the women who work in europe

several times during my stay in london i observed, standing on a corner in one of the most crowded parts of the city, a young woman selling papers. there are a good many women, young and old, who sell papers in london, but any one could see at a glance that this girl was different. there was something in her voice and manner which impressed me, because it seemed to be at once timid, ingratiating, and a little insolent, if that is not too strong a word. this young woman was, as i soon learned, a suffragette, and she was selling newspapers—"votes for women."

this was my first meeting with the women insurgents of england. a day or two later, however, i happened to fall in with a number of these suffragette newspaper-sellers. one of them, in a lively and amusing fashion, was relating the story of the morning's happenings. i could hardly help hearing what she said, and soon became very much interested in the conversation. in fact, i soon found myself so

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entertained by the bright and witty accounts these young women gave of their adventures that it was not long before i began to enter with them into the spirit of their crusade and to realize for the first time in my life what a glorious and exciting thing it was to be a suffragette, and, i might add, what a lot of fun these young women were having out of it.

it had not occurred to me, when i set out from america to make the acquaintance of the man farthest down, that i should find myself in any way concerned with the woman problem. i had not been in london more than a few days, however, before i discovered that the woman who is at the bottom in london life is just as interesting as the man in the same level of life, and perhaps a more deserving object of study and observation.

in a certain way all that i saw of the condition of woman at the bottom connected itself in my mind with the agitation that is going on with regard to woman at the top.

except in england, the women's movement has not, so far as i was able to learn, penetrated to any extent into the lower strata of life, and that strikes me as one of the interesting facts about the movement. it shows to what extent the interests, hopes, and ambitions of modern life have, or rather have not, entered into and

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become a force in the lives of the people at the bottom.

thus it came about that my interest in all that i saw of workingwomen in europe was tinged with the thought of what was going to happen when the present agitation for the emancipation and the wider freedom of women generally should reach and influence the women farthest down.

in my journey through europe i was interested, in each of the different countries i visited, in certain definite and characteristic things. in london, for example, it was some of the destructive effects of a highly organized and complicated city life, and the methods which the government and organized philanthropy have employed to correct them, that attracted my attention. elsewhere it was chiefly the condition of the agricultural populations that interested me. in all my observation and study, however, i found that the facts which i have learned about the condition of women tended to set themselves off and assume a special importance in my mind. it is for that reason that i propose to give, as well as i am able, a connected account of them at this point.

what impressed me particularly in london were the extent and effects of the drinking habit

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among women of the lower classes. until i went to london i do not believe that i had more than once or twice in my life seen women standing side by side with the men in order to drink at a public bar. one of the first things i noticed in london was the number of drunken, loafing women that one passed in the streets of the poorer quarters. more than once i ran across these drunken and besotted creatures, with red, blotched faces, which told of years of steady excess—ragged, dirty, and disorderly in their clothing—leaning tipsily against the outside of a gin-parlour or sleeping peacefully on the pavement of an alleyway.

in certain parts of london the bar-room seems to be the general meeting place of men and women alike. there, in the evening, neighbours gather and gossip while they drink their black, bitter beer. it is against the law for parents to take their children into the bar-rooms, but i have frequently observed women standing about the door of the tap-room with their babies in their arms, leisurely chatting while they sipped their beer. in such cases they frequently give the lees of their glass to the children to drink.

in america we usually think of a bar-room as a sort of men's club, and, if women go into such a place at all, they are let in surreptitiously

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at the "family entrance." among the poorer classes in england the bar-room is quite as much the woman's club as it is the man's. the light, the warmth, and the free and friendly gossip of these places make them attractive, too, and i can understand that the people in these densely populated quarters of the city, many of them living in one or two crowded little rooms, should be drawn to these places by the desire for a little human comfort and social intercourse.

in this respect the bar-rooms in the poorer parts of london are like the beer halls that one meets on the continent. there is, however, this difference—that the effect of drink upon the people of england seems to be more destructive than it is in the case of the people on the continent. it is not that the english people as a whole consume more intoxicating drink than the people elsewhere, because the statistics show that denmark leads the rest of europe in the amount of spirits, just as belgium leads in the amount of beer, consumed per capita of the population. one trouble seems to be that, under the english industrial system, the people take greater chances, they are subject to greater stress and strain, and this leads to irregularities and to excessive drinking.

while i was in vienna i went out one sunday evening to the prater, the great public park,

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which seems to be a sort of combination of central park, new york, and coney island. in this park one may see all types of austrian life, from the highest to the lowest. sunday seems, however, to be the day of the common people, and the night i visited the place there were, in addition to the ordinary labouring people of the city, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of peasant people from the country there. they were mostly young men and women who had evidently come into the city for the sunday holiday. beside the sober, modern dress of the city crowds these peasant women, with their high boots, the bright-coloured kerchiefs over their heads, and their wide, flaring, voluminous skirts (something like those of a female circus-rider, only a little longer and not so gauzy), made a strange and picturesque appearance.

meanwhile there was a great flare of music of a certain sort; and a multitude of catchpenny shows, mountebanks, music halls, theatres, merry-go-rounds, and dancing pavilions gave the place the appearance of a stupendous county fair. i do not think that i ever saw anywhere, except at a picnic or a barbecue among the negroes of the southern states, people who gave themselves up so frankly and with such entire zest to this simple, physical sort of enjoyment. everywhere there were eating, drinking, and

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dancing, but nevertheless i saw no disorder; very few people seemed to be the worse for drinking, and in no instance did i see people who showed, in the disorder of their dress or in the blotched appearance of their faces, the effects of continued excesses, such as one sees in so many parts of london. individuals were, for the most part, neatly and cleanly dressed; each class of people seemed to have its own place of amusement and its own code of manners, and every one seemed to keep easily and naturally within the restraints which custom prescribed.

i do not mean to say that i approve of this way of spending the sabbath. i simply desire to point out the fact, which others have noticed, that the effect of the drinking habit seems to be quite different in england from what it is in countries on the continent.

i had an opportunity to observe the evil effects of the drinking habit upon the englishwomen of the lower classes when i visited some of the police courts in the poorer parts of london. when i remarked to a newspaper acquaintance in london that i wanted to see as much as i could, while i was in the city, of the life of the poorer people, he advised me to visit the worship street and thames police stations. the worship street station is situated in one of

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the most crowded parts of london, in close proximity to bethnal green and spitalfields, which have for many years been the homes of the poorer working classes, and especially of those poor people known as houseworkers and casuals, who live in garrets and make paper boxes, artificial flowers, etc., or pick up such odd jobs as they can find. the thames station is situated a little way from london dock and not far from the notorious ratcliffe highway, which until a few years ago was the roughest and most dangerous part of london.

perhaps i ought to say, at the outset, that two things in regard to the london police courts especially impressed me: first, the order and dignity with which the court is conducted; second, the care with which the judge inquires into all the facts of every case he tries, the anxiety which he shows to secure the rights of the defendant, and the leniency with which those found guilty are treated. in many cases, particularly those in which men or women were charged with drunkenness, the prisoners were allowed to go with little more than a mild and fatherly reprimand.

after listening for several hours to the various cases that came up for hearing, i could well understand that the police have sometimes complained that their efforts to put down crime

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were not supported by the magistrates, who, they say, always take the side of the culprits.

in this connection i might mention a statement which i ran across recently of a man who had served at one time as a magistrate in both the worship street and thames police courts. he said that there was a great deal of drunkenness among certain of the factory girls of east london, although they were seldom arrested and brought into court for that offence.

he added: "it must not be forgotten that the number of convictions for drunkenness is not by any means a proper measure of insobriety. if a policeman sees a drunken man conducting himself quietly or sleeping in a doorway, he passes on and takes no notice. those who are convicted belong, as a rule, to the disorderly classes, who, the moment liquor rises to their heads, manifest their natural propensities by obstreperous and riotous conduct. for one drunkard of this order there must be fifty who behave quietly and always manage to reach their homes, however zigzag may be their journey thither."

that statement was made a number of years ago, but i am convinced that it holds good now, because i noticed that most of the persons arrested and brought into court, especially women, were bloodstained and badly battered.

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in the majority of these cases, as i have said, the persons were allowed to go with a reprimand or a small fine. the only case in which, it seemed to me, the judge showed a disposition to be severe was in that of a poor woman who was accused of begging. she was a pale, emaciated, and entirely wretched appearing little woman, and the charge against her was that of going through the streets, leading one of her children by the hand, and asking for alms because she and her children were starving. i learned from talking with the officer who investigated the case that the statement she made was very likely true. he had known her for some time, and she was in a very sad condition. but then, it seems, the law required that in such circumstances she should have gone to the workhouse.

i think that there were as many as fifteen or twenty women brought into court on each of the mornings i visited the court. most of them were arrested for quarrelling and fighting, and nearly all of them showed in their bloated faces and in their disorderly appearance that steady and besotted drunkenness was at the bottom of their trouble.

i have found since i returned from europe that the extent of drunkenness among englishwomen has frequently been a matter of observation and comment. richard grant white,

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in his volume "england within and without," says:

i was struck with horror at the besotted condition of so many of the women—women who were bearing children every year, and suckling them, and who seemed to me little better than foul human stills through which the accursed liquor with which they were soaked filtered drop by drop into the little drunkards at their breasts. to these children drunkenness comes unconsciously, like their mother tongue. they cannot remember a time when it was new to them. they come out of the cloudland of infancy with the impression that drunkenness is one of the normal conditions of man, like hunger and sleep.

this was written thirty years ago. it is said that conditions have greatly improved in recent years in respect to the amount of drunkenness among the poor of london. nevertheless, i notice in the last volume of the "annual charities register" for london the statement that inebriety seems to be increasing among women, and that it prevails to such an alarming extent among women in all ranks of society that "national action is becoming essential for the nation's very existence."

the statistics of london crime show that, while only about half as many women as men are arrested on the charges of "simple drunkenness" and "drunkenness with aggravations," more than three times as many women as men are arrested on the charge of "habitual" drunkenness. another thing that impressed

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me was that the american police courts deal much more severely with women. this is certainly true in the southern states, where almost all the women brought before the police courts are negroes.

the class of people to whom i have referred represent, as a matter of course, the lowest and most degraded among the working classes. nevertheless, they represent a very large element in the population, and the very existence of this hopeless class, which constitutes the dregs of life in the large cities, is an indication of the hardship and bitterness of the struggle for existence in the classes above them.

i have attempted in what i have already said to indicate the situation of the women at the bottom in the complex life of the largest and, if i may say so, the most civilized city in the world, where women are just now clamouring for all the rights and privileges of men. but there are parts of europe where, as far as i have been able to learn, women have as yet never heard that they had any rights or interests in life separate and distinct from those of their husbands and children. i have already referred to the increasing number of barefoot women i met as i journeyed southward from berlin. at first these were for the most part women who worked in the fields. but by the time i reached

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vienna i found that it was no uncommon thing to meet barefoot women in the most crowded and fashionable parts of the city.

experience in travelling had taught me that the wearing of shoes is a pretty accurate indication of civilization. the fact that in a large part of southern europe women who come from the country districts have not yet reached the point where they feel comfortable in shoes is an indication of the backwardness of the people.

what interested and surprised me more than the increasing absence of shoes among the countrywomen was the increasing number of women whom i saw engaged in rough and unskilled labour of every kind. i had never seen negro women doing the sort of work i saw the women of southern europe doing. when i reached prague, for example, i noticed a load of coal going through the streets. a man was driving it, but women were standing up behind with shovels. i learned then that it was the custom to employ women to load and unload the coal and carry it into the houses. the driving and the shovelling were done by the man, but the dirtiest and the hardest part of the work was performed by the women.

in vienna i saw hundreds of women at work as helpers in the construction of buildings; they

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mixed the mortar, loaded it in tubs, placed it on their heads, and carried it up two or three stories to men at work on the walls. the women who engage in this sort of labour wear little round mats on their heads, which support the burdens which they carry. some of these women are still young, simply grown girls, fresh from the country, but the majority of them looked like old women.

not infrequently i ran across women hauling carts through the streets. sometimes there would be a dog harnessed to the cart beside them. that, for example, is the way in which the countrywomen sometimes bring their garden truck to market. more often, however, they will be seen bringing their garden products to market in big baskets on their heads or swung over their shoulders. i remember, while i was in budapest, that, in returning to my hotel rather late one night, i passed through an open square near the market, where there were hundreds of these market women asleep on the sidewalks or in the street. some of them had thrown down a truss of straw on the pavement under their wagons and gone to sleep there. others, who had brought their produce into town from the country on their backs, had in many cases merely put their baskets on the sidewalk, lain down, thrown a portion of their

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skirts up over their heads, and gone to sleep. at this hour the city was still wide awake. from a nearby beer hall there came the sounds of music and occasional shouts of laughter. meanwhile people were passing and repassing in the street and on the sidewalk, but they paid no more attention to these sleeping women than they would if they had been horses or cows.

in other parts of austria-hungary i ran across women engaged in various sorts of rough and unskilled labour. while i was in cracow, in austrian poland, i saw women at work in the stone quarries. the men were blasting out the rock, but the women were assisting them in removing the earth and in loading the wagons. at the same time i saw women working in brickyards. the men made the brick, the women acted as helpers. while i was in cracow one of the most interesting places i visited in which women are employed was a cement factory. the man in charge was kind enough to permit me to go through the works, and explained the process of crushing and burning the stone used in the manufacture of cement. a large part of the rough work in this cement factory is done by girls. the work of loading the kilns is performed by them. very stolid, heavy, and dirty-looking creatures they were. they had

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none of the freshness and health that i noticed so frequently among the girls at work in the fields.

while i was studying the different kinds of work which women are doing in austria-hungary i was reminded of the complaint that i had heard sometimes from women in america, that they were denied their rights in respect to labour, that men in america wanted to keep women in the house, tied down to household duties.

in southern europe, at any rate, there does not seem to be any disposition to keep women tied up in the houses. apparently they are permitted to do any kind of labour that men are permitted to do; and they do, in fact, perform a great many kinds of labour that we in america think fit only for men. i noticed, moreover, as a rule, that it was only the rough, unskilled labour which was allotted to them. if women worked in the stone quarries, men did the part of the work that required skill. men used the tools, did the work of blasting the rock. if women worked on the buildings, they did only the roughest and cheapest kinds of work. i did not see any women laying brick, nor did i see anywhere women carpenters or stone-masons.

in america negro women and children are employed very largely at harvest time in the cotton-fields, but i never saw in america, as

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i have seen in austria, women employed as section hands on a railway, or digging sewers, hauling coal, carrying the hod, or doing the rough work in brickyards, kilns, and cement factories.

in the southern states of america the lowest form of unskilled labour is that of the men who are employed on what is known as public works—that is to say, the digging of sewers, building of railways, and so forth. i was greatly surprised, while i was in vienna, to see women engaged side by side with men in digging a sewer. this was such a novel sight to me that i stopped to watch these women handle the pick and shovel. they were, for the most part, young women, of that heavy, stolid type i have referred to. i watched them for some time, and i could not see but that they did their work as rapidly and as easily as the men beside them. after this i came to the conclusion that there was not anything a man could do which a woman could not do also.

in poland the women apparently do most of the work on the farms. many of the men have gone to vienna to seek their fortune. many, also, have gone to the cities, and still others are in the army, because on the continent every able-bodied man must serve in the army. the result is that more and more of the work that

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was formerly performed by men is now done by women.

one of the most interesting sights i met in europe was the market in cracow. this market is a large open square in the very centre of the ancient city. in this square is situated the ancient cloth hall, a magnificent old building, which dates back to the middle ages, when it was used as a place for the exhibition of merchandise, principally textiles of various kinds. on the four sides of this square are some of the principal buildings of the city, including the city hall and the church of the virgin mary, from the tall tower of which the hours are sounded by the melodious notes of a bugle.

on market days this whole square is crowded with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of market women, who come in from the country in the early morning with their produce, remain until it is sold, and then return to their homes.

in this market one may see offered for sale anything and everything that the peasant people produce in their homes or on the farms. among other things for sale i noted the following: geese, chickens, bread, cheese, potatoes, salads, fruits of various sorts, mushrooms, baskets, toys, milk, and butter.

what interested me as much as anything was to observe that nearly everything that was sold

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in this market was carried into the city on the backs of the women. practically, i think, one may say that the whole city of cracow, with a population of 90,000 persons, is fed on the provisions that the peasant women carry into the city, some of them travelling as far as ten or fifteen miles daily.

one day, while driving in the market of cracow, our carriage came up with a vigorous young peasant woman who was tramping, barefoot, briskly along the highway with a bundle swung on her shoulder. in this bundle, i noticed, she carried a milk-can. we stopped, and the driver spoke to her in polish and then translated to my companion, doctor park, in german. at first the woman seemed apprehensive and afraid. as soon as we told her we were from america, however, her face lighted up and she seemed very glad to answer all my questions.

i learned that she was a widow, the owner of a little farm with two cows. she lived something like fourteen kilometres (about ten miles) from the city, and every day she came into town to dispose of the milk she had from her two cows. she did not walk all the way, but rode half the distance in the train, and walked the other half. she owned a horse, she said, but the horse was at work on the farm, and she

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could not afford to use him to drive to town. in order to take care of and milk her cows and reach the city early enough to deliver her milk she had to get up very early in the morning, so that she generally got back home about ten or eleven o'clock. then, in the afternoon, she took care of the house and worked in the garden. this is a pretty good example, i suspect, of the way some of these peasant women work.

all day long one sees these women, with their bright-coloured peasant costumes, coming and going through the streets of cracow with their baskets on their backs. many of them are barefoot, but most of them wear very high leather boots, which differ from those i have seen worn by peasant women in other parts of austria and hungary in the fact that they have very small heels.

i had an opportunity to see a great many types of women in the course of my journey across europe, but i saw none who looked so handsome, fresh, and vigorous as these polish peasant women.

it is said of the polish women, as it is said of the women of the slavic races generally, that they are still living in the mental and physical slavery of former ages. probably very few of them have ever heard of women's rights. but, if that is true, it simply shows how very little

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connection such abstract words have with the condition, welfare, and happiness of the people who enjoy the freedom and independence of country life. at any rate, i venture to say that there are very few women, even in the higher ranks of labouring women in england, whose condition in life compares with that of these vigorous, wholesome, and healthy peasant women.

how can work in the stifling atmosphere of a factory or in some crowded city garret compare with the life which these women lead, working in the fields and living in the free and open country?

the emigration to america has left an enormous surplus of women in europe. in england, for instance, the women stand in the proportion of sixteen to fifteen to the men. in some parts of italy there are cities, it is said, where all the able-bodied men have left the country and gone to america. the changes brought by emigration have not, on the whole, it seems to me, affected the life of women favourably. but the same thing is true with regard to the changes brought about by the growth of cities and the use of machinery. men have profited by the use of machinery more than women. the machines have taken away from the women the occupations they had in the homes, and this has driven them to take up

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other forms of labour, of more or less temporary character, in which they are overworked and underpaid.

everywhere we find the women in europe either doing the obsolete things or performing some form of unskilled labour. for example, there are still one hundred thousand people, mostly women, in east london, it is said, who are engaged in home industries—in other words, sweating their lives away in crowded garrets trying to compete with machinery and organization in the making of clothes or artificial flowers, and in other kinds of work of this same general description.

the movement for women's suffrage in england, which began in the upper classes among the women of the west end, has got down, to some extent, to the lower levels among the women who work with the hands. women's suffrage meetings have been held, i have learned, in bethnal green and whitechapel. but i do not believe that voting alone will improve the condition of workingwomen.

there must be a new distribution of the occupations. too many women in europe are performing a kind of labour for which they are not naturally fitted and for which they have had no special training. there are too many women in the ranks of unskilled labour. my own

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conviction is that what the workingwomen of europe need most is a kind of education that will lift a larger number of them into the ranks of skilled labour—that will teach them to do something, and to do that something well.

the negro women in america have a great advantage in this respect. they are everywhere admitted to the same schools to which the men are admitted. all the negro colleges are crowded with women. they are admitted to the industrial schools and to training in the different trades on the same terms as men. one of the chief practical results of the agitation for the suffrage in europe will be, i imagine, to turn the attention of the women in the upper classes to the needs of the women in the lower classes. in europe there is much work for women among their own sex, for, as i have said elsewhere, in europe the man farthest down is woman.