over-repressive policy, an over-righteous judgment, plus a mother ignorant of the facts of life, plus a girl’s longing for joy–the sum of these equaled ruin in Edna’s case.
CHAPTER VIII
WOMAN’S HELPING HAND TO THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
Annie, Sadie, Edna, thousands of girls like them, girls of whom almost identical stories might be told, help to swell the long procession of prodigals every succeeding year. They joined that procession ignorantly because they thirsted for pleasure. Their days were without interest, their minds were unfurnished with any resources. At fourteen most of them left public school. Reading and writing are about as much intellectual accomplishments as the school gives them, and the work waiting for them in factory, mill, or department store is rarely of a character to increase their intelligence.
Ask a girl, “Why do you go to the dance hall? Why don’t you stay home evenings?” Nine times in ten her answer will be: “What should I do with myself, sitting home and twirling my fingers?”
If you suggest reading, she will reply: “You can’t be reading all the time.” In other words, there is no intellectual impulse, but instead an instinct for action.
The crowded tenement, the city slum, an oppressive system of ill-paid labor, these are evils which a gradually developing social conscience must one day eliminate. Their tenure will not be disturbed to-day, to-morrow, or next day. Their evil influence can be offset, in some measure, by a recognition on the part of the community of a debt,–a debt to youth.
The joy of life, inherent in every young creature, including the young human creature, seeks expression in play, in merriment, and will not be denied.
The oldest, the most persistent, the most attractive, the most satisfying expression of the joy of life is the dance. Other forms of recreation come in for brief periods, but their vogue is always transitory. The roller skating craze, for example, waxed, waned, and disappeared. Moving pictures and the nickelodeon have had their day, and are now passing. The charm, the passion, the lure of the dance remains perennial. It never wholly disappears. It always returns.
In New York City alone there are three hundred saloon dance halls. Three hundred dens of evil where every night in the year gallons of liquid damnation are forced down the throats of unwilling drinkers! Where the bodies and souls of thousands of girls are annually destroyed, because the young are irresistibly drawn toward joy, and because we, all of us, good people, busy people, indifferent people, unseeing people, have permitted joy to become commercialized, have turned it into a commodity to be used for money profit by the worst elements in society. Could a more inverted scheme of things have been devised in a madhouse?
New York is by no means unique. Every city has its dance hall problem; every small town its girl and boy problem; every country-side its tragedy of the girl who, for relief from monotony, goes to the city and never returns.
It is strange that nowhere, until lately, in city, town, or country, has it occurred to any one that the community owed anything to this insatiable thirst for joy.
Consider, for instance, the age-long indifference of the oldest of all guardians of virtue, the Christian Church. To the demand for joy the evangelical church has returned the stern reply: “To play cards, to go to the theater, above all, to dance, is wicked.” The Methodist Church, for one, has this baleful theory written in its book of discipline, and persistent efforts on the part of enlightened clergy and lay members have utterly failed to expurgate it. The Catholic, Episcopalian, and Lutheran churches utter no such strictures, but in effect they defend the theory that joy, if not in itself an evil, at least is no necessity of life.
To meet the growing social discontent, the increasing indifference to old forms of religion, the open dissatisfaction with religious organizations which had degenerated into clubs for rich men, there was developed some years ago in America the “institutional church.” This was an honest effort to give to church members, and to those likely to become church members, opportunity for social and intellectual diversion. Parish houses and settlements were established, and these were furnished with splendid gymnasiums, club rooms, committee rooms, auditoriums for concerts and lectures, kitchens for cooking lessons, and provision besides for basketry, sewing, and embroidery classes. These are all good, and so are the numberless reading, debating, and study clubs good, as far as they go. But what a pitifully short way they go! They have built up congregations somewhat, but they have made not the slightest impression on the big social problem. The reason is plain. The appeal of the institutional church is too intellectual. It reaches only that portion of the masses who stand least in need of social opportunity.
To this accusation the church, man instituted and man controlled since the beginning of the Christian Era, replies that it does all that can be done for the uplift of humanity. That the church seems to be losing its hold on the masses of people is attributed to a general drift of degenerate humanity towards atheism and unbelief.
The people, the great world of people,–what a field for the church to work in, if it only chose! The great obstacle is that the church (leaving out the institutional church), on Sunday a vital, living force, is content to exist all the other days in the week merely as a building. Six days and more than half six evenings in the week the churches stand empty and deserted. Simply from the point of view of material economy this waste in church property, reduced to dollars and cents, would appear deplorable. From the point of view of social economy, reduced to terms of humanity, the waste is heartbreaking.
What would happen if something should loose those churches, or, at any rate, their big Sunday-school rooms and their ample basements from this icy exclusiveness, this week-day aloofness from humanity? Can you picture them at night, streaming with light, gay with music, filled with dancing crowds? not crowds from homes of wealth and comfort, but crowds from streets and byways; crowds for which, at present, the underworld spreads its nets? The great mass of the people, packed in dreary tenements, slaves of machinery by day, slaves of their own starved souls by night, must go somewhere for relaxation and forgetfulness. What would happen if the church should invite them, not to pray but to play?
Some of the results might be a decrease in vice, in drinking, gambling, and misery. At least we may infer as much from the success of the occasional experiments which have been tried. We have a few examples to prove that human nature is not the low, brutish thing it has too often been described. It does not invariably choose wrong ways, but, on the contrary, when a choice between right ways and wrong ways is presented, the right is almost always preferred.
A year ago in Chicago there was witnessed a spectacle which, for utter brutality and blindness of heart, I hope never to see duplicated. Chicago had for some time been in the midst of a vigorous crusade against organized vice. Too long neglected by the authorities and the public, the so-called levee districts of the city had fallen into the hands of grafting police officials, who, working with the lowest of degraded of men, had created an open and most brazen vice syndicate. Without going into details, it is enough to say that conditions finally became so scandalous that all Chicago rose in horror and rebellion. The police department was thoroughly overhauled, and a new chief appointed who undertook in all earnestness to suppress the worst features of the system. He had no new weapons it is true, and he probably had no notion that he could make any impression on the evil of prostitution. But he might have restored external decency and order, and he might possibly have prepared the way for some scientific examination of the problem. But a thing happened: one of those shocking blunders we too often let happen. The efforts of the chief of police were set back, because of that blunder, no one can tell how far. A new hysteria of vice and disorder dates from the hour the blunder was made.
In October of 1909 “Gypsy” Smith, a noted evangelical preacher of the itinerant order, was holding revival meetings in an armory on the South Side of Chicago. With mistaken zeal this man announced that he was going down into the South Side Levee and with one effort would reclaim every one of the wretched inhabitants. He invited his immense congregation to follow him there, and assist in the greatest crusade against vice the world had ever seen.
In Chicago, as in other cities, no procession or parade is allowed to march without permission from police headquarters. To the sorrow of all those who believed that reform had really begun, Chief of Police Steward issued a permit to “Gypsy” Smith. It is probable that the chief feared the effect of a refusal. To lift up the fallen has ever been one of the functions of religious bodies. Before issuing the permit, it is said that he used all his powers of persuasion against the parade.
By orders from headquarters every house in the district was closed, shuttered, and pitch dark on the night of the parade. Every door was locked, and the most complete silence reigned within. It was into a city of silence that the procession of nearly five thousand men, women, and young people of both sexes marched on that October midnight. In the glare of red fire and flaming torches, to the confused blare of many Salvation Army brass bands, the quavering of hymn tunes, including the classic, “Where Is My Wandering Boy To-night,” and the constant explosion of photographers’ flashlights, the long procession stumbled and jostled its way through streets that gave back for answer darkness and silence.
But afterwards! The affair had been widely advertised, and it drew a throng of spectators, not only from every quarter of the city, but from every suburb and surrounding country town. Young men brought their sweethearts, their sisters, to see the “show.” As “Gypsy” Smith’s procession wound its noisy way out of the district, and back into the armory, this great mob of people surged into the streets pruriently eager to watch the awakening of the levee. It came. Lights flashed up in almost every house. The women appeared at the windows and even in the street. Saloon doors were flung open. The sound of pianos and phonographs rose above the clamor of the mob. Pandemonium broke loose as the crowds flung themselves into the saloons and other resorts. The police had to beat people back from the doors with their clubs. A riot, an orgy, impossible to describe, impossible to forget, ensued. Many of those who took part in it had never been in such a district before.
This horrible scene somehow typified to my mind the whole blind, chaotic, senseless attitude which society has preserved toward the most baffling of all its problems. Nothing done to prevent the evil, because no one knew what to do. After the evil was an established fact, after the hearts of the victims were thoroughly hardened, after the last hope of return had perished, then a “vice crusade”–led by a man!
Another scene witnessed about the same time seems to me to typify the new attitude which society–led by women–is assuming towards its problem. It was in the large kindergarten room of one of the oldest of Chicago’s social centers,–the Ely Bates Settlement. A group of little Italian girls, peasant clad in the red and green colors of their native land, swung around the room at a lively pace singing the familiar “Santa Lucia.” As the song ended the children suddenly broke into the maddest of dances, a tarantella. Led by a graceful young girl, one of the settlement workers, they danced with the joyous abandon of youthful spirits untrammeled, ending the dance with a chorus of happy laughter.
This was only one group of many hundreds in every quarter of Chicago,–in schools, settlements, kindergartens, and other centers,–who were rehearsing for the third of the annual play festivals given out of doors each year in Chicago. The festivals are held in the most spacious of the seventeen wonderful public gardens and playgrounds established of late throughout the city. Lasting all day, this annual carnival of play is shared by school children, working girls and boys, and young men and women. In the morning the children play and perform their costume dances. In the afternoon the fields are given up to athletic sports of older children, and in the evening young men and women, of all nationalities, many wearing their old-world peasant dresses, revive the plays and the dances of their native lands. Tens of thousands view the beautiful spectacle, which each year excites more interest and assumes an added importance in the civic life of Chicago.
Each of the large parks in Chicago’s system is provided with a municipal dance hall, spacious buildings with perfect floors, good light, and ventilation. Any group of young people are at liberty to secure a hall, rent free, for dancing parties. The city imposes only one condition,–that the dances be chaperoned by park supervisors. Beautifully decorated with growing plants from the park greenhouses these municipal dance halls are scenes of gayety almost every night in the year. Park restaurants in connection with the halls furnish good food at low prices. Of course no liquor is sold. Nobody wants it. This is proved by the fact that saloon dance halls in the neighborhood of the parks have been deserted by their old patrons.
Women have recognized the debt to youth and the joy of life, and they are preparing to pay it.
In this latest form of social service they have entered a battlefield where the powers of righteousness have ever fought a losing fight. Men have grappled with the social evil without success. They have labored to discover a substitute for the saloon, and they have failed. They have tried to suppress the dance hall and they have failed. They have made laws against evil resorts, and they have sent agents of the police to enforce their laws, but to no effect.
The failure of the men does not dishearten or discourage the women who have taken up the work. They believe that they have discovered an altogether new way in which to fight the social evil.
They propose to turn against it its own most powerful weapons. The joy of life is to be fed with proper food instead of poison. Girls and young men are to be offered a chance to escape the nets stretched for them by the underworld. In many cities women’s clubs and women’s societies are establishing on a small scale amusement and recreation centers for young people. In New York Miss Virginia Potter, niece of the late Bishop Potter, and Miss Potter’s colleagues in the Association of Working Girls’ Clubs, have opened a public dance hall. The use of the large gymnasium of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls was secured, and every Saturday evening, from eight until eleven, young men and women come in and dance to excellent music, under the instruction, if they need it, of a skilled dancing-master. A small fee is charged, partly to defray expenses, and partly to attract a class of people who disdain philanthropy and settlements. The experiment is new, but it is undoubtedly successful. As many as two hundred couples have been admitted in an evening. In half a dozen cities women’s clubs and women’s committees are at work on this matter of establishing amusement and recreation centers for young people. In New York a Committee on Amusement and Vacation Resources of Working Girls has for its president a social worker of many years, Mrs. Charles M. Israels. Associated with the committee are many other well-known social economists,–women of wealth and influence who have given years to the service of working girls. The committee began its work by a scientific investigation into the dance halls of New York, the summer parks and picnic grounds in the outlying districts, and of the summer excursion boats which ply up and down the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. The revelations made by this investigation, carried on under the supervision of Miss Julia Schoenfeld, were terrible enough. They were made to appear still more terrible when it was known that men of the highest social and commercial standing were profiting hugely from the most vicious forms of amusement. A state senator is one of the largest stockholders in Coney Island resorts of bad character. An ex-governor of the State controls a popular excursion boat, on which staterooms are rented by the hour, for immoral purposes no one can possibly doubt. The women of the committee submitted the findings of their investigators to the managers of these amusement places and to the directors of the steamboat lines, and in many instances reforms have been promised. The point is that a committee of women had to finance an investigation to show these business men the conditions which were adding to their wealth, and into which they had never even inquired.
Another investigation made by the committee revealed the meagerness of the provision made by churches, settlements, and business establishments for working girls’ vacations. There are, in round numbers, four hundred thousand working women in Greater New York. Of these, something like three hundred thousand are unmarried girls between the ages of fourteen and thirty. In all, only 6,874 of these young toilers, who earn on an average six dollars a week, are provided with vacation outings. They are usually given vacations, with or without pay, but they spend the idle time at Coney Island, on excursion boats, or in the dance hall.
Of the 1,257 churches and synagogues of New York, only six report organized vacation work for girls and women. Of the twenty or more large department stores, employing thousands of women, only three have vacation houses in the country. Of the hundred or more social settlements in New York only fifteen provide summer homes. There are several vacation societies which do good work with limited resources, but they are able to care for comparatively few. We have heard much of fresh air work for children, and we can afford to hear more. But that the fresh air work for young girls and women who toil long hours in factory and shop must be extended, this committee’s investigation definitely establishes.
The first practical work of the committee, after the investigation of amusement and recreation places, was a bill introduced into the State Legislature providing for the licensing and regulation of public dancing academies, prohibiting the sale of liquor in such establishments, and holding the proprietor responsible for indecent dancing and improper behavior.
Against the bitter opposition of the dancing academy proprietors the bill became a law and went into effect in September, 1909. Almost immediately it was challenged on constitutional grounds. The committee promptly introduced another bill, this one to regulate dance halls. This bill, which passed the legislature and is now a law, aims to wipe out the saloon dance hall absolutely, and so to regulate the sale of liquor in all dancing places that the drink evil will be cut down to a minimum. The license fee of fifty dollars a year will eliminate the lowest, cheapest resorts, and a rigid system of inspection will not only go far towards preserving good order, but will do away with the wretchedly dirty, ill-smelling, unsanitary fire traps in which many halls are located. The dance-hall proprietor who encourages or even tolerates “tough” dancing, or who admits to the floor “White Slavers,” procurers, or persons of open immorality, will be liable to forfeiture of his license.
The committee has done more than try to reform existing dance halls. It has taken steps to establish, in neighborhoods where evil resorts abound, attractive dance halls, where a decent standard of conduct is combined with all the best features of the evil places–good floors, lively music, bright lights. Two corporations have been organized for the maintenance, in various parts of the city, of model dance halls, and one hall has already been opened. The patrons of the model dance hall do not know that it is a social experiment paid for by a committee of women. It is run exactly like any public dancing place, only in an orderly fashion.
Every extension of use of public places, schools, parks, piers, as recreation places for young people between fifteen and twenty is encouraged and supported by the committee. Already two public schools have organized dancing classes, and several settlements have thrown open their dances to the public where formerly they were attended only by settlement club members.
By helping working girls to find cheap vacation homes in the country, and by establishing vacation banks to help the girls save for their summer outings, the committee hopes to discourage some of the haphazard picnic park dissipation. In summer many trades are slack, girls are idle, and out of sheer boredom they hang around the parks seeking amusement. It is only a theory, perhaps, but Mrs. Israels and the others on her committee believe that if many of these girls knew that a country vacation were within the possibilities, they would gladly save money towards it. At present the vacation facilities of working girls in large cities are small. In New York, where at least three hundred thousand girls and women earn their bread, only about six thousand are helped to summer vacations in the country. What these women are doing now on a small scale, experimentally, will soon be adopted, as their children’s playgrounds, their kindergartens, their vacation schools, and other enterprises have been adopted, by the municipalities. Their probation officers, long paid out of club treasuries, have already been transferred to many cities, east and west. Soon municipal dance halls, municipal athletic grounds, municipal amusement and recreation centers for all ages and all classes will be provided.
Already New York is preparing for such a campaign. The newly-appointed Parks Commissioner, Charles B. Stover, looking over his office force, dismissed one secretary whose function seemed largely ornamental, and diverted his salary of four thousand dollars to recreation purposes for young people. Commissioner Stover desires the appointment of a city officer who shall be a Supervisor of Recreations, a man or a woman whose entire time shall be devoted to discovering where recreation parks, dancing pavilions, music, and other forms of pleasure are needed, and how they may be made to do the most good. A neighborhood that thirsts for concerts ought to have them. A community that desires to dance deserves a dance hall. In the long run, how infinitely better, how much more economical for the city to furnish these recreations, normally and decently conducted, than to bear the consequences of an order of things like the present one. The new order must come. It is the only way yet pointed out by which we may hope to close those other avenues, where the joy of youth is turned into a cup of trembling, and the dancing feet of girlhood are led into mires of shame.
CHAPTER IX
THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE
According to the findings of the Massachusetts State Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose investigation into previous occupation of fallen women was described in a former chapter, domestic service is a dangerous trade. Of the 3,966 unfortunates who came under the examination of the Bureau’s investigators, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been in domestic service. No other single industry furnished anything like this proportion.
From time to time reformatories and institutions dealing with delinquent women and girls examine the industrial status of their charges, always with results which agree with or even exceed the Massachusetts statistics. Bedford Reformatory, one of the two New York State institutions for delinquent women, in an examination of a group of one thousand women, found four hundred and thirty general houseworkers, twenty-four chamber-maids, thirteen nursemaids, eight cooks, and thirty-six waitresses. As some of the waitresses may have been restaurant workers, we will eliminate them. Even so, it will be seen that four hundred and seventy-five–nearly half of the Bedford women–had been servants.
In 1908 the Albion House of Refuge, New York, admitted one hundred and sixty-eight girls. Of these ninety-two were domestics, one was a lady’s maid, and nine were nursemaids.
Of one hundred and twenty-seven girls in the Industrial School at Rochester, New York, in 1909, only fifty-one were wage earners. Of that number twenty-nine had worked in private homes as domestics. Bedford Reformatory receives mostly city girls; Albion and Rochester are supplied from small cities and country towns. It appears that domestic service is a dangerous trade in small communities as well as in large ones.
On the face of it, the facts are wonderfully puzzling. Domestic service is constantly urged upon women as the safest, healthiest, most normal profession in which they can possibly engage. Assuredly it seems to possess certain unique advantages. Domestic service is the only field of industry where the demand for workers permanently exceeds the supply. The nature of the work is essentially suited, by habit, tradition, and long experiment, to women. It offers economic independence within the shelter of the home.
Lastly, housework pays extremely well. A girl totally ignorant of the art of cooking, of any household art, one whose function is to clean, scrub, and assist her employer to prepare meals, can readily command ten dollars a month, with board. The same efficiency, or lack of efficiency, in a factory or department store would be worth about ten dollars a month, without board. The wages of a competent houseworker, in any part of the country, average over eighteen dollars a month. Add to this about thirty dollars a month represented by food, lodging, light, and fire, and you will see that the competent houseworker’s yearly income amounts to five hundred and seventy-six dollars. This is a higher average than the school-teacher or the stenographer receives; it is almost double the average wage of the shop girl, or the factory girl. It is, in fact, about as high as the usual income of the American workingman.
It is true that the social position of the domestic worker is lower than that of the teacher, stenographer, or factory worker. This undoubtedly affects the attractiveness of domestic service as a profession. But the lower social position is in itself no explanation of the high rate of immorality. At least there are no figures to prove that the rate of morality rises or falls with the social status of the individual.
In the contemplation of what is known as the “servant problem,” I think we have been less scientific and more superficial than in any other social or industrial problem. For the increasing dearth of domestic workers, for the lowered standard of efficiency, for the startling amount of immorality alleged to belong to the class, we have given every explanation except the right one.
At the bottom of the “servant problem” lies the fact that it exists in the privacy of the home. Now, we have reached a point of social consciousness where we allow that it is right to intrude some homes and ask questions for the good of the community. “How many children have you?” “Are they all in school?” “Does your husband drink?” We have not yet reached the point of sending agents to inquire: “How many servants do you keep; what are their hours of work, and what kind of sleeping accommodations do you furnish them?”
Some intelligent inquiry has been made into surface conditions. The Sociological Department of Vassar College, under Professor Lucy Maynard Salmon, during the years 1889 and 1890, made an exhaustive study of wages, hours of work, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages of domestic service. Professor Salmon’s book, “Domestic Service,” giving the results of the inquiry, is a classic on the subject. It deals, however, almost entirely with the ethical side of the problem, the social relation between mistress and maid. The relation between the worker and the industry is hardly examined at all.
A later inquiry into the servant problem was conducted in 1903, in half a dozen cities, by organizations of women which associated themselves for the purpose, under the name of the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research.
The Woman’s Municipal League of New York, the Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, the Housekeepers’ Alliance, and the Civic Club of Philadelphia were the moving elements in the investigation. Co-operating with them were the College Settlements Association and the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, which together established a scholar ship for the research. This research was most ably conducted by Miss Frances Kellor, a Vassar graduate, and nine assistant workers, all of whom were college women. The report of the investigation was published a year later in the volume “Out of Work.”[1]
This investigation by organizations of educated and expert women was the first survey ever made of domestic service _as an industry_, the first scientific study of domestic workers _as an industrial group_. It was the first intelligent attempt to review housework as if it were a trade.
The most important conclusion of the investigators was that housework, domestic service, although carried on as a trade, is really no trade at all. The domestic worker is no more a part of modern industry than the Italian woman who finishes “pants” in a tenement, or the child who stays from school to fasten hooks and eyes on paper cards.
Do not let us make a mistake concerning the underlying cause of the servant problem. Let us face the truth that we have two institutions which are back numbers in twentieth century civilization: two left-overs from a past-and-gone domestic system of industry. One of these is the tenement sweat shop, where women combine, or try to combine, manufacturing and housekeeping. The other is the private kitchen–the home–where the last stand of conservatism and tradition, the last lingering remnant of hand labor, continues to exist.
No woman who is free enough, strong enough, intelligent enough to seek work in a factory or shop, is ever found in a sweat shop or seen carrying bundles of coats to finish at home.
Exactly for the same reason the average American working woman shuns housework as a means of livelihood. You will find in every community a few women of intelligence who are naturally so domestic in their tastes and inclinations that they shrink from any work outside the home. Such women do adhere to domestic service, but, broadly speaking, you behold in the servant group merely the siftings of the real industrial class.
In a tentative, halting sort of fashion we are learning to humanize the factory and shop. Factory workers, mill hands, department store clerks, have been granted legislation in almost every State of the Union, regulating hours of work, sanitary conditions, ventilation, and in some cases they have been given protection from dangerous machinery. In department stores they have been granted even certain special comforts, such as seats on which to rest while not actually working.
Of course, we have done no more than make a beginning in this matter of humanizing the factory and the shop. But we have made a beginning, and the movement toward securing better and juster and healthier conditions for workers in all the industries is bound to continue. So long as manufacturing was carried on in the home, no such protective legislation as workers now enjoy was dreamed of. We had to wait until the workers came together in large groups before we could see their conditions and understand their needs.
Housework, because it is performed in isolation, because it is purely individual labor, has never been classed among the industries. It has rather been looked upon as a normal feminine function, a form of healthy exercise. No one has ever suggested to legislators that sweeping and beating rugs might be included among the dusty trades; that bending over steaming washtubs, and almost immediately afterwards going out into frosty air to hang the clothes, might be harmful to throat and lungs; that remaining within doors days at a time, as houseworkers almost invariably do, reacts on nerves and the entire physical structure; that steady service, if not actual labor, from six in the morning until nine and ten at night makes excessive demands on mind and body.
Such conditions exist because the workers are too weak, too inefficient, too unintelligent to change them. Yet the demand for servants so far exceeds the supply that they are in a position, theoretically, to dictate the terms of their own employment. If they elected to demand pianos and private baths they could get them; that is, if instead of remaining isolated individuals they could form themselves into an industrial class, like plumbers, or bricklayers, or carpenters. Even as isolated individuals they are able to command a better money wage than more efficient workers, which proves how great is the need for their services.
The housekeeper clings to her archaic kitchen, firmly believing that if she gave it up, tried to replace it by any form of co-operative living, the pillars of society would crumble and the home pass out of existence. Yet so strong is her instinctive repugnance to the medieval system on which her household is conducted, that she shuns it, runs away from it whenever she can. Housekeeping as a business is a dark mystery to her. The mass of women in the United States probably hold, almost as an article of religion, the theory that woman’s place is in the home. But the woman who can organize and manage a home as her husband manages his business, systematically, profitably, professionally–well, how many such women do you know?
It would seem as if in the newer generations, the average housekeeper is not in the professional class at all. Usually she lacks professional training. If she was brought up in a well-to-do home where there were several servants, she knows literally nothing of cooking, or of any department of housekeeping. Even when she has had some instruction in household tasks, she almost never connects cooking with chemistry, food with dietetics, cleanliness with sanitation, buying with bookkeeping. She is an amateur. And she takes into her household to do work she herself is incapable of doing, another amateur, a woman who might, in many cases, do well under a capable commander, but who is hopelessly at sea when expected to evolve a system of housekeeping all by herself.
This irregular state of affairs in what should be a carefully studied, well-organized industry is reflected in the conditions commonly meted out to domestics. Take housing conditions, for example. Some housekeepers provide their servants with good beds; of course, not quite as good as other members of the household enjoy, but good enough. Some set aside pleasant, warm, well-furnished rooms for the servants. But Miss Kellor’s investigators reported that it was common to find the only unheated room in a house or apartment set aside for the servant. They found great numbers of servants’ rooms in basements, having no sunlight or heat.
At one home, where an investigator applied for a “place,” the housekeeper complained that her last maid was untidy. Then she showed the applicant to the servant’s room. This was a little den partitioned off from the coal bin!
In another place, the maid was required to sleep on an ironing board placed over the bathtub. In still another, the maid spent her night of rest on a mattress laid over the wash tubs in a basement. A bed for two servants, consisting of a thin mattress on the dining-room table, was also found.
Unventilated closets, rooms opening off from the kitchen, small and windowless, are very commonly provided in city flats. Even in spacious country homes the servants’ rooms are considered matters of little importance.
“One woman,” writes Miss Kellor, “planned her new three-story house with the attic windows so high that no one could see out of them. When the architect remonstrated she said: ‘Oh, those are for the maids; I don’t expect them to spend their time looking out.'”
I remember a young girl who waited on table at a woman’s hotel where I made my home. One morning I sent this girl for more cream for my coffee. She was gone some time and I spoke to her a little impatiently when she returned. She was silent for a moment, then she said: “Do you know that every time you send me to the pantry it means a walk of three and a half blocks? This dining-room and the kitchens and pantries are a block apart, and are separated by three flights of stairs. I have counted the distance there and back, and it is more than three blocks.”
“But, Kittie,” I said to her, “why do you work in a hotel, if it’s like that? Why don’t you take a place in a private family?”
“I’ve tried that,” said the girl. “I had a place with the —-family,” mentioning an historic name. “They had sickness in the family, and they stopped in town all summer. My room was up in the attic, with only a skylight for ventilation. During the day, except for the time I spent sitting on the area steps after nine o’clock, I was waiting on the cook in a hot kitchen. They let me out of the house once every two weeks. Here I have some freedom, at least.”
I have told this story to dozens of domestics, many of them from homes of wealth, and they agree that it is a common case. It is very rare, these girls say, to find a mistress who is willing to allow her maids to leave the house except on their days out. They concede certain hours of rest, it is true, but those hours must be spent within doors. “Why, if you went out I should be sure to need you,” is the usual explanation.
Imagine a factory girl or a stenographer being required to remain after hours on the chance of being needed for extra work.
There is an aspect to this phase of the servant question which is generally overlooked by employers. This is an isolation from human intercourse to be found in no other industry. When the household employs only one servant the isolation is absolute. The girl is marooned, within full sight of others’ happy life. Even when kindness is her portion she is an outsider from the family circle. Important as her function is in the life of the household, she is socially the lowest unit in it.
During the course of a great strike of mill operatives in Fall River, Massachusetts, a few years ago, a considerable group of weaver and spinner girls were induced, by members of the Women’s Trade Union League, to take up domestic service until the close of the strike. As the girls were in acute financial distress they agreed to try the experiment. These were mostly American or English girls, some of them above the average of intelligence and good sense.
Housework with its great variety of tasks made severe draughts on the strength of girls accustomed to using one set of muscles. The long hours and the confinement of domestic service affected nerves adjusted to a legal fifty-eight-hour week.
But the girls’ real objection to housework was its loneliness. Hardly a single house in Boston, or the surrounding suburbs, where the girls found places, was provided with a servants’ sitting room. There was absolutely no provision made for callers. For a servant is supposed not to have friends except on her days out. On those occasions she is assumed to meet her friends on the street.
In England people recognize the fact that they have a servant class. Every house of any pretentions provides a servants’ hall.
In the United States a sitting room for servants, even in millionaires’ homes, is a rarity.
More than this, in many city households, especially in apartment households, the servants are prohibited from receiving their friends even in the kitchen. “Are we allowed to receive men visitors in the house?” chorused a group of girls, questioned in a fashionable employment agency. “Mostly our friends are not allowed to step inside the areaway while we are putting on our hats to go out.”
There is no escaping the conclusion that a large part of the social evil, or that branch of it recruited every year from domestic service, is traceable to American methods of dealing with servants. The domestic, belonging, as a rule, to a weak and inefficient class, is literally driven into paths where only strength and efficiency could possibly protect her from evil.
Servants share, in common with all other human beings, the necessity for human intercourse. They must have associates, friends, companions. If they cannot meet them in their homes they must seek them outside.
Walk through the large parks in any city, late in the evening, and observe the couples who occupy obscurely placed benches. You pity them for their immodest behavior in a public place. But most of them have no other place to meet. And it is not difficult to comprehend that clandestine appointments in dark corners as a rule do not conduce to proper behavior. Most of the women you see on park benches are domestic servants. Some of them, it is safe to assume, work in New York’s Fifth Avenue, or in mansions on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive.
[Illustration: AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION]
The social opportunity of the domestic worker is limited to the park bench, the cheap theater, the summer excursion boat, and the dance hall. Hardly ever does a settlement club admit a domestic to membership; rarely does a working girls’ society or a Young Women’s Christian Association circle bid her welcome. The Girls’ Friendly Association of the Protestant Episcopal Church is a notable exception to this rule.
In a large New England city, not long ago, a member of the Woman’s Club proposed to establish a club especially for domestics, since no other class of women seemed willing to associate with them. The proposal was voted down. “For,” said the women, “if they had a clubroom they would be sure to invite men, and immorality might result.”
But there is no direct connection between a clubroom and immorality, whereas the park bench after dark and the dance hall and its almost invariable accompaniment of strong drink are positive dangers.
The housekeeper simply does not realize that her domestics are _girls_, exactly like other girls. They need social intercourse, they need laughter and dancing and healthy pleasure just as other girls need them, as much as the young ladies of the household need them.
Perhaps they need them even more. The girl upstairs has mental resources which the girl downstairs lacks. The girl upstairs has the protection of family, friends, social position. The last is of greatest importance, because the woman without a social position has ever been regarded by a large class of men as fair game. The domestic worker sometimes finds this out within the shelter, the supposed shelter, of her employer’s home.
[Illustration: ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION]
Tolstoy’s terrible story “Resurrection” has for its central anecdote in the opening chapter a court-room scene in which a judge is called upon to sentence to prison a woman for whose downfall he had, years before, been responsible. A somewhat similar story in real life, with a happier ending, was told me by the head of a woman’s reformatory. This official received a visit from a lawyer, who told her with much emotion that he had, several days before, been present when a young girl was sentenced to a term in a reformatory.
“She lived in my home,” said the man. “I believe that she was a good girl up to that time. My wife died, my home was given up, and of course I forgot that poor girl. She never made any claim on me. When I saw her there in court, among the dregs of humanity, her face showing what her life had become, I wanted to shoot myself. Now she is here, with a chance to get back her health and a right state of mind. Will you help me to make amends?”
The head of the reformatory rather doubted the man’s sincerity at first. She feared that his repentance was superficial. She refused to allow him to see or to communicate with the girl, but she wrote him regularly of her progress. Several times in the course of the year the man visited the reformatory, and at the end of that period he was allowed to see the girl. This institution happens to be one of the few where a rational and a humane system of outdoor work is in vogue. The girl, who a year back had been almost a physical wreck from drugs and the life of the streets, was again strong, healthy, and sane. The two forgave each other and were married.
If the position of the domestic, while living in the shelter of a family, is sometimes precarious, her situation, when out of a job, is often actually perilous.
If a girl has a home she goes to that home, and regards her temporary period of unemployment as a pleasant vacation. But in most cases, in cities, at any rate, few girls have homes of which they can avail themselves.
“In no city,” says Miss Kellor’s report, “are adequate provisions made for such homeless women, and their predicament is peculiarly acute, for their friends are often household workers who cannot extend the hospitality of their rooms.”
I think I hear a chorus of protesting voices: “We don’t have anything to do with the servant class you are describing. Our girls are respectable. They meet their friends at church. They come to us from reputable employment offices, which would not deal with them if they were not all right.”
Are you sure you know this? What, after all, do you really know about your servants? What do you know about the employment office that sent her to you? What do you know of the world inhabited by servants and the people who deal in servants? Can you not imagine that it might be different from the one you live in so safely and comfortably?
Are you willing to know the facts about the world, the underworld, from which the girl who cooks your food and takes care of your children is drawn? Do you care to know how a domestic spends the time between places, how she gets to your kitchen or nursery, the kind of homes she may have been in before she came to you? Make a little descent into that underworld with a girl whose experience is matched with those of many others.
Nellie B—- was an Irish girl, strong, pretty of face, and joyful of temperament. The quiet Indiana town where she earned her living as a cook offered Nellie so little diversion that she determined to go to Chicago to live. She gave up her place, and with a month’s wages in her pocket went to the city.
It was late in the afternoon when her train reached the station. Nellie alighted, bewildered and lonely. She had the address of an employment agency, furnished her by an acquaintance. Nellie slept that night, or rather tossed sleepless in the agency lodging house, on a dirty bed occupied by two women besides herself. In all her life she had never been inside such a filthy room, or heard such frightful conversation. Therefore next morning she gladly paid her exorbitant bill of one dollar and seventy-five cents, besides a fee of two dollars and a half for obtaining employment, and accepted the first place offered her.
The house she was taken to seemed to be conducted rather strangely. Meals were at unusual hours, and the household consisted largely of young women who received many men callers. For about a week Nellie did her work unmolested. At the end of the week her mistress presented her with a low-necked satin dress and asked her if she would not like to assist in entertaining the men. Simple-minded Nellie had to have the nature of the entertaining explained to her, and she had great difficulty in leaving the house after she had declined the offer. She had hardly any money left, and the woman refused to pay her for her week’s work.
Nellie knew of no other employment agency, so she was obliged to return to the one she left. When she reproached the agent for sending her to a disreputable house he shrugged his shoulders and replied: “Well, I send girls where they’re wanted. If they don’t like the place they can leave.”
The fact is, they cannot always leave when they want to. Miss Kellor’s investigators found an office in Chicago which sent girls to a resort in Wisconsin which was represented as a summer hotel. This notorious place was surrounded by a high stockade which rendered escape impossible.
The investigators found offices in other cities which operate disreputable houses in summer places. To these the proprietors send the handsomest of their applicants for honest work.
Three girls sent to a house of this kind found themselves prisoners. One girl made such a disturbance by screaming and crying that the proprietor literally kicked her out of the house. The investigators for the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research saw this girl in a hospital, insane and dying from the treatment she had received. Another of the three escaped from the place. She, too, was discovered in a state of dementia. The fate of the third girl is obscure.
[Illustration: THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY]
Not all employment agencies cater to this trade. Not all would consent to be accessory to women’s degradation. But the employment agency business, taken by and large, is disorganized, haphazard, out of date. It is operated on a system founded in lies and extortion. The offices want fees–fees from servants and fees from employers. They encourage servants to change their employment as often as possible. Often a firm will send a girl to a place, and a week or two later will send her word that they have a better job for her. Sometimes they arrange with her to leave her place after a certain period, promising her an easier position or a better wage. They favor the girl who changes often. “You’re a nice kind of a customer!” jeered one proprietor to a girl who boasted that she had been in a family for five years. The girl was a _customer_ to him, and she was nothing more.
To his profitable customer the agent is often very accommodating. If she lacks references he writes her flattering ones, or loans her a reference written by some woman of prominence. References, indeed, are often handed around like passports among Russian revolutionists.
Many of these unpleasant facts were brought to light in the course of the investigation made by the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research. The result of their report was a model employment agency law, passed by the New York State Legislature, providing for a strict licensing system, rigid forms of contract, regulation of fees, and inspection by special officers of the Bureau of Licenses. The law applies only to cities of the first class, and unfortunately has never been very well enforced. Perhaps it has not been possible to enforce it.
In all the cities examined by the Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research the investigators found the majority of employment agencies in close connection with the homes of the agents. In New York, of three hundred and thirteen offices visited, one hundred and twenty were in tenements, one hundred and seven in apartment houses, thirty-nine in residences and only forty-nine in business buildings. In Philadelphia, only three per cent of employment agencies were found in business buildings. Chicago made a little better showing, with nineteen per cent in business houses. The difficulty of properly regulating a business which is carried on in the privacy of a home is apparent. When an agency is in a business building it usually has conspicuous signs, and often the rooms are well equipped with desks, comfortable chairs, and other office furnishings. But the majority of agencies are of another description. Those dealing with immigrant girls are sometimes filthy rooms in some rear tenement, reached through a saloon or a barber shop facing the street. Often the other tenants of the building are fortune tellers, palmists, “trance mediums,” and like undesirables.
A large number of these agencies operate lodging houses for their patrons. There is hardly a good word to say for most of these, except that they are absolutely necessary. Dirty, unsanitary, miserable as they usually are, if they were closed by law, hundreds, perhaps thousands of domestics temporarily out of work, would be turned into the streets. Many are unfamiliar with the cities they live in. Many more are barred from hotels on account of small means. Often a girl finding it impossible to bring herself to lie down on the wretched beds provided by these lodging houses, leaves her luggage and goes out, not to return until morning. She spends the night in dance halls and other resorts.
According to Miss Kellor’s report this description of employment agencies and lodging houses attached to them applies to about seventy-five per cent of all offices in the four cities examined. For greater accuracy the investigators made a brief survey of conditions in cities, such as St. Louis, New Haven, and Columbus, Ohio. The differences were slight, showing that the employment agency problem is much the same east and west.
Domestic servants have their industrial ups and downs like other workers. Sometimes they are able to pay the fees required in a high-class employment office, while at other times they are obliged to have recourse to the cheaper places, where standards of honesty, and perhaps also, of propriety, are low. Domestic workers are the nomads of industry. Their lives are like their work,–impermanent, detached from others’, unobserved.
It is for the housekeepers of America to consider the plain facts concerning domestic service. Some of the conditions they can change. Others they cannot. No one can alter the economic status of the kitchen. Like the sweat shop, it must ultimately disappear.
What system of housekeeping will take the place of the present system cannot precisely be foretold. We know that the whole trend of things everywhere is toward co-operation. Within the past ten years think how much cooking has gone into the factory, how much washing into the steam laundry, how much sewing into the shop. As the cost of living increases, more and more co-operation will be necessary, especially for those of moderate income. At the present time millions of city dwellers have given up living in their own houses, or even in rented houses. They cannot afford to maintain individual homes, but must live in apartment houses, where the expenses of heat, and other expenses, notably water, hall, and janitor service, are reduced to a minimum because shared by all the tenants. There may come a time when the private kitchen will be a luxury of the very rich.
For a time, however, the private kitchen and the servant in the kitchen will remain. That is one servant problem. But the housekeeper still has another “servant problem,” and I have tried to make it clear that this problem pretty closely involves the morals of the community.
Now this matter of community morals has begun to interest women profoundly. In many of their organizations women are studying and endeavoring to understand the causes of evil. They are securing the appointment of educated women as probation officers in the courts which deal with delinquent women and girls. Sincerely they are working toward a better understanding of the problem of the prodigal daughter.
Since about one-third of all these prodigals are recruited from the ranks of domestic workers it is possible for the housekeepers of the country to play an important part in this work. Every woman in the United States who employs one servant has a contribution to make to the movement. The power to humanize domestic service in her own household is in every woman’s hand.
Loneliness, social isolation, the ban of social inferiority,–these cruel and unreasonable restrictions placed upon an entire class of working women are out of tune with democracy. The right of the domestic worker to regular hours of labor, to freedom after her work is done, to a place to receive her friends, must be recognized. The self-respect of the servant must in all ways be encouraged.
Above all, the right of the domestic worker to social opportunity must be admitted. It must be provided for.
Yonkers, New York, a large town on the Hudson River, points out one way toward this end. In Yonkers there has been established a Women’s Institute for the exclusive use of domestics. It has an employment agency and supports classes in domestic science for those girls who wish to become more expert workers. There are club rooms and recreation parlors where the girls receive and meet their friends–including their men friends. A group of liberal-minded women established this unique institution, which is well patronized by the superior class of domestic workers in Yonkers. The dues are small, and members are allowed to share club privileges with friends. It is not unusual for employers to present their domestics with membership cards. It cannot be said that the Women’s Institute has solved the servant problem for Yonkers, but many women testify to its happy effects on their own individual problems.
The Committee on Amusements and Vacation Resources of Working Girls in New York is collecting a long list of farmhouses and village homes in the mountains and near the sea where working girls, and this includes domestics, may spend their vacations for very little money.
Every summer, as families leave the city for country and seaside, domestics are thrown out of employment. A department in the Women’s Club can examine vacation possibilities for domestics. The clubs can also deal with the employment agency. Some women’s organizations have already taken hold of this department. The Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston conducts a very large and flourishing employment agency. Women’s clubs can study the laws of their own community in regard to public employment agencies. They can investigate homes for immigrant girls and boarding-houses for working women.
Preventive work is better than reform measures, but both are necessary in dealing with this problem. Women have still much work to do in securing reformatories for women. New York is the first State to establish such reformatories for adult women. Private philanthropy has offered refuges and semipenal institutions. The State stands aloof.
Even in New York public officials are strangely skeptical of the possibilities of reform. Last year the courts of New York City sent three thousand delinquent women to the workhouse on Blackwell’s Island,–a place notorious for the low state of its _morale_. They sent only seventeen women to Bedford Reformatory, where a healthy routine of outdoor work, and a most effective system administered by a scientific penologist does wonders with its inmates. Nothing but the will and the organized effort of women will ever solve the most terrible of all problems, or remove from society the reproach of ruined womanhood which blackens it now.
NOTES:
Note 1: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904.
CHAPTER X
VOTES FOR WOMEN
Although Woman Suffrage has been for a number of years a part of the program of the International Council of Women, the American Branch, represented by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, at first displayed little interest in the subject. Although many of the club women were strong suffragists, there were many others, notably women from the Southern States, who were violently opposed to suffrage. Early in the club movement it was agreed that suffrage, being a subject on which there was an apparently hopeless difference of opinion, was not a proper subject for club consideration.
The position of the women in regard to suffrage was precisely that of the early labor unions toward politics. The unions, fearing that the labor leaders would use the men for their own political advancement, resolved that no question of politics should ever enter into their deliberations.
In the same way the club women feared that even a discussion of Woman Suffrage in their state and national federation meetings would result in their movement becoming purely political. They wanted to keep it a non-partisan benevolent and social affair.
[Illustration: SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING]
Somehow, in what mysterious manner no one can precisely tell, the reserve of the club women towards the suffrage question began some years ago to break down. At the St. Louis Biennial of 1904 part of a morning session was given up to the suffrage organizations. Several remarkable speeches in favor of the suffrage were made, and there is no doubt that a very deep impression was made, even upon those women openly opposed to the movement. Six years later, at the biennial meeting held in Cincinnati, Ohio, in June, 1910, an entire evening was given up to an exhaustive discussion of both sides of the question.
Dating from that evening a stranger visiting the convention might almost have thought that the sole object of the gathering was a discussion of the right of women to the ballot. Women floated through the corridors of the hotel talking suffrage. They talked suffrage in little groups in the dining-room, they discussed it in the street cars going to and from the convention.
The local suffrage clubs had planned a banquet to the visiting suffragists and had calculated a maximum of one hundred and fifty applications for tickets.
Three days before the banquet they had had nearly three hundred applications, and when the hour for the banquet arrived every available seat, the room’s limit of three hundred and seventy-five, was occupied. Outside were women offering ten dollars a plate and clamoring for the privilege of merely listening to the after-dinner speakers. Something must have happened in the course of those eight years to make such an astounding change in the attitude of the club women.
The fact is that until the club women had been at work at practical things for a long period of years, they did not realize the social value of their own activities. They thought of their work as benevolent and philanthropic. That they were performing community service, _citizens_’ service, they did not remotely dream. There is nothing surprising in their _naivete_. It is a fact that in this country, although every one knows that women own property, pay taxes, successfully manage their own business affairs, and do an astonishing amount of community work as well, no one ever thinks of them as citizens.
American men are accustomed to women in almost all trades and professions. It doesn’t astonish a New Yorker to see a hospital ambulance tearing down the street with a white-clad woman surgeon on the back seat. A woman lawyer, architect, editor, manufacturer, excites no particular notice. In the Western States men are beginning to elect women county treasurers, county superintendents of schools, and in Chicago, second largest city in the country, a Board of Education, overwhelmingly masculine, recently appointed a woman City Superintendent of Schools.
Yet to the vast majority of American men women do not look like citizens.
As for the majority of American women they have always until recently thought of themselves as a class,–a favored and protected class. They cherished a sentimental kind of delusion that the American man was only too anxious to give them everything that their hearts desired. When they got out into the world of action, when they began to ask for something more substantial than bonbons, the club women found that the American man was not so very generous after all.
A typical instance occurred down in Georgia. A few years ago the women of Georgia found a way to introduce into the legislature a child-labor law. It was really a very modest little bill and it protected only a fraction of the pitiful army of cotton-mill children, but still it was worth having. The women worked hard and they got some very powerful backing and a barrel or two of petitions. Nevertheless, the bill was defeated. One legislative orator rose to explain his vote.
“Mr. Speaker,” he said eloquently, “I am devoted to the good women of my State. If I thought that the women of my State wanted this bill passed I would vote for it; but, sir, I have every reason to believe that the good women of my State are opposed to this bill, and therefore;”
At this juncture another member handed to the orator a petition bearing the name of five thousand of the best known women in Georgia. The orator stammered, turned red, felt for his handkerchief, mopped his brow, and continued: “Mr. Speaker, I deeply regret that I did not see this petition yesterday. As it is, my vote is pledged.”
Incidents of this kind have occurred too frequently for the women of the United States to escape their meaning. They have learned that they cannot have everything they want merely by asking for it. Also they have learned, or a large number of them have learned that the old theory of women being represented at the polls by their husbands is very largely a delusion.
The entrance of women in large numbers into labor unions, and into membership in the Women’s Trade Union League is another factor in the increasing interest of American women in suffrage. After a decision of the New York Court of Appeals that the law prohibiting night work of women was unconstitutional, nearly one thousand women book-binders in New York City made a public announcement that they would thenceforth work for the ballot. They had been indifferent before, but this close application of politics to their industrial situation–bookbinding is one of the night trades–made them alive to their own helplessness.
The shirt-waist strike and the garment workers’ strike in New York and Philadelphia, waged so bitterly in 1910, brought great numbers of women into the suffrage ranks. Not only were the women strikers convinced that the magistrates and the police treated them with more contempt than they did the voting men, but they perceived the need of securing better labor laws for themselves. The conviction that women of the wealthier classes would stand by them in securing favorable laws, as they stood by the strikers in the industrial struggle, was a strong lever to turn them towards the suffrage ranks.
[Illustration: MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH]
The Women’s Trade Union League building, used as strike headquarters in all strikes involving women workers, is a veritable center of suffrage sentiment in New York! One floor houses the offices of the Equality League of Self Supporting Women, of which Harriot Stanton Blatch is founder and president. This society, which is entirely made up of trade and professional workers, claims an approximate membership of twenty-two thousand. A number of unions belong to the League, and there is also a very large individual membership.
In Chicago the suffrage movement and the labor movement is more closely associated than in any other American city. In Chicago, it will be remembered, the Teachers’ Federation is a trade union and is allied to the Central Labor Union. Teachers, almost everywhere denied equal pay with men for equal work, are eager seekers for political power. When, as in Chicago, they are associated with labor, they become convinced suffragists.
Organized labor has always been friendly to woman suffrage, but in Chicago not only the union women but the union men are actively friendly towards the cause. The original moving spirit in the Chicago organization was a remarkable young working girl, Josephine Casey. Miss Casey sold tickets at one of the stations of the Chicago Elevated, and she formed her first woman suffrage club among the women members of the Union of Street and Elevated Railway Employees. Later she organized on a larger scale the Women’s Political Equality Union, with membership open to men and women alike. The interest shown in the union by workingmen, many of whom had never before given the matter a moment’s thought, was, from the first, extraordinary. During the first winter of the society’s existence, union after union called for Woman Suffrage speakers. Addresses were made before fifty or more. Some of the more popular speakers often made four addresses in an evening. Mrs. Raymond Robins, president of the National Women’s Trade Union League, and Miss Alice Henry, secretary of the Chicago branch of the League, won many converts by their expositions of the exceedingly favorable labor laws of Australia and New Zealand, where women vote.
[Illustration: MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER.]
Unquestionably the mighty battle which is waging in England made a deep impression on American women of all classes. The visits made in this country by Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. Borrman Wells, Mrs. Philip Snowden, and, most of all, Mrs. Pankhurst, leader of the militant English Suffragists, aroused tremendous enthusiasm from one end of the country to the other. Never, until these women appeared, telling, with rare eloquence, their stories of struggle, of arrest and imprisonment, had the vote appeared such an incomparable treasure. Never before, except among a few enthusiasts, had there existed any feeling that the suffrage was a thing to fight for, suffer for, even to die for.
Up to this time the suffrage was a theory, an academic question of right and justice. After the visits of the English women, American suffragists everywhere began to view their cause in the light of a political movement. They began to adopt political methods. Instead of private meetings where suffrage was discussed before a select audience of the already convinced, the women began to mount soap boxes on street corners and to talk suffrage to the man in the street.
The first suffrage demonstration was held in New York in February, 1908. The members of a small but enthusiastic Equal Suffrage Club announced their intention of having a parade. Most of the women being wage earners they planned to have their parade on a Sunday. When they applied at Police Headquarters for the necessary permit they found to their disgust that Sunday parades were forbidden by law.
“Not unless you are a funeral procession,” said the stern captain of the police.
The woman replied that they were anything but a funeral procession, and threatened darkly to hold their parade in spite of police regulations. They got plenty of newspaper publicity in the succeeding days, and on the following Sunday a huge crowd of men, a sprinkling of women, a generous number of plain clothes men, and New York’s famous “camera squad” assembled in Union Square, where all incendiary things happen. The dauntless seven who made up the suffrage club were there, and at the psychological moment one of the women ran up the steps of a park pavilion and spoke in a ringing voice, yet so quietly that the police made no move to stop her.
“Friends,” she said, “we are not allowed to have our parade, so we are going to hold a meeting of protest at No. 209 East 23d Street. We invite you to go over there with us.” She and the others walked calmly out of the square, and the crowd followed. They turned into Fifth Avenue, and the crowd grew larger. Before three blocks were passed there were literally thousands of people marching in the wake of ingenious suffragists.
The sight aroused the indignation of many respectable citizens.
“Officer,” exclaimed one of these, addressing an attendant policeman, “I thought you had orders that those females were not to parade.”
“That ain’t no parade,” said the policeman, serenely; “them folks is just takin’ a quiet walk.”
The suffragists have taken more than one quiet walk since then. Street speaking has become an almost daily occurrence. At first there was some rioting, or, rather, some display of rowdyism on the part of the spectators and some show of interference from the police. The crowds listen respectfully now, and the police are friendly.
The most practical move the New York Suffragists have made was the organization, early in 1910, of the Woman Suffrage Party, a fusion of nearly all the suffrage clubs in the greater city into an association exactly along the lines of a regular political party. At the head of the party as president is Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the International Woman Suffrage Association. Each of the five boroughs of the city has a chairman, and each senatorial and assembly district is either organized or is in process of organization.
[Illustration: THE WOMEN’S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL 27, 1909]
Absolutely democratic in its spirit and its organization, the party leaders are drawn from every rank of society. The chairman of the borough of Manhattan is Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw, wife of a prominent Wall Street banker. Mrs. Frederick Nathan, president of the New York State Consumers’ League, is chairman of the assembly district in which she lives. Mrs. Melvil Dewey, whose husband is head of a department at Columbia University, is chairman of her own district. Other chairmen are Helen Hoy Greeley, lawyer; Lavinia Dock, trained nurse; Anna Mercy, an East Side physician; Maud Flowerton, buyer in a department store; Gertrude Barnum, sociologist and writer. Practically every trade and profession are represented in the party’s ranks.
The object of the Woman Suffrage Party is organization for political work. Last winter the party made the first aggressive move towards forcing the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly to report on the bill to give women votes by constitutional amendment. They succeeded in getting a motion made for the discharge of the committee, sixteen legislators voting for the women.
New York is the present center of the progressive suffrage movement, with Chicago not very far behind.
In rather amazing fashion are women in many American communities beginning to realize that politics are as much their business as men’s. In Salt Lake City when a city council undertakes to give away a valuable water franchise, or extend gamblers’ privileges, or otherwise follow the example of many another city council in bending before the god of greed, the women of Salt Lake send the word around. When the council meets the women are in the room. They don’t say anything. They don’t have to say anything. They can vote, these women. More than once the deep-laid plans of the most powerful politicians in Salt Lake City have been completely frustrated by a silent warning from the women. The city council has not dared to pass grafting measures with a roomful of women looking on.
[Illustration: HELEN HOY GREELEY]
Even the non-voting woman has discovered the power which attaches to her presence, in certain circumstances. In San Francisco during the second Ruef trial, when the decent element of the city was fighting to down one of the worst bosses that ever cursed a community, the women, under the leadership of Mrs. Elizabeth Gerberding, performed this new kind of picket duty. The courtroom where the trial was held was, by order of the boss’s attorney, packed with hired toughs whose duty it was to make a mockery of the prosecution. Every point against the Ruef side was received by these toughs with jeers and hootings. The district attorney was insulted, badgered, and openly threatened with violence.
Mrs. Gerberding, whose husband is editor of a newspaper opposed to boss rule, attended several sessions, and induced a large number of women of social importance to attend with her. These women went daily to the courtroom, occupying seats to the exclusion of many of the tough characters, and by their presence doing much to preserve order and to assist the efforts of the district attorney. When the assassin’s bullet was fired at the district attorney a number of the women were present.
Out of the horror and detestation of this crime was organized the Women’s League of Justice, which soon had a membership of five hundred. The league fought stoutly for the reelection of Heney as district attorney. Heney was defeated, and the league became the Women’s Civic Club of San Francisco, pledged to work for political betterment and a clean city government.
In four States of the Union, Washington, Oregon, South Dakota, and Oklahoma, the voters will this autumn vote for or against constitutional amendments giving women the right to vote. It is not very probable that the Suffragists will win in any of these States, not because the voters are opposed to suffrage, but because they are, for the most part, uninformed. The suffrage advocates have not yet learned enough political wisdom to further their cause through education of the voters.
Although enormous sums of money have been spent in suffrage campaigns, in no one has enough money been available to do the work thoroughly. In the four States where the question is at present before the voters, complaint is made that there is not enough money in the treasuries properly to circulate literature.
Many of the wisest leaders in the National Woman Suffrage Association, including Dr. Anna Shaw, Ida Husted Harper, and others, are advising an altogether new method of conducting the struggle for the ballot. They advocate selecting a State, possibly Nebraska, where conditions seem uncommonly favorable, and concentrating the entire strength of the national organization, every dollar of money in the national treasury, all the speakers and organizers, all the literature, in a mighty effort to give the women of that one State the ballot. The vote won in Nebraska, the national association should pass on to the next most favorable State and win a victory there. The moral effect of such campaigns would no doubt be very great.
One of the principal reasons why men hesitate in this country to give the voting power to women is that they do not know, and they rather fear to guess, how far women would unite in forcing their own policies on the country. If an Irish vote, or a German vote, or a Catholic vote, or a Hebrew vote is to be dreaded, say the men, how much more of a menace would a woman vote be. I heard a man, a delegate from an anti-suffrage association, solemnly warn the New York State Legislature, at a suffrage hearing, against this danger of a woman vote. “When the majority of women and the minority of men vote together,” he declared, “there will be no such thing as personal liberty left in the United States.”
[Illustration: SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE.]
Under certain conditions a woman vote is not an unthinkable contingency. It has even occurred.
For the edification of the possible reader who is entirely uninformed, it may be explained that women are not entirely disenfranchised in the United States. Women vote on equal terms with men, in four States. They have voted in Wyoming since 1869; in Colorado since 1894; in Utah and Idaho since 1896. They vote at school elections and on certain questions of taxation in twenty-eight States.
While it is true that in the States which have a small measure of suffrage the women show little interest in voting, in the four so-called suffrage States, they vote conscientiously and in about the same proportion as men.
But here is a notable thing. The women of the suffrage States differ so little from the women of other States, and women in general, that the chief concerns of their lives are the home, the school, and the baby,–the Kaiser’s “Kirche, Kueche, und Kinder” over again. They vote with enthusiasm on all questions which relate to domestic interests, that is, which directly relate to them and their children. Aside from this, the woman vote has made a deep impression on the moral character of candidates and that is about all it has meant. In general politics women have counted scarcely more than have the women of other States.
But the new interest in suffrage, the new realization of themselves as citizens that has been aroused all over the United States within the past two years have seriously affected the women voters of at least one suffrage State, Colorado.
The women of Colorado, especially the women of Denver, have for several years taken an active part in legislation directly affecting themselves and their children. The legislative committee of the Colorado State Federation of Clubs has held regular meetings during the sessions of the State Legislature, and it has been a regular custom to submit to that committee for approval all bills relating to women and children. This never seemed to the politicians to be anything very dangerous to their interests. It was, in a manner of speaking, a chivalric acknowledgment of women’s virtue as wives and mothers.
But lately the women of Colorado have begun to wake up to the fact that not only special legislation, but all legislation, is of direct interest to them. It has lately dawned upon them that the matter of street railway franchise affects the home as directly as a proposition to erect a high school. Also it has dawned on them that without organization, and more organization, the woman vote was more or less powerless. So, about a year ago they formed in Denver an association of women which they called the Public Service League. Nothing quite like it ever existed before. It is a political but non-partisan association of women, pledged to work for the civic betterment of Denver, pledged to fight the corrupt politicians, determined that the city government shall be well administered even if the women have to take over the offices themselves. The League is, in effect, a secret society of women. It has an inflexible rule that its proceedings are to be kept inviolable. There is a perfect understanding that any woman who divulges one syllable of what occurs at a meeting of the League will be instantly dropped from membership. No woman has yet been dropped.
It may well be understood that this secret society of women, this non-partisan league of voters, is a thing to strike terror into the heart of a ward boss. As a matter of fact, the corrupt politicians and the equally corrupt heads of corporations who had long held Denver in bondage regard the Public Service League in mingled dread and detestation. Equally as a matter of fact politicians of a better class are anxious to enlist the good will of the League. Last summer a Denver election involved a question of granting a twenty years’ franchise to a street railway company. Opposed to the granting of the franchise was a newly formed citizens’ party. Opposed also was the Women’s Public Service League. In gratitude for the co-operation of the League the Citizens’ Party offered a place on the electoral ticket to any woman chosen by the League.
It was the first time in the history of Colorado that a municipal office had been offered to a woman, and the League promptly took advantage of it. They named as a candidate for Election Commissioner Miss Ellis Meredith, one of the best known, best loved women in the State. As journalist and author and club woman Miss Meredith is known far beyond her own State, and her nomination created intense interest not only among the women of her own city and State, but among club women everywhere.
On the evening of May 3, 1910, there was a meeting held in the Broadway Theater, Denver, the like of which no American city ever before witnessed. It was a women’s political mass meeting to endorse the candidacy of a woman municipal official. The meeting was entirely in the hands of women. Presiding over the immense throng was Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker, formerly president, and still leader of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Beside her sat Mrs. Helen Grenfell, for thirteen years county and State superintendent of schools, Mrs. Helen Ring Robinson, Mrs. Martha A.B. Conine, and Miss Gail Laughlin, all women of note in their community. The enthusiasm aroused by that meeting did not subside, and on the day of the election Miss Meredith ran so far ahead of her ticket that it seemed as if every woman in Denver, as well as most of the men, had voted for her. She took her place in the Board of Election Commissioners, and was promptly elected Chairman of the Board.
There is nothing especially attractive about the office of Election Commissioner. In accepting the nomination Miss Meredith said frankly that she was influenced mainly by two things: first a desire to test the loyalty of the women voters, and second, because, while women had been held accountable for elections which have disgraced the city of Denver, they have never before been given a chance to manage the elections.
Nothing is more certain that women, when they become enfranchised, will never, in any large numbers, appear as office seekers. It is probable that office will be thrust upon the ablest of them. Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker has been spoken of as a possible future Mayor of Denver, and it is certain that she could be elected to Congress if she would allow herself to be placed in nomination.
A few women have been elected to the legislatures in the suffrage States, and they have held high office in educational departments. In suffrage and nonsuffrage States they have been elected to many county offices. Miss Gertrude Jordan is Treasurer of Cherry County, Nebraska. In Idaho, Texas, Louisiana, and several other States women have filled the same position. The State of Kansas is a true believer in women office-holders, even though it refuses its women complete suffrage. Women can vote in Kansas only at municipal elections, but in forty counties men have elected women school superintendents. They are clerks of four counties, treasurers of three, and commissioners of one. In one county of Kansas a woman is probate judge. The good and faithful work done by these women ought to go a long way towards educating men of their community to the idea of political association with women.
The attitude of men towards suffrage has undergone an enormous change within the past two years. A large number of the thinking men of the country have openly enlisted in the Suffrage ranks. It is said that almost every member of the faculty of Columbia University signed the Suffrage petition presented to the Congress of 1909. Well-known professors of many Western universities and colleges have spoken and written in favor of equal suffrage. In New York City a flourishing Voters’ League for Equal Suffrage has been formed, with a membership running into the hundreds.
[Illustration: THE “QUIET WALK” OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE WOULD NOT PERMIT TO PARADE]
To the average unprejudiced man the old arguments against political equality have almost entirely lost weight. The theory that women should not vote because they cannot fight is now rarely argued. Municipal governments certainly no longer rest on physical force. The same is true of state governments, and it is probably true of national governments. At all events we are sincerely trying to make it true. For the rest it would be extremely difficult to prove that women would make undesirable citizens. To the anxious inquiry, What will women do with their votes? the answer is simple. They will do with their votes precisely what they do, or try to do, without votes. This has been proven in every country in the world where they have received the franchise. In Australia, New Zealand, Finland, and in the English municipalities the ideal of the common good has been reflected in the woman vote. Social legislation alone interests women, and so far they have confined their efforts to matters of education, child labor, pure food, sanitation, control of liquor traffic, and public morals. The organized non-voting women of this country have devoted themselves for years to precisely these objects. Without votes, without precedents, and without very much money they instituted the playground movement, and the juvenile court movement, two of the greatest reforms this country has contributed to civilization. They have instituted a dozen reforms in our educational system. They practically invented the town and village improvement idea. They have co-operated with every social reform advocated by men, and it is to be noted that wherever their judgment has been in error they have conscientiously erred in favor of a wider democracy, a more exalted social ideal.
[Illustration: SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK]
However long-deferred Woman Suffrage may prove to be, it is pretty generally conceded that women will inevitably vote some day. The evolution of society will bring them into political equality with men just as it has brought them into intellectual and industrial equality. The first woman who followed her spinning-wheel out of her home into the factory was the natural ancestress of the first woman who demanded the ballot.
The application of steam to machinery took women’s trades out of the home and placed them in the factory. The effect of this was that men were confronted with a singular dilemma. They had to choose between two courses; they had to support their women in idleness, or else they had to allow them to leave the home and go where their trades had gone. The first course involving the intolerable burden of doing their own and their women’s work, they were obliged to choose the second. The jealously-guarded doors of the home were opened, and little by little, grudgingly, the men admitted women to full industrial freedom.
Women’s housekeeping, or most of it, has gradually been withdrawn from the home and transferred to the municipality. There was a time when women could ensure their families pure food, good milk, clean ice, proper sanitation. They cannot do that now. The City Hall governs all such matters. Again the men find themselves facing the old dilemma. They must either support their women in idleness–do all their own as well as the women’s housekeeping–or they must allow their women to leave the home and follow their housekeeping to the place where it is now being done,–the polls.
Women are beginning to understand the situation. They are even beginning to understand how badly the men are providing for the municipal family. They are demanding their old housekeeping tasks back again. To this point has the Suffrage movement, begun in 1848 by a band of women called fanatics, arrived.
CHAPTER XI
IN CONCLUSION
I have tried to set down in these pages the collective opinion of women, as far as it has expressed itself through deeds. I have not succeeded if any reader lays down the book with the impression that he has merely been reading the story of the American club woman. I have not succeeded at all if my readers imagine that I have been writing only about a selected group of women. What I have meant to do is to show the instinctive bent of the universal woman mind in all ages, reflected in the actions of the freest group of women the world has ever seen.
I might have reanimated ages of stone and of bronze; might have shown you women, through slow centuries, inventing the arts of spinning and weaving, and pottery molding; learning to build, to till the earth, to grind and to cook grains, to tan skins for clothing against the cold. No one taught them these things. Out of their brains, as undeveloped and as primitive as the brains of men, they would never have conceived so much wisdom. The vague mind of the savage woman never sent her to the spider, the nesting bird, and the burrowing squirrel to learn to weave and to build and to store. When we find exactly what it was that taught primitive woman how to lay the first stones of civilization, we have a perfect philosophical understanding of all women.
I chose to interpret the woman mind through the modern American woman, partly because she has learned the great lesson of organization, and has thus been able to work more effectively, and to impress her will on the community more strikingly than other women in other ages. What she has done is apparent and easy to prove.
Also, I chose the American club woman because she represents, not an unusually gifted type, but the average intelligent, well-educated, energetic, wife-and-mother type of woman. The club woman is not radical, or at least not consciously radical. She has not, like the progressive German and Russian woman, theories of political regeneration or of family reconstruction. What she desires, what ideals she has formed, I think must fairly represent the desires and ideals of the great mass of women of the twentieth century.
When we survey the activities the club women have engaged in, when we discover why they chose exactly these activities, we have a perfect philosophical understanding, not only of the modern woman mind, but of the cave woman mind and all the woman mind in between.
The woman mind is the most unchangeable thing in the world. It has turned on identically the same pivot since the present race began. Perhaps before.
Turn back and count over the club women’s achievements, the things they have chosen to do, the things they want. Observe first of all that they want very little for themselves. Even their political liberty they want only because it will enable them to get other things–things needed, directly or indirectly, by children. Most of the things are directly needed,–playgrounds, school gardens, child-labor laws, juvenile courts, kindergartens, pure food laws, and other visible tokens of child concern. Many of the other things are indirectly needed by children,–ten-hour working days, seats for shop girls, protection from dangerous machinery, living wages, opportunities for safe and wholesome pleasures, peace and arbitration, social purity, legal equality with men, all objects which tend to conserve the future mothers of children. These are the things women want.
In my introductory chapter I cited three extremely grave and significant facts which confront modern civilization. The first was the fact of women’s growing economic freedom, their emancipation from domestic slavery. I believe that women would not wish to be economically free if their instinct gave them any warning that freedom for them meant danger to their children. But no observer of social conditions can have failed to observe the oceans of misery endured by women and children because of their economic dependence on the fortunes of husbands and fathers.
Whatever may be the solution of poverty, whatever be the future status of the family, it seems certain to me that some way will be devised whereby motherhood will cease to be a privately supported profession. In some way society will pay its own account. If producing citizens to the State be the greatest service a woman citizen can perform, the State will ultimately recognize the right of the woman citizen to protection during her time of service. The first step towards solving the problem is for women to learn to support themselves before the time comes for them to serve the State. Through the educating process of productive labor the woman mind may devise a means of protecting the future mothers of the race.
The second fact, the growing prevalence of divorce, on the face of it seems to menace the security of the home and of children. So deeply overlain with prejudice, conventionalities, and theological traditions is the average woman as well as the average man that it is difficult to argue in favor of a temporary tolerance of divorce that a permanent high standard of marriage may be established. But to my mind any state of affairs, even a Reno state of affairs, looks more encouraging than the old conditions under which innocent girls married to rakes and drunkards were forbidden to escape their chains. It is not for the good of children to be born of disease and misery and hatred. It is not for their good to be brought up in an atmosphere of hopeless inharmony. What is happening in this country is not a weakening of the marriage bond, but a strengthening of it. For soon there will grow up in the American man’s mind a desire for a marriage which will be at least as equitable as a business partnership; as fair to one party as to the other. He will cease to regard marriage as a state of bondage for the wife and a state of license for the husband. He will not venture to suggest to a bright woman that cooking in his kitchen is a more honorable career than teaching, or painting, or writing, or manufacturing. Marriage will not mean extinction to any woman. It will mean to the well-to-do wife freedom to do community service. It will mean to the industrial woman an economic burden shared. When that time comes there will be no divorce problem. There will be no longer a class of women who avoid the risk of divorce by refusing to marry.
The third fact, the increasing popularity of woman suffrage, I disposed of in the preceding chapter. Nothing that the women who vote have ever done indicates, in the remotest degree, that they are not just as mindful of children’s interests at the polls as other women are in their nurseries and kitchens.
On the contrary, wherever women have left their kitchens and nurseries, whenever they have gone out into the world of action and of affairs, they have increased their effectiveness as mothers. I do not mean by this that the girl who enters a factory at fourteen and works there ten hours a day until she marries increases her effectiveness as a mother. Industrial slavery unfits a woman for motherhood as certainly as intellectual and moral slavery unfits her.
Women who are free, who look on life through their own eyes, who think their own thoughts, who live in the real world of striving, struggling, suffering humanity, are the most effective mothers that ever lived. They know how to care for their own children, and more than that, they know how to care for the community’s children.
The child at his mother’s knee, spelling out the words of a psalm, stands for the moral education of the race–or it used to. A group of Chicago club women walking boldly into the city Bridewell and the Cook County Jail and demanding that children of ten and twelve should no longer be locked up with criminals; these same women, after the children were segregated, establishing a school for them, and finally these same women achieving a juvenile court, is the modern edition of the old ideal.
Woman’s place is in the home. This is a platitude which no woman will ever dissent from, provided two words are dropped out of it. Woman’s place is Home. Her task is homemaking. Her talents, as a rule, are mainly for homemaking. But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do the Home and the Family and the Nursery need their mother.
I dream of a community where men and women divide the work of governing and administering, each according to his special capacities and natural abilities. The division of labor between them will be on natural and not conventional lines. No one will be rewarded according to sex, but according to work performed. The city will be like a great, well-ordered, comfortable, sanitary household. Everything will be as clean as in a good home. Every one, as in a family, will have enough to eat, clothes to wear, and a good bed to sleep on. There will be no slums, no sweat shops, no sad women and children toiling in tenement rooms. There will be no babies dying because of an impure milk supply. There will be no “lung blocks” poisoning human beings that landlords may pile up sordid profits. No painted girls, with hunger gnawing at their empty stomachs, will walk in the shadows. All the family will be taken care of, taught to take care of themselves, protected in their daily tasks, sheltered in their homes.
The evil things in society are simply the result of half the human race, with only half the wisdom, and not even half the moral power contained in the race, trying to rule the world alone. Men’s government rests on force, on violence. Everything evil, everything bad, everything selfish, is a form of violence. Poverty itself is a form of violence.
Women will not tolerate violence. They loathe waste. They cannot bear to see illness and suffering and starvation. Alone, they are no more capable of coping with these evils than men are. But they have the very resources that men lack. Working with men they could accomplish miracles.
Note the inventiveness of women, most of which goes to waste because they lack the wonderful constructive ability of men. Women invented spinning. They could never have harnessed the lightning to their wheels. Women established the first public playgrounds. Men extended the public playgrounds across the country.
Women established the juvenile court. Men took it over and worked out a new system of criminal jurisprudence for children. Women have cleaned up a hundred cities. Men are rebuilding them. Slowly men and women are learning to live and work together. Reluctantly men are coming to accept women as their co-workers.
Woman’s place is Home, and she must not be forbidden to dwell there. Who would be so selfish, so blind, so reactionary, as to forbid her her fullest freedom to do her work, must surrender opposition in the end. For woman’s work is race preservation, race improvement, and who opposes her, or interferes with her, simply fights nature, and nature never loses her battles.
INDEX
Aberdeen, Countess of,
Addams, Jane,
Alabama,
Aladyn, Alexis,
Albert Hall, London,
Albion House of Refuge, N.Y.,
Aldrich, Mrs. Richard,
Allegheny, Pa.,
Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenbund,
American, Sadie,
American Federation of Labor
American women and common law
Arbitration,
Argentine,
Arizona,
Arkansas
Arthur, Mrs. Clara B.,
Association of Collegiate Alumnae,
Association of Working Girls’ Clubs, Augsberg, Anita,
Australia,
Austria
Balliett, Thomas M.,
Barnum, Gertrude
Barrett, Mrs. Kate Waller,
Bedford Reformatory, N.Y.,
Belmont, Mrs. O.H.P.,
Berlin,
Birmingham, Ala.,
Blackstone
Blackwell’s Island,
Blatch, Harriot Stanton,
Bluhm, Agnes,
Boston, Mass
Boston Central Labor Union,
Boswell, Helen V.,
Brandeis, Louis D.
Brewer, Justice,
Brooklyn, N.Y.,
Bullowa, Emilie,
California
Carlisle, Pa.,
Carnegie, Andrew,
Casey, Josephine,
Catt, Mrs. Carrie Chapman,
Cauer, Minna,
Chicago
Child, Lydia Maria,
Church, the Christian, its relation to social problems, Civic Club of Allegheny County
Civic Club of Philadelphia,
Cleveland, O.
Cliff Dwellers’ remains,
Cobden Sanderson, Mrs.,
Code Napoleon
Cole, Elsie
College Settlements Association,
Colony Club,
Colorado,
Colorado State Federation of Clubs, Columbia University,
Columbus, Ohio,
Common law,
Coney Island
Conine, Mrs. Martha A.B.,
Consumers’ League of N.Y.,
Consumers’ Leagues
Conventions of women’s clubs,
Corpus Juris,
Cotton mills, women and girls in
Council of Women
Cranford, N.J.,
Cutting, Fulton,
Dallas, Tex.,
Dance halls,
Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Confederacy,
Davis, Mrs. Jefferson,
Decker, Mrs. Sarah Platt,
Delaware,
Denver, Colo.,
Department stores,
Detroit,
Devine, Edward T.,
Dewey, Mrs. Melvil,
Dineen, Governor,
District of Columbia,
Divorce
Dock, Lavinia,
Domestic service,
_Domestic Service_, Professor
Salmon’s,
Donnelly, Annie,
Dreier, Mary,
Dutcher, Elizabeth,
Eight-hour day,
Ely Bates Settlement,
Employment agencies,
England
Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, Europe,
European women,
Evans, Mrs. Glendower,
Factories,
Fall River, Mass.
Festivals, play,
Feudalism
Filene system,
Finland
Florida
Flowerton, Maud,
Folks, Homer,
France,
Franks, Salian
French Code,
Gad, Elizabeth,
General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Georgia
Gerberding, Mrs. Elizabeth,
German Woman Suffrage Association,
Germany,
Gillespie, Mabel,
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, her _Women and Economics_, “Girls’ Bill,”
Girls’ Friendly Association,
Golden, John,
Goldmark, Josephine,
Goldmark, Pauline,
Gompers, Samuel
Grannis, Mrs. Elizabeth,
Greece,
Greece, Queen of,
Greeley, Helen Hoy,
Greenbaum, Sadie,
Grenfell, Mrs. Helen,
Gulick, Luther H.,
Harper, Ida Husted,
Harrisburg, Pa.,
Hearn,
Henry, Alice,
Holland,
Housekeepers’ Alliance,
Hughes, Governor,
Hundred Years’ War,
Iceland,
Idaho,
Illinois,
Inheritance,
Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research, International Council of Women,
International Woman Suffrage Alliance Iowa,
Israels, Mrs. Charles M.
Italy,
Janes, Elizabeth,
Jefferson Market Court,
Jordan, Gertrude,
Kansas
Kellor, Frances,
Kennard, Beulah,
Kirby, John, Jr.,
Kusserow, Anna
Lafferty, Mrs. Alma,
Laidlaw, Mrs. James Lees,
Lake City, Minn.,
Laughlin, Gail,
Laundries,
Law, American
Legal Aid Society of N.Y. City,
Legal disabilities of women
Leipzig,
Lemlich, Clara,
Libraries,
Los Angeles, Cal.,
Louisiana
Lowell, Mrs. Josephine Shaw,
Luxemburg,
MacLean, Annie Marian,
Maloney, Elizabeth,
Marot, Helen
Massachusetts
Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics McEwans, the,
Men, their attitude toward women
Mercantile Employers’ Bill
Merchants’ Association of N.Y.,