THE WORKING GIRLS OF NEW YORK.
Of the harvest of tares, sown in iniquity and reaped in wrath, the
police returns tell the story. The pen that wrote the "Song of the
Shirt" is needed to tell of the sad and toil-worn lives of New York's
working-women. The cry echoes by night and by day through its tenements:
Oh, God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!
Six months have not passed since at a great public meeting in this
city, the Working Women's Society reported: "It is a known fact that
men's wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist, but
woman's wages have no limit, since the paths of shame are always
open to her. It is simply impossible for any woman to live without
assistance on the low salary a saleswoman earns, without depriving
herself of real necessities.... It is inevitable that they must in
many instances resort to evil." It was only a few brief weeks before
that verdict was uttered, that the community was shocked by the story
of a gentle and refined woman who, left in direst poverty to earn her
own living alone among strangers, threw herself from her attic window,
preferring death to dishonor. "I would have done any honest work, even
to scrubbing," she wrote, drenched and starving, after a vain search
for work in a driving storm. She had tramped the streets for weeks on
her weary errand, and the only living wages that were offered her were
the wages of sin. The ink was not dry upon her letter before a woman in
an East Side tenement wrote down her reason for self-murder: "Weakness,
sleeplessness, and yet obliged to work. My strength fails me. Sing
at my coffin: 'Where does the soul find a home and rest?'" Her story
may be found as one of two typical "cases of despair" in one little
church community, in the _City Mission Society's Monthly_ for last
February. It is a story that has many parallels in the experience of
every missionary, every police reporter and every family doctor whose
practice is among the poor.
It is estimated that at least one hundred and fifty thousand women
and girls earn their own living in New York; but there is reason to
believe that this estimate falls far short of the truth when sufficient
account is taken of the large number who are not wholly dependent upon
their own labor, while contributing by it to the family's earnings.
These alone constitute a large class of the women wage-earners, and it
is characteristic of the situation that the very fact that some need
not starve on their wages condemns the rest to that fate. The pay they
are willing to accept all have to take. What the "everlasting law of
supply and demand," that serves as such a convenient gag for public
indignation, has to do with it, one learns from observation all along
the road of inquiry into these real woman's wrongs. To take the case
of the saleswomen for illustration: The investigation of the Working
Women's Society disclosed the fact that wages averaging from $2 to
$4.50 a week were reduced by excessive fines, the employers placing a
value upon time lost that is not given to services rendered." A little
girl, who received two dollars a week, made cash-sales amounting to
$167 in a single day, while the receipts of a fifteen-dollar male
clerk in the same department footed up only $125; yet for some trivial
mistake the girl was fined sixty cents out of her two dollars. The
practice prevailed in some stores of dividing the fines between the
superintendent and the time-keeper at the end of the year. In one
instance they amounted to $3,000, and "the superintendent was heard to
charge the time-keeper with not being strict enough in his duties."
One of the causes for fine in a certain large store was sitting down.
The law requiring seats for saleswomen, generally ignored, was obeyed
faithfully in this establishment. The seats were there, but the girls
were fined when found using them.
Cash-girls receiving $1.75 a week for work that at certain seasons
lengthened their day to sixteen hours were sometimes required to pay
for their aprons. A common cause for discharge from stores in which, on
account of the oppressive heat and lack of ventilation, "girls fainted
day after day and came out looking like corpses," was too long service.
No other fault was found with the discharged saleswomen than that they
had been long enough in the employ of the firm to justly expect an
increase of salary. The reason was even given with brutal frankness, in
some instances.
These facts give a slight idea of the hardships and the poor pay of
a business that notoriously absorbs child-labor. The girls are sent
to the store before they have fairly entered their teens, because the
money they can earn there is needed for the support of the family.
If the boys will not work, if the street tempts them from home,
among the girls at least there must be no drones. To keep their
places they are told to lie about their age and to say that they are
over fourteen. The precaution is usually superfluous. The Women's
Investigating Committee found the majority of the children employed
in the stores to be under age, but heard only in a single instance
of the truant officers calling. In that case they came once a year
and sent the youngest children home; but in a month's time they were
all back in their places, and were not again disturbed. When it comes
to the factories, where hard bodily labor is added to long hours,
stifling rooms, and starvation wages, matters are even worse. The
Legislature has passed laws to prevent the employment of children, as
it has forbidden saloon-keepers to sell them beer, and it has provided
means of enforcing its mandate, so efficient, that the very number of
factories in New York is _guessed_ at as in the neighborhood of twelve
thousand. Up till this summer, a single inspector was charged with the
duty of keeping the run of them all, and of seeing to it that the law
was respected by the owners.
[Illustration: SEWING AND STARVING IN AN ELIZABETH STREET ATTIC.]
Sixty cents is put as the average day's earnings of the 150,000, but
into this computation enters the stylish "cashier's" two dollars a day,
as well as the thirty cents of the poor little girl who pulls threads
in an East Side factory, and, if anything, the average is probably too
high. Such as it is, however, it represents board, rent, clothing,
and "pleasure" to this army of workers. Here is the case of a woman
employed in the manufacturing department of a Broadway house. It stands
for a hundred like her own. She averages three dollars a week. Pays
$1.50 for her room; for breakfast she has a cup of coffee; lunch she
cannot afford. One meal a day is her allowance. This woman is young,
she is pretty. She has "the world before her." Is it anything less
than a miracle if she is guilty of nothing worse than the "early and
improvident marriage," against which moralists exclaim as one of the
prolific causes of the distress of the poor? Almost any door might seem
to offer welcome escape from such slavery as this. "I feel so much
healthier since I got three square meals a day," said a lodger in one
of the Girls' Homes. Two young sewing-girls came in seeking domestic
service, so that they might get enough to eat. They had been only
half-fed for some time, and starvation had driven them to the one door
at which the pride of the American-born girl will not permit her to
knock, though poverty be the price of her independence.
The tenement and the competition of public institutions and farmers'
wives and daughters, have done the tyrant shirt to death, but they
have not bettered the lot of the needle-women. The sweater of the East
Side has appropriated the flannel shirt. He turns them out to-day at
forty-five cents a dozen, paying his Jewish workers from twenty to
thirty-five cents. One of these testified before the State Board of
Arbitration, during the shirtmakers' strike, that she worked eleven
hours in the shop and four at home, and had never in the best of times
made over six dollars a week. Another stated that she worked from 4
o'clock in the morning to 11 at night. These girls had to find their
own thread and pay for their own machines out of their wages. The white
shirt has gone to the public and private institutions that shelter
large numbers of young girls, and to the country. There are not half as
many shirtmakers in New York to-day as only a few years ago, and some
of the largest firms have closed their city shops. The same is true of
the manufacturers of underwear. One large Broadway firm has nearly all
its work done by farmers' girls in Maine, who think themselves well off
if they can earn two or three dollars a week to pay for a Sunday silk,
or the wedding outfit, little dreaming of the part they are playing in
starving their city sisters. Literally, they sew "with double thread,
a shroud as well as a shirt." Their pin-money sets the rate of wages
for thousands of poor sewing-girls in New York. The average earnings of
the worker on underwear to-day do not exceed the three dollars which
her competitor among the Eastern hills is willing to accept as the
price of her play. The shirtmaker's pay is better only because the very
finest custom work is all there is left for her to do.
Calico wrappers at a dollar and a half a dozen--the very expert sewers
able to make from eight to ten, the common run five or six--neckties
at from 25 to 75 cents a dozen, with a dozen as a good day's work, are
specimens of women's wages. And yet people persist in wondering at the
poor quality of work done in the tenements! Italian cheap labor has
come of late also to possess this poor field, with the sweater in its
train. There is scarce a branch of woman's work outside of the home
in which wages, long since at low-water mark, have not fallen to the
point of actual starvation. A case was brought to my notice recently
by a woman doctor, whose heart as well as her life-work is with the
poor, of a widow with two little children she found at work in an East
Side attic, making paper-bags. Her father, she told the doctor, had
made good wages at it; but she received only five cents for six hundred
of the little three-cornered bags, and her fingers had to be very
swift and handle the paste-brush very deftly to bring her earnings up
to twenty-five and thirty cents a day. She paid four dollars a month
for her room. The rest went to buy food for herself and the children.
The physician's purse, rather than her skill, had healing for their
complaint.
I have aimed to set down a few dry facts merely. They carry their own
comment. Back of the shop with its weary, grinding toil--the home in
the tenement, of which it was said in a report of the State Labor
Bureau: "Decency and womanly reserve cannot be maintained there--what
wonder so many fall away from virtue?" Of the outlook, what? Last
Christmas Eve my business took me to an obscure street among the
West Side tenements. An old woman had just fallen on the doorstep,
stricken with paralysis. The doctor said she would never again move her
right hand or foot. The whole side was dead. By her bedside, in their
cheerless room, sat the patient's aged sister, a hopeless cripple, in
dumb despair. Forty years ago the sisters had come, five in number
then, with their mother, from the North of Ireland to make their home
and earn a living among strangers. They were lace embroiderers and
found work easily at good wages. All the rest had died as the years
went by. The two remained and, firmly resolved to lead an honest life,
worked on though wages fell and fell as age and toil stiffened their
once nimble fingers and dimmed their sight. Then one of them dropped
out, her hands palsied and her courage gone. Still the other toiled on,
resting neither by night nor by day, that the sister might not want.
Now that she too had been stricken, as she was going to the store for
the work that was to keep them through the holidays, the battle was
over at last. There was before them starvation, or the poor-house. And
the proud spirits of the sisters, helpless now, quailed at the outlook.
These were old, with life behind them. For them nothing was left but to
sit in the shadow and wait. But of the thousands, who are travelling
the road they trod to the end, with the hot blood of youth in their
veins, with the love of life and of the beautiful world to which not
even sixty cents a day can shut their eyes--who is to blame if their
feet find the paths of shame that are "always open to them?" The very
paths that have effaced the saving "limit," and to which it is declared
to be "inevitable that they must in many instances resort." Let the
moralist answer. Let the wise economist apply his rule of supply
and demand, and let the answer be heard in this city of a thousand
charities where justice goes begging.
To the everlasting credit of New York's working-girl let it be said
that, rough though her road be, all but hopeless her battle with life,
only in the rarest instances does she go astray. As a class she is
brave, virtuous, and true. New York's army of profligate women is not,
as in some foreign cities, recruited from her ranks. She is as plucky
as she is proud. That "American girls never whimper" became a proverb
long ago, and she accepts her lot uncomplainingly, doing the best she
can and holding her cherished independence cheap at the cost of a meal,
or of half her daily ration, if need be. The home in the tenement and
the traditions of her childhood have neither trained her to luxury nor
predisposed her in favor of domestic labor in preference to the shop.
So, to the world she presents a cheerful, uncomplaining front that
sometimes deceives it. Her courage will not be without its reward.
Slowly, as the conviction is thrust upon society that woman's work
must enter more and more into its planning, a better day is dawning.
The organization of working girls' clubs, unions, and societies with a
community of interests, despite the obstacles to such a movement, bears
testimony to it, as to the devotion of the unselfish women who have
made their poorer sisters' cause their own, and will yet wring from an
unfair world the justice too long denied her.