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--for the 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 the one 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's his 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 to strip
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 would feel 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 lady physician 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 eight
A. 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 deliberately by 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 and the 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"?
CHAPTER EIGHTEENTH.
STEADY TRADES AND THEIR OUTLOOK.
"I used to 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 everybody knew
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, but competition'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 United States, 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, and _vice 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 I know 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 life for 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 other conditions 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
two thousand 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 eight A. M. to half-past five P. 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.