CHAPTER IV.
WOMAN'S POSITION AS A BREADWINNER; HER INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES; DARWINISM AND THE CONDITION OF SOCIETY.
The endeavor of woman to secure economic self-support and personal independence has, to a certain degree, been recognized as legitimate by bourgeois society, the same as the endeavor of the workingman after greater freedom of motion. The principal reason for such acquiescence lies in the class interests of the bourgeoisie itself. The bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, requires the free and unrestricted purveyance of male and female labor-power for the fullest development of production. In even tempo with the perfection of machinery, and technique; with the subdivision of labor into single acts requiring ever less technical experience and strength; with the sharpening of the competitive warfare between industry and industry, and between whole regions--country against country, continent against continent--the labor-power of woman comes into ever greater demand.
The special causes, from which flows this ever increasing enlistment of woman in ever increasing numbers, have been detailed above _in extenso_. Woman is increasingly employed _along with man, or in his place, because her material demands are less than those of man_. A circumstance predicated upon her very nature as a sexual being, forces woman to proffer herself cheaper. More frequently, on an average, than man, woman is subject to physical derangements, that cause an interruption of work, and that, in view of the combination and organization of labor, in force to-day in large production, easily interfere with the steady course of production. Pregnancy and lying-in prolong such pauses. The employer turns the circumstance to advantage, and _recoups himself doubly for the inconveniences_, that these disturbances put him to, _with the payment of much lower wages_.
Moreover--as may be judged from the quotation on page 90, taken from Marx's "Capital"--the work of married women has a particular fascination for the employer. The married woman is, as working-woman, much more "attentive and docile" than her unmarried sister. Thought of her children drives her to the utmost exertion of her powers, in order to earn the needed livelihood; accordingly, she submits to many an imposition that the unmarried woman does not. In general, the working-woman ventures only exceptionally to join her fellow-toilers in securing better conditions of work. That raises her value in the eyes of the employer; not infrequently she is even a trump card in his hands against refractory workingmen. Moreover, she is endowed with great patience, greater dexterity of fingers, a better developed artistic sense, the latter of which renders her fitter than man for many branches of work.
These female "virtues" are fully appreciated by the virtuous capitalist, and thus, along with the development of industry, woman finds from year to year an ever wider field for her application--but, and this is the determining factor, _without tangible improvement to her social condition_. If woman labor is employed, it generally sets male labor free. The displaced male labor, however, wishes to live; it proffers itself for lower wages; and the proffer, in turn, re-acts depressingly upon the wages of the working-woman. The reduction of wages thus turns into an endless screw, that, due to the constant revolutions in the technique of the labor-process, is set rotating all the more swiftly, seeing that the said technical revolutions, through the savings of labor-power, set also female labor free,--all of which again increases the supply of hands. New industries somewhat counteract the constant supply of relatively superfluous labor-power, but are not strong enough to establish lasting improvement. Every rise of wages above a certain measure causes the employer to look to further improvements in his plant, calculated to substitute will-less, automatic mechanical devices for human hands and human brain. At the start of capitalist production, hardly any but male labor confronted male labor in the labor-market; now sex is played against sex, and, further along the line, age against age. Woman displaces man, and, in her turn, woman is displaced by younger folks and child-labor. Such is the "Moral Order" in modern industry.
The endeavor, on the part of employers, to extend the hours of work, with the end in view of pumping more surplus values out of their employes, is made easier to them, thanks to the slighter power of resistance possessed by women. Hence the phenomenon that, in the textile industries, for instance, in which women frequently constitute far more than one-half of the total labor employed, the hours of work are everywhere longest. Accustomed from home to the idea that her work is "never done," woman allows the increased demands to be placed upon her without resistance. In other branches, as in the millinery trade, the manufacture of flowers, etc., wages and hours of work deteriorate through the taking home of extra tasks, at which the women sit till midnight, and even later, without realizing that they thereby only compete against themselves, and, as a result, earn in a sixteen-hour workday what they would have made in a regular ten-hour day.[124] In what measure female labor has increased in the leading industrial countries may appear from the below sets of tables. We shall start with the leading industrial country of Europe,--England. The last census furnishes this picture:
Total Persons Year. Employed. Males. Females. 1871 11,593,466 8,270,186 3,323,280 1881 11,187,564 7,783,646 3,403,918 1891 12,898,484 8,883,254 4,016,230
Accordingly, within twenty years, the number of males employed increased 613,068, or 7.9 per cent.; the number of females, however, by 692,950, or 20.9 per cent. It is especially to be observed in this table that, in 1881, a year of crisis, the number of males employed fell off by 486,540, and the number of females increased by 80,638. The increase of female at the cost of male persons employed is thus emphatically brought to light. But within the increasing number of female employes itself a change is going on: _younger forces are displacing the older_. It transpired that in England, during the years 1881-1891, female labor-power of the age 10 to 45 had increased, while that above 45 had decreased.
Industries in which female exceeded considerably the number of male labor, were mainly the following:
Industries. Females. Males. Manufacture of woman's clothing 415,961 4,470 Cotton industry 332,784 213,231 Manufacture of worsted goods 69,629 40,482 Manufacture of shirts 52,943 2,153 Manufacture of hosiery 30,887 18,200 Lace industry 21,716 13,030 Tobacco industry 15,880 13,090 Bookbinding 14,249 11,487 Manufacture of gloves 9,199 2,756 Teachers 144,393 50,628
Again the wages of women are, in almost all branches, considerably lower than the wages of men _for the same hours_. In the year 1883, the wages in England were for men and women as follows, per week:--
Industries. Males. Females. Flax and jute factories 26 Marks 10-11 Marks Manufacture of glass 38 " 12 " Printing 32-36 " 10-12 " Carpet factories 29 " 15 " Weaving 26 " 16 " Shoemaking 29 " 15 " Dyeing 25-29 " 12-13 "
Similar differences in wages for men and women are found in the Post Office service, in school teaching, etc. Only in the cotton industry in Lancashire did both sexes earn equal wages for equal hours of work in the tending of power looms.
In the United States, according to the census of 1890, there were 2,652,157 women, of the age of ten years and over engaged in productive occupations:--594,510 in agriculture, 631,988 in manufacture, 59,364 in trade and transportation, and 1,366,235 in personal service, of whom 938,910 were servants. Besides that, there were 46,800 female farmers and planters, 5,135 Government employes, 155,000 school teachers, 13,182 teachers of music, 2,061 artists.[125] In the city of New York, 10,961 working-women participated in strikes during the year 1890, a sign that working-women in the United States, like their European fellow-female wage slaves, understand the class distinctions that exist between Capital and Labor. In what measure women are displacing the men in a number of industries in the United States also, is indicated by the following item from the "Levest. Journ." in 1893:
"One of the _features_ of the factory towns of Maine is a class of men that may be termed 'housekeepers.' In almost every town, where much factory work is done, these men are to be found in large numbers. Whoever calls shortly before noon will find them, with aprons tied in front, washing dishes. At other hours of the day they can be seen scrubbing, making the beds, washing the children, tidying up the place, or cooking. Whether any of them attend to the sewing and mending of the family we are not quite sure. These men attend to the household for the simple reason that _their wives can earn more in the factory than they_, and it means a saving of money if the wife goes to work."[126]
The closing sentence should read: "Because the women work for wages that the men can no longer work for, and the employer therefore prefers women,"--which happens in Germany also. The towns here described are the so-called "she-towns," already more fully referred to.
In France, there were, in 1893, not less than 15,958 women engaged in the railroad service (in the offices and as ticket agents); in the provincial Post Office there were 5,383 women employed; as telegraphers and telephonists, 9,805; and in the State Savings Banks 425. Altogether the number of women in France engaged in gainful occupations, inclusive of agriculture and personal service, was, in 1893, in round figures 4,415,000. Of 3,858 decisions, rendered by the trades courts of Paris, not less than 1,674 concerned women.
To what extent female labor was applied in the industries of Switzerland as early as 1886, is told by the following figures of the "Bund":
Industries. Males. Females. Silk industry 11,771 51,352 Cotton industry 18,320 23,846 Linen and half-linen industry 5,553 5,232 Embroidery 15,724 21,000
Altogether, there were then in the textile industries, 103,452 women engaged, besides 52,838 men; and the "Bund" expressly declares that there is hardly an occupation in Switzerland in which women are not found.
In Germany, according to the census of occupations of 1882, of the 7,340,789 persons engaged in gainful occupations, 1,506,743 were women; or 20.6 per cent. The proportions were, among others, these:--
Per Industries. Males. Females. Cent.
Commercial occupations 536,221 181,286 25.2 Service and restaurants 172,841 141,407 45.0 Messengers and day laborers 9,212 3,265 26.2 Spinning 69,272 100,459 60.0 Weaving 336,400 155,396 32.0 Embroidery 42,819 31,010 42.0 Lace and crochet work 5,676 30,204 84.0 Lace manufacture 13,526 17,478 56.4 Bookbinding and paste-board box-making 31,312 10,409 25.0 Paper manufacture 37,685 20,847 35.6 Tobacco working 64,477 48,919 43.1 Clothes-making, etc. 279,978 440,870 61.2
To these must be added 2,248,909 women engaged in agriculture, 1,282,400 female servants, also school teachers, artists, Government office-holders, etc.
According to the census of occupations for 1875-1882, the following was the result. There were employed in industrial occupations in the German Empire:--
Total Total Persons Employed. Persons Employed. In the Small Trades. In the Large Trades. Year. Males. Females. Males. Females. Males. Females. 1875 5,463,856 1,116,095 3,453,357 705,874 2,010,499 410,221 1882 5,815,039 1,506,743 3,487,073 989,422 2,327,966 514,321 --------- --------- --------- ------- --------- ------- Increase in 1882 351,183 390,648 33,716 283,548 317,966 107,100 or 6.4 or 35 or 1 or 40.2 or 15.8 or 26.1 per cent. per cent. per cent. per cent. per cent. per cent.
According to these figures, not only did female labor increase by 35 per cent. during the period of 1875-1882, while male labor increased only by 6.4 per cent., but the great increase of female labor, especially in small industries, tells the tale that _only by dint of a strong application of female labor, with its correspondingly low wages, can small production keep itself afloat, for a while_.
In 1882, there were to every 1,000 persons engaged in industry 176 women; in commerce and transportation, 190; in agriculture, 312.
In 1892, the number of women, employed in the factories of Germany, were of the following ages:
Number Age. Employed. 12-14 3,897 14-16 68,735 16-21 223,538 Over 21 337,499 Besides (for Reuss younger line without designation of ages) 6,197 ------- 639,866
In the Kingdom of Saxony, notedly the most industrial portion of Germany, the number of working-women employed in the factories was:--
Year. 16 Years and Over. 12 to 16. 1883 72,716 8,477 1892 110,555 13,333 ------- ------- Increase 37,839 4,856 52 per cent. 57 per cent.
As a result of the new factory regulations, which limited the hours of female labor, between the ages of 14 to 16, to 10 a day, and wholly forbade factory work to children of school age, the number of working-women between the ages of 14 to 16 sank to 6,763, and of girls between the ages of 12 to 14, sank by 6,334. The strongest increase in the number of working-women, as far as we are informed, took place in the tobacco industry of Baden. According to the reports of the Baden Factory Inspector, Dr. Woerishoffer, the number of persons engaged in the said industry and their subdivisions by sexes; was as follows:
Total Number Year. Employed. Males. Females. 1882 12,192 5,193 6,999 1892 24,056 7,932 16,124 ------ ----- ------ Increase 11,864 2,739 9,125 or 52.8 or 130 per cent. per cent.
This increase in the number of female tobacco workers, denotes the sharpening competitive struggle, that has developed during the last ten years in the German tobacco as well as many other industries, and which compels the ever intenser engagement of the cheaper labor of woman.
And, as in the rest of Germany, so likewise in Baden the industrial development in general shows a larger increase of female than of male workers. Within a year, it recorded the follow