Municipal government -- United States; Peace; Political participation -- United States; Social justice; Working class -- United States
These moral and economic difficulties, whether connected with the
isolation of the home or with the partial and unsatisfactory efforts
of trades unions, could be avoided only if society would frankly
recognize the industrial situation as that which concerns us all,
and would seriously prepare all classes of the community for their
relation to the situation. A technical preparation would, of course,
not be feasible, but a cultural one would be possible, so that all
parts of the community might be intelligent in regard to the industrial
developments and transitions going on about them. If American women
could but obtain a liberating knowledge of that history of industry
and commerce which is so similar in every country of the globe, the
fact that so much factory labor is performed by immigrants would
help to bring them nearer to the immigrant woman. Equipped with “the
informing mind” on the one hand and with experience on the other, we
could then walk together through the marvelous streets of the human
city, no longer conscious whether we are natives or aliens, because
we have become absorbed in a fraternal relation arising from a common
experience.
And this attitude of understanding and respect for the worker is
necessary, not only to appreciate what he produces, but to preserve
his power of production, again showing the necessity for making that
substitute for war--human labor--more aggressive and democratic. We
are told that the conquered races everywhere, in their helplessness,
are giving up the genuine practise of their own arts. In India, for
instance, where their arts have been the blossom of many years of
labor, the conquered races are casting them aside as of no value in
order that they may conform to the inferior art, or rather, lack of
art, of their conquerors. Morris constantly lamented that in some parts
of India the native arts were quite destroyed, and in many others
nearly so; that in all parts they had more or less begun to sicken.
This lack of respect and understanding of the primitive arts found
among colonies of immigrants in a modern cosmopolitan city, produces
a like result in that the arts languish and disappear. We have made
an effort at Hull-House to recover something of the early industries
from an immigrant neighborhood, and in a little exhibit called a
labor museum, we have placed in historic sequence and order methods
of spinning and weaving from a dozen nationalities in Asia Minor and
Europe. The result has been a striking exhibition of the unity and
similarity of the earlier industrial processes. Within the narrow
confines of one room, the Syrian, the Greek, the Italian, the Russian,
the Norwegian, the Dutch, and the Irish find that the differences in
their spinning have been merely putting the distaff upon a frame or
placing the old hand-spindle in a horizontal position. A group of women
representing vast differences in religion, in language, in tradition,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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