The Family and the Workers : Part 7

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 20 of 23)

The Application of Democratic Principles to Life. - Finally, the problems which inhere in work as related to the family have at their base the same great demand for equality of educational and economic opportunities which inhere in all that relates to the application of democratic principles to actual living. This is not an essay on economic theory or a statement of the results of special studies of economic condition. Still less is it an attempt to make an appeal for one or another type of economic reform. It is simply a partial view of certain work conditions as they come closest to family life.

There is to this writer no more merit or demerit in any form of economic dogmatism than in any special theologic creed. We may all differ, and with reasons sufficient to our thought and without blame, on questions of how we can best attain a true democratization of the industrial order. We cannot now be of two minus as to the righteousness of such democratization. We must all believe in giving all human beings a fair chance at the best things of life; security against want, homes that offer conditions for family well-being, educational entrance into our common social inheritance, and leisure to enjoy the things that make for happiness. The baptism of religious idealism by the social spirit is now accomplished. As Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch, that great prophet of a new social order, well says in his last thought-compelling book, "The social gospel has become orthodox."

Women Must be More Democratic. - Women have been so long held within family interests that they, less than men, have had the discipline of democratic life within the labor world. They are often the vicarious expressions of man's remaining aristocratic feeling, as Veblen has acutely outlined in his Theory of the Leisure Class. Husbands still wish their wives to be more "select" than they find it wise longer to be themselves and more tenacious of inherited conventional forms than business or inclination longer allow for themselves. Hence, women have not, as a rule, organized their households on as democratic principles and methods as men have organized their own work. Women, now that they have attained the democratic position in the state which they have long worked for must apply the principles they have preached in that crusade for political equality in the very stronghold of social caste and rigid class-feeling, the family life itself. And even if they have to educate their husbands in the process.

Woman may do this, first, by wiping out and forever the stigma that attaches or has attached to any woman who earns money outside her own home. They may do it, second, by so relating themselves to professional, clerical, manual workers among their own sex as to show that they really believe in equality of rights and mutuality of duties among all classes. They may do it, third, by taking hold of the household service problem radically and from the basis of actual knowledge of its importance to personal and family well-being. They may show actual regard for the dignity of the functions implied, by the treatment accorded the competent, faithful, and often indispensable domestic helper. There is a big social job waiting for women in matters concerning the work of their own sex both within and without the family circle; and the social power of women will be best shown, perhaps, in settling the worst problems of domestic service by the wiser and more efficient use of better educated, more socially respected, and more definitely standardized workers within the home.

The Social Effect of Trade Unions. - No study of the relation of modern industry to family life, however brief and inadequate, can ignore the question, "How has the Trade Union organization of wage-earners affected the home?" The immediate and direct effect has often been disastrous when strikes and lockouts marked the course of industrial warfare. All war is bad for family life and especially injurious to the development of children. And economic war lacks the appeal to the imagination and the ceremonial prestige of war between nations or of civil war in one country. We have had in our race-experience for untold ages the linking of military training with military defence of political ideas and of the fatherland. To fight for one's country seems highly honorable. This lift of the sense of community unity into the area of supreme struggle gives to men often what no other experience so far accomplishes, namely, a feeling of spiritual union with all other men who also struggle for what they believe to be right. In labor wars; in the strife between employer and employed, that sense of race unity even when struggling against a national enemy, that which gives what Professor James well called the "mystic element in militarism," is lacking. It is a fight between men who have and those who have not and feel themselves defrauded of just due. Hence, although the fight may be bitter even unto death, and the sacrifices of immediate comfort for ultimate ends beyond measure heroic and even wise, there can be little of the pomp and circumstance that accompany national and international warfare.

The Decoration Days when heroes of past conflicts are praised and receive from all the reverence which patriotism pays to those believed to have saved some precious inheritance from harm do not yet, perhaps will never, include heroes of labor struggles for equal right and mutual justice. Yet the history of industrial changes shows beyond cavil or doubt that in this field, as in others, he who would be free himself must win his freedom. The basic principle of the Trade Union, the right and usefulness of collective bargaining, inheres in the conditions of machine-dominated and capitalized industry. In this form of labor organization the individual worker cannot bargain individually; his place in the factory is too infinitesimal and his power measured by that of his employer too invisible for such personal alignment. This fact is now not questioned by any but those so enamoured of old methods of control of the worker by those who hire him that they cannot see what has really happened both to the employer and the employed. The labor struggle had to come. The right of workers to combine and to work together for what seems to them their best interests is as inherent a part of modern democratic ideals as is the right of all citizens to vote.

And since modern industry has given enormous power to a few master leaders and requires so many wage-earners to carry out its enterprises the struggle has necessarily been hard and long. No one can justly place all good behavior on one or the other side in this conflict. No one can fail to see that power attained by the Trade Unions has at times been used as selfishly as the power of the employers has been. But when we remember that until the first quarter of the nineteenth century combinations of workmen, even to respectfully ask an increase of wages or a bettering of work conditions in lessening of hours and in sanitary and moral provisions in work-places, was legally a "conspiracy," and liable to harsh punishments, we must be glad that at any temporary cost the main army of laborers has been organized from a mob of oppressed individual workers. But what a cost to the family has been often paid! Mothers already overworked and under-nourished still further starved by the "strike relief" that only serves to maintain wretchedness, not to abolish it.

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.