whether real malingering has much to do with it. The
conditions of industry, greatly improved as they are
from the sanitary point of view, are certainly increasing
the kind of strain that women are constitutionally
least able to bear. The industrial efficiency in the
OF PART I. 189
young girl that she and her employer are often so
proud of may be paid for later in painful illness and
incapacity. Mr. Arthur Greenwood quotes medical
opinion to the effect that the industrial strain to which
several generations of women in the textile districts
have now been subjected is responsible not only for
serious disease, but even for sterility among women. 1
So far the subject of the declining birth-rate has been
discussed chiefly as a theme for homilies on the " selfish-
ness " of women, who, it is alleged, prefer ease and
comfort to unrestricted child-bearing. If Mr. Green-
wood is right, the cause, in part at all events, is the force
of capitalistic competition feeding on the very life of
the people. Surely the subject needs medical study
and investigation of a more searching kind than it has
yet received.
The Exclusion of Women : A Counsel of Despair.
In view of the tremendous strain incidental to certain
kinds of industrial work, as at present organised, there
occurs the difficult problem, what kind of work women
are to do. In the case of work underground in mines,
and also of a few industrial processes specially injurious
to women, the State has exercised the right to exclude
women altogether, and however undesirable such
legislative exclusion may be in the abstract, there can
be little doubt that it was justified in the cases referred
to, the evils being flagrant and the women concerned
as yet unorganised and with no means of demanding
adequate regulations for their own safety. There are
even those who doubt whether woman should take part
in manufacturing industry at all, and hope that ulti-
mately she may disappear from it altogether. Those
1 School Child in Industry, by A. Greenwood, p. 7. Workers'
Educational Association, Manchester, price id.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
who take this view should clear their minds as to what
exactly they mean by industry. They probably do
not wish to exclude women from those occupations
which are almost a feminine monopoly, such as dress-
making, needlework and household work. But to
restrict any class of workers to a narrow range of
occupations undoubtedly has a very depressing effect
on their wages. We may also note that improvements
in the position and conditions of the woman-worker
have begun always outside, not inside ; in the factory
before the workshop ; in the workshop before the
home ; in industry before needlework. The Wage
Census of 1907 shows that women's wages are higher
in the great industry than in the smaller and more
old-fashioned establishment. State regulation of fac-
tory work in the first half of the nineteenth century
led to enquiries into the condition of needlewomen and
others, who, as the Children's Employment Commission
showed, were in worse case than factory workers. The
factory industry, it was immediately recognised, was
more amenable to control either by the State or by
Unionism, or both, than was the home worker, or the
worker in small workshops. Through the factory, in
spite of its many abuses, women have attained not only
an improvement in their economic circumstances, but also
the experience of comradeship and even of a citizenship
which, although incomplete, is very real as far as it goes.
Women have undoubtedly gained on the whole by
the widening of their sphere of employment. But,
women cannot possibly do all kinds of industrial work,
and to leave the matter unregulated either by law
or by Trade Union action is to leave too much to
the discretion of the employer, with whom profit is
naturally the first consideration.
OF PART I. 191
If the matter is fought out between the employer
and the men's Unions, the women's interests are not
sufficiently considered. Some years ago at Birming-
ham the question was being disputed whether women
should or should not polish brass in brass-works. The
Trade Union pronounced polishing to be filthy and
exhausting work, and degrading to women, and declared
the employers only wanted to set women on it for the
sake of cheapness. The employers on the other hand
said the Union only opposed the employment of women
because they wanted to keep women out of the trade
as much as possible. Probably motives were mixed
on both sides.
Such disputes not infrequently arise in manufactur-
ing industry, and the middle-class person arriving on
the scene is very apt to take a one-sided view. If
he is a mildly reactionary, conservative, sentimental
person, he probably wants women to be prevented
from doing anything that looks uncomfortable and
happens to be under his eyes at the moment. If he
(or particularly if she) happens to be burning with
enthusiasm for the rights of women as individuals and
scornful of old-fashioned proprieties and traditions,
he (or she) will most likely jump to the conclusion that
the objections raised to the employment of women in
the particular process are merely sex-prejudice and sex-
dortlination. Neither the sentimentalist nor the indi-
vidualist, however, sees the full bearing of the situation.
^In this connection an article by Mr. Haslam l may be
studied with advantage as being eminently thoughtful
and fair-minded. In the Lancashire cotton trade a
peculiarly complicated instance of the woman question
occurs in mule-spinning. In this, the best paid and
1 See the Englishwoman for June 1914.
192 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
most highly skilled process in the industry, a shortage
of boy labour has somehow to be met. The proportion
of helpers or " piecers " needed is much larger than the
proportion of boys who can hope to find a permanent
occupation in mule-spinning. With advancing educa-
tion, aided, no doubt, by recent good trade and demand
for labour in the trades, boys and their parents have
become increasingly aware of the disadvantages of
" piecing " as a trade, and as a result the deficiency of
juvenile labour threatens to become acute. An obvious
solution is to introduce girls as piecers, which, as it
happens, is not a new idea but the revival of an old
one. Girls were formerly employed to some extent
at piecing, but were prohibited by the Union twenty-
six or twenty-seven years ago, so far as the important
centres of cotton -spinning are concerned. The pro-
hibition was removed some years later, but for a long
time women showed no inclination to return to this
work. Only in quite recent years, with the increasing
shortage of boy-labour, have women and girls been
induced to go back to the mule-spinning room. Now
women never become mule-spinners ; the Union will
not allow it. A peculiar feature of the occupation is
that the operative spinners themselves, who employ
and pay their piecers, are thus interested in obtain-
ing a supply of cheap labour, just as any capitalist
employer is, or supposes himself to be. They con-
sistently oppose women becoming spinners, usually
alleging physical and moral objections to this occupa-
tion, but are willing to allow them to become piecers
in order to supply the deficiency of boy-labour, and to
lessen the prejudice against piecing as a " blind-alley "
occupation for boys. Now, as Mr. Haslam points out,
the employment of women as piecers is both physically
OF PART I. 193
and morally quite as objectionable as their working as
spinners. 1 Indeed, granting for the sake of argument
that women should be employed in the mule-spinning
room at all, by far the least objectionable arrangement
would be for them to work two together on a pair of
mules, which would diminish the physical strain and
obviate the moral dangers which arise from the present
plan of subordination to a male spinner in an unhealthy
environment. In this case women need organisation
and combination to protect their interests from the
operative spinners, who are virtually their employers,
almost as much as a labouring class needs to be pro-
tected from capitalist employers. And, as Mr. Haslam
shows in his weighty and temperate statement, it is
quite true that there are very great and serious
objections to female employment in this trade. The
heat, the costume, the attitudes necessitated by this
work, all render it a dangerous occupation for girls
to work at in company with men. Mr. Haslam gives
painful evidence in support of this statement, for
which readers can be referred to his article.
The moral of the whole story is by no means that
unrestricted freedom of employment for women is the
way of salvation. Rather is it that women must not
only organise but must take a conscious part in the
work of directing their organisation. At present they
are too often the shuttlecock between the opposing
interests of the employer and the men's Union. It is
not that the Trade Union is always wrong in wanting
to keep the women out ; or that the employer (whether
capitalist or operative) is always right in wanting to
take the women on. The point is that each party in
1 The work of a " big piecer " is practically identical with that
of a spinner, only that responsibility rests with the latter.
O
194 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
these disputes is usually influenced mainly by his own
interests and easily persuades himself that what is
best for him is best also for the woman-worker con-
cerned. The hardest and most unhealthy work may
be done by women without a protest from men's Unions
if it does not bring women evidently into competition
with men. Nothing can clear up the situation but the
enlightenment and better organisation of women them-
selves. They must learn not to take their cue implicitly
from the employer or from the men's Union certainly
not from the teaching of women of another class. They
must learn they are fast learning to think for them-
selves and to see their needs in relation to society as a
whole, to become articulate and take part in the control
of their organisation. It is quite likely that when they
do so they will not adopt the ideal of complete freedom
of competition.
I remember some years ago hearing a lecture on the
subject of the mining industry given to a society of
women of advanced views, the lecturer, a professional
woman, taking the line that women should not have
been excluded from work underground in mines, as
they were by the Act of 1842, and that the evils of
such work had been exaggerated. Some little time
afterwards an experienced woman cotton-operative
was invited to address the same society, and incident-
ally remarked in the course of her lecture that card-
room work was " not fit for women to do." The con-
trast was instructive, especially taking into considera-
tion that card-room work in the twentieth century,
whatever its objections, cannot be nearly as dangerous
and injurious as underground work in mines was in
1842. Legislative exclusion of women from dangerous
and unhealthy occupations, is, we may admit, an un-
OF PART I. 195
desirable remedy from many points of view especially
perhaps because it affords too easy relief to the con-
science of the employer, who may take refuge in the
idea that he need not trouble to improve conditions if
he employs only men. It is better to make the con-
ditions of industry fit for women than to drive women
out of industry ; better to strengthen the organisation
of women and give them a voice in deciding what
processes are or are not suitable to them than to
increase the competition for home work.
It seems, however, highly improbable, from what
one knows of the working woman's point of view and
outlook, that as she becomes able to voice her wishes
she will favour an indiscriminate levelling of sex-
restrictions in industry ; on the contrary, it seems likely
that as she becomes more articulate and has more voice
and influence in the organisation she belongs to, she will
favour regulations of a fairly stringent nature in regard
to the processes within an industry which may be
carried on by women. Many of the observations that
have been made on industrial women in recent or
comparatively recent years show that although at
times they are driven by stress of need to compete with
men or to do work beyond their strength, yet that they
regard themselves mainly from the point of view of the
family and believe that to keep up the standard of
men's wages is as important as to raise their own. 1
The Middle-Class Woman's Movement. There is,
however, a complication between the labour woman's
movement and the woman's movement for enfranchise-
ment and freedom of opportunity generally, and great
care is necessary to avoid confusing the issues. The
1 See Cadbury Matheson and Shann, Women's Work and Wages,
p. 212 ; Macdonald, Women in the Printing Trades, p. 53.
196 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
labour woman's movement is a class movement in which
solidarity between man and woman is all important.
The women's rights movement aims at obtaining full
citizenship for women ; that is to say, not only the
Suffrage but the entrance to professions, the entrance
without special impediments to local governing
bodies and, generally, the abolition of belated and
childish restrictions that hinder the development
of personality and social usefulness. Now these two
movements are not in principle opposed, and there
is no reason why the same women should not take
part in both, as in fact many do. The opposition
consists rather in a difference of origin and history.
The labour movement is born of the economic changes
induced by the industrial revolution, and tends towards
a socialistic solution of the problem. The women's
rights movement is the outcome of middle-class changes,
especially the decreasing prospect of marriage, which,
together with the absence of training and opportunity
for work, has produced a situation of extreme difficulty.
The middle -class woman's agitation was inevitably
influenced by the ideals of her class, a class largely
engaged in competitive business of one kind or another.
Equality of opportunity, permission to compete with
men and try their luck in open market, was what the
women of this type demanded, with considerable
justification, and with admirable courage. The
working woman, on the other hand, the victim of
that very unrestricted competition which her better-
off sister was demanding, before all things needed
improved wages and conditions of work, for which State
protection and combination with men were essential. 1
1 See in Chapter IVA. pp. 162-3. Frau Lily Braun's views on the
subject. ,
OF PART I. 197
There is, however, no fundamental opposition
between these movements. Just as the working classes
are striving through Syndicalism to express a rising
discontent, not only with the economic conditions of
their work, but also with the fact that they have no
voice in its regulation and control, so women are
striving, not only for political freedom and economic
betterment, but for a voice in the collective control of
society. Women have, until very lately, been left out
from the arrangement even of matters which most
vitally concern them and their children. The follow-
ing incident in the history of the Factory Department
will illustrate this fact. In 1879 the then Chief In-
spector of Factories, Sir Alexander Redgrave, discussed
in his annual report a tentative suggestion for the
appointment of women inspectors that some person or
persons unnamed had put forward. With the utmost
kindliness and > gentleness he negatived the proposal
altogether, first on the assumption that the inspection
of factories was work impossible for women and " in-
compatible with (their) gentle and home-loving char-
acter " ; secondly, on the ground that in regard to the
sanitary conditions in which women were employed
" it was seldom necessary to put a single question to a
female," and consequently there was no need to appoint
women inspectors. 1 Thirteen years later came the
Labour Commission. At that time it was unheard of
for women to be appointed on Commissions, even when
the subject was one in which women were most chiefly
concerned. It is said, and I see no reason to doubt
the statement, that the Labour Commission of 1892
did not at first intend even to hear evidence from
1 See an article by the present writer in the Englishwoman,
April 1911.
198 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
women witnesses as to conditions in which women were
employed. Having yielded to the urgency of two
women who were working hard at the organisation of
sweated workers in the East End and demanded to be
heard, the Commission, as an afterthought, appointed
women Assistant Commissioners, whose researches
and reports subsequently led to the appointment of
women Factory Inspectors sixty years after the first
appointments of men. Any one who is likely to read this
book will probably be already aware that women factory
inspectors had no sooner been appointed than they very
speedily were informed of flagrant sanitary defects in
factories and workshops which had been suffered to
continue simply because no woman official had been in
existence, and men, with the best intentions, did not
know what to look or ask for. The exclusion of women
had involved in this case not merely a narrowing of
the field of opportunity for professional women a
comparatively small matter but a scandalous neglect
of the elementary decencies of life for millions of women
and girls in the working-class. It is unnecessary here
to do more than remind my readers that until lately
women were excluded also from local governing bodies
which control the health, education, and conditions of
life and work of women and children.
Men are not alone to blame for this state of affairs.
If women have long been excluded from posts in which
their services were greatly needed, it is very largely
because of the ideals set up by the women themselves.
The wretched education given to girls in the Victorian
era, the egotistic passion for refinement which made it a
reproach even to allude to the grosser facts of life, much
more to the perils and dangers run by women in a lower
class, all this was due quite as much to the influence
OF PART I. 199
of women as of men. It was not surprising that men
of the upper classes, accustomed by their mothers and
wives to believe that for women ignorance and innocence
were one, and that no painful reality must ever be
mentioned before them or come near to sully their
refinement, should recoil from the idea of trusting them
with difficult duties and responsible work. It is to the
few pioneer women like Florence Nightingale, Josephine
Butler, and others who came out and braved reproach
from women as well as men that we owe the introduc-
tion of worthier social ideals.
The New Spirit among Women. As the women's
movement draws towards the labour movement, as it
is now so rapidly doing, it tends to lose the narrow
individualism derived from the middle-class ideals of
the last century. Mere freedom to compete is seen
to be a small thing in comparison with opportunity to
develop. The appeal for fuller opportunity is now
stimulated less by the desire merely to do the same
things that men do, more by the perception that the
whole social life must be impoverished until we get
the women's point of view expressed and recognised
in the functions of national life. On the other hand,
the women Unionists, who have long been taxed with
apathy and lack of interest in their trade organisation,
are drawing from the women's movement a new in-
spiration and enthusiasm. Observers in Lancashire
tell you that there is a new spirit stirring among the
women. They are no longer so contented to have the
Union efficiently managed for them by men ; they want
to take a conscious part in the work of organisation
themselves. The same movement is visible in the
plucky and self-sacrificing efforts for solidarity made
by the workers in trades hitherto unorganised ; and, at
200 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
the other end of the social scale, in the deep discontent
with the life of parasitic dependence which has been
so powerfully expressed in the Life of Florence Nightin-
gale, and in Lady Constance Lytton's book on Prisons
and Prisoners.
The Potential Changes the Industrial Revolution
carries with it. We have endeavoured to analyse the
changes effected in the position of women by the
industrial revolution. Social changes, however, take
a long time to work themselves out, and many features
in the position of the woman-worker at the present day,
as we have seen, are the result not so much of the
industrial revolution as of the status and economic
position of women in earlier times, and still more of the
neglect of the governing classes to take the measures
necessary for the protection of the people in passing
through that prolonged crisis which may be roughly
dated from 1760 to 1830. Let us now try as far as
possible to free our minds from the influence of these
disturbing factors and ask ourselves what are the
potential changes in the position of the working woman
effected by the industrial revolution, and what im-
provement, if any, she might expect to achieve if those
changes could work themselves out more completely
than social reaction and hindrances have yet permitted
them to do. Let us, in short, pass from the con-
sideration of What Is to the contemplation of What
Might Be.
i. By the use of mechanical power, the need for
muscular strength is diminished, and greater possibilities
are opened up to the weaker classes of workers. We
are accustomed to view this change with disfavour,
because it often takes the form of displacing men's
labour and lowering men's wages. But that is mainly
OF PART I. 201
because we see things in terms of unorganised labour.
With proper organisation we should not see women
taking men's work at less than men's wages ; we
should see both men and women doing the work to
which their special aptitudes are most appropriate,
each paid for their special skill. We should not see
women dragging heavy weights or doing laborious
kinds of work which are dangerous and unsuitable to
them ; we should see them using their special gifts
and special kinds of skill, and paid accordingly. There
is no reason, save custom and lack of organisation, why
a nursery-maid should be paid less than a coal-miner.
He is not one whit more capable of taking her place
than she is of taking his. For generations we have been
accustomed to assume that any girl can be a nursery-
maid (which is far from being the truth), and from force
of habit we consider the miner has to be well paid
because his occupation demands a degree of strength
and endurance which is comparatively rare, and also
because he has the sense to combine and unfortunately
the nursery-maid so far has not. The factory system
is doing a great deal for women, directly by widening
the field of occupation open to them, and indirectly by
heightening the value of special aptitudes, some of
which are peculiar to women. When mechanical power
is used, strength is no longer the prime qualification for
work, and the special powers of the girl-worker come
into play.
The factory system, also, by its immensely increased
productivity, is altering the old views of what is profit-
able, and a new science of social economics is evolving
which would have been unthinkable under the old
regime. In Miss Josephine Goldmark's recent most
interesting book, Fatigue and Efficiency, she has gathered
202 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
together the results of many experiments made by
employers to ascertain the effects of shorter hours.
There is practical unanimity in the results of these
experiments. Obviously there must be a limit to the
degree in which shortening hours of work would increase
the output, but no one appears yet to have reached
that limit. In the Factory Inspectors' Report for
1912 many cases are mentioned where employers have
voluntarily reduced hours of work and find that they,
as well as their work-people are benefited by the change.
In one case of a large firm which had formerly worked
from 8 A.M. to 8 P.M. it was arranged to cease at 7, a
decrease of a whole hour, which necessitated engaging
extra hands, but at the end of the year it was found that
the annual cost of production was slightly diminished
and the output considerably increased. Others ex-
pressed an opinion that 8 to 6.30 was " quite long
enough," and that if these hours were exceeded the