The Family and the Workers : Part 6

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 19 of 23)

The sorry picture of the haggard woman, widow, deserted, or divorced, scrubbing on her knees all night long the marble floors of a vast office-building, to hurry back to her locked-in children in the early morning hours, to fall exhausted on the bed until the call of the alarm clock to get breakfast and send the little ones to school - this picture has been portrayed often to Consumer's League and Women's Club audiences and has made many women of position and of influence call for drastic prohibition of such overwork of mothers. It has also made women work diligently until they secured forms of help from the public purse to subsidize such mothers and give them state aid until the children were able to earn something for themselves. There are many who can visualize that scrubwoman, and who can place beside her as needing social aid the sewing-machine operator, the garment-finisher or the flower-maker in the tenement sweatshop, who can not see that the farm-house mother is often subjected to labor conditions that sap life and health and doom her children to weakness.

These opposite poles of woman's work both call for better social understanding and more intelligent and devoted social work. The scrubwoman, or the poverty-bound tenement worker may be proper subjects for public or private philanthropy; the farm-house mother is or should be the prime object of social justice and social engineering for ends of social well-being. Upon the farmer and his wife and also upon the miner and his wife and the forest worker and his wife rest the very foundations of economic stability and industrial security. Those who procure at first hand the raw material of manufacture and of commerce are too precious to social order for any neglect of conditions in their work. In many foreign countries the land seems to shrink dangerously as population grows. In our vast country and in the stretches of Canada, North America seems, as Lowell said, to have "room beside her hearth for all mankind."

And yet, in New York City and in other centres of population, there are swarms of people, many of them of foreign birth, of varying races and of different nationalities, crowding each other to suffocation and many of them holding out hands for charity, who might, if rightly aided toward a different environment, work to full support of themselves and their families in the fresh air and healthful surroundings of the country. The need is to transfer city advantages to the country in far greater extent, and to transfer the people who cannot find or make a human chance in the city to the wide spaces and work needs of the country. Rural life must be urbanized, city life must be relieved of those who hinder the making of a beautiful and noble civic life, not because they are incapable but because there are too many of them who have not yet arrived at full capacity for vocational achievement and cannot do so in the crowd with which they have to contend.

Domestic Help and Family Life. - For the relief of family life in the matter of domestic help there must be an intelligent and an earnest attack of educated women upon the problems involved. The admirable suggestions of Professor Lucy Salmon in her Democracy in the Household indicate the chief difficulty in getting and keeping the right sort of domestic worker. The personal relation is not that of equals but of superior to inferior, and the helper in the home is isolated socially from the group he or she serves. This is felt peculiarly in cases where but one helper is employed within the household. The petition of many housewives recently sent to Washington to beg that "the restriction upon immigration now in force may be lifted in the case of women who seek to enter the United States to engage in domestic labor" on the ground of a household need, dire and widespread, is an indication that many women, perhaps most, look forward to a continuance of the present conditions of domestic work but with ever-new sets of domestic workers from other lands.

Their attitude in this particular is wholly mistaken. Even if the races from all the ends of the earth should one by one troop through the kitchens of American housewives, most of them would not stay long enough to even learn how to do good work in those kitchens. The first chance they got the factory or shop or even the canning shed or the open field of harvest would take them away. And this is not because the work in the home is too hard, or the room and food not so good as elsewhere, but because domestic service is the last stronghold of aristocracy and no one brought in touch with democratic ideas will long accept it. Miss Salmon's ideas, if carried out, would stay the rapidity of the current away from domestic service. But a quite new approach to the whole problem must be defined and realized by women of light and leading if we would have adequate and efficient help In household work. The fact that most professional or business women find it far easier to get good help where but one domestic worker is kept, than do most women who have no outside duties, gives one key to the situation. As one woman of character and education far above that of most household workers said, "I do housework for Mrs. So and So, for she teaches and there is a reason why she needs help. I would not take a place where there were women in the family who could do the housework themselves perfectly well and wait upon them."

The absurd hypocrisy that in one breath praises all work done for the comfort of the family as the highest form of service and in the next demands that the family "servant" accept all manner of inherited insignia of social inferiority must be outgrown. In the city and suburban towns the hour-service and the various forms of commercial aids to household tasks may work, as has been before indicated, to gradually do away with the servant class, in the old sense of those words and without much social consciousness of the change. In the small towns and in the rural districts, where is now the most acute suffering and need of housemothers, there must be a conscious and a wholesale movement to reinstate domestic service on a plane compatible with democracy and amenable to high standards of intelligence and efficiency. When one thinks of the rural need for teachers, for nurses, for doctors, for kindergartners, for recreation managers, for community leaders, one is tempted to call for a social conscription that shall make all graduates from normal and teacher-training schools, from all schools for social work, and all hospitals, from all playground classes and settlements, serve for a period of one year or two in the country districts as their part in social organization. Surely if a government has the moral right to force youth to serve in war for purposes of destruction of enemies, it has a right to compel youth to serve in peace for purposes of human conservation and for the just sharing of social advantages by all the people of a common country!

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.