Women and Machines

‘As much a woman’s job as a man’s,’ said a manufacturer, commenting on the work of women recently initiated into the operation of milling machines. By what mysterious process ‘milling’ (which has to do with metals, not flour) is accomplished, is unimportant. Its claim to distinction is its power to break through the barriers between women’s work and men’s work, and to become, as it were, a sexless job. This is but one of several hundred mechanical tasks of industry described as women’s new opportunities in a forthcoming report of the Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor and the War-Work Council of the Young Women’s Christian Association, under the title, The New Position of Women in American Industry.

The volume does not indulge in prophecy, but confines itself to the security of comprehensive statistics (from nearly fifteen thousand firms, employing almost two and a half million workers), setting forth for the first time the official record of the occupations of women during the war, and their retention since the Armistice in new tasks. With so definite a foundation on which to stand, it is tempting to analyze the more elusive factors and tendencies in women’s present industrial status. For women in industry represent one of many undetermined forces in a generation of uncertainties, and prophecy requires rash courage; but to invite others to observe changes that have already taken place, and to measure the direction of influences now operating, is not too bold an undertaking.

I

The war record, at least, is clear. Management in industry, and not feminism, opened the way to novel work for women. The usual explanation is that the war did it. Superficially, the war appears to have released the powers of women in industrial processes more effectively than all the preaching of economic independence during the past fifty years. Actually, however, by no known alchemy can war be converted into spiritual kinship with feminism. The war played a part because the strain which it put upon industrial capacity forced industry into the service of the community; and the prejudices against women’s employment in the more skilled mechanical processes were relaxed because there was no one else to produce while the men were fighting. Prejudices were laid aside ‘for the period of the war,’ but not shaken out of men’s minds permanently. Nor has industry, although temporarily controlled for national service, lost its power to exploit women as cheap and docile labor. This, however, anticipates a comment that belongs later.

The gain made in the war was the practical demonstration of women’s unsuspected industrial capacity. Their record is an accomplished fact, which may be destined to modify, alike, prejudices and the customs which they influence. But the condition to be modified is made of sterner stuff than men’s opinions.

Iron and steel, the first requisites in war, made the heaviest demands for women. Of the million or more workers employed in the various branches of their manufacture before the war, less than three in every hundred were women; but after the second draft for the army, in the late summer of 1918, the proportion of women more than trebled. By that time over forty thousand of them were employed in nearly a thousand plants, making firearms and ammunition, and fashioning other products which previously few women had ever had a chance to learn to handle. Making aeroplanes was an industry virtually created during the war. One woman had been found in it by the census enumerators in 1914; more than six thousand were employed in 1918. In the making of explosives, the Director of Munitions in the office of the Secretary of War reported that fully half of the workers were women, ‘who,’he said,‘braved the dangers . . . to which they had been, of course, entirely unaccustomed, but whose perils were not unknown to them.’ The factories manufacturing ploughshares continued to make them, since food, too, must win the war; but they made, also, tanks, trucks, shells, and grenades, and to meet all these needs increased the proportion of women fourfold, while the actual number of men employed decreased.

The labor of women was required, not only for the manufacture of these many types of equipment for the army, but for the production of food and fabrics for soldiers and civilians. These, however, were not new opportunities for women, but accustomed tasks.

In brief, so extensive were the changes in the claims of industry upon women that five and a half pages of close, small type of a government report are required for a mere listing, in paragraph form, of the processes in which women were actually substituted for men. They ranged in their main divisions from blast-furnaces and steelworks to logging-camps and sawmills. The details included, in multitudinous diversity, the making of chemical analyses of steel, the operating of cranes, core-making, acetylene welding, stamping tin, loading cartridges, caning chairs, operating lathes, and many other tasks with technical names so unfamiliar as to give no picture to the reader except an impression of variety and complexity.

For women, the varied jobs opened to them not only offered a chance to try their hands at unfamiliar occupations: they gave opportunity for release from a restricted group of industries hitherto open to them. Before the war three fourths of the women employed in manufacturing and mechanical industries were concentrated in shops making textiles, personal apparel, gloves and shoes, food, and tobacco products. The notable fact of the war experience is the drift of women from these traditional pursuits to novel adventures in mechanics.

More important than the industries opened to them was the work they did. That the proportions of women increased so greatly in the iron and steel industries and the metal trades is interesting as part of the history of the war; but more promising for the future is the fact that they learned how to operate the same machines that are used in making scientific instruments, automobiles, optical goods, and motorcycles. In managing these successfully, they were acquiring a skill which could be turned to account in manufacturing many products used in the normal times of peace. The lathe is a good illustration, because practical knowledge of its principles of operation gives the mastery of other cutting machines.

Were these large increases in the proportions of employed women due to the fact that it takes two or more women to do the work of one man? In crane-operating, yes; because women were employed in three eight-hour shifts, where men had worked in two twelve-hour shifts — a practice, by the way,which many managers in industry have now made obsolete; here, then, three women were employed in place of two men. But in all the industries considered together, with this kind of exception, ninety-eight to a hundred men were released for every hundred women employed. Hundreds of jobs, like milling, became sexless. The wise and the esteemed employer was not the one who clung to past practice, but the pioneer, who discovered new ways of releasing men for the army by successfully initiating women into their jobs.

Did the women succeed? ‘No,’ said one group of employers. ‘Women are not desirable in our work because of lack of physical endurance and training; nor are they temperamentally capable of attaining the same efficiency in machine work as a man.’ ‘Yes,’ said another group, much larger in numbers. ‘Women, if properly trained, can do as well as, if not better than, men in any kind of mechanical work.’

More important than opinions, however, was the analysis of conditions in the plants where success or failure was reported. Results apparently depended less on the kind of work, or even on the degree of skill required, than on the intelligence with which women were initiated into their new work, the mechanical changes planned where they were necessary (to the advantage of men as well as women), and especially the training given.

Uncle Sam, in spite of dire need for skilled mechanics during the war, was slow to provide training for women. In the year ending June 30, 1919,— including the four months of greatest acceleration in extending the employment of women before the Armistice was signed, — the Federal Board for Vocational Education was giving national aid, financially, to classes in which ten thousand girls were learning dressmaking, millinery, lampshade-making, power-sewing-machine operating, pasting and leather work, French-edgemaking, and embroidery designing. Little in common is found between this list and the mechanical industries which were at that moment anxiously recruiting women. The factories gave their own training, in more or less haphazard ways; while the Federal Board calmly sums up, thus, its work for the period: ‘The occupations for which training is offered are distinctively women’s occupations, and raise no debatable issues.’

It was in the security of the months after the signing of the Armistice, when opinions were normal again,— whatever that may mean, — that this frank confession was published by the Federal Board. ‘Debatable issues’ had been allowed to become quiescent while the war was on. That is the important fact for women. Their newwork did not settle old claims. When industry needed them, barriers against a choice of employment were removed. When the immediate dangers of war were past, the prejudices came to life once more. Witness, in the months that followed the Armistice, the many expressions of opinion in print and in speech that then was the time for women to return to their own work.

Industry itself, however, thought otherwise. The most important discovery that rewarded the diligent search after statistics revealed in this newest report of the Women’s Bureau is the retention of women in their new occupations. Three statistical figures will be sufficient to express the facts in regard to the industries of the war — those concerning iron and steel, metals, aeroplanes and implements for battle, excluding the foods and fabrics that women are traditionally expected to produce. In 1914, of every thousand wage-earners in these unfeminine industries, sixtyfive were women; in October and November, 1918, one hundred and thirtynine in every thousand were women; and in August, 1919, nine months after the fighting had ceased, women had so far held their own, and advanced their chances over 1914, as to constitute a hundred of every thousand.

When the fighting stopped, industry, of course, faced another revolutionary transition from war-products to the work of peace, and many plants curtailed their force. In some instances, work done by women — making gasmasks, for instance — came to an end. Extra shifts were disbanded in many plants. Indeed, forty out of every hundred were, in the language of industry, ‘laid off.’ Of every hundred men in the important war industries, sixtytwo were retained; of every hundred women employed in November, 1918, forty-three were at work in August, 1919. The larger proportions of women displaced in the transition from war to peace are accounted for, in part, by some previously wageless women of the ‘leisure class,’ by parttime workers, and by some married women who had been lured into industry by the war-emergency, with no intention of continuing. With the importance of the lathe in mind as the key to success in mechanical industries, the fact is impressive that of the firms questioned in 1919 who had recruited women for this job during the war, more than half were retaining them.

II

In accomplishing these changes, ideas and public opinion have lagged behind tangible and practical adjustments in the shops. We are almost prepared to assert that, if women are on the way to enlarged opportunities in industry, business, and not feminism, will open the way. But no one who has had even a glimpse of the new spirit of women can doubt that, if the managers of business undertake to make changes affecting them, they will have to deal with feminism, whether or not they understand that name and its purposes.

Machinery versus feminism — this is the real issue. Machinery — or, to use its more abstract title, business — does not know yet that feminism has any connection with it, or lives in the same town. Feminism is immensely interested in machinery just now, and does not know its dangers. She calls it ‘equal opportunity,’ and she thinks that, like a brave David, she needs no more power to conquer than she can carry in her bare hands. She has won the vote. Economic opportunity seems to her no more difficult to attain.

Thus these two forces stand over against each other — industry, never more problematical, transitional, uncertain of the coming phase of control, and women, confident that economic freedom is their next goal after political equality, but not yet cognizant of the burdensome and baffling ways of winning it. They seem to have forgiven industry all its past. Or, perhaps, some of them do not know that it has ever oppressed women more than men.

Some women — feminists also — know it by practical experience. These are the women in industry, who are urging laws to improve the conditions of their employment. Other women, not in industry, but familiar with its problems, stand with them in these efforts. Feminism, therefore, is by no means a unit.

The most audible interest of one group just now seems to be to forego all labor laws which are limited to women, lest they restrict women’s ‘opportunities.’ Surrender of all special protection for all women is the price they offer to pay for a novel job. And it must be said that it has often been the women in the professions who have been willing thus to offer up the present safeguards affecting their sisters in the factories — without consulting those sisters.

III

A chance to learn to operate a machine is not a woman’s most important claim on industry. A distinction must be made between technical skill and the status of an individual or a group in the industry. If technical skill were all, we could predict women’s future from the recent past. Careful selection of workers, healthful physical conditions, adequate training, would ensure success. But all the trouble men have had with industry arises out of much more puzzling conditions. If, as some pessimists declare, industrial organization is in danger of collapse, it is not because it is unskillful technically, but because it is blind socially.

Industry has a bad record for the social hopes of men, and its conspicuous victims have been women and children.

This is merely a poet’s summary of official reports, Blue Books of Parliament, lawyers’ briefs in defense of the constitutionality of labor laws. These have massed the evidence concerning wages too low to support life; hours too long to maintain health or to sleep, without even counting, as normal needs, time for recreation or for the duties of citizenship; too much noise, too rapid a pace, too little air, too much crowding— just being cogs in the wheels, one process hour after hour, uninteresting and uninspiring, and not enough return to buy the goods and service from other people’s labor that one has no time or energy left to produce for one’s self.

Technical skill? — the individual has about as much as is necessary, or he can acquire it by easily recognized methods. But status — a claim upon industry, a share in society, the opportunity to relate one’s self to one’s fellow workers and one’s fellow citizens in a common enterprise with equal powers? This it is that men and women are vaguely challenging the state and employers to give them. This it is that is withheld less by the will or greed of any man than by the intricacy of organization in industry, which gives opportunity for the greed and selfishness of a few to oppress a large number. In surrendering to a process essentially coöperative in a mechanical sense, because of its subdivisions and specializations, men have not yet learned how to establish, also, coöperation in control, which shall force industry to yield diffused happiness and economic security instead of concentrated financial success. The war, with all its record of technical achievements, wrought no change in this fundamental tendency of the industrial organization.

That this tendency, as it affects women in industry, is not universally recognized, especially among professional women, is due probably to the inherent difference in their outlook. Successful professional women are conscious of power in themselves, not inherently dependent upon the strength of their relationships with others. They have known what it means to suffer as pioneers; but they knew that they were pioneering, and success was, in a sense, their personal achievement. Not so in industry. There the enterprise is less thrilling. The nation, or even the city, is not vitally interested in a woman’s achievements even in operating the newest machine on the market, except in war-time; and the labelers of cans and packers of hair-nets never dream of exciting anybody’s interest in their accomplishments.

Women work in factories, not primarily for the joy of working, but because they must earn a living, for themselves, and often for others. In too many instances they have had neither joy, nor enough earnings for a living. Managers employ them because they need their labor, and, often, because they want it cheap. Neither the underpaid girl nor her employer is aware of the movements of history which thrill the hopeful prophet of women’s economic emancipation.

Both would be astonished if they knew that the feminist is becoming convinced that, in an age founded on iron and steel, it is the success of women in mechanical industry that must be the first step toward her economic freedom. Nor is it a mere whim that is leading so many professional women, and the victorious leaders in the fight for suffrage, to turn their attention to women in their relation to machines.

IV

On the surface, the fundamental incompatibility of feminism with modern industrial organization seems at present to be an insurmountable obstacle for women. Feminism has been concerned with the removal of prejudices and customs that make sex the barrier against woman’s freedom in the choice of her activities. Its essence is voluntary choice — in marriage, in motherhood, in politics, and in a career. The freedom of the individual, and the release of powers suppressed by artificially imposed limitations, are its goal.

Industry affords a striking contrast. Merely because of its technical developments, quite apart from the selfish use of power, its method of getting results is to give the individual a place in a complex body of inter-relationships, determined by the mechanical processes of manufacture. Management, at its best, not through lack of humanitarianism, but through technical necessity, knows it to be a virtue to standardize jobs, to discover standard speed, standard belts, standard tools. The standard man is the inevitable result. The environment is made ready and he is put into it. ‘Man . . . was a machinate mammal.’ This, elaborated, says Samuel Butler, was the argument of the only man who made serious protest against the complete destruction of machinery throughout Erewhon.

Experience is abundant to show that, whatever may be the scope ultimately for the individual to control conditions, his economic power, like his mechanical accomplishment, cannot be complete unless he acts as one of a group. In brief, it is the method of industry to attach the individual to his limited, specified place in the whole scheme of production; while the aim of feminism is to make the whole recognize a hitherto unrealized obligation to the individual, or, at least, to relax its stranglehold on the freedom of personality.

Feminism is not, and has not, a definite programme. Like democracy, it is a spirit and not an invention — not an institution, but a changing life within the changing forms of institutions. And feminism, like democracy, busies itself with the issues that the times create.

V

The economic issues of the time, as they are reflected in woman’s industrial status, were never more baffling. She must win a more secure place in the shop as a skilled worker. She has as yet only a limited and, at times, grudging recognition in the labor movement through which men are seeking to protect their own rights, giving as yet little attention to women’s needs. She is accused of aiming to undermine the home, just when she may be working hardest at uncongenial tasks to support it. So discouraging is the outlook in some of its large aspects, that one is almost inclined to agree with certain anti-feminists about the effects of industrialism on all our social institutions, including the family as a whole and women individually. Not feminism, however, but industrial organization, uncontrolled in the common service, has done the damage, and feminism has not yet been able to exert an appreciable influence.

Consider, for example, hours of work. The early tendencies of mechanical industry were all in the direction of the maximum use of machinery without regard to the health of the operator. Machinery had seemed to make production independent of physiological limitations, and women and children were drawn into the general wreckage. The story is too well known to need retelling: how labor laws, first for children, and then for women, — with advantageous results, also, for men, — registered public protest and compelled industry to recognize its obligations by restricting hours of work to limits humanly endurable. As years went by, humanitarianism became firmer in its insistence through laws that industry should achieve socially desirable standards. Much later, the scientific basis in physiology for these humanitarian measures reinforced the whole effort; and gradually management is realizing that it pays to take care of the workers’ health.

In some degree these laws have been extended to men, as in the requirement for one day’s rest in seven. But, in general, the trade-union movement of the United States has opposed, though by a divided vote, suggestions that they support legislation as a means of shortening hours for men. They have preferred to rely on trade-union efforts to secure the eight-hour day. Thus, in a more or less opportunistic fashion, legislation applying to women exclusively has been sought and continued.

Since the war, groups of women have opposed laws of this kind, for a twofold reason: first, that a job desired by a woman would be denied to her and given to a man, if she were prevented from working overtime, or at night, while he was free to work any hours prescribed by the employer; and second, that the newly won equality of women with men, politically, made special laws for women in industry an anachronism. The programme they propose is identity in conditions for men and women, with legislation, if it be necessary, applying to both alike. Thus, for exactly opposite reasons, they ally themselves with that group of employers who lead the opposition to labor legislation. The employer wants to be free to require women to work under conditions convenient to himself; under these conditions, the employee’s freedom to choose is hypothetical. The feminists of the opposition, especially those in occupations not affected by the law, are ready to give the employer the convenience of overworking women, in the confident hope that they are thereby setting them free to compete successfully with men.

After all, the shortening of hours of labor is a comparatively simple question. It is desirable for both men and women. Whether it is accomplished for one sex by legislation, and for the other by trade-unionism, or whether both legislation and collective bargaining are used as alternate methods, or whether management itself adopts the shorter day because it increases efficiency, the improvement will surely be accomplished. Far more intricate is the subject of wages of women, since here are concentrated many considerations that may ultimately defeat the hope of feminists for identity, or for equality, in the occupational status of women and men.

‘Cheapness is not a quality of the new industrial woman,’ wrote a woman recently, whose own professional success has proved that the ambitions of feminists are entirely reasonable. She was writing in an employers’ magazine. Possibly she was expressing an exhortation, not a fact. The editor, by accident or by subtle design, selected as a filler for the vacant space left at the bottom of the page a brief paragraph from the Monthly Labor Review of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. ‘Of the 2,031 women employed in 49 industries for whom weekly earnings were reported . . . nearly 57 per cent earned $10 or under. . . . Over half . . . were receiving either a bare subsistence-wage or less.’

Woman’s triumphs in winning new places in industry have often been turned to defeat, even during the war, by the tendency to make the new opportunity a woman’s job at woman’s wages. She finds herself, then, not more nearly the economic equal of man, but merely his successful under-bidder.

Not only in practice, but in theory also, is the wage of women a debatable issue. ‘ Equal pay for equal work,’ as a principle, received, to be sure, official sanction from governments during the war, and in the Peace Treaty itself.

But this was merely part of the shell of progress. It applied, at best, only to those jobs in which women took the places of men, and then only if no change of any kind was made in the process. In practice, it was often ignored, even when the work was not only equal, but identical. Failure to clarify, however, the fundamental basis of women’s wages, either in a man’s job or in a woman’s job, was its real title to superficiality. On this subject disagreement continues, unaffected by the experience of the war.

The British War Cabinet’s Committee on Women in Industry disagreed. The majority declared that no woman should receive less than a ‘reasonable subsistence-wage,’ and defined it as ‘sufficient to provide a single woman over 18 years of age . . . with an adequate dietary; with lodging to include fuel and light in a respectable house not more than half an hour’s journey, including tram or train, from the place of work; with clothing sufficient for warmth, cleanliness, and decent appearance; with money for fares, insurance, and trade-union subscriptions; and with a reasonable sum for holidays, amusements, and so forth.’

Note that ‘subsistence’ for herself alone is the normal woman’s claim on industry. If she has an old father or mother to support, or if she is sharing the life of a family with younger brothers or sisters in school, she is regarded by the British War Cabinet as exceptional, not modifying in any particular industry’s social obligation to women.

Beatrice Webb wrote the minority report. She scored the exclusion of women by law or custom from the better-paid posts, and the habitual payment to them of lower rates than men receive for equivalent work, ‘on the pretence that women are a class apart, with no family obligations, smaller needs, less capacity, and a lower level of intelligence — none of these statements being true of all the individuals thus penalized.’ She declared that the idea of a different basis for women’s wages as compared with men’s should be rejected, and that by denying, in practice, ‘the vested interest of the male’ in the more attractive jobs, the way would be open for the choice of occupation in accordance with one’s qualifications, with no barrier because of sex alone. Having accepted the principle of the sexless job, the sexless wage should accompany it. Mrs. Webb calls it the ‘occupational or standard rate,’ and insists that it should not be determined by the worker’s race, creed, height, weight, or sex.

This conclusion had already been reached in the United States by the Women’s Bureau, when, in formulating the standards found desirable during the war, the Bureau advocated a wage based on occupation and not on sex, and including provision for dependents.

At no other point do the present dangers of women’s position in industry emerge more conspicuously than in this matter of wages. Even with all the stress of the war, women’s wages, although they increased with the general rise in wage-levels, never overcame the handicap of long years of lower rates. Nor was universal public support enlisted in favor of overcoming the unfavorable comparisons in the earnings of women and men. Yet in no other aspect of industry are the interests of the family, on the one hand, and men, on the other, so involved with those of women as a group. If experience has demonstrated women’s capacity for handling complicated machines, but no controlling influence has modified the tendency to pay a woman lower rates than a man, what power can prevent the lowering of rates for men by the competition of women? On the other hand, if rising costs, the growth of the factory system, and the devotion of women to their families force them, in larger numbers, to work for wages, what hope is there that their work will yield income enough to maintain the standard of family life that the state must have as its foundation?

It is the individual basis for women’s wages, a subsistence for themselves alone, that has given rise to the defense by manufacturers of ‘the family wage,’ made up of several contributions. Once established in a community, it is difficult indeed to restore the standard of a wage for the adult head of the family, — who may be a man or a woman, — sufficient to support a home. Conservatives are not unknown who defend this home standard of support by the man, and, in the same breath, advocate the individual basis for women’s wages. In actual practice, this double standard sets up two mutually conflicting influences. The low wage of the woman is insufficient for the family for whose support she is often responsible, and the standard that she thus reinforces in industry makes it impossible for some other head of a family — man or woman — to earn enough to support a home. At this point emerges the whole complicated question of the employment of married women, and the effects of industrial life on women and on the home.

The feminist has an ideal for the home, the family, and children. She believes that all three would be improved by the greater freedom of the mother as an individual. So far, however, the economic pleas of the feminists on behalf of the wife and mother have been directed chiefly to lightening her burdens as a housekeeper. Now that this effort can safely be left to the manufacturers of electric appliances, and that central kitchens, coöperative housekeeping, and other labor-saving plans are not unknown as commercial undertakings, the feminist spirit must face bigger issues.

The first ventures of some of the feminists in the problem of wages seem to be taking the form of protests against minimum-wage laws, as, again, in their view, constituting a restriction on opportunity, and a denial of woman’s political equality by classing her with a specially ‘ protected ’ group. As a matter of fact, minimum-wage legislation does not necessarily perpetuate the old conception of a different basis for women’s wages. The law merely gives women a voice in determining what considerations should affect their wages, by providing for a commission to set minimum rates after recommendations have been made by a board in each industry, made up of representatives, in equal numbers, of employers and of women at work. Not the fixing of wages by law, but the setting up of instruments for registering the voice and vote of the women who work and the vital concern of the community in their wage, is the immediate practical purpose of minimum-wage laws. Some day, perhaps, they will apply, also, to men; but no one with any dependable information about present conditions believes that this could now be urged successfully. The choice is between minimum-wage laws for women, with the hope that they offer of immediate relief and practical experiment, and indefinite postponement of any action at all by the community.

No present issue could more effectively illustrate the dire need of cultivating a realistic respect for the slow, intermediate steps necessary for the attainment of distant aims. One group of women seems to be engaged just now in a wasteful conflict, which, if successful, can have no other result than to weaken the too slowly developing power of the community to control the leviathan of industry.

VI

‘Working women alone must study and pass judgment upon the questions involved in their work,’ wrote Mme. Jeanne Bouvier, French delegate to the International Congress of Working Women, in a recent letter to the international office in Washington, D.C. Opportunity to demonstrate this need came immediately to Mme. Bouvier, when she was sent, in July, 1920, to the Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance at Geneva, to represent the international organization of women in industry. The Scandinavian women at the Suffrage Congress maintained that the Alliance should oppose all legislation restricting the work of women, if it did not apply equally to men. The French, English, and American delegates urged legislative regulation of the work of women when conditions required it. ‘Our representation was necessary,’ wrote Mme. Bouvier in her subsequent report. It gave opportunity to protest ‘against the anomaly that the women who deal with politics should believe themselves entitled to decide on questions concerning economics without the advice of working women.’

Mme. Bouvier told the suffragists about the resolutions passed at the first International Congress of Working Women, held in the United States in October, 1919, at which women in industry of nineteen countries came together for the first time in history. They had favored legislation to protect women in industry, such as the prohibition of night work. They had pledged themselves to work for better safeguards against hazards affecting both men and women; but, with the realism growing out of their familiarity with manufacturing, they had favored also the exclusion of women from any occupation involving greater hazards for their sex than for men. Mme. Bouvier called on the suffragists not to oppose the conclusions and hopes of working women themselves, ‘ since politics,’ she added, ‘cannot dominate work, but more and more the questions of economics are dominating politics.’

The suffragists showed ‘surprise,’ Mme. Bouvier reported; but their final action reflected her influence. They desired that ‘all future labor regulations should tend toward equality of men and women.’ They demanded equal opportunities for technical training, and recognition of ‘the right to work of both married and unmarried women’; they declared that ‘no special regulations for women’s work, different from regulations for men, should be imposed, contrary to the wishes of the women themselves.’

It seems inevitable that these conflicts on the surface will soon be over. Programmes for protective legislation may be modified in some details. The very boldness of women’s demands that machines themselves should give them the power to win a new place in the sun is a refreshing and novel influence in a world too much inclined to allow its machinery to dominate its spiritual needs. While not losing sight of its brave hopes, feminism, with its characteristically practical sense, will undoubtedly settle down to a positive programme, gaining thereby a truer knowledge of facts as they are. The leadership of women in industry in these matters must be accepted by women in the professions, through sheer practical dependence upon their familiarity with actual conditions, and because the efforts of women in industry, themselves, are indispensable.

The establishment of the International Labor Office as one of the principal activities of the League of Nations, and the international conferences under its auspices stimulate new and reasonable hope of effective action in all nations having membership in the League. To this centre of information and of experience, women in industry are already turning for leadership, and offering their coöperation, as was shown by their own unofficial international congress, called in 1919, to prepare material for the first official labor conference of the League, held immediately afterwards in Washington.

Industry will never yield the spiritual opportunities that women so hopefully desire, unless it changes. That is one reason why economic freedom is so much more difficult to attain than the vote in politics. Men, in the generic sense, must learn how to make the machine their servant. Economic freedom is not a woman’s fight alone. It is not anybody’s fight alone. All workers must learn to think and act coöperatively, not merely because cooperation is necessarily the best philosophy of life (though it may prove to be so), but because their work is mechanically coöperative.

Even so pessimistic a critic of feminism as Brooks Adams gives boundless hope when he declares, in discussing the ‘Degradation of the Democratic Dogma,’ that ‘the family system is the creation of the woman.’ Woman ‘has acted as the social cement, and she has sustained the arch on which the social fabric has rested.’ If woman has accomplished the creation of the family system, in the midst of all the hazards of primitive existence, which have constantly threatened life itself and tempted man to wander, perhaps so powerful a force, if it is allowed to permeate industrial organization, will help to create relationships designed to conserve, and not to dissipate, spiritual values in our mechanical, economic order.