The Business of Being a WomanTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
General
The Business of Being a Woman
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Women -- Social and moral questions
But such a girl feels keenly the cost to herself of undertaking what
she instinctively feels ought to be for her the better task. She
knows the standards and conditions are a matter of chance; that, while
she may receive considerate treatment in one place, in another there
will be no apparent consciousness that she is a human being. She knows
and dreads the loneliness of the average "place." "It's breaking my
heart I was," sobbed an intelligent Irish girl, serving a term for
drunkenness begun in the kitchen, "alone all day long with never a one
to pass a good word." She finds herself cut off from most of the
benefits which are provided for other wage-earning girls. She finds
girls' clubhouses generally are closed to her. She is the pariah among
workers.
What is there for this girl but the factory or the shop? Yet her
presence there is a disaster for the whole labor system, for she is a
_cheap laborer_--cheap not because she is a poor laborer--she is not;
generally she is an admirable one--quick to learn, faithful to
discharge. Her weakness in trade is that she is a transient who takes
no interest in fitting herself for an advanced position. The
demonstration of this statement is found in a town like Fall River,
where the admirable textile school has only a rare woman student,
although boys and men tax its capacity. There is no object for the
average girl to take the training. She looks forward to a different
life. The working girl has still to be convinced of the "aristocracy
of celibacy"!
No more difficult or important undertaking awaits the American woman
than to accept the challenge to democratize her own special field of
labor. It is in doing this that she is going to make her chief
contribution to solving the problem of woman in industry. It is in
doing this that she is going to learn the meaning of democracy. It is
an undertaking in which every woman has a direct individual part--just
as every man has a direct part in the democratization of public life.
Individual effort aside, though it is the most fundamental, she has
various special channels of power through which she can work--her
clubs, for instance. If the vast machinery of the Federation of
Woman's Clubs could be turned to this problem of the democratization
of domestic service, what an awakening might we not hope for! Yet it
is doubtful if it will be through the trained woman's organizations
that the needed revolution will come. It will come, as always, from
the ranks of the workers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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