WOMEN OVER THE TOP IN AMERICA

American women have begun to go over the top. They are going up the scaling-ladder and out into All Man’s Land. Perhaps love of adventure tempts them, perhaps love of money, or a fine spirit of service, but whatever the propelling motive, we are seeing them make the venture.

There is nothing new in our day in a woman’s being paid for her work some of it. But she has never before been seen in America employed, for instance, as a section hand on a railway. The gangs are few and small as yet, but there the women are big and strong specimens of foreign birth. They “trim” the ballast and wield the heavy “tamping” tool with zest. They certainly have muscles, and are tempted to use them vigorously at three dollars a day.

In the machine shops where more skill than strength is called for, the American element with its quick wits and deft fingers predominates. Young women are working at the lathe with so much precision and accuracy that solicitude as to what would become of the world if all its men marched off to war is in a measure assuaged. In the push and drive of the industrial world, women are handling dangerous chemicals in making flash lights, and T.N.T. for high explosive shells. The American college girl is not as yet transmuting her prowess of the athletic field into work on the anvil, as is the university woman in England, but she has demonstrated her manual strength and skill on the farm with plough and harrow.

Women and girls answer our call for messenger service, and their intelligence and courtesy are an improvement upon the manners of the young barbarians of the race. Women operate elevators, lifting us with safety to the seventh heaven, or plunging us with precision to the depths. There were those at first who refused to entrust their lives to such frail hands, and there are still some who look concerned when they see a woman at the lever; but on the whole the elevator “girl” has gained the confidence of her public, and has gained it by skill, not by feminine wiles, for even men won’t shoot into space with a woman at the helm whose sole equipment is charm. With need of less skill than the elevator operator, but more patience and tact in managing human nature, the woman conductor is getting her patrons into line. We are still a little embarrassed in her presence. We try not to stare at the well-set-up woman in her sensible uniform, while she on her part tries to look unconscious, and with much dignity accomplishes the common aim much more successfully than do we. She is so attentive to her duties, so courteous, and, withal, so calm and serious that I hope she will abide with us longer than the “duration of the war.”

In short, America is witnessing the beginning of a great industrial and social change, and even those who regard the situation as temporary cannot doubt that the experience will have important reactions. The development is more advanced than it was in Great Britain at a corresponding time, for even before the United States entered the conflict women were being recruited in war industries. They have opened up every line of service. There is not an occupation in which a woman is not found.

When men go a-warring, women go to work.

A distinguished general at the end of the Cuban War, enlarging upon the poet’s idea of woman’s weeping rôle in wartime, said in a public speech: “When the country called, women put guns in the hands of their soldier boys and bravely sent them away. After the good-byes were said there was nothing for these women to do but to go back and wait, wait, wait. The excitement of battle was not for them. It was simply a season of anxiety and heartrending inactivity.” Now the fact is, when a great call to arms is sounded for the men of a nation, women enlist in the industrial army. If women did indeed sit at home and weep, the enemy would soon conquer.

The dull census tells the thrilling story. Before our Civil War women were found in less than a hundred trades, at its close in over four hundred. The census of 1860 gives two hundred and eighty-five thousand women in gainful pursuits; that of 1870, one million, eight hundred and thirty-six thousand. Of the Transvaal at war, this story was told to me by an English officer. He led a small band of soldiers down into the Boer country, on the north from Rhodesia, as far as he dared. He “did not see a man,” even boys as young as fifteen had joined the army. But at the post of economic duty stood the Boer woman; she was tending the herds and carrying on all the work of the farm. She was the base of supplies. That was why the British finally put her in a concentration camp. Her man could not be beaten with her at his back.

War compels women to work. That is one of its merits. Women are forced to use body and mind, they are not, cannot be idlers. Perhaps that is the reason military nations hold sway so long; their reign continues, not because they draw strength from the conquered nation, but because their women are roused to exertion. Active mothers ensure a virile race.

The peaceful nation, if its women fall victims to the luxury which rapidly increasing wealth brings, will decay. If there come no spiritual awakening, no sense of responsibility of service, then perhaps war alone can save it. The routing of idleness and ease by compulsory labor is the good counterbalancing some of the evil.

The rapidly increasing employment of women to-day, then, is the usual, and happy, accompaniment of war. But the development has its opponents, and that is nothing new, either. Let us look them over one by one. The most mischievous objector is the person, oftenest a woman, who says the war will be short, and fundamental changes, therefore, should not be made. This agreeable prophecy does not spring from a heartening belief in victory, but only from the procrastinating attitude, “Why get ready?” To prepare for anything less certain than death seems folly to many of the sex, over-trained in patient waiting.

Then there is the official who constantly sees the seamy side of industrial life and who concludes we can scarcely blame him that “it would be well if women were excluded entirely from factory life.” The bad condition of industrial surroundings bulks large in his mind, and the value of organized work to us mortals bulks small. We are all too inclined to forget that the need for work cannot be eliminated, but the unhealthy process in a dangerous trade can. Clean up the factory, rather than clean out the women, is a sound slogan.

And then comes the objector who is exercised as to the effect of paid work upon woman’s charm. Solicitude on this score is often buried in a woman’s heart. It was a woman, the owner of a large estate, who when proposing to employ women asked how many men she would have to hire in addition, “to dig, plough and do all the hard work.” On learning that the college units do everything on a farm, she queried anxiously, “But how about their corsets?” To the explanation, “They don’t wear any,” came the regret, “What a pity to make themselves so unattractive!”

I have heard fear expressed, too, lest sex attraction be lost through work on army hats, the machinery being noisy and the operative, if she talk, running the danger of acquiring a sharp, high voice. One could but wonder if most American women work on army hats.

Among the women actually employed, I have found without exception a fine spirit of service. So many of them have a friend or brother “over there,” that backing up the boys makes a strong personal appeal. But some of the women who have left factory life behind are adopting an attitude towards the present industrial situation as lacking in vision as in patriotism. Throughout a long discussion in which some of these women participated I was able to follow and get their point of view. To them a woman acting as a messenger, an elevator operator, or a trolley conductor, was anathema, and the tempting of women into these employments seemed but the latest vicious trick of the capitalist. The conductor in her becoming uniform was most reprehensible, and her evident satisfaction in her job suggested to her critics that she merely was trying to play a melodramatic part “as a war hero.” In any case, the conductor’s occupation was one no woman should be in, “crowded and pushed about as she is.” It was puzzling to know why it was regarded as right for a woman to pay five cents and be pushed, and unbecoming for another woman to be paid eighteen dollars and ninety cents a week and run the risk of a jolt when stepping outside her barrier.

But the ideals of yesterday fail to make their appeal. It is not the psychological moment to urge, on the ground of comfort, the woman’s right to protection. The contrast between the trenches and the street car or factory is too striking. But it is, however, the exact moment to plead for better care of workers, both women and men, because their health and skill are as necessary in attaining the national aim as the soldiers’ prowess and well-being. It is the time to advocate the protection of the worker from long hours, because the experience of Europe has proved that a greater and better output is achieved when a short day is strictly adhered to, when the weekly half-holiday is enjoyed, and Sunday rest respected. The United States is behind other great industrial countries in legal protection for the workers. War requirements may force us to see in the health of the worker the greatest of national assets. Meantime, whether approved or not, the American woman is going over the top. Four hundred and more are busy on aeroplanes at the Curtiss works. The manager of a munition shop where to-day but fifty women are employed, is putting up a dormitory to accommodate five hundred. An index of expectation! Five thousand are employed by the Remington Arms Company at Bridgeport. At the International Arms and Fuse Company at Bloomfield, New Jersey, two thousand, eight hundred are employed. The day I visited the place, in one of the largest shops women had only just been put on the work, but it was expected that in less than a month they would be found handling all of the twelve hundred machines under that one roof alone.

The skill of the women staggers one. After a week or two they master the operations on the “turret,” gauging and routing machines. The best worker on the “facing” machine is a woman. She is a piece worker, as many of the women are, and is paid at the same rate as men. This woman earned, the day I saw her, five dollars and forty cents. She tossed about the fuse parts, and played with that machine, as I would with a baby. Perhaps it was in somewhat the same spirit she seemed to love her toy.

Most of the testers and inspectors are women. They measure the parts step by step, and weigh the completed fuse, carrying off the palm for reliability. The manager put it, “for inspection the women are more conscientious than men. They don’t measure or weigh just one piece, shoving along a half-dozen untouched and let it go at that. They test each.” That did not surprise me, but I was not prepared to hear that the women do not have so many accidents as men, or break the machines so often. In explanation, the manager threw over an imaginary lever with vigor sufficient to shake the factory, “Men put their whole strength on, women are more gentle and patient.”

Nor are the railways neglecting to fill up gaps in their working force with women. The Pennsylvania road, it is said, has recruited some seven hundred of them. In the Erie Railroad women are not only engaged as “work classifiers” in the locomotive clerical department, but hardy Polish women are employed in the car repair shops. They move great wheels as if possessed of the strength of Hercules. And in the locomotive shops I found women working on drill-press machines with ease and skill. Just as I came up to one operator, she lifted an engine truck-box to the table and started drilling out the studs. She had been at the work only a month, and explained her skill by the information that she was Swedish, and had always worked with her husband in their auto-repair shop. All the other drill-press hands and the “shapers,” too, were Americans whose husbands, old employees, were now “over there.” Not one seemed to have any sense of the unusual; even the little blond check-clerk seated in her booth at the gates of the works with her brass discs about her had in a few months’ time changed a revolution into an established custom. She and the discs seemed old friends. Women are adaptable.

But everywhere I gathered the impression that the men are a bit uneasy. A foreman in one factory pointed out a man who “would not have voted for suffrage” had he guessed that women were “to rush in and gobble everything up.” I tried to make him see that it wasn’t the vote that gave the voracious appetite, but necessity or desire to serve. And in any case, women do not push men out, they push them up. In not a single instance did I hear of a man being turned off to make a place for a woman. He had left his job to go into the army, or was advanced to heavier or more skilled work.

As to how many women have supplanted men, or poured into the new war industries, no figures are available. One guess has put it at a million. But that is merely a guess. I have seen them by the tens, the hundreds, the thousands. The number is large and rapidly increasing. We may know that something important is happening when even the government takes note. The United States Labor Department has recognized the new-comers by establishing a Division of Women’s Work with branches in every State. It looks as if these bureaus of employment would not be idle, with a showing of one thousand, five hundred applicants the first week the New York office was opened. It is to be hoped that this government effort will save the round pegs from getting into the square holes.

But even the round peg in the round hole brings difficulties. When Adam Smith asserted that of all sorts of luggage man was the most difficult to move, he forgot woman! The instant women are carried into a new industry, they bring with them puzzling problems. Where shall we put their coats and picture hats, how shall we cover up their hair, what shall we feed them with? They must have lockers and rest rooms, caps and overalls, and above all, canteens. The munition workers, the conductors, in fact, all women in active work, get prodigiously hungry. They have made a regiment of dietitians think about calories. Here is what one of the street railways in New York City offered them on a given day:

Tomato soup 10c. or with an order 5c.
Roast leg of veal 16c.
Beef 16c.
Lamb fricassee 16c.
Ham steak 16c.
Liver and onions 16c.
Sirloin steak 30c.
Small steak 20c.
Ham and eggs 20c.
Ham omelet 20c.
Regular dinner
Soup, meat,
Vegetable,
Dessert, coffee 25c.
Rice pudding 5c.
Pie 5c.
Cake 5c.
Banana or orange 5c.

The canteen is open every hour of the twenty-four, and the women conductors at the end of each run usually take a bite, and then have a substantial meal during the long break of an hour and a half in the middle of the ten-hour day.

Another problem brought to us by women in industry is, how can we house them? The war industries have drawn large numbers to new centers. The haphazard accommodation which men win put up with, won’t satisfy women. They demand more, and get more. To attract the best type of women the munition plants are putting up dormitories to accommodate hundreds of workers, and are making their plants more attractive, with rest rooms and hospital accommodation. Take, for instance, the Briggs and Stratton Company, which in order to draw high grade workers built its new factory in one of the best sections of Milwaukee. The workrooms are as clean as the proverbial Dutch woman’s doorstep. From the top of the benches to the ceiling the walls are glass to ensure daylight in every corner, and by night the system of indirect lighting gives such perfectly diffused light that not a heavy shadow falls anywhere. And the hospital room and nurse well, one would rejoice to have an accident daily!

The factory may become the exemplar for the home. The professional woman is going over the top, and with a good opinion of herself. “I can do this work better than any man,” was the announcement made by a young woman from the Pacific Coast as she descended upon the city hall in an eastern town, credentials in her hand, and asked for the position of city chemist. There was not a microbe she did not know to its undoing, or a deadly poison she could not bring from its hiding place. The town had suffered from graft, and the mayor, thinking a woman might scare the thieves as well as the bacteria, appointed the chemist who believed in herself. And she is just one of many who have been taking up such work.

Formerly two-thirds of the positions filled by the New York Intercollegiate Bureau of Occupations were secretarial or teaching positions; now three-fourths of its applicants have been placed as physicists, chemists, office managers, sanitary experts, exhibit secretaries, and the like. The temporary positions used to outnumber the permanent placements; at present the reverse is true. Of the women placed, four times as many as formerly get salaries ranging above eighteen hundred dollars a year.

The story told at the employment bureaus in connection with professional societies and clubs such as the Chemists’ Club is the same. Women are being placed not merely as teachers of chemistry or as routine laboratory workers in hospitals, but also as experimental and control chemists in industrial plants. In the great rolling mills they are testing steel, at the copper smelters they are found in the laboratories. The government has thrown doors wide open to college-trained women. They are physicists and chemists in the United States Bureaus of Standards, Mines, and Soils, sanitary experts in military camps, research chemists in animal nutrition and fertilizers at state experiment stations.

But the industrial barrier is the one most recently scaled. Women are now found as analytical, research or control chemists in the canneries, in dye and electrical works, in flour and paper mills, in insecticide companies, and cement works. They test the steel that will carry us safely on our journeys, they pass upon the chemical composition of the flavor in our cake, as heads of departments in metal refining companies they determine the kind of copper battery we shall use, and they have a finger in our liquid glues, household oils and polishes.

And the awakened spirit of social responsibility has opened new callings. The college woman not only is beginning to fill welfare positions inside the factory, but is acting as protective officer in towns near military camps. Perhaps one of the newest and most interesting positions is that of “employment secretary.” The losing of employees has become so serious and general that big industries have engaged women who devote their time to looking up absentees and finding out why each worker left.

And so we see on all hands women breaking through the old accustomed bounds.

Not only as workers but as voters, the war has called women over the top. Since that fateful August, 1914, four provinces of Canada and the Dominion itself have raised the banner of votes for women. Nevada and Montana declared for suffrage before the war was four months old, and Denmark enfranchised its women before the year was out. And when America went forth to fight for democracy abroad, Arkansas, Michigan, Vermont, Nebraska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, began to lay the foundations of freedom at home, and New York in no faltering voice proclaimed full liberty for all its people. Lastly Great Britain has enfranchised its women, and surely the Congress of the United States will not lag behind the Mother of Parliaments!

The world is facing changes as great as the breaking up of the feudal system. Causes as fundamental, more wide-spread, and more cataclysmic are at work than at the end of the Middle Ages. Among the changes none is more marked than the intensified development in what one may call, for lack of a better term, the woman movement. The advance in political freedom has moved steadily forward during the past quarter of a century, but in the last three years progress has been intense and striking.

The peculiarity in attainment of political democracy for women has lain in the fact that while for men economic freedom invariably preceded political enfranchisement, in the case of women the conferring of the vote in no single case was related to the stage which the enfranchised group had attained in the matter of economic independence. Nowhere were even those women who were entirely lacking in economic freedom, excluded on that account from any extension of suffrage. Even in discussions of the right of suffrage no reference has ever been made, in dealing with women’s claim, to the relation, universally recognized in the case of men, of political enfranchisement to economic status. Serfdom gave way to the wage system before democracy developed for men, and the colored man was emancipated before he was enfranchised. For this reason the coming of women as paid workers over the top may be regarded as epoch-making.

In any case, self-determination is certainly a strong element in attaining any real political freedom.

Complete service to their country in this crisis may lead women to that economic freedom which will change a political possession into a political power. But the requirement is readiness to do, and to do well, the task which offers. Man-power must give itself unreservedly at the front. Women must show not only eagerness but fitness to substitute for man-power. It will hearten the nation, help to make the path clear, if individual women declare that though the call to them has not yet come for a definite service, the time of waiting will not be spent in complaint, nor yet in foolish busy-ness, but in careful and conscientious training for useful work.

Each woman must prepare so that when the nation’s need arises, she can stand at salute and say, “Here is your servant, trained and ready.” Women are not driven over the top. Through self-discipline, they go over it of their own accord.