What eight million women want Part 9

At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses were involved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis of increased pay, a fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of the union. Others settled later, and under the influence of the "uptown sc.u.m," as the employers' a.s.sociation gallantly termed the Women's Trade Union League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still others reluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out of the five hundred had settled with the union, and only about three thousand of the workers were still out of work.

Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they would ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the cla.s.s consciousness of the intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all, that their progress towards industrial emanc.i.p.ation would ever be helped along by the wives and daughters of the employing cla.s.ses was unthinkable. That the releasing of one cla.s.s of women from household labor by sending another cla.s.s of women into the factory, there to perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.

Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are becoming the co-workers instead of the compet.i.tors of men. The women of the leisure cla.s.ses, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the situation, espouse the cause of their working sisters. The woman in the factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.

The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury, Ma.s.sachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of the working women.

That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fas.h.i.+on, and wages were good enough to compensate for the long day's labor.

The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands."

The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated machinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred times more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women who had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and eight dollars.

The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the mills as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.

There you have the story of women's realization of themselves as a group. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women.

The Boston Branch of the Women's Trade Union League, through its secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined the strikers.

Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks of anxiety and deprivation.

The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business before treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, exists as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and conferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to exist. An employers' a.s.sociation is a necessity of business life. A labor union is an insult to capital.

This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor car stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs.

Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay personified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer. Her powers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercial connections, were sufficient to wring consent from the firm to receive John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers.

John Golden, intelligent, honest, a fine type of workingman, educated in the English school of unionism, held two conferences with the firm.

He was able to make the employers see the whole situation in an entirely new light. They were men of probity; they wanted to be fair; and when they saw the human side of the struggle they surrendered. When they perceived the justice of the collective bargain, the advantages to both sides of a labor organization honestly conducted, they consented to recognize the union. And the women went back, their group unbroken.

Thus are women working, women of all cla.s.ses, to humanize the factory.

From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and the judiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women of the toiling ma.s.ses in their struggle to make over the factory from the inside. Together they are impressing the men of the working world, law makers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of the race.

Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protective legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not yet complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the late Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not every court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more valuable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn.

In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in which a number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to the owner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did not strike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in that country a subst.i.tute for the strike is provided by law. To this subst.i.tute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. The employer in his answer declared, just as employers in this country might have done, that his business would not stand an increase in wages. He explained that the match industry was newly established in New Zealand, and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could not afford to pay high wages.

The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been an inquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiry into the cost of living in the town where the match factory was located.

And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court of Arbitration, and this is what he said to the man:

"It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on the wages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that they should have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls and bodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance than your profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better for the community for you to close your factory. _It would be better to send the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back to flints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter._ My award is that you pay what they ask."

Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the eight million women in the world who have learned to think in human terms.

CHAPTER VII

BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO

At the threshold of that quarter of old New York called Greenwich Village stands Jefferson Market Court. Almost concealed behind the towering structure of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, the building by day is rather inconspicuous. But when night falls, swallowing up the neighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Market a.s.sumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminated clock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands toward midnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams an intense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of the building floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, through the iron-guarded door, there pa.s.ses, every week-day night in the year, a long procession of prodigals.

The guarded door seldom admits any one as important, so to speak, as a criminal. The criminal's case waits for day. The Night Court in Jefferson Market sits in judgment only on the small fry caught in the dragnet of the police. Tramps, vagrants, drunkards, brawlers, disturbers of the peace, speeding chauffeurs, licenseless peddlers, youths caught red-handed shooting c.r.a.ps or playing ball in the streets,--these are the men with whom the Night Court deals. But it is not the men we have come to see.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MISS MAUDE E. MINER]

The women of the Night Court. Prodigal daughters! Between December, 1908, and December, 1909, no less than five thousand of them pa.s.sed through the guarded door, under the blaze of the electric lights. There is never an hour, from nine at night until three in the morning, when the prisoners' bench in Jefferson Market Court is without its full quota of women. Old--prematurely old, and young--pitifully young; white and brown; fair and faded; sad and cynical; starved and prosper ous; rag-draped and satin-bedecked; together they wait their turn at judgment.

Quietly moving back and forth before the prisoners' bench you see a woman, tall, graceful, black-gowned. She is the salaried probation officer, modern subst.i.tute for the old-time volunteer mission worker.

The probation officer's serious blue eyes burn with no missionary zeal.

There is no spark of sentimental pity in the keen gaze she turns on each new arrival.

When the bench is full of women the judge turns to her to inquire: "Anybody there you want, Miss Miner?"

Miss Miner usually shakes her head. She diagnoses her cases like a physician, and she wastes no time on incurables.

Once in a while, perhaps several times in the course of a night, Miss Miner touches a girl on the arm. At once the girl rises and follows the probation officer into an adjoining room. If she is what she appears, young in evil, if she has a story which rings true, a story of poverty and misfortune, rather than of depravity, she goes not back to the prisoners' bench. When her turn at judgment comes Miss Miner stands beside her, and in a low voice meant only for the judge, she tells the facts. The girl weeps as she listens. To hear one's troubles told is sometimes more terrible than to endure them.

Court adjourns at three in the morning, and this girl, with the others--if others have been claimed by the probation officer--goes out into the empty street, under the light of the tall tower, whose clock has begun all over again its monotonous race toward midnight. No policeman accompanies the group. The girls are under no manner of duress. They have promised to go home with Miss Miner, and they go. The night's adventure, entered into with dread, with callous indifference, or with thoughtless mirth, ends in a quiet bedroom and a pillow wet with tears.

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK.]

Waverley House, as Miss Miner's home is known, has sheltered, during the past year, over three hundred girls. Out of that number one hundred and nineteen have returned to their homes, or are earning a living at useful work.

One hundred and nineteen saved out of five thousand prodigals! In point of numbers this is a melancholy showing, but in comparison with other efforts at rescue work it is decidedly encouraging.

Nothing quite like Waverley House has appeared in other American cities, but it is a type of detention home for girls which is developing logically out of the probation system. Delinquent girls under sixteen are now considered, in all enlightened communities, subjects for the Juvenile Court. They are hardly ever a.s.sociated with older delinquents.

But a girl over sixteen is likely to be committed to prison, and may be locked in cells with criminal and abandoned women of the lowest order.

Waverley House is the first practical protest against this stupid and evil-encouraging policy.

The house, which stands a few blocks distant from the Night Court, was established and is maintained by the Probation a.s.sociation of New York, consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and of men and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The District Attorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of the a.s.sociation, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, Miss Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women's Trade Union League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women's Munic.i.p.al League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York's organized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among the supporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable and sympathetic superintendent of the house.

The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station, a laboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases which beset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency and paroled to probation officers are taken to Waverley House, where they remain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best means of disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some to hospitals, some to inst.i.tutions, some placed on long probation.

Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's college to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They have set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakes countless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery, disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women have undertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of the problem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals?

This much did the missionaries before them.

"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per cent," declares Miss Miner, "if only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning."

To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the beginning, instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That is what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning to do with poverty.

Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a cause, and that it might be possible to attack it at its source. Yet that any large number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly, voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts.

There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they find themselves entirely powerless to resist.

Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs of a very important movement among women to discover what these forces are.

Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand. We have had, and we still have, in cities east and west, committees and societies and law and order leagues earnestly engaged in "stamping out" the evil. It is like trying to stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by a strong gale. The protests of most of these leagues amount to little more than vain clamor against a thing which is not even distantly comprehended.

The _personnel_ of these agencies organized to "stamp out" the evil differs little in the various cities. It is largely if not wholly masculine in character, and the evil is usually dealt with from the point of view of religion and morals. Women, when they appear in the matter at all, figure as missionaries, "prison angels," and the like. As evangelists to sinners women have been permitted to a.s.sociate with their fallen sisters without losing caste. Likewise, when elderly enough, they have been allowed to serve on governing boards of "homes" and "refuges." Their activities were limited to rescue work. They might extend a hand to a repentant Magdalene. A Phryne they must not even be aware of. In other words, this evil as a subject of investigation and intelligent discussion among women was absolutely prohibited. It has ever been their Great Taboo.