Working With the Working WomanParker, Cornelia Stratton
History
Working With the Working Woman
Parker, Cornelia Stratton
United States -- Social conditions; Women -- Employment -- United States; Working class -- United States
Women working at everything under the sun—except perhaps being
locomotive engineers and soldiers and sailors. Why?
First, it is part of every normal human being to want to work.
Therefore, women want to work. Time was when within the home were
enough real life-sized jobs to keep a body on the jump morning and
night. Not only mother but any other females handy. There are those
who grumble that women could find enough to do at home now if they
only tried. They cannot, unless they have young children or unless
they putter endlessly at nonessentials, the doing of which leaves them
and everybody else no better off than before they began. And it is
part of the way we are made that besides wanting to work, we need to
work at something we feel “gets us some place.” We prefer to work at
something desirable and useful. Perhaps what we choose is not really
so desirable and useful, looked at in the large, but it stacks up as
more desirable and more useful than something else we might be doing.
And with it all, if there is to be any real satisfaction, must go some
feeling of independence—of being on “one's own.”
So, then, women go out to work in 1921 because there is not enough to
do to keep them busy at home. They follow in part their age-old
callings, only nowadays performed in roaring factories instead of by
the home fireside. In part they take to new callings. Whatever the job
may be, women _want_ to work in preference to the nonproductiveness of
most home life to-day.
Graham Wallas, in his _Great Society_, quotes the answers given by a
number of girls to a woman who held their confidence as to why they
worked. He wished to learn if they were happy. The question meant to
the girls evidently, “Are you happier than you would have been at
home?” and practically every answer was “Yes.”
In a “dismal and murky,” but fairly well-managed laundry, six Irish
girls all answered they were happy. One said the work “took up her
mind, she had been awfully discontented.” Another that “you were of
some use.” Another, “the hours went so much faster. At home one could
read, but only for a short time. Then there was the awful lonesome
afternoon ahead of you.” “Asked a little girl with dyed hair but a
good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It made her feel she was
worth something.”
At another laundry, the first six girls all answered they were happy
because the “work takes up your mind,” and generally added, “It's
awful lonesome at home,” or “there is an awful emptiness at home.”
However, one girl with nine brothers and sisters was happy in the
collar packing room just because “it was so awful lonesome”—she
could enjoy her own thoughts. An Irishwoman at another laundry who had
married an Italian said, “Sure I am always happy. It leaves me no time
to think.” At a knitting plant one girl said “when she didn't work,
she was always thinking of dead people, but work always made her cheer
up directly.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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