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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12226 ***
+
+Images provided by: Million Book Project.
+
+Post-Processing : Wilelmina Mallière.
+
+
+
+
+
+WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT
+
+
+
+[Illustration: CONVENTION OF OUR WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK]
+
+WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT
+
+BY RHETA CHILDE DORR
+
+1910.
+
+
+
+TO
+THE AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVES
+OF THE EIGHT MILLION--
+THE EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND MEMBERS
+OF THE GENERAL FEDERATION OF
+WOMEN'S CLUBS--
+THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
+
+
+Many of the chapters contained in this volume appeared as special
+articles in _Hampton's Magazine_, to the editor of which the author's
+thanks are due for permission to republish.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+  I INTRODUCTORY
+  II FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE
+  III EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW
+  IV AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW
+  V WOMAN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY
+  VI MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE
+  VII BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO
+  VIII WOMAN'S HELPING HAND FOR THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
+  IX THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE
+  X VOTES FOR WOMEN
+  XI IN CONCLUSION
+  INDEX
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+     CONVENTION OF CLUB WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK
+
+     CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH
+
+     CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK, PITTSBURGH
+
+     STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD, LOS
+     ANGELES, CAL.
+
+     MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER
+
+     LADY ABERDEEN
+
+     A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES
+
+     MISS EMILIE BULLOWA
+
+     MRS. FREDERICK NATHAN
+
+     MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN
+
+     MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY
+
+     A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN
+
+     MISS MAUDE E. MINER
+
+     IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK
+
+     MISS SADIE AMERICAN
+
+     A TYPICAL DANCE HALL
+
+     AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION
+
+     ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION
+
+     THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY
+
+     SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING
+
+     MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH
+
+     MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER
+
+     THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL 27,
+     1909
+
+     HELEN HOY GREELEY
+
+     SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE
+
+     THE "QUIET WALK" OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE WOULD
+     NOT PERMIT TO PARADE
+
+     SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+For the audacity of the title of this book I offer no apology. I have
+had it pointed out, not altogether facetiously, that it is impossible to
+determine with accuracy what one woman, much less what any number of
+women, wants. I sympathize with the first half of the tradition. The
+desires, that is to say, the ideals, of an individual, man or woman, are
+not always easy to determine. The individual is complex and exceedingly
+prone to variation. The mass alone is consistent. The ideals of the mass
+of women are wrapped in mystery simply because no one has cared enough
+about them to inquire what they are.
+
+Men, ardently, eternally, interested in Woman--one woman at a time--are
+almost never even faintly interested in women. Strangely, deliberately
+ignorant of women, they argue that their ignorance is justified by an
+innate unknowableness of the sex.
+
+I am persuaded that the time is at hand when this sentimental, half
+contemptuous attitude of half the population towards the other half will
+have to be abandoned. I believe that the time has arrived when
+self-interest, if other motive be lacking, will compel society to
+examine the ideals of women. In support of this opinion I ask you to
+consider three facts, each one of which is so patent that it requires no
+argument.
+
+The Census of 1900 reported nearly six million women in the United
+States engaged in wage earning outside their homes. Between 1890 and
+1900 the number of women in industry increased faster than the number of
+men in industry. _It increased faster than the birth rate._ The number
+of women wage earners at the present date can only be estimated. Nine
+million would be a conservative guess. Nine million women who have
+forsaken the traditions of the hearth and are competing with men in the
+world of paid labor, means that women are rapidly passing from the
+domestic control of their fathers and their husbands. Surely this is
+the most important economic fact in the world to-day.
+
+Within the past twenty years no less than nine hundred and fifty-four
+thousand divorces have been granted in the United States. Two thirds of
+these divorces were granted to aggrieved wives. In spite of the
+anathemas of the church, in the face of tradition and early precept, in
+defiance of social ostracism, accepting, in the vast majority of cases,
+the responsibility of self support, more than six hundred thousand
+women, in the short space of twenty years, repudiated the burden of
+uncongenial marriage. Without any doubt this is the most important
+social fact we have had to face since the slavery question was settled.
+
+Not only in the United States, but in every constitutional country in
+the world the movement towards admitting women to full political
+equality with men is gathering strength. In half a dozen countries women
+are already completely enfranchised. In England the opposition is
+seeking terms of surrender. In the United States the stoutest enemy of
+the movement acknowledges that woman suffrage is ultimately inevitable.
+The voting strength of the world is about to be doubled, and the new
+element is absolutely an unknown quantity. Does any one question that
+this is the most important political fact the modern world has ever
+faced?
+
+I have asked you to consider three facts, but in reality they are but
+three manifestations of one fact, to my mind the most important human
+fact society has yet encountered. Women have ceased to exist as a
+subsidiary class in the community. They are no longer wholly dependent,
+economically, intellectually, and spiritually, on a ruling class of men.
+They look on life with the eyes of reasoning adults, where once they
+regarded it as trusting children. Women now form a new social group,
+separate, and to a degree homogeneous. Already they have evolved a group
+opinion and a group ideal.
+
+And this brings me to my reason for believing that society will soon be
+compelled to make a serious survey of the opinions and ideals of women.
+As far as these have found collective expressions, it is evident that
+they differ very radically from accepted opinions and ideals of men. As
+a matter of fact, it is inevitable that this should be so. Back of the
+differences between the masculine and the feminine ideal lie centuries
+of different habits, different duties, different ambitions, different
+opportunities, different rewards.
+
+I shall not here attempt to outline what the differences have been or
+why they have existed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in _Women and
+Economics_, did this before me,--did it so well that it need never be
+done again. I merely wish to point out that different habits of action
+necessarily result, after long centuries, in different habits of
+thought. Men, accustomed to habits of strife, pursuit of material
+gains, immediate and tangible rewards, have come to believe that strife
+is not only inevitable but desirable; that material gain and visible
+reward are alone worth coveting. In this commercial age strife means
+business competition, reward means money. Man, in the aggregate, thinks
+in terms of money profit and money loss, and try as he will, he cannot
+yet think in any other terms.
+
+I have in mind a certain rich young man, who, when he is not
+superintending the work of his cotton mills in Virginia, is giving his
+time to settlement work in the city of Washington. The rich young man is
+devoted to the settlement. One day he confided to a guest of the house,
+a social worker of note, that he wished he might dedicate his entire
+life to philanthropy.
+
+"There is much about a commercial career that is depressing to a
+sympathetic nature," he declared. "For example, it constantly depresses
+me to observe the effect of the cotton mills on the girls in my employ.
+They come in from the country, fresh, blooming, and eager to work.
+Within a few months perhaps they are pale, anaemic, listless. Not
+infrequently a young girl contracts tuberculosis and dies before one
+realizes that she is ill. It wrings the heart to see it."
+
+"I suspect," said the visitor, "that there is something wrong with your
+mills. Are you sure that they are sufficiently well ventilated?"
+
+"They are as well ventilated as we can have them," said the rich young
+man. "Of course we cannot keep the windows open."
+
+"Why not?" persisted the visitor.
+
+"Because in our mills we spin both black and white yarn, and if the
+windows were kept open the lint from the black yarn would blow on the
+white yarn and ruin it."
+
+A quick vision rose before the visitor's consciousness, of a mill room,
+noisy with clacking machinery, reeking with the mingled odors of
+perspiration and warm oil, obscure with flying cotton flakes which
+covered the forms of the workers like snow and choked in their throats
+like desert sand.
+
+"But," she exclaimed, "you can have two rooms, one for the white yarn
+and the other for the black."
+
+The rich young man shook his head with the air of one who goes away
+exceedingly sorrowful.
+
+"No," he replied, "we can't. The business won't stand it."
+
+This story presents in miniature the social attitude of the majority of
+men. They cannot be held entirely responsible. Their minds automatically
+function just that way. They have high and generous impulses, their
+hearts are susceptible to tenderest pity, they often possess the vision
+of brotherhood and human kinship, but habit, long habit, always
+intervenes in time to save the business from loss of a few dollars
+profit.
+
+Three years ago Chicago was on the eve of one of its periodical "vice
+crusades," of which more later. Sensational stories had been published
+in several newspapers, to the effect that no fewer than five thousand
+Jewish girls were leading lives of shame in the city, a statement which
+was received with horror by the Jewish population of Chicago. A meeting
+of wealthy and influential men and women was called in the law library
+of a well known jurist and philanthropist. Representatives from various
+social settlements in Jewish quarters of the town were invited, and it
+was as a guest of one of these settlements that I was privileged to be
+present.
+
+Eloquent addresses were made and an elaborate plan for investigation and
+relief was outlined. Finally it came to a point where ways and means had
+to be considered. The presiding officer put this phase of the matter to
+the conference with smiling frankness. "You must realize, ladies and
+gentlemen," he said, "that we have entered upon an extensive and, I am
+afraid, a very expensive campaign."
+
+At this a middle aged and notably dignified man arose and said with
+emotion trembling in his voice: "Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen
+of the conference, this surely is no time for us to think of economy of
+expenditure. If the daughters of Israel are losing their ancient dower
+of purity, the sons of Israel should be willing, nay, eager to ransom
+them at any cost. Permit me, as a privileged honor which I value highly,
+to offer, as a contribution towards the preliminary expenses of this
+campaign, my check for ten thousand dollars."
+
+He sat down to that polite little murmur of applause which goes round
+the room, and I whispered to the head resident of the settlement of
+which I was a guest, an inquiry as to the identity of the generous
+donor.
+
+"That gentleman," she whispered in reply, "is one of the owners of a
+great mail order department store in Chicago." She sighed deeply, as
+she added: "During the first week of the panic that store discharged,
+without warning, five hundred girls."
+
+These typical examples of the reasoning processes of men are offered
+without the slightest rancor. They had to be given in order that the
+woman's habit of thought might be explained with clearness.
+
+Women, since society became an organized body, have been engaged in the
+rearing, as well as the bearing of children. They have made the home,
+they have cared for the sick, ministered to the aged, and given to the
+poor. The universal destiny of the mass of women trained them to feed
+and clothe, to invent, manufacture, build, repair, contrive, conserve,
+economize. They lived lives of constant service, within the narrow
+confines of a home. Their labor was given to those they loved, and the
+reward they looked for was purely a spiritual reward.
+
+A thousand generations of service, unpaid, loving, intimate, must have
+left the strongest kind of a mental habit in its wake. Women, when they
+emerged from the seclusion of their homes and began to mingle in the
+world procession, when they were thrown on their own financial
+responsibility, found themselves willy nilly in the ranks of the
+producers, the wage earners; when the enlightenment of education was no
+longer denied them, when their responsibilities ceased to be entirely
+domestic and became somewhat social, when, in a word, women began to
+_think_, they naturally thought in human terms. They couldn't have
+thought otherwise if they had tried.
+
+They might have learned, it is true. In certain circumstances women
+might have been persuaded to adopt the commercial habit of thought. But
+the circumstances were exactly propitious for the encouragement of the
+old-time woman habit of service. The modern thinking, planning,
+self-governing, educated woman came into a world which is losing faith
+in the commercial ideal, and is endeavoring to substitute in its place a
+social ideal. She came into a generation which is reaching passionate
+hands towards democracy. She became one with a nation which is weary of
+wars and hatreds, impatient with greed and privilege, sickened of
+poverty, disease, and social injustice. The modern, free-functioning
+woman accepted without the slightest difficulty these new ideals of
+democracy and social service. Where men could do little more than
+theorize in these matters, women were able easily and effectively to
+act.
+
+I hope that I shall not be suspected of ascribing to women any ingrained
+or fundamental moral superiority to men. Women are not better than men.
+The mantle of moral superiority forced upon them as a substitute for
+intellectual equality they accepted, because they could not help
+themselves. They dropped it as soon as the substitute was no longer
+necessary.
+
+That the mass of women are invariably found on the side of the new
+ideals is no evidence of their moral superiority to men; it is merely
+evidence of their intellectual youth.
+
+Visitors from western cities and towns are often amazed, and vastly
+amused, to find in New York and other eastern cities little narrow-gauge
+street car lines, where gaunt horses haul the shabbiest of cars over the
+oldest and roughest of road beds. The Westerner declares that nowhere in
+the East does he find surface cars that equal in comfort and elegance
+the cars recently installed in his Michigan or Nebraska or Washington
+home town.
+
+"Recently installed." There you have it.
+
+The eastern city retains its horse cars and its out-of-date electric
+rolling stock because it has them, and because there are all sorts of
+difficulties in the way of replacing them. Old franchises have to expire
+or otherwise be got rid of; corporations have to be coaxed or coerced;
+greed and corruption often have to be overcome; huge sums of money have
+to be appropriated; a whole machinery of municipal government has to be
+set in motion before the old and established city can change its
+traction system.
+
+The new western town goes on foot until it attains to a certain size and
+a sufficient prosperity. Then it installs electric railways, and of
+course it purchases the newest and most modern of the available models.
+
+
+New social ideals are difficult for men to acquire in a practical way
+because their minds are filled with old traditions, inherited memories,
+outworn theories of law, government, and social control. They cannot get
+rid of these at once. They have used them so long, have found them so
+convenient, so satisfactory, that even when you show them something
+admittedly better; they are able only partially to comprehend and to
+accept.
+
+Women, on the other hand, have very few antiques to get rid of. Until
+recently their minds, scantily furnished with a few personal preferences
+and personal prejudices, were entirely bare of community ideals or any
+social theory. When they found themselves in need of a social theory it
+was only natural that they should choose the most modern, the most
+progressive, the most idealistic. They made their choice unconsciously,
+and they began the application of their new-found theory almost
+automatically. The machinery they employed was the long derided,
+misconceived, and unappreciated Women's Club.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE
+
+
+Unless you have lived in a live town in the Middle West--say in
+Michigan, or Indiana, or Nebraska--you cannot have a very adequate idea
+of how ugly, and dirty, and neglected, and disreputable a town can be
+when nobody loves it. The railway station is a long, low, rakish thing
+of boards, painted a muddy maroon color. Around it is a stretch of bare
+ground strewn with ashes. Beyond lies the main street, with some good
+business blocks,--a First National Bank in imposing granite, and a
+Masonic Temple in pressed brick. The high school occupies a treeless,
+grassless, windswept block by itself.
+
+In the center of the residential section of the town is a big,
+unsightly, hummocky vacant place, vaguely known as the park--or the
+place where they are going to have a park, when the city gets around to
+it. At present it is a convenient spot wherein to dump tin cans, empty
+bottles, broken crockery, old shoes, and other residue. When the wind
+blows, in the spring and fall, a fine assortment of desiccated rubbish
+is wafted up and down, and into the neighbors' dooryards.
+
+Everybody is busy in these live towns. Everybody is prosperous, and
+patriotic, and law-abiding, and respectable. The business of "getting
+on" absorbs the entire time and attention of the men. They "get on" so
+well, for the most part, that their wives have plenty of leisure on
+their hands, and the latter occupy a portion of their leisure by
+belonging to a club, organized for the study of the art of the
+Renaissance, Chinese religions before Confucius, or the mystery of
+Browning. The club meets every second Wednesday, and the members read
+papers, after which there is tea and a social hour. The papers vary in
+degree alone, as the writer happens to be a skimmer, a wader, or a
+deep-sea diver in standard editions of the encyclopedias. The social
+hour, however, occasionally develops in a direction quite away from the
+realms of pure culture.
+
+Such a town, with such a woman's club, was Lake City, Minnesota, a few
+years ago. Lake City had a busy and a prosperous male population, a
+woman's club bent on intellectual uplift, and a place where there was
+going to be a park. One windy second Wednesday the club members arrived
+with their eyes full of dust, soot on their white gloves, and
+indignation in their hearts. When tea and the social hour came around
+culture went by the board and the conversation turned to the perfectly
+disgraceful way in which the town's street cleaning was conducted.
+
+"The streets are bad enough," said one member, "but, after all, one
+expects the streets to be dusty. What I object to is having a city
+dump-heap at my front door. Have any of you crossed my corner of the
+park since the snow melted?"
+
+She drew a lively picture of a state of things gravely menacing to the
+health of her neighborhood, and that of all the people whose homes faced
+the neglected square.
+
+"Why doesn't somebody complain to the authorities?" she concluded. "Why
+don't we do something about it? The next time we meet we might at least
+adopt resolutions, or, better still, have a committee appointed. What do
+you think, Madam President?"
+
+Madam President tapped her teaspoon on the edge of her empty cup. "I
+think," she said, "that we will come to order and do it now. Will you
+put what you have just suggested in the form of a motion?"
+
+At the next meeting of the club the committee to investigate the park
+made its report. The club members began a lively canvass among real
+estate owners and business men, and before long an astonished city
+council found itself on its feet, receiving a deputation from the
+woman's club. The women came armed with a donation of fifteen hundred
+dollars cash, and a polite, but firm, demand that the money be used to
+clean up and plant the park.
+
+The council replied that it had always intended to get around to that
+park, and would have done it long ago but for the fact that there was no
+park board in existence, and could not be one, because the Solons who
+drew up the city charter had forgotten to put in a provision for such a
+board.
+
+The club held more meetings, and appointed more committees. One of
+these unearthed a State law which seemed to cover the case, and make a
+park board possible without the direct assistance of a city charter. The
+city attorney was visited, and somehow was coaxed, or argued, or bullied
+into giving a favorable opinion, after which the election of a park
+board followed as a matter of course. The town suddenly became
+interested in the park. The club women's fifteen hundred dollars was
+doubled by popular subscription, and the work of turning a town rubbish
+heap into a cool and shady garden spot was brief but durable.
+
+You wouldn't know the Lake City of those years if you saw it to-day.
+They have an attractive railroad station, paved streets, cement
+sidewalks, public playgrounds for children, a high school set in a
+shaded square, and residence streets that look like parkways. And the
+woman's club was the parent of them all.
+
+There is a theory which expresses itself somewhat obviously in the
+phrase: "Whatever all the women of the country want they will get." The
+theory is a convenient one, because it may be used to defer action on
+any suggested reform, and it is harmless because of the seeming
+impossibility of ascertaining what all the women of the country really
+want. The women of the United States and the women of all the world have
+discovered a means through which they may express their collective
+opinions and desires: organization, and more organization. Lake City is
+but one instance in a thousand.
+
+When American women began, a generation ago, to form themselves into
+clubs, and later to join these clubs into state federations of clubs,
+and finally the state federations into a national body, they did not
+dream that they were going to express a collective opinion. Indeed, at
+that time not very many had opinions worth expressing. The immediate
+need of women's souls at the beginning of the club movement was for
+education; the higher education they missed by not going to college, and
+they formed their clubs with the sole object of self-culture.
+
+The study period did not last very long. In fact it was doomed from the
+beginning, for it is not in the nature of women, or at least it is not
+in the habit of women, to do things for themselves alone. They have
+_served_ for so many generations that they have learned to like serving
+better than anything else in the world, and they add service to the
+pursuit of culture, just as some of them add the important postscript to
+the unimportant letter.
+
+Thus Dallas, Texas, had a women's club of the culture caste. One spring
+day, after the star member had read a paper on the "Lake Poets," and
+another member had rendered a Chopin _étude_ on the piano, they began to
+talk about the stegomyia mosquito, and what a pity it was that the
+annual danger of contagion and death from the bite of that insect had to
+be faced all over again. Pools of water all over town, simply swarming
+with little wriggling things, soon to emerge as full-armed stegomyias,
+merely because the city authorities hadn't the money, or said they
+hadn't, to cover the pools with oil.
+
+"Why, oil isn't very expensive," said one of the club women. "Let's buy
+a whole lot of it and do the work ourselves."
+
+So the work of saving hundreds of lives every year was added to the
+study of "Lake Poets" and Chopin by the Women's Club of Dallas. The
+members mapped the city, laid it out in districts, organized their
+forces, bought oil and oil-cans and set forth. They visited the schools,
+got teachers and pupils interested, and secured their co-operation. The
+study of city sanitation was soon put into the school curriculum, and
+oiling pools of standing water in every quarter of the town is now a
+regular part of the school program in the upper grades. Every year the
+club women renew the agitation, and every year the school children go
+out with their teachers and cover the pools with oil.
+
+That story could be paralleled in almost any city in the United States.
+Clubs everywhere organized for the intellectual advancement of the
+members, for the culture of music, art, and crafts, soon added to the
+original object a department of philanthropy, a department of public
+school decoration, a department of child labor, a department of civics.
+The day a women's club adopts civics as a side line to literature, that
+day it ceases to be a private association and becomes a public
+institution--and the public sometimes finds this out before the club
+suspects it.
+
+An Eastern woman was visiting in San Francisco a short time before the
+fire. In the complication of three streets with names almost identical,
+she lost her way to the reception whither she was bound. The conductor
+on the last car she tried before going home was deeply sympathetic.
+
+"'Tis a shame, ma'am, them streets," he declared. "I've always said
+there was no sense at all in havin' them named like that. A stranger is
+bound to go wrong. I'll tell you what you do, ma'am: you go straight to
+Mrs. Lovell White, she that bosses the women's clubs, you know, ma'am.
+You tell her about them streets, and she'll have 'em changed."
+
+The conductor's simple faith in the Women's Club of San Francisco did
+not lack justification. In the intervals of studying Browning and
+antique art, the club found time to discover to San Francisco all sorts
+of things that the city wanted and needed without knowing that it did.
+
+"We ought to have a flower market," pronounced the club.
+
+"Nonsense," said the City Council. "Besides, where is the money to come
+from?"
+
+"We'll establish the flower market and show you," returned the club.
+
+They did. They found a centrally located square, the place where people
+would be likely to go for an early morning sale of potted plants and cut
+flowers. Prices are moderate in outdoor markets, and nothing else so
+stimulates in an entire community the gardening instinct, usually
+confined to a few individuals. The city authorities discovered that the
+flower market filled a long-felt want. So the city took the market over.
+
+These activities were more or less local. Others, begun as local
+affairs, ultimately became national in scope. The movement which has
+resulted in a national program in favor of public playgrounds for
+children began as a women's club movement. For a dozen years before the
+Playgrounds Association of America came into existence, women's clubs
+all over the country had been establishing playgrounds, supporting them
+out of their club treasuries, and using every power of persuasion to
+educate boards of education and city councils in their favor.
+
+Pittsburg affords a typical instance. In 1896 there was a Civic Club of
+Allegheny County, composed of women of the twin steel cities of
+Pittsburg and Allegheny. At the head of its Education Department there
+was a woman, Miss Beulah Kennard, who loved children; not beautifully
+clean, well behaved, curled and polished children, but just children.
+Children attracted Miss Kennard to such a degree that she couldn't bear
+the sight of them wallowing in the grime and soot of Pittsburg streets
+and alleys. Often she stopped in her walks to watch them, dodging wagons
+and automobiles; throwing stones, tossing balls, fighting, and shooting
+craps; stealing apples from push-carts, getting arrested and being
+dragged through the farce of a trial at law for the crime of playing.
+
+"Those children," Miss Kennard told her club, "have got to have a
+decent place to play this summer." And the club agreed with her. The
+treasury yielded for a beginning the modest sum of one hundred and
+twenty-five dollars, and with this money the women fitted out one
+schoolyard, large enough for sixty children to play in. There was no
+trouble about getting the sixty together. They came, a noisy, joyous,
+turbulent, vacation set of children, and the anxious committee from the
+club looked at them in great trepidation of spirit and said to one
+another: "What on earth are we going to do with them, now that we've got
+them here?"
+
+With hardly a ghost of precedent to guide them, the club undertook the
+work, and as women have had considerable experience in taking care of
+children at home, they soon discovered ways of taking care of them
+successfully in the playground.
+
+The next summer the Civic Club invested six hundred dollars in
+playgrounds. Two schoolyards were fitted up in Pittsburg and two in
+Allegheny. After that, every summer, the work was extended. More money
+each year was voted, and additional playgrounds were established. In the
+summer of 1899, three years after the first experiment, Pittsburg
+children had nine playgrounds and Allegheny children had three, all
+gifts of the women. By another year the committee was handling thousands
+of dollars and managing an enterprise of considerable magnitude. Also
+their work was attracting the admiration of other club women, who asked
+for an opportunity to co-operate. In 1900 practically all the clubs of
+the two cities united, and formed a joint committee of the Women's Clubs
+of Pittsburg and vicinity to take charge of playgrounds.
+
+[Illustration: CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH. Established
+by club women and for years supported by them.]
+
+All this time the work was entirely in the hands of the club women, who
+bought the apparatus, organized the games, employed the trained
+supervisors, and supplied from their own membership the volunteer
+workers, without whom the enterprise would have been a failure from the
+start. The Board of Education co-operated to the extent of lending
+schoolyards. Finally the Board of Education decided to vote an annual
+contribution of money.
+
+In 1902 the city of Pittsburg woke up and gave the women fifteen
+hundred dollars, with which they established one more playground and a
+recreation park. The original one hundred and twenty-five dollars had
+now expanded to nearly eight thousand dollars, and Pittsburg and
+Allegheny children were not only playing in a dozen schoolyards, but
+they were attending vacation schools, under expert instructors in manual
+training, cooking, sewing, art-crafts. Several recreation centers,
+all-the-year-round playgrounds, have been added since then. For
+Pittsburg has adopted the women's point of view in the matter of
+playgrounds. This year the city voted fifty thousand, three hundred and
+fifty dollars, and the Board of Education appropriated ten thousand
+dollars for the vacation schools.
+
+In Detroit it was the Twentieth Century Club that began the playground
+agitation. Mrs. Clara B. Arthur, some ten years ago, read a paper
+before the Department of Philanthropy and Reform, and following it the
+chairman of the meeting appointed a committee to consider the
+possibility of playgrounds for Detroit children. The committee visited
+the Board of Education, explained the need of playgrounds, and asked
+that the Board conduct one trial playground in a schoolyard, during the
+approaching vacation. The Board declined. The boards of education in
+most cities declined at first.
+
+The club did not give up. It talked playgrounds to the other clubs,
+until all the organizations of women were interested. Within a year or
+two Detroit had a Council of Women, with a committee on playgrounds. The
+committee went to the Common Council this time and asked permission to
+erect a pavilion and establish a playground on a piece of city land.
+This was a great, bare, neglected spot, the site of an abandoned
+reservoir which had been of no use to anybody for twenty years. The
+place had the advantage of being in a very forlorn neighborhood where
+many children swarmed.
+
+The Common Council was mildly amused at the idea of putting public
+property to such an absurd, such an unheard-of use. A few of the men
+were indignant. One Germanic alderman exploded wrathfully: "Vot does
+vimmens know about poys' play?--No!" And that settled it.
+
+The committee went to the Board of Education once more, this time with
+better success. They received permission to open and conduct, during the
+long vacation, one playground in a large schoolyard. For two summers the
+women maintained that playground, holding their faith against the
+opposition of the janitors, the jeers of the newspapers, and the
+constant hostility of tax-payers, who protested against the "ruin of
+school property." After two years the Board of Education took over the
+work. The mayor became personally interested, and the Common Council
+gracefully surrendered. They have plenty of playgrounds in Detroit now,
+the latest development being winter sports.
+
+If the Germanic alderman who protested that "vimmins" did not know
+anything about boys' play was in office at the time, one wonders what
+his emotions were when the playgrounds committee first appeared before
+the Council and asked to have vacant lots flooded to give children
+skating ponds in winter. Of course the Council refused. Fire plugs were
+for water in case of fire, not for children's enjoyment. In fact there
+was a city ordinance forbidding the opening of a fire plug in winter,
+except to extinguish fire. It took two years of constant work on the
+part of the club women to remove that ordinance, but they did it, and
+the children of Detroit have their winter as well as their summer
+playgrounds.
+
+[Illustration: CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK,
+PITTSBURGH. Out of the persistent work of club women more than three
+hundred playgrounds for children have been established.]
+
+In Philadelphia are fourteen splendid playgrounds and vacation schools,
+established in the beginning and maintained for many years by a civic
+club of women, the largest women's civic club in the country. The
+process of educating public opinion in their favor was slow, for it is
+difficult to make men see that the children of a modern city have
+different needs from the country or village children of a generation
+ago. Men remember their own boyhood, and scoff at the idea of organized
+and supervised play in a made playground. Women have no memories of the
+old swimming-hole. They simply see the conditions before them, and they
+instinctively know what must be done to meet them. The process of
+educating the others is slow, but this year in Philadelphia sixty public
+schoolyards were opened for public playgrounds, and the city
+appropriated five thousand dollars towards their maintenance. In a
+hundred cities East and West the women's clubs have been the original
+movers or have co-operated in the playground movement.
+
+Out of this persistent work was born the Playground Association of
+America, an organization of men and women, which in the three years of
+its existence has established more than three hundred playgrounds for
+children. In Massachusetts they have secured a referendum providing that
+all cities of over ten thousand inhabitants shall vote upon the question
+of providing adequate playgrounds. The act provides that every city and
+town in the Commonwealth which accepts the act shall after July 1, 1910,
+provide and maintain at least one public playground, and at least one
+other playground for every additional twenty thousand inhabitants.
+Something like twenty-five cities in the State have accepted the
+playgrounds act. It is a good beginning. The slogan of the movement,
+"The boy without a playground is the father of the man without a job,"
+has swept over the continent.
+
+[Illustration: STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD,
+LOS ANGELES, CAL.]
+
+This surely is a not inconsiderable achievement for so humble an
+instrument as women's clubs. It is true that in most communities they
+have forgotten that the women's clubs ever had anything to do with the
+movement. The Playgrounds Association has not forgotten, however. Its
+president, Luther Halsey Gulick, of New York, declares that even now the
+work would languish if it lost the co-operation of the women's clubs.
+
+The scope of woman's work for civic betterment is wider than the
+interests that directly affect children. How much the women attempt, how
+difficult they find their task, how much opposition they encounter, and
+how certain their success in the end, is indicated in a modest report of
+the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Women's Civic Club. That report says in
+part:
+
+"It is no longer necessary for us to continue, at our own cost, the
+practical experiment we began in street-cleaning, or to advocate the
+paving of a single principal street, as a test of the value of improved
+highways; nor is it necessary longer to strive for a pure water supply,
+a healthier sewerage system, or the construction of playgrounds. _This
+work is now being done by the City Council, by the Board of Public
+Works, and by the Park Commission._"
+
+Not that the Harrisburg Women's Civic Club has gone out of business. It
+still keeps fairly busy with schoolhouse decoration, traveling libraries
+for factory employees, and inspecting the city dump.
+
+In Birmingham, Alabama, the women's work has been recognized officially.
+The club Women have formed "block" clubs, composed of the women living
+in each block, and the mayor has invested them with powers of
+supervision, control of street cleaning, and disposal of waste and
+garbage. They really act as overseers, and can remove lazy and
+incompetent employees.
+
+Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has a ten-year-old Civic Club. The women have
+succeeded in getting objectionable billboards removed, public dumps
+removed from the town, in having all outside market stalls covered, and
+have secured ordinances forbidding spitting in public places, and
+against throwing litter into the streets.
+
+Cranford, New Jersey, is one of a dozen small cities where the women's
+clubs hold regular town house-cleanings. One large town in the Middle
+West adopted a vigorous method of educating public opinion in favor of
+spring and fall municipal house-cleaning. The club women got a
+photographer and went the rounds of streets and alleys and private
+backyards. Wherever bad or neglected conditions were found the club sent
+a note to the owner of the property asking him to co-operate with its
+members in cleaning up and beautifying the town. Where no attention was
+paid to the notes, the photographs were posted conspicuously in the
+club's public exhibit.
+
+If the California women saved the big tree grove, the New Jersey women,
+by years of persistent work, saved the Palisades of the Hudson from
+destruction and inaugurated the movement to turn them into a public
+park. As for the Colorado club women, they saved the Cliff Dwellers'
+remains. You can no longer buy the pottery and other priceless relics of
+those prehistoric people in the curio-shops of Denver.
+
+I am not attempting a catalogue; I am only giving a few crucial
+instances. The activities of women if they appeared only sporadically in
+Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, and a dozen other cities, would not
+necessarily carry much weight. They would possess an interest purely
+local. But the club women of Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, do not
+keep their interests local. Once a year they travel, hundreds of them,
+to a chosen city in the State, and there they hold a convention which
+lasts a week. And every second year the club women of Minnesota and
+Texas and California, and every other State in the Union, to say
+nothing of Alaska, Porto Rico, and the Canal Zone, thousands of them,
+journey to a chosen center, and there they hold a convention which lasts
+a week. And at these state and national conventions the club women
+compare their work and criticise it, and confer on public questions, and
+decide which movements they shall promote. They summon experts in all
+lines of work to lecture and advise. Increasingly their work is national
+in its scope.
+
+In round numbers, eight hundred thousand women are now enrolled in the
+clubs belonging to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, holding in
+common certain definite opinions, and working harmoniously towards
+certain definite social ends. Remember that these eight hundred
+thousand women are the educated, intelligent, socially powerful.
+
+Long ago these eight hundred thousand women ceased to confine their
+studies to printed pages. They began to study life. Leaders developed,
+women of intellect and experience, who could foresee the immense power
+an organized womanhood might some time wield, and who had courage to
+direct the forces under them towards vital objects.
+
+When, in 1904, Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker, of Denver, was elected President
+of the General Federation, she found a number of old-fashioned clubs
+still devoting themselves to Shakespeare and the classic writers. Mrs.
+Decker, a voter, a full citizen, and a public worker of prominence in
+her State, simply laughed the musty study clubs out of existence.
+
+"Ladies," she said to the delegates at the biennial meeting of 1904,
+"Dante is dead. He died several centuries ago, and a great many things
+have happened since his time. Let us drop the study of his 'Inferno' and
+proceed in earnest to contemplate our own social order."
+
+[Illustration: MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER]
+
+Mostly they took her advice. A few clubs still devote themselves to the
+pursuit of pure culture, a few others exist with little motive beyond
+congenial association. The great majority of women's clubs are organized
+for social service. A glance at their national program shows the
+modernity, the liberal character of organized women's ideals. The
+General Federation has twelve committees, among them being those on
+Industrial Conditions of Women and Children, Civil Service Reform,
+Forestry, Pure Food and Public Health, Education, Civics, Legislation,
+Arts and Crafts, and Household Economics. Every state federation has
+adopted, in the main, the same departments; and the individual clubs
+follow as many lines of the work as their strength warrants.
+
+The contribution of the women's clubs to education has been enormous.
+There is hardly a State in the Union the public schools of which have
+not been beautified, inside and outside; hardly a State where
+kindergartens and manual training, domestic science, medical inspection,
+stamp savings banks, or other improvements have not been introduced by
+the clubs. In almost every case the clubs have purchased the equipment
+and paid the salaries until the boards of education and the school
+superintendents have been convinced of the value of the innovations. In
+the South, where opportunities for the higher education of women are
+restricted, the clubs support dozens of scholarships in colleges and
+institutes. Many western State federations, notable among which is that
+of Colorado, have strong committees on education which are active in the
+entire school system.
+
+Thomas M. Balliett, Dean of Pedagogy in the New York University, paid a
+deserved tribute to the Massachusetts club women when he said:
+
+     In Massachusetts the various women's organizations have, within the
+     past few years, made a study of schools and school conditions
+     throughout the State with a thoroughness that has never been
+     attempted before.
+
+Dean Balliett says of women's clubs in general that the most
+important reform movements in elementary education within the past
+twenty years have been due, in large measure, to the efforts of
+organized women. And he is right.
+
+The women's clubs have founded more libraries than Mr. Carnegie. Early
+in the movement the women began the circulation among the clubs of
+traveling reference libraries. Soon this work was extended, but the
+object of the libraries was diverted. Instead of collections of books on
+special subjects to assist the club women in their studies, the
+traveling cases were arranged in miscellaneous groups, and were sent to
+schools, to factories, to lonely farms, mining camps, lumber camps, and
+to isolated towns and villages.
+
+Iowa now has more than twelve thousand volumes, half of them reference
+books, in circulation. Eighty-one permanent libraries have grown out of
+the traveling libraries in Iowa alone. After the traveling cases have
+been coming to a town for a year or two, people wake up and agree that
+they want a permanent place in which to read and study. Ohio has over a
+thousand libraries in circulation, having succeeded, a few years ago, in
+getting a substantial appropriation from the legislature to supplement
+their work. Western States--Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho--have supplied
+reading matter to ranches and mining camps for many years.
+
+One interesting special library is circulated in Massachusetts and Rhode
+Island in behalf of the anti-tuberculosis movement. Something like forty
+of the best books on health, and on the prevention and cure of
+tuberculosis, are included. This library, with a pretty complete
+tuberculosis exhibit, is sent around, and is shown by the local clubs
+of each town. Usually the women try to have a mass-meeting, at which
+local health problems are discussed. The Health Department of the
+General Federation is working to establish these health libraries and
+exhibits in every State.
+
+Not only in the United States, but in every civilized country, have
+women associated themselves together with the object of reforming what
+seems to them social chaos. In practically every civilized country in
+the world to-day there exists a Council of Women, a central organization
+to which clubs and societies of women with all sorts of opinions and
+objects send delegates. In the United States the council is made up of
+the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Woman's Christian
+Temperance Union, and innumerable smaller organizations, like the
+National Congress of Mothers, and the Daughters of the American
+Revolution. More than a million and a half American women are
+affiliated.
+
+Four hundred and twenty-six women's organizations belong to the council
+in Great Britain. In Switzerland the council has sixty-four allied
+societies; in Austria it has fifty; in the Netherlands it has
+thirty-five. Seventy-five thousand women belong to the French council.
+In all, the International Council of Women, to which all the councils
+send delegates, represents more than eight million women, in countries
+as far apart as Australia, Argentine, Iceland, Persia, South Africa, and
+every country in Europe. The council, indeed, has no formal organization
+in Russia, because organizations of every kind are illegal in Russia.
+But Russian women attend every meeting of the International Council.
+Turkish women sent word to the last meeting that they hoped soon to ask
+for admission. The President of the International Council of Women is
+the Countess of Aberdeen. Titled women in every European country belong
+to their councils. The Queen of Greece is president of the Greek
+council.
+
+The object of this great world organization of women is to provide a
+common center for women of every country, race, creed, or party who are
+associating themselves together in altruistic work. Once every five
+years the International Council holds a great world congress of women.
+
+What eight million of the most intelligent, the most thoughtful, the
+most altruistic women in the world believe, what they think the world
+needs, what they wish and desire for the good of humanity, must be of
+interest. It must count.
+
+[Illustration: LADY ABERDEEN President of the International Council of
+Women.]
+
+The International Council of Women discusses every important question
+presented, but makes no decision until the opinion of the delegates is
+practically unanimous. It commits itself to no opinion, lends itself to
+no movement, until the movement has passed the controversial stage.
+
+Those who cling to the old notion that women are perpetually at war with
+one another will learn with astonishment that eight million women of all
+nationalities, religions, and temperaments are agreed on at least four
+questions. In the course of its twenty years of existence the
+International Council has agreed to support four movements: Peace and
+arbitration, social purity, removing legal disabilities of women, woman
+suffrage.
+
+The American reader will be inclined to cavil at the last-mentioned
+object. Woman suffrage, it will be claimed, has not passed the
+controversial stage, even with women themselves. That is true in the
+United States and in England. It is true, in a sense, in most countries
+of the world. But in European countries not _woman_ suffrage, but
+_universal_ suffrage is being struggled for.
+
+I had this explained to me in Russia, in the course of a conversation
+with Alexis Aladyn, the brilliant leader of the Social Democratic party.
+I said to him that I had been informed that the conservative reformers,
+as well as the radicals, included woman suffrage in their programs.
+Aladyn looked puzzled for a moment, and then he replied: "All parties
+desire universal suffrage. Naturally that includes women."
+
+Finland at that time, 1906, had recently won its independence from the
+autocracy and was preparing for its first general election. Talking with
+one of the nineteen women returned to Parliament a few months later, I
+asked: "How did you Finnish women persuade the makers of the new
+constitution to give you the franchise?"
+
+"Persuade?" she repeated; "we did not have to persuade them. There was
+simply no opposition. One of the demands made on the Russian Government
+was for universal suffrage."
+
+The movement for universal suffrage, that is the movement for free
+government, with the consent of the governed, is considered by the
+International Council of Women to have passed the controversial stage.
+
+The whole club movement, as a matter of fact, is a part of the great
+democratic movement which is sweeping over the whole world. Individual
+clubs may be exclusive, even aristocratic in their tendencies, but the
+large organization is absolutely democratic. If the President of the
+International Council is an English peeress, one of the vice-presidents
+is the wife of a German music teacher, and one of the secretaries is a
+self-supporting woman. The General Federation in the United States is
+made up of women of various stations in life, from millionaires' wives
+to factory girls.
+
+The democracy of women's organizations was shown at the meeting in
+London a year ago of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, where
+delegates from twenty-one countries assembled. One of the great features
+of the meeting was a wonderful pageant of women's trades and
+professions. An immense procession of women, bearing banners and emblems
+of their work, marched through streets lined with spectators to Albert
+Hall, where the entire orchestra of this largest auditorium in the world
+was reserved for them. A published account of the pageant, after
+describing the delegations of teachers, nurses, doctors, journalists,
+artists, authors, house workers, factory women, stenographers, and
+others well known here, says:
+
+     Then the ranks opened, and down the long aisle came the chain
+     makers who work at the forge, and the pit-brow women from the
+     mines,--women whose faces have been blackened by smoke and coal
+     dust until they can never be washed white.... To these women, the
+     hardest workers in the land, were given the seats of honor, while
+     behind them, gladly taking a subordinate place, were many women
+     wearing gowns with scarlet and purple hoods, indicating their
+     university degrees.
+
+Every public movement--reform, philanthropic, sanitary, educational--now
+asks the co-operation of women's organizations. The United States
+Government asked the co-operation of the women's clubs to save the
+precarious Panama situation. At a moment when social discontent
+threatened literally to stop the building of the canal, the Department
+of Commerce and Labor employed Miss Helen Varick Boswell, of New York,
+to go to the Isthmus and organize the wives and daughters of Government
+employees into clubs. The Department knew that the clubs, once
+organized, would do the rest. Nor was it disappointed.
+
+The Government asks the co-operation of women in its latest work of
+conserving natural resources. At the biennial of the Federation of
+Women's Clubs in 1906 Mr. Enos Mills delivered an address on forestry, a
+movement which was beginning to engage the attention of the clubs.
+Within an hour after he left the platform Mr. Mills had been engaged by
+a dozen state presidents to lecture to clubs and federations. As soon
+as it reached the Government that the women's clubs were paying fifty
+dollars a lecture to learn about forestry work, the Government arranged
+that the clubs should have the best authorities in the nation to lecture
+on forestry free of all expense.
+
+But the Government is not alone in recognizing the power of women's
+organizations. If the Government approves their interest in public
+questions, vested interests are beginning to fear it. The president of
+the Manufacturers' Association, in his inaugural address, told his
+colleagues that their wives and daughters invited some very dangerous
+and revolutionary speakers to address their clubs. He warned them that
+the women were becoming too friendly toward reforms that the association
+frowned upon.
+
+This is indeed true, and women display, in their new-found enthusiasm,
+a singularly obstinate spirit. All the legislatures south of the Mason
+and Dixon Line cannot make the Southern women believe that Southern
+prosperity is dependent upon young children laboring in mills. The women
+go on working for child labor and compulsory education laws, unconvinced
+by the arguments of the mill owners and the votes of the legislators.
+The highest court in the State of New York was powerless to persuade New
+York club women that the United States Constitution stands in the way of
+a law prohibiting the night work of women. The Court of Appeals declared
+the law unconstitutional, and many women at present are toiling at
+night. But the club women immediately began fighting for a new law.
+
+The women of every State in the Union are able to work harmoniously
+together because they are unhampered with traditions of what the
+founders of the Republic intended,--the sacredness of state rights, or
+the protective paternalism of Wall Street. The gloriously illogical
+sincerity of women is concerned only about the thing itself.
+
+I have left for future consideration women who having definite social
+theories have organized themselves for definite objects. This chapter
+has purposely been confined to the activities of average women--good
+wives and mothers, the eight hundred thousand American women whose
+collective opinion is expressed through the General Federation of
+Women's Clubs. For the most part they are mature in years, these club
+women. Their children are grown. Some are in college and some are
+married. I have heard more than one presiding officer at a State
+Federation meeting proudly announce from the platform that she had
+become a grandmother since the last convention.
+
+The present president of the General Federation, Mrs. Philip N. Moore
+of St. Louis, Missouri, is a graduate of Vassar College, and served for
+a time as president of the National Society of Collegiate Alumnae. There
+are not wanting in the club movement many women who have taken college
+and university honors. Club women taken the country over, however, are
+not college products. If they had been, the club movement might have
+taken on a more cultural and a less practical form. As it was, the women
+formed their groups with the direct object of educating themselves and,
+being practical women used to work, they readily turned their new
+knowledge to practical ends. As quickly as they found out, through
+education, what their local communities needed they were filled with a
+generous desire to supply those needs. In reality they simply learned
+from books and study how to apply their housekeeping lore to municipal
+government and the public school system. Nine-tenths of the work they
+have undertaken relates to children, the school, and the home. Some of
+it seemed radical in the beginning, but none of it has failed, in the
+long run, to win the warmest approval of the people.
+
+The eight million women who form the International Council of Women, and
+express the collective opinion of women the world over, are not
+exceptional types, although they may possess exceptional intelligence.
+They are merely good citizens, wives, and mothers. Their program
+contains nothing especially radical. And yet, what a revolution would
+the world witness were that program carried out? Peace and arbitration;
+social purity; public health; woman suffrage; removal of all legal
+disabilities of women. This last-named object is perhaps more
+revolutionary in its character than the others, because its fulfillment
+will disturb the basic theories on which the nations have established
+their different forms of government.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW
+
+
+Several years ago a woman of wealth and social prominence in Kentucky,
+after pondering some time on the inferior position of women in the
+United States, wrote a book. In this volume the United States was
+compared most unfavorably with the countries of Europe, where the
+dignity and importance of women received some measure of recognition.
+Women, this author protested, enjoy a larger measure of political power
+in England than in America. In England and throughout Europe their
+social power is greater. If a man becomes lord mayor of an English city
+his wife becomes lady mayoress, and she shares all her husband's
+official honors. On the Continent women are often made honorary colonels
+of regiments, and take part with the men in military reviews. Women
+frequently hold high offices at court, acting as chamberlains,
+constables, and the like. The writer closed her last chapter with the
+announcement that she meant henceforth to make her home in England,
+where women had more than once occupied the throne as absolute monarch
+and constitutional ruler.
+
+It is true that in some particulars American women do seem to be at a
+disadvantage with European women. With what looks like a higher regard
+for women's intelligence, England has bestowed upon them every measure
+of suffrage except the Parliamentary franchise. In England, throughout
+the Middle Ages, and even down to the present century, women held the
+office of sheriff of the county, clerk of the crown, high constable,
+chamberlain, and even champion at a coronation,--the champion being a
+picturesque figure who rides into the hall and flings his glove to the
+nobles, in defense of the king's crown.
+
+In the royal pageants of European history behold the powerful figures of
+Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth, Mary of
+Scotland, Christina of Sweden, rulers in fact as well as in name; to say
+nothing of the long line of women regents in whose hands the state
+intrusted its affairs, during the minority of its kings. In the United
+States a woman candidate for mayor of a small town would be considered
+a joke.
+
+These and other inconsistencies have puzzled many ardent upholders of
+American chivalry. In order to understand the position of women in the
+United States it is necessary to make a brief survey of the laws under
+which European women are governed, and the social theory on which their
+apparent advantages are based.
+
+In the first place, the statement that in European countries a woman may
+succeed to the throne must be qualified. In three countries only,
+England, Spain, and Portugal, are women counted in the line of
+succession on terms approaching equality with men. In these three
+countries when a monarch dies leaving no sons his eldest daughter
+becomes the sovereign. If the ruling monarch die, leaving no children at
+all, the oldest daughter--failing sons--of the man who was in his
+lifetime in direct line of succession is given preference to male heirs
+more remote. Thus Queen Victoria succeeded William IV, she being the
+only child of the late king's deceased brother and heir, the Duke of
+Kent.
+
+Similar laws govern the succession in Portugal and Spain, although
+dispute on this point has more than once caused civil war in Spain.
+
+In Holland, Greece, Russia, Austria, and a few German states a woman may
+succeed to the throne, provided every single male heir to the crown is
+dead. Queen Wilhelmina became sovereign in Holland only because the
+House of Orange was extinct in the male line, and Holland lost, on
+account of the accession of Wilhelmina, the rich and important Duchy of
+Luxemburg.
+
+Luxemburg, in common with the rest of Europe, except the countries
+described, lives under what is known as the Salic Law, according to
+which a woman may not, in any circumstances, become sovereign.
+
+A word about this Salic Law is necessary, because the tradition of it
+permeates the whole atmosphere in which the women of Europe live, move,
+and have their legal and social being.
+
+The Salic Law was the code of a barbarous people, so far extinct and
+forgotten that it is uncertain just what territory in ancient Gaul they
+occupied at the time the code was formulated. Later the Salian Franks,
+as the tribe was designated, built on the left bank of the Seine rude
+fortresses and a collection of wattled huts which became the ancestor of
+the present-day city of Paris.
+
+The Salic Law was a complete code. It governed all matters, civil and
+military. It prescribed rules of war; it fixed the salaries of
+officials; it designated the exact amount of blood money the family of a
+slain man might collect from the family of the slayer; it regu lated
+conditions under which individuals might travel from one village to
+another; it governed matters of property transfer and inheritance.
+
+The Salian Franks are dust; their might has perished, their annals are
+forgotten, their cities are leveled, their mightiest kings sleep in
+unmarked graves, their code has passed out of existence, almost indeed
+out of the memory of man,--all except one paragraph of one division of
+one law. The law related to inheritance of property; the special
+division distinguished between real and personal property, and the
+paragraph ruled that a woman might inherit movable property, but that
+she might not inherit land.
+
+There was not a syllable in the law relating to the inheritance of a
+throne. Nevertheless, centuries after the last Salian king was laid in
+his barbarous grave a French prince successfully contested with an
+English prince the crown of France, his claim resting on that obscure
+paragraph in the Salic code. The Hundred Years' War was fought on this
+issue, and the final outcome of the war established the Salic Law
+permanently in France, and with more or less rigor in most of the
+European states.
+
+At the time of the French Revolution, when the "Rights of Man" were
+being declared with so much fervor and enthusiasm, when the old laws
+were being revised in favor of greater freedom of the individual, the
+"Rights of Woman" were actually revised downward. Up to this time the
+application of the Salic Law was based on tradition and precedent. Now a
+special statute was enacted forever barring women from the sovereignty
+of France. "Founded on the pride of the French, who could not bear to be
+ruled by their own women folk," as the records are careful to state.
+
+The interpretation of the Salic Law did more, a great deal more, than
+exclude women from the throne. It established the principle of the
+inherent inferiority of women. The system of laws erected on that
+principle were necessarily deeply tinged with contempt for women, and
+with fear lest their influence in any way might affect the conduct of
+state affairs. That explains why, at the present time, although in most
+European countries women are allowed to practice medicine, they are not
+allowed to practice law. Medicine may be as learned a profession, but it
+affects only human beings. The law, on the other hand, affects the
+state. A woman advocate, you can readily imagine, might so influence a
+court of justice that the laws of the land might suffer feminization.
+From the European point of view this would be most undesirable.
+
+The apparently superior rights possessed by English women were also
+bestowed upon them by a vanished system of laws. They have descended
+from Feudalism, in which social order the _person_ did not exist. The
+social order consisted of _property_ alone, and the claims of property,
+that is to say, land, were paramount over the claims of the individual.
+Those historic women sheriffs of counties, clerks of crown,
+chamberlains, and high constables held their high offices because the
+offices were hereditary property in certain titled families, and they
+had to belong to the entail, even when a woman was in possession. The
+offices were purely titular. No English woman ever acted as high
+constable. No English woman ever attended a coronation as king's
+champion. The rights and duties of these offices were delegated to a
+male relative. Every once in a while, during the Middle Ages, some
+strong-minded lady of title demanded the right to administer her office
+in person, but she was always sternly put down by a rebuking House of
+Lords, sometimes even by the king's majesty himself.
+
+In the same way the voting powers of the women of England are a result
+of hereditary privilege. Local affairs in England, until a very recent
+period, were administered through the parish, and the only persons
+qualified to vote were the property owners of the parish. It was really
+property interests and not people who voted. Those women who owned
+property, or who were administering property for their minor children,
+were entitled to vote, to serve on boards of guardians, and to dispense
+the Poor Laws. Out of their right of parish vote has grown their right
+of municipal franchise. It carries with it a property qualification, and
+the proposed Parliamentary franchise, for which the women of England are
+making such a magnificent fight, will also have a property
+qualification.
+
+The real position, legal and social, which women in England and
+continental Europe have for centuries occupied, may be gauged from an
+examination of the feminist movement in a very enlightened country, say
+Germany. The laws of Germany were founded on the Corpus Juris of the
+Romans, a stern code which relegates women to the position of chattels.
+And chattels they have been in Germany, until very recent years, when
+through the intelligent persistence of strong women the chains have
+somewhat been loosened.
+
+A generation ago, in 1865, to be exact, a group of women in Leipzig
+formed an association which they called the Allgemeinen Deutschen
+Frauenbund, which may be Anglicized into General Association of German
+Women. The stated objects of the association give a pretty clear idea of
+the position of women at that time. The women demanded as their rights,
+Education, the Right to Work, Free Choice of Profession. Nothing more,
+but these three demands were so revolutionary that all masculine
+Germany, and most of feminine Germany, uttered horrified protests.
+Needless to say nothing came of the women's demand.
+
+After the Franco-Prussian War the center of the women's revolt naturally
+moved to the capital of the new empire, Berlin. From that city, during
+the years that followed, so much feminine unrest was radiated that in
+1887 the German Woman Suffrage Association was formed, with the demand
+for absolute equality with men. Two remarkable women, Minna Cauer and
+Anita Augsberg, the latter unmarried and a doctor of laws, were the
+moving spirits in the first woman suffrage agitation, which has since
+extended throughout the empire until there is hardly a small town
+without its suffrage club.
+
+Now the woman suffragist in Germany differs from the American suffragist
+in that she is always a member of a political party. She is a silent
+member to be sure, but she adheres to her party, because, through
+tradition or conviction, she believes in its policies. Usually the
+suffragist is a member of the Social Democratic Party, allied to the
+International Socialist Party. She is a suffragist because she is a
+Socialist, because woman suffrage, and, indeed, the full equalization of
+the laws governing men and women are a part of the Socialist platform in
+every country in the world. The woman member of the Social Democratic
+party is not working primarily for woman suffrage. She is working for a
+complete overturning of the present economic system, and she advocates
+_universal adult suffrage_ as a means of bringing about the social and
+economic changes demanded by the Socialists.
+
+These German Socialist women are often very advanced spirits, who hold
+university degrees, who have entered the professions, and are generally
+emancipated from strictly conventional lives. Others, in large numbers,
+belong to the intellectual proletarian classes. Their American
+prototypes are to be found in the Women's Trade Union League, described
+in a later chapter.
+
+The other German suffragists are members of the radical, the moderate
+(we should say conservative), and the clerical parties. These women are
+middle class, average, intelligent wives and mothers. They correspond
+fairly well with the women of the General Federation of Clubs in the
+United States, and like the American club women they are affiliated with
+the International Council of Women. Locally they are working for the
+social reforms demanded by the first American suffrage convention, held
+in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. They are demanding the higher
+education, married women's property rights, free speech, and the right
+to choose a trade or profession. They are demanding other rights, from
+lack of which the American woman never suffered. The right to attend a
+political meeting was until recently denied to German women. Although
+they take a far keener and more intelligent interest in national and
+local politics than American women as a rule have ever taken, their
+presence at political meetings has but yesterday been sanctioned.
+
+The civil responsibility of the father and mother in many European
+countries is barbarously unequal. If a marriage exists between the
+parents the father is the only parent recognized. He is sole guardian
+and authority. When divorce dissolves a marriage the rights of the
+father are generally paramount, even when he is the party accused.
+
+On the other hand, if no marriage exists between the parents, if the
+child is what is called illegitimate, the mother is alone responsible
+for its maintenance. Not only is the father free from all
+responsibility, his status as a father is denied by law. Inquiry into
+the paternity of the child is in some countries forbidden. The unhappy
+mother may have documentary proof that she was betrayed under promise of
+marriage, but she is not allowed to produce her proof.
+
+Under the French Code, the substance of which governs all Europe, it is
+distinctly a principle that the woman's honor is and ought to be of less
+value than a man's honor. Napoleon personally insisted on this
+principle, and more than once emphasized his belief that no importance
+should be attached to men's share in illegitimacy.
+
+These and other degrading laws the European progressive women are trying
+to remove from the Codes. They have their origin in the belief in "The
+imprudence, the frailty, and the imbecility" of women, to quote from
+this Code Napoleon.
+
+Whatever women's legal disabilities in the United States, their laws
+were never based on the principle that women were imprudent, frail, or
+imbecile. They placed women at a distinct disadvantage, it is true, but
+it was the disadvantage of the minor child and not of the inferior, the
+chattel, the property of man, as in Europe.
+
+Laws in the United States were founded on the assumption that women
+stood in perpetual need of protection. The law makers carried this to
+the absurd extent of assuming that protection was all the right a woman
+needed or all she ought to claim. They even pretended that when a woman
+entered the complete protection of the married state she no longer stood
+in need of an identity apart from her husband. The working out of this
+theory in a democracy was far from ideal, as we shall see.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW
+
+
+A little girl sat in a corner of her father's law library watching, with
+wide, serious eyes, a scene the like of which was common enough a
+generation or two ago. The weeping old woman told a halting story of a
+dissipated son, a shrewish daughter-in-law, and a state of servitude on
+her own part,--a story pitifully sordid in its details. The farm had
+come to her from her father's estate. For forty years she had toiled
+side by side with her husband, getting a simple, but comfortable,
+living from the soil. Then the husband died. Under the will the son
+inherited the farm, and everything on it,--house, furniture, barns,
+cattle, tools. Even the money in the bank was his. A clause in the will
+provided that the son should give his mother a home during her lifetime.
+
+So here she was, after a life of hard work and loving service, shorn of
+everything; a pauper, an unpaid servant in the house of another
+woman,--her son's wife. Was it true that the law took her home away from
+her,--the farm that descended to her from her father, the house she had
+lived in since childhood? Could nothing, _nothing_ be done?
+
+The aged judge shook his head, sadly. "You see, Mrs. Grant," he
+explained, "the farm has never really been yours since your marriage,
+for then it became by law your husband's property, precisely as if he
+had bought it. He had a right to leave it to whom he would. No doubt he
+did what he thought was for your good. I wish I could help you, but I
+cannot. The law is inexorable in these matters."
+
+After the forlorn old woman had gone the lawyer's child went and stood
+by her father's chair. "Why couldn't you help her?" she asked. "Why do
+you let them take her home away from her?"
+
+Judge Cady opened the sheep-bound book at his elbow and showed the
+little girl a paragraph. Turning the pages, he pointed out others for
+her to read. Spelling through the ponderous legal phraseology the little
+girl learned that a married woman had no existence, in the eyes of the
+law, apart from her husband. She could own no property; she could
+neither buy nor sell; she could not receive a gift, even from her own
+husband. She was, in fact, her husband's chattel. If he beat her she had
+no means of punishing, or even restraining him, unless, indeed, she
+could prove that her life was endangered. If she ran away from him the
+law forced her to return.
+
+Paragraph after paragraph the child read through, and, unseen by her
+father, marked faintly with a pencil. So far as she was aware, father,
+and father's library of sheep-bound books, were the beginning and the
+end of the law, and to her mind the way to get rid of measures which
+took women's homes away from them was perfectly simple. That night when
+the house was quiet she stole downstairs, scissors in hand, determined
+_to cut every one of those laws out of the book_.
+
+The young reformer was restrained, but only temporarily. As Elizabeth
+Cady Stanton she lived to do her part toward revising many of the laws
+under which women, in her day, suffered, and her successors, the
+organized women of the United States, are busy with their scissors,
+revising the rest.
+
+Not alone in Russia, Germany, France, and England do the laws governing
+men and women need equalizing. In America, paradise of women, the
+generally accepted theory that women have "all the rights they want"
+does not stand the test of impartial examination.
+
+In America some women have all the rights they want. Your wife and the
+wives of the men you associate with every day usually have all the
+rights they want, sometimes a few that they do not need at all. Is the
+house yours? The furniture yours? The motor yours? The income yours? Are
+the children yours? If you are the average fond American husband, you
+will return the proud answer: "No, indeed, they are _ours_."
+
+This is quite as it should be, assuming that all wives are as tenderly
+cherished, and as well protected as the women who live on your block.
+For a whole big army of women there are often serious disadvantages
+connected with that word "ours."
+
+In Boston there lived a family of McEwans,--a man, his wife, and several
+half-grown children. McEwan was not a very steady man. He drank
+sometimes, and his earning capacity was uncertain. Mrs. McEwan was an
+energetic, capable, intelligent woman, tolerant of her husband's
+failings, ambitious for her children. She took a large house, furnished
+it on the installment plan, and filled it with boarders. The boarders
+gave the family an income larger than they had ever possessed before,
+and McEwan's contributions fell off. He became an unpaying guest
+himself. All his earnings, he explained, were going into investments.
+The man was, in fact, speculating in mining stocks.
+
+One day McEwan came home with a face of despair. His creditors, he told
+his wife, had descended on him, seized his business, and threatened to
+take possession of the boarding house.
+
+"But it is mine," protested the woman, with spirit. "I bought every bit
+of furniture with the money my boarders paid me. Nobody can touch my
+property or my earnings to satisfy a claim on you. I am not liable for
+your debts."
+
+One of the boarders was a lawyer, and to him that night she took the
+case. "A woman's earnings are her own in Massachusetts, are they not?"
+she demanded.
+
+"You are what the law calls a free trader," replied the lawyer, "and
+whatever you earn is yours, certainly. That is--of course you are
+recorded at the city clerk's office?"
+
+"Why no. Why should I be?"
+
+"The law requires it. Otherwise this property, and even the money your
+boarders pay you, are liable to attachment for your husband's debts.
+Unless you make a specific declaration that you are in business for
+yourself, the law assumes that the business is your husband's."
+
+"If I went to work for a salary, should I have to be recorded in order
+to keep my own money?" Mrs. McEwan was growing angry.
+
+"No," replied the lawyer, "not if you were careful to keep your income
+and your husband's absolutely separate. If you both paid installments on
+a piano the piano would be your husband's, not yours. If you bought a
+house together, the house could be seized for his debts. Everything you
+buy with your money is yours. Everything you buy with money he gives you
+is his. Everything you buy together is his. You could not protect such
+property from your husband's creditors, or from his heirs."
+
+Mrs. McEwan's case is mild, her wrongs faint beside those of a woman in
+Los Angeles, California. Her husband was a doctor, and she had been,
+before her marriage, a trained nurse. The young woman had saved several
+hundred dollars, and she put the money into a first payment on a pretty
+little cottage. During the first two or three years of the marriage the
+doctor's wife, from time to time, attended cases of illness, usually
+contributing her earnings toward the payment for the house or into
+furniture for the house. In all she paid about a thousand dollars, or
+something like one-third of the cost of the house. Then children came,
+and her earning days were over.
+
+Unfortunately the domestic affairs of this household became disturbed.
+The doctor contracted a drug habit. He became irregular in his conduct
+and ended by running away with a dissolute woman. After he had gone his
+wife found that the house she lived in, and which she had helped to buy,
+had been sold, without her knowledge or consent. The transaction was
+perfectly legal. Community property, that is, property held jointly by
+husband and wife, is absolutely controlled by the husband in California.
+In that State community property may even be given away, without the
+wife's knowledge or consent.
+
+It happened not many years ago that one of the most powerful
+millionaires in California, in a moment of generosity, conveyed to one
+of his sons a very valuable property. Some time afterwards the father
+and son quarreled, and the father attempted to get back his property.
+His plea in court was that his wife's consent to the transaction had
+never been sought; but the court ruled that since the property was owned
+in community, the wife's consent did not have to be obtained.
+
+This particular woman happened to be rich enough to stand the experience
+of having a large slice of property given away without her knowledge,
+but the same law would have applied to the case of a woman who could
+not afford it at all.
+
+It is in the case of women wage earners that these laws bear the
+peculiar asperity. Down in the cotton-mill districts of the South are
+scores of men who never, from one year to the next, do a stroke of work.
+They are supposed to be "weakly." Their wives and children work eleven
+hours a day (or night) and every pay day the men go to the mills and
+collect their wages. The money belongs to them under the law. Even if
+the women had the spirit to protest, the protest would be useless. The
+right of a man to collect and to spend his wife's earnings is protected
+in many States in the chivalric South. In Texas, for example, a husband
+is entitled to his wife's earnings even _though he has deserted her_.
+
+I do not know that this occurs very often in Texas. Probably not, unless
+among low-class Negroes. In all likelihood if a Texas woman should
+appeal to her employer, and tell him that her husband had abandoned her,
+he would refuse to give the man her wages. Should the husband be in a
+position to invoke the law, he could claim his wife's earnings,
+nevertheless.
+
+The Kentucky lady who chose England for her future home, had she known
+it, selected the country to which most American women owe their legal
+disabilities. American law, except in Louisiana and Florida, is founded
+on English common law, and English common law was developed at a period
+when men were of much greater importance in the state than women. The
+state was a military organization, and every man was a fighter, a
+king's defender. Women were valuable only because defenders of kings
+had to have mothers.
+
+English common law provided that every married woman must be supported
+in as much comfort as her husband's estate warranted. The mothers of the
+nation must be fed, clothed, and sheltered. What more could they
+possibly ask? In return for permanent board and clothes, the woman was
+required to give her husband all of her property, real and personal.
+What use had she for property? Did she need it to support herself? In
+case of war and pillage could she defend it?
+
+Husband and wife were one--and that one was the man. He was so much the
+one that the woman had literally no existence in the eyes of the law.
+She not only did not possess any property; she could possess none. Her
+husband could not give her any, because there could be no contract
+between a married pair. A contract implies at least two people, and
+husband and wife were one. The husband could, if he chose, establish a
+trusteeship, and thus give his wife the free use of her own. But you can
+easily imagine that he did not very often do it.
+
+A man could, also, devise property to his wife by will. Often this was
+done, but too often the sons were made heirs, and the wife was left to
+what tender mercies they owned. If a man died intestate the wife merely
+shared with other heirs. She had no preference.
+
+Under the old English common law, moreover, not only the property, but
+also the services of a married woman belonged to her husband. If he
+chose to rent out her services, or if she offered to work outside the
+home, it followed logically that her wages belonged to him. What use had
+she for wages?
+
+On the other hand, every man was held responsible for the support of his
+wife. He was responsible for her debts, as long as they were the
+necessities of life. He was also responsible for her conduct. Being
+propertyless, she could not be held to account for wrongs committed. If
+she stole, or destroyed property, or injured the person of another, if
+she committed any kind of a misdemeanor in the presence of her husband,
+and that also meant if he were in her neighborhood at the time, the law
+held him responsible. He should have restrained her.
+
+This was supposed to be a decided advantage to the woman. Whenever a
+rebellious woman or group of women voiced their objection to the system
+which robbed them of every shred of independence they were always
+reminded that the system at the same time relieved them of every shred
+of responsibility, even, to an extent, of moral responsibility. "So
+great a favorite," comments Blackstone, "is the female sex under the
+laws of England."
+
+You may well imagine that, in these circumstances, husbands were
+interested that their wives should be very good. The law supported them
+by permitting "moderate correction." A married woman might be kept in
+what Blackstone calls "reasonable restraint" by her husband. But only
+with a stick no larger than his thumb.
+
+The husbandly stick was never imported into the United States. Even the
+dour Puritans forbade its use. The very first modification of the
+English common law, in its application to American women, was made in
+1650, when the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony decreed that a
+husband beating his wife, or, for that matter, a wife beating her
+husband, should be fined ten pounds, or endure a public whipping.
+
+The Pilgrim Fathers and the other early colonists in America brought
+with them the system of English common law under which they and their
+ancestors had for centuries been governed. From time to time, as
+conditions made them necessary, new laws were enacted and put into
+force. In all cases not specifically covered by these new laws, the old
+English common law was applied. It did not occur to any one that women
+would ever need special laws. The Pilgrim Fathers and their successors,
+the Puritans, simply assumed that here, as in the England they had left
+behind, woman's place was in the home, where she was protected,
+supported, and controlled.
+
+But in the new world woman's place in the home assumed an importance
+much greater than it had formerly possessed. Labor was scarce,
+manufacturing and trading were undeveloped. Woman's special activities
+were urgently needed. Woman's hands helped to raise the roof-tree, her
+skill and industry, to a very large extent, furnished the house. She
+spun and wove, cured meat, dried corn, tanned skins, made shoes, dipped
+candles, and was, in a word, almost the only manufacturer in the
+country. But this did not raise her from her position as an inferior.
+Woman owned neither her tools nor her raw materials. These her husband
+provided. In consequence, husband and wife being one, that one, in
+America, as in England, was the husband.
+
+This explanation is necessary in order to understand why the legal
+position of most American women to-day is that of inferiors, or, at
+best, of minor children.
+
+It is necessary also, in order to understand why, except in matters of
+law, American women are treated with such extraordinary consideration
+and indulgence. As long as pioneer conditions lasted women were valuable
+because of the need of their labor, their special activities. Also, for
+a very long period, women were scarce, and they were highly prized not
+alone for their labor, but because their society was so desirable. In
+other words, pioneer conditions gave woman a better standing in the new
+world than she had in the old, and she was treated with an altogether
+new consideration and regard.
+
+In England no one thought very badly of a man who was moderately abusive
+of his wife. In America, violence against women was, from the first, an
+unbearable idea. Laws protecting maid servants, dependent women, and, as
+we have seen, even wives, were very early enacted in New England.
+
+But although woman was more dearly prized in the new country than in the
+old, no new legislation was made for her benefit. Her legal status, or
+rather her absence of legal status apart from her husband, remained
+exactly as it had been under the English common law.
+
+No legislature in the United States has deliberately made laws placing
+women at a disadvantage with men. Whatever laws are unfair and
+oppressive to women have just happened--just grown up like weeds out of
+neglected soil.
+
+Let me illustrate. No lawmaker in New Mexico ever introduced a bill into
+the legislature making men liable for their wives' torts or petty
+misdemeanors. Yet in New Mexico, at this very minute, a wife is so
+completely her husband's property that he is responsible for her
+behavior. If she should rob her neighbor's clothesline, or wreck a
+chicken yard, her unfortunate husband would have to stand trial. Simply
+because in New Mexico married women are still living under laws that
+were evolved in another civilization, long before New Mexico was dreamed
+of as a State.
+
+Nowhere else in the United States are women allowed to shelter their
+weak moral natures behind the stern morality of their husbands, but in
+more than one State the husband's responsibility for his wife's acts is
+assumed. In Massachusetts, for one State, if a woman owned a saloon and
+sold beer on Sunday, she would be liable to arrest, and so also would
+her husband, provided he were in the house when the beer was sold. Both
+would probably be fined. Simply because it was once the law that a
+married woman had no separate existence apart from her husband, this
+absurd law, or others as absurd, remain on the statute books of almost
+every State in the Union.
+
+The ascent of woman, which began with the abolishment of corporeal
+punishment of wives, proceeded very slowly. Most American women married,
+and most American wives were kindly treated. At least public opinion
+demanded that they be treated with kindness. Long before any other
+modification of her legal status was gained, a woman subjected to
+cruelty at the hands of her lawful spouse was at liberty to seek police
+protection.
+
+The reason why police protection was so seldom sought is plain enough.
+Imagine a woman complaining of a husband who would be certain to beat
+her again for revenge, and to whom she was bound irrevocably by laws
+stronger even than the laws on the statute books. Remember that the only
+right she had was the right to be supported, and if she left her
+husband's house she left her only means of living. She could hardly
+support herself, for few avenues of industry were open to women. She was
+literally a pauper, and when there is nowhere else to lay his head, even
+the most miserable pauper thinks twice before he runs away from the
+poorhouse. Besides, the woman who left her husband had to give up her
+children. They too were the husband's property.
+
+There were some women who hesitated before they consented to pauperize
+themselves by marrying. Widows were especially wary, if old stories are
+to be trusted. A story is told in the New York University Law School of
+a woman in Connecticut who took with her, as a part of her wedding
+outfit, a very handsome mahogany bureau, bequeathed her by her
+grandfather. After a few years of marriage the husband suddenly died,
+leaving no will. The home and all it contained were sold at auction. The
+widow was permitted to buy certain objects of furniture, and among them
+was her cherished bureau. Where the poor woman found the money with
+which to buy is not revealed. In time this woman married again, and
+again her husband died without a will. Again there was an auction, and
+again the widow purchased her beloved heirloom. It seems possible that
+this time she had saved money in anticipation of the necessity.
+
+A little later, for she was still young and attractive, a suitor
+appeared, offering his heart and "all his worldly goods." "No, I thank
+you," replied the sorely tried creature, "I prefer to keep my bureau."
+
+The first struggle made by women in their own behalf was against this
+condition of marital slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott,
+Lydia Maria Child, and others of that brave band of rebellious women,
+were active for years, addressing legislative committees in New York and
+Massachusetts, circulating petitions, writing to newspapers, agitating
+everywhere in favor of married women's property rights. Finally it began
+to dawn on the minds of men that there might be a certain public
+advantage, as well as private justice, attaching to separate ownership
+by married women of their own property.
+
+In 1839 the Massachusetts State Legislature passed a cautious measure
+giving married women qualified property rights. It was not until 1848
+that a really effective Married Women's Property Law was secured, by
+action of the New York State Assembly. The law served as a model in many
+of the new Western States just then framing their laws.
+
+These New York legislators, and the Western legislators who first
+granted property rights to married women, were actuated less by a sense
+of justice towards women than by enlightened selfishness. The effect of
+so much freedom on women themselves was a matter for grave conjecture.
+It was not suggested by any of the American debaters, as it was later on
+the floors of the English Parliament, that women, if they controlled
+their own property, would undoubtedly squander it on men whom they
+preferred to their husbands. But it was prophesied that women once in
+possession of money would desert their husbands by regiments,--which
+speaks none too flatteringly of the husbands of that day.
+
+Men of property stood for the Married Women's Property Act, because they
+perceived plainly that their own wealth, devised to daughters who could
+not control it, might easily be gambled away, or wasted through
+improvidence, or diverted to the use of strangers. In other words, they
+knew that their property, when daughters inherited it, became the
+property of their sons-in-law. They had no guarantee that their own
+grandchildren would ever have the use of it, unless it was controlled by
+their mothers.
+
+It was the women's clubs and women's organizations in America, as it was
+the Women's Councils in Europe, that actively began the agitation
+against women's legal disabilities. The National Woman Suffrage
+Association, oldest of all women's organizations in the United States,
+has been calling attention to the unequal laws, and demanding their
+abolishment, for two generations.
+
+Practically all of the state federations of women's clubs have
+legislative committees, and it is usually the business of these
+committees to codify the laws of their respective States which apply
+directly to women. In some cases a woman lawyer is made chairman, and
+the work is done under her direction. Sometimes, as in Texas, a well
+known and friendly man lawyer is retained for the task. Almost
+invariably the report of the legislative committee contains disagreeable
+surprises. American women have been so accustomed to their privileges
+that they have taken their rights for granted, and are usually
+astonished when they find how limited their rights actually are.
+
+There are some States in the Union where women are on terms of something
+like equality with men. There is one State to which all intelligent
+women look with a sort of envious, admiring, questioning curiosity,
+Colorado, which is literally the woman's paradise. In Colorado it would
+be difficult to find even the smallest inequality between men and women.
+They vote on equal terms, and if any woman deserves to go to the
+legislature, and succeeds in convincing a large enough public of the
+fact, nothing stands in the way of her election. One woman, Mrs. Alma
+Lafferty, is a member of the present legislature, and she has had
+several predecessors.
+
+But Colorado women have a larger influence still in legislative
+matters. To guard their interests they have a Legislative Committee of
+the State Federation of Women's Clubs, consisting of thirty to forty
+carefully chosen women.
+
+This committee has permanent headquarters in Denver during every session
+of the legislature, and every bill which directly affects women and
+children, before reaching the floor of either house, is submitted for
+approval to the committee.
+
+Miss Jane Addams has declared, and Miss Addams is pretty good authority,
+that the laws governing women and children in Colorado are superior to
+those of any other State. Women receive equal pay for equal work in
+Colorado. They are permitted to hold any office. They are co-guardians
+of their children, and the education of children has been placed almost
+entirely in the hands of women. This does not mean that Colorado has
+weakened its schools by barring men from the teaching profession. It
+means that women are superintendents of schools in many counties, and
+that one woman was, for more than ten years, State superintendent of
+schools.
+
+Contrast Colorado with Louisiana, possibly the last State in the Union a
+well-informed woman would choose for a residence. The laws of Louisiana
+were based, not on the English common law, but on the Code Napoleon,
+which regards women merely as a working, breeding, domestic animal.
+
+"There is one thing that is not _French_," thundered the great Napoleon,
+closing a conference on his famous code, "and that is that a woman can
+do as she pleases."
+
+[Illustration: A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES]
+
+The framers of Louisiana's laws were particular to guard against too
+great a freedom of action on the part of its women. Toward the end of
+Mrs. Jefferson Davis's life she added a codicil to her will, giving to a
+certain chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy a number of very
+valuable relics of her husband, and of the short-lived Confederate
+Government. Her action was made public, and it was then revealed that
+two women had signed the document as witnesses. Instantly Mrs. Davis's
+attention was called to the fact that in Louisiana, where she was then
+living, no woman may witness a document. Women's signatures are
+worthless.
+
+In Louisiana your disabilities actually begin when you become an engaged
+girl. From that happy moment on you are under the dominance of a man.
+Your wedding presents are not yours, but his. If you felt like giving a
+duplicate pickle-fork to your mother, you could not legally do so, and
+after you were married, if your husband wanted that pickle-fork, he
+could get it. Your clothing, your dowry, become community property as
+soon as the marriage ceremony is over, and community property in
+Louisiana is controlled absolutely by the husband. Every dollar a woman
+earns there is at her husband's disposal. Without her husband's consent
+a Louisiana woman may not go into a court of law, even though she may be
+in business for herself and the action sought is in defense of her
+business.
+
+Nor does the Louisiana woman fare any better as a mother. Then, in fact,
+her position is nothing short of humiliating. During her husband's
+lifetime he is sole guardian of their children. At his death she may
+become their guardian, but if she marries a second time--and the law
+permits her to remarry, provided she waits ten months--she retains her
+children only by the formal consent of her first husband's family. If
+they dislike her, or disapprove of her second marriage, they may demand
+the custody of the children.
+
+It is true that many of these absurd laws in Louisiana are not now often
+enforced. It is also true that in Louisiana and other states few men are
+so unjust to their wives as to take advantage of unequal property
+rights. Laws always lag behind the sense of justice which lives in man.
+But the point is that unequal laws still remain on our statute books,
+and they may be, and sometimes are, enforced.
+
+Between these two extremes, Colorado and Louisiana, women have the other
+forty-six States to choose. None of them offers perfect equality. Even
+in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah--the three States besides Colorado where
+women vote--women are in such a minority that their votes are powerless
+to remove all their disabilities. Very rarely have club women even so
+much felicity as the New York State Federation, whose legislative
+chairman, Miss Emilie Bullowa, reported that she was unable to find a
+single unimportant inequality in the New York laws governing the
+property rights of women.
+
+In most of the older States the property rights of married women are now
+fairly guaranteed, but the proud boast that in America no woman is the
+slave of her husband will have to be modified when it is known that in
+at least seventeen States these rights are still denied.
+
+The husband absolutely controls his wife's property and her earnings in
+Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, California, Arizona, North Dakota, and
+Idaho. He has virtual control--that is to say, the wife's rights are
+merely provisional--in Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri.
+
+Women to control their own business property must be registered as
+traders on their own account in these States: Georgia, Montana, Nevada,
+Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia.
+
+Nor are women everywhere permitted to work on equal terms with men.
+
+[Illustration: MISS EMILIE BULLOWA.]
+
+There is a current belief, often expressed, that in the United States
+every avenue of industry is open to women on equal terms with men. This
+is not quite true. In some States a married woman may not engage in any
+business without permission from the courts. In Texas, Louisiana, and
+Georgia this is the case. In Wyoming, where women vote, but where they
+are in such minority that their votes count for little, a married woman
+must satisfy the court that she is under the necessity of earning her
+living.
+
+If you are a woman, married or unmarried, and wish to practice law, you
+are barred from seven of the United States. The legal profession is
+closed to women in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Delaware,
+Tennessee, and South Carolina.
+
+In some States they discourage women from aspiring to the learned
+professions by refusing them the advantages of higher education which
+they provide for their brothers.
+
+Four state universities close their doors to women, in spite of the
+fact that women's taxes help support the universities. These States are
+Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. The last-named admits
+women to post-graduate courses.
+
+You can hold no kind of an elective office, you cannot be even a county
+superintendent of schools in Alabama or Arkansas, if you are a woman. In
+Alabama, indeed, you may not be a minister of the gospel, a doctor of
+medicine, or a notary public. Florida likewise will have nothing to do
+with a woman doctor.
+
+Only a few women want to hold office or engage in professional work.
+Every woman hopes to be a mother. What then is the legal status of the
+American mother? When the club women began the study of their position
+before the law they were amazed to find, in all but ten of the States
+and territories, that they had absolutely no control over the destinies
+of their own children. In ten States only, and in the District of
+Columbia, are women co-guardians with their husbands of their children.
+
+In Pennsylvania if a woman supports her children, or has money to
+contribute to their support, she has joint guardianship. Under somewhat
+similar circumstances Rhode Island women have the same right.
+
+In all the other States and territories children belong to their
+fathers. They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother. That
+this almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule, no
+one except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it.
+
+It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice are
+growing reluctant to administer such archaic laws.
+
+The famous Tillman case is an example. Senator Ben Tillman of South
+Carolina has one son,--a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogether
+disreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of married
+life, left him, taking with her their two little girls. South Carolina
+allows no divorce for any cause. The sanctity of the marriage tie is
+held so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abused
+at will by the veriest brute or libertine. Mrs. Tillman could not
+divorce her husband, so she took her children and went to live quietly
+at her parent's home in the city of Washington.
+
+One day the father of the children, young Tillman, appeared at that
+home, and in a fit of drunken resentment against his wife, kidnapped the
+children. He could not care for the children, probably had no wish to
+have them near him, but he took them back to South Carolina, and _gave_
+them to his parents, made a present of a woman's flesh and blood and
+heart to people who hated her and whom she hated in return.
+
+Under the laws of South Carolina, under the printed statutes, young
+Tillman had a perfect right to do this thing, and his father, a United
+States Senator, upheld him in his act. Young Mrs. Tillman, however,
+showed so little respect for the statutes that she sued her husband and
+his parents to recover her babies. The judge before whom the suit was
+brought was in a dilemma. There was the law--but also there was justice
+and common sense. To the everlasting honor of that South Carolina judge,
+justice and common sense triumphed, and he ruled that _the law was
+unconstitutional._
+
+There are other hardships in this law denying to mothers the right of
+co-guardianship of their children. Two names signed to a child's working
+papers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens that
+selfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work,
+when the mothers know they are far too young. A woman in Scranton,
+Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her children
+had been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they were
+tall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman. "What could I say about
+it, when he went and got the papers?" she sighed.
+
+The father--not the mother--controls the services of his children. He
+can collect their wages, and he does. Very, very often he squanders the
+money they earn, and no one may interfere.
+
+A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay day
+at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her
+pay envelope, unopened. It was his regular day for getting drunk and
+indulging in an orgy of gambling. Often more than half of the girls'
+wages would have vanished before night. Twice the entire amount was
+wasted in an hour. This kept on until the girls passed their childhood
+and were mature enough to rebel successfully.
+
+It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potential
+services of a child.
+
+Many times have these unjust laws been protested against. In every State
+in the Union where they exist they have been protested against by
+organized groups of intelligent women. But their protests have been
+received with apathy, and, in some instances, with contempt by
+legislators. Only last year a determined fight was made by the women of
+California for a law giving them equal guardianship of their children.
+The women's bill was lost in the California Legislature, and lost by a
+large majority.
+
+What arguments did the California legislators use against the proposed
+measure? Identically the same that were made in Massachusetts and New
+York a quarter of a century ago. If women had the guardianship of their
+children, would anything prevent them from taking the children and
+leaving home? What would become of the sanctity of the home, with its
+lawful head shorn of his paternal dignity? In California a husband is
+head of the family in very fact, or at least a law of the State says so.
+
+At one time the law which made the husband the head of the home
+guaranteed to the family support by the husband. It does not do that
+now. There are laws on the statute books of many States obliging the
+wife to support her husband if he is disabled, and the children, if the
+husband defaults. There are no laws compelling the husband to support
+his wife. The husband is under an assumed obligation to support his
+family, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty. Family
+desertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most baffling
+of modern social problems. Everybody is appalled by its prevalence, but
+nobody seems to know what to do about it. The Legal Aid Society of New
+York City reports about three new cases of family desertion for every
+day in the year. Other agencies in other cities report a state of
+affairs quite as serious.
+
+Laws have been passed in most States making family desertion a
+misdemeanor, and in New York a recent law has made it a felony.
+Unfortunately there has been devised no machinery to enforce these laws,
+so they are practically non-existent. It is true that if the deserting
+husband is arrested he may be sent to jail or to the rock pile.
+
+But that does not cure him nor support his family. Mostly he is not
+arrested. He has only to take himself out of the reach of the local
+authorities. In New York a deserting husband, though he is counted a
+felon, needs only to cross the river to New Jersey to be reasonably
+safe. Imagine the State of New York spending good money to chase a man
+whom it does not want as a citizen, and whom it can only punish by
+sending to jail for a short period. The State is better off without such
+a man. To bring him back would not even benefit his deserted family.
+
+Women, far more law abiding than men, insist that a system which evolved
+out of feudal conditions, and has for its very basis the assumption of
+the weakness, ignorance, and dependence of women, has no place in
+twentieth century civilization.
+
+American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent. The present
+social order, in which military force is subordinated to industry and
+commerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and women
+physically on much the same plane. As for women's intellectual ability
+to decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over,
+rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the
+high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher
+grammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. As
+for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better
+read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less,
+but their general intelligence is not less than men's.
+
+Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical support.
+Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves as
+independent human beings. Their work of bearing and rearing children, of
+managing the household, begins to assume a new dignity, a real value,
+in their eyes.
+
+In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shall
+determine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband's
+income. American women may not need such a law, but they insist that
+they need something to take the place of that one which in eleven States
+makes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife's income.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+WOMEN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY
+
+
+The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual
+discomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, and
+recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: "Corsets,
+millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants'
+wear, and ladies' shoes, second floor; no ma'am, carpets and rugs on the
+third floor; this car don't go to the restaurant; take the other side;
+groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs,
+men's shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor."
+
+Buying and selling, serving and being served--women. On every floor, in
+every aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, which
+covers several acres, women. Waiting their turn at the long line of
+telephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Down
+in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer
+frocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts,
+attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan
+department store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floors
+between, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks, running
+back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling the
+aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing
+throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of
+femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk,
+and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.
+
+To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the United
+States are working outside of the home for wages is a simple, unanalyzed
+fact. You grasp it as an intellectual abstraction, without much
+appreciation of its human significance. The mere reading of statistics
+does not help you to realize the changed status of women, and of
+society. You need to see the thing with your own eyes.
+
+Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, when
+the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed
+with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison
+streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in
+Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city's
+great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of
+the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too
+narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. From factory,
+office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousands
+of girls. Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of the
+electric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting of
+hucksters, the laughter and oaths of men, their voices float, a shrill,
+triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil.
+
+You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of the
+interdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrate
+into the operating-room of a telephone exchange. Any hour will do. Any
+day in the week. There are no nights, nor Sundays, nor holidays in a
+telephone exchange. The city could not get along for one single minute
+in one single hour of the twenty-four without the telephone girl. Her
+hands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long,
+silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes of
+the switch board. The wires cross and recross, until the switch board is
+like a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of the
+telephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of a city.
+
+What would happen if this army of women was suddenly withdrawn from the
+telephone exchanges? Men could not take their places. That experiment
+has been tried more than once, and it has always failed.
+
+Having seen how well women serve industry, go back to the department
+store and see how they dominate it also.
+
+The department store apparently exists for women. The architect who
+designed the building studied her necessities. The makers of store
+furniture planned counters, shelves, and seats to suit her stature.
+Buyers of goods know that their jobs are forfeit unless they can guess
+what her taste in gowns and hats is going to be six months hence.
+
+WOMEN'S DEMAND ON INDUSTRY Woman dominates the department store for the
+plain reason that she supports it. Whoever earns the income, and that
+point has been somewhat in question lately, there is no doubt at all as
+to who spends it. She does. Hence, she is able to control the conditions
+under which this business is conducted.
+
+You can see for yourself that this is so. Walk through any large
+department store and observe how much valuable space is devoted to
+making women customers comfortable. There is always a drawing-room with
+easy-chairs and couches; plenty of little desks with handsome stationery
+where the customer may write notes; here, and in the retiring-room
+adjoining, are uniformed maids to offer service. But these things are
+not all that the women who support industry demand of the men in power.
+They demand that industry be carried on under conditions favorable to
+the health and comfort of the workers.
+
+Not until the development of the department store were women able to
+observe at close range the conduct of modern business. Not unnaturally
+it was in the department store that they began one of the most ambitious
+of their present-day activities,--that of humanizing industry.
+
+It was just twenty years ago that New York City was treated to a huge
+joke. It was such a joke that even the miserable ones with whom it was
+concerned were obliged to smile. An obscure group of women, calling
+themselves the Working Women's Society, came out with the announcement
+that they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a labor
+union.
+
+These women said that the girls in the department stores were receiving
+wages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign woman
+in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an
+American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a
+half.
+
+They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for saleswomen
+was habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand from
+ten to fourteen hours a day. They said that sanitary conditions in the
+cloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as to
+endanger health and life. They said that the whole situation was so bad
+that no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years. Mostly
+they were used up in two years. They proposed a labor union of retail
+clerks as the only possible resource. Their effort failed.
+
+The trades union idea at that time had not reached the girl behind the
+counter. As a matter of fact it has not reached her yet, and it probably
+never will. The department-store clerk considers herself a higher social
+being than the ordinary working-girl, and in a way she is justified. The
+exceptionally intelligent department-store clerk has one chance in a
+thousand of rising to the well-paid, semi-professional post of buyer.
+Also the exceptionally attractive girl has possibly one chance in five
+thousand of marrying a millionaire. It is a long chance now, and it was
+a longer chance a dozen years ago, because there were fewer millionaires
+then than now, but it served well enough to cause the failure of the
+trades union plan.
+
+There is one thing that never fails, however, and that is a righteous
+protest. Out of the protest of that little, obscure group of working
+women in New York City was born a movement which has spread beyond the
+Atlantic Ocean, which has effected legislation in many States of the
+Union, which has even determined an extremely important legal decision
+in the Supreme Court of the United States.
+
+A group of rich and influential women, prominent in many philanthropic
+efforts, became interested in the Working Women's Society. They
+investigated the charges brought against the department stores, and what
+they discovered made them resolve that conditions must be changed.
+
+In May, 1890, the late Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. Frederick
+Nathan, and others, called a large mass meeting in Chickering Hall. Mrs.
+Nathan had a constructive plan for raising the standard in shop
+conditions, especially those affecting women employees.
+
+If women would simply withdraw their patronage from the stores where,
+during the Christmas season, women and children toiled long hours at
+night without any extra compensation, sooner or later the night work
+would cease. A few stores, said Mrs. Nathan, maintained a standard
+above the average. It was within the power of the women of New York to
+raise all the others to that standard, and afterwards it might be
+possible to go farther and establish a standard higher than the present
+highest.
+
+"We do not desire to blacklist any firm," declared Mrs. Nathan, "but we
+can _whitelist_ those firms which treat their employees humanely. We can
+make and publish a list of all the shops where employees receive fair
+treatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops. By acting
+openly and publishing our White List we shall be able to create an
+immense public opinion in favor of just employers."
+
+Thus was the Consumers' League of New York ushered into existence. Eight
+months after the Chickering Hall meeting the committee appointed to
+co-operate with the Working Women's Society in preparing its list of
+fair firms had finished its work and made its report. The new League was
+formally organized on January 1, 1891.
+
+
+[Illustration: Mrs. Frederick Nathan]
+
+
+
+THE CONSUMERS' LEAGUE "WHITE LIST"
+
+The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm names.
+The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew the
+conditions. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the other
+firms to their outcast position. Far from evincing a desire to earn a
+place on the White List, they cast aspersions on a "parcel of women" who
+were trying to "undermine business credit," and scouted the very idea of
+an organized feminine conscience.
+
+"Wait until the women want Easter bonnets," sneered one merchant. "Do
+you think they will pass up anything good because the store is not on
+their White List?"
+
+Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for. Even as
+far back as 1891 a few women had begun to doubt the efficacy of that
+indirect influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What was
+the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to
+be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the Mercantile
+Employers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in
+mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the
+smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory
+Department.
+
+The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, and
+still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years
+after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower
+House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported
+in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it.
+A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into
+conditions of working women in New York City.
+
+The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in two
+large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified
+to employing grown women at a salary of _thirty-three cents a day_. They
+confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in
+defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and
+wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they
+should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended,
+on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated
+overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took
+away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They
+threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were
+passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless
+girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.
+
+The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite of
+the merchants' protests the women's bill was passed without a dissenting
+vote.
+
+The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which it
+placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority
+of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also
+provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of
+seats,--one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of
+children, except those holding working certificates from the
+authorities. These, and other minor provisions, affected all retail
+stores, as far as the law was obeyed.
+
+As a matter of fact the Consumers' League's bill carried a "joker" which
+made its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter of
+inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health,
+supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it
+proved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after a
+year of this inadequate inspection, political forces were brought to
+bear, and then there were no store inspectors.
+
+Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers' League tried to
+persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed
+inspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a year
+ago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores under
+factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants'
+Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto what
+they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. Governor
+Hughes, however, signed the bill.
+
+In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred
+infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. No
+less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken
+out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were
+sent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Con sumers'
+League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been
+justified.
+
+To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To women
+capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition,
+a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterly
+fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its
+enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply business
+men, with the business man's contracted vision. They could think only
+in terms of money profit and money loss.
+
+In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have
+succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the
+stores supported by their patronage.
+
+The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League would
+concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season.
+Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one.
+The League stands firm on the point, and up to the present so do the
+stores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the
+custom whereby _thousands of young girls and women are compelled every
+holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of
+uncompensated labor_.
+
+No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extorted
+in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to
+five months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchase
+after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six
+o'clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in
+the bookkeeping and auditing departments.
+
+That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in
+most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which
+strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it
+seems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified.
+
+I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of one of
+the largest and most respectable stores in New York. In this store, and,
+according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the accounting
+force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school, ignorant and
+incapable--but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day's sales are
+posted and audited before the close of the day following, the business
+force has to work until nine and ten o'clock several nights in the week.
+In some cases they work every night.
+
+Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of
+public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the
+Consumers' League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.
+
+The Consumers' League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in
+this early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. City
+after city, State after State, formed Consumers' Leagues, until, in
+1899, a National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was
+organized. The National League, far from being a philanthropic society,
+has be come a scientific association for the study of industrial
+economics.
+
+When the original Consumers' League undertook its first piece of
+legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were
+right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their
+claim. The New York League and all of the others have been collecting
+reasons ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized
+collection of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they
+should not work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in
+tenements; why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speed
+of machines should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should be
+extended; why minimum wage rates should be established.
+
+In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group of
+trained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body of
+facts concerning the human side of industry. It is ammunition which
+tells. One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry in
+Portland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of blowing
+a large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the
+United States.
+
+There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of women in
+factories and laundries should be ten hours long. The law was constantly
+violated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland. One night a
+factory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and found
+working there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher. The inspector
+promptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller.
+
+The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars. Instead of
+paying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the other
+laundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for women
+workers was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment to the
+Constitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the right
+freely to contract. A man or a woman may contract with an employer to
+work as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whatever
+dangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions, _unless_ "there is fair
+ground to say that there is material danger to the public health or
+safety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the general
+welfare...." This is the legal decision on which most protective
+legislation in the United States has been based.
+
+Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day for
+women was declared unconstitutional because nobody's health or safety
+was endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New York
+law forbidding all-night employment of women.
+
+So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had reason to
+believe that they could attack the Oregon law. The case was appealed,
+and appealed again, by the laundrymen, and finally reached the Supreme
+Court of the United States. Then the Consumers' League took a hand.
+
+The brief for the State of Oregon, "defendant in error," was prepared by
+Louis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of the
+most effective workers in the League's New York headquarters. This brief
+is probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence. It
+consists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a few
+paragraphs were written by the attorney for the State. All the rest was
+contributed, under Miss Goldmark's direction, from the Consumers'
+League's wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should be
+protected.
+
+The League's reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to work
+their women employees far into the night was, "The World's Experience
+upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is
+Based." It is simply a mass of testimony taken from hearings before the
+English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from
+the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of
+industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical
+books; from reports of boards of health.
+
+REASONS FOR PROTECTING WOMEN WORKERS The brief included a short and
+interesting chapter, containing a number of things the League had
+collected on the subject of laundries. Supreme Court judges cannot be
+expected to know that laundry work is classed by experts among the
+dangerous trades. That washing clothes, from a simple home or backyard
+occupation, has been transformed into a highly-organized factory trade
+full of complicated and often extremely dangerous machinery; that the
+atmosphere of a steam laundry is more conducive to tuberculosis and the
+other occupational diseases than cotton mills; that the work in
+laundries, being irregular, is conducive to a general low state of
+morals; that, on the whole, women should not be required to spend more
+time than necessary in laundries; all this was set forth.
+
+Medical testimony showed the physical differences between men and
+women; the lesser power of women to endure long hours of standing; the
+heightened susceptibility of women to industrial poisons--lead, naphtha,
+and the like. A long chapter of testimony on the effect of child-bearing
+in communities where the women had toiled long hours before marriage, or
+afterwards, was included.
+
+The testimony of factory inspectors, of industrial experts, of employers
+in England, Germany, France, America, revealed the bad effect of long
+hours on women's safety, both physical and moral. It revealed the good
+effect, on the individual health, home life, and general welfare, of
+short hours of labor.
+
+Nor was the business aspect of the case neglected. That people
+accomplish as much in an eight-hour day as in a twelve-hour day has
+actually been demonstrated. The brief stated, for one instance, the
+experience of a bicycle factory in Massachusetts.
+
+In this place young women were employed to sort the ball bearings which
+went into the machines. They did this by touch, and no girl was of use
+to the firm unless her touch was very sensitive and very sure. The head
+of this firm became convinced that the work done late in the afternoon
+was of inferior quality, and he tried the experiment of cutting the
+hours from ten to nine. The work was done on piece wages, and the girls
+at first protested against the nine-hour day, fearing that their pay
+envelopes would suffer. To their astonishment they earned as much in
+nine hours as they had in ten. In time the employer cut the working day
+down to eight hours and a half, and in addition gave the girls
+ten-minute rests twice a day. Still they earned their full wages, and
+they continued to earn full wages after the day became eight hours
+long. The employer testified before the United States Industrial
+Commission of 1900 that he believed he could successfully shorten the
+day to seven hours and a half and get the same amount of work
+accomplished.
+
+What can you do against testimony like that? The Consumers' League
+convinced the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Oregon
+ten-hour law was upheld.
+
+The importance of this decision cannot be overestimated. On it hangs the
+validity of nearly all the laws which have been passed in the United
+States for the protection of women workers. If the Oregon law had been
+declared unconstitutional, laws in twenty States, or practically all
+the States where women work in factories, would have been in perpetual
+danger, and the United States might easily have sunk to a position
+occupied now by no leading country in Europe.
+
+Great Britain has had protective legislation for women workers since
+1844. In 1847 the labor of women in English textile mills was limited to
+ten hours a day, the period we are now worrying about, as being possibly
+contrary to our Constitution. France, within the past five years, has
+established a ten-hour day, broken by one hour of rest. Switzerland,
+Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy, limit the hours of women's labor. In
+several countries there are special provisions giving extra time off to
+women who have household responsibilities. What would our
+Constitution-bound law makers say to such a proposition, if any one had
+the hardihood to suggest it?
+
+If this law had not been upheld by the United States Supreme Court the
+women of no State could have hoped to secure further legislation for
+women workers. As it is, women in many States are preparing to establish
+what is now known as "The Oregon Standard," that is, a ten-hour day for
+all working women.
+
+Nothing in connection with the woman movement is more significant,
+certainly nothing was more unexpected, than the voluntary abandonment,
+on the part of women, of class prejudice and class distinctions. Where
+formerly the interest of the leisured woman in her wage-earning sisters
+was of a sentimental or philanthropic character, it has become practical
+and democratic.
+
+The Young Women's Christian Association has had an industrial
+department, which up to a recent period concerned itself merely with the
+spiritual welfare of working girls. Prayer meetings in factories, clubs,
+and classes in the Association headquarters, working-girls' boarding
+homes, and other philanthropic efforts were the limits of the
+Association's activities. The entire policy has changed of late, and
+under the capable direction of Miss Annie Marian MacLean, of Brooklyn,
+New York, the industrial department of the Association is doing
+scientific investigation of labor conditions of women.
+
+In a cracker factory I once saw a paid worker in the Young Women's
+Christian Association pause above a young girl lying on the floor,
+crimson with fever, and apparently in the throes of a serious illness.
+With angelic pity on her face the Association worker stooped and
+slipped a tract into the sick girl's hand. The kind of industrial
+secretary the Association now employs would send for an ambulance and
+see that the girl had the best of hospital care. She would inquire
+whether the girl's illness was caused by the conditions under which she
+worked, and she would know if it were possible to have those conditions
+changed.
+
+WOMEN'S CLUBS STUDYING LABOR PROBLEMS Nearly every state federation of
+women's clubs has its industrial committee, and many large clubs have a
+corresponding department. It is these industrial sections of the women's
+clubs which are such a thorn in the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr., the
+new president of the National Manufacturers' Association. In his
+inaugural address Mr. Kirby warned his colleagues that women's clubs
+were not the ladylike, innocuous institutions that too-confiding man
+supposed them to be. In those clubs, he declared, their own wives and
+daughters were listening to addresses by the worst enemies of the
+Manufacturers' Association, the labor leaders. By which he meant that
+the club women were inviting trade-union men and women to present the
+worker's side of industrial subjects. "Soon," exclaimed Mr. Kirby, "we
+shall have to fight the women as well as the unions."
+
+The richest and most aristocratic woman's club in the country is the
+Colony Club of New York. The Colony Club was organized by a number of
+women from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the manner
+of men's clubs. The women built a magnificent clubhouse on Madison
+Avenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderful
+roof-garden. For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing more
+than a beautiful toy which its members played with. But soon it began to
+develop into a sort of a woman's forum, where all sorts of social topics
+were discussed. Visiting women of distinction, artists, writers,
+lecturers, were entertained there.
+
+Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course in
+industrial economics. The women did not invite lecturers from Columbia
+University to address them. They asked John Mitchell and many lesser
+lights of the labor world. They wanted to learn, at first hand, the
+facts concerning conditions of industry. Most of them are stockholders
+in mills, factories, mines, or business establishments. Many own real
+estate on which factories stand.
+
+"It is not fair," they have openly declared, "that we should enjoy
+wealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death. We do
+not want wealth on such terms."
+
+The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to the
+National Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in the
+working and living conditions of wage earners in industries and in
+governmental institutions. A few conscientious employers have spent a
+part of their profits to make their employees comfortable. They have
+given them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, and
+comfortable seats. They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacation
+houses, and the like.
+
+No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers. Equally,
+no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem. Nor
+should they be used as a substitute for justice.
+
+Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed,
+untactfully administered. Too often it has been instituted, not to
+benefit the workers, but to advertise the business. Too often its real
+object was a desire to play the philanthropist's role, to exact
+obsequience from the wage earner.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New
+York, the most exclusive Women's Club in the country]
+
+I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of the
+perfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected, the
+girls are required to stop work and clean the rooms. Since they work on
+a piece-work scale, the "perfect sanitary conditions" exist at their
+expense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a
+printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday.
+This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their
+employers. It always fails.
+
+It seems to the women who have studied these things that proper
+sanitary conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision for
+rest, vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wage
+earner's due. They are a part of the laborer's hire, and should be
+guaranteed by law, exactly as wages are guaranteed. An employer deserves
+gratitude for overtime pay no more than for fire escapes.
+
+Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers' League, women's
+clubs, and women's labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that good
+working conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastly
+increase the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits of
+the employers.
+
+The New York Telephone Company does not set itself up to be a
+benevolent institution. Its directors know that its profits depend on
+the excellence of its service. There is one exchange in the Borough of
+Brooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic. This
+traffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summer
+resorts along the coast. In the fall and winter the traffic is very
+light. Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work only
+half the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round.
+"We cannot afford to do anything else," explains the traffic manager.
+"We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages."
+
+
+[Illustration: MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY]
+
+The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his business
+would suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen. He believed that
+he would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks human
+working conditions. Then came the Consumers' League and mercantile laws,
+and a new pressure of public opinion, and the dry-goods merchant found
+out that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than one
+that is exhausted and uncomfortable.
+
+The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has proved
+itself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligent
+employers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws will
+provide for it.
+
+It used to be the invariable custom in stores--it is so still in a
+few--to lay off many clerks during the dull seasons. Now the best stores
+find that they can better afford to give all their employees vacations
+with pay. A clerk coming home after a vacation can sell goods, even in
+dull times. More and more employers are coming to appreciate the money
+value of the Saturday half-holiday in summer. Hearn, in New York, closes
+his department store all day Saturday during July and August. The store
+sells more goods in five days than it previously sold in six.
+
+THE FILENE SYSTEM OF DEVELOPING EFFICIENT WORKERS There is one
+department store which has demonstrated that it is profitable to pay
+higher wages than its competitors, and that it pays to allow the
+employees to fix the terms of their own employment. This is the Filene
+store in Boston, which has developed within the past ten years from a
+conservative, old-fashioned dry-goods business into an extremely
+original and interesting experiment station in commercial economics.
+
+The entire policy of the Filene management is bent on developing to the
+highest possible point the efficiency of each individual clerk. The best
+possible material is sought. No girl under sixteen is employed, and no
+girl of any age who has not graduated with credit from the grammar
+schools. There are a number of college-bred men and women in the Filene
+employ.
+
+
+[Illustration: A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN]
+
+Good wages are paid, even to beginners, and experienced employees are
+rewarded, not according to a fixed rate of payment, but according to
+earning capacity. Taken throughout the store, wages, plus commissions,
+which are allowed in all departments, average about two dollars a week
+higher than in other department stores in Boston.
+
+No irresponsible, automatic employee can develop high efficiency. She
+does not want to become efficient; she wants merely to receive a pay
+envelope at the end of the week. In order to develop responsibility and
+initiative in their employees the Filenes have put them on a
+self-governing basis. The workers do not literally make their own rules,
+but the vote of the majority can change any rule made by the firm. The
+firm furnishes its employees with a printed book of rules, in which the
+policy of the store is set forth. If the employees object to any of the
+rules, or any part of the policy, they can vote a change.
+
+The medium through which the clerks express their opinions and desires
+is the Filene Co-operative Association, of which every clerk and every
+employee in the place is a member. No dues are exacted, as is the custom
+in the usual employees' association. The executive body, called the
+Store Council, and all other officers are elected by the members. All
+matters of grievance, all subjects of controversy, are referred to the
+Store Council, which, as often as occasion demands, calls a meeting of
+the entire association after business hours.
+
+For example: Christmas happens on a Friday. The firm decides to keep the
+store open on the following day--Saturday. There is an expression of
+dissatisfaction from a number of clerks. A meeting of the association is
+called, and a vote taken as to whether the majority want the extra
+holiday or not; whether the majority are willing to lose the
+commissions on a day's sales, for, of course, salaries continue. The
+vote reveals that the majority want the holiday. The Store Council so
+reports to the firm, and the firm must grant the holiday.
+
+All matters of difficulty arising between employers and employed, in the
+Filene store, are settled not by the firm, but by the Arbitration Board
+of Employees, also elected by popular vote. All disagreements as to
+wages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue between
+saleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to the
+Board of Arbitration, and the board's decision is final. There is no
+tyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of a
+department. Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as she
+is an efficient saleswoman.
+
+Surely it is not too much to hope that, in a future not too far
+distant, all women who earn their bread will serve a system of industry
+adjusted by law to human standards. In enlightened America the courts,
+presided over by men to whom manual labor is known only in theory, have
+persistently ruled that the _Constitution forbade the State to make laws
+protecting women workers_. It has seemed to most of our courts and most
+of our judges that the State fulfilled its whole duty to its women
+citizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract--even
+though they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts which
+involved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and future
+generations. The women of this country have done nothing more important
+than to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyond
+this terrible delusion.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE
+
+
+The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the
+legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was
+received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. The
+Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in
+labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable opportunity
+to get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the Illinois
+State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years later
+the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that it
+was unconstitutional.
+
+The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without
+precedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States,
+until it had become almost a principle of American law that protective
+legislation for working women was invalid.
+
+The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusion
+that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody
+of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women would
+be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may
+appear obscure.
+
+The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men, and
+they know something--not much, but still something--about the men of the
+working classes. They know, for example, something about the conditions
+under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to
+public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor,
+twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these
+are bad things,--bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for
+the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of labor
+comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.
+
+The learned judges, I say this with all due respect, do not know
+anything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts of
+their decisions, denying the constitutionality of protective measures,
+are amazing in the ignorance they display,--ignorance of industrial
+conditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects of
+certain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect of
+women's arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions in
+trades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the home
+resulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, the
+learned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, the
+happiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about the
+inhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display of
+the real facts.
+
+We have seen how the women of the Consumers' League taught the United
+States Supreme Court something about working women; showed them a few of
+the calamities resulting from the unrestricted labor of women and
+immature girls. The Supreme Court's decision forever abolished the old
+fallacy that the American Constitution _forbids_ protective legislation
+for women workers. It remains for women's organizations in the various
+States to educate local courts up to the knowledge that community
+interest _demands_ protective legislation.
+
+Following the decision of the Supreme Court in the Oregon case, which
+flatly contradicted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, the
+working women of Illinois began their educational campaign. They had
+now, for the first time, a fighting chance to secure the restoration of
+their shortened work day. The women of fifteen organized trades in the
+city of Chicago determined to take that chance.
+
+The women first appealed to the Industrial Commission, appointed early
+in 1908 by Governor Dineen, to investigate the need of protective
+legislation for workers, men and women alike.
+
+The women were given a courteous hearing, but were told frankly that
+limited hours of work for women was not one of protective measures to be
+recommended by the Commission.
+
+The Waitresses' Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists, led
+by a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary of
+the union. Miss Maloney and her associates drafted and introduced into
+the Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day for
+every woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store,
+laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for
+enforcing the measure.
+
+The "Girls' Bill," as it immediately became known, was the most hotly
+contested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during the
+session. Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing
+on the bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek and
+tired women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their
+working day made shorter. Another presented a petition signed by his
+women employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven
+hours a day!
+
+Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after learned
+counsel for the Manufacturers' Association had argued against the
+measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers'
+Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girls
+confined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of the
+Glove Makers' Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two
+girls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are
+gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a
+chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea:
+Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses' Union, was the other speaker.
+
+They described details in the daily lives of working women not generally
+known except to the workers themselves. Among these was the piece-work
+system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speed
+is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage.
+The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine
+whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; to
+consider how many stitches the operator's hand must guide in a week, a
+month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve
+hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease
+of earning power.
+
+"I am a waitress," said Miss Maloney, "and I work ten hours a day. In
+that time a waitress who is tolerably busy _walks_ ten miles, and the
+dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred to
+two thousand pounds. Don't you think eight hours a day is enough for a
+girl to walk?"
+
+Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after that
+day. The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too grave
+for the friends of the workers to overcome. It was decided to
+substitute a ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the "Oregon Standard"
+established by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle of
+limitation upon the hours of women's work once established in Illinois,
+the workers could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.
+
+The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a law
+of the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers' Association, through the
+W.C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suit
+to test the constitutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, Anna
+Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Their
+appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hours
+to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to
+contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them
+by the ten-hour law.
+
+There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved
+in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched
+state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature
+years--one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over
+thirty years--are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep
+body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no
+position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would
+contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?
+
+There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge
+R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his
+career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the
+real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For
+Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department,
+forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.
+
+Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the
+women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up in
+the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of
+Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on
+hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed
+pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers'
+League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had
+toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois
+Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply
+a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and
+bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and
+especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on
+the succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three
+pages of law.
+
+The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was the
+testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.
+
+"Medical Science has demonstrated," says this most important paragraph,
+"that while fatigue is a normal phenomenon ... excessive fatigue or
+exhaustion is abnormal.... It has discovered that fatigue is due not
+only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue,
+entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial
+toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that when
+artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin
+causes death. The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to be
+counteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body.
+But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not produced
+fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin."
+
+The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the American
+Constitution was never intended to shield manufacturers in their
+willingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. The
+ten-hour law was sustained.
+
+That the "Girls' Bill" passed, or that it was even introduced, was due
+in large measure to an organization of women, more militant and more
+democratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women's
+Trade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, the
+League consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organized
+trades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of these
+latter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-union
+principle, but more are women who work in the professional
+ranks,--teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlement
+workers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, who
+ever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federation
+of Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners,
+to appear in Labor Day parades.
+
+The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities,--New
+York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland,--is to educate women
+wage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains and
+supports organizers among all classes of workers. As quickly as a group
+in any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. It
+raises funds to assist women in their trade struggles. It acts as
+arbitrator between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes.
+
+The Women's Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factory
+trades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until lately
+believed themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundred
+and fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventy
+stenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers' Federation
+of Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before the
+Women's Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated.
+The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized.
+
+The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League was
+brilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-waist
+makers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story of
+this strike will bear retelling.
+
+On the evening of November 22, 1909, there was a great mass meeting of
+workers held at Cooper Union in New York. Samuel Gompers, President of
+the American Federation of Labor, presided, and the stage was well
+filled with members of the Women's Trade Union League. The meeting had
+been called by the League in conjunction with Shirt-Waist Makers' Union,
+Local 25, to consider the grievances of shirt-waist makers in general,
+and especially of the shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, who
+had been, for more than two months, on strike.
+
+The story of the strike, the causes that led up to it, and the bitter
+injustice which followed it were rehearsed in a dozen speeches. It was
+shown that for four to five dollars a week the girl shirt-waist makers
+worked from eight in the morning until half-past five in the evening
+two days in the week; from eight in the morning until nine at night
+four days in the week; and from eight in the morning until noon one day
+in the week--Sunday.
+
+The shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, in hope of bettering
+their conditions, had formed a union, and had informed their employers
+of their action. The employers promptly locked them out of the shop, and
+the girls declared a strike.
+
+The strike was more than two months old when the Cooper Union meeting
+was held, and the employers showed no signs of giving in. It was agreed
+that a general strike of shirt-waist makers ought to be declared. But
+the union was weak, there were no funds, and most of the shirt-waist
+makers were women and unused to the idea of solidarity in action. Could
+they stand together in an industrial struggle which promised to be long
+and bitter?
+
+President Gompers was plainly fearful that they could not.
+
+Suddenly a very small, very young, very intense Jewish girl, known to
+her associates as Clara Lemlich, sprang to her feet, and, with the
+assistance of two young men, climbed to the high platform. Flinging up
+her arms with a dramatic gesture she poured out a flood of speech,
+entirely unintelligible to the presiding Gompers, and to the members of
+the Women's Trade Union League. The Yiddish-speaking majority in the
+audience understood, however, and the others quickly caught the spirit
+of her impassioned plea.
+
+The vast audience rose as one man, and a great roar arose. "Yes, we
+will all strike!"
+
+"And will you keep the faith?" cried the girl on the platform. "Will you
+swear by the old Jewish oath of our fathers?"
+
+Two thousand Jewish hands were thrust in air, and two thousand Jewish
+throats uttered the oath: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge,
+may this hand wither and drop off from this arm I now raise."
+
+Clara Lemlich's part in the work was accomplished. Within a few days
+forty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike.
+
+The Women's Trade Union League, under the direction of Miss Helen Marot,
+secretary, at once took hold of the strike.
+
+There were two things to be done at once. The forty thousand had to be
+enrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing to
+accept the terms of the strikers had to be "signed up." Clinton Hall,
+one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, and
+for several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the street
+outside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and women
+strikers, anxious and perspiring "bosses," and busy, active associates
+of the Women's Trade Union League.
+
+The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied the
+League members undertook the work of picketing the shops. Picketing, if
+this activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling the
+neighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakers
+are going to and from their nefarious business, and importuning them to
+join the strike.
+
+Peaceful picketing is legal. The law permits a striker to speak to the
+girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her
+most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on the
+other's arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence.
+
+Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a little
+of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence.
+After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girls
+who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members.
+Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among
+these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's Superintendent
+of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a
+millionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College,
+Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association of
+Collegiate Alumnae. These young women went out day after day with girl
+strikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered arrest
+on more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation of
+magistrates who--well, who did not understand.
+
+The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and organizations of
+women other than the Women's Trade Union League began to take an
+interest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss Gertrude
+Barnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial world
+of women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike.
+They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women in
+person.
+
+The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest social
+eminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan and
+several others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the president
+of the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the strikers'
+own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. More
+than thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozen
+women promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers.
+
+A week later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, mother of the Duchess of Marlborough,
+leader of a large Woman Suffrage Association, engaged the Hippodrome,
+and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators.
+Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting.
+
+At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses were
+involved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis of
+increased pay, a fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of the
+union. Others settled later, and under the influence of the "uptown
+scum," as the employers' association gallantly termed the Women's Trade
+Union League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still others
+reluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out of
+the five hundred had settled with the union, and only about three
+thousand of the workers were still out of work.
+
+Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they would
+ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of the
+intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all,
+that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped
+along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was
+unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household
+labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to
+perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was
+to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.
+
+Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are becoming
+the co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of the
+leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the
+situation, espouse the cause of their working sisters. The woman in the
+factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.
+
+The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury,
+Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of
+the working women.
+
+That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was
+established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew
+every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the
+women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of
+labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and wages
+were good enough to compensate for the long day's labor.
+
+The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a
+corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few
+floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands."
+
+The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated
+machinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred times
+more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and
+nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances
+developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so
+bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or
+manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to
+the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women who
+had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and
+eight dollars.
+
+The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the mills
+as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.
+
+There you have the story of women's realization of themselves as a
+group. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women.
+The Boston Branch of the Women's Trade Union League, through its
+secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined the strikers.
+Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile
+Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks
+of anxiety and deprivation.
+
+The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business
+before treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, exists
+as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and
+conferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to
+exist. An employers' association is a necessity of business life. A
+labor union is an insult to capital.
+
+This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor car
+stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs.
+Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay
+personified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer. Her
+powers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercial
+connections, were sufficient to wring consent from the firm to receive
+John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers.
+
+John Golden, intelligent, honest, a fine type of workingman, educated
+in the English school of unionism, held two conferences with the firm.
+He was able to make the employers see the whole situation in an entirely
+new light. They were men of probity; they wanted to be fair; and when
+they saw the human side of the struggle they surrendered. When they
+perceived the justice of the collective bargain, the advantages to both
+sides of a labor organization honestly conducted, they consented to
+recognize the union. And the women went back, their group unbroken.
+
+Thus are women working, women of all classes, to humanize the factory.
+From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and the
+judiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women of
+the toiling masses in their struggle to make over the factory from the
+inside. Together they are impressing the men of the working world, law
+makers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of the
+race.
+
+Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protective
+legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal
+decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not
+yet complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the
+late Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not
+every court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more
+valuable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn.
+
+In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in which
+a number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to the
+owner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did not
+strike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in that
+country a substitute for the strike is provided by law. To this
+substitute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. The
+employer in his answer declared, just as employers in this country might
+have done, that his business would not stand an increase in wages. He
+explained that the match industry was newly established in New Zealand,
+and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could not
+afford to pay high wages.
+
+The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been an
+inquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiry
+into the cost of living in the town where the match factory was located.
+And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court of
+Arbitration, and this is what he said to the man:
+
+"It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on the
+wages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that they
+should have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls and
+bodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance than
+your profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better for
+the community for you to close your factory. _It would be better to
+send the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back to
+flints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter._ My
+award is that you pay what they ask."
+
+Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the eight
+million women in the world who have learned to think in human terms.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO
+
+
+At the threshold of that quarter of old New York called Greenwich
+Village stands Jefferson Market Court. Almost concealed behind the
+towering structure of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, the building by day is
+rather inconspicuous. But when night falls, swallowing up the
+neighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Market
+assumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminated
+clock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands toward
+midnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams an
+intense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of the
+building floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, through
+the iron-guarded door, there passes, every week-day night in the year, a
+long procession of prodigals.
+
+The guarded door seldom admits any one as important, so to speak, as a
+criminal. The criminal's case waits for day. The Night Court in
+Jefferson Market sits in judgment only on the small fry caught in the
+dragnet of the police. Tramps, vagrants, drunkards, brawlers, disturbers
+of the peace, speeding chauffeurs, licenseless peddlers, youths caught
+red-handed shooting craps or playing ball in the streets,--these are the
+men with whom the Night Court deals. But it is not the men we have come
+to see.
+
+[Illustration: MISS MAUDE E. MINER]
+
+The women of the Night Court. Prodigal daughters! Between December,
+1908, and December, 1909, no less than five thousand of them passed
+through the guarded door, under the blaze of the electric lights. There
+is never an hour, from nine at night until three in the morning, when
+the prisoners' bench in Jefferson Market Court is without its full quota
+of women. Old--prematurely old, and young--pitifully young; white and
+brown; fair and faded; sad and cynical; starved and prosper ous;
+rag-draped and satin-bedecked; together they wait their turn at
+judgment.
+
+Quietly moving back and forth before the prisoners' bench you see a
+woman, tall, graceful, black-gowned. She is the salaried probation
+officer, modern substitute for the old-time volunteer mission worker.
+The probation officer's serious blue eyes burn with no missionary zeal.
+There is no spark of sentimental pity in the keen gaze she turns on each
+new arrival.
+
+When the bench is full of women the judge turns to her to inquire:
+"Anybody there you want, Miss Miner?"
+
+Miss Miner usually shakes her head. She diagnoses her cases like a
+physician, and she wastes no time on incurables.
+
+Once in a while, perhaps several times in the course of a night, Miss
+Miner touches a girl on the arm. At once the girl rises and follows the
+probation officer into an adjoining room. If she is what she appears,
+young in evil, if she has a story which rings true, a story of poverty
+and misfortune, rather than of depravity, she goes not back to the
+prisoners' bench. When her turn at judgment comes Miss Miner stands
+beside her, and in a low voice meant only for the judge, she tells the
+facts. The girl weeps as she listens. To hear one's troubles told is
+sometimes more terrible than to endure them.
+
+Court adjourns at three in the morning, and this girl, with the
+others--if others have been claimed by the probation officer--goes out
+into the empty street, under the light of the tall tower, whose clock
+has begun all over again its monotonous race toward midnight. No
+policeman accompanies the group. The girls are under no manner of
+duress. They have promised to go home with Miss Miner, and they go. The
+night's adventure, entered into with dread, with callous indifference,
+or with thoughtless mirth, ends in a quiet bedroom and a pillow wet with
+tears.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK.]
+
+Waverley House, as Miss Miner's home is known, has sheltered, during the
+past year, over three hundred girls. Out of that number one hundred and
+nineteen have returned to their homes, or are earning a living at useful
+work.
+
+One hundred and nineteen saved out of five thousand prodigals! In point
+of numbers this is a melancholy showing, but in comparison with other
+efforts at rescue work it is decidedly encouraging.
+
+Nothing quite like Waverley House has appeared in other American cities,
+but it is a type of detention home for girls which is developing
+logically out of the probation system. Delinquent girls under sixteen
+are now considered, in all enlightened communities, subjects for the
+Juvenile Court. They are hardly ever associated with older delinquents.
+But a girl over sixteen is likely to be committed to prison, and may be
+locked in cells with criminal and abandoned women of the lowest order.
+Waverley House is the first practical protest against this stupid and
+evil-encouraging policy.
+
+The house, which stands a few blocks distant from the Night Court, was
+established and is maintained by the Probation Association of New York,
+consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and of
+men and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The District
+Attorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of the
+Association, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, Miss
+Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women's Trade
+Union League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women's
+Municipal League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York's
+organized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among the
+supporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable and
+sympathetic superintendent of the house.
+
+The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station, a
+laboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases which
+beset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency and
+paroled to probation officers are taken to Waverley House, where they
+remain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best means
+of disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some to
+hospitals, some to institutions, some placed on long probation.
+
+Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's college
+to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who
+are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which
+has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They have
+set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakes
+countless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery,
+disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women have
+undertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of the
+problem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals?
+This much did the missionaries before them.
+
+"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per cent," declares Miss Miner, "if
+only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning."
+
+To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the beginning,
+instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That is
+what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what
+physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning to
+do with poverty.
+
+Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a cause,
+and that it might be possible to attack it at its source. Yet that any
+large number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly,
+voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts.
+There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they find
+themselves entirely powerless to resist.
+
+Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs of a
+very important movement among women to discover what these forces are.
+Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand. We have had, and we still have,
+in cities east and west, committees and societies and law and order
+leagues earnestly engaged in "stamping out" the evil. It is like trying
+to stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by a
+strong gale. The protests of most of these leagues amount to little
+more than vain clamor against a thing which is not even distantly
+comprehended.
+
+The _personnel_ of these agencies organized to "stamp out" the evil
+differs little in the various cities. It is largely if not wholly
+masculine in character, and the evil is usually dealt with from the
+point of view of religion and morals. Women, when they appear in the
+matter at all, figure as missionaries, "prison angels," and the like. As
+evangelists to sinners women have been permitted to associate with their
+fallen sisters without losing caste. Likewise, when elderly enough, they
+have been allowed to serve on governing boards of "homes" and
+"refuges." Their activities were limited to rescue work. They might
+extend a hand to a repentant Magdalene. A Phryne they must not even be
+aware of. In other words, this evil as a subject of investigation and
+intelligent discussion among women was absolutely prohibited. It has
+ever been their Great Taboo.
+
+Nevertheless, when eight million women, in practically every civilized
+country in the world, organized themselves into an International Council
+of Women, and began their remarkable survey of the social order in which
+they live, one of their first acts was to break the Great Taboo.
+
+[Illustration: MISS SADIE AMERICAN]
+
+At early congresses of the International Council Miss Sadie American,
+Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis, among American
+delegates, Miss Elizabeth Janes of England, Miss Elizabeth Gad of
+Denmark, Dr. Agnes Bluhm of Germany, and others interested in the moral
+welfare of girls, urged upon the Council action against the "White
+Slave" traffic. No extensive argument was required to convince the
+members of the Council that the "White Slave" traffic and the whole
+subject of the moral degradation of women was a social phenomenon too
+long neglected by women.
+
+These women declared with refreshing candor that it was about time that
+the social evil was dealt with intelligently, and if it was to be dealt
+with intelligently women must do the work. The fussy old gentlemen with
+white side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other well
+meaning amateurs, who are engaged in "stamping out" the evil, deserve to
+be set aside. In their places the women propose to install social
+experts who shall deal scientifically with the problem.
+
+The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle, in
+every community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actually
+forbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for the
+first time repudiated by a body of organized women. The arguments on
+which the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time,
+seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance.
+The desirability of the descent of property in legal paternal line
+seemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid standard
+of morals to women. But they found reasons infinitely greater why the
+same rigid standard should be applied to men.
+
+The International Council of Women and women's organizations in every
+country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and
+through these physicians they have been able to consider the social evil
+from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which
+touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare
+of children, were brought forth--facts concerning infantile blindness,
+almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the
+fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women,
+and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases
+among men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of these
+maladies, and their frightful prevalence,--seventy-five per cent of city
+men, according to reliable authority, being affected,--aroused in the
+women a sentiment of indignation and revolt. The International Council
+of Women put itself on record as protesting against the responsibility
+laid upon women, the unassisted task of preserving the purity of the
+race.
+
+In the United States, women's clubs, women's societies, women's medical
+associations, special committees of women in many cities have
+courageously undertaken the study of this problem, intending by means of
+investigation and publicity to lay bare its sources and seek its remedy.
+
+The sources of the evil are about the only phase of the problem which
+has never been adequately examined. It is true that we have suspected
+that the unsteady and ill-adjusted economic position of women furnished
+some explanation for its existence, but even now our information is
+vague and unsatisfactory.
+
+A number of years ago, in 1888 to be exact, the Massachusetts Bureau of
+Labor Statistics made an interesting investigation. This was an effort
+to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world,
+usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to
+profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations
+of nearly four thousand fallen women in twenty-eight American cities.
+
+Of these unfortunates over eight hundred had worked in low-waged trades
+such as paper-box making, millinery, laundry work, rope and cordage
+making, cigar and cigarette making, candy packing, textile factory and
+shoe factory work.
+
+About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, and
+seamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was not
+stated.
+
+The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so far
+as wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundred
+and sixteen recruits to the list.
+
+On the whole, these groups were what the investigators had expected to
+find.
+
+There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were entirely
+unexpected by the investigators. Of the 3,866 girls examined 1,236, or
+nearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The next
+largest group, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domestic
+servants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homes
+into lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from that
+occupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and most
+suitable means of earning their living--housework.
+
+Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as something
+too disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least sixty-two
+per cent of those 3,866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were too
+lazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one of
+honest toil in somebody's nice kitchen. Apparently this was the view
+taken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it never
+carried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out _why_
+so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried to
+find out _why_ housework was a trade dangerous to morals.
+
+Fortunately it did occur to the women's organizations to examine the
+facts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take you
+over some of the ground they have covered and show you where their
+investigations have led them.
+
+South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and
+forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large
+city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,--enormous drab
+structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering
+chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The
+steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family
+houses, built of wood, generally unpainted, and always dismally
+utilitarian as to architectural details.
+
+In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a park,
+or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement was
+just seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quite
+imposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered for
+the day as soon as the classes were dismissed.
+
+In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of young
+girls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which always
+must be fed--if not with wholesome food, then husks. For parents these
+girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and
+came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers
+who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and
+were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For
+social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know
+what that means. It means trooping up and down the main street in lively
+groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a
+cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street
+accident or a fight.
+
+About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicago
+and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some of
+these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went
+"downtown." There was no other place for them to go.
+
+As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situation
+would you expect to evolve out of these materials?
+
+Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood. Many
+of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in
+these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile
+Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals.
+Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the
+never-ceasing procession of prodigals.
+
+This is what "no previous occupation" really means in nine cases out of
+ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all,
+according to the ideals of you who read these pages.
+
+Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes it
+was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large
+enough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In some
+there was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extreme
+cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue
+and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are
+possible.
+
+Annie Donnelly's case will serve as further illustration. Annie
+Donnelly's father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab from
+twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays
+included. Before the cab drivers' strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly's
+wages were fifteen dollars a week, and the family lived in a four-room
+tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week. You pay rent weekly to a
+tenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week
+for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a
+week.
+
+The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single
+dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York
+tenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who was
+fourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms.
+Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a
+lodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement
+because it had only one dark room.
+
+One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance.
+Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not
+allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby,
+attended the annual ball of the Coachman's Union, but that was another
+thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.
+
+The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really lived
+in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable
+except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably
+crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was
+impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit
+of her social life had to be lived out of the house.
+
+When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking about
+with the other girls or sitting on a friend's doorstep, until ten or
+even eleven o'clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city
+neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl's life when this sort of
+thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the
+doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable. So
+one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the
+lodger to a dance.
+
+The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled basement room in a building
+which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the
+front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: "The Johnny
+Sullivan Social Club."
+
+The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat
+check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in a
+waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which
+followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric
+lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest
+best with a popular waltz tune.
+
+In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat
+and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was
+piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When
+the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with
+the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.
+
+"Come along," said the lodger, "and have a beer." When Annie shook her
+head he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent
+free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy
+a beer off of 'em oncet in a while. They've gotta get something out of
+it."
+
+I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately she
+learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish
+dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable
+by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places.
+Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room means
+poor business at the bar.
+
+Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall _habitué_. Not because she was
+viciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she was
+decidedly normal in all her instincts and desires.
+
+Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every dance
+invitations to other dances are distributed with a lavish hand. These
+invitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over chairs
+and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are locally
+known as "throw-aways." Here are a few specimens, from which you may
+form an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind of
+people--almost the only kind of people--who offer pleasure to the
+starved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actual
+invitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker of
+the New York College Settlement:
+
+     "_Second annual reception and ball, given by Jibo and Jack, at New
+     Starlight Hall, 143 Suffolk Street, December 25. Music by our
+     favorite. Gents ticket 25 cents, Ladies 15 cents._"
+
+     "_Don't miss the ball given by Joe the Greaser, and Sam Rosenstock,
+     at Odd Fellows' Hall, January 29th._"
+
+     "_See the Devil Dance at the Reception and Ball given by Max Pascal
+     and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday evening, November
+     20th."_
+
+     _ "Reception and Ball given by two well known friends, Max Turk and
+     Sam Lande, better known as Mechuch, at Appollo Hall, Chrystmas
+     night. Floor manager, Young Louis. Ticket admit one 25 cents._"
+
+In addition to these private affairs which are arranged purely for the
+profit of "Jibo and Jack" and their kind, men who make a living in this
+and in yet more unspeakable ways, there are hundreds of saloon dance
+halls, not only in New York, but in other cities. These are simply
+annexes to drinking places, and people are not welcome there unless they
+drink. No admission is charged.
+
+There are also numberless dancing academies. Dancing lessons are given
+four nights in the week, as a rule, and the dancing public buys
+admission the other three nights and on Sunday afternoons. Some dancing
+academies, even in tenement house quarters, are reputable institutions,
+but to most of them the lowest of the low, both men and women, resort.
+There, as in the dance halls, the "White Slaver" plies his trade, and
+the destroyer of womanliness lays his nets.
+
+Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places. She learned to
+"spiel." You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms' length,
+and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl's
+skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of the
+spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for
+liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong
+drink.
+
+Annie also learned to dance what is known as the "half time," or the
+"part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and
+contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a
+very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan
+harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crude
+peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it to
+immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell
+the girls that it is the _American_ fashion of waltzing.
+
+Annie Donnelly's destruction was accomplished in less than a year. It
+was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her home.
+There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too
+crowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother were
+respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie's first real
+misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to
+go home.
+
+The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically
+unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in
+every city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which,
+every year, thousands of girls descend to the way of the prodigal. No
+one has counted their number. All we know of the unclassed is that they
+exist, apparently in ever-increasing masses.
+
+It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six
+thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like
+twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law. That
+is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so
+unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of these
+unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible to
+know--we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the
+unclassed.
+
+[Illustration: A DANCE HALL]
+
+The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it may
+occupy a vacant store building, or a large loft. Somewhere in its
+immediate vicinity there is a saloon. A dance lasts about five minutes,
+and the interval between dances is from ten to twenty minutes. Waiters
+circle among the dancers, importuning them to drink. The dance hall
+without a bar, or some source of liquid supply, does not often exist,
+except as it has been established by social workers to offset the
+influence of the commercial dance hall.
+
+Some dance halls are small and wretchedly lighted. Others are large and
+pretentious. Some of them have direct connections with Raines Law hotels
+and their prototypes. Of hardly a single dance hall can a good word be
+said. They are almost entirely in the hands of the element lowest in
+society, in business, and in politics.
+
+From the old-fashioned German family picnic park to Coney Island in New
+York, Revere Beach in Boston, The White City in Chicago, Savin Rock in
+New Haven, and their like, is a far cry.
+
+Some of these summer parks try to keep their amusements clean and
+decent, and some, notably Euclid Park, Cleveland, succeed. But drink and
+often worse evils are characteristic of most of them. There are parts
+of Coney Island where no beer is sold, where the vaudeville and the
+moving pictures are clean and wholesome, where dancing is orderly. But
+the nearest side street has its "tough joint." The same thing is true of
+the big summer resorts of other cities.
+
+The dance hall, both winter and summer types, have had a deteriorating
+effect upon the old-fashioned dancing academy. Formerly these were
+respectable establishments where people paid for dancing lessons. Now
+they are a _mélange_ of dancing classes and public entertainments. The
+dancing masters, unable to compete with the dance hall proprietors, have
+been obliged to transfer many of the dance hall features to their
+establishments.
+
+Oddly enough it is rather an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted to
+a dance in any kind of a dance hall. The girls go alone, with a friend,
+or with a group of girls. The exceptional girl, who is attended by a
+man, must dance with him, or if she accepts another part ner, she must
+ask his permission. An escort is deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage.
+Those who go unattended are always sure of partners. Often they meet
+"fellows" they know, or have seen on the streets. Introductions are not
+necessary. Even if a girl is unacquainted with any "fellows," if she
+possesses slight attractions, she is still sure of partners.
+
+The amount of money spent by working girls for dance-hall admissions is
+considerable. A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages
+thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.
+
+In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number of
+black-gowned girls. The black gown might almost be called the mark of
+the dance-hall _habitué_, the girl who is dance mad and who spends all
+her evenings going from one resort to another. She wears black because
+light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.
+
+An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the "spieler." This
+is a young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilled
+and untiring dancer. The business of the spieler is to look after the
+wall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he
+dances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for a
+place to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to those
+dance halls where they have had the best time.
+
+The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is a
+sinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls. The
+dance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth of
+many of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type.
+
+Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most brutally
+evil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense of
+chaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution. It is
+vicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, the
+desire of men and women to associate together, and distorts that
+instinct into evil. The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes,
+especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share their
+pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. The
+position of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treat
+her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy
+does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very
+readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack of
+chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward
+course.
+
+Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive
+young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although not
+remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a
+stenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon as
+she finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with her
+working papers. The family needed additional income, not to meet actual
+living expenses, for the Greenbaums were not acutely poor, but in order
+that the only son of the family might go to college. Max was seventeen,
+a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his superiority
+over his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family should
+toil unceasingly for his advancement.
+
+Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslin
+underwear factory. At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as a
+skilled operator on a tucking machine. She sat down to her work every
+morning at eight o'clock, and for four hours watched with straining eyes
+a tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips of
+muslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches a
+minute. The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above the
+cloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil the
+continuity of a tuck. When you are on piece wages you do not relish
+stopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work.
+
+So Sadie watched the needle assiduously, and ignored the fact that her
+head ached pretty regularly, and she was generally too weary when lunch
+time came to enjoy the black bread and pickles which, with a cup of
+strong tea, made her noon meal. After lunch she again sat down to her
+machine and watched the needles gallop over the cloth.
+
+At the end of each year Sadie Greenbaum had produced for the good of the
+community _four miles_ of tucked muslin. In return, the community had
+rendered her back something less than three hundred dollars, for the
+muslin underwear trade has its dull seasons, and you do not earn seven
+dollars every week in the year.
+
+Each week Sadie handed her pay envelope unopened to her mother. The
+mother bought all Sadie's clothes and gave her food and shelter.
+Consequently, Sadie's unceasing vigil of the needle paid for her
+existence and purchased also the proud consciousness of an older brother
+who would one day own a doctor's buggy and a social position.
+
+The one joy of this girl's life, in fact all the real life she lived,
+was dancing. Regularly every Saturday night Sadie and a girl friend,
+Rosie by name, put on their best clothes and betook themselves to
+Silver's Casino, a huge dance hall with small rooms adjoining, where
+food and much drink were to be had.
+
+There was a good floor at Silver's and a brass band to dance to. It was
+great! The girls never lacked partners, and they made some very
+agreeable acquaintances.
+
+In the dressing room, between dances, all the girls exchanged
+conversation, views on fashions, confidences about the young men and
+other gossip. Some of the girls were nice and some, it must be admitted,
+were "tough." What was the difference? The tough girls, with their
+daring humor, their cigarettes, their easy manners, and their amazingly
+smart clothes, furnished a sort of spice to the affair.
+
+Sadie and Rosie sometimes discussed the tough girls, and the
+conversation nearly always ended with one remarking: "Well, if they
+don't get anything else out of livin', look at the clothes they put on
+their backs."
+
+Perhaps you can understand that longing for pretty gowns, perhaps you
+can even sympathize with it. Of course, if you have a number of other
+resources, you can keep the dress hunger in its proper place. But if you
+have nothing in your existence but a machine--at which you toil for
+others' benefit;
+
+Sadie and Rosie continued to spend their Saturday evenings and their
+Sunday evenings at Silver's Casino. At first they went home together
+promptly at midnight. After midnight these casino dance halls change
+their character. Often professional "pace makers" are introduced, men
+and women of the lowest class, who are paid to inspire the other dancers
+to lewd conduct. These wretched people are immodestly clothed, and they
+perform immodest or very tough dances. They are usually known as
+"Twisters," a descriptive title. When they make their appearance the
+self-respecting dancers go home, and a much looser element comes in. The
+pace becomes a rapid one. Manners are free, talk is coarse, laughter is
+incessant. The bar does a lively business. The dancing and the revels go
+on until daylight.
+
+The first time Sadie and Rosie allowed themselves to be persuaded to
+stay at Silver's after midnight they were rather horrified by the
+abandoned character of the dancing, the reckless drinking, and the
+fighting which resulted in several men being thrown out. The second time
+they were not quite so horrified, but they decided not to stay so late
+another time. Then came a great social event, the annual "mask and
+shadow dance" of a local political organization. Sadie and Rosie
+attended.
+
+A "mask and shadow dance" is as important a function to girls of Sadie's
+and Rosie's class as a cotillion is to girls of your class. Such affairs
+are possible only in large dance halls, and to do them impressively
+costs the proprietor some money. The guests rent costumes and masks and
+appear in very gala fashion indeed. They dance in the rays of all kinds
+of colored lights thrown upon them from upper galleries. During part of
+a waltz the dancers are bathed in rose-colored lights, which change
+suddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects are
+made, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers' shadows are
+thrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor. At intervals a rain of
+bright-colored confetti pours down from above. The scene becomes
+bacchanalian. Color, light, music, confetti, the dance, together
+combine to produce an intense and voluptuous intoxication which the
+revelers deepen with drink.
+
+The events of the latter part of that night were very vague in Sadie's
+memory when she awoke late the next morning. She remembered that she had
+tolerated familiarities which had been foreign to her experience
+heretofore, and that she had been led home by some friendly soul, at
+daylight, almost helpless from liquor.
+
+Frightened, haunted by half-ashamed memories of that dance, Sadie
+spoiled a good bit of her work on Monday morning. The forewoman
+descended on her with a torrent of coarse abuse, whereupon Sadie rose
+suddenly from her machine, and in a burst of hysterical profanity and
+tears rushed out of the factory, vowing never to return. There was only
+one course, she decided, for her to take, and she took it.
+
+"Sadie, why did you do it?" wailed Rosie the next time they met.
+
+"It's better than the factory," said Sadie.
+
+Tucking muslin underwear is dull work, but it is, in most ways, a more
+agreeable task than icing cakes in a St. Louis biscuit factory. All day
+Edna M---- stood over a tank filled with thick chocolate icing. The
+table beside Edna's tank was kept constantly supplied with freshly baked
+"lady-fingers," and these in delicate handfuls Edna seized and plunged
+into the hot ooze of the chocolate. Her arms, up to the elbows, went
+into the black stuff, over and over again all day. At noon, over their
+lunch, the girls talked of their recreations, their clothes, their
+"fellows."
+
+Edna had not very much to contribute to the girls' stories of gayety and
+adventure. She led a quieter existence than most of the other girls,
+although her leanings were toward lively pleasures. She was engaged to a
+young man who worked in a foundry and who was steady and perhaps rather
+too serious. He was very jealous of Edna and exacted a stern degree of
+fidelity of her.
+
+Before her engagement Edna had gone to a decent dancing school and
+dearly loved the dance. Now she was not permitted to dance with any one
+but her prospective husband. The bright talk at the noon hour made Edna
+feel that she was a very poor sport.
+
+The young man's work in the foundry alternated weekly between day and
+night duty. It occurred to Edna that her young man could not possibly
+know what she did with those evenings he remained in the foundry. If she
+chose to go with a group of girls to a dance hall, what harm? The long
+years of married life stretched themselves out somewhat drably to Edna.
+She decided to have a good time beforehand.
+
+This girl from now on literally lived a double life. Evenings of the
+weeks her young man was free from the foundry, she spent at home with
+him, placidly playing cards, reading aloud, or talking. On the other
+evenings she danced, madly, incessantly. Her mother thought she spent
+the evenings with her girl friends. The dancing, plus the deceit, soon
+had its effect on Edna. She began to visit livelier and livelier
+resorts, curious to see all phases of pleasure.
+
+Suspicion entered into the mind of her affianced. He questioned her;
+she lied, and he was unconvinced. A night or two later the young man
+stayed away from the foundry and followed Edna to a suburban resort. She
+went, as usual, with a group of girls, but their men were waiting for
+them near the door of the open-air dancing pavilion. Standing just
+outside, the angry lover watched the girl "spiel" round and round with a
+man of doubtful respectability. Soon she joined a noisy, beer-drinking
+group at one of the tables, and her behavior grew more and more
+reckless. Finally, amid laughter, she and another girl performed a
+suggestive dance together.
+
+Walking swiftly up to her, the outraged foundryman grasped her by the
+shoulder, called her a name she did not yet deserve, and threw her
+violently to the floor. A terrific fight followed, and the police soon
+cleared the place.
+
+Edna did not dare go home. An over-rigid standard of morals, an
+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 _naïveté_. 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, Küche, 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.,
+Mercy, Anna,
+Meredith, Ellis
+Milholland, Inez,
+Mills,
+Mills, Enos,
+Miner, Maude E.,
+Miner, Stella,
+Missouri,
+Mitchell, John,
+Montana,
+Moore, Mrs. Philip N.,
+Morgan, Anne
+Mott, Lucretia,
+Muller, Curt
+
+Napoleon,
+Napoleon Code
+Nathan, Mrs. Frederick
+National Civic Federation,
+National Congress of Mothers,
+National Manufacturers' Association
+National Society of Collegiate Alumnae,
+National Woman Suffrage Association
+Nebraska
+Nestor, Agnes,
+Nevada,
+New England,
+New Haven, Conn.
+New Jersey,
+New Mexico,
+New York,
+New York, N.Y.,
+New York Telephone Co.,
+New Zealand,
+Night Court. See _Jefferson Market Court_
+Night work of women,
+North Carolina
+North Dakota,
+
+Ohio,
+Oklahoma,
+Orange, House of,
+Oregon,
+Oregon case,
+Oregon Standard,_Out of Work_, Miss Kellor's
+
+Palisades of the Hudson,
+Panama Canal,
+Pankhurst, Mrs.,
+Paris,
+Peace
+Pennsylvania,
+Persia,
+Philadelphia,
+Pike, Violet,
+Pittsburg,
+Playgrounds,
+Playgrounds Association of America
+Portland, Ore.,
+Portugal
+Potter, Virginia,
+Probation Association of N.Y.,
+Property Law, Married Women's,
+Public Service League of Denver, Colo.
+Puritans
+
+_Resurrection_, Tolstoy's,
+Revere Beach,
+Rheinhard Commission,
+Rhode Island
+"Rights of Man,"
+Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory,
+Robins, Mrs. Raymond,
+Robinson, Mrs. Helen Ring,
+Rochester, N.Y., Industrial School,
+Roxbury, Mass., carpet mill strike,
+Russia,
+
+Sage, Mrs. Russell,
+St. Louis, Mo.
+Salic Law,
+Salmon, Prof. Lucy Maynard
+Salt Lake City,
+San Francisco,
+Schoenfeld, Julia,
+Scranton, Pa.,
+Seneca Falls convention,
+Servant problem. See _Domestic Service_
+Shaw, Dr. Anna,
+Shirt-waist makers' strike,
+Smith, "Gypsy,"
+Snowden, Mrs. Philip,
+Social evil,
+Social purity
+Socialist party
+South Africa,
+South Carolina,
+South Chicago,
+South Dakota,
+Spain
+Stanton, Elizabeth Cady
+Stover, Charles B.,
+Succession to throne by women,
+Sweat shop, the
+Switzerland
+
+Teacher's Federation of Chicago
+Ten-hour day,
+Tennessee
+Texas,
+Tillman case,
+Turkey,
+Tuthill, Judge R.S.,
+Twentieth Century Club of Detroit,
+
+United States Government
+United States Industrial Commission,
+United Textile Workers
+Utah
+
+Vassar College,
+Victoria, Queen,
+Virginia,
+Voters' League for Equal Suffrage,
+
+Wage earning, women in,
+Washington (state),
+Waverley House,
+White, Mrs. Lovell,
+"White Slave" traffic
+Whitman, Charles S.,
+Wilhelmina, Queen,
+Windeguth, Dora
+Winthrop, Mrs. Egerton,
+_Woman and Economics_, Gilman's,
+Woman suffrage,
+Woman Suffrage Party
+Woman's Christian Temperance Union,
+Woman's Municipal League of N.Y.,
+Women, their ideals,
+  in Europe,
+  in America,
+  in industry,
+  their fight against the social evil,
+  in domestic service,
+  collective opinion of,
+Women's Civic Club of San Francisco,
+Women's Club, of Lake City, Minn.,
+  of Dallas, Tex.,
+  of San Francisco,
+  of Pittsburg
+  of Detroit,
+  of Philadelphia,
+  of Harrisburg, Pa.,
+  of Birmingham, Ala.,
+  of Carlisle, Pa.,
+  of Cranford, N.J.,
+Women's Clubs
+Women's Educational and Industrial Union of BostonWomen's League of Justice,
+Women's Political Equality Union,
+Women's Property Act,
+Women's Trade Union League
+Working Women's Society
+Wyoming,
+
+Yonkers, N.Y.,
+Young Women's Christian Association
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's What eight million women want, by Rheta Childe Dorr
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12226 ***
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+by Rheta Childe Dorr.</title>
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12226 ***</div>
+
+<h1><br>
+</h1>
+Images provided by: Million Book Project.<br>
+<br>
+Post-Processing : Wilelmina Malli&egrave;re.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1></h1>
+<h1>WHAT EIGHT MILLION</h1>
+<h1>WOMEN WANT</h1>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img001"></a><img
+ style="width: 400px; height: 318px;"
+ alt="CONVENTION OF OUR WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK"
+ title="CONVENTION OF OUR WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK"
+ src="images/001.jpg"><br>
+</div>
+<br>
+<h1>WHAT EIGHT MILLION</h1>
+<h1>WOMEN WANT</h1>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2 style="font-weight: bold;">RHETA CHILDE DORR</h2>
+<h3>1910.</h3>
+<br>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;">
+<h4>TO</h4>
+<h4>THE AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVES</h4>
+<h4>OF THE EIGHT MILLION&#8212;</h4>
+<h4>THE EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND MEMBERS</h4>
+<h4>OF THE GENERAL FEDERATION OF</h4>
+<h4>WOMEN'S CLUBS&#8212;</h4>
+<h4>THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED</h4>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<br>
+<p style="margin-left: 40px;">Many of the chapters contained in this
+volume appeared as special articles in <i>Hampton's Magazine</i>, to
+the editor of which the
+author's
+thanks are due for permission to republish.
+</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;"><br>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<p>CHAPTER</p>
+<br>
+<ul>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I INTRODUCTORY</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V WOMAN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII WOMAN'S HELPING HAND FOR THE
+PRODIGAL DAUGHTER</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_X">X VOTES FOR WOMEN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">XI IN CONCLUSION</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></li>
+</ul>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<br>
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<br>
+<ul>
+  <li><a href="#img001">CONVENTION OF CLUB WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW
+YORK</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img002">CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img003">CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON
+PARK, PITTSBURGH</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img004">STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR
+SCHOOL YARD, LOS
+ANGELES,
+CAL.</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img005">MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img006">LADY ABERDEEN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img007">A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img008">MISS EMILIE BULLOWA</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img009">MRS. FREDERICK NATHAN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img010">MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img011">MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img012">A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img013">MISS MAUDE E. MINER</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img014">IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img015">MISS SADIE AMERICAN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img016">A TYPICAL DANCE HALL</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img017">AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT
+QUESTION</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img018">ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL
+QUESTION</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img019">THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img020">SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img021">MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img022">MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img023">THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE
+ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL
+27,
+1909</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img024">HELEN HOY GREELEY</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img025">SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img026">THE "QUIET WALK" OF THE NEW YORK
+SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE
+WOULD
+NOT
+PERMIT TO PARADE</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img027">SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW
+YORK</a></li>
+</ul>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<br>
+<h2>WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT</h2>
+<br>
+<a name="Page_1"></a>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h2>INTRODUCTORY</h2>
+<p>For the audacity of the title of this book I offer no apology. I
+have
+had it pointed out, not altogether facetiously, that it is impossible
+to
+determine with accuracy what one woman, much less what any number of
+women, wants. I sympathize with the first half of the tradition. The
+desires, that is to say, the ideals, of an individual, man or woman,
+are
+not always easy to determine. The individual is complex and exceedingly
+prone to variation. The mass alone is consistent. The ideals of the
+mass
+of women are wrapped in mystery simply because no one has cared enough
+about them to inquire what they are.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_2"></a>Men, ardently, eternally, interested in
+Woman&#8212;one woman at a time&#8212;are
+almost never even faintly interested in women. Strangely, deliberately
+ignorant of women, they argue that their ignorance is justified by an
+innate unknowableness of the sex.</p>
+<p>I am persuaded that the time is at hand when this sentimental, half
+contemptuous attitude of half the population towards the other half
+will
+have to be abandoned. I believe that the time has arrived when
+self-interest, if other motive be lacking, will compel society to
+examine the ideals of women. In support of this opinion I ask you to
+consider three facts, each one of which is so patent that it requires
+no
+argument.</p>
+<p>The Census of 1900 reported nearly six million women in the United
+States engaged in wage earning outside their homes. Between 1890 and
+1900 the number of women in industry increased faster than the number
+of
+men in industry. <i>It increased faster than the birth rate.</i> The
+number
+of women wage earners at the present date can only be estimated. Nine
+<a name="Page_3"></a>million would be a conservative guess. Nine
+million women who have
+forsaken the traditions of the hearth and are competing with men in the
+world of paid labor, means that women are rapidly passing from the
+domestic control of their fathers and their husbands. Surely this is
+the
+most important economic fact in the world to-day.</p>
+<p>Within the past twenty years no less than nine hundred and
+fifty-four
+thousand divorces have been granted in the United States. Two thirds of
+these divorces were granted to aggrieved wives. In spite of the
+anathemas of the church, in the face of tradition and early precept, in
+defiance of social ostracism, accepting, in the vast majority of cases,
+the responsibility of self support, more than six hundred thousand
+women, in the short space of twenty years, repudiated the burden of
+uncongenial marriage. Without any doubt this is the most important
+social fact we have had to face since the slavery question was settled.</p>
+<p>Not only in the United States, but in every <a name="Page_4"></a>constitutional
+country in
+the world the movement towards admitting women to full political
+equality with men is gathering strength. In half a dozen countries
+women
+are already completely enfranchised. In England the opposition is
+seeking terms of surrender. In the United States the stoutest enemy of
+the movement acknowledges that woman suffrage is ultimately inevitable.
+The voting strength of the world is about to be doubled, and the new
+element is absolutely an unknown quantity. Does any one question that
+this is the most important political fact the modern world has ever
+faced?</p>
+<p>I have asked you to consider three facts, but in reality they are
+but
+three manifestations of one fact, to my mind the most important human
+fact society has yet encountered. Women have ceased to exist as a
+subsidiary class in the community. They are no longer wholly dependent,
+economically, intellectually, and spiritually, on a ruling class of
+men.
+They look on life with the eyes of reasoning adults, where once they
+<a name="Page_5"></a>regarded it as trusting children. Women now form a
+new social group,
+separate, and to a degree homogeneous. Already they have evolved a
+group
+opinion and a group ideal.</p>
+<p>And this brings me to my reason for believing that society will soon
+be
+compelled to make a serious survey of the opinions and ideals of women.
+As far as these have found collective expressions, it is evident that
+they differ very radically from accepted opinions and ideals of men. As
+a matter of fact, it is inevitable that this should be so. Back of the
+differences between the masculine and the feminine ideal lie centuries
+of different habits, different duties, different ambitions, different
+opportunities, different rewards.</p>
+<p>I shall not here attempt to outline what the differences have been
+or
+why they have existed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in <i>Women and
+Economics</i>, did this before me,&#8212;did it so well that it need never be
+done again. I merely wish to point out that different habits of action
+necessarily result, after long centuries, in differ<a name="Page_6"></a>ent
+habits of
+thought. Men, accustomed to habits of strife, pursuit of material
+gains,
+immediate and tangible rewards, have come to believe that strife is not
+only inevitable but desirable; that material gain and visible reward
+are
+alone worth coveting. In this commercial age strife means business
+competition, reward means money. Man, in the aggregate, thinks in terms
+of money profit and money loss, and try as he will, he cannot yet think
+in any other terms.</p>
+<p>I have in mind a certain rich young man, who, when he is not
+superintending the work of his cotton mills in Virginia, is giving his
+time to settlement work in the city of Washington. The rich young man
+is
+devoted to the settlement. One day he confided to a guest of the house,
+a social worker of note, that he wished he might dedicate his entire
+life to philanthropy.</p>
+<p>"There is much about a commercial career that is depressing to a
+sympathetic nature," he declared. "For example, it constantly de<a
+ name="Page_7"></a>presses
+me to observe the effect of the cotton mills on the girls in my employ.
+They come in from the country, fresh, blooming, and eager to work.
+Within a few months perhaps they are pale, anaemic, listless. Not
+infrequently a young girl contracts tuberculosis and dies before one
+realizes that she is ill. It wrings the heart to see it."</p>
+<p>"I suspect," said the visitor, "that there is something wrong with
+your
+mills. Are you sure that they are sufficiently well ventilated?"</p>
+<p>"They are as well ventilated as we can have them," said the rich
+young
+man. "Of course we cannot keep the windows open."</p>
+<p>"Why not?" persisted the visitor.</p>
+<p>"Because in our mills we spin both black and white yarn, and if the
+windows were kept open the lint from the black yarn would blow on the
+white yarn and ruin it."</p>
+<p>A quick vision rose before the visitor's consciousness, of a mill
+room,
+noisy with clacking machinery, reeking with the mingled odors of
+perspiration and warm oil, obscure with flying <a name="Page_8"></a>cotton
+flakes which
+covered the forms of the workers like snow and choked in their throats
+like desert sand.</p>
+<p>"But," she exclaimed, "you can have two rooms, one for the white
+yarn
+and the other for the black."</p>
+<p>The rich young man shook his head with the air of one who goes away
+exceedingly sorrowful.</p>
+<p>"No," he replied, "we can't. The business won't stand it."</p>
+<p>This story presents in miniature the social attitude of the majority
+of
+men. They cannot be held entirely responsible. Their minds
+automatically
+function just that way. They have high and generous impulses, their
+hearts are susceptible to tenderest pity, they often possess the vision
+of brotherhood and human kinship, but habit, long habit, always
+intervenes in time to save the business from loss of a few dollars
+profit.</p>
+<p>Three years ago Chicago was on the eve of one of its periodical
+"vice
+crusades," of which <a name="Page_9"></a>more later. Sensational
+stories had been published
+in several newspapers, to the effect that no fewer than five thousand
+Jewish girls were leading lives of shame in the city, a statement which
+was received with horror by the Jewish population of Chicago. A meeting
+of wealthy and influential men and women was called in the law library
+of a well known jurist and philanthropist. Representatives from various
+social settlements in Jewish quarters of the town were invited, and it
+was as a guest of one of these settlements that I was privileged to be
+present.</p>
+<p>Eloquent addresses were made and an elaborate plan for investigation
+and
+relief was outlined. Finally it came to a point where ways and means
+had
+to be considered. The presiding officer put this phase of the matter to
+the conference with smiling frankness. "You must realize, ladies and
+gentlemen," he said, "that we have entered upon an extensive and, I am
+afraid, a very expensive campaign."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_10"></a>At this a middle aged and notably dignified
+man arose and said with
+emotion trembling in his voice: "Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen
+of the conference, this surely is no time for us to think of economy of
+expenditure. If the daughters of Israel are losing their ancient dower
+of purity, the sons of Israel should be willing, nay, eager to ransom
+them at any cost. Permit me, as a privileged honor which I value
+highly,
+to offer, as a contribution towards the preliminary expenses of this
+campaign, my check for ten thousand dollars."</p>
+<p>He sat down to that polite little murmur of applause which goes
+round
+the room, and I whispered to the head resident of the settlement of
+which I was a guest, an inquiry as to the identity of the generous
+donor.</p>
+<p>"That gentleman," she whispered in reply, "is one of the owners of a
+great mail order department store in Chicago." She sighed deeply, as
+she
+added: "During the first week of the panic that store discharged,
+without warning, five hundred girls."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_11"></a>These typical examples of the reasoning
+processes of men are offered
+without the slightest rancor. They had to be given in order that the
+woman's habit of thought might be explained with clearness.</p>
+<p>Women, since society became an organized body, have been engaged in
+the
+rearing, as well as the bearing of children. They have made the home,
+they have cared for the sick, ministered to the aged, and given to the
+poor. The universal destiny of the mass of women trained them to feed
+and clothe, to invent, manufacture, build, repair, contrive, conserve,
+economize. They lived lives of constant service, within the narrow
+confines of a home. Their labor was given to those they loved, and the
+reward they looked for was purely a spiritual reward.</p>
+<p>A thousand generations of service, unpaid, loving, intimate, must
+have
+left the strongest kind of a mental habit in its wake. Women, when they
+emerged from the seclusion of their homes and began to mingle in the
+world pro<a name="Page_12"></a>cession, when they were thrown on their
+own financial
+responsibility, found themselves willy nilly in the ranks of the
+producers, the wage earners; when the enlightenment of education was no
+longer denied them, when their responsibilities ceased to be entirely
+domestic and became somewhat social, when, in a word, women began to
+<i>think</i>, they naturally thought in human terms. They couldn't have
+thought otherwise if they had tried.</p>
+<p>They might have learned, it is true. In certain circumstances women
+might have been persuaded to adopt the commercial habit of thought. But
+the circumstances were exactly propitious for the encouragement of the
+old-time woman habit of service. The modern thinking, planning,
+self-governing, educated woman came into a world which is losing faith
+in the commercial ideal, and is endeavoring to substitute in its place
+a
+social ideal. She came into a generation which is reaching passionate
+hands towards democracy. She became one with a nation which is weary of
+wars and <a name="Page_13"></a>hatreds, impatient with greed and
+privilege, sickened of
+poverty, disease, and social injustice. The modern, free-functioning
+woman accepted without the slightest difficulty these new ideals of
+democracy and social service. Where men could do little more than
+theorize in these matters, women were able easily and effectively to
+act.</p>
+<p>I hope that I shall not be suspected of ascribing to women any
+ingrained
+or fundamental moral superiority to men. Women are not better than men.
+The mantle of moral superiority forced upon them as a substitute for
+intellectual equality they accepted, because they could not help
+themselves. They dropped it as soon as the substitute was no longer
+necessary.</p>
+<p>That the mass of women are invariably found on the side of the new
+ideals is no evidence of their moral superiority to men; it is merely
+evidence of their intellectual youth.</p>
+<p>Visitors from western cities and towns are often amazed, and vastly
+amused, to find in <a name="Page_14"></a>New York and other eastern
+cities little
+narrow-gauge street car lines, where gaunt horses haul the shabbiest of
+cars over the oldest and roughest of road beds. The Westerner declares
+that nowhere in the East does he find surface cars that equal in
+comfort
+and elegance the cars recently installed in his Michigan or Nebraska or
+Washington home town.</p>
+<p>"Recently installed." There you have it.</p>
+<p>The eastern city retains its horse cars and its out-of-date electric
+rolling stock because it has them, and because there are all sorts of
+difficulties in the way of replacing them. Old franchises have to
+expire
+or otherwise be got rid of; corporations have to be coaxed or coerced;
+greed and corruption often have to be overcome; huge sums of money have
+to be appropriated; a whole machinery of municipal government has to be
+set in motion before the old and established city can change its
+traction system.</p>
+<p>The new western town goes on foot until it <a name="Page_15"></a>attains
+to a certain size
+and a sufficient prosperity. Then it installs electric railways, and of
+course it purchases the newest and most modern of the available models.</p>
+<p>New social ideals are difficult for men to acquire in a practical
+way
+because their minds are filled with old traditions, inherited memories,
+outworn theories of law, government, and social control. They cannot
+get
+rid of these at once. They have used them so long, have found them so
+convenient, so satisfactory, that even when you show them something
+admittedly better; they are able only partially to comprehend and to
+accept.</p>
+<p>Women, on the other hand, have very few antiques to get rid of.
+Until
+recently their minds, scantily furnished with a few personal
+preferences
+and personal prejudices, were entirely bare of community ideals or any
+social theory. When they found themselves in need of a social theory it
+was only natural that they should choose the most modern, the most
+progressive, the most idealistic. They made their <a name="Page_16"></a>choice
+unconsciously,
+and they began the application of their new-found theory almost
+automatically. The machinery they employed was the long derided,
+misconceived, and unappreciated Women's Club.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_II"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_17"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h2>FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Unless you have lived in a live town in the Middle West&#8212;say in
+Michigan, or Indiana, or Nebraska&#8212;you cannot have a very adequate idea
+of how ugly, and dirty, and neglected, and disreputable a town can be
+when nobody loves it. The railway station is a long, low, rakish thing
+of boards, painted a muddy maroon color. Around it is a stretch of bare
+ground strewn with ashes. Beyond lies the main street, with some good
+business blocks,&#8212;a First National Bank in imposing granite, and a
+Masonic Temple in pressed brick. The high school occupies a treeless,
+grassless, windswept block by itself.</p>
+<p>In the center of the residential section of the town is a big,
+unsightly, hummocky vacant place, vaguely known as the park&#8212;or the
+<a name="Page_18"></a>place where they are going to have a park, when
+the city gets around to
+it. At present it is a convenient spot wherein to dump tin cans, empty
+bottles, broken crockery, old shoes, and other residue. When the wind
+blows, in the spring and fall, a fine assortment of desiccated rubbish
+is wafted up and down, and into the neighbors' dooryards.</p>
+<p>Everybody is busy in these live towns. Everybody is prosperous, and
+patriotic, and law-abiding, and respectable. The business of "getting
+on" absorbs the entire time and attention of the men. They "get on" so
+well, for the most part, that their wives have plenty of leisure on
+their hands, and the latter occupy a portion of their leisure by
+belonging to a club, organized for the study of the art of the
+Renaissance, Chinese religions before Confucius, or the mystery of
+Browning. The club meets every second Wednesday, and the members read
+papers, after which there is tea and a social hour. The papers vary in
+degree alone, as the writer happens to be a skimmer, a wader, <a
+ name="Page_19"></a>or a
+deep-sea diver in standard editions of the encyclopedias. The social
+hour, however, occasionally develops in a direction quite away from the
+realms of pure culture.</p>
+<p>Such a town, with such a woman's club, was Lake City, Minnesota, a
+few
+years ago. Lake City had a busy and a prosperous male population, a
+woman's club bent on intellectual uplift, and a place where there was
+going to be a park. One windy second Wednesday the club members arrived
+with their eyes full of dust, soot on their white gloves, and
+indignation in their hearts. When tea and the social hour came around
+culture went by the board and the conversation turned to the perfectly
+disgraceful way in which the town's street cleaning was conducted.</p>
+<p>"The streets are bad enough," said one member, "but, after all, one
+expects the streets to be dusty. What I object to is having a city
+dump-heap at my front door. Have any of you crossed my corner of the
+park since the snow melted?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_20"></a>She drew a lively picture of a state of things
+gravely menacing to the
+health of her neighborhood, and that of all the people whose homes
+faced
+the neglected square.</p>
+<p>"Why doesn't somebody complain to the authorities?" she concluded.
+"Why
+don't we do something about it? The next time we meet we might at least
+adopt resolutions, or, better still, have a committee appointed. What
+do
+you think, Madam President?"</p>
+<p>Madam President tapped her teaspoon on the edge of her empty cup. "I
+think," she said, "that we will come to order and do it now. Will you
+put what you have just suggested in the form of a motion?"</p>
+<p>At the next meeting of the club the committee to investigate the
+park
+made its report. The club members began a lively canvass among real
+estate owners and business men, and before long an astonished city
+council found itself on its feet, receiving a deputation from the
+woman's club. The women came armed with a donation of fifteen hundred
+dol<a name="Page_21"></a>lars cash, and a polite, but firm, demand that
+the money be used to
+clean up and plant the park.</p>
+<p>The council replied that it had always intended to get around to
+that
+park, and would have done it long ago but for the fact that there was
+no
+park board in existence, and could not be one, because the Solons who
+drew up the city charter had forgotten to put in a provision for such a
+board.</p>
+<p>The club held more meetings, and appointed more committees. One of
+these
+unearthed a State law which seemed to cover the case, and make a park
+board possible without the direct assistance of a city charter. The
+city
+attorney was visited, and somehow was coaxed, or argued, or bullied
+into
+giving a favorable opinion, after which the election of a park board
+followed as a matter of course. The town suddenly became interested in
+the park. The club women's fifteen hundred dollars was doubled by
+popular subscription, and the work of turning a town rubbish heap into
+<a name="Page_22"></a>a cool and shady garden spot was brief but
+durable.</p>
+<p>You wouldn't know the Lake City of those years if you saw it to-day.
+They have an attractive railroad station, paved streets, cement
+sidewalks, public playgrounds for children, a high school set in a
+shaded square, and residence streets that look like parkways. And the
+woman's club was the parent of them all.</p>
+<p>There is a theory which expresses itself somewhat obviously in the
+phrase: "Whatever all the women of the country want they will get." The
+theory is a convenient one, because it may be used to defer action on
+any suggested reform, and it is harmless because of the seeming
+impossibility of ascertaining what all the women of the country really
+want. The women of the United States and the women of all the world
+have
+discovered a means through which they may express their collective
+opinions and desires: organization, and more organization. Lake City is
+but one instance in a thousand.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_23"></a>When American women began, a generation ago,
+to form themselves into
+clubs, and later to join these clubs into state federations of clubs,
+and finally the state federations into a national body, they did not
+dream that they were going to express a collective opinion. Indeed, at
+that time not very many had opinions worth expressing. The immediate
+need of women's souls at the beginning of the club movement was for
+education; the higher education they missed by not going to college,
+and
+they formed their clubs with the sole object of self-culture.</p>
+<p>The study period did not last very long. In fact it was doomed from
+the
+beginning, for it is not in the nature of women, or at least it is not
+in the habit of women, to do things for themselves alone. They have
+<i>served</i> for so many generations that they have learned to like
+serving
+better than anything else in the world, and they add service to the
+pursuit of culture, just as some of them add the important postscript
+to
+the unimportant letter.</p>
+<p>Thus Dallas, Texas, had a women's club of <a name="Page_24"></a>the
+culture caste. One spring
+day, after the star member had read a paper on the "Lake Poets," and
+another member had rendered a Chopin <i>&eacute;tude</i> on the piano,
+they began to
+talk about the stegomyia mosquito, and what a pity it was that the
+annual danger of contagion and death from the bite of that insect had
+to
+be faced all over again. Pools of water all over town, simply swarming
+with little wriggling things, soon to emerge as full-armed stegomyias,
+merely because the city authorities hadn't the money, or said they
+hadn't, to cover the pools with oil.</p>
+<p>"Why, oil isn't very expensive," said one of the club women. "Let's
+buy
+a whole lot of it and do the work ourselves."</p>
+<p>So the work of saving hundreds of lives every year was added to the
+study of "Lake Poets" and Chopin by the Women's Club of Dallas. The
+members mapped the city, laid it out in districts, organized their
+forces, bought oil and oil-cans and set forth. They visited the
+schools,
+got teachers and pupils interested, and <a name="Page_25"></a>secured
+their co-operation. The
+study of city sanitation was soon put into the school curriculum, and
+oiling pools of standing water in every quarter of the town is now a
+regular part of the school program in the upper grades. Every year the
+club women renew the agitation, and every year the school children go
+out with their teachers and cover the pools with oil.</p>
+<p>That story could be paralleled in almost any city in the United
+States.
+Clubs everywhere organized for the intellectual advancement of the
+members, for the culture of music, art, and crafts, soon added to the
+original object a department of philanthropy, a department of public
+school decoration, a department of child labor, a department of civics.
+The day a women's club adopts civics as a side line to literature, that
+day it ceases to be a private association and becomes a public
+institution&#8212;and the public sometimes finds this out before the club
+suspects it.</p>
+<p>An Eastern woman was visiting in San Fran<a name="Page_26"></a>cisco
+a short time before the
+fire. In the complication of three streets with names almost identical,
+she lost her way to the reception whither she was bound. The conductor
+on the last car she tried before going home was deeply sympathetic.</p>
+<p>"'Tis a shame, ma'am, them streets," he declared. "I've always said
+there was no sense at all in havin' them named like that. A stranger is
+bound to go wrong. I'll tell you what you do, ma'am: you go straight to
+Mrs. Lovell White, she that bosses the women's clubs, you know, ma'am.
+You tell her about them streets, and she'll have 'em changed."</p>
+<p>The conductor's simple faith in the Women's Club of San Francisco
+did
+not lack justification. In the intervals of studying Browning and
+antique art, the club found time to discover to San Francisco all sorts
+of things that the city wanted and needed without knowing that it did.</p>
+<p>"We ought to have a flower market," pronounced the club.</p>
+<p>"<a name="Page_27"></a>Nonsense," said the City Council. "Besides,
+where is the money to come
+from?"</p>
+<p>"We'll establish the flower market and show you," returned the club.</p>
+<p>They did. They found a centrally located square, the place where
+people
+would be likely to go for an early morning sale of potted plants and
+cut
+flowers. Prices are moderate in outdoor markets, and nothing else so
+stimulates in an entire community the gardening instinct, usually
+confined to a few individuals. The city authorities discovered that the
+flower market filled a long-felt want. So the city took the market over.</p>
+<p>These activities were more or less local. Others, begun as local
+affairs, ultimately became national in scope. The movement which has
+resulted in a national program in favor of public playgrounds for
+children began as a women's club movement. For a dozen years before the
+Playgrounds Association of America came into existence, women's clubs
+all over the country had been establishing playgrounds, <a
+ name="Page_28"></a>supporting them
+out of their club treasuries, and using every power of persuasion to
+educate boards of education and city councils in their favor.</p>
+<p>Pittsburg affords a typical instance. In 1896 there was a Civic Club
+of
+Allegheny County, composed of women of the twin steel cities of
+Pittsburg and Allegheny. At the head of its Education Department there
+was a woman, Miss Beulah Kennard, who loved children; not beautifully
+clean, well behaved, curled and polished children, but just children.
+Children attracted Miss Kennard to such a degree that she couldn't bear
+the sight of them wallowing in the grime and soot of Pittsburg streets
+and alleys. Often she stopped in her walks to watch them, dodging
+wagons
+and automobiles; throwing stones, tossing balls, fighting, and shooting
+craps; stealing apples from push-carts, getting arrested and being
+dragged through the farce of a trial at law for the crime of playing.</p>
+<p>"Those children," Miss Kennard told her <a name="Page_29"></a>club,
+"have got to have a
+decent place to play this summer." And the club agreed with her. The
+treasury yielded for a beginning the modest sum of one hundred and
+twenty-five dollars, and with this money the women fitted out one
+schoolyard, large enough for sixty children to play in. There was no
+trouble about getting the sixty together. They came, a noisy, joyous,
+turbulent, vacation set of children, and the anxious committee from the
+club looked at them in great trepidation of spirit and said to one
+another: "What on earth are we going to do with them, now that we've
+got
+them here?"</p>
+<p>With hardly a ghost of precedent to guide them, the club undertook
+the
+work, and as women have had considerable experience in taking care of
+children at home, they soon discovered ways of taking care of them
+successfully in the playground.</p>
+<p>The next summer the Civic Club invested six hundred dollars in
+playgrounds. Two schoolyards were fitted up in Pittsburg and <a
+ name="Page_30"></a>two in
+Allegheny. After that, every summer, the work was extended. More money
+each year was voted, and additional playgrounds were established. In
+the
+summer of 1899, three years after the first experiment, Pittsburg
+children had nine playgrounds and Allegheny children had three, all
+gifts of the women. By another year the committee was handling
+thousands
+of dollars and managing an enterprise of considerable magnitude. Also
+their work was attracting the admiration of other club women, who asked
+for an opportunity to co-operate. In 1900 practically all the clubs of
+the two cities united, and formed a joint committee of the Women's
+Clubs
+of Pittsburg and vicinity to take charge of playgrounds.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img002"></a><img
+ style="width: 380px; height: 271px;"
+ alt="CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH. Established by club women and for years supported by them."
+ title="CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH. Established by club women and for years supported by them."
+ src="images/002.jpg"></p>
+<p>All this time the work was entirely in the hands of the club women,
+who
+bought the apparatus, organized the games, employed the trained
+supervisors, and supplied from their own membership the volunteer
+workers, without whom the enterprise would have been a <a
+ name="Page_31"></a>failure from
+the start. The Board of Education co-operated to the extent of lending
+schoolyards. Finally the Board of Education decided to vote an annual
+contribution of money.</p>
+<p>In 1902 the city of Pittsburg woke up and gave the women fifteen
+hundred
+dollars, with which they established one more playground and a
+recreation park. The original one hundred and twenty-five dollars had
+now expanded to nearly eight thousand dollars, and Pittsburg and
+Allegheny children were not only playing in a dozen schoolyards, but
+they were attending vacation schools, under expert instructors in
+manual
+training, cooking, sewing, art-crafts. Several recreation centers,
+all-the-year-round playgrounds, have been added since then. For
+Pittsburg has adopted the women's point of view in the matter of
+playgrounds. This year the city voted fifty thousand, three hundred and
+fifty dollars, and the Board of Education appropriated ten thousand
+dollars for the vacation schools.</p>
+<p>In Detroit it was the Twentieth Century <a name="Page_32"></a>Club
+that began the playground
+agitation. Mrs. Clara B. Arthur, some ten years ago, read a paper
+before
+the Department of Philanthropy and Reform, and following it the
+chairman
+of the meeting appointed a committee to consider the possibility of
+playgrounds for Detroit children. The committee visited the Board of
+Education, explained the need of playgrounds, and asked that the Board
+conduct one trial playground in a schoolyard, during the approaching
+vacation. The Board declined. The boards of education in most cities
+declined at first.</p>
+<p>The club did not give up. It talked playgrounds to the other clubs,
+until all the organizations of women were interested. Within a year or
+two Detroit had a Council of Women, with a committee on playgrounds.
+The
+committee went to the Common Council this time and asked permission to
+erect a pavilion and establish a playground on a piece of city land.
+This was a great, bare, neglected spot, the site of an abandoned
+reservoir which had been of <a name="Page_33"></a>no use to anybody
+for twenty years. The
+place had the advantage of being in a very forlorn neighborhood where
+many children swarmed.</p>
+<p>The Common Council was mildly amused at the idea of putting public
+property to such an absurd, such an unheard-of use. A few of the men
+were indignant. One Germanic alderman exploded wrathfully: "Vot does
+vimmens know about poys' play&#8212;No!" And that settled it.</p>
+<p>The committee went to the Board of Education once more, this time
+with
+better success. They received permission to open and conduct, during
+the
+long vacation, one playground in a large schoolyard. For two summers
+the
+women maintained that playground, holding their faith against the
+opposition of the janitors, the jeers of the newspapers, and the
+constant hostility of tax-payers, who protested against the "ruin of
+school property." After two years the Board of Education took over the
+work. The mayor became personally interested, and the Common Council
+gracefully surrendered. They <a name="Page_34"></a>have plenty of
+playgrounds in Detroit now,
+the latest development being winter sports.</p>
+<p>If the Germanic alderman who protested that "vimmins" did not know
+anything about boys' play was in office at the time, one wonders what
+his emotions were when the playgrounds committee first appeared before
+the Council and asked to have vacant lots flooded to give children
+skating ponds in winter. Of course the Council refused. Fire plugs were
+for water in case of fire, not for children's enjoyment. In fact there
+was a city ordinance forbidding the opening of a fire plug in winter,
+except to extinguish fire. It took two years of constant work on the
+part of the club women to remove that ordinance, but they did it, and
+the children of Detroit have their winter as well as their summer
+playgrounds.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img003"></a><img
+ style="width: 374px; height: 312px;"
+ alt="CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK, PITTSBURGH. Out of the persistent work of club women more than three hundred playgrounds for children have been established."
+ title="CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK, PITTSBURGH. Out of the persistent work of club women more than three hundred playgrounds for children have been established."
+ src="images/003.jpg"></p>
+<p>In Philadelphia are fourteen splendid playgrounds and vacation
+schools,
+established in the beginning and maintained for many years by a civic
+club of women, the largest women's civic club in the country. The
+process of edu<a name="Page_35"></a>cating public opinion in their
+favor was slow, for it
+is difficult to make men see that the children of a modern city have
+different needs from the country or village children of a generation
+ago. Men remember their own boyhood, and scoff at the idea of organized
+and supervised play in a made playground. Women have no memories of the
+old swimming-hole. They simply see the conditions before them, and they
+instinctively know what must be done to meet them. The process of
+educating the others is slow, but this year in Philadelphia sixty
+public
+schoolyards were opened for public playgrounds, and the city
+appropriated five thousand dollars towards their maintenance. In a
+hundred cities East and West the women's clubs have been the original
+movers or have co-operated in the playground movement.</p>
+<p>Out of this persistent work was born the Playground Association of
+America, an organization of men and women, which in the three years of
+its existence has established more than three hundred playgrounds for
+children. <a name="Page_36"></a>In Massachusetts they have secured a
+referendum providing
+that all cities of over ten thousand inhabitants shall vote upon the
+question of providing adequate playgrounds. The act provides that every
+city and town in the Commonwealth which accepts the act shall after
+July
+1, 1910, provide and maintain at least one public playground, and at
+least one other playground for every additional twenty thousand
+inhabitants. Something like twenty-five cities in the State have
+accepted the playgrounds act. It is a good beginning. The slogan of the
+movement, "The boy without a playground is the father of the man
+without
+a job," has swept over the continent.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img004"></a><img
+ style="width: 357px; height: 299px;"
+ alt="STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD, LOS ANGELES, CAL."
+ title="STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD, LOS ANGELES, CAL."
+ src="images/004.jpg"></p>
+<p>This surely is a not inconsiderable achievement for so humble an
+instrument as women's clubs. It is true that in most communities they
+have forgotten that the women's clubs ever had anything to do with the
+movement. The Playgrounds Association has not forgotten, however. Its
+president, Luther Halsey Gulick, of New York, declares that even now
+the
+work <a name="Page_37"></a>would languish if it lost the co-operation
+of the women's clubs.</p>
+<p>The scope of woman's work for civic betterment is wider than the
+interests that directly affect children. How much the women attempt,
+how
+difficult they find their task, how much opposition they encounter, and
+how certain their success in the end, is indicated in a modest report
+of
+the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Women's Civic Club. That report says in
+part:</p>
+<p>"It is no longer necessary for us to continue, at our own cost, the
+practical experiment we began in street-cleaning, or to advocate the
+paving of a single principal street, as a test of the value of improved
+highways; nor is it necessary longer to strive for a pure water supply,
+a healthier sewerage system, or the construction of playgrounds. <i>This
+work is now being done by the City Council, by the Board of Public
+Works, and by the Park Commission.</i>"</p>
+<p>Not that the Harrisburg Women's Civic <a name="Page_38"></a>Club
+has gone out of business. It
+still keeps fairly busy with schoolhouse decoration, traveling
+libraries
+for factory employees, and inspecting the city dump.</p>
+<p>In Birmingham, Alabama, the women's work has been recognized
+officially.
+The club Women have formed "block" clubs, composed of the women living
+in each block, and the mayor has invested them with powers of
+supervision, control of street cleaning, and disposal of waste and
+garbage. They really act as overseers, and can remove lazy and
+incompetent employees.</p>
+<p>Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has a ten-year-old Civic Club. The women
+have
+succeeded in getting objectionable billboards removed, public dumps
+removed from the town, in having all outside market stalls covered, and
+have secured ordinances forbidding spitting in public places, and
+against throwing litter into the streets.</p>
+<p>Cranford, New Jersey, is one of a dozen small cities where the
+women's
+clubs hold <a name="Page_39"></a>regular town house-cleanings. One
+large town in the Middle
+West adopted a vigorous method of educating public opinion in favor of
+spring and fall municipal house-cleaning. The club women got a
+photographer and went the rounds of streets and alleys and private
+backyards. Wherever bad or neglected conditions were found the club
+sent
+a note to the owner of the property asking him to co-operate with its
+members in cleaning up and beautifying the town. Where no attention was
+paid to the notes, the photographs were posted conspicuously in the
+club's public exhibit.</p>
+<p>If the California women saved the big tree grove, the New Jersey
+women,
+by years of persistent work, saved the Palisades of the Hudson from
+destruction and inaugurated the movement to turn them into a public
+park. As for the Colorado club women, they saved the Cliff Dwellers'
+remains. You can no longer buy the pottery and other priceless relics
+of
+those prehistoric people in the curio-shops of Denver.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_40"></a>I am not attempting a catalogue; I am only
+giving a few crucial
+instances. The activities of women if they appeared only sporadically
+in
+Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, and a dozen other cities, would not
+necessarily carry much weight. They would possess an interest purely
+local. But the club women of Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, do not
+keep their interests local. Once a year they travel, hundreds of them,
+to a chosen city in the State, and there they hold a convention which
+lasts a week. And every second year the club women of Minnesota and
+Texas and California, and every other State in the Union, to say
+nothing
+of Alaska, Porto Rico, and the Canal Zone, thousands of them, journey
+to
+a chosen center, and there they hold a convention which lasts a week.
+And at these state and national conventions the club women compare
+their
+work and criticise it, and confer on public questions, and decide which
+movements they shall promote. They summon experts in all lines of work
+to lecture and <a name="Page_41"></a>advise. Increasingly their work
+is national in its
+scope.</p>
+<p>In round numbers, eight hundred thousand women are now enrolled in
+the
+clubs belonging to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, holding in
+common certain definite opinions, and working harmoniously towards
+certain definite social ends. Remember that these eight hundred
+thousand
+women are the educated, intelligent, socially powerful.</p>
+<p>Long ago these eight hundred thousand women ceased to confine their
+studies to printed pages. They began to study life. Leaders developed,
+women of intellect and experience, who could foresee the immense power
+an organized womanhood might some time wield, and who had courage to
+direct the forces under them towards vital objects.</p>
+<p>When, in 1904, Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker, of Denver, was elected
+President
+of the General Federation, she found a number of old-fashioned clubs
+still devoting themselves to Shakespeare and the classic writers. Mrs.
+<a name="Page_42"></a>Decker, a voter, a full citizen, and a public
+worker of prominence in
+her State, simply laughed the musty study clubs out of existence.</p>
+<p>"Ladies," she said to the delegates at the biennial meeting of 1904,
+"Dante is dead. He died several centuries ago, and a great many things
+have happened since his time. Let us drop the study of his 'Inferno'
+and
+proceed in earnest to contemplate our own social order."</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img005"></a><img
+ style="width: 286px; height: 447px;" alt="MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER"
+ title="MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER" src="images/005.jpg"></div>
+<p>Mostly they took her advice. A few clubs still devote themselves to
+the
+pursuit of pure culture, a few others exist with little motive beyond
+congenial association. The great majority of women's clubs are
+organized
+for social service. A glance at their national program shows the
+modernity, the liberal character of organized women's ideals. The
+General Federation has twelve committees, among them being those on
+Industrial Conditions of Women and Children, Civil Service Reform,
+Forestry, Pure Food and Public Health, Edu<a name="Page_43"></a>cation,
+Civics,
+Legislation, Arts and Crafts, and Household Economics. Every state
+federation has adopted, in the main, the same departments; and the
+individual clubs follow as many lines of the work as their strength
+warrants.</p>
+<p>The contribution of the women's clubs to education has been
+enormous.
+There is hardly a State in the Union the public schools of which have
+not been beautified, inside and outside; hardly a State where
+kindergartens and manual training, domestic science, medical
+inspection,
+stamp savings banks, or other improvements have not been introduced by
+the clubs. In almost every case the clubs have purchased the equipment
+and paid the salaries until the boards of education and the school
+superintendents have been convinced of the value of the innovations. In
+the South, where opportunities for the higher education of women are
+restricted, the clubs support dozens of scholarships in colleges and
+institutes. Many western State federations, notable among which is that
+<a name="Page_44"></a>of Colorado, have strong committees on education
+which are active in
+the entire school system.</p>
+<p>Thomas M. Balliett, Dean of Pedagogy in the New York University,
+paid a
+deserved tribute to the Massachusetts club women when he said:</p>
+<div class="blkquot">"In Massachusetts the various women's
+organizations have, within the
+past few years, made a study of schools and school conditions
+throughout
+the State with a thoroughness that has never been attempted before."</div>
+<p>Dean Balliett says of women's clubs in general that the most
+important
+reform movements in elementary education within the past twenty years
+have been due, in large measure, to the efforts of organized women. And
+he is right.</p>
+<p>The women's clubs have founded more libraries than Mr. Carnegie.
+Early
+in the movement the women began the circulation among the clubs of
+traveling reference libraries. Soon this work was extended, but the
+object <a name="Page_45"></a>of the libraries was diverted. Instead of
+collections of books
+on special subjects to assist the club women in their studies, the
+traveling cases were arranged in miscellaneous groups, and were sent to
+schools, to factories, to lonely farms, mining camps, lumber camps, and
+to isolated towns and villages.</p>
+<p>Iowa now has more than twelve thousand volumes, half of them
+reference
+books, in circulation. Eighty-one permanent libraries have grown out of
+the traveling libraries in Iowa alone. After the traveling cases have
+been coming to a town for a year or two, people wake up and agree that
+they want a permanent place in which to read and study. Ohio has over a
+thousand libraries in circulation, having succeeded, a few years ago,
+in
+getting a substantial appropriation from the legislature to supplement
+their work. Western States&#8212;Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho&#8212;have supplied
+reading matter to ranches and mining camps for many years.</p>
+<p>One interesting special library is circulated <a name="Page_46"></a>in
+Massachusetts and
+Rhode Island in behalf of the anti-tuberculosis movement. Something
+like
+forty of the best books on health, and on the prevention and cure of
+tuberculosis, are included. This library, with a pretty complete
+tuberculosis exhibit, is sent around, and is shown by the local clubs
+of
+each town. Usually the women try to have a mass-meeting, at which local
+health problems are discussed. The Health Department of the General
+Federation is working to establish these health libraries and exhibits
+in every State.</p>
+<p>Not only in the United States, but in every civilized country, have
+women associated themselves together with the object of reforming what
+seems to them social chaos. In practically every civilized country in
+the world to-day there exists a Council of Women, a central
+organization
+to which clubs and societies of women with all sorts of opinions and
+objects send delegates. In the United States the council is made up of
+the General Federation <a name="Page_47"></a>of Women's Clubs, the
+Woman's Christian
+Temperance Union, and innumerable smaller organizations, like the
+National Congress of Mothers, and the Daughters of the American
+Revolution. More than a million and a half American women are
+affiliated.</p>
+<p>Four hundred and twenty-six women's organizations belong to the
+council
+in Great Britain. In Switzerland the council has sixty-four allied
+societies; in Austria it has fifty; in the Netherlands it has
+thirty-five. Seventy-five thousand women belong to the French council.
+In all, the International Council of Women, to which all the councils
+send delegates, represents more than eight million women, in countries
+as far apart as Australia, Argentine, Iceland, Persia, South Africa,
+and
+every country in Europe. The council, indeed, has no formal
+organization
+in Russia, because organizations of every kind are illegal in Russia.
+But Russian women attend every meeting of the International Council.
+Turkish women sent word to the last meeting that they <a name="Page_48"></a>hoped
+soon to ask
+for admission. The President of the International Council of Women is
+the Countess of Aberdeen. Titled women in every European country belong
+to their councils. The Queen of Greece is president of the Greek
+council.</p>
+<p>The object of this great world organization of women is to provide a
+common center for women of every country, race, creed, or party who are
+associating themselves together in altruistic work. Once every five
+years the International Council holds a great world congress of women.</p>
+<p>What eight million of the most intelligent, the most thoughtful, the
+most altruistic women in the world believe, what they think the world
+needs, what they wish and desire for the good of humanity, must be of
+interest. It must count.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img006"></a><img
+ style="width: 302px; height: 572px;"
+ alt="LADY ABERDEEN President of the International Council of Women."
+ title="LADY ABERDEEN President of the International Council of Women."
+ src="images/006.jpg"></p>
+<p>The International Council of Women discusses every important
+question
+presented, but makes no decision until the opinion of the delegates is
+practically unanimous. It com<a name="Page_49"></a>mits itself to no
+opinion, lends itself
+to no movement, until the movement has passed the controversial stage.</p>
+<p>Those who cling to the old notion that women are perpetually at war
+with
+one another will learn with astonishment that eight million women of
+all
+nationalities, religions, and temperaments are agreed on at least four
+questions. In the course of its twenty years of existence the
+International Council has agreed to support four movements: Peace and
+arbitration, social purity, removing legal disabilities of women, woman
+suffrage.</p>
+<p>The American reader will be inclined to cavil at the last-mentioned
+object. Woman suffrage, it will be claimed, has not passed the
+controversial stage, even with women themselves. That is true in the
+United States and in England. It is true, in a sense, in most countries
+of the world. But in European countries not <i>woman</i> suffrage, but
+<i>universal</i> suffrage is being struggled for.</p>
+<p>I had this explained to me in Russia, in the <a name="Page_50"></a>course
+of a conversation
+with Alexis Aladyn, the brilliant leader of the Social Democratic
+party.
+I said to him that I had been informed that the conservative reformers,
+as well as the radicals, included woman suffrage in their programs.
+Aladyn looked puzzled for a moment, and then he replied: "All parties
+desire universal suffrage. Naturally that includes women."</p>
+<p>Finland at that time, 1906, had recently won its independence from
+the
+autocracy and was preparing for its first general election. Talking
+with
+one of the nineteen women returned to Parliament a few months later, I
+asked: "How did you Finnish women persuade the makers of the new
+constitution to give you the franchise?"</p>
+<p>"Persuade?" she repeated; "we did not have to persuade them. There
+was
+simply no opposition. One of the demands made on the Russian Government
+was for universal suffrage."</p>
+<p>The movement for universal suffrage, that <a name="Page_51"></a>is
+the movement for free
+government, with the consent of the governed, is considered by the
+International Council of Women to have passed the controversial stage.</p>
+<p>The whole club movement, as a matter of fact, is a part of the great
+democratic movement which is sweeping over the whole world. Individual
+clubs may be exclusive, even aristocratic in their tendencies, but the
+large organization is absolutely democratic. If the President of the
+International Council is an English peeress, one of the vice-presidents
+is the wife of a German music teacher, and one of the secretaries is a
+self-supporting woman. The General Federation in the United States is
+made up of women of various stations in life, from millionaires' wives
+to factory girls.</p>
+<p>The democracy of women's organizations was shown at the meeting in
+London a year ago of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, where
+delegates from twenty-one countries assembled. One of the great
+features
+of the meeting was a wonderful pageant of <a name="Page_52"></a>women's
+trades and
+professions. An immense procession of women, bearing banners and
+emblems
+of their work, marched through streets lined with spectators to Albert
+Hall, where the entire orchestra of this largest auditorium in the
+world
+was reserved for them. A published account of the pageant, after
+describing the delegations of teachers, nurses, doctors, journalists,
+artists, authors, house workers, factory women, stenographers, and
+others well known here, says:</p>
+<div class="blkquot">"Then the ranks opened, and down the long aisle
+came the chain
+makers
+who work at the forge, and the pit-brow women from the mines,&#8212;women
+whose faces have been blackened by smoke and coal dust until they can
+never be washed white.... To these women, the hardest workers in the
+land, were given the seats of honor, while behind them, gladly taking a
+subordinate place, were many women wearing gowns with scarlet and
+purple
+hoods, indicating their university degrees."</div>
+<p>Every public movement&#8212;reform, philan<a name="Page_53"></a>thropic,
+sanitary,
+educational&#8212;now asks the co-operation of women's organizations. The
+United States Government asked the co-operation of the women's clubs to
+save the precarious Panama situation. At a moment when social
+discontent
+threatened literally to stop the building of the canal, the Department
+of Commerce and Labor employed Miss Helen Varick Boswell, of New York,
+to go to the Isthmus and organize the wives and daughters of Government
+employees into clubs. The Department knew that the clubs, once
+organized, would do the rest. Nor was it disappointed.</p>
+<p>The Government asks the co-operation of women in its latest work of
+conserving natural resources. At the biennial of the Federation of
+Women's Clubs in 1906 Mr. Enos Mills delivered an address on forestry,
+a
+movement which was beginning to engage the attention of the clubs.
+Within an hour after he left the platform Mr. Mills had been engaged by
+a dozen state presidents to lecture to clubs and federations. As soon
+as
+it reached the <a name="Page_54"></a>Government that the women's clubs
+were paying fifty
+dollars a lecture to learn about forestry work, the Government arranged
+that the clubs should have the best authorities in the nation to
+lecture
+on forestry free of all expense.</p>
+<p>But the Government is not alone in recognizing the power of women's
+organizations. If the Government approves their interest in public
+questions, vested interests are beginning to fear it. The president of
+the Manufacturers' Association, in his inaugural address, told his
+colleagues that their wives and daughters invited some very dangerous
+and revolutionary speakers to address their clubs. He warned them that
+the women were becoming too friendly toward reforms that the
+association
+frowned upon.</p>
+<p>This is indeed true, and women display, in their new-found
+enthusiasm, a
+singularly obstinate spirit. All the legislatures south of the Mason
+and
+Dixon Line cannot make the Southern women believe that Southern
+pros<a name="Page_55"></a>perity is dependent upon young children
+laboring in mills. The
+women go on working for child labor and compulsory education laws,
+unconvinced by the arguments of the mill owners and the votes of the
+legislators. The highest court in the State of New York was powerless
+to
+persuade New York club women that the United States Constitution stands
+in the way of a law prohibiting the night work of women. The Court of
+Appeals declared the law unconstitutional, and many women at present
+are
+toiling at night. But the club women immediately began fighting for a
+new law.</p>
+<p>The women of every State in the Union are able to work harmoniously
+together because they are unhampered with traditions of what the
+founders of the Republic intended,&#8212;the sacredness of state rights, or
+the protective paternalism of Wall Street. The gloriously illogical
+sincerity of women is concerned only about the thing itself.</p>
+<p>I have left for future consideration women <a name="Page_56"></a>who
+having definite social
+theories have organized themselves for definite objects. This chapter
+has purposely been confined to the activities of average women&#8212;good
+wives and mothers, the eight hundred thousand American women whose
+collective opinion is expressed through the General Federation of
+Women's Clubs. For the most part they are mature in years, these club
+women. Their children are grown. Some are in college and some are
+married. I have heard more than one presiding officer at a State
+Federation meeting proudly announce from the platform that she had
+become a grandmother since the last convention.</p>
+<p>The present president of the General Federation, Mrs. Philip N.
+Moore of
+St. Louis, Missouri, is a graduate of Vassar College, and served for a
+time as president of the National Society of Collegiate Alumnae. There
+are not wanting in the club movement many women who have taken college
+and university honors. Club women taken the country over, however, <a
+ name="Page_57"></a>are
+not college products. If they had been, the club movement might have
+taken on a more cultural and a less practical form. As it was, the
+women
+formed their groups with the direct object of educating themselves and,
+being practical women used to work, they readily turned their new
+knowledge to practical ends. As quickly as they found out, through
+education, what their local communities needed they were filled with a
+generous desire to supply those needs. In reality they simply learned
+from books and study how to apply their housekeeping lore to municipal
+government and the public school system. Nine-tenths of the work they
+have undertaken relates to children, the school, and the home. Some of
+it seemed radical in the beginning, but none of it has failed, in the
+long run, to win the warmest approval of the people.</p>
+<p>The eight million women who form the International Council of Women,
+and
+express the collective opinion of women the world over, are not
+exceptional types, although they <a name="Page_58"></a>may possess
+exceptional intelligence.
+They are merely good citizens, wives, and mothers. Their program
+contains nothing especially radical. And yet, what a revolution would
+the world witness were that program carried out? Peace and arbitration;
+social purity; public health; woman suffrage; removal of all legal
+disabilities of women. This last-named object is perhaps more
+revolutionary in its character than the others, because its fulfillment
+will disturb the basic theories on which the nations have established
+their different forms of government.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_III"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_59"></a>CHAPTER III<br>
+</h2>
+<h2>EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW</h2>
+<p>Several years ago a woman of wealth and social prominence in
+Kentucky,
+after pondering some time on the inferior position of women in the
+United States, wrote a book. In this volume the United States was
+compared most unfavorably with the countries of Europe, where the
+dignity and importance of women received some measure of recognition.
+Women, this author protested, enjoy a larger measure of political power
+in England than in America. In England and throughout Europe their
+social power is greater. If a man becomes lord mayor of an English city
+his wife becomes lady mayoress, and she shares all her husband's
+official honors. On the Continent women are often made honorary
+colonels
+of regiments, and take part with the men in <a name="Page_60"></a>military
+reviews. Women
+frequently hold high offices at court, acting as chamberlains,
+constables, and the like. The writer closed her last chapter with the
+announcement that she meant henceforth to make her home in England,
+where women had more than once occupied the throne as absolute monarch
+and constitutional ruler.</p>
+<p>It is true that in some particulars American women do seem to be at
+a
+disadvantage with European women. With what looks like a higher regard
+for women's intelligence, England has bestowed upon them every measure
+of suffrage except the Parliamentary franchise. In England, throughout
+the Middle Ages, and even down to the present century, women held the
+office of sheriff of the county, clerk of the crown, high constable,
+chamberlain, and even champion at a coronation,&#8212;the champion being a
+picturesque figure who rides into the hall and flings his glove to the
+nobles, in defense of the king's crown.</p>
+<p>In the royal pageants of European history <a name="Page_61"></a>behold
+the powerful figures
+of Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth, Mary of
+Scotland, Christina of Sweden, rulers in fact as well as in name; to
+say
+nothing of the long line of women regents in whose hands the state
+intrusted its affairs, during the minority of its kings. In the United
+States a woman candidate for mayor of a small town would be considered
+a
+joke.</p>
+<p>These and other inconsistencies have puzzled many ardent upholders
+of
+American chivalry. In order to understand the position of women in the
+United States it is necessary to make a brief survey of the laws under
+which European women are governed, and the social theory on which their
+apparent advantages are based.</p>
+<p>In the first place, the statement that in European countries a woman
+may
+succeed to the throne must be qualified. In three countries only,
+England, Spain, and Portugal, are women counted in the line of
+succession on terms approaching equality with men. In these three
+countries when a monarch dies <a name="Page_62"></a>leaving no sons
+his eldest daughter
+becomes the sovereign. If the ruling monarch die, leaving no children
+at
+all, the oldest daughter&#8212;failing sons&#8212;of the man who was in his
+lifetime in direct line of succession is given preference to male heirs
+more remote. Thus Queen Victoria succeeded William IV, she being the
+only child of the late king's deceased brother and heir, the Duke of
+Kent.</p>
+<p>Similar laws govern the succession in Portugal and Spain, although
+dispute on this point has more than once caused civil war in Spain.</p>
+<p>In Holland, Greece, Russia, Austria, and a few German states a woman
+may
+succeed to the throne, provided every single male heir to the crown is
+dead. Queen Wilhelmina became sovereign in Holland only because the
+House of Orange was extinct in the male line, and Holland lost, on
+account of the accession of Wilhelmina, the rich and important Duchy of
+Luxemburg.</p>
+<p>Luxemburg, in common with the rest of Europe, except the countries
+described, lives <a name="Page_63"></a>under what is known as the
+Salic Law, according to
+which a woman may not, in any circumstances, become sovereign.</p>
+<p>A word about this Salic Law is necessary, because the tradition of
+it
+permeates the whole atmosphere in which the women of Europe live, move,
+and have their legal and social being.</p>
+<p>The Salic Law was the code of a barbarous people, so far extinct and
+forgotten that it is uncertain just what territory in ancient Gaul they
+occupied at the time the code was formulated. Later the Salian Franks,
+as the tribe was designated, built on the left bank of the Seine rude
+fortresses and a collection of wattled huts which became the ancestor
+of
+the present-day city of Paris.</p>
+<p>The Salic Law was a complete code. It governed all matters, civil
+and
+military. It prescribed rules of war; it fixed the salaries of
+officials; it designated the exact amount of blood money the family of
+a
+slain man might collect from the family of the slayer; it regu<a
+ name="Page_64"></a>lated
+conditions under which individuals might travel from one village to
+another; it governed matters of property transfer and inheritance.</p>
+<p>The Salian Franks are dust; their might has perished, their annals
+are
+forgotten, their cities are leveled, their mightiest kings sleep in
+unmarked graves, their code has passed out of existence, almost indeed
+out of the memory of man,&#8212;all except one paragraph of one division of
+one law. The law related to inheritance of property; the special
+division distinguished between real and personal property, and the
+paragraph ruled that a woman might inherit movable property, but that
+she might not inherit land.</p>
+<p>There was not a syllable in the law relating to the inheritance of a
+throne. Nevertheless, centuries after the last Salian king was laid in
+his barbarous grave a French prince successfully contested with an
+English prince the crown of France, his claim resting on that obscure
+paragraph in the Salic code. The Hundred Years' War was fought on this
+issue, <a name="Page_65"></a>and the final outcome of the war
+established the Salic Law
+permanently in France, and with more or less rigor in most of the
+European states.</p>
+<p>At the time of the French Revolution, when the "Rights of Man" were
+being declared with so much fervor and enthusiasm, when the old laws
+were being revised in favor of greater freedom of the individual, the
+"Rights of Woman" were actually revised downward. Up to this time the
+application of the Salic Law was based on tradition and precedent. Now
+a
+special statute was enacted forever barring women from the sovereignty
+of France. "Founded on the pride of the French, who could not bear to
+be
+ruled by their own women folk," as the records are careful to state.</p>
+<p>The interpretation of the Salic Law did more, a great deal more,
+than
+exclude women from the throne. It established the principle of the
+inherent inferiority of women. The system of laws erected on that
+principle were necessarily deeply tinged with contempt for <a
+ name="Page_66"></a>women, and
+with fear lest their influence in any way might affect the conduct of
+state affairs. That explains why, at the present time, although in most
+European countries women are allowed to practice medicine, they are not
+allowed to practice law. Medicine may be as learned a profession, but
+it
+affects only human beings. The law, on the other hand, affects the
+state. A woman advocate, you can readily imagine, might so influence a
+court of justice that the laws of the land might suffer feminization.
+From the European point of view this would be most undesirable.</p>
+<p>The apparently superior rights possessed by English women were also
+bestowed upon them by a vanished system of laws. They have descended
+from Feudalism, in which social order the <i>person</i> did not exist.
+The
+social order consisted of <i>property</i> alone, and the claims of
+property,
+that is to say, land, were paramount over the claims of the individual.
+Those historic women sheriffs of counties, clerks of crown,
+chamberlains, and high constables held <a name="Page_67"></a>their
+high offices because the
+offices were hereditary property in certain titled families, and they
+had to belong to the entail, even when a woman was in possession. The
+offices were purely titular. No English woman ever acted as high
+constable. No English woman ever attended a coronation as king's
+champion. The rights and duties of these offices were delegated to a
+male relative. Every once in a while, during the Middle Ages, some
+strong-minded lady of title demanded the right to administer her office
+in person, but she was always sternly put down by a rebuking House of
+Lords, sometimes even by the king's majesty himself.</p>
+<p>In the same way the voting powers of the women of England are a
+result
+of hereditary privilege. Local affairs in England, until a very recent
+period, were administered through the parish, and the only persons
+qualified to vote were the property owners of the parish. It was really
+property interests and not people who voted. Those women who owned
+prop<a name="Page_68"></a>erty, or who were administering property for
+their minor children,
+were entitled to vote, to serve on boards of guardians, and to dispense
+the Poor Laws. Out of their right of parish vote has grown their right
+of municipal franchise. It carries with it a property qualification,
+and
+the proposed Parliamentary franchise, for which the women of England
+are
+making such a magnificent fight, will also have a property
+qualification.</p>
+<p>The real position, legal and social, which women in England and
+continental Europe have for centuries occupied, may be gauged from an
+examination of the feminist movement in a very enlightened country, say
+Germany. The laws of Germany were founded on the Corpus Juris of the
+Romans, a stern code which relegates women to the position of chattels.
+And chattels they have been in Germany, until very recent years, when
+through the intelligent persistence of strong women the chains have
+somewhat been loosened.</p>
+<p>A generation ago, in 1865, to be exact, a <a name="Page_69"></a>group
+of women in Leipzig
+formed an association which they called the Allgemeinen Deutschen
+Frauenbund, which may be Anglicized into General Association of German
+Women. The stated objects of the association give a pretty clear idea
+of
+the position of women at that time. The women demanded as their rights,
+Education, the Right to Work, Free Choice of Profession. Nothing more,
+but these three demands were so revolutionary that all masculine
+Germany, and most of feminine Germany, uttered horrified protests.
+Needless to say nothing came of the women's demand.</p>
+<p>After the Franco-Prussian War the center of the women's revolt
+naturally
+moved to the capital of the new empire, Berlin. From that city, during
+the years that followed, so much feminine unrest was radiated that in
+1887 the German Woman Suffrage Association was formed, with the demand
+for absolute equality with men. Two remarkable women, Minna Cauer and
+Anita Augsberg, the latter unmar<a name="Page_70"></a>ried and a doctor
+of laws, were the
+moving spirits in the first woman suffrage agitation, which has since
+extended throughout the empire until there is hardly a small town
+without its suffrage club.</p>
+<p>Now the woman suffragist in Germany differs from the American
+suffragist
+in that she is always a member of a political party. She is a silent
+member to be sure, but she adheres to her party, because, through
+tradition or conviction, she believes in its policies. Usually the
+suffragist is a member of the Social Democratic Party, allied to the
+International Socialist Party. She is a suffragist because she is a
+Socialist, because woman suffrage, and, indeed, the full equalization
+of
+the laws governing men and women are a part of the Socialist platform
+in
+every country in the world. The woman member of the Social Democratic
+party is not working primarily for woman suffrage. She is working for a
+complete overturning of the present economic system, and she advocates
+<i>universal adult suffrage</i> as a means of bring<a name="Page_71"></a>ing
+about the social and
+economic changes demanded by the Socialists.</p>
+<p>These German Socialist women are often very advanced spirits, who
+hold
+university degrees, who have entered the professions, and are generally
+emancipated from strictly conventional lives. Others, in large numbers,
+belong to the intellectual proletarian classes. Their American
+prototypes are to be found in the Women's Trade Union League, described
+in a later chapter.</p>
+<p>The other German suffragists are members of the radical, the
+moderate
+(we should say conservative), and the clerical parties. These women are
+middle class, average, intelligent wives and mothers. They correspond
+fairly well with the women of the General Federation of Clubs in the
+United States, and like the American club women they are affiliated
+with
+the International Council of Women. Locally they are working for the
+social reforms demanded by the first American suffrage convention, held
+in Seneca Falls, New York, in <a name="Page_72"></a>1848. They are
+demanding the higher
+education, married women's property rights, free speech, and the right
+to choose a trade or profession. They are demanding other rights, from
+lack of which the American woman never suffered. The right to attend a
+political meeting was until recently denied to German women. Although
+they take a far keener and more intelligent interest in national and
+local politics than American women as a rule have ever taken, their
+presence at political meetings has but yesterday been sanctioned.</p>
+<p>The civil responsibility of the father and mother in many European
+countries is barbarously unequal. If a marriage exists between the
+parents the father is the only parent recognized. He is sole guardian
+and authority. When divorce dissolves a marriage the rights of the
+father are generally paramount, even when he is the party accused.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, if no marriage exists between the parents, if the
+child is what is called illegitimate, the mother is alone responsible
+for <a name="Page_73"></a>its maintenance. Not only is the father free
+from all
+responsibility, his status as a father is denied by law. Inquiry into
+the paternity of the child is in some countries forbidden. The unhappy
+mother may have documentary proof that she was betrayed under promise
+of
+marriage, but she is not allowed to produce her proof.</p>
+<p>Under the French Code, the substance of which governs all Europe, it
+is
+distinctly a principle that the woman's honor is and ought to be of
+less
+value than a man's honor. Napoleon personally insisted on this
+principle, and more than once emphasized his belief that no importance
+should be attached to men's share in illegitimacy.</p>
+<p>These and other degrading laws the European progressive women are
+trying
+to remove from the Codes. They have their origin in the belief in "The
+imprudence, the frailty, and the imbecility" of women, to quote from
+this Code Napoleon.</p>
+<p>Whatever women's legal disabilities in the <a name="Page_74"></a>United
+States, their laws
+were never based on the principle that women were imprudent, frail, or
+imbecile. They placed women at a distinct disadvantage, it is true, but
+it was the disadvantage of the minor child and not of the inferior, the
+chattel, the property of man, as in Europe.</p>
+<p>Laws in the United States were founded on the assumption that women
+stood in perpetual need of protection. The law makers carried this to
+the absurd extent of assuming that protection was all the right a woman
+needed or all she ought to claim. They even pretended that when a woman
+entered the complete protection of the married state she no longer
+stood
+in need of an identity apart from her husband. The working out of this
+theory in a democracy was far from ideal, as we shall see.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_IV"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_75"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h2>AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW</h2>
+<br>
+<p>A little girl sat in a corner of her father's law library watching,
+with
+wide, serious eyes, a scene the like of which was common enough a
+generation or two ago. The weeping old woman told a halting story of a
+dissipated son, a shrewish daughter-in-law, and a state of servitude on
+her own part,&#8212;a story pitifully sordid in its details. The farm had
+come to her from her father's estate. For forty years she had toiled
+side by side with her husband, getting a simple, but comfortable,
+living
+from the soil. Then the husband died. Under the will the son inherited
+the farm, and everything on it,&#8212;house, furniture, barns, cattle, tools.
+Even the money in the bank was his. A clause in the will provided that
+the son should give his mother a home during her lifetime.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_76"></a>So here she was, after a life of hard work and
+loving service, shorn of
+everything; a pauper, an unpaid servant in the house of another
+woman,&#8212;her son's wife. Was it true that the law took her home away from
+her,&#8212;the farm that descended to her from her father, the house she had
+lived in since childhood? Could nothing, <i>nothing</i> be done?</p>
+<p>The aged judge shook his head, sadly. "You see, Mrs. Grant," he
+explained, "the farm has never really been yours since your marriage,
+for then it became by law your husband's property, precisely as if he
+had bought it. He had a right to leave it to whom he would. No doubt he
+did what he thought was for your good. I wish I could help you, but I
+cannot. The law is inexorable in these matters."</p>
+<p>After the forlorn old woman had gone the lawyer's child went and
+stood
+by her father's chair. "Why couldn't you help her?" she asked. "Why do
+you let them take her home away from her?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_77"></a>Judge Cady opened the sheep-bound book at his
+elbow and showed the
+little girl a paragraph. Turning the pages, he pointed out others for
+her to read. Spelling through the ponderous legal phraseology the
+little
+girl learned that a married woman had no existence, in the eyes of the
+law, apart from her husband. She could own no property; she could
+neither buy nor sell; she could not receive a gift, even from her own
+husband. She was, in fact, her husband's chattel. If he beat her she
+had
+no means of punishing, or even restraining him, unless, indeed, she
+could prove that her life was endangered. If she ran away from him the
+law forced her to return.</p>
+<p>Paragraph after paragraph the child read through, and, unseen by her
+father, marked faintly with a pencil. So far as she was aware, father,
+and father's library of sheep-bound books, were the beginning and the
+end of the law, and to her mind the way to get rid of measures which
+took women's homes away from them was perfectly simple. That night <a
+ name="Page_78"></a>when
+the house was quiet she stole downstairs, scissors in hand, determined
+<i>to cut every one of those laws out of the book</i>.</p>
+<p>The young reformer was restrained, but only temporarily. As
+Elizabeth
+Cady Stanton she lived to do her part toward revising many of the laws
+under which women, in her day, suffered, and her successors, the
+organized women of the United States, are busy with their scissors,
+revising the rest.</p>
+<p>Not alone in Russia, Germany, France, and England do the laws
+governing
+men and women need equalizing. In America, paradise of women, the
+generally accepted theory that women have "all the rights they want"
+does not stand the test of impartial examination.</p>
+<p>In America some women have all the rights they want. Your wife and
+the
+wives of the men you associate with every day usually have all the
+rights they want, sometimes a few that they do not need at all. Is the
+house yours? The furniture yours? The motor yours? The income yours?
+Are
+the children yours? If <a name="Page_79"></a>you are the average fond
+American husband, you
+will return the proud answer: "No, indeed, they are <i>ours</i>."</p>
+<p>This is quite as it should be, assuming that all wives are as
+tenderly
+cherished, and as well protected as the women who live on your block.
+For a whole big army of women there are often serious disadvantages
+connected with that word "ours."</p>
+<p>In Boston there lived a family of McEwans,&#8212;a man, his wife, and
+several
+half-grown children. McEwan was not a very steady man. He drank
+sometimes, and his earning capacity was uncertain. Mrs. McEwan was an
+energetic, capable, intelligent woman, tolerant of her husband's
+failings, ambitious for her children. She took a large house, furnished
+it on the installment plan, and filled it with boarders. The boarders
+gave the family an income larger than they had ever possessed before,
+and McEwan's contributions fell off. He became an unpaying guest
+himself. All his earnings, he explained, were going into investments.
+The <a name="Page_80"></a>man was, in fact, speculating in mining
+stocks.</p>
+<p>One day McEwan came home with a face of despair. His creditors, he
+told
+his wife, had descended on him, seized his business, and threatened to
+take possession of the boarding house.</p>
+<p>"But it is mine," protested the woman, with spirit. "I bought every
+bit
+of furniture with the money my boarders paid me. Nobody can touch my
+property or my earnings to satisfy a claim on you. I am not liable for
+your debts."</p>
+<p>One of the boarders was a lawyer, and to him that night she took the
+case. "A woman's earnings are her own in Massachusetts, are they not?"
+she demanded.</p>
+<p>"You are what the law calls a free trader," replied the lawyer, "and
+whatever you earn is yours, certainly. That is&#8212;of course you are
+recorded at the city clerk's office?"</p>
+<p>"Why no. Why should I be?"</p>
+<p>"The law requires it. Otherwise this property, and even the money
+your
+boarders pay <a name="Page_81"></a>you, are liable to attachment for
+your husband's debts.
+Unless you make a specific declaration that you are in business for
+yourself, the law assumes that the business is your husband's."</p>
+<p>"If I went to work for a salary, should I have to be recorded in
+order
+to keep my own money?" Mrs. McEwan was growing angry.</p>
+<p>"No," replied the lawyer, "not if you were careful to keep your
+income
+and your husband's absolutely separate. If you both paid installments
+on
+a piano the piano would be your husband's, not yours. If you bought a
+house together, the house could be seized for his debts. Everything you
+buy with your money is yours. Everything you buy with money he gives
+you
+is his. Everything you buy together is his. You could not protect such
+property from your husband's creditors, or from his heirs."</p>
+<p>Mrs. McEwan's case is mild, her wrongs faint beside those of a woman
+in
+Los Angeles, California. Her husband was a doctor, and <a
+ name="Page_82"></a>she had been,
+before her marriage, a trained nurse. The young woman had saved several
+hundred dollars, and she put the money into a first payment on a pretty
+little cottage. During the first two or three years of the marriage the
+doctor's wife, from time to time, attended cases of illness, usually
+contributing her earnings toward the payment for the house or into
+furniture for the house. In all she paid about a thousand dollars, or
+something like one-third of the cost of the house. Then children came,
+and her earning days were over.</p>
+<p>Unfortunately the domestic affairs of this household became
+disturbed.
+The doctor contracted a drug habit. He became irregular in his conduct
+and ended by running away with a dissolute woman. After he had gone his
+wife found that the house she lived in, and which she had helped to
+buy,
+had been sold, without her knowledge or consent. The transaction was
+perfectly legal. Community property, that is, property held jointly by
+husband and wife, is absolutely controlled by the hus<a name="Page_83"></a>band
+in
+California. In that State community property may even be given away,
+without the wife's knowledge or consent.</p>
+<p>It happened not many years ago that one of the most powerful
+millionaires in California, in a moment of generosity, conveyed to one
+of his sons a very valuable property. Some time afterwards the father
+and son quarreled, and the father attempted to get back his property.
+His plea in court was that his wife's consent to the transaction had
+never been sought; but the court ruled that since the property was
+owned
+in community, the wife's consent did not have to be obtained.</p>
+<p>This particular woman happened to be rich enough to stand the
+experience
+of having a large slice of property given away without her knowledge,
+but the same law would have applied to the case of a woman who could
+not
+afford it at all.</p>
+<p>It is in the case of women wage earners that these laws bear the
+peculiar asperity. Down in the cotton-mill districts of the South are
+<a name="Page_84"></a>scores of men who never, from one year to the
+next, do a stroke of
+work. They are supposed to be "weakly." Their wives and children work
+eleven hours a day (or night) and every pay day the men go to the mills
+and collect their wages. The money belongs to them under the law. Even
+if the women had the spirit to protest, the protest would be useless.
+The right of a man to collect and to spend his wife's earnings is
+protected in many States in the chivalric South. In Texas, for example,
+a husband is entitled to his wife's earnings even <i>though he has
+deserted her</i>.</p>
+<p>I do not know that this occurs very often in Texas. Probably not,
+unless
+among low-class Negroes. In all likelihood if a Texas woman should
+appeal to her employer, and tell him that her husband had abandoned
+her,
+he would refuse to give the man her wages. Should the husband be in a
+position to invoke the law, he could claim his wife's earnings,
+nevertheless.</p>
+<p>The Kentucky lady who chose England for her future home, had she
+known
+it, selected the <a name="Page_85"></a>country to which most American
+women owe their legal
+disabilities. American law, except in Louisiana and Florida, is founded
+on English common law, and English common law was developed at a period
+when men were of much greater importance in the state than women. The
+state was a military organization, and every man was a fighter, a
+king's
+defender. Women were valuable only because defenders of kings had to
+have mothers.</p>
+<p>English common law provided that every married woman must be
+supported
+in as much comfort as her husband's estate warranted. The mothers of
+the
+nation must be fed, clothed, and sheltered. What more could they
+possibly ask? In return for permanent board and clothes, the woman was
+required to give her husband all of her property, real and personal.
+What use had she for property? Did she need it to support herself? In
+case of war and pillage could she defend it?</p>
+<p>Husband and wife were one&#8212;and that one was the man. He was so much
+the
+one that the <a name="Page_86"></a>woman had literally no existence in
+the eyes of the law.
+She not only did not possess any property; she could possess none. Her
+husband could not give her any, because there could be no contract
+between a married pair. A contract implies at least two people, and
+husband and wife were one. The husband could, if he chose, establish a
+trusteeship, and thus give his wife the free use of her own. But you
+can
+easily imagine that he did not very often do it.</p>
+<p>A man could, also, devise property to his wife by will. Often this
+was
+done, but too often the sons were made heirs, and the wife was left to
+what tender mercies they owned. If a man died intestate the wife merely
+shared with other heirs. She had no preference.</p>
+<p>Under the old English common law, moreover, not only the property,
+but
+also the services of a married woman belonged to her husband. If he
+chose to rent out her services, or if she offered to work outside the
+home, it followed logically that her wages belonged to him. What use
+had
+she for wages?</p>
+<p><a name="Page_87"></a>On the other hand, every man was held
+responsible for the support of
+his wife. He was responsible for her debts, as long as they were the
+necessities of life. He was also responsible for her conduct. Being
+propertyless, she could not be held to account for wrongs committed. If
+she stole, or destroyed property, or injured the person of another, if
+she committed any kind of a misdemeanor in the presence of her husband,
+and that also meant if he were in her neighborhood at the time, the law
+held him responsible. He should have restrained her.</p>
+<p>This was supposed to be a decided advantage to the woman. Whenever a
+rebellious woman or group of women voiced their objection to the system
+which robbed them of every shred of independence they were always
+reminded that the system at the same time relieved them of every shred
+of responsibility, even, to an extent, of moral responsibility. "So
+great a favorite," comments Blackstone, "is the female sex under the
+laws of England."</p>
+<p>You may well imagine that, in these circum<a name="Page_88"></a>stances,
+husbands were
+interested that their wives should be very good. The law supported them
+by permitting "moderate correction." A married woman might be kept in
+what Blackstone calls "reasonable restraint" by her husband. But only
+with a stick no larger than his thumb.</p>
+<p>The husbandly stick was never imported into the United States. Even
+the
+dour Puritans forbade its use. The very first modification of the
+English common law, in its application to American women, was made in
+1650, when the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony decreed that a
+husband beating his wife, or, for that matter, a wife beating her
+husband, should be fined ten pounds, or endure a public whipping.</p>
+<p>The Pilgrim Fathers and the other early colonists in America brought
+with them the system of English common law under which they and their
+ancestors had for centuries been governed. From time to time, as
+conditions made them necessary, new laws were enacted and put <a
+ name="Page_89"></a>into
+force. In all cases not specifically covered by these new laws, the old
+English common law was applied. It did not occur to any one that women
+would ever need special laws. The Pilgrim Fathers and their successors,
+the Puritans, simply assumed that here, as in the England they had left
+behind, woman's place was in the home, where she was protected,
+supported, and controlled.</p>
+<p>But in the new world woman's place in the home assumed an importance
+much greater than it had formerly possessed. Labor was scarce,
+manufacturing and trading were undeveloped. Woman's special activities
+were urgently needed. Woman's hands helped to raise the roof-tree, her
+skill and industry, to a very large extent, furnished the house. She
+spun and wove, cured meat, dried corn, tanned skins, made shoes, dipped
+candles, and was, in a word, almost the only manufacturer in the
+country. But this did not raise her from her position as an inferior.
+Woman owned neither her tools nor her raw materials. These her <a
+ name="Page_90"></a>husband
+provided. In consequence, husband and wife being one, that one, in
+America, as in England, was the husband.</p>
+<p>This explanation is necessary in order to understand why the legal
+position of most American women to-day is that of inferiors, or, at
+best, of minor children.</p>
+<p>It is necessary also, in order to understand why, except in matters
+of
+law, American women are treated with such extraordinary consideration
+and indulgence. As long as pioneer conditions lasted women were
+valuable
+because of the need of their labor, their special activities. Also, for
+a very long period, women were scarce, and they were highly prized not
+alone for their labor, but because their society was so desirable. In
+other words, pioneer conditions gave woman a better standing in the new
+world than she had in the old, and she was treated with an altogether
+new consideration and regard.</p>
+<p>In England no one thought very badly of a man who was moderately
+abusive
+of his wife. <a name="Page_91"></a>In America, violence against women
+was, from the first, an
+unbearable idea. Laws protecting maid servants, dependent women, and,
+as
+we have seen, even wives, were very early enacted in New England.</p>
+<p>But although woman was more dearly prized in the new country than in
+the
+old, no new legislation was made for her benefit. Her legal status, or
+rather her absence of legal status apart from her husband, remained
+exactly as it had been under the English common law.</p>
+<p>No legislature in the United States has deliberately made laws
+placing
+women at a disadvantage with men. Whatever laws are unfair and
+oppressive to women have just happened&#8212;just grown up like weeds out of
+neglected soil.</p>
+<p>Let me illustrate. No lawmaker in New Mexico ever introduced a bill
+into
+the legislature making men liable for their wives' torts or petty
+misdemeanors. Yet in New Mexico, at this very minute, a wife is so
+completely her husband's property that he is responsible for <a
+ name="Page_92"></a>her
+behavior. If she should rob her neighbor's clothesline, or wreck a
+chicken yard, her unfortunate husband would have to stand trial. Simply
+because in New Mexico married women are still living under laws that
+were evolved in another civilization, long before New Mexico was
+dreamed
+of as a State.</p>
+<p>Nowhere else in the United States are women allowed to shelter their
+weak moral natures behind the stern morality of their husbands, but in
+more than one State the husband's responsibility for his wife's acts is
+assumed. In Massachusetts, for one State, if a woman owned a saloon and
+sold beer on Sunday, she would be liable to arrest, and so also would
+her husband, provided he were in the house when the beer was sold. Both
+would probably be fined. Simply because it was once the law that a
+married woman had no separate existence apart from her husband, this
+absurd law, or others as absurd, remain on the statute books of almost
+every State in the Union.</p>
+<p>The ascent of woman, which began with the <a name="Page_93"></a>abolishment
+of corporeal
+punishment of wives, proceeded very slowly. Most American women
+married,
+and most American wives were kindly treated. At least public opinion
+demanded that they be treated with kindness. Long before any other
+modification of her legal status was gained, a woman subjected to
+cruelty at the hands of her lawful spouse was at liberty to seek police
+protection.</p>
+<p>The reason why police protection was so seldom sought is plain
+enough.
+Imagine a woman complaining of a husband who would be certain to beat
+her again for revenge, and to whom she was bound irrevocably by laws
+stronger even than the laws on the statute books. Remember that the
+only
+right she had was the right to be supported, and if she left her
+husband's house she left her only means of living. She could hardly
+support herself, for few avenues of industry were open to women. She
+was
+literally a pauper, and when there is nowhere else to lay his head,
+even
+the most miserable pauper thinks twice before he <a name="Page_94"></a>runs
+away from the
+poorhouse. Besides, the woman who left her husband had to give up her
+children. They too were the husband's property.</p>
+<p>There were some women who hesitated before they consented to
+pauperize
+themselves by marrying. Widows were especially wary, if old stories are
+to be trusted. A story is told in the New York University Law School of
+a woman in Connecticut who took with her, as a part of her wedding
+outfit, a very handsome mahogany bureau, bequeathed her by her
+grandfather. After a few years of marriage the husband suddenly died,
+leaving no will. The home and all it contained were sold at auction.
+The
+widow was permitted to buy certain objects of furniture, and among them
+was her cherished bureau. Where the poor woman found the money with
+which to buy is not revealed. In time this woman married again, and
+again her husband died without a will. Again there was an auction, and
+again the widow purchased her beloved heirloom. It <a name="Page_95"></a>seems
+possible that
+this time she had saved money in anticipation of the necessity.</p>
+<p>A little later, for she was still young and attractive, a suitor
+appeared, offering his heart and "all his worldly goods." "No, I thank
+you," replied the sorely tried creature, "I prefer to keep my bureau."</p>
+<p>The first struggle made by women in their own behalf was against
+this
+condition of marital slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott,
+Lydia Maria Child, and others of that brave band of rebellious women,
+were active for years, addressing legislative committees in New York
+and
+Massachusetts, circulating petitions, writing to newspapers, agitating
+everywhere in favor of married women's property rights. Finally it
+began
+to dawn on the minds of men that there might be a certain public
+advantage, as well as private justice, attaching to separate ownership
+by married women of their own property.</p>
+<p>In 1839 the Massachusetts State Legislature passed a cautious
+measure
+giving married <a name="Page_96"></a>women qualified property rights.
+It was not until 1848
+that a really effective Married Women's Property Law was secured, by
+action of the New York State Assembly. The law served as a model in
+many
+of the new Western States just then framing their laws.</p>
+<p>These New York legislators, and the Western legislators who first
+granted property rights to married women, were actuated less by a sense
+of justice towards women than by enlightened selfishness. The effect of
+so much freedom on women themselves was a matter for grave conjecture.
+It was not suggested by any of the American debaters, as it was later
+on
+the floors of the English Parliament, that women, if they controlled
+their own property, would undoubtedly squander it on men whom they
+preferred to their husbands. But it was prophesied that women once in
+possession of money would desert their husbands by regiments,&#8212;which
+speaks none too flatteringly of the husbands of that day.</p>
+<p>Men of property stood for the Married <a name="Page_97"></a>Women's
+Property Act, because
+they perceived plainly that their own wealth, devised to daughters who
+could not control it, might easily be gambled away, or wasted through
+improvidence, or diverted to the use of strangers. In other words, they
+knew that their property, when daughters inherited it, became the
+property of their sons-in-law. They had no guarantee that their own
+grandchildren would ever have the use of it, unless it was controlled
+by
+their mothers.</p>
+<p>It was the women's clubs and women's organizations in America, as it
+was
+the Women's Councils in Europe, that actively began the agitation
+against women's legal disabilities. The National Woman Suffrage
+Association, oldest of all women's organizations in the United States,
+has been calling attention to the unequal laws, and demanding their
+abolishment, for two generations.</p>
+<p>Practically all of the state federations of women's clubs have
+legislative committees, and it is usually the business of these
+committees <a name="Page_98"></a>to codify the laws of their
+respective States which apply
+directly to women. In some cases a woman lawyer is made chairman, and
+the work is done under her direction. Sometimes, as in Texas, a well
+known and friendly man lawyer is retained for the task. Almost
+invariably the report of the legislative committee contains
+disagreeable
+surprises. American women have been so accustomed to their privileges
+that they have taken their rights for granted, and are usually
+astonished when they find how limited their rights actually are.</p>
+<p>There are some States in the Union where women are on terms of
+something
+like equality with men. There is one State to which all intelligent
+women look with a sort of envious, admiring, questioning curiosity,
+Colorado, which is literally the woman's paradise. In Colorado it would
+be difficult to find even the smallest inequality between men and
+women.
+They vote on equal terms, and if any woman deserves to go to the
+legislature, and succeeds in convincing a large enough public of the
+fact, <a name="Page_99"></a>nothing stands in the way of her election.
+One woman, Mrs. Alma
+Lafferty, is a member of the present legislature, and she has had
+several predecessors.</p>
+<p>But Colorado women have a larger influence still in legislative
+matters.
+To guard their interests they have a Legislative Committee of the State
+Federation of Women's Clubs, consisting of thirty to forty carefully
+chosen women.</p>
+<p>This committee has permanent headquarters in Denver during every
+session
+of the legislature, and every bill which directly affects women and
+children, before reaching the floor of either house, is submitted for
+approval to the committee.</p>
+<p>Miss Jane Addams has declared, and Miss Addams is pretty good
+authority,
+that the laws governing women and children in Colorado are superior to
+those of any other State. Women receive equal pay for equal work in
+Colorado. They are permitted to hold any office. They are co-guardians
+of their chil<a name="Page_100"></a>dren, and the education of children
+has been placed almost
+entirely in the hands of women. This does not mean that Colorado has
+weakened its schools by barring men from the teaching profession. It
+means that women are superintendents of schools in many counties, and
+that one woman was, for more than ten years, State superintendent of
+schools.</p>
+<p>Contrast Colorado with Louisiana, possibly the last State in the
+Union a
+well-informed woman would choose for a residence. The laws of Louisiana
+were based, not on the English common law, but on the Code Napoleon,
+which regards women merely as a working, breeding, domestic animal.</p>
+<p>"There is one thing that is not <i>French</i>," thundered the great
+Napoleon,
+closing a conference on his famous code, "and that is that a woman can
+do as she pleases."</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;<a name="img007"></a><img
+ style="height: 357px; width: 462px;"
+ alt="A &quot;WOMEN'S RIGHTS&quot; MAP OF THE UNITED STATES"
+ title="A &quot;WOMEN'S RIGHTS&quot; MAP OF THE UNITED STATES"
+ src="images/007.jpg"></p>
+<p>The framers of Louisiana's laws were particular to guard against too
+great a freedom of action on the part of its women. Toward the end of
+Mrs. Jefferson Davis's life she <a name="Page_101"></a>added a codicil
+to her will, giving
+to a certain chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy a number of
+very valuable relics of her husband, and of the short-lived Confederate
+Government. Her action was made public, and it was then revealed that
+two women had signed the document as witnesses. Instantly Mrs. Davis's
+attention was called to the fact that in Louisiana, where she was then
+living, no woman may witness a document. Women's signatures are
+worthless.</p>
+<p>In Louisiana your disabilities actually begin when you become an
+engaged
+girl. From that happy moment on you are under the dominance of a man.
+Your wedding presents are not yours, but his. If you felt like giving a
+duplicate pickle-fork to your mother, you could not legally do so, and
+after you were married, if your husband wanted that pickle-fork, he
+could get it. Your clothing, your dowry, become community property as
+soon as the marriage ceremony is over, and community property in
+Louisiana is controlled absolutely <a name="Page_102"></a>by the
+husband. Every dollar a woman
+earns there is at her husband's disposal. Without her husband's consent
+a Louisiana woman may not go into a court of law, even though she may
+be
+in business for herself and the action sought is in defense of her
+business.</p>
+<p>Nor does the Louisiana woman fare any better as a mother. Then, in
+fact,
+her position is nothing short of humiliating. During her husband's
+lifetime he is sole guardian of their children. At his death she may
+become their guardian, but if she marries a second time&#8212;and the law
+permits her to remarry, provided she waits ten months&#8212;she retains her
+children only by the formal consent of her first husband's family. If
+they dislike her, or disapprove of her second marriage, they may demand
+the custody of the children.</p>
+<p>It is true that many of these absurd laws in Louisiana are not now
+often
+enforced. It is also true that in Louisiana and other states few men
+are
+so unjust to their wives as to take advantage of unequal property
+rights. <a name="Page_103"></a>Laws always lag behind the sense of
+justice which lives in man.
+But the point is that unequal laws still remain on our statute books,
+and they may be, and sometimes are, enforced.</p>
+<p>Between these two extremes, Colorado and Louisiana, women have the
+other
+forty-six States to choose. None of them offers perfect equality. Even
+in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah&#8212;the three States besides Colorado where
+women vote&#8212;women are in such a minority that their votes are powerless
+to remove all their disabilities. Very rarely have club women even so
+much felicity as the New York State Federation, whose legislative
+chairman, Miss Emilie Bullowa, reported that she was unable to find a
+single unimportant inequality in the New York laws governing the
+property rights of women.</p>
+<p>In most of the older States the property rights of married women are
+now
+fairly guaranteed, but the proud boast that in America no woman is the
+slave of her husband will have to be modified when it is known that in
+<a name="Page_104"></a>at least seventeen States these rights are still
+denied.</p>
+<p>The husband absolutely controls his wife's property and her earnings
+in
+Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, California, Arizona, North Dakota, and
+Idaho. He has virtual control&#8212;that is to say, the wife's rights are
+merely provisional&#8212;in Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri.</p>
+<p>Women to control their own business property must be registered as
+traders on their own account in these States: Georgia, Montana, Nevada,
+Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia.</p>
+<p>Nor are women everywhere permitted to work on equal terms with men.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><img
+ style="width: 276px; height: 421px;" alt="MISS EMILIE BULLOWA."
+ title="MISS EMILIE BULLOWA." src="images/008.jpg"><a name="img008"></a></div>
+<p>There is a current belief, often expressed, that in the United
+States
+every avenue of industry is open to women on equal terms with men. This
+is not quite true. In some States a married woman may not engage in any
+business without permission from the courts. In Texas, Louisiana, and
+Georgia this is the case. <a name="Page_105"></a>In Wyoming, where
+women vote, but where
+they are in such minority that their votes count for little, a married
+woman must satisfy the court that she is under the necessity of earning
+her living.</p>
+<p>If you are a woman, married or unmarried, and wish to practice law,
+you
+are barred from seven of the United States. The legal profession is
+closed to women in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Delaware,
+Tennessee, and South Carolina.</p>
+<p>In some States they discourage women from aspiring to the learned
+professions by refusing them the advantages of higher education which
+they provide for their brothers.</p>
+<p>Four state universities close their doors to women, in spite of the
+fact
+that women's taxes help support the universities. These States are
+Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. The last-named admits
+women to post-graduate courses.</p>
+<p>You can hold no kind of an elective office, you cannot be even a
+county
+superintendent <a name="Page_106"></a>of schools in Alabama or
+Arkansas, if you are a woman.
+In Alabama, indeed, you may not be a minister of the gospel, a doctor
+of
+medicine, or a notary public. Florida likewise will have nothing to do
+with a woman doctor.</p>
+<p>Only a few women want to hold office or engage in professional work.
+Every woman hopes to be a mother. What then is the legal status of the
+American mother? When the club women began the study of their position
+before the law they were amazed to find, in all but ten of the States
+and territories, that they had absolutely no control over the destinies
+of their own children. In ten States only, and in the District of
+Columbia, are women co-guardians with their husbands of their children.</p>
+<p>In Pennsylvania if a woman supports her children, or has money to
+contribute to their support, she has joint guardianship. Under somewhat
+similar circumstances Rhode Island women have the same right.</p>
+<p>In all the other States and territories chil<a name="Page_107"></a>dren
+belong to their
+fathers. They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother. That
+this almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule,
+no
+one except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it.</p>
+<p>It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice
+are
+growing reluctant to administer such archaic laws.</p>
+<p>The famous Tillman case is an example. Senator Ben Tillman of South
+Carolina has one son,&#8212;a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogether
+disreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of married
+life, left him, taking with her their two little girls. South Carolina
+allows no divorce for any cause. The sanctity of the marriage tie is
+held so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abused
+at will by the veriest brute or libertine. Mrs. Tillman could not
+divorce her husband, so she took her children and went to live quietly
+at her parent's home in the city of Washington.</p>
+<p>One day the father of the children, young <a name="Page_108"></a>Tillman,
+appeared at that
+home, and in a fit of drunken resentment against his wife, kidnapped
+the
+children. He could not care for the children, probably had no wish to
+have them near him, but he took them back to South Carolina, and <i>gave</i>
+them to his parents, made a present of a woman's flesh and blood and
+heart to people who hated her and whom she hated in return.</p>
+<p>Under the laws of South Carolina, under the printed statutes, young
+Tillman had a perfect right to do this thing, and his father, a United
+States Senator, upheld him in his act. Young Mrs. Tillman, however,
+showed so little respect for the statutes that she sued her husband and
+his parents to recover her babies. The judge before whom the suit was
+brought was in a dilemma. There was the law&#8212;but also there was justice
+and common sense. To the everlasting honor of that South Carolina
+judge,
+justice and common sense triumphed, and he ruled that <i>the law was
+unconstitutional.</i></p>
+<p><a name="Page_109"></a>There are other hardships in this law denying
+to mothers the right of
+co-guardianship of their children. Two names signed to a child's
+working
+papers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens that
+selfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work,
+when
+the mothers know they are far too young. A woman in Scranton,
+Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her children
+had been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they were
+tall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman. "What could I say about
+it, when he went and got the papers?" she sighed.</p>
+<p>The father&#8212;not the mother&#8212;controls the services of his children. He
+can collect their wages, and he does. Very, very often he squanders the
+money they earn, and no one may interfere.</p>
+<p>A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay
+day
+at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her
+pay envelope, unopened. It was <a name="Page_110"></a>his regular day
+for getting drunk and
+indulging in an orgy of gambling. Often more than half of the girls'
+wages would have vanished before night. Twice the entire amount was
+wasted in an hour. This kept on until the girls passed their childhood
+and were mature enough to rebel successfully.</p>
+<p>It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potential
+services of a child.</p>
+<p>Many times have these unjust laws been protested against. In every
+State
+in the Union where they exist they have been protested against by
+organized groups of intelligent women. But their protests have been
+received with apathy, and, in some instances, with contempt by
+legislators. Only last year a determined fight was made by the women of
+California for a law giving them equal guardianship of their children.
+The women's bill was lost in the California Legislature, and lost by a
+large majority.</p>
+<p>What arguments did the California legislators use against the
+proposed
+measure? <a name="Page_111"></a>Identically the same that were made in
+Massachusetts and New
+York a quarter of a century ago. If women had the guardianship of their
+children, would anything prevent them from taking the children and
+leaving home? What would become of the sanctity of the home, with its
+lawful head shorn of his paternal dignity? In California a husband is
+head of the family in very fact, or at least a law of the State says so.</p>
+<p>At one time the law which made the husband the head of the home
+guaranteed to the family support by the husband. It does not do that
+now. There are laws on the statute books of many States obliging the
+wife to support her husband if he is disabled, and the children, if the
+husband defaults. There are no laws compelling the husband to support
+his wife. The husband is under an assumed obligation to support his
+family, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty. Family
+desertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most baffling
+of modern <a name="Page_112"></a>social problems. Everybody is
+appalled by its prevalence, but
+nobody seems to know what to do about it. The Legal Aid Society of New
+York City reports about three new cases of family desertion for every
+day in the year. Other agencies in other cities report a state of
+affairs quite as serious.</p>
+<p>Laws have been passed in most States making family desertion a
+misdemeanor, and in New York a recent law has made it a felony.
+Unfortunately there has been devised no machinery to enforce these
+laws,
+so they are practically non-existent. It is true that if the deserting
+husband is arrested he may be sent to jail or to the rock pile.</p>
+<p>But that does not cure him nor support his family. Mostly he is not
+arrested. He has only to take himself out of the reach of the local
+authorities. In New York a deserting husband, though he is counted a
+felon, needs only to cross the river to New Jersey to be reasonably
+safe. Imagine the State of New York spending good money to chase a man
+<a name="Page_113"></a>whom it does not want as a citizen, and whom it
+can only punish by
+sending to jail for a short period. The State is better off without
+such
+a man. To bring him back would not even benefit his deserted family.</p>
+<p>Women, far more law abiding than men, insist that a system which
+evolved
+out of feudal conditions, and has for its very basis the assumption of
+the weakness, ignorance, and dependence of women, has no place in
+twentieth century civilization.</p>
+<p>American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent. The present
+social order, in which military force is subordinated to industry and
+commerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and women
+physically on much the same plane. As for women's intellectual ability
+to decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over,
+rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the
+high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher
+grammar grades. Fewer women than <a name="Page_114"></a>men are
+numbered among illiterate. As
+for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better
+read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less,
+but their general intelligence is not less than men's.</p>
+<p>Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical
+support.
+Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves as
+independent human beings. Their work of bearing and rearing children,
+of
+managing the household, begins to assume a new dignity, a real value,
+in
+their eyes.</p>
+<p>In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shall
+determine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband's
+income. American women may not need such a law, but they insist that
+they need something to take the place of that one which in eleven
+States
+makes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife's income.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_V"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_115"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h2>WOMEN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY</h2>
+<br>
+<p>The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual
+discomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, and
+recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: "Corsets,
+millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants'
+wear, and ladies' shoes, second floor; no ma'am, carpets and rugs on
+the
+third floor; this car don't go to the restaurant; take the other side;
+groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs,
+men's shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor."</p>
+<p>Buying and selling, serving and being served&#8212;women. On every floor,
+in
+every aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, which
+covers several acres, women. <a name="Page_116"></a>Waiting their turn
+at the long line of
+telephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Down
+in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer
+frocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts,
+attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan
+department store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floors
+between, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks,
+running
+back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling
+the
+aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing
+throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of
+femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man
+clerk,
+and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.</p>
+<p>To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the United
+States are working outside of the home for wages is a simple,
+unanalyzed
+fact. You grasp it as an intellec<a name="Page_117"></a>tual
+abstraction, without much
+appreciation of its human significance. The mere reading of statistics
+does not help you to realize the changed status of women, and of
+society. You need to see the thing with your own eyes.</p>
+<p>Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York,
+when
+the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed
+with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison
+streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in
+Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city's
+great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of
+the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too
+narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. From factory,
+office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousands
+of girls. Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of the
+electric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting of
+hucksters, the laughter and oaths <a name="Page_118"></a>of men, their
+voices float, a shrill,
+triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil.</p>
+<p>You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of the
+interdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrate
+into the operating-room of a telephone exchange. Any hour will do. Any
+day in the week. There are no nights, nor Sundays, nor holidays in a
+telephone exchange. The city could not get along for one single minute
+in one single hour of the twenty-four without the telephone girl. Her
+hands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long,
+silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes
+of
+the switch board. The wires cross and recross, until the switch board
+is
+like a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of the
+telephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of a city.</p>
+<p>What would happen if this army of women was suddenly withdrawn from
+the
+telephone exchanges? Men could not take their places. <a
+ name="Page_119"></a>That experiment
+has been tried more than once, and it has always failed.</p>
+<p>Having seen how well women serve industry, go back to the department
+store and see how they dominate it also.</p>
+<p>The department store apparently exists for women. The architect who
+designed the building studied her necessities. The makers of store
+furniture planned counters, shelves, and seats to suit her stature.
+Buyers of goods know that their jobs are forfeit unless they can guess
+what her taste in gowns and hats is going to be six months hence.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>WOMEN'S DEMAND ON INDUSTRY</h3>
+<p>Woman dominates the department store for the plain reason that she
+supports it. Whoever earns the income, and that point has been somewhat
+in question lately, there is no doubt at all as to who spends it. She
+does. Hence, she is able to control the conditions under which this
+business is conducted.</p>
+<p>You can see for yourself that this is so. <a name="Page_120"></a>Walk
+through any large
+department store and observe how much valuable space is devoted to
+making women customers comfortable. There is always a drawing-room with
+easy-chairs and couches; plenty of little desks with handsome
+stationery
+where the customer may write notes; here, and in the retiring-room
+adjoining, are uniformed maids to offer service. But these things are
+not all that the women who support industry demand of the men in power.
+They demand that industry be carried on under conditions favorable to
+the health and comfort of the workers.</p>
+<p>Not until the development of the department store were women able to
+observe at close range the conduct of modern business. Not unnaturally
+it was in the department store that they began one of the most
+ambitious
+of their present-day activities,&#8212;that of humanizing industry.</p>
+<p>It was just twenty years ago that New York City was treated to a
+huge
+joke. It was such a joke that even the miserable ones with whom <a
+ name="Page_121"></a>it was
+concerned were obliged to smile. An obscure group of women, calling
+themselves the Working Women's Society, came out with the announcement
+that they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a labor
+union.</p>
+<p>These women said that the girls in the department stores were
+receiving
+wages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign
+woman
+in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an
+American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a
+half.</p>
+<p>They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for
+saleswomen
+was habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand from
+ten to fourteen hours a day. They said that sanitary conditions in the
+cloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as to
+endanger health and life. They said that the whole situation was so bad
+that no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years. Mostly
+they were used up in two <a name="Page_122"></a>years. They proposed a
+labor union of retail
+clerks as the only possible resource. Their effort failed.</p>
+<p>The trades union idea at that time had not reached the girl behind
+the
+counter. As a matter of fact it has not reached her yet, and it
+probably
+never will. The department-store clerk considers herself a higher
+social
+being than the ordinary working-girl, and in a way she is justified.
+The
+exceptionally intelligent department-store clerk has one chance in a
+thousand of rising to the well-paid, semi-professional post of buyer.
+Also the exceptionally attractive girl has possibly one chance in five
+thousand of marrying a millionaire. It is a long chance now, and it was
+a longer chance a dozen years ago, because there were fewer
+millionaires
+then than now, but it served well enough to cause the failure of the
+trades union plan.</p>
+<p>There is one thing that never fails, however, and that is a
+righteous
+protest. Out of the protest of that little, obscure group of <a
+ name="Page_123"></a>working
+women in New York City was born a movement which has spread beyond the
+Atlantic Ocean, which has effected legislation in many States of the
+Union, which has even determined an extremely important legal decision
+in the Supreme Court of the United States.</p>
+<p>A group of rich and influential women, prominent in many
+philanthropic
+efforts, became interested in the Working Women's Society. They
+investigated the charges brought against the department stores, and
+what
+they discovered made them resolve that conditions must be changed.</p>
+<p>In May, 1890, the late Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. Frederick
+Nathan, and others, called a large mass meeting in Chickering Hall.
+Mrs.
+Nathan had a constructive plan for raising the standard in shop
+conditions, especially those affecting women employees.</p>
+<p>If women would simply withdraw their patronage from the stores
+where,
+during the Christmas season, women and children toiled <a
+ name="Page_124"></a>long hours at
+night without any extra compensation, sooner or later the night work
+would cease. A few stores, said Mrs. Nathan, maintained a standard
+above
+the average. It was within the power of the women of New York to raise
+all the others to that standard, and afterwards it might be possible to
+go farther and establish a standard higher than the present highest.</p>
+<p>"We do not desire to blacklist any firm," declared Mrs. Nathan, "but
+we
+can <i>whitelist</i> those firms which treat their employees humanely.
+We can
+make and publish a list of all the shops where employees receive fair
+treatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops. By acting
+openly and publishing our White List we shall be able to create an
+immense public opinion in favor of just employers."</p>
+<p>Thus was the Consumers' League of New York ushered into existence.
+Eight
+months after the Chickering Hall meeting the committee appointed to
+co-operate with the Work<a name="Page_125"></a>ing Women's Society in
+preparing its list of
+fair firms had finished its work and made its report. The new League
+was
+formally organized on January 1, 1891.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img009"></a><img
+ style="width: 300px; height: 471px;" alt="Mrs. Frederick Nathan"
+ title="Mrs. Frederick Nathan" src="images/009.jpg"><br>
+<br>
+</div>
+<h3>THE CONSUMERS' LEAGUE "WHITE LIST"</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm
+names.
+The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew the
+conditions. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the other
+firms to their outcast position. Far from evincing a desire to earn a
+place on the White List, they cast aspersions on a "parcel of women"
+who
+were trying to "undermine business credit," and scouted the very idea
+of
+an organized feminine conscience.</p>
+<p>"Wait until the women want Easter bonnets," sneered one merchant.
+"Do
+you think they will pass up anything good because the store is not on
+their White List?"</p>
+<p>Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for. Even
+as
+far back as <a name="Page_126"></a>1891 a few women had begun to doubt
+the efficacy of that
+indirect influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What was
+the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to
+be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the
+Mercantile
+Employers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in
+mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the
+smallest
+to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory Department.</p>
+<p>The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next,
+and
+still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years
+after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower
+House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported
+in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it.
+A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into
+conditions of working women in New York City.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_127"></a>The findings of this Rheinhard Commission,
+published afterwards in two
+large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified
+to employing grown women at a salary of <i>thirty-three cents a day</i>.
+They
+confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in
+defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and
+wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they
+should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended,
+on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and
+uncompensated
+overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took
+away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They
+threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were
+passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless
+girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.</p>
+<p>The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in
+spite of
+the mer<a name="Page_128"></a>chants' protests the women's bill was
+passed without a
+dissenting vote.</p>
+<p>The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit
+which it
+placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority
+of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also
+provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of seats,&#8212;one
+to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of children, except
+those holding working certificates from the authorities. These, and
+other minor provisions, affected all retail stores, as far as the law
+was obeyed.</p>
+<p>As a matter of fact the Consumers' League's bill carried a "joker"
+which
+made its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter of
+inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health,
+supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it
+proved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after a
+year of this inadequate inspection, political forces were <a
+ name="Page_129"></a>brought to
+bear, and then there were no store inspectors.</p>
+<p>Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers' League tried to
+persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed
+inspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a year
+ago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores under
+factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants'
+Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto
+what
+they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. Governor
+Hughes, however, signed the bill.</p>
+<p>In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred
+infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. No
+less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken
+out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were
+sent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Con<a
+ name="Page_130"></a>sumers'
+League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been
+justified.</p>
+<p>To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To
+women
+capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition,
+a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterly
+fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its
+enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply business
+men, with the business man's contracted vision. They could think only
+in
+terms of money profit and money loss.</p>
+<p>In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have
+succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the
+stores supported by their patronage.</p>
+<p>The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League
+would
+concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season.
+Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this
+one.
+The League stands firm on the point, <a name="Page_131"></a>and up to
+the present so do the
+stores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the
+custom whereby <i>thousands of young girls and women are compelled
+every
+holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of
+uncompensated labor</i>.</p>
+<p>No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime
+extorted
+in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to
+five months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchase
+after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six
+o'clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in
+the bookkeeping and auditing departments.</p>
+<p>That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in
+most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which
+strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it
+seems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified.</p>
+<p>I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of
+one of
+the largest and <a name="Page_132"></a>most respectable stores in New
+York. In this store,
+and, according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the
+accounting force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school,
+ignorant and incapable&#8212;but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day's
+sales are posted and audited before the close of the day following, the
+business force has to work until nine and ten o'clock several nights in
+the week. In some cases they work every night.</p>
+<p>Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of
+public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the
+Consumers' League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.</p>
+<p>The Consumers' League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in
+this
+early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. City after
+city, State after State, formed Consumers' Leagues, until, in 1899, a
+National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was organized. The
+National League, far from being a philanthropic society, has be<a
+ name="Page_133"></a>come a
+scientific association for the study of industrial economics.</p>
+<p>When the original Consumers' League undertook its first piece of
+legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were
+right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their
+claim.
+The New York League and all of the others have been collecting reasons
+ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized
+collection
+of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they should not
+work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in tenements;
+why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speed of
+machines
+should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should be extended; why
+minimum wage rates should be established.</p>
+<p>In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group
+of
+trained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body
+of
+facts concerning the human side <a name="Page_134"></a>of industry. It
+is ammunition which
+tells. One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry in
+Portland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of
+blowing
+a large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of
+the
+United States.</p>
+<p>There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of
+women in
+factories and laundries should be ten hours long. The law was
+constantly
+violated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland. One night a
+factory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and found
+working there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher. The inspector
+promptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller.</p>
+<p>The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars. Instead of
+paying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the other
+laundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for women
+workers was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment <a
+ name="Page_135"></a>to the
+Constitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the
+right
+freely to contract. A man or a woman may contract with an employer to
+work as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whatever
+dangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions, <i>unless</i> "there
+is fair
+ground to say that there is material danger to the public health or
+safety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the general
+welfare...." This is the legal decision on which most protective
+legislation in the United States has been based.</p>
+<p>Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day
+for
+women was declared unconstitutional because nobody's health or safety
+was endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New York
+law
+forbidding all-night employment of women.</p>
+<p>So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had
+reason to
+believe that they could attack the Oregon law. The case was appealed,
+and appealed again, by the <a name="Page_136"></a>laundrymen, and
+finally reached the Supreme
+Court of the United States. Then the Consumers' League took a hand.</p>
+<p>The brief for the State of Oregon, "defendant in error," was
+prepared by
+Louis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of
+the
+most effective workers in the League's New York headquarters. This
+brief
+is probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence. It
+consists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a few
+paragraphs were written by the attorney for the State. All the rest was
+contributed, under Miss Goldmark's direction, from the Consumers'
+League's wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should be
+protected.</p>
+<p>The League's reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to work
+their women employees far into the night was, "The World's Experience
+upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is
+Based." It is simply a mass of <a name="Page_137"></a>testimony taken
+from hearings before the
+English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from
+the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of
+industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical
+books; from reports of boards of health.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>REASONS FOR PROTECTING WOMEN WORKERS</h3>
+<p>The brief included a short and interesting chapter, containing a
+number
+of things the League had collected on the subject of laundries. Supreme
+Court judges cannot be expected to know that laundry work is classed by
+experts among the dangerous trades. That washing clothes, from a simple
+home or backyard occupation, has been transformed into a
+highly-organized factory trade full of complicated and often extremely
+dangerous machinery; that the atmosphere of a steam laundry is more
+conducive to tuberculosis and the other occupational diseases than
+cotton mills; that the work in laundries, being irreg<a name="Page_138"></a>ular,
+is conducive
+to a general low state of morals; that, on the whole, women should not
+be required to spend more time than necessary in laundries; all this
+was
+set forth.</p>
+<p>Medical testimony showed the physical differences between men and
+women;
+the lesser power of women to endure long hours of standing; the
+heightened susceptibility of women to industrial poisons&#8212;lead, naphtha,
+and the like. A long chapter of testimony on the effect of
+child-bearing
+in communities where the women had toiled long hours before marriage,
+or
+afterwards, was included.</p>
+<p>The testimony of factory inspectors, of industrial experts, of
+employers
+in England, Germany, France, America, revealed the bad effect of long
+hours on women's safety, both physical and moral. It revealed the good
+effect, on the individual health, home life, and general welfare, of
+short hours of labor.</p>
+<p>Nor was the business aspect of the case neglected. That people
+accomplish as much in an eight-hour day as in a twelve-hour day <a
+ name="Page_139"></a>has
+actually been demonstrated. The brief stated, for one instance, the
+experience of a bicycle factory in Massachusetts.</p>
+<p>In this place young women were employed to sort the ball bearings
+which
+went into the machines. They did this by touch, and no girl was of use
+to the firm unless her touch was very sensitive and very sure. The head
+of this firm became convinced that the work done late in the afternoon
+was of inferior quality, and he tried the experiment of cutting the
+hours from ten to nine. The work was done on piece wages, and the girls
+at first protested against the nine-hour day, fearing that their pay
+envelopes would suffer. To their astonishment they earned as much in
+nine hours as they had in ten. In time the employer cut the working day
+down to eight hours and a half, and in addition gave the girls
+ten-minute rests twice a day. Still they earned their full wages, and
+they continued to earn full wages after the day became eight hours
+long.
+The employer testified before the <a name="Page_140"></a>United States
+Industrial Commission
+of 1900 that he believed he could successfully shorten the day to seven
+hours and a half and get the same amount of work accomplished.</p>
+<p>What can you do against testimony like that? The Consumers' League
+convinced the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Oregon
+ten-hour law was upheld.</p>
+<p>The importance of this decision cannot be overestimated. On it hangs
+the
+validity of nearly all the laws which have been passed in the United
+States for the protection of women workers. If the Oregon law had been
+declared unconstitutional, laws in twenty States, or practically all
+the
+States where women work in factories, would have been in perpetual
+danger, and the United States might easily have sunk to a position
+occupied now by no leading country in Europe.</p>
+<p>Great Britain has had protective legislation for women workers since
+1844. In 1847 the labor of women in English textile mills was limited
+to
+ten hours a day, the period we are <a name="Page_141"></a>now worrying
+about, as being
+possibly contrary to our Constitution. France, within the past five
+years, has established a ten-hour day, broken by one hour of rest.
+Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy, limit the hours of
+women's labor. In several countries there are special provisions giving
+extra time off to women who have household responsibilities. What would
+our Constitution-bound law makers say to such a proposition, if any one
+had the hardihood to suggest it?</p>
+<p>If this law had not been upheld by the United States Supreme Court
+the
+women of no State could have hoped to secure further legislation for
+women workers. As it is, women in many States are preparing to
+establish
+what is now known as "The Oregon Standard," that is, a ten-hour day for
+all working women.</p>
+<p>Nothing in connection with the woman movement is more significant,
+certainly nothing was more unexpected, than the voluntary abandonment,
+on the part of women, of class <a name="Page_142"></a>prejudice and
+class distinctions. Where
+formerly the interest of the leisured woman in her wage-earning sisters
+was of a sentimental or philanthropic character, it has become
+practical
+and democratic.</p>
+<p>The Young Women's Christian Association has had an industrial
+department, which up to a recent period concerned itself merely with
+the
+spiritual welfare of working girls. Prayer meetings in factories,
+clubs,
+and classes in the Association headquarters, working-girls' boarding
+homes, and other philanthropic efforts were the limits of the
+Association's activities. The entire policy has changed of late, and
+under the capable direction of Miss Annie Marian MacLean, of Brooklyn,
+New York, the industrial department of the Association is doing
+scientific investigation of labor conditions of women.</p>
+<p>In a cracker factory I once saw a paid worker in the Young Women's
+Christian Association pause above a young girl lying on the floor,
+crimson with fever, and apparently <a name="Page_143"></a>in the
+throes of a serious illness.
+With angelic pity on her face the Association worker stooped and
+slipped
+a tract into the sick girl's hand. The kind of industrial secretary the
+Association now employs would send for an ambulance and see that the
+girl had the best of hospital care. She would inquire whether the
+girl's
+illness was caused by the conditions under which she worked, and she
+would know if it were possible to have those conditions changed.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>WOMEN'S CLUBS STUDYING LABOR PROBLEMS</h3>
+<p>Nearly every state federation of women's clubs has its industrial
+committee, and many large clubs have a corresponding department. It is
+these industrial sections of the women's clubs which are such a thorn
+in
+the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr., the new president of the National
+Manufacturers' Association. In his inaugural address Mr. Kirby warned
+his colleagues that women's clubs were not the ladylike, innocuous
+institutions that too-confiding <a name="Page_144"></a>man supposed
+them to be. In those
+clubs, he declared, their own wives and daughters were listening to
+addresses by the worst enemies of the Manufacturers' Association, the
+labor leaders. By which he meant that the club women were inviting
+trade-union men and women to present the worker's side of industrial
+subjects. "Soon," exclaimed Mr. Kirby, "we shall have to fight the
+women
+as well as the unions."</p>
+<p>The richest and most aristocratic woman's club in the country is the
+Colony Club of New York. The Colony Club was organized by a number of
+women from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the manner
+of men's clubs. The women built a magnificent clubhouse on Madison
+Avenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderful
+roof-garden. For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing more
+than
+a beautiful toy which its members played with. But soon it began to
+develop into a sort of a woman's forum, where all sorts of social
+topics
+were discussed. <a name="Page_145"></a>Visiting women of distinction,
+artists, writers,
+lecturers, were entertained there.</p>
+<p>Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course in
+industrial economics. The women did not invite lecturers from Columbia
+University to address them. They asked John Mitchell and many lesser
+lights of the labor world. They wanted to learn, at first hand, the
+facts concerning conditions of industry. Most of them are stockholders
+in mills, factories, mines, or business establishments. Many own real
+estate on which factories stand.</p>
+<p>"It is not fair," they have openly declared, "that we should enjoy
+wealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death. We do
+not want wealth on such terms."</p>
+<p>The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to the
+National Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in the
+working and living conditions of wage earners in industries and in
+governmental institutions. A few conscientious employers <a
+ name="Page_146"></a>have spent a
+part of their profits to make their employees comfortable. They have
+given them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, and
+comfortable seats. They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacation
+houses, and the like.</p>
+<p>No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers.
+Equally,
+no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem. Nor
+should they be used as a substitute for justice.</p>
+<p>Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed,
+untactfully administered. Too often it has been instituted, not to
+benefit the workers, but to advertise the business. Too often its real
+object was a desire to play the philanthropist's role, to exact
+obsequience from the wage earner.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img010"></a><img
+ style="width: 301px; height: 509px;"
+ alt="MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New York, the most exclusive Women's Club in the country"
+ title="MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New York, the most exclusive Women's Club in the country"
+ src="images/010.jpg"></p>
+<p>I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of
+the
+perfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected,
+the
+girls are required to stop work and clean the rooms. Since they work on
+a piece-<a name="Page_147"></a>work scale, the "perfect sanitary
+conditions" exist at their
+expense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a
+printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday.
+This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their
+employers. It always fails.</p>
+<p>It seems to the women who have studied these things that proper
+sanitary
+conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision for rest,
+vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wage earner's
+due.
+They are a part of the laborer's hire, and should be guaranteed by law,
+exactly as wages are guaranteed. An employer deserves gratitude for
+overtime pay no more than for fire escapes.</p>
+<p>Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers' League,
+women's
+clubs, and women's labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that
+good
+working conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastly
+increase the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits
+of
+the employers.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_148"></a>The New York Telephone Company does not set
+itself up to be a
+benevolent institution. Its directors know that its profits depend on
+the excellence of its service. There is one exchange in the Borough of
+Brooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic. This
+traffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summer
+resorts along the coast. In the fall and winter the traffic is very
+light. Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work only
+half the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round.
+"We cannot afford to do anything else," explains the traffic manager.
+"We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages."</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img011"></a><img
+ style="width: 284px; height: 522px;" alt="MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY"
+ title="MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY" src="images/011.jpg"></div>
+<p>The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his business
+would suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen. He believed that
+he would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks human
+working
+conditions. Then came the Consumers' League and mercantile laws, and a
+new pressure of <a name="Page_149"></a>public opinion, and the
+dry-goods merchant found out
+that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than one that
+is exhausted and uncomfortable.</p>
+<p>The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has
+proved
+itself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligent
+employers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws will
+provide for it.</p>
+<p>It used to be the invariable custom in stores&#8212;it is so still in a
+few&#8212;to lay off many clerks during the dull seasons. Now the best stores
+find that they can better afford to give all their employees vacations
+with pay. A clerk coming home after a vacation can sell goods, even in
+dull times. More and more employers are coming to appreciate the money
+value of the Saturday half-holiday in summer. Hearn, in New York,
+closes
+his department store all day Saturday during July and August. The store
+sells more goods in five days than it previously sold in six.</p>
+<a name="Page_150"></a><br>
+<h3>THE FILENE SYSTEM OF DEVELOPING EFFICIENT WORKERS</h3>
+<p>There is one department store which has demonstrated that it is
+profitable to pay higher wages than its competitors, and that it pays
+to
+allow the employees to fix the terms of their own employment. This is
+the Filene store in Boston, which has developed within the past ten
+years from a conservative, old-fashioned dry-goods business into an
+extremely original and interesting experiment station in commercial
+economics.</p>
+<p>The entire policy of the Filene management is bent on developing to
+the
+highest possible point the efficiency of each individual clerk. The
+best
+possible material is sought. No girl under sixteen is employed, and no
+girl of any age who has not graduated with credit from the grammar
+schools. There are a number of college-bred men and women in the Filene
+employ.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img012"></a><img
+ style="width: 356px; height: 230px;"
+ alt="A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN"
+ title="A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN" src="images/012.jpg"></div>
+<p>Good wages are paid, even to beginners, and <a name="Page_151"></a>experienced
+employees are
+rewarded, not according to a fixed rate of payment, but according to
+earning capacity. Taken throughout the store, wages, plus commissions,
+which are allowed in all departments, average about two dollars a week
+higher than in other department stores in Boston.</p>
+<p>No irresponsible, automatic employee can develop high efficiency.
+She
+does not want to become efficient; she wants merely to receive a pay
+envelope at the end of the week. In order to develop responsibility and
+initiative in their employees the Filenes have put them on a
+self-governing basis. The workers do not literally make their own
+rules,
+but the vote of the majority can change any rule made by the firm. The
+firm furnishes its employees with a printed book of rules, in which the
+policy of the store is set forth. If the employees object to any of the
+rules, or any part of the policy, they can vote a change.</p>
+<p>The medium through which the clerks express their opinions and
+desires
+is the Filene <a name="Page_152"></a>Co-operative Association, of
+which every clerk and every
+employee in the place is a member. No dues are exacted, as is the
+custom
+in the usual employees' association. The executive body, called the
+Store Council, and all other officers are elected by the members. All
+matters of grievance, all subjects of controversy, are referred to the
+Store Council, which, as often as occasion demands, calls a meeting of
+the entire association after business hours.</p>
+<p>For example: Christmas happens on a Friday. The firm decides to keep
+the
+store open on the following day&#8212;Saturday. There is an expression of
+dissatisfaction from a number of clerks. A meeting of the association
+is
+called, and a vote taken as to whether the majority want the extra
+holiday or not; whether the majority are willing to lose the
+commissions
+on a day's sales, for, of course, salaries continue. The vote reveals
+that the majority want the holiday. The Store Council so reports to the
+firm, and the firm must grant the holiday.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_153"></a>All matters of difficulty arising between
+employers and employed, in
+the Filene store, are settled not by the firm, but by the Arbitration
+Board of Employees, also elected by popular vote. All disagreements as
+to wages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue between
+saleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to the
+Board of Arbitration, and the board's decision is final. There is no
+tyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of a
+department. Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as she
+is an efficient saleswoman.</p>
+<p>Surely it is not too much to hope that, in a future not too far
+distant,
+all women who earn their bread will serve a system of industry adjusted
+by law to human standards. In enlightened America the courts, presided
+over by men to whom manual labor is known only in theory, have
+persistently ruled that the <i>Constitution forbade the State to make
+laws
+protecting women workers</i>. It has seemed to most of our courts and
+most
+of our judges <a name="Page_154"></a>that the State fulfilled its
+whole duty to its women
+citizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract&#8212;even
+though they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts which
+involved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and future
+generations. The women of this country have done nothing more important
+than to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyond
+this terrible delusion.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VI"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_155"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h2>MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE</h2>
+<br>
+<p>The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the
+legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was
+received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. The
+Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in
+labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable
+opportunity
+to get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the Illinois
+State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years
+later
+the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that
+it
+was unconstitutional.</p>
+<p>The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without
+precedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States,
+until it had become almost a prin<a name="Page_156"></a>ciple of
+American law that protective
+legislation for working women was invalid.</p>
+<p>The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the
+conclusion
+that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody
+of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women
+would
+be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may
+appear obscure.</p>
+<p>The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men,
+and
+they know something&#8212;not much, but still something&#8212;about the men of the
+working classes. They know, for example, something about the conditions
+under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to
+public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor,
+twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these
+are bad things,&#8212;bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for
+the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of labor
+comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_157"></a>The learned judges, I say this with all due
+respect, do not know
+anything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts of
+their decisions, denying the constitutionality of protective measures,
+are amazing in the ignorance they display,&#8212;ignorance of industrial
+conditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects of
+certain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect of
+women's arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions
+in
+trades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the home
+resulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, the
+learned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, the
+happiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about the
+inhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display of
+the real facts.</p>
+<p>We have seen how the women of the Consumers' League taught the
+United
+States Supreme Court something about working women; showed them a few
+of
+the calamities resulting <a name="Page_158"></a>from the unrestricted
+labor of women and
+immature girls. The Supreme Court's decision forever abolished the old
+fallacy that the American Constitution <i>forbids</i> protective
+legislation
+for women workers. It remains for women's organizations in the various
+States to educate local courts up to the knowledge that community
+interest <i>demands</i> protective legislation.</p>
+<p>Following the decision of the Supreme Court in the Oregon case,
+which
+flatly contradicted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, the
+working women of Illinois began their educational campaign. They had
+now, for the first time, a fighting chance to secure the restoration of
+their shortened work day. The women of fifteen organized trades in the
+city of Chicago determined to take that chance.</p>
+<p>The women first appealed to the Industrial Commission, appointed
+early
+in 1908 by Governor Dineen, to investigate the need of protective
+legislation for workers, men and women alike.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_159"></a>The women were given a courteous hearing, but
+were told frankly that
+limited hours of work for women was not one of protective measures to
+be
+recommended by the Commission.</p>
+<p>The Waitresses' Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists,
+led
+by a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary of
+the union. Miss Maloney and her associates drafted and introduced into
+the Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day for
+every woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store,
+laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for
+enforcing the measure.</p>
+<p>The "Girls' Bill," as it immediately became known, was the most
+hotly
+contested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during the
+session.
+Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing on the
+bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek and tired
+women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their working
+<a name="Page_160"></a>day made shorter. Another presented a petition
+signed by his women
+employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven hours
+a
+day!</p>
+<p>Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after
+learned
+counsel for the Manufacturers' Association had argued against the
+measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers'
+Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girls
+confined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of the
+Glove Makers' Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two
+girls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are
+gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a
+chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea:
+Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses' Union, was the other speaker.</p>
+<p>They described details in the daily lives of working women not
+generally
+known except to the workers themselves. Among these was <a
+ name="Page_161"></a>the piece-work
+system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible
+speed
+is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage.
+The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine
+whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; to
+consider how many stitches the operator's hand must guide in a week, a
+month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve
+hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease
+of
+earning power.</p>
+<p>"I am a waitress," said Miss Maloney, "and I work ten hours a day.
+In
+that time a waitress who is tolerably busy <i>walks</i> ten miles, and
+the
+dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred
+to
+two thousand pounds. Don't you think eight hours a day is enough for a
+girl to walk?"</p>
+<p>Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after
+that
+day. The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too grave
+for
+the friends of the workers to over<a name="Page_162"></a>come. It was
+decided to substitute a
+ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the "Oregon Standard" established
+by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle of limitation
+upon the hours of women's work once established in Illinois, the
+workers
+could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.</p>
+<p>The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a
+law
+of the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers' Association, through the
+W.C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought
+suit
+to test the constitutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, Anna
+Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Their
+appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten
+hours
+to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to
+contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them
+by the ten-hour law.</p>
+<p>There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers,
+involved
+in this protest <a name="Page_163"></a>against the ten-hour day, a
+confession of the wretched
+state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature
+years&#8212;one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over
+thirty years&#8212;are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep
+body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no
+position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would
+contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?</p>
+<p>There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time
+Judge
+R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his
+career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to
+the
+real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For
+Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory
+Department,
+forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.</p>
+<p>Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the
+women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it <a
+ name="Page_164"></a>came up in
+the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of
+Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on
+hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed
+pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers'
+League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had
+toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois
+Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply
+a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and
+bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and
+especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on
+the
+succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three pages of
+law.</p>
+<p>The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was
+the
+testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.</p>
+<p>"Medical Science has demonstrated," says this most important
+paragraph,
+"that while <a name="Page_165"></a>fatigue is a normal phenomenon ...
+excessive fatigue or
+exhaustion is abnormal.... It has discovered that fatigue is due not
+only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue,
+entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial
+toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that when
+artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin
+causes death. The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to be
+counteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body.
+But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not produced
+fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin."</p>
+<p>The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the American
+Constitution was never intended to shield manufacturers in their
+willingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. The
+ten-hour law was sustained.</p>
+<p>That the "Girls' Bill" passed, or that it was even introduced, was
+due
+in large measure to <a name="Page_166"></a>an organization of women,
+more militant and more
+democratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women's
+Trade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, the
+League
+consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organized
+trades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of these
+latter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-union
+principle, but more are women who work in the professional
+ranks,&#8212;teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlement
+workers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, who
+ever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federation
+of Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners,
+to appear in Labor Day parades.</p>
+<p>The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities,&#8212;New
+York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland,&#8212;is to educate women
+wage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains and
+sup<a name="Page_167"></a>ports organizers among all classes of
+workers. As quickly as a group
+in any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. It
+raises
+funds to assist women in their trade struggles. It acts as arbitrator
+between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes.</p>
+<p>The Women's Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factory
+trades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until lately
+believed themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundred
+and fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventy
+stenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers' Federation
+of Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before the
+Women's Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated.
+The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized.</p>
+<p>The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League was
+brilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-<a
+ name="Page_168"></a>waist
+makers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story of
+this strike will bear retelling.</p>
+<p>On the evening of November 22, 1909, there was a great mass meeting
+of
+workers held at Cooper Union in New York. Samuel Gompers, President of
+the American Federation of Labor, presided, and the stage was well
+filled with members of the Women's Trade Union League. The meeting had
+been called by the League in conjunction with Shirt-Waist Makers'
+Union,
+Local 25, to consider the grievances of shirt-waist makers in general,
+and especially of the shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, who
+had been, for more than two months, on strike.</p>
+<p>The story of the strike, the causes that led up to it, and the
+bitter
+injustice which followed it were rehearsed in a dozen speeches. It was
+shown that for four to five dollars a week the girl shirt-waist makers
+worked from eight in the morning until half-past five in the evening
+two
+days in the week; from eight in the morn<a name="Page_169"></a>ing
+until nine at night four
+days in the week; and from eight in the morning until noon one day in
+the week&#8212;Sunday.</p>
+<p>The shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, in hope of bettering
+their conditions, had formed a union, and had informed their employers
+of their action. The employers promptly locked them out of the shop,
+and
+the girls declared a strike.</p>
+<p>The strike was more than two months old when the Cooper Union
+meeting
+was held, and the employers showed no signs of giving in. It was agreed
+that a general strike of shirt-waist makers ought to be declared. But
+the union was weak, there were no funds, and most of the shirt-waist
+makers were women and unused to the idea of solidarity in action. Could
+they stand together in an industrial struggle which promised to be long
+and bitter?</p>
+<p>President Gompers was plainly fearful that they could not.</p>
+<p>Suddenly a very small, very young, very intense Jewish girl, known
+to
+her associates as <a name="Page_170"></a>Clara Lemlich, sprang to her
+feet, and, with the
+assistance of two young men, climbed to the high platform. Flinging up
+her arms with a dramatic gesture she poured out a flood of speech,
+entirely unintelligible to the presiding Gompers, and to the members of
+the Women's Trade Union League. The Yiddish-speaking majority in the
+audience understood, however, and the others quickly caught the spirit
+of her impassioned plea.</p>
+<p>The vast audience rose as one man, and a great roar arose. "Yes, we
+will
+all strike!"</p>
+<p>"And will you keep the faith?" cried the girl on the platform. "Will
+you
+swear by the old Jewish oath of our fathers?"</p>
+<p>Two thousand Jewish hands were thrust in air, and two thousand
+Jewish
+throats uttered the oath: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge,
+may this hand wither and drop off from this arm I now raise."</p>
+<p>Clara Lemlich's part in the work was accomplished. Within a few days
+forty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_171"></a>The Women's Trade Union League, under the
+direction of Miss Helen
+Marot, secretary, at once took hold of the strike.</p>
+<p>There were two things to be done at once. The forty thousand had to
+be
+enrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing to
+accept the terms of the strikers had to be "signed up." Clinton Hall,
+one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, and
+for several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the street
+outside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and women
+strikers, anxious and perspiring "bosses," and busy, active associates
+of the Women's Trade Union League.</p>
+<p>The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied the
+League members undertook the work of picketing the shops. Picketing, if
+this activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling the
+neighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakers
+are going to and from their <a name="Page_172"></a>nefarious business,
+and importuning them to
+join the strike.</p>
+<p>Peaceful picketing is legal. The law permits a striker to speak to
+the
+girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her
+most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on
+the
+other's arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence.</p>
+<p>Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a
+little
+of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence.
+After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girls
+who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members.
+Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among
+these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's
+Superintendent
+of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a
+millionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College,
+Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association of
+Collegiate Alumnae. These young women went <a name="Page_173"></a>out
+day after day with girl
+strikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered
+arrest
+on more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation of
+magistrates who&#8212;well, who did not understand.</p>
+<p>The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and
+organizations of
+women other than the Women's Trade Union League began to take an
+interest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss Gertrude
+Barnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial world
+of women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike.
+They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women in
+person.</p>
+<p>The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest social
+eminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan and
+several others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the president
+of the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the
+strikers'
+own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. <a
+ name="Page_174"></a>More
+than thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozen
+women promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers.</p>
+<p>A week later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, mother of the Duchess of
+Marlborough,
+leader of a large Woman Suffrage Association, engaged the Hippodrome,
+and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators.
+Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting.</p>
+<p>At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses were
+involved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis of
+increased pay, a fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of the
+union. Others settled later, and under the influence of the "uptown
+scum," as the employers' association gallantly termed the Women's Trade
+Union League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still others
+reluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out
+of
+the five hundred had settled with the union, and only about three
+<a name="Page_175"></a>thousand of the workers were still out of work.</p>
+<p>Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they would
+ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of the
+intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all,
+that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be
+helped
+along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was
+unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household
+labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to
+perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was
+to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.</p>
+<p>Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are
+becoming
+the co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of the
+leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the
+situation. espouse the cause of their working sisters. <a
+ name="Page_176"></a>The woman in the
+factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.</p>
+<p>The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury,
+Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of
+the working women.</p>
+<p>That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was
+established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew
+every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the
+women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of
+labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and
+wages
+were good enough to compensate for the long day's labor.</p>
+<p>The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a
+corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few
+floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands."</p>
+<p>The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated
+machinery was intro<a name="Page_177"></a>duced. The shortened work day
+was a hundred times
+more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and
+nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances
+developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so
+bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or
+manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to
+the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women who
+had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and
+eight dollars.</p>
+<p>The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the
+mills
+as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.</p>
+<p>There you have the story of women's realization of themselves as a
+group. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women.
+The Boston Branch of the Women's Trade Union League, through its
+secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined <a
+ name="Page_178"></a>the strikers.
+Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile
+Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks
+of anxiety and deprivation.</p>
+<p>The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business
+before treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, exists
+as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and
+conferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to
+exist. An employers' association is a necessity of business life. A
+labor union is an insult to capital.</p>
+<p>This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor car
+stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs.
+Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay
+personified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer. Her
+powers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercial
+connections, were sufficient to wring consent from the <a
+ name="Page_179"></a>firm to receive
+John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers.</p>
+<p>John Golden, intelligent, honest, a fine type of workingman,
+educated in
+the English school of unionism, held two conferences with the firm. He
+was able to make the employers see the whole situation in an entirely
+new light. They were men of probity; they wanted to be fair; and when
+they saw the human side of the struggle they surrendered. When they
+perceived the justice of the collective bargain, the advantages to both
+sides of a labor organization honestly conducted, they consented to
+recognize the union. And the women went back, their group unbroken.</p>
+<p>Thus are women working, women of all classes, to humanize the
+factory.
+From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and the
+judiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women of
+the toiling masses in their struggle to make over the factory from the
+inside. Together they are impressing the men of the working <a
+ name="Page_180"></a>world, law
+makers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of the
+race.</p>
+<p>Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protective
+legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal
+decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not yet
+complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the late
+Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not every
+court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more
+valuable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn.</p>
+<p>In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in
+which
+a number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to the
+owner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did not
+strike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in that
+country a substitute for the strike is provided by law. To this
+substitute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. The
+employer in his answer declared, <a name="Page_181"></a>just as
+employers in this country
+might have done, that his business would not stand an increase in
+wages.
+He explained that the match industry was newly established in New
+Zealand, and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could
+not afford to pay high wages.</p>
+<p>The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been an
+inquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiry
+into the cost of living in the town where the match factory was
+located.
+And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court of
+Arbitration, and this is what he said to the man:</p>
+<p>"It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on
+the
+wages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that they
+should have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls and
+bodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance than
+your profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better for
+the <a name="Page_182"></a>community for you to close your factory. <i>It
+would be better to
+send the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back
+to
+flints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter.</i>
+My
+award is that you pay what they ask."</p>
+<p>Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the
+eight
+million women in the world who have learned to think in human terms.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VII"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_183"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h2>BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO</h2>
+<br>
+<p>At the threshold of that quarter of old New York called Greenwich
+Village stands Jefferson Market Court. Almost concealed behind the
+towering structure of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, the building by day is
+rather inconspicuous. But when night falls, swallowing up the
+neighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Market
+assumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminated
+clock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands toward
+midnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams an
+intense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of the
+building floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, through
+the iron-guarded door, there passes, every week-day night in the year,
+a
+long procession of prodigals.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_184"></a>The guarded door seldom admits any one as
+important, so to speak, as a
+criminal. The criminal's case waits for day. The Night Court in
+Jefferson Market sits in judgment only on the small fry caught in the
+dragnet of the police. Tramps, vagrants, drunkards, brawlers,
+disturbers
+of the peace, speeding chauffeurs, licenseless peddlers, youths caught
+red-handed shooting craps or playing ball in the streets,&#8212;these are the
+men with whom the Night Court deals. But it is not the men we have come
+to see.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img013"></a><img
+ style="width: 291px; height: 417px;" alt="MISS MAUDE E. MINER"
+ title="MISS MAUDE E. MINER" src="images/013.jpg"></div>
+<p>The women of the Night Court. Prodigal daughters! Between December,
+1908, and December, 1909, no less than five thousand of them passed
+through the guarded door, under the blaze of the electric lights. There
+is never an hour, from nine at night until three in the morning, when
+the prisoners' bench in Jefferson Market Court is without its full
+quota
+of women. Old&#8212;prematurely old, and young&#8212;pitifully young; white and
+brown; fair and faded; sad and cynical; starved and prosper<a
+ name="Page_185"></a>ous;
+rag-draped and satin-bedecked; together they wait their turn at
+judgment.</p>
+<p>Quietly moving back and forth before the prisoners' bench you see a
+woman, tall, graceful, black-gowned. She is the salaried probation
+officer, modern substitute for the old-time volunteer mission worker.
+The probation officer's serious blue eyes burn with no missionary zeal.
+There is no spark of sentimental pity in the keen gaze she turns on
+each
+new arrival.</p>
+<p>When the bench is full of women the judge turns to her to inquire:
+"Anybody there you want, Miss Miner?"</p>
+<p>Miss Miner usually shakes her head. She diagnoses her cases like a
+physician, and she wastes no time on incurables.</p>
+<p>Once in a while, perhaps several times in the course of a night,
+Miss
+Miner touches a girl on the arm. At once the girl rises and follows the
+probation officer into an adjoining room. If she is what she appears,
+young in evil, if she has a story which rings true, a story of poverty
+and misfortune, rather than of depravity, <a name="Page_186"></a>she
+goes not back to the
+prisoners' bench. When her turn at judgment comes Miss Miner stands
+beside her, and in a low voice meant only for the judge, she tells the
+facts. The girl weeps as she listens. To hear one's troubles told is
+sometimes more terrible than to endure them.</p>
+<p>Court adjourns at three in the morning, and this girl, with the
+others&#8212;if others have been claimed by the probation officer&#8212;goes out
+into the empty street, under the light of the tall tower, whose clock
+has begun all over again its monotonous race toward midnight. No
+policeman accompanies the group. The girls are under no manner of
+duress. They have promised to go home with Miss Miner, and they go. The
+night's adventure, entered into with dread, with callous indifference,
+or with thoughtless mirth, ends in a quiet bedroom and a pillow wet
+with
+tears.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img014"></a><img
+ style="width: 356px; height: 306px;"
+ alt="IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK."
+ title="IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK." src="images/014.jpg"></div>
+<p>Waverley House, as Miss Miner's home is known, has sheltered, during
+the
+past year, over three hundred girls. Out of that number <a
+ name="Page_187"></a>one hundred
+and nineteen have returned to their homes, or are earning a living at
+useful work.</p>
+<p>One hundred and nineteen saved out of five thousand prodigals! In
+point
+of numbers this is a melancholy showing, but in comparison with other
+efforts at rescue work it is decidedly encouraging.</p>
+<p>Nothing quite like Waverley House has appeared in other American
+cities,
+but it is a type of detention home for girls which is developing
+logically out of the probation system. Delinquent girls under sixteen
+are now considered, in all enlightened communities, subjects for the
+Juvenile Court. They are hardly ever associated with older delinquents.
+But a girl over sixteen is likely to be committed to prison, and may be
+locked in cells with criminal and abandoned women of the lowest order.
+Waverley House is the first practical protest against this stupid and
+evil-encouraging policy.</p>
+<p>The house, which stands a few blocks distant from the Night Court,
+was
+established and is <a name="Page_188"></a>maintained by the Probation
+Association of New York,
+consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and of
+men and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The
+District
+Attorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of the
+Association, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, Miss
+Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women's Trade
+Union League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women's
+Municipal League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York's
+organized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among the
+supporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable and
+sympathetic superintendent of the house.</p>
+<p>The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station,
+a
+laboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases
+which
+beset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency
+and
+paroled to probation officers are taken to Waverley <a name="Page_189"></a>House,
+where they
+remain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best means
+of disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some to
+hospitals, some to institutions, some placed on long probation.</p>
+<p>Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's
+college
+to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who
+are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which
+has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They
+have
+set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakes
+countless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery,
+disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women have
+undertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of the
+problem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals?
+This much did the missionaries before them.</p>
+<p>"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per <a name="Page_190"></a>cent,"
+declares Miss Miner,
+"if only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning."</p>
+<p>To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the
+beginning,
+instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That
+is
+what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what
+physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning
+to
+do with poverty.</p>
+<p>Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a
+cause,
+and that it might be possible to attack it at its source. Yet that any
+large number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly,
+voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts.
+There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they find
+themselves entirely powerless to resist.</p>
+<p>Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs
+of a
+very important movement among women to discover what these forces are.
+Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand. We have had, and we still have,
+in cities <a name="Page_191"></a>east and west, committees and
+societies and law and order
+leagues earnestly engaged in "stamping out" the evil. It is like trying
+to stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by a
+strong gale. The protests of most of these leagues amount to little
+more
+than vain clamor against a thing which is not even distantly
+comprehended.</p>
+<p>The <i>personnel</i> of these agencies organized to "stamp out" the
+evil
+differs little in the various cities. It is largely if not wholly
+masculine in character, and the evil is usually dealt with from the
+point of view of religion and morals. Women, when they appear in the
+matter at all, figure as missionaries, "prison angels," and the like.
+As
+evangelists to sinners women have been permitted to associate with
+their
+fallen sisters without losing caste. Likewise, when elderly enough,
+they
+have been allowed to serve on governing boards of "homes" and
+"refuges."
+Their activities were limited to rescue work. They might extend a hand
+to a repentant Magdalene. A Phryne they must not even <a
+ name="Page_192"></a>be aware of. In
+other words, this evil as a subject of investigation and intelligent
+discussion among women was absolutely prohibited. It has ever been
+their
+Great Taboo.</p>
+<p>Nevertheless, when eight million women, in practically every
+civilized
+country in the world, organized themselves into an International
+Council
+of Women, and began their remarkable survey of the social order in
+which
+they live, one of their first acts was to break the Great Taboo.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img015"></a><img
+ style="width: 239px; height: 404px;" alt="MISS SADIE AMERICAN"
+ title="MISS SADIE AMERICAN" src="images/015.jpg"></div>
+<p>At early congresses of the International Council Miss Sadie
+American,
+Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis, among American
+delegates, Miss Elizabeth Janes of England, Miss Elizabeth Gad of
+Denmark, Dr. Agnes Bluhm of Germany, and others interested in the moral
+welfare of girls, urged upon the Council action against the "White
+Slave" traffic. No extensive argument was required to convince the
+members of the Council that the "White Slave" traffic and the whole
+subject of the moral degradation of women was <a name="Page_193"></a>a
+social phenomenon too
+long neglected by women.</p>
+<p>These women declared with refreshing candor that it was about time
+that
+the social evil was dealt with intelligently, and if it was to be dealt
+with intelligently women must do the work. The fussy old gentlemen with
+white side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other well
+meaning amateurs, who are engaged in "stamping out" the evil, deserve
+to
+be set aside. In their places the women propose to install social
+experts who shall deal scientifically with the problem.</p>
+<p>The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle,
+in
+every community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actually
+forbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for the
+first time repudiated by a body of organized women. The arguments on
+which the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time,
+seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance.
+The desirability of the descent of <a name="Page_194"></a>property in
+legal paternal line
+seemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid
+standard
+of morals to women. But they found reasons infinitely greater why the
+same rigid standard should be applied to men.</p>
+<p>The International Council of Women and women's organizations in
+every
+country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and
+through these physicians they have been able to consider the social
+evil
+from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which
+touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare
+of children, were brought forth&#8212;facts concerning infantile blindness,
+almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the
+fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women,
+and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases
+among men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of these
+maladies, and their frightful prevalence,&#8212;seventy-five per <a
+ name="Page_195"></a>cent of
+city men, according to reliable authority, being affected,&#8212;aroused in
+the women a sentiment of indignation and revolt. The International
+Council of Women put itself on record as protesting against the
+responsibility laid upon women, the unassisted task of preserving the
+purity of the race.</p>
+<p>In the United States, women's clubs, women's societies, women's
+medical
+associations, special committees of women in many cities have
+courageously undertaken the study of this problem, intending by means
+of
+investigation and publicity to lay bare its sources and seek its remedy.</p>
+<p>The sources of the evil are about the only phase of the problem
+which
+has never been adequately examined. It is true that we have suspected
+that the unsteady and ill-adjusted economic position of women furnished
+some explanation for its existence, but even now our information is
+vague and unsatisfactory.</p>
+<p>A number of years ago, in 1888 to be exact, the Massachusetts Bureau
+of
+Labor Statistics <a name="Page_196"></a>made an interesting
+investigation. This was an effort
+to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world,
+usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to
+profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations
+of nearly four thousand fallen women in twenty-eight American cities.</p>
+<p>Of these unfortunates over eight hundred had worked in low-waged
+trades
+such as paper-box making, millinery, laundry work, rope and cordage
+making, cigar and cigarette making, candy packing, textile factory and
+shoe factory work.</p>
+<p>About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, and
+seamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was not
+stated.</p>
+<p>The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so
+far
+as wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundred
+and sixteen recruits to the list.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_197"></a>On the whole, these groups were what the
+investigators had expected to
+find.</p>
+<p>There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were
+entirely
+unexpected by the investigators. Of the 3,866 girls examined 1,236, or
+nearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The next
+largest group, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domestic
+servants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homes
+into lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from that
+occupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and most
+suitable means of earning their living&#8212;housework.</p>
+<p>Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as
+something
+too disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least
+sixty-two
+per cent of those 3,866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were
+too
+lazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one of
+honest toil in somebody's nice kitchen. Apparently this was the <a
+ name="Page_198"></a>view
+taken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it never
+carried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out <i>why</i>
+so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried to
+find out <i>why</i> housework was a trade dangerous to morals.</p>
+<p>Fortunately it did occur to the women's organizations to examine the
+facts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take you
+over some of the ground they have covered and show you where their
+investigations have led them.</p>
+<p>South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and
+forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large
+city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,&#8212;enormous drab
+structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering
+chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The
+steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family
+houses, built of wood, <a name="Page_199"></a>generally unpainted, and
+always dismally
+utilitarian as to architectural details.</p>
+<p>In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a
+park,
+or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement was
+just seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quite
+imposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered for
+the day as soon as the classes were dismissed.</p>
+<p>In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of
+young
+girls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which
+always
+must be fed&#8212;if not with wholesome food, then husks. For parents these
+girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and
+came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers
+who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and
+were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For
+social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know
+what
+that <a name="Page_200"></a>means. It means trooping up and down the
+main street in lively
+groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a
+cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street
+accident or a fight.</p>
+<p>About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South
+Chicago
+and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some of
+these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went
+"downtown." There was no other place for them to go.</p>
+<p>As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral
+situation
+would you expect to evolve out of these materials?</p>
+<p>Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood.
+Many
+of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in
+these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile
+Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals.
+Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the
+never-ceasing procession of prodigals.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_201"></a>This is what "no previous occupation" really
+means in nine cases out of
+ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all,
+according to the ideals of you who read these pages.</p>
+<p>Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes
+it
+was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large
+enough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In some
+there was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extreme
+cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue
+and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are
+possible.</p>
+<p>Annie Donnelly's case will serve as further illustration. Annie
+Donnelly's father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab
+from
+twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays
+included. Before the cab drivers' strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly's
+wages were fifteen dollars a week, <a name="Page_202"></a>and the
+family lived in a four-room
+tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week. You pay rent weekly to a
+tenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week
+for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a
+week.</p>
+<p>The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single
+dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York
+tenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who was
+fourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms.
+Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a
+lodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement
+because it had only one dark room.</p>
+<p>One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance.
+Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not
+allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby,
+attended the annual ball of the Coachman's Union, but that <a
+ name="Page_203"></a>was another
+thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.</p>
+<p>The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really
+lived
+in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable
+except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably
+crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was
+impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit
+of her social life had to be lived out of the house.</p>
+<p>When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking
+about
+with the other girls or sitting on a friend's doorstep, until ten or
+even eleven o'clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city
+neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl's life when this sort of
+thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the
+doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable.
+So
+one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the
+lodger to a dance.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_204"></a>The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled
+basement room in a building
+which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the
+front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: "The
+Johnny
+Sullivan Social Club."</p>
+<p>The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat
+check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in
+a
+waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which
+followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric
+lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest
+best with a popular waltz tune.</p>
+<p>In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the
+heat
+and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was
+piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When
+the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with
+the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.</p>
+<p>"<a name="Page_205"></a>Come along," said the lodger, "and have a
+beer." When Annie shook her
+head he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent
+free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy
+a
+beer off of 'em oncet in a while. They've gotta get something out of
+it."</p>
+<p>I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately
+she
+learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish
+dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable
+by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places.
+Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room means
+poor business at the bar.</p>
+<p>Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall <i>habitu&eacute;</i>. Not
+because she was
+viciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she was
+decidedly normal in all her instincts and desires.</p>
+<p>Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every
+dance
+invitations to other <a name="Page_206"></a>dances are distributed
+with a lavish hand. These
+invitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over
+chairs
+and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are
+locally
+known as "throw-aways." Here are a few specimens, from which you may
+form an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind of
+people&#8212;almost the only kind of people&#8212;who offer pleasure to the
+starved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actual
+invitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker of
+the New York College Settlement:</p>
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"<i>Second annual reception and ball, given by Jibo and Jack, at New
+Starlight Hall, 143 Suffolk Street, December 25. Music by our favorite.
+Gents ticket 25 cents, Ladies 15 cents.</i>"</p>
+<p> "<i>Don't miss the ball given by Joe the Greaser, and Sam
+Rosenstock, at Odd Fellows' Hall, January 29th.</i>"</p>
+<p> "<a name="Page_207"></a><i>See the Devil Dance at the Reception and
+Ball given by Max Pascal and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday
+evening, November 20th."</i></p>
+<p><i> "Reception and Ball given by two well known friends, Max Turk
+and Sam Lande, better known as Mechuch, at Appollo Hall, Chrystmas
+night. Floor manager, Young Louis. Ticket admit one 25 cents.</i>"</p>
+</div>
+<p>In addition to these private affairs which are arranged purely for
+the
+profit of "Jibo and Jack" and their kind, men who make a living in this
+and in yet more unspeakable ways, there are hundreds of saloon dance
+halls, not only in New York, but in other cities. These are simply
+annexes to drinking places, and people are not welcome there unless
+they
+drink. No admission is charged.</p>
+<p>There are also numberless dancing academies. Dancing lessons are
+given
+four nights in the week, as a rule, and the dancing public <a
+ name="Page_208"></a>buys
+admission the other three nights and on Sunday afternoons. Some dancing
+academies, even in tenement house quarters, are reputable institutions,
+but to most of them the lowest of the low, both men and women, resort.
+There, as in the dance halls, the "White Slaver" plies his trade, and
+the destroyer of womanliness lays his nets.</p>
+<p>Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places. She
+learned to
+"spiel." You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms' length,
+and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl's
+skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of the
+spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for
+liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong
+drink.</p>
+<p>Annie also learned to dance what is known as the "half time," or the
+"part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and
+contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a
+very primitive form <a name="Page_209"></a>of the dance, and probably
+goes back to the pagan
+harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain
+crude
+peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it
+to
+immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell
+the girls that it is the <i>American</i> fashion of waltzing.</p>
+<p>Annie Donnelly's destruction was accomplished in less than a year.
+It
+was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her
+home.
+There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too
+crowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother were
+respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie's first real
+misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to
+go home.</p>
+<p>The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically
+unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in
+every city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which,
+every year, thou<a name="Page_210"></a>sands of girls descend to the
+way of the prodigal. No
+one has counted their number. All we know of the unclassed is that they
+exist, apparently in ever-increasing masses.</p>
+<p>It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six
+thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like
+twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law.
+That
+is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so
+unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of these
+unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible
+to
+know&#8212;we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the
+unclassed.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img016"></a><img
+ style="width: 342px; height: 516px;" alt="A DANCE HALL"
+ title="A DANCE HALL" src="images/016.jpg"></div>
+<p>The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it
+may
+occupy a vacant store building, or a large loft. Somewhere in its
+immediate vicinity there is a saloon. A dance lasts about five minutes,
+and the interval between dances is from ten to twenty minutes. Waiters
+circle among the <a name="Page_211"></a>dancers, importuning them to
+drink. The dance hall
+without a bar, or some source of liquid supply, does not often exist,
+except as it has been established by social workers to offset the
+influence of the commercial dance hall.</p>
+<p>Some dance halls are small and wretchedly lighted. Others are large
+and
+pretentious. Some of them have direct connections with Raines Law
+hotels
+and their prototypes. Of hardly a single dance hall can a good word be
+said. They are almost entirely in the hands of the element lowest in
+society, in business, and in politics.</p>
+<p>From the old-fashioned German family picnic park to Coney Island in
+New
+York, Revere Beach in Boston, The White City in Chicago, Savin Rock in
+New Haven, and their like, is a far cry.</p>
+<p>Some of these summer parks try to keep their amusements clean and
+decent, and some, notably Euclid Park, Cleveland, succeed. But drink
+and
+often worse evils are characteristic <a name="Page_212"></a>of most of
+them. There are parts
+of Coney Island where no beer is sold, where the vaudeville and the
+moving pictures are clean and wholesome, where dancing is orderly. But
+the nearest side street has its "tough joint." The same thing is true
+of
+the big summer resorts of other cities.</p>
+<p>The dance hall, both winter and summer types, have had a
+deteriorating
+effect upon the old-fashioned dancing academy. Formerly these were
+respectable establishments where people paid for dancing lessons. Now
+they are a <i>m&eacute;lange</i> of dancing classes and public
+entertainments. The
+dancing masters, unable to compete with the dance hall proprietors,
+have
+been obliged to transfer many of the dance hall features to their
+establishments.</p>
+<p>Oddly enough it is rather an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted
+to
+a dance in any kind of a dance hall. The girls go alone, with a friend,
+or with a group of girls. The exceptional girl, who is attended by a
+man, must dance with him, or if she accepts another part<a
+ name="Page_213"></a>ner, she must
+ask his permission. An escort is deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage.
+Those who go unattended are always sure of partners. Often they meet
+"fellows" they know, or have seen on the streets. Introductions are not
+necessary. Even if a girl is unacquainted with any "fellows," if she
+possesses slight attractions, she is still sure of partners.</p>
+<p>The amount of money spent by working girls for dance-hall admissions
+is
+considerable. A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages
+thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.</p>
+<p>In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number
+of
+black-gowned girls. The black gown might almost be called the mark of
+the dance-hall <i>habitu&eacute;</i>, the girl who is dance mad and
+who spends all
+her evenings going from one resort to another. She wears black because
+light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.</p>
+<p>An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the "spieler."
+This
+is a young man <a name="Page_214"></a>whose strongest recommendation
+is that he is a skilled
+and untiring dancer. The business of the spieler is to look after the
+wall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he
+dances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for a
+place to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to those
+dance halls where they have had the best time.</p>
+<p>The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is a
+sinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls. The
+dance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth of
+many of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type.</p>
+<p>Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most
+brutally
+evil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense of
+chaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution. It is
+vicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, the
+desire of men and women to associate to<a name="Page_215"></a>gether,
+and distorts that
+instinct into evil. The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes,
+especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share their
+pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. The
+position of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treat
+her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy
+does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very
+readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack
+of
+chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward
+course.</p>
+<p>Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive
+young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although not
+remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a
+stenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon as
+she finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with her
+working papers. The family needed additional income, not to meet actual
+living expenses, for the Green<a name="Page_216"></a>baums were not
+acutely poor, but in order
+that the only son of the family might go to college. Max was seventeen,
+a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his
+superiority
+over his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family
+should
+toil unceasingly for his advancement.</p>
+<p>Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslin
+underwear factory. At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as
+a
+skilled operator on a tucking machine. She sat down to her work every
+morning at eight o'clock, and for four hours watched with straining
+eyes
+a tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips of
+muslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches a
+minute. The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above the
+cloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil the
+continuity of a tuck. When you are on piece wages you do not relish
+stopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_217"></a>So Sadie watched the needle assiduously, and
+ignored the fact that her
+head ached pretty regularly, and she was generally too weary when lunch
+time came to enjoy the black bread and pickles which, with a cup of
+strong tea, made her noon meal. After lunch she again sat down to her
+machine and watched the needles gallop over the cloth.</p>
+<p>At the end of each year Sadie Greenbaum had produced for the good of
+the
+community <i>four miles</i> of tucked muslin. In return, the community
+had
+rendered her back something less than three hundred dollars, for the
+muslin underwear trade has its dull seasons, and you do not earn seven
+dollars every week in the year.</p>
+<p>Each week Sadie handed her pay envelope unopened to her mother. The
+mother bought all Sadie's clothes and gave her food and shelter.
+Consequently, Sadie's unceasing vigil of the needle paid for her
+existence and purchased also the proud consciousness of an older
+brother
+who would one day own a doctor's buggy and a social position.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_218"></a>The one joy of this girl's life, in fact all
+the real life she lived,
+was dancing. Regularly every Saturday night Sadie and a girl friend,
+Rosie by name, put on their best clothes and betook themselves to
+Silver's Casino, a huge dance hall with small rooms adjoining, where
+food and much drink were to be had.</p>
+<p>There was a good floor at Silver's and a brass band to dance to. It
+was
+great! The girls never lacked partners, and they made some very
+agreeable acquaintances.</p>
+<p>In the dressing room, between dances, all the girls exchanged
+conversation, views on fashions, confidences about the young men and
+other gossip. Some of the girls were nice and some, it must be
+admitted,
+were "tough." What was the difference? The tough girls, with their
+daring humor, their cigarettes, their easy manners, and their amazingly
+smart clothes, furnished a sort of spice to the affair.</p>
+<p>Sadie and Rosie sometimes discussed the tough girls, and the
+conversation nearly always ended with one remarking: "Well, if they
+<a name="Page_219"></a>don't get anything else out of livin', look at
+the clothes they put on
+their backs."</p>
+<p>Perhaps you can understand that longing for pretty gowns, perhaps
+you
+can even sympathize with it. Of course, if you have a number of other
+resources, you can keep the dress hunger in its proper place. But if
+you
+have nothing in your existence but a machine&#8212;at which you toil for
+others' benefit&#8212;</p>
+<p>Sadie and Rosie continued to spend their Saturday evenings and their
+Sunday evenings at Silver's Casino. At first they went home together
+promptly at midnight. After midnight these casino dance halls change
+their character. Often professional "pace makers" are introduced, men
+and women of the lowest class, who are paid to inspire the other
+dancers
+to lewd conduct. These wretched people are immodestly clothed, and they
+perform immodest or very tough dances. They are usually known as
+"Twisters," a descriptive title. When they make their appearance the
+self-respecting dancers go home, and a much looser <a name="Page_220"></a>element
+comes in.
+The pace becomes a rapid one. Manners are free, talk is coarse,
+laughter
+is incessant. The bar does a lively business. The dancing and the
+revels
+go on until daylight.</p>
+<p>The first time Sadie and Rosie allowed themselves to be persuaded to
+stay at Silver's after midnight they were rather horrified by the
+abandoned character of the dancing, the reckless drinking, and the
+fighting which resulted in several men being thrown out. The second
+time
+they were not quite so horrified, but they decided not to stay so late
+another time. Then came a great social event, the annual "mask and
+shadow dance" of a local political organization. Sadie and Rosie
+attended.</p>
+<p>A "mask and shadow dance" is as important a function to girls of
+Sadie's
+and Rosie's class as a cotillion is to girls of your class. Such
+affairs
+are possible only in large dance halls, and to do them impressively
+costs the proprietor some money. The guests rent costumes and masks and
+appear in very gala <a name="Page_221"></a>fashion indeed. They dance
+in the rays of all kinds
+of colored lights thrown upon them from upper galleries. During part of
+a waltz the dancers are bathed in rose-colored lights, which change
+suddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects are
+made, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers' shadows are
+thrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor. At intervals a rain of
+bright-colored confetti pours down from above. The scene becomes
+bacchanalian. Color, light, music, confetti, the dance, together
+combine
+to produce an intense and voluptuous intoxication which the revelers
+deepen with drink.</p>
+<p>The events of the latter part of that night were very vague in
+Sadie's
+memory when she awoke late the next morning. She remembered that she
+had
+tolerated familiarities which had been foreign to her experience
+heretofore, and that she had been led home by some friendly soul, at
+daylight, almost helpless from liquor.</p>
+<p>Frightened, haunted by half-ashamed mem<a name="Page_222"></a>ories
+of that dance, Sadie
+spoiled a good bit of her work on Monday morning. The forewoman
+descended on her with a torrent of coarse abuse, whereupon Sadie rose
+suddenly from her machine, and in a burst of hysterical profanity and
+tears rushed out of the factory, vowing never to return. There was only
+one course, she decided, for her to take, and she took it.</p>
+<p>"Sadie, why did you do it?" wailed Rosie the next time they met.</p>
+<p>"It's better than the factory," said Sadie.</p>
+<p>Tucking muslin underwear is dull work, but it is, in most ways, a
+more
+agreeable task than icing cakes in a St. Louis biscuit factory. All day
+Edna M&#8212;&#8212; stood over a tank filled with thick chocolate icing. The
+table beside Edna's tank was kept constantly supplied with freshly
+baked
+"lady-fingers," and these in delicate handfuls Edna seized and plunged
+into the hot ooze of the chocolate. Her arms, up to the elbows, went
+into the black stuff, over and over again all day. At noon, over their
+lunch, the <a name="Page_223"></a>girls talked of their recreations,
+their clothes, their
+"fellows."</p>
+<p>Edna had not very much to contribute to the girls' stories of gayety
+and
+adventure. She led a quieter existence than most of the other girls,
+although her leanings were toward lively pleasures. She was engaged to
+a
+young man who worked in a foundry and who was steady and perhaps rather
+too serious. He was very jealous of Edna and exacted a stern degree of
+fidelity of her.</p>
+<p>Before her engagement Edna had gone to a decent dancing school and
+dearly loved the dance. Now she was not permitted to dance with any one
+but her prospective husband. The bright talk at the noon hour made Edna
+feel that she was a very poor sport.</p>
+<p>The young man's work in the foundry alternated weekly between day
+and
+night duty. It occurred to Edna that her young man could not possibly
+know what she did with those evenings he remained in the foundry. If
+she
+chose to go with a group of girls to a dance hall, <a name="Page_224"></a>what
+harm? The long
+years of married life stretched themselves out somewhat drably to Edna.
+She decided to have a good time beforehand.</p>
+<p>This girl from now on literally lived a double life. Evenings of the
+weeks her young man was free from the foundry, she spent at home with
+him, placidly playing cards, reading aloud, or talking. On the other
+evenings she danced, madly, incessantly. Her mother thought she spent
+the evenings with her girl friends. The dancing, plus the deceit, soon
+had its effect on Edna. She began to visit livelier and livelier
+resorts, curious to see all phases of pleasure.</p>
+<p>Suspicion entered into the mind of her affianced. He questioned her;
+she
+lied, and he was unconvinced. A night or two later the young man stayed
+away from the foundry and followed Edna to a suburban resort. She went,
+as usual, with a group of girls, but their men were waiting for them
+near the door of the open-air dancing pavilion. Standing just outside,
+the angry lover watched the girl "spiel" <a name="Page_225"></a>round
+and round with a man of
+doubtful respectability. Soon she joined a noisy, beer-drinking group
+at
+one of the tables, and her behavior grew more and more reckless.
+Finally, amid laughter, she and another girl performed a suggestive
+dance together.</p>
+<p>Walking swiftly up to her, the outraged foundryman grasped her by
+the
+shoulder, called her a name she did not yet deserve, and threw her
+violently to the floor. A terrific fight followed, and the police soon
+cleared the place.</p>
+<p>Edna did not dare go home. An over-rigid standard of morals, an
+over-repressive policy, an over-righteous judgment, plus a mother
+ignorant of the facts of life, plus a girl's longing for joy&#8212;the sum of
+these equaled ruin in Edna's case.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_226"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<h2>WOMAN'S HELPING HAND TO THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER</h2>
+<br>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Ask a girl, "Why do you go to the dance hall? Why don't you stay
+home
+evenings?" <a name="Page_227"></a>Nine times in ten her answer will
+be: "What should I do with
+myself, sitting home and twirling my fingers?"</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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,&#8212;a
+debt to youth.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_228"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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?</p>
+<p>New York is by no means unique. Every <a name="Page_229"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_230"></a>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 in<a name="Page_231"></a>tellectual.
+It reaches only
+that portion of the masses who stand least in need of social
+opportunity.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The people, the great world of people,&#8212;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 <a name="Page_232"></a>economy,
+reduced to
+terms of humanity, the waste is heartbreaking.</p>
+<p>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?&#8212;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?</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_233"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_234"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_235"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_236"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_237"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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"&#8212;led by a man!</p>
+<p>Another scene witnessed about the same time seems to me to typify
+the
+new attitude which society&#8212;led by women&#8212;is assuming towards its
+problem. It was in the large kindergarten room of one of the oldest of
+Chicago's social centers,&#8212;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 <a
+ name="Page_238"></a>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.</p>
+<p>This was only one group of many hundreds in every quarter of
+Chicago,&#8212;in schools, settlements, kindergartens, and other
+centers,&#8212;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, <a name="Page_239"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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,&#8212;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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_240"></a>Women have recognized the debt to youth and
+the joy of life, and they
+are preparing to pay it.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_241"></a>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 <a name="Page_242"></a>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,&#8212;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 <a name="Page_243"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_244"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The first practical work of the committee, <a name="Page_245"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a
+ name="Page_246"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>Every extension of use of public places, <a name="Page_247"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_248"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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
+ name="Page_249"></a>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.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_IX"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_250"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<h2>THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE</h2>
+<br>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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, <a name="Page_251"></a>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&#8212;nearly half of the Bedford
+women&#8212;had been servants.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_252"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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. <a
+ name="Page_253"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 increas<a name="Page_254"></a>ing
+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.</p>
+<p>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?"</p>
+<p>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, <a name="Page_255"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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<a
+ name="Page_256"></a>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."<a name="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p>
+<p>This investigation by organizations of educated and expert women was
+the
+first survey ever made of domestic service <i>as an industry</i>, the
+first
+scientific study of domestic workers <i>as an industrial group</i>. It
+was
+the first intelligent attempt to review housework as if it were a trade.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Do not let us make a mistake concerning the <a name="Page_257"></a>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&#8212;the
+home&#8212;where the last stand of conservatism and tradition, the last
+lingering remnant of hand labor, continues to exist.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_258"></a>domestic service, but,
+broadly speaking, you behold
+in the servant group merely the siftings of the real industrial class.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_259"></a>had to
+wait until the workers
+came together in large groups before we could see their conditions and
+understand their needs.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Such conditions exist because the workers are too weak, too
+inefficient,
+too unintelligent <a name="Page_260"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_261"></a>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&#8212;well, how many
+such women do you know?</p>
+<p>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 ex<a name="Page_262"></a>pected to evolve a system of
+housekeeping all by herself.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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!</p>
+<p>In another place, the maid was required to <a name="Page_263"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>"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.'"</p>
+<p>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
+re<a name="Page_264"></a>turned. 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."</p>
+<p>"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?"</p>
+<p>"I've tried that," said the girl. "I had a place with the &#8212;&#8212;
+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."</p>
+<p>I have told this story to dozens of domestics, <a name="Page_265"></a>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.</p>
+<p>Imagine a factory girl or a stenographer being required to remain
+after
+hours on the chance of being needed for extra work.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>During the course of a great strike of mill <a name="Page_266"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_267"></a>days out. On
+those occasions she is
+assumed to meet her friends on the street.</p>
+<p>In England people recognize the fact that they have a servant class.
+Every house of any pretentions provides a servants' hall.</p>
+<p>In the United States a sitting room for servants, even in
+millionaires'
+homes, is a rarity.</p>
+<p>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."</p>
+<p>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
+<a name="Page_268"></a>driven into paths where only strength and
+efficiency could possibly
+protect her from evil.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img017"></a><img
+ style="width: 322px; height: 455px;"
+ alt="AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION"
+ title="AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION"
+ src="images/017.jpg"></div>
+<p>The social opportunity of the domestic worker is limited to the park
+bench, the cheap theater, the summer excursion boat, and the <a
+ name="Page_269"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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."</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The housekeeper simply does not realize that her domestics are <i>girls</i>,
+exactly like other girls. They need social intercourse, they need
+<a name="Page_270"></a>laughter and dancing and healthy pleasure just
+as other girls need
+them, as much as the young ladies of the household need them.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img018"></a><img
+ style="width: 311px; height: 507px;"
+ alt="ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION"
+ title="ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION"
+ src="images/018.jpg"></div>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_271"></a>before, been present when a
+young girl was
+sentenced to a term in a reformatory.</p>
+<p>"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?"</p>
+<p>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, <a
+ name="Page_272"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>"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."</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_273"></a>church. They come to
+us from reputable
+employment offices, which would not deal with them if they were not all
+right."</p>
+<p>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?</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Nellie B&#8212;&#8212; was an Irish girl, strong, pretty of face, and joyful of
+temperament. <a name="Page_274"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_275"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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."</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_276"></a>surrounded by a high stockade which
+rendered escape impossible.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img019"></a><img
+ style="width: 346px; height: 283px;"
+ alt="THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY"
+ title="THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY" src="images/019.jpg"></div>
+<p>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 oper<a name="Page_277"></a>ated on a system founded in lies and
+extortion. The offices
+want fees&#8212;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 <i>customer</i>
+to
+him, and she was nothing more.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Many of these unpleasant facts were brought <a name="Page_278"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 show<a name="Page_279"></a>ing,
+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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_280"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+per<a name="Page_281"></a>haps also, of propriety, are low. Domestic
+workers are the nomads of
+industry. Their lives are like their work,&#8212;impermanent, detached from
+others', unobserved.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+can<a name="Page_282"></a>not 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_283"></a>better understanding of the problem of the
+prodigal daughter.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Loneliness, social isolation, the ban of social inferiority,&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>Above all, the right of the domestic worker to social opportunity
+must
+be admitted. It must be provided for.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_284"></a>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&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>The Committee on Amusements and Vacation Resources of Working Girls
+in
+New York <a name="Page_285"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Preventive work is better than reform measures, but both are
+necessary
+in dealing with this problem. Women have still much work <a
+ name="Page_286"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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,&#8212;a place notorious for the low state of its <i>morale</i>. 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.</p>
+<br>
+<h4 style="text-align: left;">NOTES:</h4>
+<a name="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1">[1]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904.</p>
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_X"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_287"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<h2>VOTES FOR WOMEN</h2>
+<br>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The position of the women in regard to suffrage was precisely that
+of
+the early labor unions toward politics. The unions, fearing <a
+ name="Page_288"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img020"></a><img
+ style="width: 355px; height: 284px;"
+ alt="SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING"
+ title="SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING"
+ src="images/020.jpg"></p>
+<p>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
+<a name="Page_289"></a>exhaustive discussion of both sides of the
+question.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_290"></a>have happened in the course of those eight
+years to make such an
+astounding change in the attitude of the club women.</p>
+<p>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, <i>citizens</i>'
+service, they did not remotely dream. There is nothing surprising in
+their <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i>. 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.</p>
+<p>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, manufac<a name="Page_291"></a>turer,
+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.</p>
+<p>Yet to the vast majority of American men women do not look like
+citizens.</p>
+<p>As for the majority of American women they have always until
+recently
+thought of themselves as a class,&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>A typical instance occurred down in Georgia. A few years ago the
+women
+of Georgia found a way to introduce into the legislature a <a
+ name="Page_292"></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.</p>
+<p>"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&#8212;"</p>
+<p>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."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_293"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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&#8212;bookbinding is
+one of the night trades&#8212;made them alive to their own helplessness.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_294"></a>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img021"></a><img
+ style="width: 238px; height: 382px;" alt="MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH"
+ title="MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH" src="images/021.jpg"></div>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_295"></a>membership
+of
+twenty-two thousand. A number of unions belong to the League, and there
+is also a very large individual membership.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_296"></a>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img022"></a><img
+ style="width: 384px; height: 282px;"
+ alt="MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER."
+ title="MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER." src="images/022.jpg"></div>
+<p>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 Sander<a name="Page_297"></a>son, 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_298"></a>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.</p>
+<p>"Not unless you are a funeral procession," said the stern captain of
+the
+police.</p>
+<p>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
+<a name="Page_299"></a>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.</p>
+<p>"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.</p>
+<p>The sight aroused the indignation of many respectable citizens.</p>
+<p>"Officer," exclaimed one of these, addressing an attendant
+policeman, "I
+thought you had orders that those females were not to parade."</p>
+<p>"That ain't no parade," said the policeman, serenely; "them folks is
+just takin' a quiet walk."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_300"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img023"></a><img
+ style="width: 360px; height: 286px;"
+ alt="THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL 27, 1909"
+ title="THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL 27, 1909"
+ src="images/023.jpg"></div>
+<p>Absolutely democratic in its spirit and its organization, the party
+leaders are drawn from every rank of society. The chairman of the
+<a name="Page_301"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_302"></a>New York is the present center of the
+progressive suffrage movement,
+with Chicago not very far behind.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<a name="img024"></a>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><img
+ style="width: 304px; height: 456px;" alt="HELEN HOY GREELEY"
+ title="HELEN HOY GREELEY" src="images/024.jpg"></div>
+<p>Even the non-voting woman has discovered the power which attaches to
+her
+presence, in <a name="Page_303"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a
+ name="Page_304"></a>bullet
+was fired at the district attorney a number of the women were present.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_305"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_306"></a>effect
+of such
+campaigns would no doubt be very great.</p>
+<p>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."</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img025"></a><img
+ style="width: 374px; height: 256px;"
+ alt="SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE."
+ title="SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE." src="images/025.jpg"></p>
+<p>Under certain conditions a woman vote is not an unthinkable
+contingency.
+It has even occurred.</p>
+<p>For the edification of the possible reader <a name="Page_307"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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,&#8212;the Kaiser's "Kirche, K&uuml;che, 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 chil<a name="Page_308"></a>dren.
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+<a name="Page_309"></a>interests. It was, in a manner of speaking, a
+chivalric acknowledgment
+of women's virtue as wives and mothers.</p>
+<p>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. <a name="Page_310"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_311"></a>for the
+co-operation of the League the
+Citizens' Party offered a place on the electoral ticket to any woman
+chosen by the League.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+<a name="Page_312"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_313"></a>have never before been given a chance to
+manage the elections.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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, <a
+ name="Page_314"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Page_315"></a><a name="img026"></a><img
+ style="width: 380px; height: 262px;"
+ alt="THE &quot;QUIET WALK&quot; OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE WOULD NOT PERMIT TO PARADE"
+ title="THE &quot;QUIET WALK&quot; OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE WOULD NOT PERMIT TO PARADE"
+ src="images/026.jpg"></p>
+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.
+<p>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 <a name="Page_316"></a>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.</p>
+<a name="img027"></a>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><img
+ style="width: 362px; height: 278px;"
+ alt="SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK"
+ title="SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK"
+ src="images/027.jpg"></div>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_317"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Women's housekeeping, or most of it, has gradually been withdrawn
+from
+the home and transferred to the municipality. There was <a
+ name="Page_318"></a>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&#8212;do all their own as well as
+the women's housekeeping&#8212;or they must allow their women to leave the
+home and follow their housekeeping to the place where it is now being
+done,&#8212;the polls.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XI"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_319"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+<h2>IN CONCLUSION</h2>
+<br>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_320"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Also, I chose the American club woman because she represents, not an
+unusually <a name="Page_321"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Turn back and count over the club women's achievements, the things
+they
+have chosen to <a name="Page_322"></a>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&#8212;things needed,
+directly or indirectly, by children. Most of the things are directly
+needed,&#8212;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,&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>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. <a name="Page_323"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 educat<a name="Page_324"></a>ing
+process of productive
+labor the woman mind may devise a means of protecting the future
+mothers
+of the race.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_325"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_326"></a>children's interests at the polls as
+other women are in
+their nurseries and kitchens.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The child at his mother's knee, spelling out the words of a psalm,
+stands for the moral <a name="Page_327"></a>education of the race&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>I dream of a community where men and <a name="Page_328"></a>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_329"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_330"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="INDEX"></a>
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+Aberdeen, Countess of, <a href="#Page_48">48</a><br>
+Addams, Jane, <a href="#Page_99">99</a><br>
+Alabama, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+Aladyn, Alexis, <a href="#Page_50">50</a><br>
+Albert Hall, London, <a href="#Page_52">52</a><br>
+Albion House of Refuge, N.Y., <a href="#Page_251">251</a><br>
+Aldrich, Mrs. Richard, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Allegheny, Pa., <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>,
+<a href="#Page_31">31</a><br>
+Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenbund, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+American, Sadie, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+American Federation of Labor, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_168">168</a><br>
+American women and common law, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a href="#Page_114">114</a><br>
+Arbitration, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>-<a href="#Page_58">58</a><br>
+Argentine, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Arizona, <a href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+Arkansas, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+Arthur, Mrs. Clara B., <a href="#Page_32">32</a><br>
+Association of Collegiate Alumnae, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Association of Working Girls' Clubs, <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br>
+Augsberg, Anita, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+Australia, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a><br>
+Austria, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+<br>
+Balliett, Thomas M., <a href="#Page_44">44</a><br>
+Barnum, Gertrude, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Barrett, Mrs. Kate Waller, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+Bedford Reformatory, N.Y., <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a><br>
+Belmont, Mrs. O.H.P., <a href="#Page_174">174</a><br>
+Berlin, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+Birmingham, Ala., <a href="#Page_38">38</a><br>
+Blackstone, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a><br>
+Blackwell's Island, <a href="#Page_286">286</a><br>
+Blatch, Harriot Stanton, <a href="#Page_294">294</a><br>
+Bluhm, Agnes, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+Boston, Mass, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150
+</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a><br>
+Boston Central Labor Union, <a href="#Page_178">178</a><br>
+Boswell, Helen V., <a href="#Page_53">53</a><br>
+Brandeis, Louis D., <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a><br>
+Brewer, Justice, <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br>
+Brooklyn, N.Y., <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br>
+Bullowa, Emilie, <a href="#Page_103">103</a><br>
+<br>
+California, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a><br>
+Carlisle, Pa., <a href="#Page_38">38</a><br>
+Carnegie, Andrew, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Casey, Josephine, <a href="#Page_295">295</a><br>
+Catt, Mrs. Carrie Chapman, <a href="#Page_300">300</a><br>
+Cauer, Minna, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+Chicago, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_211">211,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a><br>
+Child, Lydia Maria, <a href="#Page_95">95</a><br>
+Church, the Christian, its relation to social problems, <a
+ href="#Page_229">229</a>-<a href="#Page_233">233</a><br>
+Civic Club of Allegheny County, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_29">29</a><br>
+Civic Club of Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Cleveland, O., <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a><br>
+Cliff Dwellers' remains, <a href="#Page_39">39</a><br>
+Cobden Sanderson, Mrs., <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br>
+Code Napoleon, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br>
+Cole, Elsie, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br>
+College Settlements Association, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Colony Club, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145,
+</a><a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a><br>
+Colorado, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>-<a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_311">311</a><br>
+Colorado State Federation of Clubs, <a href="#Page_308">308</a><br>
+Columbia University, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br>
+Columbus, Ohio, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br>
+Common law, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a href="#Page_114">114</a><br>
+Coney Island, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212
+</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a><br>
+Conine, Mrs. Martha A.B., <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br>
+Consumers' League of N.Y., <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_125">125</a>-<a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_140">140</a>,<br>
+<a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br>
+Consumers' Leagues, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a><br>
+Conventions of women's clubs, <a href="#Page_40">40</a><br>
+Corpus Juris, <a href="#Page_68">68</a><br>
+Cotton mills, women and girls in, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_84">84</a><br>
+Council of Women, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Cranford, N.J., <a href="#Page_38">38</a><br>
+Cutting, Fulton, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+<br>
+Dallas, Tex., <a href="#Page_23">23</a><br>
+Dance halls, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>-<a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_249">249</a><br>
+Daughters of the American Revolution, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Daughters of the Confederacy, <a href="#Page_101">101</a><br>
+Davis, Mrs. Jefferson, <a href="#Page_101">101</a><br>
+Decker, Mrs. Sarah Platt, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Delaware, <a href="#Page_105">105</a><br>
+Denver, Colo., <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Department stores, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>-<a href="#Page_116">116</a>,
+<a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_129">129</a>-<a href="#Page_132">132,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_150">150</a>-<a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_258">258</a><br>
+Detroit, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_34">34</a><br>
+Devine, Edward T., <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Dewey, Mrs. Melvil, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Dineen, Governor, <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br>
+District of Columbia, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+Divorce, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br>
+Dock, Lavinia, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Domestic service, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>-<a href="#Page_286">286</a><br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Domestic Service</i>, Professor
+Salmon's, </span><a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Donnelly, Annie, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>-<a href="#Page_209">209</a><br>
+Dreier, Mary, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Dutcher, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br>
+<br>
+Eight-hour day, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>,
+<a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br>
+Ely Bates Settlement, <a href="#Page_237">237</a><br>
+Employment agencies, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>-<a href="#Page_280">280</a><br>
+England, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>,
+<a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>,
+<a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_315">315</a><br>
+Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, <a href="#Page_294">294</a><br>
+Europe, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>,
+<a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a><br>
+European women, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>-<a href="#Page_74">74</a><br>
+Evans, Mrs. Glendower, <a href="#Page_178">178</a><br>
+<br>
+Factories, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_258">258</a><br>
+Fall River, Mass., <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a><br>
+Festivals, play, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br>
+Feudalism, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a><br>
+Filene system, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>-<a href="#Page_153">153</a><br>
+Finland, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a><br>
+Florida, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+Flowerton, Maud, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Folks, Homer, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+France, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a><br>
+Franks, Salian, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br>
+French Code, <a href="#Page_73">73</a><br>
+<br>
+Gad, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+General Federation of Women's Clubs, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>,
+<a href="#Page_56">56,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a><br>
+Georgia, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a><br>
+Gerberding, Mrs. Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_303">303</a><br>
+German Woman Suffrage Association, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+Germany, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_69">69</a>-<a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>,
+<a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a><br>
+Gillespie, Mabel, <a href="#Page_177">177</a><br>
+Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, her <i>Women and Economics</i>, <a
+ href="#Page_5">5</a><br>
+"Girls' Bill," <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a><br>
+Girls' Friendly Association, <a href="#Page_269">269</a><br>
+Golden, John, <a href="#Page_179">179</a><br>
+Goldmark, Josephine, <a href="#Page_136">136</a><br>
+Goldmark, Pauline, <a href="#Page_164">164</a><br>
+Gompers, Samuel, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br>
+Grannis, Mrs. Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+Greece, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Greece, Queen of, <a href="#Page_48">48</a><br>
+Greeley, Helen Hoy, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Greenbaum, Sadie, <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br>
+Grenfell, Mrs. Helen, <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br>
+Gulick, Luther H., <a href="#Page_36">36</a><br>
+<br>
+Harper, Ida Husted, <a href="#Page_305">305</a><br>
+Harrisburg, Pa., <a href="#Page_37">37</a><br>
+Hearn, <a href="#Page_149">149</a><br>
+Henry, Alice, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br>
+Holland, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_141">141</a><br>
+Housekeepers' Alliance, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Hughes, Governor, <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br>
+Hundred Years' War, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br>
+<br>
+Iceland, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Idaho, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Illinois, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br>
+Inheritance, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br>
+Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>,
+<a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a><br>
+International Council of Women, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>,
+<a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a><br>
+International Woman Suffrage Alliance, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_300">300</a><br>
+Iowa, <a href="#Page_45">45</a><br>
+Israels, Mrs. Charles M., <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_247">247</a><br>
+Italy, <a href="#Page_141">141</a><br>
+<br>
+Janes, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+Jefferson Market Court, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>-<a href="#Page_186">186</a>,
+<a href="#Page_189">189</a><br>
+Jordan, Gertrude, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+<br>
+Kansas, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br>
+Kellor, Frances, <a href="#Page_256">256</a><br>
+Kennard, Beulah, <a href="#Page_28">28</a><br>
+Kirby, John, Jr., <a href="#Page_143">143</a><br>
+Kusserow, Anna, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br>
+<br>
+Lafferty, Mrs. Alma, <a href="#Page_99">99</a><br>
+Laidlaw, Mrs. James Lees, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Lake City, Minn., <a href="#Page_19">19</a><br>
+Laughlin, Gail, <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br>
+Laundries, <a href="#Page_137">137</a><br>
+Law, American, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_114">114</a><br>
+Legal Aid Society of N.Y. City, <a href="#Page_112">112</a><br>
+Legal disabilities of women, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_154">154</a><br>
+Leipzig, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+Lemlich, Clara, <a href="#Page_170">170</a><br>
+Libraries, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>-<a href="#Page_46">46</a><br>
+Los Angeles, Cal., <a href="#Page_81">81</a><br>
+Louisiana, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Lowell, Mrs. Josephine Shaw, <a href="#Page_123">123</a><br>
+Luxemburg, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+<br>
+MacLean, Annie Marian, <a href="#Page_142">142</a><br>
+Maloney, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>,
+<a href="#Page_161">161</a><br>
+<br>
+Marot, Helen, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br>
+Massachusetts, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92,
+</a><a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a><br>
+Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>,
+<a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a><br>
+McEwans, the, <a href="#Page_79">79</a><br>
+Men, their attitude toward women, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_6">6</a>-<a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>,
+<a href="#Page_15">15</a><br>
+Mercantile Employers' Bill, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_130">130</a><br>
+Merchants' Association of N.Y., <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br>
+Mercy, Anna, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Meredith, Ellis, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br>
+Milholland, Inez, <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br>
+Mills, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_179">179</a><br>
+Mills, Enos, <a href="#Page_53">53</a><br>
+Miner, Maude E., <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>,
+<a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_190">190</a><br>
+Miner, Stella, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Missouri, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br>
+Mitchell, John, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br>
+Montana, <a href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+Moore, Mrs. Philip N., <a href="#Page_56">56</a><br>
+Morgan, Anne, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Mott, Lucretia, <a href="#Page_95">95</a><br>
+Muller, Curt, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a><br>
+<br>
+Napoleon, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br>
+Napoleon Code, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br>
+Nathan, Mrs. Frederick, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+National Civic Federation, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br>
+National Congress of Mothers, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+National Manufacturers' Association, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_160">160</a><br>
+National Society of Collegiate Alumnae, <a href="#Page_56">56</a><br>
+National Woman Suffrage Association, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_305">305</a><br>
+Nebraska, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Nestor, Agnes, <a href="#Page_160">160</a><br>
+Nevada, <a href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+New England, <a href="#Page_91">91</a><br>
+New Haven, Conn., <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br>
+New Jersey, <a href="#Page_112">112</a><br>
+New Mexico, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+New York, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a><br>
+New York, N.Y., <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>,
+<a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_128">128,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_314">314</a><br>
+New York Telephone Co., <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br>
+New Zealand, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>,
+<a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_315">315</a><br>
+Night Court. See <i>Jefferson Market Court</i><br>
+Night work of women, <a href="#Page_55">55</a><br>
+North Carolina, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a><br>
+North Dakota, <a href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+<br>
+Ohio, <a href="#Page_45">45</a><br>
+Oklahoma, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Orange, House of, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Oregon, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Oregon case, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>-<a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_180">180</a><br>
+Oregon Standard, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>,
+<a href="#Page_162">162</a><br>
+<i>Out of Work</i>, Miss Kellor's, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_280">280</a><br>
+<br>
+Palisades of the Hudson, <a href="#Page_39">39</a><br>
+Panama Canal, <a href="#Page_53">53</a><br>
+Pankhurst, Mrs., <a href="#Page_297">297</a><br>
+Paris, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br>
+Peace, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a><br>
+Pennsylvania, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+Persia, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_278">278</a><br>
+Pike, Violet, <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br>
+Pittsburg, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br>
+Playgrounds, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>-<a href="#Page_36">36</a><br>
+Playgrounds Association of America, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a><br>
+Portland, Ore., <a href="#Page_134">134</a><br>
+Portugal, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Potter, Virginia, <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br>
+Probation Association of N.Y., <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Property Law, Married Women's, <a href="#Page_96">96</a><br>
+Public Service League of Denver, Colo., <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a><br>
+Puritans, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a><br>
+<br>
+<i>Resurrection</i>, Tolstoy's, <a href="#Page_270">270</a><br>
+Revere Beach, <a href="#Page_211">211</a><br>
+Rheinhard Commission, <a href="#Page_127">127</a><br>
+Rhode Island, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+"Rights of Man," <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br>
+Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br>
+Robins, Mrs. Raymond, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br>
+Robinson, Mrs. Helen Ring, <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br>
+Rochester, N.Y., Industrial School, <a href="#Page_251">251</a><br>
+Roxbury, Mass., carpet mill strike, <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br>
+Russia, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a><br>
+<br>
+Sage, Mrs. Russell, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+St. Louis, Mo., <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br>
+Salic Law, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>-<a href="#Page_65">65</a><br>
+Salmon, Prof. Lucy Maynard, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Salt Lake City, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+San Francisco, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>,
+<a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Schoenfeld, Julia, <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br>
+Scranton, Pa., <a href="#Page_109">109</a><br>
+Seneca Falls convention, <a href="#Page_71">71</a><br>
+Servant problem. See <i>Domestic Service</i><br>
+Shaw, Dr. Anna, <a href="#Page_305">305</a><br>
+Shirt-waist makers' strike, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a><br>
+Smith, "Gypsy," <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a><br>
+Snowden, Mrs. Philip, <a href="#Page_297">297</a><br>
+Social evil, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>-<a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_276">276</a><br>
+Social purity, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a><br>
+Socialist party, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a><br>
+South Africa, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+South Carolina, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>,
+<a href="#Page_108">108</a><br>
+South Chicago, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>,
+<a href="#Page_200">200</a><br>
+South Dakota, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Spain, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a><br>
+Stover, Charles B., <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br>
+Succession to throne by women, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_65">65</a><br>
+Sweat shop, the, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br>
+Switzerland, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a><br>
+<br>
+Teacher's Federation of Chicago, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_295">295</a><br>
+Ten-hour day, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>,
+<a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a><br>
+Tennessee, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a><br>
+Texas, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Tillman case, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br>
+Turkey, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Tuthill, Judge R.S., <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br>
+Twentieth Century Club of Detroit, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br>
+<br>
+United States Government, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_54">54</a><br>
+United States Industrial Commission, <a href="#Page_140">140</a><br>
+United Textile Workers, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_179">179</a><br>
+Utah, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a><br>
+<br>
+Vassar College, <a href="#Page_254">254</a><br>
+Victoria, Queen, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Virginia, <a href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+Voters' League for Equal Suffrage, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br>
+<br>
+Wage earning, women in, <a href="#Page_2">2</a><br>
+Washington (state), <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Waverley House, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>-<a href="#Page_189">189</a><br>
+White, Mrs. Lovell, <a href="#Page_26">26</a><br>
+"White Slave" traffic, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br>
+Whitman, Charles S., <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Wilhelmina, Queen, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Windeguth, Dora, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br>
+Winthrop, Mrs. Egerton, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br>
+<i>Woman and Economics</i>, Gilman's, <a href="#Page_5">5</a><br>
+Woman suffrage, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>-<a href="#Page_72">72</a>,
+<a href="#Page_97">97</a>-<a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_287">287</a>-<a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_325">325</a><br>
+Woman Suffrage Party, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Woman's Christian Temperance Union, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Woman's Municipal League of N.Y., <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Women, their ideals, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>-<a href="#Page_16">16</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Europe, </span><a href="#Page_59">59</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_74">74</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in America, </span><a href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_114">114</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in industry, </span><a href="#Page_115">115</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_182">182</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their fight against the social evil, </span><a
+ href="#Page_183">183</a>-<a href="#Page_249">249</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in domestic service, </span><a
+ href="#Page_250">250</a>-<a href="#Page_286">286</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">collective opinion of, </span><a
+ href="#Page_319">319</a>-<a href="#Page_330">330</a><br>
+Women's Civic Club of San Francisco, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Women's Club, of Lake City, Minn., <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Dallas, Tex., </span><a
+ href="#Page_23">23</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of San Francisco, </span><a
+ href="#Page_26">26</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Pittsburg, </span><a href="#Page_28">28</a>,
+<a href="#Page_30">30</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Detroit, </span><a href="#Page_32">32</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Philadelphia, </span><a
+ href="#Page_34">34</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Harrisburg, Pa., </span><a
+ href="#Page_37">37</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Birmingham, Ala., </span><a
+ href="#Page_38">38</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Carlisle, Pa., </span><a
+ href="#Page_38">38</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Cranford, N.J., </span><a
+ href="#Page_38">38</a><br>
+Women's Clubs, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>,
+<a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a><br>
+Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>,
+<a href="#Page_285">285</a><br>
+Women's League of Justice, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Women's Political Equality Union, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br>
+Women's Property Act, <a href="#Page_97">97</a><br>
+Women's Trade Union League, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_166">166</a>-<a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_294">294</a><br>
+Working Women's Society, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a><br>
+Wyoming, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_307">307</a><br>
+<br>
+Yonkers, N.Y., <a href="#Page_284">284</a><br>
+Young Women's Christian Association, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_269">269</a><br>
+<br>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12226 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #12226 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12226)
diff --git a/old/12226-8.txt b/old/12226-8.txt
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+Project Gutenberg's What eight million women want, by Rheta Childe Dorr
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: What eight million women want
+
+Author: Rheta Childe Dorr
+
+Release Date: May 1, 2004 [EBook #12226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Wilelmina Mallière and the Distributed Proofreading Team
+from images provided by the Million Book Project.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Images provided by: Million Book Project.
+
+Post-Processing : Wilelmina Mallière.
+
+
+
+
+
+WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT
+
+
+
+[Illustration: CONVENTION OF OUR WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK]
+
+WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT
+
+BY RHETA CHILDE DORR
+
+1910.
+
+
+
+TO
+THE AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVES
+OF THE EIGHT MILLION--
+THE EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND MEMBERS
+OF THE GENERAL FEDERATION OF
+WOMEN'S CLUBS--
+THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
+
+
+Many of the chapters contained in this volume appeared as special
+articles in _Hampton's Magazine_, to the editor of which the author's
+thanks are due for permission to republish.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+  I INTRODUCTORY
+  II FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE
+  III EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW
+  IV AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW
+  V WOMAN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY
+  VI MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE
+  VII BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO
+  VIII WOMAN'S HELPING HAND FOR THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
+  IX THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE
+  X VOTES FOR WOMEN
+  XI IN CONCLUSION
+  INDEX
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+     CONVENTION OF CLUB WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK
+
+     CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH
+
+     CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK, PITTSBURGH
+
+     STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD, LOS
+     ANGELES, CAL.
+
+     MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER
+
+     LADY ABERDEEN
+
+     A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES
+
+     MISS EMILIE BULLOWA
+
+     MRS. FREDERICK NATHAN
+
+     MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN
+
+     MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY
+
+     A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN
+
+     MISS MAUDE E. MINER
+
+     IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK
+
+     MISS SADIE AMERICAN
+
+     A TYPICAL DANCE HALL
+
+     AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION
+
+     ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION
+
+     THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY
+
+     SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING
+
+     MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH
+
+     MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER
+
+     THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL 27,
+     1909
+
+     HELEN HOY GREELEY
+
+     SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE
+
+     THE "QUIET WALK" OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE WOULD
+     NOT PERMIT TO PARADE
+
+     SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+For the audacity of the title of this book I offer no apology. I have
+had it pointed out, not altogether facetiously, that it is impossible to
+determine with accuracy what one woman, much less what any number of
+women, wants. I sympathize with the first half of the tradition. The
+desires, that is to say, the ideals, of an individual, man or woman, are
+not always easy to determine. The individual is complex and exceedingly
+prone to variation. The mass alone is consistent. The ideals of the mass
+of women are wrapped in mystery simply because no one has cared enough
+about them to inquire what they are.
+
+Men, ardently, eternally, interested in Woman--one woman at a time--are
+almost never even faintly interested in women. Strangely, deliberately
+ignorant of women, they argue that their ignorance is justified by an
+innate unknowableness of the sex.
+
+I am persuaded that the time is at hand when this sentimental, half
+contemptuous attitude of half the population towards the other half will
+have to be abandoned. I believe that the time has arrived when
+self-interest, if other motive be lacking, will compel society to
+examine the ideals of women. In support of this opinion I ask you to
+consider three facts, each one of which is so patent that it requires no
+argument.
+
+The Census of 1900 reported nearly six million women in the United
+States engaged in wage earning outside their homes. Between 1890 and
+1900 the number of women in industry increased faster than the number of
+men in industry. _It increased faster than the birth rate._ The number
+of women wage earners at the present date can only be estimated. Nine
+million would be a conservative guess. Nine million women who have
+forsaken the traditions of the hearth and are competing with men in the
+world of paid labor, means that women are rapidly passing from the
+domestic control of their fathers and their husbands. Surely this is
+the most important economic fact in the world to-day.
+
+Within the past twenty years no less than nine hundred and fifty-four
+thousand divorces have been granted in the United States. Two thirds of
+these divorces were granted to aggrieved wives. In spite of the
+anathemas of the church, in the face of tradition and early precept, in
+defiance of social ostracism, accepting, in the vast majority of cases,
+the responsibility of self support, more than six hundred thousand
+women, in the short space of twenty years, repudiated the burden of
+uncongenial marriage. Without any doubt this is the most important
+social fact we have had to face since the slavery question was settled.
+
+Not only in the United States, but in every constitutional country in
+the world the movement towards admitting women to full political
+equality with men is gathering strength. In half a dozen countries women
+are already completely enfranchised. In England the opposition is
+seeking terms of surrender. In the United States the stoutest enemy of
+the movement acknowledges that woman suffrage is ultimately inevitable.
+The voting strength of the world is about to be doubled, and the new
+element is absolutely an unknown quantity. Does any one question that
+this is the most important political fact the modern world has ever
+faced?
+
+I have asked you to consider three facts, but in reality they are but
+three manifestations of one fact, to my mind the most important human
+fact society has yet encountered. Women have ceased to exist as a
+subsidiary class in the community. They are no longer wholly dependent,
+economically, intellectually, and spiritually, on a ruling class of men.
+They look on life with the eyes of reasoning adults, where once they
+regarded it as trusting children. Women now form a new social group,
+separate, and to a degree homogeneous. Already they have evolved a group
+opinion and a group ideal.
+
+And this brings me to my reason for believing that society will soon be
+compelled to make a serious survey of the opinions and ideals of women.
+As far as these have found collective expressions, it is evident that
+they differ very radically from accepted opinions and ideals of men. As
+a matter of fact, it is inevitable that this should be so. Back of the
+differences between the masculine and the feminine ideal lie centuries
+of different habits, different duties, different ambitions, different
+opportunities, different rewards.
+
+I shall not here attempt to outline what the differences have been or
+why they have existed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in _Women and
+Economics_, did this before me,--did it so well that it need never be
+done again. I merely wish to point out that different habits of action
+necessarily result, after long centuries, in different habits of
+thought. Men, accustomed to habits of strife, pursuit of material
+gains, immediate and tangible rewards, have come to believe that strife
+is not only inevitable but desirable; that material gain and visible
+reward are alone worth coveting. In this commercial age strife means
+business competition, reward means money. Man, in the aggregate, thinks
+in terms of money profit and money loss, and try as he will, he cannot
+yet think in any other terms.
+
+I have in mind a certain rich young man, who, when he is not
+superintending the work of his cotton mills in Virginia, is giving his
+time to settlement work in the city of Washington. The rich young man is
+devoted to the settlement. One day he confided to a guest of the house,
+a social worker of note, that he wished he might dedicate his entire
+life to philanthropy.
+
+"There is much about a commercial career that is depressing to a
+sympathetic nature," he declared. "For example, it constantly depresses
+me to observe the effect of the cotton mills on the girls in my employ.
+They come in from the country, fresh, blooming, and eager to work.
+Within a few months perhaps they are pale, anaemic, listless. Not
+infrequently a young girl contracts tuberculosis and dies before one
+realizes that she is ill. It wrings the heart to see it."
+
+"I suspect," said the visitor, "that there is something wrong with your
+mills. Are you sure that they are sufficiently well ventilated?"
+
+"They are as well ventilated as we can have them," said the rich young
+man. "Of course we cannot keep the windows open."
+
+"Why not?" persisted the visitor.
+
+"Because in our mills we spin both black and white yarn, and if the
+windows were kept open the lint from the black yarn would blow on the
+white yarn and ruin it."
+
+A quick vision rose before the visitor's consciousness, of a mill room,
+noisy with clacking machinery, reeking with the mingled odors of
+perspiration and warm oil, obscure with flying cotton flakes which
+covered the forms of the workers like snow and choked in their throats
+like desert sand.
+
+"But," she exclaimed, "you can have two rooms, one for the white yarn
+and the other for the black."
+
+The rich young man shook his head with the air of one who goes away
+exceedingly sorrowful.
+
+"No," he replied, "we can't. The business won't stand it."
+
+This story presents in miniature the social attitude of the majority of
+men. They cannot be held entirely responsible. Their minds automatically
+function just that way. They have high and generous impulses, their
+hearts are susceptible to tenderest pity, they often possess the vision
+of brotherhood and human kinship, but habit, long habit, always
+intervenes in time to save the business from loss of a few dollars
+profit.
+
+Three years ago Chicago was on the eve of one of its periodical "vice
+crusades," of which more later. Sensational stories had been published
+in several newspapers, to the effect that no fewer than five thousand
+Jewish girls were leading lives of shame in the city, a statement which
+was received with horror by the Jewish population of Chicago. A meeting
+of wealthy and influential men and women was called in the law library
+of a well known jurist and philanthropist. Representatives from various
+social settlements in Jewish quarters of the town were invited, and it
+was as a guest of one of these settlements that I was privileged to be
+present.
+
+Eloquent addresses were made and an elaborate plan for investigation and
+relief was outlined. Finally it came to a point where ways and means had
+to be considered. The presiding officer put this phase of the matter to
+the conference with smiling frankness. "You must realize, ladies and
+gentlemen," he said, "that we have entered upon an extensive and, I am
+afraid, a very expensive campaign."
+
+At this a middle aged and notably dignified man arose and said with
+emotion trembling in his voice: "Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen
+of the conference, this surely is no time for us to think of economy of
+expenditure. If the daughters of Israel are losing their ancient dower
+of purity, the sons of Israel should be willing, nay, eager to ransom
+them at any cost. Permit me, as a privileged honor which I value highly,
+to offer, as a contribution towards the preliminary expenses of this
+campaign, my check for ten thousand dollars."
+
+He sat down to that polite little murmur of applause which goes round
+the room, and I whispered to the head resident of the settlement of
+which I was a guest, an inquiry as to the identity of the generous
+donor.
+
+"That gentleman," she whispered in reply, "is one of the owners of a
+great mail order department store in Chicago." She sighed deeply, as
+she added: "During the first week of the panic that store discharged,
+without warning, five hundred girls."
+
+These typical examples of the reasoning processes of men are offered
+without the slightest rancor. They had to be given in order that the
+woman's habit of thought might be explained with clearness.
+
+Women, since society became an organized body, have been engaged in the
+rearing, as well as the bearing of children. They have made the home,
+they have cared for the sick, ministered to the aged, and given to the
+poor. The universal destiny of the mass of women trained them to feed
+and clothe, to invent, manufacture, build, repair, contrive, conserve,
+economize. They lived lives of constant service, within the narrow
+confines of a home. Their labor was given to those they loved, and the
+reward they looked for was purely a spiritual reward.
+
+A thousand generations of service, unpaid, loving, intimate, must have
+left the strongest kind of a mental habit in its wake. Women, when they
+emerged from the seclusion of their homes and began to mingle in the
+world procession, when they were thrown on their own financial
+responsibility, found themselves willy nilly in the ranks of the
+producers, the wage earners; when the enlightenment of education was no
+longer denied them, when their responsibilities ceased to be entirely
+domestic and became somewhat social, when, in a word, women began to
+_think_, they naturally thought in human terms. They couldn't have
+thought otherwise if they had tried.
+
+They might have learned, it is true. In certain circumstances women
+might have been persuaded to adopt the commercial habit of thought. But
+the circumstances were exactly propitious for the encouragement of the
+old-time woman habit of service. The modern thinking, planning,
+self-governing, educated woman came into a world which is losing faith
+in the commercial ideal, and is endeavoring to substitute in its place a
+social ideal. She came into a generation which is reaching passionate
+hands towards democracy. She became one with a nation which is weary of
+wars and hatreds, impatient with greed and privilege, sickened of
+poverty, disease, and social injustice. The modern, free-functioning
+woman accepted without the slightest difficulty these new ideals of
+democracy and social service. Where men could do little more than
+theorize in these matters, women were able easily and effectively to
+act.
+
+I hope that I shall not be suspected of ascribing to women any ingrained
+or fundamental moral superiority to men. Women are not better than men.
+The mantle of moral superiority forced upon them as a substitute for
+intellectual equality they accepted, because they could not help
+themselves. They dropped it as soon as the substitute was no longer
+necessary.
+
+That the mass of women are invariably found on the side of the new
+ideals is no evidence of their moral superiority to men; it is merely
+evidence of their intellectual youth.
+
+Visitors from western cities and towns are often amazed, and vastly
+amused, to find in New York and other eastern cities little narrow-gauge
+street car lines, where gaunt horses haul the shabbiest of cars over the
+oldest and roughest of road beds. The Westerner declares that nowhere in
+the East does he find surface cars that equal in comfort and elegance
+the cars recently installed in his Michigan or Nebraska or Washington
+home town.
+
+"Recently installed." There you have it.
+
+The eastern city retains its horse cars and its out-of-date electric
+rolling stock because it has them, and because there are all sorts of
+difficulties in the way of replacing them. Old franchises have to expire
+or otherwise be got rid of; corporations have to be coaxed or coerced;
+greed and corruption often have to be overcome; huge sums of money have
+to be appropriated; a whole machinery of municipal government has to be
+set in motion before the old and established city can change its
+traction system.
+
+The new western town goes on foot until it attains to a certain size and
+a sufficient prosperity. Then it installs electric railways, and of
+course it purchases the newest and most modern of the available models.
+
+
+New social ideals are difficult for men to acquire in a practical way
+because their minds are filled with old traditions, inherited memories,
+outworn theories of law, government, and social control. They cannot get
+rid of these at once. They have used them so long, have found them so
+convenient, so satisfactory, that even when you show them something
+admittedly better; they are able only partially to comprehend and to
+accept.
+
+Women, on the other hand, have very few antiques to get rid of. Until
+recently their minds, scantily furnished with a few personal preferences
+and personal prejudices, were entirely bare of community ideals or any
+social theory. When they found themselves in need of a social theory it
+was only natural that they should choose the most modern, the most
+progressive, the most idealistic. They made their choice unconsciously,
+and they began the application of their new-found theory almost
+automatically. The machinery they employed was the long derided,
+misconceived, and unappreciated Women's Club.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE
+
+
+Unless you have lived in a live town in the Middle West--say in
+Michigan, or Indiana, or Nebraska--you cannot have a very adequate idea
+of how ugly, and dirty, and neglected, and disreputable a town can be
+when nobody loves it. The railway station is a long, low, rakish thing
+of boards, painted a muddy maroon color. Around it is a stretch of bare
+ground strewn with ashes. Beyond lies the main street, with some good
+business blocks,--a First National Bank in imposing granite, and a
+Masonic Temple in pressed brick. The high school occupies a treeless,
+grassless, windswept block by itself.
+
+In the center of the residential section of the town is a big,
+unsightly, hummocky vacant place, vaguely known as the park--or the
+place where they are going to have a park, when the city gets around to
+it. At present it is a convenient spot wherein to dump tin cans, empty
+bottles, broken crockery, old shoes, and other residue. When the wind
+blows, in the spring and fall, a fine assortment of desiccated rubbish
+is wafted up and down, and into the neighbors' dooryards.
+
+Everybody is busy in these live towns. Everybody is prosperous, and
+patriotic, and law-abiding, and respectable. The business of "getting
+on" absorbs the entire time and attention of the men. They "get on" so
+well, for the most part, that their wives have plenty of leisure on
+their hands, and the latter occupy a portion of their leisure by
+belonging to a club, organized for the study of the art of the
+Renaissance, Chinese religions before Confucius, or the mystery of
+Browning. The club meets every second Wednesday, and the members read
+papers, after which there is tea and a social hour. The papers vary in
+degree alone, as the writer happens to be a skimmer, a wader, or a
+deep-sea diver in standard editions of the encyclopedias. The social
+hour, however, occasionally develops in a direction quite away from the
+realms of pure culture.
+
+Such a town, with such a woman's club, was Lake City, Minnesota, a few
+years ago. Lake City had a busy and a prosperous male population, a
+woman's club bent on intellectual uplift, and a place where there was
+going to be a park. One windy second Wednesday the club members arrived
+with their eyes full of dust, soot on their white gloves, and
+indignation in their hearts. When tea and the social hour came around
+culture went by the board and the conversation turned to the perfectly
+disgraceful way in which the town's street cleaning was conducted.
+
+"The streets are bad enough," said one member, "but, after all, one
+expects the streets to be dusty. What I object to is having a city
+dump-heap at my front door. Have any of you crossed my corner of the
+park since the snow melted?"
+
+She drew a lively picture of a state of things gravely menacing to the
+health of her neighborhood, and that of all the people whose homes faced
+the neglected square.
+
+"Why doesn't somebody complain to the authorities?" she concluded. "Why
+don't we do something about it? The next time we meet we might at least
+adopt resolutions, or, better still, have a committee appointed. What do
+you think, Madam President?"
+
+Madam President tapped her teaspoon on the edge of her empty cup. "I
+think," she said, "that we will come to order and do it now. Will you
+put what you have just suggested in the form of a motion?"
+
+At the next meeting of the club the committee to investigate the park
+made its report. The club members began a lively canvass among real
+estate owners and business men, and before long an astonished city
+council found itself on its feet, receiving a deputation from the
+woman's club. The women came armed with a donation of fifteen hundred
+dollars cash, and a polite, but firm, demand that the money be used to
+clean up and plant the park.
+
+The council replied that it had always intended to get around to that
+park, and would have done it long ago but for the fact that there was no
+park board in existence, and could not be one, because the Solons who
+drew up the city charter had forgotten to put in a provision for such a
+board.
+
+The club held more meetings, and appointed more committees. One of
+these unearthed a State law which seemed to cover the case, and make a
+park board possible without the direct assistance of a city charter. The
+city attorney was visited, and somehow was coaxed, or argued, or bullied
+into giving a favorable opinion, after which the election of a park
+board followed as a matter of course. The town suddenly became
+interested in the park. The club women's fifteen hundred dollars was
+doubled by popular subscription, and the work of turning a town rubbish
+heap into a cool and shady garden spot was brief but durable.
+
+You wouldn't know the Lake City of those years if you saw it to-day.
+They have an attractive railroad station, paved streets, cement
+sidewalks, public playgrounds for children, a high school set in a
+shaded square, and residence streets that look like parkways. And the
+woman's club was the parent of them all.
+
+There is a theory which expresses itself somewhat obviously in the
+phrase: "Whatever all the women of the country want they will get." The
+theory is a convenient one, because it may be used to defer action on
+any suggested reform, and it is harmless because of the seeming
+impossibility of ascertaining what all the women of the country really
+want. The women of the United States and the women of all the world have
+discovered a means through which they may express their collective
+opinions and desires: organization, and more organization. Lake City is
+but one instance in a thousand.
+
+When American women began, a generation ago, to form themselves into
+clubs, and later to join these clubs into state federations of clubs,
+and finally the state federations into a national body, they did not
+dream that they were going to express a collective opinion. Indeed, at
+that time not very many had opinions worth expressing. The immediate
+need of women's souls at the beginning of the club movement was for
+education; the higher education they missed by not going to college, and
+they formed their clubs with the sole object of self-culture.
+
+The study period did not last very long. In fact it was doomed from the
+beginning, for it is not in the nature of women, or at least it is not
+in the habit of women, to do things for themselves alone. They have
+_served_ for so many generations that they have learned to like serving
+better than anything else in the world, and they add service to the
+pursuit of culture, just as some of them add the important postscript to
+the unimportant letter.
+
+Thus Dallas, Texas, had a women's club of the culture caste. One spring
+day, after the star member had read a paper on the "Lake Poets," and
+another member had rendered a Chopin _étude_ on the piano, they began to
+talk about the stegomyia mosquito, and what a pity it was that the
+annual danger of contagion and death from the bite of that insect had to
+be faced all over again. Pools of water all over town, simply swarming
+with little wriggling things, soon to emerge as full-armed stegomyias,
+merely because the city authorities hadn't the money, or said they
+hadn't, to cover the pools with oil.
+
+"Why, oil isn't very expensive," said one of the club women. "Let's buy
+a whole lot of it and do the work ourselves."
+
+So the work of saving hundreds of lives every year was added to the
+study of "Lake Poets" and Chopin by the Women's Club of Dallas. The
+members mapped the city, laid it out in districts, organized their
+forces, bought oil and oil-cans and set forth. They visited the schools,
+got teachers and pupils interested, and secured their co-operation. The
+study of city sanitation was soon put into the school curriculum, and
+oiling pools of standing water in every quarter of the town is now a
+regular part of the school program in the upper grades. Every year the
+club women renew the agitation, and every year the school children go
+out with their teachers and cover the pools with oil.
+
+That story could be paralleled in almost any city in the United States.
+Clubs everywhere organized for the intellectual advancement of the
+members, for the culture of music, art, and crafts, soon added to the
+original object a department of philanthropy, a department of public
+school decoration, a department of child labor, a department of civics.
+The day a women's club adopts civics as a side line to literature, that
+day it ceases to be a private association and becomes a public
+institution--and the public sometimes finds this out before the club
+suspects it.
+
+An Eastern woman was visiting in San Francisco a short time before the
+fire. In the complication of three streets with names almost identical,
+she lost her way to the reception whither she was bound. The conductor
+on the last car she tried before going home was deeply sympathetic.
+
+"'Tis a shame, ma'am, them streets," he declared. "I've always said
+there was no sense at all in havin' them named like that. A stranger is
+bound to go wrong. I'll tell you what you do, ma'am: you go straight to
+Mrs. Lovell White, she that bosses the women's clubs, you know, ma'am.
+You tell her about them streets, and she'll have 'em changed."
+
+The conductor's simple faith in the Women's Club of San Francisco did
+not lack justification. In the intervals of studying Browning and
+antique art, the club found time to discover to San Francisco all sorts
+of things that the city wanted and needed without knowing that it did.
+
+"We ought to have a flower market," pronounced the club.
+
+"Nonsense," said the City Council. "Besides, where is the money to come
+from?"
+
+"We'll establish the flower market and show you," returned the club.
+
+They did. They found a centrally located square, the place where people
+would be likely to go for an early morning sale of potted plants and cut
+flowers. Prices are moderate in outdoor markets, and nothing else so
+stimulates in an entire community the gardening instinct, usually
+confined to a few individuals. The city authorities discovered that the
+flower market filled a long-felt want. So the city took the market over.
+
+These activities were more or less local. Others, begun as local
+affairs, ultimately became national in scope. The movement which has
+resulted in a national program in favor of public playgrounds for
+children began as a women's club movement. For a dozen years before the
+Playgrounds Association of America came into existence, women's clubs
+all over the country had been establishing playgrounds, supporting them
+out of their club treasuries, and using every power of persuasion to
+educate boards of education and city councils in their favor.
+
+Pittsburg affords a typical instance. In 1896 there was a Civic Club of
+Allegheny County, composed of women of the twin steel cities of
+Pittsburg and Allegheny. At the head of its Education Department there
+was a woman, Miss Beulah Kennard, who loved children; not beautifully
+clean, well behaved, curled and polished children, but just children.
+Children attracted Miss Kennard to such a degree that she couldn't bear
+the sight of them wallowing in the grime and soot of Pittsburg streets
+and alleys. Often she stopped in her walks to watch them, dodging wagons
+and automobiles; throwing stones, tossing balls, fighting, and shooting
+craps; stealing apples from push-carts, getting arrested and being
+dragged through the farce of a trial at law for the crime of playing.
+
+"Those children," Miss Kennard told her club, "have got to have a
+decent place to play this summer." And the club agreed with her. The
+treasury yielded for a beginning the modest sum of one hundred and
+twenty-five dollars, and with this money the women fitted out one
+schoolyard, large enough for sixty children to play in. There was no
+trouble about getting the sixty together. They came, a noisy, joyous,
+turbulent, vacation set of children, and the anxious committee from the
+club looked at them in great trepidation of spirit and said to one
+another: "What on earth are we going to do with them, now that we've got
+them here?"
+
+With hardly a ghost of precedent to guide them, the club undertook the
+work, and as women have had considerable experience in taking care of
+children at home, they soon discovered ways of taking care of them
+successfully in the playground.
+
+The next summer the Civic Club invested six hundred dollars in
+playgrounds. Two schoolyards were fitted up in Pittsburg and two in
+Allegheny. After that, every summer, the work was extended. More money
+each year was voted, and additional playgrounds were established. In the
+summer of 1899, three years after the first experiment, Pittsburg
+children had nine playgrounds and Allegheny children had three, all
+gifts of the women. By another year the committee was handling thousands
+of dollars and managing an enterprise of considerable magnitude. Also
+their work was attracting the admiration of other club women, who asked
+for an opportunity to co-operate. In 1900 practically all the clubs of
+the two cities united, and formed a joint committee of the Women's Clubs
+of Pittsburg and vicinity to take charge of playgrounds.
+
+[Illustration: CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH. Established
+by club women and for years supported by them.]
+
+All this time the work was entirely in the hands of the club women, who
+bought the apparatus, organized the games, employed the trained
+supervisors, and supplied from their own membership the volunteer
+workers, without whom the enterprise would have been a failure from the
+start. The Board of Education co-operated to the extent of lending
+schoolyards. Finally the Board of Education decided to vote an annual
+contribution of money.
+
+In 1902 the city of Pittsburg woke up and gave the women fifteen
+hundred dollars, with which they established one more playground and a
+recreation park. The original one hundred and twenty-five dollars had
+now expanded to nearly eight thousand dollars, and Pittsburg and
+Allegheny children were not only playing in a dozen schoolyards, but
+they were attending vacation schools, under expert instructors in manual
+training, cooking, sewing, art-crafts. Several recreation centers,
+all-the-year-round playgrounds, have been added since then. For
+Pittsburg has adopted the women's point of view in the matter of
+playgrounds. This year the city voted fifty thousand, three hundred and
+fifty dollars, and the Board of Education appropriated ten thousand
+dollars for the vacation schools.
+
+In Detroit it was the Twentieth Century Club that began the playground
+agitation. Mrs. Clara B. Arthur, some ten years ago, read a paper
+before the Department of Philanthropy and Reform, and following it the
+chairman of the meeting appointed a committee to consider the
+possibility of playgrounds for Detroit children. The committee visited
+the Board of Education, explained the need of playgrounds, and asked
+that the Board conduct one trial playground in a schoolyard, during the
+approaching vacation. The Board declined. The boards of education in
+most cities declined at first.
+
+The club did not give up. It talked playgrounds to the other clubs,
+until all the organizations of women were interested. Within a year or
+two Detroit had a Council of Women, with a committee on playgrounds. The
+committee went to the Common Council this time and asked permission to
+erect a pavilion and establish a playground on a piece of city land.
+This was a great, bare, neglected spot, the site of an abandoned
+reservoir which had been of no use to anybody for twenty years. The
+place had the advantage of being in a very forlorn neighborhood where
+many children swarmed.
+
+The Common Council was mildly amused at the idea of putting public
+property to such an absurd, such an unheard-of use. A few of the men
+were indignant. One Germanic alderman exploded wrathfully: "Vot does
+vimmens know about poys' play?--No!" And that settled it.
+
+The committee went to the Board of Education once more, this time with
+better success. They received permission to open and conduct, during the
+long vacation, one playground in a large schoolyard. For two summers the
+women maintained that playground, holding their faith against the
+opposition of the janitors, the jeers of the newspapers, and the
+constant hostility of tax-payers, who protested against the "ruin of
+school property." After two years the Board of Education took over the
+work. The mayor became personally interested, and the Common Council
+gracefully surrendered. They have plenty of playgrounds in Detroit now,
+the latest development being winter sports.
+
+If the Germanic alderman who protested that "vimmins" did not know
+anything about boys' play was in office at the time, one wonders what
+his emotions were when the playgrounds committee first appeared before
+the Council and asked to have vacant lots flooded to give children
+skating ponds in winter. Of course the Council refused. Fire plugs were
+for water in case of fire, not for children's enjoyment. In fact there
+was a city ordinance forbidding the opening of a fire plug in winter,
+except to extinguish fire. It took two years of constant work on the
+part of the club women to remove that ordinance, but they did it, and
+the children of Detroit have their winter as well as their summer
+playgrounds.
+
+[Illustration: CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK,
+PITTSBURGH. Out of the persistent work of club women more than three
+hundred playgrounds for children have been established.]
+
+In Philadelphia are fourteen splendid playgrounds and vacation schools,
+established in the beginning and maintained for many years by a civic
+club of women, the largest women's civic club in the country. The
+process of educating public opinion in their favor was slow, for it is
+difficult to make men see that the children of a modern city have
+different needs from the country or village children of a generation
+ago. Men remember their own boyhood, and scoff at the idea of organized
+and supervised play in a made playground. Women have no memories of the
+old swimming-hole. They simply see the conditions before them, and they
+instinctively know what must be done to meet them. The process of
+educating the others is slow, but this year in Philadelphia sixty public
+schoolyards were opened for public playgrounds, and the city
+appropriated five thousand dollars towards their maintenance. In a
+hundred cities East and West the women's clubs have been the original
+movers or have co-operated in the playground movement.
+
+Out of this persistent work was born the Playground Association of
+America, an organization of men and women, which in the three years of
+its existence has established more than three hundred playgrounds for
+children. In Massachusetts they have secured a referendum providing that
+all cities of over ten thousand inhabitants shall vote upon the question
+of providing adequate playgrounds. The act provides that every city and
+town in the Commonwealth which accepts the act shall after July 1, 1910,
+provide and maintain at least one public playground, and at least one
+other playground for every additional twenty thousand inhabitants.
+Something like twenty-five cities in the State have accepted the
+playgrounds act. It is a good beginning. The slogan of the movement,
+"The boy without a playground is the father of the man without a job,"
+has swept over the continent.
+
+[Illustration: STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD,
+LOS ANGELES, CAL.]
+
+This surely is a not inconsiderable achievement for so humble an
+instrument as women's clubs. It is true that in most communities they
+have forgotten that the women's clubs ever had anything to do with the
+movement. The Playgrounds Association has not forgotten, however. Its
+president, Luther Halsey Gulick, of New York, declares that even now the
+work would languish if it lost the co-operation of the women's clubs.
+
+The scope of woman's work for civic betterment is wider than the
+interests that directly affect children. How much the women attempt, how
+difficult they find their task, how much opposition they encounter, and
+how certain their success in the end, is indicated in a modest report of
+the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Women's Civic Club. That report says in
+part:
+
+"It is no longer necessary for us to continue, at our own cost, the
+practical experiment we began in street-cleaning, or to advocate the
+paving of a single principal street, as a test of the value of improved
+highways; nor is it necessary longer to strive for a pure water supply,
+a healthier sewerage system, or the construction of playgrounds. _This
+work is now being done by the City Council, by the Board of Public
+Works, and by the Park Commission._"
+
+Not that the Harrisburg Women's Civic Club has gone out of business. It
+still keeps fairly busy with schoolhouse decoration, traveling libraries
+for factory employees, and inspecting the city dump.
+
+In Birmingham, Alabama, the women's work has been recognized officially.
+The club Women have formed "block" clubs, composed of the women living
+in each block, and the mayor has invested them with powers of
+supervision, control of street cleaning, and disposal of waste and
+garbage. They really act as overseers, and can remove lazy and
+incompetent employees.
+
+Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has a ten-year-old Civic Club. The women have
+succeeded in getting objectionable billboards removed, public dumps
+removed from the town, in having all outside market stalls covered, and
+have secured ordinances forbidding spitting in public places, and
+against throwing litter into the streets.
+
+Cranford, New Jersey, is one of a dozen small cities where the women's
+clubs hold regular town house-cleanings. One large town in the Middle
+West adopted a vigorous method of educating public opinion in favor of
+spring and fall municipal house-cleaning. The club women got a
+photographer and went the rounds of streets and alleys and private
+backyards. Wherever bad or neglected conditions were found the club sent
+a note to the owner of the property asking him to co-operate with its
+members in cleaning up and beautifying the town. Where no attention was
+paid to the notes, the photographs were posted conspicuously in the
+club's public exhibit.
+
+If the California women saved the big tree grove, the New Jersey women,
+by years of persistent work, saved the Palisades of the Hudson from
+destruction and inaugurated the movement to turn them into a public
+park. As for the Colorado club women, they saved the Cliff Dwellers'
+remains. You can no longer buy the pottery and other priceless relics of
+those prehistoric people in the curio-shops of Denver.
+
+I am not attempting a catalogue; I am only giving a few crucial
+instances. The activities of women if they appeared only sporadically in
+Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, and a dozen other cities, would not
+necessarily carry much weight. They would possess an interest purely
+local. But the club women of Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, do not
+keep their interests local. Once a year they travel, hundreds of them,
+to a chosen city in the State, and there they hold a convention which
+lasts a week. And every second year the club women of Minnesota and
+Texas and California, and every other State in the Union, to say
+nothing of Alaska, Porto Rico, and the Canal Zone, thousands of them,
+journey to a chosen center, and there they hold a convention which lasts
+a week. And at these state and national conventions the club women
+compare their work and criticise it, and confer on public questions, and
+decide which movements they shall promote. They summon experts in all
+lines of work to lecture and advise. Increasingly their work is national
+in its scope.
+
+In round numbers, eight hundred thousand women are now enrolled in the
+clubs belonging to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, holding in
+common certain definite opinions, and working harmoniously towards
+certain definite social ends. Remember that these eight hundred
+thousand women are the educated, intelligent, socially powerful.
+
+Long ago these eight hundred thousand women ceased to confine their
+studies to printed pages. They began to study life. Leaders developed,
+women of intellect and experience, who could foresee the immense power
+an organized womanhood might some time wield, and who had courage to
+direct the forces under them towards vital objects.
+
+When, in 1904, Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker, of Denver, was elected President
+of the General Federation, she found a number of old-fashioned clubs
+still devoting themselves to Shakespeare and the classic writers. Mrs.
+Decker, a voter, a full citizen, and a public worker of prominence in
+her State, simply laughed the musty study clubs out of existence.
+
+"Ladies," she said to the delegates at the biennial meeting of 1904,
+"Dante is dead. He died several centuries ago, and a great many things
+have happened since his time. Let us drop the study of his 'Inferno' and
+proceed in earnest to contemplate our own social order."
+
+[Illustration: MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER]
+
+Mostly they took her advice. A few clubs still devote themselves to the
+pursuit of pure culture, a few others exist with little motive beyond
+congenial association. The great majority of women's clubs are organized
+for social service. A glance at their national program shows the
+modernity, the liberal character of organized women's ideals. The
+General Federation has twelve committees, among them being those on
+Industrial Conditions of Women and Children, Civil Service Reform,
+Forestry, Pure Food and Public Health, Education, Civics, Legislation,
+Arts and Crafts, and Household Economics. Every state federation has
+adopted, in the main, the same departments; and the individual clubs
+follow as many lines of the work as their strength warrants.
+
+The contribution of the women's clubs to education has been enormous.
+There is hardly a State in the Union the public schools of which have
+not been beautified, inside and outside; hardly a State where
+kindergartens and manual training, domestic science, medical inspection,
+stamp savings banks, or other improvements have not been introduced by
+the clubs. In almost every case the clubs have purchased the equipment
+and paid the salaries until the boards of education and the school
+superintendents have been convinced of the value of the innovations. In
+the South, where opportunities for the higher education of women are
+restricted, the clubs support dozens of scholarships in colleges and
+institutes. Many western State federations, notable among which is that
+of Colorado, have strong committees on education which are active in the
+entire school system.
+
+Thomas M. Balliett, Dean of Pedagogy in the New York University, paid a
+deserved tribute to the Massachusetts club women when he said:
+
+     In Massachusetts the various women's organizations have, within the
+     past few years, made a study of schools and school conditions
+     throughout the State with a thoroughness that has never been
+     attempted before.
+
+Dean Balliett says of women's clubs in general that the most
+important reform movements in elementary education within the past
+twenty years have been due, in large measure, to the efforts of
+organized women. And he is right.
+
+The women's clubs have founded more libraries than Mr. Carnegie. Early
+in the movement the women began the circulation among the clubs of
+traveling reference libraries. Soon this work was extended, but the
+object of the libraries was diverted. Instead of collections of books on
+special subjects to assist the club women in their studies, the
+traveling cases were arranged in miscellaneous groups, and were sent to
+schools, to factories, to lonely farms, mining camps, lumber camps, and
+to isolated towns and villages.
+
+Iowa now has more than twelve thousand volumes, half of them reference
+books, in circulation. Eighty-one permanent libraries have grown out of
+the traveling libraries in Iowa alone. After the traveling cases have
+been coming to a town for a year or two, people wake up and agree that
+they want a permanent place in which to read and study. Ohio has over a
+thousand libraries in circulation, having succeeded, a few years ago, in
+getting a substantial appropriation from the legislature to supplement
+their work. Western States--Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho--have supplied
+reading matter to ranches and mining camps for many years.
+
+One interesting special library is circulated in Massachusetts and Rhode
+Island in behalf of the anti-tuberculosis movement. Something like forty
+of the best books on health, and on the prevention and cure of
+tuberculosis, are included. This library, with a pretty complete
+tuberculosis exhibit, is sent around, and is shown by the local clubs
+of each town. Usually the women try to have a mass-meeting, at which
+local health problems are discussed. The Health Department of the
+General Federation is working to establish these health libraries and
+exhibits in every State.
+
+Not only in the United States, but in every civilized country, have
+women associated themselves together with the object of reforming what
+seems to them social chaos. In practically every civilized country in
+the world to-day there exists a Council of Women, a central organization
+to which clubs and societies of women with all sorts of opinions and
+objects send delegates. In the United States the council is made up of
+the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Woman's Christian
+Temperance Union, and innumerable smaller organizations, like the
+National Congress of Mothers, and the Daughters of the American
+Revolution. More than a million and a half American women are
+affiliated.
+
+Four hundred and twenty-six women's organizations belong to the council
+in Great Britain. In Switzerland the council has sixty-four allied
+societies; in Austria it has fifty; in the Netherlands it has
+thirty-five. Seventy-five thousand women belong to the French council.
+In all, the International Council of Women, to which all the councils
+send delegates, represents more than eight million women, in countries
+as far apart as Australia, Argentine, Iceland, Persia, South Africa, and
+every country in Europe. The council, indeed, has no formal organization
+in Russia, because organizations of every kind are illegal in Russia.
+But Russian women attend every meeting of the International Council.
+Turkish women sent word to the last meeting that they hoped soon to ask
+for admission. The President of the International Council of Women is
+the Countess of Aberdeen. Titled women in every European country belong
+to their councils. The Queen of Greece is president of the Greek
+council.
+
+The object of this great world organization of women is to provide a
+common center for women of every country, race, creed, or party who are
+associating themselves together in altruistic work. Once every five
+years the International Council holds a great world congress of women.
+
+What eight million of the most intelligent, the most thoughtful, the
+most altruistic women in the world believe, what they think the world
+needs, what they wish and desire for the good of humanity, must be of
+interest. It must count.
+
+[Illustration: LADY ABERDEEN President of the International Council of
+Women.]
+
+The International Council of Women discusses every important question
+presented, but makes no decision until the opinion of the delegates is
+practically unanimous. It commits itself to no opinion, lends itself to
+no movement, until the movement has passed the controversial stage.
+
+Those who cling to the old notion that women are perpetually at war with
+one another will learn with astonishment that eight million women of all
+nationalities, religions, and temperaments are agreed on at least four
+questions. In the course of its twenty years of existence the
+International Council has agreed to support four movements: Peace and
+arbitration, social purity, removing legal disabilities of women, woman
+suffrage.
+
+The American reader will be inclined to cavil at the last-mentioned
+object. Woman suffrage, it will be claimed, has not passed the
+controversial stage, even with women themselves. That is true in the
+United States and in England. It is true, in a sense, in most countries
+of the world. But in European countries not _woman_ suffrage, but
+_universal_ suffrage is being struggled for.
+
+I had this explained to me in Russia, in the course of a conversation
+with Alexis Aladyn, the brilliant leader of the Social Democratic party.
+I said to him that I had been informed that the conservative reformers,
+as well as the radicals, included woman suffrage in their programs.
+Aladyn looked puzzled for a moment, and then he replied: "All parties
+desire universal suffrage. Naturally that includes women."
+
+Finland at that time, 1906, had recently won its independence from the
+autocracy and was preparing for its first general election. Talking with
+one of the nineteen women returned to Parliament a few months later, I
+asked: "How did you Finnish women persuade the makers of the new
+constitution to give you the franchise?"
+
+"Persuade?" she repeated; "we did not have to persuade them. There was
+simply no opposition. One of the demands made on the Russian Government
+was for universal suffrage."
+
+The movement for universal suffrage, that is the movement for free
+government, with the consent of the governed, is considered by the
+International Council of Women to have passed the controversial stage.
+
+The whole club movement, as a matter of fact, is a part of the great
+democratic movement which is sweeping over the whole world. Individual
+clubs may be exclusive, even aristocratic in their tendencies, but the
+large organization is absolutely democratic. If the President of the
+International Council is an English peeress, one of the vice-presidents
+is the wife of a German music teacher, and one of the secretaries is a
+self-supporting woman. The General Federation in the United States is
+made up of women of various stations in life, from millionaires' wives
+to factory girls.
+
+The democracy of women's organizations was shown at the meeting in
+London a year ago of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, where
+delegates from twenty-one countries assembled. One of the great features
+of the meeting was a wonderful pageant of women's trades and
+professions. An immense procession of women, bearing banners and emblems
+of their work, marched through streets lined with spectators to Albert
+Hall, where the entire orchestra of this largest auditorium in the world
+was reserved for them. A published account of the pageant, after
+describing the delegations of teachers, nurses, doctors, journalists,
+artists, authors, house workers, factory women, stenographers, and
+others well known here, says:
+
+     Then the ranks opened, and down the long aisle came the chain
+     makers who work at the forge, and the pit-brow women from the
+     mines,--women whose faces have been blackened by smoke and coal
+     dust until they can never be washed white.... To these women, the
+     hardest workers in the land, were given the seats of honor, while
+     behind them, gladly taking a subordinate place, were many women
+     wearing gowns with scarlet and purple hoods, indicating their
+     university degrees.
+
+Every public movement--reform, philanthropic, sanitary, educational--now
+asks the co-operation of women's organizations. The United States
+Government asked the co-operation of the women's clubs to save the
+precarious Panama situation. At a moment when social discontent
+threatened literally to stop the building of the canal, the Department
+of Commerce and Labor employed Miss Helen Varick Boswell, of New York,
+to go to the Isthmus and organize the wives and daughters of Government
+employees into clubs. The Department knew that the clubs, once
+organized, would do the rest. Nor was it disappointed.
+
+The Government asks the co-operation of women in its latest work of
+conserving natural resources. At the biennial of the Federation of
+Women's Clubs in 1906 Mr. Enos Mills delivered an address on forestry, a
+movement which was beginning to engage the attention of the clubs.
+Within an hour after he left the platform Mr. Mills had been engaged by
+a dozen state presidents to lecture to clubs and federations. As soon
+as it reached the Government that the women's clubs were paying fifty
+dollars a lecture to learn about forestry work, the Government arranged
+that the clubs should have the best authorities in the nation to lecture
+on forestry free of all expense.
+
+But the Government is not alone in recognizing the power of women's
+organizations. If the Government approves their interest in public
+questions, vested interests are beginning to fear it. The president of
+the Manufacturers' Association, in his inaugural address, told his
+colleagues that their wives and daughters invited some very dangerous
+and revolutionary speakers to address their clubs. He warned them that
+the women were becoming too friendly toward reforms that the association
+frowned upon.
+
+This is indeed true, and women display, in their new-found enthusiasm,
+a singularly obstinate spirit. All the legislatures south of the Mason
+and Dixon Line cannot make the Southern women believe that Southern
+prosperity is dependent upon young children laboring in mills. The women
+go on working for child labor and compulsory education laws, unconvinced
+by the arguments of the mill owners and the votes of the legislators.
+The highest court in the State of New York was powerless to persuade New
+York club women that the United States Constitution stands in the way of
+a law prohibiting the night work of women. The Court of Appeals declared
+the law unconstitutional, and many women at present are toiling at
+night. But the club women immediately began fighting for a new law.
+
+The women of every State in the Union are able to work harmoniously
+together because they are unhampered with traditions of what the
+founders of the Republic intended,--the sacredness of state rights, or
+the protective paternalism of Wall Street. The gloriously illogical
+sincerity of women is concerned only about the thing itself.
+
+I have left for future consideration women who having definite social
+theories have organized themselves for definite objects. This chapter
+has purposely been confined to the activities of average women--good
+wives and mothers, the eight hundred thousand American women whose
+collective opinion is expressed through the General Federation of
+Women's Clubs. For the most part they are mature in years, these club
+women. Their children are grown. Some are in college and some are
+married. I have heard more than one presiding officer at a State
+Federation meeting proudly announce from the platform that she had
+become a grandmother since the last convention.
+
+The present president of the General Federation, Mrs. Philip N. Moore
+of St. Louis, Missouri, is a graduate of Vassar College, and served for
+a time as president of the National Society of Collegiate Alumnae. There
+are not wanting in the club movement many women who have taken college
+and university honors. Club women taken the country over, however, are
+not college products. If they had been, the club movement might have
+taken on a more cultural and a less practical form. As it was, the women
+formed their groups with the direct object of educating themselves and,
+being practical women used to work, they readily turned their new
+knowledge to practical ends. As quickly as they found out, through
+education, what their local communities needed they were filled with a
+generous desire to supply those needs. In reality they simply learned
+from books and study how to apply their housekeeping lore to municipal
+government and the public school system. Nine-tenths of the work they
+have undertaken relates to children, the school, and the home. Some of
+it seemed radical in the beginning, but none of it has failed, in the
+long run, to win the warmest approval of the people.
+
+The eight million women who form the International Council of Women, and
+express the collective opinion of women the world over, are not
+exceptional types, although they may possess exceptional intelligence.
+They are merely good citizens, wives, and mothers. Their program
+contains nothing especially radical. And yet, what a revolution would
+the world witness were that program carried out? Peace and arbitration;
+social purity; public health; woman suffrage; removal of all legal
+disabilities of women. This last-named object is perhaps more
+revolutionary in its character than the others, because its fulfillment
+will disturb the basic theories on which the nations have established
+their different forms of government.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW
+
+
+Several years ago a woman of wealth and social prominence in Kentucky,
+after pondering some time on the inferior position of women in the
+United States, wrote a book. In this volume the United States was
+compared most unfavorably with the countries of Europe, where the
+dignity and importance of women received some measure of recognition.
+Women, this author protested, enjoy a larger measure of political power
+in England than in America. In England and throughout Europe their
+social power is greater. If a man becomes lord mayor of an English city
+his wife becomes lady mayoress, and she shares all her husband's
+official honors. On the Continent women are often made honorary colonels
+of regiments, and take part with the men in military reviews. Women
+frequently hold high offices at court, acting as chamberlains,
+constables, and the like. The writer closed her last chapter with the
+announcement that she meant henceforth to make her home in England,
+where women had more than once occupied the throne as absolute monarch
+and constitutional ruler.
+
+It is true that in some particulars American women do seem to be at a
+disadvantage with European women. With what looks like a higher regard
+for women's intelligence, England has bestowed upon them every measure
+of suffrage except the Parliamentary franchise. In England, throughout
+the Middle Ages, and even down to the present century, women held the
+office of sheriff of the county, clerk of the crown, high constable,
+chamberlain, and even champion at a coronation,--the champion being a
+picturesque figure who rides into the hall and flings his glove to the
+nobles, in defense of the king's crown.
+
+In the royal pageants of European history behold the powerful figures of
+Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth, Mary of
+Scotland, Christina of Sweden, rulers in fact as well as in name; to say
+nothing of the long line of women regents in whose hands the state
+intrusted its affairs, during the minority of its kings. In the United
+States a woman candidate for mayor of a small town would be considered
+a joke.
+
+These and other inconsistencies have puzzled many ardent upholders of
+American chivalry. In order to understand the position of women in the
+United States it is necessary to make a brief survey of the laws under
+which European women are governed, and the social theory on which their
+apparent advantages are based.
+
+In the first place, the statement that in European countries a woman may
+succeed to the throne must be qualified. In three countries only,
+England, Spain, and Portugal, are women counted in the line of
+succession on terms approaching equality with men. In these three
+countries when a monarch dies leaving no sons his eldest daughter
+becomes the sovereign. If the ruling monarch die, leaving no children at
+all, the oldest daughter--failing sons--of the man who was in his
+lifetime in direct line of succession is given preference to male heirs
+more remote. Thus Queen Victoria succeeded William IV, she being the
+only child of the late king's deceased brother and heir, the Duke of
+Kent.
+
+Similar laws govern the succession in Portugal and Spain, although
+dispute on this point has more than once caused civil war in Spain.
+
+In Holland, Greece, Russia, Austria, and a few German states a woman may
+succeed to the throne, provided every single male heir to the crown is
+dead. Queen Wilhelmina became sovereign in Holland only because the
+House of Orange was extinct in the male line, and Holland lost, on
+account of the accession of Wilhelmina, the rich and important Duchy of
+Luxemburg.
+
+Luxemburg, in common with the rest of Europe, except the countries
+described, lives under what is known as the Salic Law, according to
+which a woman may not, in any circumstances, become sovereign.
+
+A word about this Salic Law is necessary, because the tradition of it
+permeates the whole atmosphere in which the women of Europe live, move,
+and have their legal and social being.
+
+The Salic Law was the code of a barbarous people, so far extinct and
+forgotten that it is uncertain just what territory in ancient Gaul they
+occupied at the time the code was formulated. Later the Salian Franks,
+as the tribe was designated, built on the left bank of the Seine rude
+fortresses and a collection of wattled huts which became the ancestor of
+the present-day city of Paris.
+
+The Salic Law was a complete code. It governed all matters, civil and
+military. It prescribed rules of war; it fixed the salaries of
+officials; it designated the exact amount of blood money the family of a
+slain man might collect from the family of the slayer; it regu lated
+conditions under which individuals might travel from one village to
+another; it governed matters of property transfer and inheritance.
+
+The Salian Franks are dust; their might has perished, their annals are
+forgotten, their cities are leveled, their mightiest kings sleep in
+unmarked graves, their code has passed out of existence, almost indeed
+out of the memory of man,--all except one paragraph of one division of
+one law. The law related to inheritance of property; the special
+division distinguished between real and personal property, and the
+paragraph ruled that a woman might inherit movable property, but that
+she might not inherit land.
+
+There was not a syllable in the law relating to the inheritance of a
+throne. Nevertheless, centuries after the last Salian king was laid in
+his barbarous grave a French prince successfully contested with an
+English prince the crown of France, his claim resting on that obscure
+paragraph in the Salic code. The Hundred Years' War was fought on this
+issue, and the final outcome of the war established the Salic Law
+permanently in France, and with more or less rigor in most of the
+European states.
+
+At the time of the French Revolution, when the "Rights of Man" were
+being declared with so much fervor and enthusiasm, when the old laws
+were being revised in favor of greater freedom of the individual, the
+"Rights of Woman" were actually revised downward. Up to this time the
+application of the Salic Law was based on tradition and precedent. Now a
+special statute was enacted forever barring women from the sovereignty
+of France. "Founded on the pride of the French, who could not bear to be
+ruled by their own women folk," as the records are careful to state.
+
+The interpretation of the Salic Law did more, a great deal more, than
+exclude women from the throne. It established the principle of the
+inherent inferiority of women. The system of laws erected on that
+principle were necessarily deeply tinged with contempt for women, and
+with fear lest their influence in any way might affect the conduct of
+state affairs. That explains why, at the present time, although in most
+European countries women are allowed to practice medicine, they are not
+allowed to practice law. Medicine may be as learned a profession, but it
+affects only human beings. The law, on the other hand, affects the
+state. A woman advocate, you can readily imagine, might so influence a
+court of justice that the laws of the land might suffer feminization.
+From the European point of view this would be most undesirable.
+
+The apparently superior rights possessed by English women were also
+bestowed upon them by a vanished system of laws. They have descended
+from Feudalism, in which social order the _person_ did not exist. The
+social order consisted of _property_ alone, and the claims of property,
+that is to say, land, were paramount over the claims of the individual.
+Those historic women sheriffs of counties, clerks of crown,
+chamberlains, and high constables held their high offices because the
+offices were hereditary property in certain titled families, and they
+had to belong to the entail, even when a woman was in possession. The
+offices were purely titular. No English woman ever acted as high
+constable. No English woman ever attended a coronation as king's
+champion. The rights and duties of these offices were delegated to a
+male relative. Every once in a while, during the Middle Ages, some
+strong-minded lady of title demanded the right to administer her office
+in person, but she was always sternly put down by a rebuking House of
+Lords, sometimes even by the king's majesty himself.
+
+In the same way the voting powers of the women of England are a result
+of hereditary privilege. Local affairs in England, until a very recent
+period, were administered through the parish, and the only persons
+qualified to vote were the property owners of the parish. It was really
+property interests and not people who voted. Those women who owned
+property, or who were administering property for their minor children,
+were entitled to vote, to serve on boards of guardians, and to dispense
+the Poor Laws. Out of their right of parish vote has grown their right
+of municipal franchise. It carries with it a property qualification, and
+the proposed Parliamentary franchise, for which the women of England are
+making such a magnificent fight, will also have a property
+qualification.
+
+The real position, legal and social, which women in England and
+continental Europe have for centuries occupied, may be gauged from an
+examination of the feminist movement in a very enlightened country, say
+Germany. The laws of Germany were founded on the Corpus Juris of the
+Romans, a stern code which relegates women to the position of chattels.
+And chattels they have been in Germany, until very recent years, when
+through the intelligent persistence of strong women the chains have
+somewhat been loosened.
+
+A generation ago, in 1865, to be exact, a group of women in Leipzig
+formed an association which they called the Allgemeinen Deutschen
+Frauenbund, which may be Anglicized into General Association of German
+Women. The stated objects of the association give a pretty clear idea of
+the position of women at that time. The women demanded as their rights,
+Education, the Right to Work, Free Choice of Profession. Nothing more,
+but these three demands were so revolutionary that all masculine
+Germany, and most of feminine Germany, uttered horrified protests.
+Needless to say nothing came of the women's demand.
+
+After the Franco-Prussian War the center of the women's revolt naturally
+moved to the capital of the new empire, Berlin. From that city, during
+the years that followed, so much feminine unrest was radiated that in
+1887 the German Woman Suffrage Association was formed, with the demand
+for absolute equality with men. Two remarkable women, Minna Cauer and
+Anita Augsberg, the latter unmarried and a doctor of laws, were the
+moving spirits in the first woman suffrage agitation, which has since
+extended throughout the empire until there is hardly a small town
+without its suffrage club.
+
+Now the woman suffragist in Germany differs from the American suffragist
+in that she is always a member of a political party. She is a silent
+member to be sure, but she adheres to her party, because, through
+tradition or conviction, she believes in its policies. Usually the
+suffragist is a member of the Social Democratic Party, allied to the
+International Socialist Party. She is a suffragist because she is a
+Socialist, because woman suffrage, and, indeed, the full equalization of
+the laws governing men and women are a part of the Socialist platform in
+every country in the world. The woman member of the Social Democratic
+party is not working primarily for woman suffrage. She is working for a
+complete overturning of the present economic system, and she advocates
+_universal adult suffrage_ as a means of bringing about the social and
+economic changes demanded by the Socialists.
+
+These German Socialist women are often very advanced spirits, who hold
+university degrees, who have entered the professions, and are generally
+emancipated from strictly conventional lives. Others, in large numbers,
+belong to the intellectual proletarian classes. Their American
+prototypes are to be found in the Women's Trade Union League, described
+in a later chapter.
+
+The other German suffragists are members of the radical, the moderate
+(we should say conservative), and the clerical parties. These women are
+middle class, average, intelligent wives and mothers. They correspond
+fairly well with the women of the General Federation of Clubs in the
+United States, and like the American club women they are affiliated with
+the International Council of Women. Locally they are working for the
+social reforms demanded by the first American suffrage convention, held
+in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. They are demanding the higher
+education, married women's property rights, free speech, and the right
+to choose a trade or profession. They are demanding other rights, from
+lack of which the American woman never suffered. The right to attend a
+political meeting was until recently denied to German women. Although
+they take a far keener and more intelligent interest in national and
+local politics than American women as a rule have ever taken, their
+presence at political meetings has but yesterday been sanctioned.
+
+The civil responsibility of the father and mother in many European
+countries is barbarously unequal. If a marriage exists between the
+parents the father is the only parent recognized. He is sole guardian
+and authority. When divorce dissolves a marriage the rights of the
+father are generally paramount, even when he is the party accused.
+
+On the other hand, if no marriage exists between the parents, if the
+child is what is called illegitimate, the mother is alone responsible
+for its maintenance. Not only is the father free from all
+responsibility, his status as a father is denied by law. Inquiry into
+the paternity of the child is in some countries forbidden. The unhappy
+mother may have documentary proof that she was betrayed under promise of
+marriage, but she is not allowed to produce her proof.
+
+Under the French Code, the substance of which governs all Europe, it is
+distinctly a principle that the woman's honor is and ought to be of less
+value than a man's honor. Napoleon personally insisted on this
+principle, and more than once emphasized his belief that no importance
+should be attached to men's share in illegitimacy.
+
+These and other degrading laws the European progressive women are trying
+to remove from the Codes. They have their origin in the belief in "The
+imprudence, the frailty, and the imbecility" of women, to quote from
+this Code Napoleon.
+
+Whatever women's legal disabilities in the United States, their laws
+were never based on the principle that women were imprudent, frail, or
+imbecile. They placed women at a distinct disadvantage, it is true, but
+it was the disadvantage of the minor child and not of the inferior, the
+chattel, the property of man, as in Europe.
+
+Laws in the United States were founded on the assumption that women
+stood in perpetual need of protection. The law makers carried this to
+the absurd extent of assuming that protection was all the right a woman
+needed or all she ought to claim. They even pretended that when a woman
+entered the complete protection of the married state she no longer stood
+in need of an identity apart from her husband. The working out of this
+theory in a democracy was far from ideal, as we shall see.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW
+
+
+A little girl sat in a corner of her father's law library watching, with
+wide, serious eyes, a scene the like of which was common enough a
+generation or two ago. The weeping old woman told a halting story of a
+dissipated son, a shrewish daughter-in-law, and a state of servitude on
+her own part,--a story pitifully sordid in its details. The farm had
+come to her from her father's estate. For forty years she had toiled
+side by side with her husband, getting a simple, but comfortable,
+living from the soil. Then the husband died. Under the will the son
+inherited the farm, and everything on it,--house, furniture, barns,
+cattle, tools. Even the money in the bank was his. A clause in the will
+provided that the son should give his mother a home during her lifetime.
+
+So here she was, after a life of hard work and loving service, shorn of
+everything; a pauper, an unpaid servant in the house of another
+woman,--her son's wife. Was it true that the law took her home away from
+her,--the farm that descended to her from her father, the house she had
+lived in since childhood? Could nothing, _nothing_ be done?
+
+The aged judge shook his head, sadly. "You see, Mrs. Grant," he
+explained, "the farm has never really been yours since your marriage,
+for then it became by law your husband's property, precisely as if he
+had bought it. He had a right to leave it to whom he would. No doubt he
+did what he thought was for your good. I wish I could help you, but I
+cannot. The law is inexorable in these matters."
+
+After the forlorn old woman had gone the lawyer's child went and stood
+by her father's chair. "Why couldn't you help her?" she asked. "Why do
+you let them take her home away from her?"
+
+Judge Cady opened the sheep-bound book at his elbow and showed the
+little girl a paragraph. Turning the pages, he pointed out others for
+her to read. Spelling through the ponderous legal phraseology the little
+girl learned that a married woman had no existence, in the eyes of the
+law, apart from her husband. She could own no property; she could
+neither buy nor sell; she could not receive a gift, even from her own
+husband. She was, in fact, her husband's chattel. If he beat her she had
+no means of punishing, or even restraining him, unless, indeed, she
+could prove that her life was endangered. If she ran away from him the
+law forced her to return.
+
+Paragraph after paragraph the child read through, and, unseen by her
+father, marked faintly with a pencil. So far as she was aware, father,
+and father's library of sheep-bound books, were the beginning and the
+end of the law, and to her mind the way to get rid of measures which
+took women's homes away from them was perfectly simple. That night when
+the house was quiet she stole downstairs, scissors in hand, determined
+_to cut every one of those laws out of the book_.
+
+The young reformer was restrained, but only temporarily. As Elizabeth
+Cady Stanton she lived to do her part toward revising many of the laws
+under which women, in her day, suffered, and her successors, the
+organized women of the United States, are busy with their scissors,
+revising the rest.
+
+Not alone in Russia, Germany, France, and England do the laws governing
+men and women need equalizing. In America, paradise of women, the
+generally accepted theory that women have "all the rights they want"
+does not stand the test of impartial examination.
+
+In America some women have all the rights they want. Your wife and the
+wives of the men you associate with every day usually have all the
+rights they want, sometimes a few that they do not need at all. Is the
+house yours? The furniture yours? The motor yours? The income yours? Are
+the children yours? If you are the average fond American husband, you
+will return the proud answer: "No, indeed, they are _ours_."
+
+This is quite as it should be, assuming that all wives are as tenderly
+cherished, and as well protected as the women who live on your block.
+For a whole big army of women there are often serious disadvantages
+connected with that word "ours."
+
+In Boston there lived a family of McEwans,--a man, his wife, and several
+half-grown children. McEwan was not a very steady man. He drank
+sometimes, and his earning capacity was uncertain. Mrs. McEwan was an
+energetic, capable, intelligent woman, tolerant of her husband's
+failings, ambitious for her children. She took a large house, furnished
+it on the installment plan, and filled it with boarders. The boarders
+gave the family an income larger than they had ever possessed before,
+and McEwan's contributions fell off. He became an unpaying guest
+himself. All his earnings, he explained, were going into investments.
+The man was, in fact, speculating in mining stocks.
+
+One day McEwan came home with a face of despair. His creditors, he told
+his wife, had descended on him, seized his business, and threatened to
+take possession of the boarding house.
+
+"But it is mine," protested the woman, with spirit. "I bought every bit
+of furniture with the money my boarders paid me. Nobody can touch my
+property or my earnings to satisfy a claim on you. I am not liable for
+your debts."
+
+One of the boarders was a lawyer, and to him that night she took the
+case. "A woman's earnings are her own in Massachusetts, are they not?"
+she demanded.
+
+"You are what the law calls a free trader," replied the lawyer, "and
+whatever you earn is yours, certainly. That is--of course you are
+recorded at the city clerk's office?"
+
+"Why no. Why should I be?"
+
+"The law requires it. Otherwise this property, and even the money your
+boarders pay you, are liable to attachment for your husband's debts.
+Unless you make a specific declaration that you are in business for
+yourself, the law assumes that the business is your husband's."
+
+"If I went to work for a salary, should I have to be recorded in order
+to keep my own money?" Mrs. McEwan was growing angry.
+
+"No," replied the lawyer, "not if you were careful to keep your income
+and your husband's absolutely separate. If you both paid installments on
+a piano the piano would be your husband's, not yours. If you bought a
+house together, the house could be seized for his debts. Everything you
+buy with your money is yours. Everything you buy with money he gives you
+is his. Everything you buy together is his. You could not protect such
+property from your husband's creditors, or from his heirs."
+
+Mrs. McEwan's case is mild, her wrongs faint beside those of a woman in
+Los Angeles, California. Her husband was a doctor, and she had been,
+before her marriage, a trained nurse. The young woman had saved several
+hundred dollars, and she put the money into a first payment on a pretty
+little cottage. During the first two or three years of the marriage the
+doctor's wife, from time to time, attended cases of illness, usually
+contributing her earnings toward the payment for the house or into
+furniture for the house. In all she paid about a thousand dollars, or
+something like one-third of the cost of the house. Then children came,
+and her earning days were over.
+
+Unfortunately the domestic affairs of this household became disturbed.
+The doctor contracted a drug habit. He became irregular in his conduct
+and ended by running away with a dissolute woman. After he had gone his
+wife found that the house she lived in, and which she had helped to buy,
+had been sold, without her knowledge or consent. The transaction was
+perfectly legal. Community property, that is, property held jointly by
+husband and wife, is absolutely controlled by the husband in California.
+In that State community property may even be given away, without the
+wife's knowledge or consent.
+
+It happened not many years ago that one of the most powerful
+millionaires in California, in a moment of generosity, conveyed to one
+of his sons a very valuable property. Some time afterwards the father
+and son quarreled, and the father attempted to get back his property.
+His plea in court was that his wife's consent to the transaction had
+never been sought; but the court ruled that since the property was owned
+in community, the wife's consent did not have to be obtained.
+
+This particular woman happened to be rich enough to stand the experience
+of having a large slice of property given away without her knowledge,
+but the same law would have applied to the case of a woman who could
+not afford it at all.
+
+It is in the case of women wage earners that these laws bear the
+peculiar asperity. Down in the cotton-mill districts of the South are
+scores of men who never, from one year to the next, do a stroke of work.
+They are supposed to be "weakly." Their wives and children work eleven
+hours a day (or night) and every pay day the men go to the mills and
+collect their wages. The money belongs to them under the law. Even if
+the women had the spirit to protest, the protest would be useless. The
+right of a man to collect and to spend his wife's earnings is protected
+in many States in the chivalric South. In Texas, for example, a husband
+is entitled to his wife's earnings even _though he has deserted her_.
+
+I do not know that this occurs very often in Texas. Probably not, unless
+among low-class Negroes. In all likelihood if a Texas woman should
+appeal to her employer, and tell him that her husband had abandoned her,
+he would refuse to give the man her wages. Should the husband be in a
+position to invoke the law, he could claim his wife's earnings,
+nevertheless.
+
+The Kentucky lady who chose England for her future home, had she known
+it, selected the country to which most American women owe their legal
+disabilities. American law, except in Louisiana and Florida, is founded
+on English common law, and English common law was developed at a period
+when men were of much greater importance in the state than women. The
+state was a military organization, and every man was a fighter, a
+king's defender. Women were valuable only because defenders of kings
+had to have mothers.
+
+English common law provided that every married woman must be supported
+in as much comfort as her husband's estate warranted. The mothers of the
+nation must be fed, clothed, and sheltered. What more could they
+possibly ask? In return for permanent board and clothes, the woman was
+required to give her husband all of her property, real and personal.
+What use had she for property? Did she need it to support herself? In
+case of war and pillage could she defend it?
+
+Husband and wife were one--and that one was the man. He was so much the
+one that the woman had literally no existence in the eyes of the law.
+She not only did not possess any property; she could possess none. Her
+husband could not give her any, because there could be no contract
+between a married pair. A contract implies at least two people, and
+husband and wife were one. The husband could, if he chose, establish a
+trusteeship, and thus give his wife the free use of her own. But you can
+easily imagine that he did not very often do it.
+
+A man could, also, devise property to his wife by will. Often this was
+done, but too often the sons were made heirs, and the wife was left to
+what tender mercies they owned. If a man died intestate the wife merely
+shared with other heirs. She had no preference.
+
+Under the old English common law, moreover, not only the property, but
+also the services of a married woman belonged to her husband. If he
+chose to rent out her services, or if she offered to work outside the
+home, it followed logically that her wages belonged to him. What use had
+she for wages?
+
+On the other hand, every man was held responsible for the support of his
+wife. He was responsible for her debts, as long as they were the
+necessities of life. He was also responsible for her conduct. Being
+propertyless, she could not be held to account for wrongs committed. If
+she stole, or destroyed property, or injured the person of another, if
+she committed any kind of a misdemeanor in the presence of her husband,
+and that also meant if he were in her neighborhood at the time, the law
+held him responsible. He should have restrained her.
+
+This was supposed to be a decided advantage to the woman. Whenever a
+rebellious woman or group of women voiced their objection to the system
+which robbed them of every shred of independence they were always
+reminded that the system at the same time relieved them of every shred
+of responsibility, even, to an extent, of moral responsibility. "So
+great a favorite," comments Blackstone, "is the female sex under the
+laws of England."
+
+You may well imagine that, in these circumstances, husbands were
+interested that their wives should be very good. The law supported them
+by permitting "moderate correction." A married woman might be kept in
+what Blackstone calls "reasonable restraint" by her husband. But only
+with a stick no larger than his thumb.
+
+The husbandly stick was never imported into the United States. Even the
+dour Puritans forbade its use. The very first modification of the
+English common law, in its application to American women, was made in
+1650, when the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony decreed that a
+husband beating his wife, or, for that matter, a wife beating her
+husband, should be fined ten pounds, or endure a public whipping.
+
+The Pilgrim Fathers and the other early colonists in America brought
+with them the system of English common law under which they and their
+ancestors had for centuries been governed. From time to time, as
+conditions made them necessary, new laws were enacted and put into
+force. In all cases not specifically covered by these new laws, the old
+English common law was applied. It did not occur to any one that women
+would ever need special laws. The Pilgrim Fathers and their successors,
+the Puritans, simply assumed that here, as in the England they had left
+behind, woman's place was in the home, where she was protected,
+supported, and controlled.
+
+But in the new world woman's place in the home assumed an importance
+much greater than it had formerly possessed. Labor was scarce,
+manufacturing and trading were undeveloped. Woman's special activities
+were urgently needed. Woman's hands helped to raise the roof-tree, her
+skill and industry, to a very large extent, furnished the house. She
+spun and wove, cured meat, dried corn, tanned skins, made shoes, dipped
+candles, and was, in a word, almost the only manufacturer in the
+country. But this did not raise her from her position as an inferior.
+Woman owned neither her tools nor her raw materials. These her husband
+provided. In consequence, husband and wife being one, that one, in
+America, as in England, was the husband.
+
+This explanation is necessary in order to understand why the legal
+position of most American women to-day is that of inferiors, or, at
+best, of minor children.
+
+It is necessary also, in order to understand why, except in matters of
+law, American women are treated with such extraordinary consideration
+and indulgence. As long as pioneer conditions lasted women were valuable
+because of the need of their labor, their special activities. Also, for
+a very long period, women were scarce, and they were highly prized not
+alone for their labor, but because their society was so desirable. In
+other words, pioneer conditions gave woman a better standing in the new
+world than she had in the old, and she was treated with an altogether
+new consideration and regard.
+
+In England no one thought very badly of a man who was moderately abusive
+of his wife. In America, violence against women was, from the first, an
+unbearable idea. Laws protecting maid servants, dependent women, and, as
+we have seen, even wives, were very early enacted in New England.
+
+But although woman was more dearly prized in the new country than in the
+old, no new legislation was made for her benefit. Her legal status, or
+rather her absence of legal status apart from her husband, remained
+exactly as it had been under the English common law.
+
+No legislature in the United States has deliberately made laws placing
+women at a disadvantage with men. Whatever laws are unfair and
+oppressive to women have just happened--just grown up like weeds out of
+neglected soil.
+
+Let me illustrate. No lawmaker in New Mexico ever introduced a bill into
+the legislature making men liable for their wives' torts or petty
+misdemeanors. Yet in New Mexico, at this very minute, a wife is so
+completely her husband's property that he is responsible for her
+behavior. If she should rob her neighbor's clothesline, or wreck a
+chicken yard, her unfortunate husband would have to stand trial. Simply
+because in New Mexico married women are still living under laws that
+were evolved in another civilization, long before New Mexico was dreamed
+of as a State.
+
+Nowhere else in the United States are women allowed to shelter their
+weak moral natures behind the stern morality of their husbands, but in
+more than one State the husband's responsibility for his wife's acts is
+assumed. In Massachusetts, for one State, if a woman owned a saloon and
+sold beer on Sunday, she would be liable to arrest, and so also would
+her husband, provided he were in the house when the beer was sold. Both
+would probably be fined. Simply because it was once the law that a
+married woman had no separate existence apart from her husband, this
+absurd law, or others as absurd, remain on the statute books of almost
+every State in the Union.
+
+The ascent of woman, which began with the abolishment of corporeal
+punishment of wives, proceeded very slowly. Most American women married,
+and most American wives were kindly treated. At least public opinion
+demanded that they be treated with kindness. Long before any other
+modification of her legal status was gained, a woman subjected to
+cruelty at the hands of her lawful spouse was at liberty to seek police
+protection.
+
+The reason why police protection was so seldom sought is plain enough.
+Imagine a woman complaining of a husband who would be certain to beat
+her again for revenge, and to whom she was bound irrevocably by laws
+stronger even than the laws on the statute books. Remember that the only
+right she had was the right to be supported, and if she left her
+husband's house she left her only means of living. She could hardly
+support herself, for few avenues of industry were open to women. She was
+literally a pauper, and when there is nowhere else to lay his head, even
+the most miserable pauper thinks twice before he runs away from the
+poorhouse. Besides, the woman who left her husband had to give up her
+children. They too were the husband's property.
+
+There were some women who hesitated before they consented to pauperize
+themselves by marrying. Widows were especially wary, if old stories are
+to be trusted. A story is told in the New York University Law School of
+a woman in Connecticut who took with her, as a part of her wedding
+outfit, a very handsome mahogany bureau, bequeathed her by her
+grandfather. After a few years of marriage the husband suddenly died,
+leaving no will. The home and all it contained were sold at auction. The
+widow was permitted to buy certain objects of furniture, and among them
+was her cherished bureau. Where the poor woman found the money with
+which to buy is not revealed. In time this woman married again, and
+again her husband died without a will. Again there was an auction, and
+again the widow purchased her beloved heirloom. It seems possible that
+this time she had saved money in anticipation of the necessity.
+
+A little later, for she was still young and attractive, a suitor
+appeared, offering his heart and "all his worldly goods." "No, I thank
+you," replied the sorely tried creature, "I prefer to keep my bureau."
+
+The first struggle made by women in their own behalf was against this
+condition of marital slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott,
+Lydia Maria Child, and others of that brave band of rebellious women,
+were active for years, addressing legislative committees in New York and
+Massachusetts, circulating petitions, writing to newspapers, agitating
+everywhere in favor of married women's property rights. Finally it began
+to dawn on the minds of men that there might be a certain public
+advantage, as well as private justice, attaching to separate ownership
+by married women of their own property.
+
+In 1839 the Massachusetts State Legislature passed a cautious measure
+giving married women qualified property rights. It was not until 1848
+that a really effective Married Women's Property Law was secured, by
+action of the New York State Assembly. The law served as a model in many
+of the new Western States just then framing their laws.
+
+These New York legislators, and the Western legislators who first
+granted property rights to married women, were actuated less by a sense
+of justice towards women than by enlightened selfishness. The effect of
+so much freedom on women themselves was a matter for grave conjecture.
+It was not suggested by any of the American debaters, as it was later on
+the floors of the English Parliament, that women, if they controlled
+their own property, would undoubtedly squander it on men whom they
+preferred to their husbands. But it was prophesied that women once in
+possession of money would desert their husbands by regiments,--which
+speaks none too flatteringly of the husbands of that day.
+
+Men of property stood for the Married Women's Property Act, because they
+perceived plainly that their own wealth, devised to daughters who could
+not control it, might easily be gambled away, or wasted through
+improvidence, or diverted to the use of strangers. In other words, they
+knew that their property, when daughters inherited it, became the
+property of their sons-in-law. They had no guarantee that their own
+grandchildren would ever have the use of it, unless it was controlled by
+their mothers.
+
+It was the women's clubs and women's organizations in America, as it was
+the Women's Councils in Europe, that actively began the agitation
+against women's legal disabilities. The National Woman Suffrage
+Association, oldest of all women's organizations in the United States,
+has been calling attention to the unequal laws, and demanding their
+abolishment, for two generations.
+
+Practically all of the state federations of women's clubs have
+legislative committees, and it is usually the business of these
+committees to codify the laws of their respective States which apply
+directly to women. In some cases a woman lawyer is made chairman, and
+the work is done under her direction. Sometimes, as in Texas, a well
+known and friendly man lawyer is retained for the task. Almost
+invariably the report of the legislative committee contains disagreeable
+surprises. American women have been so accustomed to their privileges
+that they have taken their rights for granted, and are usually
+astonished when they find how limited their rights actually are.
+
+There are some States in the Union where women are on terms of something
+like equality with men. There is one State to which all intelligent
+women look with a sort of envious, admiring, questioning curiosity,
+Colorado, which is literally the woman's paradise. In Colorado it would
+be difficult to find even the smallest inequality between men and women.
+They vote on equal terms, and if any woman deserves to go to the
+legislature, and succeeds in convincing a large enough public of the
+fact, nothing stands in the way of her election. One woman, Mrs. Alma
+Lafferty, is a member of the present legislature, and she has had
+several predecessors.
+
+But Colorado women have a larger influence still in legislative
+matters. To guard their interests they have a Legislative Committee of
+the State Federation of Women's Clubs, consisting of thirty to forty
+carefully chosen women.
+
+This committee has permanent headquarters in Denver during every session
+of the legislature, and every bill which directly affects women and
+children, before reaching the floor of either house, is submitted for
+approval to the committee.
+
+Miss Jane Addams has declared, and Miss Addams is pretty good authority,
+that the laws governing women and children in Colorado are superior to
+those of any other State. Women receive equal pay for equal work in
+Colorado. They are permitted to hold any office. They are co-guardians
+of their children, and the education of children has been placed almost
+entirely in the hands of women. This does not mean that Colorado has
+weakened its schools by barring men from the teaching profession. It
+means that women are superintendents of schools in many counties, and
+that one woman was, for more than ten years, State superintendent of
+schools.
+
+Contrast Colorado with Louisiana, possibly the last State in the Union a
+well-informed woman would choose for a residence. The laws of Louisiana
+were based, not on the English common law, but on the Code Napoleon,
+which regards women merely as a working, breeding, domestic animal.
+
+"There is one thing that is not _French_," thundered the great Napoleon,
+closing a conference on his famous code, "and that is that a woman can
+do as she pleases."
+
+[Illustration: A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES]
+
+The framers of Louisiana's laws were particular to guard against too
+great a freedom of action on the part of its women. Toward the end of
+Mrs. Jefferson Davis's life she added a codicil to her will, giving to a
+certain chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy a number of very
+valuable relics of her husband, and of the short-lived Confederate
+Government. Her action was made public, and it was then revealed that
+two women had signed the document as witnesses. Instantly Mrs. Davis's
+attention was called to the fact that in Louisiana, where she was then
+living, no woman may witness a document. Women's signatures are
+worthless.
+
+In Louisiana your disabilities actually begin when you become an engaged
+girl. From that happy moment on you are under the dominance of a man.
+Your wedding presents are not yours, but his. If you felt like giving a
+duplicate pickle-fork to your mother, you could not legally do so, and
+after you were married, if your husband wanted that pickle-fork, he
+could get it. Your clothing, your dowry, become community property as
+soon as the marriage ceremony is over, and community property in
+Louisiana is controlled absolutely by the husband. Every dollar a woman
+earns there is at her husband's disposal. Without her husband's consent
+a Louisiana woman may not go into a court of law, even though she may be
+in business for herself and the action sought is in defense of her
+business.
+
+Nor does the Louisiana woman fare any better as a mother. Then, in fact,
+her position is nothing short of humiliating. During her husband's
+lifetime he is sole guardian of their children. At his death she may
+become their guardian, but if she marries a second time--and the law
+permits her to remarry, provided she waits ten months--she retains her
+children only by the formal consent of her first husband's family. If
+they dislike her, or disapprove of her second marriage, they may demand
+the custody of the children.
+
+It is true that many of these absurd laws in Louisiana are not now often
+enforced. It is also true that in Louisiana and other states few men are
+so unjust to their wives as to take advantage of unequal property
+rights. Laws always lag behind the sense of justice which lives in man.
+But the point is that unequal laws still remain on our statute books,
+and they may be, and sometimes are, enforced.
+
+Between these two extremes, Colorado and Louisiana, women have the other
+forty-six States to choose. None of them offers perfect equality. Even
+in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah--the three States besides Colorado where
+women vote--women are in such a minority that their votes are powerless
+to remove all their disabilities. Very rarely have club women even so
+much felicity as the New York State Federation, whose legislative
+chairman, Miss Emilie Bullowa, reported that she was unable to find a
+single unimportant inequality in the New York laws governing the
+property rights of women.
+
+In most of the older States the property rights of married women are now
+fairly guaranteed, but the proud boast that in America no woman is the
+slave of her husband will have to be modified when it is known that in
+at least seventeen States these rights are still denied.
+
+The husband absolutely controls his wife's property and her earnings in
+Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, California, Arizona, North Dakota, and
+Idaho. He has virtual control--that is to say, the wife's rights are
+merely provisional--in Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri.
+
+Women to control their own business property must be registered as
+traders on their own account in these States: Georgia, Montana, Nevada,
+Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia.
+
+Nor are women everywhere permitted to work on equal terms with men.
+
+[Illustration: MISS EMILIE BULLOWA.]
+
+There is a current belief, often expressed, that in the United States
+every avenue of industry is open to women on equal terms with men. This
+is not quite true. In some States a married woman may not engage in any
+business without permission from the courts. In Texas, Louisiana, and
+Georgia this is the case. In Wyoming, where women vote, but where they
+are in such minority that their votes count for little, a married woman
+must satisfy the court that she is under the necessity of earning her
+living.
+
+If you are a woman, married or unmarried, and wish to practice law, you
+are barred from seven of the United States. The legal profession is
+closed to women in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Delaware,
+Tennessee, and South Carolina.
+
+In some States they discourage women from aspiring to the learned
+professions by refusing them the advantages of higher education which
+they provide for their brothers.
+
+Four state universities close their doors to women, in spite of the
+fact that women's taxes help support the universities. These States are
+Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. The last-named admits
+women to post-graduate courses.
+
+You can hold no kind of an elective office, you cannot be even a county
+superintendent of schools in Alabama or Arkansas, if you are a woman. In
+Alabama, indeed, you may not be a minister of the gospel, a doctor of
+medicine, or a notary public. Florida likewise will have nothing to do
+with a woman doctor.
+
+Only a few women want to hold office or engage in professional work.
+Every woman hopes to be a mother. What then is the legal status of the
+American mother? When the club women began the study of their position
+before the law they were amazed to find, in all but ten of the States
+and territories, that they had absolutely no control over the destinies
+of their own children. In ten States only, and in the District of
+Columbia, are women co-guardians with their husbands of their children.
+
+In Pennsylvania if a woman supports her children, or has money to
+contribute to their support, she has joint guardianship. Under somewhat
+similar circumstances Rhode Island women have the same right.
+
+In all the other States and territories children belong to their
+fathers. They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother. That
+this almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule, no
+one except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it.
+
+It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice are
+growing reluctant to administer such archaic laws.
+
+The famous Tillman case is an example. Senator Ben Tillman of South
+Carolina has one son,--a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogether
+disreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of married
+life, left him, taking with her their two little girls. South Carolina
+allows no divorce for any cause. The sanctity of the marriage tie is
+held so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abused
+at will by the veriest brute or libertine. Mrs. Tillman could not
+divorce her husband, so she took her children and went to live quietly
+at her parent's home in the city of Washington.
+
+One day the father of the children, young Tillman, appeared at that
+home, and in a fit of drunken resentment against his wife, kidnapped the
+children. He could not care for the children, probably had no wish to
+have them near him, but he took them back to South Carolina, and _gave_
+them to his parents, made a present of a woman's flesh and blood and
+heart to people who hated her and whom she hated in return.
+
+Under the laws of South Carolina, under the printed statutes, young
+Tillman had a perfect right to do this thing, and his father, a United
+States Senator, upheld him in his act. Young Mrs. Tillman, however,
+showed so little respect for the statutes that she sued her husband and
+his parents to recover her babies. The judge before whom the suit was
+brought was in a dilemma. There was the law--but also there was justice
+and common sense. To the everlasting honor of that South Carolina judge,
+justice and common sense triumphed, and he ruled that _the law was
+unconstitutional._
+
+There are other hardships in this law denying to mothers the right of
+co-guardianship of their children. Two names signed to a child's working
+papers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens that
+selfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work,
+when the mothers know they are far too young. A woman in Scranton,
+Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her children
+had been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they were
+tall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman. "What could I say about
+it, when he went and got the papers?" she sighed.
+
+The father--not the mother--controls the services of his children. He
+can collect their wages, and he does. Very, very often he squanders the
+money they earn, and no one may interfere.
+
+A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay day
+at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her
+pay envelope, unopened. It was his regular day for getting drunk and
+indulging in an orgy of gambling. Often more than half of the girls'
+wages would have vanished before night. Twice the entire amount was
+wasted in an hour. This kept on until the girls passed their childhood
+and were mature enough to rebel successfully.
+
+It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potential
+services of a child.
+
+Many times have these unjust laws been protested against. In every State
+in the Union where they exist they have been protested against by
+organized groups of intelligent women. But their protests have been
+received with apathy, and, in some instances, with contempt by
+legislators. Only last year a determined fight was made by the women of
+California for a law giving them equal guardianship of their children.
+The women's bill was lost in the California Legislature, and lost by a
+large majority.
+
+What arguments did the California legislators use against the proposed
+measure? Identically the same that were made in Massachusetts and New
+York a quarter of a century ago. If women had the guardianship of their
+children, would anything prevent them from taking the children and
+leaving home? What would become of the sanctity of the home, with its
+lawful head shorn of his paternal dignity? In California a husband is
+head of the family in very fact, or at least a law of the State says so.
+
+At one time the law which made the husband the head of the home
+guaranteed to the family support by the husband. It does not do that
+now. There are laws on the statute books of many States obliging the
+wife to support her husband if he is disabled, and the children, if the
+husband defaults. There are no laws compelling the husband to support
+his wife. The husband is under an assumed obligation to support his
+family, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty. Family
+desertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most baffling
+of modern social problems. Everybody is appalled by its prevalence, but
+nobody seems to know what to do about it. The Legal Aid Society of New
+York City reports about three new cases of family desertion for every
+day in the year. Other agencies in other cities report a state of
+affairs quite as serious.
+
+Laws have been passed in most States making family desertion a
+misdemeanor, and in New York a recent law has made it a felony.
+Unfortunately there has been devised no machinery to enforce these laws,
+so they are practically non-existent. It is true that if the deserting
+husband is arrested he may be sent to jail or to the rock pile.
+
+But that does not cure him nor support his family. Mostly he is not
+arrested. He has only to take himself out of the reach of the local
+authorities. In New York a deserting husband, though he is counted a
+felon, needs only to cross the river to New Jersey to be reasonably
+safe. Imagine the State of New York spending good money to chase a man
+whom it does not want as a citizen, and whom it can only punish by
+sending to jail for a short period. The State is better off without such
+a man. To bring him back would not even benefit his deserted family.
+
+Women, far more law abiding than men, insist that a system which evolved
+out of feudal conditions, and has for its very basis the assumption of
+the weakness, ignorance, and dependence of women, has no place in
+twentieth century civilization.
+
+American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent. The present
+social order, in which military force is subordinated to industry and
+commerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and women
+physically on much the same plane. As for women's intellectual ability
+to decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over,
+rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the
+high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher
+grammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. As
+for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better
+read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less,
+but their general intelligence is not less than men's.
+
+Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical support.
+Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves as
+independent human beings. Their work of bearing and rearing children, of
+managing the household, begins to assume a new dignity, a real value,
+in their eyes.
+
+In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shall
+determine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband's
+income. American women may not need such a law, but they insist that
+they need something to take the place of that one which in eleven States
+makes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife's income.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+WOMEN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY
+
+
+The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual
+discomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, and
+recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: "Corsets,
+millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants'
+wear, and ladies' shoes, second floor; no ma'am, carpets and rugs on the
+third floor; this car don't go to the restaurant; take the other side;
+groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs,
+men's shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor."
+
+Buying and selling, serving and being served--women. On every floor, in
+every aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, which
+covers several acres, women. Waiting their turn at the long line of
+telephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Down
+in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer
+frocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts,
+attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan
+department store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floors
+between, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks, running
+back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling the
+aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing
+throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of
+femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk,
+and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.
+
+To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the United
+States are working outside of the home for wages is a simple, unanalyzed
+fact. You grasp it as an intellectual abstraction, without much
+appreciation of its human significance. The mere reading of statistics
+does not help you to realize the changed status of women, and of
+society. You need to see the thing with your own eyes.
+
+Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, when
+the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed
+with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison
+streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in
+Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city's
+great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of
+the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too
+narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. From factory,
+office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousands
+of girls. Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of the
+electric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting of
+hucksters, the laughter and oaths of men, their voices float, a shrill,
+triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil.
+
+You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of the
+interdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrate
+into the operating-room of a telephone exchange. Any hour will do. Any
+day in the week. There are no nights, nor Sundays, nor holidays in a
+telephone exchange. The city could not get along for one single minute
+in one single hour of the twenty-four without the telephone girl. Her
+hands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long,
+silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes of
+the switch board. The wires cross and recross, until the switch board is
+like a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of the
+telephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of a city.
+
+What would happen if this army of women was suddenly withdrawn from the
+telephone exchanges? Men could not take their places. That experiment
+has been tried more than once, and it has always failed.
+
+Having seen how well women serve industry, go back to the department
+store and see how they dominate it also.
+
+The department store apparently exists for women. The architect who
+designed the building studied her necessities. The makers of store
+furniture planned counters, shelves, and seats to suit her stature.
+Buyers of goods know that their jobs are forfeit unless they can guess
+what her taste in gowns and hats is going to be six months hence.
+
+WOMEN'S DEMAND ON INDUSTRY Woman dominates the department store for the
+plain reason that she supports it. Whoever earns the income, and that
+point has been somewhat in question lately, there is no doubt at all as
+to who spends it. She does. Hence, she is able to control the conditions
+under which this business is conducted.
+
+You can see for yourself that this is so. Walk through any large
+department store and observe how much valuable space is devoted to
+making women customers comfortable. There is always a drawing-room with
+easy-chairs and couches; plenty of little desks with handsome stationery
+where the customer may write notes; here, and in the retiring-room
+adjoining, are uniformed maids to offer service. But these things are
+not all that the women who support industry demand of the men in power.
+They demand that industry be carried on under conditions favorable to
+the health and comfort of the workers.
+
+Not until the development of the department store were women able to
+observe at close range the conduct of modern business. Not unnaturally
+it was in the department store that they began one of the most ambitious
+of their present-day activities,--that of humanizing industry.
+
+It was just twenty years ago that New York City was treated to a huge
+joke. It was such a joke that even the miserable ones with whom it was
+concerned were obliged to smile. An obscure group of women, calling
+themselves the Working Women's Society, came out with the announcement
+that they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a labor
+union.
+
+These women said that the girls in the department stores were receiving
+wages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign woman
+in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an
+American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a
+half.
+
+They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for saleswomen
+was habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand from
+ten to fourteen hours a day. They said that sanitary conditions in the
+cloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as to
+endanger health and life. They said that the whole situation was so bad
+that no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years. Mostly
+they were used up in two years. They proposed a labor union of retail
+clerks as the only possible resource. Their effort failed.
+
+The trades union idea at that time had not reached the girl behind the
+counter. As a matter of fact it has not reached her yet, and it probably
+never will. The department-store clerk considers herself a higher social
+being than the ordinary working-girl, and in a way she is justified. The
+exceptionally intelligent department-store clerk has one chance in a
+thousand of rising to the well-paid, semi-professional post of buyer.
+Also the exceptionally attractive girl has possibly one chance in five
+thousand of marrying a millionaire. It is a long chance now, and it was
+a longer chance a dozen years ago, because there were fewer millionaires
+then than now, but it served well enough to cause the failure of the
+trades union plan.
+
+There is one thing that never fails, however, and that is a righteous
+protest. Out of the protest of that little, obscure group of working
+women in New York City was born a movement which has spread beyond the
+Atlantic Ocean, which has effected legislation in many States of the
+Union, which has even determined an extremely important legal decision
+in the Supreme Court of the United States.
+
+A group of rich and influential women, prominent in many philanthropic
+efforts, became interested in the Working Women's Society. They
+investigated the charges brought against the department stores, and what
+they discovered made them resolve that conditions must be changed.
+
+In May, 1890, the late Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. Frederick
+Nathan, and others, called a large mass meeting in Chickering Hall. Mrs.
+Nathan had a constructive plan for raising the standard in shop
+conditions, especially those affecting women employees.
+
+If women would simply withdraw their patronage from the stores where,
+during the Christmas season, women and children toiled long hours at
+night without any extra compensation, sooner or later the night work
+would cease. A few stores, said Mrs. Nathan, maintained a standard
+above the average. It was within the power of the women of New York to
+raise all the others to that standard, and afterwards it might be
+possible to go farther and establish a standard higher than the present
+highest.
+
+"We do not desire to blacklist any firm," declared Mrs. Nathan, "but we
+can _whitelist_ those firms which treat their employees humanely. We can
+make and publish a list of all the shops where employees receive fair
+treatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops. By acting
+openly and publishing our White List we shall be able to create an
+immense public opinion in favor of just employers."
+
+Thus was the Consumers' League of New York ushered into existence. Eight
+months after the Chickering Hall meeting the committee appointed to
+co-operate with the Working Women's Society in preparing its list of
+fair firms had finished its work and made its report. The new League was
+formally organized on January 1, 1891.
+
+
+[Illustration: Mrs. Frederick Nathan]
+
+
+
+THE CONSUMERS' LEAGUE "WHITE LIST"
+
+The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm names.
+The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew the
+conditions. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the other
+firms to their outcast position. Far from evincing a desire to earn a
+place on the White List, they cast aspersions on a "parcel of women" who
+were trying to "undermine business credit," and scouted the very idea of
+an organized feminine conscience.
+
+"Wait until the women want Easter bonnets," sneered one merchant. "Do
+you think they will pass up anything good because the store is not on
+their White List?"
+
+Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for. Even as
+far back as 1891 a few women had begun to doubt the efficacy of that
+indirect influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What was
+the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to
+be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the Mercantile
+Employers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in
+mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the
+smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory
+Department.
+
+The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, and
+still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years
+after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower
+House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported
+in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it.
+A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into
+conditions of working women in New York City.
+
+The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in two
+large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified
+to employing grown women at a salary of _thirty-three cents a day_. They
+confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in
+defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and
+wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they
+should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended,
+on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated
+overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took
+away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They
+threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were
+passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless
+girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.
+
+The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite of
+the merchants' protests the women's bill was passed without a dissenting
+vote.
+
+The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which it
+placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority
+of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also
+provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of
+seats,--one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of
+children, except those holding working certificates from the
+authorities. These, and other minor provisions, affected all retail
+stores, as far as the law was obeyed.
+
+As a matter of fact the Consumers' League's bill carried a "joker" which
+made its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter of
+inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health,
+supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it
+proved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after a
+year of this inadequate inspection, political forces were brought to
+bear, and then there were no store inspectors.
+
+Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers' League tried to
+persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed
+inspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a year
+ago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores under
+factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants'
+Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto what
+they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. Governor
+Hughes, however, signed the bill.
+
+In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred
+infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. No
+less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken
+out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were
+sent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Con sumers'
+League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been
+justified.
+
+To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To women
+capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition,
+a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterly
+fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its
+enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply business
+men, with the business man's contracted vision. They could think only
+in terms of money profit and money loss.
+
+In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have
+succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the
+stores supported by their patronage.
+
+The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League would
+concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season.
+Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one.
+The League stands firm on the point, and up to the present so do the
+stores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the
+custom whereby _thousands of young girls and women are compelled every
+holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of
+uncompensated labor_.
+
+No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extorted
+in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to
+five months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchase
+after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six
+o'clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in
+the bookkeeping and auditing departments.
+
+That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in
+most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which
+strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it
+seems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified.
+
+I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of one of
+the largest and most respectable stores in New York. In this store, and,
+according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the accounting
+force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school, ignorant and
+incapable--but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day's sales are
+posted and audited before the close of the day following, the business
+force has to work until nine and ten o'clock several nights in the week.
+In some cases they work every night.
+
+Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of
+public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the
+Consumers' League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.
+
+The Consumers' League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in
+this early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. City
+after city, State after State, formed Consumers' Leagues, until, in
+1899, a National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was
+organized. The National League, far from being a philanthropic society,
+has be come a scientific association for the study of industrial
+economics.
+
+When the original Consumers' League undertook its first piece of
+legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were
+right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their
+claim. The New York League and all of the others have been collecting
+reasons ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized
+collection of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they
+should not work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in
+tenements; why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speed
+of machines should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should be
+extended; why minimum wage rates should be established.
+
+In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group of
+trained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body of
+facts concerning the human side of industry. It is ammunition which
+tells. One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry in
+Portland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of blowing
+a large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the
+United States.
+
+There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of women in
+factories and laundries should be ten hours long. The law was constantly
+violated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland. One night a
+factory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and found
+working there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher. The inspector
+promptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller.
+
+The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars. Instead of
+paying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the other
+laundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for women
+workers was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment to the
+Constitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the right
+freely to contract. A man or a woman may contract with an employer to
+work as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whatever
+dangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions, _unless_ "there is fair
+ground to say that there is material danger to the public health or
+safety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the general
+welfare...." This is the legal decision on which most protective
+legislation in the United States has been based.
+
+Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day for
+women was declared unconstitutional because nobody's health or safety
+was endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New York
+law forbidding all-night employment of women.
+
+So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had reason to
+believe that they could attack the Oregon law. The case was appealed,
+and appealed again, by the laundrymen, and finally reached the Supreme
+Court of the United States. Then the Consumers' League took a hand.
+
+The brief for the State of Oregon, "defendant in error," was prepared by
+Louis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of the
+most effective workers in the League's New York headquarters. This brief
+is probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence. It
+consists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a few
+paragraphs were written by the attorney for the State. All the rest was
+contributed, under Miss Goldmark's direction, from the Consumers'
+League's wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should be
+protected.
+
+The League's reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to work
+their women employees far into the night was, "The World's Experience
+upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is
+Based." It is simply a mass of testimony taken from hearings before the
+English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from
+the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of
+industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical
+books; from reports of boards of health.
+
+REASONS FOR PROTECTING WOMEN WORKERS The brief included a short and
+interesting chapter, containing a number of things the League had
+collected on the subject of laundries. Supreme Court judges cannot be
+expected to know that laundry work is classed by experts among the
+dangerous trades. That washing clothes, from a simple home or backyard
+occupation, has been transformed into a highly-organized factory trade
+full of complicated and often extremely dangerous machinery; that the
+atmosphere of a steam laundry is more conducive to tuberculosis and the
+other occupational diseases than cotton mills; that the work in
+laundries, being irregular, is conducive to a general low state of
+morals; that, on the whole, women should not be required to spend more
+time than necessary in laundries; all this was set forth.
+
+Medical testimony showed the physical differences between men and
+women; the lesser power of women to endure long hours of standing; the
+heightened susceptibility of women to industrial poisons--lead, naphtha,
+and the like. A long chapter of testimony on the effect of child-bearing
+in communities where the women had toiled long hours before marriage, or
+afterwards, was included.
+
+The testimony of factory inspectors, of industrial experts, of employers
+in England, Germany, France, America, revealed the bad effect of long
+hours on women's safety, both physical and moral. It revealed the good
+effect, on the individual health, home life, and general welfare, of
+short hours of labor.
+
+Nor was the business aspect of the case neglected. That people
+accomplish as much in an eight-hour day as in a twelve-hour day has
+actually been demonstrated. The brief stated, for one instance, the
+experience of a bicycle factory in Massachusetts.
+
+In this place young women were employed to sort the ball bearings which
+went into the machines. They did this by touch, and no girl was of use
+to the firm unless her touch was very sensitive and very sure. The head
+of this firm became convinced that the work done late in the afternoon
+was of inferior quality, and he tried the experiment of cutting the
+hours from ten to nine. The work was done on piece wages, and the girls
+at first protested against the nine-hour day, fearing that their pay
+envelopes would suffer. To their astonishment they earned as much in
+nine hours as they had in ten. In time the employer cut the working day
+down to eight hours and a half, and in addition gave the girls
+ten-minute rests twice a day. Still they earned their full wages, and
+they continued to earn full wages after the day became eight hours
+long. The employer testified before the United States Industrial
+Commission of 1900 that he believed he could successfully shorten the
+day to seven hours and a half and get the same amount of work
+accomplished.
+
+What can you do against testimony like that? The Consumers' League
+convinced the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Oregon
+ten-hour law was upheld.
+
+The importance of this decision cannot be overestimated. On it hangs the
+validity of nearly all the laws which have been passed in the United
+States for the protection of women workers. If the Oregon law had been
+declared unconstitutional, laws in twenty States, or practically all
+the States where women work in factories, would have been in perpetual
+danger, and the United States might easily have sunk to a position
+occupied now by no leading country in Europe.
+
+Great Britain has had protective legislation for women workers since
+1844. In 1847 the labor of women in English textile mills was limited to
+ten hours a day, the period we are now worrying about, as being possibly
+contrary to our Constitution. France, within the past five years, has
+established a ten-hour day, broken by one hour of rest. Switzerland,
+Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy, limit the hours of women's labor. In
+several countries there are special provisions giving extra time off to
+women who have household responsibilities. What would our
+Constitution-bound law makers say to such a proposition, if any one had
+the hardihood to suggest it?
+
+If this law had not been upheld by the United States Supreme Court the
+women of no State could have hoped to secure further legislation for
+women workers. As it is, women in many States are preparing to establish
+what is now known as "The Oregon Standard," that is, a ten-hour day for
+all working women.
+
+Nothing in connection with the woman movement is more significant,
+certainly nothing was more unexpected, than the voluntary abandonment,
+on the part of women, of class prejudice and class distinctions. Where
+formerly the interest of the leisured woman in her wage-earning sisters
+was of a sentimental or philanthropic character, it has become practical
+and democratic.
+
+The Young Women's Christian Association has had an industrial
+department, which up to a recent period concerned itself merely with the
+spiritual welfare of working girls. Prayer meetings in factories, clubs,
+and classes in the Association headquarters, working-girls' boarding
+homes, and other philanthropic efforts were the limits of the
+Association's activities. The entire policy has changed of late, and
+under the capable direction of Miss Annie Marian MacLean, of Brooklyn,
+New York, the industrial department of the Association is doing
+scientific investigation of labor conditions of women.
+
+In a cracker factory I once saw a paid worker in the Young Women's
+Christian Association pause above a young girl lying on the floor,
+crimson with fever, and apparently in the throes of a serious illness.
+With angelic pity on her face the Association worker stooped and
+slipped a tract into the sick girl's hand. The kind of industrial
+secretary the Association now employs would send for an ambulance and
+see that the girl had the best of hospital care. She would inquire
+whether the girl's illness was caused by the conditions under which she
+worked, and she would know if it were possible to have those conditions
+changed.
+
+WOMEN'S CLUBS STUDYING LABOR PROBLEMS Nearly every state federation of
+women's clubs has its industrial committee, and many large clubs have a
+corresponding department. It is these industrial sections of the women's
+clubs which are such a thorn in the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr., the
+new president of the National Manufacturers' Association. In his
+inaugural address Mr. Kirby warned his colleagues that women's clubs
+were not the ladylike, innocuous institutions that too-confiding man
+supposed them to be. In those clubs, he declared, their own wives and
+daughters were listening to addresses by the worst enemies of the
+Manufacturers' Association, the labor leaders. By which he meant that
+the club women were inviting trade-union men and women to present the
+worker's side of industrial subjects. "Soon," exclaimed Mr. Kirby, "we
+shall have to fight the women as well as the unions."
+
+The richest and most aristocratic woman's club in the country is the
+Colony Club of New York. The Colony Club was organized by a number of
+women from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the manner
+of men's clubs. The women built a magnificent clubhouse on Madison
+Avenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderful
+roof-garden. For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing more
+than a beautiful toy which its members played with. But soon it began to
+develop into a sort of a woman's forum, where all sorts of social topics
+were discussed. Visiting women of distinction, artists, writers,
+lecturers, were entertained there.
+
+Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course in
+industrial economics. The women did not invite lecturers from Columbia
+University to address them. They asked John Mitchell and many lesser
+lights of the labor world. They wanted to learn, at first hand, the
+facts concerning conditions of industry. Most of them are stockholders
+in mills, factories, mines, or business establishments. Many own real
+estate on which factories stand.
+
+"It is not fair," they have openly declared, "that we should enjoy
+wealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death. We do
+not want wealth on such terms."
+
+The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to the
+National Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in the
+working and living conditions of wage earners in industries and in
+governmental institutions. A few conscientious employers have spent a
+part of their profits to make their employees comfortable. They have
+given them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, and
+comfortable seats. They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacation
+houses, and the like.
+
+No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers. Equally,
+no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem. Nor
+should they be used as a substitute for justice.
+
+Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed,
+untactfully administered. Too often it has been instituted, not to
+benefit the workers, but to advertise the business. Too often its real
+object was a desire to play the philanthropist's role, to exact
+obsequience from the wage earner.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New
+York, the most exclusive Women's Club in the country]
+
+I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of the
+perfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected, the
+girls are required to stop work and clean the rooms. Since they work on
+a piece-work scale, the "perfect sanitary conditions" exist at their
+expense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a
+printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday.
+This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their
+employers. It always fails.
+
+It seems to the women who have studied these things that proper
+sanitary conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision for
+rest, vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wage
+earner's due. They are a part of the laborer's hire, and should be
+guaranteed by law, exactly as wages are guaranteed. An employer deserves
+gratitude for overtime pay no more than for fire escapes.
+
+Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers' League, women's
+clubs, and women's labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that good
+working conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastly
+increase the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits of
+the employers.
+
+The New York Telephone Company does not set itself up to be a
+benevolent institution. Its directors know that its profits depend on
+the excellence of its service. There is one exchange in the Borough of
+Brooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic. This
+traffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summer
+resorts along the coast. In the fall and winter the traffic is very
+light. Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work only
+half the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round.
+"We cannot afford to do anything else," explains the traffic manager.
+"We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages."
+
+
+[Illustration: MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY]
+
+The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his business
+would suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen. He believed that
+he would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks human
+working conditions. Then came the Consumers' League and mercantile laws,
+and a new pressure of public opinion, and the dry-goods merchant found
+out that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than one
+that is exhausted and uncomfortable.
+
+The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has proved
+itself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligent
+employers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws will
+provide for it.
+
+It used to be the invariable custom in stores--it is so still in a
+few--to lay off many clerks during the dull seasons. Now the best stores
+find that they can better afford to give all their employees vacations
+with pay. A clerk coming home after a vacation can sell goods, even in
+dull times. More and more employers are coming to appreciate the money
+value of the Saturday half-holiday in summer. Hearn, in New York, closes
+his department store all day Saturday during July and August. The store
+sells more goods in five days than it previously sold in six.
+
+THE FILENE SYSTEM OF DEVELOPING EFFICIENT WORKERS There is one
+department store which has demonstrated that it is profitable to pay
+higher wages than its competitors, and that it pays to allow the
+employees to fix the terms of their own employment. This is the Filene
+store in Boston, which has developed within the past ten years from a
+conservative, old-fashioned dry-goods business into an extremely
+original and interesting experiment station in commercial economics.
+
+The entire policy of the Filene management is bent on developing to the
+highest possible point the efficiency of each individual clerk. The best
+possible material is sought. No girl under sixteen is employed, and no
+girl of any age who has not graduated with credit from the grammar
+schools. There are a number of college-bred men and women in the Filene
+employ.
+
+
+[Illustration: A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN]
+
+Good wages are paid, even to beginners, and experienced employees are
+rewarded, not according to a fixed rate of payment, but according to
+earning capacity. Taken throughout the store, wages, plus commissions,
+which are allowed in all departments, average about two dollars a week
+higher than in other department stores in Boston.
+
+No irresponsible, automatic employee can develop high efficiency. She
+does not want to become efficient; she wants merely to receive a pay
+envelope at the end of the week. In order to develop responsibility and
+initiative in their employees the Filenes have put them on a
+self-governing basis. The workers do not literally make their own rules,
+but the vote of the majority can change any rule made by the firm. The
+firm furnishes its employees with a printed book of rules, in which the
+policy of the store is set forth. If the employees object to any of the
+rules, or any part of the policy, they can vote a change.
+
+The medium through which the clerks express their opinions and desires
+is the Filene Co-operative Association, of which every clerk and every
+employee in the place is a member. No dues are exacted, as is the custom
+in the usual employees' association. The executive body, called the
+Store Council, and all other officers are elected by the members. All
+matters of grievance, all subjects of controversy, are referred to the
+Store Council, which, as often as occasion demands, calls a meeting of
+the entire association after business hours.
+
+For example: Christmas happens on a Friday. The firm decides to keep the
+store open on the following day--Saturday. There is an expression of
+dissatisfaction from a number of clerks. A meeting of the association is
+called, and a vote taken as to whether the majority want the extra
+holiday or not; whether the majority are willing to lose the
+commissions on a day's sales, for, of course, salaries continue. The
+vote reveals that the majority want the holiday. The Store Council so
+reports to the firm, and the firm must grant the holiday.
+
+All matters of difficulty arising between employers and employed, in the
+Filene store, are settled not by the firm, but by the Arbitration Board
+of Employees, also elected by popular vote. All disagreements as to
+wages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue between
+saleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to the
+Board of Arbitration, and the board's decision is final. There is no
+tyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of a
+department. Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as she
+is an efficient saleswoman.
+
+Surely it is not too much to hope that, in a future not too far
+distant, all women who earn their bread will serve a system of industry
+adjusted by law to human standards. In enlightened America the courts,
+presided over by men to whom manual labor is known only in theory, have
+persistently ruled that the _Constitution forbade the State to make laws
+protecting women workers_. It has seemed to most of our courts and most
+of our judges that the State fulfilled its whole duty to its women
+citizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract--even
+though they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts which
+involved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and future
+generations. The women of this country have done nothing more important
+than to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyond
+this terrible delusion.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE
+
+
+The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the
+legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was
+received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. The
+Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in
+labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable opportunity
+to get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the Illinois
+State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years later
+the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that it
+was unconstitutional.
+
+The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without
+precedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States,
+until it had become almost a principle of American law that protective
+legislation for working women was invalid.
+
+The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusion
+that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody
+of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women would
+be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may
+appear obscure.
+
+The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men, and
+they know something--not much, but still something--about the men of the
+working classes. They know, for example, something about the conditions
+under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to
+public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor,
+twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these
+are bad things,--bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for
+the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of labor
+comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.
+
+The learned judges, I say this with all due respect, do not know
+anything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts of
+their decisions, denying the constitutionality of protective measures,
+are amazing in the ignorance they display,--ignorance of industrial
+conditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects of
+certain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect of
+women's arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions in
+trades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the home
+resulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, the
+learned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, the
+happiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about the
+inhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display of
+the real facts.
+
+We have seen how the women of the Consumers' League taught the United
+States Supreme Court something about working women; showed them a few of
+the calamities resulting from the unrestricted labor of women and
+immature girls. The Supreme Court's decision forever abolished the old
+fallacy that the American Constitution _forbids_ protective legislation
+for women workers. It remains for women's organizations in the various
+States to educate local courts up to the knowledge that community
+interest _demands_ protective legislation.
+
+Following the decision of the Supreme Court in the Oregon case, which
+flatly contradicted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, the
+working women of Illinois began their educational campaign. They had
+now, for the first time, a fighting chance to secure the restoration of
+their shortened work day. The women of fifteen organized trades in the
+city of Chicago determined to take that chance.
+
+The women first appealed to the Industrial Commission, appointed early
+in 1908 by Governor Dineen, to investigate the need of protective
+legislation for workers, men and women alike.
+
+The women were given a courteous hearing, but were told frankly that
+limited hours of work for women was not one of protective measures to be
+recommended by the Commission.
+
+The Waitresses' Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists, led
+by a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary of
+the union. Miss Maloney and her associates drafted and introduced into
+the Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day for
+every woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store,
+laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for
+enforcing the measure.
+
+The "Girls' Bill," as it immediately became known, was the most hotly
+contested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during the
+session. Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing
+on the bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek and
+tired women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their
+working day made shorter. Another presented a petition signed by his
+women employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven
+hours a day!
+
+Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after learned
+counsel for the Manufacturers' Association had argued against the
+measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers'
+Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girls
+confined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of the
+Glove Makers' Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two
+girls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are
+gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a
+chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea:
+Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses' Union, was the other speaker.
+
+They described details in the daily lives of working women not generally
+known except to the workers themselves. Among these was the piece-work
+system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speed
+is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage.
+The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine
+whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; to
+consider how many stitches the operator's hand must guide in a week, a
+month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve
+hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease
+of earning power.
+
+"I am a waitress," said Miss Maloney, "and I work ten hours a day. In
+that time a waitress who is tolerably busy _walks_ ten miles, and the
+dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred to
+two thousand pounds. Don't you think eight hours a day is enough for a
+girl to walk?"
+
+Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after that
+day. The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too grave
+for the friends of the workers to overcome. It was decided to
+substitute a ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the "Oregon Standard"
+established by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle of
+limitation upon the hours of women's work once established in Illinois,
+the workers could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.
+
+The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a law
+of the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers' Association, through the
+W.C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suit
+to test the constitutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, Anna
+Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Their
+appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hours
+to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to
+contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them
+by the ten-hour law.
+
+There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved
+in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched
+state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature
+years--one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over
+thirty years--are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep
+body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no
+position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would
+contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?
+
+There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge
+R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his
+career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the
+real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For
+Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department,
+forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.
+
+Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the
+women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up in
+the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of
+Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on
+hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed
+pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers'
+League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had
+toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois
+Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply
+a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and
+bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and
+especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on
+the succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three
+pages of law.
+
+The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was the
+testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.
+
+"Medical Science has demonstrated," says this most important paragraph,
+"that while fatigue is a normal phenomenon ... excessive fatigue or
+exhaustion is abnormal.... It has discovered that fatigue is due not
+only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue,
+entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial
+toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that when
+artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin
+causes death. The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to be
+counteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body.
+But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not produced
+fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin."
+
+The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the American
+Constitution was never intended to shield manufacturers in their
+willingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. The
+ten-hour law was sustained.
+
+That the "Girls' Bill" passed, or that it was even introduced, was due
+in large measure to an organization of women, more militant and more
+democratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women's
+Trade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, the
+League consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organized
+trades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of these
+latter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-union
+principle, but more are women who work in the professional
+ranks,--teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlement
+workers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, who
+ever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federation
+of Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners,
+to appear in Labor Day parades.
+
+The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities,--New
+York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland,--is to educate women
+wage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains and
+supports organizers among all classes of workers. As quickly as a group
+in any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. It
+raises funds to assist women in their trade struggles. It acts as
+arbitrator between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes.
+
+The Women's Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factory
+trades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until lately
+believed themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundred
+and fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventy
+stenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers' Federation
+of Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before the
+Women's Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated.
+The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized.
+
+The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League was
+brilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-waist
+makers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story of
+this strike will bear retelling.
+
+On the evening of November 22, 1909, there was a great mass meeting of
+workers held at Cooper Union in New York. Samuel Gompers, President of
+the American Federation of Labor, presided, and the stage was well
+filled with members of the Women's Trade Union League. The meeting had
+been called by the League in conjunction with Shirt-Waist Makers' Union,
+Local 25, to consider the grievances of shirt-waist makers in general,
+and especially of the shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, who
+had been, for more than two months, on strike.
+
+The story of the strike, the causes that led up to it, and the bitter
+injustice which followed it were rehearsed in a dozen speeches. It was
+shown that for four to five dollars a week the girl shirt-waist makers
+worked from eight in the morning until half-past five in the evening
+two days in the week; from eight in the morning until nine at night
+four days in the week; and from eight in the morning until noon one day
+in the week--Sunday.
+
+The shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, in hope of bettering
+their conditions, had formed a union, and had informed their employers
+of their action. The employers promptly locked them out of the shop, and
+the girls declared a strike.
+
+The strike was more than two months old when the Cooper Union meeting
+was held, and the employers showed no signs of giving in. It was agreed
+that a general strike of shirt-waist makers ought to be declared. But
+the union was weak, there were no funds, and most of the shirt-waist
+makers were women and unused to the idea of solidarity in action. Could
+they stand together in an industrial struggle which promised to be long
+and bitter?
+
+President Gompers was plainly fearful that they could not.
+
+Suddenly a very small, very young, very intense Jewish girl, known to
+her associates as Clara Lemlich, sprang to her feet, and, with the
+assistance of two young men, climbed to the high platform. Flinging up
+her arms with a dramatic gesture she poured out a flood of speech,
+entirely unintelligible to the presiding Gompers, and to the members of
+the Women's Trade Union League. The Yiddish-speaking majority in the
+audience understood, however, and the others quickly caught the spirit
+of her impassioned plea.
+
+The vast audience rose as one man, and a great roar arose. "Yes, we
+will all strike!"
+
+"And will you keep the faith?" cried the girl on the platform. "Will you
+swear by the old Jewish oath of our fathers?"
+
+Two thousand Jewish hands were thrust in air, and two thousand Jewish
+throats uttered the oath: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge,
+may this hand wither and drop off from this arm I now raise."
+
+Clara Lemlich's part in the work was accomplished. Within a few days
+forty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike.
+
+The Women's Trade Union League, under the direction of Miss Helen Marot,
+secretary, at once took hold of the strike.
+
+There were two things to be done at once. The forty thousand had to be
+enrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing to
+accept the terms of the strikers had to be "signed up." Clinton Hall,
+one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, and
+for several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the street
+outside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and women
+strikers, anxious and perspiring "bosses," and busy, active associates
+of the Women's Trade Union League.
+
+The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied the
+League members undertook the work of picketing the shops. Picketing, if
+this activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling the
+neighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakers
+are going to and from their nefarious business, and importuning them to
+join the strike.
+
+Peaceful picketing is legal. The law permits a striker to speak to the
+girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her
+most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on the
+other's arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence.
+
+Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a little
+of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence.
+After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girls
+who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members.
+Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among
+these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's Superintendent
+of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a
+millionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College,
+Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association of
+Collegiate Alumnae. These young women went out day after day with girl
+strikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered arrest
+on more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation of
+magistrates who--well, who did not understand.
+
+The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and organizations of
+women other than the Women's Trade Union League began to take an
+interest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss Gertrude
+Barnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial world
+of women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike.
+They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women in
+person.
+
+The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest social
+eminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan and
+several others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the president
+of the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the strikers'
+own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. More
+than thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozen
+women promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers.
+
+A week later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, mother of the Duchess of Marlborough,
+leader of a large Woman Suffrage Association, engaged the Hippodrome,
+and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators.
+Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting.
+
+At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses were
+involved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis of
+increased pay, a fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of the
+union. Others settled later, and under the influence of the "uptown
+scum," as the employers' association gallantly termed the Women's Trade
+Union League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still others
+reluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out of
+the five hundred had settled with the union, and only about three
+thousand of the workers were still out of work.
+
+Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they would
+ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of the
+intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all,
+that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped
+along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was
+unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household
+labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to
+perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was
+to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.
+
+Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are becoming
+the co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of the
+leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the
+situation, espouse the cause of their working sisters. The woman in the
+factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.
+
+The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury,
+Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of
+the working women.
+
+That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was
+established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew
+every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the
+women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of
+labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and wages
+were good enough to compensate for the long day's labor.
+
+The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a
+corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few
+floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands."
+
+The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated
+machinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred times
+more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and
+nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances
+developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so
+bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or
+manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to
+the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women who
+had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and
+eight dollars.
+
+The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the mills
+as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.
+
+There you have the story of women's realization of themselves as a
+group. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women.
+The Boston Branch of the Women's Trade Union League, through its
+secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined the strikers.
+Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile
+Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks
+of anxiety and deprivation.
+
+The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business
+before treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, exists
+as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and
+conferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to
+exist. An employers' association is a necessity of business life. A
+labor union is an insult to capital.
+
+This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor car
+stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs.
+Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay
+personified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer. Her
+powers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercial
+connections, were sufficient to wring consent from the firm to receive
+John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers.
+
+John Golden, intelligent, honest, a fine type of workingman, educated
+in the English school of unionism, held two conferences with the firm.
+He was able to make the employers see the whole situation in an entirely
+new light. They were men of probity; they wanted to be fair; and when
+they saw the human side of the struggle they surrendered. When they
+perceived the justice of the collective bargain, the advantages to both
+sides of a labor organization honestly conducted, they consented to
+recognize the union. And the women went back, their group unbroken.
+
+Thus are women working, women of all classes, to humanize the factory.
+From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and the
+judiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women of
+the toiling masses in their struggle to make over the factory from the
+inside. Together they are impressing the men of the working world, law
+makers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of the
+race.
+
+Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protective
+legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal
+decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not
+yet complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the
+late Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not
+every court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more
+valuable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn.
+
+In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in which
+a number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to the
+owner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did not
+strike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in that
+country a substitute for the strike is provided by law. To this
+substitute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. The
+employer in his answer declared, just as employers in this country might
+have done, that his business would not stand an increase in wages. He
+explained that the match industry was newly established in New Zealand,
+and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could not
+afford to pay high wages.
+
+The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been an
+inquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiry
+into the cost of living in the town where the match factory was located.
+And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court of
+Arbitration, and this is what he said to the man:
+
+"It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on the
+wages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that they
+should have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls and
+bodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance than
+your profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better for
+the community for you to close your factory. _It would be better to
+send the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back to
+flints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter._ My
+award is that you pay what they ask."
+
+Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the eight
+million women in the world who have learned to think in human terms.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO
+
+
+At the threshold of that quarter of old New York called Greenwich
+Village stands Jefferson Market Court. Almost concealed behind the
+towering structure of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, the building by day is
+rather inconspicuous. But when night falls, swallowing up the
+neighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Market
+assumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminated
+clock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands toward
+midnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams an
+intense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of the
+building floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, through
+the iron-guarded door, there passes, every week-day night in the year, a
+long procession of prodigals.
+
+The guarded door seldom admits any one as important, so to speak, as a
+criminal. The criminal's case waits for day. The Night Court in
+Jefferson Market sits in judgment only on the small fry caught in the
+dragnet of the police. Tramps, vagrants, drunkards, brawlers, disturbers
+of the peace, speeding chauffeurs, licenseless peddlers, youths caught
+red-handed shooting craps or playing ball in the streets,--these are the
+men with whom the Night Court deals. But it is not the men we have come
+to see.
+
+[Illustration: MISS MAUDE E. MINER]
+
+The women of the Night Court. Prodigal daughters! Between December,
+1908, and December, 1909, no less than five thousand of them passed
+through the guarded door, under the blaze of the electric lights. There
+is never an hour, from nine at night until three in the morning, when
+the prisoners' bench in Jefferson Market Court is without its full quota
+of women. Old--prematurely old, and young--pitifully young; white and
+brown; fair and faded; sad and cynical; starved and prosper ous;
+rag-draped and satin-bedecked; together they wait their turn at
+judgment.
+
+Quietly moving back and forth before the prisoners' bench you see a
+woman, tall, graceful, black-gowned. She is the salaried probation
+officer, modern substitute for the old-time volunteer mission worker.
+The probation officer's serious blue eyes burn with no missionary zeal.
+There is no spark of sentimental pity in the keen gaze she turns on each
+new arrival.
+
+When the bench is full of women the judge turns to her to inquire:
+"Anybody there you want, Miss Miner?"
+
+Miss Miner usually shakes her head. She diagnoses her cases like a
+physician, and she wastes no time on incurables.
+
+Once in a while, perhaps several times in the course of a night, Miss
+Miner touches a girl on the arm. At once the girl rises and follows the
+probation officer into an adjoining room. If she is what she appears,
+young in evil, if she has a story which rings true, a story of poverty
+and misfortune, rather than of depravity, she goes not back to the
+prisoners' bench. When her turn at judgment comes Miss Miner stands
+beside her, and in a low voice meant only for the judge, she tells the
+facts. The girl weeps as she listens. To hear one's troubles told is
+sometimes more terrible than to endure them.
+
+Court adjourns at three in the morning, and this girl, with the
+others--if others have been claimed by the probation officer--goes out
+into the empty street, under the light of the tall tower, whose clock
+has begun all over again its monotonous race toward midnight. No
+policeman accompanies the group. The girls are under no manner of
+duress. They have promised to go home with Miss Miner, and they go. The
+night's adventure, entered into with dread, with callous indifference,
+or with thoughtless mirth, ends in a quiet bedroom and a pillow wet with
+tears.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK.]
+
+Waverley House, as Miss Miner's home is known, has sheltered, during the
+past year, over three hundred girls. Out of that number one hundred and
+nineteen have returned to their homes, or are earning a living at useful
+work.
+
+One hundred and nineteen saved out of five thousand prodigals! In point
+of numbers this is a melancholy showing, but in comparison with other
+efforts at rescue work it is decidedly encouraging.
+
+Nothing quite like Waverley House has appeared in other American cities,
+but it is a type of detention home for girls which is developing
+logically out of the probation system. Delinquent girls under sixteen
+are now considered, in all enlightened communities, subjects for the
+Juvenile Court. They are hardly ever associated with older delinquents.
+But a girl over sixteen is likely to be committed to prison, and may be
+locked in cells with criminal and abandoned women of the lowest order.
+Waverley House is the first practical protest against this stupid and
+evil-encouraging policy.
+
+The house, which stands a few blocks distant from the Night Court, was
+established and is maintained by the Probation Association of New York,
+consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and of
+men and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The District
+Attorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of the
+Association, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, Miss
+Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women's Trade
+Union League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women's
+Municipal League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York's
+organized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among the
+supporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable and
+sympathetic superintendent of the house.
+
+The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station, a
+laboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases which
+beset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency and
+paroled to probation officers are taken to Waverley House, where they
+remain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best means
+of disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some to
+hospitals, some to institutions, some placed on long probation.
+
+Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's college
+to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who
+are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which
+has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They have
+set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakes
+countless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery,
+disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women have
+undertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of the
+problem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals?
+This much did the missionaries before them.
+
+"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per cent," declares Miss Miner, "if
+only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning."
+
+To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the beginning,
+instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That is
+what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what
+physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning to
+do with poverty.
+
+Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a cause,
+and that it might be possible to attack it at its source. Yet that any
+large number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly,
+voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts.
+There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they find
+themselves entirely powerless to resist.
+
+Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs of a
+very important movement among women to discover what these forces are.
+Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand. We have had, and we still have,
+in cities east and west, committees and societies and law and order
+leagues earnestly engaged in "stamping out" the evil. It is like trying
+to stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by a
+strong gale. The protests of most of these leagues amount to little
+more than vain clamor against a thing which is not even distantly
+comprehended.
+
+The _personnel_ of these agencies organized to "stamp out" the evil
+differs little in the various cities. It is largely if not wholly
+masculine in character, and the evil is usually dealt with from the
+point of view of religion and morals. Women, when they appear in the
+matter at all, figure as missionaries, "prison angels," and the like. As
+evangelists to sinners women have been permitted to associate with their
+fallen sisters without losing caste. Likewise, when elderly enough, they
+have been allowed to serve on governing boards of "homes" and
+"refuges." Their activities were limited to rescue work. They might
+extend a hand to a repentant Magdalene. A Phryne they must not even be
+aware of. In other words, this evil as a subject of investigation and
+intelligent discussion among women was absolutely prohibited. It has
+ever been their Great Taboo.
+
+Nevertheless, when eight million women, in practically every civilized
+country in the world, organized themselves into an International Council
+of Women, and began their remarkable survey of the social order in which
+they live, one of their first acts was to break the Great Taboo.
+
+[Illustration: MISS SADIE AMERICAN]
+
+At early congresses of the International Council Miss Sadie American,
+Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis, among American
+delegates, Miss Elizabeth Janes of England, Miss Elizabeth Gad of
+Denmark, Dr. Agnes Bluhm of Germany, and others interested in the moral
+welfare of girls, urged upon the Council action against the "White
+Slave" traffic. No extensive argument was required to convince the
+members of the Council that the "White Slave" traffic and the whole
+subject of the moral degradation of women was a social phenomenon too
+long neglected by women.
+
+These women declared with refreshing candor that it was about time that
+the social evil was dealt with intelligently, and if it was to be dealt
+with intelligently women must do the work. The fussy old gentlemen with
+white side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other well
+meaning amateurs, who are engaged in "stamping out" the evil, deserve to
+be set aside. In their places the women propose to install social
+experts who shall deal scientifically with the problem.
+
+The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle, in
+every community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actually
+forbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for the
+first time repudiated by a body of organized women. The arguments on
+which the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time,
+seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance.
+The desirability of the descent of property in legal paternal line
+seemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid standard
+of morals to women. But they found reasons infinitely greater why the
+same rigid standard should be applied to men.
+
+The International Council of Women and women's organizations in every
+country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and
+through these physicians they have been able to consider the social evil
+from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which
+touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare
+of children, were brought forth--facts concerning infantile blindness,
+almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the
+fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women,
+and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases
+among men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of these
+maladies, and their frightful prevalence,--seventy-five per cent of city
+men, according to reliable authority, being affected,--aroused in the
+women a sentiment of indignation and revolt. The International Council
+of Women put itself on record as protesting against the responsibility
+laid upon women, the unassisted task of preserving the purity of the
+race.
+
+In the United States, women's clubs, women's societies, women's medical
+associations, special committees of women in many cities have
+courageously undertaken the study of this problem, intending by means of
+investigation and publicity to lay bare its sources and seek its remedy.
+
+The sources of the evil are about the only phase of the problem which
+has never been adequately examined. It is true that we have suspected
+that the unsteady and ill-adjusted economic position of women furnished
+some explanation for its existence, but even now our information is
+vague and unsatisfactory.
+
+A number of years ago, in 1888 to be exact, the Massachusetts Bureau of
+Labor Statistics made an interesting investigation. This was an effort
+to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world,
+usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to
+profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations
+of nearly four thousand fallen women in twenty-eight American cities.
+
+Of these unfortunates over eight hundred had worked in low-waged trades
+such as paper-box making, millinery, laundry work, rope and cordage
+making, cigar and cigarette making, candy packing, textile factory and
+shoe factory work.
+
+About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, and
+seamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was not
+stated.
+
+The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so far
+as wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundred
+and sixteen recruits to the list.
+
+On the whole, these groups were what the investigators had expected to
+find.
+
+There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were entirely
+unexpected by the investigators. Of the 3,866 girls examined 1,236, or
+nearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The next
+largest group, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domestic
+servants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homes
+into lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from that
+occupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and most
+suitable means of earning their living--housework.
+
+Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as something
+too disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least sixty-two
+per cent of those 3,866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were too
+lazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one of
+honest toil in somebody's nice kitchen. Apparently this was the view
+taken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it never
+carried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out _why_
+so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried to
+find out _why_ housework was a trade dangerous to morals.
+
+Fortunately it did occur to the women's organizations to examine the
+facts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take you
+over some of the ground they have covered and show you where their
+investigations have led them.
+
+South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and
+forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large
+city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,--enormous drab
+structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering
+chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The
+steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family
+houses, built of wood, generally unpainted, and always dismally
+utilitarian as to architectural details.
+
+In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a park,
+or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement was
+just seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quite
+imposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered for
+the day as soon as the classes were dismissed.
+
+In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of young
+girls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which always
+must be fed--if not with wholesome food, then husks. For parents these
+girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and
+came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers
+who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and
+were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For
+social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know
+what that means. It means trooping up and down the main street in lively
+groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a
+cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street
+accident or a fight.
+
+About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicago
+and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some of
+these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went
+"downtown." There was no other place for them to go.
+
+As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situation
+would you expect to evolve out of these materials?
+
+Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood. Many
+of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in
+these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile
+Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals.
+Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the
+never-ceasing procession of prodigals.
+
+This is what "no previous occupation" really means in nine cases out of
+ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all,
+according to the ideals of you who read these pages.
+
+Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes it
+was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large
+enough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In some
+there was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extreme
+cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue
+and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are
+possible.
+
+Annie Donnelly's case will serve as further illustration. Annie
+Donnelly's father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab from
+twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays
+included. Before the cab drivers' strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly's
+wages were fifteen dollars a week, and the family lived in a four-room
+tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week. You pay rent weekly to a
+tenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week
+for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a
+week.
+
+The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single
+dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York
+tenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who was
+fourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms.
+Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a
+lodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement
+because it had only one dark room.
+
+One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance.
+Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not
+allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby,
+attended the annual ball of the Coachman's Union, but that was another
+thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.
+
+The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really lived
+in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable
+except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably
+crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was
+impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit
+of her social life had to be lived out of the house.
+
+When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking about
+with the other girls or sitting on a friend's doorstep, until ten or
+even eleven o'clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city
+neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl's life when this sort of
+thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the
+doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable. So
+one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the
+lodger to a dance.
+
+The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled basement room in a building
+which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the
+front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: "The Johnny
+Sullivan Social Club."
+
+The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat
+check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in a
+waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which
+followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric
+lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest
+best with a popular waltz tune.
+
+In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat
+and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was
+piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When
+the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with
+the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.
+
+"Come along," said the lodger, "and have a beer." When Annie shook her
+head he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent
+free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy
+a beer off of 'em oncet in a while. They've gotta get something out of
+it."
+
+I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately she
+learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish
+dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable
+by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places.
+Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room means
+poor business at the bar.
+
+Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall _habitué_. Not because she was
+viciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she was
+decidedly normal in all her instincts and desires.
+
+Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every dance
+invitations to other dances are distributed with a lavish hand. These
+invitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over chairs
+and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are locally
+known as "throw-aways." Here are a few specimens, from which you may
+form an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind of
+people--almost the only kind of people--who offer pleasure to the
+starved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actual
+invitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker of
+the New York College Settlement:
+
+     "_Second annual reception and ball, given by Jibo and Jack, at New
+     Starlight Hall, 143 Suffolk Street, December 25. Music by our
+     favorite. Gents ticket 25 cents, Ladies 15 cents._"
+
+     "_Don't miss the ball given by Joe the Greaser, and Sam Rosenstock,
+     at Odd Fellows' Hall, January 29th._"
+
+     "_See the Devil Dance at the Reception and Ball given by Max Pascal
+     and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday evening, November
+     20th."_
+
+     _ "Reception and Ball given by two well known friends, Max Turk and
+     Sam Lande, better known as Mechuch, at Appollo Hall, Chrystmas
+     night. Floor manager, Young Louis. Ticket admit one 25 cents._"
+
+In addition to these private affairs which are arranged purely for the
+profit of "Jibo and Jack" and their kind, men who make a living in this
+and in yet more unspeakable ways, there are hundreds of saloon dance
+halls, not only in New York, but in other cities. These are simply
+annexes to drinking places, and people are not welcome there unless they
+drink. No admission is charged.
+
+There are also numberless dancing academies. Dancing lessons are given
+four nights in the week, as a rule, and the dancing public buys
+admission the other three nights and on Sunday afternoons. Some dancing
+academies, even in tenement house quarters, are reputable institutions,
+but to most of them the lowest of the low, both men and women, resort.
+There, as in the dance halls, the "White Slaver" plies his trade, and
+the destroyer of womanliness lays his nets.
+
+Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places. She learned to
+"spiel." You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms' length,
+and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl's
+skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of the
+spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for
+liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong
+drink.
+
+Annie also learned to dance what is known as the "half time," or the
+"part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and
+contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a
+very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan
+harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crude
+peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it to
+immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell
+the girls that it is the _American_ fashion of waltzing.
+
+Annie Donnelly's destruction was accomplished in less than a year. It
+was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her home.
+There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too
+crowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother were
+respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie's first real
+misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to
+go home.
+
+The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically
+unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in
+every city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which,
+every year, thousands of girls descend to the way of the prodigal. No
+one has counted their number. All we know of the unclassed is that they
+exist, apparently in ever-increasing masses.
+
+It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six
+thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like
+twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law. That
+is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so
+unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of these
+unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible to
+know--we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the
+unclassed.
+
+[Illustration: A DANCE HALL]
+
+The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it may
+occupy a vacant store building, or a large loft. Somewhere in its
+immediate vicinity there is a saloon. A dance lasts about five minutes,
+and the interval between dances is from ten to twenty minutes. Waiters
+circle among the dancers, importuning them to drink. The dance hall
+without a bar, or some source of liquid supply, does not often exist,
+except as it has been established by social workers to offset the
+influence of the commercial dance hall.
+
+Some dance halls are small and wretchedly lighted. Others are large and
+pretentious. Some of them have direct connections with Raines Law hotels
+and their prototypes. Of hardly a single dance hall can a good word be
+said. They are almost entirely in the hands of the element lowest in
+society, in business, and in politics.
+
+From the old-fashioned German family picnic park to Coney Island in New
+York, Revere Beach in Boston, The White City in Chicago, Savin Rock in
+New Haven, and their like, is a far cry.
+
+Some of these summer parks try to keep their amusements clean and
+decent, and some, notably Euclid Park, Cleveland, succeed. But drink and
+often worse evils are characteristic of most of them. There are parts
+of Coney Island where no beer is sold, where the vaudeville and the
+moving pictures are clean and wholesome, where dancing is orderly. But
+the nearest side street has its "tough joint." The same thing is true of
+the big summer resorts of other cities.
+
+The dance hall, both winter and summer types, have had a deteriorating
+effect upon the old-fashioned dancing academy. Formerly these were
+respectable establishments where people paid for dancing lessons. Now
+they are a _mélange_ of dancing classes and public entertainments. The
+dancing masters, unable to compete with the dance hall proprietors, have
+been obliged to transfer many of the dance hall features to their
+establishments.
+
+Oddly enough it is rather an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted to
+a dance in any kind of a dance hall. The girls go alone, with a friend,
+or with a group of girls. The exceptional girl, who is attended by a
+man, must dance with him, or if she accepts another part ner, she must
+ask his permission. An escort is deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage.
+Those who go unattended are always sure of partners. Often they meet
+"fellows" they know, or have seen on the streets. Introductions are not
+necessary. Even if a girl is unacquainted with any "fellows," if she
+possesses slight attractions, she is still sure of partners.
+
+The amount of money spent by working girls for dance-hall admissions is
+considerable. A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages
+thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.
+
+In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number of
+black-gowned girls. The black gown might almost be called the mark of
+the dance-hall _habitué_, the girl who is dance mad and who spends all
+her evenings going from one resort to another. She wears black because
+light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.
+
+An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the "spieler." This
+is a young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilled
+and untiring dancer. The business of the spieler is to look after the
+wall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he
+dances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for a
+place to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to those
+dance halls where they have had the best time.
+
+The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is a
+sinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls. The
+dance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth of
+many of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type.
+
+Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most brutally
+evil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense of
+chaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution. It is
+vicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, the
+desire of men and women to associate together, and distorts that
+instinct into evil. The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes,
+especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share their
+pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. The
+position of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treat
+her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy
+does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very
+readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack of
+chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward
+course.
+
+Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive
+young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although not
+remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a
+stenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon as
+she finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with her
+working papers. The family needed additional income, not to meet actual
+living expenses, for the Greenbaums were not acutely poor, but in order
+that the only son of the family might go to college. Max was seventeen,
+a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his superiority
+over his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family should
+toil unceasingly for his advancement.
+
+Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslin
+underwear factory. At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as a
+skilled operator on a tucking machine. She sat down to her work every
+morning at eight o'clock, and for four hours watched with straining eyes
+a tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips of
+muslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches a
+minute. The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above the
+cloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil the
+continuity of a tuck. When you are on piece wages you do not relish
+stopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work.
+
+So Sadie watched the needle assiduously, and ignored the fact that her
+head ached pretty regularly, and she was generally too weary when lunch
+time came to enjoy the black bread and pickles which, with a cup of
+strong tea, made her noon meal. After lunch she again sat down to her
+machine and watched the needles gallop over the cloth.
+
+At the end of each year Sadie Greenbaum had produced for the good of the
+community _four miles_ of tucked muslin. In return, the community had
+rendered her back something less than three hundred dollars, for the
+muslin underwear trade has its dull seasons, and you do not earn seven
+dollars every week in the year.
+
+Each week Sadie handed her pay envelope unopened to her mother. The
+mother bought all Sadie's clothes and gave her food and shelter.
+Consequently, Sadie's unceasing vigil of the needle paid for her
+existence and purchased also the proud consciousness of an older brother
+who would one day own a doctor's buggy and a social position.
+
+The one joy of this girl's life, in fact all the real life she lived,
+was dancing. Regularly every Saturday night Sadie and a girl friend,
+Rosie by name, put on their best clothes and betook themselves to
+Silver's Casino, a huge dance hall with small rooms adjoining, where
+food and much drink were to be had.
+
+There was a good floor at Silver's and a brass band to dance to. It was
+great! The girls never lacked partners, and they made some very
+agreeable acquaintances.
+
+In the dressing room, between dances, all the girls exchanged
+conversation, views on fashions, confidences about the young men and
+other gossip. Some of the girls were nice and some, it must be admitted,
+were "tough." What was the difference? The tough girls, with their
+daring humor, their cigarettes, their easy manners, and their amazingly
+smart clothes, furnished a sort of spice to the affair.
+
+Sadie and Rosie sometimes discussed the tough girls, and the
+conversation nearly always ended with one remarking: "Well, if they
+don't get anything else out of livin', look at the clothes they put on
+their backs."
+
+Perhaps you can understand that longing for pretty gowns, perhaps you
+can even sympathize with it. Of course, if you have a number of other
+resources, you can keep the dress hunger in its proper place. But if you
+have nothing in your existence but a machine--at which you toil for
+others' benefit;
+
+Sadie and Rosie continued to spend their Saturday evenings and their
+Sunday evenings at Silver's Casino. At first they went home together
+promptly at midnight. After midnight these casino dance halls change
+their character. Often professional "pace makers" are introduced, men
+and women of the lowest class, who are paid to inspire the other dancers
+to lewd conduct. These wretched people are immodestly clothed, and they
+perform immodest or very tough dances. They are usually known as
+"Twisters," a descriptive title. When they make their appearance the
+self-respecting dancers go home, and a much looser element comes in. The
+pace becomes a rapid one. Manners are free, talk is coarse, laughter is
+incessant. The bar does a lively business. The dancing and the revels go
+on until daylight.
+
+The first time Sadie and Rosie allowed themselves to be persuaded to
+stay at Silver's after midnight they were rather horrified by the
+abandoned character of the dancing, the reckless drinking, and the
+fighting which resulted in several men being thrown out. The second time
+they were not quite so horrified, but they decided not to stay so late
+another time. Then came a great social event, the annual "mask and
+shadow dance" of a local political organization. Sadie and Rosie
+attended.
+
+A "mask and shadow dance" is as important a function to girls of Sadie's
+and Rosie's class as a cotillion is to girls of your class. Such affairs
+are possible only in large dance halls, and to do them impressively
+costs the proprietor some money. The guests rent costumes and masks and
+appear in very gala fashion indeed. They dance in the rays of all kinds
+of colored lights thrown upon them from upper galleries. During part of
+a waltz the dancers are bathed in rose-colored lights, which change
+suddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects are
+made, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers' shadows are
+thrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor. At intervals a rain of
+bright-colored confetti pours down from above. The scene becomes
+bacchanalian. Color, light, music, confetti, the dance, together
+combine to produce an intense and voluptuous intoxication which the
+revelers deepen with drink.
+
+The events of the latter part of that night were very vague in Sadie's
+memory when she awoke late the next morning. She remembered that she had
+tolerated familiarities which had been foreign to her experience
+heretofore, and that she had been led home by some friendly soul, at
+daylight, almost helpless from liquor.
+
+Frightened, haunted by half-ashamed memories of that dance, Sadie
+spoiled a good bit of her work on Monday morning. The forewoman
+descended on her with a torrent of coarse abuse, whereupon Sadie rose
+suddenly from her machine, and in a burst of hysterical profanity and
+tears rushed out of the factory, vowing never to return. There was only
+one course, she decided, for her to take, and she took it.
+
+"Sadie, why did you do it?" wailed Rosie the next time they met.
+
+"It's better than the factory," said Sadie.
+
+Tucking muslin underwear is dull work, but it is, in most ways, a more
+agreeable task than icing cakes in a St. Louis biscuit factory. All day
+Edna M---- stood over a tank filled with thick chocolate icing. The
+table beside Edna's tank was kept constantly supplied with freshly baked
+"lady-fingers," and these in delicate handfuls Edna seized and plunged
+into the hot ooze of the chocolate. Her arms, up to the elbows, went
+into the black stuff, over and over again all day. At noon, over their
+lunch, the girls talked of their recreations, their clothes, their
+"fellows."
+
+Edna had not very much to contribute to the girls' stories of gayety and
+adventure. She led a quieter existence than most of the other girls,
+although her leanings were toward lively pleasures. She was engaged to a
+young man who worked in a foundry and who was steady and perhaps rather
+too serious. He was very jealous of Edna and exacted a stern degree of
+fidelity of her.
+
+Before her engagement Edna had gone to a decent dancing school and
+dearly loved the dance. Now she was not permitted to dance with any one
+but her prospective husband. The bright talk at the noon hour made Edna
+feel that she was a very poor sport.
+
+The young man's work in the foundry alternated weekly between day and
+night duty. It occurred to Edna that her young man could not possibly
+know what she did with those evenings he remained in the foundry. If she
+chose to go with a group of girls to a dance hall, what harm? The long
+years of married life stretched themselves out somewhat drably to Edna.
+She decided to have a good time beforehand.
+
+This girl from now on literally lived a double life. Evenings of the
+weeks her young man was free from the foundry, she spent at home with
+him, placidly playing cards, reading aloud, or talking. On the other
+evenings she danced, madly, incessantly. Her mother thought she spent
+the evenings with her girl friends. The dancing, plus the deceit, soon
+had its effect on Edna. She began to visit livelier and livelier
+resorts, curious to see all phases of pleasure.
+
+Suspicion entered into the mind of her affianced. He questioned her;
+she lied, and he was unconvinced. A night or two later the young man
+stayed away from the foundry and followed Edna to a suburban resort. She
+went, as usual, with a group of girls, but their men were waiting for
+them near the door of the open-air dancing pavilion. Standing just
+outside, the angry lover watched the girl "spiel" round and round with a
+man of doubtful respectability. Soon she joined a noisy, beer-drinking
+group at one of the tables, and her behavior grew more and more
+reckless. Finally, amid laughter, she and another girl performed a
+suggestive dance together.
+
+Walking swiftly up to her, the outraged foundryman grasped her by the
+shoulder, called her a name she did not yet deserve, and threw her
+violently to the floor. A terrific fight followed, and the police soon
+cleared the place.
+
+Edna did not dare go home. An over-rigid standard of morals, an
+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 _naïveté_. 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, Küche, 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.,
+Mercy, Anna,
+Meredith, Ellis
+Milholland, Inez,
+Mills,
+Mills, Enos,
+Miner, Maude E.,
+Miner, Stella,
+Missouri,
+Mitchell, John,
+Montana,
+Moore, Mrs. Philip N.,
+Morgan, Anne
+Mott, Lucretia,
+Muller, Curt
+
+Napoleon,
+Napoleon Code
+Nathan, Mrs. Frederick
+National Civic Federation,
+National Congress of Mothers,
+National Manufacturers' Association
+National Society of Collegiate Alumnae,
+National Woman Suffrage Association
+Nebraska
+Nestor, Agnes,
+Nevada,
+New England,
+New Haven, Conn.
+New Jersey,
+New Mexico,
+New York,
+New York, N.Y.,
+New York Telephone Co.,
+New Zealand,
+Night Court. See _Jefferson Market Court_
+Night work of women,
+North Carolina
+North Dakota,
+
+Ohio,
+Oklahoma,
+Orange, House of,
+Oregon,
+Oregon case,
+Oregon Standard,_Out of Work_, Miss Kellor's
+
+Palisades of the Hudson,
+Panama Canal,
+Pankhurst, Mrs.,
+Paris,
+Peace
+Pennsylvania,
+Persia,
+Philadelphia,
+Pike, Violet,
+Pittsburg,
+Playgrounds,
+Playgrounds Association of America
+Portland, Ore.,
+Portugal
+Potter, Virginia,
+Probation Association of N.Y.,
+Property Law, Married Women's,
+Public Service League of Denver, Colo.
+Puritans
+
+_Resurrection_, Tolstoy's,
+Revere Beach,
+Rheinhard Commission,
+Rhode Island
+"Rights of Man,"
+Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory,
+Robins, Mrs. Raymond,
+Robinson, Mrs. Helen Ring,
+Rochester, N.Y., Industrial School,
+Roxbury, Mass., carpet mill strike,
+Russia,
+
+Sage, Mrs. Russell,
+St. Louis, Mo.
+Salic Law,
+Salmon, Prof. Lucy Maynard
+Salt Lake City,
+San Francisco,
+Schoenfeld, Julia,
+Scranton, Pa.,
+Seneca Falls convention,
+Servant problem. See _Domestic Service_
+Shaw, Dr. Anna,
+Shirt-waist makers' strike,
+Smith, "Gypsy,"
+Snowden, Mrs. Philip,
+Social evil,
+Social purity
+Socialist party
+South Africa,
+South Carolina,
+South Chicago,
+South Dakota,
+Spain
+Stanton, Elizabeth Cady
+Stover, Charles B.,
+Succession to throne by women,
+Sweat shop, the
+Switzerland
+
+Teacher's Federation of Chicago
+Ten-hour day,
+Tennessee
+Texas,
+Tillman case,
+Turkey,
+Tuthill, Judge R.S.,
+Twentieth Century Club of Detroit,
+
+United States Government
+United States Industrial Commission,
+United Textile Workers
+Utah
+
+Vassar College,
+Victoria, Queen,
+Virginia,
+Voters' League for Equal Suffrage,
+
+Wage earning, women in,
+Washington (state),
+Waverley House,
+White, Mrs. Lovell,
+"White Slave" traffic
+Whitman, Charles S.,
+Wilhelmina, Queen,
+Windeguth, Dora
+Winthrop, Mrs. Egerton,
+_Woman and Economics_, Gilman's,
+Woman suffrage,
+Woman Suffrage Party
+Woman's Christian Temperance Union,
+Woman's Municipal League of N.Y.,
+Women, their ideals,
+  in Europe,
+  in America,
+  in industry,
+  their fight against the social evil,
+  in domestic service,
+  collective opinion of,
+Women's Civic Club of San Francisco,
+Women's Club, of Lake City, Minn.,
+  of Dallas, Tex.,
+  of San Francisco,
+  of Pittsburg
+  of Detroit,
+  of Philadelphia,
+  of Harrisburg, Pa.,
+  of Birmingham, Ala.,
+  of Carlisle, Pa.,
+  of Cranford, N.J.,
+Women's Clubs
+Women's Educational and Industrial Union of BostonWomen's League of Justice,
+Women's Political Equality Union,
+Women's Property Act,
+Women's Trade Union League
+Working Women's Society
+Wyoming,
+
+Yonkers, N.Y.,
+Young Women's Christian Association
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's What eight million women want, by Rheta Childe Dorr
+
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+  <title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of What Eight Million Women Want,
+by Rheta Childe Dorr.</title>
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+
+Project Gutenberg's What eight million women want, by Rheta Childe Dorr
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: What eight million women want
+
+Author: Rheta Childe Dorr
+
+Release Date: May 1, 2004 [EBook #12226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Wilelmina Mallière and the Distributed Proofreading Team
+from images provided by the Million Book Project.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1><br>
+</h1>
+Images provided by: Million Book Project.<br>
+<br>
+Post-Processing : Wilelmina Malli&egrave;re.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1></h1>
+<h1>WHAT EIGHT MILLION</h1>
+<h1>WOMEN WANT</h1>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img001"></a><img
+ style="width: 400px; height: 318px;"
+ alt="CONVENTION OF OUR WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK"
+ title="CONVENTION OF OUR WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK"
+ src="images/001.jpg"><br>
+</div>
+<br>
+<h1>WHAT EIGHT MILLION</h1>
+<h1>WOMEN WANT</h1>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2 style="font-weight: bold;">RHETA CHILDE DORR</h2>
+<h3>1910.</h3>
+<br>
+<hr style="height: 2px; width: 25%;">
+<h4>TO</h4>
+<h4>THE AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVES</h4>
+<h4>OF THE EIGHT MILLION&#8212;</h4>
+<h4>THE EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND MEMBERS</h4>
+<h4>OF THE GENERAL FEDERATION OF</h4>
+<h4>WOMEN'S CLUBS&#8212;</h4>
+<h4>THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED</h4>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<br>
+<p style="margin-left: 40px;">Many of the chapters contained in this
+volume appeared as special articles in <i>Hampton's Magazine</i>, to
+the editor of which the
+author's
+thanks are due for permission to republish.
+</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;"><br>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<p>CHAPTER</p>
+<br>
+<ul>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I INTRODUCTORY</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V WOMAN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII WOMAN'S HELPING HAND FOR THE
+PRODIGAL DAUGHTER</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_X">X VOTES FOR WOMEN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">XI IN CONCLUSION</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></li>
+</ul>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<br>
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<br>
+<ul>
+  <li><a href="#img001">CONVENTION OF CLUB WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW
+YORK</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img002">CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img003">CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON
+PARK, PITTSBURGH</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img004">STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR
+SCHOOL YARD, LOS
+ANGELES,
+CAL.</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img005">MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img006">LADY ABERDEEN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img007">A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img008">MISS EMILIE BULLOWA</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img009">MRS. FREDERICK NATHAN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img010">MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img011">MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img012">A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img013">MISS MAUDE E. MINER</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img014">IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img015">MISS SADIE AMERICAN</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img016">A TYPICAL DANCE HALL</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img017">AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT
+QUESTION</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img018">ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL
+QUESTION</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img019">THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img020">SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img021">MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img022">MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img023">THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE
+ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL
+27,
+1909</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img024">HELEN HOY GREELEY</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img025">SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img026">THE "QUIET WALK" OF THE NEW YORK
+SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE
+WOULD
+NOT
+PERMIT TO PARADE</a></li>
+  <li><a href="#img027">SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW
+YORK</a></li>
+</ul>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<br>
+<h2>WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT</h2>
+<br>
+<a name="Page_1"></a>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<h2>INTRODUCTORY</h2>
+<p>For the audacity of the title of this book I offer no apology. I
+have
+had it pointed out, not altogether facetiously, that it is impossible
+to
+determine with accuracy what one woman, much less what any number of
+women, wants. I sympathize with the first half of the tradition. The
+desires, that is to say, the ideals, of an individual, man or woman,
+are
+not always easy to determine. The individual is complex and exceedingly
+prone to variation. The mass alone is consistent. The ideals of the
+mass
+of women are wrapped in mystery simply because no one has cared enough
+about them to inquire what they are.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_2"></a>Men, ardently, eternally, interested in
+Woman&#8212;one woman at a time&#8212;are
+almost never even faintly interested in women. Strangely, deliberately
+ignorant of women, they argue that their ignorance is justified by an
+innate unknowableness of the sex.</p>
+<p>I am persuaded that the time is at hand when this sentimental, half
+contemptuous attitude of half the population towards the other half
+will
+have to be abandoned. I believe that the time has arrived when
+self-interest, if other motive be lacking, will compel society to
+examine the ideals of women. In support of this opinion I ask you to
+consider three facts, each one of which is so patent that it requires
+no
+argument.</p>
+<p>The Census of 1900 reported nearly six million women in the United
+States engaged in wage earning outside their homes. Between 1890 and
+1900 the number of women in industry increased faster than the number
+of
+men in industry. <i>It increased faster than the birth rate.</i> The
+number
+of women wage earners at the present date can only be estimated. Nine
+<a name="Page_3"></a>million would be a conservative guess. Nine
+million women who have
+forsaken the traditions of the hearth and are competing with men in the
+world of paid labor, means that women are rapidly passing from the
+domestic control of their fathers and their husbands. Surely this is
+the
+most important economic fact in the world to-day.</p>
+<p>Within the past twenty years no less than nine hundred and
+fifty-four
+thousand divorces have been granted in the United States. Two thirds of
+these divorces were granted to aggrieved wives. In spite of the
+anathemas of the church, in the face of tradition and early precept, in
+defiance of social ostracism, accepting, in the vast majority of cases,
+the responsibility of self support, more than six hundred thousand
+women, in the short space of twenty years, repudiated the burden of
+uncongenial marriage. Without any doubt this is the most important
+social fact we have had to face since the slavery question was settled.</p>
+<p>Not only in the United States, but in every <a name="Page_4"></a>constitutional
+country in
+the world the movement towards admitting women to full political
+equality with men is gathering strength. In half a dozen countries
+women
+are already completely enfranchised. In England the opposition is
+seeking terms of surrender. In the United States the stoutest enemy of
+the movement acknowledges that woman suffrage is ultimately inevitable.
+The voting strength of the world is about to be doubled, and the new
+element is absolutely an unknown quantity. Does any one question that
+this is the most important political fact the modern world has ever
+faced?</p>
+<p>I have asked you to consider three facts, but in reality they are
+but
+three manifestations of one fact, to my mind the most important human
+fact society has yet encountered. Women have ceased to exist as a
+subsidiary class in the community. They are no longer wholly dependent,
+economically, intellectually, and spiritually, on a ruling class of
+men.
+They look on life with the eyes of reasoning adults, where once they
+<a name="Page_5"></a>regarded it as trusting children. Women now form a
+new social group,
+separate, and to a degree homogeneous. Already they have evolved a
+group
+opinion and a group ideal.</p>
+<p>And this brings me to my reason for believing that society will soon
+be
+compelled to make a serious survey of the opinions and ideals of women.
+As far as these have found collective expressions, it is evident that
+they differ very radically from accepted opinions and ideals of men. As
+a matter of fact, it is inevitable that this should be so. Back of the
+differences between the masculine and the feminine ideal lie centuries
+of different habits, different duties, different ambitions, different
+opportunities, different rewards.</p>
+<p>I shall not here attempt to outline what the differences have been
+or
+why they have existed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in <i>Women and
+Economics</i>, did this before me,&#8212;did it so well that it need never be
+done again. I merely wish to point out that different habits of action
+necessarily result, after long centuries, in differ<a name="Page_6"></a>ent
+habits of
+thought. Men, accustomed to habits of strife, pursuit of material
+gains,
+immediate and tangible rewards, have come to believe that strife is not
+only inevitable but desirable; that material gain and visible reward
+are
+alone worth coveting. In this commercial age strife means business
+competition, reward means money. Man, in the aggregate, thinks in terms
+of money profit and money loss, and try as he will, he cannot yet think
+in any other terms.</p>
+<p>I have in mind a certain rich young man, who, when he is not
+superintending the work of his cotton mills in Virginia, is giving his
+time to settlement work in the city of Washington. The rich young man
+is
+devoted to the settlement. One day he confided to a guest of the house,
+a social worker of note, that he wished he might dedicate his entire
+life to philanthropy.</p>
+<p>"There is much about a commercial career that is depressing to a
+sympathetic nature," he declared. "For example, it constantly de<a
+ name="Page_7"></a>presses
+me to observe the effect of the cotton mills on the girls in my employ.
+They come in from the country, fresh, blooming, and eager to work.
+Within a few months perhaps they are pale, anaemic, listless. Not
+infrequently a young girl contracts tuberculosis and dies before one
+realizes that she is ill. It wrings the heart to see it."</p>
+<p>"I suspect," said the visitor, "that there is something wrong with
+your
+mills. Are you sure that they are sufficiently well ventilated?"</p>
+<p>"They are as well ventilated as we can have them," said the rich
+young
+man. "Of course we cannot keep the windows open."</p>
+<p>"Why not?" persisted the visitor.</p>
+<p>"Because in our mills we spin both black and white yarn, and if the
+windows were kept open the lint from the black yarn would blow on the
+white yarn and ruin it."</p>
+<p>A quick vision rose before the visitor's consciousness, of a mill
+room,
+noisy with clacking machinery, reeking with the mingled odors of
+perspiration and warm oil, obscure with flying <a name="Page_8"></a>cotton
+flakes which
+covered the forms of the workers like snow and choked in their throats
+like desert sand.</p>
+<p>"But," she exclaimed, "you can have two rooms, one for the white
+yarn
+and the other for the black."</p>
+<p>The rich young man shook his head with the air of one who goes away
+exceedingly sorrowful.</p>
+<p>"No," he replied, "we can't. The business won't stand it."</p>
+<p>This story presents in miniature the social attitude of the majority
+of
+men. They cannot be held entirely responsible. Their minds
+automatically
+function just that way. They have high and generous impulses, their
+hearts are susceptible to tenderest pity, they often possess the vision
+of brotherhood and human kinship, but habit, long habit, always
+intervenes in time to save the business from loss of a few dollars
+profit.</p>
+<p>Three years ago Chicago was on the eve of one of its periodical
+"vice
+crusades," of which <a name="Page_9"></a>more later. Sensational
+stories had been published
+in several newspapers, to the effect that no fewer than five thousand
+Jewish girls were leading lives of shame in the city, a statement which
+was received with horror by the Jewish population of Chicago. A meeting
+of wealthy and influential men and women was called in the law library
+of a well known jurist and philanthropist. Representatives from various
+social settlements in Jewish quarters of the town were invited, and it
+was as a guest of one of these settlements that I was privileged to be
+present.</p>
+<p>Eloquent addresses were made and an elaborate plan for investigation
+and
+relief was outlined. Finally it came to a point where ways and means
+had
+to be considered. The presiding officer put this phase of the matter to
+the conference with smiling frankness. "You must realize, ladies and
+gentlemen," he said, "that we have entered upon an extensive and, I am
+afraid, a very expensive campaign."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_10"></a>At this a middle aged and notably dignified
+man arose and said with
+emotion trembling in his voice: "Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen
+of the conference, this surely is no time for us to think of economy of
+expenditure. If the daughters of Israel are losing their ancient dower
+of purity, the sons of Israel should be willing, nay, eager to ransom
+them at any cost. Permit me, as a privileged honor which I value
+highly,
+to offer, as a contribution towards the preliminary expenses of this
+campaign, my check for ten thousand dollars."</p>
+<p>He sat down to that polite little murmur of applause which goes
+round
+the room, and I whispered to the head resident of the settlement of
+which I was a guest, an inquiry as to the identity of the generous
+donor.</p>
+<p>"That gentleman," she whispered in reply, "is one of the owners of a
+great mail order department store in Chicago." She sighed deeply, as
+she
+added: "During the first week of the panic that store discharged,
+without warning, five hundred girls."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_11"></a>These typical examples of the reasoning
+processes of men are offered
+without the slightest rancor. They had to be given in order that the
+woman's habit of thought might be explained with clearness.</p>
+<p>Women, since society became an organized body, have been engaged in
+the
+rearing, as well as the bearing of children. They have made the home,
+they have cared for the sick, ministered to the aged, and given to the
+poor. The universal destiny of the mass of women trained them to feed
+and clothe, to invent, manufacture, build, repair, contrive, conserve,
+economize. They lived lives of constant service, within the narrow
+confines of a home. Their labor was given to those they loved, and the
+reward they looked for was purely a spiritual reward.</p>
+<p>A thousand generations of service, unpaid, loving, intimate, must
+have
+left the strongest kind of a mental habit in its wake. Women, when they
+emerged from the seclusion of their homes and began to mingle in the
+world pro<a name="Page_12"></a>cession, when they were thrown on their
+own financial
+responsibility, found themselves willy nilly in the ranks of the
+producers, the wage earners; when the enlightenment of education was no
+longer denied them, when their responsibilities ceased to be entirely
+domestic and became somewhat social, when, in a word, women began to
+<i>think</i>, they naturally thought in human terms. They couldn't have
+thought otherwise if they had tried.</p>
+<p>They might have learned, it is true. In certain circumstances women
+might have been persuaded to adopt the commercial habit of thought. But
+the circumstances were exactly propitious for the encouragement of the
+old-time woman habit of service. The modern thinking, planning,
+self-governing, educated woman came into a world which is losing faith
+in the commercial ideal, and is endeavoring to substitute in its place
+a
+social ideal. She came into a generation which is reaching passionate
+hands towards democracy. She became one with a nation which is weary of
+wars and <a name="Page_13"></a>hatreds, impatient with greed and
+privilege, sickened of
+poverty, disease, and social injustice. The modern, free-functioning
+woman accepted without the slightest difficulty these new ideals of
+democracy and social service. Where men could do little more than
+theorize in these matters, women were able easily and effectively to
+act.</p>
+<p>I hope that I shall not be suspected of ascribing to women any
+ingrained
+or fundamental moral superiority to men. Women are not better than men.
+The mantle of moral superiority forced upon them as a substitute for
+intellectual equality they accepted, because they could not help
+themselves. They dropped it as soon as the substitute was no longer
+necessary.</p>
+<p>That the mass of women are invariably found on the side of the new
+ideals is no evidence of their moral superiority to men; it is merely
+evidence of their intellectual youth.</p>
+<p>Visitors from western cities and towns are often amazed, and vastly
+amused, to find in <a name="Page_14"></a>New York and other eastern
+cities little
+narrow-gauge street car lines, where gaunt horses haul the shabbiest of
+cars over the oldest and roughest of road beds. The Westerner declares
+that nowhere in the East does he find surface cars that equal in
+comfort
+and elegance the cars recently installed in his Michigan or Nebraska or
+Washington home town.</p>
+<p>"Recently installed." There you have it.</p>
+<p>The eastern city retains its horse cars and its out-of-date electric
+rolling stock because it has them, and because there are all sorts of
+difficulties in the way of replacing them. Old franchises have to
+expire
+or otherwise be got rid of; corporations have to be coaxed or coerced;
+greed and corruption often have to be overcome; huge sums of money have
+to be appropriated; a whole machinery of municipal government has to be
+set in motion before the old and established city can change its
+traction system.</p>
+<p>The new western town goes on foot until it <a name="Page_15"></a>attains
+to a certain size
+and a sufficient prosperity. Then it installs electric railways, and of
+course it purchases the newest and most modern of the available models.</p>
+<p>New social ideals are difficult for men to acquire in a practical
+way
+because their minds are filled with old traditions, inherited memories,
+outworn theories of law, government, and social control. They cannot
+get
+rid of these at once. They have used them so long, have found them so
+convenient, so satisfactory, that even when you show them something
+admittedly better; they are able only partially to comprehend and to
+accept.</p>
+<p>Women, on the other hand, have very few antiques to get rid of.
+Until
+recently their minds, scantily furnished with a few personal
+preferences
+and personal prejudices, were entirely bare of community ideals or any
+social theory. When they found themselves in need of a social theory it
+was only natural that they should choose the most modern, the most
+progressive, the most idealistic. They made their <a name="Page_16"></a>choice
+unconsciously,
+and they began the application of their new-found theory almost
+automatically. The machinery they employed was the long derided,
+misconceived, and unappreciated Women's Club.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_II"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_17"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<h2>FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE</h2>
+<br>
+<p>Unless you have lived in a live town in the Middle West&#8212;say in
+Michigan, or Indiana, or Nebraska&#8212;you cannot have a very adequate idea
+of how ugly, and dirty, and neglected, and disreputable a town can be
+when nobody loves it. The railway station is a long, low, rakish thing
+of boards, painted a muddy maroon color. Around it is a stretch of bare
+ground strewn with ashes. Beyond lies the main street, with some good
+business blocks,&#8212;a First National Bank in imposing granite, and a
+Masonic Temple in pressed brick. The high school occupies a treeless,
+grassless, windswept block by itself.</p>
+<p>In the center of the residential section of the town is a big,
+unsightly, hummocky vacant place, vaguely known as the park&#8212;or the
+<a name="Page_18"></a>place where they are going to have a park, when
+the city gets around to
+it. At present it is a convenient spot wherein to dump tin cans, empty
+bottles, broken crockery, old shoes, and other residue. When the wind
+blows, in the spring and fall, a fine assortment of desiccated rubbish
+is wafted up and down, and into the neighbors' dooryards.</p>
+<p>Everybody is busy in these live towns. Everybody is prosperous, and
+patriotic, and law-abiding, and respectable. The business of "getting
+on" absorbs the entire time and attention of the men. They "get on" so
+well, for the most part, that their wives have plenty of leisure on
+their hands, and the latter occupy a portion of their leisure by
+belonging to a club, organized for the study of the art of the
+Renaissance, Chinese religions before Confucius, or the mystery of
+Browning. The club meets every second Wednesday, and the members read
+papers, after which there is tea and a social hour. The papers vary in
+degree alone, as the writer happens to be a skimmer, a wader, <a
+ name="Page_19"></a>or a
+deep-sea diver in standard editions of the encyclopedias. The social
+hour, however, occasionally develops in a direction quite away from the
+realms of pure culture.</p>
+<p>Such a town, with such a woman's club, was Lake City, Minnesota, a
+few
+years ago. Lake City had a busy and a prosperous male population, a
+woman's club bent on intellectual uplift, and a place where there was
+going to be a park. One windy second Wednesday the club members arrived
+with their eyes full of dust, soot on their white gloves, and
+indignation in their hearts. When tea and the social hour came around
+culture went by the board and the conversation turned to the perfectly
+disgraceful way in which the town's street cleaning was conducted.</p>
+<p>"The streets are bad enough," said one member, "but, after all, one
+expects the streets to be dusty. What I object to is having a city
+dump-heap at my front door. Have any of you crossed my corner of the
+park since the snow melted?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_20"></a>She drew a lively picture of a state of things
+gravely menacing to the
+health of her neighborhood, and that of all the people whose homes
+faced
+the neglected square.</p>
+<p>"Why doesn't somebody complain to the authorities?" she concluded.
+"Why
+don't we do something about it? The next time we meet we might at least
+adopt resolutions, or, better still, have a committee appointed. What
+do
+you think, Madam President?"</p>
+<p>Madam President tapped her teaspoon on the edge of her empty cup. "I
+think," she said, "that we will come to order and do it now. Will you
+put what you have just suggested in the form of a motion?"</p>
+<p>At the next meeting of the club the committee to investigate the
+park
+made its report. The club members began a lively canvass among real
+estate owners and business men, and before long an astonished city
+council found itself on its feet, receiving a deputation from the
+woman's club. The women came armed with a donation of fifteen hundred
+dol<a name="Page_21"></a>lars cash, and a polite, but firm, demand that
+the money be used to
+clean up and plant the park.</p>
+<p>The council replied that it had always intended to get around to
+that
+park, and would have done it long ago but for the fact that there was
+no
+park board in existence, and could not be one, because the Solons who
+drew up the city charter had forgotten to put in a provision for such a
+board.</p>
+<p>The club held more meetings, and appointed more committees. One of
+these
+unearthed a State law which seemed to cover the case, and make a park
+board possible without the direct assistance of a city charter. The
+city
+attorney was visited, and somehow was coaxed, or argued, or bullied
+into
+giving a favorable opinion, after which the election of a park board
+followed as a matter of course. The town suddenly became interested in
+the park. The club women's fifteen hundred dollars was doubled by
+popular subscription, and the work of turning a town rubbish heap into
+<a name="Page_22"></a>a cool and shady garden spot was brief but
+durable.</p>
+<p>You wouldn't know the Lake City of those years if you saw it to-day.
+They have an attractive railroad station, paved streets, cement
+sidewalks, public playgrounds for children, a high school set in a
+shaded square, and residence streets that look like parkways. And the
+woman's club was the parent of them all.</p>
+<p>There is a theory which expresses itself somewhat obviously in the
+phrase: "Whatever all the women of the country want they will get." The
+theory is a convenient one, because it may be used to defer action on
+any suggested reform, and it is harmless because of the seeming
+impossibility of ascertaining what all the women of the country really
+want. The women of the United States and the women of all the world
+have
+discovered a means through which they may express their collective
+opinions and desires: organization, and more organization. Lake City is
+but one instance in a thousand.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_23"></a>When American women began, a generation ago,
+to form themselves into
+clubs, and later to join these clubs into state federations of clubs,
+and finally the state federations into a national body, they did not
+dream that they were going to express a collective opinion. Indeed, at
+that time not very many had opinions worth expressing. The immediate
+need of women's souls at the beginning of the club movement was for
+education; the higher education they missed by not going to college,
+and
+they formed their clubs with the sole object of self-culture.</p>
+<p>The study period did not last very long. In fact it was doomed from
+the
+beginning, for it is not in the nature of women, or at least it is not
+in the habit of women, to do things for themselves alone. They have
+<i>served</i> for so many generations that they have learned to like
+serving
+better than anything else in the world, and they add service to the
+pursuit of culture, just as some of them add the important postscript
+to
+the unimportant letter.</p>
+<p>Thus Dallas, Texas, had a women's club of <a name="Page_24"></a>the
+culture caste. One spring
+day, after the star member had read a paper on the "Lake Poets," and
+another member had rendered a Chopin <i>&eacute;tude</i> on the piano,
+they began to
+talk about the stegomyia mosquito, and what a pity it was that the
+annual danger of contagion and death from the bite of that insect had
+to
+be faced all over again. Pools of water all over town, simply swarming
+with little wriggling things, soon to emerge as full-armed stegomyias,
+merely because the city authorities hadn't the money, or said they
+hadn't, to cover the pools with oil.</p>
+<p>"Why, oil isn't very expensive," said one of the club women. "Let's
+buy
+a whole lot of it and do the work ourselves."</p>
+<p>So the work of saving hundreds of lives every year was added to the
+study of "Lake Poets" and Chopin by the Women's Club of Dallas. The
+members mapped the city, laid it out in districts, organized their
+forces, bought oil and oil-cans and set forth. They visited the
+schools,
+got teachers and pupils interested, and <a name="Page_25"></a>secured
+their co-operation. The
+study of city sanitation was soon put into the school curriculum, and
+oiling pools of standing water in every quarter of the town is now a
+regular part of the school program in the upper grades. Every year the
+club women renew the agitation, and every year the school children go
+out with their teachers and cover the pools with oil.</p>
+<p>That story could be paralleled in almost any city in the United
+States.
+Clubs everywhere organized for the intellectual advancement of the
+members, for the culture of music, art, and crafts, soon added to the
+original object a department of philanthropy, a department of public
+school decoration, a department of child labor, a department of civics.
+The day a women's club adopts civics as a side line to literature, that
+day it ceases to be a private association and becomes a public
+institution&#8212;and the public sometimes finds this out before the club
+suspects it.</p>
+<p>An Eastern woman was visiting in San Fran<a name="Page_26"></a>cisco
+a short time before the
+fire. In the complication of three streets with names almost identical,
+she lost her way to the reception whither she was bound. The conductor
+on the last car she tried before going home was deeply sympathetic.</p>
+<p>"'Tis a shame, ma'am, them streets," he declared. "I've always said
+there was no sense at all in havin' them named like that. A stranger is
+bound to go wrong. I'll tell you what you do, ma'am: you go straight to
+Mrs. Lovell White, she that bosses the women's clubs, you know, ma'am.
+You tell her about them streets, and she'll have 'em changed."</p>
+<p>The conductor's simple faith in the Women's Club of San Francisco
+did
+not lack justification. In the intervals of studying Browning and
+antique art, the club found time to discover to San Francisco all sorts
+of things that the city wanted and needed without knowing that it did.</p>
+<p>"We ought to have a flower market," pronounced the club.</p>
+<p>"<a name="Page_27"></a>Nonsense," said the City Council. "Besides,
+where is the money to come
+from?"</p>
+<p>"We'll establish the flower market and show you," returned the club.</p>
+<p>They did. They found a centrally located square, the place where
+people
+would be likely to go for an early morning sale of potted plants and
+cut
+flowers. Prices are moderate in outdoor markets, and nothing else so
+stimulates in an entire community the gardening instinct, usually
+confined to a few individuals. The city authorities discovered that the
+flower market filled a long-felt want. So the city took the market over.</p>
+<p>These activities were more or less local. Others, begun as local
+affairs, ultimately became national in scope. The movement which has
+resulted in a national program in favor of public playgrounds for
+children began as a women's club movement. For a dozen years before the
+Playgrounds Association of America came into existence, women's clubs
+all over the country had been establishing playgrounds, <a
+ name="Page_28"></a>supporting them
+out of their club treasuries, and using every power of persuasion to
+educate boards of education and city councils in their favor.</p>
+<p>Pittsburg affords a typical instance. In 1896 there was a Civic Club
+of
+Allegheny County, composed of women of the twin steel cities of
+Pittsburg and Allegheny. At the head of its Education Department there
+was a woman, Miss Beulah Kennard, who loved children; not beautifully
+clean, well behaved, curled and polished children, but just children.
+Children attracted Miss Kennard to such a degree that she couldn't bear
+the sight of them wallowing in the grime and soot of Pittsburg streets
+and alleys. Often she stopped in her walks to watch them, dodging
+wagons
+and automobiles; throwing stones, tossing balls, fighting, and shooting
+craps; stealing apples from push-carts, getting arrested and being
+dragged through the farce of a trial at law for the crime of playing.</p>
+<p>"Those children," Miss Kennard told her <a name="Page_29"></a>club,
+"have got to have a
+decent place to play this summer." And the club agreed with her. The
+treasury yielded for a beginning the modest sum of one hundred and
+twenty-five dollars, and with this money the women fitted out one
+schoolyard, large enough for sixty children to play in. There was no
+trouble about getting the sixty together. They came, a noisy, joyous,
+turbulent, vacation set of children, and the anxious committee from the
+club looked at them in great trepidation of spirit and said to one
+another: "What on earth are we going to do with them, now that we've
+got
+them here?"</p>
+<p>With hardly a ghost of precedent to guide them, the club undertook
+the
+work, and as women have had considerable experience in taking care of
+children at home, they soon discovered ways of taking care of them
+successfully in the playground.</p>
+<p>The next summer the Civic Club invested six hundred dollars in
+playgrounds. Two schoolyards were fitted up in Pittsburg and <a
+ name="Page_30"></a>two in
+Allegheny. After that, every summer, the work was extended. More money
+each year was voted, and additional playgrounds were established. In
+the
+summer of 1899, three years after the first experiment, Pittsburg
+children had nine playgrounds and Allegheny children had three, all
+gifts of the women. By another year the committee was handling
+thousands
+of dollars and managing an enterprise of considerable magnitude. Also
+their work was attracting the admiration of other club women, who asked
+for an opportunity to co-operate. In 1900 practically all the clubs of
+the two cities united, and formed a joint committee of the Women's
+Clubs
+of Pittsburg and vicinity to take charge of playgrounds.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img002"></a><img
+ style="width: 380px; height: 271px;"
+ alt="CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH. Established by club women and for years supported by them."
+ title="CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH. Established by club women and for years supported by them."
+ src="images/002.jpg"></p>
+<p>All this time the work was entirely in the hands of the club women,
+who
+bought the apparatus, organized the games, employed the trained
+supervisors, and supplied from their own membership the volunteer
+workers, without whom the enterprise would have been a <a
+ name="Page_31"></a>failure from
+the start. The Board of Education co-operated to the extent of lending
+schoolyards. Finally the Board of Education decided to vote an annual
+contribution of money.</p>
+<p>In 1902 the city of Pittsburg woke up and gave the women fifteen
+hundred
+dollars, with which they established one more playground and a
+recreation park. The original one hundred and twenty-five dollars had
+now expanded to nearly eight thousand dollars, and Pittsburg and
+Allegheny children were not only playing in a dozen schoolyards, but
+they were attending vacation schools, under expert instructors in
+manual
+training, cooking, sewing, art-crafts. Several recreation centers,
+all-the-year-round playgrounds, have been added since then. For
+Pittsburg has adopted the women's point of view in the matter of
+playgrounds. This year the city voted fifty thousand, three hundred and
+fifty dollars, and the Board of Education appropriated ten thousand
+dollars for the vacation schools.</p>
+<p>In Detroit it was the Twentieth Century <a name="Page_32"></a>Club
+that began the playground
+agitation. Mrs. Clara B. Arthur, some ten years ago, read a paper
+before
+the Department of Philanthropy and Reform, and following it the
+chairman
+of the meeting appointed a committee to consider the possibility of
+playgrounds for Detroit children. The committee visited the Board of
+Education, explained the need of playgrounds, and asked that the Board
+conduct one trial playground in a schoolyard, during the approaching
+vacation. The Board declined. The boards of education in most cities
+declined at first.</p>
+<p>The club did not give up. It talked playgrounds to the other clubs,
+until all the organizations of women were interested. Within a year or
+two Detroit had a Council of Women, with a committee on playgrounds.
+The
+committee went to the Common Council this time and asked permission to
+erect a pavilion and establish a playground on a piece of city land.
+This was a great, bare, neglected spot, the site of an abandoned
+reservoir which had been of <a name="Page_33"></a>no use to anybody
+for twenty years. The
+place had the advantage of being in a very forlorn neighborhood where
+many children swarmed.</p>
+<p>The Common Council was mildly amused at the idea of putting public
+property to such an absurd, such an unheard-of use. A few of the men
+were indignant. One Germanic alderman exploded wrathfully: "Vot does
+vimmens know about poys' play&#8212;No!" And that settled it.</p>
+<p>The committee went to the Board of Education once more, this time
+with
+better success. They received permission to open and conduct, during
+the
+long vacation, one playground in a large schoolyard. For two summers
+the
+women maintained that playground, holding their faith against the
+opposition of the janitors, the jeers of the newspapers, and the
+constant hostility of tax-payers, who protested against the "ruin of
+school property." After two years the Board of Education took over the
+work. The mayor became personally interested, and the Common Council
+gracefully surrendered. They <a name="Page_34"></a>have plenty of
+playgrounds in Detroit now,
+the latest development being winter sports.</p>
+<p>If the Germanic alderman who protested that "vimmins" did not know
+anything about boys' play was in office at the time, one wonders what
+his emotions were when the playgrounds committee first appeared before
+the Council and asked to have vacant lots flooded to give children
+skating ponds in winter. Of course the Council refused. Fire plugs were
+for water in case of fire, not for children's enjoyment. In fact there
+was a city ordinance forbidding the opening of a fire plug in winter,
+except to extinguish fire. It took two years of constant work on the
+part of the club women to remove that ordinance, but they did it, and
+the children of Detroit have their winter as well as their summer
+playgrounds.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img003"></a><img
+ style="width: 374px; height: 312px;"
+ alt="CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK, PITTSBURGH. Out of the persistent work of club women more than three hundred playgrounds for children have been established."
+ title="CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK, PITTSBURGH. Out of the persistent work of club women more than three hundred playgrounds for children have been established."
+ src="images/003.jpg"></p>
+<p>In Philadelphia are fourteen splendid playgrounds and vacation
+schools,
+established in the beginning and maintained for many years by a civic
+club of women, the largest women's civic club in the country. The
+process of edu<a name="Page_35"></a>cating public opinion in their
+favor was slow, for it
+is difficult to make men see that the children of a modern city have
+different needs from the country or village children of a generation
+ago. Men remember their own boyhood, and scoff at the idea of organized
+and supervised play in a made playground. Women have no memories of the
+old swimming-hole. They simply see the conditions before them, and they
+instinctively know what must be done to meet them. The process of
+educating the others is slow, but this year in Philadelphia sixty
+public
+schoolyards were opened for public playgrounds, and the city
+appropriated five thousand dollars towards their maintenance. In a
+hundred cities East and West the women's clubs have been the original
+movers or have co-operated in the playground movement.</p>
+<p>Out of this persistent work was born the Playground Association of
+America, an organization of men and women, which in the three years of
+its existence has established more than three hundred playgrounds for
+children. <a name="Page_36"></a>In Massachusetts they have secured a
+referendum providing
+that all cities of over ten thousand inhabitants shall vote upon the
+question of providing adequate playgrounds. The act provides that every
+city and town in the Commonwealth which accepts the act shall after
+July
+1, 1910, provide and maintain at least one public playground, and at
+least one other playground for every additional twenty thousand
+inhabitants. Something like twenty-five cities in the State have
+accepted the playgrounds act. It is a good beginning. The slogan of the
+movement, "The boy without a playground is the father of the man
+without
+a job," has swept over the continent.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img004"></a><img
+ style="width: 357px; height: 299px;"
+ alt="STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD, LOS ANGELES, CAL."
+ title="STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD, LOS ANGELES, CAL."
+ src="images/004.jpg"></p>
+<p>This surely is a not inconsiderable achievement for so humble an
+instrument as women's clubs. It is true that in most communities they
+have forgotten that the women's clubs ever had anything to do with the
+movement. The Playgrounds Association has not forgotten, however. Its
+president, Luther Halsey Gulick, of New York, declares that even now
+the
+work <a name="Page_37"></a>would languish if it lost the co-operation
+of the women's clubs.</p>
+<p>The scope of woman's work for civic betterment is wider than the
+interests that directly affect children. How much the women attempt,
+how
+difficult they find their task, how much opposition they encounter, and
+how certain their success in the end, is indicated in a modest report
+of
+the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Women's Civic Club. That report says in
+part:</p>
+<p>"It is no longer necessary for us to continue, at our own cost, the
+practical experiment we began in street-cleaning, or to advocate the
+paving of a single principal street, as a test of the value of improved
+highways; nor is it necessary longer to strive for a pure water supply,
+a healthier sewerage system, or the construction of playgrounds. <i>This
+work is now being done by the City Council, by the Board of Public
+Works, and by the Park Commission.</i>"</p>
+<p>Not that the Harrisburg Women's Civic <a name="Page_38"></a>Club
+has gone out of business. It
+still keeps fairly busy with schoolhouse decoration, traveling
+libraries
+for factory employees, and inspecting the city dump.</p>
+<p>In Birmingham, Alabama, the women's work has been recognized
+officially.
+The club Women have formed "block" clubs, composed of the women living
+in each block, and the mayor has invested them with powers of
+supervision, control of street cleaning, and disposal of waste and
+garbage. They really act as overseers, and can remove lazy and
+incompetent employees.</p>
+<p>Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has a ten-year-old Civic Club. The women
+have
+succeeded in getting objectionable billboards removed, public dumps
+removed from the town, in having all outside market stalls covered, and
+have secured ordinances forbidding spitting in public places, and
+against throwing litter into the streets.</p>
+<p>Cranford, New Jersey, is one of a dozen small cities where the
+women's
+clubs hold <a name="Page_39"></a>regular town house-cleanings. One
+large town in the Middle
+West adopted a vigorous method of educating public opinion in favor of
+spring and fall municipal house-cleaning. The club women got a
+photographer and went the rounds of streets and alleys and private
+backyards. Wherever bad or neglected conditions were found the club
+sent
+a note to the owner of the property asking him to co-operate with its
+members in cleaning up and beautifying the town. Where no attention was
+paid to the notes, the photographs were posted conspicuously in the
+club's public exhibit.</p>
+<p>If the California women saved the big tree grove, the New Jersey
+women,
+by years of persistent work, saved the Palisades of the Hudson from
+destruction and inaugurated the movement to turn them into a public
+park. As for the Colorado club women, they saved the Cliff Dwellers'
+remains. You can no longer buy the pottery and other priceless relics
+of
+those prehistoric people in the curio-shops of Denver.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_40"></a>I am not attempting a catalogue; I am only
+giving a few crucial
+instances. The activities of women if they appeared only sporadically
+in
+Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, and a dozen other cities, would not
+necessarily carry much weight. They would possess an interest purely
+local. But the club women of Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, do not
+keep their interests local. Once a year they travel, hundreds of them,
+to a chosen city in the State, and there they hold a convention which
+lasts a week. And every second year the club women of Minnesota and
+Texas and California, and every other State in the Union, to say
+nothing
+of Alaska, Porto Rico, and the Canal Zone, thousands of them, journey
+to
+a chosen center, and there they hold a convention which lasts a week.
+And at these state and national conventions the club women compare
+their
+work and criticise it, and confer on public questions, and decide which
+movements they shall promote. They summon experts in all lines of work
+to lecture and <a name="Page_41"></a>advise. Increasingly their work
+is national in its
+scope.</p>
+<p>In round numbers, eight hundred thousand women are now enrolled in
+the
+clubs belonging to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, holding in
+common certain definite opinions, and working harmoniously towards
+certain definite social ends. Remember that these eight hundred
+thousand
+women are the educated, intelligent, socially powerful.</p>
+<p>Long ago these eight hundred thousand women ceased to confine their
+studies to printed pages. They began to study life. Leaders developed,
+women of intellect and experience, who could foresee the immense power
+an organized womanhood might some time wield, and who had courage to
+direct the forces under them towards vital objects.</p>
+<p>When, in 1904, Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker, of Denver, was elected
+President
+of the General Federation, she found a number of old-fashioned clubs
+still devoting themselves to Shakespeare and the classic writers. Mrs.
+<a name="Page_42"></a>Decker, a voter, a full citizen, and a public
+worker of prominence in
+her State, simply laughed the musty study clubs out of existence.</p>
+<p>"Ladies," she said to the delegates at the biennial meeting of 1904,
+"Dante is dead. He died several centuries ago, and a great many things
+have happened since his time. Let us drop the study of his 'Inferno'
+and
+proceed in earnest to contemplate our own social order."</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img005"></a><img
+ style="width: 286px; height: 447px;" alt="MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER"
+ title="MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER" src="images/005.jpg"></div>
+<p>Mostly they took her advice. A few clubs still devote themselves to
+the
+pursuit of pure culture, a few others exist with little motive beyond
+congenial association. The great majority of women's clubs are
+organized
+for social service. A glance at their national program shows the
+modernity, the liberal character of organized women's ideals. The
+General Federation has twelve committees, among them being those on
+Industrial Conditions of Women and Children, Civil Service Reform,
+Forestry, Pure Food and Public Health, Edu<a name="Page_43"></a>cation,
+Civics,
+Legislation, Arts and Crafts, and Household Economics. Every state
+federation has adopted, in the main, the same departments; and the
+individual clubs follow as many lines of the work as their strength
+warrants.</p>
+<p>The contribution of the women's clubs to education has been
+enormous.
+There is hardly a State in the Union the public schools of which have
+not been beautified, inside and outside; hardly a State where
+kindergartens and manual training, domestic science, medical
+inspection,
+stamp savings banks, or other improvements have not been introduced by
+the clubs. In almost every case the clubs have purchased the equipment
+and paid the salaries until the boards of education and the school
+superintendents have been convinced of the value of the innovations. In
+the South, where opportunities for the higher education of women are
+restricted, the clubs support dozens of scholarships in colleges and
+institutes. Many western State federations, notable among which is that
+<a name="Page_44"></a>of Colorado, have strong committees on education
+which are active in
+the entire school system.</p>
+<p>Thomas M. Balliett, Dean of Pedagogy in the New York University,
+paid a
+deserved tribute to the Massachusetts club women when he said:</p>
+<div class="blkquot">"In Massachusetts the various women's
+organizations have, within the
+past few years, made a study of schools and school conditions
+throughout
+the State with a thoroughness that has never been attempted before."</div>
+<p>Dean Balliett says of women's clubs in general that the most
+important
+reform movements in elementary education within the past twenty years
+have been due, in large measure, to the efforts of organized women. And
+he is right.</p>
+<p>The women's clubs have founded more libraries than Mr. Carnegie.
+Early
+in the movement the women began the circulation among the clubs of
+traveling reference libraries. Soon this work was extended, but the
+object <a name="Page_45"></a>of the libraries was diverted. Instead of
+collections of books
+on special subjects to assist the club women in their studies, the
+traveling cases were arranged in miscellaneous groups, and were sent to
+schools, to factories, to lonely farms, mining camps, lumber camps, and
+to isolated towns and villages.</p>
+<p>Iowa now has more than twelve thousand volumes, half of them
+reference
+books, in circulation. Eighty-one permanent libraries have grown out of
+the traveling libraries in Iowa alone. After the traveling cases have
+been coming to a town for a year or two, people wake up and agree that
+they want a permanent place in which to read and study. Ohio has over a
+thousand libraries in circulation, having succeeded, a few years ago,
+in
+getting a substantial appropriation from the legislature to supplement
+their work. Western States&#8212;Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho&#8212;have supplied
+reading matter to ranches and mining camps for many years.</p>
+<p>One interesting special library is circulated <a name="Page_46"></a>in
+Massachusetts and
+Rhode Island in behalf of the anti-tuberculosis movement. Something
+like
+forty of the best books on health, and on the prevention and cure of
+tuberculosis, are included. This library, with a pretty complete
+tuberculosis exhibit, is sent around, and is shown by the local clubs
+of
+each town. Usually the women try to have a mass-meeting, at which local
+health problems are discussed. The Health Department of the General
+Federation is working to establish these health libraries and exhibits
+in every State.</p>
+<p>Not only in the United States, but in every civilized country, have
+women associated themselves together with the object of reforming what
+seems to them social chaos. In practically every civilized country in
+the world to-day there exists a Council of Women, a central
+organization
+to which clubs and societies of women with all sorts of opinions and
+objects send delegates. In the United States the council is made up of
+the General Federation <a name="Page_47"></a>of Women's Clubs, the
+Woman's Christian
+Temperance Union, and innumerable smaller organizations, like the
+National Congress of Mothers, and the Daughters of the American
+Revolution. More than a million and a half American women are
+affiliated.</p>
+<p>Four hundred and twenty-six women's organizations belong to the
+council
+in Great Britain. In Switzerland the council has sixty-four allied
+societies; in Austria it has fifty; in the Netherlands it has
+thirty-five. Seventy-five thousand women belong to the French council.
+In all, the International Council of Women, to which all the councils
+send delegates, represents more than eight million women, in countries
+as far apart as Australia, Argentine, Iceland, Persia, South Africa,
+and
+every country in Europe. The council, indeed, has no formal
+organization
+in Russia, because organizations of every kind are illegal in Russia.
+But Russian women attend every meeting of the International Council.
+Turkish women sent word to the last meeting that they <a name="Page_48"></a>hoped
+soon to ask
+for admission. The President of the International Council of Women is
+the Countess of Aberdeen. Titled women in every European country belong
+to their councils. The Queen of Greece is president of the Greek
+council.</p>
+<p>The object of this great world organization of women is to provide a
+common center for women of every country, race, creed, or party who are
+associating themselves together in altruistic work. Once every five
+years the International Council holds a great world congress of women.</p>
+<p>What eight million of the most intelligent, the most thoughtful, the
+most altruistic women in the world believe, what they think the world
+needs, what they wish and desire for the good of humanity, must be of
+interest. It must count.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img006"></a><img
+ style="width: 302px; height: 572px;"
+ alt="LADY ABERDEEN President of the International Council of Women."
+ title="LADY ABERDEEN President of the International Council of Women."
+ src="images/006.jpg"></p>
+<p>The International Council of Women discusses every important
+question
+presented, but makes no decision until the opinion of the delegates is
+practically unanimous. It com<a name="Page_49"></a>mits itself to no
+opinion, lends itself
+to no movement, until the movement has passed the controversial stage.</p>
+<p>Those who cling to the old notion that women are perpetually at war
+with
+one another will learn with astonishment that eight million women of
+all
+nationalities, religions, and temperaments are agreed on at least four
+questions. In the course of its twenty years of existence the
+International Council has agreed to support four movements: Peace and
+arbitration, social purity, removing legal disabilities of women, woman
+suffrage.</p>
+<p>The American reader will be inclined to cavil at the last-mentioned
+object. Woman suffrage, it will be claimed, has not passed the
+controversial stage, even with women themselves. That is true in the
+United States and in England. It is true, in a sense, in most countries
+of the world. But in European countries not <i>woman</i> suffrage, but
+<i>universal</i> suffrage is being struggled for.</p>
+<p>I had this explained to me in Russia, in the <a name="Page_50"></a>course
+of a conversation
+with Alexis Aladyn, the brilliant leader of the Social Democratic
+party.
+I said to him that I had been informed that the conservative reformers,
+as well as the radicals, included woman suffrage in their programs.
+Aladyn looked puzzled for a moment, and then he replied: "All parties
+desire universal suffrage. Naturally that includes women."</p>
+<p>Finland at that time, 1906, had recently won its independence from
+the
+autocracy and was preparing for its first general election. Talking
+with
+one of the nineteen women returned to Parliament a few months later, I
+asked: "How did you Finnish women persuade the makers of the new
+constitution to give you the franchise?"</p>
+<p>"Persuade?" she repeated; "we did not have to persuade them. There
+was
+simply no opposition. One of the demands made on the Russian Government
+was for universal suffrage."</p>
+<p>The movement for universal suffrage, that <a name="Page_51"></a>is
+the movement for free
+government, with the consent of the governed, is considered by the
+International Council of Women to have passed the controversial stage.</p>
+<p>The whole club movement, as a matter of fact, is a part of the great
+democratic movement which is sweeping over the whole world. Individual
+clubs may be exclusive, even aristocratic in their tendencies, but the
+large organization is absolutely democratic. If the President of the
+International Council is an English peeress, one of the vice-presidents
+is the wife of a German music teacher, and one of the secretaries is a
+self-supporting woman. The General Federation in the United States is
+made up of women of various stations in life, from millionaires' wives
+to factory girls.</p>
+<p>The democracy of women's organizations was shown at the meeting in
+London a year ago of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, where
+delegates from twenty-one countries assembled. One of the great
+features
+of the meeting was a wonderful pageant of <a name="Page_52"></a>women's
+trades and
+professions. An immense procession of women, bearing banners and
+emblems
+of their work, marched through streets lined with spectators to Albert
+Hall, where the entire orchestra of this largest auditorium in the
+world
+was reserved for them. A published account of the pageant, after
+describing the delegations of teachers, nurses, doctors, journalists,
+artists, authors, house workers, factory women, stenographers, and
+others well known here, says:</p>
+<div class="blkquot">"Then the ranks opened, and down the long aisle
+came the chain
+makers
+who work at the forge, and the pit-brow women from the mines,&#8212;women
+whose faces have been blackened by smoke and coal dust until they can
+never be washed white.... To these women, the hardest workers in the
+land, were given the seats of honor, while behind them, gladly taking a
+subordinate place, were many women wearing gowns with scarlet and
+purple
+hoods, indicating their university degrees."</div>
+<p>Every public movement&#8212;reform, philan<a name="Page_53"></a>thropic,
+sanitary,
+educational&#8212;now asks the co-operation of women's organizations. The
+United States Government asked the co-operation of the women's clubs to
+save the precarious Panama situation. At a moment when social
+discontent
+threatened literally to stop the building of the canal, the Department
+of Commerce and Labor employed Miss Helen Varick Boswell, of New York,
+to go to the Isthmus and organize the wives and daughters of Government
+employees into clubs. The Department knew that the clubs, once
+organized, would do the rest. Nor was it disappointed.</p>
+<p>The Government asks the co-operation of women in its latest work of
+conserving natural resources. At the biennial of the Federation of
+Women's Clubs in 1906 Mr. Enos Mills delivered an address on forestry,
+a
+movement which was beginning to engage the attention of the clubs.
+Within an hour after he left the platform Mr. Mills had been engaged by
+a dozen state presidents to lecture to clubs and federations. As soon
+as
+it reached the <a name="Page_54"></a>Government that the women's clubs
+were paying fifty
+dollars a lecture to learn about forestry work, the Government arranged
+that the clubs should have the best authorities in the nation to
+lecture
+on forestry free of all expense.</p>
+<p>But the Government is not alone in recognizing the power of women's
+organizations. If the Government approves their interest in public
+questions, vested interests are beginning to fear it. The president of
+the Manufacturers' Association, in his inaugural address, told his
+colleagues that their wives and daughters invited some very dangerous
+and revolutionary speakers to address their clubs. He warned them that
+the women were becoming too friendly toward reforms that the
+association
+frowned upon.</p>
+<p>This is indeed true, and women display, in their new-found
+enthusiasm, a
+singularly obstinate spirit. All the legislatures south of the Mason
+and
+Dixon Line cannot make the Southern women believe that Southern
+pros<a name="Page_55"></a>perity is dependent upon young children
+laboring in mills. The
+women go on working for child labor and compulsory education laws,
+unconvinced by the arguments of the mill owners and the votes of the
+legislators. The highest court in the State of New York was powerless
+to
+persuade New York club women that the United States Constitution stands
+in the way of a law prohibiting the night work of women. The Court of
+Appeals declared the law unconstitutional, and many women at present
+are
+toiling at night. But the club women immediately began fighting for a
+new law.</p>
+<p>The women of every State in the Union are able to work harmoniously
+together because they are unhampered with traditions of what the
+founders of the Republic intended,&#8212;the sacredness of state rights, or
+the protective paternalism of Wall Street. The gloriously illogical
+sincerity of women is concerned only about the thing itself.</p>
+<p>I have left for future consideration women <a name="Page_56"></a>who
+having definite social
+theories have organized themselves for definite objects. This chapter
+has purposely been confined to the activities of average women&#8212;good
+wives and mothers, the eight hundred thousand American women whose
+collective opinion is expressed through the General Federation of
+Women's Clubs. For the most part they are mature in years, these club
+women. Their children are grown. Some are in college and some are
+married. I have heard more than one presiding officer at a State
+Federation meeting proudly announce from the platform that she had
+become a grandmother since the last convention.</p>
+<p>The present president of the General Federation, Mrs. Philip N.
+Moore of
+St. Louis, Missouri, is a graduate of Vassar College, and served for a
+time as president of the National Society of Collegiate Alumnae. There
+are not wanting in the club movement many women who have taken college
+and university honors. Club women taken the country over, however, <a
+ name="Page_57"></a>are
+not college products. If they had been, the club movement might have
+taken on a more cultural and a less practical form. As it was, the
+women
+formed their groups with the direct object of educating themselves and,
+being practical women used to work, they readily turned their new
+knowledge to practical ends. As quickly as they found out, through
+education, what their local communities needed they were filled with a
+generous desire to supply those needs. In reality they simply learned
+from books and study how to apply their housekeeping lore to municipal
+government and the public school system. Nine-tenths of the work they
+have undertaken relates to children, the school, and the home. Some of
+it seemed radical in the beginning, but none of it has failed, in the
+long run, to win the warmest approval of the people.</p>
+<p>The eight million women who form the International Council of Women,
+and
+express the collective opinion of women the world over, are not
+exceptional types, although they <a name="Page_58"></a>may possess
+exceptional intelligence.
+They are merely good citizens, wives, and mothers. Their program
+contains nothing especially radical. And yet, what a revolution would
+the world witness were that program carried out? Peace and arbitration;
+social purity; public health; woman suffrage; removal of all legal
+disabilities of women. This last-named object is perhaps more
+revolutionary in its character than the others, because its fulfillment
+will disturb the basic theories on which the nations have established
+their different forms of government.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_III"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_59"></a>CHAPTER III<br>
+</h2>
+<h2>EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW</h2>
+<p>Several years ago a woman of wealth and social prominence in
+Kentucky,
+after pondering some time on the inferior position of women in the
+United States, wrote a book. In this volume the United States was
+compared most unfavorably with the countries of Europe, where the
+dignity and importance of women received some measure of recognition.
+Women, this author protested, enjoy a larger measure of political power
+in England than in America. In England and throughout Europe their
+social power is greater. If a man becomes lord mayor of an English city
+his wife becomes lady mayoress, and she shares all her husband's
+official honors. On the Continent women are often made honorary
+colonels
+of regiments, and take part with the men in <a name="Page_60"></a>military
+reviews. Women
+frequently hold high offices at court, acting as chamberlains,
+constables, and the like. The writer closed her last chapter with the
+announcement that she meant henceforth to make her home in England,
+where women had more than once occupied the throne as absolute monarch
+and constitutional ruler.</p>
+<p>It is true that in some particulars American women do seem to be at
+a
+disadvantage with European women. With what looks like a higher regard
+for women's intelligence, England has bestowed upon them every measure
+of suffrage except the Parliamentary franchise. In England, throughout
+the Middle Ages, and even down to the present century, women held the
+office of sheriff of the county, clerk of the crown, high constable,
+chamberlain, and even champion at a coronation,&#8212;the champion being a
+picturesque figure who rides into the hall and flings his glove to the
+nobles, in defense of the king's crown.</p>
+<p>In the royal pageants of European history <a name="Page_61"></a>behold
+the powerful figures
+of Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth, Mary of
+Scotland, Christina of Sweden, rulers in fact as well as in name; to
+say
+nothing of the long line of women regents in whose hands the state
+intrusted its affairs, during the minority of its kings. In the United
+States a woman candidate for mayor of a small town would be considered
+a
+joke.</p>
+<p>These and other inconsistencies have puzzled many ardent upholders
+of
+American chivalry. In order to understand the position of women in the
+United States it is necessary to make a brief survey of the laws under
+which European women are governed, and the social theory on which their
+apparent advantages are based.</p>
+<p>In the first place, the statement that in European countries a woman
+may
+succeed to the throne must be qualified. In three countries only,
+England, Spain, and Portugal, are women counted in the line of
+succession on terms approaching equality with men. In these three
+countries when a monarch dies <a name="Page_62"></a>leaving no sons
+his eldest daughter
+becomes the sovereign. If the ruling monarch die, leaving no children
+at
+all, the oldest daughter&#8212;failing sons&#8212;of the man who was in his
+lifetime in direct line of succession is given preference to male heirs
+more remote. Thus Queen Victoria succeeded William IV, she being the
+only child of the late king's deceased brother and heir, the Duke of
+Kent.</p>
+<p>Similar laws govern the succession in Portugal and Spain, although
+dispute on this point has more than once caused civil war in Spain.</p>
+<p>In Holland, Greece, Russia, Austria, and a few German states a woman
+may
+succeed to the throne, provided every single male heir to the crown is
+dead. Queen Wilhelmina became sovereign in Holland only because the
+House of Orange was extinct in the male line, and Holland lost, on
+account of the accession of Wilhelmina, the rich and important Duchy of
+Luxemburg.</p>
+<p>Luxemburg, in common with the rest of Europe, except the countries
+described, lives <a name="Page_63"></a>under what is known as the
+Salic Law, according to
+which a woman may not, in any circumstances, become sovereign.</p>
+<p>A word about this Salic Law is necessary, because the tradition of
+it
+permeates the whole atmosphere in which the women of Europe live, move,
+and have their legal and social being.</p>
+<p>The Salic Law was the code of a barbarous people, so far extinct and
+forgotten that it is uncertain just what territory in ancient Gaul they
+occupied at the time the code was formulated. Later the Salian Franks,
+as the tribe was designated, built on the left bank of the Seine rude
+fortresses and a collection of wattled huts which became the ancestor
+of
+the present-day city of Paris.</p>
+<p>The Salic Law was a complete code. It governed all matters, civil
+and
+military. It prescribed rules of war; it fixed the salaries of
+officials; it designated the exact amount of blood money the family of
+a
+slain man might collect from the family of the slayer; it regu<a
+ name="Page_64"></a>lated
+conditions under which individuals might travel from one village to
+another; it governed matters of property transfer and inheritance.</p>
+<p>The Salian Franks are dust; their might has perished, their annals
+are
+forgotten, their cities are leveled, their mightiest kings sleep in
+unmarked graves, their code has passed out of existence, almost indeed
+out of the memory of man,&#8212;all except one paragraph of one division of
+one law. The law related to inheritance of property; the special
+division distinguished between real and personal property, and the
+paragraph ruled that a woman might inherit movable property, but that
+she might not inherit land.</p>
+<p>There was not a syllable in the law relating to the inheritance of a
+throne. Nevertheless, centuries after the last Salian king was laid in
+his barbarous grave a French prince successfully contested with an
+English prince the crown of France, his claim resting on that obscure
+paragraph in the Salic code. The Hundred Years' War was fought on this
+issue, <a name="Page_65"></a>and the final outcome of the war
+established the Salic Law
+permanently in France, and with more or less rigor in most of the
+European states.</p>
+<p>At the time of the French Revolution, when the "Rights of Man" were
+being declared with so much fervor and enthusiasm, when the old laws
+were being revised in favor of greater freedom of the individual, the
+"Rights of Woman" were actually revised downward. Up to this time the
+application of the Salic Law was based on tradition and precedent. Now
+a
+special statute was enacted forever barring women from the sovereignty
+of France. "Founded on the pride of the French, who could not bear to
+be
+ruled by their own women folk," as the records are careful to state.</p>
+<p>The interpretation of the Salic Law did more, a great deal more,
+than
+exclude women from the throne. It established the principle of the
+inherent inferiority of women. The system of laws erected on that
+principle were necessarily deeply tinged with contempt for <a
+ name="Page_66"></a>women, and
+with fear lest their influence in any way might affect the conduct of
+state affairs. That explains why, at the present time, although in most
+European countries women are allowed to practice medicine, they are not
+allowed to practice law. Medicine may be as learned a profession, but
+it
+affects only human beings. The law, on the other hand, affects the
+state. A woman advocate, you can readily imagine, might so influence a
+court of justice that the laws of the land might suffer feminization.
+From the European point of view this would be most undesirable.</p>
+<p>The apparently superior rights possessed by English women were also
+bestowed upon them by a vanished system of laws. They have descended
+from Feudalism, in which social order the <i>person</i> did not exist.
+The
+social order consisted of <i>property</i> alone, and the claims of
+property,
+that is to say, land, were paramount over the claims of the individual.
+Those historic women sheriffs of counties, clerks of crown,
+chamberlains, and high constables held <a name="Page_67"></a>their
+high offices because the
+offices were hereditary property in certain titled families, and they
+had to belong to the entail, even when a woman was in possession. The
+offices were purely titular. No English woman ever acted as high
+constable. No English woman ever attended a coronation as king's
+champion. The rights and duties of these offices were delegated to a
+male relative. Every once in a while, during the Middle Ages, some
+strong-minded lady of title demanded the right to administer her office
+in person, but she was always sternly put down by a rebuking House of
+Lords, sometimes even by the king's majesty himself.</p>
+<p>In the same way the voting powers of the women of England are a
+result
+of hereditary privilege. Local affairs in England, until a very recent
+period, were administered through the parish, and the only persons
+qualified to vote were the property owners of the parish. It was really
+property interests and not people who voted. Those women who owned
+prop<a name="Page_68"></a>erty, or who were administering property for
+their minor children,
+were entitled to vote, to serve on boards of guardians, and to dispense
+the Poor Laws. Out of their right of parish vote has grown their right
+of municipal franchise. It carries with it a property qualification,
+and
+the proposed Parliamentary franchise, for which the women of England
+are
+making such a magnificent fight, will also have a property
+qualification.</p>
+<p>The real position, legal and social, which women in England and
+continental Europe have for centuries occupied, may be gauged from an
+examination of the feminist movement in a very enlightened country, say
+Germany. The laws of Germany were founded on the Corpus Juris of the
+Romans, a stern code which relegates women to the position of chattels.
+And chattels they have been in Germany, until very recent years, when
+through the intelligent persistence of strong women the chains have
+somewhat been loosened.</p>
+<p>A generation ago, in 1865, to be exact, a <a name="Page_69"></a>group
+of women in Leipzig
+formed an association which they called the Allgemeinen Deutschen
+Frauenbund, which may be Anglicized into General Association of German
+Women. The stated objects of the association give a pretty clear idea
+of
+the position of women at that time. The women demanded as their rights,
+Education, the Right to Work, Free Choice of Profession. Nothing more,
+but these three demands were so revolutionary that all masculine
+Germany, and most of feminine Germany, uttered horrified protests.
+Needless to say nothing came of the women's demand.</p>
+<p>After the Franco-Prussian War the center of the women's revolt
+naturally
+moved to the capital of the new empire, Berlin. From that city, during
+the years that followed, so much feminine unrest was radiated that in
+1887 the German Woman Suffrage Association was formed, with the demand
+for absolute equality with men. Two remarkable women, Minna Cauer and
+Anita Augsberg, the latter unmar<a name="Page_70"></a>ried and a doctor
+of laws, were the
+moving spirits in the first woman suffrage agitation, which has since
+extended throughout the empire until there is hardly a small town
+without its suffrage club.</p>
+<p>Now the woman suffragist in Germany differs from the American
+suffragist
+in that she is always a member of a political party. She is a silent
+member to be sure, but she adheres to her party, because, through
+tradition or conviction, she believes in its policies. Usually the
+suffragist is a member of the Social Democratic Party, allied to the
+International Socialist Party. She is a suffragist because she is a
+Socialist, because woman suffrage, and, indeed, the full equalization
+of
+the laws governing men and women are a part of the Socialist platform
+in
+every country in the world. The woman member of the Social Democratic
+party is not working primarily for woman suffrage. She is working for a
+complete overturning of the present economic system, and she advocates
+<i>universal adult suffrage</i> as a means of bring<a name="Page_71"></a>ing
+about the social and
+economic changes demanded by the Socialists.</p>
+<p>These German Socialist women are often very advanced spirits, who
+hold
+university degrees, who have entered the professions, and are generally
+emancipated from strictly conventional lives. Others, in large numbers,
+belong to the intellectual proletarian classes. Their American
+prototypes are to be found in the Women's Trade Union League, described
+in a later chapter.</p>
+<p>The other German suffragists are members of the radical, the
+moderate
+(we should say conservative), and the clerical parties. These women are
+middle class, average, intelligent wives and mothers. They correspond
+fairly well with the women of the General Federation of Clubs in the
+United States, and like the American club women they are affiliated
+with
+the International Council of Women. Locally they are working for the
+social reforms demanded by the first American suffrage convention, held
+in Seneca Falls, New York, in <a name="Page_72"></a>1848. They are
+demanding the higher
+education, married women's property rights, free speech, and the right
+to choose a trade or profession. They are demanding other rights, from
+lack of which the American woman never suffered. The right to attend a
+political meeting was until recently denied to German women. Although
+they take a far keener and more intelligent interest in national and
+local politics than American women as a rule have ever taken, their
+presence at political meetings has but yesterday been sanctioned.</p>
+<p>The civil responsibility of the father and mother in many European
+countries is barbarously unequal. If a marriage exists between the
+parents the father is the only parent recognized. He is sole guardian
+and authority. When divorce dissolves a marriage the rights of the
+father are generally paramount, even when he is the party accused.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, if no marriage exists between the parents, if the
+child is what is called illegitimate, the mother is alone responsible
+for <a name="Page_73"></a>its maintenance. Not only is the father free
+from all
+responsibility, his status as a father is denied by law. Inquiry into
+the paternity of the child is in some countries forbidden. The unhappy
+mother may have documentary proof that she was betrayed under promise
+of
+marriage, but she is not allowed to produce her proof.</p>
+<p>Under the French Code, the substance of which governs all Europe, it
+is
+distinctly a principle that the woman's honor is and ought to be of
+less
+value than a man's honor. Napoleon personally insisted on this
+principle, and more than once emphasized his belief that no importance
+should be attached to men's share in illegitimacy.</p>
+<p>These and other degrading laws the European progressive women are
+trying
+to remove from the Codes. They have their origin in the belief in "The
+imprudence, the frailty, and the imbecility" of women, to quote from
+this Code Napoleon.</p>
+<p>Whatever women's legal disabilities in the <a name="Page_74"></a>United
+States, their laws
+were never based on the principle that women were imprudent, frail, or
+imbecile. They placed women at a distinct disadvantage, it is true, but
+it was the disadvantage of the minor child and not of the inferior, the
+chattel, the property of man, as in Europe.</p>
+<p>Laws in the United States were founded on the assumption that women
+stood in perpetual need of protection. The law makers carried this to
+the absurd extent of assuming that protection was all the right a woman
+needed or all she ought to claim. They even pretended that when a woman
+entered the complete protection of the married state she no longer
+stood
+in need of an identity apart from her husband. The working out of this
+theory in a democracy was far from ideal, as we shall see.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_IV"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_75"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<h2>AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW</h2>
+<br>
+<p>A little girl sat in a corner of her father's law library watching,
+with
+wide, serious eyes, a scene the like of which was common enough a
+generation or two ago. The weeping old woman told a halting story of a
+dissipated son, a shrewish daughter-in-law, and a state of servitude on
+her own part,&#8212;a story pitifully sordid in its details. The farm had
+come to her from her father's estate. For forty years she had toiled
+side by side with her husband, getting a simple, but comfortable,
+living
+from the soil. Then the husband died. Under the will the son inherited
+the farm, and everything on it,&#8212;house, furniture, barns, cattle, tools.
+Even the money in the bank was his. A clause in the will provided that
+the son should give his mother a home during her lifetime.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_76"></a>So here she was, after a life of hard work and
+loving service, shorn of
+everything; a pauper, an unpaid servant in the house of another
+woman,&#8212;her son's wife. Was it true that the law took her home away from
+her,&#8212;the farm that descended to her from her father, the house she had
+lived in since childhood? Could nothing, <i>nothing</i> be done?</p>
+<p>The aged judge shook his head, sadly. "You see, Mrs. Grant," he
+explained, "the farm has never really been yours since your marriage,
+for then it became by law your husband's property, precisely as if he
+had bought it. He had a right to leave it to whom he would. No doubt he
+did what he thought was for your good. I wish I could help you, but I
+cannot. The law is inexorable in these matters."</p>
+<p>After the forlorn old woman had gone the lawyer's child went and
+stood
+by her father's chair. "Why couldn't you help her?" she asked. "Why do
+you let them take her home away from her?"</p>
+<p><a name="Page_77"></a>Judge Cady opened the sheep-bound book at his
+elbow and showed the
+little girl a paragraph. Turning the pages, he pointed out others for
+her to read. Spelling through the ponderous legal phraseology the
+little
+girl learned that a married woman had no existence, in the eyes of the
+law, apart from her husband. She could own no property; she could
+neither buy nor sell; she could not receive a gift, even from her own
+husband. She was, in fact, her husband's chattel. If he beat her she
+had
+no means of punishing, or even restraining him, unless, indeed, she
+could prove that her life was endangered. If she ran away from him the
+law forced her to return.</p>
+<p>Paragraph after paragraph the child read through, and, unseen by her
+father, marked faintly with a pencil. So far as she was aware, father,
+and father's library of sheep-bound books, were the beginning and the
+end of the law, and to her mind the way to get rid of measures which
+took women's homes away from them was perfectly simple. That night <a
+ name="Page_78"></a>when
+the house was quiet she stole downstairs, scissors in hand, determined
+<i>to cut every one of those laws out of the book</i>.</p>
+<p>The young reformer was restrained, but only temporarily. As
+Elizabeth
+Cady Stanton she lived to do her part toward revising many of the laws
+under which women, in her day, suffered, and her successors, the
+organized women of the United States, are busy with their scissors,
+revising the rest.</p>
+<p>Not alone in Russia, Germany, France, and England do the laws
+governing
+men and women need equalizing. In America, paradise of women, the
+generally accepted theory that women have "all the rights they want"
+does not stand the test of impartial examination.</p>
+<p>In America some women have all the rights they want. Your wife and
+the
+wives of the men you associate with every day usually have all the
+rights they want, sometimes a few that they do not need at all. Is the
+house yours? The furniture yours? The motor yours? The income yours?
+Are
+the children yours? If <a name="Page_79"></a>you are the average fond
+American husband, you
+will return the proud answer: "No, indeed, they are <i>ours</i>."</p>
+<p>This is quite as it should be, assuming that all wives are as
+tenderly
+cherished, and as well protected as the women who live on your block.
+For a whole big army of women there are often serious disadvantages
+connected with that word "ours."</p>
+<p>In Boston there lived a family of McEwans,&#8212;a man, his wife, and
+several
+half-grown children. McEwan was not a very steady man. He drank
+sometimes, and his earning capacity was uncertain. Mrs. McEwan was an
+energetic, capable, intelligent woman, tolerant of her husband's
+failings, ambitious for her children. She took a large house, furnished
+it on the installment plan, and filled it with boarders. The boarders
+gave the family an income larger than they had ever possessed before,
+and McEwan's contributions fell off. He became an unpaying guest
+himself. All his earnings, he explained, were going into investments.
+The <a name="Page_80"></a>man was, in fact, speculating in mining
+stocks.</p>
+<p>One day McEwan came home with a face of despair. His creditors, he
+told
+his wife, had descended on him, seized his business, and threatened to
+take possession of the boarding house.</p>
+<p>"But it is mine," protested the woman, with spirit. "I bought every
+bit
+of furniture with the money my boarders paid me. Nobody can touch my
+property or my earnings to satisfy a claim on you. I am not liable for
+your debts."</p>
+<p>One of the boarders was a lawyer, and to him that night she took the
+case. "A woman's earnings are her own in Massachusetts, are they not?"
+she demanded.</p>
+<p>"You are what the law calls a free trader," replied the lawyer, "and
+whatever you earn is yours, certainly. That is&#8212;of course you are
+recorded at the city clerk's office?"</p>
+<p>"Why no. Why should I be?"</p>
+<p>"The law requires it. Otherwise this property, and even the money
+your
+boarders pay <a name="Page_81"></a>you, are liable to attachment for
+your husband's debts.
+Unless you make a specific declaration that you are in business for
+yourself, the law assumes that the business is your husband's."</p>
+<p>"If I went to work for a salary, should I have to be recorded in
+order
+to keep my own money?" Mrs. McEwan was growing angry.</p>
+<p>"No," replied the lawyer, "not if you were careful to keep your
+income
+and your husband's absolutely separate. If you both paid installments
+on
+a piano the piano would be your husband's, not yours. If you bought a
+house together, the house could be seized for his debts. Everything you
+buy with your money is yours. Everything you buy with money he gives
+you
+is his. Everything you buy together is his. You could not protect such
+property from your husband's creditors, or from his heirs."</p>
+<p>Mrs. McEwan's case is mild, her wrongs faint beside those of a woman
+in
+Los Angeles, California. Her husband was a doctor, and <a
+ name="Page_82"></a>she had been,
+before her marriage, a trained nurse. The young woman had saved several
+hundred dollars, and she put the money into a first payment on a pretty
+little cottage. During the first two or three years of the marriage the
+doctor's wife, from time to time, attended cases of illness, usually
+contributing her earnings toward the payment for the house or into
+furniture for the house. In all she paid about a thousand dollars, or
+something like one-third of the cost of the house. Then children came,
+and her earning days were over.</p>
+<p>Unfortunately the domestic affairs of this household became
+disturbed.
+The doctor contracted a drug habit. He became irregular in his conduct
+and ended by running away with a dissolute woman. After he had gone his
+wife found that the house she lived in, and which she had helped to
+buy,
+had been sold, without her knowledge or consent. The transaction was
+perfectly legal. Community property, that is, property held jointly by
+husband and wife, is absolutely controlled by the hus<a name="Page_83"></a>band
+in
+California. In that State community property may even be given away,
+without the wife's knowledge or consent.</p>
+<p>It happened not many years ago that one of the most powerful
+millionaires in California, in a moment of generosity, conveyed to one
+of his sons a very valuable property. Some time afterwards the father
+and son quarreled, and the father attempted to get back his property.
+His plea in court was that his wife's consent to the transaction had
+never been sought; but the court ruled that since the property was
+owned
+in community, the wife's consent did not have to be obtained.</p>
+<p>This particular woman happened to be rich enough to stand the
+experience
+of having a large slice of property given away without her knowledge,
+but the same law would have applied to the case of a woman who could
+not
+afford it at all.</p>
+<p>It is in the case of women wage earners that these laws bear the
+peculiar asperity. Down in the cotton-mill districts of the South are
+<a name="Page_84"></a>scores of men who never, from one year to the
+next, do a stroke of
+work. They are supposed to be "weakly." Their wives and children work
+eleven hours a day (or night) and every pay day the men go to the mills
+and collect their wages. The money belongs to them under the law. Even
+if the women had the spirit to protest, the protest would be useless.
+The right of a man to collect and to spend his wife's earnings is
+protected in many States in the chivalric South. In Texas, for example,
+a husband is entitled to his wife's earnings even <i>though he has
+deserted her</i>.</p>
+<p>I do not know that this occurs very often in Texas. Probably not,
+unless
+among low-class Negroes. In all likelihood if a Texas woman should
+appeal to her employer, and tell him that her husband had abandoned
+her,
+he would refuse to give the man her wages. Should the husband be in a
+position to invoke the law, he could claim his wife's earnings,
+nevertheless.</p>
+<p>The Kentucky lady who chose England for her future home, had she
+known
+it, selected the <a name="Page_85"></a>country to which most American
+women owe their legal
+disabilities. American law, except in Louisiana and Florida, is founded
+on English common law, and English common law was developed at a period
+when men were of much greater importance in the state than women. The
+state was a military organization, and every man was a fighter, a
+king's
+defender. Women were valuable only because defenders of kings had to
+have mothers.</p>
+<p>English common law provided that every married woman must be
+supported
+in as much comfort as her husband's estate warranted. The mothers of
+the
+nation must be fed, clothed, and sheltered. What more could they
+possibly ask? In return for permanent board and clothes, the woman was
+required to give her husband all of her property, real and personal.
+What use had she for property? Did she need it to support herself? In
+case of war and pillage could she defend it?</p>
+<p>Husband and wife were one&#8212;and that one was the man. He was so much
+the
+one that the <a name="Page_86"></a>woman had literally no existence in
+the eyes of the law.
+She not only did not possess any property; she could possess none. Her
+husband could not give her any, because there could be no contract
+between a married pair. A contract implies at least two people, and
+husband and wife were one. The husband could, if he chose, establish a
+trusteeship, and thus give his wife the free use of her own. But you
+can
+easily imagine that he did not very often do it.</p>
+<p>A man could, also, devise property to his wife by will. Often this
+was
+done, but too often the sons were made heirs, and the wife was left to
+what tender mercies they owned. If a man died intestate the wife merely
+shared with other heirs. She had no preference.</p>
+<p>Under the old English common law, moreover, not only the property,
+but
+also the services of a married woman belonged to her husband. If he
+chose to rent out her services, or if she offered to work outside the
+home, it followed logically that her wages belonged to him. What use
+had
+she for wages?</p>
+<p><a name="Page_87"></a>On the other hand, every man was held
+responsible for the support of
+his wife. He was responsible for her debts, as long as they were the
+necessities of life. He was also responsible for her conduct. Being
+propertyless, she could not be held to account for wrongs committed. If
+she stole, or destroyed property, or injured the person of another, if
+she committed any kind of a misdemeanor in the presence of her husband,
+and that also meant if he were in her neighborhood at the time, the law
+held him responsible. He should have restrained her.</p>
+<p>This was supposed to be a decided advantage to the woman. Whenever a
+rebellious woman or group of women voiced their objection to the system
+which robbed them of every shred of independence they were always
+reminded that the system at the same time relieved them of every shred
+of responsibility, even, to an extent, of moral responsibility. "So
+great a favorite," comments Blackstone, "is the female sex under the
+laws of England."</p>
+<p>You may well imagine that, in these circum<a name="Page_88"></a>stances,
+husbands were
+interested that their wives should be very good. The law supported them
+by permitting "moderate correction." A married woman might be kept in
+what Blackstone calls "reasonable restraint" by her husband. But only
+with a stick no larger than his thumb.</p>
+<p>The husbandly stick was never imported into the United States. Even
+the
+dour Puritans forbade its use. The very first modification of the
+English common law, in its application to American women, was made in
+1650, when the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony decreed that a
+husband beating his wife, or, for that matter, a wife beating her
+husband, should be fined ten pounds, or endure a public whipping.</p>
+<p>The Pilgrim Fathers and the other early colonists in America brought
+with them the system of English common law under which they and their
+ancestors had for centuries been governed. From time to time, as
+conditions made them necessary, new laws were enacted and put <a
+ name="Page_89"></a>into
+force. In all cases not specifically covered by these new laws, the old
+English common law was applied. It did not occur to any one that women
+would ever need special laws. The Pilgrim Fathers and their successors,
+the Puritans, simply assumed that here, as in the England they had left
+behind, woman's place was in the home, where she was protected,
+supported, and controlled.</p>
+<p>But in the new world woman's place in the home assumed an importance
+much greater than it had formerly possessed. Labor was scarce,
+manufacturing and trading were undeveloped. Woman's special activities
+were urgently needed. Woman's hands helped to raise the roof-tree, her
+skill and industry, to a very large extent, furnished the house. She
+spun and wove, cured meat, dried corn, tanned skins, made shoes, dipped
+candles, and was, in a word, almost the only manufacturer in the
+country. But this did not raise her from her position as an inferior.
+Woman owned neither her tools nor her raw materials. These her <a
+ name="Page_90"></a>husband
+provided. In consequence, husband and wife being one, that one, in
+America, as in England, was the husband.</p>
+<p>This explanation is necessary in order to understand why the legal
+position of most American women to-day is that of inferiors, or, at
+best, of minor children.</p>
+<p>It is necessary also, in order to understand why, except in matters
+of
+law, American women are treated with such extraordinary consideration
+and indulgence. As long as pioneer conditions lasted women were
+valuable
+because of the need of their labor, their special activities. Also, for
+a very long period, women were scarce, and they were highly prized not
+alone for their labor, but because their society was so desirable. In
+other words, pioneer conditions gave woman a better standing in the new
+world than she had in the old, and she was treated with an altogether
+new consideration and regard.</p>
+<p>In England no one thought very badly of a man who was moderately
+abusive
+of his wife. <a name="Page_91"></a>In America, violence against women
+was, from the first, an
+unbearable idea. Laws protecting maid servants, dependent women, and,
+as
+we have seen, even wives, were very early enacted in New England.</p>
+<p>But although woman was more dearly prized in the new country than in
+the
+old, no new legislation was made for her benefit. Her legal status, or
+rather her absence of legal status apart from her husband, remained
+exactly as it had been under the English common law.</p>
+<p>No legislature in the United States has deliberately made laws
+placing
+women at a disadvantage with men. Whatever laws are unfair and
+oppressive to women have just happened&#8212;just grown up like weeds out of
+neglected soil.</p>
+<p>Let me illustrate. No lawmaker in New Mexico ever introduced a bill
+into
+the legislature making men liable for their wives' torts or petty
+misdemeanors. Yet in New Mexico, at this very minute, a wife is so
+completely her husband's property that he is responsible for <a
+ name="Page_92"></a>her
+behavior. If she should rob her neighbor's clothesline, or wreck a
+chicken yard, her unfortunate husband would have to stand trial. Simply
+because in New Mexico married women are still living under laws that
+were evolved in another civilization, long before New Mexico was
+dreamed
+of as a State.</p>
+<p>Nowhere else in the United States are women allowed to shelter their
+weak moral natures behind the stern morality of their husbands, but in
+more than one State the husband's responsibility for his wife's acts is
+assumed. In Massachusetts, for one State, if a woman owned a saloon and
+sold beer on Sunday, she would be liable to arrest, and so also would
+her husband, provided he were in the house when the beer was sold. Both
+would probably be fined. Simply because it was once the law that a
+married woman had no separate existence apart from her husband, this
+absurd law, or others as absurd, remain on the statute books of almost
+every State in the Union.</p>
+<p>The ascent of woman, which began with the <a name="Page_93"></a>abolishment
+of corporeal
+punishment of wives, proceeded very slowly. Most American women
+married,
+and most American wives were kindly treated. At least public opinion
+demanded that they be treated with kindness. Long before any other
+modification of her legal status was gained, a woman subjected to
+cruelty at the hands of her lawful spouse was at liberty to seek police
+protection.</p>
+<p>The reason why police protection was so seldom sought is plain
+enough.
+Imagine a woman complaining of a husband who would be certain to beat
+her again for revenge, and to whom she was bound irrevocably by laws
+stronger even than the laws on the statute books. Remember that the
+only
+right she had was the right to be supported, and if she left her
+husband's house she left her only means of living. She could hardly
+support herself, for few avenues of industry were open to women. She
+was
+literally a pauper, and when there is nowhere else to lay his head,
+even
+the most miserable pauper thinks twice before he <a name="Page_94"></a>runs
+away from the
+poorhouse. Besides, the woman who left her husband had to give up her
+children. They too were the husband's property.</p>
+<p>There were some women who hesitated before they consented to
+pauperize
+themselves by marrying. Widows were especially wary, if old stories are
+to be trusted. A story is told in the New York University Law School of
+a woman in Connecticut who took with her, as a part of her wedding
+outfit, a very handsome mahogany bureau, bequeathed her by her
+grandfather. After a few years of marriage the husband suddenly died,
+leaving no will. The home and all it contained were sold at auction.
+The
+widow was permitted to buy certain objects of furniture, and among them
+was her cherished bureau. Where the poor woman found the money with
+which to buy is not revealed. In time this woman married again, and
+again her husband died without a will. Again there was an auction, and
+again the widow purchased her beloved heirloom. It <a name="Page_95"></a>seems
+possible that
+this time she had saved money in anticipation of the necessity.</p>
+<p>A little later, for she was still young and attractive, a suitor
+appeared, offering his heart and "all his worldly goods." "No, I thank
+you," replied the sorely tried creature, "I prefer to keep my bureau."</p>
+<p>The first struggle made by women in their own behalf was against
+this
+condition of marital slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott,
+Lydia Maria Child, and others of that brave band of rebellious women,
+were active for years, addressing legislative committees in New York
+and
+Massachusetts, circulating petitions, writing to newspapers, agitating
+everywhere in favor of married women's property rights. Finally it
+began
+to dawn on the minds of men that there might be a certain public
+advantage, as well as private justice, attaching to separate ownership
+by married women of their own property.</p>
+<p>In 1839 the Massachusetts State Legislature passed a cautious
+measure
+giving married <a name="Page_96"></a>women qualified property rights.
+It was not until 1848
+that a really effective Married Women's Property Law was secured, by
+action of the New York State Assembly. The law served as a model in
+many
+of the new Western States just then framing their laws.</p>
+<p>These New York legislators, and the Western legislators who first
+granted property rights to married women, were actuated less by a sense
+of justice towards women than by enlightened selfishness. The effect of
+so much freedom on women themselves was a matter for grave conjecture.
+It was not suggested by any of the American debaters, as it was later
+on
+the floors of the English Parliament, that women, if they controlled
+their own property, would undoubtedly squander it on men whom they
+preferred to their husbands. But it was prophesied that women once in
+possession of money would desert their husbands by regiments,&#8212;which
+speaks none too flatteringly of the husbands of that day.</p>
+<p>Men of property stood for the Married <a name="Page_97"></a>Women's
+Property Act, because
+they perceived plainly that their own wealth, devised to daughters who
+could not control it, might easily be gambled away, or wasted through
+improvidence, or diverted to the use of strangers. In other words, they
+knew that their property, when daughters inherited it, became the
+property of their sons-in-law. They had no guarantee that their own
+grandchildren would ever have the use of it, unless it was controlled
+by
+their mothers.</p>
+<p>It was the women's clubs and women's organizations in America, as it
+was
+the Women's Councils in Europe, that actively began the agitation
+against women's legal disabilities. The National Woman Suffrage
+Association, oldest of all women's organizations in the United States,
+has been calling attention to the unequal laws, and demanding their
+abolishment, for two generations.</p>
+<p>Practically all of the state federations of women's clubs have
+legislative committees, and it is usually the business of these
+committees <a name="Page_98"></a>to codify the laws of their
+respective States which apply
+directly to women. In some cases a woman lawyer is made chairman, and
+the work is done under her direction. Sometimes, as in Texas, a well
+known and friendly man lawyer is retained for the task. Almost
+invariably the report of the legislative committee contains
+disagreeable
+surprises. American women have been so accustomed to their privileges
+that they have taken their rights for granted, and are usually
+astonished when they find how limited their rights actually are.</p>
+<p>There are some States in the Union where women are on terms of
+something
+like equality with men. There is one State to which all intelligent
+women look with a sort of envious, admiring, questioning curiosity,
+Colorado, which is literally the woman's paradise. In Colorado it would
+be difficult to find even the smallest inequality between men and
+women.
+They vote on equal terms, and if any woman deserves to go to the
+legislature, and succeeds in convincing a large enough public of the
+fact, <a name="Page_99"></a>nothing stands in the way of her election.
+One woman, Mrs. Alma
+Lafferty, is a member of the present legislature, and she has had
+several predecessors.</p>
+<p>But Colorado women have a larger influence still in legislative
+matters.
+To guard their interests they have a Legislative Committee of the State
+Federation of Women's Clubs, consisting of thirty to forty carefully
+chosen women.</p>
+<p>This committee has permanent headquarters in Denver during every
+session
+of the legislature, and every bill which directly affects women and
+children, before reaching the floor of either house, is submitted for
+approval to the committee.</p>
+<p>Miss Jane Addams has declared, and Miss Addams is pretty good
+authority,
+that the laws governing women and children in Colorado are superior to
+those of any other State. Women receive equal pay for equal work in
+Colorado. They are permitted to hold any office. They are co-guardians
+of their chil<a name="Page_100"></a>dren, and the education of children
+has been placed almost
+entirely in the hands of women. This does not mean that Colorado has
+weakened its schools by barring men from the teaching profession. It
+means that women are superintendents of schools in many counties, and
+that one woman was, for more than ten years, State superintendent of
+schools.</p>
+<p>Contrast Colorado with Louisiana, possibly the last State in the
+Union a
+well-informed woman would choose for a residence. The laws of Louisiana
+were based, not on the English common law, but on the Code Napoleon,
+which regards women merely as a working, breeding, domestic animal.</p>
+<p>"There is one thing that is not <i>French</i>," thundered the great
+Napoleon,
+closing a conference on his famous code, "and that is that a woman can
+do as she pleases."</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;<a name="img007"></a><img
+ style="height: 357px; width: 462px;"
+ alt="A &quot;WOMEN'S RIGHTS&quot; MAP OF THE UNITED STATES"
+ title="A &quot;WOMEN'S RIGHTS&quot; MAP OF THE UNITED STATES"
+ src="images/007.jpg"></p>
+<p>The framers of Louisiana's laws were particular to guard against too
+great a freedom of action on the part of its women. Toward the end of
+Mrs. Jefferson Davis's life she <a name="Page_101"></a>added a codicil
+to her will, giving
+to a certain chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy a number of
+very valuable relics of her husband, and of the short-lived Confederate
+Government. Her action was made public, and it was then revealed that
+two women had signed the document as witnesses. Instantly Mrs. Davis's
+attention was called to the fact that in Louisiana, where she was then
+living, no woman may witness a document. Women's signatures are
+worthless.</p>
+<p>In Louisiana your disabilities actually begin when you become an
+engaged
+girl. From that happy moment on you are under the dominance of a man.
+Your wedding presents are not yours, but his. If you felt like giving a
+duplicate pickle-fork to your mother, you could not legally do so, and
+after you were married, if your husband wanted that pickle-fork, he
+could get it. Your clothing, your dowry, become community property as
+soon as the marriage ceremony is over, and community property in
+Louisiana is controlled absolutely <a name="Page_102"></a>by the
+husband. Every dollar a woman
+earns there is at her husband's disposal. Without her husband's consent
+a Louisiana woman may not go into a court of law, even though she may
+be
+in business for herself and the action sought is in defense of her
+business.</p>
+<p>Nor does the Louisiana woman fare any better as a mother. Then, in
+fact,
+her position is nothing short of humiliating. During her husband's
+lifetime he is sole guardian of their children. At his death she may
+become their guardian, but if she marries a second time&#8212;and the law
+permits her to remarry, provided she waits ten months&#8212;she retains her
+children only by the formal consent of her first husband's family. If
+they dislike her, or disapprove of her second marriage, they may demand
+the custody of the children.</p>
+<p>It is true that many of these absurd laws in Louisiana are not now
+often
+enforced. It is also true that in Louisiana and other states few men
+are
+so unjust to their wives as to take advantage of unequal property
+rights. <a name="Page_103"></a>Laws always lag behind the sense of
+justice which lives in man.
+But the point is that unequal laws still remain on our statute books,
+and they may be, and sometimes are, enforced.</p>
+<p>Between these two extremes, Colorado and Louisiana, women have the
+other
+forty-six States to choose. None of them offers perfect equality. Even
+in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah&#8212;the three States besides Colorado where
+women vote&#8212;women are in such a minority that their votes are powerless
+to remove all their disabilities. Very rarely have club women even so
+much felicity as the New York State Federation, whose legislative
+chairman, Miss Emilie Bullowa, reported that she was unable to find a
+single unimportant inequality in the New York laws governing the
+property rights of women.</p>
+<p>In most of the older States the property rights of married women are
+now
+fairly guaranteed, but the proud boast that in America no woman is the
+slave of her husband will have to be modified when it is known that in
+<a name="Page_104"></a>at least seventeen States these rights are still
+denied.</p>
+<p>The husband absolutely controls his wife's property and her earnings
+in
+Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, California, Arizona, North Dakota, and
+Idaho. He has virtual control&#8212;that is to say, the wife's rights are
+merely provisional&#8212;in Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri.</p>
+<p>Women to control their own business property must be registered as
+traders on their own account in these States: Georgia, Montana, Nevada,
+Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia.</p>
+<p>Nor are women everywhere permitted to work on equal terms with men.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><img
+ style="width: 276px; height: 421px;" alt="MISS EMILIE BULLOWA."
+ title="MISS EMILIE BULLOWA." src="images/008.jpg"><a name="img008"></a></div>
+<p>There is a current belief, often expressed, that in the United
+States
+every avenue of industry is open to women on equal terms with men. This
+is not quite true. In some States a married woman may not engage in any
+business without permission from the courts. In Texas, Louisiana, and
+Georgia this is the case. <a name="Page_105"></a>In Wyoming, where
+women vote, but where
+they are in such minority that their votes count for little, a married
+woman must satisfy the court that she is under the necessity of earning
+her living.</p>
+<p>If you are a woman, married or unmarried, and wish to practice law,
+you
+are barred from seven of the United States. The legal profession is
+closed to women in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Delaware,
+Tennessee, and South Carolina.</p>
+<p>In some States they discourage women from aspiring to the learned
+professions by refusing them the advantages of higher education which
+they provide for their brothers.</p>
+<p>Four state universities close their doors to women, in spite of the
+fact
+that women's taxes help support the universities. These States are
+Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. The last-named admits
+women to post-graduate courses.</p>
+<p>You can hold no kind of an elective office, you cannot be even a
+county
+superintendent <a name="Page_106"></a>of schools in Alabama or
+Arkansas, if you are a woman.
+In Alabama, indeed, you may not be a minister of the gospel, a doctor
+of
+medicine, or a notary public. Florida likewise will have nothing to do
+with a woman doctor.</p>
+<p>Only a few women want to hold office or engage in professional work.
+Every woman hopes to be a mother. What then is the legal status of the
+American mother? When the club women began the study of their position
+before the law they were amazed to find, in all but ten of the States
+and territories, that they had absolutely no control over the destinies
+of their own children. In ten States only, and in the District of
+Columbia, are women co-guardians with their husbands of their children.</p>
+<p>In Pennsylvania if a woman supports her children, or has money to
+contribute to their support, she has joint guardianship. Under somewhat
+similar circumstances Rhode Island women have the same right.</p>
+<p>In all the other States and territories chil<a name="Page_107"></a>dren
+belong to their
+fathers. They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother. That
+this almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule,
+no
+one except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it.</p>
+<p>It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice
+are
+growing reluctant to administer such archaic laws.</p>
+<p>The famous Tillman case is an example. Senator Ben Tillman of South
+Carolina has one son,&#8212;a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogether
+disreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of married
+life, left him, taking with her their two little girls. South Carolina
+allows no divorce for any cause. The sanctity of the marriage tie is
+held so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abused
+at will by the veriest brute or libertine. Mrs. Tillman could not
+divorce her husband, so she took her children and went to live quietly
+at her parent's home in the city of Washington.</p>
+<p>One day the father of the children, young <a name="Page_108"></a>Tillman,
+appeared at that
+home, and in a fit of drunken resentment against his wife, kidnapped
+the
+children. He could not care for the children, probably had no wish to
+have them near him, but he took them back to South Carolina, and <i>gave</i>
+them to his parents, made a present of a woman's flesh and blood and
+heart to people who hated her and whom she hated in return.</p>
+<p>Under the laws of South Carolina, under the printed statutes, young
+Tillman had a perfect right to do this thing, and his father, a United
+States Senator, upheld him in his act. Young Mrs. Tillman, however,
+showed so little respect for the statutes that she sued her husband and
+his parents to recover her babies. The judge before whom the suit was
+brought was in a dilemma. There was the law&#8212;but also there was justice
+and common sense. To the everlasting honor of that South Carolina
+judge,
+justice and common sense triumphed, and he ruled that <i>the law was
+unconstitutional.</i></p>
+<p><a name="Page_109"></a>There are other hardships in this law denying
+to mothers the right of
+co-guardianship of their children. Two names signed to a child's
+working
+papers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens that
+selfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work,
+when
+the mothers know they are far too young. A woman in Scranton,
+Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her children
+had been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they were
+tall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman. "What could I say about
+it, when he went and got the papers?" she sighed.</p>
+<p>The father&#8212;not the mother&#8212;controls the services of his children. He
+can collect their wages, and he does. Very, very often he squanders the
+money they earn, and no one may interfere.</p>
+<p>A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay
+day
+at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her
+pay envelope, unopened. It was <a name="Page_110"></a>his regular day
+for getting drunk and
+indulging in an orgy of gambling. Often more than half of the girls'
+wages would have vanished before night. Twice the entire amount was
+wasted in an hour. This kept on until the girls passed their childhood
+and were mature enough to rebel successfully.</p>
+<p>It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potential
+services of a child.</p>
+<p>Many times have these unjust laws been protested against. In every
+State
+in the Union where they exist they have been protested against by
+organized groups of intelligent women. But their protests have been
+received with apathy, and, in some instances, with contempt by
+legislators. Only last year a determined fight was made by the women of
+California for a law giving them equal guardianship of their children.
+The women's bill was lost in the California Legislature, and lost by a
+large majority.</p>
+<p>What arguments did the California legislators use against the
+proposed
+measure? <a name="Page_111"></a>Identically the same that were made in
+Massachusetts and New
+York a quarter of a century ago. If women had the guardianship of their
+children, would anything prevent them from taking the children and
+leaving home? What would become of the sanctity of the home, with its
+lawful head shorn of his paternal dignity? In California a husband is
+head of the family in very fact, or at least a law of the State says so.</p>
+<p>At one time the law which made the husband the head of the home
+guaranteed to the family support by the husband. It does not do that
+now. There are laws on the statute books of many States obliging the
+wife to support her husband if he is disabled, and the children, if the
+husband defaults. There are no laws compelling the husband to support
+his wife. The husband is under an assumed obligation to support his
+family, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty. Family
+desertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most baffling
+of modern <a name="Page_112"></a>social problems. Everybody is
+appalled by its prevalence, but
+nobody seems to know what to do about it. The Legal Aid Society of New
+York City reports about three new cases of family desertion for every
+day in the year. Other agencies in other cities report a state of
+affairs quite as serious.</p>
+<p>Laws have been passed in most States making family desertion a
+misdemeanor, and in New York a recent law has made it a felony.
+Unfortunately there has been devised no machinery to enforce these
+laws,
+so they are practically non-existent. It is true that if the deserting
+husband is arrested he may be sent to jail or to the rock pile.</p>
+<p>But that does not cure him nor support his family. Mostly he is not
+arrested. He has only to take himself out of the reach of the local
+authorities. In New York a deserting husband, though he is counted a
+felon, needs only to cross the river to New Jersey to be reasonably
+safe. Imagine the State of New York spending good money to chase a man
+<a name="Page_113"></a>whom it does not want as a citizen, and whom it
+can only punish by
+sending to jail for a short period. The State is better off without
+such
+a man. To bring him back would not even benefit his deserted family.</p>
+<p>Women, far more law abiding than men, insist that a system which
+evolved
+out of feudal conditions, and has for its very basis the assumption of
+the weakness, ignorance, and dependence of women, has no place in
+twentieth century civilization.</p>
+<p>American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent. The present
+social order, in which military force is subordinated to industry and
+commerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and women
+physically on much the same plane. As for women's intellectual ability
+to decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over,
+rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the
+high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher
+grammar grades. Fewer women than <a name="Page_114"></a>men are
+numbered among illiterate. As
+for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better
+read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less,
+but their general intelligence is not less than men's.</p>
+<p>Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical
+support.
+Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves as
+independent human beings. Their work of bearing and rearing children,
+of
+managing the household, begins to assume a new dignity, a real value,
+in
+their eyes.</p>
+<p>In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shall
+determine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband's
+income. American women may not need such a law, but they insist that
+they need something to take the place of that one which in eleven
+States
+makes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife's income.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_V"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_115"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<h2>WOMEN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY</h2>
+<br>
+<p>The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual
+discomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, and
+recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: "Corsets,
+millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants'
+wear, and ladies' shoes, second floor; no ma'am, carpets and rugs on
+the
+third floor; this car don't go to the restaurant; take the other side;
+groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs,
+men's shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor."</p>
+<p>Buying and selling, serving and being served&#8212;women. On every floor,
+in
+every aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, which
+covers several acres, women. <a name="Page_116"></a>Waiting their turn
+at the long line of
+telephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Down
+in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer
+frocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts,
+attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan
+department store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floors
+between, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks,
+running
+back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling
+the
+aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing
+throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of
+femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man
+clerk,
+and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.</p>
+<p>To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the United
+States are working outside of the home for wages is a simple,
+unanalyzed
+fact. You grasp it as an intellec<a name="Page_117"></a>tual
+abstraction, without much
+appreciation of its human significance. The mere reading of statistics
+does not help you to realize the changed status of women, and of
+society. You need to see the thing with your own eyes.</p>
+<p>Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York,
+when
+the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed
+with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison
+streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in
+Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city's
+great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of
+the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too
+narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. From factory,
+office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousands
+of girls. Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of the
+electric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting of
+hucksters, the laughter and oaths <a name="Page_118"></a>of men, their
+voices float, a shrill,
+triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil.</p>
+<p>You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of the
+interdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrate
+into the operating-room of a telephone exchange. Any hour will do. Any
+day in the week. There are no nights, nor Sundays, nor holidays in a
+telephone exchange. The city could not get along for one single minute
+in one single hour of the twenty-four without the telephone girl. Her
+hands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long,
+silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes
+of
+the switch board. The wires cross and recross, until the switch board
+is
+like a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of the
+telephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of a city.</p>
+<p>What would happen if this army of women was suddenly withdrawn from
+the
+telephone exchanges? Men could not take their places. <a
+ name="Page_119"></a>That experiment
+has been tried more than once, and it has always failed.</p>
+<p>Having seen how well women serve industry, go back to the department
+store and see how they dominate it also.</p>
+<p>The department store apparently exists for women. The architect who
+designed the building studied her necessities. The makers of store
+furniture planned counters, shelves, and seats to suit her stature.
+Buyers of goods know that their jobs are forfeit unless they can guess
+what her taste in gowns and hats is going to be six months hence.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>WOMEN'S DEMAND ON INDUSTRY</h3>
+<p>Woman dominates the department store for the plain reason that she
+supports it. Whoever earns the income, and that point has been somewhat
+in question lately, there is no doubt at all as to who spends it. She
+does. Hence, she is able to control the conditions under which this
+business is conducted.</p>
+<p>You can see for yourself that this is so. <a name="Page_120"></a>Walk
+through any large
+department store and observe how much valuable space is devoted to
+making women customers comfortable. There is always a drawing-room with
+easy-chairs and couches; plenty of little desks with handsome
+stationery
+where the customer may write notes; here, and in the retiring-room
+adjoining, are uniformed maids to offer service. But these things are
+not all that the women who support industry demand of the men in power.
+They demand that industry be carried on under conditions favorable to
+the health and comfort of the workers.</p>
+<p>Not until the development of the department store were women able to
+observe at close range the conduct of modern business. Not unnaturally
+it was in the department store that they began one of the most
+ambitious
+of their present-day activities,&#8212;that of humanizing industry.</p>
+<p>It was just twenty years ago that New York City was treated to a
+huge
+joke. It was such a joke that even the miserable ones with whom <a
+ name="Page_121"></a>it was
+concerned were obliged to smile. An obscure group of women, calling
+themselves the Working Women's Society, came out with the announcement
+that they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a labor
+union.</p>
+<p>These women said that the girls in the department stores were
+receiving
+wages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign
+woman
+in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an
+American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a
+half.</p>
+<p>They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for
+saleswomen
+was habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand from
+ten to fourteen hours a day. They said that sanitary conditions in the
+cloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as to
+endanger health and life. They said that the whole situation was so bad
+that no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years. Mostly
+they were used up in two <a name="Page_122"></a>years. They proposed a
+labor union of retail
+clerks as the only possible resource. Their effort failed.</p>
+<p>The trades union idea at that time had not reached the girl behind
+the
+counter. As a matter of fact it has not reached her yet, and it
+probably
+never will. The department-store clerk considers herself a higher
+social
+being than the ordinary working-girl, and in a way she is justified.
+The
+exceptionally intelligent department-store clerk has one chance in a
+thousand of rising to the well-paid, semi-professional post of buyer.
+Also the exceptionally attractive girl has possibly one chance in five
+thousand of marrying a millionaire. It is a long chance now, and it was
+a longer chance a dozen years ago, because there were fewer
+millionaires
+then than now, but it served well enough to cause the failure of the
+trades union plan.</p>
+<p>There is one thing that never fails, however, and that is a
+righteous
+protest. Out of the protest of that little, obscure group of <a
+ name="Page_123"></a>working
+women in New York City was born a movement which has spread beyond the
+Atlantic Ocean, which has effected legislation in many States of the
+Union, which has even determined an extremely important legal decision
+in the Supreme Court of the United States.</p>
+<p>A group of rich and influential women, prominent in many
+philanthropic
+efforts, became interested in the Working Women's Society. They
+investigated the charges brought against the department stores, and
+what
+they discovered made them resolve that conditions must be changed.</p>
+<p>In May, 1890, the late Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. Frederick
+Nathan, and others, called a large mass meeting in Chickering Hall.
+Mrs.
+Nathan had a constructive plan for raising the standard in shop
+conditions, especially those affecting women employees.</p>
+<p>If women would simply withdraw their patronage from the stores
+where,
+during the Christmas season, women and children toiled <a
+ name="Page_124"></a>long hours at
+night without any extra compensation, sooner or later the night work
+would cease. A few stores, said Mrs. Nathan, maintained a standard
+above
+the average. It was within the power of the women of New York to raise
+all the others to that standard, and afterwards it might be possible to
+go farther and establish a standard higher than the present highest.</p>
+<p>"We do not desire to blacklist any firm," declared Mrs. Nathan, "but
+we
+can <i>whitelist</i> those firms which treat their employees humanely.
+We can
+make and publish a list of all the shops where employees receive fair
+treatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops. By acting
+openly and publishing our White List we shall be able to create an
+immense public opinion in favor of just employers."</p>
+<p>Thus was the Consumers' League of New York ushered into existence.
+Eight
+months after the Chickering Hall meeting the committee appointed to
+co-operate with the Work<a name="Page_125"></a>ing Women's Society in
+preparing its list of
+fair firms had finished its work and made its report. The new League
+was
+formally organized on January 1, 1891.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img009"></a><img
+ style="width: 300px; height: 471px;" alt="Mrs. Frederick Nathan"
+ title="Mrs. Frederick Nathan" src="images/009.jpg"><br>
+<br>
+</div>
+<h3>THE CONSUMERS' LEAGUE "WHITE LIST"</h3>
+<br>
+<p>The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm
+names.
+The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew the
+conditions. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the other
+firms to their outcast position. Far from evincing a desire to earn a
+place on the White List, they cast aspersions on a "parcel of women"
+who
+were trying to "undermine business credit," and scouted the very idea
+of
+an organized feminine conscience.</p>
+<p>"Wait until the women want Easter bonnets," sneered one merchant.
+"Do
+you think they will pass up anything good because the store is not on
+their White List?"</p>
+<p>Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for. Even
+as
+far back as <a name="Page_126"></a>1891 a few women had begun to doubt
+the efficacy of that
+indirect influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What was
+the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to
+be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the
+Mercantile
+Employers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in
+mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the
+smallest
+to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory Department.</p>
+<p>The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next,
+and
+still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years
+after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower
+House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported
+in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it.
+A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into
+conditions of working women in New York City.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_127"></a>The findings of this Rheinhard Commission,
+published afterwards in two
+large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified
+to employing grown women at a salary of <i>thirty-three cents a day</i>.
+They
+confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in
+defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and
+wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they
+should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended,
+on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and
+uncompensated
+overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took
+away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They
+threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were
+passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless
+girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.</p>
+<p>The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in
+spite of
+the mer<a name="Page_128"></a>chants' protests the women's bill was
+passed without a
+dissenting vote.</p>
+<p>The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit
+which it
+placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority
+of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also
+provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of seats,&#8212;one
+to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of children, except
+those holding working certificates from the authorities. These, and
+other minor provisions, affected all retail stores, as far as the law
+was obeyed.</p>
+<p>As a matter of fact the Consumers' League's bill carried a "joker"
+which
+made its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter of
+inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health,
+supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it
+proved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after a
+year of this inadequate inspection, political forces were <a
+ name="Page_129"></a>brought to
+bear, and then there were no store inspectors.</p>
+<p>Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers' League tried to
+persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed
+inspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a year
+ago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores under
+factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants'
+Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto
+what
+they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. Governor
+Hughes, however, signed the bill.</p>
+<p>In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred
+infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. No
+less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken
+out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were
+sent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Con<a
+ name="Page_130"></a>sumers'
+League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been
+justified.</p>
+<p>To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To
+women
+capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition,
+a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterly
+fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its
+enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply business
+men, with the business man's contracted vision. They could think only
+in
+terms of money profit and money loss.</p>
+<p>In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have
+succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the
+stores supported by their patronage.</p>
+<p>The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League
+would
+concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season.
+Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this
+one.
+The League stands firm on the point, <a name="Page_131"></a>and up to
+the present so do the
+stores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the
+custom whereby <i>thousands of young girls and women are compelled
+every
+holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of
+uncompensated labor</i>.</p>
+<p>No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime
+extorted
+in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to
+five months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchase
+after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six
+o'clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in
+the bookkeeping and auditing departments.</p>
+<p>That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in
+most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which
+strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it
+seems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified.</p>
+<p>I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of
+one of
+the largest and <a name="Page_132"></a>most respectable stores in New
+York. In this store,
+and, according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the
+accounting force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school,
+ignorant and incapable&#8212;but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day's
+sales are posted and audited before the close of the day following, the
+business force has to work until nine and ten o'clock several nights in
+the week. In some cases they work every night.</p>
+<p>Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of
+public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the
+Consumers' League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.</p>
+<p>The Consumers' League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in
+this
+early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. City after
+city, State after State, formed Consumers' Leagues, until, in 1899, a
+National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was organized. The
+National League, far from being a philanthropic society, has be<a
+ name="Page_133"></a>come a
+scientific association for the study of industrial economics.</p>
+<p>When the original Consumers' League undertook its first piece of
+legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were
+right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their
+claim.
+The New York League and all of the others have been collecting reasons
+ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized
+collection
+of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they should not
+work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in tenements;
+why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speed of
+machines
+should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should be extended; why
+minimum wage rates should be established.</p>
+<p>In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group
+of
+trained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body
+of
+facts concerning the human side <a name="Page_134"></a>of industry. It
+is ammunition which
+tells. One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry in
+Portland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of
+blowing
+a large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of
+the
+United States.</p>
+<p>There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of
+women in
+factories and laundries should be ten hours long. The law was
+constantly
+violated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland. One night a
+factory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and found
+working there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher. The inspector
+promptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller.</p>
+<p>The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars. Instead of
+paying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the other
+laundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for women
+workers was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment <a
+ name="Page_135"></a>to the
+Constitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the
+right
+freely to contract. A man or a woman may contract with an employer to
+work as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whatever
+dangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions, <i>unless</i> "there
+is fair
+ground to say that there is material danger to the public health or
+safety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the general
+welfare...." This is the legal decision on which most protective
+legislation in the United States has been based.</p>
+<p>Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day
+for
+women was declared unconstitutional because nobody's health or safety
+was endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New York
+law
+forbidding all-night employment of women.</p>
+<p>So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had
+reason to
+believe that they could attack the Oregon law. The case was appealed,
+and appealed again, by the <a name="Page_136"></a>laundrymen, and
+finally reached the Supreme
+Court of the United States. Then the Consumers' League took a hand.</p>
+<p>The brief for the State of Oregon, "defendant in error," was
+prepared by
+Louis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of
+the
+most effective workers in the League's New York headquarters. This
+brief
+is probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence. It
+consists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a few
+paragraphs were written by the attorney for the State. All the rest was
+contributed, under Miss Goldmark's direction, from the Consumers'
+League's wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should be
+protected.</p>
+<p>The League's reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to work
+their women employees far into the night was, "The World's Experience
+upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is
+Based." It is simply a mass of <a name="Page_137"></a>testimony taken
+from hearings before the
+English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from
+the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of
+industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical
+books; from reports of boards of health.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>REASONS FOR PROTECTING WOMEN WORKERS</h3>
+<p>The brief included a short and interesting chapter, containing a
+number
+of things the League had collected on the subject of laundries. Supreme
+Court judges cannot be expected to know that laundry work is classed by
+experts among the dangerous trades. That washing clothes, from a simple
+home or backyard occupation, has been transformed into a
+highly-organized factory trade full of complicated and often extremely
+dangerous machinery; that the atmosphere of a steam laundry is more
+conducive to tuberculosis and the other occupational diseases than
+cotton mills; that the work in laundries, being irreg<a name="Page_138"></a>ular,
+is conducive
+to a general low state of morals; that, on the whole, women should not
+be required to spend more time than necessary in laundries; all this
+was
+set forth.</p>
+<p>Medical testimony showed the physical differences between men and
+women;
+the lesser power of women to endure long hours of standing; the
+heightened susceptibility of women to industrial poisons&#8212;lead, naphtha,
+and the like. A long chapter of testimony on the effect of
+child-bearing
+in communities where the women had toiled long hours before marriage,
+or
+afterwards, was included.</p>
+<p>The testimony of factory inspectors, of industrial experts, of
+employers
+in England, Germany, France, America, revealed the bad effect of long
+hours on women's safety, both physical and moral. It revealed the good
+effect, on the individual health, home life, and general welfare, of
+short hours of labor.</p>
+<p>Nor was the business aspect of the case neglected. That people
+accomplish as much in an eight-hour day as in a twelve-hour day <a
+ name="Page_139"></a>has
+actually been demonstrated. The brief stated, for one instance, the
+experience of a bicycle factory in Massachusetts.</p>
+<p>In this place young women were employed to sort the ball bearings
+which
+went into the machines. They did this by touch, and no girl was of use
+to the firm unless her touch was very sensitive and very sure. The head
+of this firm became convinced that the work done late in the afternoon
+was of inferior quality, and he tried the experiment of cutting the
+hours from ten to nine. The work was done on piece wages, and the girls
+at first protested against the nine-hour day, fearing that their pay
+envelopes would suffer. To their astonishment they earned as much in
+nine hours as they had in ten. In time the employer cut the working day
+down to eight hours and a half, and in addition gave the girls
+ten-minute rests twice a day. Still they earned their full wages, and
+they continued to earn full wages after the day became eight hours
+long.
+The employer testified before the <a name="Page_140"></a>United States
+Industrial Commission
+of 1900 that he believed he could successfully shorten the day to seven
+hours and a half and get the same amount of work accomplished.</p>
+<p>What can you do against testimony like that? The Consumers' League
+convinced the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Oregon
+ten-hour law was upheld.</p>
+<p>The importance of this decision cannot be overestimated. On it hangs
+the
+validity of nearly all the laws which have been passed in the United
+States for the protection of women workers. If the Oregon law had been
+declared unconstitutional, laws in twenty States, or practically all
+the
+States where women work in factories, would have been in perpetual
+danger, and the United States might easily have sunk to a position
+occupied now by no leading country in Europe.</p>
+<p>Great Britain has had protective legislation for women workers since
+1844. In 1847 the labor of women in English textile mills was limited
+to
+ten hours a day, the period we are <a name="Page_141"></a>now worrying
+about, as being
+possibly contrary to our Constitution. France, within the past five
+years, has established a ten-hour day, broken by one hour of rest.
+Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy, limit the hours of
+women's labor. In several countries there are special provisions giving
+extra time off to women who have household responsibilities. What would
+our Constitution-bound law makers say to such a proposition, if any one
+had the hardihood to suggest it?</p>
+<p>If this law had not been upheld by the United States Supreme Court
+the
+women of no State could have hoped to secure further legislation for
+women workers. As it is, women in many States are preparing to
+establish
+what is now known as "The Oregon Standard," that is, a ten-hour day for
+all working women.</p>
+<p>Nothing in connection with the woman movement is more significant,
+certainly nothing was more unexpected, than the voluntary abandonment,
+on the part of women, of class <a name="Page_142"></a>prejudice and
+class distinctions. Where
+formerly the interest of the leisured woman in her wage-earning sisters
+was of a sentimental or philanthropic character, it has become
+practical
+and democratic.</p>
+<p>The Young Women's Christian Association has had an industrial
+department, which up to a recent period concerned itself merely with
+the
+spiritual welfare of working girls. Prayer meetings in factories,
+clubs,
+and classes in the Association headquarters, working-girls' boarding
+homes, and other philanthropic efforts were the limits of the
+Association's activities. The entire policy has changed of late, and
+under the capable direction of Miss Annie Marian MacLean, of Brooklyn,
+New York, the industrial department of the Association is doing
+scientific investigation of labor conditions of women.</p>
+<p>In a cracker factory I once saw a paid worker in the Young Women's
+Christian Association pause above a young girl lying on the floor,
+crimson with fever, and apparently <a name="Page_143"></a>in the
+throes of a serious illness.
+With angelic pity on her face the Association worker stooped and
+slipped
+a tract into the sick girl's hand. The kind of industrial secretary the
+Association now employs would send for an ambulance and see that the
+girl had the best of hospital care. She would inquire whether the
+girl's
+illness was caused by the conditions under which she worked, and she
+would know if it were possible to have those conditions changed.</p>
+<br>
+<h3>WOMEN'S CLUBS STUDYING LABOR PROBLEMS</h3>
+<p>Nearly every state federation of women's clubs has its industrial
+committee, and many large clubs have a corresponding department. It is
+these industrial sections of the women's clubs which are such a thorn
+in
+the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr., the new president of the National
+Manufacturers' Association. In his inaugural address Mr. Kirby warned
+his colleagues that women's clubs were not the ladylike, innocuous
+institutions that too-confiding <a name="Page_144"></a>man supposed
+them to be. In those
+clubs, he declared, their own wives and daughters were listening to
+addresses by the worst enemies of the Manufacturers' Association, the
+labor leaders. By which he meant that the club women were inviting
+trade-union men and women to present the worker's side of industrial
+subjects. "Soon," exclaimed Mr. Kirby, "we shall have to fight the
+women
+as well as the unions."</p>
+<p>The richest and most aristocratic woman's club in the country is the
+Colony Club of New York. The Colony Club was organized by a number of
+women from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the manner
+of men's clubs. The women built a magnificent clubhouse on Madison
+Avenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderful
+roof-garden. For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing more
+than
+a beautiful toy which its members played with. But soon it began to
+develop into a sort of a woman's forum, where all sorts of social
+topics
+were discussed. <a name="Page_145"></a>Visiting women of distinction,
+artists, writers,
+lecturers, were entertained there.</p>
+<p>Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course in
+industrial economics. The women did not invite lecturers from Columbia
+University to address them. They asked John Mitchell and many lesser
+lights of the labor world. They wanted to learn, at first hand, the
+facts concerning conditions of industry. Most of them are stockholders
+in mills, factories, mines, or business establishments. Many own real
+estate on which factories stand.</p>
+<p>"It is not fair," they have openly declared, "that we should enjoy
+wealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death. We do
+not want wealth on such terms."</p>
+<p>The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to the
+National Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in the
+working and living conditions of wage earners in industries and in
+governmental institutions. A few conscientious employers <a
+ name="Page_146"></a>have spent a
+part of their profits to make their employees comfortable. They have
+given them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, and
+comfortable seats. They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacation
+houses, and the like.</p>
+<p>No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers.
+Equally,
+no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem. Nor
+should they be used as a substitute for justice.</p>
+<p>Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed,
+untactfully administered. Too often it has been instituted, not to
+benefit the workers, but to advertise the business. Too often its real
+object was a desire to play the philanthropist's role, to exact
+obsequience from the wage earner.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img010"></a><img
+ style="width: 301px; height: 509px;"
+ alt="MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New York, the most exclusive Women's Club in the country"
+ title="MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New York, the most exclusive Women's Club in the country"
+ src="images/010.jpg"></p>
+<p>I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of
+the
+perfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected,
+the
+girls are required to stop work and clean the rooms. Since they work on
+a piece-<a name="Page_147"></a>work scale, the "perfect sanitary
+conditions" exist at their
+expense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a
+printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday.
+This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their
+employers. It always fails.</p>
+<p>It seems to the women who have studied these things that proper
+sanitary
+conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision for rest,
+vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wage earner's
+due.
+They are a part of the laborer's hire, and should be guaranteed by law,
+exactly as wages are guaranteed. An employer deserves gratitude for
+overtime pay no more than for fire escapes.</p>
+<p>Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers' League,
+women's
+clubs, and women's labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that
+good
+working conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastly
+increase the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits
+of
+the employers.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_148"></a>The New York Telephone Company does not set
+itself up to be a
+benevolent institution. Its directors know that its profits depend on
+the excellence of its service. There is one exchange in the Borough of
+Brooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic. This
+traffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summer
+resorts along the coast. In the fall and winter the traffic is very
+light. Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work only
+half the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round.
+"We cannot afford to do anything else," explains the traffic manager.
+"We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages."</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img011"></a><img
+ style="width: 284px; height: 522px;" alt="MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY"
+ title="MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY" src="images/011.jpg"></div>
+<p>The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his business
+would suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen. He believed that
+he would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks human
+working
+conditions. Then came the Consumers' League and mercantile laws, and a
+new pressure of <a name="Page_149"></a>public opinion, and the
+dry-goods merchant found out
+that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than one that
+is exhausted and uncomfortable.</p>
+<p>The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has
+proved
+itself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligent
+employers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws will
+provide for it.</p>
+<p>It used to be the invariable custom in stores&#8212;it is so still in a
+few&#8212;to lay off many clerks during the dull seasons. Now the best stores
+find that they can better afford to give all their employees vacations
+with pay. A clerk coming home after a vacation can sell goods, even in
+dull times. More and more employers are coming to appreciate the money
+value of the Saturday half-holiday in summer. Hearn, in New York,
+closes
+his department store all day Saturday during July and August. The store
+sells more goods in five days than it previously sold in six.</p>
+<a name="Page_150"></a><br>
+<h3>THE FILENE SYSTEM OF DEVELOPING EFFICIENT WORKERS</h3>
+<p>There is one department store which has demonstrated that it is
+profitable to pay higher wages than its competitors, and that it pays
+to
+allow the employees to fix the terms of their own employment. This is
+the Filene store in Boston, which has developed within the past ten
+years from a conservative, old-fashioned dry-goods business into an
+extremely original and interesting experiment station in commercial
+economics.</p>
+<p>The entire policy of the Filene management is bent on developing to
+the
+highest possible point the efficiency of each individual clerk. The
+best
+possible material is sought. No girl under sixteen is employed, and no
+girl of any age who has not graduated with credit from the grammar
+schools. There are a number of college-bred men and women in the Filene
+employ.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img012"></a><img
+ style="width: 356px; height: 230px;"
+ alt="A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN"
+ title="A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN" src="images/012.jpg"></div>
+<p>Good wages are paid, even to beginners, and <a name="Page_151"></a>experienced
+employees are
+rewarded, not according to a fixed rate of payment, but according to
+earning capacity. Taken throughout the store, wages, plus commissions,
+which are allowed in all departments, average about two dollars a week
+higher than in other department stores in Boston.</p>
+<p>No irresponsible, automatic employee can develop high efficiency.
+She
+does not want to become efficient; she wants merely to receive a pay
+envelope at the end of the week. In order to develop responsibility and
+initiative in their employees the Filenes have put them on a
+self-governing basis. The workers do not literally make their own
+rules,
+but the vote of the majority can change any rule made by the firm. The
+firm furnishes its employees with a printed book of rules, in which the
+policy of the store is set forth. If the employees object to any of the
+rules, or any part of the policy, they can vote a change.</p>
+<p>The medium through which the clerks express their opinions and
+desires
+is the Filene <a name="Page_152"></a>Co-operative Association, of
+which every clerk and every
+employee in the place is a member. No dues are exacted, as is the
+custom
+in the usual employees' association. The executive body, called the
+Store Council, and all other officers are elected by the members. All
+matters of grievance, all subjects of controversy, are referred to the
+Store Council, which, as often as occasion demands, calls a meeting of
+the entire association after business hours.</p>
+<p>For example: Christmas happens on a Friday. The firm decides to keep
+the
+store open on the following day&#8212;Saturday. There is an expression of
+dissatisfaction from a number of clerks. A meeting of the association
+is
+called, and a vote taken as to whether the majority want the extra
+holiday or not; whether the majority are willing to lose the
+commissions
+on a day's sales, for, of course, salaries continue. The vote reveals
+that the majority want the holiday. The Store Council so reports to the
+firm, and the firm must grant the holiday.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_153"></a>All matters of difficulty arising between
+employers and employed, in
+the Filene store, are settled not by the firm, but by the Arbitration
+Board of Employees, also elected by popular vote. All disagreements as
+to wages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue between
+saleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to the
+Board of Arbitration, and the board's decision is final. There is no
+tyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of a
+department. Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as she
+is an efficient saleswoman.</p>
+<p>Surely it is not too much to hope that, in a future not too far
+distant,
+all women who earn their bread will serve a system of industry adjusted
+by law to human standards. In enlightened America the courts, presided
+over by men to whom manual labor is known only in theory, have
+persistently ruled that the <i>Constitution forbade the State to make
+laws
+protecting women workers</i>. It has seemed to most of our courts and
+most
+of our judges <a name="Page_154"></a>that the State fulfilled its
+whole duty to its women
+citizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract&#8212;even
+though they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts which
+involved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and future
+generations. The women of this country have done nothing more important
+than to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyond
+this terrible delusion.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VI"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_155"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<h2>MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE</h2>
+<br>
+<p>The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the
+legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was
+received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. The
+Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in
+labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable
+opportunity
+to get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the Illinois
+State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years
+later
+the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that
+it
+was unconstitutional.</p>
+<p>The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without
+precedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States,
+until it had become almost a prin<a name="Page_156"></a>ciple of
+American law that protective
+legislation for working women was invalid.</p>
+<p>The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the
+conclusion
+that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody
+of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women
+would
+be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may
+appear obscure.</p>
+<p>The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men,
+and
+they know something&#8212;not much, but still something&#8212;about the men of the
+working classes. They know, for example, something about the conditions
+under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to
+public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor,
+twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these
+are bad things,&#8212;bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for
+the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of labor
+comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_157"></a>The learned judges, I say this with all due
+respect, do not know
+anything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts of
+their decisions, denying the constitutionality of protective measures,
+are amazing in the ignorance they display,&#8212;ignorance of industrial
+conditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects of
+certain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect of
+women's arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions
+in
+trades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the home
+resulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, the
+learned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, the
+happiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about the
+inhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display of
+the real facts.</p>
+<p>We have seen how the women of the Consumers' League taught the
+United
+States Supreme Court something about working women; showed them a few
+of
+the calamities resulting <a name="Page_158"></a>from the unrestricted
+labor of women and
+immature girls. The Supreme Court's decision forever abolished the old
+fallacy that the American Constitution <i>forbids</i> protective
+legislation
+for women workers. It remains for women's organizations in the various
+States to educate local courts up to the knowledge that community
+interest <i>demands</i> protective legislation.</p>
+<p>Following the decision of the Supreme Court in the Oregon case,
+which
+flatly contradicted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, the
+working women of Illinois began their educational campaign. They had
+now, for the first time, a fighting chance to secure the restoration of
+their shortened work day. The women of fifteen organized trades in the
+city of Chicago determined to take that chance.</p>
+<p>The women first appealed to the Industrial Commission, appointed
+early
+in 1908 by Governor Dineen, to investigate the need of protective
+legislation for workers, men and women alike.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_159"></a>The women were given a courteous hearing, but
+were told frankly that
+limited hours of work for women was not one of protective measures to
+be
+recommended by the Commission.</p>
+<p>The Waitresses' Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists,
+led
+by a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary of
+the union. Miss Maloney and her associates drafted and introduced into
+the Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day for
+every woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store,
+laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for
+enforcing the measure.</p>
+<p>The "Girls' Bill," as it immediately became known, was the most
+hotly
+contested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during the
+session.
+Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing on the
+bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek and tired
+women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their working
+<a name="Page_160"></a>day made shorter. Another presented a petition
+signed by his women
+employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven hours
+a
+day!</p>
+<p>Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after
+learned
+counsel for the Manufacturers' Association had argued against the
+measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers'
+Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girls
+confined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of the
+Glove Makers' Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two
+girls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are
+gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a
+chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea:
+Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses' Union, was the other speaker.</p>
+<p>They described details in the daily lives of working women not
+generally
+known except to the workers themselves. Among these was <a
+ name="Page_161"></a>the piece-work
+system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible
+speed
+is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage.
+The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine
+whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; to
+consider how many stitches the operator's hand must guide in a week, a
+month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve
+hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease
+of
+earning power.</p>
+<p>"I am a waitress," said Miss Maloney, "and I work ten hours a day.
+In
+that time a waitress who is tolerably busy <i>walks</i> ten miles, and
+the
+dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred
+to
+two thousand pounds. Don't you think eight hours a day is enough for a
+girl to walk?"</p>
+<p>Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after
+that
+day. The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too grave
+for
+the friends of the workers to over<a name="Page_162"></a>come. It was
+decided to substitute a
+ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the "Oregon Standard" established
+by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle of limitation
+upon the hours of women's work once established in Illinois, the
+workers
+could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.</p>
+<p>The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a
+law
+of the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers' Association, through the
+W.C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought
+suit
+to test the constitutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, Anna
+Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Their
+appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten
+hours
+to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to
+contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them
+by the ten-hour law.</p>
+<p>There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers,
+involved
+in this protest <a name="Page_163"></a>against the ten-hour day, a
+confession of the wretched
+state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature
+years&#8212;one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over
+thirty years&#8212;are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep
+body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no
+position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would
+contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?</p>
+<p>There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time
+Judge
+R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his
+career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to
+the
+real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For
+Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory
+Department,
+forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.</p>
+<p>Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the
+women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it <a
+ name="Page_164"></a>came up in
+the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of
+Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on
+hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed
+pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers'
+League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had
+toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois
+Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply
+a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and
+bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and
+especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on
+the
+succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three pages of
+law.</p>
+<p>The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was
+the
+testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.</p>
+<p>"Medical Science has demonstrated," says this most important
+paragraph,
+"that while <a name="Page_165"></a>fatigue is a normal phenomenon ...
+excessive fatigue or
+exhaustion is abnormal.... It has discovered that fatigue is due not
+only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue,
+entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial
+toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that when
+artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin
+causes death. The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to be
+counteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body.
+But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not produced
+fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin."</p>
+<p>The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the American
+Constitution was never intended to shield manufacturers in their
+willingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. The
+ten-hour law was sustained.</p>
+<p>That the "Girls' Bill" passed, or that it was even introduced, was
+due
+in large measure to <a name="Page_166"></a>an organization of women,
+more militant and more
+democratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women's
+Trade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, the
+League
+consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organized
+trades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of these
+latter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-union
+principle, but more are women who work in the professional
+ranks,&#8212;teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlement
+workers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, who
+ever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federation
+of Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners,
+to appear in Labor Day parades.</p>
+<p>The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities,&#8212;New
+York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland,&#8212;is to educate women
+wage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains and
+sup<a name="Page_167"></a>ports organizers among all classes of
+workers. As quickly as a group
+in any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. It
+raises
+funds to assist women in their trade struggles. It acts as arbitrator
+between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes.</p>
+<p>The Women's Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factory
+trades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until lately
+believed themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundred
+and fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventy
+stenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers' Federation
+of Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before the
+Women's Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated.
+The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized.</p>
+<p>The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League was
+brilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-<a
+ name="Page_168"></a>waist
+makers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story of
+this strike will bear retelling.</p>
+<p>On the evening of November 22, 1909, there was a great mass meeting
+of
+workers held at Cooper Union in New York. Samuel Gompers, President of
+the American Federation of Labor, presided, and the stage was well
+filled with members of the Women's Trade Union League. The meeting had
+been called by the League in conjunction with Shirt-Waist Makers'
+Union,
+Local 25, to consider the grievances of shirt-waist makers in general,
+and especially of the shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, who
+had been, for more than two months, on strike.</p>
+<p>The story of the strike, the causes that led up to it, and the
+bitter
+injustice which followed it were rehearsed in a dozen speeches. It was
+shown that for four to five dollars a week the girl shirt-waist makers
+worked from eight in the morning until half-past five in the evening
+two
+days in the week; from eight in the morn<a name="Page_169"></a>ing
+until nine at night four
+days in the week; and from eight in the morning until noon one day in
+the week&#8212;Sunday.</p>
+<p>The shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, in hope of bettering
+their conditions, had formed a union, and had informed their employers
+of their action. The employers promptly locked them out of the shop,
+and
+the girls declared a strike.</p>
+<p>The strike was more than two months old when the Cooper Union
+meeting
+was held, and the employers showed no signs of giving in. It was agreed
+that a general strike of shirt-waist makers ought to be declared. But
+the union was weak, there were no funds, and most of the shirt-waist
+makers were women and unused to the idea of solidarity in action. Could
+they stand together in an industrial struggle which promised to be long
+and bitter?</p>
+<p>President Gompers was plainly fearful that they could not.</p>
+<p>Suddenly a very small, very young, very intense Jewish girl, known
+to
+her associates as <a name="Page_170"></a>Clara Lemlich, sprang to her
+feet, and, with the
+assistance of two young men, climbed to the high platform. Flinging up
+her arms with a dramatic gesture she poured out a flood of speech,
+entirely unintelligible to the presiding Gompers, and to the members of
+the Women's Trade Union League. The Yiddish-speaking majority in the
+audience understood, however, and the others quickly caught the spirit
+of her impassioned plea.</p>
+<p>The vast audience rose as one man, and a great roar arose. "Yes, we
+will
+all strike!"</p>
+<p>"And will you keep the faith?" cried the girl on the platform. "Will
+you
+swear by the old Jewish oath of our fathers?"</p>
+<p>Two thousand Jewish hands were thrust in air, and two thousand
+Jewish
+throats uttered the oath: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge,
+may this hand wither and drop off from this arm I now raise."</p>
+<p>Clara Lemlich's part in the work was accomplished. Within a few days
+forty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_171"></a>The Women's Trade Union League, under the
+direction of Miss Helen
+Marot, secretary, at once took hold of the strike.</p>
+<p>There were two things to be done at once. The forty thousand had to
+be
+enrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing to
+accept the terms of the strikers had to be "signed up." Clinton Hall,
+one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, and
+for several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the street
+outside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and women
+strikers, anxious and perspiring "bosses," and busy, active associates
+of the Women's Trade Union League.</p>
+<p>The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied the
+League members undertook the work of picketing the shops. Picketing, if
+this activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling the
+neighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakers
+are going to and from their <a name="Page_172"></a>nefarious business,
+and importuning them to
+join the strike.</p>
+<p>Peaceful picketing is legal. The law permits a striker to speak to
+the
+girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her
+most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on
+the
+other's arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence.</p>
+<p>Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a
+little
+of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence.
+After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girls
+who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members.
+Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among
+these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's
+Superintendent
+of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a
+millionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College,
+Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association of
+Collegiate Alumnae. These young women went <a name="Page_173"></a>out
+day after day with girl
+strikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered
+arrest
+on more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation of
+magistrates who&#8212;well, who did not understand.</p>
+<p>The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and
+organizations of
+women other than the Women's Trade Union League began to take an
+interest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss Gertrude
+Barnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial world
+of women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike.
+They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women in
+person.</p>
+<p>The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest social
+eminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan and
+several others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the president
+of the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the
+strikers'
+own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. <a
+ name="Page_174"></a>More
+than thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozen
+women promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers.</p>
+<p>A week later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, mother of the Duchess of
+Marlborough,
+leader of a large Woman Suffrage Association, engaged the Hippodrome,
+and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators.
+Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting.</p>
+<p>At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses were
+involved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis of
+increased pay, a fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of the
+union. Others settled later, and under the influence of the "uptown
+scum," as the employers' association gallantly termed the Women's Trade
+Union League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still others
+reluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out
+of
+the five hundred had settled with the union, and only about three
+<a name="Page_175"></a>thousand of the workers were still out of work.</p>
+<p>Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they would
+ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of the
+intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all,
+that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be
+helped
+along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was
+unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household
+labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to
+perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was
+to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.</p>
+<p>Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are
+becoming
+the co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of the
+leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the
+situation. espouse the cause of their working sisters. <a
+ name="Page_176"></a>The woman in the
+factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.</p>
+<p>The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury,
+Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of
+the working women.</p>
+<p>That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was
+established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew
+every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the
+women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of
+labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and
+wages
+were good enough to compensate for the long day's labor.</p>
+<p>The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a
+corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few
+floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands."</p>
+<p>The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated
+machinery was intro<a name="Page_177"></a>duced. The shortened work day
+was a hundred times
+more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and
+nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances
+developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so
+bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or
+manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to
+the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women who
+had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and
+eight dollars.</p>
+<p>The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the
+mills
+as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.</p>
+<p>There you have the story of women's realization of themselves as a
+group. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women.
+The Boston Branch of the Women's Trade Union League, through its
+secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined <a
+ name="Page_178"></a>the strikers.
+Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile
+Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks
+of anxiety and deprivation.</p>
+<p>The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business
+before treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, exists
+as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and
+conferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to
+exist. An employers' association is a necessity of business life. A
+labor union is an insult to capital.</p>
+<p>This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor car
+stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs.
+Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay
+personified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer. Her
+powers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercial
+connections, were sufficient to wring consent from the <a
+ name="Page_179"></a>firm to receive
+John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers.</p>
+<p>John Golden, intelligent, honest, a fine type of workingman,
+educated in
+the English school of unionism, held two conferences with the firm. He
+was able to make the employers see the whole situation in an entirely
+new light. They were men of probity; they wanted to be fair; and when
+they saw the human side of the struggle they surrendered. When they
+perceived the justice of the collective bargain, the advantages to both
+sides of a labor organization honestly conducted, they consented to
+recognize the union. And the women went back, their group unbroken.</p>
+<p>Thus are women working, women of all classes, to humanize the
+factory.
+From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and the
+judiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women of
+the toiling masses in their struggle to make over the factory from the
+inside. Together they are impressing the men of the working <a
+ name="Page_180"></a>world, law
+makers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of the
+race.</p>
+<p>Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protective
+legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal
+decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not yet
+complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the late
+Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not every
+court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more
+valuable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn.</p>
+<p>In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in
+which
+a number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to the
+owner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did not
+strike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in that
+country a substitute for the strike is provided by law. To this
+substitute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. The
+employer in his answer declared, <a name="Page_181"></a>just as
+employers in this country
+might have done, that his business would not stand an increase in
+wages.
+He explained that the match industry was newly established in New
+Zealand, and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could
+not afford to pay high wages.</p>
+<p>The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been an
+inquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiry
+into the cost of living in the town where the match factory was
+located.
+And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court of
+Arbitration, and this is what he said to the man:</p>
+<p>"It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on
+the
+wages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that they
+should have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls and
+bodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance than
+your profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better for
+the <a name="Page_182"></a>community for you to close your factory. <i>It
+would be better to
+send the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back
+to
+flints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter.</i>
+My
+award is that you pay what they ask."</p>
+<p>Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the
+eight
+million women in the world who have learned to think in human terms.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VII"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_183"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<h2>BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO</h2>
+<br>
+<p>At the threshold of that quarter of old New York called Greenwich
+Village stands Jefferson Market Court. Almost concealed behind the
+towering structure of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, the building by day is
+rather inconspicuous. But when night falls, swallowing up the
+neighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Market
+assumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminated
+clock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands toward
+midnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams an
+intense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of the
+building floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, through
+the iron-guarded door, there passes, every week-day night in the year,
+a
+long procession of prodigals.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_184"></a>The guarded door seldom admits any one as
+important, so to speak, as a
+criminal. The criminal's case waits for day. The Night Court in
+Jefferson Market sits in judgment only on the small fry caught in the
+dragnet of the police. Tramps, vagrants, drunkards, brawlers,
+disturbers
+of the peace, speeding chauffeurs, licenseless peddlers, youths caught
+red-handed shooting craps or playing ball in the streets,&#8212;these are the
+men with whom the Night Court deals. But it is not the men we have come
+to see.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img013"></a><img
+ style="width: 291px; height: 417px;" alt="MISS MAUDE E. MINER"
+ title="MISS MAUDE E. MINER" src="images/013.jpg"></div>
+<p>The women of the Night Court. Prodigal daughters! Between December,
+1908, and December, 1909, no less than five thousand of them passed
+through the guarded door, under the blaze of the electric lights. There
+is never an hour, from nine at night until three in the morning, when
+the prisoners' bench in Jefferson Market Court is without its full
+quota
+of women. Old&#8212;prematurely old, and young&#8212;pitifully young; white and
+brown; fair and faded; sad and cynical; starved and prosper<a
+ name="Page_185"></a>ous;
+rag-draped and satin-bedecked; together they wait their turn at
+judgment.</p>
+<p>Quietly moving back and forth before the prisoners' bench you see a
+woman, tall, graceful, black-gowned. She is the salaried probation
+officer, modern substitute for the old-time volunteer mission worker.
+The probation officer's serious blue eyes burn with no missionary zeal.
+There is no spark of sentimental pity in the keen gaze she turns on
+each
+new arrival.</p>
+<p>When the bench is full of women the judge turns to her to inquire:
+"Anybody there you want, Miss Miner?"</p>
+<p>Miss Miner usually shakes her head. She diagnoses her cases like a
+physician, and she wastes no time on incurables.</p>
+<p>Once in a while, perhaps several times in the course of a night,
+Miss
+Miner touches a girl on the arm. At once the girl rises and follows the
+probation officer into an adjoining room. If she is what she appears,
+young in evil, if she has a story which rings true, a story of poverty
+and misfortune, rather than of depravity, <a name="Page_186"></a>she
+goes not back to the
+prisoners' bench. When her turn at judgment comes Miss Miner stands
+beside her, and in a low voice meant only for the judge, she tells the
+facts. The girl weeps as she listens. To hear one's troubles told is
+sometimes more terrible than to endure them.</p>
+<p>Court adjourns at three in the morning, and this girl, with the
+others&#8212;if others have been claimed by the probation officer&#8212;goes out
+into the empty street, under the light of the tall tower, whose clock
+has begun all over again its monotonous race toward midnight. No
+policeman accompanies the group. The girls are under no manner of
+duress. They have promised to go home with Miss Miner, and they go. The
+night's adventure, entered into with dread, with callous indifference,
+or with thoughtless mirth, ends in a quiet bedroom and a pillow wet
+with
+tears.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img014"></a><img
+ style="width: 356px; height: 306px;"
+ alt="IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK."
+ title="IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK." src="images/014.jpg"></div>
+<p>Waverley House, as Miss Miner's home is known, has sheltered, during
+the
+past year, over three hundred girls. Out of that number <a
+ name="Page_187"></a>one hundred
+and nineteen have returned to their homes, or are earning a living at
+useful work.</p>
+<p>One hundred and nineteen saved out of five thousand prodigals! In
+point
+of numbers this is a melancholy showing, but in comparison with other
+efforts at rescue work it is decidedly encouraging.</p>
+<p>Nothing quite like Waverley House has appeared in other American
+cities,
+but it is a type of detention home for girls which is developing
+logically out of the probation system. Delinquent girls under sixteen
+are now considered, in all enlightened communities, subjects for the
+Juvenile Court. They are hardly ever associated with older delinquents.
+But a girl over sixteen is likely to be committed to prison, and may be
+locked in cells with criminal and abandoned women of the lowest order.
+Waverley House is the first practical protest against this stupid and
+evil-encouraging policy.</p>
+<p>The house, which stands a few blocks distant from the Night Court,
+was
+established and is <a name="Page_188"></a>maintained by the Probation
+Association of New York,
+consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and of
+men and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The
+District
+Attorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of the
+Association, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, Miss
+Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women's Trade
+Union League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women's
+Municipal League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York's
+organized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among the
+supporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable and
+sympathetic superintendent of the house.</p>
+<p>The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station,
+a
+laboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases
+which
+beset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency
+and
+paroled to probation officers are taken to Waverley <a name="Page_189"></a>House,
+where they
+remain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best means
+of disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some to
+hospitals, some to institutions, some placed on long probation.</p>
+<p>Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's
+college
+to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who
+are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which
+has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They
+have
+set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakes
+countless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery,
+disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women have
+undertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of the
+problem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals?
+This much did the missionaries before them.</p>
+<p>"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per <a name="Page_190"></a>cent,"
+declares Miss Miner,
+"if only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning."</p>
+<p>To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the
+beginning,
+instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That
+is
+what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what
+physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning
+to
+do with poverty.</p>
+<p>Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a
+cause,
+and that it might be possible to attack it at its source. Yet that any
+large number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly,
+voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts.
+There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they find
+themselves entirely powerless to resist.</p>
+<p>Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs
+of a
+very important movement among women to discover what these forces are.
+Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand. We have had, and we still have,
+in cities <a name="Page_191"></a>east and west, committees and
+societies and law and order
+leagues earnestly engaged in "stamping out" the evil. It is like trying
+to stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by a
+strong gale. The protests of most of these leagues amount to little
+more
+than vain clamor against a thing which is not even distantly
+comprehended.</p>
+<p>The <i>personnel</i> of these agencies organized to "stamp out" the
+evil
+differs little in the various cities. It is largely if not wholly
+masculine in character, and the evil is usually dealt with from the
+point of view of religion and morals. Women, when they appear in the
+matter at all, figure as missionaries, "prison angels," and the like.
+As
+evangelists to sinners women have been permitted to associate with
+their
+fallen sisters without losing caste. Likewise, when elderly enough,
+they
+have been allowed to serve on governing boards of "homes" and
+"refuges."
+Their activities were limited to rescue work. They might extend a hand
+to a repentant Magdalene. A Phryne they must not even <a
+ name="Page_192"></a>be aware of. In
+other words, this evil as a subject of investigation and intelligent
+discussion among women was absolutely prohibited. It has ever been
+their
+Great Taboo.</p>
+<p>Nevertheless, when eight million women, in practically every
+civilized
+country in the world, organized themselves into an International
+Council
+of Women, and began their remarkable survey of the social order in
+which
+they live, one of their first acts was to break the Great Taboo.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img015"></a><img
+ style="width: 239px; height: 404px;" alt="MISS SADIE AMERICAN"
+ title="MISS SADIE AMERICAN" src="images/015.jpg"></div>
+<p>At early congresses of the International Council Miss Sadie
+American,
+Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis, among American
+delegates, Miss Elizabeth Janes of England, Miss Elizabeth Gad of
+Denmark, Dr. Agnes Bluhm of Germany, and others interested in the moral
+welfare of girls, urged upon the Council action against the "White
+Slave" traffic. No extensive argument was required to convince the
+members of the Council that the "White Slave" traffic and the whole
+subject of the moral degradation of women was <a name="Page_193"></a>a
+social phenomenon too
+long neglected by women.</p>
+<p>These women declared with refreshing candor that it was about time
+that
+the social evil was dealt with intelligently, and if it was to be dealt
+with intelligently women must do the work. The fussy old gentlemen with
+white side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other well
+meaning amateurs, who are engaged in "stamping out" the evil, deserve
+to
+be set aside. In their places the women propose to install social
+experts who shall deal scientifically with the problem.</p>
+<p>The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle,
+in
+every community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actually
+forbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for the
+first time repudiated by a body of organized women. The arguments on
+which the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time,
+seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance.
+The desirability of the descent of <a name="Page_194"></a>property in
+legal paternal line
+seemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid
+standard
+of morals to women. But they found reasons infinitely greater why the
+same rigid standard should be applied to men.</p>
+<p>The International Council of Women and women's organizations in
+every
+country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and
+through these physicians they have been able to consider the social
+evil
+from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which
+touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare
+of children, were brought forth&#8212;facts concerning infantile blindness,
+almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the
+fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women,
+and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases
+among men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of these
+maladies, and their frightful prevalence,&#8212;seventy-five per <a
+ name="Page_195"></a>cent of
+city men, according to reliable authority, being affected,&#8212;aroused in
+the women a sentiment of indignation and revolt. The International
+Council of Women put itself on record as protesting against the
+responsibility laid upon women, the unassisted task of preserving the
+purity of the race.</p>
+<p>In the United States, women's clubs, women's societies, women's
+medical
+associations, special committees of women in many cities have
+courageously undertaken the study of this problem, intending by means
+of
+investigation and publicity to lay bare its sources and seek its remedy.</p>
+<p>The sources of the evil are about the only phase of the problem
+which
+has never been adequately examined. It is true that we have suspected
+that the unsteady and ill-adjusted economic position of women furnished
+some explanation for its existence, but even now our information is
+vague and unsatisfactory.</p>
+<p>A number of years ago, in 1888 to be exact, the Massachusetts Bureau
+of
+Labor Statistics <a name="Page_196"></a>made an interesting
+investigation. This was an effort
+to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world,
+usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to
+profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations
+of nearly four thousand fallen women in twenty-eight American cities.</p>
+<p>Of these unfortunates over eight hundred had worked in low-waged
+trades
+such as paper-box making, millinery, laundry work, rope and cordage
+making, cigar and cigarette making, candy packing, textile factory and
+shoe factory work.</p>
+<p>About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, and
+seamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was not
+stated.</p>
+<p>The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so
+far
+as wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundred
+and sixteen recruits to the list.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_197"></a>On the whole, these groups were what the
+investigators had expected to
+find.</p>
+<p>There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were
+entirely
+unexpected by the investigators. Of the 3,866 girls examined 1,236, or
+nearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The next
+largest group, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domestic
+servants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homes
+into lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from that
+occupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and most
+suitable means of earning their living&#8212;housework.</p>
+<p>Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as
+something
+too disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least
+sixty-two
+per cent of those 3,866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were
+too
+lazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one of
+honest toil in somebody's nice kitchen. Apparently this was the <a
+ name="Page_198"></a>view
+taken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it never
+carried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out <i>why</i>
+so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried to
+find out <i>why</i> housework was a trade dangerous to morals.</p>
+<p>Fortunately it did occur to the women's organizations to examine the
+facts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take you
+over some of the ground they have covered and show you where their
+investigations have led them.</p>
+<p>South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and
+forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large
+city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,&#8212;enormous drab
+structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering
+chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The
+steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family
+houses, built of wood, <a name="Page_199"></a>generally unpainted, and
+always dismally
+utilitarian as to architectural details.</p>
+<p>In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a
+park,
+or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement was
+just seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quite
+imposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered for
+the day as soon as the classes were dismissed.</p>
+<p>In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of
+young
+girls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which
+always
+must be fed&#8212;if not with wholesome food, then husks. For parents these
+girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and
+came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers
+who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and
+were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For
+social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know
+what
+that <a name="Page_200"></a>means. It means trooping up and down the
+main street in lively
+groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a
+cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street
+accident or a fight.</p>
+<p>About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South
+Chicago
+and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some of
+these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went
+"downtown." There was no other place for them to go.</p>
+<p>As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral
+situation
+would you expect to evolve out of these materials?</p>
+<p>Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood.
+Many
+of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in
+these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile
+Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals.
+Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the
+never-ceasing procession of prodigals.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_201"></a>This is what "no previous occupation" really
+means in nine cases out of
+ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all,
+according to the ideals of you who read these pages.</p>
+<p>Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes
+it
+was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large
+enough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In some
+there was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extreme
+cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue
+and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are
+possible.</p>
+<p>Annie Donnelly's case will serve as further illustration. Annie
+Donnelly's father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab
+from
+twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays
+included. Before the cab drivers' strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly's
+wages were fifteen dollars a week, <a name="Page_202"></a>and the
+family lived in a four-room
+tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week. You pay rent weekly to a
+tenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week
+for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a
+week.</p>
+<p>The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single
+dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York
+tenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who was
+fourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms.
+Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a
+lodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement
+because it had only one dark room.</p>
+<p>One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance.
+Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not
+allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby,
+attended the annual ball of the Coachman's Union, but that <a
+ name="Page_203"></a>was another
+thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.</p>
+<p>The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really
+lived
+in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable
+except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably
+crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was
+impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit
+of her social life had to be lived out of the house.</p>
+<p>When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking
+about
+with the other girls or sitting on a friend's doorstep, until ten or
+even eleven o'clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city
+neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl's life when this sort of
+thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the
+doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable.
+So
+one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the
+lodger to a dance.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_204"></a>The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled
+basement room in a building
+which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the
+front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: "The
+Johnny
+Sullivan Social Club."</p>
+<p>The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat
+check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in
+a
+waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which
+followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric
+lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest
+best with a popular waltz tune.</p>
+<p>In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the
+heat
+and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was
+piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When
+the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with
+the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.</p>
+<p>"<a name="Page_205"></a>Come along," said the lodger, "and have a
+beer." When Annie shook her
+head he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent
+free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy
+a
+beer off of 'em oncet in a while. They've gotta get something out of
+it."</p>
+<p>I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately
+she
+learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish
+dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable
+by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places.
+Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room means
+poor business at the bar.</p>
+<p>Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall <i>habitu&eacute;</i>. Not
+because she was
+viciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she was
+decidedly normal in all her instincts and desires.</p>
+<p>Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every
+dance
+invitations to other <a name="Page_206"></a>dances are distributed
+with a lavish hand. These
+invitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over
+chairs
+and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are
+locally
+known as "throw-aways." Here are a few specimens, from which you may
+form an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind of
+people&#8212;almost the only kind of people&#8212;who offer pleasure to the
+starved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actual
+invitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker of
+the New York College Settlement:</p>
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"<i>Second annual reception and ball, given by Jibo and Jack, at New
+Starlight Hall, 143 Suffolk Street, December 25. Music by our favorite.
+Gents ticket 25 cents, Ladies 15 cents.</i>"</p>
+<p> "<i>Don't miss the ball given by Joe the Greaser, and Sam
+Rosenstock, at Odd Fellows' Hall, January 29th.</i>"</p>
+<p> "<a name="Page_207"></a><i>See the Devil Dance at the Reception and
+Ball given by Max Pascal and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday
+evening, November 20th."</i></p>
+<p><i> "Reception and Ball given by two well known friends, Max Turk
+and Sam Lande, better known as Mechuch, at Appollo Hall, Chrystmas
+night. Floor manager, Young Louis. Ticket admit one 25 cents.</i>"</p>
+</div>
+<p>In addition to these private affairs which are arranged purely for
+the
+profit of "Jibo and Jack" and their kind, men who make a living in this
+and in yet more unspeakable ways, there are hundreds of saloon dance
+halls, not only in New York, but in other cities. These are simply
+annexes to drinking places, and people are not welcome there unless
+they
+drink. No admission is charged.</p>
+<p>There are also numberless dancing academies. Dancing lessons are
+given
+four nights in the week, as a rule, and the dancing public <a
+ name="Page_208"></a>buys
+admission the other three nights and on Sunday afternoons. Some dancing
+academies, even in tenement house quarters, are reputable institutions,
+but to most of them the lowest of the low, both men and women, resort.
+There, as in the dance halls, the "White Slaver" plies his trade, and
+the destroyer of womanliness lays his nets.</p>
+<p>Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places. She
+learned to
+"spiel." You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms' length,
+and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl's
+skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of the
+spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for
+liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong
+drink.</p>
+<p>Annie also learned to dance what is known as the "half time," or the
+"part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and
+contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a
+very primitive form <a name="Page_209"></a>of the dance, and probably
+goes back to the pagan
+harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain
+crude
+peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it
+to
+immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell
+the girls that it is the <i>American</i> fashion of waltzing.</p>
+<p>Annie Donnelly's destruction was accomplished in less than a year.
+It
+was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her
+home.
+There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too
+crowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother were
+respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie's first real
+misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to
+go home.</p>
+<p>The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically
+unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in
+every city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which,
+every year, thou<a name="Page_210"></a>sands of girls descend to the
+way of the prodigal. No
+one has counted their number. All we know of the unclassed is that they
+exist, apparently in ever-increasing masses.</p>
+<p>It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six
+thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like
+twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law.
+That
+is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so
+unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of these
+unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible
+to
+know&#8212;we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the
+unclassed.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img016"></a><img
+ style="width: 342px; height: 516px;" alt="A DANCE HALL"
+ title="A DANCE HALL" src="images/016.jpg"></div>
+<p>The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it
+may
+occupy a vacant store building, or a large loft. Somewhere in its
+immediate vicinity there is a saloon. A dance lasts about five minutes,
+and the interval between dances is from ten to twenty minutes. Waiters
+circle among the <a name="Page_211"></a>dancers, importuning them to
+drink. The dance hall
+without a bar, or some source of liquid supply, does not often exist,
+except as it has been established by social workers to offset the
+influence of the commercial dance hall.</p>
+<p>Some dance halls are small and wretchedly lighted. Others are large
+and
+pretentious. Some of them have direct connections with Raines Law
+hotels
+and their prototypes. Of hardly a single dance hall can a good word be
+said. They are almost entirely in the hands of the element lowest in
+society, in business, and in politics.</p>
+<p>From the old-fashioned German family picnic park to Coney Island in
+New
+York, Revere Beach in Boston, The White City in Chicago, Savin Rock in
+New Haven, and their like, is a far cry.</p>
+<p>Some of these summer parks try to keep their amusements clean and
+decent, and some, notably Euclid Park, Cleveland, succeed. But drink
+and
+often worse evils are characteristic <a name="Page_212"></a>of most of
+them. There are parts
+of Coney Island where no beer is sold, where the vaudeville and the
+moving pictures are clean and wholesome, where dancing is orderly. But
+the nearest side street has its "tough joint." The same thing is true
+of
+the big summer resorts of other cities.</p>
+<p>The dance hall, both winter and summer types, have had a
+deteriorating
+effect upon the old-fashioned dancing academy. Formerly these were
+respectable establishments where people paid for dancing lessons. Now
+they are a <i>m&eacute;lange</i> of dancing classes and public
+entertainments. The
+dancing masters, unable to compete with the dance hall proprietors,
+have
+been obliged to transfer many of the dance hall features to their
+establishments.</p>
+<p>Oddly enough it is rather an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted
+to
+a dance in any kind of a dance hall. The girls go alone, with a friend,
+or with a group of girls. The exceptional girl, who is attended by a
+man, must dance with him, or if she accepts another part<a
+ name="Page_213"></a>ner, she must
+ask his permission. An escort is deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage.
+Those who go unattended are always sure of partners. Often they meet
+"fellows" they know, or have seen on the streets. Introductions are not
+necessary. Even if a girl is unacquainted with any "fellows," if she
+possesses slight attractions, she is still sure of partners.</p>
+<p>The amount of money spent by working girls for dance-hall admissions
+is
+considerable. A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages
+thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.</p>
+<p>In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number
+of
+black-gowned girls. The black gown might almost be called the mark of
+the dance-hall <i>habitu&eacute;</i>, the girl who is dance mad and
+who spends all
+her evenings going from one resort to another. She wears black because
+light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.</p>
+<p>An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the "spieler."
+This
+is a young man <a name="Page_214"></a>whose strongest recommendation
+is that he is a skilled
+and untiring dancer. The business of the spieler is to look after the
+wall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he
+dances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for a
+place to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to those
+dance halls where they have had the best time.</p>
+<p>The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is a
+sinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls. The
+dance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth of
+many of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type.</p>
+<p>Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most
+brutally
+evil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense of
+chaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution. It is
+vicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, the
+desire of men and women to associate to<a name="Page_215"></a>gether,
+and distorts that
+instinct into evil. The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes,
+especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share their
+pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. The
+position of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treat
+her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy
+does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very
+readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack
+of
+chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward
+course.</p>
+<p>Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive
+young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although not
+remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a
+stenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon as
+she finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with her
+working papers. The family needed additional income, not to meet actual
+living expenses, for the Green<a name="Page_216"></a>baums were not
+acutely poor, but in order
+that the only son of the family might go to college. Max was seventeen,
+a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his
+superiority
+over his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family
+should
+toil unceasingly for his advancement.</p>
+<p>Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslin
+underwear factory. At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as
+a
+skilled operator on a tucking machine. She sat down to her work every
+morning at eight o'clock, and for four hours watched with straining
+eyes
+a tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips of
+muslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches a
+minute. The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above the
+cloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil the
+continuity of a tuck. When you are on piece wages you do not relish
+stopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_217"></a>So Sadie watched the needle assiduously, and
+ignored the fact that her
+head ached pretty regularly, and she was generally too weary when lunch
+time came to enjoy the black bread and pickles which, with a cup of
+strong tea, made her noon meal. After lunch she again sat down to her
+machine and watched the needles gallop over the cloth.</p>
+<p>At the end of each year Sadie Greenbaum had produced for the good of
+the
+community <i>four miles</i> of tucked muslin. In return, the community
+had
+rendered her back something less than three hundred dollars, for the
+muslin underwear trade has its dull seasons, and you do not earn seven
+dollars every week in the year.</p>
+<p>Each week Sadie handed her pay envelope unopened to her mother. The
+mother bought all Sadie's clothes and gave her food and shelter.
+Consequently, Sadie's unceasing vigil of the needle paid for her
+existence and purchased also the proud consciousness of an older
+brother
+who would one day own a doctor's buggy and a social position.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_218"></a>The one joy of this girl's life, in fact all
+the real life she lived,
+was dancing. Regularly every Saturday night Sadie and a girl friend,
+Rosie by name, put on their best clothes and betook themselves to
+Silver's Casino, a huge dance hall with small rooms adjoining, where
+food and much drink were to be had.</p>
+<p>There was a good floor at Silver's and a brass band to dance to. It
+was
+great! The girls never lacked partners, and they made some very
+agreeable acquaintances.</p>
+<p>In the dressing room, between dances, all the girls exchanged
+conversation, views on fashions, confidences about the young men and
+other gossip. Some of the girls were nice and some, it must be
+admitted,
+were "tough." What was the difference? The tough girls, with their
+daring humor, their cigarettes, their easy manners, and their amazingly
+smart clothes, furnished a sort of spice to the affair.</p>
+<p>Sadie and Rosie sometimes discussed the tough girls, and the
+conversation nearly always ended with one remarking: "Well, if they
+<a name="Page_219"></a>don't get anything else out of livin', look at
+the clothes they put on
+their backs."</p>
+<p>Perhaps you can understand that longing for pretty gowns, perhaps
+you
+can even sympathize with it. Of course, if you have a number of other
+resources, you can keep the dress hunger in its proper place. But if
+you
+have nothing in your existence but a machine&#8212;at which you toil for
+others' benefit&#8212;</p>
+<p>Sadie and Rosie continued to spend their Saturday evenings and their
+Sunday evenings at Silver's Casino. At first they went home together
+promptly at midnight. After midnight these casino dance halls change
+their character. Often professional "pace makers" are introduced, men
+and women of the lowest class, who are paid to inspire the other
+dancers
+to lewd conduct. These wretched people are immodestly clothed, and they
+perform immodest or very tough dances. They are usually known as
+"Twisters," a descriptive title. When they make their appearance the
+self-respecting dancers go home, and a much looser <a name="Page_220"></a>element
+comes in.
+The pace becomes a rapid one. Manners are free, talk is coarse,
+laughter
+is incessant. The bar does a lively business. The dancing and the
+revels
+go on until daylight.</p>
+<p>The first time Sadie and Rosie allowed themselves to be persuaded to
+stay at Silver's after midnight they were rather horrified by the
+abandoned character of the dancing, the reckless drinking, and the
+fighting which resulted in several men being thrown out. The second
+time
+they were not quite so horrified, but they decided not to stay so late
+another time. Then came a great social event, the annual "mask and
+shadow dance" of a local political organization. Sadie and Rosie
+attended.</p>
+<p>A "mask and shadow dance" is as important a function to girls of
+Sadie's
+and Rosie's class as a cotillion is to girls of your class. Such
+affairs
+are possible only in large dance halls, and to do them impressively
+costs the proprietor some money. The guests rent costumes and masks and
+appear in very gala <a name="Page_221"></a>fashion indeed. They dance
+in the rays of all kinds
+of colored lights thrown upon them from upper galleries. During part of
+a waltz the dancers are bathed in rose-colored lights, which change
+suddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects are
+made, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers' shadows are
+thrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor. At intervals a rain of
+bright-colored confetti pours down from above. The scene becomes
+bacchanalian. Color, light, music, confetti, the dance, together
+combine
+to produce an intense and voluptuous intoxication which the revelers
+deepen with drink.</p>
+<p>The events of the latter part of that night were very vague in
+Sadie's
+memory when she awoke late the next morning. She remembered that she
+had
+tolerated familiarities which had been foreign to her experience
+heretofore, and that she had been led home by some friendly soul, at
+daylight, almost helpless from liquor.</p>
+<p>Frightened, haunted by half-ashamed mem<a name="Page_222"></a>ories
+of that dance, Sadie
+spoiled a good bit of her work on Monday morning. The forewoman
+descended on her with a torrent of coarse abuse, whereupon Sadie rose
+suddenly from her machine, and in a burst of hysterical profanity and
+tears rushed out of the factory, vowing never to return. There was only
+one course, she decided, for her to take, and she took it.</p>
+<p>"Sadie, why did you do it?" wailed Rosie the next time they met.</p>
+<p>"It's better than the factory," said Sadie.</p>
+<p>Tucking muslin underwear is dull work, but it is, in most ways, a
+more
+agreeable task than icing cakes in a St. Louis biscuit factory. All day
+Edna M&#8212;&#8212; stood over a tank filled with thick chocolate icing. The
+table beside Edna's tank was kept constantly supplied with freshly
+baked
+"lady-fingers," and these in delicate handfuls Edna seized and plunged
+into the hot ooze of the chocolate. Her arms, up to the elbows, went
+into the black stuff, over and over again all day. At noon, over their
+lunch, the <a name="Page_223"></a>girls talked of their recreations,
+their clothes, their
+"fellows."</p>
+<p>Edna had not very much to contribute to the girls' stories of gayety
+and
+adventure. She led a quieter existence than most of the other girls,
+although her leanings were toward lively pleasures. She was engaged to
+a
+young man who worked in a foundry and who was steady and perhaps rather
+too serious. He was very jealous of Edna and exacted a stern degree of
+fidelity of her.</p>
+<p>Before her engagement Edna had gone to a decent dancing school and
+dearly loved the dance. Now she was not permitted to dance with any one
+but her prospective husband. The bright talk at the noon hour made Edna
+feel that she was a very poor sport.</p>
+<p>The young man's work in the foundry alternated weekly between day
+and
+night duty. It occurred to Edna that her young man could not possibly
+know what she did with those evenings he remained in the foundry. If
+she
+chose to go with a group of girls to a dance hall, <a name="Page_224"></a>what
+harm? The long
+years of married life stretched themselves out somewhat drably to Edna.
+She decided to have a good time beforehand.</p>
+<p>This girl from now on literally lived a double life. Evenings of the
+weeks her young man was free from the foundry, she spent at home with
+him, placidly playing cards, reading aloud, or talking. On the other
+evenings she danced, madly, incessantly. Her mother thought she spent
+the evenings with her girl friends. The dancing, plus the deceit, soon
+had its effect on Edna. She began to visit livelier and livelier
+resorts, curious to see all phases of pleasure.</p>
+<p>Suspicion entered into the mind of her affianced. He questioned her;
+she
+lied, and he was unconvinced. A night or two later the young man stayed
+away from the foundry and followed Edna to a suburban resort. She went,
+as usual, with a group of girls, but their men were waiting for them
+near the door of the open-air dancing pavilion. Standing just outside,
+the angry lover watched the girl "spiel" <a name="Page_225"></a>round
+and round with a man of
+doubtful respectability. Soon she joined a noisy, beer-drinking group
+at
+one of the tables, and her behavior grew more and more reckless.
+Finally, amid laughter, she and another girl performed a suggestive
+dance together.</p>
+<p>Walking swiftly up to her, the outraged foundryman grasped her by
+the
+shoulder, called her a name she did not yet deserve, and threw her
+violently to the floor. A terrific fight followed, and the police soon
+cleared the place.</p>
+<p>Edna did not dare go home. An over-rigid standard of morals, an
+over-repressive policy, an over-righteous judgment, plus a mother
+ignorant of the facts of life, plus a girl's longing for joy&#8212;the sum of
+these equaled ruin in Edna's case.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_226"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<h2>WOMAN'S HELPING HAND TO THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER</h2>
+<br>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Ask a girl, "Why do you go to the dance hall? Why don't you stay
+home
+evenings?" <a name="Page_227"></a>Nine times in ten her answer will
+be: "What should I do with
+myself, sitting home and twirling my fingers?"</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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,&#8212;a
+debt to youth.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_228"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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?</p>
+<p>New York is by no means unique. Every <a name="Page_229"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_230"></a>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 in<a name="Page_231"></a>tellectual.
+It reaches only
+that portion of the masses who stand least in need of social
+opportunity.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The people, the great world of people,&#8212;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 <a name="Page_232"></a>economy,
+reduced to
+terms of humanity, the waste is heartbreaking.</p>
+<p>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?&#8212;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?</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_233"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_234"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_235"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_236"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_237"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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"&#8212;led by a man!</p>
+<p>Another scene witnessed about the same time seems to me to typify
+the
+new attitude which society&#8212;led by women&#8212;is assuming towards its
+problem. It was in the large kindergarten room of one of the oldest of
+Chicago's social centers,&#8212;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 <a
+ name="Page_238"></a>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.</p>
+<p>This was only one group of many hundreds in every quarter of
+Chicago,&#8212;in schools, settlements, kindergartens, and other
+centers,&#8212;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, <a name="Page_239"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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,&#8212;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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_240"></a>Women have recognized the debt to youth and
+the joy of life, and they
+are preparing to pay it.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_241"></a>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 <a name="Page_242"></a>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,&#8212;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 <a name="Page_243"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_244"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The first practical work of the committee, <a name="Page_245"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a
+ name="Page_246"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>Every extension of use of public places, <a name="Page_247"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_248"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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
+ name="Page_249"></a>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.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_IX"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_250"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<h2>THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE</h2>
+<br>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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, <a name="Page_251"></a>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&#8212;nearly half of the Bedford
+women&#8212;had been servants.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_252"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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. <a
+ name="Page_253"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 increas<a name="Page_254"></a>ing
+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.</p>
+<p>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?"</p>
+<p>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, <a name="Page_255"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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<a
+ name="Page_256"></a>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."<a name="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p>
+<p>This investigation by organizations of educated and expert women was
+the
+first survey ever made of domestic service <i>as an industry</i>, the
+first
+scientific study of domestic workers <i>as an industrial group</i>. It
+was
+the first intelligent attempt to review housework as if it were a trade.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Do not let us make a mistake concerning the <a name="Page_257"></a>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&#8212;the
+home&#8212;where the last stand of conservatism and tradition, the last
+lingering remnant of hand labor, continues to exist.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_258"></a>domestic service, but,
+broadly speaking, you behold
+in the servant group merely the siftings of the real industrial class.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_259"></a>had to
+wait until the workers
+came together in large groups before we could see their conditions and
+understand their needs.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Such conditions exist because the workers are too weak, too
+inefficient,
+too unintelligent <a name="Page_260"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_261"></a>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&#8212;well, how many
+such women do you know?</p>
+<p>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 ex<a name="Page_262"></a>pected to evolve a system of
+housekeeping all by herself.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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!</p>
+<p>In another place, the maid was required to <a name="Page_263"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>"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.'"</p>
+<p>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
+re<a name="Page_264"></a>turned. 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."</p>
+<p>"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?"</p>
+<p>"I've tried that," said the girl. "I had a place with the &#8212;&#8212;
+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."</p>
+<p>I have told this story to dozens of domestics, <a name="Page_265"></a>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.</p>
+<p>Imagine a factory girl or a stenographer being required to remain
+after
+hours on the chance of being needed for extra work.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>During the course of a great strike of mill <a name="Page_266"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_267"></a>days out. On
+those occasions she is
+assumed to meet her friends on the street.</p>
+<p>In England people recognize the fact that they have a servant class.
+Every house of any pretentions provides a servants' hall.</p>
+<p>In the United States a sitting room for servants, even in
+millionaires'
+homes, is a rarity.</p>
+<p>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."</p>
+<p>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
+<a name="Page_268"></a>driven into paths where only strength and
+efficiency could possibly
+protect her from evil.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img017"></a><img
+ style="width: 322px; height: 455px;"
+ alt="AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION"
+ title="AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION"
+ src="images/017.jpg"></div>
+<p>The social opportunity of the domestic worker is limited to the park
+bench, the cheap theater, the summer excursion boat, and the <a
+ name="Page_269"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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."</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The housekeeper simply does not realize that her domestics are <i>girls</i>,
+exactly like other girls. They need social intercourse, they need
+<a name="Page_270"></a>laughter and dancing and healthy pleasure just
+as other girls need
+them, as much as the young ladies of the household need them.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img018"></a><img
+ style="width: 311px; height: 507px;"
+ alt="ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION"
+ title="ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION"
+ src="images/018.jpg"></div>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_271"></a>before, been present when a
+young girl was
+sentenced to a term in a reformatory.</p>
+<p>"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?"</p>
+<p>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, <a
+ name="Page_272"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>"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."</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_273"></a>church. They come to
+us from reputable
+employment offices, which would not deal with them if they were not all
+right."</p>
+<p>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?</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Nellie B&#8212;&#8212; was an Irish girl, strong, pretty of face, and joyful of
+temperament. <a name="Page_274"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_275"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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."</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_276"></a>surrounded by a high stockade which
+rendered escape impossible.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img019"></a><img
+ style="width: 346px; height: 283px;"
+ alt="THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY"
+ title="THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY" src="images/019.jpg"></div>
+<p>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 oper<a name="Page_277"></a>ated on a system founded in lies and
+extortion. The offices
+want fees&#8212;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 <i>customer</i>
+to
+him, and she was nothing more.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Many of these unpleasant facts were brought <a name="Page_278"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 show<a name="Page_279"></a>ing,
+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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_280"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+per<a name="Page_281"></a>haps also, of propriety, are low. Domestic
+workers are the nomads of
+industry. Their lives are like their work,&#8212;impermanent, detached from
+others', unobserved.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+can<a name="Page_282"></a>not 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_283"></a>better understanding of the problem of the
+prodigal daughter.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Loneliness, social isolation, the ban of social inferiority,&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>Above all, the right of the domestic worker to social opportunity
+must
+be admitted. It must be provided for.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_284"></a>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&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>The Committee on Amusements and Vacation Resources of Working Girls
+in
+New York <a name="Page_285"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Preventive work is better than reform measures, but both are
+necessary
+in dealing with this problem. Women have still much work <a
+ name="Page_286"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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,&#8212;a place notorious for the low state of its <i>morale</i>. 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.</p>
+<br>
+<h4 style="text-align: left;">NOTES:</h4>
+<a name="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1">[1]</a>
+<div class="note">
+<p> G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904.</p>
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_X"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_287"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<h2>VOTES FOR WOMEN</h2>
+<br>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The position of the women in regard to suffrage was precisely that
+of
+the early labor unions toward politics. The unions, fearing <a
+ name="Page_288"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img020"></a><img
+ style="width: 355px; height: 284px;"
+ alt="SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING"
+ title="SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING"
+ src="images/020.jpg"></p>
+<p>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
+<a name="Page_289"></a>exhaustive discussion of both sides of the
+question.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_290"></a>have happened in the course of those eight
+years to make such an
+astounding change in the attitude of the club women.</p>
+<p>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, <i>citizens</i>'
+service, they did not remotely dream. There is nothing surprising in
+their <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i>. 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.</p>
+<p>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, manufac<a name="Page_291"></a>turer,
+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.</p>
+<p>Yet to the vast majority of American men women do not look like
+citizens.</p>
+<p>As for the majority of American women they have always until
+recently
+thought of themselves as a class,&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>A typical instance occurred down in Georgia. A few years ago the
+women
+of Georgia found a way to introduce into the legislature a <a
+ name="Page_292"></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.</p>
+<p>"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&#8212;"</p>
+<p>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."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_293"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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&#8212;bookbinding is
+one of the night trades&#8212;made them alive to their own helplessness.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_294"></a>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img021"></a><img
+ style="width: 238px; height: 382px;" alt="MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH"
+ title="MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH" src="images/021.jpg"></div>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_295"></a>membership
+of
+twenty-two thousand. A number of unions belong to the League, and there
+is also a very large individual membership.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_296"></a>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img022"></a><img
+ style="width: 384px; height: 282px;"
+ alt="MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER."
+ title="MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER." src="images/022.jpg"></div>
+<p>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 Sander<a name="Page_297"></a>son, 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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_298"></a>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.</p>
+<p>"Not unless you are a funeral procession," said the stern captain of
+the
+police.</p>
+<p>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
+<a name="Page_299"></a>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.</p>
+<p>"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.</p>
+<p>The sight aroused the indignation of many respectable citizens.</p>
+<p>"Officer," exclaimed one of these, addressing an attendant
+policeman, "I
+thought you had orders that those females were not to parade."</p>
+<p>"That ain't no parade," said the policeman, serenely; "them folks is
+just takin' a quiet walk."</p>
+<p><a name="Page_300"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><a name="img023"></a><img
+ style="width: 360px; height: 286px;"
+ alt="THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL 27, 1909"
+ title="THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL 27, 1909"
+ src="images/023.jpg"></div>
+<p>Absolutely democratic in its spirit and its organization, the party
+leaders are drawn from every rank of society. The chairman of the
+<a name="Page_301"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_302"></a>New York is the present center of the
+progressive suffrage movement,
+with Chicago not very far behind.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<a name="img024"></a>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><img
+ style="width: 304px; height: 456px;" alt="HELEN HOY GREELEY"
+ title="HELEN HOY GREELEY" src="images/024.jpg"></div>
+<p>Even the non-voting woman has discovered the power which attaches to
+her
+presence, in <a name="Page_303"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a
+ name="Page_304"></a>bullet
+was fired at the district attorney a number of the women were present.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_305"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_306"></a>effect
+of such
+campaigns would no doubt be very great.</p>
+<p>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."</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="img025"></a><img
+ style="width: 374px; height: 256px;"
+ alt="SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE."
+ title="SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE." src="images/025.jpg"></p>
+<p>Under certain conditions a woman vote is not an unthinkable
+contingency.
+It has even occurred.</p>
+<p>For the edification of the possible reader <a name="Page_307"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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,&#8212;the Kaiser's "Kirche, K&uuml;che, 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 chil<a name="Page_308"></a>dren.
+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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+<a name="Page_309"></a>interests. It was, in a manner of speaking, a
+chivalric acknowledgment
+of women's virtue as wives and mothers.</p>
+<p>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. <a name="Page_310"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_311"></a>for the
+co-operation of the League the
+Citizens' Party offered a place on the electoral ticket to any woman
+chosen by the League.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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
+<a name="Page_312"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_313"></a>have never before been given a chance to
+manage the elections.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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, <a
+ name="Page_314"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center;"><a name="Page_315"></a><a name="img026"></a><img
+ style="width: 380px; height: 262px;"
+ alt="THE &quot;QUIET WALK&quot; OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE WOULD NOT PERMIT TO PARADE"
+ title="THE &quot;QUIET WALK&quot; OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE WOULD NOT PERMIT TO PARADE"
+ src="images/026.jpg"></p>
+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.
+<p>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 <a name="Page_316"></a>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.</p>
+<a name="img027"></a>
+<div style="text-align: center;"><img
+ style="width: 362px; height: 278px;"
+ alt="SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK"
+ title="SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK"
+ src="images/027.jpg"></div>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_317"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Women's housekeeping, or most of it, has gradually been withdrawn
+from
+the home and transferred to the municipality. There was <a
+ name="Page_318"></a>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&#8212;do all their own as well as
+the women's housekeeping&#8212;or they must allow their women to leave the
+home and follow their housekeeping to the place where it is now being
+done,&#8212;the polls.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="CHAPTER_XI"></a>
+<h2><a name="Page_319"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+<h2>IN CONCLUSION</h2>
+<br>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_320"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Also, I chose the American club woman because she represents, not an
+unusually <a name="Page_321"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>Turn back and count over the club women's achievements, the things
+they
+have chosen to <a name="Page_322"></a>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&#8212;things needed,
+directly or indirectly, by children. Most of the things are directly
+needed,&#8212;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,&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>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. <a name="Page_323"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 educat<a name="Page_324"></a>ing
+process of productive
+labor the woman mind may devise a means of protecting the future
+mothers
+of the race.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_325"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="Page_326"></a>children's interests at the polls as
+other women are in
+their nurseries and kitchens.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>The child at his mother's knee, spelling out the words of a psalm,
+stands for the moral <a name="Page_327"></a>education of the race&#8212;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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>I dream of a community where men and <a name="Page_328"></a>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_329"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p><a name="Page_330"></a>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.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;">
+<a name="INDEX"></a>
+<h2>INDEX</h2>
+Aberdeen, Countess of, <a href="#Page_48">48</a><br>
+Addams, Jane, <a href="#Page_99">99</a><br>
+Alabama, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+Aladyn, Alexis, <a href="#Page_50">50</a><br>
+Albert Hall, London, <a href="#Page_52">52</a><br>
+Albion House of Refuge, N.Y., <a href="#Page_251">251</a><br>
+Aldrich, Mrs. Richard, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Allegheny, Pa., <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>,
+<a href="#Page_31">31</a><br>
+Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenbund, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+American, Sadie, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+American Federation of Labor, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_168">168</a><br>
+American women and common law, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a href="#Page_114">114</a><br>
+Arbitration, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>-<a href="#Page_58">58</a><br>
+Argentine, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Arizona, <a href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+Arkansas, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+Arthur, Mrs. Clara B., <a href="#Page_32">32</a><br>
+Association of Collegiate Alumnae, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Association of Working Girls' Clubs, <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br>
+Augsberg, Anita, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+Australia, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a><br>
+Austria, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+<br>
+Balliett, Thomas M., <a href="#Page_44">44</a><br>
+Barnum, Gertrude, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Barrett, Mrs. Kate Waller, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+Bedford Reformatory, N.Y., <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a><br>
+Belmont, Mrs. O.H.P., <a href="#Page_174">174</a><br>
+Berlin, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+Birmingham, Ala., <a href="#Page_38">38</a><br>
+Blackstone, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a><br>
+Blackwell's Island, <a href="#Page_286">286</a><br>
+Blatch, Harriot Stanton, <a href="#Page_294">294</a><br>
+Bluhm, Agnes, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+Boston, Mass, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150
+</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a><br>
+Boston Central Labor Union, <a href="#Page_178">178</a><br>
+Boswell, Helen V., <a href="#Page_53">53</a><br>
+Brandeis, Louis D., <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a><br>
+Brewer, Justice, <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br>
+Brooklyn, N.Y., <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br>
+Bullowa, Emilie, <a href="#Page_103">103</a><br>
+<br>
+California, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a><br>
+Carlisle, Pa., <a href="#Page_38">38</a><br>
+Carnegie, Andrew, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Casey, Josephine, <a href="#Page_295">295</a><br>
+Catt, Mrs. Carrie Chapman, <a href="#Page_300">300</a><br>
+Cauer, Minna, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+Chicago, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_211">211,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_238">238</a>, <a href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a><br>
+Child, Lydia Maria, <a href="#Page_95">95</a><br>
+Church, the Christian, its relation to social problems, <a
+ href="#Page_229">229</a>-<a href="#Page_233">233</a><br>
+Civic Club of Allegheny County, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_29">29</a><br>
+Civic Club of Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Cleveland, O., <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a><br>
+Cliff Dwellers' remains, <a href="#Page_39">39</a><br>
+Cobden Sanderson, Mrs., <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br>
+Code Napoleon, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br>
+Cole, Elsie, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br>
+College Settlements Association, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Colony Club, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145,
+</a><a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a><br>
+Colorado, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>-<a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_311">311</a><br>
+Colorado State Federation of Clubs, <a href="#Page_308">308</a><br>
+Columbia University, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br>
+Columbus, Ohio, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br>
+Common law, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a href="#Page_114">114</a><br>
+Coney Island, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212
+</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a><br>
+Conine, Mrs. Martha A.B., <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br>
+Consumers' League of N.Y., <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_125">125</a>-<a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_140">140</a>,<br>
+<a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br>
+Consumers' Leagues, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a><br>
+Conventions of women's clubs, <a href="#Page_40">40</a><br>
+Corpus Juris, <a href="#Page_68">68</a><br>
+Cotton mills, women and girls in, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_84">84</a><br>
+Council of Women, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Cranford, N.J., <a href="#Page_38">38</a><br>
+Cutting, Fulton, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+<br>
+Dallas, Tex., <a href="#Page_23">23</a><br>
+Dance halls, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>-<a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_239">239</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_249">249</a><br>
+Daughters of the American Revolution, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Daughters of the Confederacy, <a href="#Page_101">101</a><br>
+Davis, Mrs. Jefferson, <a href="#Page_101">101</a><br>
+Decker, Mrs. Sarah Platt, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Delaware, <a href="#Page_105">105</a><br>
+Denver, Colo., <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Department stores, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>-<a href="#Page_116">116</a>,
+<a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_129">129</a>-<a href="#Page_132">132,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_150">150</a>-<a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_258">258</a><br>
+Detroit, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_34">34</a><br>
+Devine, Edward T., <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Dewey, Mrs. Melvil, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Dineen, Governor, <a href="#Page_158">158</a><br>
+District of Columbia, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+Divorce, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a><br>
+Dock, Lavinia, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Domestic service, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>-<a href="#Page_286">286</a><br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>Domestic Service</i>, Professor
+Salmon's, </span><a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Donnelly, Annie, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>-<a href="#Page_209">209</a><br>
+Dreier, Mary, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Dutcher, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br>
+<br>
+Eight-hour day, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>,
+<a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br>
+Ely Bates Settlement, <a href="#Page_237">237</a><br>
+Employment agencies, <a href="#Page_274">274</a>-<a href="#Page_280">280</a><br>
+England, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>,
+<a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>,
+<a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_315">315</a><br>
+Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, <a href="#Page_294">294</a><br>
+Europe, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>,
+<a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a><br>
+European women, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>-<a href="#Page_74">74</a><br>
+Evans, Mrs. Glendower, <a href="#Page_178">178</a><br>
+<br>
+Factories, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_258">258</a><br>
+Fall River, Mass., <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_266">266</a><br>
+Festivals, play, <a href="#Page_238">238</a><br>
+Feudalism, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a><br>
+Filene system, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>-<a href="#Page_153">153</a><br>
+Finland, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a><br>
+Florida, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+Flowerton, Maud, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Folks, Homer, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+France, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a><br>
+Franks, Salian, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br>
+French Code, <a href="#Page_73">73</a><br>
+<br>
+Gad, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+General Federation of Women's Clubs, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>,
+<a href="#Page_56">56,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a><br>
+Georgia, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a><br>
+Gerberding, Mrs. Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_303">303</a><br>
+German Woman Suffrage Association, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+Germany, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_69">69</a>-<a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>,
+<a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a><br>
+Gillespie, Mabel, <a href="#Page_177">177</a><br>
+Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, her <i>Women and Economics</i>, <a
+ href="#Page_5">5</a><br>
+"Girls' Bill," <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a><br>
+Girls' Friendly Association, <a href="#Page_269">269</a><br>
+Golden, John, <a href="#Page_179">179</a><br>
+Goldmark, Josephine, <a href="#Page_136">136</a><br>
+Goldmark, Pauline, <a href="#Page_164">164</a><br>
+Gompers, Samuel, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br>
+Grannis, Mrs. Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+Greece, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Greece, Queen of, <a href="#Page_48">48</a><br>
+Greeley, Helen Hoy, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Greenbaum, Sadie, <a href="#Page_215">215</a><br>
+Grenfell, Mrs. Helen, <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br>
+Gulick, Luther H., <a href="#Page_36">36</a><br>
+<br>
+Harper, Ida Husted, <a href="#Page_305">305</a><br>
+Harrisburg, Pa., <a href="#Page_37">37</a><br>
+Hearn, <a href="#Page_149">149</a><br>
+Henry, Alice, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br>
+Holland, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_141">141</a><br>
+Housekeepers' Alliance, <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Hughes, Governor, <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br>
+Hundred Years' War, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br>
+<br>
+Iceland, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Idaho, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Illinois, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br>
+Inheritance, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br>
+Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>,
+<a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a><br>
+International Council of Women, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>,
+<a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a><br>
+International Woman Suffrage Alliance, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_300">300</a><br>
+Iowa, <a href="#Page_45">45</a><br>
+Israels, Mrs. Charles M., <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_247">247</a><br>
+Italy, <a href="#Page_141">141</a><br>
+<br>
+Janes, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_192">192</a><br>
+Jefferson Market Court, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>-<a href="#Page_186">186</a>,
+<a href="#Page_189">189</a><br>
+Jordan, Gertrude, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+<br>
+Kansas, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br>
+Kellor, Frances, <a href="#Page_256">256</a><br>
+Kennard, Beulah, <a href="#Page_28">28</a><br>
+Kirby, John, Jr., <a href="#Page_143">143</a><br>
+Kusserow, Anna, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br>
+<br>
+Lafferty, Mrs. Alma, <a href="#Page_99">99</a><br>
+Laidlaw, Mrs. James Lees, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Lake City, Minn., <a href="#Page_19">19</a><br>
+Laughlin, Gail, <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br>
+Laundries, <a href="#Page_137">137</a><br>
+Law, American, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_114">114</a><br>
+Legal Aid Society of N.Y. City, <a href="#Page_112">112</a><br>
+Legal disabilities of women, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_154">154</a><br>
+Leipzig, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br>
+Lemlich, Clara, <a href="#Page_170">170</a><br>
+Libraries, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>-<a href="#Page_46">46</a><br>
+Los Angeles, Cal., <a href="#Page_81">81</a><br>
+Louisiana, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Lowell, Mrs. Josephine Shaw, <a href="#Page_123">123</a><br>
+Luxemburg, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+<br>
+MacLean, Annie Marian, <a href="#Page_142">142</a><br>
+Maloney, Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>,
+<a href="#Page_161">161</a><br>
+<br>
+Marot, Helen, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br>
+Massachusetts, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92,
+</a><a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a><br>
+Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>,
+<a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a><br>
+McEwans, the, <a href="#Page_79">79</a><br>
+Men, their attitude toward women, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_6">6</a>-<a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>,
+<a href="#Page_15">15</a><br>
+Mercantile Employers' Bill, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_130">130</a><br>
+Merchants' Association of N.Y., <a href="#Page_129">129</a><br>
+Mercy, Anna, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Meredith, Ellis, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>, <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br>
+Milholland, Inez, <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br>
+Mills, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_179">179</a><br>
+Mills, Enos, <a href="#Page_53">53</a><br>
+Miner, Maude E., <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>,
+<a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_190">190</a><br>
+Miner, Stella, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Missouri, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br>
+Mitchell, John, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br>
+Montana, <a href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+Moore, Mrs. Philip N., <a href="#Page_56">56</a><br>
+Morgan, Anne, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Mott, Lucretia, <a href="#Page_95">95</a><br>
+Muller, Curt, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a><br>
+<br>
+Napoleon, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br>
+Napoleon Code, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a><br>
+Nathan, Mrs. Frederick, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+National Civic Federation, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br>
+National Congress of Mothers, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+National Manufacturers' Association, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_160">160</a><br>
+National Society of Collegiate Alumnae, <a href="#Page_56">56</a><br>
+National Woman Suffrage Association, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_305">305</a><br>
+Nebraska, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Nestor, Agnes, <a href="#Page_160">160</a><br>
+Nevada, <a href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+New England, <a href="#Page_91">91</a><br>
+New Haven, Conn., <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br>
+New Jersey, <a href="#Page_112">112</a><br>
+New Mexico, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+New York, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a><br>
+New York, N.Y., <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>,
+<a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_128">128,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242,<br>
+</a><a href="#Page_244">244</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_294">294</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_314">314</a><br>
+New York Telephone Co., <a href="#Page_148">148</a><br>
+New Zealand, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>,
+<a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_315">315</a><br>
+Night Court. See <i>Jefferson Market Court</i><br>
+Night work of women, <a href="#Page_55">55</a><br>
+North Carolina, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a><br>
+North Dakota, <a href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+<br>
+Ohio, <a href="#Page_45">45</a><br>
+Oklahoma, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Orange, House of, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Oregon, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Oregon case, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>-<a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_180">180</a><br>
+Oregon Standard, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>,
+<a href="#Page_162">162</a><br>
+<i>Out of Work</i>, Miss Kellor's, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_272">272</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_280">280</a><br>
+<br>
+Palisades of the Hudson, <a href="#Page_39">39</a><br>
+Panama Canal, <a href="#Page_53">53</a><br>
+Pankhurst, Mrs., <a href="#Page_297">297</a><br>
+Paris, <a href="#Page_63">63</a><br>
+Peace, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a><br>
+Pennsylvania, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+Persia, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Philadelphia, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_278">278</a><br>
+Pike, Violet, <a href="#Page_172">172</a><br>
+Pittsburg, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br>
+Playgrounds, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>-<a href="#Page_36">36</a><br>
+Playgrounds Association of America, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a><br>
+Portland, Ore., <a href="#Page_134">134</a><br>
+Portugal, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Potter, Virginia, <a href="#Page_241">241</a><br>
+Probation Association of N.Y., <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Property Law, Married Women's, <a href="#Page_96">96</a><br>
+Public Service League of Denver, Colo., <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_310">310</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a><br>
+Puritans, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a><br>
+<br>
+<i>Resurrection</i>, Tolstoy's, <a href="#Page_270">270</a><br>
+Revere Beach, <a href="#Page_211">211</a><br>
+Rheinhard Commission, <a href="#Page_127">127</a><br>
+Rhode Island, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a><br>
+"Rights of Man," <a href="#Page_65">65</a><br>
+Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, <a href="#Page_162">162</a><br>
+Robins, Mrs. Raymond, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br>
+Robinson, Mrs. Helen Ring, <a href="#Page_312">312</a><br>
+Rochester, N.Y., Industrial School, <a href="#Page_251">251</a><br>
+Roxbury, Mass., carpet mill strike, <a href="#Page_176">176</a><br>
+Russia, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a><br>
+<br>
+Sage, Mrs. Russell, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+St. Louis, Mo., <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a><br>
+Salic Law, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>-<a href="#Page_65">65</a><br>
+Salmon, Prof. Lucy Maynard, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Salt Lake City, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+San Francisco, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>,
+<a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Schoenfeld, Julia, <a href="#Page_242">242</a><br>
+Scranton, Pa., <a href="#Page_109">109</a><br>
+Seneca Falls convention, <a href="#Page_71">71</a><br>
+Servant problem. See <i>Domestic Service</i><br>
+Shaw, Dr. Anna, <a href="#Page_305">305</a><br>
+Shirt-waist makers' strike, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_294">294</a><br>
+Smith, "Gypsy," <a href="#Page_234">234</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a><br>
+Snowden, Mrs. Philip, <a href="#Page_297">297</a><br>
+Social evil, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>-<a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_251">251</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_276">276</a><br>
+Social purity, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a><br>
+Socialist party, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a><br>
+South Africa, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+South Carolina, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>,
+<a href="#Page_108">108</a><br>
+South Chicago, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>,
+<a href="#Page_200">200</a><br>
+South Dakota, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Spain, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a><br>
+Stover, Charles B., <a href="#Page_248">248</a><br>
+Succession to throne by women, <a href="#Page_61">61</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_65">65</a><br>
+Sweat shop, the, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br>
+Switzerland, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a><br>
+<br>
+Teacher's Federation of Chicago, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_295">295</a><br>
+Ten-hour day, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>,
+<a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a><br>
+Tennessee, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a><br>
+Texas, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_104">104</a>, <a href="#Page_313">313</a><br>
+Tillman case, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br>
+Turkey, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Tuthill, Judge R.S., <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br>
+Twentieth Century Club of Detroit, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br>
+<br>
+United States Government, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_54">54</a><br>
+United States Industrial Commission, <a href="#Page_140">140</a><br>
+United Textile Workers, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_179">179</a><br>
+Utah, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a><br>
+<br>
+Vassar College, <a href="#Page_254">254</a><br>
+Victoria, Queen, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Virginia, <a href="#Page_104">104</a><br>
+Voters' League for Equal Suffrage, <a href="#Page_314">314</a><br>
+<br>
+Wage earning, women in, <a href="#Page_2">2</a><br>
+Washington (state), <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Waverley House, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>-<a href="#Page_189">189</a><br>
+White, Mrs. Lovell, <a href="#Page_26">26</a><br>
+"White Slave" traffic, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a><br>
+Whitman, Charles S., <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br>
+Wilhelmina, Queen, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br>
+Windeguth, Dora, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a><br>
+Winthrop, Mrs. Egerton, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br>
+<i>Woman and Economics</i>, Gilman's, <a href="#Page_5">5</a><br>
+Woman suffrage, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>-<a href="#Page_72">72</a>,
+<a href="#Page_97">97</a>-<a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_287">287</a>-<a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_325">325</a><br>
+Woman Suffrage Party, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a><br>
+Woman's Christian Temperance Union, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br>
+Woman's Municipal League of N.Y., <a href="#Page_255">255</a><br>
+Women, their ideals, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>-<a href="#Page_16">16</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in Europe, </span><a href="#Page_59">59</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_74">74</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in America, </span><a href="#Page_75">75</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_114">114</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in industry, </span><a href="#Page_115">115</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_182">182</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">their fight against the social evil, </span><a
+ href="#Page_183">183</a>-<a href="#Page_249">249</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">in domestic service, </span><a
+ href="#Page_250">250</a>-<a href="#Page_286">286</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">collective opinion of, </span><a
+ href="#Page_319">319</a>-<a href="#Page_330">330</a><br>
+Women's Civic Club of San Francisco, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Women's Club, of Lake City, Minn., <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Dallas, Tex., </span><a
+ href="#Page_23">23</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of San Francisco, </span><a
+ href="#Page_26">26</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Pittsburg, </span><a href="#Page_28">28</a>,
+<a href="#Page_30">30</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Detroit, </span><a href="#Page_32">32</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Philadelphia, </span><a
+ href="#Page_34">34</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Harrisburg, Pa., </span><a
+ href="#Page_37">37</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Birmingham, Ala., </span><a
+ href="#Page_38">38</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Carlisle, Pa., </span><a
+ href="#Page_38">38</a>;<br>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">of Cranford, N.J., </span><a
+ href="#Page_38">38</a><br>
+Women's Clubs, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>-<a
+ href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>,
+<a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a><br>
+Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>,
+<a href="#Page_285">285</a><br>
+Women's League of Justice, <a href="#Page_304">304</a><br>
+Women's Political Equality Union, <a href="#Page_296">296</a><br>
+Women's Property Act, <a href="#Page_97">97</a><br>
+Women's Trade Union League, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_166">166</a>-<a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_294">294</a><br>
+Working Women's Society, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a><br>
+Wyoming, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_307">307</a><br>
+<br>
+Yonkers, N.Y., <a href="#Page_284">284</a><br>
+Young Women's Christian Association, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a
+ href="#Page_269">269</a><br>
+<br>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's What eight million women want, by Rheta Childe Dorr
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+Project Gutenberg's What eight million women want, by Rheta Childe Dorr
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: What eight million women want
+
+Author: Rheta Childe Dorr
+
+Release Date: May 1, 2004 [EBook #12226]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Wilelmina Malliere and the Distributed Proofreading Team
+from images provided by the Million Book Project.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Images provided by: Million Book Project.
+
+Post-Processing : Wilelmina Malliere.
+
+
+
+
+
+WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT
+
+
+
+[Illustration: CONVENTION OF OUR WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK]
+
+WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT
+
+BY RHETA CHILDE DORR
+
+1910.
+
+
+
+TO
+THE AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVES
+OF THE EIGHT MILLION--
+THE EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND MEMBERS
+OF THE GENERAL FEDERATION OF
+WOMEN'S CLUBS--
+THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
+
+
+Many of the chapters contained in this volume appeared as special
+articles in _Hampton's Magazine_, to the editor of which the author's
+thanks are due for permission to republish.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+  I INTRODUCTORY
+  II FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE
+  III EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW
+  IV AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW
+  V WOMAN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY
+  VI MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE
+  VII BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO
+  VIII WOMAN'S HELPING HAND FOR THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
+  IX THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE
+  X VOTES FOR WOMEN
+  XI IN CONCLUSION
+  INDEX
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+     CONVENTION OF CLUB WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK
+
+     CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH
+
+     CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK, PITTSBURGH
+
+     STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD, LOS
+     ANGELES, CAL.
+
+     MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER
+
+     LADY ABERDEEN
+
+     A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES
+
+     MISS EMILIE BULLOWA
+
+     MRS. FREDERICK NATHAN
+
+     MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN
+
+     MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY
+
+     A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN
+
+     MISS MAUDE E. MINER
+
+     IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK
+
+     MISS SADIE AMERICAN
+
+     A TYPICAL DANCE HALL
+
+     AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION
+
+     ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION
+
+     THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY
+
+     SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING
+
+     MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH
+
+     MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER
+
+     THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL 27,
+     1909
+
+     HELEN HOY GREELEY
+
+     SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE
+
+     THE "QUIET WALK" OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE WOULD
+     NOT PERMIT TO PARADE
+
+     SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+
+For the audacity of the title of this book I offer no apology. I have
+had it pointed out, not altogether facetiously, that it is impossible to
+determine with accuracy what one woman, much less what any number of
+women, wants. I sympathize with the first half of the tradition. The
+desires, that is to say, the ideals, of an individual, man or woman, are
+not always easy to determine. The individual is complex and exceedingly
+prone to variation. The mass alone is consistent. The ideals of the mass
+of women are wrapped in mystery simply because no one has cared enough
+about them to inquire what they are.
+
+Men, ardently, eternally, interested in Woman--one woman at a time--are
+almost never even faintly interested in women. Strangely, deliberately
+ignorant of women, they argue that their ignorance is justified by an
+innate unknowableness of the sex.
+
+I am persuaded that the time is at hand when this sentimental, half
+contemptuous attitude of half the population towards the other half will
+have to be abandoned. I believe that the time has arrived when
+self-interest, if other motive be lacking, will compel society to
+examine the ideals of women. In support of this opinion I ask you to
+consider three facts, each one of which is so patent that it requires no
+argument.
+
+The Census of 1900 reported nearly six million women in the United
+States engaged in wage earning outside their homes. Between 1890 and
+1900 the number of women in industry increased faster than the number of
+men in industry. _It increased faster than the birth rate._ The number
+of women wage earners at the present date can only be estimated. Nine
+million would be a conservative guess. Nine million women who have
+forsaken the traditions of the hearth and are competing with men in the
+world of paid labor, means that women are rapidly passing from the
+domestic control of their fathers and their husbands. Surely this is
+the most important economic fact in the world to-day.
+
+Within the past twenty years no less than nine hundred and fifty-four
+thousand divorces have been granted in the United States. Two thirds of
+these divorces were granted to aggrieved wives. In spite of the
+anathemas of the church, in the face of tradition and early precept, in
+defiance of social ostracism, accepting, in the vast majority of cases,
+the responsibility of self support, more than six hundred thousand
+women, in the short space of twenty years, repudiated the burden of
+uncongenial marriage. Without any doubt this is the most important
+social fact we have had to face since the slavery question was settled.
+
+Not only in the United States, but in every constitutional country in
+the world the movement towards admitting women to full political
+equality with men is gathering strength. In half a dozen countries women
+are already completely enfranchised. In England the opposition is
+seeking terms of surrender. In the United States the stoutest enemy of
+the movement acknowledges that woman suffrage is ultimately inevitable.
+The voting strength of the world is about to be doubled, and the new
+element is absolutely an unknown quantity. Does any one question that
+this is the most important political fact the modern world has ever
+faced?
+
+I have asked you to consider three facts, but in reality they are but
+three manifestations of one fact, to my mind the most important human
+fact society has yet encountered. Women have ceased to exist as a
+subsidiary class in the community. They are no longer wholly dependent,
+economically, intellectually, and spiritually, on a ruling class of men.
+They look on life with the eyes of reasoning adults, where once they
+regarded it as trusting children. Women now form a new social group,
+separate, and to a degree homogeneous. Already they have evolved a group
+opinion and a group ideal.
+
+And this brings me to my reason for believing that society will soon be
+compelled to make a serious survey of the opinions and ideals of women.
+As far as these have found collective expressions, it is evident that
+they differ very radically from accepted opinions and ideals of men. As
+a matter of fact, it is inevitable that this should be so. Back of the
+differences between the masculine and the feminine ideal lie centuries
+of different habits, different duties, different ambitions, different
+opportunities, different rewards.
+
+I shall not here attempt to outline what the differences have been or
+why they have existed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in _Women and
+Economics_, did this before me,--did it so well that it need never be
+done again. I merely wish to point out that different habits of action
+necessarily result, after long centuries, in different habits of
+thought. Men, accustomed to habits of strife, pursuit of material
+gains, immediate and tangible rewards, have come to believe that strife
+is not only inevitable but desirable; that material gain and visible
+reward are alone worth coveting. In this commercial age strife means
+business competition, reward means money. Man, in the aggregate, thinks
+in terms of money profit and money loss, and try as he will, he cannot
+yet think in any other terms.
+
+I have in mind a certain rich young man, who, when he is not
+superintending the work of his cotton mills in Virginia, is giving his
+time to settlement work in the city of Washington. The rich young man is
+devoted to the settlement. One day he confided to a guest of the house,
+a social worker of note, that he wished he might dedicate his entire
+life to philanthropy.
+
+"There is much about a commercial career that is depressing to a
+sympathetic nature," he declared. "For example, it constantly depresses
+me to observe the effect of the cotton mills on the girls in my employ.
+They come in from the country, fresh, blooming, and eager to work.
+Within a few months perhaps they are pale, anaemic, listless. Not
+infrequently a young girl contracts tuberculosis and dies before one
+realizes that she is ill. It wrings the heart to see it."
+
+"I suspect," said the visitor, "that there is something wrong with your
+mills. Are you sure that they are sufficiently well ventilated?"
+
+"They are as well ventilated as we can have them," said the rich young
+man. "Of course we cannot keep the windows open."
+
+"Why not?" persisted the visitor.
+
+"Because in our mills we spin both black and white yarn, and if the
+windows were kept open the lint from the black yarn would blow on the
+white yarn and ruin it."
+
+A quick vision rose before the visitor's consciousness, of a mill room,
+noisy with clacking machinery, reeking with the mingled odors of
+perspiration and warm oil, obscure with flying cotton flakes which
+covered the forms of the workers like snow and choked in their throats
+like desert sand.
+
+"But," she exclaimed, "you can have two rooms, one for the white yarn
+and the other for the black."
+
+The rich young man shook his head with the air of one who goes away
+exceedingly sorrowful.
+
+"No," he replied, "we can't. The business won't stand it."
+
+This story presents in miniature the social attitude of the majority of
+men. They cannot be held entirely responsible. Their minds automatically
+function just that way. They have high and generous impulses, their
+hearts are susceptible to tenderest pity, they often possess the vision
+of brotherhood and human kinship, but habit, long habit, always
+intervenes in time to save the business from loss of a few dollars
+profit.
+
+Three years ago Chicago was on the eve of one of its periodical "vice
+crusades," of which more later. Sensational stories had been published
+in several newspapers, to the effect that no fewer than five thousand
+Jewish girls were leading lives of shame in the city, a statement which
+was received with horror by the Jewish population of Chicago. A meeting
+of wealthy and influential men and women was called in the law library
+of a well known jurist and philanthropist. Representatives from various
+social settlements in Jewish quarters of the town were invited, and it
+was as a guest of one of these settlements that I was privileged to be
+present.
+
+Eloquent addresses were made and an elaborate plan for investigation and
+relief was outlined. Finally it came to a point where ways and means had
+to be considered. The presiding officer put this phase of the matter to
+the conference with smiling frankness. "You must realize, ladies and
+gentlemen," he said, "that we have entered upon an extensive and, I am
+afraid, a very expensive campaign."
+
+At this a middle aged and notably dignified man arose and said with
+emotion trembling in his voice: "Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen
+of the conference, this surely is no time for us to think of economy of
+expenditure. If the daughters of Israel are losing their ancient dower
+of purity, the sons of Israel should be willing, nay, eager to ransom
+them at any cost. Permit me, as a privileged honor which I value highly,
+to offer, as a contribution towards the preliminary expenses of this
+campaign, my check for ten thousand dollars."
+
+He sat down to that polite little murmur of applause which goes round
+the room, and I whispered to the head resident of the settlement of
+which I was a guest, an inquiry as to the identity of the generous
+donor.
+
+"That gentleman," she whispered in reply, "is one of the owners of a
+great mail order department store in Chicago." She sighed deeply, as
+she added: "During the first week of the panic that store discharged,
+without warning, five hundred girls."
+
+These typical examples of the reasoning processes of men are offered
+without the slightest rancor. They had to be given in order that the
+woman's habit of thought might be explained with clearness.
+
+Women, since society became an organized body, have been engaged in the
+rearing, as well as the bearing of children. They have made the home,
+they have cared for the sick, ministered to the aged, and given to the
+poor. The universal destiny of the mass of women trained them to feed
+and clothe, to invent, manufacture, build, repair, contrive, conserve,
+economize. They lived lives of constant service, within the narrow
+confines of a home. Their labor was given to those they loved, and the
+reward they looked for was purely a spiritual reward.
+
+A thousand generations of service, unpaid, loving, intimate, must have
+left the strongest kind of a mental habit in its wake. Women, when they
+emerged from the seclusion of their homes and began to mingle in the
+world procession, when they were thrown on their own financial
+responsibility, found themselves willy nilly in the ranks of the
+producers, the wage earners; when the enlightenment of education was no
+longer denied them, when their responsibilities ceased to be entirely
+domestic and became somewhat social, when, in a word, women began to
+_think_, they naturally thought in human terms. They couldn't have
+thought otherwise if they had tried.
+
+They might have learned, it is true. In certain circumstances women
+might have been persuaded to adopt the commercial habit of thought. But
+the circumstances were exactly propitious for the encouragement of the
+old-time woman habit of service. The modern thinking, planning,
+self-governing, educated woman came into a world which is losing faith
+in the commercial ideal, and is endeavoring to substitute in its place a
+social ideal. She came into a generation which is reaching passionate
+hands towards democracy. She became one with a nation which is weary of
+wars and hatreds, impatient with greed and privilege, sickened of
+poverty, disease, and social injustice. The modern, free-functioning
+woman accepted without the slightest difficulty these new ideals of
+democracy and social service. Where men could do little more than
+theorize in these matters, women were able easily and effectively to
+act.
+
+I hope that I shall not be suspected of ascribing to women any ingrained
+or fundamental moral superiority to men. Women are not better than men.
+The mantle of moral superiority forced upon them as a substitute for
+intellectual equality they accepted, because they could not help
+themselves. They dropped it as soon as the substitute was no longer
+necessary.
+
+That the mass of women are invariably found on the side of the new
+ideals is no evidence of their moral superiority to men; it is merely
+evidence of their intellectual youth.
+
+Visitors from western cities and towns are often amazed, and vastly
+amused, to find in New York and other eastern cities little narrow-gauge
+street car lines, where gaunt horses haul the shabbiest of cars over the
+oldest and roughest of road beds. The Westerner declares that nowhere in
+the East does he find surface cars that equal in comfort and elegance
+the cars recently installed in his Michigan or Nebraska or Washington
+home town.
+
+"Recently installed." There you have it.
+
+The eastern city retains its horse cars and its out-of-date electric
+rolling stock because it has them, and because there are all sorts of
+difficulties in the way of replacing them. Old franchises have to expire
+or otherwise be got rid of; corporations have to be coaxed or coerced;
+greed and corruption often have to be overcome; huge sums of money have
+to be appropriated; a whole machinery of municipal government has to be
+set in motion before the old and established city can change its
+traction system.
+
+The new western town goes on foot until it attains to a certain size and
+a sufficient prosperity. Then it installs electric railways, and of
+course it purchases the newest and most modern of the available models.
+
+
+New social ideals are difficult for men to acquire in a practical way
+because their minds are filled with old traditions, inherited memories,
+outworn theories of law, government, and social control. They cannot get
+rid of these at once. They have used them so long, have found them so
+convenient, so satisfactory, that even when you show them something
+admittedly better; they are able only partially to comprehend and to
+accept.
+
+Women, on the other hand, have very few antiques to get rid of. Until
+recently their minds, scantily furnished with a few personal preferences
+and personal prejudices, were entirely bare of community ideals or any
+social theory. When they found themselves in need of a social theory it
+was only natural that they should choose the most modern, the most
+progressive, the most idealistic. They made their choice unconsciously,
+and they began the application of their new-found theory almost
+automatically. The machinery they employed was the long derided,
+misconceived, and unappreciated Women's Club.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE
+
+
+Unless you have lived in a live town in the Middle West--say in
+Michigan, or Indiana, or Nebraska--you cannot have a very adequate idea
+of how ugly, and dirty, and neglected, and disreputable a town can be
+when nobody loves it. The railway station is a long, low, rakish thing
+of boards, painted a muddy maroon color. Around it is a stretch of bare
+ground strewn with ashes. Beyond lies the main street, with some good
+business blocks,--a First National Bank in imposing granite, and a
+Masonic Temple in pressed brick. The high school occupies a treeless,
+grassless, windswept block by itself.
+
+In the center of the residential section of the town is a big,
+unsightly, hummocky vacant place, vaguely known as the park--or the
+place where they are going to have a park, when the city gets around to
+it. At present it is a convenient spot wherein to dump tin cans, empty
+bottles, broken crockery, old shoes, and other residue. When the wind
+blows, in the spring and fall, a fine assortment of desiccated rubbish
+is wafted up and down, and into the neighbors' dooryards.
+
+Everybody is busy in these live towns. Everybody is prosperous, and
+patriotic, and law-abiding, and respectable. The business of "getting
+on" absorbs the entire time and attention of the men. They "get on" so
+well, for the most part, that their wives have plenty of leisure on
+their hands, and the latter occupy a portion of their leisure by
+belonging to a club, organized for the study of the art of the
+Renaissance, Chinese religions before Confucius, or the mystery of
+Browning. The club meets every second Wednesday, and the members read
+papers, after which there is tea and a social hour. The papers vary in
+degree alone, as the writer happens to be a skimmer, a wader, or a
+deep-sea diver in standard editions of the encyclopedias. The social
+hour, however, occasionally develops in a direction quite away from the
+realms of pure culture.
+
+Such a town, with such a woman's club, was Lake City, Minnesota, a few
+years ago. Lake City had a busy and a prosperous male population, a
+woman's club bent on intellectual uplift, and a place where there was
+going to be a park. One windy second Wednesday the club members arrived
+with their eyes full of dust, soot on their white gloves, and
+indignation in their hearts. When tea and the social hour came around
+culture went by the board and the conversation turned to the perfectly
+disgraceful way in which the town's street cleaning was conducted.
+
+"The streets are bad enough," said one member, "but, after all, one
+expects the streets to be dusty. What I object to is having a city
+dump-heap at my front door. Have any of you crossed my corner of the
+park since the snow melted?"
+
+She drew a lively picture of a state of things gravely menacing to the
+health of her neighborhood, and that of all the people whose homes faced
+the neglected square.
+
+"Why doesn't somebody complain to the authorities?" she concluded. "Why
+don't we do something about it? The next time we meet we might at least
+adopt resolutions, or, better still, have a committee appointed. What do
+you think, Madam President?"
+
+Madam President tapped her teaspoon on the edge of her empty cup. "I
+think," she said, "that we will come to order and do it now. Will you
+put what you have just suggested in the form of a motion?"
+
+At the next meeting of the club the committee to investigate the park
+made its report. The club members began a lively canvass among real
+estate owners and business men, and before long an astonished city
+council found itself on its feet, receiving a deputation from the
+woman's club. The women came armed with a donation of fifteen hundred
+dollars cash, and a polite, but firm, demand that the money be used to
+clean up and plant the park.
+
+The council replied that it had always intended to get around to that
+park, and would have done it long ago but for the fact that there was no
+park board in existence, and could not be one, because the Solons who
+drew up the city charter had forgotten to put in a provision for such a
+board.
+
+The club held more meetings, and appointed more committees. One of
+these unearthed a State law which seemed to cover the case, and make a
+park board possible without the direct assistance of a city charter. The
+city attorney was visited, and somehow was coaxed, or argued, or bullied
+into giving a favorable opinion, after which the election of a park
+board followed as a matter of course. The town suddenly became
+interested in the park. The club women's fifteen hundred dollars was
+doubled by popular subscription, and the work of turning a town rubbish
+heap into a cool and shady garden spot was brief but durable.
+
+You wouldn't know the Lake City of those years if you saw it to-day.
+They have an attractive railroad station, paved streets, cement
+sidewalks, public playgrounds for children, a high school set in a
+shaded square, and residence streets that look like parkways. And the
+woman's club was the parent of them all.
+
+There is a theory which expresses itself somewhat obviously in the
+phrase: "Whatever all the women of the country want they will get." The
+theory is a convenient one, because it may be used to defer action on
+any suggested reform, and it is harmless because of the seeming
+impossibility of ascertaining what all the women of the country really
+want. The women of the United States and the women of all the world have
+discovered a means through which they may express their collective
+opinions and desires: organization, and more organization. Lake City is
+but one instance in a thousand.
+
+When American women began, a generation ago, to form themselves into
+clubs, and later to join these clubs into state federations of clubs,
+and finally the state federations into a national body, they did not
+dream that they were going to express a collective opinion. Indeed, at
+that time not very many had opinions worth expressing. The immediate
+need of women's souls at the beginning of the club movement was for
+education; the higher education they missed by not going to college, and
+they formed their clubs with the sole object of self-culture.
+
+The study period did not last very long. In fact it was doomed from the
+beginning, for it is not in the nature of women, or at least it is not
+in the habit of women, to do things for themselves alone. They have
+_served_ for so many generations that they have learned to like serving
+better than anything else in the world, and they add service to the
+pursuit of culture, just as some of them add the important postscript to
+the unimportant letter.
+
+Thus Dallas, Texas, had a women's club of the culture caste. One spring
+day, after the star member had read a paper on the "Lake Poets," and
+another member had rendered a Chopin _etude_ on the piano, they began to
+talk about the stegomyia mosquito, and what a pity it was that the
+annual danger of contagion and death from the bite of that insect had to
+be faced all over again. Pools of water all over town, simply swarming
+with little wriggling things, soon to emerge as full-armed stegomyias,
+merely because the city authorities hadn't the money, or said they
+hadn't, to cover the pools with oil.
+
+"Why, oil isn't very expensive," said one of the club women. "Let's buy
+a whole lot of it and do the work ourselves."
+
+So the work of saving hundreds of lives every year was added to the
+study of "Lake Poets" and Chopin by the Women's Club of Dallas. The
+members mapped the city, laid it out in districts, organized their
+forces, bought oil and oil-cans and set forth. They visited the schools,
+got teachers and pupils interested, and secured their co-operation. The
+study of city sanitation was soon put into the school curriculum, and
+oiling pools of standing water in every quarter of the town is now a
+regular part of the school program in the upper grades. Every year the
+club women renew the agitation, and every year the school children go
+out with their teachers and cover the pools with oil.
+
+That story could be paralleled in almost any city in the United States.
+Clubs everywhere organized for the intellectual advancement of the
+members, for the culture of music, art, and crafts, soon added to the
+original object a department of philanthropy, a department of public
+school decoration, a department of child labor, a department of civics.
+The day a women's club adopts civics as a side line to literature, that
+day it ceases to be a private association and becomes a public
+institution--and the public sometimes finds this out before the club
+suspects it.
+
+An Eastern woman was visiting in San Francisco a short time before the
+fire. In the complication of three streets with names almost identical,
+she lost her way to the reception whither she was bound. The conductor
+on the last car she tried before going home was deeply sympathetic.
+
+"'Tis a shame, ma'am, them streets," he declared. "I've always said
+there was no sense at all in havin' them named like that. A stranger is
+bound to go wrong. I'll tell you what you do, ma'am: you go straight to
+Mrs. Lovell White, she that bosses the women's clubs, you know, ma'am.
+You tell her about them streets, and she'll have 'em changed."
+
+The conductor's simple faith in the Women's Club of San Francisco did
+not lack justification. In the intervals of studying Browning and
+antique art, the club found time to discover to San Francisco all sorts
+of things that the city wanted and needed without knowing that it did.
+
+"We ought to have a flower market," pronounced the club.
+
+"Nonsense," said the City Council. "Besides, where is the money to come
+from?"
+
+"We'll establish the flower market and show you," returned the club.
+
+They did. They found a centrally located square, the place where people
+would be likely to go for an early morning sale of potted plants and cut
+flowers. Prices are moderate in outdoor markets, and nothing else so
+stimulates in an entire community the gardening instinct, usually
+confined to a few individuals. The city authorities discovered that the
+flower market filled a long-felt want. So the city took the market over.
+
+These activities were more or less local. Others, begun as local
+affairs, ultimately became national in scope. The movement which has
+resulted in a national program in favor of public playgrounds for
+children began as a women's club movement. For a dozen years before the
+Playgrounds Association of America came into existence, women's clubs
+all over the country had been establishing playgrounds, supporting them
+out of their club treasuries, and using every power of persuasion to
+educate boards of education and city councils in their favor.
+
+Pittsburg affords a typical instance. In 1896 there was a Civic Club of
+Allegheny County, composed of women of the twin steel cities of
+Pittsburg and Allegheny. At the head of its Education Department there
+was a woman, Miss Beulah Kennard, who loved children; not beautifully
+clean, well behaved, curled and polished children, but just children.
+Children attracted Miss Kennard to such a degree that she couldn't bear
+the sight of them wallowing in the grime and soot of Pittsburg streets
+and alleys. Often she stopped in her walks to watch them, dodging wagons
+and automobiles; throwing stones, tossing balls, fighting, and shooting
+craps; stealing apples from push-carts, getting arrested and being
+dragged through the farce of a trial at law for the crime of playing.
+
+"Those children," Miss Kennard told her club, "have got to have a
+decent place to play this summer." And the club agreed with her. The
+treasury yielded for a beginning the modest sum of one hundred and
+twenty-five dollars, and with this money the women fitted out one
+schoolyard, large enough for sixty children to play in. There was no
+trouble about getting the sixty together. They came, a noisy, joyous,
+turbulent, vacation set of children, and the anxious committee from the
+club looked at them in great trepidation of spirit and said to one
+another: "What on earth are we going to do with them, now that we've got
+them here?"
+
+With hardly a ghost of precedent to guide them, the club undertook the
+work, and as women have had considerable experience in taking care of
+children at home, they soon discovered ways of taking care of them
+successfully in the playground.
+
+The next summer the Civic Club invested six hundred dollars in
+playgrounds. Two schoolyards were fitted up in Pittsburg and two in
+Allegheny. After that, every summer, the work was extended. More money
+each year was voted, and additional playgrounds were established. In the
+summer of 1899, three years after the first experiment, Pittsburg
+children had nine playgrounds and Allegheny children had three, all
+gifts of the women. By another year the committee was handling thousands
+of dollars and managing an enterprise of considerable magnitude. Also
+their work was attracting the admiration of other club women, who asked
+for an opportunity to co-operate. In 1900 practically all the clubs of
+the two cities united, and formed a joint committee of the Women's Clubs
+of Pittsburg and vicinity to take charge of playgrounds.
+
+[Illustration: CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH. Established
+by club women and for years supported by them.]
+
+All this time the work was entirely in the hands of the club women, who
+bought the apparatus, organized the games, employed the trained
+supervisors, and supplied from their own membership the volunteer
+workers, without whom the enterprise would have been a failure from the
+start. The Board of Education co-operated to the extent of lending
+schoolyards. Finally the Board of Education decided to vote an annual
+contribution of money.
+
+In 1902 the city of Pittsburg woke up and gave the women fifteen
+hundred dollars, with which they established one more playground and a
+recreation park. The original one hundred and twenty-five dollars had
+now expanded to nearly eight thousand dollars, and Pittsburg and
+Allegheny children were not only playing in a dozen schoolyards, but
+they were attending vacation schools, under expert instructors in manual
+training, cooking, sewing, art-crafts. Several recreation centers,
+all-the-year-round playgrounds, have been added since then. For
+Pittsburg has adopted the women's point of view in the matter of
+playgrounds. This year the city voted fifty thousand, three hundred and
+fifty dollars, and the Board of Education appropriated ten thousand
+dollars for the vacation schools.
+
+In Detroit it was the Twentieth Century Club that began the playground
+agitation. Mrs. Clara B. Arthur, some ten years ago, read a paper
+before the Department of Philanthropy and Reform, and following it the
+chairman of the meeting appointed a committee to consider the
+possibility of playgrounds for Detroit children. The committee visited
+the Board of Education, explained the need of playgrounds, and asked
+that the Board conduct one trial playground in a schoolyard, during the
+approaching vacation. The Board declined. The boards of education in
+most cities declined at first.
+
+The club did not give up. It talked playgrounds to the other clubs,
+until all the organizations of women were interested. Within a year or
+two Detroit had a Council of Women, with a committee on playgrounds. The
+committee went to the Common Council this time and asked permission to
+erect a pavilion and establish a playground on a piece of city land.
+This was a great, bare, neglected spot, the site of an abandoned
+reservoir which had been of no use to anybody for twenty years. The
+place had the advantage of being in a very forlorn neighborhood where
+many children swarmed.
+
+The Common Council was mildly amused at the idea of putting public
+property to such an absurd, such an unheard-of use. A few of the men
+were indignant. One Germanic alderman exploded wrathfully: "Vot does
+vimmens know about poys' play?--No!" And that settled it.
+
+The committee went to the Board of Education once more, this time with
+better success. They received permission to open and conduct, during the
+long vacation, one playground in a large schoolyard. For two summers the
+women maintained that playground, holding their faith against the
+opposition of the janitors, the jeers of the newspapers, and the
+constant hostility of tax-payers, who protested against the "ruin of
+school property." After two years the Board of Education took over the
+work. The mayor became personally interested, and the Common Council
+gracefully surrendered. They have plenty of playgrounds in Detroit now,
+the latest development being winter sports.
+
+If the Germanic alderman who protested that "vimmins" did not know
+anything about boys' play was in office at the time, one wonders what
+his emotions were when the playgrounds committee first appeared before
+the Council and asked to have vacant lots flooded to give children
+skating ponds in winter. Of course the Council refused. Fire plugs were
+for water in case of fire, not for children's enjoyment. In fact there
+was a city ordinance forbidding the opening of a fire plug in winter,
+except to extinguish fire. It took two years of constant work on the
+part of the club women to remove that ordinance, but they did it, and
+the children of Detroit have their winter as well as their summer
+playgrounds.
+
+[Illustration: CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK,
+PITTSBURGH. Out of the persistent work of club women more than three
+hundred playgrounds for children have been established.]
+
+In Philadelphia are fourteen splendid playgrounds and vacation schools,
+established in the beginning and maintained for many years by a civic
+club of women, the largest women's civic club in the country. The
+process of educating public opinion in their favor was slow, for it is
+difficult to make men see that the children of a modern city have
+different needs from the country or village children of a generation
+ago. Men remember their own boyhood, and scoff at the idea of organized
+and supervised play in a made playground. Women have no memories of the
+old swimming-hole. They simply see the conditions before them, and they
+instinctively know what must be done to meet them. The process of
+educating the others is slow, but this year in Philadelphia sixty public
+schoolyards were opened for public playgrounds, and the city
+appropriated five thousand dollars towards their maintenance. In a
+hundred cities East and West the women's clubs have been the original
+movers or have co-operated in the playground movement.
+
+Out of this persistent work was born the Playground Association of
+America, an organization of men and women, which in the three years of
+its existence has established more than three hundred playgrounds for
+children. In Massachusetts they have secured a referendum providing that
+all cities of over ten thousand inhabitants shall vote upon the question
+of providing adequate playgrounds. The act provides that every city and
+town in the Commonwealth which accepts the act shall after July 1, 1910,
+provide and maintain at least one public playground, and at least one
+other playground for every additional twenty thousand inhabitants.
+Something like twenty-five cities in the State have accepted the
+playgrounds act. It is a good beginning. The slogan of the movement,
+"The boy without a playground is the father of the man without a job,"
+has swept over the continent.
+
+[Illustration: STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD,
+LOS ANGELES, CAL.]
+
+This surely is a not inconsiderable achievement for so humble an
+instrument as women's clubs. It is true that in most communities they
+have forgotten that the women's clubs ever had anything to do with the
+movement. The Playgrounds Association has not forgotten, however. Its
+president, Luther Halsey Gulick, of New York, declares that even now the
+work would languish if it lost the co-operation of the women's clubs.
+
+The scope of woman's work for civic betterment is wider than the
+interests that directly affect children. How much the women attempt, how
+difficult they find their task, how much opposition they encounter, and
+how certain their success in the end, is indicated in a modest report of
+the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Women's Civic Club. That report says in
+part:
+
+"It is no longer necessary for us to continue, at our own cost, the
+practical experiment we began in street-cleaning, or to advocate the
+paving of a single principal street, as a test of the value of improved
+highways; nor is it necessary longer to strive for a pure water supply,
+a healthier sewerage system, or the construction of playgrounds. _This
+work is now being done by the City Council, by the Board of Public
+Works, and by the Park Commission._"
+
+Not that the Harrisburg Women's Civic Club has gone out of business. It
+still keeps fairly busy with schoolhouse decoration, traveling libraries
+for factory employees, and inspecting the city dump.
+
+In Birmingham, Alabama, the women's work has been recognized officially.
+The club Women have formed "block" clubs, composed of the women living
+in each block, and the mayor has invested them with powers of
+supervision, control of street cleaning, and disposal of waste and
+garbage. They really act as overseers, and can remove lazy and
+incompetent employees.
+
+Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has a ten-year-old Civic Club. The women have
+succeeded in getting objectionable billboards removed, public dumps
+removed from the town, in having all outside market stalls covered, and
+have secured ordinances forbidding spitting in public places, and
+against throwing litter into the streets.
+
+Cranford, New Jersey, is one of a dozen small cities where the women's
+clubs hold regular town house-cleanings. One large town in the Middle
+West adopted a vigorous method of educating public opinion in favor of
+spring and fall municipal house-cleaning. The club women got a
+photographer and went the rounds of streets and alleys and private
+backyards. Wherever bad or neglected conditions were found the club sent
+a note to the owner of the property asking him to co-operate with its
+members in cleaning up and beautifying the town. Where no attention was
+paid to the notes, the photographs were posted conspicuously in the
+club's public exhibit.
+
+If the California women saved the big tree grove, the New Jersey women,
+by years of persistent work, saved the Palisades of the Hudson from
+destruction and inaugurated the movement to turn them into a public
+park. As for the Colorado club women, they saved the Cliff Dwellers'
+remains. You can no longer buy the pottery and other priceless relics of
+those prehistoric people in the curio-shops of Denver.
+
+I am not attempting a catalogue; I am only giving a few crucial
+instances. The activities of women if they appeared only sporadically in
+Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, and a dozen other cities, would not
+necessarily carry much weight. They would possess an interest purely
+local. But the club women of Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, do not
+keep their interests local. Once a year they travel, hundreds of them,
+to a chosen city in the State, and there they hold a convention which
+lasts a week. And every second year the club women of Minnesota and
+Texas and California, and every other State in the Union, to say
+nothing of Alaska, Porto Rico, and the Canal Zone, thousands of them,
+journey to a chosen center, and there they hold a convention which lasts
+a week. And at these state and national conventions the club women
+compare their work and criticise it, and confer on public questions, and
+decide which movements they shall promote. They summon experts in all
+lines of work to lecture and advise. Increasingly their work is national
+in its scope.
+
+In round numbers, eight hundred thousand women are now enrolled in the
+clubs belonging to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, holding in
+common certain definite opinions, and working harmoniously towards
+certain definite social ends. Remember that these eight hundred
+thousand women are the educated, intelligent, socially powerful.
+
+Long ago these eight hundred thousand women ceased to confine their
+studies to printed pages. They began to study life. Leaders developed,
+women of intellect and experience, who could foresee the immense power
+an organized womanhood might some time wield, and who had courage to
+direct the forces under them towards vital objects.
+
+When, in 1904, Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker, of Denver, was elected President
+of the General Federation, she found a number of old-fashioned clubs
+still devoting themselves to Shakespeare and the classic writers. Mrs.
+Decker, a voter, a full citizen, and a public worker of prominence in
+her State, simply laughed the musty study clubs out of existence.
+
+"Ladies," she said to the delegates at the biennial meeting of 1904,
+"Dante is dead. He died several centuries ago, and a great many things
+have happened since his time. Let us drop the study of his 'Inferno' and
+proceed in earnest to contemplate our own social order."
+
+[Illustration: MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER]
+
+Mostly they took her advice. A few clubs still devote themselves to the
+pursuit of pure culture, a few others exist with little motive beyond
+congenial association. The great majority of women's clubs are organized
+for social service. A glance at their national program shows the
+modernity, the liberal character of organized women's ideals. The
+General Federation has twelve committees, among them being those on
+Industrial Conditions of Women and Children, Civil Service Reform,
+Forestry, Pure Food and Public Health, Education, Civics, Legislation,
+Arts and Crafts, and Household Economics. Every state federation has
+adopted, in the main, the same departments; and the individual clubs
+follow as many lines of the work as their strength warrants.
+
+The contribution of the women's clubs to education has been enormous.
+There is hardly a State in the Union the public schools of which have
+not been beautified, inside and outside; hardly a State where
+kindergartens and manual training, domestic science, medical inspection,
+stamp savings banks, or other improvements have not been introduced by
+the clubs. In almost every case the clubs have purchased the equipment
+and paid the salaries until the boards of education and the school
+superintendents have been convinced of the value of the innovations. In
+the South, where opportunities for the higher education of women are
+restricted, the clubs support dozens of scholarships in colleges and
+institutes. Many western State federations, notable among which is that
+of Colorado, have strong committees on education which are active in the
+entire school system.
+
+Thomas M. Balliett, Dean of Pedagogy in the New York University, paid a
+deserved tribute to the Massachusetts club women when he said:
+
+     In Massachusetts the various women's organizations have, within the
+     past few years, made a study of schools and school conditions
+     throughout the State with a thoroughness that has never been
+     attempted before.
+
+Dean Balliett says of women's clubs in general that the most
+important reform movements in elementary education within the past
+twenty years have been due, in large measure, to the efforts of
+organized women. And he is right.
+
+The women's clubs have founded more libraries than Mr. Carnegie. Early
+in the movement the women began the circulation among the clubs of
+traveling reference libraries. Soon this work was extended, but the
+object of the libraries was diverted. Instead of collections of books on
+special subjects to assist the club women in their studies, the
+traveling cases were arranged in miscellaneous groups, and were sent to
+schools, to factories, to lonely farms, mining camps, lumber camps, and
+to isolated towns and villages.
+
+Iowa now has more than twelve thousand volumes, half of them reference
+books, in circulation. Eighty-one permanent libraries have grown out of
+the traveling libraries in Iowa alone. After the traveling cases have
+been coming to a town for a year or two, people wake up and agree that
+they want a permanent place in which to read and study. Ohio has over a
+thousand libraries in circulation, having succeeded, a few years ago, in
+getting a substantial appropriation from the legislature to supplement
+their work. Western States--Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho--have supplied
+reading matter to ranches and mining camps for many years.
+
+One interesting special library is circulated in Massachusetts and Rhode
+Island in behalf of the anti-tuberculosis movement. Something like forty
+of the best books on health, and on the prevention and cure of
+tuberculosis, are included. This library, with a pretty complete
+tuberculosis exhibit, is sent around, and is shown by the local clubs
+of each town. Usually the women try to have a mass-meeting, at which
+local health problems are discussed. The Health Department of the
+General Federation is working to establish these health libraries and
+exhibits in every State.
+
+Not only in the United States, but in every civilized country, have
+women associated themselves together with the object of reforming what
+seems to them social chaos. In practically every civilized country in
+the world to-day there exists a Council of Women, a central organization
+to which clubs and societies of women with all sorts of opinions and
+objects send delegates. In the United States the council is made up of
+the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Woman's Christian
+Temperance Union, and innumerable smaller organizations, like the
+National Congress of Mothers, and the Daughters of the American
+Revolution. More than a million and a half American women are
+affiliated.
+
+Four hundred and twenty-six women's organizations belong to the council
+in Great Britain. In Switzerland the council has sixty-four allied
+societies; in Austria it has fifty; in the Netherlands it has
+thirty-five. Seventy-five thousand women belong to the French council.
+In all, the International Council of Women, to which all the councils
+send delegates, represents more than eight million women, in countries
+as far apart as Australia, Argentine, Iceland, Persia, South Africa, and
+every country in Europe. The council, indeed, has no formal organization
+in Russia, because organizations of every kind are illegal in Russia.
+But Russian women attend every meeting of the International Council.
+Turkish women sent word to the last meeting that they hoped soon to ask
+for admission. The President of the International Council of Women is
+the Countess of Aberdeen. Titled women in every European country belong
+to their councils. The Queen of Greece is president of the Greek
+council.
+
+The object of this great world organization of women is to provide a
+common center for women of every country, race, creed, or party who are
+associating themselves together in altruistic work. Once every five
+years the International Council holds a great world congress of women.
+
+What eight million of the most intelligent, the most thoughtful, the
+most altruistic women in the world believe, what they think the world
+needs, what they wish and desire for the good of humanity, must be of
+interest. It must count.
+
+[Illustration: LADY ABERDEEN President of the International Council of
+Women.]
+
+The International Council of Women discusses every important question
+presented, but makes no decision until the opinion of the delegates is
+practically unanimous. It commits itself to no opinion, lends itself to
+no movement, until the movement has passed the controversial stage.
+
+Those who cling to the old notion that women are perpetually at war with
+one another will learn with astonishment that eight million women of all
+nationalities, religions, and temperaments are agreed on at least four
+questions. In the course of its twenty years of existence the
+International Council has agreed to support four movements: Peace and
+arbitration, social purity, removing legal disabilities of women, woman
+suffrage.
+
+The American reader will be inclined to cavil at the last-mentioned
+object. Woman suffrage, it will be claimed, has not passed the
+controversial stage, even with women themselves. That is true in the
+United States and in England. It is true, in a sense, in most countries
+of the world. But in European countries not _woman_ suffrage, but
+_universal_ suffrage is being struggled for.
+
+I had this explained to me in Russia, in the course of a conversation
+with Alexis Aladyn, the brilliant leader of the Social Democratic party.
+I said to him that I had been informed that the conservative reformers,
+as well as the radicals, included woman suffrage in their programs.
+Aladyn looked puzzled for a moment, and then he replied: "All parties
+desire universal suffrage. Naturally that includes women."
+
+Finland at that time, 1906, had recently won its independence from the
+autocracy and was preparing for its first general election. Talking with
+one of the nineteen women returned to Parliament a few months later, I
+asked: "How did you Finnish women persuade the makers of the new
+constitution to give you the franchise?"
+
+"Persuade?" she repeated; "we did not have to persuade them. There was
+simply no opposition. One of the demands made on the Russian Government
+was for universal suffrage."
+
+The movement for universal suffrage, that is the movement for free
+government, with the consent of the governed, is considered by the
+International Council of Women to have passed the controversial stage.
+
+The whole club movement, as a matter of fact, is a part of the great
+democratic movement which is sweeping over the whole world. Individual
+clubs may be exclusive, even aristocratic in their tendencies, but the
+large organization is absolutely democratic. If the President of the
+International Council is an English peeress, one of the vice-presidents
+is the wife of a German music teacher, and one of the secretaries is a
+self-supporting woman. The General Federation in the United States is
+made up of women of various stations in life, from millionaires' wives
+to factory girls.
+
+The democracy of women's organizations was shown at the meeting in
+London a year ago of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, where
+delegates from twenty-one countries assembled. One of the great features
+of the meeting was a wonderful pageant of women's trades and
+professions. An immense procession of women, bearing banners and emblems
+of their work, marched through streets lined with spectators to Albert
+Hall, where the entire orchestra of this largest auditorium in the world
+was reserved for them. A published account of the pageant, after
+describing the delegations of teachers, nurses, doctors, journalists,
+artists, authors, house workers, factory women, stenographers, and
+others well known here, says:
+
+     Then the ranks opened, and down the long aisle came the chain
+     makers who work at the forge, and the pit-brow women from the
+     mines,--women whose faces have been blackened by smoke and coal
+     dust until they can never be washed white.... To these women, the
+     hardest workers in the land, were given the seats of honor, while
+     behind them, gladly taking a subordinate place, were many women
+     wearing gowns with scarlet and purple hoods, indicating their
+     university degrees.
+
+Every public movement--reform, philanthropic, sanitary, educational--now
+asks the co-operation of women's organizations. The United States
+Government asked the co-operation of the women's clubs to save the
+precarious Panama situation. At a moment when social discontent
+threatened literally to stop the building of the canal, the Department
+of Commerce and Labor employed Miss Helen Varick Boswell, of New York,
+to go to the Isthmus and organize the wives and daughters of Government
+employees into clubs. The Department knew that the clubs, once
+organized, would do the rest. Nor was it disappointed.
+
+The Government asks the co-operation of women in its latest work of
+conserving natural resources. At the biennial of the Federation of
+Women's Clubs in 1906 Mr. Enos Mills delivered an address on forestry, a
+movement which was beginning to engage the attention of the clubs.
+Within an hour after he left the platform Mr. Mills had been engaged by
+a dozen state presidents to lecture to clubs and federations. As soon
+as it reached the Government that the women's clubs were paying fifty
+dollars a lecture to learn about forestry work, the Government arranged
+that the clubs should have the best authorities in the nation to lecture
+on forestry free of all expense.
+
+But the Government is not alone in recognizing the power of women's
+organizations. If the Government approves their interest in public
+questions, vested interests are beginning to fear it. The president of
+the Manufacturers' Association, in his inaugural address, told his
+colleagues that their wives and daughters invited some very dangerous
+and revolutionary speakers to address their clubs. He warned them that
+the women were becoming too friendly toward reforms that the association
+frowned upon.
+
+This is indeed true, and women display, in their new-found enthusiasm,
+a singularly obstinate spirit. All the legislatures south of the Mason
+and Dixon Line cannot make the Southern women believe that Southern
+prosperity is dependent upon young children laboring in mills. The women
+go on working for child labor and compulsory education laws, unconvinced
+by the arguments of the mill owners and the votes of the legislators.
+The highest court in the State of New York was powerless to persuade New
+York club women that the United States Constitution stands in the way of
+a law prohibiting the night work of women. The Court of Appeals declared
+the law unconstitutional, and many women at present are toiling at
+night. But the club women immediately began fighting for a new law.
+
+The women of every State in the Union are able to work harmoniously
+together because they are unhampered with traditions of what the
+founders of the Republic intended,--the sacredness of state rights, or
+the protective paternalism of Wall Street. The gloriously illogical
+sincerity of women is concerned only about the thing itself.
+
+I have left for future consideration women who having definite social
+theories have organized themselves for definite objects. This chapter
+has purposely been confined to the activities of average women--good
+wives and mothers, the eight hundred thousand American women whose
+collective opinion is expressed through the General Federation of
+Women's Clubs. For the most part they are mature in years, these club
+women. Their children are grown. Some are in college and some are
+married. I have heard more than one presiding officer at a State
+Federation meeting proudly announce from the platform that she had
+become a grandmother since the last convention.
+
+The present president of the General Federation, Mrs. Philip N. Moore
+of St. Louis, Missouri, is a graduate of Vassar College, and served for
+a time as president of the National Society of Collegiate Alumnae. There
+are not wanting in the club movement many women who have taken college
+and university honors. Club women taken the country over, however, are
+not college products. If they had been, the club movement might have
+taken on a more cultural and a less practical form. As it was, the women
+formed their groups with the direct object of educating themselves and,
+being practical women used to work, they readily turned their new
+knowledge to practical ends. As quickly as they found out, through
+education, what their local communities needed they were filled with a
+generous desire to supply those needs. In reality they simply learned
+from books and study how to apply their housekeeping lore to municipal
+government and the public school system. Nine-tenths of the work they
+have undertaken relates to children, the school, and the home. Some of
+it seemed radical in the beginning, but none of it has failed, in the
+long run, to win the warmest approval of the people.
+
+The eight million women who form the International Council of Women, and
+express the collective opinion of women the world over, are not
+exceptional types, although they may possess exceptional intelligence.
+They are merely good citizens, wives, and mothers. Their program
+contains nothing especially radical. And yet, what a revolution would
+the world witness were that program carried out? Peace and arbitration;
+social purity; public health; woman suffrage; removal of all legal
+disabilities of women. This last-named object is perhaps more
+revolutionary in its character than the others, because its fulfillment
+will disturb the basic theories on which the nations have established
+their different forms of government.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW
+
+
+Several years ago a woman of wealth and social prominence in Kentucky,
+after pondering some time on the inferior position of women in the
+United States, wrote a book. In this volume the United States was
+compared most unfavorably with the countries of Europe, where the
+dignity and importance of women received some measure of recognition.
+Women, this author protested, enjoy a larger measure of political power
+in England than in America. In England and throughout Europe their
+social power is greater. If a man becomes lord mayor of an English city
+his wife becomes lady mayoress, and she shares all her husband's
+official honors. On the Continent women are often made honorary colonels
+of regiments, and take part with the men in military reviews. Women
+frequently hold high offices at court, acting as chamberlains,
+constables, and the like. The writer closed her last chapter with the
+announcement that she meant henceforth to make her home in England,
+where women had more than once occupied the throne as absolute monarch
+and constitutional ruler.
+
+It is true that in some particulars American women do seem to be at a
+disadvantage with European women. With what looks like a higher regard
+for women's intelligence, England has bestowed upon them every measure
+of suffrage except the Parliamentary franchise. In England, throughout
+the Middle Ages, and even down to the present century, women held the
+office of sheriff of the county, clerk of the crown, high constable,
+chamberlain, and even champion at a coronation,--the champion being a
+picturesque figure who rides into the hall and flings his glove to the
+nobles, in defense of the king's crown.
+
+In the royal pageants of European history behold the powerful figures of
+Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth, Mary of
+Scotland, Christina of Sweden, rulers in fact as well as in name; to say
+nothing of the long line of women regents in whose hands the state
+intrusted its affairs, during the minority of its kings. In the United
+States a woman candidate for mayor of a small town would be considered
+a joke.
+
+These and other inconsistencies have puzzled many ardent upholders of
+American chivalry. In order to understand the position of women in the
+United States it is necessary to make a brief survey of the laws under
+which European women are governed, and the social theory on which their
+apparent advantages are based.
+
+In the first place, the statement that in European countries a woman may
+succeed to the throne must be qualified. In three countries only,
+England, Spain, and Portugal, are women counted in the line of
+succession on terms approaching equality with men. In these three
+countries when a monarch dies leaving no sons his eldest daughter
+becomes the sovereign. If the ruling monarch die, leaving no children at
+all, the oldest daughter--failing sons--of the man who was in his
+lifetime in direct line of succession is given preference to male heirs
+more remote. Thus Queen Victoria succeeded William IV, she being the
+only child of the late king's deceased brother and heir, the Duke of
+Kent.
+
+Similar laws govern the succession in Portugal and Spain, although
+dispute on this point has more than once caused civil war in Spain.
+
+In Holland, Greece, Russia, Austria, and a few German states a woman may
+succeed to the throne, provided every single male heir to the crown is
+dead. Queen Wilhelmina became sovereign in Holland only because the
+House of Orange was extinct in the male line, and Holland lost, on
+account of the accession of Wilhelmina, the rich and important Duchy of
+Luxemburg.
+
+Luxemburg, in common with the rest of Europe, except the countries
+described, lives under what is known as the Salic Law, according to
+which a woman may not, in any circumstances, become sovereign.
+
+A word about this Salic Law is necessary, because the tradition of it
+permeates the whole atmosphere in which the women of Europe live, move,
+and have their legal and social being.
+
+The Salic Law was the code of a barbarous people, so far extinct and
+forgotten that it is uncertain just what territory in ancient Gaul they
+occupied at the time the code was formulated. Later the Salian Franks,
+as the tribe was designated, built on the left bank of the Seine rude
+fortresses and a collection of wattled huts which became the ancestor of
+the present-day city of Paris.
+
+The Salic Law was a complete code. It governed all matters, civil and
+military. It prescribed rules of war; it fixed the salaries of
+officials; it designated the exact amount of blood money the family of a
+slain man might collect from the family of the slayer; it regu lated
+conditions under which individuals might travel from one village to
+another; it governed matters of property transfer and inheritance.
+
+The Salian Franks are dust; their might has perished, their annals are
+forgotten, their cities are leveled, their mightiest kings sleep in
+unmarked graves, their code has passed out of existence, almost indeed
+out of the memory of man,--all except one paragraph of one division of
+one law. The law related to inheritance of property; the special
+division distinguished between real and personal property, and the
+paragraph ruled that a woman might inherit movable property, but that
+she might not inherit land.
+
+There was not a syllable in the law relating to the inheritance of a
+throne. Nevertheless, centuries after the last Salian king was laid in
+his barbarous grave a French prince successfully contested with an
+English prince the crown of France, his claim resting on that obscure
+paragraph in the Salic code. The Hundred Years' War was fought on this
+issue, and the final outcome of the war established the Salic Law
+permanently in France, and with more or less rigor in most of the
+European states.
+
+At the time of the French Revolution, when the "Rights of Man" were
+being declared with so much fervor and enthusiasm, when the old laws
+were being revised in favor of greater freedom of the individual, the
+"Rights of Woman" were actually revised downward. Up to this time the
+application of the Salic Law was based on tradition and precedent. Now a
+special statute was enacted forever barring women from the sovereignty
+of France. "Founded on the pride of the French, who could not bear to be
+ruled by their own women folk," as the records are careful to state.
+
+The interpretation of the Salic Law did more, a great deal more, than
+exclude women from the throne. It established the principle of the
+inherent inferiority of women. The system of laws erected on that
+principle were necessarily deeply tinged with contempt for women, and
+with fear lest their influence in any way might affect the conduct of
+state affairs. That explains why, at the present time, although in most
+European countries women are allowed to practice medicine, they are not
+allowed to practice law. Medicine may be as learned a profession, but it
+affects only human beings. The law, on the other hand, affects the
+state. A woman advocate, you can readily imagine, might so influence a
+court of justice that the laws of the land might suffer feminization.
+From the European point of view this would be most undesirable.
+
+The apparently superior rights possessed by English women were also
+bestowed upon them by a vanished system of laws. They have descended
+from Feudalism, in which social order the _person_ did not exist. The
+social order consisted of _property_ alone, and the claims of property,
+that is to say, land, were paramount over the claims of the individual.
+Those historic women sheriffs of counties, clerks of crown,
+chamberlains, and high constables held their high offices because the
+offices were hereditary property in certain titled families, and they
+had to belong to the entail, even when a woman was in possession. The
+offices were purely titular. No English woman ever acted as high
+constable. No English woman ever attended a coronation as king's
+champion. The rights and duties of these offices were delegated to a
+male relative. Every once in a while, during the Middle Ages, some
+strong-minded lady of title demanded the right to administer her office
+in person, but she was always sternly put down by a rebuking House of
+Lords, sometimes even by the king's majesty himself.
+
+In the same way the voting powers of the women of England are a result
+of hereditary privilege. Local affairs in England, until a very recent
+period, were administered through the parish, and the only persons
+qualified to vote were the property owners of the parish. It was really
+property interests and not people who voted. Those women who owned
+property, or who were administering property for their minor children,
+were entitled to vote, to serve on boards of guardians, and to dispense
+the Poor Laws. Out of their right of parish vote has grown their right
+of municipal franchise. It carries with it a property qualification, and
+the proposed Parliamentary franchise, for which the women of England are
+making such a magnificent fight, will also have a property
+qualification.
+
+The real position, legal and social, which women in England and
+continental Europe have for centuries occupied, may be gauged from an
+examination of the feminist movement in a very enlightened country, say
+Germany. The laws of Germany were founded on the Corpus Juris of the
+Romans, a stern code which relegates women to the position of chattels.
+And chattels they have been in Germany, until very recent years, when
+through the intelligent persistence of strong women the chains have
+somewhat been loosened.
+
+A generation ago, in 1865, to be exact, a group of women in Leipzig
+formed an association which they called the Allgemeinen Deutschen
+Frauenbund, which may be Anglicized into General Association of German
+Women. The stated objects of the association give a pretty clear idea of
+the position of women at that time. The women demanded as their rights,
+Education, the Right to Work, Free Choice of Profession. Nothing more,
+but these three demands were so revolutionary that all masculine
+Germany, and most of feminine Germany, uttered horrified protests.
+Needless to say nothing came of the women's demand.
+
+After the Franco-Prussian War the center of the women's revolt naturally
+moved to the capital of the new empire, Berlin. From that city, during
+the years that followed, so much feminine unrest was radiated that in
+1887 the German Woman Suffrage Association was formed, with the demand
+for absolute equality with men. Two remarkable women, Minna Cauer and
+Anita Augsberg, the latter unmarried and a doctor of laws, were the
+moving spirits in the first woman suffrage agitation, which has since
+extended throughout the empire until there is hardly a small town
+without its suffrage club.
+
+Now the woman suffragist in Germany differs from the American suffragist
+in that she is always a member of a political party. She is a silent
+member to be sure, but she adheres to her party, because, through
+tradition or conviction, she believes in its policies. Usually the
+suffragist is a member of the Social Democratic Party, allied to the
+International Socialist Party. She is a suffragist because she is a
+Socialist, because woman suffrage, and, indeed, the full equalization of
+the laws governing men and women are a part of the Socialist platform in
+every country in the world. The woman member of the Social Democratic
+party is not working primarily for woman suffrage. She is working for a
+complete overturning of the present economic system, and she advocates
+_universal adult suffrage_ as a means of bringing about the social and
+economic changes demanded by the Socialists.
+
+These German Socialist women are often very advanced spirits, who hold
+university degrees, who have entered the professions, and are generally
+emancipated from strictly conventional lives. Others, in large numbers,
+belong to the intellectual proletarian classes. Their American
+prototypes are to be found in the Women's Trade Union League, described
+in a later chapter.
+
+The other German suffragists are members of the radical, the moderate
+(we should say conservative), and the clerical parties. These women are
+middle class, average, intelligent wives and mothers. They correspond
+fairly well with the women of the General Federation of Clubs in the
+United States, and like the American club women they are affiliated with
+the International Council of Women. Locally they are working for the
+social reforms demanded by the first American suffrage convention, held
+in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. They are demanding the higher
+education, married women's property rights, free speech, and the right
+to choose a trade or profession. They are demanding other rights, from
+lack of which the American woman never suffered. The right to attend a
+political meeting was until recently denied to German women. Although
+they take a far keener and more intelligent interest in national and
+local politics than American women as a rule have ever taken, their
+presence at political meetings has but yesterday been sanctioned.
+
+The civil responsibility of the father and mother in many European
+countries is barbarously unequal. If a marriage exists between the
+parents the father is the only parent recognized. He is sole guardian
+and authority. When divorce dissolves a marriage the rights of the
+father are generally paramount, even when he is the party accused.
+
+On the other hand, if no marriage exists between the parents, if the
+child is what is called illegitimate, the mother is alone responsible
+for its maintenance. Not only is the father free from all
+responsibility, his status as a father is denied by law. Inquiry into
+the paternity of the child is in some countries forbidden. The unhappy
+mother may have documentary proof that she was betrayed under promise of
+marriage, but she is not allowed to produce her proof.
+
+Under the French Code, the substance of which governs all Europe, it is
+distinctly a principle that the woman's honor is and ought to be of less
+value than a man's honor. Napoleon personally insisted on this
+principle, and more than once emphasized his belief that no importance
+should be attached to men's share in illegitimacy.
+
+These and other degrading laws the European progressive women are trying
+to remove from the Codes. They have their origin in the belief in "The
+imprudence, the frailty, and the imbecility" of women, to quote from
+this Code Napoleon.
+
+Whatever women's legal disabilities in the United States, their laws
+were never based on the principle that women were imprudent, frail, or
+imbecile. They placed women at a distinct disadvantage, it is true, but
+it was the disadvantage of the minor child and not of the inferior, the
+chattel, the property of man, as in Europe.
+
+Laws in the United States were founded on the assumption that women
+stood in perpetual need of protection. The law makers carried this to
+the absurd extent of assuming that protection was all the right a woman
+needed or all she ought to claim. They even pretended that when a woman
+entered the complete protection of the married state she no longer stood
+in need of an identity apart from her husband. The working out of this
+theory in a democracy was far from ideal, as we shall see.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW
+
+
+A little girl sat in a corner of her father's law library watching, with
+wide, serious eyes, a scene the like of which was common enough a
+generation or two ago. The weeping old woman told a halting story of a
+dissipated son, a shrewish daughter-in-law, and a state of servitude on
+her own part,--a story pitifully sordid in its details. The farm had
+come to her from her father's estate. For forty years she had toiled
+side by side with her husband, getting a simple, but comfortable,
+living from the soil. Then the husband died. Under the will the son
+inherited the farm, and everything on it,--house, furniture, barns,
+cattle, tools. Even the money in the bank was his. A clause in the will
+provided that the son should give his mother a home during her lifetime.
+
+So here she was, after a life of hard work and loving service, shorn of
+everything; a pauper, an unpaid servant in the house of another
+woman,--her son's wife. Was it true that the law took her home away from
+her,--the farm that descended to her from her father, the house she had
+lived in since childhood? Could nothing, _nothing_ be done?
+
+The aged judge shook his head, sadly. "You see, Mrs. Grant," he
+explained, "the farm has never really been yours since your marriage,
+for then it became by law your husband's property, precisely as if he
+had bought it. He had a right to leave it to whom he would. No doubt he
+did what he thought was for your good. I wish I could help you, but I
+cannot. The law is inexorable in these matters."
+
+After the forlorn old woman had gone the lawyer's child went and stood
+by her father's chair. "Why couldn't you help her?" she asked. "Why do
+you let them take her home away from her?"
+
+Judge Cady opened the sheep-bound book at his elbow and showed the
+little girl a paragraph. Turning the pages, he pointed out others for
+her to read. Spelling through the ponderous legal phraseology the little
+girl learned that a married woman had no existence, in the eyes of the
+law, apart from her husband. She could own no property; she could
+neither buy nor sell; she could not receive a gift, even from her own
+husband. She was, in fact, her husband's chattel. If he beat her she had
+no means of punishing, or even restraining him, unless, indeed, she
+could prove that her life was endangered. If she ran away from him the
+law forced her to return.
+
+Paragraph after paragraph the child read through, and, unseen by her
+father, marked faintly with a pencil. So far as she was aware, father,
+and father's library of sheep-bound books, were the beginning and the
+end of the law, and to her mind the way to get rid of measures which
+took women's homes away from them was perfectly simple. That night when
+the house was quiet she stole downstairs, scissors in hand, determined
+_to cut every one of those laws out of the book_.
+
+The young reformer was restrained, but only temporarily. As Elizabeth
+Cady Stanton she lived to do her part toward revising many of the laws
+under which women, in her day, suffered, and her successors, the
+organized women of the United States, are busy with their scissors,
+revising the rest.
+
+Not alone in Russia, Germany, France, and England do the laws governing
+men and women need equalizing. In America, paradise of women, the
+generally accepted theory that women have "all the rights they want"
+does not stand the test of impartial examination.
+
+In America some women have all the rights they want. Your wife and the
+wives of the men you associate with every day usually have all the
+rights they want, sometimes a few that they do not need at all. Is the
+house yours? The furniture yours? The motor yours? The income yours? Are
+the children yours? If you are the average fond American husband, you
+will return the proud answer: "No, indeed, they are _ours_."
+
+This is quite as it should be, assuming that all wives are as tenderly
+cherished, and as well protected as the women who live on your block.
+For a whole big army of women there are often serious disadvantages
+connected with that word "ours."
+
+In Boston there lived a family of McEwans,--a man, his wife, and several
+half-grown children. McEwan was not a very steady man. He drank
+sometimes, and his earning capacity was uncertain. Mrs. McEwan was an
+energetic, capable, intelligent woman, tolerant of her husband's
+failings, ambitious for her children. She took a large house, furnished
+it on the installment plan, and filled it with boarders. The boarders
+gave the family an income larger than they had ever possessed before,
+and McEwan's contributions fell off. He became an unpaying guest
+himself. All his earnings, he explained, were going into investments.
+The man was, in fact, speculating in mining stocks.
+
+One day McEwan came home with a face of despair. His creditors, he told
+his wife, had descended on him, seized his business, and threatened to
+take possession of the boarding house.
+
+"But it is mine," protested the woman, with spirit. "I bought every bit
+of furniture with the money my boarders paid me. Nobody can touch my
+property or my earnings to satisfy a claim on you. I am not liable for
+your debts."
+
+One of the boarders was a lawyer, and to him that night she took the
+case. "A woman's earnings are her own in Massachusetts, are they not?"
+she demanded.
+
+"You are what the law calls a free trader," replied the lawyer, "and
+whatever you earn is yours, certainly. That is--of course you are
+recorded at the city clerk's office?"
+
+"Why no. Why should I be?"
+
+"The law requires it. Otherwise this property, and even the money your
+boarders pay you, are liable to attachment for your husband's debts.
+Unless you make a specific declaration that you are in business for
+yourself, the law assumes that the business is your husband's."
+
+"If I went to work for a salary, should I have to be recorded in order
+to keep my own money?" Mrs. McEwan was growing angry.
+
+"No," replied the lawyer, "not if you were careful to keep your income
+and your husband's absolutely separate. If you both paid installments on
+a piano the piano would be your husband's, not yours. If you bought a
+house together, the house could be seized for his debts. Everything you
+buy with your money is yours. Everything you buy with money he gives you
+is his. Everything you buy together is his. You could not protect such
+property from your husband's creditors, or from his heirs."
+
+Mrs. McEwan's case is mild, her wrongs faint beside those of a woman in
+Los Angeles, California. Her husband was a doctor, and she had been,
+before her marriage, a trained nurse. The young woman had saved several
+hundred dollars, and she put the money into a first payment on a pretty
+little cottage. During the first two or three years of the marriage the
+doctor's wife, from time to time, attended cases of illness, usually
+contributing her earnings toward the payment for the house or into
+furniture for the house. In all she paid about a thousand dollars, or
+something like one-third of the cost of the house. Then children came,
+and her earning days were over.
+
+Unfortunately the domestic affairs of this household became disturbed.
+The doctor contracted a drug habit. He became irregular in his conduct
+and ended by running away with a dissolute woman. After he had gone his
+wife found that the house she lived in, and which she had helped to buy,
+had been sold, without her knowledge or consent. The transaction was
+perfectly legal. Community property, that is, property held jointly by
+husband and wife, is absolutely controlled by the husband in California.
+In that State community property may even be given away, without the
+wife's knowledge or consent.
+
+It happened not many years ago that one of the most powerful
+millionaires in California, in a moment of generosity, conveyed to one
+of his sons a very valuable property. Some time afterwards the father
+and son quarreled, and the father attempted to get back his property.
+His plea in court was that his wife's consent to the transaction had
+never been sought; but the court ruled that since the property was owned
+in community, the wife's consent did not have to be obtained.
+
+This particular woman happened to be rich enough to stand the experience
+of having a large slice of property given away without her knowledge,
+but the same law would have applied to the case of a woman who could
+not afford it at all.
+
+It is in the case of women wage earners that these laws bear the
+peculiar asperity. Down in the cotton-mill districts of the South are
+scores of men who never, from one year to the next, do a stroke of work.
+They are supposed to be "weakly." Their wives and children work eleven
+hours a day (or night) and every pay day the men go to the mills and
+collect their wages. The money belongs to them under the law. Even if
+the women had the spirit to protest, the protest would be useless. The
+right of a man to collect and to spend his wife's earnings is protected
+in many States in the chivalric South. In Texas, for example, a husband
+is entitled to his wife's earnings even _though he has deserted her_.
+
+I do not know that this occurs very often in Texas. Probably not, unless
+among low-class Negroes. In all likelihood if a Texas woman should
+appeal to her employer, and tell him that her husband had abandoned her,
+he would refuse to give the man her wages. Should the husband be in a
+position to invoke the law, he could claim his wife's earnings,
+nevertheless.
+
+The Kentucky lady who chose England for her future home, had she known
+it, selected the country to which most American women owe their legal
+disabilities. American law, except in Louisiana and Florida, is founded
+on English common law, and English common law was developed at a period
+when men were of much greater importance in the state than women. The
+state was a military organization, and every man was a fighter, a
+king's defender. Women were valuable only because defenders of kings
+had to have mothers.
+
+English common law provided that every married woman must be supported
+in as much comfort as her husband's estate warranted. The mothers of the
+nation must be fed, clothed, and sheltered. What more could they
+possibly ask? In return for permanent board and clothes, the woman was
+required to give her husband all of her property, real and personal.
+What use had she for property? Did she need it to support herself? In
+case of war and pillage could she defend it?
+
+Husband and wife were one--and that one was the man. He was so much the
+one that the woman had literally no existence in the eyes of the law.
+She not only did not possess any property; she could possess none. Her
+husband could not give her any, because there could be no contract
+between a married pair. A contract implies at least two people, and
+husband and wife were one. The husband could, if he chose, establish a
+trusteeship, and thus give his wife the free use of her own. But you can
+easily imagine that he did not very often do it.
+
+A man could, also, devise property to his wife by will. Often this was
+done, but too often the sons were made heirs, and the wife was left to
+what tender mercies they owned. If a man died intestate the wife merely
+shared with other heirs. She had no preference.
+
+Under the old English common law, moreover, not only the property, but
+also the services of a married woman belonged to her husband. If he
+chose to rent out her services, or if she offered to work outside the
+home, it followed logically that her wages belonged to him. What use had
+she for wages?
+
+On the other hand, every man was held responsible for the support of his
+wife. He was responsible for her debts, as long as they were the
+necessities of life. He was also responsible for her conduct. Being
+propertyless, she could not be held to account for wrongs committed. If
+she stole, or destroyed property, or injured the person of another, if
+she committed any kind of a misdemeanor in the presence of her husband,
+and that also meant if he were in her neighborhood at the time, the law
+held him responsible. He should have restrained her.
+
+This was supposed to be a decided advantage to the woman. Whenever a
+rebellious woman or group of women voiced their objection to the system
+which robbed them of every shred of independence they were always
+reminded that the system at the same time relieved them of every shred
+of responsibility, even, to an extent, of moral responsibility. "So
+great a favorite," comments Blackstone, "is the female sex under the
+laws of England."
+
+You may well imagine that, in these circumstances, husbands were
+interested that their wives should be very good. The law supported them
+by permitting "moderate correction." A married woman might be kept in
+what Blackstone calls "reasonable restraint" by her husband. But only
+with a stick no larger than his thumb.
+
+The husbandly stick was never imported into the United States. Even the
+dour Puritans forbade its use. The very first modification of the
+English common law, in its application to American women, was made in
+1650, when the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony decreed that a
+husband beating his wife, or, for that matter, a wife beating her
+husband, should be fined ten pounds, or endure a public whipping.
+
+The Pilgrim Fathers and the other early colonists in America brought
+with them the system of English common law under which they and their
+ancestors had for centuries been governed. From time to time, as
+conditions made them necessary, new laws were enacted and put into
+force. In all cases not specifically covered by these new laws, the old
+English common law was applied. It did not occur to any one that women
+would ever need special laws. The Pilgrim Fathers and their successors,
+the Puritans, simply assumed that here, as in the England they had left
+behind, woman's place was in the home, where she was protected,
+supported, and controlled.
+
+But in the new world woman's place in the home assumed an importance
+much greater than it had formerly possessed. Labor was scarce,
+manufacturing and trading were undeveloped. Woman's special activities
+were urgently needed. Woman's hands helped to raise the roof-tree, her
+skill and industry, to a very large extent, furnished the house. She
+spun and wove, cured meat, dried corn, tanned skins, made shoes, dipped
+candles, and was, in a word, almost the only manufacturer in the
+country. But this did not raise her from her position as an inferior.
+Woman owned neither her tools nor her raw materials. These her husband
+provided. In consequence, husband and wife being one, that one, in
+America, as in England, was the husband.
+
+This explanation is necessary in order to understand why the legal
+position of most American women to-day is that of inferiors, or, at
+best, of minor children.
+
+It is necessary also, in order to understand why, except in matters of
+law, American women are treated with such extraordinary consideration
+and indulgence. As long as pioneer conditions lasted women were valuable
+because of the need of their labor, their special activities. Also, for
+a very long period, women were scarce, and they were highly prized not
+alone for their labor, but because their society was so desirable. In
+other words, pioneer conditions gave woman a better standing in the new
+world than she had in the old, and she was treated with an altogether
+new consideration and regard.
+
+In England no one thought very badly of a man who was moderately abusive
+of his wife. In America, violence against women was, from the first, an
+unbearable idea. Laws protecting maid servants, dependent women, and, as
+we have seen, even wives, were very early enacted in New England.
+
+But although woman was more dearly prized in the new country than in the
+old, no new legislation was made for her benefit. Her legal status, or
+rather her absence of legal status apart from her husband, remained
+exactly as it had been under the English common law.
+
+No legislature in the United States has deliberately made laws placing
+women at a disadvantage with men. Whatever laws are unfair and
+oppressive to women have just happened--just grown up like weeds out of
+neglected soil.
+
+Let me illustrate. No lawmaker in New Mexico ever introduced a bill into
+the legislature making men liable for their wives' torts or petty
+misdemeanors. Yet in New Mexico, at this very minute, a wife is so
+completely her husband's property that he is responsible for her
+behavior. If she should rob her neighbor's clothesline, or wreck a
+chicken yard, her unfortunate husband would have to stand trial. Simply
+because in New Mexico married women are still living under laws that
+were evolved in another civilization, long before New Mexico was dreamed
+of as a State.
+
+Nowhere else in the United States are women allowed to shelter their
+weak moral natures behind the stern morality of their husbands, but in
+more than one State the husband's responsibility for his wife's acts is
+assumed. In Massachusetts, for one State, if a woman owned a saloon and
+sold beer on Sunday, she would be liable to arrest, and so also would
+her husband, provided he were in the house when the beer was sold. Both
+would probably be fined. Simply because it was once the law that a
+married woman had no separate existence apart from her husband, this
+absurd law, or others as absurd, remain on the statute books of almost
+every State in the Union.
+
+The ascent of woman, which began with the abolishment of corporeal
+punishment of wives, proceeded very slowly. Most American women married,
+and most American wives were kindly treated. At least public opinion
+demanded that they be treated with kindness. Long before any other
+modification of her legal status was gained, a woman subjected to
+cruelty at the hands of her lawful spouse was at liberty to seek police
+protection.
+
+The reason why police protection was so seldom sought is plain enough.
+Imagine a woman complaining of a husband who would be certain to beat
+her again for revenge, and to whom she was bound irrevocably by laws
+stronger even than the laws on the statute books. Remember that the only
+right she had was the right to be supported, and if she left her
+husband's house she left her only means of living. She could hardly
+support herself, for few avenues of industry were open to women. She was
+literally a pauper, and when there is nowhere else to lay his head, even
+the most miserable pauper thinks twice before he runs away from the
+poorhouse. Besides, the woman who left her husband had to give up her
+children. They too were the husband's property.
+
+There were some women who hesitated before they consented to pauperize
+themselves by marrying. Widows were especially wary, if old stories are
+to be trusted. A story is told in the New York University Law School of
+a woman in Connecticut who took with her, as a part of her wedding
+outfit, a very handsome mahogany bureau, bequeathed her by her
+grandfather. After a few years of marriage the husband suddenly died,
+leaving no will. The home and all it contained were sold at auction. The
+widow was permitted to buy certain objects of furniture, and among them
+was her cherished bureau. Where the poor woman found the money with
+which to buy is not revealed. In time this woman married again, and
+again her husband died without a will. Again there was an auction, and
+again the widow purchased her beloved heirloom. It seems possible that
+this time she had saved money in anticipation of the necessity.
+
+A little later, for she was still young and attractive, a suitor
+appeared, offering his heart and "all his worldly goods." "No, I thank
+you," replied the sorely tried creature, "I prefer to keep my bureau."
+
+The first struggle made by women in their own behalf was against this
+condition of marital slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott,
+Lydia Maria Child, and others of that brave band of rebellious women,
+were active for years, addressing legislative committees in New York and
+Massachusetts, circulating petitions, writing to newspapers, agitating
+everywhere in favor of married women's property rights. Finally it began
+to dawn on the minds of men that there might be a certain public
+advantage, as well as private justice, attaching to separate ownership
+by married women of their own property.
+
+In 1839 the Massachusetts State Legislature passed a cautious measure
+giving married women qualified property rights. It was not until 1848
+that a really effective Married Women's Property Law was secured, by
+action of the New York State Assembly. The law served as a model in many
+of the new Western States just then framing their laws.
+
+These New York legislators, and the Western legislators who first
+granted property rights to married women, were actuated less by a sense
+of justice towards women than by enlightened selfishness. The effect of
+so much freedom on women themselves was a matter for grave conjecture.
+It was not suggested by any of the American debaters, as it was later on
+the floors of the English Parliament, that women, if they controlled
+their own property, would undoubtedly squander it on men whom they
+preferred to their husbands. But it was prophesied that women once in
+possession of money would desert their husbands by regiments,--which
+speaks none too flatteringly of the husbands of that day.
+
+Men of property stood for the Married Women's Property Act, because they
+perceived plainly that their own wealth, devised to daughters who could
+not control it, might easily be gambled away, or wasted through
+improvidence, or diverted to the use of strangers. In other words, they
+knew that their property, when daughters inherited it, became the
+property of their sons-in-law. They had no guarantee that their own
+grandchildren would ever have the use of it, unless it was controlled by
+their mothers.
+
+It was the women's clubs and women's organizations in America, as it was
+the Women's Councils in Europe, that actively began the agitation
+against women's legal disabilities. The National Woman Suffrage
+Association, oldest of all women's organizations in the United States,
+has been calling attention to the unequal laws, and demanding their
+abolishment, for two generations.
+
+Practically all of the state federations of women's clubs have
+legislative committees, and it is usually the business of these
+committees to codify the laws of their respective States which apply
+directly to women. In some cases a woman lawyer is made chairman, and
+the work is done under her direction. Sometimes, as in Texas, a well
+known and friendly man lawyer is retained for the task. Almost
+invariably the report of the legislative committee contains disagreeable
+surprises. American women have been so accustomed to their privileges
+that they have taken their rights for granted, and are usually
+astonished when they find how limited their rights actually are.
+
+There are some States in the Union where women are on terms of something
+like equality with men. There is one State to which all intelligent
+women look with a sort of envious, admiring, questioning curiosity,
+Colorado, which is literally the woman's paradise. In Colorado it would
+be difficult to find even the smallest inequality between men and women.
+They vote on equal terms, and if any woman deserves to go to the
+legislature, and succeeds in convincing a large enough public of the
+fact, nothing stands in the way of her election. One woman, Mrs. Alma
+Lafferty, is a member of the present legislature, and she has had
+several predecessors.
+
+But Colorado women have a larger influence still in legislative
+matters. To guard their interests they have a Legislative Committee of
+the State Federation of Women's Clubs, consisting of thirty to forty
+carefully chosen women.
+
+This committee has permanent headquarters in Denver during every session
+of the legislature, and every bill which directly affects women and
+children, before reaching the floor of either house, is submitted for
+approval to the committee.
+
+Miss Jane Addams has declared, and Miss Addams is pretty good authority,
+that the laws governing women and children in Colorado are superior to
+those of any other State. Women receive equal pay for equal work in
+Colorado. They are permitted to hold any office. They are co-guardians
+of their children, and the education of children has been placed almost
+entirely in the hands of women. This does not mean that Colorado has
+weakened its schools by barring men from the teaching profession. It
+means that women are superintendents of schools in many counties, and
+that one woman was, for more than ten years, State superintendent of
+schools.
+
+Contrast Colorado with Louisiana, possibly the last State in the Union a
+well-informed woman would choose for a residence. The laws of Louisiana
+were based, not on the English common law, but on the Code Napoleon,
+which regards women merely as a working, breeding, domestic animal.
+
+"There is one thing that is not _French_," thundered the great Napoleon,
+closing a conference on his famous code, "and that is that a woman can
+do as she pleases."
+
+[Illustration: A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES]
+
+The framers of Louisiana's laws were particular to guard against too
+great a freedom of action on the part of its women. Toward the end of
+Mrs. Jefferson Davis's life she added a codicil to her will, giving to a
+certain chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy a number of very
+valuable relics of her husband, and of the short-lived Confederate
+Government. Her action was made public, and it was then revealed that
+two women had signed the document as witnesses. Instantly Mrs. Davis's
+attention was called to the fact that in Louisiana, where she was then
+living, no woman may witness a document. Women's signatures are
+worthless.
+
+In Louisiana your disabilities actually begin when you become an engaged
+girl. From that happy moment on you are under the dominance of a man.
+Your wedding presents are not yours, but his. If you felt like giving a
+duplicate pickle-fork to your mother, you could not legally do so, and
+after you were married, if your husband wanted that pickle-fork, he
+could get it. Your clothing, your dowry, become community property as
+soon as the marriage ceremony is over, and community property in
+Louisiana is controlled absolutely by the husband. Every dollar a woman
+earns there is at her husband's disposal. Without her husband's consent
+a Louisiana woman may not go into a court of law, even though she may be
+in business for herself and the action sought is in defense of her
+business.
+
+Nor does the Louisiana woman fare any better as a mother. Then, in fact,
+her position is nothing short of humiliating. During her husband's
+lifetime he is sole guardian of their children. At his death she may
+become their guardian, but if she marries a second time--and the law
+permits her to remarry, provided she waits ten months--she retains her
+children only by the formal consent of her first husband's family. If
+they dislike her, or disapprove of her second marriage, they may demand
+the custody of the children.
+
+It is true that many of these absurd laws in Louisiana are not now often
+enforced. It is also true that in Louisiana and other states few men are
+so unjust to their wives as to take advantage of unequal property
+rights. Laws always lag behind the sense of justice which lives in man.
+But the point is that unequal laws still remain on our statute books,
+and they may be, and sometimes are, enforced.
+
+Between these two extremes, Colorado and Louisiana, women have the other
+forty-six States to choose. None of them offers perfect equality. Even
+in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah--the three States besides Colorado where
+women vote--women are in such a minority that their votes are powerless
+to remove all their disabilities. Very rarely have club women even so
+much felicity as the New York State Federation, whose legislative
+chairman, Miss Emilie Bullowa, reported that she was unable to find a
+single unimportant inequality in the New York laws governing the
+property rights of women.
+
+In most of the older States the property rights of married women are now
+fairly guaranteed, but the proud boast that in America no woman is the
+slave of her husband will have to be modified when it is known that in
+at least seventeen States these rights are still denied.
+
+The husband absolutely controls his wife's property and her earnings in
+Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, California, Arizona, North Dakota, and
+Idaho. He has virtual control--that is to say, the wife's rights are
+merely provisional--in Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri.
+
+Women to control their own business property must be registered as
+traders on their own account in these States: Georgia, Montana, Nevada,
+Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia.
+
+Nor are women everywhere permitted to work on equal terms with men.
+
+[Illustration: MISS EMILIE BULLOWA.]
+
+There is a current belief, often expressed, that in the United States
+every avenue of industry is open to women on equal terms with men. This
+is not quite true. In some States a married woman may not engage in any
+business without permission from the courts. In Texas, Louisiana, and
+Georgia this is the case. In Wyoming, where women vote, but where they
+are in such minority that their votes count for little, a married woman
+must satisfy the court that she is under the necessity of earning her
+living.
+
+If you are a woman, married or unmarried, and wish to practice law, you
+are barred from seven of the United States. The legal profession is
+closed to women in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Delaware,
+Tennessee, and South Carolina.
+
+In some States they discourage women from aspiring to the learned
+professions by refusing them the advantages of higher education which
+they provide for their brothers.
+
+Four state universities close their doors to women, in spite of the
+fact that women's taxes help support the universities. These States are
+Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. The last-named admits
+women to post-graduate courses.
+
+You can hold no kind of an elective office, you cannot be even a county
+superintendent of schools in Alabama or Arkansas, if you are a woman. In
+Alabama, indeed, you may not be a minister of the gospel, a doctor of
+medicine, or a notary public. Florida likewise will have nothing to do
+with a woman doctor.
+
+Only a few women want to hold office or engage in professional work.
+Every woman hopes to be a mother. What then is the legal status of the
+American mother? When the club women began the study of their position
+before the law they were amazed to find, in all but ten of the States
+and territories, that they had absolutely no control over the destinies
+of their own children. In ten States only, and in the District of
+Columbia, are women co-guardians with their husbands of their children.
+
+In Pennsylvania if a woman supports her children, or has money to
+contribute to their support, she has joint guardianship. Under somewhat
+similar circumstances Rhode Island women have the same right.
+
+In all the other States and territories children belong to their
+fathers. They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother. That
+this almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule, no
+one except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it.
+
+It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice are
+growing reluctant to administer such archaic laws.
+
+The famous Tillman case is an example. Senator Ben Tillman of South
+Carolina has one son,--a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogether
+disreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of married
+life, left him, taking with her their two little girls. South Carolina
+allows no divorce for any cause. The sanctity of the marriage tie is
+held so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abused
+at will by the veriest brute or libertine. Mrs. Tillman could not
+divorce her husband, so she took her children and went to live quietly
+at her parent's home in the city of Washington.
+
+One day the father of the children, young Tillman, appeared at that
+home, and in a fit of drunken resentment against his wife, kidnapped the
+children. He could not care for the children, probably had no wish to
+have them near him, but he took them back to South Carolina, and _gave_
+them to his parents, made a present of a woman's flesh and blood and
+heart to people who hated her and whom she hated in return.
+
+Under the laws of South Carolina, under the printed statutes, young
+Tillman had a perfect right to do this thing, and his father, a United
+States Senator, upheld him in his act. Young Mrs. Tillman, however,
+showed so little respect for the statutes that she sued her husband and
+his parents to recover her babies. The judge before whom the suit was
+brought was in a dilemma. There was the law--but also there was justice
+and common sense. To the everlasting honor of that South Carolina judge,
+justice and common sense triumphed, and he ruled that _the law was
+unconstitutional._
+
+There are other hardships in this law denying to mothers the right of
+co-guardianship of their children. Two names signed to a child's working
+papers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens that
+selfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work,
+when the mothers know they are far too young. A woman in Scranton,
+Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her children
+had been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they were
+tall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman. "What could I say about
+it, when he went and got the papers?" she sighed.
+
+The father--not the mother--controls the services of his children. He
+can collect their wages, and he does. Very, very often he squanders the
+money they earn, and no one may interfere.
+
+A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay day
+at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her
+pay envelope, unopened. It was his regular day for getting drunk and
+indulging in an orgy of gambling. Often more than half of the girls'
+wages would have vanished before night. Twice the entire amount was
+wasted in an hour. This kept on until the girls passed their childhood
+and were mature enough to rebel successfully.
+
+It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potential
+services of a child.
+
+Many times have these unjust laws been protested against. In every State
+in the Union where they exist they have been protested against by
+organized groups of intelligent women. But their protests have been
+received with apathy, and, in some instances, with contempt by
+legislators. Only last year a determined fight was made by the women of
+California for a law giving them equal guardianship of their children.
+The women's bill was lost in the California Legislature, and lost by a
+large majority.
+
+What arguments did the California legislators use against the proposed
+measure? Identically the same that were made in Massachusetts and New
+York a quarter of a century ago. If women had the guardianship of their
+children, would anything prevent them from taking the children and
+leaving home? What would become of the sanctity of the home, with its
+lawful head shorn of his paternal dignity? In California a husband is
+head of the family in very fact, or at least a law of the State says so.
+
+At one time the law which made the husband the head of the home
+guaranteed to the family support by the husband. It does not do that
+now. There are laws on the statute books of many States obliging the
+wife to support her husband if he is disabled, and the children, if the
+husband defaults. There are no laws compelling the husband to support
+his wife. The husband is under an assumed obligation to support his
+family, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty. Family
+desertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most baffling
+of modern social problems. Everybody is appalled by its prevalence, but
+nobody seems to know what to do about it. The Legal Aid Society of New
+York City reports about three new cases of family desertion for every
+day in the year. Other agencies in other cities report a state of
+affairs quite as serious.
+
+Laws have been passed in most States making family desertion a
+misdemeanor, and in New York a recent law has made it a felony.
+Unfortunately there has been devised no machinery to enforce these laws,
+so they are practically non-existent. It is true that if the deserting
+husband is arrested he may be sent to jail or to the rock pile.
+
+But that does not cure him nor support his family. Mostly he is not
+arrested. He has only to take himself out of the reach of the local
+authorities. In New York a deserting husband, though he is counted a
+felon, needs only to cross the river to New Jersey to be reasonably
+safe. Imagine the State of New York spending good money to chase a man
+whom it does not want as a citizen, and whom it can only punish by
+sending to jail for a short period. The State is better off without such
+a man. To bring him back would not even benefit his deserted family.
+
+Women, far more law abiding than men, insist that a system which evolved
+out of feudal conditions, and has for its very basis the assumption of
+the weakness, ignorance, and dependence of women, has no place in
+twentieth century civilization.
+
+American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent. The present
+social order, in which military force is subordinated to industry and
+commerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and women
+physically on much the same plane. As for women's intellectual ability
+to decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over,
+rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the
+high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher
+grammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. As
+for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better
+read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less,
+but their general intelligence is not less than men's.
+
+Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical support.
+Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves as
+independent human beings. Their work of bearing and rearing children, of
+managing the household, begins to assume a new dignity, a real value,
+in their eyes.
+
+In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shall
+determine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband's
+income. American women may not need such a law, but they insist that
+they need something to take the place of that one which in eleven States
+makes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife's income.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+WOMEN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY
+
+
+The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual
+discomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, and
+recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: "Corsets,
+millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants'
+wear, and ladies' shoes, second floor; no ma'am, carpets and rugs on the
+third floor; this car don't go to the restaurant; take the other side;
+groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs,
+men's shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor."
+
+Buying and selling, serving and being served--women. On every floor, in
+every aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, which
+covers several acres, women. Waiting their turn at the long line of
+telephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Down
+in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer
+frocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts,
+attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan
+department store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floors
+between, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks, running
+back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling the
+aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing
+throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of
+femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk,
+and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.
+
+To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the United
+States are working outside of the home for wages is a simple, unanalyzed
+fact. You grasp it as an intellectual abstraction, without much
+appreciation of its human significance. The mere reading of statistics
+does not help you to realize the changed status of women, and of
+society. You need to see the thing with your own eyes.
+
+Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, when
+the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed
+with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison
+streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in
+Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city's
+great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of
+the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too
+narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. From factory,
+office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousands
+of girls. Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of the
+electric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting of
+hucksters, the laughter and oaths of men, their voices float, a shrill,
+triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil.
+
+You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of the
+interdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrate
+into the operating-room of a telephone exchange. Any hour will do. Any
+day in the week. There are no nights, nor Sundays, nor holidays in a
+telephone exchange. The city could not get along for one single minute
+in one single hour of the twenty-four without the telephone girl. Her
+hands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long,
+silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes of
+the switch board. The wires cross and recross, until the switch board is
+like a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of the
+telephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of a city.
+
+What would happen if this army of women was suddenly withdrawn from the
+telephone exchanges? Men could not take their places. That experiment
+has been tried more than once, and it has always failed.
+
+Having seen how well women serve industry, go back to the department
+store and see how they dominate it also.
+
+The department store apparently exists for women. The architect who
+designed the building studied her necessities. The makers of store
+furniture planned counters, shelves, and seats to suit her stature.
+Buyers of goods know that their jobs are forfeit unless they can guess
+what her taste in gowns and hats is going to be six months hence.
+
+WOMEN'S DEMAND ON INDUSTRY Woman dominates the department store for the
+plain reason that she supports it. Whoever earns the income, and that
+point has been somewhat in question lately, there is no doubt at all as
+to who spends it. She does. Hence, she is able to control the conditions
+under which this business is conducted.
+
+You can see for yourself that this is so. Walk through any large
+department store and observe how much valuable space is devoted to
+making women customers comfortable. There is always a drawing-room with
+easy-chairs and couches; plenty of little desks with handsome stationery
+where the customer may write notes; here, and in the retiring-room
+adjoining, are uniformed maids to offer service. But these things are
+not all that the women who support industry demand of the men in power.
+They demand that industry be carried on under conditions favorable to
+the health and comfort of the workers.
+
+Not until the development of the department store were women able to
+observe at close range the conduct of modern business. Not unnaturally
+it was in the department store that they began one of the most ambitious
+of their present-day activities,--that of humanizing industry.
+
+It was just twenty years ago that New York City was treated to a huge
+joke. It was such a joke that even the miserable ones with whom it was
+concerned were obliged to smile. An obscure group of women, calling
+themselves the Working Women's Society, came out with the announcement
+that they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a labor
+union.
+
+These women said that the girls in the department stores were receiving
+wages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign woman
+in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an
+American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a
+half.
+
+They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for saleswomen
+was habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand from
+ten to fourteen hours a day. They said that sanitary conditions in the
+cloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as to
+endanger health and life. They said that the whole situation was so bad
+that no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years. Mostly
+they were used up in two years. They proposed a labor union of retail
+clerks as the only possible resource. Their effort failed.
+
+The trades union idea at that time had not reached the girl behind the
+counter. As a matter of fact it has not reached her yet, and it probably
+never will. The department-store clerk considers herself a higher social
+being than the ordinary working-girl, and in a way she is justified. The
+exceptionally intelligent department-store clerk has one chance in a
+thousand of rising to the well-paid, semi-professional post of buyer.
+Also the exceptionally attractive girl has possibly one chance in five
+thousand of marrying a millionaire. It is a long chance now, and it was
+a longer chance a dozen years ago, because there were fewer millionaires
+then than now, but it served well enough to cause the failure of the
+trades union plan.
+
+There is one thing that never fails, however, and that is a righteous
+protest. Out of the protest of that little, obscure group of working
+women in New York City was born a movement which has spread beyond the
+Atlantic Ocean, which has effected legislation in many States of the
+Union, which has even determined an extremely important legal decision
+in the Supreme Court of the United States.
+
+A group of rich and influential women, prominent in many philanthropic
+efforts, became interested in the Working Women's Society. They
+investigated the charges brought against the department stores, and what
+they discovered made them resolve that conditions must be changed.
+
+In May, 1890, the late Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. Frederick
+Nathan, and others, called a large mass meeting in Chickering Hall. Mrs.
+Nathan had a constructive plan for raising the standard in shop
+conditions, especially those affecting women employees.
+
+If women would simply withdraw their patronage from the stores where,
+during the Christmas season, women and children toiled long hours at
+night without any extra compensation, sooner or later the night work
+would cease. A few stores, said Mrs. Nathan, maintained a standard
+above the average. It was within the power of the women of New York to
+raise all the others to that standard, and afterwards it might be
+possible to go farther and establish a standard higher than the present
+highest.
+
+"We do not desire to blacklist any firm," declared Mrs. Nathan, "but we
+can _whitelist_ those firms which treat their employees humanely. We can
+make and publish a list of all the shops where employees receive fair
+treatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops. By acting
+openly and publishing our White List we shall be able to create an
+immense public opinion in favor of just employers."
+
+Thus was the Consumers' League of New York ushered into existence. Eight
+months after the Chickering Hall meeting the committee appointed to
+co-operate with the Working Women's Society in preparing its list of
+fair firms had finished its work and made its report. The new League was
+formally organized on January 1, 1891.
+
+
+[Illustration: Mrs. Frederick Nathan]
+
+
+
+THE CONSUMERS' LEAGUE "WHITE LIST"
+
+The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm names.
+The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew the
+conditions. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the other
+firms to their outcast position. Far from evincing a desire to earn a
+place on the White List, they cast aspersions on a "parcel of women" who
+were trying to "undermine business credit," and scouted the very idea of
+an organized feminine conscience.
+
+"Wait until the women want Easter bonnets," sneered one merchant. "Do
+you think they will pass up anything good because the store is not on
+their White List?"
+
+Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for. Even as
+far back as 1891 a few women had begun to doubt the efficacy of that
+indirect influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What was
+the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to
+be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the Mercantile
+Employers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in
+mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the
+smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory
+Department.
+
+The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, and
+still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years
+after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower
+House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported
+in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it.
+A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into
+conditions of working women in New York City.
+
+The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in two
+large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified
+to employing grown women at a salary of _thirty-three cents a day_. They
+confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in
+defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and
+wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they
+should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended,
+on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated
+overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took
+away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They
+threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were
+passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless
+girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.
+
+The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite of
+the merchants' protests the women's bill was passed without a dissenting
+vote.
+
+The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which it
+placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority
+of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also
+provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of
+seats,--one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of
+children, except those holding working certificates from the
+authorities. These, and other minor provisions, affected all retail
+stores, as far as the law was obeyed.
+
+As a matter of fact the Consumers' League's bill carried a "joker" which
+made its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter of
+inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health,
+supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it
+proved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after a
+year of this inadequate inspection, political forces were brought to
+bear, and then there were no store inspectors.
+
+Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers' League tried to
+persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed
+inspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a year
+ago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores under
+factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants'
+Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto what
+they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. Governor
+Hughes, however, signed the bill.
+
+In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred
+infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. No
+less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken
+out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were
+sent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Con sumers'
+League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been
+justified.
+
+To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To women
+capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition,
+a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterly
+fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its
+enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply business
+men, with the business man's contracted vision. They could think only
+in terms of money profit and money loss.
+
+In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have
+succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the
+stores supported by their patronage.
+
+The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League would
+concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season.
+Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one.
+The League stands firm on the point, and up to the present so do the
+stores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the
+custom whereby _thousands of young girls and women are compelled every
+holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of
+uncompensated labor_.
+
+No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extorted
+in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to
+five months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchase
+after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six
+o'clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in
+the bookkeeping and auditing departments.
+
+That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in
+most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which
+strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it
+seems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified.
+
+I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of one of
+the largest and most respectable stores in New York. In this store, and,
+according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the accounting
+force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school, ignorant and
+incapable--but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day's sales are
+posted and audited before the close of the day following, the business
+force has to work until nine and ten o'clock several nights in the week.
+In some cases they work every night.
+
+Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of
+public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the
+Consumers' League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.
+
+The Consumers' League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in
+this early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. City
+after city, State after State, formed Consumers' Leagues, until, in
+1899, a National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was
+organized. The National League, far from being a philanthropic society,
+has be come a scientific association for the study of industrial
+economics.
+
+When the original Consumers' League undertook its first piece of
+legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were
+right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their
+claim. The New York League and all of the others have been collecting
+reasons ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized
+collection of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they
+should not work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in
+tenements; why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speed
+of machines should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should be
+extended; why minimum wage rates should be established.
+
+In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group of
+trained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body of
+facts concerning the human side of industry. It is ammunition which
+tells. One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry in
+Portland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of blowing
+a large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the
+United States.
+
+There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of women in
+factories and laundries should be ten hours long. The law was constantly
+violated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland. One night a
+factory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and found
+working there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher. The inspector
+promptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller.
+
+The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars. Instead of
+paying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the other
+laundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for women
+workers was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment to the
+Constitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the right
+freely to contract. A man or a woman may contract with an employer to
+work as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whatever
+dangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions, _unless_ "there is fair
+ground to say that there is material danger to the public health or
+safety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the general
+welfare...." This is the legal decision on which most protective
+legislation in the United States has been based.
+
+Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day for
+women was declared unconstitutional because nobody's health or safety
+was endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New York
+law forbidding all-night employment of women.
+
+So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had reason to
+believe that they could attack the Oregon law. The case was appealed,
+and appealed again, by the laundrymen, and finally reached the Supreme
+Court of the United States. Then the Consumers' League took a hand.
+
+The brief for the State of Oregon, "defendant in error," was prepared by
+Louis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of the
+most effective workers in the League's New York headquarters. This brief
+is probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence. It
+consists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a few
+paragraphs were written by the attorney for the State. All the rest was
+contributed, under Miss Goldmark's direction, from the Consumers'
+League's wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should be
+protected.
+
+The League's reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to work
+their women employees far into the night was, "The World's Experience
+upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is
+Based." It is simply a mass of testimony taken from hearings before the
+English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from
+the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of
+industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical
+books; from reports of boards of health.
+
+REASONS FOR PROTECTING WOMEN WORKERS The brief included a short and
+interesting chapter, containing a number of things the League had
+collected on the subject of laundries. Supreme Court judges cannot be
+expected to know that laundry work is classed by experts among the
+dangerous trades. That washing clothes, from a simple home or backyard
+occupation, has been transformed into a highly-organized factory trade
+full of complicated and often extremely dangerous machinery; that the
+atmosphere of a steam laundry is more conducive to tuberculosis and the
+other occupational diseases than cotton mills; that the work in
+laundries, being irregular, is conducive to a general low state of
+morals; that, on the whole, women should not be required to spend more
+time than necessary in laundries; all this was set forth.
+
+Medical testimony showed the physical differences between men and
+women; the lesser power of women to endure long hours of standing; the
+heightened susceptibility of women to industrial poisons--lead, naphtha,
+and the like. A long chapter of testimony on the effect of child-bearing
+in communities where the women had toiled long hours before marriage, or
+afterwards, was included.
+
+The testimony of factory inspectors, of industrial experts, of employers
+in England, Germany, France, America, revealed the bad effect of long
+hours on women's safety, both physical and moral. It revealed the good
+effect, on the individual health, home life, and general welfare, of
+short hours of labor.
+
+Nor was the business aspect of the case neglected. That people
+accomplish as much in an eight-hour day as in a twelve-hour day has
+actually been demonstrated. The brief stated, for one instance, the
+experience of a bicycle factory in Massachusetts.
+
+In this place young women were employed to sort the ball bearings which
+went into the machines. They did this by touch, and no girl was of use
+to the firm unless her touch was very sensitive and very sure. The head
+of this firm became convinced that the work done late in the afternoon
+was of inferior quality, and he tried the experiment of cutting the
+hours from ten to nine. The work was done on piece wages, and the girls
+at first protested against the nine-hour day, fearing that their pay
+envelopes would suffer. To their astonishment they earned as much in
+nine hours as they had in ten. In time the employer cut the working day
+down to eight hours and a half, and in addition gave the girls
+ten-minute rests twice a day. Still they earned their full wages, and
+they continued to earn full wages after the day became eight hours
+long. The employer testified before the United States Industrial
+Commission of 1900 that he believed he could successfully shorten the
+day to seven hours and a half and get the same amount of work
+accomplished.
+
+What can you do against testimony like that? The Consumers' League
+convinced the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Oregon
+ten-hour law was upheld.
+
+The importance of this decision cannot be overestimated. On it hangs the
+validity of nearly all the laws which have been passed in the United
+States for the protection of women workers. If the Oregon law had been
+declared unconstitutional, laws in twenty States, or practically all
+the States where women work in factories, would have been in perpetual
+danger, and the United States might easily have sunk to a position
+occupied now by no leading country in Europe.
+
+Great Britain has had protective legislation for women workers since
+1844. In 1847 the labor of women in English textile mills was limited to
+ten hours a day, the period we are now worrying about, as being possibly
+contrary to our Constitution. France, within the past five years, has
+established a ten-hour day, broken by one hour of rest. Switzerland,
+Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy, limit the hours of women's labor. In
+several countries there are special provisions giving extra time off to
+women who have household responsibilities. What would our
+Constitution-bound law makers say to such a proposition, if any one had
+the hardihood to suggest it?
+
+If this law had not been upheld by the United States Supreme Court the
+women of no State could have hoped to secure further legislation for
+women workers. As it is, women in many States are preparing to establish
+what is now known as "The Oregon Standard," that is, a ten-hour day for
+all working women.
+
+Nothing in connection with the woman movement is more significant,
+certainly nothing was more unexpected, than the voluntary abandonment,
+on the part of women, of class prejudice and class distinctions. Where
+formerly the interest of the leisured woman in her wage-earning sisters
+was of a sentimental or philanthropic character, it has become practical
+and democratic.
+
+The Young Women's Christian Association has had an industrial
+department, which up to a recent period concerned itself merely with the
+spiritual welfare of working girls. Prayer meetings in factories, clubs,
+and classes in the Association headquarters, working-girls' boarding
+homes, and other philanthropic efforts were the limits of the
+Association's activities. The entire policy has changed of late, and
+under the capable direction of Miss Annie Marian MacLean, of Brooklyn,
+New York, the industrial department of the Association is doing
+scientific investigation of labor conditions of women.
+
+In a cracker factory I once saw a paid worker in the Young Women's
+Christian Association pause above a young girl lying on the floor,
+crimson with fever, and apparently in the throes of a serious illness.
+With angelic pity on her face the Association worker stooped and
+slipped a tract into the sick girl's hand. The kind of industrial
+secretary the Association now employs would send for an ambulance and
+see that the girl had the best of hospital care. She would inquire
+whether the girl's illness was caused by the conditions under which she
+worked, and she would know if it were possible to have those conditions
+changed.
+
+WOMEN'S CLUBS STUDYING LABOR PROBLEMS Nearly every state federation of
+women's clubs has its industrial committee, and many large clubs have a
+corresponding department. It is these industrial sections of the women's
+clubs which are such a thorn in the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr., the
+new president of the National Manufacturers' Association. In his
+inaugural address Mr. Kirby warned his colleagues that women's clubs
+were not the ladylike, innocuous institutions that too-confiding man
+supposed them to be. In those clubs, he declared, their own wives and
+daughters were listening to addresses by the worst enemies of the
+Manufacturers' Association, the labor leaders. By which he meant that
+the club women were inviting trade-union men and women to present the
+worker's side of industrial subjects. "Soon," exclaimed Mr. Kirby, "we
+shall have to fight the women as well as the unions."
+
+The richest and most aristocratic woman's club in the country is the
+Colony Club of New York. The Colony Club was organized by a number of
+women from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the manner
+of men's clubs. The women built a magnificent clubhouse on Madison
+Avenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderful
+roof-garden. For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing more
+than a beautiful toy which its members played with. But soon it began to
+develop into a sort of a woman's forum, where all sorts of social topics
+were discussed. Visiting women of distinction, artists, writers,
+lecturers, were entertained there.
+
+Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course in
+industrial economics. The women did not invite lecturers from Columbia
+University to address them. They asked John Mitchell and many lesser
+lights of the labor world. They wanted to learn, at first hand, the
+facts concerning conditions of industry. Most of them are stockholders
+in mills, factories, mines, or business establishments. Many own real
+estate on which factories stand.
+
+"It is not fair," they have openly declared, "that we should enjoy
+wealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death. We do
+not want wealth on such terms."
+
+The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to the
+National Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in the
+working and living conditions of wage earners in industries and in
+governmental institutions. A few conscientious employers have spent a
+part of their profits to make their employees comfortable. They have
+given them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, and
+comfortable seats. They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacation
+houses, and the like.
+
+No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers. Equally,
+no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem. Nor
+should they be used as a substitute for justice.
+
+Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed,
+untactfully administered. Too often it has been instituted, not to
+benefit the workers, but to advertise the business. Too often its real
+object was a desire to play the philanthropist's role, to exact
+obsequience from the wage earner.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New
+York, the most exclusive Women's Club in the country]
+
+I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of the
+perfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected, the
+girls are required to stop work and clean the rooms. Since they work on
+a piece-work scale, the "perfect sanitary conditions" exist at their
+expense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a
+printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday.
+This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their
+employers. It always fails.
+
+It seems to the women who have studied these things that proper
+sanitary conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision for
+rest, vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wage
+earner's due. They are a part of the laborer's hire, and should be
+guaranteed by law, exactly as wages are guaranteed. An employer deserves
+gratitude for overtime pay no more than for fire escapes.
+
+Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers' League, women's
+clubs, and women's labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that good
+working conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastly
+increase the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits of
+the employers.
+
+The New York Telephone Company does not set itself up to be a
+benevolent institution. Its directors know that its profits depend on
+the excellence of its service. There is one exchange in the Borough of
+Brooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic. This
+traffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summer
+resorts along the coast. In the fall and winter the traffic is very
+light. Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work only
+half the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round.
+"We cannot afford to do anything else," explains the traffic manager.
+"We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages."
+
+
+[Illustration: MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY]
+
+The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his business
+would suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen. He believed that
+he would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks human
+working conditions. Then came the Consumers' League and mercantile laws,
+and a new pressure of public opinion, and the dry-goods merchant found
+out that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than one
+that is exhausted and uncomfortable.
+
+The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has proved
+itself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligent
+employers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws will
+provide for it.
+
+It used to be the invariable custom in stores--it is so still in a
+few--to lay off many clerks during the dull seasons. Now the best stores
+find that they can better afford to give all their employees vacations
+with pay. A clerk coming home after a vacation can sell goods, even in
+dull times. More and more employers are coming to appreciate the money
+value of the Saturday half-holiday in summer. Hearn, in New York, closes
+his department store all day Saturday during July and August. The store
+sells more goods in five days than it previously sold in six.
+
+THE FILENE SYSTEM OF DEVELOPING EFFICIENT WORKERS There is one
+department store which has demonstrated that it is profitable to pay
+higher wages than its competitors, and that it pays to allow the
+employees to fix the terms of their own employment. This is the Filene
+store in Boston, which has developed within the past ten years from a
+conservative, old-fashioned dry-goods business into an extremely
+original and interesting experiment station in commercial economics.
+
+The entire policy of the Filene management is bent on developing to the
+highest possible point the efficiency of each individual clerk. The best
+possible material is sought. No girl under sixteen is employed, and no
+girl of any age who has not graduated with credit from the grammar
+schools. There are a number of college-bred men and women in the Filene
+employ.
+
+
+[Illustration: A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN]
+
+Good wages are paid, even to beginners, and experienced employees are
+rewarded, not according to a fixed rate of payment, but according to
+earning capacity. Taken throughout the store, wages, plus commissions,
+which are allowed in all departments, average about two dollars a week
+higher than in other department stores in Boston.
+
+No irresponsible, automatic employee can develop high efficiency. She
+does not want to become efficient; she wants merely to receive a pay
+envelope at the end of the week. In order to develop responsibility and
+initiative in their employees the Filenes have put them on a
+self-governing basis. The workers do not literally make their own rules,
+but the vote of the majority can change any rule made by the firm. The
+firm furnishes its employees with a printed book of rules, in which the
+policy of the store is set forth. If the employees object to any of the
+rules, or any part of the policy, they can vote a change.
+
+The medium through which the clerks express their opinions and desires
+is the Filene Co-operative Association, of which every clerk and every
+employee in the place is a member. No dues are exacted, as is the custom
+in the usual employees' association. The executive body, called the
+Store Council, and all other officers are elected by the members. All
+matters of grievance, all subjects of controversy, are referred to the
+Store Council, which, as often as occasion demands, calls a meeting of
+the entire association after business hours.
+
+For example: Christmas happens on a Friday. The firm decides to keep the
+store open on the following day--Saturday. There is an expression of
+dissatisfaction from a number of clerks. A meeting of the association is
+called, and a vote taken as to whether the majority want the extra
+holiday or not; whether the majority are willing to lose the
+commissions on a day's sales, for, of course, salaries continue. The
+vote reveals that the majority want the holiday. The Store Council so
+reports to the firm, and the firm must grant the holiday.
+
+All matters of difficulty arising between employers and employed, in the
+Filene store, are settled not by the firm, but by the Arbitration Board
+of Employees, also elected by popular vote. All disagreements as to
+wages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue between
+saleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to the
+Board of Arbitration, and the board's decision is final. There is no
+tyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of a
+department. Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as she
+is an efficient saleswoman.
+
+Surely it is not too much to hope that, in a future not too far
+distant, all women who earn their bread will serve a system of industry
+adjusted by law to human standards. In enlightened America the courts,
+presided over by men to whom manual labor is known only in theory, have
+persistently ruled that the _Constitution forbade the State to make laws
+protecting women workers_. It has seemed to most of our courts and most
+of our judges that the State fulfilled its whole duty to its women
+citizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract--even
+though they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts which
+involved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and future
+generations. The women of this country have done nothing more important
+than to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyond
+this terrible delusion.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE
+
+
+The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the
+legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was
+received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. The
+Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in
+labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable opportunity
+to get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the Illinois
+State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years later
+the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that it
+was unconstitutional.
+
+The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without
+precedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States,
+until it had become almost a principle of American law that protective
+legislation for working women was invalid.
+
+The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusion
+that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody
+of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women would
+be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may
+appear obscure.
+
+The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men, and
+they know something--not much, but still something--about the men of the
+working classes. They know, for example, something about the conditions
+under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to
+public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor,
+twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these
+are bad things,--bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for
+the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of labor
+comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.
+
+The learned judges, I say this with all due respect, do not know
+anything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts of
+their decisions, denying the constitutionality of protective measures,
+are amazing in the ignorance they display,--ignorance of industrial
+conditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects of
+certain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect of
+women's arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions in
+trades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the home
+resulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, the
+learned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, the
+happiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about the
+inhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display of
+the real facts.
+
+We have seen how the women of the Consumers' League taught the United
+States Supreme Court something about working women; showed them a few of
+the calamities resulting from the unrestricted labor of women and
+immature girls. The Supreme Court's decision forever abolished the old
+fallacy that the American Constitution _forbids_ protective legislation
+for women workers. It remains for women's organizations in the various
+States to educate local courts up to the knowledge that community
+interest _demands_ protective legislation.
+
+Following the decision of the Supreme Court in the Oregon case, which
+flatly contradicted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, the
+working women of Illinois began their educational campaign. They had
+now, for the first time, a fighting chance to secure the restoration of
+their shortened work day. The women of fifteen organized trades in the
+city of Chicago determined to take that chance.
+
+The women first appealed to the Industrial Commission, appointed early
+in 1908 by Governor Dineen, to investigate the need of protective
+legislation for workers, men and women alike.
+
+The women were given a courteous hearing, but were told frankly that
+limited hours of work for women was not one of protective measures to be
+recommended by the Commission.
+
+The Waitresses' Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists, led
+by a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary of
+the union. Miss Maloney and her associates drafted and introduced into
+the Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day for
+every woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store,
+laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for
+enforcing the measure.
+
+The "Girls' Bill," as it immediately became known, was the most hotly
+contested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during the
+session. Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing
+on the bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek and
+tired women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their
+working day made shorter. Another presented a petition signed by his
+women employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven
+hours a day!
+
+Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after learned
+counsel for the Manufacturers' Association had argued against the
+measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers'
+Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girls
+confined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of the
+Glove Makers' Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two
+girls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are
+gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a
+chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea:
+Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses' Union, was the other speaker.
+
+They described details in the daily lives of working women not generally
+known except to the workers themselves. Among these was the piece-work
+system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speed
+is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage.
+The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine
+whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; to
+consider how many stitches the operator's hand must guide in a week, a
+month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve
+hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease
+of earning power.
+
+"I am a waitress," said Miss Maloney, "and I work ten hours a day. In
+that time a waitress who is tolerably busy _walks_ ten miles, and the
+dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred to
+two thousand pounds. Don't you think eight hours a day is enough for a
+girl to walk?"
+
+Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after that
+day. The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too grave
+for the friends of the workers to overcome. It was decided to
+substitute a ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the "Oregon Standard"
+established by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle of
+limitation upon the hours of women's work once established in Illinois,
+the workers could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.
+
+The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a law
+of the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers' Association, through the
+W.C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suit
+to test the constitutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, Anna
+Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Their
+appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hours
+to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to
+contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them
+by the ten-hour law.
+
+There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved
+in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched
+state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature
+years--one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over
+thirty years--are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep
+body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no
+position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would
+contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?
+
+There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge
+R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his
+career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the
+real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For
+Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department,
+forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.
+
+Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the
+women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up in
+the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of
+Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on
+hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed
+pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers'
+League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had
+toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois
+Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply
+a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and
+bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and
+especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on
+the succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three
+pages of law.
+
+The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was the
+testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.
+
+"Medical Science has demonstrated," says this most important paragraph,
+"that while fatigue is a normal phenomenon ... excessive fatigue or
+exhaustion is abnormal.... It has discovered that fatigue is due not
+only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue,
+entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial
+toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that when
+artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin
+causes death. The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to be
+counteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body.
+But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not produced
+fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin."
+
+The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the American
+Constitution was never intended to shield manufacturers in their
+willingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. The
+ten-hour law was sustained.
+
+That the "Girls' Bill" passed, or that it was even introduced, was due
+in large measure to an organization of women, more militant and more
+democratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women's
+Trade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, the
+League consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organized
+trades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of these
+latter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-union
+principle, but more are women who work in the professional
+ranks,--teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlement
+workers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, who
+ever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federation
+of Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners,
+to appear in Labor Day parades.
+
+The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities,--New
+York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland,--is to educate women
+wage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains and
+supports organizers among all classes of workers. As quickly as a group
+in any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. It
+raises funds to assist women in their trade struggles. It acts as
+arbitrator between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes.
+
+The Women's Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factory
+trades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until lately
+believed themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundred
+and fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventy
+stenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers' Federation
+of Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before the
+Women's Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated.
+The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized.
+
+The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League was
+brilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-waist
+makers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story of
+this strike will bear retelling.
+
+On the evening of November 22, 1909, there was a great mass meeting of
+workers held at Cooper Union in New York. Samuel Gompers, President of
+the American Federation of Labor, presided, and the stage was well
+filled with members of the Women's Trade Union League. The meeting had
+been called by the League in conjunction with Shirt-Waist Makers' Union,
+Local 25, to consider the grievances of shirt-waist makers in general,
+and especially of the shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, who
+had been, for more than two months, on strike.
+
+The story of the strike, the causes that led up to it, and the bitter
+injustice which followed it were rehearsed in a dozen speeches. It was
+shown that for four to five dollars a week the girl shirt-waist makers
+worked from eight in the morning until half-past five in the evening
+two days in the week; from eight in the morning until nine at night
+four days in the week; and from eight in the morning until noon one day
+in the week--Sunday.
+
+The shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, in hope of bettering
+their conditions, had formed a union, and had informed their employers
+of their action. The employers promptly locked them out of the shop, and
+the girls declared a strike.
+
+The strike was more than two months old when the Cooper Union meeting
+was held, and the employers showed no signs of giving in. It was agreed
+that a general strike of shirt-waist makers ought to be declared. But
+the union was weak, there were no funds, and most of the shirt-waist
+makers were women and unused to the idea of solidarity in action. Could
+they stand together in an industrial struggle which promised to be long
+and bitter?
+
+President Gompers was plainly fearful that they could not.
+
+Suddenly a very small, very young, very intense Jewish girl, known to
+her associates as Clara Lemlich, sprang to her feet, and, with the
+assistance of two young men, climbed to the high platform. Flinging up
+her arms with a dramatic gesture she poured out a flood of speech,
+entirely unintelligible to the presiding Gompers, and to the members of
+the Women's Trade Union League. The Yiddish-speaking majority in the
+audience understood, however, and the others quickly caught the spirit
+of her impassioned plea.
+
+The vast audience rose as one man, and a great roar arose. "Yes, we
+will all strike!"
+
+"And will you keep the faith?" cried the girl on the platform. "Will you
+swear by the old Jewish oath of our fathers?"
+
+Two thousand Jewish hands were thrust in air, and two thousand Jewish
+throats uttered the oath: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge,
+may this hand wither and drop off from this arm I now raise."
+
+Clara Lemlich's part in the work was accomplished. Within a few days
+forty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike.
+
+The Women's Trade Union League, under the direction of Miss Helen Marot,
+secretary, at once took hold of the strike.
+
+There were two things to be done at once. The forty thousand had to be
+enrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing to
+accept the terms of the strikers had to be "signed up." Clinton Hall,
+one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, and
+for several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the street
+outside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and women
+strikers, anxious and perspiring "bosses," and busy, active associates
+of the Women's Trade Union League.
+
+The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied the
+League members undertook the work of picketing the shops. Picketing, if
+this activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling the
+neighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakers
+are going to and from their nefarious business, and importuning them to
+join the strike.
+
+Peaceful picketing is legal. The law permits a striker to speak to the
+girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her
+most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on the
+other's arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence.
+
+Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a little
+of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence.
+After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girls
+who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members.
+Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among
+these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's Superintendent
+of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a
+millionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College,
+Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association of
+Collegiate Alumnae. These young women went out day after day with girl
+strikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered arrest
+on more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation of
+magistrates who--well, who did not understand.
+
+The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and organizations of
+women other than the Women's Trade Union League began to take an
+interest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss Gertrude
+Barnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial world
+of women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike.
+They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women in
+person.
+
+The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest social
+eminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan and
+several others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the president
+of the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the strikers'
+own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. More
+than thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozen
+women promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers.
+
+A week later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, mother of the Duchess of Marlborough,
+leader of a large Woman Suffrage Association, engaged the Hippodrome,
+and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators.
+Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting.
+
+At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses were
+involved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis of
+increased pay, a fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of the
+union. Others settled later, and under the influence of the "uptown
+scum," as the employers' association gallantly termed the Women's Trade
+Union League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still others
+reluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out of
+the five hundred had settled with the union, and only about three
+thousand of the workers were still out of work.
+
+Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they would
+ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of the
+intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all,
+that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped
+along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was
+unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household
+labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to
+perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was
+to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.
+
+Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are becoming
+the co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of the
+leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the
+situation, espouse the cause of their working sisters. The woman in the
+factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.
+
+The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury,
+Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of
+the working women.
+
+That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was
+established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew
+every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the
+women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of
+labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and wages
+were good enough to compensate for the long day's labor.
+
+The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a
+corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few
+floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands."
+
+The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated
+machinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred times
+more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and
+nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances
+developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so
+bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or
+manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to
+the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women who
+had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and
+eight dollars.
+
+The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the mills
+as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.
+
+There you have the story of women's realization of themselves as a
+group. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women.
+The Boston Branch of the Women's Trade Union League, through its
+secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined the strikers.
+Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile
+Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks
+of anxiety and deprivation.
+
+The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business
+before treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, exists
+as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and
+conferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to
+exist. An employers' association is a necessity of business life. A
+labor union is an insult to capital.
+
+This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor car
+stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs.
+Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay
+personified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer. Her
+powers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercial
+connections, were sufficient to wring consent from the firm to receive
+John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers.
+
+John Golden, intelligent, honest, a fine type of workingman, educated
+in the English school of unionism, held two conferences with the firm.
+He was able to make the employers see the whole situation in an entirely
+new light. They were men of probity; they wanted to be fair; and when
+they saw the human side of the struggle they surrendered. When they
+perceived the justice of the collective bargain, the advantages to both
+sides of a labor organization honestly conducted, they consented to
+recognize the union. And the women went back, their group unbroken.
+
+Thus are women working, women of all classes, to humanize the factory.
+From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and the
+judiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women of
+the toiling masses in their struggle to make over the factory from the
+inside. Together they are impressing the men of the working world, law
+makers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of the
+race.
+
+Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protective
+legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal
+decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not
+yet complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the
+late Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not
+every court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more
+valuable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn.
+
+In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in which
+a number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to the
+owner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did not
+strike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in that
+country a substitute for the strike is provided by law. To this
+substitute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. The
+employer in his answer declared, just as employers in this country might
+have done, that his business would not stand an increase in wages. He
+explained that the match industry was newly established in New Zealand,
+and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could not
+afford to pay high wages.
+
+The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been an
+inquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiry
+into the cost of living in the town where the match factory was located.
+And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court of
+Arbitration, and this is what he said to the man:
+
+"It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on the
+wages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that they
+should have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls and
+bodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance than
+your profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better for
+the community for you to close your factory. _It would be better to
+send the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back to
+flints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter._ My
+award is that you pay what they ask."
+
+Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the eight
+million women in the world who have learned to think in human terms.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO
+
+
+At the threshold of that quarter of old New York called Greenwich
+Village stands Jefferson Market Court. Almost concealed behind the
+towering structure of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, the building by day is
+rather inconspicuous. But when night falls, swallowing up the
+neighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Market
+assumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminated
+clock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands toward
+midnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams an
+intense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of the
+building floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, through
+the iron-guarded door, there passes, every week-day night in the year, a
+long procession of prodigals.
+
+The guarded door seldom admits any one as important, so to speak, as a
+criminal. The criminal's case waits for day. The Night Court in
+Jefferson Market sits in judgment only on the small fry caught in the
+dragnet of the police. Tramps, vagrants, drunkards, brawlers, disturbers
+of the peace, speeding chauffeurs, licenseless peddlers, youths caught
+red-handed shooting craps or playing ball in the streets,--these are the
+men with whom the Night Court deals. But it is not the men we have come
+to see.
+
+[Illustration: MISS MAUDE E. MINER]
+
+The women of the Night Court. Prodigal daughters! Between December,
+1908, and December, 1909, no less than five thousand of them passed
+through the guarded door, under the blaze of the electric lights. There
+is never an hour, from nine at night until three in the morning, when
+the prisoners' bench in Jefferson Market Court is without its full quota
+of women. Old--prematurely old, and young--pitifully young; white and
+brown; fair and faded; sad and cynical; starved and prosper ous;
+rag-draped and satin-bedecked; together they wait their turn at
+judgment.
+
+Quietly moving back and forth before the prisoners' bench you see a
+woman, tall, graceful, black-gowned. She is the salaried probation
+officer, modern substitute for the old-time volunteer mission worker.
+The probation officer's serious blue eyes burn with no missionary zeal.
+There is no spark of sentimental pity in the keen gaze she turns on each
+new arrival.
+
+When the bench is full of women the judge turns to her to inquire:
+"Anybody there you want, Miss Miner?"
+
+Miss Miner usually shakes her head. She diagnoses her cases like a
+physician, and she wastes no time on incurables.
+
+Once in a while, perhaps several times in the course of a night, Miss
+Miner touches a girl on the arm. At once the girl rises and follows the
+probation officer into an adjoining room. If she is what she appears,
+young in evil, if she has a story which rings true, a story of poverty
+and misfortune, rather than of depravity, she goes not back to the
+prisoners' bench. When her turn at judgment comes Miss Miner stands
+beside her, and in a low voice meant only for the judge, she tells the
+facts. The girl weeps as she listens. To hear one's troubles told is
+sometimes more terrible than to endure them.
+
+Court adjourns at three in the morning, and this girl, with the
+others--if others have been claimed by the probation officer--goes out
+into the empty street, under the light of the tall tower, whose clock
+has begun all over again its monotonous race toward midnight. No
+policeman accompanies the group. The girls are under no manner of
+duress. They have promised to go home with Miss Miner, and they go. The
+night's adventure, entered into with dread, with callous indifference,
+or with thoughtless mirth, ends in a quiet bedroom and a pillow wet with
+tears.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK.]
+
+Waverley House, as Miss Miner's home is known, has sheltered, during the
+past year, over three hundred girls. Out of that number one hundred and
+nineteen have returned to their homes, or are earning a living at useful
+work.
+
+One hundred and nineteen saved out of five thousand prodigals! In point
+of numbers this is a melancholy showing, but in comparison with other
+efforts at rescue work it is decidedly encouraging.
+
+Nothing quite like Waverley House has appeared in other American cities,
+but it is a type of detention home for girls which is developing
+logically out of the probation system. Delinquent girls under sixteen
+are now considered, in all enlightened communities, subjects for the
+Juvenile Court. They are hardly ever associated with older delinquents.
+But a girl over sixteen is likely to be committed to prison, and may be
+locked in cells with criminal and abandoned women of the lowest order.
+Waverley House is the first practical protest against this stupid and
+evil-encouraging policy.
+
+The house, which stands a few blocks distant from the Night Court, was
+established and is maintained by the Probation Association of New York,
+consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and of
+men and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The District
+Attorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of the
+Association, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, Miss
+Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women's Trade
+Union League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women's
+Municipal League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York's
+organized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among the
+supporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable and
+sympathetic superintendent of the house.
+
+The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station, a
+laboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases which
+beset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency and
+paroled to probation officers are taken to Waverley House, where they
+remain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best means
+of disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some to
+hospitals, some to institutions, some placed on long probation.
+
+Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's college
+to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who
+are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which
+has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They have
+set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakes
+countless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery,
+disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women have
+undertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of the
+problem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals?
+This much did the missionaries before them.
+
+"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per cent," declares Miss Miner, "if
+only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning."
+
+To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the beginning,
+instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That is
+what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what
+physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning to
+do with poverty.
+
+Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a cause,
+and that it might be possible to attack it at its source. Yet that any
+large number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly,
+voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts.
+There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they find
+themselves entirely powerless to resist.
+
+Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs of a
+very important movement among women to discover what these forces are.
+Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand. We have had, and we still have,
+in cities east and west, committees and societies and law and order
+leagues earnestly engaged in "stamping out" the evil. It is like trying
+to stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by a
+strong gale. The protests of most of these leagues amount to little
+more than vain clamor against a thing which is not even distantly
+comprehended.
+
+The _personnel_ of these agencies organized to "stamp out" the evil
+differs little in the various cities. It is largely if not wholly
+masculine in character, and the evil is usually dealt with from the
+point of view of religion and morals. Women, when they appear in the
+matter at all, figure as missionaries, "prison angels," and the like. As
+evangelists to sinners women have been permitted to associate with their
+fallen sisters without losing caste. Likewise, when elderly enough, they
+have been allowed to serve on governing boards of "homes" and
+"refuges." Their activities were limited to rescue work. They might
+extend a hand to a repentant Magdalene. A Phryne they must not even be
+aware of. In other words, this evil as a subject of investigation and
+intelligent discussion among women was absolutely prohibited. It has
+ever been their Great Taboo.
+
+Nevertheless, when eight million women, in practically every civilized
+country in the world, organized themselves into an International Council
+of Women, and began their remarkable survey of the social order in which
+they live, one of their first acts was to break the Great Taboo.
+
+[Illustration: MISS SADIE AMERICAN]
+
+At early congresses of the International Council Miss Sadie American,
+Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis, among American
+delegates, Miss Elizabeth Janes of England, Miss Elizabeth Gad of
+Denmark, Dr. Agnes Bluhm of Germany, and others interested in the moral
+welfare of girls, urged upon the Council action against the "White
+Slave" traffic. No extensive argument was required to convince the
+members of the Council that the "White Slave" traffic and the whole
+subject of the moral degradation of women was a social phenomenon too
+long neglected by women.
+
+These women declared with refreshing candor that it was about time that
+the social evil was dealt with intelligently, and if it was to be dealt
+with intelligently women must do the work. The fussy old gentlemen with
+white side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other well
+meaning amateurs, who are engaged in "stamping out" the evil, deserve to
+be set aside. In their places the women propose to install social
+experts who shall deal scientifically with the problem.
+
+The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle, in
+every community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actually
+forbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for the
+first time repudiated by a body of organized women. The arguments on
+which the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time,
+seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance.
+The desirability of the descent of property in legal paternal line
+seemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid standard
+of morals to women. But they found reasons infinitely greater why the
+same rigid standard should be applied to men.
+
+The International Council of Women and women's organizations in every
+country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and
+through these physicians they have been able to consider the social evil
+from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which
+touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare
+of children, were brought forth--facts concerning infantile blindness,
+almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the
+fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women,
+and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases
+among men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of these
+maladies, and their frightful prevalence,--seventy-five per cent of city
+men, according to reliable authority, being affected,--aroused in the
+women a sentiment of indignation and revolt. The International Council
+of Women put itself on record as protesting against the responsibility
+laid upon women, the unassisted task of preserving the purity of the
+race.
+
+In the United States, women's clubs, women's societies, women's medical
+associations, special committees of women in many cities have
+courageously undertaken the study of this problem, intending by means of
+investigation and publicity to lay bare its sources and seek its remedy.
+
+The sources of the evil are about the only phase of the problem which
+has never been adequately examined. It is true that we have suspected
+that the unsteady and ill-adjusted economic position of women furnished
+some explanation for its existence, but even now our information is
+vague and unsatisfactory.
+
+A number of years ago, in 1888 to be exact, the Massachusetts Bureau of
+Labor Statistics made an interesting investigation. This was an effort
+to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world,
+usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to
+profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations
+of nearly four thousand fallen women in twenty-eight American cities.
+
+Of these unfortunates over eight hundred had worked in low-waged trades
+such as paper-box making, millinery, laundry work, rope and cordage
+making, cigar and cigarette making, candy packing, textile factory and
+shoe factory work.
+
+About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, and
+seamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was not
+stated.
+
+The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so far
+as wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundred
+and sixteen recruits to the list.
+
+On the whole, these groups were what the investigators had expected to
+find.
+
+There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were entirely
+unexpected by the investigators. Of the 3,866 girls examined 1,236, or
+nearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The next
+largest group, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domestic
+servants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homes
+into lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from that
+occupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and most
+suitable means of earning their living--housework.
+
+Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as something
+too disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least sixty-two
+per cent of those 3,866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were too
+lazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one of
+honest toil in somebody's nice kitchen. Apparently this was the view
+taken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it never
+carried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out _why_
+so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried to
+find out _why_ housework was a trade dangerous to morals.
+
+Fortunately it did occur to the women's organizations to examine the
+facts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take you
+over some of the ground they have covered and show you where their
+investigations have led them.
+
+South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and
+forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large
+city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,--enormous drab
+structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering
+chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The
+steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family
+houses, built of wood, generally unpainted, and always dismally
+utilitarian as to architectural details.
+
+In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a park,
+or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement was
+just seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quite
+imposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered for
+the day as soon as the classes were dismissed.
+
+In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of young
+girls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which always
+must be fed--if not with wholesome food, then husks. For parents these
+girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and
+came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers
+who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and
+were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For
+social opportunity the girls had "going downtown." Perhaps you know
+what that means. It means trooping up and down the main street in lively
+groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a
+cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street
+accident or a fight.
+
+About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicago
+and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some of
+these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went
+"downtown." There was no other place for them to go.
+
+As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situation
+would you expect to evolve out of these materials?
+
+Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood. Many
+of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in
+these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile
+Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals.
+Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the
+never-ceasing procession of prodigals.
+
+This is what "no previous occupation" really means in nine cases out of
+ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all,
+according to the ideals of you who read these pages.
+
+Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes it
+was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large
+enough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In some
+there was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extreme
+cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue
+and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are
+possible.
+
+Annie Donnelly's case will serve as further illustration. Annie
+Donnelly's father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab from
+twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays
+included. Before the cab drivers' strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly's
+wages were fifteen dollars a week, and the family lived in a four-room
+tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week. You pay rent weekly to a
+tenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week
+for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a
+week.
+
+The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single
+dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York
+tenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who was
+fourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms.
+Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a
+lodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement
+because it had only one dark room.
+
+One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance.
+Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not
+allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby,
+attended the annual ball of the Coachman's Union, but that was another
+thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.
+
+The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really lived
+in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable
+except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably
+crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was
+impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit
+of her social life had to be lived out of the house.
+
+When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking about
+with the other girls or sitting on a friend's doorstep, until ten or
+even eleven o'clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city
+neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl's life when this sort of
+thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the
+doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable. So
+one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the
+lodger to a dance.
+
+The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled basement room in a building
+which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the
+front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: "The Johnny
+Sullivan Social Club."
+
+The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat
+check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in a
+waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which
+followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric
+lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest
+best with a popular waltz tune.
+
+In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat
+and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was
+piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When
+the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with
+the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.
+
+"Come along," said the lodger, "and have a beer." When Annie shook her
+head he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent
+free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy
+a beer off of 'em oncet in a while. They've gotta get something out of
+it."
+
+I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately she
+learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish
+dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable
+by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places.
+Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room means
+poor business at the bar.
+
+Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall _habitue_. Not because she was
+viciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she was
+decidedly normal in all her instincts and desires.
+
+Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every dance
+invitations to other dances are distributed with a lavish hand. These
+invitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over chairs
+and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are locally
+known as "throw-aways." Here are a few specimens, from which you may
+form an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind of
+people--almost the only kind of people--who offer pleasure to the
+starved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actual
+invitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker of
+the New York College Settlement:
+
+     "_Second annual reception and ball, given by Jibo and Jack, at New
+     Starlight Hall, 143 Suffolk Street, December 25. Music by our
+     favorite. Gents ticket 25 cents, Ladies 15 cents._"
+
+     "_Don't miss the ball given by Joe the Greaser, and Sam Rosenstock,
+     at Odd Fellows' Hall, January 29th._"
+
+     "_See the Devil Dance at the Reception and Ball given by Max Pascal
+     and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday evening, November
+     20th."_
+
+     _ "Reception and Ball given by two well known friends, Max Turk and
+     Sam Lande, better known as Mechuch, at Appollo Hall, Chrystmas
+     night. Floor manager, Young Louis. Ticket admit one 25 cents._"
+
+In addition to these private affairs which are arranged purely for the
+profit of "Jibo and Jack" and their kind, men who make a living in this
+and in yet more unspeakable ways, there are hundreds of saloon dance
+halls, not only in New York, but in other cities. These are simply
+annexes to drinking places, and people are not welcome there unless they
+drink. No admission is charged.
+
+There are also numberless dancing academies. Dancing lessons are given
+four nights in the week, as a rule, and the dancing public buys
+admission the other three nights and on Sunday afternoons. Some dancing
+academies, even in tenement house quarters, are reputable institutions,
+but to most of them the lowest of the low, both men and women, resort.
+There, as in the dance halls, the "White Slaver" plies his trade, and
+the destroyer of womanliness lays his nets.
+
+Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places. She learned to
+"spiel." You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms' length,
+and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl's
+skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of the
+spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for
+liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong
+drink.
+
+Annie also learned to dance what is known as the "half time," or the
+"part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and
+contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a
+very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan
+harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crude
+peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it to
+immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell
+the girls that it is the _American_ fashion of waltzing.
+
+Annie Donnelly's destruction was accomplished in less than a year. It
+was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her home.
+There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too
+crowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother were
+respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie's first real
+misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to
+go home.
+
+The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically
+unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in
+every city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which,
+every year, thousands of girls descend to the way of the prodigal. No
+one has counted their number. All we know of the unclassed is that they
+exist, apparently in ever-increasing masses.
+
+It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six
+thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like
+twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law. That
+is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so
+unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of these
+unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible to
+know--we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the
+unclassed.
+
+[Illustration: A DANCE HALL]
+
+The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it may
+occupy a vacant store building, or a large loft. Somewhere in its
+immediate vicinity there is a saloon. A dance lasts about five minutes,
+and the interval between dances is from ten to twenty minutes. Waiters
+circle among the dancers, importuning them to drink. The dance hall
+without a bar, or some source of liquid supply, does not often exist,
+except as it has been established by social workers to offset the
+influence of the commercial dance hall.
+
+Some dance halls are small and wretchedly lighted. Others are large and
+pretentious. Some of them have direct connections with Raines Law hotels
+and their prototypes. Of hardly a single dance hall can a good word be
+said. They are almost entirely in the hands of the element lowest in
+society, in business, and in politics.
+
+From the old-fashioned German family picnic park to Coney Island in New
+York, Revere Beach in Boston, The White City in Chicago, Savin Rock in
+New Haven, and their like, is a far cry.
+
+Some of these summer parks try to keep their amusements clean and
+decent, and some, notably Euclid Park, Cleveland, succeed. But drink and
+often worse evils are characteristic of most of them. There are parts
+of Coney Island where no beer is sold, where the vaudeville and the
+moving pictures are clean and wholesome, where dancing is orderly. But
+the nearest side street has its "tough joint." The same thing is true of
+the big summer resorts of other cities.
+
+The dance hall, both winter and summer types, have had a deteriorating
+effect upon the old-fashioned dancing academy. Formerly these were
+respectable establishments where people paid for dancing lessons. Now
+they are a _melange_ of dancing classes and public entertainments. The
+dancing masters, unable to compete with the dance hall proprietors, have
+been obliged to transfer many of the dance hall features to their
+establishments.
+
+Oddly enough it is rather an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted to
+a dance in any kind of a dance hall. The girls go alone, with a friend,
+or with a group of girls. The exceptional girl, who is attended by a
+man, must dance with him, or if she accepts another part ner, she must
+ask his permission. An escort is deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage.
+Those who go unattended are always sure of partners. Often they meet
+"fellows" they know, or have seen on the streets. Introductions are not
+necessary. Even if a girl is unacquainted with any "fellows," if she
+possesses slight attractions, she is still sure of partners.
+
+The amount of money spent by working girls for dance-hall admissions is
+considerable. A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages
+thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.
+
+In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number of
+black-gowned girls. The black gown might almost be called the mark of
+the dance-hall _habitue_, the girl who is dance mad and who spends all
+her evenings going from one resort to another. She wears black because
+light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.
+
+An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the "spieler." This
+is a young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilled
+and untiring dancer. The business of the spieler is to look after the
+wall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he
+dances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for a
+place to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to those
+dance halls where they have had the best time.
+
+The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is a
+sinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls. The
+dance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth of
+many of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type.
+
+Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most brutally
+evil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense of
+chaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution. It is
+vicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, the
+desire of men and women to associate together, and distorts that
+instinct into evil. The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes,
+especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share their
+pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. The
+position of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treat
+her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy
+does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very
+readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack of
+chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward
+course.
+
+Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive
+young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although not
+remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a
+stenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon as
+she finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with her
+working papers. The family needed additional income, not to meet actual
+living expenses, for the Greenbaums were not acutely poor, but in order
+that the only son of the family might go to college. Max was seventeen,
+a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his superiority
+over his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family should
+toil unceasingly for his advancement.
+
+Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslin
+underwear factory. At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as a
+skilled operator on a tucking machine. She sat down to her work every
+morning at eight o'clock, and for four hours watched with straining eyes
+a tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips of
+muslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches a
+minute. The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above the
+cloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil the
+continuity of a tuck. When you are on piece wages you do not relish
+stopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work.
+
+So Sadie watched the needle assiduously, and ignored the fact that her
+head ached pretty regularly, and she was generally too weary when lunch
+time came to enjoy the black bread and pickles which, with a cup of
+strong tea, made her noon meal. After lunch she again sat down to her
+machine and watched the needles gallop over the cloth.
+
+At the end of each year Sadie Greenbaum had produced for the good of the
+community _four miles_ of tucked muslin. In return, the community had
+rendered her back something less than three hundred dollars, for the
+muslin underwear trade has its dull seasons, and you do not earn seven
+dollars every week in the year.
+
+Each week Sadie handed her pay envelope unopened to her mother. The
+mother bought all Sadie's clothes and gave her food and shelter.
+Consequently, Sadie's unceasing vigil of the needle paid for her
+existence and purchased also the proud consciousness of an older brother
+who would one day own a doctor's buggy and a social position.
+
+The one joy of this girl's life, in fact all the real life she lived,
+was dancing. Regularly every Saturday night Sadie and a girl friend,
+Rosie by name, put on their best clothes and betook themselves to
+Silver's Casino, a huge dance hall with small rooms adjoining, where
+food and much drink were to be had.
+
+There was a good floor at Silver's and a brass band to dance to. It was
+great! The girls never lacked partners, and they made some very
+agreeable acquaintances.
+
+In the dressing room, between dances, all the girls exchanged
+conversation, views on fashions, confidences about the young men and
+other gossip. Some of the girls were nice and some, it must be admitted,
+were "tough." What was the difference? The tough girls, with their
+daring humor, their cigarettes, their easy manners, and their amazingly
+smart clothes, furnished a sort of spice to the affair.
+
+Sadie and Rosie sometimes discussed the tough girls, and the
+conversation nearly always ended with one remarking: "Well, if they
+don't get anything else out of livin', look at the clothes they put on
+their backs."
+
+Perhaps you can understand that longing for pretty gowns, perhaps you
+can even sympathize with it. Of course, if you have a number of other
+resources, you can keep the dress hunger in its proper place. But if you
+have nothing in your existence but a machine--at which you toil for
+others' benefit;
+
+Sadie and Rosie continued to spend their Saturday evenings and their
+Sunday evenings at Silver's Casino. At first they went home together
+promptly at midnight. After midnight these casino dance halls change
+their character. Often professional "pace makers" are introduced, men
+and women of the lowest class, who are paid to inspire the other dancers
+to lewd conduct. These wretched people are immodestly clothed, and they
+perform immodest or very tough dances. They are usually known as
+"Twisters," a descriptive title. When they make their appearance the
+self-respecting dancers go home, and a much looser element comes in. The
+pace becomes a rapid one. Manners are free, talk is coarse, laughter is
+incessant. The bar does a lively business. The dancing and the revels go
+on until daylight.
+
+The first time Sadie and Rosie allowed themselves to be persuaded to
+stay at Silver's after midnight they were rather horrified by the
+abandoned character of the dancing, the reckless drinking, and the
+fighting which resulted in several men being thrown out. The second time
+they were not quite so horrified, but they decided not to stay so late
+another time. Then came a great social event, the annual "mask and
+shadow dance" of a local political organization. Sadie and Rosie
+attended.
+
+A "mask and shadow dance" is as important a function to girls of Sadie's
+and Rosie's class as a cotillion is to girls of your class. Such affairs
+are possible only in large dance halls, and to do them impressively
+costs the proprietor some money. The guests rent costumes and masks and
+appear in very gala fashion indeed. They dance in the rays of all kinds
+of colored lights thrown upon them from upper galleries. During part of
+a waltz the dancers are bathed in rose-colored lights, which change
+suddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects are
+made, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers' shadows are
+thrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor. At intervals a rain of
+bright-colored confetti pours down from above. The scene becomes
+bacchanalian. Color, light, music, confetti, the dance, together
+combine to produce an intense and voluptuous intoxication which the
+revelers deepen with drink.
+
+The events of the latter part of that night were very vague in Sadie's
+memory when she awoke late the next morning. She remembered that she had
+tolerated familiarities which had been foreign to her experience
+heretofore, and that she had been led home by some friendly soul, at
+daylight, almost helpless from liquor.
+
+Frightened, haunted by half-ashamed memories of that dance, Sadie
+spoiled a good bit of her work on Monday morning. The forewoman
+descended on her with a torrent of coarse abuse, whereupon Sadie rose
+suddenly from her machine, and in a burst of hysterical profanity and
+tears rushed out of the factory, vowing never to return. There was only
+one course, she decided, for her to take, and she took it.
+
+"Sadie, why did you do it?" wailed Rosie the next time they met.
+
+"It's better than the factory," said Sadie.
+
+Tucking muslin underwear is dull work, but it is, in most ways, a more
+agreeable task than icing cakes in a St. Louis biscuit factory. All day
+Edna M---- stood over a tank filled with thick chocolate icing. The
+table beside Edna's tank was kept constantly supplied with freshly baked
+"lady-fingers," and these in delicate handfuls Edna seized and plunged
+into the hot ooze of the chocolate. Her arms, up to the elbows, went
+into the black stuff, over and over again all day. At noon, over their
+lunch, the girls talked of their recreations, their clothes, their
+"fellows."
+
+Edna had not very much to contribute to the girls' stories of gayety and
+adventure. She led a quieter existence than most of the other girls,
+although her leanings were toward lively pleasures. She was engaged to a
+young man who worked in a foundry and who was steady and perhaps rather
+too serious. He was very jealous of Edna and exacted a stern degree of
+fidelity of her.
+
+Before her engagement Edna had gone to a decent dancing school and
+dearly loved the dance. Now she was not permitted to dance with any one
+but her prospective husband. The bright talk at the noon hour made Edna
+feel that she was a very poor sport.
+
+The young man's work in the foundry alternated weekly between day and
+night duty. It occurred to Edna that her young man could not possibly
+know what she did with those evenings he remained in the foundry. If she
+chose to go with a group of girls to a dance hall, what harm? The long
+years of married life stretched themselves out somewhat drably to Edna.
+She decided to have a good time beforehand.
+
+This girl from now on literally lived a double life. Evenings of the
+weeks her young man was free from the foundry, she spent at home with
+him, placidly playing cards, reading aloud, or talking. On the other
+evenings she danced, madly, incessantly. Her mother thought she spent
+the evenings with her girl friends. The dancing, plus the deceit, soon
+had its effect on Edna. She began to visit livelier and livelier
+resorts, curious to see all phases of pleasure.
+
+Suspicion entered into the mind of her affianced. He questioned her;
+she lied, and he was unconvinced. A night or two later the young man
+stayed away from the foundry and followed Edna to a suburban resort. She
+went, as usual, with a group of girls, but their men were waiting for
+them near the door of the open-air dancing pavilion. Standing just
+outside, the angry lover watched the girl "spiel" round and round with a
+man of doubtful respectability. Soon she joined a noisy, beer-drinking
+group at one of the tables, and her behavior grew more and more
+reckless. Finally, amid laughter, she and another girl performed a
+suggestive dance together.
+
+Walking swiftly up to her, the outraged foundryman grasped her by the
+shoulder, called her a name she did not yet deserve, and threw her
+violently to the floor. A terrific fight followed, and the police soon
+cleared the place.
+
+Edna did not dare go home. An over-rigid standard of morals, an
+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.,
+Mercy, Anna,
+Meredith, Ellis
+Milholland, Inez,
+Mills,
+Mills, Enos,
+Miner, Maude E.,
+Miner, Stella,
+Missouri,
+Mitchell, John,
+Montana,
+Moore, Mrs. Philip N.,
+Morgan, Anne
+Mott, Lucretia,
+Muller, Curt
+
+Napoleon,
+Napoleon Code
+Nathan, Mrs. Frederick
+National Civic Federation,
+National Congress of Mothers,
+National Manufacturers' Association
+National Society of Collegiate Alumnae,
+National Woman Suffrage Association
+Nebraska
+Nestor, Agnes,
+Nevada,
+New England,
+New Haven, Conn.
+New Jersey,
+New Mexico,
+New York,
+New York, N.Y.,
+New York Telephone Co.,
+New Zealand,
+Night Court. See _Jefferson Market Court_
+Night work of women,
+North Carolina
+North Dakota,
+
+Ohio,
+Oklahoma,
+Orange, House of,
+Oregon,
+Oregon case,
+Oregon Standard,_Out of Work_, Miss Kellor's
+
+Palisades of the Hudson,
+Panama Canal,
+Pankhurst, Mrs.,
+Paris,
+Peace
+Pennsylvania,
+Persia,
+Philadelphia,
+Pike, Violet,
+Pittsburg,
+Playgrounds,
+Playgrounds Association of America
+Portland, Ore.,
+Portugal
+Potter, Virginia,
+Probation Association of N.Y.,
+Property Law, Married Women's,
+Public Service League of Denver, Colo.
+Puritans
+
+_Resurrection_, Tolstoy's,
+Revere Beach,
+Rheinhard Commission,
+Rhode Island
+"Rights of Man,"
+Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory,
+Robins, Mrs. Raymond,
+Robinson, Mrs. Helen Ring,
+Rochester, N.Y., Industrial School,
+Roxbury, Mass., carpet mill strike,
+Russia,
+
+Sage, Mrs. Russell,
+St. Louis, Mo.
+Salic Law,
+Salmon, Prof. Lucy Maynard
+Salt Lake City,
+San Francisco,
+Schoenfeld, Julia,
+Scranton, Pa.,
+Seneca Falls convention,
+Servant problem. See _Domestic Service_
+Shaw, Dr. Anna,
+Shirt-waist makers' strike,
+Smith, "Gypsy,"
+Snowden, Mrs. Philip,
+Social evil,
+Social purity
+Socialist party
+South Africa,
+South Carolina,
+South Chicago,
+South Dakota,
+Spain
+Stanton, Elizabeth Cady
+Stover, Charles B.,
+Succession to throne by women,
+Sweat shop, the
+Switzerland
+
+Teacher's Federation of Chicago
+Ten-hour day,
+Tennessee
+Texas,
+Tillman case,
+Turkey,
+Tuthill, Judge R.S.,
+Twentieth Century Club of Detroit,
+
+United States Government
+United States Industrial Commission,
+United Textile Workers
+Utah
+
+Vassar College,
+Victoria, Queen,
+Virginia,
+Voters' League for Equal Suffrage,
+
+Wage earning, women in,
+Washington (state),
+Waverley House,
+White, Mrs. Lovell,
+"White Slave" traffic
+Whitman, Charles S.,
+Wilhelmina, Queen,
+Windeguth, Dora
+Winthrop, Mrs. Egerton,
+_Woman and Economics_, Gilman's,
+Woman suffrage,
+Woman Suffrage Party
+Woman's Christian Temperance Union,
+Woman's Municipal League of N.Y.,
+Women, their ideals,
+  in Europe,
+  in America,
+  in industry,
+  their fight against the social evil,
+  in domestic service,
+  collective opinion of,
+Women's Civic Club of San Francisco,
+Women's Club, of Lake City, Minn.,
+  of Dallas, Tex.,
+  of San Francisco,
+  of Pittsburg
+  of Detroit,
+  of Philadelphia,
+  of Harrisburg, Pa.,
+  of Birmingham, Ala.,
+  of Carlisle, Pa.,
+  of Cranford, N.J.,
+Women's Clubs
+Women's Educational and Industrial Union of BostonWomen's League of Justice,
+Women's Political Equality Union,
+Women's Property Act,
+Women's Trade Union League
+Working Women's Society
+Wyoming,
+
+Yonkers, N.Y.,
+Young Women's Christian Association
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's What eight million women want, by Rheta Childe Dorr
+
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