Women Workers in Seven Professions

Excerpt

The present economic position of women bristles with anomalies. It is the outcome of long ages of semi-serfdom, when women toiled continuously to produce wealth, which, if they were married, they could enjoy only at the good pleasure of their lords,—ages when the work of most women was conditioned and subordinated by male dominance. Yet in those days the working housewife commanded the consideration always conceded to a bread-winner—even when dependent. In modern times women's economic position has been undermined by the helpless dependence engendered amongst the well-to-do by "parasitism" resulting from nineteenth-century luxury—to quote the striking word of Olive Schreiner. Similarly, dependence has been forced upon large sections of women-folk amongst the manual workers by the loss of their hold upon land and by the decay of home industries. Now a new force is at work: the revolt of the modern woman against parasitism and dependence in all their forms; her demand for freedom to work and to choose her sphere of work, as well as for the right to dispose of what she gains.

Six years ago some women of the Fabian Society, deeply stirred by the tremendous social import of this movement, banded themselves together to unravel the tangled skein of women's economic subjection and to discover how its knots were tied. The first step was to get women to speak out, to analyse their own difficulties and hindrances as matters boldly to be faced. Whatever the truth may turn out to be with regard to natural and inevitable differences of faculty between men and women, it is at least certain that difference of sex, like any other persistent condition of individual existence, implies some difference of outlook. The woman's own standpoint—that is the first essential in understanding her position, economic or other: the trouble is that she has but recently begun to realise that she inevitably has a standpoint, which is not that of her husband, or her brother, or of the men with whom she works, or even that which these persons imagine must naturally be hers. Her point of view is her own, and it is essential to social progress that she shall both recognise this fact and make it understood.

The aim of the Fabian Women's Group was to elicit women's own thoughts and feelings on their economic position, and to this end we invited women of experience and expert knowledge, from various quarters and of many types of thought, to discourse of what they best knew to audiences of women. After the lectures, the questions raised were discussed in all their bearings by women speaking amongst women without diffidence or prejudice. In this manner the physical disabilities of women as workers have been explained clearly by women doctors, and carefully and frankly weighed and considered; the part taken by women in producing the wealth of this country in past times has been set forth by students of economic history, and much scattered material of great value unearthed, and for the first time brought together concerning a subject hitherto deemed negligible by the male historian....