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Title: Women's Labour Author: Freedom Press, Anonymous Date: July, 1887 Language: en Topics: Freedom Press, Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 1, No. 10, online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3175, retrieved on May 8, 2020. Notes: Freedom Press
Many Socialists have joined in the outcry of certain Trade Unionists and
Radicals against the employment of women in work which the women think
suitable and the men do not. They have done so on the plea that the
women's labor is simply used by capitalists to reduce men's wages. Their
argument is perfectly correct as far as it goes, but it goes a very
little way. Roughly speaking, it is probably true that the total of
men's wages is decreased by something like the amount they would require
to support the said women as their chattel-slaves. The women become the
wage-slaves of the capitalist, and the workman is deprived of his
dependent domestic serf. A man and woman both working often earn between
them only about as much as the man alone could earn before the
competition of women came into his labor market; or, putting it in
another way, about as small a share of the fruit of their labor falls
into the hands of the wage-workers as a class, if women are employed in
productive labor, or if they were not so occupied. But if the women work
outside their homes, they become independent of their lovers and male
relatives, and the family is broken up.
After all this is the great point. Amid the misery of this period of
transition, and its misery would be hard to exaggerate, this solid good
remains; the individualist family system, i.e., the dependence of the
individual woman upon the individual man, is being slowly and surely
undermined, and with it one of the bases of our detestable civilization.
It is a necessary step towards the realization of a free Socialism that
men and women alike should learn to recognize their direct relation to
society; that they should be loosed from individual dependence and
individual obligation, and learn to live and work directly for the
commonwealth, for each and all-not for this person and that.
True, landlord and capitalist effectually stand in the way of any such
common and social life and work in the present; but landlord and
capitalist are frankly recognized as enemies to be overcome by every
worker who is at all awake to his position; whereas, the idea that each
individual man must necessarily have the support of his wife and
children hung round his neck like Christian's burden of sins, is fixed
in the minds of many as a law of the Medes and Persians. Nevertheless,
the increasing competition of women in the labor-market is a direct
negative to this assumption. This competition, with all its attendant
ills, is yet one of the disturbing forces at work in our rotten social
system, preparing the way for the growth of new and more healthy human
relations in the future. In the present, too, it is helping to form the
army of the down-trodden workers into line.
When a large number of women have come into direct personal conflict
with the masters, they will cease the opposition to revolutionary
action, which at present hang a dead weight upon the cause. How many a
well-meaning fellow accepts a dog's terms from his master today because
his wife is so afraid he will lose his place if he dares to resist.
Whereas, if she were directly and personally galled by the employer's
brutality, she would be ready to face any privation rather than submit.
The time is passing when factory owners found their female "hands" so
humble and submissive. When men and women work together and a strike is
agreed upon, e.g., in the chain trade, the women are by no means the
first to give in. And when women are brought into direct conflict with
the cruelty and injustice, as in the land war in Scotland and Ireland,
they often display, as Michael Davitt truly said at Bodyke, more
revolutionary spirit than men.
To turn from general considerations to the special subject of discussion
now before the public, the employment of women at the pit brow.
I suppose if there is one universal medical prescription which might
safely and advantageously be given to the whole mass of puny and ailing
women in the United Kingdom, it is, adopt a comfortable and rational
style of dress, and take up some useful and sociable out-of-doors
occupation which will exercise and develop your muscles. Those of us who
have lived in the country know how gladly many women hail the summer
field work, heavy and exhausting as it is, for the health-giving change
it brings them. The work of a pit-girl may be dirty and hard, but she
leads a healthier life and one more worthy of a human being than most of
the fine ladies who live on her labor, or the maid-servants who wait on
those ladies' whims and caprices.
One more word out of the many to be said on this matter. What I claim
have any class or section of the community to forcibly decide for
another what is or is riot a "suitable" occupation for them? What has
become of the old Radical precept, wholesome as far as it went, about
class legislation? Have our Radical fellow-workers found the legislation
of capital for labor such an unmixed blessing, that they set about the
analogous business of the legislation of men for women? As for us, our
cause is that of the down-trodden and oppressed of humanity, whether
they be men or women, not the temporary relief--such relief is never
more than temporary--of this section or that at the expense of the
others. Surely our Socialist comrades, of any school, fall short of
their own beliefs when they espouse a sectional dispute among the
workers, whose cause, could they but realize it, is one and indivisible.
"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of
its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members
agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to
surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most
request is conformity, self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not
realities and creators, but mariners and customs."--Emerson.