For many generations it has been believed that woman's place is within
the walls of her own home, and it is indeed impossible to imagine the
time when her duty there shall be ended or to forecast any social change
which shall release her from that paramount obligation.
This paper is an attempt to show that many women to-day are
failing to discharge their duties to their own households properly
simply because they do not perceive that as society grows more
complicated it, is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of
responsibility to many things outside of her own home if she would
continue to preserve the home in its entirety. One could illustrate in
many ways. A woman's simplest duty, one would say, is to keep her house
clean and wholesome and to feed her children properly. Yet if she lives
in a tenement house, as so many of my neighbors do, she cannot fulfill
these simple obligations by her own efforts because she is utterly
dependent upon the city administration for the conditions which render
decent living possible. Her basement will not be dry, her stairways will
not be fireproof, her house will not be provided with sufficient windows
to give light and air, nor will it be equipped with sanitary plumbing,
unless the Public Works Department sends inspectors who constantly
insist that these elementary decencies be provided. Women who live in
the country sweep their own dooryards and may either feed the refuse of
the table to a flock of chickens or allow it innocently to decay in the
open air and sunshine. In a crowded city quarter, however, if the street
is not cleaned by the city authorities-no amount of private sweeping
will keep the tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly
collected and destroyed a tenement house mother may see her children
sicken and die of diseases from which she alone is powerless to shield
them, although her tenderness and devotion are unbounded. She cannot
even secure untainted meat for her household, she cannot provide fresh
fruit, unless the meat has been inspected by city officials, and the
decayed fruit, which is so often placed upon sale in the tenement
districts, has been destroyed in the interests of public health. In
short, if woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her
house and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in
regard to public affairs lying quite outside of her immediate household.
The individual conscience and devotion are no longer effective.
Chicago one spring had a spreading contagion of scarlet fever
just at the time that the school nurses had been discontinued because
business men had pronounced them too expensive. If the women who sent
their children to the schools had been sufficiently public-spirited and
had been provided with an implement through which to express that public
spirit they would have insisted that the schools be supplied with nurses
in order that their own children might be protected from contagion. In
other words, if women would effectively continue their old avocations
they must take part in the slow upbuilding of that code of legislation
which is alone sufficient to protect the home from the dangers incident
to modern life. One might instance the many deaths of children from
contagions diseases the germs of which had been carried in tailored
clothing. Country doctors testify as to the outbreak of scarlet fever in
remote neighborhoods each autumn, after the children have begun to wear
the winter overcoats and cloaks which have been sent from infected city
sweatshops. That their mothers charter was the unexpected enthusiasm and
help which came from large groups of foreign-born women. The
Scandinavian women represented in many Lutheran Church societies said
quite simply that in the old country they had had the municipal
franchise upon the same basis as men for many years; all the women
living under the British Government, in England, Australia or Canada,
pointed out that Chicago women were asking now for what the British
women had long ago. But the most unexpected response came from the
foreign colonies in which women had never heard such problems discussed
and took the prospect of the municipal ballot as a simple device - which
it is - to aid them in their daily struggle with adverse city
conditions. The Italian women said that the men engaged in railroad
construction were away all summer and did not know anything about their
household difficulties. Some of them came to Hull-House one day to talk
over the possibility of a public wash-house. They do not like to wash in
their own tenements; they had never seen a washing-tub until they came
to America, and find it very difficult to use it in the restricted space
of their little kitchens and to hang the clothes within the house to
dry. They say that in the Italian villages the women all go to the
streams together; in the town they go to the public wash-house; and
washing, instead of being lonely and disagreeable, is made pleasant by
cheerful conversation. It is asking a great deal of these women to
change suddenly all their habits of living, and their contention that
the tenement house kitchen is too small for laundry work is well taken.
If women in Chicago knew the needs of the Italian colony they would
realize that any change bringing cleanliness and fresh air into the
Italian household would be a very sensible and hygienic measure. It is,
perhaps, asking a great deal that the members of the City Council should
understand this, but surely a comprehension of the needs of these women
and efforts toward ameliorating their lot might be regarded as matters
of municipal obligation on the part of voting women.
The same thing is true of the Jewish women in their desire for
covered markets which have always been a municipal provision in Russia
and Poland. The vegetables piled high upon the wagons standing in the
open markets of Chicago become covered with dust and soot. It seems to
these women a violation of the most rudimentary decencies and they
sometimes say quite simply: "If women had anything to say about it they
would change all that."
If women follow only the lines of their traditional activities,
here are certain primary duties which belong to even the most
conservative women, and which no one woman or group of women can
adequately discharge unless they join the more general movements looking
toward social amelioration through legal enactment.
The first of these, of which this article has already treated, is
woman's responsibility for the members of her own household that they
may be properly fed and clothed and surrounded by hygienic conditions.
The second is a responsibility for the education of children: (a) that
they may be provided with good books; (b) that they may be kept free
from vicious influences on the street; (c) that when working they may be
protected by adequate child-labor legislation.
(a) The duty of a woman toward the schools which her children
attend is so obvious that it is not necessary to dwell upon it. But even
this simple obligation cannot be effectively carried out without some
form of social organization, as the mothers' school clubs and mothers'
congresses testify, and to which the most conservative women belong
because they feel the need of wider reading and discussion concerning
the many problems of childhood. It is, therefore, perhaps natural that
the public should have been more willing to accord a vote to women in
school matters than in any other, and yet women have never been members
of a Board of Education in sufficient numbers to influence largely
actual school curiculi. If they had been, kindergartens, domestic
science courses and school playgrounds would be far more numerous than
they are. More than one woman has been convinced of the need of the
ballot by the futility of her efforts in persuading a business man that
young children need nurture in something besides the three r's. Perhaps,
too, only women realize the influence which the school might exert upon
the home if a proper adaptation to actual needs were considered. An
Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking at the public school will
help her mother to connect the entire family with American food and
household habits. That the mother has never baked bread in Italy - only
mixed it in her own house and then taken it out to the village oven -
makes it all the more necessary that her daughter should understand the
complications of a cooking-stove. The same thing is true of the girl who
learns to sew in the public school, and more than anything else,
perhaps, of the girl who receives the first simple instruction in the
care of little children, that skillful care which every tenement house
baby requires if he is lo be pulled through his second summer. The only
time, to my knowledge, that lessons in the care of children were given
in the public schools of Chicago was one summer when the vacation
schools were being managed by a volunteer body of women. The instruction
was eagerly received by the Italian girls, who had been "little mothers"
to younger children ever since they could remember.
As a result of this teaching I recall a young girl who carefully
explained to her Italian mother that the reason the babies in Italy were
so healthy and the babies in Chicago were so sickly was not, as her
mother had always firmly insisted, because her babies in Italy had
goat's milk and her babies in America had cow's milk, but because the
milk in Italy was clean and the milk in Chicago was dirty. She said that
when you milked your own goat before the door you knew that the milk was
clean, but when you bought milk from the grocery store after it had been
carried for many miles in the country, "you couldn't tell whether or not
it was fit for the baby to drink until the men from the City Hall, who
had watched it all the way, said that it was all right." She also
informed her mother that the "City Hall wanted to fix up the milk so
that it couldn't make the baby sick, but that they hadn't quite-enough
votes for it yet." The Italian mother believed what her child had been
taught in the big school; it seemed to her quite as natural that the
city should be concerned in providing pure milk for her younger children
as that it should provide big schools and teachers for her older
children. She reached this naive conclusion because she had never heard
those arguments which make it seem reasonable that a woman should be
given the school franchise, but no other.
(b) But women are also beginning to realize that children need
attention outside of school hours; that much of the petty vice in cities
is merely the love of pleasure gone wrong, the over-strained boy or girl
seeking improper recreation and excitement. It is obvious that a little
study of the needs of children, a sympathetic understanding of the
conditions under which they go astray, might save hundreds of them.
Women traditionally have had an opportunity to observe the plays of
children and the needs of youth, and yet in Chicago, at least, they had
done singularly little in this vexed problem of juvenile delinquency
until they helped to inaugurate the Juvenile Court movement a dozen
years ago. The Juvenile Court Committee, made up largely of women, paid
the salaries Of the probation officers connected with the court for the
first six years of its existence, and after the salaries were cared for
by the county the same organization turned itself into a Juvenile
Protective League, and through a score of paid officers are doing
valiant service in minimizing some of the dangers of city life which
boys and girls encounter.
This Protective League, however, was not formed until the women
had bad a civic training through their semi-official connection with the
juvenile Court. This is, perhaps, an illustration of our inability to
see the duty "next to hand" until we have become alert through our
knowledge of conditions in connection with the larger duties. We would
all agree that social amelioration must come about through the efforts
of many people who are moved thereto by the compunction and stirring of
the individual conscience, but we are only beginning to understand that
the individual conscience will respond to the special challenge largely
in proportion as the individual is able to see the social conditions
because he has felt responsible for their improvement. Because this body
of women assumed a public responsibility they have seen to it that every
series of pictures displayed in the five-cent theatre is subjected to a
careful censorship before it is produced, and those series suggesting
obscenity and criminality have been practically eliminated. The police
department has performed this and many other duties to which it was
oblivious before, simply because these women have made it realize that
it is necessary to protect and purify those places of amusement which
are crowded with young people every night. This is but the negative side
of the policy pursued by the public authorities in the fifteen small
parks of Chicago, each of which is provided with balls in which young
people may meet nightly for social gatherings and dances. The more
extensively the modern city endeavors on the one hand to control and on
the other hand to provide recreational facilities for its young people,
the more necessary it is that women should assist in their direction and
extension. After all, a care for wholesome and innocent amusement is
what women have for many years assumed. When the reaction comes on the
part of taxpayers, women's votes may be necessary to keep the city to
its beneficent obligations toward its own young people.
(c) As the education of her children has been more and more
transferred to the school, so that even children four years old go to
the kindergarten, the woman has been left in a household of
constantly-narrowing interests, not only because the children are away,
but also because one industry after another is slipping from the
household into the factory. Ever since steam power has been applied to
the processes of weaving and spinning woman's traditional work has been
carried on largely outside of the home. The clothing and household linen
are not only spun and woven, but also usually sewed by machinery; the
preparation of many foods has also passed into the factory and
necessarily a certain number of women have been obliged to follow their
work there, although it is doubtful, in spite of the large number of
factory girls, whether women now are doing as large a proportion of the
world's work as they used to do. Because many thousands of those working
in factories and shops are girls between the ages of fourteen and
twenty-two, there is a necessity that older women should be interested
in the conditions of industry. The very fact that these girls are not
going to remain in industry permanently makes it more important that
some one should see to it that they shall not be incapacitated for their
future family life because they work for exhausting hours and under
insanitary conditions.
If woman's sense of obligation had enlarged as the industrial
conditions changed she might naturally and almost imperceptibly have
inaugurated movements for social amelioration in the line of factory
legislation and shop sanitation. That she has not done so is doubtless
due to the fact that her conscience is slow to recognize any obligation
outside of her own family circle, and because she was so absorbed in her
own household that she failed to see what the conditions outside
actually were. It would be interesting to know how far the consciousness
that she had no vote and could not change matters operated in this
direction. After all, we see only those things to which our attention
has been drawn, we feel responsibility for those things which are
brought to us as matters of responsibility. If conscientious women were
convinced that it was a civic duty to be informed in regard to these
grave industrial affairs, and then to express the conclusions which they
had reached by depositing a piece of paper in a ballot-box, one cannot
imagine that they would shirk simply because the action ran counter to
old traditions.
To those of my readers who would admit that although woman has no
right to shirk her old obligations, that all of these measures could be
secured more easily through her influence upon the men of her family
than through the direct use of the ballot, I should like to tell a
little story. I have a friend in Chicago who is the mother of four sons
and the grandmother of twelve grandsons who are voters. She is a woman
of wealth, of secured social position, of sterling character and clear
intelligence, and may, therefore, quite fairly be cited as a "woman of
influence." Upon one of her recent birthdays, when she was asked how she
had kept so young, she promptly replied: "Because I have always
advocated at least one unpopular cause." It may have been in pursuance
of this policy that for many years she has been an ardent advocate of
free silver, although her manufacturing family are all Republicans! I
happened to call at her house on the day that Mr. McKinley was elected
President against Mr. Bryan for the first time. I found my friend much
disturbed. She said somewhat bitterly that she had at last discovered
what the much-vaunted influence of woman was worth; that she had
implored each one of her sons and grandsons; had entered into endless
arguments and moral appeals to induce one of them to represent her
convictions by voting for Mr. Bryan; that, although sincerely devoted to
her, each one had assured her that his convictions forced him to vote
the Republican ticket! She said that all she had been able to secure was
the promise from one of the grandsons, for whom she had an especial
tenderness because he bore her husband's name, that he would not vote at
all. He could not vote for Bryan, but out of respect for her feeling he
would refrain from voting for McKinley. My friend said that for many
years she had suspected that women could influence men only in regard to
those things in which men were not deeply concerned, but when it came to
persuading a man to a woman's view in affairs of politics or business it
was absolutely useless. I contended that a woman had no right to
persuade a man to vote against his own convictions; that I respected the
men of her family for following their own judgement regardless of the
appeal which the honored bead of the house had made to their chivalric
devotion. To this she replied that she would agree with that point of
view when a woman had the same opportunity as a man to register her
convictions by vote. I believed then as I do now, that nothing is gained
when independence of judgment is assailed by "influence," sentimental or
otherwise, and that we test advancing civilization somewhat by our power
to respect differences and by our tolerance of another's honest
conviction.
This is, perhaps, the attitude of many busy women who would be
glad to use the ballot to further public measures in which they are
interested and for which they have been working for years. It offends
the taste of such a woman to be obliged to use indirect "influence" when
she is accustomed to well-bred, open action in other affairs, and she
very much resents the time spent in persuading a voter to take her point
of view, and possibly to give up his own, quite as honest and valuable
as hers, although different because resulting from a totally different
experience. Public-spirited women who wish to use the ballot, as I know
them, do not wish to do the work of men nor to take over men's affairs.
They simply want an opportunity to do their own work and to take care of
those affairs which naturally and historically belong to women, but
which are constantly being overlooked and slighted in our political
institutions. In a complex community like the modern city all points of
view need to be represented; the resultants of diverse experiences need
to be pooled if the community would make for sane and balanced progress.
If it would meet fairly each problem as it arises, whether it be
connected with a freight tunnel having to do largely with business men,
or with the increasing death rate among children under five years of
age, a problem in which women are vitally concerned, or with the
question of more adequate streetcar transfers, in which both men and
women might be said to be equally interested, it must not ignore the
judgments of its entire adult population. To turn the administration of
our civic affairs wholly over to men may mean that the American city
will continue to push forward in its commercial and industrial
development, and continue to lag behind in those things which make a
City healthful and beautiful. After all, woman's traditional function
has been to make her dwelling-place both clean and fair. Is that
dreariness in city life, that lack of domesticity which the humblest
farm dwelling presents, due to a withdrawal of one of the naturally
co-operating forces? If women have in any sense been responsible for the
gentler side of life which softens and blurs some of its harsher
conditions, may they not have a duty to perform in our American cities?
In closing, may I recapitulate that if woman would fulfill her
traditional responsibility to her own children; if she would educate and
protect from danger factory children who must find their recreation on
the street; if she would bring the cultural forces to bear upon our
materialistic civilization; and if she would do it all with the dignity
and directness fitting one who carries on her immemorial duties, then
she must bring herself to the use of the ballot - that latest implement
for self-government. May we not fairly say that American women need this
implement in order to preserve the home?
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