Woman's Wages.

It is in the partial failure of the condition on which I have here dwelt so much at length that we find one important cause of the inadequate wages of women.

But first as to the fact of wages inadequate to the service performed. Nothing is more common than the assertion, in print, that women are paid but one half or one third as much as men for performing the same work. Such assertions are generally based on a misconception of the actual constitution of industrial society. Because a woman working in a woollen factory receives but twelve shillings a week while a man gets twenty-four, it can not properly be said that the latter receives twice as much for doing the same work, since the work done in a factory is of many kinds, making very different demands upon the operatives in the respects of strength, skill, and intelligence, and hence justly remunerated at very different rates, from threepence a day, it may be, to as many shillings. And if we inquire, we shall find that women in a woollen factory are in fact rarely engaged upon the same kind of work as the men. Thus in an account of the organization of a representative establishment given in the Statistical Journal, where the number and sex of the operatives of each class are stated, and the wages paid to each, I note that all the hand-loom weavers are men, all the power-loom weavers women. And I also note what is significant, that the wages of the men employed as handloom weavers are much nearer women's wages than the wages of the men employed in any other department of the factory.

In the same way, in his history of the cotton manufacture, published a generation ago, Mr. Baines stated that large departments were then entirely given up to women and children. Now, clearly, as Mr. Baines remarks, "that which is only a child's labor can be remunerated only by a child's wages." We have seen that the employer can not pay in wages more than he may fairly look to get back in the price of his products. Hence the fact that a woman may require more to subsist upon than a twelve-year-old boy affords no economical reason why she should receive more wages if she only does the same kind of work.

But even though women performed the same kind of work as men, receiving therefor wages less than men, it would not follow, as of course, that their wages were inadequate to their service. The differences existing in respect to the efficiency of labor, both on the side of work and on the side of waste, have been seen (Chapter III.) to be very great as between laborers actually employed in the same operation. Hence it might be true that a man and a woman working at the same table, upon the same material, with the same implements, or laboring side by side in the fields, should receive wages in very different amounts, and yet their respective services be most exactly recompensed.

Now, there are reasons, some of a social and some of a physiological nature, for the services of women, as a body, being in a degree less desirable to employers than those of men. The physiological reasons have been well stated by Dr. Ames in his recent book, Sex in Industry. These are sufficient totally to debar women from many occupations, and greatly to reduce their efficiency in others. Among social reasons we may adduce the generally less practical education which girls receive as compared with that given to boys, and the almost universal expectation of domesticity which is inherent and ineradicable in the constitution of woman, interfering not only with her preparation for active pursuits, but also with her prosecution of them, because it reduces the singleness of purpose and interest with which her duties are discharged, and depreciates in the eyes of her employer, and justly so, the value of services which may abruptly be terminated by marriage. Nor are these industrial disabilities to be wholly cured by any cause that shall not disrupt and destroy society. Just so long as girls grow up in the belief that their mission is not to work in a shop, but to adorn a home, their education will take shape accordingly. Parents and school-boards may lay out courses of study with never so much of utilitarian intention, the mind of the girl will secrete sweetness and grace from whatever food is offered it. And just so long as the same tender illusion lasts—and we know it will outlast much bitter experience—woman will serve distraite, if not unhappy, as one who has a name she has not yet taken, a city to which she has not come. If a man marries, he as a rule becomes a better and more stable workman on that account. If a woman marries, it is most probable that she will leave her employment; it is almost certain that if she remains she will be a less desirable laborer than before. This expectation of domesticity is always likely to exist with greater or less force in the female mind, and will inevitably, wherever it exists, reduce the efficiency of female labor.

Yet though there is thus much misapprehension of the relation between the wages of women and those of men, there can, I think, be no question that the wages of the former are in a degree inadequate to the service rendered, after due allowance for all differences of amount and quality. If there be such inadequacy, the sole cause must, as we have seen (Chapter X.), be found in the failure of competition.

Inasmuch as the failure of competition comes mainly through the immobility of labor, let us inquire whether female labor is under any exceptional disabilities in respect to movement.

In the first place, it needs to be observed that women have far more occasion, relatively, to move to the labor-market than men, and have need, therefore, to be far more mobile and active. This is due to the fact that the industries for which women are physiologically suited are highly localized. Wherever there is population, there are women who feel the necessity of working outside their own families for subsistence: yet the opportunities for their employment in mechanical work are found only here and there. Thus, in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, we find that there were in 1870 29,139 men employed in mechanical labor, and but 1723 women; in Erie County, New-York, 11,357 men and but 960 women; in Wayne County, Michigan, 11,543 men and but 1454 women; in St. Louis County, Missouri, 32,484 men and but 3455 women; in Cook County, Illinois, 24,705 men and but 4652 women; in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, 8698 men and but 791 women. On the other hand, there were 5887 women employed in Hillsborough County, New-Hampshire, against 7627 men; in Androscoggin and York Counties, Maine, respectively 4045 and 4512 women against 3908 and 3689 men. These are only given as instances to show how irregularly and how rarely at the best, the opportunities for the employment of women in mechanical industry occur. An examination of the statistics of industry in the United States discloses that of the women employed in mechanical pursuits, fortytwo per cent are found in only seven counties, comprising but seven per cent of the population of the country.

While women have thus far more occasion relatively to move to their market than men, we find them disabled therefrom, in a great measure, by physical weakness, by timidity, and by those liabilities to misconstruction, insult, and outrage which arise out of their sexual characteristics. Having more need than men to be free to move from place to place, they have far less ability to do so. It must be remembered that it is not a question merely of taking a journey from home to a place where a "situation" has already been engaged, but, it may be, of seeking out employment from street to street, and from shop to shop, by repeated inquiries, and often through much urgency and persistency of application. This is what men have to do to "get a place," often going into doubtful localities, freely encountering strangers, and sleeping in casual company. These, with men, are among the conditions of the mobility of labor which not only secures employment for the individual applicant, but relieves the pressure upon the market elsewhere, and oftentimes prevents that painful or fatal "congestion of labor" which breaks down wages, crushes the hopefulness and self-respect of the operative class, and engenders habits of laboring and living which it may take long, even under favorable conditions, to wear out of the industrial body.

To state these conditions is to show some of the disadvantages under which women have labored in the past from their natural indisposition and disqualification to encounter strangers and make terms for themselves. I would not seek to idealize the sex in dealing with so plain and practical a matter. No one who has had to do with book-agents of both sexes would unhesitatingly award the palm for persistency and assurance to the man; while it is proverbial that female venders of fish, in all countries and ages, have succeeded so far in overcoming their native meekness and bashfulness as to qualify them fully to hold their own whether in a bargain or in a wrangle. Nor would it be just to speak of female labor anywhere as if it were absolutely immobile. Country girls have always gone to the city to find employment in shops and stores; while the cotton factories and the boot and shoe shops of Massachusetts and Rhode Island have always been filled with women from the rural parts of New-England and even from the British Provinces.

Yet, after all allowances that require to be made, it remains true that while, from the specialization and localization of the industries in which female labor is employed, women have far more occasion than men to keep themselves free to seek their own market, they are in fact, from many causes, under serious disabilities in respect to movement from place to place, with all which that implies for females poor and unprotected, and, it may be, also ignorant and fearful.

While much of this disqualification of woman for seeking the labor-market arises out of her physiological conditions, and is not to be cured by law or opinion, it is also true that no inconsiderable part has been due, in the past, to a lack of respect and sympathy for her in her capacity as a laborer, if not to positive prejudice and even to actual physical obstruction offered to her industrial movements. Of the insults and violence not infrequently offered to women seeking employment in departments of industry which men have chosen to regard as exclusively their own, it is not necessary to speak. Women scarcely need this to restrain them from pursuing their economical interests. Intensely sensitive to opinion, they shrink from the faintest utterances of blame; while coldness and indifference alone are often sufficient to repress their impulses to activity.

This unfortunate result—namely, a public opinion unfavorable, or less favorable than is desirable, to the extension of female labor—is doubtless due in some part to the comparative newness of the occasion which women have to enter the general market of labor, from which it results that their entrance is not unnaturally greeted by the body of male laborers interested therein as an intrusion threatening a reduction of their own wages, while the outside community, though disinterested, remains indifferent, not having been educated up to the point of giving women a warm and strong moral support in their efforts to find employment, and of providing adequate protection to them in the casual and often rude encounters which the search for employment may involve.

The necessity for the employment of women in wagelabor not agricultural, in any thing like the extent which exists at present, dates from the decay of the system of domestic manufactures which followed the extensive introduction of machinery in the latter part of the eighteenth century. "The original artisans," says Mr. Mill, "were either slaves or the women of the family." It was the women who wove and spun, fashioned and sewed, the garments, the blankets, and the nets of our ancestors. It is true we occasionally find record of women earning wages in other occupations. Prof. Rogers has pointed out that, in the fourteenth century, the thatcher's help, or "homo," was generally a woman. But, speaking broadly, there was, until the inventions of Watt, Hargreaves, and Arkwright antiquated the distaff and the spinning-wheel, work enough within the house for all the women of the family if we except the harvest season, when agriculture was, as it is to-day in Europe, the occupation, and in Russia the equal occupation, of both sexes.

But no longer can the wife and daughter, in a family where children must needs go mainly uncared for, and housekeeping becomes reduced to the minimum by the scantiness at once of space and of food, do their equal share, or at any rate seem to do their equal share, in the support of the household, within the house. All which now enters into domestic consumption must come in from without; and so wife and daughter must, or think they must, go out and bring in a part of it. At the same time the extension of water and steam-power has made the labor of women useful in a thousand operations for which their strength was formerly inadequate. This it is which has driven women into the labor-market. In families where bread comes hardly, the services of the house are foregone, and wife and daughter, no longer working as of old for the head of the house, go out to seek strange employers and be jostled in public places. Shame on the man, if he be man, who will not gladly give them room!

Coincidently with this great industrial change, involving the necessity of wives and daughters contributing by wage labor to the support of the family, have occurred social changes, of scarcely less importance, which have resulted in a steady increase in the proportion of women who are wholly dependent on themselves for maintenance. What these social changes are I need not point out; the result itself is patent, palpable, and needs no proof.

I have spoken of wife and daughter entering the market of wage labor, as a necessity resulting from the social and industrial changes indicated. And so, in a melancholy proportion of cases, it is. Yet there can be little doubt that it is sometimes accepted as a necessity where more courage and patience and a broader view of self-interest would prove that this might be avoided; and in such a case it would often be truer economy to forego wages to be earned at the expense of leaving the house uncared for. "I find," says Mr. Fraser, Assistant Commissioner on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, "that in my own parish, in Berkshire, the women have a sort of proverb that 'there's only four-pence a year difference between what she gets who goes out to work and what she gets who stays at home, and she who stays at home wins it.'"

With something of exaggeration there is, no doubt, much of truth in this proverb of the Berkshire women. In the eagerness to increase the family income it is not sufficiently considered that, in the absence of the wife and mother, great loss must necessarily be sustained in the expenditure of that income; and secondly, that the ill-effects on the health of the family, on the duration of the laboring power, and on the moral elements of industry may be sufficient in many cases to offset the nominal gain achieved by stripping the house of its service and depriving the household of their proper care. The failure to appreciate that a penny saved is a penny earned, lies at the bottom of many a far-reaching mistake in domestic life as in productive industry. Waste in food, clothing, and utensils; waste in laboring force through ill-prepared and ill-preserved food; waste of the vital endowment of the rising generation through lack of that constant care which is the essential condition of well-being in childhood; waste of character and the formation of indolent and vicious habits through neglect to instruct and train the young, and through making the house cheerless and distasteful to the mature: the waste in these and many other forms which the entry of the wife and daughter on wage labor necessarily implies, in greater or less degree, will surely balance the addition of many shillings a week to the family income.

Yet, after all, there is an increasing multitude of women who, through having no house to keep, or through the straitness of the family means, have no choice but to enter the mill or the shop, and submit to the rude hustlings of the market-place—and room has not been made for them.

It may sound strangely that even in the United States, where it is of general consent that women are treated with higher relative consideration than in any other country in the world, respect and sympathy for them are wanting in such a degree as to deprive them of any part of their equitable wages. I speak, however, of respect and sympathy for women as laborers. In their "sphere," to use the phrase which so exasperates the advocates of suffrage without regard to sex, women have always received homage and service, but as wage-laborers in the public market they have suffered not a little in the past. This has not been from want of chivalry, but from defects of education. The need that woman is coming to have, in modern life, to enter the competitions of industry, has not become sufficiently familiar to the public mind; the idea has been strange, her image in such garb unwelcome. That public opinion which should open to her avenues of employment; which should be a strong support to her in her demands for fair remuneration; which should be a defence to her in her close pursuit of employment, in her urgent and persistent application for work, in her necessary exposure to gaze and comment, and in her contact with much that is strange and rude, has not yet been created in such a degree as to give to the sex all that freedom of industrial movement which might be consistent with feminine purity and delicacy. We have not yet come to appreciate the obligation which their necessity imposes upon us, as men and gentlemen, to follow them with our earnest, active sympathy, and to protect and champion them not less in their labor than at dance or festival.

And what is the remedy? Agitation and the diffusion of correct ideas. Let gifted women continue, as in the past, to appeal for public respect and sympathy for their sisters in their work; let the schools teach that public opinion may powerfully affect wages, and that nothing which depends on human volition is "inexorable;" let the statistics of women's wages be carefully gathered and persistently held up to view. Efforts like these will not fail to strengthen and support woman in her resort to market, thus enabling her the better to realize the condition upon which alone she can expect to receive the highest wages which the existing state of industry will allow.