Mobilizing Woman-Power · Chapter 5Illustrations (2)
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
This is a call for man-power in addition to that suggested by the Fuel Administrator to the effect that lack of coal is partly lack of cars and that "back of the transportation shortage lies labor shortage." An order was sent out by the Director General of Railways, soon after his appointment, that mechanics from the repair shops of the west were to be shifted to the east to supply the call for help on the Atlantic border.
Suggestive of the cause of all this shortage, float the service flags of the mining and railway companies, the hundreds of glowing stars telling their tale of men gone to the front, and of just so many stars torn from the standards of the industrial army at home.
The Shipping Board recently called for two hundred and fifty thousand men to be gradually recruited as a skilled army for work in shipyards. At the same time the Congress passed an appropriation of fifty million dollars for building houses to accommodate ship labor. Six months ago only fifty thousand men were employed in ship-building, today there are one hundred and forty-five thousand. This rapid drawing of men to new centers creates a housing problem so huge that it must he met by the government; and it need hardly be pointed out, shelter can be built only by human hands.
One state official, prompted no doubt by a wise hostility to coolie labor, and dread of woman labor, has gone so far as to declare publicly that any employer who will pay "adequate wages can get all the labor he requires." This view suggests that we may soon have to adopt the methods of other belligerents and stop employers by law from stealing a neighbor's working force. I know of a shipyard with a normal pay-roll of five hundred hands, which in one year engaged and lost to nearby munition factories thirteen thousand laborers. Such "shifting," hiding as it does shortage of manpower, leads to serious loss in our productive efficiency and should not be allowed to go unchecked.
The manager of one of the New York City street railways met with complete denial the easy optimism that adequate remuneration will command a sufficient supply of men. He told me that he had introduced women at the same wage as male conductors, not because he wanted women, but because he now had only five applications by fit men to thirty or forty formerly. There were men to be had, he said, and at lower wages than his company was paying; but they were "not of the class capable of fulfilling the requirements of the position."
The Labor Administration announced on its creation that its "policy would be to prevent woman labor in positions for which men are available," and one of the deputy commissioners of the Industrial Commission of the State of New York declared quite frankly at a labor conference that "if he could, he would exclude women from industry altogether."
We may try to prevent the oncoming tide of the economic independence of women, but it will not be possible to force the business world to accept permanently the service of the inefficient in place of that of the alert and intelligent. To carry on the economic life of a nation with its labor flotsam and jetsam is loss at any time; in time of storm and stress it is suicide.
Man-power is short, seriously so. The farm is always the best barometer to give warning of scarcity of labor. The land has been drained of its workers. A fair wage would keep them on the farm--this is the philosophy of laissez faire. Without stopping to inquire as to what the munition works would then do, we can still see that it is doubtful whether the farm can act as magnet. Even men, let us venture the suggestion, like change for the mere sake of change. A middle-aged man, who had taken up work at Bridgeport, said to me, "I've mulled around on the farm all my days. I grabbed the first chance to get away." And then there's a finer spirit prompting the desertion of the hoe. A man of thirty-three gave me the point of view. "My brother is 'over there,' and I feel as if I were backing him up by making guns."
The only thing that can change the idea that farming is "mulling around," and making a gun "backs up" the man at the front more thoroughly than raising turnips, is to bring to the farm new workers who realize the vital part played by food in the winning of the war. As the modern industrial system has developed with its marvels of specialized machinery, its army of employees gathered and dispersed on the stroke of the clock, and strong organizations created to protect the interests of the worker, the calm and quiet processes of agriculture have in comparison grown colorless. The average farmhand has never found push and drive and group action on the farm, but only individualism to the extreme of isolation. And now in war time, when in addition to its usual life of stirring contacts, the factory takes on an intimate and striking relation to the intense experience of the battle front, the work of the farm seems as flat as it is likely to be unprofitable. The man in the furrow has no idea that he is "backing up" the boy in the trench.
The farmer in his turn does not find himself part of the wider relations that attract and support the manufacturer. Crops are not grown on order. The marketing is as uncertain as the weather. The farmer could by higher wages attract more labor, but as the selling of the harvest remains a haphazard matter, the venture might mean ruin all the more certain and serious were wage outlay large. In response to a call for food and an appeal to his patriotism, the farmer has repeatedly made unusual efforts to bring his land to the maximum fertility, only to find his crops often a dead loss, as he could not secure the labor to harvest them. I saw, one summer, acres of garden truck at its prime ploughed under in Connecticut because of a shortage of labor. I saw fruit left rotting by the bushel in the orchards near Rochester because of scarcity of pickers and a doubt of the reliability of the market. The industry which means more than any other to the well-being of humanity at this crisis, is the sport of methods outgrown and of servants who lack understanding and inspiration. The war may furnish the spark for the needed revolution. Man-power is not available, woman-power is at hand. A new labor force always brings ideas and ideals peculiar to itself. May not women as fresh recruits in a land army stamp their likes and dislikes on farm life? Their enthusiasm may put staleness to rout, and the group system of women land workers, already tested in the crucible of experience, may bring to the farm the needed antidote to isolation.
To win the war we must have man-power in the trenches sufficient to win it with. To win, every soldier, every sailor, must be well fed, well clothed, well equipped. To win, behind the armed forces must stand determined peoples. To win, the people of America and her Allies must be heartened by care and food.
The sun shines on the fertile land, the earth teems with forests, with coal, with every necessary mineral and food, but labor, labor alone can transform all to meet our necessities. Man-power unaided cannot supply the demand. Women in America must shoulder as nobly as have the women of Europe, this duty. They must answer their country's call. Let them see clearly that the desire of their men to shield them from possible injury exposes the nation and the world to actual danger.
Our winning of the war depends upon the full use of the energy of our entire people. Every muscle, every brain, must be mobilized if the national aim is to be achieved.
In no country have women reached a mobilization so complete and systematized as in Great Britain. This mobilization covers the whole field of war service--in industry, business and professional life, and in government administration. Women serve on the Ministry of Food and are included in the membership of twenty-five of the important government committees, not auxiliary or advisory, but administrative committees, such as those on War Pensions, on Disabled Officers and Men, on Education after the War, and the Labor Commission to Deal with Industrial Unrest.
In short, the women of Great Britain are working side by side with men in the initiation and execution of plans to solve the problems which confront the nation.
Four committees, as for instance those making investigations and recommendations on Women's Wages and Drink Among Women, are entirely composed of women, and great departments, such as the Women's Land Army, the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, are officered throughout by them. Hospitals under the War Office have been placed in complete control of medical women; they take rank with medical men in the army and receive the pay going with their commissions.
When Great Britain recognized that the war could not be won by merely sending splendid fighters to the front and meeting the wastage by steady drafts upon the manhood of the country, she began to build an efficient organization of industry at home.
To the call for labor-power British women gave instant response. In munitions a million are mobilized, in the Land Army there have been drafted and actually placed on the farms over three hundred thousand, and in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps fourteen thousand women are working in direct connection with the fighting force, and an additional ten thousand are being called out for service each month. In the clerical force of the government departments, some of which had never seen women before in their sacred precincts, over one hundred and ninety-eight thousand are now working. And the women civil servants are not only engaged in indoor service, but outside too, most of the carrying of mail being in their hands.
Women are dock-laborers, some seven thousand strong. Four thousand act as patrols and police, forty thousand are in banks and various financial houses. It is said that there are in Great Britain scarce a million women--and they are mostly occupied as housewives--who could render greater service to their country than that which they are now giving.
The wide inclusion of women in government administration is very striking to us in America. But we must not forget that the contrast between the two countries in the participation of women in political life and public service has always been great. The women of the United Kingdom have enjoyed the municipal and county franchise for years. For a long time large numbers of women have been called to administrative positions. They have had thorough training in government as Poor Law Guardians, District and County Councilors, members of School Boards. No women, the whole world over, are equipped as those of Great Britain for service to the state.
In the glamor of the extremely striking government service of British women, we must not overlook their non-official organizations. Perhaps these offer the most valuable suggestions for America. They are near enough to our experience to be quite understandable.
The mother country is not under regimentation. Originality and initiative have full play. Perhaps it was well that the government failed to appreciate what women could do, and neglected them so long. Most of the effective work was started in volunteer societies and had proved a success before there was an official laying on of hands. Anglo-Saxons--it is our strong point--always work from below, up.
A glance at any account of the mobilization of woman-power in Great Britain, Miss Fraser's admirable "Women and War Work," for instance, will reveal the printed page dotted thick with the names of volunteer associations. A woman with sympathy sees a need, she gets an idea and calls others about her. Quickly, there being no red tape, the need begins to be met. What more admirable service could have been performed than that inaugurated in the early months of the war under the Queen's Work for Women Fund, when work was secured for the women in luxury trades which were collapsing under war pressure? A hundred and thirty firms employing women were kept running.
What more thrilling example of courage and forethought has been shown than by the Scottish Women's Hospitals in putting on the western front the first X-ray car to move from point to point near the lines? It but adds to the appeal of the work that those great scientists, Mrs. Ayrton and Madame Curie, selected the equipment.
It was a non-official body, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, which opened before the war was two weeks old the Women's Service Bureau, and soon placed forty thousand women as paid and volunteer workers. It was this bureau that furnished the government with its supervisors for the arsenals. The Women's Farm and Garden Union was the fore-runner of the official Land Army, and to it still is left the important work of enrolling those women who, while willing to undertake agricultural work, are disinclined to sign up for service "for the duration of the war."
Not only have unnumbered voluntary associations achieved miracles in necessary work, but many of them have gained untold discipline in the ridicule they have had to endure from a doubting public. I remember hunting in vain all about Oxford Circus for the tucked-away office of the Women's Signalling Corps. My inquiries only made the London bobbies grin. Everyone laughed at the idea of women signalling, but to-day the members are recognized officially, one holding an important appointment in the college of wireless telegraphy.
How Scotland Yard smiled, at first, at Miss Damer Dawson and her Women Police Service! But now the metropolitan police are calling for the help of her splendidly trained and reliable force.
And the Women's Reserve Ambulance Corps--I climbed and climbed to an attic to visit their headquarters! There was the commandant in her khaki, very gracious, but very upstanding, and maintaining the strictest discipline. No member of the corps entered or left her office without clapping heels together and saluting. The ambulance about which the corps revolved, I often met in the streets--empty. But those women had vision. They saw that England would need them some day. They had faith in their ability to serve. So on and on they went, training themselves to higher efficiency in body and mind. And to-day--well, theirs is always the first ambulance on the spot to care for the injured in the air-raids. The scoffers have remained to pray.
If Britain has a lesson for us it is an all-hail to non-official societies, an encouragement to every idea, a blessing on every effort which has behind it honesty of purpose. Great Britain's activities are as refreshingly diversified as her talents. They are not all under one hat.
In the training for new industrial openings this same spirit of non-official service showed itself. In munitions, for instance, private employers were the first to recognize that they had in women-workers a labor force worth the cost of training. The best of the skilled men in many cases were told off to give the necessary instruction. The will to do was in the learner; she soon mastered even complex processes, and at the end of a few weeks was doing even better than men in the light work, and achieving commendable output in the heavy. The suffrage organizations, whenever a new line of skilled work was opened to women, established well-equipped centers to give the necessary teaching. Not until it became apparent that the new labor-power only needed training to reach a high grade of proficiency, did County Councils establish, at government expense, technical classes for girls and women.
Equipment of the army was obviously the first and pressing obligation. Fields might lie fallow, for food in the early days could easily be brought from abroad, but men had to be registered, soldiers clothed and equipped. It was natural, then, that the new workers were principally used in registration work and in making military supplies.
But in the second year of the war came the conviction that the contest was not soon to be ended, and that the matter of raising food at home must be met. Women were again appealed to. A Land Army mobilized by women was created. At first this work was carried on under a centralized division of the National Service Department, but there has been decentralization and the Land Army is now a department of the Board of Agriculture. It is headed by Miss M. Talbot as director. Under this central body are Women's Agricultural Committees in each county, with an organizing secretary whose duty it is to secure full-time recruits.
The part-time workers in a locality are obtained by the wife of the squire or vicar acting as a volunteer registrar. Many of these part-time workers register to do the domestic work of the lusty young village housewife or mother while she is absent from home performing her allotted task on a nearby farm. The full-time recruits are not only secured by the organizers, but through registrations at every post office. Any woman can ask for a registration card and fill it out, and the postmaster then forwards the application to the committee. The next step is that likely applicants are called to the nearest center for examination and presentation of credentials. When finally accepted they are usually sent for six weeks' or three months' training to a farm belonging to some large estate. The landlord contributes the training, and the government gives the recruit her uniform and fifteen shillings a week to cover her board and lodging. At the end of her course she receives an armlet signifying her rank in the Land Army and is ready to go wherever the authorities send her.
The farmer in Great Britain no longer needs to be converted to the value of the new workers. He knows they can do every kind of farm work as well as men, and are more reliable and conscientious than boys, and he is ready, therefore, to pay the required minimum wage of eighteen shillings a week, or above that amount if the rate ruling in the district is higher.
Equally well organized is the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, familiarly known as the Waacs. The director is Mrs. Chalmers Watson. A would-be Waac goes to the center in her county for examination, and then is assigned to work at home or "somewhere in France" according to training and capacity. She may be fitted as a cook, a storekeeper, a telephone or telegraph operator, or for signalling or salvage work. Let us not say she will supplant a man, but rather set a man free for fuller service.
My niece, a slip of a girl, felt the call of duty at the beginning of the war. Her brothers were early volunteers in Kitchener's Army. They were in the trenches and she longed for the sensation of bearing a burden of hard work. She went to Woolwich Arsenal and toiled twelve hours a day. She broke under the strain, recuperated, and took up munition work again. She became expert, and was in time an overseer told off to train other women. But she was never satisfied, and always anxious to be nearer the great struggle. She broke away one day and went to Southampton for a Waac examination, and found herself one of a group of a hundred and fifty gentlewomen all anxious to enter active service and all prepared for some definite work. They stood their tests, and Dolly--that's the little niece's pet name, given to her because she is so tiny--is now working as an "engine fitter" just behind the fighting lines. Dainty Dolly, whom we have always treated as a fragile bit of Sèvres china, clad in breeches and puttees, under the booming of the great guns, is fitting patiently, part to part, the beating engine which will lift on wings some English boy in his flight through the blue skies of France.
But it must not be supposed that the magnificent service of British women, devoted, efficient and well-organized from top to bottom, realized itself without friction, any more than it will here. There were certainly two wars going on in Great Britain for a long time, and the internal strife was little less bitter than the international conflict. The most active center of this contest of which we have heard so little was in industry, and the combatants were the government, trade unions and women. The unions were doing battle because of fear of unskilled workers, especially when intelligent and easily trained; the government, in sore need of munition hands, was bargaining with the unskilled for long hours and low pay. Finally the government and the unions reluctantly agreed that women must be employed; both wanted them to be skillful, but not too skillful, and above all, to remain amenable. It has been made clear, too, that women enter their new positions "for the war only." At the end of hostilities--international hostilities--women are to hand over their work and wages to men and go home and be content. Will the program be fulfilled?
The wishes of women themselves may play some part. How do they feel? Obviously, every day the war lasts they get wider experience of the sorrows and pleasures of financial independence. Women are called the practical sex, and I certainly found them in England facing the fact that peace will mean an insufficient number of breadwinners to go around and that a maimed man may have low earning power. The women I met were not dejected at the prospect; they showed, on the contrary, a spirit not far removed from elation in finding new opportunities of service. After I had sat and listened to speech after speech at the annual conference of the National Union of Women Workers, with delegates from all parts of the country, presided over by Mrs. Creighton, widow of the late Bishop of London, there was no doubt in my mind that British women desired to enter paid fields of work, and regarded as permanent the great increase in their employment. No regrets or hesitations were expressed in a single speech, and the solutions of the problems inherent in the new situation all lay in the direction of equality of preparation and equality of pay with men.
The strongest element in the women's trade unions takes the same stand. The great rise in the employment of women is not regarded as a "war measure," and all the suggestions made to meet the hardships of readjustment, such as a "minimum wage for all unskilled workers, men as well as women," are based on the idea of the new workers being permanent factors in the labor market.
The same conclusion was reached in the report presented to the British Association by the committee appointed to investigate the "Replacement of Male by Female Labor." The committee found itself in entire disagreement with the opinion that the increased employment of women was a passing phase, and made recommendations bearing on such measures as improved technical training for girls as well as for boys, a minimum wage for unskilled men as well as women, equal pay for equal work, and the abolition of "half-timers." But while it was obvious that the greatest asset of belligerent nations is the labor of women, while learned societies and organizations of women laid down rules for their safe and permanent employment, the British Government showed marked opposition to the new workers. If the Cabinet did not believe the war would be brief, it certainly acted as if Great Britain alone among the belligerents would have no shortage of male industrial hands. At a time when Germany had five hundred thousand women in munition factories, England had but ten thousand.
There is no doubt that the country was at first organized merely for a spurt. Boys and girls were pressed into service, wages were cut down for women, hours lengthened for men. Government reports read like the Shaftesbury attacks on the conditions of early factory days. We hear again of beds that are never cold, the occupant of one shift succeeding the occupant of the next, of the boy sleeping in the same bed with two men, and three girls in a cot in the same room. Labor unrest was met at first by the Munitions War Act prohibiting strikes and lockouts, establishing compulsory arbitration and suspending all trade-union rules which might "hamper production." Under the law a "voluntary army of workers" signed up as ready to go anywhere their labor was needed, and local munition committees became labor courts endowed with power to change wage rates, to inflict fines on slackers, and on those who broke the agreements of the "voluntary army."
To meet the threatening rebellion, a Health of Munition Workers Committee under the Ministry of Munitions was appointed to "consider and advise on questions of industrial fatigue, hours of labor and other matters affecting the physical health and physical efficiency of workers in munition factories and workshops." On this committee there were distinguished medical men, labor experts, members of parliament and two women, Miss R.E. Squire of the Factory Department and Mrs. H.J. Tennant.
The committee was guided by a desire to have immense quantities of munitions turned out, and faced squarely the probability that the war would be of long duration. Its findings, embodied in a series of memoranda, have lessons for us, not only for war times, but for peace times, for all time.
On a seven day week the verdict was that "if the maximum output is to be secured and maintained for any length of time, a weekly period of rest must be allowed." Overtime was advised against, a double or triple shift being recommended.
In July, 1916, the committee published a most interesting memorandum on experiments in the relation of output to hours. In one case the output was increased eight percent by reducing the weekly hours from sixty-eight to fifty-nine, and it was found that a decrease to fifty-six hours per week gave the same output as fifty-nine. It need hardly be said that there was no change in machinery, tools, raw material or workers. All elements except hours of work were identical. Twenty-seven workers doing very heavy work increased their output ten percent by cutting weekly hours from sixty-one to fifty-five. In a munition plant employing thirty-six thousand hands it was found that the sick rate ranged from five to eight percent when the employees were working overtime, and was only three percent when they were on a double shift.
The war has forced Great Britain to carry out the findings of this committee and to consider more seriously than ever before, and for both men and women, the problem of industrial fatigue, the relation of accidents to hours of labor, industrial diseases, housing, transit, and industrial canteens. The munition worker is as important as the soldier and must have the best of care.
While the friction in the ranks of industrial women workers was still far from being adjusted, the government met its Waterloo in the contest with medical women. The service which they freely offered their country was at first sternly refused. Undaunted, they sought recognition outside the mother country. They knew their skill and they knew the soldiers' need. They turned to hospitable France, and received official recognition. On December 14, 1914, the first hospital at the front under British medical women was opened in Abbaye Royaumont, near Creil. It carries the official designation, "Hôpital Auxiliaire 301." The doctors, the nurses, the cooks, are all women. One of the capable chauffeurs I saw running the ambulance when I was in Creil. She was getting the wounded as they came down from the front. The French Government appreciated what the women were doing and urged them to give more help. At Troyes another unit gave the French army its first experience of nursing under canvas.
After France had been profiting by the skill of British women for months, Sir Alfred Keogh, Medical Director General, wisely insisted that the War Office yield and place a hospital in the hands of women. The War Hospital in Endell Street, London, is now under Dr. Flora Murray, and every office, except that of gateman, is filled by women. From the doctors, who rank as majors, down to the cooks, who rank as non-commissioned officers, every one connected with Endell Street has military standing. It indicated the long, hard road these women had traveled to secure official recognition that the doctor who showed me over the hospital told me, as a matter for congratulation, that at night the police brought in drunken soldiers to be sobered. "Every war hospital must receive them," she explained, "and we are glad we are not passed over, for that gives the stamp to our official standing."
It was a beautiful autumn day when I visited Endell Street. The great court was full of convalescents, and the orderlies in khaki, with veils floating back from their close-fitting toques, were carefully and skillfully lifting the wounded from an ambulance. I spoke to one of the soldier boys about the absence of men doctors and orderlies, and his quick query was, "And what should we want men for?" It seems that they always take that stand after a day or two. At first the patient is puzzled; he calls the doctor "sister" and the orderly "nurse," but ends by being an enthusiastic champion of the new order. Not a misogynist did I find. One poor fellow who had been wounded again and again and had been in many hospitals, declared, "I don't mean no flattery, but this place leaves nothink wanting."