Women's Wild Oats. C. Gasquoine Hartley
a protest that really I can hardly trust myself to write any comment. This is the ideal now set before us for the industrial woman "to stand by a machine pressing all her life." I ask, Is it for this that the sons of these women have died? Marriage is spoken of as "one of women's industrial drawbacks," "it makes her less ambitious and enterprising."
Now, I do not wish to be unfair. The questions involved are, I know, immense and many-sided. There can be no easy dismissal of this valuable Report in condemnation. Mrs. Sidney Webb's minority Report[28:1] in particular is valuable; and in many ways the findings of the Committee are excellent. Everyone must agree with the wise recommendations as to the reduction of the hours of work and better conditions of labor. They are in advance of anything hitherto proposed. The popular formula of "equal pay for equal work" or more correctly "equal value," is accepted. If women are to do men's work, obviously they ought to be paid men's wages. Other very commendable recommendations concern pensions for widowed, deserted or necessitous mothers (I should add unmarried mothers). State payment is advised for the entire cost of the lying-in-period as the only way to ensure births under satisfactory conditions to the child and the mother. All this is just and good. If the state desires women to remain in industrial occupations, it is some gain that help should be given them, when for a few weeks they go from the factory to do their own work and bear children. Yet, after all, is there not something ridiculous, yes, and also disgraceful, in such a compromise. We leave a woman "to stand by a machine pressing all her life" (a work of monotony, so nerve-exhausting and soul-deadening that no man will do it), and then we pay her a small sum to enable her to bear an enfeebled child. Afterwards we send her back to the factory and open State crêches and nursery-schools to rid her of the responsibilities and joys of bringing up her child. Such miserable makeshifts for fitting motherhood could be acceptable only in an industrially ruled society, where the simple belief would seem to be that a woman can do everything that men won't do—and their own work as well.
IV
Let us be honest. Do we care for the cherishing of children? Do we want to preserve the health and help mothers? Are we really concerned with the prevention of our high infantile death-rate, with all the futile suffering without any sense of purpose or compensation that it must entail to children and to mothers? Let us pray to care more passionately, to see a vision of motherhood such as will force us to act differently; a vision which, as when the mists clear away among the mountains, will show a wide world lit by the sun. It would not then be difficult for us to know what to do; we should decide unhesitatingly as to the mother in industry, that she ought not to be there.
V
Many facts combine in acclaiming our indifference; all of which show our distressing inability to take a wide view of social problems with our commercially blinded eyes. We look at everything, even the nation's children, through spectacles of gold. I cannot wonder at our endless sicknesses and crime.
A small paper-backed book is now lying upon my desk. It is an inquiry most carefully made by the Minister of Reconstruction into the conditions of juvenile employment during the war, and, to me at any rate, it is pitiless in its revelation of our failure in this period of stress in knowing how to live.
It would be difficult, indeed, to find a more complete condemnation of what we have been allowing to go on in our factories and workshops. The Report reveals an intolerable neglect, a reckless betrayal of young lives that not even the emergency of war can sanction.[31:1]
Mark what the report tells us:
Unless those most competent to judge are mistaken, in the generation which entered industry between 1914 and 1918 vitality has been lowered, morale undermined, and training neglected. …
For three years numbers of young persons have been exposed to almost every influence which could impair health, undermine character and unfit them, both in body and mind, for regular industry and intelligent citizenship.
And this passage also:
From the point of view of the community, the adolescent worker is a potential parent and a potential citizen … there is no doubt whatever what course of action should be prescribed by consideration for the interests of the nation. It would be to subordinate the employment of young persons for their immediate utility to their preparation for more effective work as men and women. … The danger is not that there may, in the present, be too few adolescent laborers, but that there may be too many, and that as a result there may in the future be too few healthy and well trained adult workers and intelligent citizens.
The profit-seeking employer, the patriotic maker of munitions, considers output: he does not think of the girls' or the boys' future, of the adult employment for which they are being prepared, or not prepared, or if the occupation leads, as so often is the case, to a blank wall. No kind of concern is shown of the degree in which the occupation enlarges the interests of the growing minds, or fritters them away and leaves for a later use nothing but a dead machine, capable only of spasmodic excitement; does not think of the effect of long hours or of large wages and their consequent premature freedom from home restraints on character.
The last mentioned evil has been greatly accentuated by the absence of soldier fathers. The indictable offenses committed by the young have increased markedly during the war, and surely we are responsible for this lapse of children into crime.
We have permitted heavy and nerve-exhausting work to be done in just the years when the adolescent was making the always difficult passage of the boy to the man, of the girl to the woman. And for this reason their suppressed, not-understood, thwarted instincts have broken out in unpleasing and often dangerous ways. Is it any wonder if in such circumstances boys turn to petty robberies and other unsocial acts, while girls display some of the less estimable characteristics of the prostitute?
Our ideal is to ignore sex in industry; to deny the strong and necessary separations that nature's wisdom places as barriers between boy and girl, between man and woman. We make our sons and daughters compete in education and in industry. No doubt education and industry are ill-fitted for males, but at any rate they were intended for males. Intellectually inferior to the boy or the man, the girl or woman is not. She is exasperatingly observant, often understands character with unconsidered quickness, feels spontaneously; but it does not follow that there is any value for her in the collection of dead facts, stored by abstract-minded professors—all the futile things we call education, which show in every direction the most coarse lack of understanding of the needs of the child and of life. And the girl suffers more than the boy, for the girl-student does as she is told much more conscientiously than boys. Similarly in industry: tapping or pushing at a machine until she taps or pushes on in her dreams; all the more monotonous kinds of machine-tending will wear feminine nerves, naturally more irritable than those of men, more than the same work will wear the male nerves. Not that I believe in subordinating the worker of either sex to the machine. What I want to prevent is the same stupid sacrifice of girls and women in industry as has been permitted in the case of boys and men. There has been in our commercialized society no kind of effective tradition for the care and guidance of adolescent workers, and, there is no escaping from the condemning proofs of our neglect: there has been, and, indeed, is still going on, in many directions a vast range of betrayal and baseness in the way we have shirked our duties to the young. As the writer, from whose Report I have quoted, says, with a rather grim irony: "a strain has been put on the character of young persons which might have corrupted the integrity of a Washington and have undermined the energy of Samuel Smiles."
VI
The war is over, and with it the special and pressing need for women's and girls' work, but the consequences of the war period are far, indeed, from nearing their end. Following all the industrial confusion of the war, we are now facing the certainty of wide-spread unemployment among women and girls. We have condemned thousands of them to unemployment with the same thoughtlessness with which they were called into industry; and in the less skilled ranges of employment, the always existing competition between men and women and boys and girls is certain to be fiercely accentuated.
It is officially stated