WOMAN AND LABOUR.

White Ribbon, Volume 19, Issue 227, 18 May 1914, Page 1

WOMAN AND LABOUR.

(Compiled by Miss Roberts from “Woman and Labour, by Olive Schreiner, and read at Gisborne Convention.) In that clamour which ha> arisen in the modern world, where now this and then that, is demanded for, and by large bodies of women, he who listens carefully may detect a* a keynote a demand which may be* embodied in such a cry as this: “Give us labour and the training which tits for labour, We demand this, not for ourselves alone, but for the race. - ’ When first savage man wandered, hunted and fought, we wandered with him. Each step of his way was our*. Within our bodies we bore the race, on our shoulders We carried it, w* sought the roots and plants for its food, our hands dressed the game* brought by man; side by side, the savage man and the savage woman, we wandered free together, and laboured free together, and we were contented. Then a change came. We ceased from our wanderings, and, camping upon one spot of earth, again the labours of life were divided between us. While man went forth to hunt, or to battle with the foe who would have dispossessed us of all, we laboured on the land. We hoed the earth, we reaped the grain, we shaiM'd the dwellings, we wove the clothing, we modelled the earthen vessels, and drew the lines upon them which were humanity’s first attempt at domestic art ; we studied the pro-

perties and U"es of plants, and our old women were the fii-t physicians of the race, as often its iir>t priests and prophets. We fed the* race* at our breast, we bare it on our shoulders, through us it wa> shaped, fed and clothed. Labour more toilsome and unending than that of man was cur>; yet did we never cry out that it was too heavy for us. Man fought—tnat was his work. We fed and nurtured the rare that was ours. W <* knew that upon oui labours, even as upon man’s, depended the life and well-being of the people whom we bare*. We endured our toil as man bore his wounds, bravely and silently, and we were content. Then again a change came. Ages passed, and time* was when it was no longer necessary that all men should go to the hunt or the fic*ld of war. Then our fellow-man having no longer full oce upation in hi" old fields of labour, began to take his share in ours. He began to cultivate the field, to build the house, to grind 'the corn, and the tools of certain industries passed from our hands to his. The life in the fields was ours no more; we moved within the gates where the time passes more slowly, and the world is sadder than in the* sweet air outside; but we had our own work still, and were content. It we no longer grew the food, we still dressed it; if we did not grow and prepare the flax and hemp, we still wove the garments for our race; it we no longer built the house, the tapestries which covered their wall" "ere the work of our hand". V\e brew d the ale, and the simples, whic h we re* used as medicines, were distilled,

prepared, and prescribed by us; ami, c lose about our feet, from birth to manhood and womanhood, grew up the children we had borne. We sat with our spinning wheels, and lord * wife, peasant’s wife, or burgher’s wife, we all still had our work to do. it now again a c hange has c ome. Something that i" entirely new has entered into the tic-id of human labour, and left nothing as it was. The introduction of machinery has entirely reversed the* old order both as regards industry and war. The importance of mere muscular strength, whether in labours of war or peace, is gone- for ever, and the day of the all-importance of the culture and ac tivity of mental power and nerve* has already come, and the new conditions have opened up before men a million spheres of labour, undre rued of by their ancestors. Never before in the* history of the* earth has the man’s field of remunerative toil been so wide, so interesting, >o complex, and, in its re"iilts, so all important to soc iety; never before has the male sex, taken as a whole, been "<> fully and strenuously oceupied. Man connot complain that modern e hanges have, as a whole, robbed him of hi" fields of labour, diminished hi" share in the conduc t of life, or reduced him to a condition of morbid inactivity. In our woman’s field of labour matters have tended to shape themselves entirely otherwise. Modern civilisation has tended to rob woman almost wholly of the more valuable of her ancient domain of productive and c o < ial labour, and, where there has not been a determined and conscious re sistancc on her part, nowhere have

new and compensatory fields of work tended to open out to her. In thousands of huge buildings steamdriven looms produce the clothing of half the world. To-day steam often shapes our bread, and a motor car sets the loaf down at our door. Day by day machine-prepared and factoryproduced viands ta»*e a larger and larger place in the dietary of ri< I and poor. Among the wealthier cla '*s men are to be found labouring in < ur homes and kitchens. The dairymaid has given place to the cream separa tor. In modern cities our carpets are beaten, our windows cleaned, cur floors polished by machinery, and often by male labour. The sewing machine begins to become antiquated, and thousands of machines, driven by central engines, are supplying, not only husband and son, but the woman herself, with almost every article of clothing, from vest to jacket. Year by year, as modern civilisation advances, there is a marked tendency for the sphere of woman’s domestic labour to contract, and this contraction manifests itself more in Kngland and America than in less progressive countries, more in cities than in country places; more among the wealthier classes than the poorer; and is an unfailing indication of advancing civilisation. Not only in her sphere of domestic labours has change touched her and shrunk her ancient field of labour. Time was when the* mother kept her children about her knees till adult years were reached. Hers was the training and influence which shaped them. To-day so mighty ard inexorable are the demands which modern civilisation makes for spec ialised instruction and training for all individuals, who are to retain the ir usefulness under present conditions, that from the* earliest years cf its life the child is, of necessity, removed from the hands of the mother and placed in those of the specialised instructor. This is especially so in the case of the wealthier classes, but even among the poorer classes, the infant school, the public school, and later the necessity for manual training takes the son, and often the daughter, from the mother's control. A woman of almost any class may have borne* many children, and yet, in early middle ag“, be found sitting alone in an empty house, all her offspring gone from her to receive training and instruction at the hands of others. The old statement that the training

and education of her offspring is the duty of the mother, has become an absolute misstatement, and the woman who should to-day insist on entirely educating her children would, in nine cases out of ten, inflict an irreparable injury on them, because she is incompetent. Even in the matter of child bearing, the need and demand for the exercise of her utmost capacity in thi> direction has greatly lessened. When, under barbarous conditions, infant mortality was very high, when rec urring famine and pestilence decimated the people, when war was continually raging, and surgical skill so wanting that most wounds proved fatal, it was all important that woman’s child-bearing powers should be taxed to their very uttermost limits, if the race were not to dwindle and die out. In the old days twenty men would need to be born and reared to do the labour which is performed to-day by one small >team-crane, and not one of them would have needed any expenditure of family or tribal wealth in his training or education. Conditions to-day have greatly reduced infant and adult mortality, and al>o added greatly to length of life. Famine and pestilence are things of the past, and though war cannot yet, unfortunately, be placed in that cat *- gody, still it is by no means the general thing it once was. We have already reached a point where the soc ial demand is not merely for hu man creatures in the bulk, for use as beasts of burden, but rather for such human creatures as shall be so trained and cultured as to be fitted for the performance of the more crmpl'X duties of modem life. Not now merely for many men, but rather for few men, and those few well born and well instructed, is the modern demand. Indeed, so difficult and expensive* his become the reading and training of children to fit them for the* complexities of modern life, that the ancient good wish for a man i 11 his wedding day that he might be the father of twenty sons and a like rumber of daughters would be con sidered by a modern bridegroom as a malediction rather than a blessing; and society believes now that parents should not bring into the world n.oiv children than they can rear, educate, and train satisfactorily. Loakmg round, then, on the entire field of woman’s ancient labours, we find that fully three-fourths of it has shrunk away for ever, and that remaining

fourth still tends to shrink. It is this great fact which lies behind that vast and restless woman’s movement which marks our day. It is this fact, whether clearly grasped or vaguely felt, which awakes in the hearts oi the ablest modern European women iheir passionate cry for new forms of labour, and new fields for the cxercise of their powers.

We do not ask that the wheels of time should go back, but we demand that in the new conditions which have ari en, and are still arising, alike upon the man and the woman, we also shall have our full share* of honoured ard socially useful human toil. We demand nothing more than this, and we will take nothing less. As the old fields of labour close up beniad us, we demand entrance in to the new. We demand in the factory, the warehouse, the field, wherever machinery has usurped our ancient labour ground, that we also shall have our place as workers, controllers, and possessors, and we make this demand not for our own sakes alone, but for the succour of the race. The Woman Sets the Standard for the Race. Again and again in the history of the past, when a certain stage of material civilisation has been reached, a curious tendency has manifested itself to rob the woman of all forms of active, conscious, social labour, and the result has invariably been the decay of her vitality and intelligence, followed, after a longer or shorter period, by that .of her male descendants and her entire race. In the past this danger of becoming a mere parasite has never threatened more ihan the woman belonging to a dominant class. It-is in the present days, under the peculiar conditions of our modern civilisation, that sex-parasit-ism has become a danger, more or less remote, to the mass of civilised woman. In early days, before the introduction of slavery to any extent, the tendency was to throw an excessive amount of social labour on the woman. Under no conditions, at no time, in no place, in the history of the world, have the men of any period, of any nation, or of any class, shown the slightest inclination to allow their women to become inactive if, by so doing, the work would fall upon themselves. In ancient Greece its womanhood was heavily and

richly endowed with duties and occupations. From kind’s wife to peasant’s daughter all wete busily employed from the various arts and industries carried on in the homes, to the highest social functions as priestesses and prophetesses. It was from such women as these that those heroes, thinkers, and arti>ts sprang, who laid the foundations of Grecian greatness. Hut the time came when these virile, labouring women in the upper classes were to he found no more. The great wealth, gathered by the dominant ciass, through the labour of slaves ai d subject peoples, had so immensely increased that there was no longer a call for physical labour on the part of these women. Waited on by slaves, living a luxurious and pampered life, they no longer sustained by their exertions, cither their own life, or the life of their people, but sank into a condition of supine inaction and ignorance. In the course of time it was inevitable that the manhood should decay, and the day came when the nation of Greece fell utterly before her enemies, swept clean from Thessaly to Sparta, from Corinth to Kphesus, her temples destroyed, and her effete women captives.

In Rome, in the days of her virtue and vigour, the Roman woman laboured mightily, and bore on her shoulders her full half of the social burden. From the vestal virgin to the matron everywhere we find the Roman woman, erect, labouring, resolute, fulfilling lofty functions, and bearing the whole weight of domestic toil. These were the Roman women who gave birth to the men who built up Roman greatness. A few centuries later and Rome had reached that dangerous spot in the order of social change which Greece had reached centuries before her. Slave labour and enjoyment of the unlimited spoils of conquered races, had done away with the demand for physical labour on the part of the members of the upper classes. The Roman matron had ceased for ever from her toils. Decked in jewels and fine clothing, waited on and attended by slaves, faring sumptu uslv every day, she sank lower and : over, till the mad pursuit of pleasure and sensuality filled the void left by the lack of honourable activity and service. Again it was inevitable that this womanhood should at last have

given birth to a manhood a> effete as itself, and that both should have been swept from existence. The woman’s decay has always been preceded by the subjugation of huge bodies of other human creatures, either as slaves, subject races, or classes, and as the result of the excessive labours of these (lasses there has always been an a< cumulation of increased wealth in the hands of the dominant ( lass or r. ce. It has invariably been by existing on thiwealth, the result of forced or ill paid labour, that the women of the dominant (lass has in the past lo>t her activity. There is therefore a profound truth in the statement that the decay of the great nations and c ivi lisation of the pa>t has resulted from the enervation caused by excessive wealth and luxury. The mere use of any of the material products of labour, which we term wealth, can never in it>elf produce that decay ef the race, physical or mental, which precedes the downfall of great civilised nations. The debilitating effect of wealth sets in at that point exactly land never before) at which the supply of material necessaries, comforts, and enjoyments clog the individuality, causing it to rest >atished in the mere passive possession of the results of the labour of others without feeling any necessity or desire for further productive activity of its own. The debilitating effect of unlaboured-for wealth lies, then, not in what it may give in the way of material benefit, but in the power H may, and often does, possess of rob bing the individual of all incentive to exertion, thus destroying the intellectual, the physical, and finally the moral fibre. Fxamination of past civilisation will show that almost invariably it has been the woman who has tended first to reach thipoint, and almost invariably from the woman to the man has enervation and decay spread.

Again and again the same story repeats itself among the nations of the past. First, the accumulation of increased wealth in the hands of the dominant class, the reduction first of the womanhood of that to a life of useless luxury and idleness, and then the inevitable decay of tin' manhood and nation. Not slavery, nor the most vast accumulations of wealth, could destroy a nation by

enervation whose women remained active, virile, and laborious; but the man cannot advance in physical power and intellectual vigour if the woman becomes inactive and stationary, taking no share in the labour necessary to build and maintain the society of which she is part. Only an able and labouring womanhood can permanently produce an able and labouring manhood. Only an effete and inactive manhood can ultimately be produced by an effete and inactive w omanhood. It is the woman who sets the standard of the race, from which there can be no departure for any distance, for any length of time, in any direction. As her brain weakens, so weakens the man’s she bear-.; as her muscle softens, so softens his ; as she decays, so decay the people. If today woman is content to leave to man all labour in the new fields which are rapidly opening before the human race; if, as the old ioims of domestic labour slip from her for ever, she does not grasp the new, then, ultimately, large bodies of women in civilised societies must sink into a state of dependent parasitism, giving no useful and honourable labour 01 service to the nation to which they belong. The woman’s labour movement of our day, which has taken it» rise among women of the more cultured and wealthy classes, and which consists mainly in a demand to have the doors leading to professional, political, and skilled labour thrown open to men and women alike, if brought to a satisfactory conclusion, will tend to the material and physical well-being of woman herself, as well as to that of her male companions and descendants. It is the perception of this fact that, not for herself, nor even for fellow-women alone, but for the benefit of humanity at large, it is right and necessary that woman should have her full share in all spheres of useful and honourable labour.

It is a remarkable fact that the men who object to women entering into the fields of labour which they consider outside her sphere, do not object to the toil, nor the amount of toil, which the woman undertakes; it is the form and the amount of reward. It is not the hard labouring woman, even in his own worn out and prematurely aged with mon otonous domestic toil, that has no be

ginning and knows no end; it is not the h;sggard, work-crushed woman and mother, who irons his shirts, or destroys health and youth in the swea er’s den, where she >ews the gar ments in which he so radiantly appears, that disturbs him. It is the thought of the woman doctor, with an income of some hundreds a year, who drives round to see her patients, or receives them in her consulting rooms, who has time to read in her study, or to receive her guests; it is the thought of the woman who, a> legislator, may 101 l for perhaps six hour> of the day on the padded legislative bench, relieving the tedium by an occasional turn in the billiard or refreshment room when she is not needed to vote or speak; it is the thought of the woman as Greek professor, with three or four hundred a year, who gives half a dozen lectures a week, and has leisure to enjoy the -o<icty of her husband and c hildren, and time to devote to her own study and life of thought. It is these women who wring his heart. It is not the woman who, on hands and knees, at tenpencc a day, scrubs the Hoors of public buildings or private dwellings, that tills him with an anguish for womanhood; that posture is for him truly feminine, and does not interfere with his ideal of the mother and child-bearer, or that some weary woman passes far into the night, bearing w ith a< hing back and tired head his fretful teething child for a yearly pittance of £2O, does not distress him, but that the same woman, by work in an office, should earn be able to have a comfortable home of her own, and her evening free for study or pleasure, distress's him deeply. It is not the labour or the amount of labour so much as the amount of reward that interfere*, with hi- ideal of tlie* eter nal womanly; he is, as a rule, quite contented that the women of the race should labour for him, whether as tea-pickers or washer-women, or toilers for his children, provided the reward they receive is not large, nor in sue h fields as he might himself at any time desire to enter.

The woman’s movement today manifests itself in many ways and various directions. It breaks out now here and now there. At one point it is a passionate cry for a share in public and social duties; at another it makes itself felt as a determined endeavour after self-culture; again it

shows itself in a resolute endeavour to enlarge the sphere of remunerative labour for women ; and everywhere is heard the cry for even handed justice between the relations of the sexes. All this diversity shows not the weakness, but the strength of the movement, which, taken as a whole, is a movement steady and persistent in one direction, the direction of increased activity and culture. This movement is shaping itself in the bosc in of our time beside those vast human developments of which men have said in the days of old, “Surely this thing is not of man, but of God.”

For the woman whose faith can see through the distance the great things towards which the struggles and suffering- of the women of to-day tend; who sees beyond the present, though in a future which she knows she will never enter, an enlarged and strengthened womanhood, bearing forward a strengthened and expanded race, it is not so hard to renounce and labour with unshaken purpose, but for those who have not that clear view, but struggle on, with a vague const iousness that somewhere ahead lies a larger end, towards which their efforts tend. For such as these it is perhaps not so easy to labour without growing weary. Nevertheless it is through the labours of these myriad toilers, each in her own small sphere, and out of endless failures and miscarriages, that at last the widened and beautiful relations of woman to life will and must rise. It is often said of those who are seeking this w ider sphere for women that they are “New Women.” We are not new. We, who lead in this movement to-day, have in us the blood of a womanhood that was never bought and never sold; that wore no veii, and had no foot bound; whose realised ideal of marriage was that of companionship and an equality in duty and labour; who stood side by side with the man they loved in peace and in war. We art* of a race of women that of old knew no fear, and feared no death, and lived great lives, and hoped great hopes; and if to-day some of us have fallen on evil and degenerate times, there moves in us yet the throb of the old blood. If to-day it be on no physical battlefield that we stand beside our men, it is yet the old spirit which stirs within us in deeper and subtler ways. Though the battlefield be now for us all in the laboratory, or the workshop, in the forum or the

study, in the assembly or in the mart, o- in the political arena, with the pen and not the sword, of the head and not the arm, we still, as of old, stand side by side with the men we love, to dare and suffer and rejoice with them. It is a gracious fact, to which every woman who has achieved success or accomplished good work in any of the fields generally apportioned to men, will bear witness, whether that work be in the held of literature, of science, or the organised profession >, that the hands which have been most eagerly stretched out to uelcomy her have been those of men; that the voices which have most generously acclaimed her success have been those of male fellow-workers in the fields into which she has entered. There is no door at which the hand of woman has knocked for admission into a new field of toil but there have been found on the other side strong and generous men eager to turn it for her, almost before she knocks. To those of us who stand with shaded eyes gazing into the future nothing seems of so graJous a promise as the outline we seem to discern of a condition of human life in which a closer union than the world has yet seen shall exist between the man and the woman. In his apocalypse there was one who saw a new heaven and a new earth. We see a new earth, and therein dwells love, the love of comrades and co-workers.

It is because so wide and gracious to us are the possibilities of the future, so impossible is a return to the past, so deadly is a passive acquiescence in the present, that to day we women are found everywhere raising our strange new cry—“ Give us labour and the training that fits us for labour/’