands, made butter, cheese, tallow, candles and preserves, spun, wove, and made clothing for family consumption, and frequently found time to produce socks, bonnets and suits of clothing for sale, or to make thread or cloth for commission merchants, even as the workers in such "sweated" trades as dressmaking, button carding, and bead stringing do now...

...He tilled the soil, kept the cattle and improved the premises...

...There was still enough producing, however, in most households, to keep the married woman abundantly busy in spite of the diversion of parts of the cotton industry to other hands...

...Although we frequently hear that the employment of married women decreases the birth rate, the reverse is probably the true situation...

...In America, as in England, the early manufacturing establishments employed chiefly women and children...

...They also indicate that men's wages in industrial sections are often inadequate for the decent support of a moderate-sized family, and that the daughters in certain industrial regions give more liberally of their earnings than the sons toward family support...

...Of course all but a negligible part of the work indicated above was performed in the home...

...The world, and the race of man, have not yet reached the stage where the male, unaided, can produce wealth enough for two others beside himself...

...America is still, in comparison with other countries, the woman's paradise...

...In fact, in the perspective of what has been, it appears that the gentler sex in the United States of today has less of an automatic economic place in the world than her New England or Dakota grandmother...

...Because of the wide arable lands and the simplicity of civilization, agriculture was a profitable and imperative occupation, and the prevalent economic theory was that man should be left free to engage in it while the manufacturing was done by weaker hands...

...She cared for the household, supervised the servants and the children-even as she now does...