Who'll Do the Women's Work?

by Mrs. A.J. Wilder

Flaring headlines in the papers have announced that "women will fight to hold jobs," meaning the men's jobs which they took when the men went to war. What to do about the situation seems to be a very important question. One would think that there must have been a great number of women who were idle before the war. If not, one wonders what has become of the jobs they had. To paraphrase a more or less popular song— I wonder who's holding them now?

With men by the thousands out of work and the unemployment situation growing so acute as to cause grave fears of attempted revolution, women by hundreds are further complicating affairs by adding their numbers to the ranks of labor, employed, unemployed or striking as the case may be.

We heard nothing of numbers of women who could not find work, before the war. They were all busy, apparently and fairly well satisfied. Who is doing the work they left, to fill the places of men who went into the army, or is that work undone?

It would be interesting to know and it seems strange that while statistics are being prepared and investigations made of every subject under the sun, no one has compiled the records of "The Jobs Women Left or Woman's Work Undone."

But however curious we may be about the past, we are more vitally interested in the future. Will these women take up their old work and give the men a chance to go back to the places they will thus leave vacant? The women say not.

Other women, also, besides those who took men's jobs, have gone out of the places they filled in pre-war days, out into community and social work and government positions which were created by and because of the war. Will these women go back? Again we hear them answer, "Never! We never will go back!" All this is very well, but where are they going and with them all of us? I think this query could most truthfully be answered by a slang expression, which tho perhaps not polished is very apt–"We don't know where we're going but we're on our way."

It makes our hearts thrill and our heads rise proudly to think that women were found capable and eager to do such important work in the crisis of war-time days. I think that never again will anyone have the courage to say that women could not run world affairs if necessary. Also, it is true that when men or women have advanced they do not go back. History does not retrace its steps.

But this too is certain. We must advance logically, in order and all together if the ground gained is to be held. If what has hitherto been woman's work, in the world, is simply left undone by them, there is no one else to take it up. If it their haste to do other, perhaps more showy things, their old and special work is neglected and only half done, there will be something seriously wrong with the world, but the commonplace home work of women is the very foundation upon which everything else rests.

So if we wish to go more into world affairs, to have the time to work at public work, we must arrange our old duties in some way so that it will be possible. We cannot leave things at loose ends, no good housemother can do that, and we have been good housekeepers so long that we have the habit of finishing our work up neatly.

Women in towns and villages have an advantage over farm women in being able to co-operate more easily. There is talk now of community kitchens for them, from which hot meals may be sent to the homes. They have of course the laundries and the bake shops already.

We farm women, at least farm mothers, have stayed on the job, our own job, during all the excitement. We could not be spared from it as we realized, so there is no question of our going back or not going back. We are still doing business at the old place, in kitchen and garden and poultry yard and no one seems to be trying to take our job from us.

But we do not wish to be left too far behind our sisters in towns and cities. We are interested in social and world betterment: in religion and politics: we might even be glad to do some work as a side line that would give us a change from the old routine. We would like to keep up, if any one can keep up with these whirling times and we must have more leisure from the treadmill if we are to do any of these things. We must arrange our work differently in some way. Why not a laundry for a farm neighborhood and a bakery also, so situated that they will be easily accessible to a group of farms? Perhaps if we study conditions of labor and the forward movements of the world as related to the farm, we may find some way of applying the best of them to our own use.

Mrs. A.J. Wilder. "Who'll Do the Women's Work?" Missouri Ruralist (April 5, 1919): 36.

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