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OF the harvest of tares, sown in iniquity and reaped
in wrath, the police returns tell the story. The pen
that wrote the "Song of the Shirt" is needed
to tell of the sad and toil-worn lives of New York's
working-women. The cry echoes by night and by day
through its tenements:
Oh, God ! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!
Six months have not passed since at a great public
meeting in this city, the Working Women's Society
reported: "It is a known fact that men's wages
cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist,
but woman's wages have no limit, since the paths of
shame are always open to her. It is simply impossible
for any woman to live without assistance on the low
salary a saleswoman earns, without depriving herself
of real necessities. . . It is inevitable that they
must in many instances resort to evil." It was
only a few brief weeks before that verdict was uttered,
that the community was shocked by the story of a gentle
and refined woman who, left in direst poverty to earn
her own living alone among strangers threw herself
from her attic window, preferring death to dishonor.
"I would have done any honest work, even to scrubbing,"
she wrote, drenched and starving, after a vain search
for work in a driving storm. She had tramped the streets
for weeks on her weary errand, and the only living
wages that were offered her were the wages of sin.
The ink was not dry upon her letter before a woman
in an East Side tenement wrote down her reason for
self-murder: "Weakness, sleeplessness, and yet
obliged to work. My strength fails me. Sing at my
coffin: 'Where does the soul find a home and rest?'"
Her story may be found as one of two typical "cases
of despair" in one little church community, in
the City Mission Society's Monthly
for last February. It is a story that has many parallels
in the experience of every missionary, every police
reporter and every family doctor whose practice is
among the poor.
It is estimated that at least one hundred and fifty
thousand women and girls earn their own living in
New York; but there is reason to believe that this
estimate falls far short of the truth when sufficient
account is taken of the large number who are not wholly
dependent upon their own labor, while contributing
by it to the family's earnings. These alone constitute
a large class of the women wage-earners, and it is
characteristic of the situation that the very fact
that some need not starve on their wages condemns
the rest to that fate. The pay they are willing to
accept all have to take. What the "everlasting
law of supply and demand," that serves as such
a convenient gag for public indignation, has to do
with it, one learns from observation all along the
road of inquiry into these real woman's wrongs. To
take the case of the saleswomen for illustration:
The investigation of the Working Women's Society disclosed
the fact that wages averaging from $2 to $4.50 a week
were reduced by excessive fines, the employers placing
a value upon time lost that is not given to services
rendered." A little girl, who received two dollars
a week, made cash-sales amounting to $167 in a single
day, while the receipts of a fifteen-dollar male clerk
in the same department footed up only $195; yet for
some trivial mistake the girl was fined sixty cents
out of her two dollars. The practice prevailed in
some stores of dividing the fines between the superintendent
and the time-keeper at the end of the year. In one
instance they amounted to $3,000, and "the superintendent
was heard to charge the timekeeper with not being
strict enough in his duties." One of the causes
for fine in a certain large store was sitting down.
The law requiring seats for saleswomen, generally
ignored, was obeyed faithfully in this establishment.
The seats were there, but the girls were fined when
found using them. |
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Cash-girls receiving $1.75 a week for work
that at certain seasons lengthened their day
to sixteen hours were sometimes required to
pay for their aprons. A common cause for discharge
from stores in which, on account of the oppressive
heat and lack of ventilation, "girls fainted
day after day and came out looking like corpses,"
was too long service. No other fault was found
with the discharged saleswomen than that they
had been long enough in the employ of the firm
to justly expect an increase of salary. The
reason was even given with brutal frankness,
in some instances.
These facts give a slight idea of the hardships
and the poor pay of a business that notoriously
absorbs child-labor. The girls are sent to the
store before they have fairly entered their
teens, because the money they tan earn there
is needed for
the support of the family. If the boys will not
work, if the street tempts them from home, among
the girls at least there must be no drones. To
keep their places they |
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are told to lie about their
age and to say that they are over foul teen. The
precaution is usually superfluous. The Women's
Investigating Committee found the majority of
the children employed in the stores to be under
age, but heard only in a single instance of the
truant officers calling. In that case they came
once a year and sent the youngest children home; but in a month's time they were all
back in their places, and were not again disturbed.
When it comes to the factories, where hard bodily labor
is added to long hours, stifling rooms, and starvation
wages, matters are even worse. The Legislature has passed
laws to prevent the employment of children, as it has
forbidden saloon-keepers to sell them beer, and it has
provided means of enforcing its mandate, so efficient,
that the very number of factories in New York is guessed
at as in the neighborhood of twelve thousand. Up till
this summer, a single inspector was charged with the
duty of keeping the run of them all, and of seeing to
it that the law was respected by the owners.
Sixty cents is put as the average day's earnings of
the 150,000, but into this computation enters the stylish
"cashier's" two dollars a day, as well as
the thirty cents of the poor little girl who pulls threads
in an East Side factory, and, if anything, the average
is probably too high. Such as it is, however, it represents
board, rent, clothing, and "pleasure" to this
army of workers. Here is the case of a woman employed
in the manufacturing department of a Broadway house.
It stands for a hundred like her own. She averages three
dollars a week. Pays $1.50 for her room; for breakfast
she has a cup of coffee; lunch she cannot afford. One
meal a day is her allowance. This woman is young, she
is pretty. She has "the world before her."
Is it anything less than a miracle if she is guilty
of nothing worse than the "early and improvident
marriage," against which moralists exclaim as one
of the prolific causes of the distress of the poor?
Almost any door might seem to offer welcome escape from
such slavery as this. "I feel so much healthier
since I got three square meals a day," said a lodger
in one of the Girls' Homes. Two young sewing-girls came
in seeking domestic service, so that they might get
enough to eat. They had been only half-fed for some
time, and starvation had driven them to the one door
at which the pride of the American-born girl will not
permit her to knock, though poverty be the price of
her independence. |
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The tenement and the
competition of public institutions and farmers'
wives and daughters, have done the tyrant shirt
to death, but they have not bettered the lot of
the needle-women. The sweater of the East Side
has appropriated the flannel shirt. He turns them
out today at forty-five cents a dozen, paying
his Jewish workers from twenty to thirty-five
cents. One of these testified before the State
Board of Arbitration, during the shirtmakers'
strike, that she worked eleven hours in the shop
and four at home, and had never in the best of
times made over six dollars a week. Another stated
that she worked from 4 o'clock in the morning
to 11 at night. These girls had to find their
own thread and pay for their own machines out
of their wages. The white shirt has gone to the
public and private institutions that shelter large
numbers of young girls, and to the country. There
are not half as many shirtmakers in New York to-day
as only a few years ago, and some of the largest
firms have closed their city shops. The same |
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is
true of the manufacturers of underwear. One large
Broadway firm has nearly all its work done by farmers' girls in Maine, who think themselves
well off if they can earn two or three dollars
a week to pay for a Sunday silk, or the wedding
outfit, little dreaming of the part they are playing
in starving their city sisters Literally, they
sew "with double thread, a shroud as well
as a shirt." Their pin-money sets the rate
of wages for thousands of poor sewing-girls in
New York. The average earnings of the worker on underwear to-day do not
exceed the three dollars which her competitor among
the Eastern hills is willing to accept as the price
of her play. The shirtmaker's pay is better only because
the very finest custom work is all there is left for
her to do.
Calico wrappers at a dollar and a half a dozen--the
very expert sewers able to make from eight to ten,
the common run five or six-- neckties at from 25 to
75 cents a dozen, with a dozen as a good day's work,
are specimens of women's wages. And yet people persist
in wondering at the poor quality of work done in the
tenements! Italian cheap labor has come of late also
to possess this poor field, with the sweater in its
train. There is scarce a branch of woman's work outside
of the home in which wages, long since at low-water
mark, have not fallen to the point of actual starvation.
A case was brought to my notice recently by a woman
doctor, whose heart as well as her life-work is with
the poor, of a widow with two little children she
found at work in an East Side attic, making paper-bags.
Her father, she told the doctor, had made good wages
at it; but she received only five cents for six hundred
of the little three-cornered bags, and her fingers
had to be very swift and handle the paste-brush very
deftly to bring her earnings up to twenty-five and
thirty cents a day. She paid four dollars a month
for her room. The rest went to buy food for herself and the children. The physician's purse, rather than
her skill, had healing for their complaint.
I have aimed to set down a few dry facts merely.
They carry their own comment. Back of the shop with
its weary, grinding toil--the home in the tenement,
of which it was said in a report of the State Labor
Bureau: "Decency and womanly reserve cannot be
maintained there--what wonder so many fall away from
virtue?" Of the outlook, what? Last Christmas
Eve my business took me to an obscure street among
the West Side tenements. An old woman had just fallen
on the doorstep, stricken with paralysis. The doctor
said she would never again move her right hand or
foot. The whole side was dead. By her bedside, in
their cheerless room, sat the patient's aged sister,
a hopeless cripple, in dumb despair. Forty years ago
the sisters had come, five in number then, with their
mother, from the North of Ireland to make their home
and earn a living among strangers. They were lace
embroiderers and found work easily at good wages.
All the rest had died as the years went by. The two
remained and, firmly resolved to lead an honest life,
worked on though wages fell and fell as age and toil
stiffened their once nimble fingers and dimmed their
sight. Then one of them dropped oat, her hands palsied
and her courage gone. Still the other toiled on, resting
neither by night nor by day, that the sister might
not want. Now that she too had been stricken, as she
was going to the store for the work that was to keep
them through the holidays, the battle was over at
last. There was before them starvation, or the poor-house.
And the proud spirits of the sisters, helpless now,
quailed at the outlook.
These were old, with life behind them. For them nothing
was left but to sit in the shadow and wait. But of
the thousands, who are travelling the road they trod
to the end, with the hot blood of youth in their veins,
with the love of life and of the beautiful world to
which not even sixty cents a day can shut their eyes--who
is to blame if their feet find the paths of shame
that are "always open to them?" The very
paths that have effaced the saving "limit,"
and to which it is declared to be "inevitable
that they must in many instances resort." Let
the moralist answer. Let the wise economist apply
his rule of supply and demand, and let the answer
be heard in this city of a thousand charities where
justice goes begging. |
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To the everlasting
credit of New York's working-girl let it be said
that, rough though her road be, all but hopeless
her battle with life, only in the rarest instances
does she go astray. As a class she is brave, virtuous,
and true. New York's army of profligate women
is not, as in some foreign cities, recruited from
her ranks. She is as plucky as she is proud. That
"American girls never whimper" became
a proverb long ago, and she accepts her lot uncomplainingly,
doing the best she can and holding her cherished
independence cheap at the cost of a meal, or of
half her daily ration, if heed be. The home in
the tenement and the traditions of her childhood
have neither trained her to luxury nor predisposed
her in favor of domestic labor in preference to
the shop. So, to the world she presents a cheerful,
uncomplaining front that sometimes deceives it.
Her courage will not be without its reward. Slowly,
as |
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the conviction is thrust upon society that
woman's work must enter more and more into its
planning, a better day is dawning. The organization
of working girls' clubs, unions, and societies
with a community of interests despite the obstacles
to such a movement, bears testimony to it, as
to the devotion of the unselfish women who have
made their poorer sisters' cause their own, and
will yet wring from an unfair world the justice
too long denied her. |
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Go to Chapter
21 |
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