The economic position of women

Washington, D. C.

The history of women’s work in the United States is the story of an economic and industrial readjustment which is by no means yet complete. Women have worked since the world began, and at the dawn of history their labor was probably as important in family or tribal economy as it is to-day in the industrial world. Since early colonial days in this country, moreover, women have worked for gain, sometimes selling to the local storekeeper the products of leisure hours spent in spinning, weaving, knitting or sewing, sometimes themselves keeping little shops, and sometimes hiring themselves out to work in the families of their neighbors. But during the nineteenth century a great transformation occurred which has materially changed woman’s economic position.

Woman’s work may be divided into five general categories: unpaid labor, independent gainful labor, domestic service, wage labor in manufacturing industries and wage labor in trade and transportation. In all these varieties of work great changes have taken place. In the first place technical improvements have removed from the home to the factory and workshop a large part of the labor formerly carried on almost exclusively by women. Women naturally followed their occupations, and in doing so changed their economic status from that of unpaid laborers to that of paid laborers. Though the number gainfully employed has materially increased, however, the amount of unremunerated home work performed by women must still be considerably larger than the amount of gainful labor, for in 1900 only about one fifth of all females 16 years of age and over were breadwinners.[1]

Not only have unpaid, home-working women been transformed into paid factory operatives, but both independent home workers and wage-earning home workers have been transferred to factories and workshops. This change is especially evident in the comparatively backward clothing industries, which the sewing machine and artificial power have gradually driven from the home to the shop and, in some branches, to the factory. In the early days of wholesale clothing manufacture in this country all the work, except the cutting, was done for piece wages in the homes of the workers. Gradually, however, the industry has been drawn into sweatshops and factories. Independent domestic production, meanwhile, except in certain lines like dressmaking and to a slight extent the preserving of fruit and making of jelly, has practically become a thing of the past. The movement away from home work can hardly be regretted, however, in view of the fact that the entire history of women’s work shows that their wage labor under the domestic system has almost invariably been under worse conditions of hours, wages and general sanitation than their wage labor under the factory system.

There has probably been, moreover, a material increase in the proportion of women wage earners as compared with independent producers. Before the introduction of machinery wage labor generally meant domestic service. There were, of course, exceptions. Early instances are well known of women spinners gathered together in groups and paid fixed sums, and women were early employed to sort and cut rags in paper mills. But the range of wage-earning occupations open to them has enormously increased, while it is doubtful whether any larger proportion are now engaged in independent industry than were so engaged two centuries ago. In commercial and professional pursuits, it is true, the opportunities for independent business have very greatly increased, but in manufacturing industries, as a result of the unprecedented growth of wholesale production, they have materially narrowed for women as well as for men.

The wage-earning opportunities of women in the three great groups of occupations, domestic service, manufacturing industries, and trade and transportation, have also changed decidedly. Thousands, of course, have always been employed in domestic service, which has acted as the complement of the industrial pursuits. The opportunity to “hire out” has continually confronted the working woman and frequently, when she complained that her conditions of work were hard and her pay inadequate, she has been admonished by philanthropists and even by economists to betake herself to the kitchen, whose homelike conditions, high wages and pressing need of her labor have always been loudly proclaimed. The conditions and problems of domestic service, indeed, have changed far less than those of any other occupation. Nevertheless, the proportion of all gainfully employed women engaged in domestic and personal service has steadily decreased.[2]

In the manufacturing industries, on the other hand, great changes have taken place. The entrance of women into these industries may be attributed to three principal causes, machinery, artificial power and division of labor. All of these are in part the cause and in part the effect of an unprecedented development of wholesale, as opposed to retail production, and this growth of wholesale trade is itself primarily the result of improved means of communication and transportation.

These three factors have also caused a considerable amount of shifting of occupations. Under the domestic system of labor woman’s work and man’s work were clearly defined, women doing the spinning, part of the weaving, the knitting, the sewing and generally the cooking. But with the introduction of machinery for spinning and weaving thousands of hand workers were thrown out of employment. It is not surprising to learn that the first spinners and weavers by machinery were women. Later, however, mule spindles, operated by men, were introduced for part of the work. In certain other cases, too, machinery has caused the substitution of men for women in industries formerly considered as belonging to woman’s sphere. Women’s suits, for instance, are now largely made by men tailors, and men dressmakers and milliners are not uncommon. Men bake our bread and brew our ale and wash our clothes in the steam laundry. At present men even clean our houses by the vacuum process.

One result has been that thousands of women who, under the old régime, would have sat calmly like Priscilla by the window spinning, have been forced to seek other occupations. When the industrial revolution transformed the textile industries they naturally turned to the only other employment for which they were trained, sewing. This, however, only increased the pressure of competition in the sewing trades, already sufficiently supplied with laborers. In the middle of the century, moreover, before any effective readjustment had taken place, the sewing machine was introduced, greatly increasing productivity and at the same time further sharpening competition.

Thus the increased productivity due to machinery and the simultaneous loss, by reason of the greater adaptability of men to certain machines, of woman’s practical monopoly of the textile trades has caused intense competition and has forced many women into other industries, not traditionally theirs. From the beginning, however, their choice of occupations has been hampered by custom. As early as 1829 a writer in the _Boston Courier_[3] said:

Custom and long habit have closed the doors of very many employments against the industry and perseverance of woman. She has been taught to deem so many occupations masculine, and made only for men, that, excluded by a mistaken deference to the world’s opinion, from innumerable labors, most happily adapted to her physical constitution, the competition for the few places left open to her, has occasioned a reduction in the estimated value of her labor, until it has fallen below the minimum, and is no longer adequate to present comfortable subsistence, much less to the necessary provision against age and infirmity, or the every day contingencies of mortality.

Economic necessity, however, with division of labor as its chief tool, sometimes aided by power machinery and sometimes alone, has gradually opened up new industries to women. As early as 1832 they were employed in as many as one hundred different occupations. In many of these, to be sure, they were as rare as women blacksmiths are today. But in 1836 a committee of the National Trades’ Union, appointed to inquire into the evils of “female labor,” reported that in the New England States “printing, saddling, brush making, tailoring, whip making and many other trades are in a certain measure governed by females,” and added that of the fifty-eight societies composing the Trades’ Union of Philadelphia, twenty four were “seriously affected by female labor.”[4] The census of 1850 enumerated nearly one hundred and seventy-five different manufacturing industries in which women were employed, and the number has steadily increased until there is now scarcely an industry in which they are not to be found.

Usually, however, they have been employed, in the first instance, only in the least skilled and most poorly paid occupations, and have not competed directly with men. This has been due in part to custom and prejudice, perhaps, but primarily it has been due to lack of training and ambition, and to general irresponsibility. One of the causes, to be sure, of the lack of training and ambition is the knowledge that well-paid positions are seldom given to women. A much more vital cause, however, is to be found in the lack of connection between the work and the girl’s natural ambitions. Before the industrial revolution women were probably as skilful and efficient in their lines of industry as men in theirs. The occupations taught girls at that time were theirs for life and naturally they took great pride and pleasure in becoming proficient in work which prepared them for marriage and for the career which nearly every young girl, with wholesome instincts, looks forward to as her ideal, the keeping of the home and the care of children. But when the connection was lost between work and marriage, when girls were forced by machinery and division of labor to undertake tasks which had no vital interest to them, there grew up a hybrid class of women workers in whose lives there is contradiction and internal if not external discord. Their work no longer fits in with their ideals and has lost its charm.

Even in industries which, like the textile and sewing trades, belong to women by long inheritance, machinery and division of labor have so transformed processes that both the individuality of their work and the original incentive to industry have been wholly lost in a standardized product. Moreover, in their traditional sphere of employment and especially in the sewing trade, competition has been so keen that the conditions under which they have worked have been, upon the whole, more degrading and more hopeless than in any other class of occupations. From the very beginning of the wholesale clothing manufacture in this country, indeed, five elements, home work, the sweating system, the contract and sub-contract systems increasing the number of middlemen between producer and consumer, the exaggerated overstrain due to piece payment, and the fact that the clothing trades have served as the general dumping ground of the unskilled, inefficient and casual women workers, have produced a condition of almost pure industrial anarchy.