WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 375 



WOMEX IX INDUSTRY 



Bt D. R. MALCOLM KEIR 



DErARTMEXT OF IXDUSTET, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSTLVANIA 



The Physical Effects of Wage Work 



WOMEX'S efforts to obtain a vote have directed attention to other 

 problems which confront members of their sex. Long hours 

 of work in factories and stores and the evils of the sweat shop have been 

 investigated, but little has been written upon the effect that working 

 may have on women's ability to bear children. 



It is said that the hue and cry over the work of women in industry 

 is misplaced and overemphasized. Women have always been employed 

 at the very same things for which they now draw wages. Since history- 

 has been recorded they have woven cloth, prepared food and borne bur- 

 dens. The only difference between former times and the present is 

 that most of this work was once done individually in the home, whereas 

 now it is carried on collectively in a factory. Women are not doing 

 men's work. They can not, for they are smaller, less agile, less strong. 

 Eather it is true that men in spinning, weaving and sewing are invading 

 women's sphere and crowding out the women. It is claimed that the 

 work in mills is for no longer hours, nor under worse sanitary and 

 hygienic conditions, than women's tasks have always been. A parallel 

 argument is that scarlet fever is not a dangerous disease because it is 

 no worse than smallpox. If it is true that there are 156 women sick 

 for every 100 sick men in the cotton mills; if the sick- insurance societies 

 of England, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and France report that 

 women are ill oftener and for a longer duration than men; if medical 

 authorities report that 40 per cent, of married women who have been 

 factory girls are treated for pelvic disorders before they are thirty years 

 old; then it must also be true that factory work has in it something 

 that is more injurious to health than similar emplojonent at home. 

 When the labor is performed away from the domestic hearth new ele- 

 ments enter into it that make it dangerous. In the home the woman 

 prepared the raw material for spinning, twisted it into thread and then 

 wove the cloth. Each of these operations called for a change of posi- 

 tion. In the factory the whole task has been so subdivided that each 

 woman does only a very small share of it, and so she must stand or sit 

 continually in one place. Such intense specialization permits no 

 variety in the motions of the work, thus producing a monotony that is 

 deadening. Furthermore, the number of machines to which a woman 



