Chapter Eight
Woman and Work
And unto Adam the Lord said: “Cursed be the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herbs of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground, for dust thou art and into dust thou shalt return. Gen. 3: 17-18-19.
Upon man was pronounced the curse of the world’s work. The Bible declares it was because of his sinfulness that the earth was to be cursed; for his punishment that he was to eat of it in sorrow all the days of his life; because of his wickedness that it was to bear thorns and thistles; and in consequence of his disobedience that he was to eat the herb of the field in the sweat of his face until he returned unto the ground from whence he came. No curse of work was pronounced upon woman; her “curse” was of an entirely different character. It was a positive command of the Lord God Almighty, that upon man alone the work of the world should fall and this work he was to perform in sorrow and the sweat of his brow.
Thus far this book has been devoted to a consideration of the doctrines taught by christian men in regard to “woman’s curse,” and so earnestly has this doctrine been proclaimed that man seems to have entirely forgotten the “curse,” also pronounced upon himself or if he has not forgotten, he has neglected to see its full import, and in his anxiety to keep woman in subordination he has placed his “curse” also upon her thus thwarting the express command of God. It is therefore but just to now devote a few pages to the consideration of man’s “curse” and an investigation of the spirit in which he has accepted the penalty imposed upon him for his share in the transgression which cost him Paradise. At the commencement of this investigation, it will be well to remember that Eve was not banished from the Garden of Eden. Adam alone was cast out and to prohibit his re-entrance, not hers, the angel with the flaming sword was set as guardian at its gates.
We must also recall the opposition of the church through the ages to all attempts made towards the amelioration of woman’s suffering at time of her bringing forth children, upon the plea that such mitigation was a direct interference with the mandate of the Almighty and an inexcusable sin. It will be recalled that in the chapter upon witchcraft, the bitter hostility of the church to the use of anaesthetics by the women physicians of that period was shown, and its opposing sermons, its charges of heresy, its burnings at the stake as methods of enforcing that opposition. Man, ever unjust to woman, has been no less so in the field of work. He has not taken upon himself the entire work of the world, as commanded, but has ever imposed a large portion of it upon woman. Neither do all men labor; but thousands in idleness evade the “curse” of work pronounced upon all men alike. The church in its teachings and through its non-preaching the duty of man in this respect, is guilty of that defiance of the Lord God it has ever been so ready to attribute to woman. The pulpit does not proclaim that this curse of work rests upon any man; does not preach this command to the idle, the profligate, the rich or the honored but on the contrary shows less sympathy and less respect for the laborer, than for the idle man. The influence of this neglect of its duty by the church has permeated the christian world, we everywhere find contempt for the man who amid thorns and thistles tills the ground, obeying his primal “curse” of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow; and everywhere see respect accorded to the man, who by whatever means of honest or of dishonest capacity evades his curse, taking no share in the labors of the field, nor earning his bread in the sweat of his brow.
Anaesthetics have justly been called the greatest boon ever conferred by science upon mankind. But after the persecution of the witchcraft period a knowledge of their use was lost to the world for many hundred years, but when rediscovered during the present century, their employment in mitigating the sufferings of the expectant mother, again met with the same opposition as during the middle ages upon the same ground of its interference with “the curse” pronounced by God upon woman. The question of their use at such time was violently discussed at ministerial gatherings, and when Sir James Simpson, physician to Queen Victoria, employed them at the birth of the later princes and princesses he was assailed by pulpit and press as having sacrilegiously thwarted “the curse.” When the practice was introduced into the United States, prominent New England clergymen preached against their use upon the same ground, of its being an impious frustration of the curse of the Almighty upon woman. But the history of christendom does not show an instance in which the church or the pulpit ever opposed labor by woman, upon the ground of its being an interference with the “curse” pronounced upon man, but on the contrary her duty to labor has been taught by church and state alike, having met no opposition, unless, perchance she has entered upon some remunerative employment theretofore monopolized by man, with the purpose of applying its proceeds to her own individual use. Nor has objection then arisen because of the work, but solely because of its money-earning qualities. An investigation of the laws concerning woman, their origin, growth, and by whom chiefly sustained, will enable us to judge how far they are founded upon the eternal principles of justice and how far emanating from ignorance, superstition and love of power which is the basis of all despotism. Viewing her through the Christian Ages, we find woman has chiefly been regarded as an element of wealth; the labor of wife539 and daughters, the sale of the latter in the prostitution of a loveless marriage, having been an universally extended form of domestic slavery, one which the latest court decisions recognize as still extant. It is the boast of America and Europe that woman holds a higher position in the world of work under christianity than under pagandom. Heathen treatment of women in this respect often forms the subject of returned missionary sermons from men apparently forgetful that servile labor of the severest and most degrading character is performed by christian women, is demanded from them in every christian country, Catholic, Greek, and Protestant alike, many savage and barbarous races showing superiority over christian lands in their general treatment of women.
England claiming to represent the highest result of christian civilization shows girls of the most tender years and married women with infants at the breast working in the depths of coal mines nearly naked, where harnessed to trucks they drag loads of coal on their hands and knees through long low galleries to the pit mouth. Among the pit-women in England are those to whom Christianity is not even a name; one to whom the word Christ was spoken, asking “who’s him; be he a hodman or a pitman?” It has been truthfully declared that England protects its hunting dogs kept for their master’s pleasure, far better than it protects the women and children of its working classes. It takes about $2,500,000 annually to pay the maintenance of the 20,000 hounds owned in Great Britain, while women and children are left to slowly die at starvation wages. A few years since a commission was instituted by Parliament to inquire into the condition of women working in the coal mines and the wages paid them. The facts ascertained were of the most horrible character, no improvement being shown in the past fifty years, men and women, boys and girls, still working together in an almost naked condition.
In the Lancashire coal-fields lying to the north and west of Manchester, females are regularly employed in underground labor, and the brutal conduct of the men and the debasement of the women are well described by some of the witnesses examined by them. Betty Harris, (one of numerous persons examined), aged thirty-seven, drawer in a coal pit, said: “I have a belt around my waist and a chain between my legs to the truck, and I go on my hands and feet; the road is very steep and we have to hold by a rope, and when there is no rope, by anything we can catch hold of. There are six women and about six boys or girls in the pit I work in; it is very wet, and the water comes over our clog-tops always, and I have seen it up to my thighs; my clothes are always wet.” Patience Keershaw aged seventeen, another examined, said: “I work in the clothes I now have on (trousers and ragged jacket); the bald place upon my head is made by thrusting the cones; the getters I work for are naked, except their caps; they pull off their clothes; all the men are naked.” Margaret Hibbs, aged eighteen, said: “My employment after reaching the wall-face is to fill my bagie or stype with two and a half or three hundred weight of coal; I then hook it on to my chain and drag it through the seam, which is from twenty-six to twenty-eight inches high, till I get to the main road, a good distance, probably two hundred to 400 yards; the pavement I drag over is wet, and I am obliged at all times to crawl on my hands and feet with my bagie hung to the chain and ropes. It is sad, sweating, sore and fatiguing work, and frequently maims the women.” Robert Bald, the government coal-viewer, states, that “In surveying the workings of an extensive colliery under ground, a married woman came forward groaning under an excessive weight of coals, trembling in every nerve, and almost unable to keep her knees from sinking under her. On coming up she said, in a plaintive and melancholy voice, ‘Oh sir, this is sore, sore, sore work’.” A sub-commissioner said: “it is almost incredible that human beings can submit to such employment – crawling on hands and knees harnessed like horses, over soft, slushy floors, more difficult than dragging the same weight through our lowest sewers.” Hundreds of pages are filled with testimony of the same revolting character. These miserable human beings are paid less than twenty cents per day. The evidence shows almost as terrible a condition of the employees of the workshops and large manufacturing establishments.
For the same kind of work men are paid three times more wages than are paid to women.
Women in the iron trade of the Midlands are compelled, according to a labor commission witness, to work in the sheds scantily covered and in the summer have to divest themselves of nearly all their clothing while hammering nuts and bolts. They bring their children to the factories and cover them up to prevent their being burnt by red-hot sparks. Often they have to carry bundles of iron weighing half a hundred weight. For such work they earn 4s. or 5s. a week, while the men make about 14s.
As early as 1840 an inquiry into the mining affairs of Great Britain, while showing a pitiable condition of the male laborers, exhibited that of women and children in a much worse light. As the natural guardians of children, well aware of their immaturity of body and mind, no mother allows their employment in severe labor at a tender age unless herself compelled to such work and unable to save her children. But at this investigation, men, women and children were found working together in the pits all either nude or nearly so, and according to the Report, not seeing daylight for weeks at a time. Women soon to become mothers were found yoked to carts in the pits; girls carried baskets of coal on their backs up ladders; while mere children crawling like dogs, on hands and feet, hauled carts along narrow rails, the system in operation requiring these victims to remain underground for weeks at a time, breathing foul air and deprived of the light of day. The spirit of ambition is not dead among these wretched serfs, these women working out man’s “curse”. The most degraded woman in the English coal mine will fight for precedence. She has all the force of the man by her side whose religious equal she is not; whose political equal she is not; he possessing those elements of power, entrance to the priesthood and use of the ballot, denied to her. Through the ballot he receives higher wages for the same kind and amount of work, the church having taught his superior rights upon every point; through the ballot he influences the action of government in his own favor to the injury of his fellow work-woman. A few years since the male miners petitioned against the employment of women in the mines, when a clause to that effect was immediately introduced to the Coal Mine Bill, then before Parliament, although in the Lancashire districts where one hundred and sixty-four women were employed, all but twenty-six were widows or single women entirely dependent upon their own earnings. As severe as the work, the women were remarkable for their bright and healthful appearance as contrasted with the woman workers in the factories of Great Britain. Man, hereditarily unjust to woman under the principles of the Patriarchate and the lessons of Christianity, is even more unjust in the fields of work he has compelled her to enter, than in those of education and the ballot which she is seeking for herself. Organizations, strikes, the eight hour law demand, are largely conducted by men for men. The grim humor originating the proverb “a man’s work is from sun to sun, a woman’s work is never done,” still clings with all its old force to women in most employments. To such small extent has man made the woman worker’s cause his own, that instances are to be found even in the United States, where men and women working together and together going out upon a strike, the men have been reinstated at the increase demanded, the women forced to return at the old wages. Nor is our own country the chief sinner in this respect. It was found imperative many years since, among the women of England to organize leagues of their own sex alone, if they desired their own interest in labor to be protected; the male Trades Unions of that country excluding women from some of the best paid branches of industry, as carpet making, cloth weaving, letter press printing.540 In self defense, the Woman’s Protective and Provident League, and a Woman’s Union Labor Journal were founded. The principle of exclusion has not alone been shown against woman’s entrance into well paid branches of work, but in those they have been permitted to enter they have found themselves subjected to much petty annoyance. Among the male painters of pottery a combination was formed to prevent the use by woman of the arm-rests required in this work. Tram-way trains carry London workmen at reduced rates, but a combination was entered into by male laborers to prevent women workers from using the low-priced trains. Nor in many instances are employers less the enemies of women, unions having been found necessary for the purpose of moral protection. A most deplorable evidence of the low respect in which woman is held and the slavery that work and cheap wages mean for her, is the suggestion often made by employers that she shall supplement her wages by the sale of her body. The manager of an industrial league in New York City a few years since found that no young girl escaped such temptation. Neither extreme youth nor friendliness afforded security or protection but were rather additional inducements for betrayal, most of the victims numbering but fourteen short years. The late Jennie Collins, of Boston, one of the earliest persons in the United States, to devote herself to this branch of the “woman question,” said:
It is easy for a young girl to obtain employment but let her go where she will, even in government positions at Washington, she will find her innocence assailed if not made the price at which she gets a chance to work. And that same government does not pay its women employees the same amount of wages for the same kind of work.
In the Scottish collieries women are compelled to work in mines filled with gas and flooded with water,541 little girls commencing work in these collieries at four years of age, and at six carrying loads of one hundred and fifty pounds upon their backs. Half clothed women work by the side of entirely nude men, dragging ponderous loads of 16,000 yards a day by means of a chain fastened to a belt, the severe labor of dragging this coal up inclined places to the mouth of the pit, testing every muscle and straining every nerve. It is a work so destructive to health that even the stoutest men shrink from it, women engaged in it seldom living to be over thirty or forty years of age.
A gentleman traveling in Ireland blushed for his sex when he saw the employments of women young and old. He described them as patient drudges, staggering over the bogs with heavy creels of turf on their backs or climbing the slopes from the sea-shore laden like beasts of burden, with heavy sand-dripping sea-weed, or undertaking long journeys on foot into the market towns bearing heavy hampers of farm produce. Man in thrusting the enforcement of his “curse” upon woman in Christian lands has made her the great unpaid laborer of the world. In European countries and in the United States, we find her everywhere receiving less pay than man for the same kind and quality of work. A recent statement regarding women workers in the foundries of Pittsburgh, Penn., where five hundred women are employed in putting heads on nails and bolts, declared they received less than one-half the sum formerly paid to men who did the same kind of work; women getting from but four to five dollars a week while the wages of men ranged from fourteen to sixteen dollars a week. But as evil as the experience of young women in the world of work, that of old women is in some respects even greater. While the young girl is almost certain to obtain work even if at small wages, it is very difficult for the woman of mature years to obtain work at all, either in households as seamstresses or in manufactories. Societies in the City of New York, for the aid of the working women find it impossible to secure employment for middle-aged women. The report of one such society stated that some of these women managed to procure commitment to the Island in order to obtain food and prevent absolute starvation; others slowly died from want of sufficient food; still others, like the poor hard working girls of Paris, sought the river as an end to their sufferings. As in the witchcraft period when the chief persecution for many years raged against old women, we still find in our own country that the woman of middle life is the least regarded in her efforts for a livelihood. The reason remains the same. Looked upon during the Christian ages from a sensual standard, the church teaching that woman was made for man still exerts its poisonous influence, still destroys woman. Not alone employers and male laborers oppress woman, but legislation is frequently invoked to prevent her entering certain occupations. The Coal Miner’s Bill was one of many instances in Great Britain. Women work there also at making nails, spikes and chains. Not long since legislation prohibiting their entering this branch of work was attempted, when a deputation of women iron-workers waited upon the home secretary to protest against government interference with their right to earn a livelihood. One of these representative women had entered the work at seven years of age, being then fifty-seven. Having spent nearly half a century in this occupation she was practically incapacitated for any other form of labor.
The terrible condition of working women in Paris, has attracted the attention of the French government. In but three or four trades are they even fairly well paid, and these few require a peculiar adaptation, as well as an expensive training out of reach of most women laborers. And even in these best paid kinds of work, a discrimination in favor of man exists; at the China manufactory at Sevres where the men employed receive a retiring pension, the women do not. From fifteen to eighteen pence represents the daily earnings of the Parisian working girl, upon which sum it is impossible for her to properly support life. Many of these girls die of slow starvation, others are driven into prostitution, still others seek relief in the Seine. French women perform the most repulsive labors of the docks; they work in the mines dragging or pushing heavy trucks of coal like their English sisters, through narrow tunnels that run from the seams to the shaft; eating food of such poor quality that the lessening stature of the population daily shows the result. This decreasing size of Frenchmen especially among the peasantry, the majority not coming up to the regulation army height, has within the last fifteen or twenty years called attention of the government during conscription, yet without seeming to teach its cause as lying in the poor food and hard labor of women, the mothers of these men. The heaviest burdens of porters, the most offensive sanitary work, the severest agricultural labor in that country falls upon woman. “I pity the women, the donkeys, and the boys,” wrote Mrs. Stanton when traveling in the south of France. It is the poor nourishment and excessive labor of woman which makes France today a country of rapidly decreasing birth-rate, seriously affecting its population and calling the earnest attention of statistical bureaus and physicians to this vital question; a question which affects the standing of France among the nations of the earth. According to the report of the chief of the statistical bureau, 1890, there were fewer births than deaths that year, the births amounting to 838,059, the deaths to 876,505, an excess of 38,446 deaths. Commenting upon these returns, “Der Reichsbote” of Berlin, attributed the cause to a wide-spread aversion to large families; acknowledging, however, that the lower classes had become weakened and dwarfed by the tasks imposed upon them. What neither the statistical bureau, the press, or the church yet comprehend is the fact that the work imposed upon its Christian women, the “curse” of man thrust upon her, is the chief cause of the lessening size and lessening population of that country. A French gentleman employing a large number of women in a flax factory was appalled at the great amount of infant mortality among the children of his employees. Believing the excessive death rate to be in consequence of the continued labor of women, he released expectant mothers for a month previous, and two months after the birth of a child, with a marked diminution of the death rate. The ordinary food of the peasantry is of poor quality and meager quantity. Those employed in the manufacture of silk largely subsist upon a species of black broth proverbial for its lack of nutritive qualities. The absence of certain elements in food both creates specific diseases and inability to combat disease. Vital stamina is closely dependent upon the number of red corpuscles in the blood, the quality of food possessing direct connection with these corpuscles. Dr. Blackwell, of the London Anthropological Society, examined the blood of different races as related to the food eaten by them, finding the number and shape of the red corpuscles to be dependent upon the kind of food eaten. Dr. Richardson, a Philadelphia microscopist, said: “Any cause which interferes with perfect nutrition may diminish the red corpuscles in number.” These corpuscles are recognized as “oxygen carriers,” therefore any cause which tends to diminish the number of red corpuscles also deprives the system of a portion of the oxygen required for sanitary needs. Blood not fully oxygenated is poisonous to the system. Among the causes recognized by physiologists as creating that alteration in the functions of the body which materially changes the character of the red corpuscles, are poor food, bad air and overwork. These specifically produce blood poisoning, creating new substances in the body that are injurious to the organism.
It is not alone in France that such effects are to be noted, although governmental attention has not elsewhere been called to the condition produced, yet twenty years since, Frazer’s Magazine in an article on “Field Farming Women in England” in reference to the poor food and overwork of women of this class, said of their children: “The boys are always very short for their age, those of fifteen being no larger than town boys of ten; girls are thin and skinny, angular and bony.” Eight years ago, Dr. Rochad, who has given much time to this question, prophesied that the population of France would become stationary before the end of the century. At that time his words carried no weight; he was ridiculed as a vague theorizer, but this result has been reached in one half the time he gave and the results are even of graver character than Dr. Rochad assumed them to be. The balance has already fallen upon the opposite side and in a single year the deaths have outnumbered the births nearly 40,000. Two hundred and fifty thousand infants annually die in France because of the impoverished blood, hard work and general innutrition of French mothers. “These lives are the more precious to France which can no longer afford to lose them, since in a single year the death rate outnumbered the birth rate 40,000.” Through the effort of Dr. Rochad, a society has been organized, rules for feeding infants formulated with penalties attached, and like futile methods for effecting a change suggested; while the real cause of the lessening population is left untouched. Until the condition of the mother as life-giver is held as sacred under Christianity as it was among the Greeks and Romans; until man taking his own “curse” upon himself frees woman from its penalties; until she and her young children are supplied with nourishing food and woman secures pure air to breathe and freedom from the hardships so supremely her lot under existing laws and customs, not until then will a change take place. Parker Pillsbury in Popular Religion, says:
Once I journeyed among the magnificent fields, villages and vineyards in the south of France. Women tanned, browned, almost bronzed by the sun, wind and much exposure, weary and worn, many of them mothers, or soon to become such, spaded, shoveled, plowed, harrowed, often drawing harrows themselves across furrowed fields; they mowed, raked, pitched, loaded and unloaded the hay of the meadows; they harvested the crops and then hastened to haul manure and prepare the ground for other crops, rising early and toiling late, doing almost all kinds of work men do anywhere, and some kinds which neither man or woman should ever do.
Germany, whose women were revered in the centuries before Christianity, now degrades them to the level of beasts. Women and dogs harnessed together are found drawing milk carts in the streets; women and cows yoked draw the plough in the fields; the German peasant wife works on the roads or carries mortar to the top of the highest buildings, while her husband smokes his pipe at the foot of the ladder until she descends for him to again fill the hod. To such extent is woman a laborer that she comes in competition with the railroad and all public methods of traffic. Eight-tenths of the agricultural laborers are women; they plow and sow, and reap the grain and carry immense loads of offal for fertilizing the land. As street cleaners they collect the garbage of towns, work with brooms and shovels to cleanse roadways; and harnessed alone, or with cows or dogs, perform all the most repulsive labors of the fields and streets. Nor for a knowledge of their work are we dependent upon the statements of travelers, but official documents corroborate the worst. An American consul says of a Circular Upon Labor recently issued by the German government:
An important factor in the labor of Germany is not enquired of in the circular, viz., the labor of dogs. I have heard it estimated that women and dogs harnessed together do more hauling than the railroads and all other modes of conveyance of goods united. Hundreds of small wagons can be seen every day on all the roads leading to and from Dresden, each having a dog for the “near horse” harnessed, while the “off horse” is a woman with her left hand grasping the wagon tongue to give it direction, and the right hand passed through a loop in the rope which is attached to the axle, binding the shoulder; the harnessed woman and dog trudge along together, pulling miraculous loads in all sorts of weather.
The pay of woman for this strange, degrading labor is from ten to twenty-five cents a day. Nor is that of sewing more remunerative. In March, 1892, a libel suit against an embroidery manufacturer brought to light the fact that women in his employ received but five cents a day. No burden in Germany is considered too heavy for woman until the failing strength of old age necessitates a change of occupation, when amid all varieties of weather they take the place of the newsboys of our own country, selling papers upon the streets. Munich, the capital of Bavarian Germany, is famed for its treasury of art; paintings, ancient and modern sculptures, old manuscripts of inestimable value, large libraries and splendid architecture make it the seat of the fine arts. But its women are still victims of Christian civilization. Dresden is another city whose art treasures and architectural beauty has rendered it famous among European cities as the “German Florence.” Yet both of these cities employ women in the same kinds of work under the same repulsive conditions that are found in other portions of that empire.
Bavarian men wearing heavy wooden shoes drive their bare-footed wives and daughters before the plough in the field, or harnessed with dogs send them as carriers of immense loads of merchandise through the cities. Says a writer: