Dreamers of a New Day (31 page)

Jane Addams and Florence Kelley’s investigations of sweated work at Hull House convinced them of the need to combine organization with legislative protection. In 1893 Kelley was appointed chief factory inspector for the State of Illinois, and drafted a bill to prohibit garment homework and restrict the hours of work for women and children. In making her case Kelley argued that women’s biological difference from men required protection. Though she had intended to use the law as a means of shortening the hours of labour for men as well as women, Kelley’s position was to provide an excuse for employers to exclude women from occupations which were predominantly male. Kelley’s biographer, Kathryn Kish Sklar, points out that she possessed a sophisticated approach to legislation as embodying social relations. Changing the law, Kelley believed, could help to alter people’s assumptions.
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The problem she did not envisage was that the laws could rebound to reinforce and stiffen existing attitudes.

In Britain, the Factory Acts had established a precedent for a degree of state intervention in the workplace. However the role of the state was contentious. Emilia Dilke’s husband, the Liberal MP Charles Dilke, tried repeatedly but without success to secure a minimum wages bill.
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The Dilkes’ acceptance of the need for the state put them at odds with more traditional Liberals, and brought them into an alliance with socialists campaigning for shorter hours and legislation to protect women and children. In 1892 Eleanor Marx Aveling lined up with the Women’s Trade Union League attempts to extend protective legislation to laundry workers, and denounced the Liberal feminist Millicent Fawcett and the anarchist Edith Lupton because they both opposed state intervention.
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Poor Edith Lupton’s proposal for a Co-operative Association for laundry women was equally scorned by the anarchists then gaining ascendancy in the Socialist League. They told her sternly, ‘Nothing but the Social Revolution will raise the mass from the horrible misery from which most working women suffer at the present time’.
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The problem of course was, what about the meantime?

Working-class women themselves were beginning to assert a claim for leisure time, along with better pay and conditions. When women from Chicago’s sewing factories took to the streets for the mass May Day demonstrations which preceded the 1886 Haymarket tragedy, they told the
Chicago Tribune
: ‘We want eight hours work with ten hours’ pay, which means a fair advance.’
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Similarly, in Britain it was the agitation for the eight-hour day which prompted Ada Nield Chew to complain in 1894 that the ‘under-paid, over-worked “Factory Girl”’ was being overlooked. She and her companions were forced to work long hours ‘in order to keep ourselves in independence, which self-respecting girls even in our class of life like to do.’
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Chew went on to say:

To take what may be considered a good week’s wage the work has to be so close and unremitting that we cannot be said to ‘live’ – we merely exist. We eat, we sleep, we work, endlessly, ceaselessly work, from Monday morning till Saturday night without remission. Cultivation of the mind? How is it possible? Reading? Those of us who are determined to live like human beings and require food for mind as well as body are obliged to take time which is necessary for sleep to gratify this desire. As for recreation and enjoying the beauties of nature, the seasons come and go, and we have barely time to notice whether it is spring or summer . . . ‘A living wage!’ Ours is a lingering, dying wage. . . . I sometimes wax very warm as I sit stitching and thinking over our wrongs.
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Chew was expressing a personal experience, but she was also drawing on a collective culture. By the 1890s women workers in the factory areas of Lancashire had acquired habits of organization through activity in mixed trade unions. They were beginning to take these into labour women’s organizations and into the feminist and socialist movements. Awareness of class solidarity was accompanied by a gendered sense of entitlement as working-class women. In 1896 the
Manchester Guardian
reported Mrs Rigby, a Bury member of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, as saying at the Guild’s conference: ‘Those who lived in the textile districts knew the great benefits that had accrued to the workers from a curtailment of the hours of labour. She noticed that many men were going in for even shorter hours, and if it was good for Jack to have shorter hours it was surely good for Jill.’
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Her intervention was met with ‘Hear, hear’ and laughter.

Because so many women remained outside the trade unions, attempts were made during the 1890s to involve the unorganized in separate structures. Under the leadership of Emilia Dilke and Clementina Black, the Women’s Trade Union League tried to reach laundry workers, rag sorters, and clothing workers.
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In Manchester, the feminist reformer Margaret Ashton became involved with the Manchester, Salford and District Women’s Trade Union Council, which from 1895 supported the unionization of women in the printing trade, linotype workers, rubber workers, box-makers, umbrella makers, typists, midwives, café workers, as well as clothing and textile workers. In a 1937 memorial issue of the
Woman Citizen
dedicated to Ashton, Mary Quaile explained that the growth of separate organizing had been because ‘many of the then existing unions’ did not prioritize the organization of unskilled or semi-skilled women workers.
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In the US, women who worked with first the Knights of Labour and then the craft-orientated American Federation of Labor (AFL) encountered very similar problems. The American Women’s Trade Union League was formed in 1903 to support the unionization of women who were neglected by the male-dominated institutions.
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White reformers and trade unionists alike tended to bypass the conditions under which black American women, mainly confined to domestic and agricultural sectors, laboured. As Anna Julia Cooper observed in
A View From the South
(1892), their toil was hardly seen as ‘work’:

One often hears in the North an earnest plea from some lecturer for ‘our working girls’ (of course this means white working girls) . . . But how many have ever given a thought to the pinched and downtrodden colored women bending over wash-tubs and ironing boards – with children to feed and house rent to pay, wood to buy, soap and starch to furnish – lugging home weekly great baskets of clothes for families who pay them for a month’s laundering barely enough to purchase a substantial pair of shoes!
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Employment options for African Americans were actually narrowing. The late nineteenth century saw an intensification of racial prejudice marked by the ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws in the Southern states, which were supported by white people determined to reverse the gains made since slavery and drive African Americans out of better-paid jobs. From 1885 schools were segregated, along with railway carriages, streetcars, hotels, restaurants, parks, playgrounds, theatres and meeting places.
Segregation was accompanied by the economic decline of industries, such as tobacco, in which African Americans had worked. ‘How many occupations have Negro women?’ asked Maggie Lena Walker. ‘Let us count them: Negro women are domestic menials, teachers and church builders.’
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African-American women reformers like Maggie Lena Walker were inclined to accept that women needed to work, and in order to provide more attractive forms of employment they set up their own cooperatives and businesses. They also played a leading role in creating the mix of self-help services which helped shape black communities in the South, as well as in the newly settled poor neighbourhoods in the North.
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While stressing economic independence and self-help, black American culture also put a high value on co-operation and sacrifice. Sharon Harley observes how mothers’ paid employment was justified by a strong belief that parents should put aside ‘their own needs and wants for the advancement of their children and kin’.
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In the textile areas of Lancashire where women workers were part of a labour force with traditions of unionization, there existed a similar pragmatic acceptance that women went out to work even when they were married and had children. The attitudes of Ada Nield Chew’s husband George were shaped by his background in a Lancashire weaving family where it was customary for women to work, as well as by the new ideas of women’s independence discussed in the Independent Labour Party for which he worked as an organizer. He accepted that his wife should work and contribute to the family income, but he also assumed that their daughter Doris’s welfare was her responsibility. This separation of functions meant that Ada exercised control over the ultimate decisions in Doris’s upbringing – but she was also taking on the greater part of the work in the home.

The most acute tension for Ada Nield Chew was in how to reconcile her work and her close emotional bond with her daughter. When Doris was two, her mother went off to do her organizing work for the Women’s Trade Union League, leaving Doris with her father. Doris recalled how ‘my mother was so stricken by the look on my face and the unbelieving exclamation of “Mamma” when I was brought to the station to meet her on her return, that she decided then and there that she would never leave me behind again.’
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So, from 1900 until 1905 when she went to school, Doris travelled with her mother. Motherhood was a knot, not only ideologically or politically, but personally.

Women with children who were involved in social and political work faced painful choices if their relationship disintegrated. In 1888, aged twenty-two, the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre formed a free union with an older free thinker, a carpenter called James B. Elliott. By the time she fell pregnant the following year, she already knew they were incompatible. Elliott wanted a conventional domestic woman; she needed a wider life. De Cleyre left her son Harry with her former partner, though she paid for his education. Harry, who became a house painter, loved her nonetheless and was proud of her life and work.
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The working-class Polish immigrant Anzia Yezierska found marriage and domestic life were undermining her desperate desire to ‘make herself for a person’. She also left her husband and young child, teaching herself English so she could write down her experiences.
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Middle-class women with children had to make distressing decisions too. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s daughter Katharine was brought up by her first husband and his second wife, Grace Channing. Gilman missed her daughter and regarded her life as a failure after the collapse of her marriage, but Katharine felt her mother had abandoned her. ‘I suppose you were hurt in many ways I never knew,’ Gilman wrote to her daughter in 1933.
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When her marriage broke down, Florence Kelley made her home at Hull House, campaigning through the settlement on employment and housing. However, she felt conditions in the slums of Chicago were too dangerous for her children, who were cared for by friends. ‘I miss the chicks with a perennial heartache,’ she told her mother in 1892.
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The debates around women’s employment were shadowed by many such wrenching personal dilemmas.

Middle-class adventurers were prepared to sacrifice much for their own right to work; indeed a few were arguing that women should be able to combine careers with motherhood. Nevertheless, their knowledge of working-class women’s conditions convinced many of them that married working-class women should not be in the labour force. Concern about the unhealthy and dangerous circumstances of labour also led some to advocate legislation restricting the hours and regulating the types of work women could do. In America, attempts at state regulation faced particularly daunting resistance, not simply from employers but from the judicial system, which was inclined to reject any interference in the wage contract.
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In 1908 two members of the National Consumers’ League, Louis Brandeis and his sister-in-law, Josephine Goldmark, followed Florence Kelley’s tactic in making the
case for Oregon’s ten-hour law on the grounds of women’s physical weakness and the importance of their reproductive role in maintaining the ‘strength and vigour of the race’.
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The result of the Brandeis brief would be a Supreme Court ruling that treated women workers as a special case. By implication all women were mothers, and women were cast as victims. Protection was thus boxed in by a restrictive definition of absolute gender differences. Trade union attitudes compounded the difficulties of extending workplace protection more generally. Alice Kessler-Harris observes how the AFL ‘resisted efforts to legislate on behalf of men and acquiesced reluctantly and ambivalently to efforts to legislate for women’.
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Between 1909 and 1917, laws restricting women’s hours were to be introduced in nineteen states. This contrasted with the slow progress made in the legal protection of wage rates: as late as 1927, campaigners for a minimum wage law had only achieved success in nine states.

During the 1890s the British Women’s Trade Union League complemented organizing with legislative pressure for the minimum wage. Some campaigners, like Clementina Black, argued for the more generous ‘living wage’ which acknowledged livelihood needs. But the question of how best to tackle the problem of low pay remained. In the early twentieth century the chances of organizing women were looking somewhat better. In 1906 the WTUL was replaced by the National Federation of Women Workers. A new generation of leaders took over: the Scottish draper’s daughter, Mary Macarthur, became Secretary, and Gertrude Tuckwell, a niece of Emilia Dilke, was President. Women were gaining a stronger profile in the labour movement, and Macarthur and Tuckwell, both socialists, were able to lobby on their behalf. Nevertheless the problems were daunting: ‘Women are unorganized because they are badly paid and poorly paid because they are unorganized’, Macarthur told the House of Commons Select Committee on Home Work in 1907.
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