Florence Kelley quotes
Hence, within the space of two generations there has been a complete revolution in the attitude of the trades-unions toward the women working in their trades.
In order to be rated as good as a good man in the field of her earnings, she must show herself better than he. She must be more steady, or more trustworthy, or more skilled, or more cheap in order to have the same chance of employment.
In the garment trades, on the other hand, the presence of a body of the disfranchised, of the weak and young, undoubtedly contributes to the economic weakness of these trades.
It is fatal for any body of workers to have forever hanging from the fringes of its skirts other bodies on a level just below its own; for that means continual pressure downward, additional difficulty to be overcome in the struggle to maintain reasonable rates of wages.
No one needs all the powers of the fullest citizenship more urgently than the wage-earning woman, and from two different points of view-that of actual money wages and that of her wider needs as a human being and a member of the community.
On the one hand, she is cut off from the protection awarded to her sisters abroad; on the other, she has no such power to defend her interests at the polls, as is the heritage of her brothers at home.
The lack of the ballot places the wage-earning woman upon a level of irresponsibility compared with her enfranchised fellow workingman. By impairing her standing in the community the general rating of her value as a human being, and consequently as a worker, is lowered.
The very fact that women now form about one-fifth of the employes in manufacture and commerce in this country has opened a vast field of industrial legislation directly affecting women as wage-earners.
The workingmen have perceived that women are in the field of industry to stay; and they see, too, that there can not be two standards of work and wages for any trade without constant menace to the higher standard.
Their effort to place the women upon the same industrial level with themselves in order that all may pull together in the effort to maintain reasonable conditions of life.
This position is untenable, and there can be no pause in the agitation for full political power and responsibility until these are granted to all the women of the nation.
Thus, while women are accused of lowering wages, might they not justly reply that it is only by conceding something from the pay which they would gladly claim, that they can hold their own in the market, so long as they labor under the disadvantage of disfranchisement?
Whereas forty years ago women might have knocked in vain at the doors of the most enlightened trade-union, today the Federation of Labor keeps in the field paid organizers whose duty it is to enlist in the unions as many women as possible.