The Family and the Workers : Part 2

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 15 of 23)

Child-labor. - The student of industrial history knows that child-labor is not a new evil. Children were often overworked and cruelly driven when parents, guardians, and those to whom they were "bound out" as apprentices were the only taskmasters and their labor was wholly within the household. Indeed, Hutchins and Harrison, in their History of Factory Legislation, declare that "it is not easy to say whether children were really worked harder in the early factories than under the domestic system which they replaced." Edith Abbott, in her excellent summary of The Early History of Child Labor in America, shows clearly that at the bottom of the ancient desire to use very young persons in industry was a conviction that work, constant and hard work, is the only safeguard against evil. "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" was not a figure of speech to our ancestors, it was statement of a sober fact. This feeling led naturally to the conditions that gave Samuel Slater, the pioneer in textile manufacture in New England, a collection of child workers in his first mill as his only laborers and at ages between seven and twelve years.

We are now able to see and remedy some evils of child-labor in the factory system which passed unnoticed and for which no prohibitive law was in existence in the handicraft stage. It is true, however, as all must recognize, that the modern specialization of labor and modern use of machines allows a wholesale exploitation of youth and of physical weakness impossible in older forms of industry. Hence the facts of modern industry justify and make necessary the "Child Labor Movement." Yet vital and strong as that movement is, we have to-day, as has been stated in another connection, a misuse of children by millions in industry.

We have also a dangerous overuse of youth in industry, and we have a reckless waste of mothers and of potential mothers in unsuitable work. We have also certain dangers to family life in the turning of attention and of ambition of young people away from family interests into fields of industrial activity which are inimical to family success. This makes the problem of the family and the workers one of great difficulty and one to be given the most serious attention on the part of those who are themselves above the economic conditions which operate to complicate that problem among the poor and struggling.

Increase in Women Wage-earners. - In the first place, we must note the tendency toward rapid increase of the numbers of women listed by the census as in "gainful occupations." Without noting in this connection the conditions just before and during the Great War, conditions not at all indicative of normal increase in the numbers of working-women, we trace in the period from 1880 to 1910 a rise from 2,647,157 to 8,075,772 of the number of women in receipt of salary or wages for work outside their own homes. The estimate of 1920, now given, of nearly 41,609,192 "persons of both sexes and of ten years old and over engaged in gainful occupations" shows us 8,549,399 "females." Of these, over a million are engaged in "Professional service" (a larger proportion than of men so listed and, of course, indicating the great majority of women in the teaching profession). More than two millions are listed in "Domestic and Personal service." That leaves over three millions working in "agriculture, forestry, animal industry, manufacture and mechanical industries," and nearly a million and a half in "clerical occupations."

The use of ten years of age in such lists is now obsolete as an indication of custom in employment of youth. Fourteen years of age is the norm in the listing of youthful workers and the age limits should be revised to suit that rise in the legal age of the child wage-earner as generally practised now in the United States. With that understanding, the statistics for "Child Labor Certificates" issued by the large manufacturing cities of our country show an army of young workers, more than twenty thousand in New York City alone, annually entering the competitive industrial field with full consent of society. This all means that millions of women and very young persons who under the earlier forms of industrial life would have been employed (however steadily or with whatever handicaps or even cruelty) within some family circle, are now under the full control of mass-direction, mass-standardization, and mass-influence in their daily work.

Social Pressure on the Individual Worker. - This pressure is in itself almost a sufficient reason for the family instability now seen. To divorce all the working-time, and all the work-tendency, and most of the work-training from home life is to weaken the hold of the family upon the average worker. Members of a family in which each has definite and firm relation to some different requirement and control connected with a daily task are likely to acquire an independent relation to society in general. In such eases it requires a far more vital and enduring affection, a distinctly superior mutual understanding and sense of justice, and a far larger natural equipment of tact and power of adjustment than was required in other economic conditions, in order to make the family life enduring and happy. The economic self-interest of each member of the family in the domestic circle was obviously that of every other member when the household was a workshop.

Even, the land and all which it implied was a family possession in primitive days. And the worker's equipment, owned privately, was limited in the early days. We read that "tools, weapons, slaves and captured women and the products of some special skill were generally private possession, but products of group-work, such as the capture and killing of buffalo, salmon, and all larger game among the North American Indians, and the maize which individual women tended but which belonged to the household or the tribe in common, were all shared as community property." When to this communal possession of products of group-activity were added control over marriage portions, however those might be appropriated, and the management of all property thought to be of group-value, we can see that all of economic weight of influence now so individualized once went into the family asset.

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.