47 



There has been far less reason for it in between times, because the men 

 have themselves acquiesced in a division between the sexes industrially 

 which has not favoured solidarity. Now it is noticeable that during 

 the war period the solidarity of women of all classes has been greatly 

 increased. Many women of the comfortable classes have gone into 

 munition work. They constantly find themselves coming into the 

 very closest and most sympathetic relationship with the working 

 women who are their fellow employees, and this is so even where at 

 the commencement feeling was very divided. The fact of this new 

 solidarity amongst women has been pointed to as a danger for the male 

 worker in the future. I think it is only so if the male worker chooses 

 to make it a danger. The working woman will be always ready to 

 join forces with him industrially, as she is ready to join with him 

 socially. After all, the men and women are together outside the 

 workshop, and it is not a difficult thing to bring them into a close 

 partnership of interest and loyalty inside it. But there is a distinct 

 tendency through the agency of welfare work, which is almost wholly 

 looked at from the woman's side, to imply that the woman worker 

 needs the welfare worker as the man needs his Trade Union. Indeed, 

 that is one of the serious dangers in the present form of welfare work. 

 It makes play with the undeniable fact that women are much more 

 fastidious and more impressed by the comfort and cleanliness and 

 social amenities of their workplaces than men. The danger can be 

 corrected, however, by the Trade Unions taking a greater interest 

 in these questions and insisting upon the replacement of the official 

 welfare worker by the workers' own shop committee. But an attention 

 to the amenities of the working-day life would do much to interest 

 women in the affairs of their trade union branches. 



The fact of the matter is that real solidarity has never yet been aimed 

 at for more than momentary crises. Whenever it is, the men will find 

 the women ready. In one great trade it has been partially gained 

 already, and that because the wage demand of each sex has always 

 been the same. I mean in the cotton textile industry. But even in that 

 case the solidarity is only partial, because women have never yet 

 claimed equal share in the management of the Unions or in the real 

 control of their own affairs. They have been content to leave it to 

 the men for so long that little short of revolution seems likely to alter 

 that balance. But when it is altered, the men as well as the women 

 will find it to their advantage will find that the life of the Unions 

 themselves will become more varied, many-sided and influential, 

 touching on far more things than wages, and becoming imbued with 

 a spirit of more than collective bargaining. 



It is for that widening of industrial progress that I think we must 

 work now in readjusting the relation between the men and women 

 workers. With the settlement of the economic question are bound up 

 many questions of social and spiritual meaning and significance. 

 The freedom of the worker cannot be achieved unless the woman 

 as well as the man is free. Just as the presence of a class of low- waged 



