(1885 and 1886),--Connecticut, New Jersey, and California, the former
being for 1885. In this, women's wages are given incidentally in general
tables, and must be disentangled to find any average. In artificial
flowers the highest wage is given as $7, and the lowest $3, the average
being $5. In blankets and woollen goods the highest is $12.50 and the
lowest $6, an average of $9 per week. In factory work of all orders,
wages range from $6 to $9.75 per week, the average paid to women and
girls being $7.50 per week. In clothing, including underwear, wages are
from $3 to $15 per week, and the average annual income of women in these
trades is given as $300 per year. In cloakmaking the lowest wage is $3,
the highest $9, and the average $7.50. The average wage for San
Francisco is given as $6.95, and that for the whole State is about $6.
The Connecticut report for 1885 gives simply the yearly wage in various
trades. Reason for this is found in the fact that it was the first, and
could thus deal with the subject only tentatively. Clothing is given as
producing for women a yearly average of $229, and shirts $237. Factory
work gave $207, paper boxes $227, and woollen goods $245.
In the report for 1886, the lowest average wage is reported as found in
the making of wearing apparel; but the average for the State was found
to be a trifle over $6.50 per week.
The report from New Jersey makes the lowest wages $3 per week, and the
highest $10, the average being $5. This report covers ground more fully
and in more varied directions than any one of the same period, though
there is only incidental reference to the work of women as a whole, the
returns being given in the general tables of wages. Wages and the cost
of living are compared, and the chapter under this head is one of the
most valuable in the summary of reports as a whole. The report for 1886
gives the same general average of wages for the State, but adds an
exhaustive treatment of "Earnings, Cost of Living, and Prices."
Maine sent out its first annual report in 1887, and gives the wages of
women workers as $3.58 for the lowest, and $15.20 for the highest, the
annual earnings ranging from $104 to $520. The report from the same
State for 1889 takes up the subject of working-women in detail, giving
their home or boarding conditions, sanitary conditions, their own
remarks on trades, wages, etc., and the aspect of their labor as a
whole. The average wage remains the same.
Rhode Island, in its Third Annual Report for 1889, under the direction
of Commissioner Almon K. Goodwin, gives the average wage for the State
as $5.87, and devotes the bulk of its space to working-women, with full
returns from the entire State.
For the same year California, by its labor commissioner, Mr. John J.
Tobin, gives an equally exhaustive statement of the conditions of women
wage-earners in that State. The lowest weekly wage given is $5, and the
highest $11. Plain cooks receive from $25 to $40 a month with board and
lodging, and domestic servants from $15 to $25 with board. In
cloak-making the lowest wage is $3, and the highest $7.50; and in
shirt-making the lowest is $2.50, and the highest $6. General clothing
and underwear range from $4.50 to $6, and other trades average a trifle
higher wage than in New England. The chapter on domestic service is
suggestive and important, and the whole treatment makes the report a
necessity to all who would understand the situation in detail. This,
however, is so true of all that have touched upon the subject that it
appears invidious to single out any one alone. They must be taken
together. With each year the scientific value of each increases, and
there appears to be distinct emulation among the commissioners as to
which shall embody the most in the returns made and the general
treatment of the whole.
The first report from Colorado, issued in 1888, Mr. James Rice
commissioner, devotes a chapter to women wage-earners, with an
additional one on domestic service and its drawbacks. The average wage
for the State is given as $6; and the commissioner states that
notwithstanding the general impression that higher wages are paid in
Colorado than at any other point save California, actual returns show
that the average sums in several occupations are less than that paid to
persons similarly employed in cities along the Atlantic seaboard.
Kansas, in its fifth annual report issued in 1889, gives a section to
working-women. The commissioner, Mr. Frank Betton, considers the returns
imperfect, great difficulty having been experienced in securing them.
The average weekly wage is given as $5.17. Expenses are carefully
analyzed, and there is a report of the remarks of employers, as well as
from a number of those employed.
In the report from Iowa for 1887, Commissioner Hutchins laments that so
few women have been willing to fill out blanks of returns. The wage
returns given range from $3.75 to $9. The report for 1889 makes mention
of continued difficulties in securing returns, and gives the annual
earnings of women as from $100 to $440. The tables include cost of
living and many other essential particulars.
Wisconsin, in the report for 1884, has a chapter on working-girls. It
gives the average weekly income in personal services as $5.25; in
trade, $4.18; in manufactures, $5.22, and the general average for the
year as $5.17.
Minnesota, whose first report, under the supervision of Commissioner
John Lamb, appeared in 1888 for the years 1887 and 1888, found little or
no room for statistics, but included a chapter on working-women, with a
few admirable tables of age, nativity, home and working conditions, etc.
Minute inquiry was made as to cost of living, clothing, etc.; and the
results form a chapter of painful interest, that on domestic service
being equally suggestive. Clothing, as usual, represents the lowest
average wage, $3.66 per week, the highest being $8.50, and the general
average a trifle over $6.
Michigan, in 1890, under its labor commissioner, Mr. Henry A. Robinson,
added to the list one of the most thorough studies yet made of general
conditions. The agents of the bureau, trained for the work, made
personal visits to working-women and girls to the number of 13,436, this
representing one hundred and thirty-seven distinct industries and three
hundred and seventy-eight occupations. The blanks prepared for filling
out contained one hundred and twenty-nine questions, classified as
follows: Social, 28; industrial, 12; hours of labor, 14; economic, 54;
sanitary, 21, with seven others as to dress, societies, church
attendance, with remarks and suggestions from the workers themselves. As
usual, in such cases, employers here and there objected to any
investigation, fearing labor organizations were at the bottom of it; but
the majority allowed free examination. The report is very full, and
gives a clear and full view of the individual lives of this body of
women workers. The average wage proved to be $4.81 per week, the average
income for the year being $216.45. The average income of teachers and
those in public positions was $457.27.
This is the showing, State by State, so far as bureaus have reported.
Many States have made no move in this direction; but interest is now
thoroughly aroused, and the subject is likely to find treatment in all,
this depending somewhat, however, on the character of the State
industries and the numbers at work in each. Manufacturing necessarily
brings with it conditions that in the end compel inquiry; and for most
of the Southern States such industries are still new, while the West
has not yet found the same occasion as the East for full knowledge of
the problems involved in woman's work and wages.
We come now to the most elaborate and far-reaching inquiry yet
made,--the work of the United States Bureau of Labor under Commissioner
Wright, entitled "Working-Women in Large Cities." Twenty-two of these
are reported upon after one of the most rigorous examinations ever
undertaken; and the average wage of each tallies with the rates given in
the States to which they belong. Taken alphabetically, the list is as
follows:--
AVERAGE WEEKLY EARNINGS, BY CITIES.
Atlanta $4.95 | New Orleans $4.31
Baltimore 4.18 | New York 5.85
Boston 5.64 | Philadelphia 5.34
Brooklyn 5.76 | Providence 5.51
Buffalo 4.27 | Richmond 3.83
Charleston, S.C. 4.22 | St. Louis 5.19
Chicago 5.74 | St. Paul 6.62
Cincinnati 4.50 | San Francisco 6.91
Cleveland 4.63 | San José 6.11
Indianapolis 4.57 | Savannah 4.90
Louisville 4.51 | ----
Newark 5.20 | All Cities 5.24
In addition to these figures, it seems well to give the average yearly
earnings of women in some of the most profitable industries, those
being chosen which are seldom affected by "seasons":--
Artificial flowers, $277.53; awnings and tents, $276.46; bookbinding,
$271.31; boots and shoes, $286.60; candy, $213.59; carpets, $298.53;
cigar boxes, $267.36; cigar factory, $294.66; cigarette factory,
$266.12; cloak factory, $291.76; clothing factory, $248.36;
cotton-mills, $228.32; dressmaking, $278.37; dry-goods stores, $368.84;
jewelry factory, $263.80; men's furnishing-goods factory, $232.24;
millinery, $345.95; paper-box factory, $240.47; plug-tobacco factory,
$235.67; printing-office, $300; skirt factory, $265.40; smoking-tobacco
factory, $238.70.
These, so far as they have been collected and tabulated by the various
labor bureaus, are the returns for the United States as a whole. The
reports for the following years of 1891 and 1892 were expected to be far
more general, but this has not proved to be the case.
AVERAGE WAGE PER STATE.
Maine $5.50
Massachusetts 6.68
Connecticut 6.50
Rhode Island 5.87
New York 5.85
New Jersey 5.00
California 6.00
Colorado 6.00
Kansas 5.17
Wisconsin 5.17
Minnesota 6.00
All cities 5.24
FOOTNOTES:
[23] Third Annual Report of New York Bureau of Labor, p. 162. These are
Mr. Peck's figures; but the United States report gives the average for
skilled labor as $5.85 per week, and adds that the unskilled earns far
less.
[24] Ibid. p. 165.
[25] New York Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Third Annual Report, p. 27.
VII.
GENERAL CONDITIONS FOR ENGLISH WORKERS.
So far as opportunity is concerned, it is the United States only that
offers a practically unlimited field to women workers, to whom some four
hundred trades and occupations are now open. Comparison with other
countries is, however, essential, if we would judge fairly of conditions
as a whole; and thus we turn first to that other English-speaking race,
and the English worker at home. At once we are faced with the
impossibility of gathering much more than surface indications, since in
no other country is there any counterpart to our admirable system of
investigation and tabulation, each year more and more systematic and
thorough. In spite of the fact that factory laws had their birth in
England, and that the whole system of child labor--the early horrors of
which find record in thousands of pages of special reports from
inspectors appointed by government--has been through their means
modified and improved, there are, even now, no sources of information as
to numbers at work or the characteristics of special industries. The
census must be the chief dependence; and here we find the enormous
proportions to which the employment of women has attained.
In 1861 these returns gave for England and Wales 1,024,277 women at
work. Twenty years later the number had doubled, half a million being
found in London alone. This does not include all, since, as Mr. Charles
Booth notes in his recent "Labor and Life of the People," many employed
women do not return their employments.
Mr. Booth's work is a purely private enterprise, assisted by devoted
co-workers, and by trained experts employed at his own expense. For the
final estimate must be added general census returns, and the recent
reports on the sweating-system in London and other English cities.
Beginning with factory operatives and their interests, nothing is easier
than to follow the course of legislation on their behalf. The "Life of
Lord Shaftesbury" is, in itself, the history of the movement for the
protection of women and children,--a movement begun early in the present
century, and made imperative by the hideous disclosures of oppression
and outrage, not only among factory operatives, but the women and
children in mining and other industries. Active as were his efforts and
those of his colleagues, it is only within a generation that the fruit
of their labor is plainly seen. As late as 1844, at the time Engel's
notable book on "The Condition of the Working-Class in England"
appeared, the labor of children of four and five years was still
permitted; and women and children alike worked in mines, in brickyards,
and other exposed and dangerous employments for the merest pittance. The
pages of Engel's book swarm with incidents of individual and class
misery; and while he admits fully, in the appendix prepared in 1886,
that many of the evils enumerated have disappeared, he adds that for the
mass of workers "the state of misery and insecurity in which they live
now is as low as ever, perhaps lower."
Year by year, in spite of constant agitation and the unceasing effort of
Lord Shaftesbury to alter the worst abuses, these evils remained, and
faced the examiner into social problems, slight ameliorations here and
there serving chiefly to throw into darker relief the misery of the
situation. Not only the philanthropist but officials joined hands; and
in the proceedings of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, each year added to the number and importance of the protests
against an iniquitous system.
Chief among these protests ranked that against the overwork of pregnant
mothers, through which, as one of the most able opponents of existing
evils, W. Stanley Jevons, wrote, "infinite, irreparable wrong is done to
helpless children," adding that the appalling infant mortality of the
manufacturing districts attracted far less attention and interest in the
public mind than the death of a single murderer. At nearly the same time
Mr. F.W. Lowndes gave the fruit of long research in a paper read before
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled "The
Destruction of Infancy;"[26] and this was supplemented by testimony
from experts, the Statistical Society adding weighty testimony to the
same effect.[27]
From these and other official testimony it was found that in nineteen
manufacturing towns,[28] out of 1,023,896 children [Forty-first Report
of the Registrar-General, p. 36] born, 82,259 died in infancy. The rate
of mortality varied from 59.4 in Portsmouth through an ascending scale,
being in London 78.6 and in Liverpool the almost incredible proportion
of 103.6 per thousand. In a rural country infant mortality does not
exceed from thirty-five to forty per thousand. The Report of the Select
Committee on the Protection of Infant Life was filled with details so
horrible that only the sworn testimony of experts made them credited at
all.[29]
Dr. Hunter's report on rural mortality shows that when mothers are
employed in what are known as "field gangs" for out-of-door work,
leaving their children in the charge of old women too weak for such
labor as their own, that infants died like sheep. Godfrey's Cordial was
the chief engine of destruction; the corps of inspectors who reported to
the Government finding infants in all stages of prostration, from the
overdoses of the popular specific warranted to render any attention from
nurse or mother quite unnecessary.
As to the direct effects of factory or out-door labor on pregnant
mothers, out of 10,000 births among factory mothers, there died from
1863-75 of children under one year of age, in Portsmouth 1,459,
Liverpool 2,189, London 1,591, and other towns with textile industries
1,940. Statistics taken in Germany and at other points all went to show
that in the matter of out-door labor at the harvest season, when all
women-workers are in the fields, the deaths of nursing infants were
three times as great as in the other nine months.
For details and deduction from these facts the reader is referred to the
reports themselves. "I go so far," wrote Mr. Jevons, "as to advocate the
ultimate complete exclusion of mothers of children under the age of
three years from factories and workshops;" and his conviction voiced
that of every examiner into the situation as it stood at that time.
The Factory and Workshop Act came as partial solution to the many
problems; and though regarded by the working-class as a mass of
arbitrary restrictions whose usefulness they denied and in whose
benefits they had no faith, it has actually proved the Great
Charter of the working-classes. There are points still to be
altered,--modifications made necessary by the constant change in methods
of production, as well as in the enlarging sense of the ethical
principles involved. But our own legislation is still far behind it at
many points, and its work is done efficiently and thoroughly. Laws had
been made, one by one, fifteen standing on the Statute Books in 1878,
when all were abrogated, their essential features being codified in the
Act as it stands to-day,--a genuine industrial code in one hundred and
seven sections.
Up to this date violation of its provisions had been incessant; but
determined enforcement brought about a uniform working day, protection
of dangerous machinery, proper ventilation, improved sanitary
conditions, an interdict on Sunday labor, and many other reforms in
administration. Fourteen years have seen next to no change in the Act,
and the condition of women and child workers in factories and workshops
has come to be regarded as the best that modern systems of production
admit. These workers, whose numbers now mount to hundreds of thousands,
are a class apart, and for them legislation has accomplished all that
legislation seems able to do in alleviating social miseries. Content
with the results achieved, need of further effort in other directions
failed of recognition, and apathy became the general condition.
It was during this season of repose that the public mind received first
one shock and then another. "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London" appalled
all who read; and leaf by leaf the new book of revelations disclosed
always deeper depths of misery and want among all workers with the
needle,--from the days of the fig-leaf the symbol of grinding toil and
often hopeless misery.
Not alone from professional agitators, so called, but from
philanthropists of every order, came the cry for help. The Factory and
Workshop Act had not touched home labor. The sweating-system, born of
modern conditions, had risen unsuspected, and ran riot, not only in East
London, but even in back alleys of the sacred west, and in the swarming
southwest region beyond London Bridge. The London "Lancet," the most
authoritative medical journal of the world, conservative as it has
always been, has at last found that it must join hands with socialist
and anarchist, "scientific" or otherwise, with philanthropists of every
order, against the new evil and its horrors. Rich and poor alike were
involved. The virus of the deadly conditions under which the garments
took shape was implanted in every stitch that held them together, and
transferred itself to the wearer. Not only from London, but from every
city of England, came the same cry; and the public faced suddenly an
abyss of misery whose existence had been unknown and unsuspected, and
the causes of which seemed inexplicable.
For many months of the year just ended (1892) parliamentary
investigation has gone on. Report after report has been made to its
committees; and as testimony from accredited sources poured in,
incidentally a flood of light has been let in upon many forms of work
outside the clothing-manufacturer. To-day, in four huge volumes of some
thousand pages each, one may read the testimony, heart-sickening in
every detail,--a noted French political economist, the Comte
d'Haussonville, describing it, in a recent article in "La Revue des deux
Mondes" as "The Martyrology of English Industries."
In such conditions inspection is inoperative. An army of inspectors
would not suffice where every house represents from one to a dozen
workshops under its roof, in each of which sanitary conditions are
defied, and the working day made more often fourteen and sixteen hours
than twelve. Even for this day a starvation wage is the rule; the
sewing-machine operative, for example, while earning a wage of fifteen
or eighteen pence, furnishing her own thread and being forced to pay
rental on the machine.
A portion of a wage table is given here as illustrative of rates, and
used as a reference table before the preparation of Mr. Booth's book,
which gives much the same figures:--
Making paper bags, 4-1/2d. to 5-1/2d. per thousand; possible
earnings, 5s. to 6s. per week.
Button-holes, 3d. a dozen; possible earnings, 8s. a week.
Shirts, 2d. each, worker finding her own cotton; can get six done
between 8 A.M. and 11 P.M.
Sack sewing, 6d. for twenty-five; 8d. to 1s. 6d. per hundred.
Possible earnings, 8s. per week.
Pill-box making, 9s. for thirty-six gross; possible earnings, 8s.
per week.
Shirt button-hole making, 1d. a dozen; can do three or four dozen a
day.
Whip-making, 1s. a dozen; can do a dozen a day.
Trousers finishing, 3d. to 5d. each, finding one's own cotton; can
do four a day.
Shirt-finishing, 3d. to 4d. a dozen; possible earnings, 6s. a week.
Outside of the cities, where the needle is almost the sole refuge of the
unskilled worker, every industry is invaded. A recent report as to
English nail and chain workers shows hours and general conditions to be
almost intolerable, while the wage averages eightpence a day. In the
mines, despite steady action concerning them, women are working by
hundreds for the same rate. In short, from every quarter comes in
repeated testimony that the majority of working Englishwomen are
struggling for a livelihood; that a pound a week is a fortune, and that
the majority live on a wage below subsistence point.
The enormous influx of foreign population is partly responsible for
these conditions, but far less than is popularly supposed; since the
Jews, most often accused, are in many cases juster employers than the
Christians, and suffer from the same causes. For all alike, legislation
is powerless to reach certain ingrained evils, and the recent
sweating-commission ended its report with the words:--
"We express the firm hope that the faithful exposure of the evils
that we have been called upon to unveil, will have the effect of
leading capitalists to lend greater attention to the conditions
under which work is done, which furnishes the merchandise they
demand. When legislation has attained the limit beyond which it can
no longer be useful, the amelioration of the condition of workers
can result only from the increasing moral sense of those who employ
them."
This conclusion, it may be added, is in full accord with that given in
the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII., as well as with that of our most
serious workers at home; our own government examination into the
sweating-system, now embodied in a Congressional Report accessible to
all, being simply confirmation of every point made in that for England.
As a summary of many working conditions in London, I add part of a
report made by an indefatigable student of social conditions, Margaret
Harkness, associated now with Mr. Charles Booth, and as able an observer
as her cousin and co-worker, Miss Beatrice Potter, whose report on the
sweating-system makes part of Mr. Booth's first volume:[30]--