THE CLASS STRUGGLE CHANGING LABOR CONDITIONS 130 131 Six months after hostilities opened however, unemployment diminished, and the Allies contracts and the social results thereof began to grow clearly visible. To fill the void in the labor market created by the cessation of immigration and by the international demand for food, fuel and munitions, there began a flow of recruits to the ranks of industry such as this country had not previously experienced. Connecticut, one of the permanent homes of the munitions industry, revealed to the observant eye that lowering of industrial standards whichi has since spread in many directions. famous Connecticut arms manufacturing company having huge contracts began in 1915 to require men in its employ to bring in their wives if these had, before marriage, worked in their factories. In Connecticut, more than in most of the states, building and loan associations and savings banks had thriven, and great numbers of working men homes were in process of being paid for. When therefore, the dictum went forth from the munitions works that a man having a wife eligible for employment and failing to bring her in when requested, need not come himself, great numbers of mothers began to work at night while caring for their young children by day. They attempted, by thus doing the work of two persons, to aid their husbands in saving their homes from foreclosure.
Nebraska, and Indiana do. When, however, an attempt was made to enforce this provision, the Connecticut courts held that the limitation applied only to stores, which have naturally only slight occasion to employ women after 10 It has not been possible to get the Connecticut legislature, which sat in 1915 and in 1917, to extend the prohibition of work of women at night to include factories.
Connecticut was merely a sample. Wherever war contracts have appeared, suction has been applied to draw in fresh groups of workers new to industry. Country bred men and women have swarmed to the new munitions towns, and heavy pressure has been þrought to bear upon all laws regulating working hours of women, minors and children.
Soon the visiting nurses raised voices of warning. Tuberculous mothers whose disease had been arrested were again open cases. Able to maintain their restored health under the ordinary strains of home life with care and guidance of the tuberculosis nurses, these Connecticut mothers were perishing like grain before the scythe under the stress of the war contracts, two years before the United States entered the war.
Home making mothers by day and wage earning wives by night, these were early victims of the world war.
It had been widely believed that Connecticut forbade the employment of women in manufacture after 10 at night, as Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, The Negroes in Industry Negroes, both men and women, were brought from the rural Southern States to Northern industrial centers in 1915 and 1916 first by hundreds, then by thousands, to the serious disorganization of Southern food production.
The world suffers hunger and we, with our unmeasured wealth, can save neither ourselves nor the starving peoples.
While Europe looks to us for food, fuel and cotton, we are not meeting our own demand, much less that of the other nations.
One reason is neglect of the South. The nation has tacitly approved while two generations of masses of people have remained in blind ignorance of modern agriculture and horticulture. For more than a half century, ever since the Civil War, millions of our rural people, both white and colored, have by our national policy of neglect of education been left unqualified for producing maximum crops wherewith to meet the demand that the present crisis makes upon us.
Only in the present year are appreciable sums becoming available under the Smith Hughes and the Smith Lever Laws, in the educationally least developed states for training teachers of agriculture, horticulture and domestic science, and