CHAPTER VII THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM

(1) The Wage-Earner
“And here I’ll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets:
Ay, and amid this hurly, I intend,
That all is done in reverent care of her;
And, in conclusion, she shall watch all night;
And, if she chance to nod, I’ll rail and brawl,
And with the clamour keep her still awake.
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness.”
The Taming of the Shrew, IV. i.

The day of the rule of man’s physical force over women is over in what are called the civilised countries—a relative term! There are, of course, very many unacknowledged relics of it, but they are disappearing, partly through the growth of reason, partly through the insistent hammering of the women and their men champions. But there is another source of dominance of man over woman, more insidious, more penetrating, much more difficult to abolish: this is the dominance of man by economic force.

It is difficult to believe in the intellectual honesty of those feminists who declare that women must[70] fight men on an equality in the economic world. I have read articles insisting that women must not only bear the child, but make provision for the child, unaided by men, either individually or collectively. Such proposals depend on the evolution of a race of Superwomen unlike any the world has seen, and no one has demonstrated, or even suggested, how such a race is to be formed. The women who dream these dreams are very attractive visionaries, but I do not propose to follow them into their Utopia, for the reason that I am more interested in the world of reality. In this world of reality, we must face the fact that women, for every child they bear in health and strength, are made less capable of producing exchange value (called wealth), and that not only motherhood, but potential motherhood, affects and always will affect the market value of a woman’s work. The people who do not admit this are exceedingly few; but those who do admit it are sharply divided in their views as to how the resultant evils are to be met, and even those who believe most earnestly in the women’s movement, differ in their solutions of the economic problem. Yet the economic slavery of women is worse and more difficult to deal with than any other slavery, and it cannot be met by machinery only; it must be met by a change of heart, a change as needful in women themselves as in men. Women must have pride and belief in themselves and their work, and men must leave off applying to women a cash standard wholly inappropriate[71] to that part of the community whose work is so largely work for the future.

I have preferred to begin with this statement of the women’s economic handicap, because I find the great and ineluctable weight of it more often under-rated by women in the movement than by those I have called reactionaries. The queer thing is, that the reactionaries who make such play with the burden of woman, are those who propose to pile on to the necessary burden of the child the totally unnecessary additional burdens of ignorance and lack of training, and a thousand restrictions of law and custom, while still making no serious attempt to remove all necessity for earning. Analogies are often misleading, but, in modern England, the picture is fairly correct which shows woman with a baby at her breast, one hand tied behind her by trade and legal restrictions, her eyes closed with the bandage of ignorance, her mouth gagged by the refusal of voting rights, hampered by the skirt of custom, having to struggle over the same rock-encumbered ground as man, unburdened, with head erect and limbs free.

Women are notoriously paid less than men, and the reactionaries are very fond of giving us a somewhat superfluous lesson in elementary economics, to account for these lower wages. They say that wages depend on the demand for, and supply of, labour, and that these depend on the amount of skill required, the pleasantness and healthiness of the work, the amount and the cost of training for[72] it, and so forth. They say that women’s work is less efficient than men’s, partly on account of their essential inferiority (one instance of this being their greater liability to sickness), and partly because of their expectation of matrimony, which makes their work less constant and makes their parents less willing to expend money in training them. Finally, they say that women have other sources of income than their labour, and that their wages being supplemented from these sources, they are able and willing to take lower wages than men, able and willing in many cases to accept wages upon which one woman cannot live. These sources are twofold: their male relations partly keep them, so that their wage is only a pocket-money wage; or other men partly keep them, in return for their favours.

With the exception of the somewhat sweeping assertions about the essential inferiority of women’s work, I am prepared to admit all these statements as being manifestly in accordance with facts as they are. This does not increase my enthusiasm for facts as they are; on the contrary, it makes me cast about for means of changing them, and some of them seem to be already in course of rapid change. As for the greater incidence of sickness among women making their work less valuable, it would be interesting to inquire how much of that sickness is due to the low standard of living, caused by low wages: by overwork from having to do housework and needlework when the day’s wage-work is done, by poor food, lack of rational pleasures, and the[73] depression of knowing that, however hard they work, there is no future before them; a woman cannot rise. There is another cause of depression, in the nature of the “dependents” a woman generally has. A man’s “dependents” mostly include a wife, who nurses and looks after him, and children, in whom he can have hope and pride. A woman’s dependents are the crippled husband, the old mother, the invalid sister for whom there is no hope. When a woman falls sick, there is frequently no one to give her the little comforts and help which may prevent the sickness from becoming serious. It is more than doubtful whether women’s greater liability to sickness is not simply the result of conditions too hard and depressing for the health of anyone, man or woman. Perhaps men would break down far sooner than women, under the strain of a life as joyless as that which most women are expected to endure.

Of the essential inferiority of women’s work, I will only say that, except in the matter of muscular power, it is entirely unproven. Many employers prefer women, saying they are quieter, cleaner, more sober, more trustworthy, than men; others disagree. The willingness of parents to allow time and money for the training of their girls is being considerably modified, and it is in the power of public opinion to modify it much further. The liability of women to marry and pass out of wage-earning is a drawback which will always exist to some extent, but which would be greatly reduced by better[74] organisation. The existence of a class of pocket-money workers has been very much exaggerated, and there is no reason why women should not, by judicious combination, practically eliminate this peculiarly obnoxious type of blackleg. The supplementing of wages by prostitution is a more difficult problem, to which I will return in a later chapter.

Are there no other causes for women’s low wages? Let us see. Demand and Supply regulate wages, they say. Then anything that tends to restrict the field of labour wherein a group of persons may compete, lowers the wages of that group of persons. So long as by law women cannot be lawyers, chartered accountants, or clergymen of the Church of England; so long as, by administrative action, women are excluded from all the well-paid posts in the Civil Service, and married women tied out from teaching and the post office; so long as, by custom and the action of men’s trade unions, women are either directly refused admission into trades or indirectly refused by being denied apprenticeship; so long as all these artificial restrictions of women’s labour exist, will the supply of women’s labour in other directions be artificially increased and their wages lowered.

So at the present day it is by no means true to say that wages are determined by Supply and Demand acting without restriction; Supply and Demand are artificially affected by all sorts of forces, not least of these being political forces, which have[75] established fair wages clauses for men in Government employ, and are establishing trade-boards for many of the sweated industries in which women were the victims. We abandoned the principle of laissez-faire some half a century ago, and most of us have no desire to return to it, for under a system of absolutely free industrial competition, women must go under. But what we do desire is that protection shall be given to women in ways that will help them and not in ways that hinder them, and that wage-earning employments shall not be taken away from them without any equivalent. Experience has shown that men alone cannot be trusted to judge of women’s employment fairly. A gentleman is shocked to see a woman with her face covered with coal dust; but it is healthier to have coal dust on your face than cotton or lead dust in your lungs. They do not like to see a woman tip a coal waggon with a twist of her loins; they do not watch the overdone mother of a family carrying water up and down steep stairs on the eve of her confinement or a week or two after it. Three times has Parliament been invited to put a stop to the employment of women at the pit-brow, all for their good, of course. And the reason given is that it is bad for their health. The country was scoured to find a doctor or a nurse who would give evidence of cases of strain or injury, but all they found was evidence that consumptive girls from the cotton mills became robust and healthy at the pit-brow. The climax of absurdity was reached when[76] gentlemen of the House of Commons pleaded that the women ought to be protected from hearing the bad language of the colliers. As if these same colliers spoke, in the home, quite a different, and only a parliamentary, language! And as if, when you come to think of it, a man’s right to swear were a more precious thing than a woman’s right to work! The fact is that, in this instance, as in many others, the work was to be taken away from the women because some men wanted it, and they were not ashamed to use their political power to try to filch the work from the women, though they were ashamed to own up to the reason. Their intention was thwarted, because there were men in Parliament and out who refused to be convinced by the pretension that the restriction was for the women’s good, and because the women made a tremendous fuss, came up to London, held meetings of protest, and roused the country and the press. But this was the third battle over this one position; and why should women be called upon to defend their right to earn their livelihood in honest, necessary labour? If women were to demand legislation to prohibit men from following the “unmanly” and “unhealthy” occupation of selling sarsanet over a counter, or writing accounts in a book, and “taking the bread out of the mouths of the women,” there would be more to be said for it than there has been for many restrictions men have made on women’s work.

What the women in the movement want is the[77] opening up of trades and professions to women. We should then find what women could do, and it would be unnecessary to prohibit them from doing what they could not do. If, further, a living wage were insisted on, those who did the work best, whether men or women, would be employed, and those who were not worth a living wage to any employer would drop out of employment and be dealt with by the State. It is bad business for man to treat woman as a competitor in the labour market, whom he will grind down and grind out altogether if he can. A sweated and degraded womanhood is as great a danger to the community as a sweated and degraded manhood.