Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/50

 receive as much wages for an entire week's work of 13 to 14 hours per day, as journeymen receive in the same branches for a single day of ten hours."

It is evident that glaring evils of factory life existed from the beginning, and that in many respects conditions were much worse than at present, especially for the women. The wage-earning woman, in the early days of the factories, stood unprotected by law, her problems ignored or disregarded by society. It was absolutely necessary, therefore, that she learn to protect herself, that she learn to employ those infallible weapons that have ever given strength to the weak: co-operation and organization. Yet the wage-earning woman was slow to learn. Though all the evils of her new environment pointed to the need of co-operation and organization, this tendency was continually repressed by the influences of her former environment, her education, her traditions. The factory, with its complicated machinery, its many workers, its organized system of production, was a strange, bewildering place to the inexperienced, timid girls who had been transplanted there from quiet, rural homesteads. All matters not pertaining to the home were utterly foreign to them. They could not analyze nor even understand their own problems. Moreover they had little power of resistance, as a result of the age-long oppression of their sex. The daughters of generations of subjected mothers cannot at once rise to a high level of independence and self-assertion. The ability to assert their own rights can only be gradually cultivated by the experience of freedom. Therefore we still find that hard and unfair industrial conditions are far more readily accepted by women than by men. This natural meekness of the subjected sex was, of course, even more in evidence when women first came into industry. The early women workers had been so accustomed to obedience at home, that obedience to the rules of their employers seemed natural. If the conditions of their toil were hard, if long hours of incessant labor and insanitary workrooms left them pale and weak, they did not complain. They accepted the evils as an inevitable