The Family and its Members Part 18

=Turning From Compulsory to Attractive Methods of Reform.=--To undertake that social task, the psychology of social effort must be turned from compulsive methods of prevention of legal divorce, when such divorce is sought, to ways of making marriage choices wiser, marriage experience more sane and better balanced by sense of obligation to the nearer and more remote of social relations, and by putting at the command of all, the helpful sympathy and the social guidance that can alone hold to firm and n.o.ble lines the wavering and the weak.

QUESTIONS ON THE BROKEN FAMILY

1. Is the admitted increase in divorce wholly a testimony to moral degeneracy? If so, what can be done about it? If not, what else does it indicate?

2. What are the main points to work for in order to reduce the number of divorces, and to remove the social evils of which divorces are only the symptom?

3. Should the social psychology be directed princ.i.p.ally toward preventing people from getting divorce or from remarrying after divorce, or toward making marriage so generally successful that fewer people want to separate?

4. What is specially needed in education both of youth and the adult in the United States in the interest of family stability and family success?

5. Make a list of causes that in your opinion justify legal separation or divorce and find out whether or not these causes are named in the statutes of your State. If they are not, what should be done about it?

6. What is done for and with the children of legally separated and divorced persons in your State?

CHAPTER XIII

THE FAMILY AND THE WORKERS

"It is all work, and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred world. For the thistle a blade of gra.s.s, later a drop of nouris.h.i.+ng milk, later a n.o.bler man. Man perfects himself as well as the world by working."--CARLYLE.

"Every man's task is his life preserver."--EMERSON.

"What was his name? I do not know his name.

No form of bronze and no memorial stones Show me the place where lie his mouldering bones.

Only a cheerful city stands, Builded by his hardened hands; Only ten thousand homes, Where every day The cheerful play Of love and hope and courage comes; These are his monuments, and these alone,-- There is no form of bronze and no memorial stone."

--EDWARD EVERETT HALE.

"Let us now praise the artificer and the workmaster Who is wakeful to finish his work.

These put their trust in their hands And each becometh wise in his own work.

Though they sit not in the seat of the judge, Nor understand the covenant of judgment; Though they declare not instruction nor utter dark sayings Yet without these shall not a city be inhabited Nor shall men sojourn therein.

For these maintain the fabric of the world And in the handiwork of their craft is their prayer."

--ECCLESIASTICUS.

=Changes from Ancient to Modern Forms of Labor.=--The change from the domestic and handicraft stage in industry to the capitalized, power-driven, machine-dominated, and highly specialized work-system of the present day has been often described and is a part of all the economic problems of modern times. We do not need here to rehea.r.s.e the details of that change or to speak of its effect upon workers in general. What we must do, however, is to trace specifically some of the results of that industrial change in the const.i.tution and in the development of family life.

In the old order the worker owned his tool, selected his material, controlled the process of his task, and often was master of the sale of the finished product. Hence, as has so often been shown, the character of a man was so obviously a part of the stock-in-trade of the worker, his judgment, probity and skill were so clearly causes of his success in handicraft, that the ethical training of life came definitely through the exercise of work-power. Now, as we are often reminded, the worker is divorced from the management and control of his work-process and is a "hand," merely attached to a machine that others must choose, buy and install, the product of which is in only an infinitesimal part his responsibility and of the profit from which another takes the lion's share. This has made many feel that ethical training in life must come to the worker from his leisure hours only, and that his task must be always merely a routine one, to be got through with as soon as possible each day in order that he may "live"

in the hours left from work. This idea cannot be accepted by anyone who realizes the character-drill that may inhere in any form of useful labor. The need is to permeate the methods of modern industry with the creative spirit, to mix the management of all business and manufacturing with the brains of workmen as well as of directors and to make a new connection, strong, obvious, and thought-compelling, between the worker and the control and responsibility of his work.

While this is being accomplished the results of the change from handicraft to machine work in the family order must be understood and unsocial elements in that change minimized. It must be remembered that among the opportunities of character-training in work lost by the man, the woman and the child and youth, by the change in industrial methods, is the constant influence of the home life while at work. The old industries cl.u.s.tered about the fireside. It made the household a work-place, and some feel that this was a detriment to home life and that we have a better chance to make real centres of love and happiness now that we have taken out of the domestic field almost all the elements of manufacture and of trade. However that may be, this much is sure, that when father and mother worked together, and children learned how to work while still within the family influence, it was easier than it is now to make the daily task one of mutual cooperation and mutual service within the family circle.

=The Old Household a Work-place.=--We have pa.s.sed laws now, forbidding "home industries" because so many "sweated trades" find their last and often impregnable fortress in the crowded rooms of the tenement living-places. This may be necessary and may be well to do, but the fact remains that something inhered in the old domestic training of children and youth in useful work within the home which was lost when the factory was built and the young workers had to seek their jobs outside the family circle. And that something of work-drill and habit-forming in the interest of self-support and family usefulness we are now trying to reintroduce into the education of children and youth by elaborate and costly "manual training," "Pre-vocational and Vocational courses" and similar departments in the schools.

=Welfare Managers in Modern Times.=--The fact that hours of work and conditions affecting the workers can be standardized more easily when those workers are ma.s.sed in large numbers under one recognized owner and manager of a great industry has sometimes blinded us to the need of each young person to have constantly near at hand a personal representative of society's interest in the development of his character; some interpreter of social customs and ideals to follow which will make for his advantage. We are trying now to get "Welfare Managers," paid chaperons, nurses and teachers, into business concerns to take the place of older forms of social direction and care for youthful workers. These functionaries often do much good and are recognized expressions of the social interest of employers. Since they are installed avowedly for the purpose of making conditions better for the younger, weaker, less trained and more needy of the workers, "Welfare Managers" often find a hostile or at least indifferent att.i.tude toward their efforts on the part of the higher paid, the better established, and more competent women workers, especially those organized in Trade Unions with the slogan of "Not Charity, but Justice." They do, however, reach with light and leading some of the darker sides of modern industry as related to the younger workers.

=Child-labor.=--The student of industrial history knows that child-labor is not a new evil. Children were often overworked and cruelly driven when parents, guardians, and those to whom they were "bound out" as apprentices were the only taskmasters and their labor was wholly within the household. Indeed, Hutchins and Harrison, in their _History of Factory Legislation_, declare that "it is not easy to say whether children were really worked harder in the early factories than under the domestic system which they replaced." Edith Abbott, in her excellent summary of _The Early History of Child Labor in America_, shows clearly that at the bottom of the ancient desire to use very young persons in industry was a conviction that work, constant and hard work, is the only safeguard against evil. "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" was not a figure of speech to our ancestors, it was statement of a sober fact. This feeling led naturally to the conditions that gave Samuel Slater, the pioneer in textile manufacture in New England, a collection of child workers in his first mill as his only laborers and at ages between seven and twelve years.

We are now able to see and remedy some evils of child-labor in the factory system which pa.s.sed unnoticed and for which no prohibitive law was in existence in the handicraft stage. It is true, however, as all must recognize, that the modern specialization of labor and modern use of machines allows a wholesale exploitation of youth and of physical weakness impossible in older forms of industry. Hence the facts of modern industry justify and make necessary the "Child Labor Movement."

Yet vital and strong as that movement is, we have to-day, as has been stated in another connection, a misuse of children by millions in industry. We have also a dangerous overuse of youth in industry, and we have a reckless waste of mothers and of potential mothers in unsuitable work. We have also certain dangers to family life in the turning of attention and of ambition of young people away from family interests into fields of industrial activity which are inimical to family success. This makes the problem of the family and the workers one of great difficulty and one to be given the most serious attention on the part of those who are themselves above the economic conditions which operate to complicate that problem among the poor and struggling.

=Increase in Women Wage-earners.=--In the first place, we must note the tendency toward rapid increase of the numbers of women listed by the census as in "gainful occupations." Without noting in this connection the conditions just before and during the Great War, conditions not at all indicative of normal increase in the numbers of working-women, we trace in the period from 1880 to 1910 a rise from 2,647,157 to 8,075,772 of the number of women in receipt of salary or wages for work outside their own homes. The estimate of 1920, now given, of nearly 41,609,192 "persons of both s.e.xes and of ten years old and over engaged in gainful occupations" shows us 8,549,399 "females." Of these, over a million are engaged in "Professional service" (a larger proportion than of men so listed and, of course, indicating the great majority of women in the teaching profession).

More than two millions are listed in "Domestic and Personal service."

That leaves over three millions working in "agriculture, forestry, animal industry, manufacture and mechanical industries," and nearly a million and a half in "clerical occupations." The use of ten years of age in such lists is now obsolete as an indication of custom in employment of youth. Fourteen years of age is the norm in the listing of youthful workers and the age limits should be revised to suit that rise in the legal age of the child wage-earner as generally practised now in the United States. With that understanding, the statistics for "Child Labor Certificates" issued by the large manufacturing cities of our country show an army of young workers, more than twenty thousand in New York City alone, annually entering the compet.i.tive industrial field with full consent of society. This all means that millions of women and very young persons who under the earlier forms of industrial life would have been employed (however steadily or with whatever handicaps or even cruelty) within some family circle, are now under the full control of ma.s.s-direction, ma.s.s-standardization, and ma.s.s-influence in their daily work.

=Social Pressure on the Individual Worker.=--This pressure is in itself almost a sufficient reason for the family instability now seen.

To divorce all the working-time, and all the work-tendency, and most of the work-training from home life is to weaken the hold of the family upon the average worker. Members of a family in which each has definite and firm relation to some different requirement and control connected with a daily task are likely to acquire an independent relation to society in general. In such eases it requires a far more vital and enduring affection, a distinctly superior mutual understanding and sense of justice, and a far larger natural equipment of tact and power of adjustment than was required in other economic conditions, in order to make the family life enduring and happy. The economic self-interest of each member of the family in the domestic circle was obviously that of every other member when the household was a workshop. Even, the land and all which it implied was a family possession in primitive days. And the worker's equipment, owned privately, was limited in the early days. We read that "tools, weapons, slaves and captured women and the products of some special skill were generally private possession, but products of group-work, such as the capture and killing of buffalo, salmon, and all larger game among the North American Indians, and the maize which individual women tended but which belonged to the household or the tribe in common, were all shared as community property." When to this communal possession of products of group-activity were added control over marriage portions, however those might be appropriated, and the management of all property thought to be of group-value, we can see that all of economic weight of influence now so individualized once went into the family a.s.set.

In the mediaeval times, when laborers were gaining slowly a cla.s.s consciousness outlined by Guilds and Unions of special groups of workers, the family was still the main centre of work-direction and of united profit from work, and hence it was evident to the dullest mind and the coldest heart that members of a family should work and save together. Now the whole trend of industrial relations.h.i.+p is toward making independent and individualistic connection between the worker and his job outside of family unity. Even movements for legal protection of the worker against exploitation by masters in industry often take little account of family relations.h.i.+p or the varying inherited family ideals. Setting the well-being of one member of the family against what is supposed to be the well-being of other members of the family, as in the case of some child-labor laws, may be necessary and socially wise, but it surely does not lead to family stability.

=Demands of Family Life Upon Industry and Labor Legislation.=--The demands of family life should at least be stated and have some weight in any further attempts to make the lot of the individual worker better, and should be considered in any drastic attempts to enforce labor legislation which sets the parent and the child against each other in the courts, or which hampers a mother in what she deems of vital necessity in the carrying out of her parental duty.

"The Code for Women in Industry," issued by the division of Women in Industry of the Department of Labor, in cooperation with the "War Labor Board" and the "War Labor Policies Board," when the questions concerning standards for employment of women in war plants were acute, as published in the _Survey_ of January 4, 1919, is in brief summary as follows: No woman employed or permitted to work more than eight hours a day or forty-eight hours a week. One day of rest a week demanded for all and no night work for minors or women. The basis of the wage-scale to be form of occupation, not s.e.x; and no lesser wage for women permitted unless it can be proved that their employment lessens the output of work. A legal minimum wage for all women, which should include cost of living of dependents as well as of individuals.

All work conditions to be good and safety adequately secured. Women to be prohibited from working in occupations where exposure to heat or cold or to poisonous substances, or where bad position or too great muscular strain, endanger health. Home work prohibited.

=Should Adult Women and Children be Listed Together in Labor Laws?=--There is grave question whether some of these items listed as essentials in the protection of women in industry, and certainly useful in the peculiar conditions of munition manufacture into which women rushed in such vast numbers in answer to the call of war, should form a permanent outline of the relation of law to women workers.

Some of them have, and clearly, a place in any future code in peace time. The requirement for one day of rest in seven; the demand that quality and power of labor, not s.e.x, shall set the wage-scale; and the legal requirement for sanitary, safe, and moral conditions in workshops and factories, all are vital to sound social demand in the interest of women workers. Are these not also demands for just labor conditions of men? The eight-hour day is now fixed as a standard for men and women alike, with the forty-eight hour a week definition. A minimum wage, including cost of living for dependents as well as for individuals involved, has justice at its base, but requires for its application less a blanket sum indicated by law than a wages-board or other form of discriminating commission with power to adjust flexibly, with due consideration of place and of quality of work, the wages to the task. Conditions of labor should be "good" in all cases, and what is good should be fixed by disinterested persons. Physical safety and moral protection must be secured at all hazards, and in the case of women special protection, particularly for those under twenty-one years of age, is needed. Any work which is peculiarly a menace to health and to the race-life for mothers or potential mothers may well be forbidden by law. The absolute prohibition of night work and of home work to adult women may well be left in the background, however, until the industrial situation is clearer for all women workers. The evils of night work for the "sweated" woman, untrained for any lucrative labor and who has to catch on to the labor wheels at any point open to her effort at middle age, must not blind us to the fact that one of the most precious things in the inheritance of brave and loyal natures is the determination to earn for one's own support and for that of one's dearest. The tenement labor, which is such an evil in many of our cities and one so impossible to deal with adequately by ordinary inspectors.h.i.+p provision, is not all there is to "home work."

It may well be that, as has been before indicated, the new uses of electrical power may return to the home, and in ways to the advantage of the family, some of the processes now wholly under factory control and provision. The point is that while there cannot be too much protective legislation for children and youth, the place of adult women in the labor world must not be too firmly and exclusively held by the side of children lest we add to the difficulties women still experience in finding and keeping a place in the world of modern industry.

=Women in War Work.=--In England, we are told, there were one million women employed in war plants during the great struggle with Germany.

In every variety of munitions manufacture women were found in great numbers, often furnis.h.i.+ng eighty per cent, or more of the total number employed. It is a fact that they "made good." It is also a fact that the average of health among the working women of England rose in many localities where women were employed at these unwonted tasks. The reason given for this by one keen observer being that the higher wages earned enabled many thousands of women, before undernourished because of their poverty, to have "three square meals a day." When we remember that in England there are nearly two million more women than men, and that the men who served in the army and have returned physically and mentally able to take back the jobs they left for army service are clamoring for them, and when we remember that the struggle for a standard of living never goes backward and that women workers once used to good wages will not willingly take poor ones again, we can see what difficulties the war has made in our sister country for both men and women in industry.

In our own country the one and a quarter million women engaged in industrial work directly or indirectly connected with the war service when the first investigation was made in fifteen states, under the auspices of the National League of Women's Service, were but a section of the army of women who were enlisted in war work, paid or unpaid and of various kinds. Now we have an unemployment problem of our own with something of the same complaint of the men of England that the returned soldier finds a woman in his place, a woman who is still wanted, perhaps, by the employer and who does not wish to relinquish her job.

When Mrs. Muhlhauser Richards took charge of the Woman's Division of the Department of Labor in the effort to make a clearing house of women's work in the interest of help to the government it was not simply a measure for temporary use or of temporary value. The idea still persists in peace as well as in war, and justly, that the interests of women in industry require a special division of the Labor Department in order that we shall be able to know what is needed for their protection in the interest of family life as well as understand what individual women require in justice when they are wage-earners. A minimum wage is demanded and in several states made a legal requirement, but to name a definite sum per week puts a stated figure where a movable and changeable condition inheres in the situation.

Experts in labor reform, therefore, urge the pa.s.sage of legislative bills providing for "wage commissions to determine living wages for women and minors," and such have been secured in several states.

The linking of women of all ages with minors may be necessary for protection of individual women from exploitation, but again, it must be insisted that such a blanket cover for women workers of all ages may not be for the ultimate good of the adult, competent yet struggling women, who are trying to compete with men for a place in the world of labor. The fact is that we often approach the problems of work and wages and general labor conditions from the angle of the most needy, the most exploited, the least trained, and the poorest in opportunity. This may be the highway of philanthropy and to be travelled in the interest of social helpfulness, but it is not all the roads labor reform must use.

=Minimum Wage for Fathers of Families Real Need.=--When we study questions of labor as related to family well-being we must begin with an ideal of what the normal family requires of its members, men, women, and older children, and place in the first position of economic requirement the family demand upon the husband and father. He must, we have said, be in position to be a "good provider" for his group. That means he must be trained to be a worker, faithful, efficient, intelligent, who does something which society needs to have done and for which employers can and will pay adequate wages. That means vocational training, guidance, and opportunity. That means, also, an economic system not easily convulsed by bad times and ups and downs in the industrial world. That means, again, ease and cheapness of transportation in order that families may live in decent homes and yet the chief wage-earner go back and forth to his work without too great strain of strength or purse. That means some social control of housing facilities, food supply, public sanitation, and educational facilities which will secure the essential of human living to all workers and their families. To work harder to secure these vital elements of family well-being is the task of all. If we were as anxious as citizens to secure opportunity for the men and women who make up the great army of average workers, self-supporting but at cost of struggle often too severe, as we are anxious as philanthropists to ease the burden and protect the weakness of the more backward members of the industrial army, the current of upward movement of all in gainful occupations would be stronger and more socially helpful. The family is most of all concerned with the minimum wage of adult men who marry and have children.

=The Att.i.tude of Women Toward Labor Problems.=--The family is concerned next with the att.i.tude of women who are wives and mothers, or daughters partially supported from the family purse, toward the whole area of industrial problems. It may be always right, as it is often necessary, for married women, even when mothers of young children, to earn in the outside labor world. It is, however, always a social crime for women who try simply to piece out an insufficient family income to do it in ways to bring down or to keep down wages in the specialty of work they take part in, especially to bring down or keep down the wages of men in that specialty of work. It may be best (it usually is) for young daughters to earn wages even if they do kinds of work which in the labor market will not secure a return adequate for full self-support. The work may be educational in its quality; much that young girls do in department stores is of that character; but wages too low for full self-support must be reckoned as part pay for a work-opportunity mixed of training and service, not one that lists the worker in full compet.i.tive position.

=Necessary Protection for Children and Youth in Labor.=--Where young boys or young girls enter into the industrial world they should step from either a Trade School, and if so, with the guidance and care of some representatives of that school to aid them in making physically, morally, and vocationally helpful alignment, or else should be given half-time employment in the factory or shop that takes them on as helpers and find in some "Continuation School" a right use of the rest of the work-day. The right sort of protective aid to boys and girls between the ages of fourteen, when the law allows some form of wage-earning, and that of sixteen to eighteen years, when they may safely s.h.i.+ft for themselves, should halve the wage-earning hours (four instead of eight each day or twenty-four instead of forty-eight a week or alternate weeks at work or study); should double the numbers set to each stated task in shop or factory; should treble the supervisory control of society, in a union of Health Board, School Board, and Employers' and Employees' Council; and should quadruple the fitly trained teachers, the school sittings, the adequately equipped recreation centres and all incitements to higher uses of leisure time.

The early years of every child should be held sacredly apart from the whir of wheels and the din of machinery; he should then rehea.r.s.e in some degree, as will be later shown, the handicraft age of industry and its personalizing influence. His entrance into the world of modern labor should be not a plunge or a tumble but along a regulated highway of well-outlined endeavor, with social influences on either side to make his pa.s.sage into wage-earning safe for himself and useful to others.

Social protection should be less a club marked, "Thou shalt not," and more an opportunity inscribed, "Chances to rise, win them!" For the woman, married and a mother, there must be not so many new ways of enforcing prohibitions of what are deemed for her harmful forms of labor, as more ingenuity in providing half-time work, better adjustments of earning facilities to domestic duties, far more cooperative machinery for reducing the cost of living and for securing the family against economic exploitation in food, clothing, and shelter.

=Women and the Cost of Living.=--There is a field of family conservation which has been until lately almost wholly neglected by women; a field which must be mastered by them, the field of combination of all family interests in behalf of each family need. The att.i.tude of the new voters among women who have organized into a League to enable them to become better and more efficient citizens is eminently encouraging. When the League of Women Voters takes hold definitely, consciously, and with intelligent devotion of the problems of cost of living, market supply, distribution of essentials of life and the whole range of economic interests which lie next to family well-being, it means that women are taking into the electorate a new and vitally needed form of social control and social service. That in itself, alone, would justify the struggle of women to obtain the franchise. More and more men in political life will come to understand what a League of women, for the most part "home-women" and family-serving-women, will demand of officials in the area of basic essentials of comfort and security in the home.

=The Family Demand upon Unmarried Women.=--The social demand upon women who are at work in any field of personal endeavor, whether that be professional, clerical, manual or artistic, has been outlined before in this treatment of the relation of the home to society in general as involving sortie special consideration of family needs.

This may seem a negligible quant.i.ty to many women, unmarried, with relatives all self-supporting or well-to-do. There is no reason why a daughter should be called "undutiful" or "selfish" who is absorbed in her own work than why a son should be so esteemed when there is no special reason why other members of the family should hold that daughter's time and effort at their disposal. The selfishness may be on the other side, and often is where parents or near relatives within the family bond try to burden the young woman with odds and ends of family service, which others might as well a.s.sume, and leave her with no ambition or opportunity for personal achievement. There are, however, in this complicated life of ours many contingencies of family experience which still demand from daughters a share in time and strength which sons may more easily concentrate upon their own work.

This fact, often operating unconsciously, leads many young women to choices of types of work which have fixed hours and easy adjustment to frequent absences from work. These give little chance for rising in wage or position and often give low wages from the start. This tendency keeps many women from success in work and is often a reason why men distrust and oppose their entrance into a new field of industry.