Mobilizing Woman-Power · Chapter 10Illustrations (7)
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
It may be the brutal truth, taking bread as the index, that only a quarter of the processes carried on in the home turn out satisfactorily, while of the other three-quarters, a just verdict may show that mother gets a "little too much lye" in the soap, cooks the preserves a "little too hard," "candies the fruit just a little bit," and grinds the flour in the mill "not quite fine enough."
But perhaps even more than the quality of the product does the question of the economical disposition of labor-power agitate some women. They are asking, since labor is very scarce, whether the extreme individualistic direction of their labor-power is permissible. The vast majority of American homes are without servants. In those homes are the women working such short hours that they can, without dropping important obligations, take over preserving, canning, dehydrating, the making of bread, soap, and butter substitute? Has the tenement-house dweller accommodation suitable for introducing these industrial processes into her home? Would the woman in the small ménage in the country be wise in cutting down time given, for instance, to the care of her baby and to reading to the older children, and using the precious moments laboriously to grind wheat to flour? My observation convinces me that conscientious housewives in servantless or one-servant households, with work adjusted to a given end, with relative values already determined upon, are not prepared by acceptance of the Adamistic theory to return to primitive occupations.
But even if business and home life could respond to the change without strain, even if both could easily turn back on the road they have come during the last hundred years, commerce yielding up and the home re-adopting certain occupations, we should carefully weigh the economic value of a reversion to primitive methods.
The Adamistic attitude is influenced, perhaps unconsciously but no less certainly, by the fact that the housewife is an unpaid worker. If an unpaid person volunteers to do a thing, it is readily assumed that the particular effort is worth while. "We get the labor for nothing" puts to rout all thought of valuation. No doubt Adam will have to give over thinking in this loose way. Labor-power, whether it is paid for or not, must be used wisely or we shall not be able to maintain the structure of our civilization.
Then, too, the Adamistic theory weighs and values the housewife's time as little as it questions the quality of the home product. Any careful reader of the various "Hints to Housewives" which have appeared, will note that the "simplifying of meals" recommended would require nearly double the time to prepare. The simplification takes into consideration only the question of food substitutions, price and waste. Mother is supposed to be wholly or largely unemployed and longing for unpaid toil. Should any housewife conscientiously follow the advice given her by state and municipal authorities she would be the drudge at the center of a home quite medieval in development.
Let us take a concrete example:--In a recently published and widely applauded cookbook put out by a whole committee of Adamistic philosophers, it is stated that the object of the book is to give practical hints as to the various ways in which "economies can be effected and waste saved;" and yet no saving of the woman's time, nerves and muscles is referred to from cover to cover. The housewife is told, for instance, to "insist upon getting the meat trimmings." The fat "can be rendered." And then follows the process in soap-making. Mother is to place the scraps of fat on the back of the stove. If she "watches it carefully" and does not allow it to get hot enough to smoke there will be no odor. No doubt if she removes her watchful eye and turns to bathe her baby, her tenement will reek with smoking fat. She is to pursue this trying of fat and nerves day by day until she has six pounds of grease. Next, she is to "stir it well," cool it, melt it again; she is then to pour in the lye, "slowly stirring all the time." Add ammonia. Then "stir the mixture constantly for twenty minutes or half an hour."
In contrast to all this primeval elaboration is the simple, common-sense rule: Do not buy the trimmings, make the butcher trim meat before weighing, insist that soap-making shall not be brought back to defile the home, but remain where it belongs, a trade in which the workers can be protected by law, and its malodorousness brought under regulation.
In the same spirit the Adamistic suggestion to Eve to save coal by a "heatless day" is met by the cold challenge of the riotous extravagance of cooking in twelve separate tenements, twelve separate potatoes, on twelve separate fires.
The Adamistic theory, through its emphasis on the relation of food to Eve, and the almost religious necessity of its manipulation at the altar of the home cook-stove, has drawn thought away from the nutritive side of what we eat. While the child in the streets is tossing about such words as calories and carbohydrates with a glibness that comes of much hearing, physiology and food values are destined to remain as far away as ever from the average family breakfast table. Segregating a sex in the home, it is true, centralizes it in a given place, but it does not necessarily train the individual to function efficiently. Mother, as she "used to do," cooks by rule of thumb; in fact, how could she do otherwise, since she must keep one eye on her approving Adam while the other eye glances at the oven. The Adamistic theory requires individualistic action, and disapproves specialization in Eve.
The theory also demands economic dependence in the home builder. Mother's labor is not her own, she lives under the truck system, so to speak. She is paid in kind for her work. Influenced by the Adamistic theory, the human animal is the only species in which sex and economic relations are closely linked, the only one in which the female depends upon the male for sustenance. Mother must give personal service to those about her, and in return the law ensures her keep according to the station of her husband, that is, not according to her ability or usefulness, but according to the man's earning capacity.
The close association of mother with home in the philosophy of her mate, has circumscribed her most natural and modest attempts at relaxation. Mother's holiday is a thing to draw tears from those who contemplate it. The summer outing means carrying the family from one spot to another, and making the best of new surroundings for the old group. The "day off" means a concentration of the usual toil into a few hours, followed by a hazy passing show that she is too weary to enjoy. The kindly farmer takes his wife this year to the county fair. She's up at four to "get on" with the work. She serves breakfast, gives the children an extra polish in honor of the day, puts on the clean frocks and suits with an admonition "not to get all mussed up" before the start. The farmer cheerily counsels haste in order that "we may have a good long day of it." He does not say what "it" is, but the wife knows. At last the house is ready to be left, and the wife and her brood are ready to settle down in the farm wagon.
The fair grounds are reached. Adam has prepared the setting. It has no relation to mother's needs. It was a most thrilling innovation when in the summer of 1914 the Women's Political Union first set up big tents at county fairs, fitted with comfortable chairs for mother, and cots and toys, nurses and companions for the children. The farmer's wife for the first time was relieved of care, and could go off to see the sights with her mind at rest, if she desired anything more active than rocking lazily with the delicious sensation of having nothing to do.
Women must not blame Adam for lack of thoughtfulness. He cannot put himself in mother's place. She must do her own thinking or let women who are capable of thought do it for her.
Men are relieved when mother is independent and happy. The farmer approved the crèche tent at the county fairs. It convinced him that women have ideas to contribute to the well-being of the community. The venture proved the greatest of vote getters for the suffrage referendum.
In fact, men themselves are the chief opponents of the Adamistic theory to-day. The majority want women to organize the home and it is only a small minority who place obstacles in the way of the wider functioning of women. It is Eve herself who likes to exaggerate the necessity of her personal service. I have seen many a primitive housewife grow hot at the suggestion that her methods need modifying. It seemed like severing the silken cords by which she held her mate, to challenge her pumpkin pie.
But women are slowly overcoming Eve. Take the item of the care of children in city parks. The old way is for fifty women to look after fifty separate children, and thus waste the time of some thirty of them in keeping fifty miserable children in segregation. The new way, now successfully initiated, is to form play groups of happy children under the leadership of capable young women trained for such work.
Salvaging New York City's food waste was a very splendid bit of coöperative action on the part of women. Mrs. William H. Lough of the Women's University Club found on investigation that thousands of tons of good food are lost by a condemnation, necessarily rough and ready, by the Board of Health. She secured permission to have the sound and unsound fruits and vegetables separated and with a large committee of women saved the food for consumption by the community by dehydrating and other preserving processes.
This was not as mother used to do.
Mother's ways are being investigated and discarded the whole world round. At last accounts half the population of Hamburg was being fed through municipal kitchens and in Great Britain an order has been issued by Lord Rhondda, the Food Controller, authorizing local authorities to open kitchens as food distributing centers. The central government is to bear twenty-five percent of the cost of equipment and lend another twenty-five percent to start the enterprise.
Mother's cook stove cannot bear the strain of war economies.
Dropping their old segregation, women are going forth in fellowship with men to meet in new ways the pressing problems of a new world.
Great Britain, France and Germany have mobilized a land army of women; will the United States do less? Not if the farmer can be brought to have as much faith in American women as the women have in themselves. And why should they not have faith; the farm has already tested them out, and they have not been found wanting. In face of this fine accomplishment the minds of some men still entertain doubt, or worse, obliviousness, to the possible contribution of women to land service.
The farmer knows his need and has made clear statement of the national dilemma in the form of a memorial to the President of the United States. In part, it is as follows:
"If food is to win the war, as we are assured on every side, the farmers of America must produce more food in 1918 than they did in 1917. Under existing conditions we cannot equal the production of 1917, much less surpass it, and this for reasons over which the farmers have no control. "The chief causes which will inevitably bring about a smaller crop next year, unless promptly removed by national action, are six in number, of which the first is the shortage of farm labor.
"Since the war began in 1914 and before the first draft was made there is reason to believe that more farm workers had left farms than there are men in our army and navy together. Those men were drawn away by the high wages paid in munition plants and other war industries, and their places remain unfilled. In spite of the new classification, future drafts will still further reduce the farm labor supply."
With a million and a half men drawn out of the country and ten billion dollars to be expended on war material, making every ammunition factory a labor magnet, it seems like the smooth deceptions of prestidigitation to answer the cry of the farmer with suggestion that men rejected by the draft or high school boys be paroled to meet the exigency. The farm can't be run with decrepit men or larking boys, nor the war won with less than its full quota of soldiers. Legislators, government officials and farm associations by sudden shifting of labor battalions cannot camouflage the fact that the front line trenches of the fighting army and labor force are undermanned.
Women can and will be the substitutes if the experiments already made are signs of the times.
Groups of women from colleges and seasonal trades have ploughed and harrowed, sowed and planted, weeded and cultivated, mowed and harvested, milked and churned, at Vassar, Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke, at Newburg and Milton, at Bedford Hills and Mahwah. It has been demonstrated that our girls from college and city trade can do farm work, and do it with a will. And still better, at the end of the season their health wins high approval from the doctors and their work golden opinions from the farmers.
Twelve crusaders were chosen from the thirty-three students who volunteered for dangerous service during a summer vacation on the Vassar College farm. The twelve ventured out on a new enterprise that meant aching muscles, sunburn and blisters, but not one of the twelve "ever lost a day" in their eight hours at hard labor, beginning at four-thirty each morning for eight weeks during one of our hottest summers. They ploughed with horses, they ploughed with tractors, they sowed the seed, they thinned and weeded the plants, they reaped, they raked, they pitched the hay, they did fencing and milking. The Vassar farm had bumper crops on its seven hundred and forty acres, and its superintendent, Mr. Louis P. Gillespie, said, "A very great amount of the work necessary for the large production was done by our students. They hoed and cultivated sixteen acres of field corn, ten acres of ensilage corn, five acres of beans, five acres of potatoes; carried sheaves of rye and wheat to the shocks and shocked them; and two of the students milked seven cows at each milking time. In the garden they laid out a strawberry bed of two thousand plants, helped to plant corn and beans, picked beans and other vegetables. They took great interest in the work and did the work just as well as the average man and made good far beyond the most sanguine expectations."
At first the students were paid twenty-five cents an hour, the same rate as the male farm hands. The men objected, saying that the young women were beginners, but by the end of the summer the critics realized that "brains tell" and said the girls were worth the higher wage, though they had only been getting, in order to appease the masculine prejudice, seventeen and a half cents an hour. There is no pleasing some people! If women are paid less, they are unfair competitors, if they are paid equally they are being petted--in short, fair competitors.
Mt. Holyoke and Bryn Mawr have made experiments, and, like Vassar, demonstrated not only that women can, and that satisfactorily, work on the land, but that they will, and that cheerfully. The groups were happy and they comprehended that they were doing transcendently important work, were rendering a patriotic service by filling up the places left vacant by the drafted men.
The Women's Agricultural Camp, known popularly as the "Bedford Unit," proved an experiment rich in practical suggestion. Barnard students, graduates of the Manhattan Trade School, and girls from seasonal trades formed the backbone of the group. They were housed in an old farmhouse, chaperoned by one of the Barnard professors, fed by student dietitians from the Household Arts Department of Teachers College, transported from farm to farm by seven chauffeurs, and coached in the arts of Ceres by an agricultural expert. The "day laborers" as well as the experts were all women.
In founding the camp Mrs. Charles W. Short, Jr., had three definite ideas in mind. First, she was convinced that young women could without ill-effect on their health, and should as a patriotic service, do all sorts of agricultural work. Second, that in the present crisis the opening up of new land with women as farm managers is not called for, but rather the supply of the labor-power on farms already under cultivation is the need. Third, that the women laborers must, in groups, have comfortable living conditions without being a burden on the farmer's wife, must have adequate pay, and must have regulated hours of work.
With these sound ideas as its foundation the camp opened at Mt. Kisco, backed by the Committee on Agriculture of the Mayor's Committee of Women on National Defense of New York City, under the chairmanship of Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College.
At its greatest enrolment the unit had seventy-three members. When the prejudice of the fanners was overcome, the demand for workers was greater than the camp could supply. Practically the same processes were carried through as at Vassar, and the verdict of the farmer on his new helpers was that "while less strong than men, they more than made up for this by superior conscientiousness and quickness." Proof of the genuineness of his estimate was shown in his willingness to pay the management of the camp the regulation two dollars for an eight hour working day. And it indicated entire satisfaction with the experiment, rather than abstract faith in woman, that each farmer anxiously urged the captain of the group at the end of his first trial to "please bring the same young ladies tomorrow." He was sure no others so good existed.
The unit plan seems a heaven-born solution of many of the knotty problems of the farm. In the first place, the farmer gets cheerful and handy helpers, and his over-worked wife does not find her domestic cares added to in the hot summer season. The new hands house and feed themselves. From the point of view of the worker, the advantage is that her food at the camp is prepared by trained hands and the proverbial farm isolation gives way to congenial companionship.
These separate experiments growing out of the need of food production and the shortage of labor have brought new blood to the farm, have turned the college girl on vacation and, what is more important, being a solution of an industrial problem, the unemployed in seasonal trades, into recruits for an agricultural army. And by concentrating workers in well-run camps there has been attracted to the land a higher order of helper.
One obstacle in the way of the immediate success of putting such women on the land is a wholly mistaken idea in the minds of many persons of influence in agricultural matters that the new labor can be diverted to domestic work in the farm house. This view is urged in the following letter to me from the head of one of our best agricultural colleges: "The farm labor shortage is much more acute than is generally understood and I have much confidence in the possibility of a great amount of useful work in food production being done by women who are physically strong enough and who can secure sufficient preliminary training to do this with some degree of efficiency. Probably the larger measure of service could be done by relieving women now on the farms of this State from the double burden of indoor work and the attempt to assist in farm operations and chores. If farm women would get satisfactory domestic assistance within the house they could add much to the success of field husbandry. Women who know farm conditions and who could largely take the place of men in the management of outdoor affairs can accomplish much more than will ever be possible by drafting city-bred women directly into garden or other forms of field work."
The opinions expressed in this letter are as generally held as they are mistaken. In the first place, the theory that the country-bred woman in America is stronger and healthier than the city-bred has long since been exploded. The assumption cannot stand up under the facts. Statistics show that the death rate in the United States is lower in city than in farm communities, and if any added proof were needed to indicate that the stamina of city populations overbalances the country it was furnished by the draft records. Any group of college and Manhattan Trade School girls could be pitted against a group of women from the farms and win the laurels in staying powers. Nor must it be overlooked that we are not dealing here with uncertainties; the mettle of the girls has been proved.
In any case the fact must be faced that these agricultural units will not do domestic work. Nine-tenths of the farm houses in America are without modern conveniences. The well-appointed barn may have running water, but the house has not. To undertake work as a domestic helper on the average farm is to step back into quite primitive conditions. The farmer's wife can attract no one from city life, where so much cooperation is enjoyed, to her extreme individualistic surroundings.
A second obstacle to the employment of this new labor-force is due to the government's failure to see the possibility of saving most valuable labor-power and achieving an economic gain by dovetailing the idle months of young women in industrial life into the rush time of agriculture.
One department suggests excusing farm labor from the draft, as if we had already fulfilled our obligation in man-power to the battlefront of our Allies. The United States Senate discusses bringing in coolie and contract labor, as if we had not demonstrated our unfitness to deal with less advanced peoples, and as if a republic could live comfortably with a class of disfranchised workers. The Labor Department declares it will mobilize for the farm an army of a million boys, as if the wise saw, "boys will be boys," did not apply with peculiar sharpness of flavor to the American vintage, God bless them, and as if it were not our plain duty at this world crisis to spur up rather than check civilizing agencies and keep our boys in school for the full term.
Refusing to be in the least crushed by government neglect, far-seeing women determined to organize widely and carefully their solution of the farm-labor problem. To this end the Women's National Farm and Garden Association, the Garden Clubs of America, the Young Women's Christian Association, the Woman's Suffrage Party, the New York Women's University Club, and the Committee of the Women's Agricultural Camp, met with representatives of the Grange, of the Cornell Agricultural College, and of the Farmingdale State School of Agriculture, and formed an advisory council, the object of which is to "stimulate the formation of a Land Army of Women to take the places on the farms of the men who are being drafted for active service." This is to be on a nationwide scale.
The Council has put lecturers in the Granges to bring to the farmer by the spoken word and lantern slides the value of the labor of women, and is appealing to colleges, seasonal trades and village communities to form units for the Land Army. It is asking the coöperation of the labor bureaus to act as media through which units may be placed where labor is most needed.
This mobilization of woman-power is not yet large or striking. The effort is entirely civil. But all the more is it praiseworthy. It shows on the part of women, clear-eyed recognition of facts as they exist and vision as to the future.
The mobilization of this fresh labor-power should of course be taken in hand by the government. Not only that, it should be led by women as in Great Britain and Germany. But the spirit in America today is the same as in England the first year of the war,--a disposition to exclude women from full service.
But facts remain facts in spite of prejudice, and the Woman's Land Army, with faith and enthusiasm in lieu of a national treasury, are endeavoring to bring woman-power and the untilled fields together. The proved achievement of the individual worker will win the employer, the unit plan with its solution of housing conditions and dreary isolation will overcome not only the opposition of the farmer's wife, but that of the intelligent worker. When the seed time of the movement has been lived through by anxious and inspired women, the government may step in to reap the harvest of a nation's gratitude.
The mobilization of woman-power on the farm is the need of the hour, and the wise and devoted women who are trying to answer the need, deserve an all-hail from the people of the United States and her Allies.
Men have played--all honor to them--the major part in the actual conflict of the war. Women will mobilize for the major part of binding up the wounds and conserving civilization.
The spirit of the world might almost be supposed to have been looking forward to this day and clearly seeing its needs, so well are women being prepared to receive and carry steadily the burden which will be laid on their shoulders. For three-quarters of a century schools and colleges have given to women what they had to confer in the way of discipline. Gainful pursuits were opened up to them, adding training in ordered occupation and self-support. Lastly has come the Great War, with its drill in sacrifice and economy, its larger opportunities to function and achieve, its ideals of democracy which have directly and quickly led to the political enfranchisement of women in countries widely separated.
Fate has prepared women to share fully in the saving of civilization.
Whether victory be ours in the immediate future, or whether the dangers rising so clearly on the horizon develop into fresh alignments leading to years of war, civilization stands in jeopardy. Political ideals and ultimate social aims may remain intact, but the immediate, practical maintenance of those standards of life which are necessary to ensure strong and fruitful reactions are in danger of being swept away.
We have been destroying the life, the wealth and beauty of the world. The nobility of our aim in the war must not blind us to the awfulness and the magnitude of the destruction. In the fighting forces there are at least thirty-eight million men involved in international or civil conflict. Over four million men have fallen, and three million have been maimed for life. Disease has taken its toll of fighting strength and economic power. In addition to all this human depletion, we have the loss of life and the destruction of health and initiative in harried peoples madly flying across their borders from invading armies.
Starvation has swept across wide areas, and steady underfeeding rules in every country in Europe and in the cities of America, letting loose malnutrition, that hidden enemy whose ambushes are more serious than the attacks of an open foe. The world is sick.
And the world is poor. The nations have spent over a hundred billions on the war, and that is but part of the wealth which has gone down in the catastrophe. Thousands of square miles are plowed so deep with shot and shell and trench that the fertile soil lies buried beneath unyielding clay. Orchards and forests are gone. Villages are wiped out, cities are but skeletons of themselves. In the face of all the need of reconstruction we must admit, however much we would wish to cover the fact,--the world is poor.
And still, as in no other war, the will to guard human welfare has remained dominant. The country rose to a woman in most spirited fashion to combat the plan to lower the standards of labor conditions in the supposed interest of war needs. With but few exceptions the States have strengthened their labor laws. In its summary the American Association for Labor Legislation says:
"Eleven States strengthened their child labor laws, by raising age limits, extending restrictions to new employments, or shortening hours. Texas passed a new general statute setting a fifteen-year minimum age for factories and Vermont provided for regulations in conformity with those of the Federal Child Labor Act. Kansas and New Hampshire legislated on factory safeguards, Texas on fire escapes, New Jersey on scaffolds, Montana on electrical apparatus, Delaware on sanitary equipment, and West Virginia on mines. New Jersey forbade the manufacture of articles of food or children's wear in tenements.
"Workmen's compensation laws were enacted in Delaware, Idaho, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Utah, making forty States and Territories which now have such laws, in addition to the Federal Government's compensation law, for its own half-million civilian employees. In more than twenty additional States existing acts were amended, the changes being marked by a tendency to extend the scope, shorten the working period, and increase provision for medical care."