The Family and the Workers : Part 8

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 21 of 23)

The sufferings of children who miss even the meagre family comfort which the too small pay of the father when at work was able to supply. The greater suffering of children shunned and ill-treated by school mates when the father is called a "scab." The deeper tragedy of experience of men who take work that their labor comrades have refused because of the claim of wife and children, and are abused, both in body and in denial of sympathy and respect, because they are thought to be traitors to their striking fellows. What is hinted at in these few words could be made into one of the great dramas of the ages if only the social imagination could take into understanding and show without partiality both sides of the picture.

The time may come when it will be seen that in all wars some heroes fall on the side that is called wrong and have right to meed of deferred praise. When that time comes, the history of labor conflicts will show that in the struggle between the father's duty to his children and the wife who shares his service to them, and his duty toward the democratizing of labor by force of battle for justice and a fair chance for all his class, heroes and martyrs have fallen on both sides of the line. Meanwhile, the encouraging thing is that Labor Commissions and permanent Boards of Investigation and Arbitration and many government devices for securing a more even justice all around the circle of wage-earning activity are increasing in evidence as a sign that we are on the way to bring the common need for peace and order in industry to bear upon its warring elements. It only needs that the great consuming public, the final and the worst sufferer when labor wars are waged, shall understand and use its overmastering social power to bring order out of the chaos of opposing interests.

Women's Trade Unions. - The entrance of women into the Trade Union field is a significant feature of modern industry. Denied in many men's Unions the right of membership and in many fields of work competing only with those of their own sex, yet obviously in need of the same declaration of rights and the same class support of each other in securing better conditions of labor that men realized before them, the Women's Trade Union members have much the same spirit and many of the same methods that men have used in similar bodies. They, as a rule, stand, however, for more protective legislation for women than men demand for themselves and have one element unique in such bodies. That element is the membership within Women's Trade Unions of women of social position, of financial security and even of wealth and of broadest culture. These women who join the Trade Union League not to benefit their own class, which is usually the professional or the employing class, but to help wage-earning women to better conditions, have often been the laboring oar in the organization and maintenance of such Unions.

Nothing analogous to this is found in the Men's Trade Union movement in the United States. It bears witness to two elements, one that women of the so-called privileged classes are growing very sensitive to the claims of social justice as these are related to wage-earning women, and the other that the average age of wage-earning women is so much younger than that of men employed in similar work that the need for help from without in any effective effort for relief from bad conditions is more apparent. The transitory character of much of women's work makes the permanent personnel of any Trade Union League of women a smaller minority of its membership than in the case of men. It is said that in any trade where both the men and the women are well organized the membership of the men's Union will be fairly stable for twenty years, that of the women's Union will show a radical change each five years, making almost a complete turn-over in the twenty years' count. That is, of course, due to the fact that most women use for wage-earning only the period between leaving school and marrying, usually about four and a half years. That makes the term "working-girls" most appropriate and is a contrast to the working man's longer hold upon his trade.

The New Solidarity of Women. - The fact that women of all types of social advantage and disadvantage are already linked together in the Women's Trade Union movement, has, however, deep social significance, especially as wage-earners' organizations relate themselves to family life. No woman who has had right opportunities for education and family life in her own experience can work in intimate comradeship with those who have been denied such advantages without aiming directly for social arrangements in labor which will no longer cheat any young life of its joy, its culture, or chance for its possibility of right relation in the home. The signs are full of hope that more and more members of each class will feel that society as a whole has claims upon them above all that any group may attain by working only for its own advantage. No law of justice will stand the test of time save that which ordains an order in which "Each for All, and All for Each" will be the rule in industry as in the nobler state!

Questions on the Family and the Workers

1. What is most important to the success of the modern family, a minimum wage for working women or a minimum wage for men which can supply decent living for a man, his wife, and at least three children?

2. What effect has the wage-earning of married women and mothers in gainful employments outside the home had upon the stability and happiness of the family?

3. What effect have the laws protecting women and children in industry had upon family life?

4. What effect would the proposed increase of legislation placing men and women, married and single women, and unionized and non-unionized labor upon an identical legal plane be likely to have upon family life? As, for example, in the case of "deserting husbands," or in work especially inimical to women's health?

5. How can the admitted evil of industrial exploitation of children be best and most surely prevented?

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.