Whythis army of women, many thousand strong, is standing behind counters, over-worked and underpaid, the average duration of life among them as a class lessening every year, is a question with which we can at present deal only indirectly. It is sufficient to state that the retail stores of wellnigh every order, though chiefly the dry-goods retail trade, have found their quickness and aptness to learn, the honesty and general faithfulness of women, and their cheapness essentials in their work; and that this combination of qualities—cheapness dominating all—has given them permanent place in the modern system of trade. A tour among many of the larger establishments confirmed the statement made by employers in smaller ones, the summary being given in the words of a manager of one of the largest retail houses to be found in the United States.
“We don’t want men,” he said. “We wouldn’t have them even if they came at the same price. Of course cheapness has something to do with it, and will have, but for my part give me a woman to deal withevery time. Now there’s an illustration over at that hat-counter. We were short of hands to-day, and I had to send for three girls that had applied for places, but were green—didn’t know the business. It didn’t take them ten minutes to get the hang of doing things, and there they are, and you’d never know which was old and which was new hand. Of course they don’t know all about qualities and so on, but the head of the department looks out for that. No, give me women every time. I’ve been a manager thirteen years, and we never had but four dishonest girls, and we’ve had to discharge over forty boys in the same time. Boys smoke and lose at cards, and do a hundred things that women don’t, and they get worse instead of better. I go in for women.”
“How good is their chance of promotion?”
“We never lose sight of a woman that shows any business capacity, but of course that’s only as a rule in heads of departments. A saleswoman gets about the same right along. Two thirds of the girls here are public-school girls and live at home. You see that makes things pretty easy, for the family pool their earnings and they dress well and live well. We don’t take from the poorer class at all. These girls earn from four and a half to eight dollars a week. A few get ten dollars, and they’re not likely to do better than that. Forty dollars a month is a fortune to a woman. A man must have his little fling, you know. Women manage better.”
“If they are really worth so much to you, why can’t you give better pay? What chance has a girl to save anything, unless she lives at home?”
“We give as high pay as anybody, and we don’t give more because for every girl here there are a dozen waiting to take her place. As to saving, she doesn’t want to save. There isn’t a girl here that doesn’t expect to marry before long, and she puts what she makes on her back, because a fellow naturally goes for the best-looking and the best-dressed girl. That’s the woman question as I’ve figured it out, and you’ll find it the same everywhere.”
Practically he was right, for the report, though varying slightly, summed up as substantially the same. Descending a grade, it was found that even in the second and third rate stores the system of fines for any damage soon taught the girls carefulness, and that while a few were discharged for hopeless incompetency, the majority served faithfully and well.
“I dare say they’re put upon,” said the manager of one of the cheaper establishments. “They’re sassy enough, a good many of them, and some of the better ones suffer for their goings-on. But they ain’t a bad set—not half; and these women that come in complaining that they ain’t well-treated, nine times out of ten it’s their own airs that brought it on. It’s a shop-girl’s interest to behave herself and satisfy customers, and she’s more apt to do it than not, according to my experience.”
“They’d drive a man clean out of his mind,” said another. “The tricks of girls are beyond telling. If it wasn’t for fines there wouldn’t one in twenty be here on time, and the same way with a dozen other things. But they learn quick, and they turn in anywhere where they’re wanted. They make the best kind of clerks, after all.”
“Do you give them extra pay for over-hours during the busy season?”
“Not much! We keep them on, most of them, right through the dull one. Why shouldn’t they balance things for us when the busy time comes? Turn about’s fair play.”
A girl who had been sent into the office for some purpose shook her head slightly as she heard the words, and it was this girl who, a day or two later, gave her view of the situation. The talk went on in the pretty, home-like parlors of a small “Home” on the west side, where rules are few and the atmosphere of the place so cheery that while it is intended only for those out of work, it is constantly besieged with requests to enlarge its borders and make room for more. Half a dozen other girls were near: three from other stores, one from a shirt factory, one an artificial-flower-maker who had been a shop-girl.
“When I began,” said the first, “father was alive, and I used what I earned just for dressing myself. We were up at Morrisania, and I came down every day. I was in the worsted and fancy department atD——’s, and I had such a good eye for matching and choosing that they seemed to think everything of me. But then father fell sick. He was a painter, and had painter’s colic awfully and at last paralysis. Then he died finally and left mother and me, and she’s in slow consumption and can’t do much. I earned seven dollars a week because I’d learned fancy work and did some things evenings for the store, and we should have got along very well. We’d had to move out a little farther, to the place mother was born in, because rent was cheaper and she could never stand the city. But this is the way it worked. I have to be at the store at eight o’clock. The train that leaves home at seven gets me to the store two minutes after eight, but though I’ve explained this to the manager he says I’ve got to be at the store at eight, and so, summer and winter, I have to take the train at half-past six and wait till doors are open. It’s the same way at night. The store closes at six, and if I could leave then I could catch an express train that would get me home at seven. The rules are that I must stop five minutes to help the girls cover up the goods, and that just hinders my getting the train till after seven, so that I am not home till eight.”
I looked at the girl more attentively. She was colorless and emaciated, and, when not excited by speaking, languid and heavy.
“Are you sure that you have explained thething clearly so that the manager understands?” I asked.
“More than once,” the girl answered, “but he said I should be fined if I were not there at eight. Then I told him that the girls at my counter would be glad to cover up my goods, and if he would only let me go at six it would give me a little more time for mother. I sit up late anyway to do things she can’t, for we live in two rooms and I sew and do a good many things after I go home.”
Inquiry a day or two later showed that her story was true in every detail and also that she was a valuable assistant, one of the best among a hundred or so employed. The firm gives largely to charitable objects, and pays promptly, and at rates which, if low, are no lower than usual; but they continue to exact this seven minutes’ service from one whose faithfulness might seem to have earned exemption from a purely arbitrary rule—in such a case mere tyranny. The girl had offered to give up her lunch hour, but the manager refused; and she dared not speak again for fear of losing her place.
“After all, she’s better off than I am or lots of others,” said one who sat near her. “I’m down in the basement at M——’s, and forty others like me, and about forty little girls. There’s gas and electric light both, but there isn’t a breath of air, and it’s so hot that after an hour or two your head feels baked and your eyes as if they would fall out. The dullseason—that’s from spring to fall—lasts six months, and then we work nine and a half hours and Saturdays thirteen. The other six months we work eleven hours, and holiday time till ten and eleven. I’m strong. I’m an old hand and somehow stand things, but I’ve a cousin at the ribbon counter, the very best girl in the world, I do believe. She always makes the best of things, but this year it did seem as if the whole town was at that counter. They stood four and five deep. She was penned in with the other girls, a dozen or two, with drawers and cases behind and counter in front, and there she stood from eight in the morning till ten at night, with half an hour off for dinner and for supper. She could have got through even that, but you see there has to be steady passing in that narrow space, and she was knocked and pushed, first by one and then by another, till she was sore all over; and at last down she dropped right there, not fainting, but sort of gone, and the doctor says she’s most dead and can’t go back, he doesn’t know when. Down there in the basement the girls have to put on blue glasses, the glare is so dreadful, but they don’t like to have us. The only comfort is you’re with a lot and don’t feel lonesome. I can’t bear to do anything alone, no matter what it is.”
A girl with clear dark eyes and a face that might have been almost beautiful but for its haggard, worn-out expression, turned from the table where she hadbeen writing and smiled as she looked at the last speaker.
“That is because you happen to be made that way,” she said. “I am always happier when I can be alone a good deal, but of course that’s never possible, or almost never. I shall want the first thousand years of my heaven quite to myself, just for pure rest and a chance to think.”
“I don’t know anything about heaven,” the last speaker said hastily, “but I’m sure I hope there’s purgatory at least for some of the people I’ve had to submit to. I think a woman manager is worse than a man. I’ve never had trouble anywhere and always stay right on, but I’ve wanted to knock some of the managers down, and it ought to have been done. Just take the new superintendent. We loved the old one, but this one came in when she died, and one of the first things she did was to discharge one of the old girls because she didn’t smile enough. Good reason why. She’d lost her mother the week before and wasn’t likely to feel much like smiling. And then she went inside the counters and pitched out all the old shoes the girls had there to make it easier to stand. It ’most kills you to stand all day in new shoes, but Miss T—— pitched them all out and said she wasn’t going to have the store turned into an old-clothes shop.”
“Well, it’s better than lots of them, no matter what she does,” said another. “I was at H——’sfor six months, and there you have to ask a man for leave every time it is necessary to go upstairs, and half the time he would look and laugh with the other clerks. I’d rather be where there are all women. They’re hard on you sometimes, but they don’t use foul language and insult you when you can’t help yourself.”
This last complaint has proved for many stores a perfectly well-founded one. Wash-rooms and other conveniences have been for common use, and many sensitive and shrinking girls have brought on severe illnesses arising solely from dread of running this gantlet.
Here and there the conditions of this form of labor are of the best, but as a whole the saleswoman suffers not only from long-continued standing, but from bad air, ventilation having no place in the construction of the ordinary store. Separate dressing-rooms are a necessity, yet are only occasionally found, the system demanding that no outlay shall be made when it is possible to avoid it. Overheating and overcrowding, hastily eaten and improper food, are all causes of the weakness and anæmic condition so perceptible among shop and factory workers, these being divided into many classes. For a large proportion it can be said that they are tolerably educated, so far as our public-school system can be said to educate, and are hard-working, self-sacrificing, patient girls who have the American knack of dressing well on small outlay,and who have tastes and aspirations far beyond any means of gratifying them. For such girls the working-women’s guilds and the Friendly societies—these last of English origin—have proved of inestimable service, giving them the opportunities long denied. In such guilds many of them receive the first real training of eye and hand and mind, learn what they can best do, and often develop a practical ability for larger and better work. Even in the lowest order filling the cheaper stores there is always a proportion eager to learn. But here, as in all ordinary methods of learning, the market is overstocked, and even the best-trained girl may sometimes fail of employment. Now and then one turns toward household service, but the mass prefer any cut in wages and any form of privation to what they regard as almost a final degradation. A multitude of their views on this point are recorded and will in time find place.
In the mean time a minute examination of the causes that determine their choice and of the conditions surrounding it as a whole go to prove the justice of the conviction that penetrates the student of social problems. Again, the shop-girl as a class demonstrates the fact that not with her but with the class above her, through accident of birth or fortune, lies the real responsibility for the follies over which we make moan. The cheaper daily papers record in fullest detail the doings of that fashionable worldtoward which many a weak girl or woman looks with unspeakable longing; and the weekly “story papers” feed the flame with unending details of the rich marriage that lifted the poor girl into the luxury which stands to her empty mind as the sole thing to be desired in earth or heaven. She knows far better what constitutes the life of the rich than the rich ever know of the life of the poor. From her post behind the counter the shop-girl examines every detail of costume, every air and grace of these women whom she despises, even when longing most to be one of them. She imitates where she can, and her cheap shoe has its French heel, her neck its tin dog-collar. Gilt rings and bracelets and bangles, frizzes and bangs and cheap trimmings of every order, swallow up her earnings. The imitation is often more effective than the real, and the girl knows it. She aspires to a “manicure” set, to an opera-glass, to anything that will simulate the life daily more passionately desired; and it is small wonder that when sudden temptation comes and the door opens into that land where luxury is at least nearer, she falls an easy victim. The class in which she finally takes rank is seldom recruited from sources that would seem most fruitful. The sewing-woman, the average factory worker, is devitalized to such an extent that even ambition dies and the brain barely responds to even the allurements of the weekly story paper. It is the class but a grade removed, to whomno training has come from which strength or simplicity or any virtue of honest living could grow, that makes the army of women who have chosen degradation.
A woman, herself a worker, but large-brained and large-hearted beyond the common endowment, wrote recently of the dangers put in the way of the average shop or factory girl, imploring happy women living at ease to adopt simpler forms, or at least to ask what form of living went on below them. She wrote:—
“It may be urged that ignorant and inexperienced as these workers are, they see only the bubbles and the froth, the superficial glitter and exuberant overflow of passing styles and social pleasures, and miss much, if not all, of the earnestness, the virtue, the charity, and the refinement which may belong to those they imitate, but with whom they seldom come in contact. This is the very point and purpose of this paper, to remonstrate against the injustice done to the women of wealth and leisure by their own carelessness and indifference, and to urge them to come down to those who cannot come up to them, to study them with as keen an interest as they themselves are studied,—to know how that other half lives.”
“It may be urged that ignorant and inexperienced as these workers are, they see only the bubbles and the froth, the superficial glitter and exuberant overflow of passing styles and social pleasures, and miss much, if not all, of the earnestness, the virtue, the charity, and the refinement which may belong to those they imitate, but with whom they seldom come in contact. This is the very point and purpose of this paper, to remonstrate against the injustice done to the women of wealth and leisure by their own carelessness and indifference, and to urge them to come down to those who cannot come up to them, to study them with as keen an interest as they themselves are studied,—to know how that other half lives.”
“To know how that other half lives.” That is the demand made upon woman and man alike. Once at least put yourselves in the worker’s place, if it be but for half an hour, and think her thought and live her starved and dreary life. Then ask whatwork must be done to alter conditions, to kill false ideals, and vow that no day on earth shall pass that has not held some effort, in word or deed, to make true living more possible for every child of man. No mission, no guild, no sermon, has or can have power alone. Only in the determined effort of the individual, in individual understanding and renunciation forever of what has been selfish and mean and base, can humanity know redemption and walk at last side by side in that path where he who journeys alone finds no entrance, nor can win it till self has dropped away, and knowledge come that forever we are our brothers’ keepers.
Whyand how the money-getting spirit has become the ruler of American life and thought no analyzer of social conditions has yet made plain. That New York might be monopolist in this respect could well be conceived, for the Dutch were traders by birthright and New Amsterdam arose to this one end. But why the Puritan colony, whose first act before even the tree stumps were brown in their corn-fields was the founding of a college, and whose corner-stone rested on a book,—why these people should have come to represent a spirit of bargaining and an aptitude for getting on unmatched by the keenest-witted Dutchman hath no man yet told us.
The sharpest business men of the present are chiefly “Yankees;” and if “Jew” and “a hard bargain” are counted synonymes, “New-Englander” has equal claim to the place. The birthplace and home of all reform, New England is the home also of a greed born of hard conditions and developing a keenness unequalled by that of any other bargainer on earth. The Italian, the Greek, the Turk, find a certain æstheticsatisfaction in bargaining and do it methodically, but always picturesquely and with a relish unaffected by defeat; but with the Yankee it is a passionate, absorbing desire, sharpening every line of the face and felt even in the turn of the head or shoulders, and in every line of the eager, restless figure. Success assured softens and modifies these tendencies. Defeat aggravates them. One meets many a man for whom it is plain that the beginning of life held unlimited faith that the great city meant a fortune, the sanguine conviction passing gradually into the interrogative form. The fortune is still there. Thus far the conviction holds good, but his share in it has become more and more problematical. The flying and elusive shadow still holds for him the only real substance, but his hands have had no power to grasp or detain, and the most dogged determination gives way at last to the sense of hopeless failure. For this type may be the ending as cheap clerk or bookkeeper, with furtive attempts at speculation when a few dollars have been saved, or a retreat toward that remote West which has hidden effectually so many baffled and defeated lives. There may also come another ending, and the feverish, scheming soul lose its hold on the body, which has meant to it merely a means of getting and increasing money.
It is this latter fate that came to a man who would have no place in this record save for the fact that his last querulous and still-questioning days were livedside by side with a man who had also sought money, and having found it had chosen for it certain experimental uses by means of which siphon he was presently drained dry. For him also had been many defeats. A hospital ward held them both, and the two beds were side by side, the one representing a patience that never failed, yet something more than patience. For the face of this man bore no token of defeat. It was rather triumph that looked at moments from the clear eyes that had also an almost divine pity as they turned toward the neighbor who poured out his story between paroxysms of coughing, and having told it once, proceeded to tell it again, his sole and final satisfaction in life being the arraignment of all living. The visitor who came into the ward was pinned on the instant, the fiery eyes demanding the hearing which was the last gift time held for him. It was a common story often told, this slow, inevitable descent into poverty. Its force lay in the condensed fury of the speaker, who looked on the men he had known as sworn conspirators against him, and cursed them in their going out and coming in with a relish that no argument could affect. What his neighbor might have to tell was a matter of the purest indifference. It was impossible even to ask his story; and it remained impossible until a day when arraignment was cut short and the disappointed, bitter soul passed on to such conditions as it had made for itself.
“You’ve got the best of me. They all do,” he said in dying, with a last turn of the sombre eyes toward his neighbor. “You ought to have gone first by a week, and there you are. But this time I guess it’s just as well. I don’t seem to want to fight any longer, and I’m glad I’m done. It’s your turn next. Good—”
The words had come with gasps between and long pauses. Here they stopped once for all. Good had found him; the only good for the child of earth, who, having failed to learn his lesson here, must try a larger school with a different system of training. The empty bed was not filled at once. A screen shut it off. There was time now to hear other words than the passionate railings that had monopolized all time. The sick man mended a little, and in one of the days in which speech was easier gave this record of his forty years:—
“It’s a fact, I believe, that the sons of reformers seldom walk in the same track. My father was one of the old Abolitionists, and an honest one, ready to give money when he could and any kind of work when he couldn’t. It was a great cause. I cried over the negroes down South and went without sugar a year or so, and learned to knit so that I could knit some stockings for the small slaves my own size. But by the time I was eight years old it was plain enough to me that there were other kinds of slavery quite as bad, and that my own mother wore as heavybonds as any of them. She was a farmer’s wife, and from year’s end to year’s end she toiled and worked. She never had a cent of her own, for the butter money was consecrated to the cause, and she gave it gladly. My father had no particular intention to be unkind. He was simply like a good two-thirds of the farmers I have known,—much more careful of his animals than of his wife. A woman was so much cooking and cleaning and butter-making force, and child-bearing an incident demanding as little notice as possible. It is because of that theory that I am five inches shorter than any of our tribe. My mother was a tall, slender woman, with a springy step and eyes as clear as a brook. I see them sometimes as I lie here at night.
“I said to myself when I was ten that I’d have things easier for her before she died. I said it straight ahead while I was working my way up in the village store, for I would not farm, and when she died I said it to her in the last hour I ever heard her voice: ‘What I couldn’t do for you, mother, I’ll do for all women as long as I am on the earth.’
“I was eighteen then, and whichever way I turned some woman was having a hard time, and some brute was making it for her. I knew it was partly their own fault for not teaching their boys how to be unselfish and decent, but custom and tradition, the law and the prophets, were all against them. I watchedit all I could, but I was deep in trying to get ahead and I did. Somehow, in spite of my dreams and my fancies, there was a money-making streak in me. It’s a lost vein. You may search as you will and find no trace, but it was there once and gave good returns. I left the village at twenty-one and went to Philadelphia, and the small savings I took with me from my clerking soon began to roll up. I had the chance to go into a soap-factory; a queer change, but the old Quaker who owned it knew my father and wanted to do me a good turn, and by the time I had got the hang of it all I was junior partner and settled for life if I liked.
“Well, here it was again. This man was honest and clean. He meant to do fairly by all mankind, and he tried to. He had some secrets in his methods that made his soap the best in the market. The chief secret was honest ingredients, but it was famous. If you’ve ever been in a soap-factory you know what it is like. Every pound of it was wrapped in paper as fast as it cooled, and the cooling and cutting room was filled with girls who did the work. They were not the best order of girls. The wages a week were from three to five dollars, and they were at it from sevenA. M.to sixP. M.There was a good woman in the office,—a woman with a head as well as a heart,—and she did the directing and disciplining. It was no joke to keep peace if the cooling delayed and the creatures began squabbling together, but she managedit, and by night they were always meek enough. You’re likely to be meek when you’ve carried soap ten pounds at a time ten hours a day, from the cutting table to the cooling table, across floors as slippery as glass or glare ice. They picked it up as it cooled, wrapped it in paper, and had it in boxes, five pounds to the minute, three hundred pounds an hour. The caustic soda in it first turned their nails orange-color and then it ate off their finger tips till they bled. They could not wear gloves, for that would have interfered with the packing.
“Now and then one cried, but only seldom. They were big, hearty girls. They had to be to do that work, but my heart ached for them as they filed out at night, so worn that there was no life left for anything but to get home and into bed. Very few stayed on. The smart ones graduated into something better. The stupid ones fell back and tried something easier. But as I watched them and it came over me how untrained and helpless they were, and how every chance of learning was cut off by the long labor and the dead weariness, I said to myself that we owed them something: shorter hours; better wages; some sort of share in the money we were making. Friend Peter shook his head when I began to hint these things. ‘They fare well enough,’ he said. ‘Thee must not get socialistic notions in thy head.’ ‘I know nothing about socialism,’ I said. ‘All I want is justice, and thee wants it too. Thee has cried outfor it for the black brother and sister; why not for the white?’
“‘Thee is talking folly,’ he said and would make no other answer.
“It all weighed on me. Here was the money rolling in, or so it seemed to me. We did make it in a sure, comfortable fashion. I was well off at twenty-five, and better off every month; and I said to myself, the money would have a curse on it if those who helped to earn it had no share. I talked to the men in the boiling department. It takes brains to be a good soap-maker. We kept to the old ways, simply because what they call improvement in soap-making, like many another improvement, has been the cheapening the product by the addition of various articles that lower the quality. Experience has to teach. Theoretical knowledge isn’t much use save as foundation. A man must use eyes and tongue, and watch for the critical moment in the finishing like a lynx.
“Well, I beat my head against that wall of obstinacy till head and heart were sore. It was enough to the old Quaker that he paid promptly and did honest work; and when I told him at last that his gains were as fraudulent as if he cheated deliberately, he said, ‘Then thee need share them no longer. Go thy way for a hot-headed fool.’
“I went. There was an opening in New York, and I had every detail at my fingers’ ends. I wentin with a man a little older, who seemed to think as I did, and who did, till I made practical application of my theories. I had studied everything to be had on the subject. I had mastered a language or two in my evenings, for I lived like a hermit; but now I began to talk with every business man, and try to understand why competition was inevitable. I was in no haste. I admitted that men must be trained to co-operate, but I said, ‘We shall never learn by waiting. We must learn by trying.’ I tried to bring in other soap-makers, and one or two listened; but most of them were using the cheap methods,—increasing the quantity and lowering the quality. Some of the men had come on to me from Philadelphia, and were bound to stay, but it was hard on them. They had to go into tenement-houses, for there were no homes for them such as building associations in Philadelphia make possible for every workman. But I took a house and divided it up and made it comfortable, and I lived on the lower floor myself, so that kept them contented. I fitted up a room for a reading-room, and twice a week had talks; not lectures, but talks where every man had a chance to speak five minutes if he would, and to ask questions. I coaxed the women to come. I wanted them to understand, and two or three took hold. I made a decent place for them to eat their dinners, and put these women in charge. I put in an oil-stove and a table and seats, and gave themcoffee and tea at two cents a cup, and tried to have them care for the place. That has been done over and over by many an employer who pities his workers; and nine times out of ten the same result follows. The animal crops out. They were rough girls at any time, yet, taken one by one, behaved well enough. But I’ve seen boys and girls at a donation party throw cheese and what not on the carpet and rub it in deliberately, and I don’t know that one need wonder that lunch-rooms in store or factory turn into pig-pens, and the few decent ones can make no headway.
“I spoke out to them all, but it was no more than the wind blowing, and at last even I gave it up. There was no conscience in them to touch. They wanted shorter hours and more money, when they had got to the point of seeing that I was trying to help, but they had no notion of helping back. With my men it worked, and they talked down the women sometimes. But when a bad year came,—for soap has its ups and downs like everything else,—most of them struck, and the wise ones could make no headway. ‘It’s a losing game,’ my partner said; ‘if you want to go on you must go on alone.’
“I did go on alone. He left and took his capital with him. The best men stayed with me and swore to take their chances. The soap was good, and I made a hit in one or two fancy kinds, but I couldnot compete with men who used mean material and turned out something that looked as well at half the price. My money melted away, and a fire—set, they told me, by a man I had discharged for long-continued dishonesty—finished me. I had the name of stirring up strife for the manufacturers, because I tried to teach my workers the principle of co-operation, and begged for it where I could. It hurt my business standing. Men felt that I must be a fool. I had worked for it with such absorption that I had had little time for any joy of life. I had neither wife nor child, though I longed for both. I would not have ease and happiness alone. I wanted it for my fellows. To-day it might be. Ten years ago it only the thought of a dreamer, and I made no headway.
“The fire left me stranded. I went in as superintendent of some new works, but went out in a month, for I could not consent to cheat, and fraud was in every pound sent out. I tried one place and another with the same result. Competition makes honesty impossible. A man would admit it to me without hesitation, but would end: ‘There’s no other way. Don’t be a fool. You can’t stand out against a system.’
“‘I will stand out if it starves me,’ I said. ‘I will not sell my soul for any man’s hire. The time is coming when this rottenness must end. Make one more to fight it now.’
“Men looked at me pitifully. ‘I was throwing away chances,’ they said. ‘Why wouldn’t I hear reason? We were in the world, not in Utopia.’
“‘We are in the hell we have made for all mankind,’ I said. ‘The only real world is the world which is founded on truth and justice. Everything else falls away.’
“Everything else has fallen away. I was never strong, and a year ago I was knocked down in a scrimmage. Some bullies from one of the factories set on my men—mine no longer, but still preaching my doctrine. Somehow I was kicked in the chest and a rib broken, and this saved me probably from being sent up as a disturber of the peace. The right lung was wounded, and consumption came naturally. They nursed me—Tom’s wife and sister, good souls—till I refused to burden them any longer and came here in spite of them. It has been a sharp fight. I seem to have failed; yet the way is easier for the next. Co-operation will come. It must come. It is the law of life. It is the only path out of this jungle in which we wander and struggle and die. But there must be training. There must be better understanding. I would give a thousand lives joyfully if only I could make men and women who sit at ease know the sorrow of the poor. It is their ignorance that is their curse. Teach them; study them. Care as much for the outcast at home as for the heathen abroad. And, oh, if you can makeanybody listen, beg them for Christ’s sake, for their own sake, to hearken and to help! Beg them to study; not to say with no knowledge that help is impossible, but to study, to think, and then to work with their might. It is my last word,—a poor word that can reach none, it may be, any more, and yet, who knows what wind of the Lord may bear it on, what ground may be waiting for the seed? I shall see it, but not now. I shall behold it, and it will be nigh, in that place to which I go. Work for it; die for it if need be; for man’s hope, man’s life, if ever he knows true life, has no other foundation.”
Politicaleconomists in general, with the additional number of those who for one purpose and another turn over statistics of labor, nodded approvingly as they gazed upon the figures of the last general census for the State of New York, which showed that among the myriad of workers in factory and other occupations, but twenty-four thousand children were included.
“Fifty-six million and more inhabitants, and all faring so well that only one fortieth part of one of these millions is employed too early in this Empire State. Civilization could hardly do more. See how America leads among all civilized countries as the protector of the feeble, the guarantee of strength for the weakest. No other country guards its children so well. There have been errors, of course; such enlightenment is not reached at a bound; but the last Legislature made further ones impossible, for it fixed the minimum limit at which a child may be employed in factories at thirteen years of age. By thirteen a child isn’t likely to be stunted or hurt by overwork. We protect all classes and the weakest most.”
“Fifty-six million and more inhabitants, and all faring so well that only one fortieth part of one of these millions is employed too early in this Empire State. Civilization could hardly do more. See how America leads among all civilized countries as the protector of the feeble, the guarantee of strength for the weakest. No other country guards its children so well. There have been errors, of course; such enlightenment is not reached at a bound; but the last Legislature made further ones impossible, for it fixed the minimum limit at which a child may be employed in factories at thirteen years of age. By thirteen a child isn’t likely to be stunted or hurt by overwork. We protect all classes and the weakest most.”
Thus the political economist who stops at figures and considers any further dealing with the question unnecessary. And if the law were of stringent application; if parents told the truth as to age, and if the two inspectors who are supposed to suffice for the thousands of factories in the State of New York were multiplied by fifty, there might be some chance of carrying out the provisions of this law. As it is, it is a mere form of words, evaded daily; a bit of legislation which, like much else bearing with it apparent benefit, proves when analyzed to be not much more than sham. The law applies to factories only. It does not touch mercantile establishments or trades that are carried on in tenement-houses, and it is with these two latter forms of labor that we deal to-day. In factory labor in the city of New York nine thousand children under twelve years of age are doing their part toward swelling the accumulation of wealth, each adding their tiny contribution to the great stream of what we call the prosperity of the nineteenth century. Thus far their share in the trades we have considered has been ignored. Let us see in what fashion they make part of the system.
For a large proportion of the women visited, among whom all forms of the clothing industry were the occupation, children under ten, and more often from four to eight, were valuable assistants. In a small room on Hester Street, a woman on work on overalls—forthe making of which she received one dollar a dozen—said:—
“I couldn’t do as well if it wasn’t for Jinny and Mame there. Mame has learned to sew on buttons first-rate, and Jinny is doing almost as well. I’m alone to-day, but most days three of us sew together here, and Jinny keeps right along. We’ll do better yet when Mame gets a bit older.”
As she spoke the door opened and a woman with an enormous bundle of overalls entered and sat down on the nearest chair with a gasp.
“Them stairs is killin’,” she said. “It’s lucky I’ve not to climb ’em often.”
Something crept forward as the bundle slid to the floor, and busied itself with the string that bound it.
“Here you, Jinny,” said the woman, “don’t you be foolin’. What do you want anyhow?”
The something shook back a mat of thick hair and rose to its feet,—a tiny child who in size seemed no more than three, but whose countenance indicated the experience of three hundred.
“It’s the string I want,” the small voice said. “Me an’ Mame was goin’ to play with it.”
“There’s small time for play,” said the mother; “there’ll be two pair more in a minute or two, an’ you’re to see how Mame does one an’ do it good too, or I’ll find out why not.”
Mame had come forward and stood holding to theone thin garment which but partly covered Jinny’s little bones. She too looked out from a wild thatch of black hair, and with the same expression of deep experience, the pallid, hungry little faces lighting suddenly as some cheap cakes were produced. Both of them sat down on the floor and ate their portion silently.
“Mame’s seven and Jinny’s going on six,” said the mother, “but Jinny’s the smartest. She could sew on buttons when she wasn’t but much over four. I had five then, but the Lord’s took ’em all but these two. I couldn’t get on if it wasn’t for Mame.”
Mame looked up but said no word, and as I left the room settled herself with her back against the wall, Jinny at her side, laying the coveted string near at hand for use if any minute for play arrived. In the next room, half-lighted like the last, and if possible even dirtier, a Jewish tailor sat at work on a coat, and by him on the floor a child of five picking threads from another.
“Netta is good help,” he said after a word or two. “So fast as I finish, she pick all the threads. She care not to go away—she stay by me always to help.”
“Is she the only one?”
“But one that sells papers. Last year is five, but mother and dree are gone with fever. It is many that die. What will you? It is the will of God.”
On the floor below two children of seven and eight were found also sewing on buttons—in this case for four women who had their machines in one room and were making the cheapest order of corset-cover, for which they received fifty cents a dozen, each one having five buttons. It could not be called oppressive work, yet the children were held there to be ready for each one completed, and sat as such children most often do, silent and half asleep waiting for the next demand.
“It’s hard on ’em,” one of the women said. “We work till ten and sometimes later, but then they sleep between and we can’t; and they get the change of running out for a loaf of bread or whatever’s wanted, and we don’t stir from the machine from morning till night. I’ve got two o’ me own, but they’re out peddling matches.”
On the lower floor back of the small grocery in which the people of the house bought their food supply,—wilted or half-decayed vegetables, meat of the cheapest order, broken eggs and stale fish,—a tailor and two helpers were at work. A girl of nine or ten sat among them and picked threads or sewed on buttons as needed; a haggard, wretched-looking child who did not look up as the door opened. A woman who had come down the stairs behind me stopped a moment, and as I passed out said:—
“If there was a law for him I’d have him up. It’shis own sister’s child, and he workin’ her ten hours a day an’ many a day into the night, an’ she with an open sore on her neck, an’ crying out many’s the time when she draws out a long needleful an’ so gives it a jerk. She’s sewed on millions of buttons, that child has, an’ she but a little past ten. May there be a hot place waitin’ for him!”
A block or two beyond, the house entered proved to be given over chiefly to cigar-making. It is to this trade that women and girls turn during the dull season, and one finds in it representatives from every trade in which women are engaged. The sewing-women employed in suit and clothing manufactories during the busy season have no resource save this, and thus prices are kept down and the regular cigar-makers constantly reinforced by the irregular. In the present case it was chiefly with regular makers that the house was filled, one room a little less than twelve by fourteen feet holding a family of seven persons, three of them children under ten, all girls. Tobacco lay in piles on the floor and under the long table at one end where the cigars were rolled, its rank smell dominating that from the sinks and from the general filth, not only of this room but of the house as a whole. Two of the children sat on the floor stripping the leaves, and another on a small stool. A girl of twenty sat near them, and all alike had sores on lips and cheeks and on the hands. Children from five or six years up can be taught tostrip and thus add to the week’s income, which is far less for the tenement-house manufacture than for regular factory work, the latter averaging from eight to twelve dollars a week. But the work if done at home can be made to include the entire family, and some four thousand women are engaged in it, an almost equal but unregistered number of young children sharing it with them. As in sewing, a number of women often club together, using one room, and in such case their babies crawl about in the filth on the wet floors, playing with the damp tobacco and breathing the poison with which the room is saturated.
Here, as in tobacco factories, women and girls of every age become speedily the victims of nervous and hysterical complaints, the direct result of nicotine poisoning; while succeeding these come consumption and throat diseases resulting from the dust. Canker is one of the most frequent difficulties, and sores of many orders, the trade involving more dangers than any that can be chosen. Yet because an entire family can find occupation in it, with no necessity for leaving home, it is often preferred to easier employment. It is the children who suffer most, growth being stunted, nervous disease developed and ending often in St. Vitus’s dance, and skin diseases of every order being the rule, the causes being not only tobacco, but the filth in which they live.
It is doubtful if the most inveterate smoker wouldfeel much relish for the cigar manufactured under such conditions; yet hundreds of thousands go out yearly from these houses, bearing in every leaf the poison of their preparation. In this one house nearly thirty children of all ages and sizes, babies predominating, rolled in the tobacco which covered the floor and was piled in every direction; and of these children under ten thirteen were strippers and did their day’s work of ten hours and more. Physical degeneration in its worst forms becomes inevitable. Even the factory child-worker fares better, for in the factory there is exercise and the going to and from work, while in the tenement-house cigar-making the worn-out little creatures crawl to the bed, often only a pile of rags in the corner, or lie down on a heap of the tobacco itself, breathing this poison day and night uninterruptedly. Vices of every order flourish in such air, and morality in this trade is at lowest ebb. Nervous excitement is so intense that necessarily nothing but immorality can result, and the child of eight or ten is as gross and confirmed an offender as the full-grown man or woman. Diligent search discovers few exceptions to this rule, and the whole matter has reached a stage where legislative interference is absolutely indispensable. Only in forbidding tenement-house manufacture absolutely can there be any safety for either consumer or producer.
Following in the same line of inquiry I take here the facts furnished to Professor Adler by a ladyphysician whose work has long lain among the poor. During the eighteen months prior to February 1, 1886, she found among the people with whom she came in contact five hundred and thirty-five children under twelve years old,—most of them between ten and twelve,—who either worked in shops or stores or helped their mothers in some kind of work at home. Of these five hundred and thirty-five children but sixty were healthy. In one family a child at three years old had infantile paralysis, easily curable. The mother had no time to attend to it. At five years old the child was taught to sew buttons on trousers. She is now at thirteen a hopeless cripple; but she finishes a dozen pair of trousers a day, and her family are thus twenty cents the richer. In another family she found twin girls four and a half years old sewing on buttons from six in the morning till ten at night; and near them was a family of three,—a woman who did the same work and whose old father of eighty and little girl of six were her co-workers.
There is a compulsory education law, but it demands only fourteen weeks of the year, and the poorer class work from early morning till eightA. M.and after school hours from four till late in the night. With such energy as is left they take their fourteen weeks of education, but even in these many methods of evasion are practised. It is easy to swear that the child is over fourteen, but small of its age, and this is constantly done. It is sometimes done deliberatelyby thinking workmen, who deny that the common school as it at present exists can give any training that they desire for their children, or that it will ever do so till manual training forms part of the course. But for most it is not intelligent dissatisfaction, but the absorbing press of getting a living that compels the employment of child-labor, and thus brings physical and moral degeneration, not only for this generation but for many to come. It is not alone the nine thousand in factories that we must deal with, but many hundred thousands uncounted and unrecognized, the same spirit dominating all.
In one of the better class of tenement-houses a woman, a polisher in a jewelry manufactory, said the other day:—
“I’m willing to work hard, I don’t care how hard; but it’s awful to me to see my little boy and the way he goes on. He’s a cash-boy at D——’s, and they don’t pay by the week, they pay by checks, so every cash-boy is on the keen jump after a call. They’re so worried and anxious and afraid they won’t get enough; and Johnny cries and says, ‘O mamma, I do try, but there’s one boy that always gets ahead of me.’ I think it’s an awful system, even if it does make them smart.”
An awful system, yet in its ranks march more and more thousands every year. It would seem as if every force in modern civilization bent toward this one end of money-getting, and the child of days andthe old man of years alike shared the passion and ran the same mad race. It is the passion itself that has outgrown all bounds and that faces us to-day,—the modern Medusa on which he who looks has no more heart of flesh and blood but forever heart of stone, insensible to any sorrow, unmoved by any cry of child or woman. It is with this shape that the battle must be, and no man has yet told us its issue. Nay, save here and there one, who counts that battle is needed, or sees the shadow of the terror walking not only in darkness but before all men’s eyes, who is there that has not chosen blindness and will not hear the voice that pleads: “Let my people go free”?
“I usedto think there were steady trades; but somehow now everything gets mixed, and you can’t tell what’s steady and what isn’t.”
“What makes the mix?”
“The Lord only knows! I’ve studied over it till I’m dazed, and sometimes I’ve wondered if my mind was weakening.”
The speaker, a middle-aged Scotchwoman, whose tongue still held a little of the burr that thirty years of American life had not been able to extract, put her hand to her head as if the fault must concentrate there.
“If it was my trade alone,” she said, “I might think I was to blame for not learning new ways, but it’s the same in all. Now, take mattress-making. I learned that because I could help my father best that way. He was an upholsterer in Aberdeen, and came over to better himself, and he did if he hadn’t signed notes for a friend and ruined himself. He upholstered in the big families for thirty years, and everybodyknew his little place on Hudson Street. People then bought furniture to last, and had it covered with the best of stuff, and so with curtains and hangings. Damask was damask, I can tell you, and velvet lambrequins meant money. No cotton-back stuff. They got shaken and brushed and done up from moths. People had some respect for good material. Nobody respects anything now. I saw a rich woman the other day let her boy six years old empty a box of candy on a pale-blue satin couch, and then sit down on it and rub his shoes up and down on the edge. I say that when there’s no respect left for anything it’s no wonder decent work comes to an end. I make a mattress and there isn’t an inch of it that isn’t sewed to last and that isn’t an honest piece of work, but you can go into any house-furnishing department and buy one that looks just as well for a third less money. Everything’s so cheap that people don’t care whether anything lasts or not, and so there’s no decent work done; and people pretend to have learned trades when really they just botch things together. I just go round in houses and make over,—places that I’ve had for years; and I’ve been forewoman in a big factory, but somehow a factory mattress never seems to me as springy and good as the old kind. Upholsterers make pretty good wages, but it can’t be called steady any more, though it used to be. I’ve thought many a time of going into business for myself, butcompetition’s awful, and I’m afraid to try. I won’t cheat, and there’s no getting ahead unless you do.”
“What are the wages?”
“A picker gets about three dollars a week. She just picks over the hair, and most any kind of girl seems to do now that everything is steamed or done by machinery. The highest wages now are nine dollars a week, though I used to earn fifteen and eighteen sometimes, and the dull season makes the average about six dollars. I earn nine or ten because I do a good deal of private work, but a woman that can make forty dollars a month straight ahead is lucky.”
Several women of much the same order of intelligence, two of them forewomen for years in prosperous establishments, added their testimony as to the shifting character of wages and of employments. One had watched the course of neckties for seventeen years,—a keen-eyed little widow who had fought hard to educate her two children and preserve some portion of the respectability she loved.
“You’d never dream how many kinds there have been, or, for that matter, how many kinds there are. We even make stocks for a few old-fashioned gentlemen that will have them. It’s a business that a lady turns to first thing almost if she wants to earn, and we give out hundreds on hundreds to such, besides sending loads into the country. I often think our house turns out enough for the whole UnitedStates, but we’re only a beginning. We pay well,—well as any, and better. Twenty-five cents a dozen is good pay now, and we see that our cutter leaves margin enough to keep the women from being cheated. That’s a great trick with some. Sometimes the cutter is paid by the number he can get out of a piece of goods; sometimes he screws just because he’s made so. But they cut by measure, and they allow so little to turn in that the thing frays in your hand, and no mortal could help it, and if one is frayed the foreman just throws out the dozen. Then lots of them advertise for girls to learn, and say they must give the first week or fortnight free; and when that is over they say work is slack or some other excuse, and take in a lot more that have been waiting. We’ve taken many a girl that came crying and told how she’d been kept on and cheated. There’s one man on Third Avenue that runs his place on this plan, and has got rich. But I say to every girl: ‘You’d better have something more than the last shape in neckties between you and starvation. You’ll never get beyond five or six dollars a week at most, and generally not that.’ It don’t make any difference. There are dozens waiting for the chance to starve genteelly. It’s a genteel trade and a pretty steady one, but if a dull time comes the girls go into cigar-making and manage along somehow. I’ve coaxed a good many into service, but it isn’t one in a hundred will try that.”
The third woman represented a hat-pressing factory in which she had been eleven years, and in which the wages had fallen year by year, till at present women, even when most expert, can earn not over six dollars per week as against from eight to twelve in previous years. The trade is regarded as a steady one, for spring and summer straws give place to felt, and a certain number of hands are sure of employment. In direct association with this trade must be considered that of artificial flowers and feathers, in which there is perpetual see-saw. If feathers are in vogue flowers are down, andvice versa. Five thousand women are employed on feathers, and the establishments, which in 1871 numbered but twelve, now number over fifty; but those for flowers far exceed them. Learners work for three dollars or less per week, the highest wages attainable in either being fifteen dollars, the average being about nine. The demand for one or the other is continuous, but when fashion in 1886 called for scarfs and flowers, four thousand feather-workers were thrown out and lived as they could till another turn in the wheel restored their occupation.
“One or the other of ’em is always steady” said a woman who had learned both trades, and thus stood prepared to circumvent fate. “The trouble is, you never know a week ahead which will be up and which down. Lots of us have learned both, and when I see the firm putting their heads together Iknow what it means and just go across the way to Pillsbury’s, and the same with them. It’s good pay and one or the other steady, but the Lord only knows which.”
“If you want steadiness you’ve got to take to jute,” said a girl who with her sister lived in one of the upper rooms. “There ain’t many jute-mills in the country, and you go straight ahead. We two began in a cotton-mill, but there’s this queer thing about it. Breathe cotton-fluff all day and you’re just sure to have consumption; but breathe a peck of jute-fluff a day and it didn’t seem to make any difference. That isn’t my notion. Our doctor said he’d noticed it, and he took home some of the fibre to examine it. For my part we’re called a rough lot, but I’d rather take that discredit and keep on in the mill. You can stir round and don’t have to double up over sewing or that kind of thing. I can earn seven dollars a week, and I’d rather earn it that way than any other.”
An hour or two in the mill, which included every form of manufacture that jute has yet taken, from seamless bags of all sizes and grades up to carpets, convinced one that if nerves were hardened to the incessant noise of machinery, there were distinct advantages associated with it. The few Scotch in the mill, men and women who had been brought over from Dundee, the headquarters of the jute industry abroad, insisted that jute was healthy, and long lifefor all who handled it a forgone conclusion. A tour among the workers seemed to confirm this impression, though here and there one found the factory face, with its dead paleness and dark-ringed eyes. Children as small as can be held to be consistent with the assumption of their thirteen years are preferred, their work as “doffers” or spool-changers requiring small quick hands. So, too, in fixing the pattern for carpets, where the threads must be manipulated with speed and light touch. It is preferred that children should grow up in the mill, passing from one room to another as they master processes, and the employees thus stay on and regard themselves as portions of the business. Some three or four thousand women and girls find occupation here. The waste from the carding-rooms is sent to the paper-mills and enters into manila paper and pasteboard, and this brings one to the paper-box makers, of whom there are several thousand at work.
This trade, while nominally one of the steadiest, has its short periods of depression. Competition is also as severe here as in every other present form of industry, and thus prices are kept down, the highest rate of wages earned being nine dollars, while seven dollars is considered fair. There must be a certain apprenticeship, not less than six months being required to master details and understand each stage of the work. In one of the best of these establishments, where space was plenty and ventilation and otherconditions all good, one woman had been in the firm’s employ for eighteen years and was practically forewoman, though no such office is recognized. Beginners were placed in her hands and did not leave her till a perfect box could be turned off. Cutting is all done by special machines, and the paper for covering is prepared in the same way, glue or paste being used according to the degree of strength desired in the box. The work is all piece-work, from fifty to seventy cents a hundred being paid; a fair worker making two hundred a day and an expert nearly or quite three hundred. But competition governs the price and cuts are often made. A firm will underbid and an order be transferred to it, unless the girls will consent to do the work five or, it may be, ten cents less on the hundred, and thus wages can seldom pass beyond nine dollars a week, dull seasons and cuts reducing the average to seven and a half. Many even good workers fall far below this, as they prefer to come late and go early, piece-work admitting of this arrangement. The woman who takes up this trade may be confident of earning from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a month, but she never exceeds this amount; nor is there promotion beyond a certain point. In paper hangings wages do not rise above twenty-five dollars at most, and in paper collars and cuffs, as in everything connected with clothing, the rate is much less. Rags are the foundation industry in all these forms of paper manufacture, but the twothousand women who work at sorting these seldom pass beyond five dollars, and more often receive but two and a half or three dollars per week.
Under much the same head must come the preparation of sample cards, playing cards, and various forms of stationers’ work. The latter has short dull seasons when girls may, for two or three weeks, have no work; but it is otherwise a steady trade, the wages running from three and a half to seven dollars per week. They stamp initials and crests with large hand presses, and stamp also the cheaper order of lithographs; they run envelope machines, color mourning paper, apply mucilage to envelopes, and pack small boxes of paper and envelopes. In all of the last mentioned trades hours are from eightA. M.to half-past fiveP. M., with half an hour for lunch, and a girl of fifteen can earn the same wages as the woman of fifty, a light, quick touch and care being the only essentials.
The trades mentioned here and in preceding papers form but a portion of the ninety and more open to women. Thirty-eight of these are directly connected with clothing, and include every phase of ornament or use in braid, gimp, button, clasp, lining, or other article employed in its manufacture. In every one of these competition keeps wages at the lowest possible figure. Outside of the army here employed come the washers and ironers who laundry shirts and underwear, whose work is of the most exhausting order,who “lean hard” on the iron, and in time become the victims of diseases resulting from ten hours a day of this “leaning hard,” and who complain bitterly that prisons and reformatories underbid them and keep wages down. It is quite true. Convict labor here as elsewhere is the foe of the honest worker, and complicates a problem already sufficiently complicated. These ironers can make from ten to twelve dollars per week, but soon fail in health and turn to lighter work, many of them taking up cigar-making, which soon finishes the work of demoralization.
Fringes, gimps, plush, and bonnet ornaments are overcrowded with workers, for here, as in flowers and feathers, fashion determines the season’s work, and the fringe-maker has for a year or so had small call for her knowledge save in some forms of upholstery. One and all are so hedged in by competition that to pass beyond a certain limit is impossible, and all wages are kept at the lowest point, not only by this fact, but by the fact that many women who had learned the trade continue it after marriage as a means of adding a trifle to the family income. An expert in any one of them is tolerably certain of steady employment, but wages have reached the lowest point and it does not appear that any rise is probable. Sharp competition rules and will rule till the working class themselves recognize the necessity of an education that will make them something more thanadjuncts to machinery, and of an organization in which co-operation will take the place of competition. That both must come is as certain as that evolution is upward and not downward, but it is still a distant day, and neither employer nor employed have yet learned the possibilities of either.