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Page 27
With the rise of Protestantism, and later with the rise of modern
democracy, these ideals were blended, and women found themselves, not
indeed slaves and subject to sale, but serfs, entangled in a mass of
feudal obligations and bound to the house. Practically, most men still
hold this threefold conception of woman's place in the social organism.
She is to be a combination of housekeeper, nun and lady. It is the
kitchen, church and children ideal of the German Emperor.
Meantime forces were set at work which were to change the economic
foundations of the family and enable the woman to emerge from serfdom
into some new form of industrial relationship. From the rise of the
European cities in the twelfth century, certain industries have tended,
especially in the Netherlands and in England, to segregate themselves in
farm-houses and towns. Women naturally participated in these
activities, generally taking the least desirable parts. With the freeing
of the mind, which followed the democratic revolutions at the end of the
eighteenth century, inventions blossomed out and perfected steam
engines, cotton gins, spinning jennies, and a thousand other machines
driven by steam or water power, which have changed the civilization of
Europe and America. Miss Edith Abbott has shown us how this change,
involving increasing segregation and specialization, came into America
even in the pre-Revolutionary time.[35]
[35] EDITH ABBOTT, _Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic
History_, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1910.
Spinning and weaving industries led the way in this movement, but its
full force was not felt until the late eighteenth century. Since then,
one industry after another has left the home for the factory until
to-day, in all large communities, even the preparation of food
increasingly goes to the packing-house, the canning establishment, the
bakery and the delicatessen-store. These industries needed hands, and so
the women followed them to the factories.
As 1870 marks the beginning of higher education for women, so it also
marks the beginning of her industrial self-consciousness. The perfecting
of such inventions as the typewriter, the telegraph and the telephone,
and the creation of a great variety of office appliances, together with
the perfecting of highly elaborate means of distribution, like the
departmental store, called for thousands of cheap workers possessed of
some slight intelligence but not necessarily having any serious
preliminary training. Our elementary schools and high schools have
increasingly turned out a multitude of girls who could meet these
requirements. The increased cost of living, the lessened labor demands
of the home, and the attractions of the pay envelope, have called
millions to work in industrial plants. In 1890, there were 4,005,532
wage-earning women in the United States; in 1900, 5,319,397; while in
1910, we have probably nearly 8,000,000.
Like most other great changes in civilization, this industrial
transformation was neither preceded nor accompanied by any general
consciousness of what was happening. Daily necessities were offset by
weekly pay envelopes, or the failures fell out of sight, and so the next
week and the years followed. Country populations moved away; cities grew
enormously, leading to congestion in living which, combined with the
daily absence of women, has often transformed the old time homes into
communal tiers of tenements occupied, during working hours, only by the
young and the infirm.
The children of all ages after a while followed their mothers into the
factories; but the evil effects of child labor were so apparent that
repressive legislative measures have increasingly raised the age of
their admission until now, in the more advanced communities, they must
stay outside the factory doors until they are twelve or fourteen years
old. Some growing self-consciousness, largely of a police nature, has
led us to institute measures for the protection of the children who are
not allowed to work. Schools, playgrounds, day nurseries, institutional
churches, college settlements and public social centers now bid against
the streets and vacant lots, the nickel shows and the dancing halls, for
the children's patronage.
Education, however, true to its origin as the assistant of theology,
refuses to recognize in any large way the new world into which we have
come, and where the next generation of children must follow. Manual
training has, here and there, quieted the fears of some who had
disturbing visions; and we go on employing an army of unenfranchised,
celibate women, with little or no industrial experience, to teach ten
million boys how to be good citizens of a republic, and how to serve in
a modern industrial army; and ten million girls how to work in shops and
factories, and how to live without homes. As a consequence, girls come
up to the factories from their schools with ideals,[36] so far as the
school has shaped them, founded on unmarried school mistresses and
George Washington; and they pass, by way of the altar, into cheerless
tenements which the school still thinks of as places where children are
cared for, family clothing is made and the family baking is done.
Practically, of course, most education is given outside the schools, and
there the evils of an unregulated time of transition are multiplied
through imitation.
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