Womens Wild Oats | Page 5

not as our women have done, like war-work for its own sake. They never transferred their affections from their homes to the factories of war, they were too certain of themselves, too content with their power as women to do anything so foolish. What is the explanation of this profound difference in attitude? Why has the vision of English women failed? That is the question to which we have to try to find an answer.
II
The great part played by women coming forward during the war to take the place of men called to the army is disclosed in a White Paper recently issued by the Board of Trade. Over a million and a half women offered their services, in addition to those already employed.[23:1] The increase has been the highest in the occupations in which comparatively few women were engaged before the war. In April, 1918, 701,000 women were working on munitions and 774,000 in other industrial government employment. A disturbing fact revealed (called, I note, in the Report an interesting point!) is the number of women who have been engaged in hard, laboring work. Before the war when the public discovered women doing very hard work, it excited indignation and pity. The women chain-makers of Craddock Heath, to cite one example, were accorded general commiseration. But during the war our feelings on the question would seem to have undergone a somewhat sudden transformation; a complete turn-round has taken place in our attitude. Heavy work done by women--foundry work, for instance, demanding great expenditure of physical strength[24:1] has excited admiration and become an important factor of the industrial situation. A glamour of patriotic war service, added to the lure of high wages, has been thrown like a cloak of romance over such exhibitions of female power. They became victories of female will over female weakness.
Certainly in many cases the work done was quite unsuitable for women. The employment of married women during long days of tiring work had inevitable results. Babies were neglected or births were deliberately prevented. This spendthrift folly will have to be paid for in the future.
Not that I believe that all apparently hard work to be on an equality of unfitness for women. Country work is generally healthful; though hard work it is restful to the nerves. Every kind of nerve-racking work as in factories, heavy weight-lifting, long standing, and the tending of machinery without any kind of human interest, must be detrimental to women. Certain employments, consecrated by custom as comparatively womanly, yet, in their nerve-exhausting details mean ill-health. Take, for an instance, the average shop-girl, or machine worker, with her whitened face, dragging steps and flattened figure: does she not show plainly that she is an?mic and wanting in vitality? On the other hand, to my eye the lift attendants on the tubes, the charming conductresses of the 'buses seem healthy, though their work has been done only recently by women. I would make the influence of an occupation on woman's health--considering first and as most important her primary biological function as a potential mother--the test of its womanliness. But the health of women will never be protected while we are content to accept the valuations and suffer the defilements of this commercial age.
III
Only this morning I have been reading the newly issued Report of the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry, a large book of 340 pages, packed with information, in particular as to "the increased employment of women owing to the development of automatic machinery." What I read fills me with dismay and indignation. I was not prepared--and I thought I was prepared for anything--for such blindness of outlook.
To prove this, let me quote directly from the Report. The Committee urges rightly the importance to the health of the workers of good food, clothing and domestic comfort, and the necessity of good wages to maintain this standard. But why are these improved conditions recommended? Listen to what is said:
Properly nourished women have a much greater reserve of energy than they have usually been credited with, and under suitable conditions they can properly and advantageously be employed upon more arduous occupation than has been considered desirable in the past, even when these involve considerable activity and physical strain....
And a little further:
It is desirable that women's wide employment should be made permanent.
In another passage the Committee report that on piece work a woman will always beat a man. And again further on: On mass production she will come first every time.... Men will never stand the monotony of a fast repetition job like women; they will not stand by a machine pressing all their lives, but a woman will.[27:1]
Nothing that I can say, or any writer could say, could be more vividly condemning than are these passages. They have filled me with so