of the most insidious. Other points affecting health are found in the
nature of certain of the trades and the conditions under which they must
be carried on. Feather-sorters, fur-workers, cotton-sorters, all
workers on any material that gives off dust, are subject to lung and
bronchial troubles. In soap-factories the girls' hands are eaten by the
caustic soda, and by the end of the day the fingers are often raw and
bleeding. In making buttons, pins, and other manufactures of this
nature, there is always liability of getting the fingers jammed or
caught. For the first three times the wounds are dressed without charge.
After that the person injured must pay expenses. In these and many other
trades work must be so closely watched that it brings on weakness of the
eyes, so that many girls are under treatment for this.
In bakeries the girls stand from ten to sixteen hours a day, and break
down after a short time. Boots and shoes oblige being on the feet all
day; and this is the case for saleswomen, cash-girls, and all
factory-workers. In type-founderies the air is always filled with a fine
dust produced by rubbing, and the girls employed have no color in their
faces. In paper-box making constant standing brings on the same
difficulties found among all workers who stand all day; and they
complain also of the poison often resulting from the coloring matter
used in making the boxes. In book-binderies, brush-manufactories, etc.,
the work soon breaks down the girls.
In the clothing-business, where the running of heavy sewing-machines is
done by foot-power, there is a fruitful source of disease; and even
where steam is used, the work is exhausting, and soon produces weakness
and various difficulties.
In food preparations girls who clean and pack fish get blistered hands
and fingers from the saltpetre employed by the fishermen. Others in
"working-stalls" stand in cold water all day, and have the hands in cold
water; and in laundries, confectionery establishments, etc., excessive
heat and standing in steam make workers especially liable to throat and
lung diseases, as well as those induced by continuous standing.
Straw goods produce a fine dust, and cause a constant hacking among the
girls at work upon them; and the acids used in setting the colors often
produce "acid sores" upon the ends of the fingers.
In match-factories, as already mentioned, even with the usual
precautions, necrosis often attacks the worker, and the jaw is eaten
away. Sores, ulcerations, and suffering of many orders are the portion
of workers in chemicals. In many cases a little expenditure on the part
of the employer would prevent this; but unless brought up by an
inspector, no precautions are taken.
The question of seats for saleswomen comes up periodically, has been at
some points legislated upon, and is in most stores ignored or evaded.
"The girls look better,--more as if they were ready for work," is the
word of one employer, who frankly admitted that he did not mean they
should sit; and this is the opinion acted upon by most. Insufficient
time for meals is a universal complaint; and nine times out of ten, the
conveniences provided are insufficient for the numbers who must use
them, and thus throw off offensive and dangerous effluvia.
It is one of the worst evils in shop life, not only for Massachusetts,
but for the entire United States, that in all large stores, where fixed
rules must necessarily be adopted, girls are forced to ask men for
permission to go to closets, and often must run the gauntlet of men and
boys. All physicians who treat this class testify to the fact that many
become seriously diseased as the result of unwillingness to subject
themselves to this ordeal.
One of the ablest factory-inspectors in this country, or indeed in any
country, Mrs. Fanny B. Ames of Boston, reports this as one of the least
regarded points in a large proportion of the factories and manufacturing
establishments visited, but adds that it arises often from pure
ignorance and carelessness, and is remedied as soon as attention is
called to it.
Taking up the other New England reports in which reference to these
evils is found, the testimony is the same. Law is often evaded or wholly
set aside,--at times through carelessness, at others wilfully. The most
exhaustive treatment of this subject in all its bearings is found in the
report of the New Jersey Bureau of Labor for 1889, the larger portion of
it being devoted to the fullest consideration of the hygiene of
occupation, the diseases peculiar to special trades, and general
sanitary condition and methods of working, not only in "dangerous,
unhealthy, or noxious trades," but in all. Commissioner Bishop, from
whose report quotations have already been made (p. 197), gives many
instances of working under fearful conditions, absolutely destructive to
health and often to morals; and the report may be regarded as one of the
most authoritative words yet spoken in this direction.
The Factory Inspection Law for the State of New York, in detail much the
same as that of Massachusetts, is sufficiently full and explicit to
secure to all workers better conditions than any as yet attained save in
isolated cases. There is, however, constant violation of its most vital
points; and this must remain true for all States, until the number of
inspectors is made in some degree adequate to the demand. At present
they are not only seriously overworked, but find it impossible to cover
the required ground. The law which stands at present as the demand to be
made by all factory-workers and all interested in intelligent
legislation, will be found in the Appendix.
Destructive to health and morals as are often the factories and
workshops in which women must work, they play far less part in their
lives than the homes afforded by the great cities, where the poor herd
in quarters,--at their best only tolerable shelters, at their worst
unfit for man or beast. It is the tenement-house question that in these
words presents itself for consideration, and that makes part of the
general problem. Taking New York as illustrative of some of the worst
forms of over-crowding, though Boston and Chicago are not far behind, we
turn to the work of one of the closest and most competent of observers,
Dr. Annie S. Daniel, for many years physician in charge of out-practice
for the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. The report of this
practice for 1891 includes a series of facts bearing vitally on every
phase of woman's labor. Known as an expert in these directions, her
testimony was called for in the examination of 1893 into the
sweating-system of New York, made by a congressional committee and now
on record in a report to be had on application to the New York
Congressmen at Washington.[43] For years she has watched the effects of
child-labor, taking hundreds of measurements of special cases, and
studying the effects of the life mothers and children alike were
compelled to live. "The medical problems," she writes, "which present
themselves to the physician are so closely connected with the social
problems that it is impossible to study one alone. The people are sick
because of insufficient food and clothing and unsanitary surroundings,
and these conditions exist because the people are poor. They are often
poor _because they have no work_." At another point, commenting on
drinking among the poor, she writes: "Drinking among the women is
increasing. In the majority of cases we have studied, it has been the
effect of poverty, not the cause."
In the region between Houston Street and Canal Street, known now to be
the most thickly populated portion of the inhabited globe, every house
is a factory; that is, some form of manufacture is going on in every
room. The average family of five adds to itself from two to ten more,
often a sewing-machine to each person; and from six or seven in the
morning till far into the night work goes on,--usually the manufacture
of clothing. Here contagious diseases pass from one to another. Here
babies are born and babies die, the work never pausing save for death
and hardly for that. In one of these homes Dr. Daniel found a family of
five making cigars, the mother included. "Two of the children were ill
of diphtheria. Both parents attended to these children; they would
syringe the nose of each child, and without washing their hands return
to their cigars. We have repeatedly observed the same thing when the
work was manufacturing clothing and undergarments to be bought as well
by the rich as by the poor. Hand-sewed shoes, made for a fashionable
Broadway shoe-store, were sewed at home by a man in whose family were
three children sick with scarlet-fever. And such instances are common.
Only death or lack of work closes tenement-house manufactories ... When
we consider that stopping this work means no food and no roof over their
heads, the fact that the disease may be carried by their work cannot be
expected to impress the people."
Farther on in the report, she adds: "The people can neither be moral nor
healthy until they have decent homes." Yet the present wage-rate makes
decent homes impossible; and though Brooklyn and Boston have a few model
tenement-houses, New York has none, the experiment of making over in
part a few old ones hardly counting save in intention. Into these homes
respectable, ambitious, hard-working girls and women are compelled to
go. That they live decent lives speaks worlds for the intrinsic goodness
and purity of nature which in the midst of conditions intolerable to
every sense still preserves these characteristics. That they must live
in such surroundings is one of the deepest disgraces of civilization.
As to wages, concerning which there seems to be a general opinion that
steady rise has gone on, we find Dr. Daniel giving the rates for many
years. She writes:--
"Wages have steadily decreased. Among the women who earned the
whole or part of the income, finishing pantaloons was the most
common occupation. For this work, in 1881, they received ten to
fifteen cents a pair; for the same work in 1891, three to five, at
the most ten cents a pair. The women doing this work claim that
wages are reduced because of the influx of Italian women, but few
Italian women do the poor quality of trousers. While we are glad to
note some excellent sanitary changes in the tenement-house
construction, the people we believe to be just as poor, just as
overcrowded and wretched to-day, as in 1881 and 1853, the only
difference being that there are a greater number of people who are
poor now."
These statements apply in great part to unskilled labor; but there is
always in these houses a large proportion of skilled labor disabled by
sickness or other causes and out of work for the time being. The wage at
best for skilled labor is given by the Labor Commissioner as $5.29. Let
any one study the possibilities of this sum per week, and the wonder
will arise, not why living is not easier, but how it goes on at all.
Specific evils speak for themselves, and are gradually being eliminated.
They are before the eyes, and the least experienced student may gauge
their bearing and judge their effects. But wider-reaching than any or
all the worst abuses of the worst trades is the wrong done to the child
and to family life as a whole, by the continuous labor of married women
in factories, or at any occupation which demands, for ten hours or more
a day, unremitting toil. At all points where scientific observation has
been made the expert lifts up a warning voice. It is the future of the
race that is in question. Child labor, while not entering directly into
our present examination, is, as has already been said, inextricably
bound up with the question of woman's work and wages. The two must be
studied together; and for our own country there are already admirable
monographs on this subject,[44] two authoritative ones coming from the
American Economic Association, and one hardly less so from a close and
keen observer whose scientific training gives her equal right to form
conclusions.[45]
A dispassionate observer, Mr. W. Stanley Jevons, whose conclusions are
founded on long investigation and deduction, years ago wrote words which
he has at various times emphasized and repeated, and which sum up the
evils to which the infancy of the children of overworked mothers is
subject, as well as the consequences to the State in which they are
born, and which faces the results of the system which produces them. He
writes as follows:--
"We can help evolution by the aid of its own highest and latest
product,--science. When all the teaching of medical and social
science lead us to look upon the absence of the mother from the
home as the cause of the gravest possible evils, can we be
warranted in standing passively by, allowing this evil to work
itself out to the bitter end, by the process of natural selection?
Something might perhaps be said in favor of the present apathetic
mode of viewing this question, if natural selection were really
securing the survival of the fittest, so that only the weakly babes
were killed off, and the strong ones well brought up. But it is
much to be feared that no infants ever really recover from the test
of virtual starvation to which they are so ruthlessly exposed. The
vital powers are irreparably crippled, and the infant grows up a
stunted, miserable specimen of humanity, the prey to every physical
and moral evil."[46]
It is hardly necessary to go on specifying special violations of
sanitary law or special illustrative cases. The Report of the New York
Bureau of Labor for 1885 is a magazine of such cases,--a summary of all
the horrors that the worst conditions can include. Aside from the
revolting pictures of the life lived from day to day by the workers
themselves, it gives in detail case after case of rapacity and
over-reaching on the part of the employers; and parallel ones may be
found in every labor report which has touched upon the subject.
In New York a "Working Woman's Protective Union," formed more than
twenty-five years ago, has done unceasing work in settling disputed
claims and collecting wages unjustly withheld. No case is entered on
their books which has not been examined by their lawyer, and thus only
well grounded complaints find record; but with even these precautions
the records show nearly fifty thousand adjudicated since they began
work. Many cities have special committees, in the organized charities,
who seek to cover the same ground, but who find it impossible to do all
that is required. From East and West alike, complaints are practically
the same. It is not only women in trades, but those in domestic service,
who are recorded as suffering every form of oppression and injustice.
Colorado and California, Kansas and Wisconsin, speak the same word. With
varying industries wrongs vary, but the general summary is the same.
The system of fines, while on general principles often just, has been
used by unscrupulous employers to such a degree as to bring the week's
wages down a third or even half. It is impossible to give illustrative
instances in detail; but all who deal with girls, in clubs and
elsewhere, report that the system requires modification.
On the side of the employers, and as bearing also on the evils which are
most marked among women workers, we may quote from the Government
Report, "Working Women in Large Cities":--
"Actual ill-treatment by employers seems to be infrequent....
Foreigners are often found to be more considerate of their help
than native-born men, and the kindest proprietor in the world is a
Jew of the better class. In some shops week-workers are locked out
for the half-day if late, or docked for every minute of time lost,
an extra fine being often added. Piece workers have great freedom
as to hours, and employers complain much of tardiness and
absenteeism. The mere existence of health and labor laws insures
privileges formerly unheard of; half-holidays in summer, vacation
with pay, and shorter hours are becoming every year more frequent,
better workshops are constructed, and more comfortable
accommodations are being furnished."
This is most certainly true, but more light shows the shadows even more
clearly; and the fact remains that every force must be brought to bear,
to remedy the evils depicted in the reports of the bureaus quoted here.
The general conditions of working-women in New York retail stores were
reported upon, in 1890, by a committee from the Working-Woman's Society,
at 27 Clinton Place, New York. The report was read at a mass meeting
held at Chickering Hall, May 6, 1890; and its statements represent
general conditions in all the large cities of the United States. It is
impossible to give more than the principal points of the report; but
readers can obtain it on application to the Secretary of the
Association.[47] These are as follows:--
Hours are often excessive, and employees are not paid for over-time.
Many stores give no half-holiday, and keep open on Saturdays till ten
and eleven o'clock in the evening, and at the holiday season do this for
three or four weeks nightly.
Sanitary conditions are usually bad, and include bad ventilation,
unsanitary arrangements, and indifference to the considerations of
decency. Toilet arrangements in many stores are horrible, and closets
for male and female are often side by side, with only slight partition
between. One hand-basin and towel serve for all. Often water for drink
can be obtained only from the attic.
Numbers of children under age are employed for excessive hours, and at
work far beyond their strength, an investigation having shown that over
one hundred thousand children under the legal age of fourteen were at
work in factories, workshops, and stores.
Service for a number of years often meets with no consideration, but is
regarded as a reason for dismissal. It is the rule in some stores to
keep no one over five years, lest they come to feel that they have some
claim on the firm; and when a saleswoman is dismissed from one house,
she finds it almost impossible to obtain employment in another.
The wages are reduced by excessive fines, employers placing a value upon
time lost that is not given to services rendered. The fines run from
five to thirty cents for a few minutes' tardiness. In some stores the
fines are divided at the end of the year between the timekeeper and the
superintendent, and there is thus every temptation to injustice.
The report concludes:--
"We find that, through low wages, long hours, unwholesome sanitary
conditions, and the discouraging effect of excessive fines, not
only is the physical condition injured, but the tendency is to
injure the moral well-being. It is simply impossible for a woman to
live without assistance on the low salary a saleswoman earns,
without depriving herself of real necessities."
These were the conditions which, in 1889, led to the formation of the
little society which, though limited in numbers, has done admirable and
efficient work, its latest effort being to secure from the Assembly at
Albany a bill making inspection of stores and shops as obligatory as
that of factories.
It was through the concerted effort of its members that the Factory
Inspection Act became a law, though not without violent opposition. The
bill originated in the Working-Woman's Society, was drawn up there, sent
to Albany by its delegates, and passed without the aid of money.
There are eleven thousand factories in New York State, and only one
inspector to investigate their condition; while in England, scarce
larger in territory, forty-one inspectors are appointed by the
Government.
The Andrus bill, adding to the power of factory inspectors, raising the
working age of children to fourteen years, and prohibiting night work
for girls under twenty-one and boys under eighteen, was sent with the
Factory Bill to the Central Labor Union, and the women were largely
instrumental in obtaining the passage of the measure.
Why such determined opposition still meets every attempt to bring about
the same inspection for mercantile establishments cannot be determined;
but thus far, though admitted to be necessary, the act has at each
reading been laid upon the table. Another effort will be made in the
coming winter of 1893-94.
In spite, however, of much agitation of all phases of woman's work, it
is only some wrong as startling as that involved in the sweating-system
that seems able to arouse more than a temporary interest. One of the
most able and experienced women inspectors of the United States Bureau
of Labor, Miss de Grafenried, has lately written:--
"It is an open question whether woman's pay is not falling, cost
and standards of living considered. Could partly supported labor
and children be eliminated, shop employees would get higher rates.
Still there are other economic anomalies that affect women's wages.
'Wholesalers' and manufacturers shut up their factories and 'give
out' everything--umbrellas, coats, hair-wigs, and shrouds--to be
made,--they know not in what den, or wrung they care not from what
misery ... Again, wages are depressed by over-stimulating
piece-work; and its unscrupulous use by proprietors who hesitate to
confess to paying women only $3 or $4 a week, yet who scale prices
so that only experts can earn that sum. Many employers cut rates as
soon as, by desperate exertions, operatives clear $5 a week. Then,
underbidding from the unemployed is a fruitful source of low wages.
Massachusetts has 20 per cent of her workers unemployed."
These conditions, while varying as to numbers, are practically the same
for the work of women in all parts of the United States, and are matters
of increasing perplexity and sorrow to every searcher into these
problems. At its best, woman's work in industries is intermittent, since
it is only textile work that continues the year round; dress and cloak
making, shoe and umbrella making, fur-sewing and millinery, have
specific seasons, in the intervals between which the worker waits and
starves, or, if too desperate, goes upon the streets, driven there by
the wretched competitive system, the evils of which increase in direct
ratio to the longing for speedy wealth. In short, matters are at that
point where only radical change of methods can better the situation,
even the most conservative observer, relying most thoroughly upon
evolution, feeling something more than evolution must work if justice is
to have place in the present social scheme.
It is at this point that some consideration of domestic service
naturally presents itself. Though regarded often as no part of the labor
question, there can be no other head under which to range it, since the
last census gives over a million persons engaged in this occupation, the
lowest rough estimate of wages being $160,000,000 and the support
included forming a sum at least as large. It is through the hands of
the domestic servant that a large part of the finished products of other
forms of labor must pass, and the economic aspects of the question grow
in importance with every year of the changing conditions of American
life. In no other occupation is a just consideration of the points
involved so difficult a task, since the mistress who faces the
incompetence, insubordination, and all the other trials involved in the
relation, suffers too keenly from the sense of individual wrong to treat
the matter in the large. Till it is so treated, however, understanding
for both sides is impossible, and to bring about such understanding is
the first necessity for all.