INTRODUCTION F all the problems that have come in the train of the in O dustrial revolution none are more perplexing than those that concern women. It is a wearisome commonplace that the factory has taken over much of the industrial work of the home, and that women have followed their work into the factory; but the fundamental change thus introduced into their life has not always been clearly seen. Formerly home and industry were synonymous terms for them; training for industry was training in household management. To-day industrial work is sharply separated from the management of the home, and there has come into the occupation of women a dualism that finds no parallel in the life of men. Most of the difficulties of women in industry relate themselves in some way to this fact. An unregulated competitive system is good only for the strong. Women, by virtue of their double relation as industrial producers and as homemakers and mothers, are industrially weak. Most women are fundamentally interested in the home. rather than the factory, and industrial occupation is only an interlude in their real business. Working women so-called are mostly mere girls under twenty-five who go to work with no thought of industry as a permanent career. Uninterested, untrained, unskilled, they are on a low level of efficiency, and they have little motive for climbing to a higher level. In industry a few years, then out of it into the home, they lack the discipline and solidity that come with a permanent life task. Small wonder that they crowd the unskilled labor market, and that their work commands a mere pittance. Inefficient in their industrial work, they tend to become quite as inefficient in their function of homekeepers: for during the very years when they might otherwise be acquiring the household arts, they are busy in shop or factory, subject to a discipline requiring obedience to mechanical routine rather than that power of thoughtful initiative which marks the skilful homemaker. Moreover, they become accustomed to the stimulus and excitement of the crowd, so that they do not want to be alone, and home life they too often find monotonous and uninteresting. The untrained, unskilled factory hand becomes the untrained, unskilled wife and mother. Working women are not only untrained and inefficient, but industrially ignorant and lacking in standards. Hence they put up with whatever conditions the employer imposes. They do not "make a fuss," and therefore they get treatment to which no man would submit. Moreover, such a large proportion of them are mere "pin-money girls" that there is no minimum standard of wages, such as is furnished for men by the necessary cost of maintaining a family. Women's wages are perhaps in a majority of cases simply supplementary earnings, and the wages of all women, self-dependent or not, tend to be fixed on the assumption that they will live parasitically on their relatives. As a result of this lack of standards, the whole subject of the pay and conditions of women's work is a veritable chaos. Standardization has been well worked out in many men's trades, and technical progress has followed. In women's occupations it is often easier for an unprogressive employer to throw the burden of his backwardness on docile women employes by paying low wages than it is to keep up with the march of improvement in machinery and methods. So much for the human element in this problem. On the industrial side we find, as is more than once pointed out in these papers, that industry as now organized takes no cognizance of the special needs of the worker. Competitive cheapness must be obtained at all costs. If the worker does not insist on his rights, he gets small part of the benefits of progress. Hence changes in machinery and organization bring little advantage to women workers; such changes, in fact, are frequently carried through with distinct loss to them, however great the gain to society in general. But more than this, our present industry is made for men, and it wants only standard workers, working standard hours at standard speed. The workers must conform to this inelastic system or go without a job. |