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NETWORKS OF KNOWLEDGE
Collaborative Innovation in International Learning

The network is the pervasive organizational image of the new millen-

nium. This book examines one particular kind of network - the
'knowledge network' - whose primary mandate is to create and dis-
seminate knowledge based on multidisciplinary research that is
informed by problem-solving as well as theoretical agendas. In their
examination of five knowledge networks based in Canadian universi-
ties, and in most cases working closely with researchers in developing
countries, the authors demonstrate the ability of networks to cross dis-
ciplinary boundaries, to blend the operational with the theoretical, and
to respond to broad social processes. Operating through networks,
rather than through formal, hierarchical structures, diverse communi-
ties of researchers create different kinds of knowledge and disseminate
their results effectively across disciplinary, sectoral, and spatial bound-
aries. Analysis of networks in health, environment, urban, and educa-
tional fields suggests that old categories of 'North' and 'South' are
becoming blurred, and that the new structures of knowledge creation
and dissemination help to sustain collaborative research.

JANICE GROSS STEIN is Professor of Political Science and Director of the

Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto.
She specializes in international conflict management, and has acted as
a consultant with the Canadian government, the United Nations, and
NGOs such as CARE Canada.

RICHARD STREN is Professor of Political Science at the University of

Toronto. He has carried out extensive research in Africa on urban plan-
ning and politics, and has also coordinated a number of large research
networks with colleagues in developing countries.

JOY FITZGIBBON is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political

Science at the University of Toronto.

MELISSA MACLEAN is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politi-

cal Science at the University of Toronto.
IPACIAPC IAPC
The Institute L

The Institute of Public Administration of Canada

Series in Public Management and Governance
Editor: Peter Aucoin

This
This series is sponsored by the Institute of Public Administration of
Canada as part of its commitment to encourage research on issues in
Canadian public administration, public sector management, and pub-
among practitioners, academics, and the general public.

Networks
Networks of Knowledge: Collaborative Innovation in International Lear
Janice Stein, Richard Stren, Joy Fitzgibbon, and Melissa MacLean
The National Research Council in the Innovative Policy Era: Chan
Hierarchies, Networks, and Markets
G. Bruce Doern and Richard Levesqu
Beyond Service: State Worke
Greg McElligott
Networks of Knowledge
Collaborative Innovation in
International Learning

JANICE GROSS STEIN

RICHARD STREN
JOY FITZGIBBON
MELISSA MACLEAN

IPA IAPC
T h e Institute o f
Public Administration of Canada L
publique du Canada

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
 www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2001
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada

ISBN 0-8020-4844-7 (cloth)

ISBN 0-8020-8371-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

Networks of knowledge : collaborative innovation in international learning
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-4844-7 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-8371-4 (pbk.)
1. Information networks - Canada. 2. Information networks - Ontario -
Toronto - Case studies. 3. Information networks - Nova Scotia - Halifax -
Case studies. 4. Economic development - Research - Canada.
5. Community development - Research - Canada. 6. Communication in
economic development - Canada. 7. Communication in community
development - Canada. I. Stein, Janice.
HD76.N47 2001 338.91'07'2071 C2001-930320-3

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its pub-
lishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents

Preface vii
About the Authors xi

1 Knowledge Networks in Global Society:

Pathways to Development 3
Janice Gross Stein and Richard Siren

2 Knowledge Production and Global Civil Society 29

Janice Gross Stein

3 The Canada International Scientific Exchange Program in

Otolaryngology 51
Joy Fitzgibbon

4 The Coastal Resources Research Network 72

Joy Fitzgibbon and Melissa MacLean

5 The Global Urban Research Initiative 85

Melissa MacLean

6 The Learning for Environmental Action Program 104

Melissa MacLean

7 The Canadian Aging Research Network 118

Joy Fitzgibbon
vi Contents

8 Knowledge Networks and New Approaches to

'Development' 133
Richard Siren

Appendix. A: Template Questions 151

Appendix B: Comparative Characteristics of the Five Networks 157
Bibliography 165
Index 171
Preface

This project was created as a response to a Canadian task force estab-

lished by three leading development organizations - the International
Development Research Centre (IDRC), the International Institute for
Sustainable Development (USD), and the North-South Institute -
under the leadership of Maurice R Strong. The purpose of the Interna-
tional Development Research and Policy Task Force was to reflect on
Canada's role and position in the twenty-first century, 'and, more spe-
cifically, to consider Canadian strengths and capabilities with regard to
the global development challenges ahead.' One of the authors of this
volume was a member of the task force, whose provocative report,
entitled Connecting with the World: Priorities for Canadian International-
ism in the Twenty-first Century, was published in 1996.
The report argued that, in an increasingly globalizing world, the
challenge to Canada is to build bridges to the developing world
'around issues relating to knowledge and communication for sustain-
able development' (p. 6). Canada should think of itself as a 'knowledge
broker/ with knowledge viewed in three dimensions: the creation of
substantive knowledge, in the form of services and products; the cre-
ation and maintenance of knowledge-based networks; and the build-
ing of the capacity to use, adapt, and build knowledge at the local level
(p. 7). While granting that 'the call for "networking" has become a
mantra in the 1990s' (p. 9), the task force emphasized that knowledge
must have a practical use, since '... in the past far too much knowledge
for development has been centralized, generalized, and loaded onto a
one-way conveyor belt from North to South, without adequate regard
to practical problems, local conditions, or the ultimate end-user. The
Task Force [therefore] conceives of a system based on the most up-to-
viii Preface

date communication technologies, that is both dynamic and partici-

patory, where the conveyor belt is multidirectional, and where local
adaptations can be fed back into the system and disseminated more
broadly to other practitioners' (p. 9). To this end, the report recom-
mended funding for the promotion of 'knowledge-based networks' as
a particularly Canadian approach to development.
The task force concluded that universities - at least in Canada - have
played only a minor role in the development of networks. While the
evidence in the report is mixed (there are some examples of successful
university-based networks in the field of development-oriented 'policy
enquiry'), the report's general perspective on universities is that 'the
Canadian academic community ... has not done enough to translate
knowledge into practical tools for sustainable development or useful
instruments for policymakers at home and abroad' (p. 26). We are con-
cerned about the suggestion, implied in the report, that universities are
not active in development. Indeed, our own experience suggests other-
wise.
We set out, then, to conduct a preliminary empirical probe into the
contributions that Canadian universities may be making to develop-
ment networks. We discovered that our universities are indeed making
meaningful and practical contributions to local development efforts
around the globe through network relationships that cross disciplines
and communities. These networks have contributed to the creation of
fascinating, innovative development projects. Sparked by deliberate
strategies that link the best of theory with deeply rooted local experi-
ences, and marked by intellectual creativity and energy, these net-
works are producing new kinds of knowledge and projects that would
not otherwise be produced. We are left with a series of unanswered
questions that focus, not on if universities matter in development, but
rather on when and how.
Much of the evidence in this book comes from interviews with the
directors and members of the five networks studied: the Canadian
Aging Research Network (GARNET), the Canada International Scien-
tific Exchange Program in Otolaryngology (CISEPO), the Coastal
Resources Research Network (CoRR), the Global Urban Research Ini-
tiative (GURI), and the Learning for Environmental Action Program
(LEAP). We are deeply grateful for their willingness to share their
experiences, perspectives, and time. They were generous with all.
None of this research would have been possible without the IDRC and
the Office of the Vice-President, Research and International Relations,
 Preface ix

University of Toronto, who provided us with the financial support to

pursue the project. We are particularly grateful to Chris Smart at IDRC
for his patience and encouragement at each point along the way, and to
Heather Munroe-Blum, Vice-President of Research and International
Relations at the University of Toronto, for encouraging us to think
about this study in the first place, and for her unfailing interest in our
subsequent work. We also want to acknowledge the helpful and per-
ceptive comments from anonymous reviewers as well as the support
and patience of Virgil Duff, Editor-in-Chief of University of Toronto
Press. We are most grateful to Chris Gore, who read the manuscript
and provided detailed and insightful suggestions. A very special
thank-you goes to our editor Judith Bell, whose painstaking eye for
detail and clarity has added so much to this book. She responded to
our frequently urgent requests with patience and persistent good
humour.
Finally, this book is the result of an extraordinarily fruitful collabora-
tion between faculty and graduate students. The faculty learned an
enormous amount from two exceptional graduate students, who
became full and valuable contributors in this shared analysis of knowl-
edge networks and international development. The graduate students
learned so much from Janice Stein and Richard Stren, and are im-
mensely grateful for the extraordinary opportunity they provided. It
was a privilege to learn from them in such an open, supportive, and
meaningful collaboration.

Toronto
January 2001
This page intentionally left blank
About the Authors

Joy Fitzgibbon is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the Univer-

sity of Toronto. Her research interests link global politics, public policy,
and development with international public health. Her dissertation
evaluates the effectiveness of global knowledge networks in the man-
agement of tuberculosis. She is currently a Research Assistant in the
Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto.

Melissa MacLean is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the Uni-

versity of Toronto, currently preparing a thesis on decentralization and
democratization in Bolivia. She has worked for the Canadian Council
for International Cooperation in Ottawa, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and
Social Justice, the Developing Countries Farm Radio Network, both in
Toronto, and for a local non-governmental organization in India. She
has written and edited numerous popular-format publications on
development issues. Her paper 'Canadian Bilateral Aid Policy in Neo-
liberal Nicaragua' was published by Canada-Americas Policy Alterna-
tives. She has travelled and lived in various parts of South Asia, Latin
America, and Europe.

Janice Gross Stein is Director of the Munk Centre for International

Studies at the University of Toronto, Harrowston Professor of Conflict
Management and Negotiation in the Department of Political Science at
the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
She received her Ph.D. from McGill University and specializes in inter-
national conflict management and development. Her recent publica-
tions include Mean Times: Humanitarian Action in Complex Political
Emergencies; Stark Choices, Cruel Dilemmas (with Michael Bryans and
xii About the Authors

Bruce D. Jones); Powder Keg in the Middle East: The Struggle for Gulf Secu-
rity (with Geoffrey Kemp); We All Lost the Cold War (with Richard Ned
Lebow); and Choosing to Cooperate: How States Avoid Loss (edited, with
Louis W. Pauly).

Richard Stren is Professor of Political Science at the University of Tor-

onto, and former Director of the Centre for Urban and Community
Studies. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University
of California at Berkeley. From 1965 to the mid-1990s, he carried out
extensive research on African cities, studying urban politics, compara-
tive urban policy, and the effects of international projects on the prob-
lems of the urban poor. Since then, his work has turned more toward
Latin America and the larger-scale comparative study of urban reform.
His major publications include Housing the Urban Poor in Africa; African
Cities in Crisis (edited, with Rodney White); Sustainable Cities (edited,
with Rodney White and Joseph Whitney); The Social Sustainability of
Cities (edited, with Mario Polese); and The Challenge of Urban Govern-
ment (edited, with Mila Freire). He also edited the four-volume Urban
Research in the Developing World, published by the Centre for Urban and
Community Studies for the Global Urban Research Initiative (GURI), a
major international collaborative research project of which he was the
Coordinator.
NETWORKS OF KNOWLEDGE
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER ONE

Knowledge Networks in Global

Society: Pathways to Development
Janice Gross Stein and Richard Siren

Introduction

The network is the pervasive organizational image of the new millen-

nium. In our everyday lives, a multitude of networks - communica-
tions networks, infrastructure networks, and financial networks, to
name only a few - have become central to the way we work and live.
In an important comparative study, the sociologist Manuel Castells
argues that 'as a historical trend, dominant functions and processes in
the information age are increasingly organized around networks. Net-
works constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the
diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and
outcomes in processes of production, experience, power and culture/1
Increasingly, we are living in a networked world.
In this book we examine one particular kind of network - the
'knowledge network' - whose primary mandate is to create and dis-
seminate knowledge. Knowledge, rather than land or capital, has
become the most important input of production as the global economy
has developed in the post-industrial era. Fortunately, knowledge is a
renewable resource, relatively inexpensive to reproduce once the costs
of its production have been paid. As we become more aware of the
generic importance of networks in the wake of the revolution in infor-
mation and communication, the special importance of knowledge net-
works is becoming clear.2 Knowledge networks are the engine for the
interrelated scientific and social processes that have been described as
the global 'knowledge revolution/3
We are interested in the complex, subtle, and synergistic relation-
ships between institutions such as universities that generate knowl-
4 Networks of Knowledge

edge in well-understood, well-established ways, and networks that

produce knowledge through broader social processes.4 How 'knowl-
edge-based networks' should be constructed and supported is a cen-
tral concern of this volume. Within this broader analysis of the origins,
contributions, and sustainability of knowledge networks, we focus
particularly on the impact of knowledge networks on civil society, both
local and global, and on development and development assistance.
Networks that have global reach can draw on sources of knowledge
that might otherwise be missed, frame research agendas in response to
a broad range of need and expertise, and disseminate the results of
research. We argue that there are three important ways in which knowl-
edge networks contribute to innovation and international learning.
Knowledge networks:

• produce new knowledge through transdisciplinary research on problems as

they are experienced across international boundaries in different contexts;
• produce 'operational' knowledge, acquired through context-bound inter-
actions among multiple sectors of expertise; and
• disseminate knowledge by blurring the boundaries between participants
and researchers, thereby ensuring that 'global' knowledge is introduced
locally and that 'local' knowledge shapes and, at times, redefines global
knowledge.

Our analysis uses university-based networks as exemplars of pro-

ducers and disseminators of knowledge in a connected world. How
important are these networks in the production and dissemination of
knowledge? We ask three counterfactual questions: if these networks
did not exist, would we know less, would we know differently, or woulddid not exist, would we know less, would we know differently, or would
we know more slowly or less widelyl5
The starting point of this study was the identification of five univer-
sity-based research networks.6 Four of these networks were connected
to institutions within our own university - the University of Toronto -
while a fifth operated through Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
Our choices were limited by resources and time, but we also wanted to
take advantage of the fact that many of our colleagues were willing to
share their experiences with us, and that one of us has coordinated a
research network for over seven years. The five networks were not
chosen as representative cases. We searched for knowledge networks
that had been in existence for more than one year, that had some exter-
nal funding, that were international in scope, and that had kept some
 Knowledge Networks in Global Society 5

records of their objectives, memberships, and processes. We identified

four global networks, familiar through their reputations, and included
one largely domestic (Canadian) network for purposes of comparison.
We make no claims about the representativeness of this group; on the
contrary, we consider this analysis of these five networks as a 'first cut/
a preliminary analysis in a field where little systematic evidence
exists.7
Although the concept of a network is widely used in sociology, orga-
nizational behaviour, economics, and comparative public policy, there
is little consensus on what a network is. Definitions range from 'every-
one you know and everyone who knows you/ a highly contextualized
and fluid concept, to 'a map of lines between points/ an explicitly spa-
tial and defined representation.8 Some sociologists represent all struc-
tures as networks, with sets of nodes, or members, and sets of ties, the
interconnections between network members.9 These ties may be for-
mal or informal relationships, transfers, information exchanges, and
resource flows between members. This generalized representation of a
network does not distinguish sharply enough between hierarchically
managed spatial organizations, and horizontal, fluid networks in
which members share converging, if passing, interests and exchange
resources.
We define a network as a spatially diffuse structure, with no rigidly
defined boundaries, consisting of several autonomous nodes sharing
common values or interests, linked together in interdependent ex-
change relationships.10 Here we are emphasizing the repetitive intera-
ctions among members, as well as their converging interests. Another
distinguishing characteristic of a network is its largely horizontal,
rather than hierarchical, structure. It is this absence of hierarchy which
gives networks their flexibility, their capacity to expand and contract in
response to changing environments, and their potential to adapt.11
Another approach to defining a network is to compare it with other
dominant organizational protocols. The most important alternative
modalities are markets and hierarchies. Walter Powell argues that net-
works can be clearly distinguished from both markets and hierarchies:

In market transactions the benefits to be exchanged are clearly specified,

no trust is required, and agreements are bolstered by the power of legal
sanction. Network forms of exchange, however, entail indefinite, sequen-
tial transactions within the context of a general pattern of interaction.
Sanctions are typically normative rather than legal. The value of the
6 Networks of Knowledge

goods to be exchanged in markets are much more important than the rela-
tionship itself; when relations do matter, they are frequently defined as if
they were commodities. In hierarchies, communication occurs in the con-
text of the employment contract. Relationships matter and previous inter-
actions shape current ones, but the patterns and context of intra-
organizational exchange are most strongly shaped by one's position
within the formal hierarchical structure of authority.12

In contrast to markets, relationships matter in networks. The distinc-

tion between markets and networks, some have argued, is overdrawn
since relationships matter in markets as well, and networks are sys-
tems of exchange, as are markets. What is different in knowledge net-
works is the nature of what is being exchanged and the relationships
that develop around the 'exchange' and the deepening of knowledge
as the basic commodity.13
In contrast to hierarchies, flows in networks are predominantly hori-
zontal rather than vertical. These kinds of flows are especially im-
portant when new knowledge is at a premium. The most useful infor-
mation is rarely that which flows down the formal chain of command
in an organization, or that which can be inferred from shifting price
signals. Rather, it is that which is obtained from someone whom you
have dealt with in the past and found to be reliable ... The open-ended,
relational features of networks, with their relative absence of explicit
quid pro quo behavior, greatly enhance the ability to transmit and
learn new knowledge and skills/14
An absence of hierarchy creates many advantages but also chal-
lenges. When largely horizontal networks are established, how is
membership determined? How are 'nodes' created? W,e have little sys-
tematic evidence about how knowledge networks, our particular inter-
est, begin and about the processes that define these networks. Are
there boundaries around the membership or is the network infinitely
expandable? Are there rules of inclusion and exclusion? If there are
rules, how are they made and how stable are they? In short, how for-
mal are networks?
These questions are relevant to knowledge networks, a subset of
generic networks and the focus of this study. Ronnie Lipschutz defines
a global knowledge network as the actors and linkages among these
actors that transcend boundaries and localities.15 Global knowledge
networks create and transfer knowledge - scientific, community-
based, and policy-relevant - as well as the necessary hardware and
 Knowledge Networks in Global Society 7

finances to support knowledge acquisition and implementation. This

transfer between scientific knowledge, local community-based knowl-
edge, and policy-relevant knowledge is a process of 'social learning/
Such knowledge networks operate within a globally shared system of
knowledge creation and transmission, while the practices of individual
members are informed by the histories, politics, and ecologies of the
national and local places in which they work; in this sense, global
knowledge networks link the global, the national, and the local. Lips-
chutz finds considerable internal hierarchy within the networks,
reflecting imbalances in resources of network members.16
A recent study of knowledge networks in Canada similarly develops
a concept of 'formal' knowledge networks that seems to have many of
the attributes of highly structured, hierarchical organizations. While he
recognizes what he calls 'open networks/ which are set up in order to
create new knowledge with no concerns 'about possible applications
or development/ Howard Glark appears to favour what he calls
'development networks/ whose members and projects 'are carefully
chosen by peer review using criteria based on excellence. The network
exists to create new knowledge, but also to accelerate the application of
that new knowledge to economic or social development. The network
has a tight form of governance, a formal constitution, and a more hier-
archical structure/17 As this study shows, knowledge-based networks
need not be, and often are not, so tightly conceived and organized.
Knowledge networks do more than link nodes and transfer knowl-
edge. Economists consider these networks as private producers of pub-
lic goods who add value. A knowledge network is 'a set of activities
undertaken by discrete autonomous actors endowed with knowledge
producing and consuming capacity ... that increase the value of the
activities of the actors, contribute to the expansion of knowledge,
broaden the scope for the applications of new knowledge, and enable
knowledge-feedback and development/18 Members of a knowledge
network actively participate in the exchange of information, in contrast
to information or 'broadcasting' networks, in which the roles of sender
and receiver are clearly demarcated. This participation adds value for
the users by improving the knowledge that is shared.
We define knowledge networks as spatially diffuse structures, often aggre-
gations of individuals and organizations, linked together by shared interest in
and concern about a puzzling problem. These individuals and organiza-
tions are autonomous, but coalesce to generate and add to knowledge
about the shared problem. Knowledge networks generally have no rig-
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
some kind did not attempt to fill, and each in its particular way
emphasized Emerson’s truth, “there is more kindness in the world
than ever was spoken.” Through the efforts of a few liberal-minded,
energetic men and women, there was established in New York, in
1868, a society called the “Working Woman’s Protective Union,” that
purposed to provide “women with legal protection against the frauds
and impositions of unscrupulous employers, to assist them in
procuring employment, and to secure them such suitable
departments of labor as are not occupied by them.” From the start,
the novel work done by this society was appreciated by the class it
was intended to help. Perfectly unsectarian, with all its services
gratis, the rooms, first on Bleecker Street, and for the past twenty
years on Clinton Place, were thronged by women in distress desirous
of legal counsel, matronly advice, or help to better work. At all times
chance visitors could see women waiting in the front room, while the
superintendent gave sympathetic ear in the rear apartment to some
earlier comer. One day in each week was known as “complaint day.”
On that day the legal representative of the Union received and
examined the complaints that the superintendent deemed worthy of
prosecution. What the society has done in the twenty-five years of its
existence is summed up in the statement that on an annual outlay of
$5000 it has fought and won the legal battles of 12,000 women, who
would otherwise have been defrauded of their hard-earned wages by
unscrupulous employers. It has collected by legal processes $41,000,
in sums averaging $4 each, and supplied in twenty-five years more
than 300,000 applicants with employment, advice, or relief. As
many of these applications were made by the same person three or
four different times, there were represented, perhaps, 10,000
applicants annually. It was of this society that Henry Ward Beecher
said the Union’s greatest and best work was “the mere fact of its
existence,” as this fact made employers more careful in withholding
from the working-woman her just dues.
When a plan to redress a wrong succeeds, it is sure to have
imitators. Societies in other cities followed the example of the
Woman’s Protective Union, and some of these branched out in
directions unthought of by the founders of the parent institution. The
Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union, in Boston, besides
securing wages unjustly withheld from working-women, added the
task of investigating advertisements for work to be done at home,
and, if found fraudulent, warning women against them. It procured
situations for the unemployed; sold on commission the fruits of
woman’s work; opened a lunch-room where women could have
varied bills of fare at moderate prices, or where they could sit and eat
the luncheons brought from home. It included in its scope the
instruction of women in various points of law, such as those
regarding the relations between employer and employed, the hiring
of rooms, and the detention of property. It detailed agents to look up
titles to furniture that, by means of mortgage or insufficient payment
of the installments, might not belong to the seller. A feature was
made of holding lectures and mothers’ meetings, the purpose of the
talks being to lead women into higher planes of thought and action.
One of the most active endeavors was made in the line of securing
the appointment of police matrons in large cities.[176]
The honor of originating the parent Woman’s Protective Union in
New York belongs to men; but the establishment of both similar and
widely different societies in the United States is due to the zealous
energy of women themselves. The Woman’s Club in Chicago
instituted, in 1866, a Protective Agency that had for its objects the
protection of woman’s purity and honor, and her deliverance from
swindlers and extortionists. In the first year of its existence, it
examined 156 complaints, fifty-one of which were claims for money,
—chiefly wages. These aggregated $992.89. It is said to be the design
of this agency “to establish in the near future a loan fund for the
benefit of those in need of temporary assistance, and who, under
existing conditions, are obliged to pay usurious interest for money.”
Better than anything else, philanthropic work undertaken by
women in America shows the difference between past and present
generations. A few decades ago, woman’s attention was absorbed in
organizing small, local, sectarian sewing societies, Sunday-school
classes, and church fairs. After the Civil War these few circumscribed
channels no longer sufficed for woman’s activity, and an expansion
took place that made itself felt in the organization of societies for
working-women. These took no heed of sects, restricted in no way
the compass of the schools designed for them, and worked for
humanity as a whole. In their management of these institutions,
women displayed an amount of executive ability and enlightened
interest in public need that surprised men. Because they had never
attempted organization on a large scale, they were supposed to lack
constructive talent. Some, with true conceptions of what society
should be as a whole, endeavored here and there to take away from
the institutions they founded, and over which they presided, the
semblance of that offensive charity which plumed itself formerly in
making petticoats for the poor,—
Because we are of one flesh after all.
And need one flannel (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality),

or distributing stale bread and thin soup, together with homilies on

the virtues of contentment and the blessing of poverty and work.
Along with men, they fell into the swim of modern thought which
attempted to render institutions self-supporting through the co-
operative efforts of those availing themselves of their privileges. It
was on these broad lines of non-sectarianism, diversity of teaching
for a sisterhood of women, and the co-operative society in which
there is strength, that there was built up for the use of the working-
women the various boarding-homes, industrial schools, and stores
for the disposal of woman’s handiwork. To soften the harshest
experiences of women thrown upon their own resources for
necessities of food and shelter, philanthropic women, and men, too,
made it their business to establish “boarding-homes,” where the
price of entrance was fixed at sums low enough to come within the
reach of the average wage-earning woman. The clean, quiet streets
usually chosen for these homes, contrasted with the filthy, crowded
thoroughfares where the cheap lodging-houses—the only resorts the
average friendless working-woman could afford—were most apt to be
situated. The difference within was as great as without. In place of
the cold, comfortless rooms which, as a rule, were destitute of fire or
carpet, and where there was neither reception-room for visitors, nor
bath nor laundry for inmates; the model boarding-houses had
spacious, well-ventilated bedrooms attractively adorned, with a neat
parlor, usually a library or reading-room, well warmed, brightly
lighted, and inviting. Privileges of bath-rooms and laundries were
added to increase the comforts of the boarders. Two of the best of
these homes are to be found in Boston, one on Warrenton, the other
on Berkeley Street. These structures, built under the auspices of the
Woman’s Christian Association, are provided with electric bells,
ventilating appliances, and safeguards against fire. Both houses have,
besides offices and attendants, handsome parlors, well-stocked
reading-rooms, libraries, and lecture halls. One of them possesses a
fine gymnasium. The price for board and lodging varies from $3 to
$5.50 per week, but more than one-half of the guests pay from $3 to
$4 per week. In the two homes there exist accommodations for about
three hundred women. The sums named secure pleasant rooms,
well-prepared and neatly served meals, and include, besides washing
and ironing, heating and lighting of rooms, the use of reading-rooms,
library, parlor, and admission to all entertainments of the
association.
In thirteen other cities in the United States there have been
established, by the same energetic society, one “home,” smaller, but
similar in character to the Boston homes. Connected with all of
these, and adding greatly to their usefulness, are departments for
giving instruction in sewing, teaching the art of dressmaking, and
training woman in housework. Chautauqua circles were organized
among the residents, and classes gotten up in which, for nominal
sums, girls could be taught the languages, book-keeping, type-
writing, stenography, painting, drawing, calisthenics, etc.
Employment bureaus were attached, which, by personal application
or through correspondence, obtained situations for those who were
on its registers for services to be given, or received. To still further
extend their helpfulness, another department, called the “Travelers’
Aid,” employed agents to meet incoming steamers and direct
unprotected girls to the Association Homes, advise them as to the
best and most economical means of transportation, and the best way
to secure employment. Several smaller organizations, such as the
“Helping Hand,” “Girls’ Friendly Society,” etc., instituted homes that
were carried on in much the same way. The benefits of ventilation,
cleanliness, and decent behavior were rigidly enforced, while in
general the most strenuous efforts were put forth to make the homes
so far self-supporting that their residents could look on them as co-
operative enterprises, in which, by combination and judicious
management, the funds each expended singly, brought them all
unitedly, comforts which would have been impossible without such
action.
 To propagate the idea of the value of co-operation among women,
whether workers or not, was perhaps the most useful thing
accomplished by the boarding-home societies. So far the number of
these institutions has been limited, so that they suggest what could
be done rather than indicate what has been accomplished in
brightening the lives of the great mass of homeless working-women.
In Boston, where these “homes” are most numerous, there are, for a
population of eighty thousand wage-earning women, but six of these
dwellings. Altogether, the limit of their accommodations is about 387
boarders. In these meager results, for so much energetic,
philanthropic work, the abortiveness is shown of private
individualistic attempts to supplant by means of model co-operative
boarding-homes, the cheap and nasty tenement lodging-houses,
situated too often in close proximity to gin-shops, gambling dens and
brothels. By the numbers who vainly seek admission into the few
boarding-homes that have been established in various large cities,
the fact is proved that were the idea of co-operative homes carried
out to largest national issues and placed everywhere within reach of
wage-earning women, all but the most debased would avail
themselves of their privileges, and thus secure the comforts and good
living enjoyed so rarely by women whom circumstances compel to
labor.
Another phase of work initiated by women, and which, like the
boarding-homes, needs only to be carried out on the broad and
liberal lines of a national co-operation to become a power for
universal good, were the exchanges, or stores, instituted for the
purpose of selling hand or machine-made articles of woman’s
manufacture, and which gave the maker the full price they brought,
less a ten per cent. commission and a membership fee of $5 for
maintaining the establishment. In this way, the founder of the
Woman’s Exchange hoped to solve the ever-perplexing problem of
finding a remunerative market for the work that women had been
taught to do in the various art and industrial schools. At the time the
first exchange was planned in New York, some ten years ago,
thousands of women, graduates from the various art schools, were at
work in stores and factories decorating china, painting household
adornments such as portières, screens, wall-hangings, and doing all
kinds of fancy work at prices but little, if any, beyond the wages of
the average worker on men’s and women’s clothing. To direct this
work into a channel, where the maker and not the employer would
receive the profit, was what the originator of the exchange proposed
to do for women pressed by poverty into the ranks of the bread-
winners.
From the first, the exchange became popular with a certain class,
and had a most phenomenal growth, forty having come into
existence during the last decade, all of which are working
successfully on the same general plan. A walk through the rooms of
the parent institution, now established in a handsome building at
329 Fifth Avenue, shows the number and variety of workers who
availed themselves of its privileges. In the salesrooms, hand-painted
and embroidered tapestries hang on the walls; artistic screens,
painted or embroidered on all conceivable materials, stand in every
nook and corner; elaborately decorated china for ornament or table
use lies piled on shelves; while textile fabrics of all kinds, made up
into articles for wall decorations, bed and table use, or personal
wear, are tastefully arranged on counters or within glass cases. On
the upper floors in the building, women are kept constantly at work
inspecting, marking, and ticketing goods sent in by consignees. In
the basement are the storehouse and restaurant for receiving and
selling cakes, pickles, preserves, and other edibles, sent to be
disposed of for the benefit of the makers.
In this one establishment the sales for the year 1888 amounted to
$51,180.26. The aggregate sold in the cake and preserve department
amounted to $13,256.89. One consignee of chicken jelly, etc., got
during the year $1,256.89. Of two consignees in the cake and
preserve department one received $1,019.73, the other $772.42.
Things sent to the lunch-room for Sunday night teas brought one
consignee the comfortable little income of $965.78. From the sale of
children’s wrappers alone, one consignee received $548.66, and one
woman for screens, decorated frames, etc., $1105.71. One consignee
received during the spring and fall months $217.35 for articles which
she had previously made for manufacturers at $2.50 apiece, and
which were sold for $35 each. In the order department connected
with the exchange, the work done consisted of 1263 pieces of plain
sewing, 1784 pieces of English embroidery, 1100 painted articles, and
2033 fancy articles. From the forty other societies then in existence
the reports showed a grand aggregate of over one million dollars
from sales during the year.
These figures demonstrate how thoroughly practical the scheme is
of sending hand-made articles to special magazines to be disposed of
for the makers’ benefit. The woman who, by sending her work to the
exchange, got $35 for what she, as a wage-earner, had received $2.50
from the manufacturer, got the profit that had previously gone to
swell the bank-account of the manufacturer, middle men, and retail
dealers. This was the same with all contributors to the exchanges; by
employing their own labor they accumulated the premiums which,
under the old factory and store system, inured to the benefit of their
employers. In establishing the woman’s exchanges, the difficulty was
to secure enough women of intelligence to be their own employers
and to interest enough women in woman’s work to become patrons
of the exchanges instead of the stores. For instance, to meet the
expenses of the Fifth Avenue establishment in 1888, the income from
all sources was $13,589.56, while the expenses of carrying on the
business amounted to $16,318.48. This left a deficit of $2723.92 that
had to be met by donations, and which kept the institution on a
partly charitable instead of wholly self-supporting basis. As this
deficit had lessened with each year, some optimistic thinkers began
to hope that the time was coming when it would disappear
altogether, and thus allow them to become strictly co-operative
instead of philanthropic concerns. A conclusion reached was, that
were they once to become independent of charitable donations, they
would branch out largely enough in most of the worst paid
departments of woman’s work so as to force out those employed on
such labor for the vast retail stores. But it was found that an
insuperable obstacle to the extension of the exchanges lay in the
utter lack of system with which contributors worked. In the matter of
production, the regular stores had but little system; still some
attempt was made in them to regulate the supply of manufactured
goods to meet a possible or expected demand. Contributors to the
exchanges had no such guide. Those who made and sent articles for
sale could have no opportunity for knowing what others were making
and sending. The result was that women living near or afar off in
town and country worked completely in the dark. With no finger on
the public pulse in the matter of supply and demand for goods, they
were obliged for this haphazard work to purchase their own material
in small quantities in the retail markets, while the merchant-
manufacturers bought theirs in bulk in the cheapest. This could only
mean more failures than successes in the disposal of goods made
under such conditions. Again, only women possessed of some means
could afford to lay out money for materials and wait the uncertain
chances of its returning to them with a profit. In consequence, most
of those contributing articles to the exchanges for sale were “reduced
gentlewomen,” who made use of this means of becoming their own
employers, not so much for support, as to better their conditions of
living, without the publicity consequent upon working for
manufacturers. This in itself made it impossible for the exchanges
(as was claimed by their supporters) to have “helped women in
general to have hushed the ‘Song of the Shirt.’”[177] To the women of
the proletariat, the exchanges were not only unknown mediums by
reason of their situation in fashionable thoroughfares, but forbidden
factors because of their attendant risks and expenses. The number of
sewing women helped in them to increased earnings was too
insignificant to warrant any hope that the co-operative principles
underlying their business methods would ever spread far enough to
leave any impress upon prevailing modes of work in the business
world. Like all other remedies, instituted by wealthy philanthropists
to assist the working-women, they were palliatives for the ills of a
few, not curatives for the sufferings of the many.
Much more satisfactory than anything which had been
accomplished in the name of philanthropy or charity for working-
women were the labor organizations founded by the proletariat and
sustained by their own energy and contributions. About 1870,
associations of working-people (including women) were inaugurated
for the purpose of gaining better social conditions. These were more
attractive and beneficial to the laboring class because they lacked
that element of restitution of a modicum of withheld wages which
tainted all that wealth did for the alleviation of the condition of wage-
earning women,[178] and, moreover, was built upon the sounder
philosophy of an endeavor to organize into bodies capable of striving
collectively for their own deliverance, that class of women whom the
industrial schools, women’s exchanges, etc., could not reach. The
most important of these bodies was the Knights of Labor. Organized
openly in 1881 at the Detroit Convention, but more secretly some
years before, this body welcomed women into its ranks on the
ground of seeking “to gather into one fold all branches of honorable
toil, without regard to nationality, sex, creed, or color.” Trade
assemblies, composed entirely of working-women, were formed, and
the members were taught the beautiful principles on which the order
was founded. In amalgamating with knights, women assumed the
duties of the new chivalry. Engaging as equals in the undertaking,
helping with time and money to carry out the new mission, they
sought by Agitation, Education, and Organization to lighten the
burden of toil, and to elevate the moral and social condition of
mankind. In 1883, one local assembly, composed entirely of women,
counted fifteen hundred members. These must all have given
adherence to that order’s doctrine of “Equal pay for equal work,” and
“woman’s equitable consideration with man in the Nation’s
government.” Mrs. Leonora Barry, who had been a factory worker for
some years in Central New York, became the chief officer of a trade
assembly of nine hundred and twenty-seven women. Later, in 1886,
she was elected a delegate to the general assembly, by which she was
commissioned “to go forth and educate her sister working-women
and the public generally as to their needs and necessities.”
The open declaration of this powerful organization,—that women
possessed equal rights with men,—showed, as much as anything else,
the advance of public sentiment in regard to women. Its educational
influence extended outside the ranks of the order. Most of the
women members were drawn from the employees in factories
producing clothing, textile fabrics, food, tobacco, etc., and from the
trades of typography, telegraphy, and stenography. In the mixed
local assemblies women have an equal chance with men to express
their views upon subjects bearing on the labor question. And even
where women sat quiet, as most frequently happened, without taking
share in the debates, one of the valuable purposes of the order was
said to be served by the information and larger views which came to
them through these discussions. In assemblies composed entirely of
women, of whom not one, perhaps, could boast of more than a minor
part of a common school education, ideas were advanced for their
financial as well as educational benefit. Factory operatives, coming
under their influence, became shareholders in co-operative concerns.
Co-operative shirt factories, conducted solely by women, were
established in Baltimore and New York. A co-operative knitting mill
was set up at Little Falls, N. Y., while other co-operative industries
throughout the land came, through co-operative principles, into the
possession of the workers. A co-operative tailoring establishment in
Chicago had its rise in the lock-out of a few factory girls who
attended a labor parade without permission. With the luck that
comes with pluck, they became possessed of $400, through soliciting
subscriptions. With this they went into business and succeeded. It is
claimed, that inside of nine months they had done $36,000 worth of
business, besides having the gratification of being their own
employers.
This departure from the custom prevailing among the proletariat
to sell their services for wage-hire, was due largely to the demand
made in the nineteenth plank of the platform of the Knights of Labor
for the abolition of the wage system and a national system of co-
operation in lieu thereof. The insertion of such a demand proved the
founders of the order to have been thinkers radical enough to go a
step beyond the old idea of trades organizations with their petty
notions of each trade working solely in its own interests. In
comparison with the broad and lofty conception of the Knights of
Labor, which sought to include in its benefits all women and men
engaged in every department of industrial work, other organizations,
such as the American Federation of Labor, which is a mere rope of
sand, showed themselves away in the rear-guard of progressive
civilization by placing themselves solely on the old competitive and
selfish trades union basis.
The next largest organization that took women into its body on
terms of equality was “The Granger Association of Western
Farmers.”[179] Founded in 1870, this association of the agriculturists
of the country proposed to do for women on the farms what the
societies had done for them in the other industries. They formulated
as a principle “that no Grange should be organized, or exist, without
women.” This act was held to be the emancipation of women on the
farms, as that of the Knight of Labor had been in the trades. In their
public meetings, women were invited to take part in the discussions
of plans for mutual benefit, for usefulness and culture. The principles
of co-operation, which brought them together, extended to the
buying of all descriptions of goods in bulk. This, by increasing the
purchasing power of limited incomes, increased the comforts and
attractions of homes that would otherwise have been deprived of
them. The women who entered the Granges held a conspicuous place
in the national census of agricultural operators and producers of
national wealth. They were engaged in the farm labors of milking,
making butter and cheese, raising poultry, preserving eggs, and
gathering honey for market and home consumption. Vegetable
gardens, fruit orchards, viticulture, berry plants, and shrubs of many
millions’ value were largely attended to by them; while planting,
weeding, haying, harvesting, tilling the soil, and caring for live-stock
were rapidly added to the list of women’s occupations on the farm.
To bring a new brightness into the lives of these toilers was an
avowed object of the Grange. It proposed, by bringing men and
women together with communities of interests, to effect a great
moral and social good, and thus elevate them from slaves and
drudges into a “better and higher manhood and womanhood.”
As “the thoughts of men were widened by the processes of the
suns,” the idea gained ground that if organization was good for
women in one direction, it might be good in all. Men began, about
1884, to receive women into their trades’ unions, and a few energetic
women in various States started working-women’s unions that
comprised the members of different trades. The Cigar and
Typographical Unions were among the first to admit women into
their bodies. The Cigar-Makers’ Union of Denver, a branch of the
International Cigar-Makers’ Union, admitted women to membership
and made no distinction on account of color. Through the efforts of
the union, the hours of labor were reduced from ten to eight, and the
rate of wages, as they expressed it, “raised from a mere pittance to
respectable living wages.” Typographical unions were much praised
for their gallantry in forcing employers to agree to their terms of
“Equal work, equal pay, equal terms of apprenticeship for both
sexes.” This chivalric aspect was somewhat dimmed by the refusal
afterward of some union men to work in the same offices with
women. Employers were frequently given the option of choosing
between having all men or all women at the cases, and the struggle
usually ended in favor of the men. How this worked to the
disadvantage of women can be seen by referring to the California
Bureau of Labor Statistics for 1889, where the statement is that the
book and job printing houses in San Francisco employing union help
had only three women in three separate printing establishments as
against one hundred and nineteen men; while in the non-union, the
proportion was forty-eight women against eighty-five men. Since the
investigations of the Bureau, the number of union women employed
is said to be “much increased.” This in regard to wages means a great
deal to women, as the unions have a fixed scale which ranges from
eighteen to thirty dollars for week or time work. In one of the largest
printing establishments in San Francisco, women compositors not in
the unions received as wages nine dollars per week as against fifteen
dollars for men; proof-readers, nine dollars against eighteen dollars
for men. Forewomen and foremen were paid in the same ratio.
Discrepancies like these, of fifty per cent. difference in the wages of
women, because they were women, proved the value of an
association that insisted upon the justice of “equal pay for equal
work.”
Trade organizations composed exclusively of women were
instituted timidly and tentatively in the large cities.[180] Though
protective rather than educational, the instruction given in the few
trades unions established by and for women possessed a very
broadening character. Able speakers, frequenting the meetings,
familiarized the members with the economic theories advanced as to
the value of the co-operative principle, the duties owed by the strong
to the weak, and the correlation between woman’s best interests and
the interests of the State. The experience of the trades unions proved
the absurd fallacy of the time-worn objection against women’s guilds,
“that it would unsex them,” for the effect of their organizations was
to make their members more unselfish and more womanly, more apt
to think of the good of all than of a part, and, through the importance
of being one of a large body working for some common weal, less
inclined to frivolous ends.
To wage-working women, one important practical result of labor
combinations was the concession made by legislators, through fear of
losing the labor vote, to the demand for Bureaus of Labor Statistics,
which should show the actual condition of men and women engaged
in any and every department of labor. Massachusetts, always first in
the field of reform, established such a bureau of labor statistics in
1869. Other States followed slowly in her wake. By 1887 twenty-two
States had recognized the importance of having similar bureaus.
Among them was “the Department of Labor,” instituted in
Washington in 1885, for the purpose of doing collectively for the
whole people what the individual States were to accomplish
separately. When the Massachusetts Labor Bureau went into
operation, its chief, General Henry K. Oliver, a man of liberal views,
endeavored to ascertain the conditions under which industrial
women worked. The means employed were:
I. Personal investigation.
II. Distribution of printed forms with blanks for employed and
employers to fill.
III. Summons to witnesses from the employed and employing
classes to testify.
IV. Soliciting information through correspondence.
Through the recommendation of ladies interested in the question
of ascertaining the conditions of working-women, General Oliver
associated one of their own sex, Miss Adeline Bryant, with the work
of the bureau. In the third year of the bureau’s existence five women
were placed on the staff of helpers. The precedent set by
Massachusetts of employing women as investigators was followed in
turn by the other State bureaus and by the “Department of Labor” at
Washington.
The investigations of the bureau of 1869 covered the thirty-five
industries in which the working-women of Massachusetts were then
engaged. Published in 1870, the report of the bureau corroborated
the accounts given by the press of that year concerning the low
wages, long hours of work, and miserable state of living that was the
lot of the wage-earning women in the manufacturing towns of
Massachusetts. General Oliver himself assisted in the personal
investigation carried on in Boston. Accompanied by the Chief of
Police, he visited the homes of “poor-paid laborers,”—women and
men,—and found that the homes of the laborers are a pretty accurate
index of the social, industrial, sanitary, educational, and moral
standard of the laborers themselves. The result of his work was a
recommendation for further and more thorough research. “Such
investigations,” he said, “will reveal a state of things at which the
people of Massachusetts will gaze with amazement, disgust, and
anger, and demand a bettering of the wrong.”
Investigations by blanks and by summons to witnesses was less
successful than the personal interview. The mass of the people were
ignorant of what the bureau sought to accomplish by their questions;
hence not more than twenty per cent. of the employers and thirty-
three per cent. of the employed addressed returned replies. A dread
on the part of manufacturers and shopkeepers, lest “out of their own
mouths they should be condemned,” prevented them from
answering, and those under them were restrained to silence through
fear of losing employment. In spite of the risk, courageous women
replied to the blanks and gave personal testimony sufficient to enable
the commission to form a partial estimate of the social and economic
conditions of the whole. The statistics presented by the bureau were
said to have reached “the very verge of human society.” Said Mrs.
Atkinson, speaking of the reports on the working-women, “The stern
fact, the thrilling incident, the woeful spectacle, the harrowing sight
of squalor and wretchedness are marshaled before our eyes in a great
and terrible array.” The subjects investigated were: Housework,
Hotel and Saloon work, Home work, Store work. Under the Home
work was classified sale work; under Store work, clerks, accountants,
saleswomen, and cash girls. All that could be found out concerning
women in these employments was printed and presented by General
Oliver to the Legislature and to the public, without any of the
softening touches common to later reports.
The next extended investigation into the occupations and history
of wage-earning women was made in 1884, at the instigation of Mr.
Carroll D. Wright, who, in 1874, had superseded General Oliver as
chief of the Massachusetts Bureau. The research undertaken by Mr.
Wright had for its object the ascertainment of the “moral, sanitary,
physical, and economical” condition of all wage-earning women in
Boston, except those employed in domestic service. This was a larger
field than that covered in 1869. Woman’s occupations had multiplied
in the earlier year five-fold over what they were in 1840, when, to
Harriet Martineau’s surprise, seven vocations, outside of housework,
were all into which the women of the United States had entered. In
1884 they were more than ten times seven. Methods of working had
also become more difficult to classify. One by one domestic
industries were relegated from the home to the factory. And in most
of these, what had been done by one person had become
differentiated into numerous parts, requiring the co-operation of
many workers. Thus, in the occupation of making men’s and
women’s clothing, there were classified in 1884 as many as 103
subdivisions. Altogether, in the seventy distinct industries
catalogued, there were 354 subdivisions of industries, and each one
of these parts employed a different set of workers. It was important
that a number of representative women should be interviewed in
each of these departments; for, even where each branch formed part
of a distinct whole, each worker in those branches had interests at
variance with the others.
The force of women engaged in the industries of Boston had also
seemingly almost doubled in the five years from 1880 to 1885.
Exclusive of domestic service, the number of women in all other
industries was estimated in the United States census of 1880 at
20,000; in the Massachusetts Census Report for 1885 at 39,647.
With this apparent doubling of the population, the amount
distributed in wages had not doubled, and so all that had been bad in
the conditions of wage-earning women in previous years was
heightened because there was nothing to relieve it. On account of all
this, the appearance of the report of 1884 was anxiously looked for
by large numbers of persons who had become familiar with the line
of work of the bureaus. Great, therefore, was the public surprise at
finding the whole report so biased in favor of the law-making, shop-
keeping, manufacturing class as to prove valueless as an
investigation into the condition of women dependent on wages for
their living. The statistical information it contained, although
arranged in the formidable manner common to the expert
statistician, needed no careful scrutiny of its figures to establish the
truth of Disraeli’s proposition that “nothing is so unreliable as facts,
unless it is figures.”
However, the work done by the Boston Bureau, although
misleading in itself, had the good effect of stimulating similar
research in other places. In the following year, 1885, the first part of
the Third New York Report was devoted to an investigation of the
condition of the working-women of New York City. It was estimated
that in that year over two hundred thousand women were employed
in the various trades of that city, exclusive of those in Brooklyn. The
number of industries, exclusive of domestic service, and without
counting subdivisions, was ninety. Scarcely any European city
offered so wide and diversified a field for inquiry as this; and yet the
commissioner, Mr. Charles F. Peck, claimed that, through lack of
time, in place of any close and searching inquiry “into special
conditions of the effects of these employments on the physical
development of women and its relation to the social, commercial,
and industrial prosperity of the State,” he was obliged to content
himself “with a general survey, instead of that minute and detailed
examination which the subject would justify.”
Mr. Peck discovered, as his predecessors in Massachusetts had
done, that at all times the questions involved in the conditions of
working-women resolved themselves into those of “wages, hours,
health, and morals.” With regard to the first, he found that the wages
of women, as a rule, were, in 1885 as in 1869, less than one-half that
obtained by men,—the remuneration being widely different even
where the work performed was the same. In those professions or
trades in which women were organized, and for equal work received
equal pay with men,—as printers, cigar-makers, and hatters,—the
men themselves received very low pay. In the tenement-house
factories, the women engaged in cigar-making numbered four
thousand. These were employed in the branches paying the lowest
wages, as stripping and binding. For these, the pay seldom averaged
$5 per week, and then was not steady the year round. The
manufacturers gave as reason for hiring so many women, “That they
could get them for fifty per cent. less than men.” Capmakers earned
from $3 to $4.50 per week; compositors all the way from $8 to $16
per week. One of the new branches of work into which women had
entered was that of polishing marble. The manager of the Niagara
Marble Works testified that they employed from twenty-five to thirty
women, whose wages averaged from $4.50 to $8 per week, men
getting for the same kind of work from $1.50 to $3 per day. When
asked if “they could get men to work for the same wages as women?”
the reply was, “Hardly, unless they were boys, and then they would
not be so skillful.”
But it was in the class of work that has always been called
“woman’s work” that the bureaus found the most beggarly wages
paid. A manufacturer of pants, vests, shirts, and overalls testified
that he gave from fifteen to thirty-five cents apiece for making vests;
seventy-five cents to $1.50 per dozen for shirts, and from twelve and
a half cents to twenty-five cents a pair for pants. Boy’s gingham
waists, with trimming on neck and sleeves, were paid for at the rate
of two and a half cents each. By working steadily at the machine from
six o’clock in the morning until one at night, the seamstress could
make twenty-five cents a day at this “shop work.” The inmates of
several charitable institutions in the city were found by the
commissioner crocheting ladies’ shawls for twenty-five cents apiece.
An expert, he was told, could finish one in two days. This was all that
the several Blanks & Co. would pay, because competition for this
kind of work was so great they were able to get the work done for
almost any price.[181] On woman’s wear, the wages had been so
reduced that it was alleged that a full day’s work on a cloak brought
from fifty to sixty cents. The visits of the commissioner to some of
the attic tenement-house rookeries, where this work was carried on
under the direction of “sweaters,” disclosed numbers of cloak-
makers working sixteen hours a day for fifty cents. In those dens he
saw stacks of cloaks piled on the floors ready to be sewn together by
women scantily clad, with hair unkempt, and whose pale, abject
countenances formed such pictures of physical suffering and want as
he trusted “he might never again be compelled to look upon.” The
style and quality of the cloaks upon which these women toiled were
of the latest and best. They were lined with quilted silk or satin and
trimmed with sealskin or other expensive material, and found ready
sale in the largest retail stores in the city at from thirty-five to
seventy-five dollars each.
To give some idea of how the cloak-makers lived on this pittance
the bureau gave a realistic engraving, done from a drawing taken on
the spot, in which it was endeavored to reproduce the outlines of one
room (as a sample exhibit of the rest) where six women sat at work
under the directions of sweaters. In size the room might possibly
have measured twelve by fourteen feet, and perhaps nine feet high.
The atmosphere was next to suffocating and dense with impurities.
On one end of a table, at which four of the women sat, was a dinner-
pail partially filled with soup (that is what they called it) and a loaf of
well-seasoned bread. These two courses, served with one spoon and
one knife, satiated the thirst and hunger of four working-women. In
an adjoining side room, without means for ventilation or light, the
deadly sewer gas rose in clouds from a sink. On the floor lay a
mattress which partook in appearance of the general filth found
throughout the building. On this mattress the cloak-makers, tired
out by the long day’s work and faint for want of food, threw
themselves down and awaited the coming day’s awful toil for bread.
This, it was claimed, was neither a fanciful nor exceptional picture;
that a degree of want, misery, and degradation existed among the
working-women living in tenement houses next to impossible to
describe. “Certainly,” said the commissioner, “no words of mine can
convey to the public any adequate conception of the truly awful
condition of thousands of these suffering people. Formerly,” he
wrote, “Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ gave sentimental celebrity to the
wrongs of the sewing-women, but it is not the shirt (alone) now, but
the woman’s cloak and the man’s coat or pants that draw tears and
groans from the overdone sewing-woman.”
Testimony elicited as to the workers in some of the trades,
particularly tobacco, was even more revolting than that concerning
the sewing-woman. In the report, wood-cuts were given of rooms
such as a large proportion of cigar-makers worked, lived, ate, and
slept in. “These people,” it was said, “worked till twelve P. M. or one
o’clock A. M., then slept by the machine a few hours, and commenced
work again.” The description of women sitting “surrounded by filth,
with children waddling in it, whose hands, faces, and bodies were
covered with sores,” were sickening. Cankerous sores were “even on
the lips of the workers, they all the time handling the tobacco that
was made into cigars.” In the scale of sanitary conditions of homes
and workrooms, the cigar-makers were among the lowest. Of bunch-
makers and rollers, who replied to the questions of the sanitary
condition of their homes, but two out of 118 answered, “good.” All of
the rest wrote, “bad,” “very bad,” the “worst you ever saw,”
“miserable,” and “poor.” As to their workrooms, out of one hundred
and thirty, one hundred and three were without means for free
circulation of air. One only possessed no offensive odors. The
unhealthfulness of the workrooms of the cigar-makers, the coat-
makers, the tailoresses, and the cloak-makers was about the same.
Among this latter class of seamstresses 38 out of 41 answered that
their surroundings were very offensive through being “near offensive
stables.” The order of the day was, “general filth, water-closets, bad
sewerage, dirty neighborhoods, overcrowding, and poor ventilation.”
Similar complaints came from compositors in printing-offices,
women in type-foundries, kid-glove sewers, carpet-factory operators,
and silk weavers.
 While in many of the large factories the sanitary conditions were
good and proper, ventilation being secured,—when it did not
interfere with the work carried on,—there were other features that if
less injurious to health were quite as objectionable to the wage-
worker. In the carpet and silk factories, women were obliged to stand
all day, as, though seats were provided in many instances, fines were
exacted from those using them. It was the same with washing
facilities; women employed in silk establishments in weaving light-
colored or white silks were fined as high as fifty cents for washing
their hands, and fines were also imposed if spots got on the goods.
Women testified that they were fined “if discovered reading a letter,
or a paper, or spoke to one another.” The proprietor of one of these
factories stated that the fines he collected in this way he gave away in
“charity,” and, “That five dollars a week was enough for a girl to live
on.” In some carpet factories the system of fines was even more
excessive. Women were docked as much as five dollars if any
accident happened to the machinery, which they were compelled to
clean while it was in motion. In one mill, they were “not allowed to
talk to one another during working hours or at noon, under penalty
of being docked or discharged.” The fine in some places for being five
minutes late was twenty-five cents, while a half-hour over-time was
exacted. How disproportionate this punishment was is evident; those
women who were fined at the rate of thirty dollars per day, were
being paid at the rate of eight cents an hour. When women were not
fined for being five minutes behind time, they were “locked out” for
two hours. These were the hands employed on piece work, and the
loss of two hours made, as it was intended, a large hole in the day’s
earnings. In most cases it was claimed that the amount of fines
exacted was optional with the foreman or superintendent, and that
frequently they were so excessive as to affect the whole pay of
employees for weeks ahead.
The tyranny of the strong and powerful over the weak and
helpless,—which found expression in the exaction of fines from those
who were termed variously “white slaves,” “slave girls,” “prisoners of
poverty,” etc.,—existed in another form in the long hours of labor
demanded by the Legrees of the industrial world from the wage-
working women. While in many factories the legal limit of sixty
hours per week for minors, and women under twenty-one, was
observed, there were grave and numerous exceptions to this rule
among tobacco-workers, seamstresses, bakery employees, etc., etc.
In the cigar factories, the great majority of bunch-makers and rollers,
whether employed at home or in the factory proper, were worked
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and even eighteen hours a day. Operatives
on clothing worked from nine to sixteen hours per day. In the collar,
cuff, and shirt-making factories in Troy, as well as the laundries in
that place, the hours were uniformly ten, and in New York from eight
to twelve. Milliners worked nine hours in factories and from fourteen
to sixteen at home. Feather-workers in factories nine to ten.
Operatives on ladies’ underwear eight to ten in factories; twelve to
fourteen hours at home. While this made a good showing for the
factories engaged in these industries, it must be remembered that
much of the work quoted as done “at home” was only a continuation
of factory labor, as work was in many cases taken home from these,
either to supplement the day’s earnings, or to oblige (?) employers,
who withheld extra compensation for the extra work exacted. In
occupations requiring a different kind of skill, or impossible at home,
the hours were found to be sometimes less than the legal limit. Those
for compositors were from eight to ten. Type-foundry operatives,
seven and a half to nine. Stenographers, telegraphers, and
typewriters, from five and a half to six, seven, and eight.
Saleswomen, again, worked many hours over-time in all except the
largest houses, and during the holiday season these largest stores
were no longer exceptions. In fancy-goods stores, millinery shops,
bakeries, candy stores, etc., etc., no limit was placed through the
holidays,—that were in no sense holidays to employees,—except the
limit of physical endurance. In return no portion of the extra profit
this extra work brought was shared by proprietors with their
overtaxed employees.
Economically speaking, the worst of all the evils society
perpetrated against the working-women was that of forcing her into
long hours of continuous labor; for, whether standing at the looms
and in the stores, or sitting at the sewing-machine, specific diseases
of the sexual organs were induced, causing marriage to be followed
by miscarriage or sickly children. No original statistics were collected
by the bureau to show how far the health and morals of women
engaged in industries were affected by their employments, and what
relation this influence exerted in reference to woman’s position in
the State. While this prevented the report from being of full service
to the political economist, to the historian its pages were valuable as
forming a succession of genre pictures, otherwise unattainable, of
the proletarian women, as they lived, labored, and suffered in New
York City in 1885.
An epidemic of investigation into women’s condition as wage-
workers followed the New York report. Five States—Maine,
California, Colorado, Iowa, and Minnesota—prepared separate
chapters on the subject of the working-women for their Bureaus of
Labor Statistics for 1887–1888. In New Jersey, although no original
investigation was made by the State, the bureau reprinted in 1887 a
large portion of an excellent report on “Woman’s Work and Wages,”
gathered by Mrs. Barry in 1886 by order of the Knights of Labor. The
latest, and what should have been the best report, was a national
research into the social and economic environments of wage-earning
women in twenty-two of the largest and most representative cities in
the United States. This investigation, conducted under the auspices
of the Central Bureau at Washington, comprehended statistics
gained through interviewing and questioning personally 17,427
women engaged in industrial pursuits. Undertaken in 1888, this
national report was printed in 1889, under the title of “Working-
women in Large Cities.” It formed a volume of 631 pages, mostly
statistical tables, framed so as to seem to cover the most important
points concerning women as industrial workers.
To two grades of readers these bureau publications were most
welcome. First, to the more intelligent among the working-class, “in
whose humble cabins,” it was said,[182] “complete sets of Bureau
Reports could be found preserved in calico covers having as many
colors as ‘Joseph’s coat,’ and presenting as much evidence of
constant use as the old-time spelling-book in a country school-house
that was passed from scholar to scholar until it has made the round
of the school.” Second, to the students of sociology, who pored over
their pages, hoping to gain clear ideas of what was going on in the
working world of men and women. Excellent though they were, these
reports were nevertheless disappointing, at least as far as they
related to facts concerning woman’s industrial position. The first and
greatest disappointment for readers was the fact that the number of
wage-earning women interviewed in any one place by the bureau
agents was too small to give even an approximate idea of the whole;
e. g. the statistical tables of all industries for New York City were
founded on the testimony alone of 2984 women, while at that period
(1889) the number of wage-earning women in that city and Brooklyn
was estimated at 300,000.(?) As this method of taking one per cent.
of the population of women as a guide by which to estimate the
conditions of all the others prevailed everywhere, conclusions drawn
from the presented statistics were, of necessity, vitiated. To a certain
extent they had to be accepted with allowance.
With all that this limitation implies, the bureau statistics are,
nevertheless, interesting as comprising the best data we have on
which to base assumptions of the industrial status of wage-earning
women. In regard to wages, the conclusions, though obviously
inexact, still show plainly enough that wages were regulated
everywhere by the prices of rent and food, and that only so much was
paid as would keep life in the worker. In the appended table, taken
from the National Report for 1889, it will be seen that in the South,
where living is comparatively cheap, wages are lower than in the
West, where life’s necessaries come higher. In the East they are a
mean between the two.
 AVERAGE WEEKLY EARNINGS, BY CITIES.
Cities. Average Weekly Earnings.
Atlanta $4.05
Baltimore 4.18
Boston 5.64
Brooklyn 5.76
Buffalo 4.27
Charleston 4.22
Chicago 5.74
Cincinnati 4.59
Cleveland 4.63
Indianapolis 4.67
Louisville. 4.51
Newark 5.10
New Orleans 4.31
New York 5.85
Philadelphia 5.34
Providence 5.51
Richmond 3.93
St. Louis 5.19
St. Paul 6.02
San Francisco 6.91
San Jose 6.11
Savannah 4.99

All Cities $5.24

In the 343 industries named in this report, for 1889, it will be seen
that the conditions under which women gained their livelihood had
not been bettered, and that, on the contrary, the testimony as
published in the other State reports disclosed a state of affairs similar
to that which Engels[183] described as existing among the same class
of laboring women in England in 1844. Nothing worse can be found
in any of Engels’ descriptions than the following account (given in
the New Jersey Report for 1887–1888) of the tyranny practiced upon
the linen thread spinners of Paterson: “In one branch of this
industry,” it is said, “women are compelled to stand on a stone floor
in water the year round, most of the time barefoot, with a spray of
water from a revolving cylinder flying constantly against the breast;
and the coldest night in winter, as well as the warmest in summer,
these poor creatures must go to their homes with water dripping
from their underclothing along their path, because there could not be
space or a few moments allowed them wherein to change their
clothing.”[184] Another account, which calls up the experiences at
Leeds and Lancaster in 1844, is taken from the Wisconsin Report for
1888. In the prosperous city of Janesville, in that highly favored
State described as a paradise for workers, the report tells of a factory
“in which some three hundred women and children are employed,
who work eleven and a half to twelve hours per day and night, the
night being the time most of the children are employed.” Although
eight hours is the legal working day in Wisconsin, and fourteen years
the age limit at which children may be employed, “many of the
children are under fourteen years of age, and all have to work eleven
and a half hours.” The thermometer averages, in the heated season,
about 108 degrees ... and loss of health follows women by reason “of
the intense heat at night and insufficient sleep in the day-time.”
These by no means exceptional cases show how conditions of work
for laboring women were increasing in intensity in the United States.
That they were becoming worse in other ways was evidenced in New
England manufacturing towns, where employment of women and
children as the cheaper wage-taking element was gradually
extinguishing the male operative.[185] In the manufacturing towns of
Fall River, Lawrence, Lowell, etc., the family life was so demoralized
that men were obliged to be supported in idleness by mothers, wives,
or sisters or children, because no work was to be had for them in the
mills. It was said that some of these men, displaced by the light-
running machinery that a child’s hand might guide, remained at
home and did the housework and minded the children, while the
women went forth as the bread-winners; others, less patient, took to
loafing, and ended generally in prisons. “This,” as Engels termed it,
“insane state of things” affected all unfavorably. Women learned to
care so little for themselves that it was said “a girl in Fall River comes
out of the mill with bare feet and a shawl thrown over her head, and
all she cares for is a loaf of bread and a mug of beer.” Children, going
too early into the mills, were corrupted, morally and physically; yet
mothers, unable from their own slender wages to support the family,
were tempted to swear “false oaths in regard to their children’s ages,
so as to get them into the mills and thus make more money.”
 This Moloch of cheap labor, which demanded both women and
children, did not stop at making mothers commit perjury for the sake
of bread; it rifled the eleemosynary institutions of little ones left
there for safe keeping, and sent them in ship or car loads to the West.
[186]
The claim was made in New York in 1888 that[187] “during the last
forty years not less than two hundred thousand children had been
sent into the Western States, many of whom had been sold outright,”
by managers of asylums, who refused to allow the names of these
little ones to be known, for fear that parents or relatives, who had
surrendered them in seasons of distress, might wish to reclaim them
when fortunate enough to procure work. These children, not sold in
the open market as their black brothers and sisters had been, but
disposed of in the name of Charity, had their identity concealed by
change of name; cases are on record where brothers and sisters have
grown up, met, and married, and “after marriage learned to their
horror that they were children of the same parents.”
Thus factory and farm-house had begun to stand in the United
States as they had in England from Queen Elizabeth’s days—as the
fabled ogre’s castles of ancient legend, which drew women and
children into them to serve and suffer hopelessly, unless relieved
from captivity and death by a stronger power. History repeated itself
in this exploitation of women and children and in the plans made for
their relief. The broad system of factory legislation, inspired in
England by the revelations of the cruelty practiced upon the most
hapless portions of its population, began to be imitated in the United
States. Massachusetts, the pioneer State in introducing salutary
reforms, took the initiative, and in 1874 forced its Legislature to
recognize that it was the duty of the State to regulate the hours of
labor of women and children engaged in the manufactures. In that
year, after a long series of discussions between radicals and
conservatives, the Ten-hour Factory Bill was passed. It is doubtful if
the radicals would have triumphed even then, had they not been able
to demonstrate that there was “a limit to human endurance, which,
once transgressed, was not only disastrous to the operative but
unprofitable to the mill-owners.”
Having once committed itself to the precedent of interfering to
protect the weak against the strong, Massachusetts had no
alternative but to advance in the same direction. By degrees, twenty-
four distinct points were covered by factory legislation.[188] Nine
other States followed Massachusetts in the enaction of factory laws,
and all made provision for bureaus of factory inspection to see that
the laws were obeyed. These factory laws, as far as they concerned
women, besides limiting the hours of labor, obliged “employers to
provide seats for women and grant them permission to use them
when not actively engaged in the duties for which they were
employed.” Fire-escapes were to be provided, and proper safeguards
thrown around machinery. Women under twenty-one years were not
to be allowed to clean machinery while in motion. Suitable wash-
rooms and other conveniences were to be furnished them. Forty-five
minutes were to be given for the noon-day meal at a uniform and
proper time. Locking of doors—that travesty upon free labor—was
prohibited during working-hours. Sanitary regulations of workrooms
and weekly payments were to be enforced. The trusteeing of wages
was abolished. Cellars were forbidden to be used as workrooms. “No
plea,” it was said, “and no subterfuge should be permitted to justify
the use of any underground apartment for purposes of human
habitation.”
Delegating to States the privileges of exercising supervision over
manufactories, etc., for the benefit of labor, was a long step forward
in the path of progress; a signal triumph of radicalism over
conservative obstructionists denying the right of the State to protect
its citizens. But if the reformer gained his points, the manufacturer
contrived, as far as possible, to make the victory an empty one. Only
so far as employers could not prevent was labor legislation effective.
With the ten-hour working day, while employers complied with the
letter of the law, a large majority defied the spirit. No fact was better
known than that the ten-hour law for women and children was
disregarded whenever possible. In factories where notice was given
that ten hours would constitute a day’s work, the clause “unless
otherwise ordered,” usually accompanied it; and the “otherwise
ordered” came whenever the manufacturer’s convenience demanded
it. Other factory legislation fared little better. When, according to
law, seats were placed in mills, factories, shops, and stores, women
were, in general, forbidden to use them, under penalty of discharge.
Locking of doors, when employees were at work, although less
common, was still continued. Labor commissioners, wishing to enter
factories employing many women, “had much difficulty in getting
inside, so securely was every gate and door locked and barred.”
Sanitary workrooms remained the exceptions; underground places
continued to be used for human habitations, workshops, and
salesrooms. Cellars were converted into bazaars in which hundreds
of women and children were employed, and where they lived the year
round in the glare of electric lights, never seeing daylight except in
the morning hours, on Saturday half-holidays, and Sundays. One
obvious reason why factory laws were disregarded so flagrantly was
that the working force of factory inspectors in every State but
Massachusetts was so limited as to make it impossible for them to
visit even once during the year half the factories under their
supervision. In many cases their powers were so restricted that when
they caught an offender against the laws, they had to act on
Dogberry’s advice “to take no note of him, but let him go.”
Despite the fact that laws, made for the protection of women in the
industries, were not always enforced,—enough good resulted from
them to increase the tendency everywhere of looking to the State for
further legislation. In the pages of the labor reports containing the
replies made by working-women to the question of what, in their
opinion, would remedy the wrongs of industrial workers, one
response was, “The power to vote, as the right of suffrage, will place
the services of women on an economic basis with those of men.”
Women working in factories asked to have inspectors appointed of
their own sex, on the ground that women could understand and
protect the interests of women better than men. In States where the
statutory age for protection under the eight or ten hour factory law
was below twenty-one, women over twenty-one desired the law
extended so as to embrace those of all ages. Employees in mercantile
houses doing duty as clerks, cashiers, saleswomen, etc., desired “that
the same protection given to women in factories be extended to
them, as their duties are fully as onerous as those of the average
female in the mill or factory.”
As almost all reforms have originated with the educated, and have
gathered strength for fruition by rolling onward among the people,
the value of these suggestions was enhanced by reason of being the
expression of the most intelligent of the working-women interviewed
by the Labor Bureau agents. Private philanthropic efforts of all kinds
had yielded no effectual help to women, and it was small wonder if
the more thoughtful among them turned to the power of the State as
the only adequate means for relief from conditions which new
inventions of machinery—dispensing with men and employing
women and children as guides—and a mania for money-getting at
the expense of the proletariat, had rendered intolerable. Though a
few stenographers, telegraphers, typewriters, teachers, with some
workers in the industrial arts, had gained better breathing-places
upon the middle rungs of what was called the “social ladder,” the
struggle for life had been constantly growing fiercer among those
crowded en masse at the bottom. Everywhere production was carried
on with less regard for the life, health, and comfort of the working-
women. Women were employed in even greater numbers in the
poisonous, dusty, dangerous, and laborious industries, all of which
were much more injurious to them, as child-bearers, than to men.
The long hours of exhaustive work, destructive of family ties; the
starvation wages obtained during seasons of work; the misery of
seasons of lock-outs from work, led too frequently to the chaffering
of their bodies on the street corners for bread, or the finding of a
refuge from starvation in a leap from some house-top or a plunge
into the river. The stories of the suffering endured by women
engaged in the industrial occupations of the country, as told by
capable investigators like Helen Campbell, proved that everything
made by women, not excepting the whitest, daintiest robes, had
crimson spots on them,—the blood-splashes of the toilers,—that,
although unseen, no cleansing could wash away. Not a shop-made
garment, a web of silk, cotton, or flax, or wool, a pair of gloves, shoes
or stockings, any knitted thing,—machine or hand-made,—a woven
carpet or piece of furniture, an artificial flower, feather, or piece of
lace, a hat for a man or bonnet for a woman, a piece of table-glass,
pottery, or cutlery, a lucifer match, an article of jewelry, or even a
printed book, but over them all flitted the ghosts of women twice
murdered in their making: once by their own pangs, and again by the
sufferings of the little children, flesh of their own flesh, who toiled
beside them wearily—
Weeping (working) in the play-time of the others,
In the country of the free.

The publication of Helen Campbell’s “Prisoners of Poverty,” with

frequent repetitions, from other sources, of the wrongs endured by
industrial women, caused a great wave of indignation to sweep over
society. Many good men and women carried on crusades against the
purchase of ready-made garments—sad misnomer for things so
hardly made. One of their war-cries was, “An honest woman’s back is
not the place for a dishonestly manufactured article,” and another
that, “It is better for a woman to wear a coat with a hole in it than
one with the stain on it of blood-guiltiness.” Economically unwise
and impossible of success as this crusade was, it was important as
showing that a higher ideal of Justice had begun to enter into
woman’s mind. Hitherto people had partaken of the fruits of labor
unthinkingly. Now the time was seen to have come when an
awakened public began to question the propriety of purchasing and
using things made through the abuse of their fellow-beings. As
Emerson said of his charity-given dollar that “it was a wicked dollar
he would yet learn to withhold,” so women were teaching themselves
to withstand desires for articles which helped to perpetuate wicked
systems of work.
To the political economist, the part that woman was taking in the
country’s industries became a subject of national importance. After
frequent investigations into the nature of their occupations, the
question was propounded, “Whether it would not be expedient, for
the good of the State, to altogether forbid the employment of women
in factories?” The position taken by Mr. Wright, the leading authority
in American labor statistics,—not prominent, however, as an
advanced reformer,—was “that married women ought not to be
tolerated in the mills at all,” as “the employment of mothers is the
most harmful wrong done to the race.” “Vital science,” he observes,
“will one day demand their exclusion, as the effect of such
employment is an evil that is sapping the life of our operative
population and must, sooner or later, be regulated, or more
probably, stopped.”[189]
It will be seen at once that this suggestion of Mr. Wright lies
directly on the plane of modern socialism or nationalism. To
advocate taking two million women forcibly from certain harmful
occupations is a tacit admission that the individual has no right to
dispose of herself to the disadvantage of the State. Physicians had
long sounded notes of warning of a race deterioration that was going
on in consequence of the employment of women under bad
conditions of labor, and the claim was made that “at all hazards the
State must protect itself.” To do this, however, involved
consequences that the advisers, perhaps, foresaw. As legislation
excluding women and children from factories would interfere
directly with their support, the logical conclusion would be that the
State, to keep them from actual starvation, would be bound to
interfere again to the extent of furnishing them with such means of
living as would make them—what the State wanted—happy, healthy,
capable mothers of the race. And, as it would be obviously impossible
to discriminate between those engaged in one pursuit at the expense
of those employed in others, it would follow that the State, by
supporting the factory workers, would place itself under obligations
to clothe, feed, shelter, and educate all women.
This second proposition is so necessary a corollary of the first as to
make Mr. Wright’s suggestion almost conclusive evidence that his
investigations had led him to accept the nationalistic theory of State
interference with the liberty of labor, as the sole remedy for the evils
sapping the life of our female operative population. And as no
student of practical economics would consent to the entire
withdrawal from the productive industries of so large and capable a
body of workers as the three millions women now engaged in them,
Mr. Wright must have also given acceptance to that other part of the
nationalistic creed—growing so fast into popular favor—of its being
the duty of the State to regulate the hours of labor so that work may
be the promoter of health in women in place of being its destroyer.
Even if the results of Mr. Wright’s investigations into the hard
facts of woman’s industrial condition in America had been to throw
him into accord with what is termed “scientific socialism,”[190] his
experience would have been simply that of most honest investigators.
Helen Campbell, converted to socialism while gathering material for
her books illustrative of women as workers, claimed in her latest
volume that “In socialism ... in its highest interpretation, lies the only
solution for every problem on either side the great sea, between the
eastern and western worker.” Instances of similar experience might
be multiplied, but are rendered unnecessary by the rapidity with
which the doctrine has spread in the past ten years throughout
Europe and America, and the honored names which have become
identified with its support. According to its adherents, one phase of