The Future of the Women's MovementSwanwick, Helena M. (Helena Maria)
General
The Future of the Women's Movement
Swanwick, Helena M. (Helena Maria)
Women -- Social and moral questions; Women's rights
Girls are less domesticated now, largely because the development of
industry has made them less so. Bread, jams, pickles, candles, hams,
yarn, cloth and clothes that used to be made in the home are now made in
the factory. It seems to me perfectly clear that by degrees much of the
cooking and laundering, even of the poor, will be done on a large scale
by those who receive wages for doing it. The discomfort and unhealthiness
of laundry work in a small cottage, and the waste of time and fuel in
cookery, are manifest to everyone who has ever seen them. There will be
a development of the crèche or day nursery in all towns, and eventually
those who love the individualist life will find it best in country
districts, while the towns will be given over to the men and women of
co-operative and gregarious temperaments.
These developments will, of course, bring with them their characteristic
dangers and disadvantages. Neither progress nor stagnation is safe; but
the one is life, the other is death. What is necessary is to face things
as they are and not go on eternally pretending that the world is what it
is not: that women all have sheltered happy homes, if only they would
stay in them; that it is only idleness or perversity which prevents women
from making their own bread (without a suitable oven) and stocking their
own jam (without even a shelf to put it on). We have seen enough of the
very serious disadvantages of modern industrialism to have a shrewd idea
of what the dangers of further development will be, and it would be the
wisest thing for sociologists not to attempt to sweep back the tide, but
to direct its channels for the future.
The divorce of the producer and the consumer has had many bad effects as
well as some good. While people prepared their own food and made their
own clothes and furniture, there was a direct personal incentive to make
them good. This incentive must be replaced by one as strong, or quality
will drop. The modern producer finds it difficult to know what his
enormous public wants, and it profits him to assert, by advertisement,
that what he makes is what the public wants. The consumer is confused and
helpless, disorganised and very open to suggestion. Moreover, the power
of finance, of trusts and combinations, to beat out competitors and to
rig the market, acts more often than not in direct opposition to the
real interests of the consumer. Hence enormous waste of material wealth,
adulteration and shoddy, and the ugliness that comes from bad material
and bad workmanship overlaid with vulgar ornament.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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