EDITH M. HADLEY
President Chelsea House Association, New York
In a factory town, at the lunch hour, have you ever consciously watched
the girls and women thronging down the steps and filling the streets
surrounding the workshop? Have you listened to their noisy laughter and
scraps of conversation and tried to understand their meaning? In 1910,
when the last Census of Manufactures was taken, there were over
1,500,000 of these girls and women—factory workers in the United States.
In a large city at nightfall, when the lamps are lighted, have you ever
observed the streams of girls flowing into the streets from the offices
and great department stores? Again at night, have you seen the girls,
waiting at the entrances of tenement houses or on the street corners for
their “gentleman friends” who are to emancipate them for a few hours
from their cramped and dingy environment? And have you asked yourself
where and how do these girls live?
During the last few years we have heard so much about the discontent of
the labor classes, the “restlessness of the present age,” that the
phrases fall upon unheeding ears. But it takes no Socialist to
understand that, if a family man’s expenses are $900 a year, and that
working to the best of his ability he can earn only $700 to $800, and
that if it costs a girl $8 a week to live, and she cannot earn that
much, there must be discontent. It is time for the community to regulate
such conditions.
The question of wages is so closely allied to the question of housing
that a study of the latter involves some knowledge of the former. Cost
of living and standard of living must be approached from a fact basis.
Studies by Robert Chapin, Scott Nearing and the commission appointed by
Congress, indicate that a man, his wife and three children under
fourteen, cannot live and maintain efficiency under $900 a year on the
Island of Manhattan. This is not excessive for Boston, Buffalo and
Chicago. It is low for Pittsburgh, a little high for Philadelphia and
Baltimore but a fair average for the great cities east of the
Mississippi and north of Virginia.
Investigations prove that there is no great wage variation in different
sections of the country. In the West wages run slightly higher than in
the East, and in the larger cities than in the smaller towns. From a
study of 1,391 New York girls working in department stores, the average
earnings were reported as $4.69 a week during the first year and $5.28
the second. They increased in ten years, to $9.81, during which period
many fall out of the ranks. Buyers and expert saleswomen remain. Their
average earnings mount up to $13.33. In factories the average earnings
of 3,421 girls showed $4.62 a week for the first year and $5.34 for the
second year. After ten years’ experience $8.48 was reached.
The majority of girls at work live at home and, in many cases, have to a
certain extent the protection of their family. But an ever-increasing
number of girls are entering the towns and cities, quite alone and
friendless, to earn their way. These girls either keep house, live in
families, in boarding and lodging houses or in the organized boarding
house.
The girl who lives at home usually gives all her earnings to her
parents—over 84 per cent working in shops, and 88 per cent in factories
in New York city, and a similar number in Chicago and St. Louis. The
parents rely upon their daughters for an exact amount of income, so that
these girls are in no sense “pin money workers.” The girl at home in New
York city usually lives in a three to five-room flat in a tenement
house, for which her father pays from $10 to $35 a month; and into these
cramped quarters, one, two or more boarders are frequently taken.
In New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Minneapolis and
St. Paul, it has been estimated that about 65,000 girls, exclusive of
stenographers, office girls, nurses and teachers, are without homes, and
entirely dependent upon themselves for support. Girls with a low
standard of living can live more cheaply by keeping house than in any
other manner. This means that several girls may join together and rent a
two or three room flat. After their daily work of eight to twelve hours
in factory, shop or office, is over, they have the housework to
do—cleaning, cooking, washing and sewing. A girl keeping house or living
in lodgings may save on food. She may go without breakfast or lunch, or
have bread and coffee for breakfast, bread for lunch, and bread and soup
or meat for dinner. She may spend part of her evenings making clothes,
the material for which has been bought with money saved from food. “Oh,
my, where would we get our clothes, if we bought meat every day?” asked
one girl. How long do these girls remain economically efficient?
Fortunate is the girl who can find a home with some respectable tenement
house family. Here she frequently underpays. Anna Friedman earns $7 a
week as cashier; she lives with Mrs. McCoy in a $27 a month five-room
flat. Anna pays $3 a week for her accommodation, but considers herself
entirely self-supporting, as Mrs. McCoy’s husband is absent part of the
time, and Anna’s companionship is of some value. She therefore has a
margin of $4 for clothes, laundry, amusements, sickness and incidentals,
and is well off. Girls living in this way usually associate with the
family, using all rooms in common.
The most dangerous way in which a girl can live is in a lodging, or as
they are called “a furnished-room house.” Investigations of forty-three
boarding and lodging houses in one city showed that five were known to
be houses where fast women lived. “Not only were good and bad houses on
the same block, but good and bad people were living in the same house.”
Freda Lippeg earned $3 a week, and paid $1.50 for her room; her food,
which she cooked in her room, cost her $1.46. Seeing how easy it is for
them to get plenty to eat, pretty clothes to wear, and to have “good
times,” what temptations are placed in the way of such girls living in
houses with immoral women!
While a landlady may prove to be a girl’s best friend, giving her
advice, trusting her when she is unable to pay, even lending her money,
in the majority of cases the girl has no supervision at all. With the
exception of houses in Philadelphia, where the wage earner’s standard of
respectability demands a sitting room, few houses can afford to have
one. As a lodging house is now conducted, the landlady’s net profits,
are usually free rent of her room and $150 a year. As the parlor is the
best paying room, the requirement of its use for lodgers would mean a
readjustment of rents, either of house or rooms or both. So the girls
receive their “gentlemen friends” in their bed rooms.
For the young girl in a strange city, earning moderate wages, no manner
of life is so capable of approaching that of the home as the organized
boarding house. Scattered throughout the United States are a number of
these houses, but the supply can in no way approach the demand. In many
cases they are too expensive for the poorer girl to afford. Few of these
houses aim to be self-supporting, which fact also deters many
self-respecting girls. The girl rightfully wishes to be a customer at
the boarding house, and not an object of charity. The rules in some of
the houses are stringent; sometimes a closing hour is enforced, and
girls returning later may be locked out. Nearly all have an age and a
wage limit. But they all have a drawing room which is usually furnished
with a piano, books and magazines. Here girls may receive their friends,
and have the companionship of other girls. Often warm friendships are
formed.
The welfare of the house depends upon the “housemother,” whose
opportunities and responsibilities are unbounded. To be able to keep a
clean, well ordered, full house; to supply an ample amount of nourishing
food; to receive enough board money from the girls to cover all expenses
without dunning them is no easy matter. But in addition to this to be
sympathetic without being partial or sentimental; to be able to care for
the tired and sick; to be patient and firm with the hysterical; to
understand and direct youth, gayety and extravagance; and to help the
girls who are in danger of losing their “woman’s heritage,” a woman must
give the best that is in her. The Eleanor Clubs in Chicago; the Ladies’
Christian Union Houses, the Chelsea House Association and the Virginia
in New York; and the Girl’s Friendly Society Lodges in New York,
Providence and Louisville are helping to solve the housing problem for
girls. But why have we not hundreds, instead of tens of these houses?
Can we not see the relationship between unsanitary, overcrowded homes,
the loneliness and often vicious environment of many lodging houses, and
human waste and immorality?
“If, because of our privileges, because of our warm, comfortable clean
homes, we can not say to these girls ‘My sister come home,’ surely it
rests upon us to do it in some community way. And if we can not get the
housing of girls taken up as a community duty, then all the more must we
struggle by private enterprise to find out the way. We must say there
shall be no town throughout the length and breadth of our land where the
girl can not find safe shelter, a place which if her need is great, she
may call home.”