The number of books on the labor problem is indeed legion. The tragedy of the literature on any dynamic subject is that most of it is written by people who have time to do little else. Perhaps the best books on many subjects will never be written because those folk, who would be most competent to do the writing, through their vital connection with the problem at hand, never find the spare minutes to put their findings down on paper.

There could be no more dynamic subject than labor, since labor is nothing less than human beings, and what is more dynamic than human beings? It is, therefore, the last subject in the world to be approached academically. Yet most of the approach to the problems of labor is academic. Men in sanctuaries forever far removed from the endless hum and buzz and roar of machinery, with an intellectual background and individual ambitions forever far removed from the interests and desires of those who labor in factory and mill, theorize—and another volume is added to the study of labor.

But, points out some one, there are books on labor written by bona-fide workers. First, the number is few. Second, and more important, any bona-fide worker capable of writing any kind of book on any subject, puts himself so far above the rank and file that one is justified in asking, for how many does he speak?

Suppose that for the moment your main intellectual interest was to ascertain what the average worker—not the man or woman so far advanced in the cultural scale that he or she can set his ideas intelligently on paper—thought about his job and things in general. To what books could you turn? Indeed I have come to feel that in the pages of O. Henry there is more to be gleaned on the psychology of the working class than any books to be found on economic shelves. The outstanding conclusion forced upon any reader of such books as consciously attempt to give a picture of the worker and his job is that whoever wrote the books was bound and determined to find out everything that was wrong in every investigation made, and tell all about the wrongs and the wrongs only. Goodness knows, if one is hunting for the things which should be improved in this world, one life seems all too short to so much as make a start. In all honesty, then, such books on labor should be classified under “Troubles of Workers.” No one denies they are legion. Everybody's troubles are, if troubles are what you want to find.

The Schemer of Things has so arranged, praise be, that no one's life shall be nothing but woe and misery. Yea, even workers have been known to smile.

The experiences lived through in the following pages may strike the reader as superficial, artificial. In a way they were. Yet, they fulfilled their object in my eyes, at least. I wanted to feel for myself the general “atmosphere” of a job, several jobs. I wanted to know the worker without any suspicion on the part of the girls and women I labored among that they were being “investigated.” I wanted to see the world through their eyes—for the time being to close my own altogether.

There are no startling new facts or discoveries here recorded. Nothing in these pages will revolutionize anything. To such as wish the lot of the worker painted as the most miserable on earth, they will be disappointing.

Yet in being as honest as I could in recording the impressions of my experiences, I am aware that I have made possible the drawing of false conclusions. Already such false conclusions have been drawn. “See,” says an “old-fashioned” employer, “the workers are happy—these articles of Mrs. Parker's show it. Why should they have better conditions? They don't want them!”

A certain type of labor agitator, or a “parlor laborite,” prefer to see only the gloomy side of the worker's life. They are as dishonest as the employer who would see only the contentment. The picture must be viewed in its entirety—and that means considering the workers not as a labor problem, but as a social problem. Workers are not an isolated group, who keep their industrial adversities or industrial blessings to themselves. They and their families and dependents are the majority of our population. As a nation, we rise no higher in the long run than the welfare of the majority. Nor can the word “welfare,” if one thinks socially, ever be limited to the word “contentment.” It is quite conceivable—nay, every person has seen it in actuality—that an individual may be quite contented in his lot and yet have that lot incompatible with the welfare of the larger group.

It is but as a part of the larger group that worker, employer, and the public must come to view the labor problem. When a worker is found who appears perfectly amenable to long hours, bad air, unhygienic conditions in general—and many are—somebody has to pay the price. There are thousands of contented souls, as we measure contentment, in the congested tenement districts of East Side New York. Does that fact add to our social welfare? Because mothers for years were willing to feed their children bad milk, was then the movement to provide good milk for babies a waste of time and money? Plenty of people always could be found who would willingly drink impure water. Society found that too costly, and cities pride themselves to-day on their pure water supply and low typhoid rate.

There are industrial conditions flourishing which insidiously take a greater toll of society than did ever the death of babies from unclean milk, the death of old and young from impure water. The trouble is that their effects permeate in ways difficult for the unwilling eye to see.

Perhaps in the long run, one of the most harmful phases of modern civilization is this very contentment of not only the workers, but the employer and society at large, under conditions which are not building up a wholesome, healthy, intelligent population. Indeed, it is not so much the fault of modern industrialism as such. Perhaps it is because there are so many people in the world and the ability of us human beings, cave men only ten thousand years ago, to care for so many people has not increased with the same rapidity as the population. Our numbers have outrun our capacities. Twentieth century development calls for large-scale organization for which the human mind has shown itself inadequate.

It is well to keep in mind that no situation is the product of its own day. The working woman, for instance, we have had with us since the beginning of women—and they began a good spell ago. The problem of the working woman, as we think of it to-day, began with the beginning of modern industry. Nor is it possible to view her past without realizing that the tendency has ever been, with but few interruptions, toward improvement.

In the early factory days in our country it is known that women rose at four, took their breakfast with them to the mills, and by five were hard at work in badly constructed buildings, badly heated, badly lighted. From seven-thirty to eight-thirty there was an hour for breakfast, at noon half an hour, and from then on steady work until half past seven at night. It would be perhaps eight o'clock before the mill girls reached home, sometimes too tired to stay awake till the end of supper. Later, hours were more generally from five in the morning until seven at night. In Lowell the girls worked two hours before breakfast and went back to the mills again in the evening after supper. By 1850 twelve hours had come to be the average working day.[1]

Wages were very low—around seventy-five cents or a dollar a week with board. Mills and factories were accustomed to provide room and board in the corporation boarding houses, poorly constructed, ill-ventilated buildings, girls often sleeping six and eight in a room. In 1836 it was estimated that the average wage for women in industry (excluding board) was thirty-seven and one-half cents a day, although one thousand sewing women investigated received on an average twenty-five cents a day. In 1835 the New York Journal of Commerce estimated that at the beginning of the century women's labor brought about fifty cents a week, which was equivalent to twenty-five cents in 1835. In 1845 the New York Tribune reported fifty thousand women averaging less than two dollars a week wages, and thousands receiving one dollar and fifty cents. Another investigation in 1845 found “female labor in New York in a deplorable degree of servitude, privation and misery, drudging on, miserably cooped up in ill-ventilated cellars and garrets.” Women worked fifteen to eighteen hours a day to earn one to three dollars a week.

And yet authorities tell us that some of the mill towns of New England, Lowell in particular, are looked back upon as being almost idyllic as regards the opportunities for working women. On examination it is found that what was exceptional from our point of view was not the conditions, but the factory employees. In those days work in the mills was “socially permissible.” Indeed there was practically no other field of employment open to educated girls. The old domestic labors had been removed from the household—where could a girl with spirit and ability make the necessary money to carry out her legitimate desires? Her brothers “went west”—she went into the factories—with the same spirit. Ambitious daughters of New England farmers formed the bulk of cotton mill employees the first half of the nineteenth century. Their granddaughters are probably college graduates of the highest type to-day. After the long factory hours they found time for reading, debating clubs, lectures, church activities, French, and German classes. Part of the time some of the mill operatives taught school. Many of them looked forward to furthering their own education in such female seminaries as existed in those days, the expense to be met from their mill earnings. Poorly paid as mill hands were, it was often six to seven times what teachers received.

“The mills offered not only regular employment and higher wages, but educational advantages which many of the operatives prized even more highly. Moreover, the girl who had worked in Lowell was looked upon with respect as a person of importance when she returned to her rural neighborhood. Her fashionable dress and manners and her general air of independence were greatly envied by those who had not been to the metropolis and enjoyed its advantages.”[2]

By 1850 the situation had altered. With the opening of the west, opportunities for women of gumption and spirit increased. The industrial depression of 1848-49 lowered wages, and little by little the former type of operative left the mill, her place being filled largely by Irish immigrants.

The Civil War saw a great change in the world of working women. Thousands of men were taken from industry into war, and overnight great new fields of opportunity were opened to women. The more educated were needed as nurses, for teaching positions, and for various grades of clerical work deserted by men. After the close of the war farmers became more prosperous and their daughters were not forced to work for the wherewithal to acquire advantages. Add to all this the depression caused in the cotton industry due to the war—and the result of these new conditions was that when the mills reopened it was with cheap immigrant labor. What then could have been considered high wages were offered in an attempt to induce the more efficient American women operatives back to the mills, but the cost of living had jumped far higher even than high wages. The mills held no further attractions. Even the Irish deserted, their places being filled with immigrants of a lower type.

Since the Civil War look at us—8,075,772 women in industry, as against 2,647,157 in 1880. Almost a fourth of the entire female population over ten years of age are at work, as against about one-seventh in 1880. The next census figures will show a still larger proportion. Those thousands of women the World War threw into industry, who never had worked before, did not all get out of industry after the war. Take just the railroads, for example. In April, 1918, there were 65,816 women employed in railroad work; in October, 1918, 101,785; and in April, 1919, 86,519. In the 1910 census, of all the kinds of jobs in our country filled by men, only twelve were not also filled by women—and the next census will show a reduction there: firemen (either in manufacturing or railroads), brakemen, conductors, plumbers, common laborers (under transportation), locomotive engineers, motormen, policemen, soldiers, sailors, and marines. The interesting point is that in only one division of work are women decreasing in proportion to men—and that was women's work at the beginning—manufacturing. In agriculture, in the professions, in domestic and personal service, in trade and transportation, the number of women is creeping up, up, in proportion to the number of men. From the point of view of national health and vitality for this and the next generation, it is indeed a hopeful sign if women are giving way to men in factories, mills, and plants, and pushing up into work requiring more education and in turn not demanding such physical and nervous strain as does much of the machine process. Also, since on the whole as it has been organized up to date, domestic service has been one of the least attractive types of work women could fill, it is encouraging (though not to the housewife) to find that the proportion of women going into domestic and personal service has fallen from forty-four and six-tenths per cent, in 1880, to thirty-two and five-tenths per cent, in 1910.

Women working at everything under the sun—except perhaps being locomotive engineers and soldiers and sailors. Why?

First, it is part of every normal human being to want to work. Therefore, women want to work. Time was when within the home were enough real life-sized jobs to keep a body on the jump morning and night. Not only mother but any other females handy. There are those who grumble that women could find enough to do at home now if they only tried. They cannot, unless they have young children or unless they putter endlessly at nonessentials, the doing of which leaves them and everybody else no better off than before they began. And it is part of the way we are made that besides wanting to work, we need to work at something we feel “gets us some place.” We prefer to work at something desirable and useful. Perhaps what we choose is not really so desirable and useful, looked at in the large, but it stacks up as more desirable and more useful than something else we might be doing. And with it all, if there is to be any real satisfaction, must go some feeling of independence—of being on “one's own.”

So, then, women go out to work in 1921 because there is not enough to do to keep them busy at home. They follow in part their age-old callings, only nowadays performed in roaring factories instead of by the home fireside. In part they take to new callings. Whatever the job may be, women want to work in preference to the nonproductiveness of most home life to-day.

Graham Wallas, in his Great Society, quotes the answers given by a number of girls to a woman who held their confidence as to why they worked. He wished to learn if they were happy. The question meant to the girls evidently, “Are you happier than you would have been at home?” and practically every answer was “Yes.”

In a “dismal and murky,” but fairly well-managed laundry, six Irish girls all answered they were happy. One said the work “took up her mind, she had been awfully discontented.” Another that “you were of some use.” Another, “the hours went so much faster. At home one could read, but only for a short time. Then there was the awful lonesome afternoon ahead of you.” “Asked a little girl with dyed hair but a good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It made her feel she was worth something.”

At another laundry, the first six girls all answered they were happy because the “work takes up your mind,” and generally added, “It's awful lonesome at home,” or “there is an awful emptiness at home.” However, one girl with nine brothers and sisters was happy in the collar packing room just because “it was so awful lonesome”—she could enjoy her own thoughts. An Irishwoman at another laundry who had married an Italian said, “Sure I am always happy. It leaves me no time to think.” At a knitting plant one girl said “when she didn't work, she was always thinking of dead people, but work always made her cheer up directly.”

The great industrial population comes from crowded tenements. It is inconceivable that enough work could be found within those walls to make life attractive to the girls and young women growing to maturity in such households.

So much for the psychological side. The fact remains that the great bulk of women in industry work because they have to work—they enter industrial life to make absolutely necessary money. The old tasks at which a woman could be self-supporting in the home are no longer possible in the home. She earns her bread now as she has earned it for thousands of years—spinning, weaving, sewing, baking, cooking—only to-day she is one of hundreds, thousands in a great factory. Nor is she longer confined to her traditional tasks. Men are playing a larger part in what was since time began and up to a few years ago woman's work. Women, in their need, are finding employment at any work that can use unskilled less physically capable labor.

Ever has it been the very small proportion of men who could by their unaided effort support the entire family. At no time have all the men in a country been able to support all the women, regardless of whether that situation would be desirable. Always must the aid of womenfolk be called in as a matter of course. We have a national ideal of a living wage to the male head of the family which will allow him to support his family without forcing his wife and children into industry. Any man who earns less than that amount during the year must depend on the earnings of wife and children or else fall below the minimum necessary to subsistence, with all which that implies. In 1910, four-fifths of the heads of families in the United States earned under eight hundred dollars a year. At that same time, almost nine-tenths of the women workers living at home in New York City working in factories, mills, and such establishments, paid their entire earnings to the family. Of 13,686 women investigated in Wisconsin in 1914, only 2 per cent gave nothing to the family support. Of girls in retail stores living at home in New York City, 84 per cent paid their entire earnings to the family. Work, then, for the majority of women, is more apt to be cold economic necessity—not only for herself, but for her family.

Besides the fact that great numbers of women must work and many want to work, there are the reasons for women's work arising in modern industry itself. First, a hundred years ago, there was the need for hands in the new manufactures, and because of the even more pressing agricultural demands, men could not be spared. The greater the subdivisions of labor up to a certain point, the simpler the process, and the more women can be used, unskilled as they are ever apt to be. Also they will work at more monotonous, more disagreeable work than men, and for less wages. Again, women's entrance into new industries has often been as strike breakers, and once in, there was no way to get them out. Industrial depressions throw men out of work, and also women, and in the financial pressure following, women turn to any sort of work at any sort of pay, and perhaps open a new wedge for women's work in a heretofore untried field, desirable or undesirable.

The freedom from having to perform every and all domestic functions within the four walls of home is purchased at the expense of millions of toilers outside the home, the majority of whom do not to-day receive enough wages, where they are the menfolk, to support their own families; nor where they are single women, to support themselves. The fact that men cannot support their families forces women in large numbers into industry. There would be nothing harmful in that, if only industry were organized so that participation in it enriched human lives. Remembering always that where industry takes women from the care of young children, society and the nation pay dearly; for, inadequate and ignorant as mothers often are regarding child care, their substitutes to-day are apt to be even less efficient.

Pessimists marshal statistics to show that modern industrialism is going to rack and ruin. Maybe it is. But pessimism is more a matter of temperament than statistics. An optimist can assemble a most cheerful array of figures to show that everything is on the up. Temperament again. Industry is what industry does. If you are feeling gloomy to-day, you can visit factories where it is plain to see that no human being could have his lot improved by working there. Such factories certainly exist. If you would hug your pessimism to your soul, then there are many factories you must stay away from. Despite all the pessimists, there is a growing tendency to increase the welfare of human beings in industry.

It is but an infinitesimal drop any one individual can contribute to hasten a saner industrialism. Yet some of us would so fain contribute our mite! Where the greatest need of all lies is that the human beings in industry, the employer and the employees, shall better understand one another, and society at large better understand both. My own amateur and humble experiences here recorded have added much to my own understanding of the problems of both manager and worker.

Can they add even a fraction to the understanding of anyone else?

Cornelia Stratton Parker.

Woods Hole,
August, 1921.