THE NEW MATER DOLOROSA

Otago Witness, Issue 3101, 20 August 1913, Page 77

THE NEW MATER DOLOROSA

By Jessie Mackay,

(Continued.)

It ifi almost impossible for New Zealanders, who for 2U years have been rearing the walls of what, compared with English conditions, is almost a New Jerusalem, to understand the inner life of the mothers of England’s poor. We have to go back so many centuries in thought, and so many steps in ©volution; we are strangled with so much red tape, and Shocked with so many callous inconsistencies, that w© feel we are back in old oligarchy of the mouldy past. The word “ commonwealth ” dies on the tongue as we look into the grey life of the labourer and the black fate of the mother who bore him. Por slavery is not to be gilded with occasional benevolences and sporadic kindnesses. This is England s condemnation, some say, her sentence of doom, that while she boasted of treeing her villeins 600 years ago, she has perpetrated for her women a villenage of which the . conditions have even been worsened, not bettered, for the very poorest class by recent movements oi reform. This villenage is the deadly foundation of the very prosperity on which she plumes herself. For England s trade is based on the under-payment of female labour, and her social policy is founded on the non-existence of woman as a citizen or as a factor in national progress. She has made a gigantic mistake, even on the low commercial level, which she has adopted on this question. For, as the true political economist, eit Reiman- or woman, is now pointing out, the wealth of a country is not so much in bullion or in the value of its productions as it is in the system of service and exchange by which each portion of the community 'has its wants legitimately supplied. A country where drones oa - serfs predominate in the population is ripening for ruin. The country stands or falls on the home-making work of its women, no less than on the work of its men. If that work is performed under degrading, harassing, and unhealthy conditions, the country is building on sands, and worse Mias Anna Martin sums up the case of the working wife with convincing - force in the Nineteenth Century. Woman, she points out, is a worker, however the State ignore it. * She is tied to one employer—her husband. That is so in ah civilised countries. But in England, the State, which keeps, or professes to keep, the ball true between employer and employed, fails to do so for the working wife. The law doubly fails in that it neither enforces the civil contract of marriage on the husband-employer, nor does it protect the wife fi - om his personal violence. ", The marriage laws of England are bad for rich and poor; she shares with Greece the discredit of the worst code in Europe, it is said. But whereas the woman of the upper class is really endowed with material benefit by her husband, the church door the poorer woman leaves as a bride slams upon her last enforceable right to the protection which the State, theoretically at least, extends to everv other class of worker in the land. She has entered into a civil contract to keep her husband’s house ; he 1 as entered into a civil contract to maintain her in honour and reasonable comfort for doing so. But it is just there that the State, to all intents and purposes, washes its hands of the woman’s concerns. We may happily believe that tire majority of 'Englishmen do keep the contract faithfully ; we must needs know that millions do not keep it, and that for their wives there is less redress than for the lowest indentured coolie in England’s farthest colony. In point of fact, hers is indentured* labour without safeguard. A fatuous Church has pronounced them pne —but which one?—and shrieks at practical interference. A fatuous State does not recognise the woman either as a “person or as a factor in the nation’s work, and carefully lives up—or down—to its own doctrine. - ’ Let us glance first at the girl who enters that fateful church door as a bride. She does not come there to-day robust and rosy, as the future mother of men came when England was a land of villages and thriving little cottage industries. The industrial revolution cl tanged all that; it emptied the village, hushed the cottage loom, drove the man into a smoky factory at low wages, pushed the woman in after him at lower wages, and their child for a time, in ghastly rivalry with both. The factory is cleaner now, it is true, and the young child is starving outside it, not in it, to-day. But between school and that fatefully earlv wedding day, the girl has been putting 6 in some years of work as a machinist, operative', laundry worker, boxmaker, or whatnot. She has keut herself on wages ranging from 4s 6d )q 7s a week. When Parliament was forced recently into securing in a few trades a weekly wage of 10s for girls, pious employers gasped like Bumble when Oliver Twist asked for more. Our little bride has helped her mother out of her 5s wage ; she has acquired little towards her own s'tart in life, but a predisposition to tuberculosis or dyspepsia. She has tired of the noisy garret full of brothers and sisters; slie ’ has tired of the factory, with its everlasting rebukes and fines for the least breach of rules. She is ready is listen to the first- miniature youth who has also tired of the comfortless family garret, Hcr fate is soon decided. Either she has found a good master, as masters go in the slums, who will give her the larger half of his precarious earnings and not correct her with anything heavier than the flat of his hand in moments of exasperation, or she is the slave of a drunkard or a wastrel, to become in time the helot mother of a brood, which of necessity includes one or two or several degenerates. Each one of these unwanted yearly arrivals In a world of want plunges the mother deeper in debility and despair. By not enforcing the marriatre contract on the defaulting husband, the English law ha.s destroyed the man’s feeling of parental

responsibility. I! tetters think the onus of rearing a family lies wholly on the mother, naturally he thinks it too. And in the majority of cases, the slum mother is almost superhuman in her powers of endurance, self-sacrifice, and sleepless exertion to make a shilling do the work of a pound. Her children are her world, and ae long as one ounce of strength remains in her bruised, emaciated body she goes on toiling for them, and with singular success in many oases. “ 1 don’t like it,” said one young married woman; “now there are so many children, I never take any dinner. I remember mother never took anything but a piece of bread, aaid we children did not think it strange at the time.” So while the defaulting slum father takes his pot of beer, bets on the races, or loafs away his chance, so the slum mother blindly works out her own and her children’s destiny, unhelped by anything like farm colonies, detachment of wages, or any other equitable way of enforcing the broken contract, but fussily hindered at every turn by Parliament, School Board, and sanitary inspector, whose half-baked schemes and man-made regulations leave her own powers, rights, and wishes wholly out of account. Her ignorance spares her from realising that she is. in her very meekness and selfsacrifice, a walking eugenic crime and the first of national menaces. She does not understand that it is because the State has lost the-standard of her domestic labour - that her husband is screwed down to the petty wage he earns. Were every working man’s wife in England to down tools or go to hospital for two months the huslrand would have to hire house help or starve. And since they could uot work unfed, nnmended. unwashed for, at the end of the two months a living wage, a real family wage, would have been granted. It is because England has tacitly relied upon her unlimited supply of unregulated serf labour in the house - that she has kept her workman’s wages down to the lowest single standard. Worst of all has been the moral effect upon the husband. No man can be a slaveowner and keep his own manhood intact. He knows that the State does not in any practical way hold him responsible for the maintenance of his family ; if he provides them with the shell of a dwelling, he may repudiate every other obligation. He 'may lieat, starve, insult, or lastingly injure his wife with impunity behind that sacred traditional door which opens into an Englishman's castle and an Englishwoman’s pergatory. Only “ aggravated” assault or ‘‘persistent” cruelty may be urged by a wife in court. How many such claims are urged the police records toll ; how many unspeakable cases never reach court heaven only knows. The Mater Dolorosa tells no more than she can help. Cui bono? English magistrates have strange views on these matters. One calmly pronounces “ a severe horse-whip-ping ” not “ aggravated ” enoughs, for punishment; another does not see that a husband who has dragged his wife out of bed by the hair and thrown her outside for the night has made himself liable for any serious correction. As to mental distress, a magistrate the other week advised a woman whose husband had brought his mistress to live in the house “to go home and make the* best of it, since he had no rower to help her.” things cause no public feeling among Englishmen ; high ami low acouiesce in these Solomonic judgments. The only thing, apparently, that stirs a typical Englishman to righteous indignation is the zeal of the few “ unsexed ” women who “ shriek ” in the open on these unseemly subjects, which, after all, lie in the decrees of an inscrutable Providence. (To be concluded.)