Woman's Suffrage and the Preservation of the Home.
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 ever release her from that paramount obligation.
This paper, however, is an attempt to show that many women [today] are failing properly to discharge their duties to their own households 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 can not 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 shall send 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 a 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 [page 2] of disease from which she alone of powerless to shield them, although her tenderness and devotion are unbounded. She cannot even secure untainted meat for her household, she cannot provide them 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, shall have been promptly 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 of ↑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.
In Chicago one spring we 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 send 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 contagious 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 sweat shops. That their mothers mend their stockings and guard them from "taking cold" is not a sufficient protection when the tailoring of the family is done in a distant city under conditions which the mother cannot possibly control. The sanitary regulation of sweat shops by city officials and a careful enforcement of factory legislation by state factory [page 3] inspectors ↑is↓ all that can be depended upon to control conditions and to prevent such needless destruction. But even these will not avail unless city and state shall be able to pass and enforce a code of comparatively uniform legislation. Efforts have been through the Sultzer Bill and other federal acts to utilize the Interstate Commerce legislation in order to regulate by national authority the sanitary conditions under which clothing is made. Many of the national Representatives have realized that only by federal legislation could their constituents in remote country places be protected from contagious diseases raging in New York or Chicago. The British government woke up to the need of such legislation after the death of the Duke of Connaught's daughter. The highest medical authorities of England testified that her fever had been contracted from a garment which had been brought into the palace directly from a sweater's den. If all this federal and parliamentary action is necessary to protect children in their homes. ↑Who↓ shall say that the women are not concerned in the enactment and enforcement of such legislation ↑if they would preserve their power?↓ Even women who take no part in public affairs in order that they may give themselves ↑entirely↓ to their own families, sometimes going so far as to despise those other women who are endeavoring to secure public protective legislation, may illustrate this point. Our own ↑The Hull-House↓ neighborhood was at one time suffering from a typhoid epidemic. A careful investigation was made by which we were able to establish a very close connection between the typhoid and a mode of plumbing which made it most probable that the infection had been carried by flies. Among the people who had been exposed to the infection was a widow who had lived in the ward for a number of years, in a comfortable little house which she owned. Although the Italian immigrants were closing in all around her, she was not willing to sell her property and to move away until she had finished the education of her children. In the meantime she held herself quite aloof from her Italian neighbors and their affairs [page 4] could never be drawn into any of the public efforts to protect them by securing for the city a better code of tenement house sanitation. Her two daughters were sent to an Eastern college; one June the ↑when↓ one of them had graduated and the other still had two years before she took her degree, they came to the spotless little house and to their self sacrificing mother for the summer's holiday. They both fell ill, not because their own home was not clean, not because their mother was not devoted, but because next door to them and also in the rear were wretched tenements and because the mother's utmost efforts could not keep the infection out of her own house. One daughter died, and one recovered, but was an invalid for two years following. This is, perhaps, a fair illustration of the futility of the individual conscience when woman insists upon isolating her family from the rest of the community and its interests. The result is sure to be a pitiful failure.
One of the interesting experiences in the Chicago campaign for inducing the members of the Charter Convention to recommend the municipal franchise for women in the provisions of the new 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 since the 17th century; all the women formerly living in ↑under the↓ British government ↑in↓ England, Australia or Canada, pointed out that Chicago women were asking now for what the ↑British women↓ had long had. 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 quite simply 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 have never seen a washing tub until they came [page 5] 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 Italy washing clothes is a pleasant task in the ↑Italian↓ villages the women all go to the streams [together]; in the town, to the public wash house, and washing, instead of being lonely and disagreable, is made pleasant by cheerful conversation. It is asking a great deal of 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 ↑that would really is that↑ and were conversant with their living in Italy, they, too, would agitate for the erection of public wash-houses for the use of Italian Women. Anything ↑change↓ that would bringing cleanliness and fresh clothing 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, at present, but surely a comprehension of the needs of these women and efforts towards 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 pile 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 there are certain primary duties which we would all admit 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 towards 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 [page 6] conditions.
The second is a responsibility for the education of children; (a) that they may be provided with good schools; (b) that they may be kept free from vicious influences on the street; (c) that when working they may be protected from dangerous machinery and from exhausting hours by adequate chid 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 specify ↑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 members to largely influence actual school curriculi. 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 to the ballot by the futility of her efforts in persuading a business man that young children need nurture in something else besides the three rs. Perhaps, too, only women realize the influence which the school might exert upon the home if a proper adaption to actual needs was considered. An Italian girl who has gone 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 bakes 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 instructions the care of little children, that skillful care which every [page 7] tenement house baby requires if he is to be pulled through his ↑2nd↓ 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 vocation 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 the you bought milk from the grocery store after it a 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 elaborate 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 realise that children need attention outside of school hours; that much of they petty vice in cities is merely the love of pleasure gone wrong, the over-restrained boy or girl seeking improper recreation and excitement. and that many boys are arrested from sheer excess of animal spirits which have gotten them into [page 8] difficulties. It is obvious that a little study of the needs of the boys ↑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 have 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 that ↑salaries were↓ was 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 had 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 ↑a↓ special challenge largely in proportion as the individual is able to see the social conditions because he had 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 subject 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 they were indifferent ↑oblivious↓ before, simply because these women have made them 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↓ [page 9] ↑deserved by the public authentic in↓ the fifteen small parks of Chicago are each ↑of which is↓ provided with halls in which young people may meet nightly for social gathering and dances. The more extensively the modern city endeavors on the one hand to control and on the other to provide recreational facilities for its young people, the more necessary it is that the women should have a chance to express themselves as to ↑assist in↓ their direction and extension. After all, a care for the wholesome and innocent amusement is what women have for many years assumed. When the reaction comes on the part of tax payers, their votes may be necessary to keep the city to its beneficent obligations towards 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 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 is not only spun and woven but largely 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 them who are ↑those↓ working in factories and shops are girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two, who we at once recognize that 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 someone should see to it that they shall not be incapacitated for their future family life because they work for exhausting hours and under unsanitary conditions.
If woman's sense of obligation had enlarged as the [page 10] industrial conditions changed, she might naturally and almost imperceptibly have inaugurated the 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 affairs 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 only see 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 ↑conscienscious↓ 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 and upon other voters 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 sighted ↑cited↓ as a "woman of influence." On one of her recent birthdays upon being 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 [page 11] very day that President McKinley was being elected against Mr. Bryan then a candidate 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 in turn each one of her sons and grandsons, had entered into endless arguments and moral appeals to induce one of them to represent her convictions at the polls by voting for Bryan. That although sincerely devoted to her, each one had in turn 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 venerable friend said that for many years she had suspected that women could only influence men in regard to those things in which they 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 head of the family ↑house↓ had made to their chivalric devotion. To this she replied, that she would only agree with their ↑that↓↑↑ point of view when the ↑a↓ woman had the same opportunity as a man to register her convictions by vote. I believed, then, however, as I do now, that nothing is gained when independence of judgement is assailed by "influence," sentimental or otherwise ↑and↓ that we test advancing civilization somewhat by the ↑one↓ power we attain to respect differences, and by our tolerance of another's honest conviction. which may be totally unlike our own.
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 so ↑an↓ indirect a method when she is accustomed [page 12] to well bread 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, do not as I know them, do not wish to do the work of men nor to take over men's affairs. They simply ↑Women↓ 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 street car transfers, in which both men and women might be said to be equally interested; it must not ignore any ↑the↓ judgements 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 from the cave to the castle, 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 cooperating forces? If women have in any sense been responsible for the gentler side of life which softens and blurs some of its harsher conditions, then certainly they 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 [page 13] children; if she would educate and protect from danger factory children who must of necessity 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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