Women Wage Workers: With Reference to Directing Immigrants

This is an age of progress; and, surrounded as we are to-day by every evidence of the astounding advance that the nineteenth century has carried with in its train, I feel that I am flinging down a challenge that will, perhaps, bring me face to face with a volley of rhetorical bullets, when I assert that in no other country and in no other direction is this progress more noticeable than in the relative position to man and the affairs of the world that woman occupies to-day. This advance has been made in almost every grade in society, in almost every walk in life; but so far as my own personal observations have permitted me to go, so far as my own experiences have enabled me to judge, it is my belief that this change, this revolution, yes, this progress is more noticeable in the position held by the Jewish women of America (notably the descendants of European emigrants driven from their home forty or fifty years ago), than in that of any other class in our cosmopolitan society.

Many conditions have conspired to bring about this change; the general advance in the education of women; the desire to give children greater educational advantages than the parents enjoyed; the financial value of woman’s work; the frequent necessity for women to contribute to the support of families; the growing conviction that there is not a sufficient number of marrying men to supply all the marriageable girls with good husbands—these are but a few, with only one of which it is my privilege to deal, viz., the financial value of woman’s work.

Perhaps it is due to custom and tradition, perhaps due to our oriental origin, but notwithstanding the fact that there may have always been among us a certain number of Deborahs, Ruths and Esthers, in general; the wives and daughters of Jews were, and in parts of the world unfortunately still are, regarded as man’s inferiors, their chief mission in life being to marry or rather to be given in marriage, to rear children, to perform household duties and to serve their lords and masters.

This is an age of progress; and thousands of women, many of them good, true, womanly women, have discovered for themselves, or have been led to discover, that there is, at best, only an uncertain chance of real happiness facing the woman who calmly settles down in her parents’ home, to perform, in an inane, desultory way, certain little household or social duties, who lives on from day to day, from year to year, without any special object in life, and who sees no prospect of change, unless a husband should appear to rescue her from so aimless an existence. Having made this discovery they try to join, and frequently, in the face of opposition, succeed in joining the ever-increasing army of women wage-workers, striving to lead useful, if sometimes lonely, lives, with the hope of making the world, or that little corner thereof into which their lives have fallen, a little better and a little brighter than they found it. . . .

The Jews of America, particularly the Jews of New York City, are, perhaps, the most charitable class of people in the whole world. Time, labor and money are given freely in some directions. But charity is not always philanthropy; and we have reached a point in the development of various sociological problems which makes it imperative that philanthropy be placed above charity. The need of charity must disappear as we teach the rising generation how to improve its conditions.

Almost all female immigrants who come to this shore, through lack of knowledge as to the means by which they can swing themselves above the discouraging conditions which face them, sink down into the moral and intellectual maelstrom of the American ghettos, becoming first household or factory drudges, and then drifting into one of three channels; that of the careless slattern, of the giddy and all-too-frequently sinful gadabout, or of the weary, discontented wife.

We must disentangle the individual from the mass. We must find a way or several ways of leading these girls, one by one, away from the shadows which envelop them, if not into the sunshine of happiness and prosperity, at least, into the softening light of content, born of pleasant surroundings, congenial occupations, and the inward satisfaction of a life well spent.

Working girls’ clubs are doing a grand work, but these clubs never reach the lower strata. There must be something before and beyond the working girls’ clubs, something that shall lay hold of the immigrant before she has been sucked down into the stream of physical misery of moral oblivion, from which depths it becomes almost impossible to raise her.

In this age of materialism, in these days of close inquiry as to the “Why?” of every condition, it has been claimed that the ever-increasing proportion of unmarried women among the Jews of America is largely due to the independent, position women make for themselves, first, by becoming wage-earners, and, second, through the development of self-reliance brought about by societies, working girls’ clubs and kindred movements. If marriage always meant happiness, and if celibacy always meant unhappiness, to make women independent and self-reliant would be a calamity. But, in the face of so much married unhappiness and so much unmarried discontentment, it is hardly pessimistic to wish that there might be fewer marriages consummated until the contracting parties show more discrimination in their selection of mates.

The saddest of many sad conditions that face our poor Jewish girls is the class of husbands that is being selected for them by relatives. It is the rule, not the exception, for the father, elder brother or some other near relative of a Jewish working girl to save a few hundred dollars, by which means he purchases some gross, repulsive Pole or Russian as a husband for the girl. That her whole soul revolts against such a marriage, that the man betrays, even before marriage, the brutality of his nature, that he may, perhaps, have left a wife and family in Russia, all this counts for nothing. Marry him she must, and another generation of worthless Jews is the lamentable result.

I wish it distinctly understood that there is no desire on my part to disparage matrimony; indeed, happy wifehood and motherhood are to my mind the highest mission any woman can fulfill; but in leading these girls to see the horror of ill-assorted marriages, I intend to teach them to recognize the fact that many of them may never find suitable husbands; and recognizing this fact, they must fill up their lives with useful, perhaps even noble work. Should the possible husband fail to appear, their lives will not have been barren; should he come, will a girl make a less faithful wife and mother because she has been taught to be faithful in other things?

And so I could go on showing how, in every direction, the harm and the evil grow, until the day will come when charity, even with millions at her disposal, will not be able to do good. It is easier to save from drowning than to resuscitate the drowned. Disentangle the individual from the mass; create a new mass of disentangled individuals, who shall become the leading spirits in helping their benighted Sisters, and with God’s help, the future will redeem the present and the past.