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WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT

[Illustration: CONVENTION OF OUR WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK]

WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT

BY RHETA CHILDE DORR

1910. 

TOTHE AMERICAN REPRESENTATIVESOF THE EIGHT MILLION--THE EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND MEMBERSOF THE GENERAL FEDERATION OFWOMEN'S CLUBS--THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED

Many of the chapters contained in this volume appeared as specialarticles in _Hampton's Magazine_, to the editor of which the author'sthanks are due for permission to republish. 

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

 I INTRODUCTORY II FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE III EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW IV AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW V WOMAN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY VI MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE VII BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO VIII WOMAN'S HELPING HAND FOR THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER IX THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE X VOTES FOR WOMEN XI IN CONCLUSION INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 CONVENTION OF CLUB WOMEN AT HOTEL ASTOR, NEW YORK

 CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH

 CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK, PITTSBURGH

 STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD, LOS ANGELES, CAL. 

 MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER

 LADY ABERDEEN

 A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES

 MISS EMILIE BULLOWA

 MRS. FREDERICK NATHAN

 MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN

 MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY

 A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN

 MISS MAUDE E. MINER

 IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK

 MISS SADIE AMERICAN

 A TYPICAL DANCE HALL

 AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION

 ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION

 THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY

 SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING

 MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH

 MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER

 THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL 27, 1909

 HELEN HOY GREELEY

 SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE

 THE "QUIET WALK" OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THE POLICE WOULD NOT PERMIT TO PARADE

 SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK

WHAT EIGHT MILLION WOMEN WANT

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

For the audacity of the title of this book I offer no apology. I havehad it pointed out, not altogether facetiously, that it is impossible todetermine with accuracy what one woman, much less what any number ofwomen, wants. I sympathize with the first half of the tradition. Thedesires, that is to say, the ideals, of an individual, man or woman, arenot always easy to determine. The individual is complex and exceedinglyprone to variation. The mass alone is consistent. The ideals of the massof women are wrapped in mystery simply because no one has cared enoughabout them to inquire what they are. 

Men, ardently, eternally, interested in Woman--one woman at a time--arealmost never even faintly interested in women. Strangely, deliberatelyignorant of women, they argue that their ignorance is justified by aninnate unknowableness of the sex. 

I am persuaded that the time is at hand when this sentimental, halfcontemptuous attitude of half the population towards the other half willhave to be abandoned. I believe that the time has arrived whenself-interest, if other motive be lacking, will compel society toexamine the ideals of women. In support of this opinion I ask you toconsider three facts, each one of which is so patent that it requires noargument. 

The Census of 1900 reported nearly six million women in the UnitedStates engaged in wage earning outside their homes. Between 1890 and1900 the number of women in industry increased faster than the number ofmen in industry. _It increased faster than the birth rate. _ The numberof women wage earners at the present date can only be estimated. Ninemillion would be a conservative guess. Nine million women who haveforsaken the traditions of the hearth and are competing with men in theworld of paid labor, means that women are rapidly passing from thedomestic control of their fathers and their husbands. Surely this isthe most important economic fact in the world to-day. 

Within the past twenty years no less than nine hundred and fifty-fourthousand divorces have been granted in the United States. Two thirds ofthese divorces were granted to aggrieved wives. In spite of theanathemas of the church, in the face of tradition and early precept, indefiance of social ostracism, accepting, in the vast majority of cases, the responsibility of self support, more than six hundred thousandwomen, in the short space of twenty years, repudiated the burden ofuncongenial marriage. Without any doubt this is the most importantsocial fact we have had to face since the slavery question was settled. 

Not only in the United States, but in every constitutional country inthe world the movement towards admitting women to full politicalequality with men is gathering strength. In half a dozen countries womenare already completely enfranchised. In England the opposition isseeking terms of surrender. In the United States the stoutest enemy ofthe movement acknowledges that woman suffrage is ultimately inevitable. The voting strength of the world is about to be doubled, and the newelement is absolutely an unknown quantity. Does any one question thatthis is the most important political fact the modern world has everfaced?

I have asked you to consider three facts, but in reality they are butthree manifestations of one fact, to my mind the most important humanfact society has yet encountered. Women have ceased to exist as asubsidiary class in the community. They are no longer wholly dependent, economically, intellectually, and spiritually, on a ruling class of men. They look on life with the eyes of reasoning adults, where once theyregarded it as trusting children. Women now form a new social group, separate, and to a degree homogeneous. Already they have evolved a groupopinion and a group ideal. 

And this brings me to my reason for believing that society will soon becompelled to make a serious survey of the opinions and ideals of women. As far as these have found collective expressions, it is evident thatthey differ very radically from accepted opinions and ideals of men. Asa matter of fact, it is inevitable that this should be so. Back of thedifferences between the masculine and the feminine ideal lie centuriesof different habits, different duties, different ambitions, differentopportunities, different rewards. 

I shall not here attempt to outline what the differences have been orwhy they have existed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in _Women andEconomics_, did this before me, --did it so well that it need never bedone again. I merely wish to point out that different habits of actionnecessarily result, after long centuries, in different habits ofthought. Men, accustomed to habits of strife, pursuit of materialgains, immediate and tangible rewards, have come to believe that strifeis not only inevitable but desirable; that material gain and visiblereward are alone worth coveting. In this commercial age strife meansbusiness competition, reward means money. Man, in the aggregate, thinksin terms of money profit and money loss, and try as he will, he cannotyet think in any other terms. 

I have in mind a certain rich young man, who, when he is notsuperintending the work of his cotton mills in Virginia, is giving histime to settlement work in the city of Washington. The rich young man isdevoted to the settlement. One day he confided to a guest of the house, a social worker of note, that he wished he might dedicate his entirelife to philanthropy. 

"There is much about a commercial career that is depressing to asympathetic nature, " he declared. "For example, it constantly depressesme to observe the effect of the cotton mills on the girls in my employ. They come in from the country, fresh, blooming, and eager to work. Within a few months perhaps they are pale, anaemic, listless. Notinfrequently a young girl contracts tuberculosis and dies before onerealizes that she is ill. It wrings the heart to see it. "

"I suspect, " said the visitor, "that there is something wrong with yourmills. Are you sure that they are sufficiently well ventilated?"

"They are as well ventilated as we can have them, " said the rich youngman. "Of course we cannot keep the windows open. "

"Why not?" persisted the visitor. 

"Because in our mills we spin both black and white yarn, and if thewindows were kept open the lint from the black yarn would blow on thewhite yarn and ruin it. "

A quick vision rose before the visitor's consciousness, of a mill room, noisy with clacking machinery, reeking with the mingled odors ofperspiration and warm oil, obscure with flying cotton flakes whichcovered the forms of the workers like snow and choked in their throatslike desert sand. 

"But, " she exclaimed, "you can have two rooms, one for the white yarnand the other for the black. "

The rich young man shook his head with the air of one who goes awayexceedingly sorrowful. 

"No, " he replied, "we can't. The business won't stand it. "

This story presents in miniature the social attitude of the majority ofmen. They cannot be held entirely responsible. Their minds automaticallyfunction just that way. They have high and generous impulses, theirhearts are susceptible to tenderest pity, they often possess the visionof brotherhood and human kinship, but habit, long habit, alwaysintervenes in time to save the business from loss of a few dollarsprofit. 

Three years ago Chicago was on the eve of one of its periodical "vicecrusades, " of which more later. Sensational stories had been publishedin several newspapers, to the effect that no fewer than five thousandJewish girls were leading lives of shame in the city, a statement whichwas received with horror by the Jewish population of Chicago. A meetingof wealthy and influential men and women was called in the law libraryof a well known jurist and philanthropist. Representatives from varioussocial settlements in Jewish quarters of the town were invited, and itwas as a guest of one of these settlements that I was privileged to bepresent. 

Eloquent addresses were made and an elaborate plan for investigation andrelief was outlined. Finally it came to a point where ways and means hadto be considered. The presiding officer put this phase of the matter tothe conference with smiling frankness. "You must realize, ladies andgentlemen, " he said, "that we have entered upon an extensive and, I amafraid, a very expensive campaign. "

At this a middle aged and notably dignified man arose and said withemotion trembling in his voice: "Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemenof the conference, this surely is no time for us to think of economy ofexpenditure. If the daughters of Israel are losing their ancient dowerof purity, the sons of Israel should be willing, nay, eager to ransomthem at any cost. Permit me, as a privileged honor which I value highly, to offer, as a contribution towards the preliminary expenses of thiscampaign, my check for ten thousand dollars. "

He sat down to that polite little murmur of applause which goes roundthe room, and I whispered to the head resident of the settlement ofwhich I was a guest, an inquiry as to the identity of the generousdonor. 

"That gentleman, " she whispered in reply, "is one of the owners of agreat mail order department store in Chicago. " She sighed deeply, asshe added: "During the first week of the panic that store discharged, without warning, five hundred girls. "

These typical examples of the reasoning processes of men are offeredwithout the slightest rancor. They had to be given in order that thewoman's habit of thought might be explained with clearness. 

Women, since society became an organized body, have been engaged in therearing, as well as the bearing of children. They have made the home, they have cared for the sick, ministered to the aged, and given to thepoor. The universal destiny of the mass of women trained them to feedand clothe, to invent, manufacture, build, repair, contrive, conserve, economize. They lived lives of constant service, within the narrowconfines of a home. Their labor was given to those they loved, and thereward they looked for was purely a spiritual reward. 

A thousand generations of service, unpaid, loving, intimate, must haveleft the strongest kind of a mental habit in its wake. Women, when theyemerged from the seclusion of their homes and began to mingle in theworld procession, when they were thrown on their own financialresponsibility, found themselves willy nilly in the ranks of theproducers, the wage earners; when the enlightenment of education was nolonger denied them, when their responsibilities ceased to be entirelydomestic and became somewhat social, when, in a word, women began to_think_, they naturally thought in human terms. They couldn't havethought otherwise if they had tried. 

They might have learned, it is true. In certain circumstances womenmight have been persuaded to adopt the commercial habit of thought. Butthe circumstances were exactly propitious for the encouragement of theold-time woman habit of service. The modern thinking, planning, self-governing, educated woman came into a world which is losing faithin the commercial ideal, and is endeavoring to substitute in its place asocial ideal. She came into a generation which is reaching passionatehands towards democracy. She became one with a nation which is weary ofwars and hatreds, impatient with greed and privilege, sickened ofpoverty, disease, and social injustice. The modern, free-functioningwoman accepted without the slightest difficulty these new ideals ofdemocracy and social service. Where men could do little more thantheorize in these matters, women were able easily and effectively toact. 

I hope that I shall not be suspected of ascribing to women any ingrainedor fundamental moral superiority to men. Women are not better than men. The mantle of moral superiority forced upon them as a substitute forintellectual equality they accepted, because they could not helpthemselves. They dropped it as soon as the substitute was no longernecessary. 

That the mass of women are invariably found on the side of the newideals is no evidence of their moral superiority to men; it is merelyevidence of their intellectual youth. 

Visitors from western cities and towns are often amazed, and vastlyamused, to find in New York and other eastern cities little narrow-gaugestreet car lines, where gaunt horses haul the shabbiest of cars over theoldest and roughest of road beds. The Westerner declares that nowhere inthe East does he find surface cars that equal in comfort and elegancethe cars recently installed in his Michigan or Nebraska or Washingtonhome town. 

"Recently installed. " There you have it. 

The eastern city retains its horse cars and its out-of-date electricrolling stock because it has them, and because there are all sorts ofdifficulties in the way of replacing them. Old franchises have to expireor otherwise be got rid of; corporations have to be coaxed or coerced;greed and corruption often have to be overcome; huge sums of money haveto be appropriated; a whole machinery of municipal government has to beset in motion before the old and established city can change itstraction system. 

The new western town goes on foot until it attains to a certain size anda sufficient prosperity. Then it installs electric railways, and ofcourse it purchases the newest and most modern of the available models. 

New social ideals are difficult for men to acquire in a practical waybecause their minds are filled with old traditions, inherited memories, outworn theories of law, government, and social control. They cannot getrid of these at once. They have used them so long, have found them soconvenient, so satisfactory, that even when you show them somethingadmittedly better; they are able only partially to comprehend and toaccept. 

Women, on the other hand, have very few antiques to get rid of. Untilrecently their minds, scantily furnished with a few personal preferencesand personal prejudices, were entirely bare of community ideals or anysocial theory. When they found themselves in need of a social theory itwas only natural that they should choose the most modern, the mostprogressive, the most idealistic. They made their choice unconsciously, and they began the application of their new-found theory almostautomatically. The machinery they employed was the long derided, misconceived, and unappreciated Women's Club. 

CHAPTER II

FROM CULTURE CLUBS TO SOCIAL SERVICE

Unless you have lived in a live town in the Middle West--say inMichigan, or Indiana, or Nebraska--you cannot have a very adequate ideaof how ugly, and dirty, and neglected, and disreputable a town can bewhen nobody loves it. The railway station is a long, low, rakish thingof boards, painted a muddy maroon color. Around it is a stretch of bareground strewn with ashes. Beyond lies the main street, with some goodbusiness blocks, --a First National Bank in imposing granite, and aMasonic Temple in pressed brick. The high school occupies a treeless, grassless, windswept block by itself. 

In the center of the residential section of the town is a big, unsightly, hummocky vacant place, vaguely known as the park--or theplace where they are going to have a park, when the city gets around toit. At present it is a convenient spot wherein to dump tin cans, emptybottles, broken crockery, old shoes, and other residue. When the windblows, in the spring and fall, a fine assortment of desiccated rubbishis wafted up and down, and into the neighbors' dooryards. 

Everybody is busy in these live towns. Everybody is prosperous, andpatriotic, and law-abiding, and respectable. The business of "gettingon" absorbs the entire time and attention of the men. They "get on" sowell, for the most part, that their wives have plenty of leisure ontheir hands, and the latter occupy a portion of their leisure bybelonging to a club, organized for the study of the art of theRenaissance, Chinese religions before Confucius, or the mystery ofBrowning. The club meets every second Wednesday, and the members readpapers, after which there is tea and a social hour. The papers vary indegree alone, as the writer happens to be a skimmer, a wader, or adeep-sea diver in standard editions of the encyclopedias. The socialhour, however, occasionally develops in a direction quite away from therealms of pure culture. 

Such a town, with such a woman's club, was Lake City, Minnesota, a fewyears ago. Lake City had a busy and a prosperous male population, awoman's club bent on intellectual uplift, and a place where there wasgoing to be a park. One windy second Wednesday the club members arrivedwith their eyes full of dust, soot on their white gloves, andindignation in their hearts. When tea and the social hour came aroundculture went by the board and the conversation turned to the perfectlydisgraceful way in which the town's street cleaning was conducted. 

"The streets are bad enough, " said one member, "but, after all, oneexpects the streets to be dusty. What I object to is having a citydump-heap at my front door. Have any of you crossed my corner of thepark since the snow melted?"

She drew a lively picture of a state of things gravely menacing to thehealth of her neighborhood, and that of all the people whose homes facedthe neglected square. 

"Why doesn't somebody complain to the authorities?" she concluded. "Whydon't we do something about it? The next time we meet we might at leastadopt resolutions, or, better still, have a committee appointed. What doyou think, Madam President?"

Madam President tapped her teaspoon on the edge of her empty cup. "Ithink, " she said, "that we will come to order and do it now. Will youput what you have just suggested in the form of a motion?"

At the next meeting of the club the committee to investigate the parkmade its report. The club members began a lively canvass among realestate owners and business men, and before long an astonished citycouncil found itself on its feet, receiving a deputation from thewoman's club. The women came armed with a donation of fifteen hundreddollars cash, and a polite, but firm, demand that the money be used toclean up and plant the park. 

The council replied that it had always intended to get around to thatpark, and would have done it long ago but for the fact that there was nopark board in existence, and could not be one, because the Solons whodrew up the city charter had forgotten to put in a provision for such aboard. 

The club held more meetings, and appointed more committees. One ofthese unearthed a State law which seemed to cover the case, and make apark board possible without the direct assistance of a city charter. Thecity attorney was visited, and somehow was coaxed, or argued, or bulliedinto giving a favorable opinion, after which the election of a parkboard followed as a matter of course. The town suddenly becameinterested in the park. The club women's fifteen hundred dollars wasdoubled by popular subscription, and the work of turning a town rubbishheap into a cool and shady garden spot was brief but durable. 

You wouldn't know the Lake City of those years if you saw it to-day. They have an attractive railroad station, paved streets, cementsidewalks, public playgrounds for children, a high school set in ashaded square, and residence streets that look like parkways. And thewoman's club was the parent of them all. 

There is a theory which expresses itself somewhat obviously in thephrase: "Whatever all the women of the country want they will get. " Thetheory is a convenient one, because it may be used to defer action onany suggested reform, and it is harmless because of the seemingimpossibility of ascertaining what all the women of the country reallywant. The women of the United States and the women of all the world havediscovered a means through which they may express their collectiveopinions and desires: organization, and more organization. Lake City isbut one instance in a thousand. 

When American women began, a generation ago, to form themselves intoclubs, and later to join these clubs into state federations of clubs, and finally the state federations into a national body, they did notdream that they were going to express a collective opinion. Indeed, atthat time not very many had opinions worth expressing. The immediateneed of women's souls at the beginning of the club movement was foreducation; the higher education they missed by not going to college, andthey formed their clubs with the sole object of self-culture. 

The study period did not last very long. In fact it was doomed from thebeginning, for it is not in the nature of women, or at least it is notin the habit of women, to do things for themselves alone. They have_served_ for so many generations that they have learned to like servingbetter than anything else in the world, and they add service to thepursuit of culture, just as some of them add the important postscript tothe unimportant letter. 

Thus Dallas, Texas, had a women's club of the culture caste. One springday, after the star member had read a paper on the "Lake Poets, " andanother member had rendered a Chopin _étude_ on the piano, they began totalk about the stegomyia mosquito, and what a pity it was that theannual danger of contagion and death from the bite of that insect had tobe faced all over again. Pools of water all over town, simply swarmingwith little wriggling things, soon to emerge as full-armed stegomyias, merely because the city authorities hadn't the money, or said theyhadn't, to cover the pools with oil. 

"Why, oil isn't very expensive, " said one of the club women. "Let's buya whole lot of it and do the work ourselves. "

So the work of saving hundreds of lives every year was added to thestudy of "Lake Poets" and Chopin by the Women's Club of Dallas. Themembers mapped the city, laid it out in districts, organized theirforces, bought oil and oil-cans and set forth. They visited the schools, got teachers and pupils interested, and secured their co-operation. Thestudy of city sanitation was soon put into the school curriculum, andoiling pools of standing water in every quarter of the town is now aregular part of the school program in the upper grades. Every year theclub women renew the agitation, and every year the school children goout with their teachers and cover the pools with oil. 

That story could be paralleled in almost any city in the United States. Clubs everywhere organized for the intellectual advancement of themembers, for the culture of music, art, and crafts, soon added to theoriginal object a department of philanthropy, a department of publicschool decoration, a department of child labor, a department of civics. The day a women's club adopts civics as a side line to literature, thatday it ceases to be a private association and becomes a publicinstitution--and the public sometimes finds this out before the clubsuspects it. 

An Eastern woman was visiting in San Francisco a short time before thefire. In the complication of three streets with names almost identical, she lost her way to the reception whither she was bound. The conductoron the last car she tried before going home was deeply sympathetic. 

"'Tis a shame, ma'am, them streets, " he declared. "I've always saidthere was no sense at all in havin' them named like that. A stranger isbound to go wrong. I'll tell you what you do, ma'am: you go straight toMrs. Lovell White, she that bosses the women's clubs, you know, ma'am. You tell her about them streets, and she'll have 'em changed. "

The conductor's simple faith in the Women's Club of San Francisco didnot lack justification. In the intervals of studying Browning andantique art, the club found time to discover to San Francisco all sortsof things that the city wanted and needed without knowing that it did. 

"We ought to have a flower market, " pronounced the club. 

"Nonsense, " said the City Council. "Besides, where is the money to comefrom?"

"We'll establish the flower market and show you, " returned the club. 

They did. They found a centrally located square, the place where peoplewould be likely to go for an early morning sale of potted plants and cutflowers. Prices are moderate in outdoor markets, and nothing else sostimulates in an entire community the gardening instinct, usuallyconfined to a few individuals. The city authorities discovered that theflower market filled a long-felt want. So the city took the market over. 

These activities were more or less local. Others, begun as localaffairs, ultimately became national in scope. The movement which hasresulted in a national program in favor of public playgrounds forchildren began as a women's club movement. For a dozen years before thePlaygrounds Association of America came into existence, women's clubsall over the country had been establishing playgrounds, supporting themout of their club treasuries, and using every power of persuasion toeducate boards of education and city councils in their favor. 

Pittsburg affords a typical instance. In 1896 there was a Civic Club ofAllegheny County, composed of women of the twin steel cities ofPittsburg and Allegheny. At the head of its Education Department therewas a woman, Miss Beulah Kennard, who loved children; not beautifullyclean, well behaved, curled and polished children, but just children. Children attracted Miss Kennard to such a degree that she couldn't bearthe sight of them wallowing in the grime and soot of Pittsburg streetsand alleys. Often she stopped in her walks to watch them, dodging wagonsand automobiles; throwing stones, tossing balls, fighting, and shootingcraps; stealing apples from push-carts, getting arrested and beingdragged through the farce of a trial at law for the crime of playing. 

"Those children, " Miss Kennard told her club, "have got to have adecent place to play this summer. " And the club agreed with her. Thetreasury yielded for a beginning the modest sum of one hundred andtwenty-five dollars, and with this money the women fitted out oneschoolyard, large enough for sixty children to play in. There was notrouble about getting the sixty together. They came, a noisy, joyous, turbulent, vacation set of children, and the anxious committee from theclub looked at them in great trepidation of spirit and said to oneanother: "What on earth are we going to do with them, now that we've gotthem here?"

With hardly a ghost of precedent to guide them, the club undertook thework, and as women have had considerable experience in taking care ofchildren at home, they soon discovered ways of taking care of themsuccessfully in the playground. 

The next summer the Civic Club invested six hundred dollars inplaygrounds. Two schoolyards were fitted up in Pittsburg and two inAllegheny. After that, every summer, the work was extended. More moneyeach year was voted, and additional playgrounds were established. In thesummer of 1899, three years after the first experiment, Pittsburgchildren had nine playgrounds and Allegheny children had three, allgifts of the women. By another year the committee was handling thousandsof dollars and managing an enterprise of considerable magnitude. Alsotheir work was attracting the admiration of other club women, who askedfor an opportunity to co-operate. In 1900 practically all the clubs ofthe two cities united, and formed a joint committee of the Women's Clubsof Pittsburg and vicinity to take charge of playgrounds. 

[Illustration: CARPENTER SHOP, VACATION SCHOOL, PITTSBURGH. Establishedby club women and for years supported by them. ]

All this time the work was entirely in the hands of the club women, whobought the apparatus, organized the games, employed the trainedsupervisors, and supplied from their own membership the volunteerworkers, without whom the enterprise would have been a failure from thestart. The Board of Education co-operated to the extent of lendingschoolyards. Finally the Board of Education decided to vote an annualcontribution of money. 

In 1902 the city of Pittsburg woke up and gave the women fifteenhundred dollars, with which they established one more playground and arecreation park. The original one hundred and twenty-five dollars hadnow expanded to nearly eight thousand dollars, and Pittsburg andAllegheny children were not only playing in a dozen schoolyards, butthey were attending vacation schools, under expert instructors in manualtraining, cooking, sewing, art-crafts. Several recreation centers, all-the-year-round playgrounds, have been added since then. ForPittsburg has adopted the women's point of view in the matter ofplaygrounds. This year the city voted fifty thousand, three hundred andfifty dollars, and the Board of Education appropriated ten thousanddollars for the vacation schools. 

In Detroit it was the Twentieth Century Club that began the playgroundagitation. Mrs. Clara B. Arthur, some ten years ago, read a paperbefore the Department of Philanthropy and Reform, and following it thechairman of the meeting appointed a committee to consider thepossibility of playgrounds for Detroit children. The committee visitedthe Board of Education, explained the need of playgrounds, and askedthat the Board conduct one trial playground in a schoolyard, during theapproaching vacation. The Board declined. The boards of education inmost cities declined at first. 

The club did not give up. It talked playgrounds to the other clubs, until all the organizations of women were interested. Within a year ortwo Detroit had a Council of Women, with a committee on playgrounds. Thecommittee went to the Common Council this time and asked permission toerect a pavilion and establish a playground on a piece of city land. This was a great, bare, neglected spot, the site of an abandonedreservoir which had been of no use to anybody for twenty years. Theplace had the advantage of being in a very forlorn neighborhood wheremany children swarmed. 

The Common Council was mildly amused at the idea of putting publicproperty to such an absurd, such an unheard-of use. A few of the menwere indignant. One Germanic alderman exploded wrathfully: "Vot doesvimmens know about poys' play?--No!" And that settled it. 

The committee went to the Board of Education once more, this time withbetter success. They received permission to open and conduct, during thelong vacation, one playground in a large schoolyard. For two summers thewomen maintained that playground, holding their faith against theopposition of the janitors, the jeers of the newspapers, and theconstant hostility of tax-payers, who protested against the "ruin ofschool property. " After two years the Board of Education took over thework. The mayor became personally interested, and the Common Councilgracefully surrendered. They have plenty of playgrounds in Detroit now, the latest development being winter sports. 

If the Germanic alderman who protested that "vimmins" did not knowanything about boys' play was in office at the time, one wonders whathis emotions were when the playgrounds committee first appeared beforethe Council and asked to have vacant lots flooded to give childrenskating ponds in winter. Of course the Council refused. Fire plugs werefor water in case of fire, not for children's enjoyment. In fact therewas a city ordinance forbidding the opening of a fire plug in winter, except to extinguish fire. It took two years of constant work on thepart of the club women to remove that ordinance, but they did it, andthe children of Detroit have their winter as well as their summerplaygrounds. 

[Illustration: CAPTAIN BALL ON GIRL'S FIELD, WASHINGTON PARK, PITTSBURGH. Out of the persistent work of club women more than threehundred playgrounds for children have been established. ]

In Philadelphia are fourteen splendid playgrounds and vacation schools, established in the beginning and maintained for many years by a civicclub of women, the largest women's civic club in the country. Theprocess of educating public opinion in their favor was slow, for it isdifficult to make men see that the children of a modern city havedifferent needs from the country or village children of a generationago. Men remember their own boyhood, and scoff at the idea of organizedand supervised play in a made playground. Women have no memories of theold swimming-hole. They simply see the conditions before them, and theyinstinctively know what must be done to meet them. The process ofeducating the others is slow, but this year in Philadelphia sixty publicschoolyards were opened for public playgrounds, and the cityappropriated five thousand dollars towards their maintenance. In ahundred cities East and West the women's clubs have been the originalmovers or have co-operated in the playground movement. 

Out of this persistent work was born the Playground Association ofAmerica, an organization of men and women, which in the three years ofits existence has established more than three hundred playgrounds forchildren. In Massachusetts they have secured a referendum providing thatall cities of over ten thousand inhabitants shall vote upon the questionof providing adequate playgrounds. The act provides that every city andtown in the Commonwealth which accepts the act shall after July 1, 1910, provide and maintain at least one public playground, and at least oneother playground for every additional twenty thousand inhabitants. Something like twenty-five cities in the State have accepted theplaygrounds act. It is a good beginning. The slogan of the movement, "The boy without a playground is the father of the man without a job, "has swept over the continent. 

[Illustration: STORY HOUR AT VACATION PLAYGROUND, CASTELAR SCHOOL YARD, LOS ANGELES, CAL. ]

This surely is a not inconsiderable achievement for so humble aninstrument as women's clubs. It is true that in most communities theyhave forgotten that the women's clubs ever had anything to do with themovement. The Playgrounds Association has not forgotten, however. Itspresident, Luther Halsey Gulick, of New York, declares that even now thework would languish if it lost the co-operation of the women's clubs. 

The scope of woman's work for civic betterment is wider than theinterests that directly affect children. How much the women attempt, howdifficult they find their task, how much opposition they encounter, andhow certain their success in the end, is indicated in a modest report ofthe Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Women's Civic Club. That report says inpart:

"It is no longer necessary for us to continue, at our own cost, thepractical experiment we began in street-cleaning, or to advocate thepaving of a single principal street, as a test of the value of improvedhighways; nor is it necessary longer to strive for a pure water supply, a healthier sewerage system, or the construction of playgrounds. _Thiswork is now being done by the City Council, by the Board of PublicWorks, and by the Park Commission. _"

Not that the Harrisburg Women's Civic Club has gone out of business. Itstill keeps fairly busy with schoolhouse decoration, traveling librariesfor factory employees, and inspecting the city dump. 

In Birmingham, Alabama, the women's work has been recognized officially. The club Women have formed "block" clubs, composed of the women livingin each block, and the mayor has invested them with powers ofsupervision, control of street cleaning, and disposal of waste andgarbage. They really act as overseers, and can remove lazy andincompetent employees. 

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has a ten-year-old Civic Club. The women havesucceeded in getting objectionable billboards removed, public dumpsremoved from the town, in having all outside market stalls covered, andhave secured ordinances forbidding spitting in public places, andagainst throwing litter into the streets. 

Cranford, New Jersey, is one of a dozen small cities where the women'sclubs hold regular town house-cleanings. One large town in the MiddleWest adopted a vigorous method of educating public opinion in favor ofspring and fall municipal house-cleaning. The club women got aphotographer and went the rounds of streets and alleys and privatebackyards. Wherever bad or neglected conditions were found the club senta note to the owner of the property asking him to co-operate with itsmembers in cleaning up and beautifying the town. Where no attention waspaid to the notes, the photographs were posted conspicuously in theclub's public exhibit. 

If the California women saved the big tree grove, the New Jersey women, by years of persistent work, saved the Palisades of the Hudson fromdestruction and inaugurated the movement to turn them into a publicpark. As for the Colorado club women, they saved the Cliff Dwellers'remains. You can no longer buy the pottery and other priceless relics ofthose prehistoric people in the curio-shops of Denver. 

I am not attempting a catalogue; I am only giving a few crucialinstances. The activities of women if they appeared only sporadically inLake City, Dallas, San Francisco, and a dozen other cities, would notnecessarily carry much weight. They would possess an interest purelylocal. But the club women of Lake City, Dallas, San Francisco, do notkeep their interests local. Once a year they travel, hundreds of them, to a chosen city in the State, and there they hold a convention whichlasts a week. And every second year the club women of Minnesota andTexas and California, and every other State in the Union, to saynothing of Alaska, Porto Rico, and the Canal Zone, thousands of them, journey to a chosen center, and there they hold a convention which lastsa week. And at these state and national conventions the club womencompare their work and criticise it, and confer on public questions, anddecide which movements they shall promote. They summon experts in alllines of work to lecture and advise. Increasingly their work is nationalin its scope. 

In round numbers, eight hundred thousand women are now enrolled in theclubs belonging to the General Federation of Women's Clubs, holding incommon certain definite opinions, and working harmoniously towardscertain definite social ends. Remember that these eight hundredthousand women are the educated, intelligent, socially powerful. 

Long ago these eight hundred thousand women ceased to confine theirstudies to printed pages. They began to study life. Leaders developed, women of intellect and experience, who could foresee the immense poweran organized womanhood might some time wield, and who had courage todirect the forces under them towards vital objects. 

When, in 1904, Mrs. Sarah Platt Decker, of Denver, was elected Presidentof the General Federation, she found a number of old-fashioned clubsstill devoting themselves to Shakespeare and the classic writers. Mrs. Decker, a voter, a full citizen, and a public worker of prominence inher State, simply laughed the musty study clubs out of existence. 

"Ladies, " she said to the delegates at the biennial meeting of 1904, "Dante is dead. He died several centuries ago, and a great many thingshave happened since his time. Let us drop the study of his 'Inferno' andproceed in earnest to contemplate our own social order. "

[Illustration: MRS. SARAH PLATT DECKER]

Mostly they took her advice. A few clubs still devote themselves to thepursuit of pure culture, a few others exist with little motive beyondcongenial association. The great majority of women's clubs are organizedfor social service. A glance at their national program shows themodernity, the liberal character of organized women's ideals. TheGeneral Federation has twelve committees, among them being those onIndustrial Conditions of Women and Children, Civil Service Reform, Forestry, Pure Food and Public Health, Education, Civics, Legislation, Arts and Crafts, and Household Economics. Every state federation hasadopted, in the main, the same departments; and the individual clubsfollow as many lines of the work as their strength warrants. 

The contribution of the women's clubs to education has been enormous. There is hardly a State in the Union the public schools of which havenot been beautified, inside and outside; hardly a State wherekindergartens and manual training, domestic science, medical inspection, stamp savings banks, or other improvements have not been introduced bythe clubs. In almost every case the clubs have purchased the equipmentand paid the salaries until the boards of education and the schoolsuperintendents have been convinced of the value of the innovations. Inthe South, where opportunities for the higher education of women arerestricted, the clubs support dozens of scholarships in colleges andinstitutes. Many western State federations, notable among which is thatof Colorado, have strong committees on education which are active in theentire school system. 

Thomas M. Balliett, Dean of Pedagogy in the New York University, paid adeserved tribute to the Massachusetts club women when he said:

 In Massachusetts the various women's organizations have, within the past few years, made a study of schools and school conditions throughout the State with a thoroughness that has never been attempted before. 

Dean Balliett says of women's clubs in general that the mostimportant reform movements in elementary education within the pasttwenty years have been due, in large measure, to the efforts oforganized women. And he is right. 

The women's clubs have founded more libraries than Mr. Carnegie. Earlyin the movement the women began the circulation among the clubs oftraveling reference libraries. Soon this work was extended, but theobject of the libraries was diverted. Instead of collections of books onspecial subjects to assist the club women in their studies, thetraveling cases were arranged in miscellaneous groups, and were sent toschools, to factories, to lonely farms, mining camps, lumber camps, andto isolated towns and villages. 

Iowa now has more than twelve thousand volumes, half of them referencebooks, in circulation. Eighty-one permanent libraries have grown out ofthe traveling libraries in Iowa alone. After the traveling cases havebeen coming to a town for a year or two, people wake up and agree thatthey want a permanent place in which to read and study. Ohio has over athousand libraries in circulation, having succeeded, a few years ago, ingetting a substantial appropriation from the legislature to supplementtheir work. Western States--Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho--have suppliedreading matter to ranches and mining camps for many years. 

One interesting special library is circulated in Massachusetts and RhodeIsland in behalf of the anti-tuberculosis movement. Something like fortyof the best books on health, and on the prevention and cure oftuberculosis, are included. This library, with a pretty completetuberculosis exhibit, is sent around, and is shown by the local clubsof each town. Usually the women try to have a mass-meeting, at whichlocal health problems are discussed. The Health Department of theGeneral Federation is working to establish these health libraries andexhibits in every State. 

Not only in the United States, but in every civilized country, havewomen associated themselves together with the object of reforming whatseems to them social chaos. In practically every civilized country inthe world to-day there exists a Council of Women, a central organizationto which clubs and societies of women with all sorts of opinions andobjects send delegates. In the United States the council is made up ofthe General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Woman's ChristianTemperance Union, and innumerable smaller organizations, like theNational Congress of Mothers, and the Daughters of the AmericanRevolution. More than a million and a half American women areaffiliated. 

Four hundred and twenty-six women's organizations belong to the councilin Great Britain. In Switzerland the council has sixty-four alliedsocieties; in Austria it has fifty; in the Netherlands it hasthirty-five. Seventy-five thousand women belong to the French council. In all, the International Council of Women, to which all the councilssend delegates, represents more than eight million women, in countriesas far apart as Australia, Argentine, Iceland, Persia, South Africa, andevery country in Europe. The council, indeed, has no formal organizationin Russia, because organizations of every kind are illegal in Russia. But Russian women attend every meeting of the International Council. Turkish women sent word to the last meeting that they hoped soon to askfor admission. The President of the International Council of Women isthe Countess of Aberdeen. Titled women in every European country belongto their councils. The Queen of Greece is president of the Greekcouncil. 

The object of this great world organization of women is to provide acommon center for women of every country, race, creed, or party who areassociating themselves together in altruistic work. Once every fiveyears the International Council holds a great world congress of women. 

What eight million of the most intelligent, the most thoughtful, themost altruistic women in the world believe, what they think the worldneeds, what they wish and desire for the good of humanity, must be ofinterest. It must count. 

[Illustration: LADY ABERDEEN President of the International Council ofWomen. ]

The International Council of Women discusses every important questionpresented, but makes no decision until the opinion of the delegates ispractically unanimous. It commits itself to no opinion, lends itself tono movement, until the movement has passed the controversial stage. 

Those who cling to the old notion that women are perpetually at war withone another will learn with astonishment that eight million women of allnationalities, religions, and temperaments are agreed on at least fourquestions. In the course of its twenty years of existence theInternational Council has agreed to support four movements: Peace andarbitration, social purity, removing legal disabilities of women, womansuffrage. 

The American reader will be inclined to cavil at the last-mentionedobject. Woman suffrage, it will be claimed, has not passed thecontroversial stage, even with women themselves. That is true in theUnited States and in England. It is true, in a sense, in most countriesof the world. But in European countries not _woman_ suffrage, but_universal_ suffrage is being struggled for. 

I had this explained to me in Russia, in the course of a conversationwith Alexis Aladyn, the brilliant leader of the Social Democratic party. I said to him that I had been informed that the conservative reformers, as well as the radicals, included woman suffrage in their programs. Aladyn looked puzzled for a moment, and then he replied: "All partiesdesire universal suffrage. Naturally that includes women. "

Finland at that time, 1906, had recently won its independence from theautocracy and was preparing for its first general election. Talking withone of the nineteen women returned to Parliament a few months later, Iasked: "How did you Finnish women persuade the makers of the newconstitution to give you the franchise?"

"Persuade?" she repeated; "we did not have to persuade them. There wassimply no opposition. One of the demands made on the Russian Governmentwas for universal suffrage. "

The movement for universal suffrage, that is the movement for freegovernment, with the consent of the governed, is considered by theInternational Council of Women to have passed the controversial stage. 

The whole club movement, as a matter of fact, is a part of the greatdemocratic movement which is sweeping over the whole world. Individualclubs may be exclusive, even aristocratic in their tendencies, but thelarge organization is absolutely democratic. If the President of theInternational Council is an English peeress, one of the vice-presidentsis the wife of a German music teacher, and one of the secretaries is aself-supporting woman. The General Federation in the United States ismade up of women of various stations in life, from millionaires' wivesto factory girls. 

The democracy of women's organizations was shown at the meeting inLondon a year ago of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, wheredelegates from twenty-one countries assembled. One of the great featuresof the meeting was a wonderful pageant of women's trades andprofessions. An immense procession of women, bearing banners and emblemsof their work, marched through streets lined with spectators to AlbertHall, where the entire orchestra of this largest auditorium in the worldwas reserved for them. A published account of the pageant, afterdescribing the delegations of teachers, nurses, doctors, journalists, artists, authors, house workers, factory women, stenographers, andothers well known here, says:

 Then the ranks opened, and down the long aisle came the chain makers who work at the forge, and the pit-brow women from the mines, --women whose faces have been blackened by smoke and coal dust until they can never be washed white. . . . To these women, the hardest workers in the land, were given the seats of honor, while behind them, gladly taking a subordinate place, were many women wearing gowns with scarlet and purple hoods, indicating their university degrees. 

Every public movement--reform, philanthropic, sanitary, educational--nowasks the co-operation of women's organizations. The United StatesGovernment asked the co-operation of the women's clubs to save theprecarious Panama situation. At a moment when social discontentthreatened literally to stop the building of the canal, the Departmentof Commerce and Labor employed Miss Helen Varick Boswell, of New York, to go to the Isthmus and organize the wives and daughters of Governmentemployees into clubs. The Department knew that the clubs, onceorganized, would do the rest. Nor was it disappointed. 

The Government asks the co-operation of women in its latest work ofconserving natural resources. At the biennial of the Federation ofWomen's Clubs in 1906 Mr. Enos Mills delivered an address on forestry, amovement which was beginning to engage the attention of the clubs. Within an hour after he left the platform Mr. Mills had been engaged bya dozen state presidents to lecture to clubs and federations. As soonas it reached the Government that the women's clubs were paying fiftydollars a lecture to learn about forestry work, the Government arrangedthat the clubs should have the best authorities in the nation to lectureon forestry free of all expense. 

But the Government is not alone in recognizing the power of women'sorganizations. If the Government approves their interest in publicquestions, vested interests are beginning to fear it. The president ofthe Manufacturers' Association, in his inaugural address, told hiscolleagues that their wives and daughters invited some very dangerousand revolutionary speakers to address their clubs. He warned them thatthe women were becoming too friendly toward reforms that the associationfrowned upon. 

This is indeed true, and women display, in their new-found enthusiasm, a singularly obstinate spirit. All the legislatures south of the Masonand Dixon Line cannot make the Southern women believe that Southernprosperity is dependent upon young children laboring in mills. The womengo on working for child labor and compulsory education laws, unconvincedby the arguments of the mill owners and the votes of the legislators. The highest court in the State of New York was powerless to persuade NewYork club women that the United States Constitution stands in the way ofa law prohibiting the night work of women. The Court of Appeals declaredthe law unconstitutional, and many women at present are toiling atnight. But the club women immediately began fighting for a new law. 

The women of every State in the Union are able to work harmoniouslytogether because they are unhampered with traditions of what thefounders of the Republic intended, --the sacredness of state rights, orthe protective paternalism of Wall Street. The gloriously illogicalsincerity of women is concerned only about the thing itself. 

I have left for future consideration women who having definite socialtheories have organized themselves for definite objects. This chapterhas purposely been confined to the activities of average women--goodwives and mothers, the eight hundred thousand American women whosecollective opinion is expressed through the General Federation ofWomen's Clubs. For the most part they are mature in years, these clubwomen. Their children are grown. Some are in college and some aremarried. I have heard more than one presiding officer at a StateFederation meeting proudly announce from the platform that she hadbecome a grandmother since the last convention. 

The present president of the General Federation, Mrs. Philip N. Mooreof St. Louis, Missouri, is a graduate of Vassar College, and served fora time as president of the National Society of Collegiate Alumnae. Thereare not wanting in the club movement many women who have taken collegeand university honors. Club women taken the country over, however, arenot college products. If they had been, the club movement might havetaken on a more cultural and a less practical form. As it was, the womenformed their groups with the direct object of educating themselves and, being practical women used to work, they readily turned their newknowledge to practical ends. As quickly as they found out, througheducation, what their local communities needed they were filled with agenerous desire to supply those needs. In reality they simply learnedfrom books and study how to apply their housekeeping lore to municipalgovernment and the public school system. Nine-tenths of the work theyhave undertaken relates to children, the school, and the home. Some ofit seemed radical in the beginning, but none of it has failed, in thelong run, to win the warmest approval of the people. 

The eight million women who form the International Council of Women, andexpress the collective opinion of women the world over, are notexceptional types, although they may possess exceptional intelligence. They are merely good citizens, wives, and mothers. Their programcontains nothing especially radical. And yet, what a revolution wouldthe world witness were that program carried out? Peace and arbitration;social purity; public health; woman suffrage; removal of all legaldisabilities of women. This last-named object is perhaps morerevolutionary in its character than the others, because its fulfillmentwill disturb the basic theories on which the nations have establishedtheir different forms of government. 

CHAPTER III

EUROPEAN WOMEN AND THE SALIC LAW

Several years ago a woman of wealth and social prominence in Kentucky, after pondering some time on the inferior position of women in theUnited States, wrote a book. In this volume the United States wascompared most unfavorably with the countries of Europe, where thedignity and importance of women received some measure of recognition. Women, this author protested, enjoy a larger measure of political powerin England than in America. In England and throughout Europe theirsocial power is greater. If a man becomes lord mayor of an English cityhis wife becomes lady mayoress, and she shares all her husband'sofficial honors. On the Continent women are often made honorary colonelsof regiments, and take part with the men in military reviews. Womenfrequently hold high offices at court, acting as chamberlains, constables, and the like. The writer closed her last chapter with theannouncement that she meant henceforth to make her home in England, where women had more than once occupied the throne as absolute monarchand constitutional ruler. 

It is true that in some particulars American women do seem to be at adisadvantage with European women. With what looks like a higher regardfor women's intelligence, England has bestowed upon them every measureof suffrage except the Parliamentary franchise. In England, throughoutthe Middle Ages, and even down to the present century, women held theoffice of sheriff of the county, clerk of the crown, high constable, chamberlain, and even champion at a coronation, --the champion being apicturesque figure who rides into the hall and flings his glove to thenobles, in defense of the king's crown. 

In the royal pageants of European history behold the powerful figures ofMaria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth, Mary ofScotland, Christina of Sweden, rulers in fact as well as in name; to saynothing of the long line of women regents in whose hands the stateintrusted its affairs, during the minority of its kings. In the UnitedStates a woman candidate for mayor of a small town would be considereda joke. 

These and other inconsistencies have puzzled many ardent upholders ofAmerican chivalry. In order to understand the position of women in theUnited States it is necessary to make a brief survey of the laws underwhich European women are governed, and the social theory on which theirapparent advantages are based. 

In the first place, the statement that in European countries a woman maysucceed to the throne must be qualified. In three countries only, England, Spain, and Portugal, are women counted in the line ofsuccession on terms approaching equality with men. In these threecountries when a monarch dies leaving no sons his eldest daughterbecomes the sovereign. If the ruling monarch die, leaving no children atall, the oldest daughter--failing sons--of the man who was in hislifetime in direct line of succession is given preference to male heirsmore remote. Thus Queen Victoria succeeded William IV, she being theonly child of the late king's deceased brother and heir, the Duke ofKent. 

Similar laws govern the succession in Portugal and Spain, althoughdispute on this point has more than once caused civil war in Spain. 

In Holland, Greece, Russia, Austria, and a few German states a woman maysucceed to the throne, provided every single male heir to the crown isdead. Queen Wilhelmina became sovereign in Holland only because theHouse of Orange was extinct in the male line, and Holland lost, onaccount of the accession of Wilhelmina, the rich and important Duchy ofLuxemburg. 

Luxemburg, in common with the rest of Europe, except the countriesdescribed, lives under what is known as the Salic Law, according towhich a woman may not, in any circumstances, become sovereign. 

A word about this Salic Law is necessary, because the tradition of itpermeates the whole atmosphere in which the women of Europe live, move, and have their legal and social being. 

The Salic Law was the code of a barbarous people, so far extinct andforgotten that it is uncertain just what territory in ancient Gaul theyoccupied at the time the code was formulated. Later the Salian Franks, as the tribe was designated, built on the left bank of the Seine rudefortresses and a collection of wattled huts which became the ancestor ofthe present-day city of Paris. 

The Salic Law was a complete code. It governed all matters, civil andmilitary. It prescribed rules of war; it fixed the salaries ofofficials; it designated the exact amount of blood money the family of aslain man might collect from the family of the slayer; it regu latedconditions under which individuals might travel from one village toanother; it governed matters of property transfer and inheritance. 

The Salian Franks are dust; their might has perished, their annals areforgotten, their cities are leveled, their mightiest kings sleep inunmarked graves, their code has passed out of existence, almost indeedout of the memory of man, --all except one paragraph of one division ofone law. The law related to inheritance of property; the specialdivision distinguished between real and personal property, and theparagraph ruled that a woman might inherit movable property, but thatshe might not inherit land. 

There was not a syllable in the law relating to the inheritance of athrone. Nevertheless, centuries after the last Salian king was laid inhis barbarous grave a French prince successfully contested with anEnglish prince the crown of France, his claim resting on that obscureparagraph in the Salic code. The Hundred Years' War was fought on thisissue, and the final outcome of the war established the Salic Lawpermanently in France, and with more or less rigor in most of theEuropean states. 

At the time of the French Revolution, when the "Rights of Man" werebeing declared with so much fervor and enthusiasm, when the old lawswere being revised in favor of greater freedom of the individual, the"Rights of Woman" were actually revised downward. Up to this time theapplication of the Salic Law was based on tradition and precedent. Now aspecial statute was enacted forever barring women from the sovereigntyof France. "Founded on the pride of the French, who could not bear to beruled by their own women folk, " as the records are careful to state. 

The interpretation of the Salic Law did more, a great deal more, thanexclude women from the throne. It established the principle of theinherent inferiority of women. The system of laws erected on thatprinciple were necessarily deeply tinged with contempt for women, andwith fear lest their influence in any way might affect the conduct ofstate affairs. That explains why, at the present time, although in mostEuropean countries women are allowed to practice medicine, they are notallowed to practice law. Medicine may be as learned a profession, but itaffects only human beings. The law, on the other hand, affects thestate. A woman advocate, you can readily imagine, might so influence acourt of justice that the laws of the land might suffer feminization. From the European point of view this would be most undesirable. 

The apparently superior rights possessed by English women were alsobestowed upon them by a vanished system of laws. They have descendedfrom Feudalism, in which social order the _person_ did not exist. Thesocial order consisted of _property_ alone, and the claims of property, that is to say, land, were paramount over the claims of the individual. Those historic women sheriffs of counties, clerks of crown, chamberlains, and high constables held their high offices because theoffices were hereditary property in certain titled families, and theyhad to belong to the entail, even when a woman was in possession. Theoffices were purely titular. No English woman ever acted as highconstable. No English woman ever attended a coronation as king'schampion. The rights and duties of these offices were delegated to amale relative. Every once in a while, during the Middle Ages, somestrong-minded lady of title demanded the right to administer her officein person, but she was always sternly put down by a rebuking House ofLords, sometimes even by the king's majesty himself. 

In the same way the voting powers of the women of England are a resultof hereditary privilege. Local affairs in England, until a very recentperiod, were administered through the parish, and the only personsqualified to vote were the property owners of the parish. It was reallyproperty interests and not people who voted. Those women who ownedproperty, or who were administering property for their minor children, were entitled to vote, to serve on boards of guardians, and to dispensethe Poor Laws. Out of their right of parish vote has grown their rightof municipal franchise. It carries with it a property qualification, andthe proposed Parliamentary franchise, for which the women of England aremaking such a magnificent fight, will also have a propertyqualification. 

The real position, legal and social, which women in England andcontinental Europe have for centuries occupied, may be gauged from anexamination of the feminist movement in a very enlightened country, sayGermany. The laws of Germany were founded on the Corpus Juris of theRomans, a stern code which relegates women to the position of chattels. And chattels they have been in Germany, until very recent years, whenthrough the intelligent persistence of strong women the chains havesomewhat been loosened. 

A generation ago, in 1865, to be exact, a group of women in Leipzigformed an association which they called the Allgemeinen DeutschenFrauenbund, which may be Anglicized into General Association of GermanWomen. The stated objects of the association give a pretty clear idea ofthe position of women at that time. The women demanded as their rights, Education, the Right to Work, Free Choice of Profession. Nothing more, but these three demands were so revolutionary that all masculineGermany, and most of feminine Germany, uttered horrified protests. Needless to say nothing came of the women's demand. 

After the Franco-Prussian War the center of the women's revolt naturallymoved to the capital of the new empire, Berlin. From that city, duringthe years that followed, so much feminine unrest was radiated that in1887 the German Woman Suffrage Association was formed, with the demandfor absolute equality with men. Two remarkable women, Minna Cauer andAnita Augsberg, the latter unmarried and a doctor of laws, were themoving spirits in the first woman suffrage agitation, which has sinceextended throughout the empire until there is hardly a small townwithout its suffrage club. 

Now the woman suffragist in Germany differs from the American suffragistin that she is always a member of a political party. She is a silentmember to be sure, but she adheres to her party, because, throughtradition or conviction, she believes in its policies. Usually thesuffragist is a member of the Social Democratic Party, allied to theInternational Socialist Party. She is a suffragist because she is aSocialist, because woman suffrage, and, indeed, the full equalization ofthe laws governing men and women are a part of the Socialist platform inevery country in the world. The woman member of the Social Democraticparty is not working primarily for woman suffrage. She is working for acomplete overturning of the present economic system, and she advocates_universal adult suffrage_ as a means of bringing about the social andeconomic changes demanded by the Socialists. 

These German Socialist women are often very advanced spirits, who holduniversity degrees, who have entered the professions, and are generallyemancipated from strictly conventional lives. Others, in large numbers, belong to the intellectual proletarian classes. Their Americanprototypes are to be found in the Women's Trade Union League, describedin a later chapter. 

The other German suffragists are members of the radical, the moderate(we should say conservative), and the clerical parties. These women aremiddle class, average, intelligent wives and mothers. They correspondfairly well with the women of the General Federation of Clubs in theUnited States, and like the American club women they are affiliated withthe International Council of Women. Locally they are working for thesocial reforms demanded by the first American suffrage convention, heldin Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. They are demanding the highereducation, married women's property rights, free speech, and the rightto choose a trade or profession. They are demanding other rights, fromlack of which the American woman never suffered. The right to attend apolitical meeting was until recently denied to German women. Althoughthey take a far keener and more intelligent interest in national andlocal politics than American women as a rule have ever taken, theirpresence at political meetings has but yesterday been sanctioned. 

The civil responsibility of the father and mother in many Europeancountries is barbarously unequal. If a marriage exists between theparents the father is the only parent recognized. He is sole guardianand authority. When divorce dissolves a marriage the rights of thefather are generally paramount, even when he is the party accused. 

On the other hand, if no marriage exists between the parents, if thechild is what is called illegitimate, the mother is alone responsiblefor its maintenance. Not only is the father free from allresponsibility, his status as a father is denied by law. Inquiry intothe paternity of the child is in some countries forbidden. The unhappymother may have documentary proof that she was betrayed under promise ofmarriage, but she is not allowed to produce her proof. 

Under the French Code, the substance of which governs all Europe, it isdistinctly a principle that the woman's honor is and ought to be of lessvalue than a man's honor. Napoleon personally insisted on thisprinciple, and more than once emphasized his belief that no importanceshould be attached to men's share in illegitimacy. 

These and other degrading laws the European progressive women are tryingto remove from the Codes. They have their origin in the belief in "Theimprudence, the frailty, and the imbecility" of women, to quote fromthis Code Napoleon. 

Whatever women's legal disabilities in the United States, their lawswere never based on the principle that women were imprudent, frail, orimbecile. They placed women at a distinct disadvantage, it is true, butit was the disadvantage of the minor child and not of the inferior, thechattel, the property of man, as in Europe. 

Laws in the United States were founded on the assumption that womenstood in perpetual need of protection. The law makers carried this tothe absurd extent of assuming that protection was all the right a womanneeded or all she ought to claim. They even pretended that when a womanentered the complete protection of the married state she no longer stoodin need of an identity apart from her husband. The working out of thistheory in a democracy was far from ideal, as we shall see. 

CHAPTER IV

AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE COMMON LAW

A little girl sat in a corner of her father's law library watching, withwide, serious eyes, a scene the like of which was common enough ageneration or two ago. The weeping old woman told a halting story of adissipated son, a shrewish daughter-in-law, and a state of servitude onher own part, --a story pitifully sordid in its details. The farm hadcome to her from her father's estate. For forty years she had toiledside by side with her husband, getting a simple, but comfortable, living from the soil. Then the husband died. Under the will the soninherited the farm, and everything on it, --house, furniture, barns, cattle, tools. Even the money in the bank was his. A clause in the willprovided that the son should give his mother a home during her lifetime. 

So here she was, after a life of hard work and loving service, shorn ofeverything; a pauper, an unpaid servant in the house of anotherwoman, --her son's wife. Was it true that the law took her home away fromher, --the farm that descended to her from her father, the house she hadlived in since childhood? Could nothing, _nothing_ be done?

The aged judge shook his head, sadly. "You see, Mrs. Grant, " heexplained, "the farm has never really been yours since your marriage, for then it became by law your husband's property, precisely as if hehad bought it. He had a right to leave it to whom he would. No doubt hedid what he thought was for your good. I wish I could help you, but Icannot. The law is inexorable in these matters. "

After the forlorn old woman had gone the lawyer's child went and stoodby her father's chair. "Why couldn't you help her?" she asked. "Why doyou let them take her home away from her?"

Judge Cady opened the sheep-bound book at his elbow and showed thelittle girl a paragraph. Turning the pages, he pointed out others forher to read. Spelling through the ponderous legal phraseology the littlegirl learned that a married woman had no existence, in the eyes of thelaw, apart from her husband. She could own no property; she couldneither buy nor sell; she could not receive a gift, even from her ownhusband. She was, in fact, her husband's chattel. If he beat her she hadno means of punishing, or even restraining him, unless, indeed, shecould prove that her life was endangered. If she ran away from him thelaw forced her to return. 

Paragraph after paragraph the child read through, and, unseen by herfather, marked faintly with a pencil. So far as she was aware, father, and father's library of sheep-bound books, were the beginning and theend of the law, and to her mind the way to get rid of measures whichtook women's homes away from them was perfectly simple. That night whenthe house was quiet she stole downstairs, scissors in hand, determined_to cut every one of those laws out of the book_. 

The young reformer was restrained, but only temporarily. As ElizabethCady Stanton she lived to do her part toward revising many of the lawsunder which women, in her day, suffered, and her successors, theorganized women of the United States, are busy with their scissors, revising the rest. 

Not alone in Russia, Germany, France, and England do the laws governingmen and women need equalizing. In America, paradise of women, thegenerally accepted theory that women have "all the rights they want"does not stand the test of impartial examination. 

In America some women have all the rights they want. Your wife and thewives of the men you associate with every day usually have all therights they want, sometimes a few that they do not need at all. Is thehouse yours? The furniture yours? The motor yours? The income yours? Arethe children yours? If you are the average fond American husband, youwill return the proud answer: "No, indeed, they are _ours_. "

This is quite as it should be, assuming that all wives are as tenderlycherished, and as well protected as the women who live on your block. For a whole big army of women there are often serious disadvantagesconnected with that word "ours. "

In Boston there lived a family of McEwans, --a man, his wife, and severalhalf-grown children. McEwan was not a very steady man. He dranksometimes, and his earning capacity was uncertain. Mrs. McEwan was anenergetic, capable, intelligent woman, tolerant of her husband'sfailings, ambitious for her children. She took a large house, furnishedit on the installment plan, and filled it with boarders. The boardersgave the family an income larger than they had ever possessed before, and McEwan's contributions fell off. He became an unpaying guesthimself. All his earnings, he explained, were going into investments. The man was, in fact, speculating in mining stocks. 

One day McEwan came home with a face of despair. His creditors, he toldhis wife, had descended on him, seized his business, and threatened totake possession of the boarding house. 

"But it is mine, " protested the woman, with spirit. "I bought every bitof furniture with the money my boarders paid me. Nobody can touch myproperty or my earnings to satisfy a claim on you. I am not liable foryour debts. "

One of the boarders was a lawyer, and to him that night she took thecase. "A woman's earnings are her own in Massachusetts, are they not?"she demanded. 

"You are what the law calls a free trader, " replied the lawyer, "andwhatever you earn is yours, certainly. That is--of course you arerecorded at the city clerk's office?"

"Why no. Why should I be?"

"The law requires it. Otherwise this property, and even the money yourboarders pay you, are liable to attachment for your husband's debts. Unless you make a specific declaration that you are in business foryourself, the law assumes that the business is your husband's. "

"If I went to work for a salary, should I have to be recorded in orderto keep my own money?" Mrs. McEwan was growing angry. 

"No, " replied the lawyer, "not if you were careful to keep your incomeand your husband's absolutely separate. If you both paid installments ona piano the piano would be your husband's, not yours. If you bought ahouse together, the house could be seized for his debts. Everything youbuy with your money is yours. Everything you buy with money he gives youis his. Everything you buy together is his. You could not protect suchproperty from your husband's creditors, or from his heirs. "

Mrs. McEwan's case is mild, her wrongs faint beside those of a woman inLos Angeles, California. Her husband was a doctor, and she had been, before her marriage, a trained nurse. The young woman had saved severalhundred dollars, and she put the money into a first payment on a prettylittle cottage. During the first two or three years of the marriage thedoctor's wife, from time to time, attended cases of illness, usuallycontributing her earnings toward the payment for the house or intofurniture for the house. In all she paid about a thousand dollars, orsomething like one-third of the cost of the house. Then children came, and her earning days were over. 

Unfortunately the domestic affairs of this household became disturbed. The doctor contracted a drug habit. He became irregular in his conductand ended by running away with a dissolute woman. After he had gone hiswife found that the house she lived in, and which she had helped to buy, had been sold, without her knowledge or consent. The transaction wasperfectly legal. Community property, that is, property held jointly byhusband and wife, is absolutely controlled by the husband in California. In that State community property may even be given away, without thewife's knowledge or consent. 

It happened not many years ago that one of the most powerfulmillionaires in California, in a moment of generosity, conveyed to oneof his sons a very valuable property. Some time afterwards the fatherand son quarreled, and the father attempted to get back his property. His plea in court was that his wife's consent to the transaction hadnever been sought; but the court ruled that since the property was ownedin community, the wife's consent did not have to be obtained. 

This particular woman happened to be rich enough to stand the experienceof having a large slice of property given away without her knowledge, but the same law would have applied to the case of a woman who couldnot afford it at all. 

It is in the case of women wage earners that these laws bear thepeculiar asperity. Down in the cotton-mill districts of the South arescores of men who never, from one year to the next, do a stroke of work. They are supposed to be "weakly. " Their wives and children work elevenhours a day (or night) and every pay day the men go to the mills andcollect their wages. The money belongs to them under the law. Even ifthe women had the spirit to protest, the protest would be useless. Theright of a man to collect and to spend his wife's earnings is protectedin many States in the chivalric South. In Texas, for example, a husbandis entitled to his wife's earnings even _though he has deserted her_. 

I do not know that this occurs very often in Texas. Probably not, unlessamong low-class Negroes. In all likelihood if a Texas woman shouldappeal to her employer, and tell him that her husband had abandoned her, he would refuse to give the man her wages. Should the husband be in aposition to invoke the law, he could claim his wife's earnings, nevertheless. 

The Kentucky lady who chose England for her future home, had she knownit, selected the country to which most American women owe their legaldisabilities. American law, except in Louisiana and Florida, is foundedon English common law, and English common law was developed at a periodwhen men were of much greater importance in the state than women. Thestate was a military organization, and every man was a fighter, aking's defender. Women were valuable only because defenders of kingshad to have mothers. 

English common law provided that every married woman must be supportedin as much comfort as her husband's estate warranted. The mothers of thenation must be fed, clothed, and sheltered. What more could theypossibly ask? In return for permanent board and clothes, the woman wasrequired to give her husband all of her property, real and personal. What use had she for property? Did she need it to support herself? Incase of war and pillage could she defend it?

Husband and wife were one--and that one was the man. He was so much theone that the woman had literally no existence in the eyes of the law. She not only did not possess any property; she could possess none. Herhusband could not give her any, because there could be no contractbetween a married pair. A contract implies at least two people, andhusband and wife were one. The husband could, if he chose, establish atrusteeship, and thus give his wife the free use of her own. But you caneasily imagine that he did not very often do it. 

A man could, also, devise property to his wife by will. Often this wasdone, but too often the sons were made heirs, and the wife was left towhat tender mercies they owned. If a man died intestate the wife merelyshared with other heirs. She had no preference. 

Under the old English common law, moreover, not only the property, butalso the services of a married woman belonged to her husband. If hechose to rent out her services, or if she offered to work outside thehome, it followed logically that her wages belonged to him. What use hadshe for wages?

On the other hand, every man was held responsible for the support of hiswife. He was responsible for her debts, as long as they were thenecessities of life. He was also responsible for her conduct. Beingpropertyless, she could not be held to account for wrongs committed. Ifshe stole, or destroyed property, or injured the person of another, ifshe committed any kind of a misdemeanor in the presence of her husband, and that also meant if he were in her neighborhood at the time, the lawheld him responsible. He should have restrained her. 

This was supposed to be a decided advantage to the woman. Whenever arebellious woman or group of women voiced their objection to the systemwhich robbed them of every shred of independence they were alwaysreminded that the system at the same time relieved them of every shredof responsibility, even, to an extent, of moral responsibility. "Sogreat a favorite, " comments Blackstone, "is the female sex under thelaws of England. "

You may well imagine that, in these circumstances, husbands wereinterested that their wives should be very good. The law supported themby permitting "moderate correction. " A married woman might be kept inwhat Blackstone calls "reasonable restraint" by her husband. But onlywith a stick no larger than his thumb. 

The husbandly stick was never imported into the United States. Even thedour Puritans forbade its use. The very first modification of theEnglish common law, in its application to American women, was made in1650, when the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony decreed that ahusband beating his wife, or, for that matter, a wife beating herhusband, should be fined ten pounds, or endure a public whipping. 

The Pilgrim Fathers and the other early colonists in America broughtwith them the system of English common law under which they and theirancestors had for centuries been governed. From time to time, asconditions made them necessary, new laws were enacted and put intoforce. In all cases not specifically covered by these new laws, the oldEnglish common law was applied. It did not occur to any one that womenwould ever need special laws. The Pilgrim Fathers and their successors, the Puritans, simply assumed that here, as in the England they had leftbehind, woman's place was in the home, where she was protected, supported, and controlled. 

But in the new world woman's place in the home assumed an importancemuch greater than it had formerly possessed. Labor was scarce, manufacturing and trading were undeveloped. Woman's special activitieswere urgently needed. Woman's hands helped to raise the roof-tree, herskill and industry, to a very large extent, furnished the house. Shespun and wove, cured meat, dried corn, tanned skins, made shoes, dippedcandles, and was, in a word, almost the only manufacturer in thecountry. But this did not raise her from her position as an inferior. Woman owned neither her tools nor her raw materials. These her husbandprovided. In consequence, husband and wife being one, that one, inAmerica, as in England, was the husband. 

This explanation is necessary in order to understand why the legalposition of most American women to-day is that of inferiors, or, atbest, of minor children. 

It is necessary also, in order to understand why, except in matters oflaw, American women are treated with such extraordinary considerationand indulgence. As long as pioneer conditions lasted women were valuablebecause of the need of their labor, their special activities. Also, fora very long period, women were scarce, and they were highly prized notalone for their labor, but because their society was so desirable. Inother words, pioneer conditions gave woman a better standing in the newworld than she had in the old, and she was treated with an altogethernew consideration and regard. 

In England no one thought very badly of a man who was moderately abusiveof his wife. In America, violence against women was, from the first, anunbearable idea. Laws protecting maid servants, dependent women, and, aswe have seen, even wives, were very early enacted in New England. 

But although woman was more dearly prized in the new country than in theold, no new legislation was made for her benefit. Her legal status, orrather her absence of legal status apart from her husband, remainedexactly as it had been under the English common law. 

No legislature in the United States has deliberately made laws placingwomen at a disadvantage with men. Whatever laws are unfair andoppressive to women have just happened--just grown up like weeds out ofneglected soil. 

Let me illustrate. No lawmaker in New Mexico ever introduced a bill intothe legislature making men liable for their wives' torts or pettymisdemeanors. Yet in New Mexico, at this very minute, a wife is socompletely her husband's property that he is responsible for herbehavior. If she should rob her neighbor's clothesline, or wreck achicken yard, her unfortunate husband would have to stand trial. Simplybecause in New Mexico married women are still living under laws thatwere evolved in another civilization, long before New Mexico was dreamedof as a State. 

Nowhere else in the United States are women allowed to shelter theirweak moral natures behind the stern morality of their husbands, but inmore than one State the husband's responsibility for his wife's acts isassumed. In Massachusetts, for one State, if a woman owned a saloon andsold beer on Sunday, she would be liable to arrest, and so also wouldher husband, provided he were in the house when the beer was sold. Bothwould probably be fined. Simply because it was once the law that amarried woman had no separate existence apart from her husband, thisabsurd law, or others as absurd, remain on the statute books of almostevery State in the Union. 

The ascent of woman, which began with the abolishment of corporealpunishment of wives, proceeded very slowly. Most American women married, and most American wives were kindly treated. At least public opiniondemanded that they be treated with kindness. Long before any othermodification of her legal status was gained, a woman subjected tocruelty at the hands of her lawful spouse was at liberty to seek policeprotection. 

The reason why police protection was so seldom sought is plain enough. Imagine a woman complaining of a husband who would be certain to beather again for revenge, and to whom she was bound irrevocably by lawsstronger even than the laws on the statute books. Remember that the onlyright she had was the right to be supported, and if she left herhusband's house she left her only means of living. She could hardlysupport herself, for few avenues of industry were open to women. She wasliterally a pauper, and when there is nowhere else to lay his head, eventhe most miserable pauper thinks twice before he runs away from thepoorhouse. Besides, the woman who left her husband had to give up herchildren. They too were the husband's property. 

There were some women who hesitated before they consented to pauperizethemselves by marrying. Widows were especially wary, if old stories areto be trusted. A story is told in the New York University Law School ofa woman in Connecticut who took with her, as a part of her weddingoutfit, a very handsome mahogany bureau, bequeathed her by hergrandfather. After a few years of marriage the husband suddenly died, leaving no will. The home and all it contained were sold at auction. Thewidow was permitted to buy certain objects of furniture, and among themwas her cherished bureau. Where the poor woman found the money withwhich to buy is not revealed. In time this woman married again, andagain her husband died without a will. Again there was an auction, andagain the widow purchased her beloved heirloom. It seems possible thatthis time she had saved money in anticipation of the necessity. 

A little later, for she was still young and attractive, a suitorappeared, offering his heart and "all his worldly goods. " "No, I thankyou, " replied the sorely tried creature, "I prefer to keep my bureau. "

The first struggle made by women in their own behalf was against thiscondition of marital slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Lydia Maria Child, and others of that brave band of rebellious women, were active for years, addressing legislative committees in New York andMassachusetts, circulating petitions, writing to newspapers, agitatingeverywhere in favor of married women's property rights. Finally it beganto dawn on the minds of men that there might be a certain publicadvantage, as well as private justice, attaching to separate ownershipby married women of their own property. 

In 1839 the Massachusetts State Legislature passed a cautious measuregiving married women qualified property rights. It was not until 1848that a really effective Married Women's Property Law was secured, byaction of the New York State Assembly. The law served as a model in manyof the new Western States just then framing their laws. 

These New York legislators, and the Western legislators who firstgranted property rights to married women, were actuated less by a senseof justice towards women than by enlightened selfishness. The effect ofso much freedom on women themselves was a matter for grave conjecture. It was not suggested by any of the American debaters, as it was later onthe floors of the English Parliament, that women, if they controlledtheir own property, would undoubtedly squander it on men whom theypreferred to their husbands. But it was prophesied that women once inpossession of money would desert their husbands by regiments, --whichspeaks none too flatteringly of the husbands of that day. 

Men of property stood for the Married Women's Property Act, because theyperceived plainly that their own wealth, devised to daughters who couldnot control it, might easily be gambled away, or wasted throughimprovidence, or diverted to the use of strangers. In other words, theyknew that their property, when daughters inherited it, became theproperty of their sons-in-law. They had no guarantee that their owngrandchildren would ever have the use of it, unless it was controlled bytheir mothers. 

It was the women's clubs and women's organizations in America, as it wasthe Women's Councils in Europe, that actively began the agitationagainst women's legal disabilities. The National Woman SuffrageAssociation, oldest of all women's organizations in the United States, has been calling attention to the unequal laws, and demanding theirabolishment, for two generations. 

Practically all of the state federations of women's clubs havelegislative committees, and it is usually the business of thesecommittees to codify the laws of their respective States which applydirectly to women. In some cases a woman lawyer is made chairman, andthe work is done under her direction. Sometimes, as in Texas, a wellknown and friendly man lawyer is retained for the task. Almostinvariably the report of the legislative committee contains disagreeablesurprises. American women have been so accustomed to their privilegesthat they have taken their rights for granted, and are usuallyastonished when they find how limited their rights actually are. 

There are some States in the Union where women are on terms of somethinglike equality with men. There is one State to which all intelligentwomen look with a sort of envious, admiring, questioning curiosity, Colorado, which is literally the woman's paradise. In Colorado it wouldbe difficult to find even the smallest inequality between men and women. They vote on equal terms, and if any woman deserves to go to thelegislature, and succeeds in convincing a large enough public of thefact, nothing stands in the way of her election. One woman, Mrs. AlmaLafferty, is a member of the present legislature, and she has hadseveral predecessors. 

But Colorado women have a larger influence still in legislativematters. To guard their interests they have a Legislative Committee ofthe State Federation of Women's Clubs, consisting of thirty to fortycarefully chosen women. 

This committee has permanent headquarters in Denver during every sessionof the legislature, and every bill which directly affects women andchildren, before reaching the floor of either house, is submitted forapproval to the committee. 

Miss Jane Addams has declared, and Miss Addams is pretty good authority, that the laws governing women and children in Colorado are superior tothose of any other State. Women receive equal pay for equal work inColorado. They are permitted to hold any office. They are co-guardiansof their children, and the education of children has been placed almostentirely in the hands of women. This does not mean that Colorado hasweakened its schools by barring men from the teaching profession. Itmeans that women are superintendents of schools in many counties, andthat one woman was, for more than ten years, State superintendent ofschools. 

Contrast Colorado with Louisiana, possibly the last State in the Union awell-informed woman would choose for a residence. The laws of Louisianawere based, not on the English common law, but on the Code Napoleon, which regards women merely as a working, breeding, domestic animal. 

"There is one thing that is not _French_, " thundered the great Napoleon, closing a conference on his famous code, "and that is that a woman cando as she pleases. "

[Illustration: A "WOMEN'S RIGHTS" MAP OF THE UNITED STATES]

The framers of Louisiana's laws were particular to guard against toogreat a freedom of action on the part of its women. Toward the end ofMrs. Jefferson Davis's life she added a codicil to her will, giving to acertain chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy a number of veryvaluable relics of her husband, and of the short-lived ConfederateGovernment. Her action was made public, and it was then revealed thattwo women had signed the document as witnesses. Instantly Mrs. Davis'sattention was called to the fact that in Louisiana, where she was thenliving, no woman may witness a document. Women's signatures areworthless. 

In Louisiana your disabilities actually begin when you become an engagedgirl. From that happy moment on you are under the dominance of a man. Your wedding presents are not yours, but his. If you felt like giving aduplicate pickle-fork to your mother, you could not legally do so, andafter you were married, if your husband wanted that pickle-fork, hecould get it. Your clothing, your dowry, become community property assoon as the marriage ceremony is over, and community property inLouisiana is controlled absolutely by the husband. Every dollar a womanearns there is at her husband's disposal. Without her husband's consenta Louisiana woman may not go into a court of law, even though she may bein business for herself and the action sought is in defense of herbusiness. 

Nor does the Louisiana woman fare any better as a mother. Then, in fact, her position is nothing short of humiliating. During her husband'slifetime he is sole guardian of their children. At his death she maybecome their guardian, but if she marries a second time--and the lawpermits her to remarry, provided she waits ten months--she retains herchildren only by the formal consent of her first husband's family. Ifthey dislike her, or disapprove of her second marriage, they may demandthe custody of the children. 

It is true that many of these absurd laws in Louisiana are not now oftenenforced. It is also true that in Louisiana and other states few men areso unjust to their wives as to take advantage of unequal propertyrights. Laws always lag behind the sense of justice which lives in man. But the point is that unequal laws still remain on our statute books, and they may be, and sometimes are, enforced. 

Between these two extremes, Colorado and Louisiana, women have the otherforty-six States to choose. None of them offers perfect equality. Evenin Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah--the three States besides Colorado wherewomen vote--women are in such a minority that their votes are powerlessto remove all their disabilities. Very rarely have club women even somuch felicity as the New York State Federation, whose legislativechairman, Miss Emilie Bullowa, reported that she was unable to find asingle unimportant inequality in the New York laws governing theproperty rights of women. 

In most of the older States the property rights of married women are nowfairly guaranteed, but the proud boast that in America no woman is theslave of her husband will have to be modified when it is known that inat least seventeen States these rights are still denied. 

The husband absolutely controls his wife's property and her earnings inTexas, Tennessee, Louisiana, California, Arizona, North Dakota, andIdaho. He has virtual control--that is to say, the wife's rights aremerely provisional--in Alabama, New Mexico, and Missouri. 

Women to control their own business property must be registered astraders on their own account in these States: Georgia, Montana, Nevada, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, and Virginia. 

Nor are women everywhere permitted to work on equal terms with men. 

[Illustration: MISS EMILIE BULLOWA. ]

There is a current belief, often expressed, that in the United Statesevery avenue of industry is open to women on equal terms with men. Thisis not quite true. In some States a married woman may not engage in anybusiness without permission from the courts. In Texas, Louisiana, andGeorgia this is the case. In Wyoming, where women vote, but where theyare in such minority that their votes count for little, a married womanmust satisfy the court that she is under the necessity of earning herliving. 

If you are a woman, married or unmarried, and wish to practice law, youare barred from seven of the United States. The legal profession isclosed to women in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Arkansas, Delaware, Tennessee, and South Carolina. 

In some States they discourage women from aspiring to the learnedprofessions by refusing them the advantages of higher education whichthey provide for their brothers. 

Four state universities close their doors to women, in spite of thefact that women's taxes help support the universities. These States areGeorgia, Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina. The last-named admitswomen to post-graduate courses. 

You can hold no kind of an elective office, you cannot be even a countysuperintendent of schools in Alabama or Arkansas, if you are a woman. InAlabama, indeed, you may not be a minister of the gospel, a doctor ofmedicine, or a notary public. Florida likewise will have nothing to dowith a woman doctor. 

Only a few women want to hold office or engage in professional work. Every woman hopes to be a mother. What then is the legal status of theAmerican mother? When the club women began the study of their positionbefore the law they were amazed to find, in all but ten of the Statesand territories, that they had absolutely no control over the destiniesof their own children. In ten States only, and in the District ofColumbia, are women co-guardians with their husbands of their children. 

In Pennsylvania if a woman supports her children, or has money tocontribute to their support, she has joint guardianship. Under somewhatsimilar circumstances Rhode Island women have the same right. 

In all the other States and territories children belong to theirfathers. They can be given away, or willed away, from the mother. Thatthis almost never happens is due largely to the fact that, as a rule, noone except the mother of a child is especially keen to possess it. 

It is due also in large measure to the fact that courts of justice aregrowing reluctant to administer such archaic laws. 

The famous Tillman case is an example. Senator Ben Tillman of SouthCarolina has one son, --a dissipated, ill-tempered, and altogetherdisreputable man, whose wife, after several miserable years of marriedlife, left him, taking with her their two little girls. South Carolinaallows no divorce for any cause. The sanctity of the marriage tie isheld so lightly in South Carolina that the law permits it to be abusedat will by the veriest brute or libertine. Mrs. Tillman could notdivorce her husband, so she took her children and went to live quietlyat her parent's home in the city of Washington. 

One day the father of the children, young Tillman, appeared at thathome, and in a fit of drunken resentment against his wife, kidnapped thechildren. He could not care for the children, probably had no wish tohave them near him, but he took them back to South Carolina, and _gave_them to his parents, made a present of a woman's flesh and blood andheart to people who hated her and whom she hated in return. 

Under the laws of South Carolina, under the printed statutes, youngTillman had a perfect right to do this thing, and his father, a UnitedStates Senator, upheld him in his act. Young Mrs. Tillman, however, showed so little respect for the statutes that she sued her husband andhis parents to recover her babies. The judge before whom the suit wasbrought was in a dilemma. There was the law--but also there was justiceand common sense. To the everlasting honor of that South Carolina judge, justice and common sense triumphed, and he ruled that _the law wasunconstitutional. _

There are other hardships in this law denying to mothers the right ofco-guardianship of their children. Two names signed to a child's workingpapers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens thatselfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work, when the mothers know they are far too young. A woman in Scranton, Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her childrenhad been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they weretall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman. "What could I say aboutit, when he went and got the papers?" she sighed. 

The father--not the mother--controls the services of his children. Hecan collect their wages, and he does. Very, very often he squanders themoney they earn, and no one may interfere. 

A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay dayat the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one herpay envelope, unopened. It was his regular day for getting drunk andindulging in an orgy of gambling. Often more than half of the girls'wages would have vanished before night. Twice the entire amount waswasted in an hour. This kept on until the girls passed their childhoodand were mature enough to rebel successfully. 

It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potentialservices of a child. 

Many times have these unjust laws been protested against. In every Statein the Union where they exist they have been protested against byorganized groups of intelligent women. But their protests have beenreceived with apathy, and, in some instances, with contempt bylegislators. Only last year a determined fight was made by the women ofCalifornia for a law giving them equal guardianship of their children. The women's bill was lost in the California Legislature, and lost by alarge majority. 

What arguments did the California legislators use against the proposedmeasure? Identically the same that were made in Massachusetts and NewYork a quarter of a century ago. If women had the guardianship of theirchildren, would anything prevent them from taking the children andleaving home? What would become of the sanctity of the home, with itslawful head shorn of his paternal dignity? In California a husband ishead of the family in very fact, or at least a law of the State says so. 

At one time the law which made the husband the head of the homeguaranteed to the family support by the husband. It does not do thatnow. There are laws on the statute books of many States obliging thewife to support her husband if he is disabled, and the children, if thehusband defaults. There are no laws compelling the husband to supporthis wife. The husband is under an assumed obligation to support hisfamily, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty. Familydesertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most bafflingof modern social problems. Everybody is appalled by its prevalence, butnobody seems to know what to do about it. The Legal Aid Society of NewYork City reports about three new cases of family desertion for everyday in the year. Other agencies in other cities report a state ofaffairs quite as serious. 

Laws have been passed in most States making family desertion amisdemeanor, and in New York a recent law has made it a felony. Unfortunately there has been devised no machinery to enforce these laws, so they are practically non-existent. It is true that if the desertinghusband is arrested he may be sent to jail or to the rock pile. 

But that does not cure him nor support his family. Mostly he is notarrested. He has only to take himself out of the reach of the localauthorities. In New York a deserting husband, though he is counted afelon, needs only to cross the river to New Jersey to be reasonablysafe. Imagine the State of New York spending good money to chase a manwhom it does not want as a citizen, and whom it can only punish bysending to jail for a short period. The State is better off without sucha man. To bring him back would not even benefit his deserted family. 

Women, far more law abiding than men, insist that a system which evolvedout of feudal conditions, and has for its very basis the assumption ofthe weakness, ignorance, and dependence of women, has no place intwentieth century civilization. 

American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent. The presentsocial order, in which military force is subordinated to industry andcommerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and womenphysically on much the same plane. As for women's intellectual abilityto decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over, rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in thehigh schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the highergrammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. Asfor the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are betterread than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less, but their general intelligence is not less than men's. 

Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical support. Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves asindependent human beings. Their work of bearing and rearing children, ofmanaging the household, begins to assume a new dignity, a real value, in their eyes. 

In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shalldetermine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband'sincome. American women may not need such a law, but they insist thatthey need something to take the place of that one which in eleven Statesmakes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife's income. 

CHAPTER V

WOMEN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY

The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actualdiscomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, andrecited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: "Corsets, millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants'wear, and ladies' shoes, second floor; no ma'am, carpets and rugs on thethird floor; this car don't go to the restaurant; take the other side;groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs, men's shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor. "

Buying and selling, serving and being served--women. On every floor, inevery aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, whichcovers several acres, women. Waiting their turn at the long line oftelephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Downin the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summerfrocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts, attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitandepartment store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floorsbetween, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks, runningback and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling theaisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departingthrong of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass offemininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk, and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place. 

To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the UnitedStates are working outside of the home for wages is a simple, unanalyzedfact. You grasp it as an intellectual abstraction, without muchappreciation of its human significance. The mere reading of statisticsdoes not help you to realize the changed status of women, and ofsociety. You need to see the thing with your own eyes. 

Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, whenthe Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packedwith homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madisonstreets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, inPhiladelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city'sgreat industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Ofthe pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much toonarrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. From factory, office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousandsof girls. Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of theelectric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting ofhucksters, the laughter and oaths of men, their voices float, a shrill, triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil. 

You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of theinterdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrateinto the operating-room of a telephone exchange. Any hour will do. Anyday in the week. There are no nights, nor Sundays, nor holidays in atelephone exchange. The city could not get along for one single minutein one single hour of the twenty-four without the telephone girl. Herhands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long, silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes ofthe switch board. The wires cross and recross, until the switch board islike a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of thetelephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of a city. 

What would happen if this army of women was suddenly withdrawn from thetelephone exchanges? Men could not take their places. That experimenthas been tried more than once, and it has always failed. 

Having seen how well women serve industry, go back to the departmentstore and see how they dominate it also. 

The department store apparently exists for women. The architect whodesigned the building studied her necessities. The makers of storefurniture planned counters, shelves, and seats to suit her stature. Buyers of goods know that their jobs are forfeit unless they can guesswhat her taste in gowns and hats is going to be six months hence. 

WOMEN'S DEMAND ON INDUSTRY Woman dominates the department store for theplain reason that she supports it. Whoever earns the income, and thatpoint has been somewhat in question lately, there is no doubt at all asto who spends it. She does. Hence, she is able to control the conditionsunder which this business is conducted. 

You can see for yourself that this is so. Walk through any largedepartment store and observe how much valuable space is devoted tomaking women customers comfortable. There is always a drawing-room witheasy-chairs and couches; plenty of little desks with handsome stationerywhere the customer may write notes; here, and in the retiring-roomadjoining, are uniformed maids to offer service. But these things arenot all that the women who support industry demand of the men in power. They demand that industry be carried on under conditions favorable tothe health and comfort of the workers. 

Not until the development of the department store were women able toobserve at close range the conduct of modern business. Not unnaturallyit was in the department store that they began one of the most ambitiousof their present-day activities, --that of humanizing industry. 

It was just twenty years ago that New York City was treated to a hugejoke. It was such a joke that even the miserable ones with whom it wasconcerned were obliged to smile. An obscure group of women, callingthemselves the Working Women's Society, came out with the announcementthat they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a laborunion. 

These women said that the girls in the department stores were receivingwages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign womanin a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas anAmerican girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and ahalf. 

They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for saleswomenwas habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand fromten to fourteen hours a day. They said that sanitary conditions in thecloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as toendanger health and life. They said that the whole situation was so badthat no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years. Mostlythey were used up in two years. They proposed a labor union of retailclerks as the only possible resource. Their effort failed. 

The trades union idea at that time had not reached the girl behind thecounter. As a matter of fact it has not reached her yet, and it probablynever will. The department-store clerk considers herself a higher socialbeing than the ordinary working-girl, and in a way she is justified. Theexceptionally intelligent department-store clerk has one chance in athousand of rising to the well-paid, semi-professional post of buyer. Also the exceptionally attractive girl has possibly one chance in fivethousand of marrying a millionaire. It is a long chance now, and it wasa longer chance a dozen years ago, because there were fewer millionairesthen than now, but it served well enough to cause the failure of thetrades union plan. 

There is one thing that never fails, however, and that is a righteousprotest. Out of the protest of that little, obscure group of workingwomen in New York City was born a movement which has spread beyond theAtlantic Ocean, which has effected legislation in many States of theUnion, which has even determined an extremely important legal decisionin the Supreme Court of the United States. 

A group of rich and influential women, prominent in many philanthropicefforts, became interested in the Working Women's Society. Theyinvestigated the charges brought against the department stores, and whatthey discovered made them resolve that conditions must be changed. 

In May, 1890, the late Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. FrederickNathan, and others, called a large mass meeting in Chickering Hall. Mrs. Nathan had a constructive plan for raising the standard in shopconditions, especially those affecting women employees. 

If women would simply withdraw their patronage from the stores where, during the Christmas season, women and children toiled long hours atnight without any extra compensation, sooner or later the night workwould cease. A few stores, said Mrs. Nathan, maintained a standardabove the average. It was within the power of the women of New York toraise all the others to that standard, and afterwards it might bepossible to go farther and establish a standard higher than the presenthighest. 

"We do not desire to blacklist any firm, " declared Mrs. Nathan, "but wecan _whitelist_ those firms which treat their employees humanely. We canmake and publish a list of all the shops where employees receive fairtreatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops. By actingopenly and publishing our White List we shall be able to create animmense public opinion in favor of just employers. "

Thus was the Consumers' League of New York ushered into existence. Eightmonths after the Chickering Hall meeting the committee appointed toco-operate with the Working Women's Society in preparing its list offair firms had finished its work and made its report. The new League wasformally organized on January 1, 1891. 

[Illustration: Mrs. Frederick Nathan]

THE CONSUMERS' LEAGUE "WHITE LIST"

The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm names. The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew theconditions. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the otherfirms to their outcast position. Far from evincing a desire to earn aplace on the White List, they cast aspersions on a "parcel of women" whowere trying to "undermine business credit, " and scouted the very idea ofan organized feminine conscience. 

"Wait until the women want Easter bonnets, " sneered one merchant. "Doyou think they will pass up anything good because the store is not ontheir White List?"

Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for. Even asfar back as 1891 a few women had begun to doubt the efficacy of thatindirect influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What wasthe astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused tobe introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the MercantileEmployers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children inmercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from thesmallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State FactoryDepartment. 

The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, andstill the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four yearsafter it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lowerHouse. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reportedin the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it. A commission was appointed to make an official investigation intoconditions of working women in New York City. 

The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in twolarge volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testifiedto employing grown women at a salary of _thirty-three cents a day_. Theyconfessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, indefiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard andwooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that theyshould not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended, on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensatedovertime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes tookaway from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. Theythreatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old werepassed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helplessgirls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity. 

The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite ofthe merchants' protests the women's bill was passed without a dissentingvote. 

The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which itplaced on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majorityof department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill alsoprovided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number ofseats, --one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment ofchildren, except those holding working certificates from theauthorities. These, and other minor provisions, affected all retailstores, as far as the law was obeyed. 

As a matter of fact the Consumers' League's bill carried a "joker" whichmade its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter ofinspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health, supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as itproved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after ayear of this inadequate inspection, political forces were brought tobear, and then there were no store inspectors. 

Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers' League tried topersuade the legislature that department and other retail stores neededinspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a yearago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores underfactory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants'Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto whatthey declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. GovernorHughes, however, signed the bill. 

In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundredinfractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. Noless than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were takenout of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and weresent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Con sumers'League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have beenjustified. 

To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To womencapital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition, a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterlyfought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought itsenforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply businessmen, with the business man's contracted vision. They could think onlyin terms of money profit and money loss. 

In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women havesucceeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of thestores supported by their patronage. 

The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League wouldconcede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season. Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one. The League stands firm on the point, and up to the present so do thestores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove thecustom whereby _thousands of young girls and women are compelled everyholiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours ofuncompensated labor_. 

No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extortedin the business departments of nearly all city stores during three tofive months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchaseafter a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at sixo'clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil inthe bookkeeping and auditing departments. 

That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting inmost stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement whichstrains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy itseems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified. 

I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of one ofthe largest and most respectable stores in New York. In this store, and, according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the accountingforce is made up of girls not long out of grammar school, ignorant andincapable--but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day's sales areposted and audited before the close of the day following, the businessforce has to work until nine and ten o'clock several nights in the week. In some cases they work every night. 

Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education ofpublic opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and theConsumers' League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education. 

The Consumers' League began with a purely benevolent motive, and inthis early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. Cityafter city, State after State, formed Consumers' Leagues, until, in1899, a National League, with branches in twenty-two States, wasorganized. The National League, far from being a philanthropic society, has be come a scientific association for the study of industrialeconomics. 

When the original Consumers' League undertook its first piece oflegislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they wereright, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of theirclaim. The New York League and all of the others have been collectingreasons ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematizedcollection of reasons why women should not work long hours; why theyshould not work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on intenements; why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speedof machines should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should beextended; why minimum wage rates should be established. 

In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group oftrained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body offacts concerning the human side of industry. It is ammunition whichtells. One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry inPortland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of blowinga large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of theUnited States. 

There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of women infactories and laundries should be ten hours long. The law was constantlyviolated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland. One night afactory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and foundworking there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher. The inspectorpromptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller. 

The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars. Instead ofpaying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the otherlaundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for womenworkers was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment to theConstitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the rightfreely to contract. A man or a woman may contract with an employer towork as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whateverdangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions, _unless_ "there is fairground to say that there is material danger to the public health orsafety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the generalwelfare. . . . " This is the legal decision on which most protectivelegislation in the United States has been based. 

Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day forwomen was declared unconstitutional because nobody's health or safetywas endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New Yorklaw forbidding all-night employment of women. 

So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had reason tobelieve that they could attack the Oregon law. The case was appealed, and appealed again, by the laundrymen, and finally reached the SupremeCourt of the United States. Then the Consumers' League took a hand. 

The brief for the State of Oregon, "defendant in error, " was prepared byLouis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of themost effective workers in the League's New York headquarters. This briefis probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence. Itconsists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a fewparagraphs were written by the attorney for the State. All the rest wascontributed, under Miss Goldmark's direction, from the Consumers'League's wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should beprotected. 

The League's reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to worktheir women employees far into the night was, "The World's Experienceupon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women isBased. " It is simply a mass of testimony taken from hearings before theEnglish Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; fromthe reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports ofindustrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medicalbooks; from reports of boards of health. 

REASONS FOR PROTECTING WOMEN WORKERS The brief included a short andinteresting chapter, containing a number of things the League hadcollected on the subject of laundries. Supreme Court judges cannot beexpected to know that laundry work is classed by experts among thedangerous trades. That washing clothes, from a simple home or backyardoccupation, has been transformed into a highly-organized factory tradefull of complicated and often extremely dangerous machinery; that theatmosphere of a steam laundry is more conducive to tuberculosis and theother occupational diseases than cotton mills; that the work inlaundries, being irregular, is conducive to a general low state ofmorals; that, on the whole, women should not be required to spend moretime than necessary in laundries; all this was set forth. 

Medical testimony showed the physical differences between men andwomen; the lesser power of women to endure long hours of standing; theheightened susceptibility of women to industrial poisons--lead, naphtha, and the like. A long chapter of testimony on the effect of child-bearingin communities where the women had toiled long hours before marriage, orafterwards, was included. 

The testimony of factory inspectors, of industrial experts, of employersin England, Germany, France, America, revealed the bad effect of longhours on women's safety, both physical and moral. It revealed the goodeffect, on the individual health, home life, and general welfare, ofshort hours of labor. 

Nor was the business aspect of the case neglected. That peopleaccomplish as much in an eight-hour day as in a twelve-hour day hasactually been demonstrated. The brief stated, for one instance, theexperience of a bicycle factory in Massachusetts. 

In this place young women were employed to sort the ball bearings whichwent into the machines. They did this by touch, and no girl was of useto the firm unless her touch was very sensitive and very sure. The headof this firm became convinced that the work done late in the afternoonwas of inferior quality, and he tried the experiment of cutting thehours from ten to nine. The work was done on piece wages, and the girlsat first protested against the nine-hour day, fearing that their payenvelopes would suffer. To their astonishment they earned as much innine hours as they had in ten. In time the employer cut the working daydown to eight hours and a half, and in addition gave the girlsten-minute rests twice a day. Still they earned their full wages, andthey continued to earn full wages after the day became eight hourslong. The employer testified before the United States IndustrialCommission of 1900 that he believed he could successfully shorten theday to seven hours and a half and get the same amount of workaccomplished. 

What can you do against testimony like that? The Consumers' Leagueconvinced the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Oregonten-hour law was upheld. 

The importance of this decision cannot be overestimated. On it hangs thevalidity of nearly all the laws which have been passed in the UnitedStates for the protection of women workers. If the Oregon law had beendeclared unconstitutional, laws in twenty States, or practically allthe States where women work in factories, would have been in perpetualdanger, and the United States might easily have sunk to a positionoccupied now by no leading country in Europe. 

Great Britain has had protective legislation for women workers since1844. In 1847 the labor of women in English textile mills was limited toten hours a day, the period we are now worrying about, as being possiblycontrary to our Constitution. France, within the past five years, hasestablished a ten-hour day, broken by one hour of rest. Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy, limit the hours of women's labor. Inseveral countries there are special provisions giving extra time off towomen who have household responsibilities. What would ourConstitution-bound law makers say to such a proposition, if any one hadthe hardihood to suggest it?

If this law had not been upheld by the United States Supreme Court thewomen of no State could have hoped to secure further legislation forwomen workers. As it is, women in many States are preparing to establishwhat is now known as "The Oregon Standard, " that is, a ten-hour day forall working women. 

Nothing in connection with the woman movement is more significant, certainly nothing was more unexpected, than the voluntary abandonment, on the part of women, of class prejudice and class distinctions. Whereformerly the interest of the leisured woman in her wage-earning sisterswas of a sentimental or philanthropic character, it has become practicaland democratic. 

The Young Women's Christian Association has had an industrialdepartment, which up to a recent period concerned itself merely with thespiritual welfare of working girls. Prayer meetings in factories, clubs, and classes in the Association headquarters, working-girls' boardinghomes, and other philanthropic efforts were the limits of theAssociation's activities. The entire policy has changed of late, andunder the capable direction of Miss Annie Marian MacLean, of Brooklyn, New York, the industrial department of the Association is doingscientific investigation of labor conditions of women. 

In a cracker factory I once saw a paid worker in the Young Women'sChristian Association pause above a young girl lying on the floor, crimson with fever, and apparently in the throes of a serious illness. With angelic pity on her face the Association worker stooped andslipped a tract into the sick girl's hand. The kind of industrialsecretary the Association now employs would send for an ambulance andsee that the girl had the best of hospital care. She would inquirewhether the girl's illness was caused by the conditions under which sheworked, and she would know if it were possible to have those conditionschanged. 

WOMEN'S CLUBS STUDYING LABOR PROBLEMS Nearly every state federation ofwomen's clubs has its industrial committee, and many large clubs have acorresponding department. It is these industrial sections of the women'sclubs which are such a thorn in the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr. , thenew president of the National Manufacturers' Association. In hisinaugural address Mr. Kirby warned his colleagues that women's clubswere not the ladylike, innocuous institutions that too-confiding mansupposed them to be. In those clubs, he declared, their own wives anddaughters were listening to addresses by the worst enemies of theManufacturers' Association, the labor leaders. By which he meant thatthe club women were inviting trade-union men and women to present theworker's side of industrial subjects. "Soon, " exclaimed Mr. Kirby, "weshall have to fight the women as well as the unions. "

The richest and most aristocratic woman's club in the country is theColony Club of New York. The Colony Club was organized by a number ofwomen from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the mannerof men's clubs. The women built a magnificent clubhouse on MadisonAvenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderfulroof-garden. For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing morethan a beautiful toy which its members played with. But soon it began todevelop into a sort of a woman's forum, where all sorts of social topicswere discussed. Visiting women of distinction, artists, writers, lecturers, were entertained there. 

Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course inindustrial economics. The women did not invite lecturers from ColumbiaUniversity to address them. They asked John Mitchell and many lesserlights of the labor world. They wanted to learn, at first hand, thefacts concerning conditions of industry. Most of them are stockholdersin mills, factories, mines, or business establishments. Many own realestate on which factories stand. 

"It is not fair, " they have openly declared, "that we should enjoywealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death. We donot want wealth on such terms. "

The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to theNational Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in theworking and living conditions of wage earners in industries and ingovernmental institutions. A few conscientious employers have spent apart of their profits to make their employees comfortable. They havegiven them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, andcomfortable seats. They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacationhouses, and the like. 

No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers. Equally, no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem. Norshould they be used as a substitute for justice. 

Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed, untactfully administered. Too often it has been instituted, not tobenefit the workers, but to advertise the business. Too often its realobject was a desire to play the philanthropist's role, to exactobsequience from the wage earner. 

[Illustration: MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, NewYork, the most exclusive Women's Club in the country]

I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of theperfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected, thegirls are required to stop work and clean the rooms. Since they work ona piece-work scale, the "perfect sanitary conditions" exist at theirexpense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign aprinted expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday. This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from theiremployers. It always fails. 

It seems to the women who have studied these things that propersanitary conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision forrest, vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wageearner's due. They are a part of the laborer's hire, and should beguaranteed by law, exactly as wages are guaranteed. An employer deservesgratitude for overtime pay no more than for fire escapes. 

Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers' League, women'sclubs, and women's labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that goodworking conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastlyincrease the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits ofthe employers. 

The New York Telephone Company does not set itself up to be abenevolent institution. Its directors know that its profits depend onthe excellence of its service. There is one exchange in the Borough ofBrooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic. Thistraffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summerresorts along the coast. In the fall and winter the traffic is verylight. Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work onlyhalf the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round. "We cannot afford to do anything else, " explains the traffic manager. "We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages. "

[Illustration: MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY]

The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his businesswould suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen. He believed thathe would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks humanworking conditions. Then came the Consumers' League and mercantile laws, and a new pressure of public opinion, and the dry-goods merchant foundout that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than onethat is exhausted and uncomfortable. 

The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has proveditself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligentemployers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws willprovide for it. 

It used to be the invariable custom in stores--it is so still in afew--to lay off many clerks during the dull seasons. Now the best storesfind that they can better afford to give all their employees vacationswith pay. A clerk coming home after a vacation can sell goods, even indull times. More and more employers are coming to appreciate the moneyvalue of the Saturday half-holiday in summer. Hearn, in New York, closeshis department store all day Saturday during July and August. The storesells more goods in five days than it previously sold in six. 

THE FILENE SYSTEM OF DEVELOPING EFFICIENT WORKERS There is onedepartment store which has demonstrated that it is profitable to payhigher wages than its competitors, and that it pays to allow theemployees to fix the terms of their own employment. This is the Filenestore in Boston, which has developed within the past ten years from aconservative, old-fashioned dry-goods business into an extremelyoriginal and interesting experiment station in commercial economics. 

The entire policy of the Filene management is bent on developing to thehighest possible point the efficiency of each individual clerk. The bestpossible material is sought. No girl under sixteen is employed, and nogirl of any age who has not graduated with credit from the grammarschools. There are a number of college-bred men and women in the Fileneemploy. 

[Illustration: A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN]

Good wages are paid, even to beginners, and experienced employees arerewarded, not according to a fixed rate of payment, but according toearning capacity. Taken throughout the store, wages, plus commissions, which are allowed in all departments, average about two dollars a weekhigher than in other department stores in Boston. 

No irresponsible, automatic employee can develop high efficiency. Shedoes not want to become efficient; she wants merely to receive a payenvelope at the end of the week. In order to develop responsibility andinitiative in their employees the Filenes have put them on aself-governing basis. The workers do not literally make their own rules, but the vote of the majority can change any rule made by the firm. Thefirm furnishes its employees with a printed book of rules, in which thepolicy of the store is set forth. If the employees object to any of therules, or any part of the policy, they can vote a change. 

The medium through which the clerks express their opinions and desiresis the Filene Co-operative Association, of which every clerk and everyemployee in the place is a member. No dues are exacted, as is the customin the usual employees' association. The executive body, called theStore Council, and all other officers are elected by the members. Allmatters of grievance, all subjects of controversy, are referred to theStore Council, which, as often as occasion demands, calls a meeting ofthe entire association after business hours. 

For example: Christmas happens on a Friday. The firm decides to keep thestore open on the following day--Saturday. There is an expression ofdissatisfaction from a number of clerks. A meeting of the association iscalled, and a vote taken as to whether the majority want the extraholiday or not; whether the majority are willing to lose thecommissions on a day's sales, for, of course, salaries continue. Thevote reveals that the majority want the holiday. The Store Council soreports to the firm, and the firm must grant the holiday. 

All matters of difficulty arising between employers and employed, in theFilene store, are settled not by the firm, but by the Arbitration Boardof Employees, also elected by popular vote. All disagreements as towages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue betweensaleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to theBoard of Arbitration, and the board's decision is final. There is notyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of adepartment. Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as sheis an efficient saleswoman. 

Surely it is not too much to hope that, in a future not too fardistant, all women who earn their bread will serve a system of industryadjusted by law to human standards. In enlightened America the courts, presided over by men to whom manual labor is known only in theory, havepersistently ruled that the _Constitution forbade the State to make lawsprotecting women workers_. It has seemed to most of our courts and mostof our judges that the State fulfilled its whole duty to its womencitizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract--eventhough they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts whichinvolved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and futuregenerations. The women of this country have done nothing more importantthan to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyondthis terrible delusion. 

CHAPTER VI

MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE

The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing thelegality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, wasreceived with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. TheIllinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized inlabor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable opportunityto get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the IllinoisState Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years laterthe Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that itwas unconstitutional. 

The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means withoutprecedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States, until it had become almost a principle of American law that protectivelegislation for working women was invalid. 

The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusionthat an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybodyof his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women wouldbe outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, mayappear obscure. 

The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men, andthey know something--not much, but still something--about the men of theworking classes. They know, for example, something about the conditionsunder which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary topublic interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor, twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and theseare bad things, --bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad forthe whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of laborcomes legitimately under the police powers of the law. 

The learned judges, I say this with all due respect, do not knowanything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts oftheir decisions, denying the constitutionality of protective measures, are amazing in the ignorance they display, --ignorance of industrialconditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects ofcertain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect ofwomen's arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions intrades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the homeresulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, thelearned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, thehappiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about theinhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display ofthe real facts. 

We have seen how the women of the Consumers' League taught the UnitedStates Supreme Court something about working women; showed them a few ofthe calamities resulting from the unrestricted labor of women andimmature girls. The Supreme Court's decision forever abolished the oldfallacy that the American Constitution _forbids_ protective legislationfor women workers. It remains for women's organizations in the variousStates to educate local courts up to the knowledge that communityinterest _demands_ protective legislation. 

Following the decision of the Supreme Court in the Oregon case, whichflatly contradicted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, theworking women of Illinois began their educational campaign. They hadnow, for the first time, a fighting chance to secure the restoration oftheir shortened work day. The women of fifteen organized trades in thecity of Chicago determined to take that chance. 

The women first appealed to the Industrial Commission, appointed earlyin 1908 by Governor Dineen, to investigate the need of protectivelegislation for workers, men and women alike. 

The women were given a courteous hearing, but were told frankly thatlimited hours of work for women was not one of protective measures to berecommended by the Commission. 

The Waitresses' Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists, ledby a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary ofthe union. Miss Maloney and her associates drafted and introduced intothe Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day forevery woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store, laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery forenforcing the measure. 

The "Girls' Bill, " as it immediately became known, was the most hotlycontested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during thesession. Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearingon the bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek andtired women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having theirworking day made shorter. Another presented a petition signed by hiswomen employees, appealing against being prevented from working elevenhours a day!

Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after learnedcounsel for the Manufacturers' Association had argued against themeasure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers'Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girlsconfined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of theGlove Makers' Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the twogirls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners aregentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on achair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea:Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses' Union, was the other speaker. 

They described details in the daily lives of working women not generallyknown except to the workers themselves. Among these was the piece-worksystem, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speedis extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage. The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machinewhose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; toconsider how many stitches the operator's hand must guide in a week, amonth, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelvehours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decreaseof earning power. 

"I am a waitress, " said Miss Maloney, "and I work ten hours a day. Inthat time a waitress who is tolerably busy _walks_ ten miles, and thedishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred totwo thousand pounds. Don't you think eight hours a day is enough for agirl to walk?"

Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after thatday. The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too gravefor the friends of the workers to overcome. It was decided tosubstitute a ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the "Oregon Standard"established by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle oflimitation upon the hours of women's work once established in Illinois, the workers could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day. 

The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a lawof the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers' Association, through theW. C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suitto test the constitutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, AnnaKusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Theirappeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hoursto earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely tocontract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from themby the ten-hour law. 

There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involvedin this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretchedstate of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of matureyears--one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for overthirty years--are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keepbody and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in noposition freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, wouldcontract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?

There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time JudgeR. S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of hiscareer, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to thereal meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. ForJudge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department, forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law. 

Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with thewomen's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up inthe December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis ofBoston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was onhand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printedpages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers'League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students hadtoiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the IllinoisCircuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simplya digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, andbodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, andespecially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them onthe succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained threepages of law. 

The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was thetestimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue. 

"Medical Science has demonstrated, " says this most important paragraph, "that while fatigue is a normal phenomenon . . . Excessive fatigue orexhaustion is abnormal. . . . It has discovered that fatigue is due notonly to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue, entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterialtoxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that whenartificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxincauses death. The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to becounteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body. But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not producedfast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin. "

The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the AmericanConstitution was never intended to shield manufacturers in theirwillingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. Theten-hour law was sustained. 

That the "Girls' Bill" passed, or that it was even introduced, was duein large measure to an organization of women, more militant and moredemocratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women'sTrade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, theLeague consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organizedtrades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of theselatter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-unionprinciple, but more are women who work in the professionalranks, --teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlementworkers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, whoever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federationof Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners, to appear in Labor Day parades. 

The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities, --NewYork, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland, --is to educate womenwage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains andsupports organizers among all classes of workers. As quickly as a groupin any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. Itraises funds to assist women in their trade struggles. It acts asarbitrator between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes. 

The Women's Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factorytrades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until latelybelieved themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundredand fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventystenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers' Federationof Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before theWomen's Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated. The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized. 

The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League wasbrilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-waistmakers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story ofthis strike will bear retelling. 

On the evening of November 22, 1909, there was a great mass meeting ofworkers held at Cooper Union in New York. Samuel Gompers, President ofthe American Federation of Labor, presided, and the stage was wellfilled with members of the Women's Trade Union League. The meeting hadbeen called by the League in conjunction with Shirt-Waist Makers' Union, Local 25, to consider the grievances of shirt-waist makers in general, and especially of the shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, whohad been, for more than two months, on strike. 

The story of the strike, the causes that led up to it, and the bitterinjustice which followed it were rehearsed in a dozen speeches. It wasshown that for four to five dollars a week the girl shirt-waist makersworked from eight in the morning until half-past five in the eveningtwo days in the week; from eight in the morning until nine at nightfour days in the week; and from eight in the morning until noon one dayin the week--Sunday. 

The shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, in hope of betteringtheir conditions, had formed a union, and had informed their employersof their action. The employers promptly locked them out of the shop, andthe girls declared a strike. 

The strike was more than two months old when the Cooper Union meetingwas held, and the employers showed no signs of giving in. It was agreedthat a general strike of shirt-waist makers ought to be declared. Butthe union was weak, there were no funds, and most of the shirt-waistmakers were women and unused to the idea of solidarity in action. Couldthey stand together in an industrial struggle which promised to be longand bitter?

President Gompers was plainly fearful that they could not. 

Suddenly a very small, very young, very intense Jewish girl, known toher associates as Clara Lemlich, sprang to her feet, and, with theassistance of two young men, climbed to the high platform. Flinging upher arms with a dramatic gesture she poured out a flood of speech, entirely unintelligible to the presiding Gompers, and to the members ofthe Women's Trade Union League. The Yiddish-speaking majority in theaudience understood, however, and the others quickly caught the spiritof her impassioned plea. 

The vast audience rose as one man, and a great roar arose. "Yes, wewill all strike!"

"And will you keep the faith?" cried the girl on the platform. "Will youswear by the old Jewish oath of our fathers?"

Two thousand Jewish hands were thrust in air, and two thousand Jewishthroats uttered the oath: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither and drop off from this arm I now raise. "

Clara Lemlich's part in the work was accomplished. Within a few daysforty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike. 

The Women's Trade Union League, under the direction of Miss Helen Marot, secretary, at once took hold of the strike. 

There were two things to be done at once. The forty thousand had to beenrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing toaccept the terms of the strikers had to be "signed up. " Clinton Hall, one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, andfor several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the streetoutside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and womenstrikers, anxious and perspiring "bosses, " and busy, active associatesof the Women's Trade Union League. 

The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied theLeague members undertook the work of picketing the shops. Picketing, ifthis activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling theneighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakersare going to and from their nefarious business, and importuning them tojoin the strike. 

Peaceful picketing is legal. The law permits a striker to speak to thegirl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in hermost persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on theother's arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence. 

Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a littleof this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence. After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girlswho went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members. Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and amongthese were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's Superintendentof Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of amillionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College, Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association ofCollegiate Alumnae. These young women went out day after day with girlstrikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered arreston more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation ofmagistrates who--well, who did not understand. 

The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and organizations ofwomen other than the Women's Trade Union League began to take aninterest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss GertrudeBarnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial worldof women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike. They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women inperson. 

The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest socialeminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan andseveral others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the presidentof the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the strikers'own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. Morethan thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozenwomen promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers. 

A week later Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, mother of the Duchess of Marlborough, leader of a large Woman Suffrage Association, engaged the Hippodrome, and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators. Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting. 

At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses wereinvolved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis ofincreased pay, a fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of theunion. Others settled later, and under the influence of the "uptownscum, " as the employers' association gallantly termed the Women's TradeUnion League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still othersreluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out ofthe five hundred had settled with the union, and only about threethousand of the workers were still out of work. 

Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they wouldever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of theintelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all, that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helpedalong by the wives and daughters of the employing classes wasunthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from householdlabor by sending another class of women into the factory, there toperform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, wasto result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied. 

Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are becomingthe co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of theleisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to thesituation, espouse the cause of their working sisters. The woman in thefactory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it. 

The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury, Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress ofthe working women. 

That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it wasestablished, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knewevery one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of thewomen operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours oflabor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and wageswere good enough to compensate for the long day's labor. 

The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to acorporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a fewfloor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands. "

The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicatedmachinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred timesmore fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed andnerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievancesdeveloped. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often sobad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp ormanipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according tothe piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women whohad formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven andeight dollars. 

The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the millsas long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls. 

There you have the story of women's realization of themselves as agroup. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women. The Boston Branch of the Women's Trade Union League, through itssecretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined the strikers. Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United TextileWorkers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeksof anxiety and deprivation. 

The employers were firm in their determination to go out of businessbefore treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, existsas an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received andconferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right toexist. An employers' association is a necessity of business life. Alabor union is an insult to capital. 

This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor carstopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs. Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Baypersonified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer. Herpowers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercialconnections, were sufficient to wring consent from the firm to receiveJohn Golden, president of the United Textile Workers. 

John Golden, intelligent, honest, a fine type of workingman, educatedin the English school of unionism, held two conferences with the firm. He was able to make the employers see the whole situation in an entirelynew light. They were men of probity; they wanted to be fair; and whenthey saw the human side of the struggle they surrendered. When theyperceived the justice of the collective bargain, the advantages to bothsides of a labor organization honestly conducted, they consented torecognize the union. And the women went back, their group unbroken. 

Thus are women working, women of all classes, to humanize the factory. From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and thejudiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women ofthe toiling masses in their struggle to make over the factory from theinside. Together they are impressing the men of the working world, lawmakers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of therace. 

Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protectivelegislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legaldecisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is notyet complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of thelate Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Notevery court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely morevaluable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn. 

In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in whicha number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to theowner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did notstrike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in thatcountry a substitute for the strike is provided by law. To thissubstitute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. Theemployer in his answer declared, just as employers in this country mighthave done, that his business would not stand an increase in wages. Heexplained that the match industry was newly established in New Zealand, and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could notafford to pay high wages. 

The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been aninquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiryinto the cost of living in the town where the match factory was located. And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court ofArbitration, and this is what he said to the man:

"It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on thewages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that theyshould have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls andbodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance thanyour profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better forthe community for you to close your factory. _It would be better tosend the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back toflints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter. _ Myaward is that you pay what they ask. "

Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the eightmillion women in the world who have learned to think in human terms. 

CHAPTER VII

BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO

At the threshold of that quarter of old New York called GreenwichVillage stands Jefferson Market Court. Almost concealed behind thetowering structure of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, the building by day israther inconspicuous. But when night falls, swallowing up theneighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Marketassumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminatedclock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands towardmidnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams anintense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of thebuilding floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, throughthe iron-guarded door, there passes, every week-day night in the year, along procession of prodigals. 

The guarded door seldom admits any one as important, so to speak, as acriminal. The criminal's case waits for day. The Night Court inJefferson Market sits in judgment only on the small fry caught in thedragnet of the police. Tramps, vagrants, drunkards, brawlers, disturbersof the peace, speeding chauffeurs, licenseless peddlers, youths caughtred-handed shooting craps or playing ball in the streets, --these are themen with whom the Night Court deals. But it is not the men we have cometo see. 

[Illustration: MISS MAUDE E. MINER]

The women of the Night Court. Prodigal daughters! Between December, 1908, and December, 1909, no less than five thousand of them passedthrough the guarded door, under the blaze of the electric lights. Thereis never an hour, from nine at night until three in the morning, whenthe prisoners' bench in Jefferson Market Court is without its full quotaof women. Old--prematurely old, and young--pitifully young; white andbrown; fair and faded; sad and cynical; starved and prosper ous;rag-draped and satin-bedecked; together they wait their turn atjudgment. 

Quietly moving back and forth before the prisoners' bench you see awoman, tall, graceful, black-gowned. She is the salaried probationofficer, modern substitute for the old-time volunteer mission worker. The probation officer's serious blue eyes burn with no missionary zeal. There is no spark of sentimental pity in the keen gaze she turns on eachnew arrival. 

When the bench is full of women the judge turns to her to inquire:"Anybody there you want, Miss Miner?"

Miss Miner usually shakes her head. She diagnoses her cases like aphysician, and she wastes no time on incurables. 

Once in a while, perhaps several times in the course of a night, MissMiner touches a girl on the arm. At once the girl rises and follows theprobation officer into an adjoining room. If she is what she appears, young in evil, if she has a story which rings true, a story of povertyand misfortune, rather than of depravity, she goes not back to theprisoners' bench. When her turn at judgment comes Miss Miner standsbeside her, and in a low voice meant only for the judge, she tells thefacts. The girl weeps as she listens. To hear one's troubles told issometimes more terrible than to endure them. 

Court adjourns at three in the morning, and this girl, with theothers--if others have been claimed by the probation officer--goes outinto the empty street, under the light of the tall tower, whose clockhas begun all over again its monotonous race toward midnight. Nopoliceman accompanies the group. The girls are under no manner ofduress. They have promised to go home with Miss Miner, and they go. Thenight's adventure, entered into with dread, with callous indifference, or with thoughtless mirth, ends in a quiet bedroom and a pillow wet withtears. 

[Illustration: IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK. ]

Waverley House, as Miss Miner's home is known, has sheltered, during thepast year, over three hundred girls. Out of that number one hundred andnineteen have returned to their homes, or are earning a living at usefulwork. 

One hundred and nineteen saved out of five thousand prodigals! In pointof numbers this is a melancholy showing, but in comparison with otherefforts at rescue work it is decidedly encouraging. 

Nothing quite like Waverley House has appeared in other American cities, but it is a type of detention home for girls which is developinglogically out of the probation system. Delinquent girls under sixteenare now considered, in all enlightened communities, subjects for theJuvenile Court. They are hardly ever associated with older delinquents. But a girl over sixteen is likely to be committed to prison, and may belocked in cells with criminal and abandoned women of the lowest order. Waverley House is the first practical protest against this stupid andevil-encouraging policy. 

The house, which stands a few blocks distant from the Night Court, wasestablished and is maintained by the Probation Association of New York, consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and ofmen and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The DistrictAttorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of theAssociation, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, MissAnne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women's TradeUnion League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women'sMunicipal League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York'sorganized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among thesupporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable andsympathetic superintendent of the house. 

The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station, alaboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases whichbeset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency andparoled to probation officers are taken to Waverley House, where theyremain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best meansof disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some tohospitals, some to institutions, some placed on long probation. 

Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman's collegeto work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women whoare attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem whichhas baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They haveset themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakescountless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery, disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women haveundertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of theproblem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals?This much did the missionaries before them. 

"We could reclaim fully seventy-five per cent, " declares Miss Miner, "ifonly we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning. "

To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the beginning, instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That iswhat educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; whatphysicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning todo with poverty. 

Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a cause, and that it might be possible to attack it at its source. Yet that anylarge number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly, voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts. There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they findthemselves entirely powerless to resist. 

Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs of avery important movement among women to discover what these forces are. Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand. We have had, and we still have, in cities east and west, committees and societies and law and orderleagues earnestly engaged in "stamping out" the evil. It is like tryingto stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by astrong gale. The protests of most of these leagues amount to littlemore than vain clamor against a thing which is not even distantlycomprehended. 

The _personnel_ of these agencies organized to "stamp out" the evildiffers little in the various cities. It is largely if not whollymasculine in character, and the evil is usually dealt with from thepoint of view of religion and morals. Women, when they appear in thematter at all, figure as missionaries, "prison angels, " and the like. Asevangelists to sinners women have been permitted to associate with theirfallen sisters without losing caste. Likewise, when elderly enough, theyhave been allowed to serve on governing boards of "homes" and"refuges. " Their activities were limited to rescue work. They mightextend a hand to a repentant Magdalene. A Phryne they must not even beaware of. In other words, this evil as a subject of investigation andintelligent discussion among women was absolutely prohibited. It hasever been their Great Taboo. 

Nevertheless, when eight million women, in practically every civilizedcountry in the world, organized themselves into an International Councilof Women, and began their remarkable survey of the social order in whichthey live, one of their first acts was to break the Great Taboo. 

[Illustration: MISS SADIE AMERICAN]

At early congresses of the International Council Miss Sadie American, Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis, among Americandelegates, Miss Elizabeth Janes of England, Miss Elizabeth Gad ofDenmark, Dr. Agnes Bluhm of Germany, and others interested in the moralwelfare of girls, urged upon the Council action against the "WhiteSlave" traffic. No extensive argument was required to convince themembers of the Council that the "White Slave" traffic and the wholesubject of the moral degradation of women was a social phenomenon toolong neglected by women. 

These women declared with refreshing candor that it was about time thatthe social evil was dealt with intelligently, and if it was to be dealtwith intelligently women must do the work. The fussy old gentlemen withwhite side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other wellmeaning amateurs, who are engaged in "stamping out" the evil, deserve tobe set aside. In their places the women propose to install socialexperts who shall deal scientifically with the problem. 

The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle, inevery community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actuallyforbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for thefirst time repudiated by a body of organized women. The arguments onwhich the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time, seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance. The desirability of the descent of property in legal paternal lineseemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid standardof morals to women. But they found reasons infinitely greater why thesame rigid standard should be applied to men. 

The International Council of Women and women's organizations in everycountry number among their members and delegates women physicians, andthrough these physicians they have been able to consider the social evilfrom an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, whichtouch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfareof children, were brought forth--facts concerning infantile blindness, almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of thefathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women, and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseasesamong men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of thesemaladies, and their frightful prevalence, --seventy-five per cent of citymen, according to reliable authority, being affected, --aroused in thewomen a sentiment of indignation and revolt. The International Councilof Women put itself on record as protesting against the responsibilitylaid upon women, the unassisted task of preserving the purity of therace. 

In the United States, women's clubs, women's societies, women's medicalassociations, special committees of women in many cities havecourageously undertaken the study of this problem, intending by means ofinvestigation and publicity to lay bare its sources and seek its remedy. 

The sources of the evil are about the only phase of the problem whichhas never been adequately examined. It is true that we have suspectedthat the unsteady and ill-adjusted economic position of women furnishedsome explanation for its existence, but even now our information isvague and unsatisfactory. 

A number of years ago, in 1888 to be exact, the Massachusetts Bureau ofLabor Statistics made an interesting investigation. This was an effortto determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world, usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing toprofligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupationsof nearly four thousand fallen women in twenty-eight American cities. 

Of these unfortunates over eight hundred had worked in low-waged tradessuch as paper-box making, millinery, laundry work, rope and cordagemaking, cigar and cigarette making, candy packing, textile factory andshoe factory work. 

About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, andseamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was notstated. 

The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so faras wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundredand sixteen recruits to the list. 

On the whole, these groups were what the investigators had expected tofind. 

There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were entirelyunexpected by the investigators. Of the 3, 866 girls examined 1, 236, ornearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The nextlargest group, 1, 115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domesticservants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homesinto lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from thatoccupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and mostsuitable means of earning their living--housework. 

Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as somethingtoo disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least sixty-twoper cent of those 3, 866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were toolazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one ofhonest toil in somebody's nice kitchen. Apparently this was the viewtaken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it nevercarried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out _why_so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried tofind out _why_ housework was a trade dangerous to morals. 

Fortunately it did occur to the women's organizations to examine thefacts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take youover some of the ground they have covered and show you where theirinvestigations have led them. 

South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness andforlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any largecity. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills, --enormous drabstructures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose toweringchimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. Thesteel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three familyhouses, built of wood, generally unpainted, and always dismallyutilitarian as to architectural details. 

In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a park, or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement wasjust seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quiteimposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered forthe day as soon as the classes were dismissed. 

In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of younggirls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which alwaysmust be fed--if not with wholesome food, then husks. For parents thesegirls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills andcame home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and motherswho toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub andwere too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. Forsocial opportunity the girls had "going downtown. " Perhaps you knowwhat that means. It means trooping up and down the main street in livelygroups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth acheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a streetaccident or a fight. 

About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicagoand turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some ofthese were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went"downtown. " There was no other place for them to go. 

As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situationwould you expect to evolve out of these materials?

Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood. Manyof the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described inthese pages were so young that their cases were tried in the JuvenileCourt. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals. Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join thenever-ceasing procession of prodigals. 

This is what "no previous occupation" really means in nine cases out often. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all, according to the ideals of you who read these pages. 

Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes itwas an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not largeenough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In somethere was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extremecases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtueand innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them arepossible. 

Annie Donnelly's case will serve as further illustration. AnnieDonnelly's father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab fromtwelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidaysincluded. Before the cab drivers' strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly'swages were fifteen dollars a week, and the family lived in a four-roomtenement, for which they paid $5. 50 a week. You pay rent weekly to atenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a weekfor cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents aweek. 

The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a singledark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New Yorktenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who wasfourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms. Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took alodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenementbecause it had only one dark room. 

One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance. Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would notallow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby, attended the annual ball of the Coachman's Union, but that was anotherthing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared. 

The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really livedin one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitableexcept at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortablycrowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It wasimpossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bitof her social life had to be lived out of the house. 

When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking aboutwith the other girls or sitting on a friend's doorstep, until ten oreven eleven o'clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded cityneighborhood. There comes a time in a girl's life when this sort ofthing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on thedoorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable. Soone balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with thelodger to a dance. 

The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled basement room in a buildingwhich was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of thefront windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: "The JohnnySullivan Social Club. "

The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hatcheck, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in awaltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust whichfollowed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electriclights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiestbest with a popular waltz tune. 

In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heatand the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music waspiercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. Whenthe waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping withthe heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance. 

"Come along, " said the lodger, "and have a beer. " When Annie shook herhead he exclaimed: "Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rentfree, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buya beer off of 'em oncet in a while. They've gotta get something out ofit. "

I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately shelearned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnishdance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearableby heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places. Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room meanspoor business at the bar. 

Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall _habitué_. Not because she wasviciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she wasdecidedly normal in all her instincts and desires. 

Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every danceinvitations to other dances are distributed with a lavish hand. Theseinvitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over chairsand benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are locallyknown as "throw-aways. " Here are a few specimens, from which you mayform an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind ofpeople--almost the only kind of people--who offer pleasure to thestarved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actualinvitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker ofthe New York College Settlement:

 "_Second annual reception and ball, given by Jibo and Jack, at New Starlight Hall, 143 Suffolk Street, December 25. Music by our favorite. Gents ticket 25 cents, Ladies 15 cents. _"

 "_Don't miss the ball given by Joe the Greaser, and Sam Rosenstock, at Odd Fellows' Hall, January 29th. _"

 "_See the Devil Dance at the Reception and Ball given by Max Pascal and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday evening, November 20th. "_

 _ "Reception and Ball given by two well known friends, Max Turk and Sam Lande, better known as Mechuch, at Appollo Hall, Chrystmas night. Floor manager, Young Louis. Ticket admit one 25 cents. _"

In addition to these private affairs which are arranged purely for theprofit of "Jibo and Jack" and their kind, men who make a living in thisand in yet more unspeakable ways, there are hundreds of saloon dancehalls, not only in New York, but in other cities. These are simplyannexes to drinking places, and people are not welcome there unless theydrink. No admission is charged. 

There are also numberless dancing academies. Dancing lessons are givenfour nights in the week, as a rule, and the dancing public buysadmission the other three nights and on Sunday afternoons. Some dancingacademies, even in tenement house quarters, are reputable institutions, but to most of them the lowest of the low, both men and women, resort. There, as in the dance halls, the "White Slaver" plies his trade, andthe destroyer of womanliness lays his nets. 

Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places. She learned to"spiel. " You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms' length, and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl'sskirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of thespiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand forliquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strongdrink. 

Annie also learned to dance what is known as the "half time, " or the"part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying andcontorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really avery primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the paganharvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crudepeasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it toimmigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tellthe girls that it is the _American_ fashion of waltzing. 

Annie Donnelly's destruction was accomplished in less than a year. Itwas the more rapid because of the really superior character of her home. There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was toocrowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother wererespectable, hard-working people, and after Annie's first realmisadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid togo home. 

The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practicallyunregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime inevery city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which, every year, thousands of girls descend to the way of the prodigal. Noone has counted their number. All we know of the unclassed is that theyexist, apparently in ever-increasing masses. 

It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about sixthousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something liketwenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law. Thatis, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street sounostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of theseunfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible toknow--we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of theunclassed. 

[Illustration: A DANCE HALL]

The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it mayoccupy a vacant store building, or a large loft. Somewhere in itsimmediate vicinity there is a saloon. A dance lasts about five minutes, and the interval between dances is from ten to twenty minutes. Waiterscircle among the dancers, importuning them to drink. The dance hallwithout a bar, or some source of liquid supply, does not often exist, except as it has been established by social workers to offset theinfluence of the commercial dance hall. 

Some dance halls are small and wretchedly lighted. Others are large andpretentious. Some of them have direct connections with Raines Law hotelsand their prototypes. Of hardly a single dance hall can a good word besaid. They are almost entirely in the hands of the element lowest insociety, in business, and in politics. 

From the old-fashioned German family picnic park to Coney Island in NewYork, Revere Beach in Boston, The White City in Chicago, Savin Rock inNew Haven, and their like, is a far cry. 

Some of these summer parks try to keep their amusements clean anddecent, and some, notably Euclid Park, Cleveland, succeed. But drink andoften worse evils are characteristic of most of them. There are partsof Coney Island where no beer is sold, where the vaudeville and themoving pictures are clean and wholesome, where dancing is orderly. Butthe nearest side street has its "tough joint. " The same thing is true ofthe big summer resorts of other cities. 

The dance hall, both winter and summer types, have had a deterioratingeffect upon the old-fashioned dancing academy. Formerly these wererespectable establishments where people paid for dancing lessons. Nowthey are a _mélange_ of dancing classes and public entertainments. Thedancing masters, unable to compete with the dance hall proprietors, havebeen obliged to transfer many of the dance hall features to theirestablishments. 

Oddly enough it is rather an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted toa dance in any kind of a dance hall. The girls go alone, with a friend, or with a group of girls. The exceptional girl, who is attended by aman, must dance with him, or if she accepts another part ner, she mustask his permission. An escort is deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage. Those who go unattended are always sure of partners. Often they meet"fellows" they know, or have seen on the streets. Introductions are notnecessary. Even if a girl is unacquainted with any "fellows, " if shepossesses slight attractions, she is still sure of partners. 

The amount of money spent by working girls for dance-hall admissions isconsiderable. A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wagesthinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing. 

In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number ofblack-gowned girls. The black gown might almost be called the mark ofthe dance-hall _habitué_, the girl who is dance mad and who spends allher evenings going from one resort to another. She wears black becauselight evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew. 

An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the "spieler. " Thisis a young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilledand untiring dancer. The business of the spieler is to look after thewall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; hedances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for aplace to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to thosedance halls where they have had the best time. 

The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is asinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls. Thedance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth ofmany of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type. 

Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most brutallyevil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense ofchaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution. It isvicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, thedesire of men and women to associate together, and distorts thatinstinct into evil. The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes, especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share theirpleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. Theposition of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treather as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boydoes not play with the girl. The relations between young people veryreadily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack ofchaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downwardcourse. 

Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractiveyoung Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although notremarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be astenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon asshe finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with herworking papers. The family needed additional income, not to meet actualliving expenses, for the Greenbaums were not acutely poor, but in orderthat the only son of the family might go to college. Max was seventeen, a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his superiorityover his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family shouldtoil unceasingly for his advancement. 

Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslinunderwear factory. At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as askilled operator on a tucking machine. She sat down to her work everymorning at eight o'clock, and for four hours watched with straining eyesa tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips ofmuslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches aminute. The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above thecloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil thecontinuity of a tuck. When you are on piece wages you do not relishstopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work. 

So Sadie watched the needle assiduously, and ignored the fact that herhead ached pretty regularly, and she was generally too weary when lunchtime came to enjoy the black bread and pickles which, with a cup ofstrong tea, made her noon meal. After lunch she again sat down to hermachine and watched the needles gallop over the cloth. 

At the end of each year Sadie Greenbaum had produced for the good of thecommunity _four miles_ of tucked muslin. In return, the community hadrendered her back something less than three hundred dollars, for themuslin underwear trade has its dull seasons, and you do not earn sevendollars every week in the year. 

Each week Sadie handed her pay envelope unopened to her mother. Themother bought all Sadie's clothes and gave her food and shelter. Consequently, Sadie's unceasing vigil of the needle paid for herexistence and purchased also the proud consciousness of an older brotherwho would one day own a doctor's buggy and a social position. 

The one joy of this girl's life, in fact all the real life she lived, was dancing. Regularly every Saturday night Sadie and a girl friend, Rosie by name, put on their best clothes and betook themselves toSilver's Casino, a huge dance hall with small rooms adjoining, wherefood and much drink were to be had. 

There was a good floor at Silver's and a brass band to dance to. It wasgreat! The girls never lacked partners, and they made some veryagreeable acquaintances. 

In the dressing room, between dances, all the girls exchangedconversation, views on fashions, confidences about the young men andother gossip. Some of the girls were nice and some, it must be admitted, were "tough. " What was the difference? The tough girls, with theirdaring humor, their cigarettes, their easy manners, and their amazinglysmart clothes, furnished a sort of spice to the affair. 

Sadie and Rosie sometimes discussed the tough girls, and theconversation nearly always ended with one remarking: "Well, if theydon't get anything else out of livin', look at the clothes they put ontheir backs. "

Perhaps you can understand that longing for pretty gowns, perhaps youcan even sympathize with it. Of course, if you have a number of otherresources, you can keep the dress hunger in its proper place. But if youhave nothing in your existence but a machine--at which you toil forothers' benefit;

Sadie and Rosie continued to spend their Saturday evenings and theirSunday evenings at Silver's Casino. At first they went home togetherpromptly at midnight. After midnight these casino dance halls changetheir character. Often professional "pace makers" are introduced, menand women of the lowest class, who are paid to inspire the other dancersto lewd conduct. These wretched people are immodestly clothed, and theyperform immodest or very tough dances. They are usually known as"Twisters, " a descriptive title. When they make their appearance theself-respecting dancers go home, and a much looser element comes in. Thepace becomes a rapid one. Manners are free, talk is coarse, laughter isincessant. The bar does a lively business. The dancing and the revels goon until daylight. 

The first time Sadie and Rosie allowed themselves to be persuaded tostay at Silver's after midnight they were rather horrified by theabandoned character of the dancing, the reckless drinking, and thefighting which resulted in several men being thrown out. The second timethey were not quite so horrified, but they decided not to stay so lateanother time. Then came a great social event, the annual "mask andshadow dance" of a local political organization. Sadie and Rosieattended. 

A "mask and shadow dance" is as important a function to girls of Sadie'sand Rosie's class as a cotillion is to girls of your class. Such affairsare possible only in large dance halls, and to do them impressivelycosts the proprietor some money. The guests rent costumes and masks andappear in very gala fashion indeed. They dance in the rays of all kindsof colored lights thrown upon them from upper galleries. During part ofa waltz the dancers are bathed in rose-colored lights, which changesuddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects aremade, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers' shadows arethrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor. At intervals a rain ofbright-colored confetti pours down from above. The scene becomesbacchanalian. Color, light, music, confetti, the dance, togethercombine to produce an intense and voluptuous intoxication which therevelers deepen with drink. 

The events of the latter part of that night were very vague in Sadie'smemory when she awoke late the next morning. She remembered that she hadtolerated familiarities which had been foreign to her experienceheretofore, and that she had been led home by some friendly soul, atdaylight, almost helpless from liquor. 

Frightened, haunted by half-ashamed memories of that dance, Sadiespoiled a good bit of her work on Monday morning. The forewomandescended on her with a torrent of coarse abuse, whereupon Sadie rosesuddenly from her machine, and in a burst of hysterical profanity andtears rushed out of the factory, vowing never to return. There was onlyone course, she decided, for her to take, and she took it. 

"Sadie, why did you do it?" wailed Rosie the next time they met. 

"It's better than the factory, " said Sadie. 

Tucking muslin underwear is dull work, but it is, in most ways, a moreagreeable task than icing cakes in a St. Louis biscuit factory. All dayEdna M---- stood over a tank filled with thick chocolate icing. Thetable beside Edna's tank was kept constantly supplied with freshly baked"lady-fingers, " and these in delicate handfuls Edna seized and plungedinto the hot ooze of the chocolate. Her arms, up to the elbows, wentinto the black stuff, over and over again all day. At noon, over theirlunch, the girls talked of their recreations, their clothes, their"fellows. "

Edna had not very much to contribute to the girls' stories of gayety andadventure. She led a quieter existence than most of the other girls, although her leanings were toward lively pleasures. She was engaged to ayoung man who worked in a foundry and who was steady and perhaps rathertoo serious. He was very jealous of Edna and exacted a stern degree offidelity of her. 

Before her engagement Edna had gone to a decent dancing school anddearly loved the dance. Now she was not permitted to dance with any onebut her prospective husband. The bright talk at the noon hour made Ednafeel that she was a very poor sport. 

The young man's work in the foundry alternated weekly between day andnight duty. It occurred to Edna that her young man could not possiblyknow what she did with those evenings he remained in the foundry. If shechose to go with a group of girls to a dance hall, what harm? The longyears of married life stretched themselves out somewhat drably to Edna. She decided to have a good time beforehand. 

This girl from now on literally lived a double life. Evenings of theweeks her young man was free from the foundry, she spent at home withhim, placidly playing cards, reading aloud, or talking. On the otherevenings she danced, madly, incessantly. Her mother thought she spentthe evenings with her girl friends. The dancing, plus the deceit, soonhad its effect on Edna. She began to visit livelier and livelierresorts, curious to see all phases of pleasure. 

Suspicion entered into the mind of her affianced. He questioned her;she lied, and he was unconvinced. A night or two later the young manstayed away from the foundry and followed Edna to a suburban resort. Shewent, as usual, with a group of girls, but their men were waiting forthem near the door of the open-air dancing pavilion. Standing justoutside, the angry lover watched the girl "spiel" round and round with aman of doubtful respectability. Soon she joined a noisy, beer-drinkinggroup at one of the tables, and her behavior grew more and morereckless. Finally, amid laughter, she and another girl performed asuggestive dance together. 

Walking swiftly up to her, the outraged foundryman grasped her by theshoulder, called her a name she did not yet deserve, and threw herviolently to the floor. A terrific fight followed, and the police sooncleared the place. 

Edna did not dare go home. An over-rigid standard of morals, anover-repressive policy, an over-righteous judgment, plus a motherignorant of the facts of life, plus a girl's longing for joy--the sum ofthese equaled ruin in Edna's case. 

CHAPTER VIII

WOMAN'S HELPING HAND TO THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER

Annie, Sadie, Edna, thousands of girls like them, girls of whom almostidentical stories might be told, help to swell the long procession ofprodigals every succeeding year. They joined that procession ignorantlybecause they thirsted for pleasure. Their days were without interest, their minds were unfurnished with any resources. At fourteen most ofthem left public school. Reading and writing are about as muchintellectual accomplishments as the school gives them, and the workwaiting for them in factory, mill, or department store is rarely of acharacter to increase their intelligence. 

Ask a girl, "Why do you go to the dance hall? Why don't you stay homeevenings?" Nine times in ten her answer will be: "What should I do withmyself, sitting home and twirling my fingers?"

If you suggest reading, she will reply: "You can't be reading all thetime. " In other words, there is no intellectual impulse, but instead aninstinct for action. 

The crowded tenement, the city slum, an oppressive system of ill-paidlabor, these are evils which a gradually developing social consciencemust one day eliminate. Their tenure will not be disturbed to-day, to-morrow, or next day. Their evil influence can be offset, in somemeasure, by a recognition on the part of the community of a debt, --adebt to youth. 

The joy of life, inherent in every young creature, including the younghuman creature, seeks expression in play, in merriment, and will not bedenied. 

The oldest, the most persistent, the most attractive, the mostsatisfying expression of the joy of life is the dance. Other forms ofrecreation come in for brief periods, but their vogue is alwaystransitory. The roller skating craze, for example, waxed, waned, anddisappeared. Moving pictures and the nickelodeon have had their day, andare now passing. The charm, the passion, the lure of the dance remainsperennial. It never wholly disappears. It always returns. 

In New York City alone there are three hundred saloon dance halls. Threehundred dens of evil where every night in the year gallons of liquiddamnation are forced down the throats of unwilling drinkers! Wherethe bodies and souls of thousands of girls are annually destroyed, because the young are irresistibly drawn toward joy, and because we, allof us, good people, busy people, indifferent people, unseeing people, have permitted joy to become commercialized, have turned it into acommodity to be used for money profit by the worst elements in society. Could a more inverted scheme of things have been devised in a madhouse?

New York is by no means unique. Every city has its dance hall problem;every small town its girl and boy problem; every country-side itstragedy of the girl who, for relief from monotony, goes to the city andnever returns. 

It is strange that nowhere, until lately, in city, town, or country, hasit occurred to any one that the community owed anything to thisinsatiable thirst for joy. 

Consider, for instance, the age-long indifference of the oldest of allguardians of virtue, the Christian Church. To the demand for joy theevangelical church has returned the stern reply: "To play cards, to goto the theater, above all, to dance, is wicked. " The Methodist Church, for one, has this baleful theory written in its book of discipline, andpersistent efforts on the part of enlightened clergy and lay membershave utterly failed to expurgate it. The Catholic, Episcopalian, andLutheran churches utter no such strictures, but in effect they defendthe theory that joy, if not in itself an evil, at least is no necessityof life. 

To meet the growing social discontent, the increasing indifference toold forms of religion, the open dissatisfaction with religiousorganizations which had degenerated into clubs for rich men, there wasdeveloped some years ago in America the "institutional church. " This wasan honest effort to give to church members, and to those likely tobecome church members, opportunity for social and intellectualdiversion. Parish houses and settlements were established, and thesewere furnished with splendid gymnasiums, club rooms, committee rooms, auditoriums for concerts and lectures, kitchens for cooking lessons, andprovision besides for basketry, sewing, and embroidery classes. Theseare all good, and so are the numberless reading, debating, and studyclubs good, as far as they go. But what a pitifully short way they go!They have built up congregations somewhat, but they have made not theslightest impression on the big social problem. The reason is plain. Theappeal of the institutional church is too intellectual. It reaches onlythat portion of the masses who stand least in need of socialopportunity. 

To this accusation the church, man instituted and man controlled sincethe beginning of the Christian Era, replies that it does all that canbe done for the uplift of humanity. That the church seems to be losingits hold on the masses of people is attributed to a general drift ofdegenerate humanity towards atheism and unbelief. 

The people, the great world of people, --what a field for the church towork in, if it only chose! The great obstacle is that the church(leaving out the institutional church), on Sunday a vital, living force, is content to exist all the other days in the week merely as a building. Six days and more than half six evenings in the week the churches standempty and deserted. Simply from the point of view of material economythis waste in church property, reduced to dollars and cents, wouldappear deplorable. From the point of view of social economy, reduced toterms of humanity, the waste is heartbreaking. 

What would happen if something should loose those churches, or, at anyrate, their big Sunday-school rooms and their ample basements from thisicy exclusiveness, this week-day aloofness from humanity? Can youpicture them at night, streaming with light, gay with music, filled withdancing crowds? not crowds from homes of wealth and comfort, but crowdsfrom streets and byways; crowds for which, at present, the underworldspreads its nets? The great mass of the people, packed in drearytenements, slaves of machinery by day, slaves of their own starved soulsby night, must go somewhere for relaxation and forgetfulness. What wouldhappen if the church should invite them, not to pray but to play?

Some of the results might be a decrease in vice, in drinking, gambling, and misery. At least we may infer as much from the success of theoccasional experiments which have been tried. We have a few examples toprove that human nature is not the low, brutish thing it has too oftenbeen described. It does not invariably choose wrong ways, but, on thecontrary, when a choice between right ways and wrong ways is presented, the right is almost always preferred. 

A year ago in Chicago there was witnessed a spectacle which, for utterbrutality and blindness of heart, I hope never to see duplicated. Chicago had for some time been in the midst of a vigorous crusadeagainst organized vice. Too long neglected by the authorities and thepublic, the so-called levee districts of the city had fallen into thehands of grafting police officials, who, working with the lowest ofdegraded of men, had created an open and most brazen vice syndicate. Without going into details, it is enough to say that conditions finallybecame so scandalous that all Chicago rose in horror and rebellion. Thepolice department was thoroughly overhauled, and a new chief appointedwho undertook in all earnestness to suppress the worst features of thesystem. He had no new weapons it is true, and he probably had nonotion that he could make any impression on the evil of prostitution. But he might have restored external decency and order, and he mightpossibly have prepared the way for some scientific examination of theproblem. But a thing happened: one of those shocking blunders we toooften let happen. The efforts of the chief of police were set back, because of that blunder, no one can tell how far. A new hysteria of viceand disorder dates from the hour the blunder was made. 

In October of 1909 "Gypsy" Smith, a noted evangelical preacher of theitinerant order, was holding revival meetings in an armory on the SouthSide of Chicago. With mistaken zeal this man announced that he was goingdown into the South Side Levee and with one effort would reclaim everyone of the wretched inhabitants. He invited his immense congregation tofollow him there, and assist in the greatest crusade against vice theworld had ever seen. 

In Chicago, as in other cities, no procession or parade is allowed tomarch without permission from police headquarters. To the sorrow of allthose who believed that reform had really begun, Chief of Police Stewardissued a permit to "Gypsy" Smith. It is probable that the chief fearedthe effect of a refusal. To lift up the fallen has ever been one of thefunctions of religious bodies. Before issuing the permit, it is saidthat he used all his powers of persuasion against the parade. 

By orders from headquarters every house in the district was closed, shuttered, and pitch dark on the night of the parade. Every door waslocked, and the most complete silence reigned within. It was into acity of silence that the procession of nearly five thousand men, women, and young people of both sexes marched on that October midnight. In theglare of red fire and flaming torches, to the confused blare of manySalvation Army brass bands, the quavering of hymn tunes, including theclassic, "Where Is My Wandering Boy To-night, " and the constantexplosion of photographers' flashlights, the long procession stumbledand jostled its way through streets that gave back for answer darknessand silence. 

But afterwards! The affair had been widely advertised, and it drew athrong of spectators, not only from every quarter of the city, but fromevery suburb and surrounding country town. Young men brought theirsweethearts, their sisters, to see the "show. " As "Gypsy" Smith'sprocession wound its noisy way out of the district, and back into thearmory, this great mob of people surged into the streets prurientlyeager to watch the awakening of the levee. It came. Lights flashed up inalmost every house. The women appeared at the windows and even in thestreet. Saloon doors were flung open. The sound of pianos andphonographs rose above the clamor of the mob. Pandemonium broke loose asthe crowds flung themselves into the saloons and other resorts. Thepolice had to beat people back from the doors with their clubs. A riot, an orgy, impossible to describe, impossible to forget, ensued. Many ofthose who took part in it had never been in such a district before. 

This horrible scene somehow typified to my mind the whole blind, chaotic, senseless attitude which society has preserved toward the mostbaffling of all its problems. Nothing done to prevent the evil, becauseno one knew what to do. After the evil was an established fact, afterthe hearts of the victims were thoroughly hardened, after the last hopeof return had perished, then a "vice crusade"--led by a man!

Another scene witnessed about the same time seems to me to typify thenew attitude which society--led by women--is assuming towards itsproblem. It was in the large kindergarten room of one of the oldest ofChicago's social centers, --the Ely Bates Settlement. A group of littleItalian girls, peasant clad in the red and green colors of their nativeland, swung around the room at a lively pace singing the familiar "SantaLucia. " As the song ended the children suddenly broke into the maddestof dances, a tarantella. Led by a graceful young girl, one of thesettlement workers, they danced with the joyous abandon of youthfulspirits untrammeled, ending the dance with a chorus of happy laughter. 

This was only one group of many hundreds in every quarter ofChicago, --in schools, settlements, kindergartens, and othercenters, --who were rehearsing for the third of the annual playfestivals given out of doors each year in Chicago. The festivals areheld in the most spacious of the seventeen wonderful public gardens andplaygrounds established of late throughout the city. Lasting all day, this annual carnival of play is shared by school children, working girlsand boys, and young men and women. In the morning the children play andperform their costume dances. In the afternoon the fields are given upto athletic sports of older children, and in the evening young men andwomen, of all nationalities, many wearing their old-world peasantdresses, revive the plays and the dances of their native lands. Tens ofthousands view the beautiful spectacle, which each year excites moreinterest and assumes an added importance in the civic life of Chicago. 

Each of the large parks in Chicago's system is provided with a municipaldance hall, spacious buildings with perfect floors, good light, andventilation. Any group of young people are at liberty to secure a hall, rent free, for dancing parties. The city imposes only onecondition, --that the dances be chaperoned by park supervisors. Beautifully decorated with growing plants from the park greenhousesthese municipal dance halls are scenes of gayety almost every night inthe year. Park restaurants in connection with the halls furnish goodfood at low prices. Of course no liquor is sold. Nobody wants it. Thisis proved by the fact that saloon dance halls in the neighborhood of theparks have been deserted by their old patrons. 

Women have recognized the debt to youth and the joy of life, and theyare preparing to pay it. 

In this latest form of social service they have entered a battlefieldwhere the powers of righteousness have ever fought a losing fight. Menhave grappled with the social evil without success. They have laboredto discover a substitute for the saloon, and they have failed. They havetried to suppress the dance hall and they have failed. They have madelaws against evil resorts, and they have sent agents of the police toenforce their laws, but to no effect. 

The failure of the men does not dishearten or discourage the women whohave taken up the work. They believe that they have discovered analtogether new way in which to fight the social evil. 

They propose to turn against it its own most powerful weapons. The joyof life is to be fed with proper food instead of poison. Girls and youngmen are to be offered a chance to escape the nets stretched for them bythe underworld. In many cities women's clubs and women's societies areestablishing on a small scale amusement and recreation centers for youngpeople. In New York Miss Virginia Potter, niece of the late BishopPotter, and Miss Potter's colleagues in the Association of WorkingGirls' Clubs, have opened a public dance hall. The use of the largegymnasium of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls was secured, and everySaturday evening, from eight until eleven, young men and women come inand dance to excellent music, under the instruction, if they need it, of a skilled dancing-master. A small fee is charged, partly to defrayexpenses, and partly to attract a class of people who disdainphilanthropy and settlements. The experiment is new, but it isundoubtedly successful. As many as two hundred couples have beenadmitted in an evening. In half a dozen cities women's clubs and women'scommittees are at work on this matter of establishing amusement andrecreation centers for young people. In New York a Committee onAmusement and Vacation Resources of Working Girls has for its presidenta social worker of many years, Mrs. Charles M. Israels. Associated withthe committee are many other well-known social economists, --women ofwealth and influence who have given years to the service of workinggirls. The committee began its work by a scientific investigation intothe dance halls of New York, the summer parks and picnic grounds in theoutlying districts, and of the summer excursion boats which ply up anddown the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. The revelations made bythis investigation, carried on under the supervision of Miss JuliaSchoenfeld, were terrible enough. They were made to appear still moreterrible when it was known that men of the highest social and commercialstanding were profiting hugely from the most vicious forms ofamusement. A state senator is one of the largest stockholders in ConeyIsland resorts of bad character. An ex-governor of the State controls apopular excursion boat, on which staterooms are rented by the hour, forimmoral purposes no one can possibly doubt. The women of the committeesubmitted the findings of their investigators to the managers of theseamusement places and to the directors of the steamboat lines, and inmany instances reforms have been promised. The point is that a committeeof women had to finance an investigation to show these business men theconditions which were adding to their wealth, and into which they hadnever even inquired. 

Another investigation made by the committee revealed the meagerness ofthe provision made by churches, settlements, and business establishmentsfor working girls' vacations. There are, in round numbers, four hundredthousand working women in Greater New York. Of these, something likethree hundred thousand are unmarried girls between the ages of fourteenand thirty. In all, only 6, 874 of these young toilers, who earn on anaverage six dollars a week, are provided with vacation outings. They areusually given vacations, with or without pay, but they spend the idletime at Coney Island, on excursion boats, or in the dance hall. 

Of the 1, 257 churches and synagogues of New York, only six reportorganized vacation work for girls and women. Of the twenty or more largedepartment stores, employing thousands of women, only three havevacation houses in the country. Of the hundred or more socialsettlements in New York only fifteen provide summer homes. There areseveral vacation societies which do good work with limited resources, but they are able to care for comparatively few. We have heard much offresh air work for children, and we can afford to hear more. But thatthe fresh air work for young girls and women who toil long hours infactory and shop must be extended, this committee's investigationdefinitely establishes. 

The first practical work of the committee, after the investigation ofamusement and recreation places, was a bill introduced into the StateLegislature providing for the licensing and regulation of public dancingacademies, prohibiting the sale of liquor in such establishments, andholding the proprietor responsible for indecent dancing and improperbehavior. 

Against the bitter opposition of the dancing academy proprietors thebill became a law and went into effect in September, 1909. Almostimmediately it was challenged on constitutional grounds. The committeepromptly introduced another bill, this one to regulate dance halls. This bill, which passed the legislature and is now a law, aims to wipeout the saloon dance hall absolutely, and so to regulate the sale ofliquor in all dancing places that the drink evil will be cut down to aminimum. The license fee of fifty dollars a year will eliminate thelowest, cheapest resorts, and a rigid system of inspection will not onlygo far towards preserving good order, but will do away with thewretchedly dirty, ill-smelling, unsanitary fire traps in which manyhalls are located. The dance-hall proprietor who encourages or eventolerates "tough" dancing, or who admits to the floor "White Slavers, "procurers, or persons of open immorality, will be liable to forfeitureof his license. 

The committee has done more than try to reform existing dance halls. Ithas taken steps to establish, in neighborhoods where evil resortsabound, attractive dance halls, where a decent standard of conduct iscombined with all the best features of the evil places--good floors, lively music, bright lights. Two corporations have been organized forthe maintenance, in various parts of the city, of model dance halls, andone hall has already been opened. The patrons of the model dance hall donot know that it is a social experiment paid for by a committee ofwomen. It is run exactly like any public dancing place, only in anorderly fashion. 

Every extension of use of public places, schools, parks, piers, asrecreation places for young people between fifteen and twenty isencouraged and supported by the committee. Already two public schoolshave organized dancing classes, and several settlements have thrown opentheir dances to the public where formerly they were attended only bysettlement club members. 

By helping working girls to find cheap vacation homes in the country, and by establishing vacation banks to help the girls save for theirsummer outings, the committee hopes to discourage some of the haphazardpicnic park dissipation. In summer many trades are slack, girls areidle, and out of sheer boredom they hang around the parks seekingamusement. It is only a theory, perhaps, but Mrs. Israels and the otherson her committee believe that if many of these girls knew that a countryvacation were within the possibilities, they would gladly save moneytowards it. At present the vacation facilities of working girls in largecities are small. In New York, where at least three hundred thousandgirls and women earn their bread, only about six thousand are helped tosummer vacations in the country. What these women are doing now on asmall scale, experimentally, will soon be adopted, as their children'splaygrounds, their kindergartens, their vacation schools, and otherenterprises have been adopted, by the municipalities. Their probationofficers, long paid out of club treasuries, have already beentransferred to many cities, east and west. Soon municipal dance halls, municipal athletic grounds, municipal amusement and recreation centersfor all ages and all classes will be provided. 

Already New York is preparing for such a campaign. The newly-appointedParks Commissioner, Charles B. Stover, looking over his office force, dismissed one secretary whose function seemed largely ornamental, anddiverted his salary of four thousand dollars to recreation purposes foryoung people. Commissioner Stover desires the appointment of a cityofficer who shall be a Supervisor of Recreations, a man or a woman whoseentire time shall be devoted to discovering where recreation parks, dancing pavilions, music, and other forms of pleasure are needed, andhow they may be made to do the most good. A neighborhood that thirstsfor concerts ought to have them. A community that desires to dancedeserves a dance hall. In the long run, how infinitely better, how muchmore economical for the city to furnish these recreations, normally anddecently conducted, than to bear the consequences of an order of thingslike the present one. The new order must come. It is the only way yetpointed out by which we may hope to close those other avenues, where thejoy of youth is turned into a cup of trembling, and the dancing feet ofgirlhood are led into mires of shame. 

CHAPTER IX

THE SERVANT IN HER HOUSE

According to the findings of the Massachusetts State Bureau of LaborStatistics, whose investigation into previous occupation of fallen womenwas described in a former chapter, domestic service is a dangeroustrade. Of the 3, 966 unfortunates who came under the examination of theBureau's investigators, 1, 115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been indomestic service. No other single industry furnished anything like thisproportion. 

From time to time reformatories and institutions dealing with delinquentwomen and girls examine the industrial status of their charges, alwayswith results which agree with or even exceed the Massachusettsstatistics. Bedford Reformatory, one of the two New York Stateinstitutions for delinquent women, in an examination of a group of onethousand women, found four hundred and thirty general houseworkers, twenty-four chamber-maids, thirteen nursemaids, eight cooks, andthirty-six waitresses. As some of the waitresses may have beenrestaurant workers, we will eliminate them. Even so, it will be seenthat four hundred and seventy-five--nearly half of the Bedfordwomen--had been servants. 

In 1908 the Albion House of Refuge, New York, admitted one hundred andsixty-eight girls. Of these ninety-two were domestics, one was a lady'smaid, and nine were nursemaids. 

Of one hundred and twenty-seven girls in the Industrial School atRochester, New York, in 1909, only fifty-one were wage earners. Of thatnumber twenty-nine had worked in private homes as domestics. BedfordReformatory receives mostly city girls; Albion and Rochester aresupplied from small cities and country towns. It appears that domesticservice is a dangerous trade in small communities as well as in largeones. 

On the face of it, the facts are wonderfully puzzling. Domestic serviceis constantly urged upon women as the safest, healthiest, most normalprofession in which they can possibly engage. Assuredly it seems topossess certain unique advantages. Domestic service is the only field ofindustry where the demand for workers permanently exceeds the supply. The nature of the work is essentially suited, by habit, tradition, andlong experiment, to women. It offers economic independence within theshelter of the home. 

Lastly, housework pays extremely well. A girl totally ignorant of theart of cooking, of any household art, one whose function is to clean, scrub, and assist her employer to prepare meals, can readily command tendollars a month, with board. The same efficiency, or lack of efficiency, in a factory or department store would be worth about ten dollars amonth, without board. The wages of a competent houseworker, in any partof the country, average over eighteen dollars a month. Add to this aboutthirty dollars a month represented by food, lodging, light, and fire, and you will see that the competent houseworker's yearly income amountsto five hundred and seventy-six dollars. This is a higher average thanthe school-teacher or the stenographer receives; it is almost double theaverage wage of the shop girl, or the factory girl. It is, in fact, about as high as the usual income of the American workingman. 

It is true that the social position of the domestic worker is lower thanthat of the teacher, stenographer, or factory worker. This undoubtedlyaffects the attractiveness of domestic service as a profession. But thelower social position is in itself no explanation of the high rate ofimmorality. At least there are no figures to prove that the rate ofmorality rises or falls with the social status of the individual. 

In the contemplation of what is known as the "servant problem, " I thinkwe have been less scientific and more superficial than in any othersocial or industrial problem. For the increasing dearth of domesticworkers, for the lowered standard of efficiency, for the startlingamount of immorality alleged to belong to the class, we have given everyexplanation except the right one. 

At the bottom of the "servant problem" lies the fact that it exists inthe privacy of the home. Now, we have reached a point of socialconsciousness where we allow that it is right to intrude some homes andask questions for the good of the community. "How many children haveyou?" "Are they all in school?" "Does your husband drink?" We have notyet reached the point of sending agents to inquire: "How many servantsdo you keep; what are their hours of work, and what kind of sleepingaccommodations do you furnish them?"

Some intelligent inquiry has been made into surface conditions. TheSociological Department of Vassar College, under Professor Lucy MaynardSalmon, during the years 1889 and 1890, made an exhaustive study ofwages, hours of work, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages ofdomestic service. Professor Salmon's book, "Domestic Service, " givingthe results of the inquiry, is a classic on the subject. It deals, however, almost entirely with the ethical side of the problem, thesocial relation between mistress and maid. The relation between theworker and the industry is hardly examined at all. 

A later inquiry into the servant problem was conducted in 1903, in halfa dozen cities, by organizations of women which associated themselvesfor the purpose, under the name of the Intermunicipal Committee onHousehold Research. 

The Woman's Municipal League of New York, the Educational and IndustrialUnion of Boston, the Housekeepers' Alliance, and the Civic Club ofPhiladelphia were the moving elements in the investigation. Co-operatingwith them were the College Settlements Association and theAssociation of Collegiate Alumnae, which together established ascholar ship for the research. This research was most ably conducted byMiss Frances Kellor, a Vassar graduate, and nine assistant workers, allof whom were college women. The report of the investigation waspublished a year later in the volume "Out of Work. "[1]

This investigation by organizations of educated and expert women was thefirst survey ever made of domestic service _as an industry_, the firstscientific study of domestic workers _as an industrial group_. It wasthe first intelligent attempt to review housework as if it were a trade. 

The most important conclusion of the investigators was that housework, domestic service, although carried on as a trade, is really no trade atall. The domestic worker is no more a part of modern industry than theItalian woman who finishes "pants" in a tenement, or the child who staysfrom school to fasten hooks and eyes on paper cards. 

Do not let us make a mistake concerning the underlying cause of theservant problem. Let us face the truth that we have two institutionswhich are back numbers in twentieth century civilization: two left-oversfrom a past-and-gone domestic system of industry. One of these is thetenement sweat shop, where women combine, or try to combine, manufacturing and housekeeping. The other is the private kitchen--thehome--where the last stand of conservatism and tradition, the lastlingering remnant of hand labor, continues to exist. 

No woman who is free enough, strong enough, intelligent enough to seekwork in a factory or shop, is ever found in a sweat shop or seencarrying bundles of coats to finish at home. 

Exactly for the same reason the average American working woman shunshousework as a means of livelihood. You will find in every community afew women of intelligence who are naturally so domestic in their tastesand inclinations that they shrink from any work outside the home. Suchwomen do adhere to domestic service, but, broadly speaking, you beholdin the servant group merely the siftings of the real industrial class. 

In a tentative, halting sort of fashion we are learning to humanize thefactory and shop. Factory workers, mill hands, department store clerks, have been granted legislation in almost every State of the Union, regulating hours of work, sanitary conditions, ventilation, and in somecases they have been given protection from dangerous machinery. Indepartment stores they have been granted even certain special comforts, such as seats on which to rest while not actually working. 

Of course, we have done no more than make a beginning in this matter ofhumanizing the factory and the shop. But we have made a beginning, andthe movement toward securing better and juster and healthier conditionsfor workers in all the industries is bound to continue. So long asmanufacturing was carried on in the home, no such protective legislationas workers now enjoy was dreamed of. We had to wait until the workerscame together in large groups before we could see their conditions andunderstand their needs. 

Housework, because it is performed in isolation, because it is purelyindividual labor, has never been classed among the industries. It hasrather been looked upon as a normal feminine function, a form of healthyexercise. No one has ever suggested to legislators that sweeping andbeating rugs might be included among the dusty trades; that bending oversteaming washtubs, and almost immediately afterwards going out intofrosty air to hang the clothes, might be harmful to throat and lungs;that remaining within doors days at a time, as houseworkers almostinvariably do, reacts on nerves and the entire physical structure; thatsteady service, if not actual labor, from six in the morning until nineand ten at night makes excessive demands on mind and body. 

Such conditions exist because the workers are too weak, too inefficient, too unintelligent to change them. Yet the demand for servants so farexceeds the supply that they are in a position, theoretically, todictate the terms of their own employment. If they elected to demandpianos and private baths they could get them; that is, if instead ofremaining isolated individuals they could form themselves into anindustrial class, like plumbers, or bricklayers, or carpenters. Even asisolated individuals they are able to command a better money wage thanmore efficient workers, which proves how great is the need for theirservices. 

The housekeeper clings to her archaic kitchen, firmly believing that ifshe gave it up, tried to replace it by any form of co-operative living, the pillars of society would crumble and the home pass out of existence. Yet so strong is her instinctive repugnance to the medieval system onwhich her household is conducted, that she shuns it, runs away from itwhenever she can. Housekeeping as a business is a dark mystery to her. The mass of women in the United States probably hold, almost as anarticle of religion, the theory that woman's place is in the home. Butthe woman who can organize and manage a home as her husband manages hisbusiness, systematically, profitably, professionally--well, how manysuch women do you know?

It would seem as if in the newer generations, the average housekeeper isnot in the professional class at all. Usually she lacks professionaltraining. If she was brought up in a well-to-do home where there wereseveral servants, she knows literally nothing of cooking, or of anydepartment of housekeeping. Even when she has had some instruction inhousehold tasks, she almost never connects cooking with chemistry, foodwith dietetics, cleanliness with sanitation, buying with bookkeeping. She is an amateur. And she takes into her household to do work sheherself is incapable of doing, another amateur, a woman who might, inmany cases, do well under a capable commander, but who is hopelessly atsea when expected to evolve a system of housekeeping all by herself. 

This irregular state of affairs in what should be a carefully studied, well-organized industry is reflected in the conditions commonly metedout to domestics. Take housing conditions, for example. Somehousekeepers provide their servants with good beds; of course, not quiteas good as other members of the household enjoy, but good enough. Someset aside pleasant, warm, well-furnished rooms for the servants. ButMiss Kellor's investigators reported that it was common to find the onlyunheated room in a house or apartment set aside for the servant. Theyfound great numbers of servants' rooms in basements, having no sunlightor heat. 

At one home, where an investigator applied for a "place, " thehousekeeper complained that her last maid was untidy. Then she showedthe applicant to the servant's room. This was a little den partitionedoff from the coal bin!

In another place, the maid was required to sleep on an ironing boardplaced over the bathtub. In still another, the maid spent her night ofrest on a mattress laid over the wash tubs in a basement. A bed for twoservants, consisting of a thin mattress on the dining-room table, wasalso found. 

Unventilated closets, rooms opening off from the kitchen, small andwindowless, are very commonly provided in city flats. Even in spaciouscountry homes the servants' rooms are considered matters of littleimportance. 

"One woman, " writes Miss Kellor, "planned her new three-story house withthe attic windows so high that no one could see out of them. When thearchitect remonstrated she said: 'Oh, those are for the maids; I don'texpect them to spend their time looking out. '"

I remember a young girl who waited on table at a woman's hotel where Imade my home. One morning I sent this girl for more cream for my coffee. She was gone some time and I spoke to her a little impatiently when shereturned. She was silent for a moment, then she said: "Do you know thatevery time you send me to the pantry it means a walk of three and a halfblocks? This dining-room and the kitchens and pantries are a blockapart, and are separated by three flights of stairs. I have counted thedistance there and back, and it is more than three blocks. "

"But, Kittie, " I said to her, "why do you work in a hotel, if it's likethat? Why don't you take a place in a private family?"

"I've tried that, " said the girl. "I had a place with the ----family, "mentioning an historic name. "They had sickness in the family, and theystopped in town all summer. My room was up in the attic, with only askylight for ventilation. During the day, except for the time I spentsitting on the area steps after nine o'clock, I was waiting on the cookin a hot kitchen. They let me out of the house once every two weeks. Here I have some freedom, at least. "

I have told this story to dozens of domestics, many of them from homesof wealth, and they agree that it is a common case. It is very rare, these girls say, to find a mistress who is willing to allow her maids toleave the house except on their days out. They concede certain hours ofrest, it is true, but those hours must be spent within doors. "Why, ifyou went out I should be sure to need you, " is the usual explanation. 

Imagine a factory girl or a stenographer being required to remain afterhours on the chance of being needed for extra work. 

There is an aspect to this phase of the servant question which isgenerally overlooked by employers. This is an isolation from humanintercourse to be found in no other industry. When the household employsonly one servant the isolation is absolute. The girl is marooned, withinfull sight of others' happy life. Even when kindness is her portion sheis an outsider from the family circle. Important as her function is inthe life of the household, she is socially the lowest unit in it. 

During the course of a great strike of mill operatives in Fall River, Massachusetts, a few years ago, a considerable group of weaver andspinner girls were induced, by members of the Women's Trade UnionLeague, to take up domestic service until the close of the strike. Asthe girls were in acute financial distress they agreed to try theexperiment. These were mostly American or English girls, some of themabove the average of intelligence and good sense. 

Housework with its great variety of tasks made severe draughts on thestrength of girls accustomed to using one set of muscles. The long hoursand the confinement of domestic service affected nerves adjusted to alegal fifty-eight-hour week. 

But the girls' real objection to housework was its loneliness. Hardly asingle house in Boston, or the surrounding suburbs, where the girlsfound places, was provided with a servants' sitting room. There wasabsolutely no provision made for callers. For a servant is supposed notto have friends except on her days out. On those occasions she isassumed to meet her friends on the street. 

In England people recognize the fact that they have a servant class. Every house of any pretentions provides a servants' hall. 

In the United States a sitting room for servants, even in millionaires'homes, is a rarity. 

More than this, in many city households, especially in apartmenthouseholds, the servants are prohibited from receiving their friendseven in the kitchen. "Are we allowed to receive men visitors in thehouse?" chorused a group of girls, questioned in a fashionableemployment agency. "Mostly our friends are not allowed to step insidethe areaway while we are putting on our hats to go out. "

There is no escaping the conclusion that a large part of the socialevil, or that branch of it recruited every year from domestic service, is traceable to American methods of dealing with servants. The domestic, belonging, as a rule, to a weak and inefficient class, is literallydriven into paths where only strength and efficiency could possiblyprotect her from evil. 

Servants share, in common with all other human beings, the necessity forhuman intercourse. They must have associates, friends, companions. Ifthey cannot meet them in their homes they must seek them outside. 

Walk through the large parks in any city, late in the evening, andobserve the couples who occupy obscurely placed benches. You pity themfor their immodest behavior in a public place. But most of them have noother place to meet. And it is not difficult to comprehend thatclandestine appointments in dark corners as a rule do not conduce toproper behavior. Most of the women you see on park benches are domesticservants. Some of them, it is safe to assume, work in New York'sFifth Avenue, or in mansions on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. 

[Illustration: AN UNTHOUGHT-OF PHASE OF THE SERVANT QUESTION]

The social opportunity of the domestic worker is limited to the parkbench, the cheap theater, the summer excursion boat, and the dance hall. Hardly ever does a settlement club admit a domestic to membership;rarely does a working girls' society or a Young Women's ChristianAssociation circle bid her welcome. The Girls' Friendly Association ofthe Protestant Episcopal Church is a notable exception to this rule. 

In a large New England city, not long ago, a member of the Woman's Clubproposed to establish a club especially for domestics, since no otherclass of women seemed willing to associate with them. The proposal wasvoted down. "For, " said the women, "if they had a clubroom they would besure to invite men, and immorality might result. "

But there is no direct connection between a clubroom and immorality, whereas the park bench after dark and the dance hall and its almostinvariable accompaniment of strong drink are positive dangers. 

The housekeeper simply does not realize that her domestics are _girls_, exactly like other girls. They need social intercourse, they needlaughter and dancing and healthy pleasure just as other girls need them, as much as the young ladies of the household need them. 

Perhaps they need them even more. The girl upstairs has mental resourceswhich the girl downstairs lacks. The girl upstairs has the protectionof family, friends, social position. The last is of greatest importance, because the woman without a social position has ever been regarded by alarge class of men as fair game. The domestic worker sometimes findsthis out within the shelter, the supposed shelter, of her employer'shome. 

[Illustration: ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRIBUTION TO THE SOCIAL QUESTION]

Tolstoy's terrible story "Resurrection" has for its central anecdote inthe opening chapter a court-room scene in which a judge is called uponto sentence to prison a woman for whose downfall he had, years before, been responsible. A somewhat similar story in real life, with a happierending, was told me by the head of a woman's reformatory. This officialreceived a visit from a lawyer, who told her with much emotion that hehad, several days before, been present when a young girl was sentencedto a term in a reformatory. 

"She lived in my home, " said the man. "I believe that she was a goodgirl up to that time. My wife died, my home was given up, and of courseI forgot that poor girl. She never made any claim on me. When I saw herthere in court, among the dregs of humanity, her face showing what herlife had become, I wanted to shoot myself. Now she is here, with achance to get back her health and a right state of mind. Will you helpme to make amends?"

The head of the reformatory rather doubted the man's sincerity at first. She feared that his repentance was superficial. She refused to allowhim to see or to communicate with the girl, but she wrote him regularlyof her progress. Several times in the course of the year the man visitedthe reformatory, and at the end of that period he was allowed to see thegirl. This institution happens to be one of the few where a rational anda humane system of outdoor work is in vogue. The girl, who a year backhad been almost a physical wreck from drugs and the life of the streets, was again strong, healthy, and sane. The two forgave each other and weremarried. 

If the position of the domestic, while living in the shelter of afamily, is sometimes precarious, her situation, when out of a job, isoften actually perilous. 

If a girl has a home she goes to that home, and regards her temporaryperiod of unemployment as a pleasant vacation. But in most cases, incities, at any rate, few girls have homes of which they can availthemselves. 

"In no city, " says Miss Kellor's report, "are adequate provisions madefor such homeless women, and their predicament is peculiarly acute, fortheir friends are often household workers who cannot extend thehospitality of their rooms. "

I think I hear a chorus of protesting voices: "We don't have anythingto do with the servant class you are describing. Our girls arerespectable. They meet their friends at church. They come to us fromreputable employment offices, which would not deal with them if theywere not all right. "

Are you sure you know this? What, after all, do you really know aboutyour servants? What do you know about the employment office that senther to you? What do you know of the world inhabited by servants and thepeople who deal in servants? Can you not imagine that it might bedifferent from the one you live in so safely and comfortably?

Are you willing to know the facts about the world, the underworld, fromwhich the girl who cooks your food and takes care of your children isdrawn? Do you care to know how a domestic spends the time betweenplaces, how she gets to your kitchen or nursery, the kind of homes shemay have been in before she came to you? Make a little descent into thatunderworld with a girl whose experience is matched with those of manyothers. 

Nellie B---- was an Irish girl, strong, pretty of face, and joyful oftemperament. The quiet Indiana town where she earned her living as acook offered Nellie so little diversion that she determined to go toChicago to live. She gave up her place, and with a month's wages in herpocket went to the city. 

It was late in the afternoon when her train reached the station. Nelliealighted, bewildered and lonely. She had the address of an employmentagency, furnished her by an acquaintance. Nellie slept that night, orrather tossed sleepless in the agency lodging house, on a dirty bedoccupied by two women besides herself. In all her life she had neverbeen inside such a filthy room, or heard such frightful conversation. Therefore next morning she gladly paid her exorbitant bill of one dollarand seventy-five cents, besides a fee of two dollars and a half forobtaining employment, and accepted the first place offered her. 

The house she was taken to seemed to be conducted rather strangely. Meals were at unusual hours, and the household consisted largely ofyoung women who received many men callers. For about a week Nellie didher work unmolested. At the end of the week her mistress presented herwith a low-necked satin dress and asked her if she would not like toassist in entertaining the men. Simple-minded Nellie had to have thenature of the entertaining explained to her, and she had greatdifficulty in leaving the house after she had declined the offer. Shehad hardly any money left, and the woman refused to pay her for herweek's work. 

Nellie knew of no other employment agency, so she was obliged to returnto the one she left. When she reproached the agent for sending her to adisreputable house he shrugged his shoulders and replied: "Well, I sendgirls where they're wanted. If they don't like the place they canleave. "

The fact is, they cannot always leave when they want to. Miss Kellor'sinvestigators found an office in Chicago which sent girls to a resort inWisconsin which was represented as a summer hotel. This notorious placewas surrounded by a high stockade which rendered escape impossible. 

The investigators found offices in other cities which operatedisreputable houses in summer places. To these the proprietors send thehandsomest of their applicants for honest work. 

Three girls sent to a house of this kind found themselves prisoners. Onegirl made such a disturbance by screaming and crying that the proprietorliterally kicked her out of the house. The investigators for theIntermunicipal Committee on Household Research saw this girl in ahospital, insane and dying from the treatment she had received. Anotherof the three escaped from the place. She, too, was discovered in a stateof dementia. The fate of the third girl is obscure. 

[Illustration: THE SERVANT GIRL AND THE EMPLOYMENT AGENCY]

Not all employment agencies cater to this trade. Not all would consentto be accessory to women's degradation. But the employment agencybusiness, taken by and large, is disorganized, haphazard, out of date. It is operated on a system founded in lies and extortion. The officeswant fees--fees from servants and fees from employers. They encourageservants to change their employment as often as possible. Often a firmwill send a girl to a place, and a week or two later will send her wordthat they have a better job for her. Sometimes they arrange with her toleave her place after a certain period, promising her an easier positionor a better wage. They favor the girl who changes often. "You're a nicekind of a customer!" jeered one proprietor to a girl who boasted thatshe had been in a family for five years. The girl was a _customer_ tohim, and she was nothing more. 

To his profitable customer the agent is often very accommodating. If shelacks references he writes her flattering ones, or loans her a referencewritten by some woman of prominence. References, indeed, are oftenhanded around like passports among Russian revolutionists. 

Many of these unpleasant facts were brought to light in the course ofthe investigation made by the Intermunicipal Committee on HouseholdResearch. The result of their report was a model employment agency law, passed by the New York State Legislature, providing for a strictlicensing system, rigid forms of contract, regulation of fees, andinspection by special officers of the Bureau of Licenses. The lawapplies only to cities of the first class, and unfortunately has neverbeen very well enforced. Perhaps it has not been possible to enforce it. 

In all the cities examined by the Intermunicipal Committee on HouseholdResearch the investigators found the majority of employment agencies inclose connection with the homes of the agents. In New York, of threehundred and thirteen offices visited, one hundred and twenty were intenements, one hundred and seven in apartment houses, thirty-nine inresidences and only forty-nine in business buildings. InPhiladelphia, only three per cent of employment agencies were foundin business buildings. Chicago made a little better showing, withnineteen per cent in business houses. The difficulty of properlyregulating a business which is carried on in the privacy of a home isapparent. When an agency is in a business building it usually hasconspicuous signs, and often the rooms are well equipped with desks, comfortable chairs, and other office furnishings. But the majority ofagencies are of another description. Those dealing with immigrant girlsare sometimes filthy rooms in some rear tenement, reached through asaloon or a barber shop facing the street. Often the other tenants ofthe building are fortune tellers, palmists, "trance mediums, " and likeundesirables. 

A large number of these agencies operate lodging houses for theirpatrons. There is hardly a good word to say for most of these, exceptthat they are absolutely necessary. Dirty, unsanitary, miserable as theyusually are, if they were closed by law, hundreds, perhaps thousands ofdomestics temporarily out of work, would be turned into the streets. Many are unfamiliar with the cities they live in. Many more are barredfrom hotels on account of small means. Often a girl finding itimpossible to bring herself to lie down on the wretched beds provided bythese lodging houses, leaves her luggage and goes out, not to returnuntil morning. She spends the night in dance halls and other resorts. 

According to Miss Kellor's report this description of employmentagencies and lodging houses attached to them applies to aboutseventy-five per cent of all offices in the four cities examined. Forgreater accuracy the investigators made a brief survey of conditions incities, such as St. Louis, New Haven, and Columbus, Ohio. Thedifferences were slight, showing that the employment agency problem ismuch the same east and west. 

Domestic servants have their industrial ups and downs like otherworkers. Sometimes they are able to pay the fees required in ahigh-class employment office, while at other times they are obliged tohave recourse to the cheaper places, where standards of honesty, andperhaps also, of propriety, are low. Domestic workers are the nomads ofindustry. Their lives are like their work, --impermanent, detached fromothers', unobserved. 

It is for the housekeepers of America to consider the plain factsconcerning domestic service. Some of the conditions they can change. Others they cannot. No one can alter the economic status of the kitchen. Like the sweat shop, it must ultimately disappear. 

What system of housekeeping will take the place of the present systemcannot precisely be foretold. We know that the whole trend of thingseverywhere is toward co-operation. Within the past ten years think howmuch cooking has gone into the factory, how much washing into the steamlaundry, how much sewing into the shop. As the cost of living increases, more and more co-operation will be necessary, especially for those ofmoderate income. At the present time millions of city dwellers havegiven up living in their own houses, or even in rented houses. Theycannot afford to maintain individual homes, but must live in apartmenthouses, where the expenses of heat, and other expenses, notably water, hall, and janitor service, are reduced to a minimum because shared byall the tenants. There may come a time when the private kitchen will bea luxury of the very rich. 

For a time, however, the private kitchen and the servant in the kitchenwill remain. That is one servant problem. But the housekeeper still hasanother "servant problem, " and I have tried to make it clear that thisproblem pretty closely involves the morals of the community. 

Now this matter of community morals has begun to interest womenprofoundly. In many of their organizations women are studying andendeavoring to understand the causes of evil. They are securing theappointment of educated women as probation officers in the courts whichdeal with delinquent women and girls. Sincerely they are working towarda better understanding of the problem of the prodigal daughter. 

Since about one-third of all these prodigals are recruited from theranks of domestic workers it is possible for the housekeepers of thecountry to play an important part in this work. Every woman in theUnited States who employs one servant has a contribution to make to themovement. The power to humanize domestic service in her own household isin every woman's hand. 

Loneliness, social isolation, the ban of social inferiority, --thesecruel and unreasonable restrictions placed upon an entire class ofworking women are out of tune with democracy. The right of the domesticworker to regular hours of labor, to freedom after her work is done, toa place to receive her friends, must be recognized. The self-respect ofthe servant must in all ways be encouraged. 

Above all, the right of the domestic worker to social opportunity mustbe admitted. It must be provided for. 

Yonkers, New York, a large town on the Hudson River, points out one waytoward this end. In Yonkers there has been established a Women'sInstitute for the exclusive use of domestics. It has an employmentagency and supports classes in domestic science for those girls who wishto become more expert workers. There are club rooms and recreationparlors where the girls receive and meet their friends--including theirmen friends. A group of liberal-minded women established this uniqueinstitution, which is well patronized by the superior class of domesticworkers in Yonkers. The dues are small, and members are allowed to shareclub privileges with friends. It is not unusual for employers to presenttheir domestics with membership cards. It cannot be said that theWomen's Institute has solved the servant problem for Yonkers, but manywomen testify to its happy effects on their own individual problems. 

The Committee on Amusements and Vacation Resources of Working Girls inNew York is collecting a long list of farmhouses and village homes inthe mountains and near the sea where working girls, and this includesdomestics, may spend their vacations for very little money. 

Every summer, as families leave the city for country and seaside, domestics are thrown out of employment. A department in the Women's Clubcan examine vacation possibilities for domestics. The clubs can alsodeal with the employment agency. Some women's organizations have alreadytaken hold of this department. The Women's Educational and IndustrialUnion of Boston conducts a very large and flourishing employment agency. Women's clubs can study the laws of their own community in regard topublic employment agencies. They can investigate homes for immigrantgirls and boarding-houses for working women. 

Preventive work is better than reform measures, but both are necessaryin dealing with this problem. Women have still much work to do insecuring reformatories for women. New York is the first State toestablish such reformatories for adult women. Private philanthropy hasoffered refuges and semipenal institutions. The State stands aloof. 

Even in New York public officials are strangely skeptical of thepossibilities of reform. Last year the courts of New York City sentthree thousand delinquent women to the workhouse on Blackwell'sIsland, --a place notorious for the low state of its _morale_. They sentonly seventeen women to Bedford Reformatory, where a healthy routine ofoutdoor work, and a most effective system administered by a scientificpenologist does wonders with its inmates. Nothing but the will and theorganized effort of women will ever solve the most terrible of allproblems, or remove from society the reproach of ruined womanhood whichblackens it now. 

NOTES:

Note 1: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904. 

CHAPTER X

VOTES FOR WOMEN

Although Woman Suffrage has been for a number of years a part of theprogram of the International Council of Women, the American Branch, represented by the General Federation of Women's Clubs, at firstdisplayed little interest in the subject. Although many of the clubwomen were strong suffragists, there were many others, notably womenfrom the Southern States, who were violently opposed to suffrage. Earlyin the club movement it was agreed that suffrage, being a subject onwhich there was an apparently hopeless difference of opinion, was not aproper subject for club consideration. 

The position of the women in regard to suffrage was precisely that ofthe early labor unions toward politics. The unions, fearing that thelabor leaders would use the men for their own political advancement, resolved that no question of politics should ever enter into theirdeliberations. 

In the same way the club women feared that even a discussion of WomanSuffrage in their state and national federation meetings would result intheir movement becoming purely political. They wanted to keep it anon-partisan benevolent and social affair. 

[Illustration: SUFFRAGETTES IN LONDON ADVERTISING A MEETING]

Somehow, in what mysterious manner no one can precisely tell, thereserve of the club women towards the suffrage question began some yearsago to break down. At the St. Louis Biennial of 1904 part of a morningsession was given up to the suffrage organizations. Several remarkablespeeches in favor of the suffrage were made, and there is no doubt thata very deep impression was made, even upon those women openly opposed tothe movement. Six years later, at the biennial meeting held inCincinnati, Ohio, in June, 1910, an entire evening was given up to anexhaustive discussion of both sides of the question. 

Dating from that evening a stranger visiting the convention might almosthave thought that the sole object of the gathering was a discussion ofthe right of women to the ballot. Women floated through the corridors ofthe hotel talking suffrage. They talked suffrage in little groups in thedining-room, they discussed it in the street cars going to and from theconvention. 

The local suffrage clubs had planned a banquet to the visitingsuffragists and had calculated a maximum of one hundred and fiftyapplications for tickets. 

Three days before the banquet they had had nearly three hundredapplications, and when the hour for the banquet arrived every availableseat, the room's limit of three hundred and seventy-five, was occupied. Outside were women offering ten dollars a plate and clamoring for theprivilege of merely listening to the after-dinner speakers. Somethingmust have happened in the course of those eight years to make such anastounding change in the attitude of the club women. 

The fact is that until the club women had been at work at practicalthings for a long period of years, they did not realize the social valueof their own activities. They thought of their work as benevolent andphilanthropic. That they were performing community service, _citizens_'service, they did not remotely dream. There is nothing surprising intheir _naïveté_. It is a fact that in this country, although every oneknows that women own property, pay taxes, successfully manage their ownbusiness affairs, and do an astonishing amount of community work aswell, no one ever thinks of them as citizens. 

American men are accustomed to women in almost all trades andprofessions. It doesn't astonish a New Yorker to see a hospitalambulance tearing down the street with a white-clad woman surgeon on theback seat. A woman lawyer, architect, editor, manufacturer, excites noparticular notice. In the Western States men are beginning to electwomen county treasurers, county superintendents of schools, and inChicago, second largest city in the country, a Board of Education, overwhelmingly masculine, recently appointed a woman City Superintendentof Schools. 

Yet to the vast majority of American men women do not look likecitizens. 

As for the majority of American women they have always until recentlythought of themselves as a class, --a favored and protected class. Theycherished a sentimental kind of delusion that the American man was onlytoo anxious to give them everything that their hearts desired. When theygot out into the world of action, when they began to ask for somethingmore substantial than bonbons, the club women found that the Americanman was not so very generous after all. 

A typical instance occurred down in Georgia. A few years ago the womenof Georgia found a way to introduce into the legislature a child-laborlaw. It was really a very modest little bill and it protected only afraction of the pitiful army of cotton-mill children, but still it wasworth having. The women worked hard and they got some very powerfulbacking and a barrel or two of petitions. Nevertheless, the bill wasdefeated. One legislative orator rose to explain his vote. 

"Mr. Speaker, " he said eloquently, "I am devoted to the good women of myState. If I thought that the women of my State wanted this bill passedI would vote for it; but, sir, I have every reason to believe that thegood women of my State are opposed to this bill, and therefore;"

At this juncture another member handed to the orator a petition bearingthe name of five thousand of the best known women in Georgia. The oratorstammered, turned red, felt for his handkerchief, mopped his brow, andcontinued: "Mr. Speaker, I deeply regret that I did not see thispetition yesterday. As it is, my vote is pledged. "

Incidents of this kind have occurred too frequently for the women of theUnited States to escape their meaning. They have learned that theycannot have everything they want merely by asking for it. Also they havelearned, or a large number of them have learned that the old theory ofwomen being represented at the polls by their husbands is very largely adelusion. 

The entrance of women in large numbers into labor unions, and intomembership in the Women's Trade Union League is another factor in theincreasing interest of American women in suffrage. After a decision ofthe New York Court of Appeals that the law prohibiting night work ofwomen was unconstitutional, nearly one thousand women book-binders inNew York City made a public announcement that they would thenceforthwork for the ballot. They had been indifferent before, but this closeapplication of politics to their industrial situation--bookbinding isone of the night trades--made them alive to their own helplessness. 

The shirt-waist strike and the garment workers' strike in New York andPhiladelphia, waged so bitterly in 1910, brought great numbers of womeninto the suffrage ranks. Not only were the women strikers convinced thatthe magistrates and the police treated them with more contempt than theydid the voting men, but they perceived the need of securing better laborlaws for themselves. The conviction that women of the wealthier classeswould stand by them in securing favorable laws, as they stood by thestrikers in the industrial struggle, was a strong lever to turn themtowards the suffrage ranks. 

[Illustration: MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH]

The Women's Trade Union League building, used as strike headquarters inall strikes involving women workers, is a veritable center of suffragesentiment in New York! One floor houses the offices of the EqualityLeague of Self Supporting Women, of which Harriot Stanton Blatch isfounder and president. This society, which is entirely made up of tradeand professional workers, claims an approximate membership of twenty-twothousand. A number of unions belong to the League, and there is also avery large individual membership. 

In Chicago the suffrage movement and the labor movement is more closelyassociated than in any other American city. In Chicago, it will beremembered, the Teachers' Federation is a trade union and is allied tothe Central Labor Union. Teachers, almost everywhere denied equal paywith men for equal work, are eager seekers for political power. When, asin Chicago, they are associated with labor, they become convincedsuffragists. 

Organized labor has always been friendly to woman suffrage, but inChicago not only the union women but the union men are actively friendlytowards the cause. The original moving spirit in the Chicagoorganization was a remarkable young working girl, Josephine Casey. MissCasey sold tickets at one of the stations of the Chicago Elevated, andshe formed her first woman suffrage club among the women members of theUnion of Street and Elevated Railway Employees. Later she organized on alarger scale the Women's Political Equality Union, with membership opento men and women alike. The interest shown in the union by workingmen, many of whom had never before given the matter a moment's thought, was, from the first, extraordinary. During the first winter of the society'sexistence, union after union called for Woman Suffrage speakers. Addresses were made before fifty or more. Some of the more popularspeakers often made four addresses in an evening. Mrs. Raymond Robins, president of the National Women's Trade Union League, and Miss AliceHenry, secretary of the Chicago branch of the League, won many convertsby their expositions of the exceedingly favorable labor laws ofAustralia and New Zealand, where women vote. 

[Illustration: MEETING A RELEASED SUFFRAGETTE PRISONER. ]

Unquestionably the mighty battle which is waging in England made a deepimpression on American women of all classes. The visits made in thiscountry by Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. Borrman Wells, Mrs. PhilipSnowden, and, most of all, Mrs. Pankhurst, leader of the militantEnglish Suffragists, aroused tremendous enthusiasm from one end of thecountry to the other. Never, until these women appeared, telling, withrare eloquence, their stories of struggle, of arrest and imprisonment, had the vote appeared such an incomparable treasure. Never before, except among a few enthusiasts, had there existed any feeling that thesuffrage was a thing to fight for, suffer for, even to die for. 

Up to this time the suffrage was a theory, an academic question of rightand justice. After the visits of the English women, American suffragistseverywhere began to view their cause in the light of a politicalmovement. They began to adopt political methods. Instead of privatemeetings where suffrage was discussed before a select audience of thealready convinced, the women began to mount soap boxes on street cornersand to talk suffrage to the man in the street. 

The first suffrage demonstration was held in New York in February, 1908. The members of a small but enthusiastic Equal Suffrage Club announcedtheir intention of having a parade. Most of the women being wage earnersthey planned to have their parade on a Sunday. When they applied atPolice Headquarters for the necessary permit they found to their disgustthat Sunday parades were forbidden by law. 

"Not unless you are a funeral procession, " said the stern captain of thepolice. 

The woman replied that they were anything but a funeral procession, andthreatened darkly to hold their parade in spite of police regulations. They got plenty of newspaper publicity in the succeeding days, and onthe following Sunday a huge crowd of men, a sprinkling of women, agenerous number of plain clothes men, and New York's famous "camerasquad" assembled in Union Square, where all incendiary things happen. The dauntless seven who made up the suffrage club were there, and at thepsychological moment one of the women ran up the steps of a parkpavilion and spoke in a ringing voice, yet so quietly that the policemade no move to stop her. 

"Friends, " she said, "we are not allowed to have our parade, so we aregoing to hold a meeting of protest at No. 209 East 23d Street. We inviteyou to go over there with us. " She and the others walked calmly out ofthe square, and the crowd followed. They turned into Fifth Avenue, andthe crowd grew larger. Before three blocks were passed there wereliterally thousands of people marching in the wake of ingenioussuffragists. 

The sight aroused the indignation of many respectable citizens. 

"Officer, " exclaimed one of these, addressing an attendant policeman, "Ithought you had orders that those females were not to parade. "

"That ain't no parade, " said the policeman, serenely; "them folks isjust takin' a quiet walk. "

The suffragists have taken more than one quiet walk since then. Streetspeaking has become an almost daily occurrence. At first there was somerioting, or, rather, some display of rowdyism on the part of thespectators and some show of interference from the police. The crowdslisten respectfully now, and the police are friendly. 

The most practical move the New York Suffragists have made was theorganization, early in 1910, of the Woman Suffrage Party, a fusion ofnearly all the suffrage clubs in the greater city into an associationexactly along the lines of a regular political party. At the head of theparty as president is Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of theInternational Woman Suffrage Association. Each of the five boroughs ofthe city has a chairman, and each senatorial and assembly district iseither organized or is in process of organization. 

[Illustration: THE WOMEN'S TRADES PROCESSION TO THE ALBERT HALL MEETING, APRIL 27, 1909]

Absolutely democratic in its spirit and its organization, the partyleaders are drawn from every rank of society. The chairman of theborough of Manhattan is Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw, wife of a prominentWall Street banker. Mrs. Frederick Nathan, president of the New YorkState Consumers' League, is chairman of the assembly district in whichshe lives. Mrs. Melvil Dewey, whose husband is head of a department atColumbia University, is chairman of her own district. Other chairmen areHelen Hoy Greeley, lawyer; Lavinia Dock, trained nurse; Anna Mercy, anEast Side physician; Maud Flowerton, buyer in a department store;Gertrude Barnum, sociologist and writer. Practically every trade andprofession are represented in the party's ranks. 

The object of the Woman Suffrage Party is organization for politicalwork. Last winter the party made the first aggressive move towardsforcing the Judiciary Committee of the Assembly to report on the bill togive women votes by constitutional amendment. They succeeded in gettinga motion made for the discharge of the committee, sixteen legislatorsvoting for the women. 

New York is the present center of the progressive suffrage movement, with Chicago not very far behind. 

In rather amazing fashion are women in many American communitiesbeginning to realize that politics are as much their business as men's. In Salt Lake City when a city council undertakes to give away a valuablewater franchise, or extend gamblers' privileges, or otherwise follow theexample of many another city council in bending before the god of greed, the women of Salt Lake send the word around. When the council meets thewomen are in the room. They don't say anything. They don't have to sayanything. They can vote, these women. More than once the deep-laid plansof the most powerful politicians in Salt Lake City have been completelyfrustrated by a silent warning from the women. The city council has notdared to pass grafting measures with a roomful of women looking on. 

[Illustration: HELEN HOY GREELEY]

Even the non-voting woman has discovered the power which attaches to herpresence, in certain circumstances. In San Francisco during the secondRuef trial, when the decent element of the city was fighting to down oneof the worst bosses that ever cursed a community, the women, under theleadership of Mrs. Elizabeth Gerberding, performed this new kind ofpicket duty. The courtroom where the trial was held was, by order of theboss's attorney, packed with hired toughs whose duty it was to make amockery of the prosecution. Every point against the Ruef side wasreceived by these toughs with jeers and hootings. The district attorneywas insulted, badgered, and openly threatened with violence. 

Mrs. Gerberding, whose husband is editor of a newspaper opposed to bossrule, attended several sessions, and induced a large number of women ofsocial importance to attend with her. These women went daily to thecourtroom, occupying seats to the exclusion of many of the toughcharacters, and by their presence doing much to preserve order and toassist the efforts of the district attorney. When the assassin's bulletwas fired at the district attorney a number of the women were present. 

Out of the horror and detestation of this crime was organized theWomen's League of Justice, which soon had a membership of five hundred. The league fought stoutly for the reelection of Heney as districtattorney. Heney was defeated, and the league became the Women's CivicClub of San Francisco, pledged to work for political betterment and aclean city government. 

In four States of the Union, Washington, Oregon, South Dakota, andOklahoma, the voters will this autumn vote for or against constitutionalamendments giving women the right to vote. It is not very probable thatthe Suffragists will win in any of these States, not because the votersare opposed to suffrage, but because they are, for the most part, uninformed. The suffrage advocates have not yet learned enough politicalwisdom to further their cause through education of the voters. 

Although enormous sums of money have been spent in suffrage campaigns, in no one has enough money been available to do the work thoroughly. Inthe four States where the question is at present before the voters, complaint is made that there is not enough money in the treasuriesproperly to circulate literature. 

Many of the wisest leaders in the National Woman Suffrage Association, including Dr. Anna Shaw, Ida Husted Harper, and others, are advising analtogether new method of conducting the struggle for the ballot. Theyadvocate selecting a State, possibly Nebraska, where conditions seemuncommonly favorable, and concentrating the entire strength of thenational organization, every dollar of money in the national treasury, all the speakers and organizers, all the literature, in a mighty effortto give the women of that one State the ballot. The vote won inNebraska, the national association should pass on to the next mostfavorable State and win a victory there. The moral effect of suchcampaigns would no doubt be very great. 

One of the principal reasons why men hesitate in this country to givethe voting power to women is that they do not know, and they rather fearto guess, how far women would unite in forcing their own policies on thecountry. If an Irish vote, or a German vote, or a Catholic vote, or aHebrew vote is to be dreaded, say the men, how much more of a menacewould a woman vote be. I heard a man, a delegate from an anti-suffrageassociation, solemnly warn the New York State Legislature, at a suffragehearing, against this danger of a woman vote. "When the majority ofwomen and the minority of men vote together, " he declared, "there willbe no such thing as personal liberty left in the United States. "

[Illustration: SUFFRAGETTES IN MADISON SQUARE. ]

Under certain conditions a woman vote is not an unthinkable contingency. It has even occurred. 

For the edification of the possible reader who is entirely uninformed, it may be explained that women are not entirely disenfranchised in theUnited States. Women vote on equal terms with men, in four States. Theyhave voted in Wyoming since 1869; in Colorado since 1894; in Utah andIdaho since 1896. They vote at school elections and on certain questionsof taxation in twenty-eight States. 

While it is true that in the States which have a small measure ofsuffrage the women show little interest in voting, in the four so-calledsuffrage States, they vote conscientiously and in about the sameproportion as men. 

But here is a notable thing. The women of the suffrage States differ solittle from the women of other States, and women in general, that thechief concerns of their lives are the home, the school, and thebaby, --the Kaiser's "Kirche, Küche, und Kinder" over again. They votewith enthusiasm on all questions which relate to domestic interests, that is, which directly relate to them and their children. Aside fromthis, the woman vote has made a deep impression on the moral characterof candidates and that is about all it has meant. In general politicswomen have counted scarcely more than have the women of other States. 

But the new interest in suffrage, the new realization of themselves ascitizens that has been aroused all over the United States within thepast two years have seriously affected the women voters of at least onesuffrage State, Colorado. 

The women of Colorado, especially the women of Denver, have for severalyears taken an active part in legislation directly affecting themselvesand their children. The legislative committee of the Colorado StateFederation of Clubs has held regular meetings during the sessions of theState Legislature, and it has been a regular custom to submit to thatcommittee for approval all bills relating to women and children. Thisnever seemed to the politicians to be anything very dangerous to theirinterests. It was, in a manner of speaking, a chivalric acknowledgmentof women's virtue as wives and mothers. 

But lately the women of Colorado have begun to wake up to the fact thatnot only special legislation, but all legislation, is of direct interestto them. It has lately dawned upon them that the matter of streetrailway franchise affects the home as directly as a proposition to erecta high school. Also it has dawned on them that without organization, andmore organization, the woman vote was more or less powerless. So, abouta year ago they formed in Denver an association of women which theycalled the Public Service League. Nothing quite like it ever existedbefore. It is a political but non-partisan association of women, pledgedto work for the civic betterment of Denver, pledged to fight the corruptpoliticians, determined that the city government shall be welladministered even if the women have to take over the offices themselves. The League is, in effect, a secret society of women. It has aninflexible rule that its proceedings are to be kept inviolable. There isa perfect understanding that any woman who divulges one syllable of whatoccurs at a meeting of the League will be instantly dropped frommembership. No woman has yet been dropped. 

It may well be understood that this secret society of women, thisnon-partisan league of voters, is a thing to strike terror into theheart of a ward boss. As a matter of fact, the corrupt politicians andthe equally corrupt heads of corporations who had long held Denver inbondage regard the Public Service League in mingled dread anddetestation. Equally as a matter of fact politicians of a better classare anxious to enlist the good will of the League. Last summer a Denverelection involved a question of granting a twenty years' franchise to astreet railway company. Opposed to the granting of the franchise was anewly formed citizens' party. Opposed also was the Women's PublicService League. In gratitude for the co-operation of the League theCitizens' Party offered a place on the electoral ticket to any womanchosen by the League. 

It was the first time in the history of Colorado that a municipal officehad been offered to a woman, and the League promptly took advantage ofit. They named as a candidate for Election Commissioner Miss EllisMeredith, one of the best known, best loved women in the State. Asjournalist and author and club woman Miss Meredith is known far beyondher own State, and her nomination created intense interest not onlyamong the women of her own city and State, but among club womeneverywhere. 

On the evening of May 3, 1910, there was a meeting held in the BroadwayTheater, Denver, the like of which no American city ever beforewitnessed. It was a women's political mass meeting to endorse thecandidacy of a woman municipal official. The meeting was entirely in thehands of women. Presiding over the immense throng was Mrs. Sarah PlattDecker, formerly president, and still leader of the General Federationof Women's Clubs. Beside her sat Mrs. Helen Grenfell, for thirteen yearscounty and State superintendent of schools, Mrs. Helen Ring Robinson, Mrs. Martha A. B. Conine, and Miss Gail Laughlin, all women of note intheir community. The enthusiasm aroused by that meeting did not subside, and on the day of the election Miss Meredith ran so far ahead of herticket that it seemed as if every woman in Denver, as well as most ofthe men, had voted for her. She took her place in the Board of ElectionCommissioners, and was promptly elected Chairman of the Board. 

There is nothing especially attractive about the office of ElectionCommissioner. In accepting the nomination Miss Meredith said franklythat she was influenced mainly by two things: first a desire to test theloyalty of the women voters, and second, because, while women had beenheld accountable for elections which have disgraced the city of Denver, they have never before been given a chance to manage the elections. 

Nothing is more certain that women, when they become enfranchised, willnever, in any large numbers, appear as office seekers. It is probablethat office will be thrust upon the ablest of them. Mrs. Sarah PlattDecker has been spoken of as a possible future Mayor of Denver, and itis certain that she could be elected to Congress if she would allowherself to be placed in nomination. 

A few women have been elected to the legislatures in the suffrageStates, and they have held high office in educational departments. Insuffrage and nonsuffrage States they have been elected to many countyoffices. Miss Gertrude Jordan is Treasurer of Cherry County, Nebraska. In Idaho, Texas, Louisiana, and several other States women have filledthe same position. The State of Kansas is a true believer in womenoffice-holders, even though it refuses its women complete suffrage. Women can vote in Kansas only at municipal elections, but in fortycounties men have elected women school superintendents. They are clerksof four counties, treasurers of three, and commissioners of one. In onecounty of Kansas a woman is probate judge. The good and faithful workdone by these women ought to go a long way towards educating men oftheir community to the idea of political association with women. 

The attitude of men towards suffrage has undergone an enormous changewithin the past two years. A large number of the thinking men of thecountry have openly enlisted in the Suffrage ranks. It is said thatalmost every member of the faculty of Columbia University signed theSuffrage petition presented to the Congress of 1909. Well-knownprofessors of many Western universities and colleges have spoken andwritten in favor of equal suffrage. In New York City a flourishingVoters' League for Equal Suffrage has been formed, with a membershiprunning into the hundreds. 

[Illustration: THE "QUIET WALK" OF THE NEW YORK SUFFRAGISTS, WHOM THEPOLICE WOULD NOT PERMIT TO PARADE]

To the average unprejudiced man the old arguments against politicalequality have almost entirely lost weight. The theory that women shouldnot vote because they cannot fight is now rarely argued. Municipalgovernments certainly no longer rest on physical force. The same is trueof state governments, and it is probably true of national governments. At all events we are sincerely trying to make it true. For the rest itwould be extremely difficult to prove that women would make undesirablecitizens. To the anxious inquiry, What will women do with their votes?the answer is simple. They will do with their votes precisely what theydo, or try to do, without votes. This has been proven in every countryin the world where they have received the franchise. In Australia, NewZealand, Finland, and in the English municipalities the ideal of thecommon good has been reflected in the woman vote. Social legislationalone interests women, and so far they have confined their efforts tomatters of education, child labor, pure food, sanitation, control ofliquor traffic, and public morals. The organized non-voting women ofthis country have devoted themselves for years to precisely theseobjects. Without votes, without precedents, and without very much moneythey instituted the playground movement, and the juvenile courtmovement, two of the greatest reforms this country has contributed tocivilization. They have instituted a dozen reforms in our educationalsystem. They practically invented the town and village improvement idea. They have co-operated with every social reform advocated by men, and itis to be noted that wherever their judgment has been in error they haveconscientiously erred in favor of a wider democracy, a more exaltedsocial ideal. 

[Illustration: SUFFRAGE DEMONSTRATION IN UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK]

However long-deferred Woman Suffrage may prove to be, it is prettygenerally conceded that women will inevitably vote some day. Theevolution of society will bring them into political equality with menjust as it has brought them into intellectual and industrial equality. The first woman who followed her spinning-wheel out of her home into thefactory was the natural ancestress of the first woman who demanded theballot. 

The application of steam to machinery took women's trades out of thehome and placed them in the factory. The effect of this was that menwere confronted with a singular dilemma. They had to choose between twocourses; they had to support their women in idleness, or else they hadto allow them to leave the home and go where their trades had gone. Thefirst course involving the intolerable burden of doing their own andtheir women's work, they were obliged to choose the second. Thejealously-guarded doors of the home were opened, and little by little, grudgingly, the men admitted women to full industrial freedom. 

Women's housekeeping, or most of it, has gradually been withdrawn fromthe home and transferred to the municipality. There was a time whenwomen could ensure their families pure food, good milk, clean ice, proper sanitation. They cannot do that now. The City Hall governs allsuch matters. Again the men find themselves facing the old dilemma. Theymust either support their women in idleness--do all their own as well asthe women's housekeeping--or they must allow their women to leave thehome and follow their housekeeping to the place where it is now beingdone, --the polls. 

Women are beginning to understand the situation. They are even beginningto understand how badly the men are providing for the municipal family. They are demanding their old housekeeping tasks back again. To thispoint has the Suffrage movement, begun in 1848 by a band of women calledfanatics, arrived. 

CHAPTER XI

IN CONCLUSION

I have tried to set down in these pages the collective opinion of women, as far as it has expressed itself through deeds. I have not succeeded ifany reader lays down the book with the impression that he has merelybeen reading the story of the American club woman. I have not succeededat all if my readers imagine that I have been writing only about aselected group of women. What I have meant to do is to show theinstinctive bent of the universal woman mind in all ages, reflected inthe actions of the freest group of women the world has ever seen. 

I might have reanimated ages of stone and of bronze; might have shownyou women, through slow centuries, inventing the arts of spinning andweaving, and pottery molding; learning to build, to till the earth, togrind and to cook grains, to tan skins for clothing against the cold. Noone taught them these things. Out of their brains, as undeveloped and asprimitive as the brains of men, they would never have conceived so muchwisdom. The vague mind of the savage woman never sent her to the spider, the nesting bird, and the burrowing squirrel to learn to weave and tobuild and to store. When we find exactly what it was that taughtprimitive woman how to lay the first stones of civilization, we have aperfect philosophical understanding of all women. 

I chose to interpret the woman mind through the modern American woman, partly because she has learned the great lesson of organization, and hasthus been able to work more effectively, and to impress her will on thecommunity more strikingly than other women in other ages. What she hasdone is apparent and easy to prove. 

Also, I chose the American club woman because she represents, not anunusually gifted type, but the average intelligent, well-educated, energetic, wife-and-mother type of woman. The club woman is not radical, or at least not consciously radical. She has not, like the progressiveGerman and Russian woman, theories of political regeneration or offamily reconstruction. What she desires, what ideals she has formed, Ithink must fairly represent the desires and ideals of the great mass ofwomen of the twentieth century. 

When we survey the activities the club women have engaged in, when wediscover why they chose exactly these activities, we have a perfectphilosophical understanding, not only of the modern woman mind, but ofthe cave woman mind and all the woman mind in between. 

The woman mind is the most unchangeable thing in the world. It hasturned on identically the same pivot since the present race began. Perhaps before. 

Turn back and count over the club women's achievements, the things theyhave chosen to do, the things they want. Observe first of all that theywant very little for themselves. Even their political liberty they wantonly because it will enable them to get other things--things needed, directly or indirectly, by children. Most of the things are directlyneeded, --playgrounds, school gardens, child-labor laws, juvenile courts, kindergartens, pure food laws, and other visible tokens of childconcern. Many of the other things are indirectly needed bychildren, --ten-hour working days, seats for shop girls, protection fromdangerous machinery, living wages, opportunities for safe and wholesomepleasures, peace and arbitration, social purity, legal equality withmen, all objects which tend to conserve the future mothers of children. These are the things women want. 

In my introductory chapter I cited three extremely grave and significantfacts which confront modern civilization. The first was the fact ofwomen's growing economic freedom, their emancipation from domesticslavery. I believe that women would not wish to be economically free iftheir instinct gave them any warning that freedom for them meant dangerto their children. But no observer of social conditions can have failedto observe the oceans of misery endured by women and children because oftheir economic dependence on the fortunes of husbands and fathers. 

Whatever may be the solution of poverty, whatever be the future statusof the family, it seems certain to me that some way will be devisedwhereby motherhood will cease to be a privately supported profession. Insome way society will pay its own account. If producing citizens to theState be the greatest service a woman citizen can perform, the Statewill ultimately recognize the right of the woman citizen to protectionduring her time of service. The first step towards solving the problemis for women to learn to support themselves before the time comes forthem to serve the State. Through the educating process of productivelabor the woman mind may devise a means of protecting the future mothersof the race. 

The second fact, the growing prevalence of divorce, on the face of itseems to menace the security of the home and of children. So deeplyoverlain with prejudice, conventionalities, and theological traditionsis the average woman as well as the average man that it is difficult toargue in favor of a temporary tolerance of divorce that a permanent highstandard of marriage may be established. But to my mind any state ofaffairs, even a Reno state of affairs, looks more encouraging than theold conditions under which innocent girls married to rakes and drunkardswere forbidden to escape their chains. It is not for the good ofchildren to be born of disease and misery and hatred. It is not fortheir good to be brought up in an atmosphere of hopeless inharmony. Whatis happening in this country is not a weakening of the marriage bond, but a strengthening of it. For soon there will grow up in the Americanman's mind a desire for a marriage which will be at least as equitableas a business partnership; as fair to one party as to the other. He willcease to regard marriage as a state of bondage for the wife and a stateof license for the husband. He will not venture to suggest to a brightwoman that cooking in his kitchen is a more honorable career thanteaching, or painting, or writing, or manufacturing. Marriage will notmean extinction to any woman. It will mean to the well-to-do wifefreedom to do community service. It will mean to the industrial woman aneconomic burden shared. When that time comes there will be no divorceproblem. There will be no longer a class of women who avoid the risk ofdivorce by refusing to marry. 

The third fact, the increasing popularity of woman suffrage, I disposedof in the preceding chapter. Nothing that the women who vote have everdone indicates, in the remotest degree, that they are not just asmindful of children's interests at the polls as other women are in theirnurseries and kitchens. 

On the contrary, wherever women have left their kitchens and nurseries, whenever they have gone out into the world of action and of affairs, they have increased their effectiveness as mothers. I do not mean bythis that the girl who enters a factory at fourteen and works there tenhours a day until she marries increases her effectiveness as a mother. Industrial slavery unfits a woman for motherhood as certainly asintellectual and moral slavery unfits her. 

Women who are free, who look on life through their own eyes, who thinktheir own thoughts, who live in the real world of striving, struggling, suffering humanity, are the most effective mothers that ever lived. Theyknow how to care for their own children, and more than that, they knowhow to care for the community's children. 

The child at his mother's knee, spelling out the words of a psalm, stands for the moral education of the race--or it used to. A group ofChicago club women walking boldly into the city Bridewell and the CookCounty Jail and demanding that children of ten and twelve should nolonger be locked up with criminals; these same women, after the childrenwere segregated, establishing a school for them, and finally these samewomen achieving a juvenile court, is the modern edition of the oldideal. 

Woman's place is in the home. This is a platitude which no woman willever dissent from, provided two words are dropped out of it. Woman'splace is Home. Her task is homemaking. Her talents, as a rule, aremainly for homemaking. But Home is not contained within the four wallsof an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people isthe Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do the Homeand the Family and the Nursery need their mother. 

I dream of a community where men and women divide the work of governingand administering, each according to his special capacities and naturalabilities. The division of labor between them will be on natural and notconventional lines. No one will be rewarded according to sex, butaccording to work performed. The city will be like a great, well-ordered, comfortable, sanitary household. Everything will be asclean as in a good home. Every one, as in a family, will have enough toeat, clothes to wear, and a good bed to sleep on. There will be noslums, no sweat shops, no sad women and children toiling in tenementrooms. There will be no babies dying because of an impure milk supply. There will be no "lung blocks" poisoning human beings that landlords maypile up sordid profits. No painted girls, with hunger gnawing at theirempty stomachs, will walk in the shadows. All the family will be takencare of, taught to take care of themselves, protected in their dailytasks, sheltered in their homes. 

The evil things in society are simply the result of half the human race, with only half the wisdom, and not even half the moral power containedin the race, trying to rule the world alone. Men's government rests onforce, on violence. Everything evil, everything bad, everything selfish, is a form of violence. Poverty itself is a form of violence. 

Women will not tolerate violence. They loathe waste. They cannot bear tosee illness and suffering and starvation. Alone, they are no morecapable of coping with these evils than men are. But they have the veryresources that men lack. Working with men they could accomplishmiracles. 

Note the inventiveness of women, most of which goes to waste becausethey lack the wonderful constructive ability of men. Women inventedspinning. They could never have harnessed the lightning to their wheels. Women established the first public playgrounds. Men extended the publicplaygrounds across the country. 

Women established the juvenile court. Men took it over and worked out anew system of criminal jurisprudence for children. Women have cleaned upa hundred cities. Men are rebuilding them. Slowly men and women arelearning to live and work together. Reluctantly men are coming to acceptwomen as their co-workers. 

Woman's place is Home, and she must not be forbidden to dwell there. Whowould be so selfish, so blind, so reactionary, as to forbid her herfullest freedom to do her work, must surrender opposition in the end. For woman's work is race preservation, race improvement, and who opposesher, or interferes with her, simply fights nature, and nature neverloses her battles. 

INDEX

Aberdeen, Countess of, Addams, Jane, Alabama, Aladyn, Alexis, Albert Hall, London, Albion House of Refuge, N. Y. , Aldrich, Mrs. Richard, Allegheny, Pa. , Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenbund, American, Sadie, American Federation of LaborAmerican women and common lawArbitration, Argentine, Arizona, ArkansasArthur, Mrs. Clara B. , Association of Collegiate Alumnae, Association of Working Girls' Clubs, Augsberg, Anita, Australia, Austria

Balliett, Thomas M. , Barnum, GertrudeBarrett, Mrs. Kate Waller, Bedford Reformatory, N. Y. , Belmont, Mrs. O. H. P. , Berlin, Birmingham, Ala. , BlackstoneBlackwell's Island, Blatch, Harriot Stanton, Bluhm, Agnes, Boston, MassBoston Central Labor Union, Boswell, Helen V. , Brandeis, Louis D. Brewer, Justice, Brooklyn, N. Y. , Bullowa, Emilie, CaliforniaCarlisle, Pa. , Carnegie, Andrew, Casey, Josephine, Catt, Mrs. Carrie Chapman, Cauer, Minna, ChicagoChild, Lydia Maria, Church, the Christian, its relation to social problems, Civic Club of Allegheny CountyCivic Club of Philadelphia, Cleveland, O. Cliff Dwellers' remains, Cobden Sanderson, Mrs. , Code NapoleonCole, ElsieCollege Settlements Association, Colony Club, Colorado, Colorado State Federation of Clubs, Columbia University, Columbus, Ohio, Common law, Coney IslandConine, Mrs. Martha A. B. , Consumers' League of N. Y. , Consumers' LeaguesConventions of women's clubs, Corpus Juris, Cotton mills, women and girls inCouncil of WomenCranford, N. J. , Cutting, Fulton, Dallas, Tex. , Dance halls, Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Confederacy, Davis, Mrs. Jefferson, Decker, Mrs. Sarah Platt, Delaware, Denver, Colo. , Department stores, Detroit, Devine, Edward T. , Dewey, Mrs. Melvil, Dineen, Governor, District of Columbia, DivorceDock, Lavinia, Domestic service, _Domestic Service_, ProfessorSalmon's, Donnelly, Annie, Dreier, Mary, Dutcher, Elizabeth, Eight-hour day, Ely Bates Settlement, Employment agencies, EnglandEquality League of Self-Supporting Women, Europe, European women, Evans, Mrs. Glendower, Factories, Fall River, Mass. Festivals, play, FeudalismFilene system, FinlandFloridaFlowerton, Maud, Folks, Homer, France, Franks, SalianFrench Code, Gad, Elizabeth, General Federation of Women's Clubs, GeorgiaGerberding, Mrs. Elizabeth, German Woman Suffrage Association, Germany, Gillespie, Mabel, Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, her _Women and Economics_, "Girls' Bill, "Girls' Friendly Association, Golden, John, Goldmark, Josephine, Goldmark, Pauline, Gompers, SamuelGrannis, Mrs. Elizabeth, Greece, Greece, Queen of, Greeley, Helen Hoy, Greenbaum, Sadie, Grenfell, Mrs. Helen, Gulick, Luther H. , Harper, Ida Husted, Harrisburg, Pa. , Hearn, Henry, Alice, Holland, Housekeepers' Alliance, Hughes, Governor, Hundred Years' War, Iceland, Idaho, Illinois, Inheritance, Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research, International Council of Women, International Woman Suffrage AllianceIowa, Israels, Mrs. Charles M. Italy, Janes, Elizabeth, Jefferson Market Court, Jordan, Gertrude, KansasKellor, Frances, Kennard, Beulah, Kirby, John, Jr. , Kusserow, Anna

Lafferty, Mrs. Alma, Laidlaw, Mrs. James Lees, Lake City, Minn. , Laughlin, Gail, Laundries, Law, AmericanLegal Aid Society of N. Y. City, Legal disabilities of womenLeipzig, Lemlich, Clara, Libraries, Los Angeles, Cal. , LouisianaLowell, Mrs. Josephine Shaw, Luxemburg, MacLean, Annie Marian, Maloney, Elizabeth, Marot, HelenMassachusettsMassachusetts Bureau of Labor StatisticsMcEwans, the, Men, their attitude toward womenMercantile Employers' BillMerchants' Association of N. Y. , Mercy, Anna, Meredith, EllisMilholland, Inez, Mills, Mills, Enos, Miner, Maude E. , Miner, Stella, Missouri, Mitchell, John, Montana, Moore, Mrs. Philip N. , Morgan, AnneMott, Lucretia, Muller, Curt

Napoleon, Napoleon CodeNathan, Mrs. FrederickNational Civic Federation, National Congress of Mothers, National Manufacturers' AssociationNational Society of Collegiate Alumnae, National Woman Suffrage AssociationNebraskaNestor, Agnes, Nevada, New England, New Haven, Conn. New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, New York, N. Y. , New York Telephone Co. , New Zealand, Night Court. See _Jefferson Market Court_Night work of women, North CarolinaNorth Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Orange, House of, Oregon, Oregon case, Oregon Standard, _Out of Work_, Miss Kellor's

Palisades of the Hudson, Panama Canal, Pankhurst, Mrs. , Paris, PeacePennsylvania, Persia, Philadelphia, Pike, Violet, Pittsburg, Playgrounds, Playgrounds Association of AmericaPortland, Ore. , PortugalPotter, Virginia, Probation Association of N. Y. , Property Law, Married Women's, Public Service League of Denver, Colo. Puritans

_Resurrection_, Tolstoy's, Revere Beach, Rheinhard Commission, Rhode Island"Rights of Man, "Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, Robins, Mrs. Raymond, Robinson, Mrs. Helen Ring, Rochester, N. Y. , Industrial School, Roxbury, Mass. , carpet mill strike, Russia, Sage, Mrs. Russell, St. Louis, Mo. Salic Law, Salmon, Prof. Lucy MaynardSalt Lake City, San Francisco, Schoenfeld, Julia, Scranton, Pa. , Seneca Falls convention, Servant problem. See _Domestic Service_Shaw, Dr. Anna, Shirt-waist makers' strike, Smith, "Gypsy, "Snowden, Mrs. Philip, Social evil, Social puritySocialist partySouth Africa, South Carolina, South Chicago, South Dakota, SpainStanton, Elizabeth CadyStover, Charles B. , Succession to throne by women, Sweat shop, theSwitzerland

Teacher's Federation of ChicagoTen-hour day, TennesseeTexas, Tillman case, Turkey, Tuthill, Judge R. S. , Twentieth Century Club of Detroit, United States GovernmentUnited States Industrial Commission, United Textile WorkersUtah

Vassar College, Victoria, Queen, Virginia, Voters' League for Equal Suffrage, Wage earning, women in, Washington (state), Waverley House, White, Mrs. Lovell, "White Slave" trafficWhitman, Charles S. , Wilhelmina, Queen, Windeguth, DoraWinthrop, Mrs. Egerton, _Woman and Economics_, Gilman's, Woman suffrage, Woman Suffrage PartyWoman's Christian Temperance Union, Woman's Municipal League of N. Y. , Women, their ideals, in Europe, in America, in industry, their fight against the social evil, in domestic service, collective opinion of, Women's Civic Club of San Francisco, Women's Club, of Lake City, Minn. , of Dallas, Tex. , of San Francisco, of Pittsburg of Detroit, of Philadelphia, of Harrisburg, Pa. , of Birmingham, Ala. , of Carlisle, Pa. , of Cranford, N. J. , Women's ClubsWomen's Educational and Industrial Union of BostonWomen's League of Justice, Women's Political Equality Union, Women's Property Act, Women's Trade Union LeagueWorking Women's SocietyWyoming, Yonkers, N. Y. , Young Women's Christian Association