These facts show that woman is increasingly torn from family life by
modern developments. Marriage and the family, in the bourgeois sense,
are undermined by this development, and dissolved. From the view point
afforded by this fact also, it is an absurdity to direct women to a
domestic life. That can be done only by such people, who thoughtlessly
walk the path of life; who fail to see the facts that shape themselves
all around, or do not wish to see them, because they have an interest in
plying the trade of optimism. Facts furnish a very different picture
from that presented by such gentlemen.
In a large number of industries women are employed exclusively; in a
larger number they constitute the majority; and in most of the others
women are more or less numerously found. Their number steadily
increases, and they crowd into ever newer occupations, that they had not
previously engaged in. Finally, the working-woman is not merely paid
worse than the working man; where she does as much as a man, her hours
are, on an average, longer.
The German factory ordinances of the year 1891 fixed a maximum of eleven
hours for adult working-women. The same is, however, broken through by a
mass of exceptions that the authorities are allowed to make. Nightwork
also is forbidden for working-women in factories, but here also the
Government can make exceptions in favor of factories where work is
continuous, or for special seasons; in sugar refineries, for instance.
German legislation has not yet been able to rise to the height of
really effective measures for the protection of working-women;
consequently, these are exploited by inhumanly long hours, and
physically wrecked in the small factories, especially in the tenement
house industry. Their exploitation is made all the easier to the
employer through the circumstance that, until now, a small minority
excepted, the women have not realized that, the same as the men, they
must organize in their trades, and, there where also men are employed,
they must organize jointly with them, in order to conquer for themselves
better conditions of work. The ever stronger influx of women in
industrial pursuits affects, however, not those occupations only that
their correspondingly weaker physique especially fits them for, but it
affects also all occupations in which the modern system of exploitation
believes it can, with their aid, knock off larger profits. Under this
latter head belong both the physically exhausting and the most
disagreeable and dangerous occupations. Thus the fantastic pretence of
seeing in woman only a tender, finely-strung being, such as poets and
writers of fiction love to depict for the delectation of men, a being,
that, if it exists at all exists only as an exception, is again reduced
to its true value.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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