VI Massachusetts Compared With Suffrage States
Catherine Robinson
Miss Catherine Robinson was a student at Radcliffe in 1911; graduated from Miss Wheelock’s Kindergarten Training School in 1915; has worked two winters among the children in the cotton mills of Georgia, and has been affiliated with Neighborhood House in East Boston, and with the Associated Charities in the Co-operative Workrooms. She is now connected with the Social Service Department of the Massachusetts General Hospital, her work being in the Orthopaedic Clinic for Children. Miss Robinson was formerly a suffragist, but after studying the question decided that the suffragists’ claims are illusions which never become realities. She says: “Everything I do along these lines (Social Service) convinces me more than ever what a detriment the vote would be to our sex.”
J. A. H.
Not long ago I heard Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the President of the National Woman Suffrage Association, say at Springfield:
“Laws have nothing to do with this question of woman suffrage; facts have nothing to do with it. I shall not answer facts. We do not promise to do great things for women; why should we? All we ask is the right to vote.”
All suffrage speakers are not so frank about their inability to answer facts as Dr. Shaw is, nor do they cease from claiming that good laws for women exist chiefly in suffrage states.
Massachusetts gives to her women the best protection of any state in the Union. In January, 1915, New York ranked first, but since our legislative enactments of 1915, Massachusetts is again in the lead. We have, in the first place, the Maternity Act. Then we have the law prohibiting women in industry from working more than fifty-four hours per week. We have the absolute prohibition of night-work for our women in textile, mercantile, and manufacturing establishments. We are one of the five states in the Union to have such a law. All the five states are male suffrage states. Not a single woman suffrage state prohibits the night employment of its women; and yet among the laws safeguarding the health of women workers, the prohibition of night work is of the most fundamental importance.
Some women suffrage states do not even set a limit to the hours a woman may work. In Wyoming, Nevada, and Kansas—all woman suffrage states, you note—there is no limitation of hours of labor and no prohibition of night work. Some one may say that Colorado, California, Oregon and Washington have an eight-hour limitation. They have; but in each case the canneries are excepted, so that in those states where the cannery business is of vast importance, the women therein employed may work any number of hours and any time of the day or night. Not long ago in New York a similar law was proposed, allowing women and children to work seventy-two hours a week in canneries, but the bill was defeated. Colorado, to be sure, has the eight-hour law, but it does not prohibit night work for women, so that the eight hours can be at night; neither does Colorado require one day of rest in every seven. In Massachusetts and New York there is a law specifically requiring one day of rest in every seven for employees in factories, workshops, and all mercantile establishments.
Another way in which we can protect women is by early closing hours, and prohibition of work before a certain hour in the morning. Again we find that it is in the male suffrage states that women have acquired such protection, for New York sets an early closing hour of 5 p. m. for her women in factories, mercantile, and manufacturing establishments, and Massachusetts sets 6 p. m. Fourteen other male suffrage states set 10 p. m. as the closing hour; and all these states prohibit work before 6 a. m. What do we find in the woman suffrage states? Simply that out of the eleven suffrage states, one state, California, sets a 10 p. m. limit, but it does not apply to canneries.
As women enter further into the industrial field, more and more laws are made for their protection. The men have done wonderfully for our women. Whenever the public conscience is aroused to the need of a law, that law is passed. Women do much, in fact, nearly everything, towards arousing that public conscience, but we find when we study the laws as they exist in our state that our men have made better laws for the protection of our women than the men and women have made together in any suffrage state. Let me add some of the other good laws we have in Massachusetts. We have the Mothers’ Pension Bill. This law was originated by a man in a male suffrage state. We have the Equal Guardianship Law. There are suffrage states where neither of these laws exist.
Not long ago Mrs. Maud Wood Park, asserted that I was misstating the laws in suffrage states. She said I did not know the happenings in the legislature this year. I have made a careful study of the laws proposed and the action taken upon them in the eleven suffrage states and the four big “campaign states” in the legislative year of 1915. I find that while in Massachusetts we enacted five new laws relating to our women and children assuring them of still greater protection and better public health regulations, Arizona turned down five laws for women which already exist here in our own state. I was unable to find any suffrage state which could compare in any favorable way with the progress Massachusetts has made. Wyoming turned down a bill regulating the employment of children and a bill limiting the hours a woman may work. As long as I have mentioned Arizona, let me continue the comparison one step further and point out that on the 16th of February, 1915, Mrs. Berry, an Arizona suffragist, introduced a bill regulating and granting teachers’ pensions. The bill was indefinitely postponed. In the same year Massachusetts women teachers introduced a bill asking to have their former pensions granted again to them. At the same time the men teachers introduced a similar bill; and it is an interesting fact that the men were turned down, while the women’s bill was signed by the Governor. For our suffrage friends who say that women must have the ballot to be listened to, this is rather a stumbling block. I happened to be up at the State House the day the bill went through, and heard one of the women who was interested say: “It’s a mighty lucky thing we women did not have the vote.” This is the latest example of what Massachusetts men are interested in doing for Massachusetts women. Let us voice our just pride that Massachusetts touches the high water mark of protective legislation and stands as an example to all other states.