Fabian Tract No. 175 (Fabian Women's Group Series No. 4)

June, 1914. Publisher: Fabian Society (London)

Accessed via LSE Fabian Society Archive (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0):

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The Economic Foundations of the Women's Movement

Miss Mabel Atkinson

The Spiritual Aspect of the Women's Movement

Purely economic causes are never sufficient to account entirely for any great revolt of the human spirit. Behind every revolution there lies a spiritual striving, a grasping after an ideal felt rather than seen. Most emphatically is it true that there is a social impulse independent of economic conditions, which has over and over again asserted itself in the demand for the emancipation of women. All the greatest seers and prophets have insisted on the equal value of men and women, and on the right of women to control their own lives. Four centuries before Christ, Plato claimed that in the life of the State women, as well as men, should take their place; and in all the records of Christ's conversations, which the Gospels have handed down to us, there is not one hint that he advocated that subordination of women on which his disciples later on insisted. In Rome also, at the Renaissance, and at the time of the French Revolution, powerful voices were raised in denunciation of the subjection of women.

These demands were, however, only sporadic. At most they affected a small class. It was not until the nineteenth century that the demand of women for political, economic, and educational freedom was heard among any considerable mass of the people. This extension of the demand for emancipation was due to economic changes, to those alterations in human control over environment which are associated with the substitution of mechanical power for human energy in the making of commodities, and with the development of powerful and smoothly working machines in place of human hands and simple tools.

The Effect of the Industrial Revolution

Probably when Hargreaves invented his spinning jenny, and when Arkwright established his first cotton mill, in which the power of water took the place of the easily wearied arms of humanity, they had no conception of the fact that they were preparing the way for the greatest revolution in human society which has ever taken place since man learnt the use of fire. Yet nothing less was the truth, for then first men learnt how to utilize for their service the energies of the universe without previously absorbing them into their own bodies or into the bodies of domesticated animals in the form of food. Before the end of the eighteenth century man did indeed use water power on a small scale for grinding corn, and the capricious force of the wind for the same end and for propelling sailing vessels. But the energies of steam and electricity and petrol were lying dormant or running to waste all around him, while he sweated at the forge or the loom, and was hauled slowly over badly made roads by the straining sinews of horses. Now throughout human society inanimate forces are at work, harnessed at last successfully to the service of man, shaping iron and steel plates, setting to work looms and printing presses, propelling enormous trains of waggons, urging leviathan ships across the ocean.

Before this mighty revolution, whatever alterations man wanted made in his world must be made through his own physical exertions; now he sets to work the energies of his environment to remould that environment according to his needs. From himself there is demanded merely the brain work of planning and directing and the nervous strain of tendence on the marvellous machines. It is true that in our badly arranged social system (all of whose concepts of property, contract, wages, and labor are still adjusted to the pre-machine era) the increased control over nature has brought but little advantage to the mass of the workers. But the full effects of the substitution of inanimate for human energy have not yet been seen, and will ultimately work themselves out into conditions of life vastly different from those which we know at present.

Women Before the Industrial Revolution

Of all the changes introduced by the industrial revolution there is none greater than the alteration brought about in the position of women. Many people believe that it was only in the nineteenth century that women began, on a large scale, to work for their living. There could be no greater mistake. All the evidence goes to show that before the eighteenth century women, with few exceptions, worked as hard and as long as men did. In the sixteenth century women not only helped their husbands in farm work, but they toiled at spinning and carding of flax and wool as a by-industry of their own. Few nineteenth century women could work harder than the wife of a sixteenth century husbandman, whose duties are thus described by Fitzherbert, writing in 1534:

'First swepe thy house, dresse up thy dysshe bord, and sette all thynges in good order within thy house. Milk thy kye, suckle thy calves, sye up thy mylke, take uope thy children and array them, and provide for thy husband's brekefaste, dinner, souper, and thy children and servants, and take thy part with them. And to ordayne corne and malt to the myll, and bake and brue withal whanne nede is. And meet it to the mill and for the mill, and se that thou have thy measure again beside the toll, or else the miller dealeth not truly with the or els thy corn is not drye as it should be. Thou must make butter and cheese when thou maist, serve thy swyne both morning and evening and give thy poleyn [i.e., poultry] meat in the morning; and when tyme of the year cometh thou must take hede how thy hennes, duckes, and geese do ley, and to gather up their eggs, and when they wax broodie to set them there as no beasts, swyne, or other vermin hurt them. . . . And when they brought forth their birds to see that they be well kept from the gleyd, kites, crowe, polecats, fullymarts, and other vermin. And in the beginning of March or a little before is tyme for a wife to make her garden, and to gette as many good seedes and herbes as she canne, and specially such as be good for the pott and to eat. And also in March is tyme to sowe flax and hemp . . . but how it should be sown, weded, pulled, rippled, watered, washen, dryed, beaten, braked, tawed, heckled, spon, wounded, wrapped, and woven, it needeth not for me to show, for they be wise enough. And thereof may they make shetes, bordclothes, towels, sherts, smocks, and such other necessaries; and therefore let thy distaff be always ready for a pastime, that thou be not idle. . . . May fortune sometime that thou shalt have so many things to do that thou shalt not well know where is best to begin. . . . It is convenient for a husband to have shepe of his owne for many causes, and then maye his wife have part of the wool to make her husband and herself some clothes. And at the least way she may have the locks of the sheep either to make clothes or blankets and coverlets, or both. And if she have no wool of her own, she may take wool to spyn of clothmakers, and by that means she may have a convenient living and many tymes to do other works. It is a wife's occupation to wynowe all manner of corns, and make malt, to wasshe and wrynge, to make haye, shere corn, and in tyme of nede to helpe her husband fyll the muckwain or dungcart, drive the plough, to load hay, corn, and such other. And to go or ride to the market to sell butter, cheese, milk, eggs, chekyns, capons, henns, pigs, geese, and all manner of corns. And also to bye all manner of necessary things belonging to the household, and to make a trewe reckoning and account to her husband what she hath paid. And if the husband go to the market to bye or sell, as they oft do, he then to show his wife in like manner.'¹

About two hundred years later a realistic Scotch novelist makes his hero write thus of his second marriage:

I had placed my affections, with due consideration, on Miss Lizy Kibbock, the well brought up daughter of Mr Joseph Kibbock, of the Gorbyholm . . . whose cheeses were of such excellent quality that they have, under the name of Delap cheese, spread far and wide over the civilized world . . . The second Mrs Balquhidder that was had a genius for management . . . for she was the bee that made my honey. There was such a buying of wool to make blankets, with a booming of the meikle wheel to spin the same, and such birring of the little wheel for sheets and napery, that the manse was for many a day like an organ kist. Then we had milk cows and the calves to bring up and a kirning of butter and a making of cheese. In short, I was almost by myself with the jangle and din . . . and I for a time thought of the peaceful and kindly nature of the first Mrs Balquhidder with a sigh; but the outcoming was soon manifest. The second Mrs Balquhidder sent her butter on the market days to Irvine, and her cheese from time to time to Glasgow to Mrs Firlot, that kept the huxtry in the Salt Market; and they were both so well made that our dairy was just a coining of money, insomuch that after the first year we had the whole lot of my stipend to put untouched into the bank.'²

The Family as the Economic Unit; Marriage an Industrial Partnership

These extracts—and many like them could be quoted³—show clearly that before the industrial revolution women took a full share in industrial work. The basis of their work, however, was quite different from what it is today. Speaking generally, before the industrial revolution the economic unit was the family, and not the individual. So much was this the case, that in the censuses of 1811, 1821, and 1831 it was assumed that all the members of the family would practise the same occupation. Much of the work done by women in the family was of a domestic nature for the immediate service of their husbands and children, and not for profit. In technical language it was the production of use values, and not of exchange values. This can be illustrated from the inventory of the furniture of a middle class house at Brook, near Wingham, in 1760, which is preserved in an auctioneer's catalogue in the British Museum. The equipment of the establishment included a bolting room, where were kept 'one large reading trough, one meal tub and sieve, and one quilting frame'; a bottle house, which contained, among other things, 'one brine tub, one syder stock and beater, one pickling trough'; a milk house, where were kept milk keelers, churns, a butter board, and a butter printer.' In the 'larder' were 'pickling pans and stilling tubs'; in the brew house 'a mash tub, five brewing keelers, and one bucking tub' (whatever that may have been).

But it would be a mistake to assume that women never worked for profit. The second Mrs Balquhilder obviously did. It is common to find a woman carrying on the farm or shop of her husband after his death, and the farmer's wife, who has been already described, was her husband's working partner in his business enterprise as well as his housekeeper and servant. In fact, before the nineteenth century marriage was an industrial partnership as well as a relation of affection. The women worked, and worked hard, contributing much to the wealth of England, which was sold in her markets. This situation must have served to modify considerably the harshness of the common law, which decreed the husband's entire control of his wife's property. Fitzherbert's husbandman, depending as he did on his wife's energy in poultry yard, garden, and spinning room, would not be likely to insist upon his legal rights to take absolute possession of her earnings. And in one way the law recognized the wife's partnership. A husband could not leave his property entirely away from his wife. The widow's ancient right to one third of her husband's property was only abolished in England by the Reform Parliament,⁴ that Parliament which was called together on the basis of the Franchise Act, which for the first time introduced the word 'male' into the qualifications of the parliamentary elector.

The Alteration of the Economic Basis of the Family

Before the industrial revolution, then, the household was, as a general rule, the unit of industry, and women worked in it as members of the family for the production of exchange as well as of use values. Now what was the effect of the industrial revolution on the position of women in relation to these economic activities of the family? Briefly, the answer is that the introduction of machinery, by taking work out of the home and establishing the factory, the railway, and the mine as the organs of industry, broke up the family as an economic unit and diminished the amount of production for use carried on within the home. Brewing, baking, butter-making, spinning, weaving, even — to a large extent — the making of clothes, have ceased to be activities of the family; and increasingly, housewives are finding that it is cheaper and more convenient to hand over jam making, laundry work, even window cleaning and floor polishing, to agencies that exist independently of the home. This is an inevitable development. Modern machinery and the use of artificial sources of power immensely cheapen production, but they can only be used by organizations bigger than the family group. So that the economic basis of the family has altered more within the last hundred years than in the whole course of Christian civilizaton preceding that time.

Inevitably this has reacted on the position of women, whose relation to the family was always closer than that of men; and the changes in the nature and aspirations of women, which have developed in the nineteenth century, are very largely, though not entirely, due to these altered economic conditions.

The Changed Position of Women

But different classes of women were affected very differently. Among the wealthier people attempts were made to preserve the subordination of women to the family unit, although the economic justification for that dependence had ceased. Among the poor the necessity for the women's contribution to the family income was so strong that they were drafted into the new forms of industrial life without any consideration of their powers or capacities. To put it shortly, parasitism became the fate of the middle class women, ruthless exploitation that of the working class women. The latter were absorbed in large numbers by the new factories, as were also the children, who equally had worked as parts of the family unit; and the first stage of machine production saw the women and children workers cruelly and shamelessly sacrificed to the demands of profit.

The Exploitation of the Working Women

There is no need to repeat this oft-told story, but it may be pointed out that the previous close relation of the women and children to the family unit had rendered them incapable of asserting themselves against the powers of capital and competition. And the low wages which they received made them dangerous rivals of the men and no longer co-operators with them. No one during the first agitation for the Factory Acts seems to have realized that the general labor of women and children pulled down the wages of men. The conditions became so bad that dead in the face of a public opinion more strongly individualistic than has ever been the case either before or since, the State was forced to constitute itself the established guardian of the women and children, and to bring into existence all the machinery of the Factory Acts, by which, first in the textile industries and in mining, later on in all branches of machine production, and still later in practically the whole field of industry, an attempt was made to preserve women and children from the degradation and suffering due to over long hours and work in unsanitary conditions. The problem is, of course, not yet fully solved. In the industrial world the cheap labor of women is continually threatening new industries. Since these women believe themselves inferior to men, and since most of them expect to marry early and regard their occupation only as a makeshift, they are naturally willing to work more cheaply than men, and so constitute a perpetual menace to the masculine standard of life, while they themselves are subjected to conditions unfit for human beings. It cannot be wondered at that under these circumstances many social reformers regard the work of women outside the home as an evil development. For women in the industrial world are frequently forced to be blacklegs. Moreover, the conditions of modern large scale industry are determined not by the needs of the human beings who work in it, but by the demands of the machinery, and are therefore often unsuitable for women (equally so, in all probability, for men). In the early days of the movement for State regulation of industry, that innovation on the doctrine of laissez faire which then prevailed was justified on the ground that women were not free agents. Men, it was asserted, could and should stand out for themselves against the power of their employers. The State ought never to interfere in the wages contracts formed by its citizens among themselves, but women and children were not citizens. They were weak, ignorant, easily exploited. Further, they represented in a special way the human capital of the nation. The men might be used from generation to generation and the life of the race would still continue, but a nation which lived upon the labor of its women and children was doomed to degeneration.

The Parasitism of the Middle Class Women

In this view there is, of course, a truth which must never be forgotten. But it ignores another part of the problem, that which confronted the other class of women. The middle class women had so awful and so bitter an experience that for a time they were quite unable to appreciate the need of State protection for women. The result for them of the introduction of machinery was altogether opposite to the effect produced upon the industrial women. As the economic functions of the family diminished, the daughters of lawyers, doctors, wealthy shopkeepers, and manufacturers did not work out new forms of activity for themselves. It would have been against the dignity of their fathers and brothers to permit them to do so. Moreover, it would have diminished their chances of marriage, and would have involved a breach with the people who were nearest and dearest to them. They remained within the family group, occupied in the insignificant domestic duties that still remained and in the futilities of an extraordinarily conventional social intercourse. Dusting, arranging the flowers, and paying calls were the important duties of their existence. The married middle class woman had indeed, as wife and mother, a definite place and important responsibility, though the decay of household activities and the growing habit of living in suburbs, quite apart from the man's business, lessened at every point her contact with the social world and cut even her off more than had ever been the case previously from intercourse with the spheres of industry and commerce. But the unmarried woman, forbidden during her years of greatest vitality and strongest desire for new scenes and fresh interest to find any channels for her energies, save those of 'helping mamma' and 'visiting the poor,' suffered intensely from the inactive parasitism forced upon her. Exploitation brings great suffering; but suffering as acute, though more obscure, is experienced by those whose growing powers and growing need for human contacts are damned within them by an incomprehensible social fiat, resting really on conditions that had passed away a generation earlier. The only escape from this enforced inactivity and dependence was through marriage. The middle class woman, in fact, was regarded solely from the stand-point of sex. There was no way by which she might satisfy her natural wish to use the welling energies within her other than by becoming the mistress of a household. Naturally, therefore, she often regarded 'to be settled' as an end to be aimed at, quite apart from the personality of the man who offered to make her his wife. And the irony of the situation was that to the finer spirits who refused to acquiesce in this degradation of love to the economic plane, there was no other alternative than an existence which became 'that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing' of which one of Charlotte Bronte's heroines so bitterly complains.

The Surplus of Women

As the nineteenth century wore on other tendencies came into play which further increased the hardships of middle class women. The presence of a surplus of women in the middle classes made itself more and more apparent. Probably the cause of this is the emigration of young men, rendered necessary by our enormous colonial development; but it may be that some other and more subtle cause is at work. Exact statistics are difficult to give, as our statistics are not based on class distinctions. But certain conclusions can be drawn, as Miss Clara Collet first pointed out, from the distribution of unmarried males and females over certain ages in different boroughs of London, which to some extent are peopled by different classes of the community. The following table shows how striking the difference is, and how the surplus of females tends to accumulate in the better off districts. Some have urged that these surplus females are really domestic servants. But the number of female unmarried domestic servants over thirty-five is comparatively small.

Putting the same facts in another way, for every 100 unmarried men between thirty-five and fifty-five there are in Hampstead 291 unmarried women of the same ages, in Kensington 409, and in Chelsea 260; while in Woolwich to every 100 unmarried men of these ages there are 81 unmarried women, in Shoreditch only 59, and in Bethnal Green 81.

We can cite also an article by Miss Hutchins in the Englishwoman, June, 1913, in the course of which she says: 'Another means of comparing the prospects of marriage in different social strata is by comparing the proportion of single women in the age group 25-45 in rich and poor districts respectively. In making this comparison we must allow for the numbers of domestic servants, who of course very considerably augment the proportion of single women in the wealthy residential districts. The following table shows that, even if we subtract all the domestic indoor servants from the single women in the age group (which is over-generous, as a small but unknown proportion of them are certainly married or widowed), the single women in Hampstead, Kensington and Paddington are a considerably higher proportion than in Stepney, Shoreditch and Poplar. These districts have been 'selected' only in the sense that they were the first that occurred to the writer as affording a marked contrast of wealth and poverty.

This table also brings out the extraordinary difference between the proportions of women of the most marriageable period of life married in rich and in poor districts. The same fact is illustrated by the following table, comparing the number of married, single and widowed women among the population living 'on private means' and among the general population. The comparison is suggested by Miss Hutchins, but the table used by her in the Englishwoman cannot be reproduced here as the new Census does not give the information in the same way.

No doubt the figures in this table are distorted by the number of widows who owe their private means to their widowhood, but even allowing for this it is remarkable to discover that the percentage of married women in the general population is so much greater than in the population living on private means.

But statistical evidence is really not necessary. All hostesses and organizers of middle class social functions know well that one of the constant difficulties with which they have to contend is the over supply of women.

The Salaried Middle Class

Another new element in the position of the middle class woman arises from the fact that her men relations tend to become salaried officials in place of independent merchants and employers. This means not only that the women can no longer take part in the economic activities of their men relations, but that, in the event of the death of the latter, their position is far more precarious. A business or a shop goes on even after the death of a husband or father who established or inherited it, but when a salaried official dies his family are altogether deprived of the support which he afforded them.

Can He Afford to Get Married?

And again, if a wife is no longer of any direct economic value, if, on the contrary, she is an expense, then men, in many cases probably with reluctance, must defer marriage until they can afford that luxury. To a middle class man before the industrial revolution, as indeed to the men of the working class at present, marriage was not a thing 'to be afforded.' A wife was a partner, bringing to the relation of wedlock economically, as well as in other and more emotional ways, as much value as she received. But the middle class bachelor contemplating marriage today realizes that he must be prepared to double, or more than double, his expenditure, while his wife adds nothing to the income. Therefore he defers marriage, finding often an outlet to his emotions in other directions (it would be interesting to endeavour to trace the relation between prostitution and the use of machinery), and the girl who should be his mate withers unwanted in the 'upholstered cage' of her parents' home. Therefore in the nineteenth century the middle class woman had fewer chances of marriage, was less needed in the family life if unmarried, and was liable to find herself when that family life came to an end through the death of a father or brother stranded resourceless on the world.

The Tragedy of the Surplus Women

It is heartrending to think of the hidden tragedies which these sociological changes brought in their train, the mute sufferings of the women, who, unmated and workless, felt themselves of no value or importance to the world around them. What wonder that in the end a revolt came, and women insisted that in the great world of human activities outside the family they, too, must have place and power. Some echo of this unhappiness found its way into the literature of the Victorian era. Charlotte Bronte utters it in the repinings of poor Caroline Helston.

"Caroline," demanded Miss Keoldar, abruptly, "don't you wish you had a profession—a trade?"

"I wish it fifty times a day. As it is, I often wonder what I came into the world for. I long to have something absorbing and compulsory to fill my head and hands, and to occupy my thoughts."

"Can labor alone make a human being happy?"

"No; but it can give varieties of pain, and prevent us from breaking our hearts with a single tyrant master torture. Besides, successful labor has its recompense; a vacant, weary, lonely, hopeless life has none."

"But hard labor and learned professions, they say, make women masculine, coarse, unwomanly."

"And what does it signify whether unmarried and never-to-be-married women are unattractive and inelegant or not? Provided only they are decent, decorous, and neat, it is enough. The utmost which ought to be required of old maids in the way of appearance is that they should not absolutely offend men's eyes as they pass them in the street. For the rest, they should be allowed, without too much scorn, to be as absorbed, grave, plain looking, and plain dressed as they please."

"You might be an old maid yourself, Caroline; you speak so earnestly."

"I shall be one; it is my destiny. I will never marry a Malone or a Sykes, and no one else will ever marry me."⁶

"Look at the numerous families of girls in this neighbourhood: the Armitages, the Birtwhistles, the Sykes. The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions. They have something to do. Their sisters have no earthly employment but household work and sewing; no earthly pleasure but an unprofitable visiting; and no hope in all their life to come of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health. They are never well, and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness. The great wish, the sole aim, of everyone of them is to be married. But the majority will never marry; they will die as they now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare husbands. The gentlemen turn them into ridicule; they don't want them; they hold them very cheap; they say—I have heard them say it with sneering laughs many a time—the matrimonial market is overstocked. Fathers say so likewise, and are angry with their daughters when they observe their manoeuvres. They order them to stay at home. What do they expect them to do at home? If you ask, they would answer, sew and cook. They expect them to do this, and this only, contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly, all their lives long, as if they had no germs of faculties for anything else. A doctrine as reasonable to hold as it would be that the fathers have no faculties but for eating what their daughters cook, or for wearing what they sew."⁷

The same restlessness, unconscious as it usually was of its cause, was expressed even more fully by George Gissing in that wonderful book, "The Odd Women." But to most people the elderly spinster was no more than an occasion for mocking, and yet the same people were most bitter against the women who demanded the right to work, the right to education, and the right to enter politics, those three demands of the disinherited women of middle class Victorian England.

The First Feminist Movement

The first feminist movement emerged into the open at the time of the Reform Bill of 1867. If its origin is grasped, its peculiar characteristics will be easily understood. It was on the whole a demand of elderly unmarried women for the right to freer activities, as the alternative to an impracticable ideal of marriage and motherhood for every woman.⁸ Therefore it is not astonishing that these early feminists tended on the whole to ignore differences of sex, since those differences had been made the pretext for condemning them to a condition of parasitism, against which a healthy human being was bound to revolt. It was natural enough that these pioneers of the women's movement should insist upon their likeness to men, should demand the right to the same education as men received and the entrance to the same professions as men followed. In their revolt against the degradations which sex parasitism had brought in its train, it was not unnatural that in their dress and bearing they should neglect the grace and charm which a normal man will always desire in women. It was not unnatural either, when they found a section of the public advocating in industry special protection of women by law, that they should regard this as another form of the masculine exclusiveness from which they themselves suffered, so that to them the right of a woman to be a doctor and the right of a woman to work underground in a mine should present themselves as similar demands. Being but middle class women, influenced by the progressive ideals of their class, they were mostly Liberals, and to their special dread of the exclusion of women from human activities, other than those conditioned by sex, was added the strong individualism of the Liberalism of the period. Therefore they naturally set themselves in opposition to the demand for factory legislation, and there arose in consequence misunderstandings between two sections of reformers, the echoes of which have persisted to our own time.

Its Attitude towards Marriage

The attitude towards marriage of these early feminists has also been much misunderstood. There were, no doubt, a certain number among them who were indifferent or opposed to marriage; but most of them found themselves driven into hostility to normal family relations, mainly because these were used as an argument to convince them that the alterations in the position of women which they desired were impossible. When a woman, struggling for education and the right to work for herself, was met by the objection: 'If you learn Greek or if you become a doctor no one will marry you,' is it astonishing that she answered, 'I don't care if no one does'? Moreover, as has been already said, the pioneers came mostly from the class of 'superfluous women.' They knew well that marriage was far from being the certainty or the likelihood which their opponents always assumed it to be. The alternative for them was not work or marriage, but work and money of their own or a spinstered existence in their fathers' houses. Therefore, naturally most of them put out of their minds, with what bitterness few people have realized, the possibility of marriage and motherhood, and turned instead to develop their own intellectual and spiritual forces, devoting themselves to public work and to the struggle for that independent living which is so sweet to the woman who has revolted against parasitism.

Economic Independence

Few men understand what importance the modern middle class woman attaches to her economic independence. To men the right to earn a livelihood does not present itself as a hardly won and cherished privilege, but as a tiresome necessity. They may have earned an income with difficulty, but, at least, when they earned it it was theirs to spend as they would. But many women, even wealthy women, dressed in gorgeous raiment, with servants and horses and carriages at their command, never know what it is to be able to spend a guinea on the gratification simply of their own tastes. The money that they receive comes from father or husband, and must be spent as father or husband approve. Workers in the feminist movement are perfectly familiar with the well-dressed and prosperous looking woman who declares, 'Yes, I quite agree with you. I have often thought these things myself, and I wish I could help, but my husband does not approve of Women's Suffrage, and I have no money except what I get from him.'⁹ The life of the professional woman is often toilsome and often lonely, but the power of self-direction and self-activity which economic independence brings with it counts for much, and few women who have realized what sex parasitism means, and have succeeded in emerging from it will ever willingly return to it.

The Two Sections of the Women's Movement

So, at the present time there are two main sections in the modern women's movement—the movement of the middle class women who are revolting against their exclusion from human activity and insisting, firstly, on their right to education, which is now practically conceded on all sides; secondly, on their right to earn a livelihood for themselves, which is rapidly being won; and, thirdly, on their right to share in the control of Government, the point round which the fight is now most fiercely raging. These women are primarily rebelling against the sex-exclusiveness of men, and regard independence and the right to work as the most valuable privilege to be striven for.

On the other hand, there are the women of the working classes, who have been faced with a totally different problem, and who naturally react in a different way. Parasitism has never been forced on them. Even when the working class woman does not earn her own living in the world of industry—though practically all the unmarried girls of the working classes do so—her activities at home are so unending, and she subconsciously feels so important and so valuable, that she has never conceived of herself as useless and shut out from human interests, as was the parasitic middle class woman. What the woman of the proletariat feels as her grievance is that her work is too long and too monotonous, the burden laid upon her too heavy. Moreover, in her case that burden is due to the power of capitalistic exploitation resulting from the injustice of our social system. It is not due, or not, at least, to any considerable extent, to the fact that the men of her class shut her out from gainful occupations. Therefore, among the working women there is less sex consciousness. Evolving social enthusiasm tends to run rather into the channel of the labor revolt in general than into a specific revolution against the conditions alleged to be due to sex differences. The working woman feels her solidarity with the men of her class rather than their antagonism to her. The reforms that she demands are not independence and the right to work, but rather protection against the unending burden of toil which has been laid upon her. A speaker at a working women's congress said once, 'It is not work we want, but more love, more leisure to enjoy life, and more beauty.' These facts explain the relative lukewarmness of working class women in the distinctively feminist movement, and one of the possible dangers of the future is that the working class women in their right and natural desire to be protected against that exploitation which the first development of machinery brought with it, should allow themselves to drift without observing it into the parasitism which was the lot of middle class women. If the exclusion of married women from all paid work were carried out; if the unmarried women were at the same time prevented from following all those occupations which reactionary male hygienists choose, without adequate investigation, to assume to be bad for women; if at the same time the growth of the public supply of schools and other agencies for the care of children were to go on and the number of children in each family were to continue to diminish; if the home, by reason of the development of machinery and large scale production, were to lose all those remaining economic activities which are carried on within it, then working women might come to live through the same experience as the middle class women have already known.

Sex-consciousness among Working Women

But changes are proceeding in this situation. The consciousness of their rights and wrongs as a sex is arising among the working class women. They are beginning to see the possibility that even in the fight against capitalist exploitation, on which the men of their class are now entering, their specific interests may be overlooked. The shocking disregard of the needs of women by the Insurance Act has given them a clear proof of this. The great calamity against which the working class woman needs insurance is the death of her husband and bread winner; yet it is commonly stated that in the bargain with the big insurance societies the Government simply threw overboard the plans for a form of insurance which would make more secure the position of widows and orphans. Again, the home-staying working class woman finds that the Government cares little for her health, and makes practically no provision for her care should she fall ill, save in the one case of maternity benefit, and that, by curious irony, was originally to be paid to the husband and not to herself, save where the woman was herself a wage earner. Moreover, the development of social legislation is throwing heavier burdens on the working woman, and is yet making scant provision for her special needs. There are clubs, lectures, holidays provided for men, for boys, for young girls; but for the married woman how little is done? A few schools for mothers, still mainly supported by private charity, in the poorest districts is about the sum total; yet all the while it is she who bears the burden of the insurance paid by her husband, for it comes in nine cases out of ten out of her housekeeping money. It is she who has to send the children to school clean and tidy and has to keep the great appetites of growing boys satisfied; it is she who is regarded as responsible for buying inflammable flannelette, for not providing fireguards or separate cradles for the babies, and whatever else a Government of men may choose to impose on her. So that there is appearing also among the working women an understanding of the fact that their interests are not altogether safe in the hands of men, though the working class women will never probably arrive at the intense consciousness of sex antagonism which characterizes some sections of the middle class feminists, and is due to men's callous disregard of their claims as human beings.

Changed Views among the Middle Class Women

At the same time among the middle class women, too, the situation is altering. Many of them are realizing that to earn their own living is not always the joy it had appeared at first, for the living may be so meagre as to provide, at the cost of perpetual toil, only the merest food and shelter. Although the number of girls among the middle classes who are working for their living is steadily increasing, every now and then one comes across a young woman who finds the rigor of her work and the fierce competition too much for her, and hastens back gladly to the parasitic shelter of her relatives' roof. The lower sections of professional women, in short, are coming to understand the possibilities of exploitation, and are dimly beginning to feel rather than to comprehend the fact that work may be so monotonous and so ill-paid that even their human qualities, and much more their feminine attractiveness, will be beaten out of them in the process of earning their living.

And among the whole community the growth of collectivist feeling is bringing us to realize that State regulation of the conditions of labor is a necessity, and therefore we seldom find now among the feminists that embittered opposition to factory legislation which caused so many difficulties in the seventies and eighties. It is realized on all hands that the position of women in industry is not an exceptional one; that men, too, need protection against over-long hours of work, low wages, and insanitary conditions; and that, therefore, women are not accepting an inferior position in demanding the intervention of the State to secure for them suitable conditions of work.

They Want Both Work and Marriage

They Want both Work and MarriageAn even more momentous change is occurring in the attitude towards marriage. The first generation of feminists did not so much oppose marriage as ignore it; but there is now coming into existence a second generation of advanced women, few at present, but destined to increase. Most of them know nothing at first hand of the old struggles. They have gone to high schools and colleges, and education has come to them as naturally as to their brothers. Many under the care of feminist relatives have been carefully trained to win the economic independence for which their mothers and aunts agonized in vain. And now these younger women find themselves face to face with a new set of problems. The fierceness and bitterness of the old struggles caused the first set of feminists to put the question of marriage and the supposed special disabilities of their sex altogether on one side. To-day many of these elder women, looking at their young relatives in receipt of independent incomes, doing work that is of real value to the world, and enjoying in such matters as foreign travel, theatre and concert going, and the cultivation of friendships a degree of freedom which they had longed for as unattainable, wonder what difficulties the young women of to-day can possibly have to contend with. But there are fundamental human instincts which can be disregarded only for a time. The problem of the modern professional woman is that she is forced to reconcile two needs of her nature which the present constitution of society make irreconcilable. She wants work, she wants the control of her own financial position, she wants education and the right to take part in the human activities of the State, but at the same time she is no longer willing to be shut out from marriage and motherhood. And the present organization of society means that for most women the two are alternatives. In almost all occupations the public acknowledgement of marriage means for a woman dismissal from her post and diminished economic resources. This is the case in practically all the Government posts: women civil servants, including even factory inspectors and school inspectors, are compelled to resign on marriage. Even the women school medical officers of the L.C.C. are now forced to sign a contract stating that they will retire on marriage,¹⁰ and although the same rule is not so strict in private business, there, too, it is rare for married women to be employed. Most women, that is to say, can only continue to preserve that economic independence, so keenly appreciated and won by such fierce struggles, on condition of compulsory celibacy and, what to many women is far worse, compulsory childlessness. Against this state of things a revolt is beginning which so far is barely articulate, but which is bound to make itself heard in public before long. What women who have fully thought out the position want, is not this forced alternative between activity in the human world and control of their own economic position on the one hand and marriage and children on the other, but both. The normal woman, like the normal man, desires a mate and a child, but she does not therefore desire nothing else. Least of all does she desire to sink back into a state of economic dependence and sex parasitism. Women do not want either love or work, but both; and the full meaning of the feminist movement will not develop until this demand becomes conscious and articulate among the rank and file of the movement.

Can Child-bearing Women Earn Their Living?

Now there can be no denying the fact that this demand will raise many difficulties. Some writers, chief of whom is that extraordinarily suggestive and interesting American, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, assume that with improved conditions of household management and the development of large scale housekeeping and publicly managed crèches and nursery schools it will be possible even for childbearing women to continue to earn their own living in such a way that they will be able not only to keep themselves during this period, but to contribute their share towards the bringing up of children, and this without any injury to the children. To the writer this seems a very optimistic attitude. It may, perhaps, be practicable for a few exceptional women, who possess sufficient ability to earn large incomes and have sufficient energy to endure, without breaking down, the twofold strain of working for a living and bringing children into the world. But it is obvious that for the vast majority of women regular work on exactly the same terms as those which men now submit to in office or factory is most undesirable for women during at least six months of the prenatal and post-natal life of each child. If the child is to be nursed by its mother, as it should be, probably in most cases an even longer period of rest should be taken. The common sense of mankind knows well that just as increasing civilization leads to an increasing protection of children, so, too, it should mean more care for young mothers. During the child-bearing years the welfare of the child should have the precedence over all other considerations. But this does not mean that the woman need be incapacitated for earning her own living during her whole married life. It is not marriage that prevents a woman from working. On the contrary, the married woman who is leading a normal and healthy life is likely to do better work and be a more satisfactory person than the spinster. The real hindrance is not marriage, but motherhood. Most people assume that the two are identical; but should absorption in maternal duties extend over the whole of married life? The days have gone past (one hopes never to return) when the married woman had a child every one or two years during the whole of the fertile period of life. The modern family, it seems probable, will not consist in the future of more than three or four children, and even if one made the assumption¹¹ that the woman should devote herself entirely to the care of the children until the youngest reached school age, there would still remain many years of her life during which she would be strong and fit for work. Indeed, one of the most pathetic sights of to-day is the middle aged woman whose children have ceased to afford her complete occupation. They are absorbed in school life and in the training for their future occupations. The husband, too, gives up his time to his work and his sport, and the woman of forty or fifty, still at the height of her maturity, stronger perhaps, and certainly wiser, than she was in her youth, is left stranded by the current of life, with no interests outside her family; whilst by the family the necessary task of being 'company to mother' is resented and evaded.¹² How much happier would such women be if, when their children no longer needed all their time, they could return to activities outside the household; and how much richer would humanity be if it could avail itself of the services of such women. A type might come into existence, of which only one or two instances have yet appeared, of mature women who, as girls, had worked for themselves and known what human life, as opposed to sex life, meant; who then had lived through the normal feminine experiences of being sought in marriage, loved, and made mothers of children; and who, ripened and enriched by these experiences, returned in middle age to the activities of the world, knowing—because they have lived through—both sides of life. How enormously valuable such women would be in education and in the medical profession, where, indeed, even now a few of them may be found.

The Problem of the Future

So, then, the problem before the future is to secure for women freedom and independence, the right to control their own destinies, and yet to make it possible for the same women to be wives and mothers. The solution of this problem will not be easy. It cannot be attained through the methods advocated by either of the schools of thought that now hold the field; neither by the feminists of the more old fashioned sort, on the one hand, who simply demand for women the same rights as men possess, ignoring all the inevitable differences of sex; nor, on the other hand, by those who believe that sex is the only characteristic of women that matters, and disregard in her the human nature that she shares with man. Neither independence alone nor protection alone will meet the case. The whole problem is still so new that it is perhaps best to be cautious in dealing with it, and to avoid committing oneself too soon to any specific solution.

Women in Unpaid Public Work

It may be that some women after the days of active motherhood are past will find a sufficient sphere in unpaid public work of various kinds, though at present our electoral laws shut out in practice the vast majority of married women from membership of all our public bodies except the less important ones.¹³

The Legal Claim to Half the Husband's Income

But it would be unreasonable to insist that the older married woman as a whole should be confined to unpaid activities of this specific kind. Moreover, the objection which many of the noblest women feel to an undefined dependence on a husband would not be met at all by this suggestion, and we should find that if marriage means the complete relinquishment of a cherished occupation many of the finest women will refuse to marry. Some thinkers advocate that the difficulty should be met by giving to the married woman a legal claim to half her husband's income, and making her jointly responsible with him for the necessary expenditure on the family. There will be cases where the care of the household and children takes up the whole of a woman's time, in which such an arrangement would be quite legitimate, and it may be that it should be a possible legal settlement for those who care to adopt it. But it certainly should not be compulsory on all married couples. In the first place, it would obviously increase the tendency to evade legal marriage, and so would defeat the very purpose which it has in view. Again, dependence is not any the less dependence if definite legal provision is made for the endowment of it. Moreover, it would endow childless women equally with the child-bearing women, and it would continue the endowment during the years when the woman might reasonably return to ordinary economic activities. Therefore (although there will be cases where women will be supported by husbands who can afford to do so, and so will be set free either for the parasitic activities of fashion, sport and charity, or will use their leisure and freedom to carry on work for which no financial return may be expected, such as scientific research or the agitation for social reforms), yet the whole line of development should be in the direction of decreasing and not increasing the legal right of woman to be kept by the man, save when child-bearing and child-nurture are in question.

The Endowment of Motherhood

Now, these are really specific activities of the greatest possible importance. No act of citizenship is more fundamental than the act of bringing into the world and protecting in his helpless infancy a new citizen, and therefore the most reasonable solution of the problem, though it may not be applicable in every case, is that women during the period when these activities must absorb their whole energies should be supported by a State endowment, but that this State endowment should not continue longer than the time during which they are so absorbed, and that at the end of that time they should be free to return to their former vocations.¹⁴

Such a system would at one blow solve innumerable difficulties. If childbearing is protected by the State, it would not be unreasonable for the State to impose on the women who are possible mothers certain restrictions with regard to the activities which they may follow. Moreover, if the husband is no longer solely responsible for the support of his wife and her children, marriage will become easier among precisely those classes where we desire to encourage it. At the same time, if the dependence of women on marriage disappeared, and with it the inevitable accompanying subordination of their own wishes to their husbands' marital demands, we should establish the most reasonable check on the increase of the population, namely, the woman's natural dislike to excessive and unwished for childbearing. That decline of the birth rate among the classes with the highest standard of comfort which exists at present would be checked by the greater facilities for marriage, yet, on the other hand, there would be no danger of the too large families which are due to the dependence of women, and which give rise to over population. At present the distribution of children presents the same inequality as the distribution of wealth; some people have far too many at the same time that others have too few. Another problem which would in time disappear is the inequality of the wages of men and women. The great argument which now weighs with the popular mind in favor of this inequality is the alleged fact that most men have dependants, while most women have not. Unfortunately, this is by no means always true; and, moreover, this theory overlooks the fact that in a certain number of instances, at all events, women compete with men, and therefore if a lower level of payment is established for women, they will drive the men out altogether, as they have done in typewriting, and are in process of doing in elementary school teaching. What we want to work towards is a system whereby all adult human beings not incapacitated by some specific cause shall work for their living and be paid for it, no distinction of sex being made where similar work is done by men and women. Then the young, the aged, and those adults who for some special reason are unable to earn their living, should be supported by the State from the surplus funds available when rent and interest have been absorbed by the community; a system of which we have already made a beginning in old age pensions on the one hand, and maintenance scholarships on the other. And among the most honored and respected of all those endowed by the State should be the women who are rendering to it the greatest possible service, that, namely, of ushering into the world its future citizens. But their reward for this service should only cover the time when their maternal duties prevent them from taking any part in industry.

This is coming to be realized more and more clearly as the ultimate ideal of the feminist movement, and what we have to do at present is, while not straining our adhesion to it unduly in the face of the conflicts of the present situation, to attempt no changes in the law which will make our ultimate attainment of it impossible; so that we should watch very carefully any development which may result in intensifying the dependence of women outside the child-bearing years. It cannot be denied that the demands of some eugenists who are unable to believe that the necessary protec tion for motherhood can be given save through absolute dependence on a husband may make in this direction, and the increasing tendency of local authorities and government departments and of some philanthropic employers to exclude women from employment simply because they are legally married is equally a danger.

Socialism and Feminism

It will be seen that these changes in the status of women cannot come about in our present individualistic society. In the first place, under the existing state of competition in business a woman who drops out for the childbearing period can hardly expect to be reinstated, and the world will probably honestly have to face the fact that certain readjustments, not otherwise desirable, must be made in order that the mother may not be penalized in her later economic life by reason of her motherhood. Even among elementary school teachers to-day a married teacher who frequently demands leave of absence because of her approaching confinement finds herself at a serious disadvantage. The absence and subsequent return of the married women to their work will no doubt be inconvenient, but the inconvenience must be faced, and the women as far as possible be placed at no disadvantage, if we are to put a stop to our present practice of the deliberate sterilization of the ablest and most independent women.¹⁵

Such a system could be deliberately and consciously introduced into the public services; it could be imposed on private enterprise by factory legislation, though with much greater difficulty. But it is the development of Socialism, and that alone, which can make it possible throughout the whole fabric of society for the normal woman to attain her twin demands, independent work and motherhood. It is only Socialism which can make the endowment of the women during the maternal years a possibility, that endowment being one of the first charges on the surplus value or economic rent which the State will absorb; and until the State has made itself master of the land and the capital of this country, it will not have an income big enough to enable it to provide adequate endowments for the childbearing women. Therefore it becomes clear that the only path to the ultimate and most deep lying ends of the feminist movement is through Socialism, and every wise feminist will find herself more and more compelled to adopt the principles of Socialism. But the wise Socialists must also be feminists. The public spirit of willingness to serve the community which will be necessary if the Socialist principles are to work must be inculcated into children from their earliest days. Can they be so inculcated by women who know nothing of the activities of the world beyond the four walls of their homes? Women, too, must be citizens and fully conscious of the privileges and duties of their citizenship if Socialism is to be attained. Not least among the duties of that citizenship should be what Plato long ago demanded of his women guardians—that they should bear children for the service of the State.

Notes

1. Fitzherbert's 'Book of Husbandry.' English Dialect Society. 1882.↩
2. Galt. 'Annals of the Parish,' Chapter VI. Pages 38-9 of edition in Routledge's Universal Library.↩
3. The staff consisted of the general manager, John Dalton; a collier, who prepared the charcoal from the brushwood of the neighboring forest; a 'blomesmyth,' or 'smythman,' in charge of the 'blomeharth'; and a 'faber,' working at the strying hearth . . . The employment of the wives of the foreman and smith lends an air of domesticity to the little settlement. The wife of John Gyll, the 'blomesmyth,' seems to have been a general factotum, sometimes helping her husband or the laborers, then working at the bellows. At first her employment was intermittent and her payment irregular, but later she seems to have settled down to fixed employment at a regular rate of a halfpenny a blome, i.e., a weight of fifteen stones of thirteen pounds each. 'Durham County History,' Vol. II., p. 279, quoting Account Roll of John Dalton, first Durham ironmaster (about 1410).↩
4. Dower Act, 3 & 4 Will. IV., c. 105.↩
5. Miss Hutchins's original figures, which were taken from the Census of 1901, have been brought up to date.↩
6. 'Shirley,' Chapter XII.↩
7. 'Shirley,' Chapter XXII.↩
8. Lydia Becker, one of the earliest agitators, is reported to have replied to a married woman, who said that she, too, would like a vote, 'My dear, a good husband is much better worth having than a vote.'↩
9. The personal experience of the writer will illustrate this point. She was once staying with the wife of a millionaire, and was going on after her visit for a walking tour with a friend in the Lake district. Mrs D., when she heard of the plan, said: 'Are you two going off by yourselves just where you like? That must be delightful. All my life I have never been able to do that kind of thing. Before my marriage I had to go where mamma said, and now, of course, Mr D. always decides about our holiday.' Many a wealthy lady is as much subservient to the whims of her husband as though she were one of his upper servants, which, indeed, in many cases, she is, with the difference that they have holidays and she has none.↩
10. As these pages pass through the press, the desirability of requiring women doctors to retire on marriage is again being raised on the L.C.C.↩
11. The writer is not prepared to admit that this assumption is true in every case, or indeed in many cases. Many women who can bear splendid children are not necessarily fit to care for all the details of their health and rearing, and in many cases it would be well that the mother should return to her normal occupation as soon as ever the child no longer required to be nursed every two or three hours, and should use her earnings to pay for the skilled care given in creche or nursery, resuming charge of the child in the non-working hours. But that this is possible cannot yet be considered as established beyond a doubt.↩
12. See the serial story 'Won Over,' which appeared in Mrs Gilman's magazine The Forerunner during 1913.↩

13. I am indebted to the Secretary of the Women's Local Government Society for the following note on the electoral laws as they affect the position of married women on public bodies: ↩

    For candidature for county and town councils in Great Britain it is necessary to have an electoral qualification, and the candidate's name must appear either on the burgess roll or on the list of county electors. In England and Wales (outside London) married women are in general excluded from standing, as they are not entitled to have their names placed on the register. The Qualification of Women (County and Borough Councils) Act, 1907, removed the disabilities of sex and marriage in regard to candidates, but it did not amend the statute law which demands that candidates for county and town councils shall be electors. Married women can stand in London for the County Council, as the London County Council Electors Act, 1900, gave parochial electors the right to vote for the County Council.

    In Scotland and Ireland women owners, women lodgers and women service voters are entitled to be registered, and therefore to stand for county and town councils. In England and Wales these three classes of women cannot have their names placed on the register.

    Since 1894 in England and Wales, and since 1898 in Ireland, there has existed a residential qualification alternative with the electoral qualification for the following local government bodies:

    England and Wales	Ireland
    Metropolitan Borough Councils	Urban District Councils
    Urban District Councils	Rural District Councils
    Rural District Councils	Boards of Guardians
    Parish Councils
    Boards of Guardians

    It is in virtue of this residential qualification that at least two-thirds of the women guardians in England and Wales are now serving, and at the triennial elections for Metropolitan borough councils last November three-fourths of the women candidates were qualified by residence only.

    In Scotland the school board is the only local authority for which the residential qualification is available. A change in the law is urgently needed in all three countries, so as to permit of an alternative residential qualification for candidates to all local government bodies.

    It should be observed that even where there is no legal barrier against the candidature of married women for local bodies, few married women can in practice stand where it is necessary for candidates to be electors, as married women seldom have qualifications as occupiers or owners, their houses being naturally hired or possessed by their husbands.

    The new President of the Local Government Board has undertaken to introduce a Bill abolishing some of these anomalies.

14. It is neither possible nor desirable that we should at this stage adopt a dogmatic attitude as to the length of time during which an expectant and nursing mother should be freed from ordinary industry and be supported by a State grant. It will certainly vary from industry to industry. No pregnant woman should follow any occupation where the lifting of heavy weights is necessary or the raising of her arms above her head (obviously ordinary house work should be one of the first industries to be barred). On the other hand, most doctors advocate light out-door occupations. Women during these periods need work and interests and activities quite as much as the single or childless women: especially do they need what is now often denied them -some amount of social life. It would be easy under a properly organized state of Socialism to set aside excellently appropriate work for expectant mothers, and the State maintenance might then only need to cover a few weeks.↩
15. Cf. Shaw, 'Man and Superman,' p. 220. 'Mr Graham Wallas has already ventured to suggest, as Chairman of the School Management Committee of the London School Board, that the accepted policy of the sterilization of the school mistress, however administratively convenient, is open to criticism from the national stockbreeding point of view.'↩