The Modern Woman's Rights Movement: A Historical SurveySchirmacher, Käthe
History
The Modern Woman's Rights Movement: A Historical Survey
Schirmacher, Käthe
Women -- Social and moral questions; Women's rights
The workingwomen especially will be helped by the right to vote. In the
"Political Equality Series" appears a pamphlet entitled _Why does the
Working-woman need the Right to Vote?_ In the first place she needs the
right to vote in order to secure higher wages. Just suppose that the
members of the typographical union were to-morrow deprived of their right
to vote. Only their full political emancipation could again restore them
to their former position of prestige among the working classes. This is
exactly the case with the women, and they have not even reached the
highly-developed organization of the typographers. A politically unfree
laboring class is also unable to maintain its vocation against a laboring
class possessing political rights; _if the vocation is remunerative the
unfree class will be deprived of it or be kept from it altogether_. The
oppression of the workingwomen has its effect also on men through its
tendency to lower wages. Therefore at the present time the trades-unions
have recognized that to organize women is _in the interests of all
workingmen_, and while the women were refused organization forty years
ago, the Federation of Labor is to-day paying trades-union organizers to
induce women to become members of trades-unions. The introduction of a
low rate of wages in one branch of a trade (pursued by both men _and_
women) is always a menace to the branches that survive the reduction. The
number of women engaged in the industries in 1900 was 1,315,890. The
number of married women engaged in industrial pursuits is small; in 1895,
an official investigation showed that in 1067 factories 7,000 workingwomen
out of 71,000 were married. The chief industries in which women are
employed are the textile industry (cotton), laundering, the manufacture of
ready-made clothing, corsets, carpets, millinery, and fancy-goods. Women
work alongside the men in wool-spinning, in bookbinding, and in the
manufacture of shoes, mittens, tobacco, and confectionery.
The inability of workingwomen to exercise political rights makes minors of
them when compared with workingmen, and this decreases their importance as
human beings. Women cannot protect themselves against injustice, and these
things put them at a great disadvantage.
The American women became involved in a lively conflict with President
Roosevelt (otherwise favoring woman's rights) concerning his gift to a
father and mother for bringing twenty children into the world. The women
declared in the _Woman's Journal_ that it is wrong to encourage an
immoderate procreation of children among a population 70 per cent of
which possesses no property.[23] Above all, this encouragement is not only
a menace to the overworked and oppressed workingwomen, but it is inhuman,
and really lowers woman to the position of a machine for bearing children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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