Woman may do this, first, by wiping out and forever the stigma that
attaches or has attached to any woman who earns money outside her own
home. They may do it, second, by so relating themselves to
professional, clerical, manual workers among their own sex as to show
that they really believe in equality of rights and mutuality of duties
among all classes. They may do it, third, by taking hold of the
household service problem radically and from the basis of actual
knowledge of its importance to personal and family well-being. They
may show actual regard for the dignity of the functions implied, by
the treatment accorded the competent, faithful, and often
indispensable domestic helper. There is a big social job waiting for
women in matters concerning the work of their own sex both within and
without the family circle; and the social power of women will be best
shown, perhaps, in settling the worst problems of domestic service by
the wiser and more efficient use of better educated, more socially
respected, and more definitely standardized workers within the home.
=The Social Effect of Trade Unions.=--No study of the relation of
modern industry to family life, however brief and inadequate, can
ignore the question, "How has the Trade Union organization of
wage-earners affected the home?" The immediate and direct effect has
often been disastrous when strikes and lockouts marked the course of
industrial warfare. All war is bad for family life and especially
injurious to the development of children. And economic war lacks the
appeal to the imagination and the ceremonial prestige of war between
nations or of civil war in one country. We have had in our
race-experience for untold ages the linking of military training with
military defence of political ideas and of the fatherland. To fight
for one's country seems highly honorable. This lift of the sense of
community unity into the area of supreme struggle gives to men often
what no other experience so far accomplishes, namely, a feeling of
spiritual union with all other men who also struggle for what they
believe to be right. In labor wars; in the strife between employer and
employed, that sense of race unity even when struggling against a
national enemy, that which gives what Professor James well called the
"mystic element in militarism," is lacking. It is a fight between men
who have and those who have not and feel themselves defrauded of just
due. Hence, although the fight may be bitter even unto death, and the
sacrifices of immediate comfort for ultimate ends beyond measure
heroic and even wise, there can be little of the pomp and circumstance
that accompany national and international warfare. The Decoration Days
when heroes of past conflicts are praised and receive from all the
reverence which patriotism pays to those believed to have saved some
precious inheritance from harm do not yet, perhaps will never, include
heroes of labor struggles for equal right and mutual justice. Yet the
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