Mobilizing Woman-Power · Chapter 9Illustrations (6)
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In answering the questionnaire which the New York Bureau of Occupations sent to one hundred and twenty-five industrial plants, the manager in almost every case replied, in regard to the possibility of employing women in such positions as research or control chemists, that applicants were "badly prepared." As hand workers, too, women are handicapped by lack of knowledge of machinery. In this tool age, high school girls are cut off from technical education, although they are destined to carry on in large measure our skilled trades. I am told that in Germany many factories had to close because only women were available as managers, and they had not been fitted by business and technical schools for the task.
If women individually are looking for a soft place, if they are afraid, as one manager expressed it, "to put on overalls and go into a vat," even when their country is so in need of their service, it is futile for them to ask collectively for equal opportunity and equal pay; if they individually fail to prepare as for a life work, regarding themselves as but temporarily in business or a profession, their collective demand upon the world for a fair field and no favor will be as ineffective as illogical.
The doors stand wide open. It rests with women themselves as to whether they shall enter in.
To the steady appeals of the employment bureaus, backed by the stern facts of life, the colleges are yielding. On examination I found that curricula are already being modified. None but the sorriest pessimist could doubt the nature of the final outcome, on realizing the pooling of brains which is going on in such associations as the Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations and the League for Business Opportunities. They work to the end of having young women not only soundly prepared for the new openings, but sensitive to the demands of a world set towards stern duty.
Not only is there call for a pooling of brains to look after the timid and unready, but there is need of combination to open the gates for the prepared and brave. Few who cheered the Red Cross nurses as they made their stirring march on Fifth Avenue, knew that those devoted women would, on entering the Military Nurse Corps, find themselves the only nurses among the Allies without a position of honor. The humiliation to our nurses in placing them below the orderlies in the hospitals is not only a blow to their esprit de corps, but a definite handicap to their efficiency. A nurse who was at the head of the nursing staff in a state hospital wrote from the front: "There is one thing the Nursing Committee needs to work for, and work hard, too, and that is, to make for nurses the rank of lieutenant. The Canadians have it, why not the Americans? You will find that it will make a tremendous difference. You see, there are no officers in our nursing personnel. One of our staff says we are the hired extras! It is really a great mistake." Uncle Sam may merely be waiting for a concentrated drive of public opinion against his tardy representatives.
And why should it be necessary to urge that while scores of young men are dashing to death in endeavors to learn to fly, there are women unmobilized who know how to soar aloft in safety? They have never, it is true, been submitted to laboratory tests in twirlings and twistings, but they reach the zenith. Two carried off the records in long distance flights, but both have been refused admission to the Flying Corps. Will it need a campaign to secure for our army this efficient service? Must women pool their brains to have Ruth Law spread her protecting wings over our boys in France?
To any one who realizes the significance of the military situation as it stands, and who is cognizant of the contrast between Germany's use of her entire people in her national effort, and the slow mobilization of woman-power among the Allies and entire lack of anything worthy the name of mobilization of the labor-power of women in the United States, there will come a determination to bury every jealousy between woman and woman, all prejudice in men, to cut red tape in government, with the one object of combining all resources.
The full power of our men must be thrown into military effort. And, then, if as a nation we have brains to pool, we will not stand niggling, but will throw women doctors in to render their service, grant to the nurse corps what it needs to ensure efficiency, throw open the technical schools to girls as well as to boys, modify the college course to meet the facts of life. Each woman unprepared is a national handicap, each prejudice blocking the use of woman-power is treachery to our cause.
As to the final outcome of united thought and group action among women, no one can doubt. Contacts will rub off angles, capable service will break down sex prejudice and overcome government opposition. But there is not time to wait for the slow development of "final outcomes."
Women must pool their brains against their own shortcomings, and in favor of their own ability to back up their country now and here.
It is a platitude to say that America is the most extravagant nation on earth. The whole world tells us so, and we do not deny it, being, indeed, a bit proud of the fact. Who is there among us who does not respond with sympathetic understanding to the defense of the bride reprimanded for extravagance by her mother-in-law (women have mothers-in-law), "John and I find we can do without the necessities of life. It's the luxuries we must have." One of the obstacles to complete mobilization of our country is extravagance. And at the center of this national failing sits the American woman enthroned.
Europe found it could not allow old-time luxury trades to go on, if the war was to be won. "Business as usual" is not in harmony with victory.
I remember the first time I heard the slogan, and how it carried me and everyone else away. The Zeppelins had visited London the night before. A house in Red Lion Mews was crushed down into its cellar, a heap of ruins. Every pane of glass was shattered in the hospitals surrounding Queen's Square, and ploughed deep, making a great basin in the center of the grass, lay the remnants of the bomb that had buried itself in the heart of England. The shops along Theobald's Road were wrecked, but in the heaps of broken glass in each show window were improvised signs such as, "Don't sympathize with us, buy something." The sign which was displayed oftenest read, "Business as usual."
The first I noticed was in the window of a print shop, the owner a woman. I talked to her through the frame of the shattered glass. She looked very pale and her face was cut, but she and everyone else was calm. And no one was doing business as usual more composedly than a wee tot trudging along to school with a nasty scratch from a glass splinter on her chubby cheek.
"Business as usual" expressed the fine spirit, the courage, the determination of a people. As the sporting motto of an indomitable race, it was very splendid. But war is not a sport, it is a cold, hard science, demanding every energy of the nation for its successful pursuit. In proportion as our indulgence in luxury has been greater than that of any European nation, our challenge to every business must be the more insistent. There must be a straight answer to two questions: Does this enterprise render direct war service, or, if not, is it essential to the well-being of our citizens?
But the discipline will not come from the gods. Nor will our government readily turn taskmaster. The effort must come largely as self-discipline, growing into group determination to win the war and the conviction that it is impossible to achieve victory and conserve the virility of our people, if any considerable part of the community devotes its time, energy and money to creating useless things. A nation can make good in this cataclysm only if it centers its whole power on the two objects in view: military victory, and husbanding of life and resources at home.
Let me hasten to add that the act of creating a thing does not include only the processes of industry. The act of buying is creative. The riot of luxury trades in the United States will not end so long as the American woman remains a steady buyer of luxuries. The mobilization of women as workers is no more essential to the triumph of our cause, than the mobilization of women for thrift. The beginning and end of saving in America rests almost entirely in the hands of women. They are the buyers in the working class and in the professional class. Among the wealthy they set the standard of living.
Practically every appeal for thrift has been addressed to the rich. I am not referring to the supply of channels into which to pour savings, but to appeals to make the economies which will furnish the means to buy stamps or bonds. Those appeals are addressed almost wholly to the well-to-do, as for example, suggestions as to reducing courses at dinner or cutting out "that fourth meal."
Self-denial, no doubt, is supposed to be good for the millionaire soul, but to such it is chiefly recommended, I think, as an example sure of imitation. What the rich do, other women will follow, is the idea. But the steady insistence that we fight in this war for democracy has put into the minds of the people very definite demands for independence and for freedom.
In such a democratic world the newly adopted habits of the wealthy will not prove widely convincing. Economy needs other than an aristocratic stimulus.
I do not mean to under-estimate the value of economy in the well-to-do class. There is no doubt that shop windows on Fifth Avenue are a severe commentary upon our present intelligence and earnestness of purpose. No one, I think, would deny that it would be a service if the woman of fashion ceased to drape fur here, there and everywhere on her gowns except where she might really need the thick pelt to keep her warm, and instead saved the price of the garment which serves no purpose but that of display, and gave the money in Liberty Bonds to buy a fur-lined coat for some soldier, or food for a starving baby abroad. And overburdened as the railways are with freight and ordinary passenger traffic, I am sure the general public will not fail to appreciate to the full a self-denial which leads patrons of private cars, Pullman and dining coaches to abandon their self-indulgence.
Undoubtedly economy among the rich is of value. I presume few would gainsay that it would have been well for America if the use of private automobiles had long since ceased, and the labor and plants used in their making turned to manufacturing much-needed trucks and ambulances. But while not inclined to belittle the work of any possible saving and self-sacrifice on the part of those of wealth, it seems to me that the most fruitful field for war economy lies among simple people. Thrift waits for democratization.
We of limited means hug some of the most extravagant of habits. The average working-class family enjoys none of the fruits of coöperation We keep each to our isolated family group, while the richer a person is the more does she gather under her roof representatives of other families. Her cook may come from the Berri family, the waitress may be an Andersen, the nurse an O'Hara.
The poor might well practice the economy of fellowship.
The better-off live in apartment houses where the economy of central heating is practised, while the majority of the poor occupy tenements where the extravagance of the individual stove is indulged in. The saving of coal is urged, but the authorities do not seek to secure for the poor the comfort of the true method of fuel saving.
The richer a family is, the more it saves by the use of skilled service. The poor, clinging to their prejudices and refusing to trust one another, do not profit by coöperative buying, or by central kitchens run by experts. Money is wasted by amateurish selection of food and clothing, and nutritive values are squandered by poor cooking.
Unfortunately Uncle Sam does not suggest how many War Saving Stamps could be bought as a result of economy along these lines.
The woman with the pay envelope may democratize thrift. She knows how hard it is to earn money, and has learned to make her wages reach a long way. Then, too, she has it brought home to her each pay day that health is capital. She finds that it is economy to keep well, for lost time brings a light pay envelope. Every woman who keeps herself in condition is making a war saving. There has been no propaganda as yet appealing to women to value dress according to durability and comfort rather than according to its prettiness, to bow to no fashion which means the lessening of power. To corset herself as fashion dictates, to prop herself on high heels, means to a woman just so much lost efficiency, and even the most thoughtless, if appealed to for national saving, might learn to turn by preference in dress, in habits, in recreation, to the simple things.
The Japanese, I am told, make a ceremony of going out from the city to enjoy the beauties of a moonlight night. We go to a stuffy theatre and applaud a night "set." Nature gives her children the one, and the producer charges his patrons for the other. A propaganda of democratic war economy would teach us to delight in the beauties of nature.
In making the change from business as usual to economy, Europe suffered hardship, because although the retrenchments suggested were fairly democratic it had not created channels into which savings might be thrown with certainty of their flowing on to safe expenditures. Europe was not ready with its great thrift schemes, nor had the adjustments been made which would enable a shop to turn out a needed uniform, let us say, in place of a useless dress.
Definite use of savings has been provided for in the United States. The government needs goods of every kind to make our military effort successful. Camps must be built for training the soldiers, uniforms, guns and ammunition supplied. Transportation on land and sea is called for. The government needs money to carry on the industries essential to winning the war.
If a plucky girl who works in a button factory refuses to buy an ornament which she at first thought of getting to decorate her belt, and puts that twenty-five cents into a War Saving Stamp, all in the spirit of backing up her man at the front, she will not find herself thrown out of employment; instead, while demands for unnecessary ornamental fastenings will gradually cease, she will be kept busy on government orders.
Profiting by the errors of those nations who had to blaze out new paths, the United States knit into law, a few months after the declaration of war, not only the quick drafting of its man-power for military service, but methods of absorbing the people's savings. If we neither waste nor hoard, we will not suffer as did Europe from wide-spread unemployment. There is more work to be done than our available labor-power can meet.
There is nothing to fear from the curtailment of luxury; our danger lies in lack of a sound definition of extravagance. Uncle Sam could get more by appeals to simple folk than by homilies preached to the rich. The Great War is a conflict between the ideals of the peoples. 'Tis a people's war, and with women as half the people. The savings made to support the war must needs, then, be made by the people, for the people.
There has been no compelling propaganda to that end. The suggestion of mere "cutting down" may be a valuable goal to set for the well-to-do, but it is not a mark to be hit by those already down to bed rock. The only saving possible to those living on narrow margins is by coöperation, civil or state.
It is a mad extravagance, for instance, to kill with autos children at play in the streets. A saving of life could easily be achieved through group action, by securing children's attendants, by opening play-grounds on the roofs of churches and public buildings, by shutting off streets dedicated to the sacred right of children to play. This would be a war saving touching the heart and the enthusiasm of the people.
Central municipal heating is not a wild dream, but a recognized economy in many places. Municipal kitchens are not vague surmisings, but facts achieved in the towns of Europe. They are forms of war thrift. In America no such converting examples of economy are as yet given, and not an appeal has been made to women to save through solidarity.
Uncle Sam has been commendably quick and wise in offering a reservoir to hold the tiny savings, but slow in starting a democratic propaganda suggesting ways of saving the pennies.
If business as usual is a poor motto, so is life as usual, habits as usual.
Man's admiration for things as mother used to do them is as great an obstacle as business as usual in the path of winning the war and husbanding the race. The glamour surrounding the economic feats of mother in the past hides the shortcomings of today.
I once saw one of her old fortresses, a manor home where in bygone days she had reigned supreme. In the court yard was the smoke house where she cured meat and fish. In the cellar were the caldrons and vats where long ago she tried tallow and brewed beer. And there were all the utensils for dealing with flax. In the garret I saw the spindles for spinning cotton and wool, and the hand looms for weaving the homespun. In her day, mother was a great creator of wealth.
But then an economic earthquake came. Foundations were shaken, the roof was torn off her domestic workshop. Steam and machinery, like cyclones, carried away her industries, and nothing was left to her but odds and ends of occupations.
Toiling in the family circle from the days of the cave dwellers, mother had become so intimately associated in the tribal mind with the hearthstone that the home was called her sphere. Around this segregation accumulated accretions of opinion, layer on layer emanating from the mind of her mate. Let us call the accretions the Adamistic Theory. Its authors happened to be the government and could use the public treasury in furtherance of publicity for their ideas set forth in hieroglyphics cut in stone, or written in plain English and printed on the front page of an American daily.
One of the few occupations left to mother after the disruption of her sphere at the end of the eighteenth century was the preparation of food. In the minds of men, food, from its seed sowing up to its mastication, has always been associated with woman. Mention food and the average man thinks of mother. That is the Adam in him. And so, quite naturally, one must first consider this relation of women to food in the Adamistic Theory.
When the world under war conditions asked to be fed, Adam, running true to his theory, pointed to mother as the source of supply, and declared with an emphasis that came of implicit faith, that the universe need want for nothing, if each woman would eliminate waste in her kitchen and become a voluntary and obedient reflector of the decisions of state and national food authorities. This solution presupposed a highly developed sense of community devotion in women running hand in hand with entire lack of gift for community action. Woman, it was expected, would display more than her proverbial lack of logic by embracing with enthusiasm state direction and at the same time remain an exemplar of individualistic performance. The Adamistic scheme seems still further to demand for its smooth working that the feminine group show self-abnegation and agree that it is not itself suited to reason out general plans.
It is within the range of possibility, however, that no comprehensive scheme of food conservation or effective saving in any line can be imposed on women without consulting them. The negro who agreed "dat de colored folk should keep in dar places," touched a fundamental note in human nature, over-running sex as well as racial boundaries, when he added, "and de colored folk must do de placin'." It might seem to run counter to this bit of wisdom for women to be told that the welfare of the world depends upon them, and then for no woman to be given administrative power to mobilize the group.
But the contest between man's devotion to the habits of his ancestry in the female line, and the ideas of his very living women folk, is as trying to him as it is interesting to the outside observer. The conflicting forces illustrate a universal fact. It is always true that the ruling class, when a discipline and a sacrifice are recognized as necessary, endeavors to make it appear that the new obligation should be shouldered by the less powerful. For instance, to take an illustration quite outside the domestic circle, when America first became convinced that military preparation was incumbent upon us, the ruling class would scarcely discuss conscription, much less adopt universal service. That is, it vetoed self-discipline. In many States, laws were passed putting off upon children in the schools the training which the voting adults knew the nation needed.
In the same way, when food falls short and the victualing of the world becomes a pressing duty, the governing class adopts a thesis that a politically less-favored group can, by saving in small and painful ways, accumulate the extra food necessary to keep the world from starving. The ruling class seeks cover in primitive ideas, accuses Eve of introducing sin into the world, and calls upon her to mend her wasteful ways.
Men, of course, know intellectually that much food is a factory product in these days, but emotionally they have a picture of mother, still supplying the family in a complete, secret, and silent manner.
This Adamistic emotion takes command at the crisis, for when human beings are suddenly faced with a new and agitating situation, primitive ideas seize them. Mother, it is true, did create the goods for immediate consumption, and so the sons of Adam, in a spirit of admiration, doffing their helmets, so to speak, to the primitive woman, turn in this time of stress and call confidently upon Eve's daughters to create and save. The confidence is touching, but perhaps the feminine reaction will not be, and perchance ought not to be just such as Adam expects.
Women have passed in aspiration, and to some extent in action, out of the ultra-individualistic stage of civilization.
The food propaganda reflects the hiatus in Adam's thought. I have looked over hundreds of publications issued by the agricultural departments and colleges of the various States. They tell housewives what to "put into the garbage pail," what to "keep out of the garbage pail," what to substitute for wheat, how to make soap, but, with a single exception, not a word issued suggests to women any saving through group action.
This exception, which stood out as a beacon light in an ocean of literature worthy of the Stone Age, was a small pamphlet issued by the Michigan Agricultural College on luncheons in rural schools. Sound doctrine was preached on the need of the children for substantial and warm noon meals, and the comparative ease and economy with which such luncheons could be provided at the school house. Children can of course be better and more cheaply fed as a group than as isolated units supplied with a cold home-prepared lunch box. And yet with the whole machinery of the state in his hands, Adam's commissions, backed by the people's money, goad mother on to isolated endeavor. She plants and weeds and harvests. She dries and cans, preserves and pickles. Then she calculates and perchance finds that her finished product is not always of the best and has often cost more than if purchased in the open market.
It may be the truest devotion to our Allies to challenge the individualistic rôle recommended by Adam to mother, for it will hinder, not help, the feeding of the world to put women back under eighteenth century conditions. Food is short and expensive because labor is short. And even when the harvest is ripe, the saving of food cannot be set as a separate and commendable goal, and the choice as to where labor shall be expended as negligible. It is a prejudiced devotion to mother and her ways which leads Adam in his food pamphlets to advise that a woman shall sit in her chimney corner and spend time peeling a peach "very thin," when hundreds of bushels of peaches rot in the orchards for lack of hands to pick them.
Just how wide Adam's Eve has opened the gate of Eden and looked out into the big world is not entirely clear, but probably wide enough to glimpse the fact that all the advice Adam has recently given to her runs counter to man's method of achievement. Men have preached to one another for a hundred years and more and practiced so successfully the concentration in industry of unlimited machinery with a few hands, that even mother knows some of the truths in regard to the creation of wealth in the business world, and she is probably not incapable of drawing a conclusion from her own experience in the transfer of work from the home to the factory.
If they are city dwellers, women have seen bread and preserves transferred; if farm dwellers, they have seen the curing of meat and fish transferred, the making of butter and cheese. They know that because of this transfer the home is cleaner and quieter, more people better fed and clothed, and the hours of the factory worker made shorter than those "mother used to work." With half an eye women cannot fail to note that the labor which used to be occupied in the home in interminable hours of spinning, baking and preserving, has come to occupy itself for regulated periods in the school, in business, in factory or cannery. And lo, Eve finds herself with a pay envelope able to help support the quieter, cleaner home!
All this is a commonplace to the business man, who knows that the evolution has gone so far that ten percent of the married women of America are in gainful pursuits, and that capital ventured on apartment hotels brings a tempting return.
But the Adamistic theory is based on the dream that women are contentedly and efficiently conducting in their flats many occupations, and longing to receive back into the life around the gas-log all those industries which in years gone by were drawn from the fireside and established as money making projects in mill or work-shop. And so Adam addresses an exhortation to his Eve: "Don't buy bread, bake it; don't buy flour, grind your own; don't buy soap, make it; don't buy canned, preserved, or dried food, carry on the processes yourself; don't buy fruits and vegetables, raise them."
Not a doubt seems to exist in Adam's mind as to the efficiency of functioning woman-power in this way. According to the Adamistic theory, work as mother used to do it is unqualifiedly perfect. This flattering faith is naturally balm to women's hearts, and yet there are skeptics among them. When quite by themselves women speculate as to how much of the fruit and vegetables now put up in the home will "work."
They smile when the hope is expressed that the quality will rise above the old-time domestic standard. The home of the past was a beehive in which women drudged, and little children were weary toilers, and the result was not of a high grade. Statistics have shown that seventy-five percent of the home-made bread of America was a poor product. I lived as a child in the days of home-made bread. Once in so often the batch of bread "went sour," and there seemed to be an unfailing supply of stale bread which "must be eaten first." Those who cry out against a city of bakers' bread, have never lived in a country of the home-made loaf. It is the Adamistic philosophy, so complimentary to Eve, that leads us to expect that all housewives can turn out a product as good as that of an expert who has specialized to the one end of making bread, and who is supplied with expensive equipment beyond the reach of the individual to possess. But there are rebellious consumers who point out that the baker is under the law, while the housewife is a law unto herself. Against the baker's shortcomings such brave doubters assure us we have redress, we can refuse to patronize him; against the housewife there is no appeal, her family must swallow her product to the detriment of digestion.