WOMEN AS WORKERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 16467, 17 February 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

WOMEN AS WORKERS.

SOtjE FACTS WE MUST FACE. I BT TOIIIWGA. Tnu Auckland Education Board has been i considering the always important question , 0 the effect of continued work-strain upon ■ women-teachers, and has obtained a rePort from a woman-doctor, which is full |of wise and kindly suggestion. The problems of the work strain which girls and I women can comfortably bear is, however, far from being confined to the schools, t has long been of national importance in every civilised country, and is beconv "'g of extraordinary interest now that women aro taking up the work of men who have gone to fight. Even after the war, thn industrial sphere of woman can never be the same as before. She has won, by her ready and unconditional service to nations in need, the right to enter henceforward any vocation or calling for which she proves herself competent. We need not worry ourselves to find arguments to answer those well-meaning, but very silly, people who insist that men and women are equal in all things because they are equal as living souls. Everybody who is able to think knows that in almost every phase of their respective individuality men and women are unequal to one another. The difference is unavoidable and inherent. It is in their bones and their brains, in their energies and their potentialities, in their power of euduranco and their faculty for concentration. Women are not inferior to men, but different. Unless wo recognise their difference when they enter what wo call industrialism,' we grievously injure them and the nation to which they belong. The "Superiority" of Men. Men are undoubtedly "superior" to women in the average stability of their energies, if we like to regard that as superiority." The energy of man is normally as a tideless sea; that of woman is normally affected by flood and ebb. Science tells us whatever it may tell us to-morrow— even the energies of men are subject to a rhythmic rise and fall, just as even in the Meditteranean there are faint tidal movements. But however that may be, this physical energy, this nerve-force, or whatever else wo choose to call it, is relatively stable in man as compared with that in women. The average man is absolutely unaware of the rise and fall, tho flood-tide and ebbtide, which marks the physiological cycles of all normal women. He is as capable of effort one day as another. He never looks forward with dread to a shrinking within itself of the nervous energy which must be exerted to meet the strain and stress of industrial life. He is physically organised for constant and unforeseen demands upon his power to work, to fight, and to hunt. Industry in all its branches has been developed to suit the unvarying energies of man. Is it not possible for a sympathetic and intelligent society to gradually make such industrial arrangements as will prevent this from wrecking the health of women-workers, when health means so much to them, and so much more to the state? Incalculable evil has been wrought by that amazing reaction against crudities of speech which marked the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Society swung to the opposite extreme and made a very effective pretence of believing that physiology was non-existent. Only from the old Bißle did men and women who sought to be conventional ever hear any allusions to the fundamental facts of physical life. To these allusions the orthodox listened with wooden faces and petrified minds. Wo are told that this \ras Puritanism, but the great Puritan writers had no such pruderies and the non-Puritan writers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries cannot be accused of a hesitation which suggests any popular reluctance to recognise things as they are. It is in the Nineteenth Century that we find the mind of men' and women befogged. Nor is this strange, for the Nineteenth Century was at once the worst and the best, the greatest and the smallest, the most blind and the most open-eyed, in our annals. The Elizabethan would walk among us rejoicing and receptive and unafraid, while the Early Victorian would wonder that oar freedom of speech and our disregard for dogma did not call down upon us fire from Heaven. It was in this bewildering Nineteenth Century that women came into industrialism as it exists among us. She came into an industrialism made inhuman by the Manchester dogmas at a time when Society would have been shocked at the suggestion that her physiological life ought to be considered and allowed for. Women and Overwork. Woman is not a child, any more than man is a . child/ but she possesses long after maturity, as man does not possess, the inherent quality of being ablo to draw upon energies and potentialities allotted to her for absolutely personal needs. The normal child possesses in its fragile and delicate little body the power of growth. If the child is overworked and overstrained, it becomes stunted; for the energies normally devoted to growing are thus drained away. Children are thus able to work under pressure to quite a remarkable extent, as was discovered.in the early Nineteenth Century, to their suffering and our British shame. Woman is the growing factor in humanity. Even before she has fully completed her individual growth she becomes a trustee of energies over and above those essential for her individual life. She can endure overwork and. overstrain by drawing upon this reserve strength in her, but she cannot do so without suffering severe penalties, any more than the child can. What apparently happens is that when her energy normally ebbs and the conditions of her life demand unabated energy, she forces into activity and thus exhausts those latent reserves of strength and energy which are essential to healthy and happy womanhood. She does not suffer alone. Future generations suffer with her. We are a little inclined in these humanitarian days— the war has emphasised the growing humanitarianism of civilisation—to resent the idea that the sins of the fathers—and the mothers—should be visited upon the children. Our humanitarianism can modify the penalty of "sin" by exciting us to.remedial effort, but the penalty is' there—and justly. There is no such thing as an isolated generation. We inherit from our parents and bequeath to our children more than gold coins and tin pans. In so far as our fathers and mothers obeyed the Law we are strong and courageous to-day; in so far as they failed to obey we suffer; thus it must always be. Consolation is to be found in the fact that many a heroic spirit lives in a broken body, and that, after all, it is the spirit that matters most. Yet if we would do our duty bv the •generations to come and would give them power to enjoy in health and Happiness the lands and the liberties, the hopes and the aspirations, which millions are suffering and dying for, we must organise mid arrange our vocations and industries so that women do not lose health and energy by over-work and overstrain. And the remedy! Well, the remedy is the application of common-sense, which is easy to say and hard to do. To begin with, we mu<it wipe from the industrial mind of society any dogmatic conception that vocational work cannot be carried on any differently by women than it is by men. We should face the fact that the average woman-worker cannot preserve her health and give good results as a "full-timer" in the industrial organisa-1 I (ion. j