My own story
the women guardians' demand for a reform of one part of the Poor Law.
That section deals with the little children who are boarded out, not by
the workhouse, but by the parents, that parent being almost always the
mother. It is from that class of workhouse mothers--mostly young servant
girls--which thoughtless people say all working girls ought to be; it is
from that class more than from any other that cases of illegitimacy
come. Those poor little servant girls, who can get out perhaps only in
the evening, whose minds are not very cultivated, and who find all the
sentiment of their lives in cheap novelettes, fall an easy prey to those
who have designs against them. These are the people by whom the babies
are mostly put out to nurse, and the mothers have to pay for their keep.
Of course the babies are very badly protected. The Poor Law Guardians
are supposed to protect them by appointing inspectors to visit the homes
where the babies are boarded. But, under the law, if a man who ruins a
girl pays down a lump sum of twenty pounds, less than a hundred dollars,
the boarding home is immune from inspection. As long as a baby-farmer
takes only one child at a time, the twenty pounds being paid, the
inspectors cannot inspect the house. Of course the babies die with
hideous promptness, often long before the twenty pounds have been spent,
and then the baby-farmers are free to solicit another victim. For years,
as I have said, women have tried in vain to get that one small reform of
the Poor Law, to reach and protect all illegitimate children, and to
make it impossible for any rich scoundrel to escape future liability for
his child because of the lump sum he has paid down. Over and over again
it has been tried, but it has always failed, because the ones who really
care about the thing are mere women.
I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian,
but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a
right but as a desperate necessity. These poor, unprotected mothers and
their babies I am sure were potent factors in my education as a
militant. In fact, all the women I came in contact with in the workhouse
contributed to that education. Very soon after I went on the board I saw
that the class of old women who came into the workhouse were in many
ways superior to the kind of old men who came into the workhouse. One
could not help noticing it. They were, to begin with, more industrious.
In fact, it was quite touching to see their industry and patience. Old
women, over sixty and seventy years of age, did most of the work of that
place, most of the sewing, most of the things that kept the house clean
and which supplied the inmates with clothing. I found that the old men
were different. One could not get very much work out of them. They liked
to stop in the oakum picking-room, where they were allowed to smoke;
but as to real work, very little was done by our old men.
I began to make inquiries about these old women. I found that the
majority of them were not women who had been dissolute, who had been
criminal, but women who had lead perfectly respectable lives, either as
wives and mothers, or as single women earning their own living. A great
many were of the domestic-servant class, who had not married, who had
lost their employment, and had reached a time of life when it was
impossible to get more employment. It was through no fault of their own,
but simply because they had never earned enough to save. The average
wage of working women in England is less than two dollars a week. On
this pittance it is difficult enough to keep alive, and of course it is
impossible to save. Every one who knows anything about conditions under
which our working women live knows that few of them can ever hope to put
by enough to keep them in old age. Besides, the average working woman
has to support others than herself. How can she save?
Some of our old women were married. Many of them, I found, were widows
of skilled artisans who had had pensions from their unions, but the
pensions had died with the men. These women, who had given up the power
to work for themselves, and had devoted themselves to working for their
husbands and children, were left penniless. There was nothing for them
to do but to go into the workhouse. Many of them were widows of men who
had served their country in the army or the navy. The men had had
pensions from the government, but the pensions had died with them, and
so the women were in the workhouse.
We shall not in future, I hope, find so many respectable old women in
English workhouses. We have an old-age pension law now, which allows old
women as well as old men the sum of five shillings--$1.20--a week;
hardly enough to live on, but enough to enable the poor to keep their
old fathers and mothers out of the workhouse without starving themselves
or their children. But when I was a Poor Law Guardian there was simply
nothing to do with a woman when her life of toil ceased except make a
pauper of her.
I wish I had space to tell you of other tragedies of women I witnessed
while I was on that board. In our out-relief department, which exists
chiefly for able-bodied poor and dependent persons, I was brought into
contact with widows who were struggling desperately to keep their homes
and families together. The law allowed these women relief of a certain
very inadequate kind, but for herself and one child it offered no relief
except the workhouse. Even if the woman had a baby at her breast she was
regarded, under the law, as an able-bodied man. Women, we are told,
should stay at home and take care of their children. I used to astound
my men colleagues by saying to them: "When women have the vote they will
see that mothers _can_ stay at home and care for their children. You men
have made it impossible for these mothers to do that."
I am convinced that the enfranchised woman will find many ways in which
to lessen, at least, the curse of poverty. Women have more practical
ideas about relief, and especially of prevention of dire poverty, than
men display. I was struck with this whenever I attended the District
Conferences and the annual Poor Law Union Meetings. In our discussions
the women showed themselves much more capable, much more resourceful,
than the men. I remember two papers which I prepared and which caused
considerable discussion. One of these was on the Duties of Guardians in
Times of Unemployment, in which I pointed out that the government had
one reserve of employment for men which could always be used. We have,
on our northwest coast, a constant washing away of the fore shore. Every
once in a while the question of coast reclamation comes up for
discussion, but I had never heard any man suggest coast reclamation as a
means of giving the unemployed relief.
In 1898 I suffered an irreparable loss in the death of my husband. His
death occurred suddenly and left me with the heavy responsibility of
caring for a family of children, the eldest only seventeen years of age.
I resigned my place on the Board of Guardians, and was almost
immediately appointed to the salaried office of Registrar of Births and
Deaths in Manchester. We have registrars of births, deaths and marriages
in England, but since the act establishing the last named contains the
words "male person," a woman may not be appointed a registrar of
marriages. The head of this department of the government is the
registrar-general, with offices at Somerset House, London, where all
vital statistics are returned and all records filed.
It was my duty as registrar of births and deaths to act as chief census
officer of my district; I was obliged to receive all returns of births
and deaths, record them, and send my books quarterly to the office of
the registrar-general. My district was in a working-class quarter, and
on this account I instituted evening office hours twice a week. It was
touching to observe how glad the women were to have a woman registrar to
go to. They used to tell me their stories, dreadful stories some of
them, and all of them pathetic with that patient and uncomplaining
pathos of poverty. Even after my experience on the Board of Guardians, I
was shocked to be reminded over and over again of the little respect
there was in the world for women and children. I have had little girls
of thirteen come to my office to register the births of their babies,
illegitimate, of course. In many of these cases I found that the child's
own father or some near male relative was responsible for her state.
There was nothing that could be done in most cases. The age of consent
in England is sixteen years, but a man can always claim that he thought
the girl was over sixteen. During my term of office a very young mother
of an illegitimate child exposed her baby, and it died. The girl was
tried for murder and was sentenced to death. This was afterwards
commuted, it is true, but the unhappy child had the horrible experience
of the trial and the sentence "to be hanged by the neck, until you are
dead." The wretch who was, from the point of view of justice, the real
murderer of the baby, received no punishment at all.
I needed only one more experience after this one, only one more contact
with the life of my time and the position of women, to convince me that
if civilisation is to advance at all in the future, it must be through
the help of women, women freed of their political shackles, women with
full power to work their will in society. In 1900 I was asked to stand
as a candidate for the Manchester School Board. The schools were then
under the old law, and the school boards were very active bodies. They
administered the Elementary Education Act, bought school sites, erected
buildings, employed and paid teachers. The school code and the
curriculum were framed by the Board of Education, which is part of the
central government. Of course this was absurd. A body of men in London
could not possibly realise all the needs of boys and girls in remote
parts of England. But so it was.
As a member of the school board I very soon found that the teachers,
working people of the higher grade, were in exactly the same position as
the working people of the lower grades. That is, the men had all the
advantage. Teachers had a representative in the school board councils.
Of course that representative was a man teacher, and equally of course,
he gave preference to the interests of the men teachers. Men teachers
received much higher salaries than the women, although many of the
women, in addition to their regular class work, had to teach sewing and
domestic science into the bargain. They received no extra pay for their
extra work. In spite of this added burden, and in spite of the lower
salaries received, I found that the women cared a great deal more about
their work, and a great deal more about the children than the men. It
was a winter when there was a great deal of poverty and unemployment in
Manchester. I found that the women teachers were spending their slender
salaries to provide regular dinners for destitute children, and were
giving up their time to waiting on them and seeing that they were
nourished. They said to me, quite simply: "You see, the little things
are too badly off to study their lessons. We have to feed them before we
can teach them."
Well, instead of seeing that women care more for schools and school
children than men do and should therefore have more power in education,
the Parliament of 1900 actually passed a law which took education in
England entirely out of the hands of women. This law abolished the
school board altogether and placed the administration of schools in the
hands of the municipalities. Certain corporations had formerly made
certain grants to technical education--Manchester had built a