Women's Wild Oats. C. Gasquoine Hartley
Trade inquiries, Government reports, newspaper cuttings, recent books, articles from the reviews and popular magazines—all dealing, in one manner or another, with women's labor and their position as workers in the immediate past and in the future. Woman, eternally surprising, has established her power in new fields.
During the five war years a revolution has taken place in the industrial position of women. But the war was not the cause of the revolution. It only afforded an opportunity for forces to display themselves which already were in action. It hurried women forward, running at top speed, along paths where before their feet had slowly walked. War hastened the action of forces existing already. The wage-earning woman came in with the forties with the factory system, and every year she has increased in numbers, but during the five years of war her ranks have gained an enormous influx; moreover, a different class of girls and women have come to seek different kinds of work. And what marks the permanent importance of this is that a change of occupations has brought with it a startling change of behavior and outlook.
Just as the militarist has regarded war, not as a means of preventing the enslavement of peoples and their subjection to foreign rule, but rather as in itself a source of virtue and blessing, of progress and civilization; so too the feminist teachers have told us, not that the entrance of women into munition works was necessary to enable our country to arm for its terrible war, but have hailed the successive appearances of women in factories, foundries, and railway-stations as in itself a great step forward; as a goal long strived for that has been gained. What has been going on is a continuance of the process by which women are led more and more to escape from any specialization of function and are brought into competition with men in every kind of occupation. Now, let us be clear about it: this is a process which makes the excitement and experience and possible good of the individual woman outweigh in importance the safeguarding of the perpetual stream of man. A confusion of values has led women astray. Being a woman is a handicap. For the true carrying out of the duties of the wife and mother physical and mental quiet and sound nerves are needed. The industrial field has become the ideal place of action for the feminists, who persistently romanticize the independent commercial or industrial career, trampling heedlessly on the wisdom of the past, bent on living their own little lives and all that kind of egoistic futility; holding up as admirable cheap achievements in the hell of modern competitive, beggar-your-fellow-worker, sell-at-a-profit industrialism; blackening as sacrifice, as a limiting of character, woman's service to her husband and her children, her work in the home and in the nursery.
I tell you women everywhere among us are being starved of sacrifice and service. Sacrifice lives in the soul of a woman, and not alone in the separate spirit of the individual woman to whom it is communicated only through a losing of herself, which marks her union with the greatest powers of life. It is, I think, one of the most destroying tragedies of our industrial society that women are denied this sustenance in a fixed and regulated unison of sacrifice, are forced away from service to life, excited to do violence to their deepest instinct, by engaging in the deadly and futile rivalry, where the greatest successfulness must bring to them the greatest destruction.
There has been much happening to bring fear. Something has gone wrong with the women of this land. In saying this, I am not forgetting the splendidness of their work; what I complain of is that their womanly vision has failed. In France, as is evident to all, the attitude of women has been very different. The French women also worked hard during the war to save their country, but they did not as our women have done, like war-work for its own sake. They never transferred their affections from their homes to the factories of war, they were too certain of themselves, too content with their power as women to do anything so foolish. What is the explanation of this profound difference in attitude? Why has the vision of English women failed? That is the question to which we have to try to find an answer.
II
The great part played by women coming forward during the war to take the place of men called to the army is disclosed in a White Paper recently issued by the Board of Trade. Over a million and a half women offered their services, in addition to those already employed.[23:1] The increase has been the highest in the occupations in which comparatively few women were engaged before the war. In April, 1918, 701,000 women were working on munitions and 774,000 in other industrial government employment. A disturbing fact revealed (called, I note, in the Report an interesting point!) is the number of women who have been engaged in hard, laboring work. Before the war when the public discovered women doing very hard work, it excited indignation and pity. The women chain-makers of Craddock Heath, to cite one example, were accorded general commiseration. But during the war our feelings on the question would seem to have undergone a somewhat sudden transformation; a complete turn-round has taken place in our attitude. Heavy work done by women—foundry work, for instance, demanding great expenditure of physical strength[24:1] has excited admiration and become an important factor of the industrial situation. A glamour of patriotic war service, added to the lure of high wages, has been thrown like a cloak of romance over such exhibitions of female power. They became victories of female will over female weakness.
Certainly in many cases the work done was quite unsuitable for women. The employment of married women during long days of tiring work had inevitable results. Babies were neglected or births were deliberately prevented. This spendthrift folly will have to be paid for in the future.
Not that I believe that all apparently hard work to be on an equality of unfitness for women. Country work is generally healthful; though hard work it is restful to the nerves. Every kind of nerve-racking work as in factories, heavy weight-lifting, long standing, and the tending of machinery without any kind of human interest, must be detrimental to women. Certain employments, consecrated by custom as comparatively womanly, yet, in their nerve-exhausting details mean ill-health. Take, for an instance, the average shop-girl, or machine worker, with her whitened face, dragging steps and flattened figure: does she not show plainly that she is anæmic and wanting in vitality? On the other hand, to my eye the lift attendants on the tubes, the charming conductresses of the 'buses seem healthy, though their work has been done only recently by women. I would make the influence of an occupation on woman's health—considering first and as most important her primary biological function as a potential mother—the test of its womanliness. But the health of women will never be protected while we are content to accept the valuations and suffer the defilements of this commercial age.
III
Only this morning I have been reading the newly issued Report of the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry, a large book of 340 pages, packed with information, in particular as to "the increased employment of women owing to the development of automatic machinery." What I read fills me with dismay and indignation. I was not prepared—and I thought I was prepared for anything—for such blindness of outlook.
To prove this, let me quote directly from the Report. The Committee urges rightly the importance to the health of the workers of good food, clothing and domestic comfort, and the necessity of good wages to maintain this standard. But why are these improved conditions recommended? Listen to what is said:
Properly nourished women have a much greater reserve of energy than they have usually been credited with, and under suitable conditions they can properly and advantageously be employed upon more arduous occupation than has been considered desirable in the past, even when these involve considerable activity and physical strain. …
And a little further:
It is desirable that women's wide employment should be made permanent.
In another passage the Committee report that on piece work a woman will always beat a man. And again further on: On mass production she will come first every time. … Men will never stand the monotony of a fast repetition job like women; they will not stand by a machine pressing all their lives, but a woman will.[27:1]
Nothing that I can say, or any writer could say, could be more vividly condemning than are these passages. They have filled me