The Family and the Workers : Part 5

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 18 of 23)

Social protection should be less a club marked, "Thou shalt not," and more an opportunity inscribed, "Chances to rise, win them!" For the woman, married and a mother, there must be not so many new ways of enforcing prohibitions of what are deemed for her harmful forms of labor, as more ingenuity in providing half-time work, better adjustments of earning facilities to domestic duties, far more coöperative machinery for reducing the cost of living and for securing the family against economic exploitation in food, clothing, and shelter.

Women and the Cost of Living. - There is a field of family conservation which has been until lately almost wholly neglected by women; a field which must be mastered by them, the field of combination of all family interests in behalf of each family need. The attitude of the new voters among women who have organized into a League to enable them to become better and more efficient citizens is eminently encouraging. When the League of Women Voters takes hold definitely, consciously, and with intelligent devotion of the problems of cost of living, market supply, distribution of essentials of life and the whole range of economic interests which lie next to family well-being, it means that women are taking into the electorate a new and vitally needed form of social control and social service. That in itself, alone, would justify the struggle of women to obtain the franchise. More and more men in political life will come to understand what a League of women, for the most part "home-women" and family-serving-women, will demand of officials in the area of basic essentials of comfort and security in the home.

The Family Demand upon Unmarried Women. - The social demand upon women who are at work in any field of personal endeavor, whether that be professional, clerical, manual or artistic, has been outlined before in this treatment of the relation of the home to society in general as involving sortie special consideration of family needs. This may seem a negligible quantity to many women, unmarried, with relatives all self-supporting or well-to-do. There is no reason why a daughter should be called "undutiful" or "selfish" who is absorbed in her own work than why a son should be so esteemed when there is no special reason why other members of the family should hold that daughter's time and effort at their disposal.

The selfishness may be on the other side, and often is where parents or near relatives within the family bond try to burden the young woman with odds and ends of family service, which others might as well assume, and leave her with no ambition or opportunity for personal achievement. There are, however, in this complicated life of ours many contingencies of family experience which still demand from daughters a share in time and strength which sons may more easily concentrate upon their own work. This fact, often operating unconsciously, leads many young women to choices of types of work which have fixed hours and easy adjustment to frequent absences from work. These give little chance for rising in wage or position and often give low wages from the start. This tendency keeps many women from success in work and is often a reason why men distrust and oppose their entrance into a new field of industry.

The first essential of character, it must be insisted, is the power of self-support, of self-direction, of self-achievement. This is, now seen to be an essential for women as for men. The only adequate solution of problems of commercialized prostitution includes for each girl capable of that attainment the power of easy and complete self-support. Hence, the family has no right to take from its members some present advantage which will handicap potential workers, either boys or girls, in their struggle to meet adult responsibilities of economic life. Hence, again, the whole question of vocational preparation for girls, as well as for boys, has right-of-way as against any temporary or easily dispensed-with helping in family emergencies which may seriously hamper the future wage-earner. This is now being seen clearly; and the consequence is that parents do without for themselves both luxuries and often comforts, in order that their children shall have a chance in general education and in vocational training to fit them for later economic success. This fact, so honorable to parents, often leads away from family unity by increasing a chasm of culture and of condition between parents and children. This, again, indicates that the modern standardization of child-care and of parental duty has in it elements that demand far more developed character in all the members of a family in order to hold together by affection, justice, and higher compulsions of tenderness those who have by virtue of the self-sacrifice of the older ones lost touch on many of the common fields of effort.

Farming and the Farmer's Wife. - There is one great area both of man's work and of woman's work which supremely needs better understanding and more efficient organization in the interest of family life. That is the basic industry of all civilized life, farming, and woman's service in the farm home. We now generally place our farm houses far apart from each other, and we have usually but one house on the place and that for the owner and his family. We have no adequate provisions by which the seasonal nature of agricultural work can be so arranged by ingenious dovetailing with other forms of labor as to furnish an all-the-year employment to men who wish to marry and bring up families and yet do not own but work upon farms. We have few means for easing the burdens of household labor for the farmer's wife, and hence the larger the farm, the more property it represents, the more men laborers it demands for the owner's successful conduct of the business, the more unbearable the pressure upon health, strength, time, and energy of the woman who is the farmer's helpmate. These are some of the fundamental reasons for the drift away from farm life to the cities and the towns, a drift seen to be ominous and if not checked socially destructive of national prosperity when the Great War forced us to take account of social conditions in the United States more seriously than ever before.

The girls of the farms want to go away from home to find easier work than their mother's kitchens afford quite as much as do the boys who wish to get away from the summer drudgery and the winter dulness of the isolated farmstead; and now the girls can get away easily and often do. It is the lack of workers to adequately aid those in command of agricultural life which is more than all things else the difficulty that must be faced, wrestled with, and overcome if we would keep adequate numbers on the farms. The effect of the drift away from the country upon general family life is too evidently bad to need any intensive statement here. The congestion of cities, the street life of children which makes legal offenses of acts natural and necessary to free play, the walking of city streets by armies of unemployed fathers and those who might be fathers while harvests are lost for want of laborers, the lack of food in one stratum of society while in another there are no people to eat what nature provides so abundantly - all this and more rises in the mind of everyone who understands that in the right adjustment of agriculture to the people's needs lies the best interests of all.

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.