Fighting for Life

by S. Josephine Baker

  It was a long and difficult task to restore some sanity to this branch of our work and to get the system in a condition so that the children might be protected so far as the law allowed. The New York State Child Labor Committee came to my aid. Miss Jeannie Minor of that Committee came to work with me as the head of that division of our work and with the aid of Mr. George A. Hall, who is still the Committee’s Secretary, we gradually got the work in such good condition that for many years it ranked first in the State in the enforcement of the law and in the protection of the child. But, try as we would, it all seemed rather futile to me. Why should children work? What sort of country was this that had to subsist, in part at least, upon the toil and labor of the young? It was easy enough to see that the fault was basic and that no amount of careful work in our office did anything more than help enforce a bad law. And so, I became an ardent worker in the attempt to get a Federal Amendment prohibiting all child labor in the United States. That was thirty years ago and I am still working for the same end.

  We have made some progress, due largely I think to the adult need of the jobs that children used to get with little or no trouble. Slowly, but surely, various states have passed adequate laws prohibiting child labor, but the Federal Amendment, passed by Congress in 1924, still hangs fire. The age at which these certificates may be issued has gradually been raised to sixteen, in many states, but there are still too many states which allow little children to work long hours for little pay. The big ray of hope has come recently. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 bans interstate commerce in articles made wholly, or in part, by children under sixteen years of age.

  I can think of no potent arguments in favor of child labor. It is a shameful and degrading thing that childhood should lose the essence of its being so that the men who employ these children may live at ease. States rights can become a sad failure when they are invoked to perpetuate such an evil. We are, on the whole, a decent and warm-hearted people who love our children. Can’t we forget political animosities and get together to give these thousands of children the protection from exploitation that we want for our own children? Can’t we at last abolish all child labor, in this country, for all time?

  CHAPTER X

  UP TO 1914 I THINK I COULD CONSCIENTIOUSLY have testified on oath that, in my opinion, I was leading a fairly active life. The foregoing pages merely summarize and actually give very little idea of the amount of skirmishing about, plus omnipresent, desk-confining detail, that goes into the organization and management of an undertaking like the Bureau of Child Hygiene. During the next five or six years, however, I began to look back on the pre-war period as a period of dignified relaxation. And I am not speaking merely of the war. Everything started whirling at once that year; why I do not know. Suffrage, for instance. Once I start talking suffrage and the general crisis in the cause of women’s rights with which the height of American suffrage agitation coincided, I indulge in another period of marveling at the difference twenty years has made.

  In the spring of 1914 I received a letter from the Philadelphia College of Physicians asking me to read a paper before them on some aspect of my child health work. I assumed that the Philadelphia College of Physicians was about the same as the New York Academy of Medicine, an institution with which I have had many contacts, both friendly and otherwise. When I reached Philadelphia, however, there was a note waiting for me at my hotel asking me to dine with twelve of the College doctors at the Union League. I was the only woman in the clubhouse. From the way the place felt and the way the members’ faces froze into paralytic astonishment as I passed, I suspect I was the only woman who ever had been in the clubhouse. The dinner was a highly formal, extremely enjoyable, but definitely stately occasion. I could not understand why they were making so much social fuss over the mere reading of a paper before a first-rate medical society, or why I had been honored with this exclusively male society.

  After dinner, my twelve hosts formed up in a column and escorted me in an impressive procession of motor cars to the College itself. There were no women in the audience there either. Then the President of the college rose to introduce me to this solemn assemblage of medical men, and they were an impressive-looking group.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “this is a remarkable occasion. For the first time since the Philadelphia College of Physicians was founded in 1787, a woman has been allowed to enter its premises.” I learned privately afterwards that it was only after months of debate that the College had decided to invite me at all.

  That was more than half a century after Dr. Blackwell had started women in medical practice in America. The name of Pankhurst was already a household word wherever newspapers were read and periodicals of all kinds had been talking about the New Woman for thirty years. But that is not to be taken as evidence of peculiar conservatism, in Philadelphia. I was presently to encounter a less gentlemanly version of the same tradition among medical students at the New York University-Bellevue Hospital Medical School in my own New York.

  There were several absurdities about that incident. It all began when Dr. William H. Park, who was both dean of the N. Y. U. medical school and laboratory-director in the New York Department of Health, asked me to lecture on child hygiene in a new course the school was giving to lead up to the new degree of Doctor of Public Health. I reflected that presently I would be taking into the Bureau new men who could write Dr.P.H. after their names, whereas I would be without that extremely pertinent degree. So, in the interests of discipline, I offered Dr. Park a bargain: I would give those lectures on child hygiene at Bellevue if he would let me enroll in the course myself, so I could take a Dr.P.H. degree too. He refused. The idea of letting me take the same course in which I was lecturing was not what bothered him. It was the college regulations forbidding women in any courses whatever. I can hardly be accused of acting unreasonably because I declined to act as teacher in an institution that considered me unfit for instruction.

  Dr. Park tried for some time to find someone to lecture in that part of the course. No one would. Child hygiene was not as well known a subject then as it has since become. So he returned to me and again I refused except on that one condition and the argument went back and forth until we were all heartily sick of it. Finally the college surrendered. I was to be allowed to take the two-year course in public health and get my degree. Naturally they could not admit me and deny entrance to other women, so another set of long-barred doors opened to the female of the species.

  With that farcical beginning, I lectured to Bellevue students for fifteen years. They never allowed me to forget that I was the first woman ever to impose herself on the college. Their method of keeping me reminded derived directly from my first lecture, which was a nerve-racking occasion. I stood down in a well with tiers of seats rising all around me, surgical-theater fashion, and the seats were filled with unruly, impatient, hardboiled young men. I looked them over and opened my mouth to begin the lecture. Instantly, before a syllable could be heard, they began to clap—thunderously, deafeningly, grinning and pounding their palms together. Then the only possible way of saving my face occurred to me. I threw back my head and roared with laughter, laughing at them and with them at the same time—and they stopped, as if somebody had turned a switch. I began to lecture like mad before they changed their minds, and they heard me in dead silence to the end. But, the moment I stopped speaking at the end of the hour, that horrible clapping began again. Frightened and tired as I was from talking a solid hour against a gloweringly hostile audience, I fled at top speed. Every lecture I gave at Bellevue, from 1915 through to 1930, was clapped in and clapped out that way; not the spontaneous burst of real applause that can sound so heart-warming, but instead the flat, contemptuous whacking rhythms with which the crowd at a baseball game walk an unpopular player in from the outfield.

  By that time I was in the middle of the suffrage fight, as I should have been as a conspicuous woman in government service. I have explained before that I did not start out as a feminis
t at all. But it was impossible to resist the psychological suction which gradually drew you into active participation in the great struggle to get political recognition of the fact that women are as much human beings as men are. Fundamentally that was what we were all after. We suffrage agitators talked a great deal about how women’s votes would clean up political corruption and encourage legislation and discourage wars, high-sounding hopes which seemed plausible enough at the time. But most of that was no more than strategic special pleading before the court of public opinion. Deep down what held us together was our sense of how unfair and absurd it was that the male half of the world should possess responsibilities from which we were excluded.

  My early indifference to the suffrage issue broke down soon enough for me to be one of the five or six original members of the College Equal Suffrage League, an organization of college women working for the vote. We tried particularly to emphasize the absurdities of denying to well-educated women a privilege accorded to semi-illiterate men. When the League was founded, there were only half a dozen women college graduates who dared belong to such an association. When asked to become a member, the average college woman acted as if you had suggested she play Lady Godiva at a stag-picnic. But that only goes to show the pathetically small scale of the suffrage movement within a few years of its great triumph.

  The annual suffrage parade up Fifth Avenue, for instance, which eventually became one of the most impressive shows in American life, had only five hundred marchers the first time it braved public scorn. I was one of the five hundred, all of us about as excited and apprehensive as if we had been early Christian martyrs lining up for the grand march into the Colosseum. When I heard the command to march, I was literally not at all sure that the nerves and muscles in my quivering legs would meet their assignment. None of us had any idea how the public would react to the idea of a group of women making a public show of themselves, and that was pretty certainly the way the man in the street was going to look at it those days. So our orders were to march straight ahead, eyes front, no matter what happened.

  A group of some fifty courageous men, headed by Oswald Garrison Villard, marched with us and carried banners and placards boosting our cause as fervidly as we were boosting it ourselves. When this men’s section swung into line and stepped out into Fifth Avenue, we all heard a roar of laughter go up and pursue them like a vanishing wave. Here it comes, we thought, glancing out of the corners of our eyes at the grinning, sniggering crowd. But they had a respectable reason for their mirth. Somebody had been in too much of a hurry handing out the placards, and one of the men, striding along conspicuously in the van of the men’s section, was carrying a large sign that read: “Men can vote—why can’t we?”

  When we got that away from him, the spectators quieted down somewhat. There was plenty of jeering, but there was also a fair amount of encouragement for us. The chief danger was from the sheer bulk of the crowd. Police protection was most inadequate and presently the spectators were pressing inquisitively in from the sidewalks, as crowds always will when there is nothing to hold them back, threatening to smother the parade without trying to. But we stepped right ahead, chins up and out, and our immediate path was kept clear by a kind of psychological right of eminent domain.

  Every year after that experiment, the suffrage parade was bigger, more impressive and more picturesque, and every year we drew larger and more friendly crowds. Different units in the parade had special costuming both to work up morale among their members and to increase the spectacular aspects of the show; we college women, for instance, did our parading as a solid phalanx of academic caps and gowns—and there were masses of brilliant scarves and magnificent women-riders dashing up and down on horseback, acting as marshals and incidentally demonstrating to the crowd that a female creature, for all this weaker sex talk, could sit a horse like a cavalry colonel. The spectacle of Inez Milholland, the beautiful Joan of Arc of the suffrage movement, wearing a long, snow-white riding habit and clattering up and down on a white horse, was probably worth thousands of votes to us. The whole thing was a grand show in the bright sunshine of early fall when the parade was usually held; the air just a little crisp, the bands playing and thousands on thousands of determined and disciplined women steadily marching from Union Square to 59th Street in a demonstration of solidarity that made each individual in the line of march feel like a giantess in her own right. What a thrill we did get out of it! I am not much of a walker, but every time we got to the Plaza and were ordered to disband, I felt childishly disappointed because we could not go right back to Union Square and start over again.

  The first few years police protection was consistently bad: a few patrolmen scattered along, but evidently under no orders to do anything about the crowd’s tendency to ooze into the street and swamp us. It was so bad that there was every reason to suspect the city authorities of purposely neglecting their responsibilities in hope that the parade would be broken up. Every year there was a bigger quarrel between the suffrage leaders and the city on this point, until finally the city was shamed into assigning plenty of men in uniform with strict orders to keep the crowd back. The policemen loved it. When we were stopped to let cross-traffic through, they would saunter over and tell us they were all for us and we were doing a fine thing. Commend me to policemen. I have had a good deal of experience with them and, give them half a chance, they are always a good lot.

  We might have had less pleasant experiences if we had fought our battle along the militant lines favored by Mrs. Pankhurst’s followers in England, where suffragettes raided the House of Commons, chained themselves to railings, threw stones, went on hunger-strikes after being thrown into jail, and generally had a violent good time in a good cause. There was a small organization called the American Woman’s Party, headed by Mrs. Oliver Belmont, which used some few of these methods here. It still goes on, in fact, agitating for complete equality between men and women, all the way from the privilege of serving on juries to the elimination of laws protecting women, going so far as to repudiate even maternity legislation. But the bulk of the suffrage movement in this country, thanks to the sound strategical wisdom of Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, was just as dignified as it was successful.

  When we finally saw the famous Mrs. Pankhurst, she failed completely to be the brawny, rowdy Amazon she should have been. I was on the platform when she addressed a big meeting at Carnegie Hall, so I had a fine look at her—a timid-appearing little mouse of an elderly lady, dressed in Quakerish gray, very tired, very mild, just the type for the vicar’s wife in an English village. If this was one of the most dynamic personalities of the time, and that is an accurate description of Mrs. Pankhurst’s reputation, something was wrong with my eyesight. She moved wearily to the edge of the platform and began to talk to her packed house of fire-breathing suffrage-enthusiasts as gently and dully as if she had really been the vicar’s wife discussing the distribution of soup and flannel to the poor. For the first half-hour she chose to discuss the English governmental system, not a lively subject at best and practically unintelligible to most Americans even if it were exciting. I felt, and could tell that the rest of the committee felt, sick at heart.

  Yet it was curiously true that, dull as the content of her speech was and mousy as her manner might seem, she was holding the attention of those thousands of women, even those in the rear of the hall who may well have been having trouble hearing. Then she swung into what we had been waiting to hear—suffrage—and from then on, it was a triumph. Her queer, clear little voice picked up an edge from somewhere and went cutting into the farthest corners of the hall, her little figure straightened and quivered and strained and in no time they were cheering and applauding so frequently that she had to pause between sentences. We did not agree with her methods, but we went away feeling that we had been in touch with an inspired and courageous leader.

  Naturally we had to do more than just listen to speeches and attend luncheons and try to get the vote for women merely by holding that
thought in the most ladylike manner possible. There was a good deal of fairly unconventional activity connected with our crusading, particularly in the speechmaking department. Few of us reached the high point attained by Inez Milholland, who used to make women’s rights’ speeches at Poughkeepsie to the Vassar girls. The college authorities would not let her hold meetings on the campus, so she discovered and made use of an old cemetery near by, where the young women used to listen to impassioned outpourings about the wrongs of their sex while seated on cherub-carved tombstones. But any of us who served time as stump-speakers in the suffrage cause got plenty of rough and tumble of the verbal variety to keep things from being too decorous.