IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
In choosing the scene for my first experiences, I decided upon
Pittsburg, as being an industrial centre whose character was determined
by its working population. It exceeds all other cities of the country in
the variety and extent of its manufacturing products. Of its 321,616
inhabitants, 100,000 are labouring men employed in the mills. Add to
these the great number of women and girls who work in the factories and
clothing shops, and the character of the place becomes apparent at a
glance. There is, moreover, another reason which guided me toward this
Middle West town without its like. This land which we are accustomed to
call democratic, is in reality composed of a multitude of kingdoms whose
despots are the employers--the multi-millionaire patrons--and whose
serfs are the labouring men and women. The rulers are invested with an
authority and a power not unlike those possessed by the early barons,
the feudal lords, the Lorenzo de Medicis, the Cheops; but with this
difference, that whereas Pharaoh by his unique will controlled a
thousand slaves, the steel magnate uses, for his own ends also,
thousands of separate wills. It was a submissive throng who built the
pyramids. The mills which produce half the steel the world requires are
run by a collection of individuals. Civilization has undergone a change.
The multitudes once worked for one; now each man works for himself first
and for a master secondarily. In our new society where tradition plays
no part, where the useful is paramount, where business asserts itself
over art and beauty, where material needs are the first to be satisfied,
and where the country's unclaimed riches are our chief incentive to
effort, it is not uninteresting to find an analogy with the society in
Italy which produced the Renaissance. Diametrically opposed in their
ideals, they have a common spirit. In Italy the rebirth was of the love
of art, and of classic forms, the desire to embellish--all that was
inspired by culture of the beautiful; the Renaissance in America is the
rebirth of man's originality in the invention of the useful, the virgin
power of man's wits as quickened in the crude struggle for life.
Florence is _par excellence_ the place where we can study the Italian
Renaissance; Pittsburg appealed to me as a most favourable spot to watch
the American Renaissance, the enlivening of energies which give value to
a man devoid of education, energies which in their daily exercise with
experience generate a new force, a force that makes our country what it
is, industrially and economically. So it was toward Pittsburg that I
first directed my steps, but before leaving New York I assumed my
disguise. In the Parisian clothes I am accustomed to wear I present the
familiar outline of any woman of the world. With the aid of coarse
woolen garments, a shabby felt sailor hat, a cheap piece of fur, a
knitted shawl and gloves I am transformed into a working girl of the
ordinary type. I was born and bred and brought up in the world of the
fortunate--I am going over now into the world of the unfortunate. I am
to share their burdens, to lead their lives, to be present as one of
them at the spectacle of their sufferings and joys, their ambitions and
sorrows.
I get no farther than the depot when I observe that I am being treated
as though I were ignorant and lacking in experience. As a rule the
gateman says a respectful "To the right" or "To the left," and trusts to
his well-dressed hearer's intelligence. A word is all that a moment's
hesitation calls forth. To the working girl he explains as follows: "Now
you take your ticket, do you understand, and I'll pick up your money for
you; you don't need to pay anything for your ferry--just put those three
cents back in your pocket-book and go down there to where that gentleman
is standing and he'll direct you to your train."
This without my having asked a question. I had divested myself of a
certain authority along with my good clothes, and I had become one of a
class which, as the gateman had found out, and as I find out later
myself, are devoid of all knowledge of the world and, aside from their
manual training, ignorant on all subjects.
My train is three hours late, which brings me at about noon to
Pittsburg. I have not a friend or an acquaintance within hundreds of
miles. With my bag in my hand I make my way through the dark, busy
streets to the Young Women's Christian Association. It is down near a
frozen river. The wind blows sharp and biting over the icy water; the
streets are covered with snow, and over the snow the soot falls softly
like a mantle of perpetual mourning. There is almost no traffic.
Innumerable tramways ring their way up and down wire-lined avenues;
occasionally a train of freight cars announces itself with a warning
bell in the city's midst. It is a black town of toil, one man in every
three a labourer. They have no need for vehicles of pleasure. The
trolleys take them to their work, the trains transport the products of
the mills.
I hear all languages spoken: this prodigious town is a Western bazaar
where the nations assemble not to buy but to be employed. The stagnant
scum of other countries floats hither to be purified in the fierce
bouillon of live opportunity. It is a cosmopolitan procession that
passes me: the dusky Easterner with a fez of Astrakhan, the gentle-eyed
Italian with a shawl of gay colours, the loose-lipped Hungarian, the
pale, mystic Swede, the German with wife and children hanging on his
arm.
[Illustration: "THE STREETS ARE COVERED WITH SNOW, AND OVER THE SNOW THE
SOOT FALLS SOFTLY LIKE A MANTLE OF PERPETUAL MOURNING"]
In this giant bureau of labour all nationalities gather, united by a
common bond of hope, animated by a common chance of prosperity, kindred
through a common effort, fellow-citizens in a new land of freedom.
At the central office of the Young Women's Christian Association I
receive what attention a busy secretary can spare me. She questions and
I answer as best I can.
"What is it you want?"
"Board and work in a factory."
"Have you ever worked in a factory?"
"No, ma'am."
"Have you ever done any housework?"
She talks in the low, confidential tone of those accustomed to reforming
prisoners and reasoning with the poor.
"Yes, ma'am, I have done housework."
"What did you make?"
"Twelve dollars a month."
"I can get you a place where you will have a room to yourself and
fourteen dollars a month. Do you want it?"
"No, ma'am."
"Are you making anything now?"
"No, ma'am."
"Can you afford to pay board?"
"Yes, as I hope to get work at once."
She directs me to a boarding place which is at the same time a refuge
for the friendless and a shelter for waifs. The newly arrived population
of the fast-growing city seems unfamiliar with the address I carry
written on a card. I wait on cold street corners, I travel over miles of
half-settled country, long stretches of shanties and saloons huddled
close to the trolley line. The thermometer is at zero. Toward three
o'clock I find the waif boarding-house.
The matron is in the parlour hovering over a gas stove. She has false
hair, false teeth, false jewelry, and the dry, crabbed, inquisitive
manner of the idle who are entrusted with authority. She is there to
direct others and do nothing herself, to be cross and make herself
dreaded. In the distance I can hear a shrill, nasal orchestra of
children's voices. I am cold and hungry. I have as yet no job. The
noise, the sordidness, the witchlike matron annoy me. I have a sudden
impulse to flee, to seek warmth and food and proper shelter--to snap my
fingers at experience and be grateful I was born among the fortunate.
Something within me calls _Courage_! I take a room at three dollars a
week with board, put my things in it, and while my feet yet ache with
cold I start to find a factory, a pickle factory, which, the matron
tells me, is run by a Christian gentleman.
I have felt timid and even overbold at different moments in my life,
but never so audacious as on entering a factory door marked in gilt
letters: "_Women Employees_."
The Cerberus between me and the fulfilment of my purpose is a
gray-haired timekeeper with kindly eyes. He sits in a glass cage and
about him are a score or more of clocks all ticking soundly and all
surrounded by an extra dial of small numbers running from one to a
thousand. Each number means a workman--each tick of the clock a moment
of his life gone in the service of the pickle company. I rap on the
window of the glass cage. It opens.
"Do you need any girls?" I ask, trying not to show my emotion.
"Ever worked in a factory?"
"No, sir; but I'm very handy."
"What have you done?"
"Housework," I respond with conviction, beginning to believe it myself.
"Well," he says, looking at me, "they need help up in the bottling
department; but I don't know as it would pay you--they don't give more
than sixty or seventy cents a day."
"I am awfully anxious for work," I say. "Couldn't I begin and get
raised, perhaps?"
"Surely--there is always room for those who show the right spirit. You
come in to-morrow morning at a quarter before seven. You can try it,
and you mustn't get discouraged; there's plenty of work for good
workers."
The blood tingles through my cold hands. My heart is lighter. I have not
come in vain. I have a place!
When I get back to the boarding-house it is twilight. The voices I had
heard and been annoyed by have materialized. Before the gas stove there
are nine small individuals dressed in a strange combination of uniform
checked aprons and patent leather boots worn out and discarded by the
babies of the fortunate. The small feet they encase are crossed, and the
freshly washed faces are demure, as the matron with the wig frowns down
into a newspaper from which she now and then hisses a command to order.
Three miniature members are rocking violently in tiny rocking chairs.
"_Quit rocking_!" the false mother cries at them. "You make my head
ache. Most of 'em have no parents," she explains to me. "None of 'em
have homes."
Here they are, a small kingdom, not wanted, unwelcome, unprovided for,
growled at and grumbled over. Yet each is developing in spite of chance;
each is determining hour by hour his heritage from unknown parents. The
matron leaves us; the rocking begins again. Conversation is animated.
The three-year-old baby bears the name of a three-year-old hero. This
"Dewey" complains in a plaintive voice of a too long absent mother. His
rosy lips are pursed out even with his nose. Again and again he
reiterates the refrain: "My mamma don't never come to see me. She don't
bring me no toys." And then with pride, "My mamma buys rice and tea and
lots of things," and dashing to the window as a trolley rattles by, "My
mamma comes in the street cars, only," sadly, "she don't never come."
Not one of them has forgotten what fate has willed them to do without.
At first they look shrinkingly toward my outstretched hand. Is it coming
to administer some punishment? Little by little they are reassured, and,
gaining in confidence, they sketch for me in disconnected chapters the
short outlines of their lives.
"I've been to the hospital," says one, "and so's Lily. I drank a lot of
washing soda and it made me sick."
Lily begins her hospital reminiscences. "I had typhoy fever--I was in
the childun's ward awful long, and one night they turned down the
lights--it was just evening--and a man came in and he took one of the
babies up in his arms, and we all said, 'What's the row? What's the
row?' and he says 'Hush, the baby's dead.' And out in the hall there was
something white, and he carried the baby and put it in the white thing,
and the baby had a doll that could talk, and he put that in the white
thing too, right alongside o' the dead baby. Another time," Lily goes
on, "there was a baby in a crib alongside of mine, and one day he was
takin' his bottle, and all of a suddint he choked; and he kept on
chokin' and then he died, and he was still takin' his bottle."
Lily is five. I see in her and in her companions a familiarity not only
with the mysteries but with the stern realities of life. They have an
understanding look at the mention of death, drunkenness and all domestic
difficulties or irregularities. Their vocabulary and conversation image
the violent and brutal side of existence--the only one with which they
are acquainted.
At bedtime I find my way upward through dark and narrow stairs that open
into a long room with a slanting roof. It serves as nursery and parlour.
In the dull light of a stove and an oil lamp four or five women are
seated with babies on their knees. They have the meek look of those who
doom themselves to acceptance of misfortune, the flat, resigned figures
of the overworked. Their loose woolen jackets hang over their gaunt
shoulders; their straight hair is brushed hard and smooth against high
foreheads. One baby lies a comfortable bundle in its mother's arms; one
is black in the face after a spasm of coughing; one howls its woes
through a scarlet mask. The corners of the room are filled with the
drones--those who "work for a bite of grub." The cook, her washing done,
has piled her aching bones in a heap; her drawn face waits like an
indicator for some fresh signal to a new fatigue. Mary, the
woman-of-all-work, who has spent more than one night within a prison's
walls, has long ago been brutalized by the persistence of life in spite
of crime; her gray hair ripples like sand under receding waves; her
profile is strong and fine, but her eyes have a film of misery over
them--dull and silent, they deaden her face. And Jennie, the charwoman,
is she a cripple or has toil thus warped her body? Her arms, long and
withered, swing like the broken branches of a gnarled tree; her back is
twisted and her head bowed toward earth. A stranger to rest, she seems a
mechanical creature wound up for work and run down in the middle of a
task.
What could be hoped for in such surroundings? With every effort to be
clean the dirt accumulates faster than it can be washed away. It was
impossible, I found by my own experience, to be really clean. There was
a total absence of beauty in everything--not a line of grace, not a
pleasing sound, not an agreeable odour anywhere. One could get used to
this ugliness, become unconscious even of the acrid smells that pervade
the tenement. It was probable my comrades felt at no time the discomfort
I did, but the harm done them is not the physical suffering their
condition causes, but the moral and spiritual bondage in which it holds
them. They are not a class of drones made differently from us. I saw
nothing to indicate that they were not born with like _capacities_ to
ours. As our bodies accustom themselves to luxury and cleanliness,
theirs grow hardened to deprivation and filth. As our souls develop with
the advantages of all that constitutes an ideal--an intellectual,
esthetic and moral ideal--their souls diminish under the oppression of a
constant physical effort to meet material demands. The fact that they
become physically callous to what we consider unbearable is used as an
argument for their emotional insensibility. I hold such an argument as
false. From all I saw I am convinced that, _given their relative
preparation_ for suffering and for pleasure, their griefs and their joys
are the same as ours in kind and in degree.
* * * * *
When one is accustomed to days begun at will by the summons of a tidy
maid, waking oneself at half-past five means to be guardian of the hours
until this time arrives. Once up, the toilet I made in the nocturnal
darkness of my room can best be described by the matron's remark to me
as I went to bed: "If you want to wash," she said, "you'd better wash
now; you can't have no water in your room, and there won't be nobody up
when you leave in the morning." My evening bath is supplemented by a
whisk of the sponge at five.
Without it is black--a more intense black than night's beginning, when
all is astir. The streets are silent, an occasional train whirls past,
groups of men hurry hither and thither swinging their arms, rubbing
their ears in the freezing air. Many of them have neither overcoats nor
gloves. Now and then a woman sweeps along. Her skirts have the same
swing as my own short ones; under her arm she carries a newspaper bundle
whose meaning I have grown to know. My own contains a midday meal: two
cold fried oysters, two dried preserve sandwiches, a pickle and an
orange. My way lies across a bridge. In the first gray of dawn the river
shows black under its burden of ice. Along its troubled banks
innumerable chimneys send forth their hot activity, clouds of seething
flames, waving arms of smoke and steam--a symbol of spent energy, of the
lives consumed and vanishing again, the sparks that shine an instant
against the dark sky and are spent forever.
As I draw nearer the factory I move with a stream of fellow workers
pouring toward the glass cage of the timekeeper. He greets me and starts
me on my upward journey with a wish that I shall not get discouraged, a
reminder that the earnest worker always makes a way for herself.
"What will you do about your name?" "What will you do with your hair and
your hands?" "How can you deceive people?" These are some of the
questions I had been asked by my friends.
Before any one had cared or needed to know my name it was morning of
the second day, and my assumed name seemed by that time the only one I
had ever had. As to hair and hands, a half-day's work suffices for their
undoing. And my disguise is so successful I have deceived not only
others but myself. I have become with desperate reality a factory girl,
alone, inexperienced, friendless. I am making $4.20 a week and spending
$3 of this for board alone, and I dread not being strong enough to keep
my job. I climb endless stairs, am given a white cap and an apron, and
my life as a factory girl begins. I become part of the ceaseless,
unrelenting mechanism kept in motion by the poor.
The factory I have chosen has been built contemporaneously with reforms
and sanitary inspection. There are clean, well-aired rooms, hot and cold
water with which to wash, places to put one's hat and coat, an
obligatory uniform for regular employees, hygienic and moral advantages
of all kinds, ample space for work without crowding.
Side by side in rows of tens or twenties we stand before our tables
waiting for the seven o'clock whistle to blow. In their white caps and
blue frocks and aprons, the girls in my department, like any unfamiliar
class, all look alike. My first task is an easy one; anybody could do
it. On the stroke of seven my fingers fly. I place a lid of paper in a
tin jar-top, over it a cork; this I press down with both hands, tossing
the cover, when done, into a pan. In spite of myself I hurry; I cannot
work fast enough--I outdo my companions. How can they be so slow? I have
finished three dozen while they are doing two. Every nerve, every muscle
is offering some of its energy. Over in one corner the machinery for
sealing the jars groans and roars; the mingled sounds of filling,
washing, wiping, packing, comes to my eager ears as an accompaniment for
the simple work assigned to me. One hour passes, two, three hours; I fit
ten, twenty, fifty dozen caps, and still my energy keeps up.
The forewoman is a pretty girl of twenty. Her restless eyes, her
metallic voice are the messengers who would know all. I am afraid of
her. I long to please her. I am sure she must be saying "_How well the
new girl works_."
Conversation is possible among those whose work has become mechanical.
Twice I am sent to the storeroom for more caps. In these brief moments
my companions volunteer a word of themselves.
"I was out to a ball last night," the youngest one says. "I stayed so
late I didn't feel a bit like getting up this morning."
"That's nothing," another retorts. "There's hardly an evening we don't
have company at the house, music or somethin'; I never get enough rest."
And on my second trip the pale creature with me says:
"I'm in deep mourning. My mother died last Friday week. It's awful
lonely without her. Seems as though I'd never get over missing her. I
miss her _dreadful_. Perhaps by and by I'll get used to it."
"Oh, no, you won't," the answer comes from a girl with short skirts.
"You'll never get used to it. My ma's been dead eight years next month
and I dreamt about her all last night. I can't get her out o' me mind."
Born into dirt and ugliness, disfigured by effort, they have the same
heritage as we: joys and sorrows, grief and laughter. With them as with
us gaiety is up to its old tricks, tempting from graver rivals, making
duty an alien. Grief is doing her ugly work: hollowing round cheeks,
blackening bright eyes, putting her weight of leaden loneliness in
hearts heretofore light with youth.
When I have fitted 110 dozen tin caps the forewoman comes and changes my
job. She tells me to haul and load up some heavy crates with pickle
jars. I am wheeling these back and forth when the twelve o'clock whistle
blows. Up to that time the room has been one big dynamo, each girl a
part of it. With the first moan of the noon signal the dynamo comes to
life. It is hungry; it has friends and favourites--news to tell. We herd
down to a big dining-room and take our places, five hundred of us in
all. The newspaper bundles are unfolded. The ménu varies little: bread
and jam, cake and pickles, occasionally a sausage, a bit of cheese or a
piece of stringy cold meat. In ten minutes the repast is over. The
dynamo has been fed; there are twenty minutes of leisure spent in
dancing, singing, resting, and conversing chiefly about young men and
"sociables."
At 12:30 sharp the whistle draws back the life it has given. I return to
my job. My shoulders are beginning to ache. My hands are stiff, my
thumbs almost blistered. The enthusiasm I had felt is giving way to a
numbing weariness. I look at my companions now in amazement. How can
they keep on so steadily, so swiftly? Cases are emptied and refilled;
bottles are labeled, stamped and rolled away; jars are washed, wiped and
loaded, and still there are more cases, more jars, more bottles. Oh! the
monotony of it, the never-ending supply of work to be begun and
finished, begun and finished, begun and finished! Now and then some one
cuts a finger or runs a splinter under the flesh; once the mustard
machine broke--and still the work goes on, on, on! New girls like
myself, who had worked briskly in the morning, are beginning to loiter.
Out of the washing-tins hands come up red and swollen, only to be
plunged again into hot dirty water. Would the whistle never blow? Once I
pause an instant, my head dazed and weary, my ears strained to bursting
with the deafening noise. Quickly a voice whispers in my ear: "You'd
better not stand there doin' nothin'. If _she_ catches you she'll give
it to you."
On! on! bundle of pains! For you this is one day's work in a thousand of
peace and beauty. For those about you this is the whole of daylight,
this is the winter dawn and twilight, this is the glorious summer noon,
this is all day, this is every day, this is _life_. Rest is only a bit
of a dream, snatched when the sleeper's aching body lets her close her
eyes for a moment in oblivion.
Out beyond the chimney tops the snowfields and the river turn from gray
to pink, and still the work goes on. Each crate I lift grows heavier,
each bottle weighs an added pound. Now and then some one lends a helping
hand.
"Tired, ain't you? This is your first day, ain't it?"
The acid smell of vinegar and mustard penetrates everywhere. My ankles
cry out pity. Oh! to sit down an instant!
"Tidy up the table," some one tells me; "we're soon goin' home."
Home! I think of the stifling fumes of fried food, the dim haze in the
kitchen where my supper waits me; the children, the band of drifting
workers, the shrill, complaining voice of the hired mother. This is
home.
I sweep and set to rights, limping, lurching along. At last the whistle
blows! In a swarm we report; we put on our things and get away into the
cool night air. I have stood ten hours; I have fitted 1,300 corks; I
have hauled and loaded 4,000 jars of pickles. My pay is seventy cents.
The impressions of my first day crowd pell-mell upon my mind. The sound
of the machinery dins in my ears. I can hear the sharp, nasal voices of
the forewoman and the girls shouting questions and answers.
A sudden recollection comes to me of a Dahomayan family I had watched at
work in their hut during the Paris Exhibition. There was a magic spell
in their voices as they talked together; the sounds they made had the
cadence of the wind in the trees, the running of water, the song of
birds: they echoed unconsciously the caressing melodies of nature. My
factory companions drew their vocal inspiration from the bedlam of
civilization, the rasping and pounding of machinery, the din which they
must out-din to be heard.
For the two days following my first experience I am unable to resume
work. Fatigue has swept through my blood like a fever. Every bone and
joint has a clamouring ache. I pass the time visiting other factories
and hunting for a place to board in the neighbourhood of the pickling
house. At the cork works they do not need girls; at the cracker company
I can get a job, but the hours are longer, the advantages less than
where I am; at the broom factory they employ only men. I decide to
continue with tin caps and pickle jars.
My whole effort now is to find a respectable boarding-house. I start
out, the thermometer near zero, the snow falling. I wander and ask,
wander and ask. Up and down the black streets running parallel and at
right angles with the factory I tap and ring at one after another of the
two-story red-brick houses. More than half of them are empty, tenantless
during the working hours. What hope is there for family life near the
hearth which is abandoned at the factory's first call? The sociableness,
the discipline, the division of responsibility make factory work a
dangerous rival to domestic care. There is something in the modern
conditions of labour which act magnetically upon American girls,
impelling them to work not for bread alone, but for clothes and finery
as well. Each class in modern society knows a menace to its homes:
sport, college education, machinery--each is a factor in the gradual
transformation of family life from a united domestic group to a
collection of individuals with separate interests and aims outside the
home.
I pursue my search. It is the dinner hour. At last a narrow door opens,
letting a puff of hot rank air blow upon me as I stand in the vestibule
questioning: "Do you take boarders?"
The woman who answers stands with a spoon in her hand, her eyes fixed
upon a rear room where a stove, laden with frying-pans, glows and
sputters.
"Come in," she says, "and get warm."
I walk into a front parlour with furniture that evidently serves
domestic as well as social purposes. There is a profusion of white
knitted tidies and portieres that exude an odour of cooking. Before the
fire a workingman sits in a blue shirt and overalls. Fresh from the
barber's hands, he has a clean mask marked by the razor's edge. Already
I feel at home.
"Want board, do you?" the woman asks. "Well, we ain't got no place;
we're always right full up."
My disappointment is keen. Regretfully I leave the fire and start on
again.
"I guess you'll have some trouble in finding what you want," the woman
calls to me on her way back to the kitchen, as I go out.
The answer is everywhere the same, with slight variations. Some take
"mealers" only, some only "roomers," some "only gentlemen." I begin to
understand it. Among the thousands of families who live in the city on
account of the work provided by the mills, there are girls enough to
fill the factories. There is no influx such as creates in a small town
the necessity for working-girl boarding-houses. There is an ample supply
of hands from the existing homes. There is the same difference between
city and country factory life that there is between university life in
a capital and in a country town.
A sign on a neat-looking corner house attracts me. I rap and continue to
rap; the door is opened at length by a tall good-looking young woman.
Her hair curls prettily, catching the light; her eyes are stupid and
beautiful. She has on a black skirt and a bright purple waist.
"Do you take boarders?"
"Why, yes. I don't generally like to take ladies, they give so much
trouble. You can come in if you like. Here's the room," she continues,
opening a door near the vestibule. She brushes her hand over her
forehead and stares at me; and then, as though she can no longer silence
the knell that is ringing in her heart, she says to me, always staring:
"My husband was killed on the railroad last week. He lived three hours.
They took him to the hospital--a boy come running down and told me. I
went up as fast as I could, but it was too late; he never spoke again. I
guess he didn't know what struck him; his head was all smashed. He was
awful good to me--so easy-going. I ain't got my mind down to work yet.
If you don't like this here room," she goes on listlessly, "maybe you
could get suited across the way."
Thompson Seton tells us in his book on wild animals that not one among
them ever dies a natural death. As the opposite extreme of vital
persistence we have the man whose life, in spite of acute disease, is
prolonged against reason by science; and midway comes the labourer, who
takes his chances unarmed by any understanding of physical law, whose
only safeguards are his wits and his presence of mind. The violent
death, the accidents, the illnesses to which he falls victim might be
often warded off by proper knowledge. Nature is a zealous enemy;
ignorance and inexperience keep a whole class defenseless.
The next day is Saturday. I feel a fresh excitement at going back to my
job; the factory draws me toward it magnetically. I long to be in the
hum and whir of the busy workroom. Two days of leisure without resources
or amusement make clear to me how the sociability of factory life, the
freedom from personal demands, the escape from self can prove a
distraction to those who have no mental occupation, no money to spend on
diversion. It is easier to submit to factory government which commands
five hundred girls with one law valid for all, than to undergo the
arbitrary discipline of parental authority. I speed across the
snow-covered courtyard. In a moment my cap and apron are on and I am
sent to report to the head forewoman.
"We thought you'd quit," she says. "Lots of girls come in here and quit
after one day, especially Saturday. To-day is scrubbing day," she smiles
at me. "Now we'll do right by you if you do right by us. What did the
timekeeper say he'd give you?"
"Sixty or seventy a day."
"We'll give you seventy," she says. "Of course, we can judge girls a
good deal by their looks, and we can see that you're above the average."
She wears her cap close against her head. Her front hair is rolled up in
crimping-pins. She has false teeth and is a widow. Her pale, parched
face shows what a great share of life has been taken by daily
over-effort repeated during years. As she talks she touches my arm in a
kindly fashion and looks at me with blue eyes that float about under
weary lids. "You are only at the beginning," they seem to say. "Your
youth and vigour are at full tide, but drop by drop they will be sapped
from you, to swell the great flood of human effort that supplies the
world's material needs. You will gain in experience," the weary lids
flutter at me, "but you will pay _with your life_ the living you make."
There is no variety in my morning's work. Next to me is a bright, pretty
girl jamming chopped pickles into bottles.
"How long have you been here?" I ask, attracted by her capable
appearance. She does her work easily and well.
"About five months."
"How much do you make?"
"From 90 cents to $1.05. I'm doing piece-work," she explains. "I get
seven-eighths of a cent for every dozen bottles I fill. I have to fill
eight dozen to make seven cents. Downstairs in the corking-room you can
make as high as $1.15 to $1.20. They won't let you make any more than
that. Me and them two girls over there are the only ones in this room
doing piece-work. I was here three weeks as a day-worker."
"Do you live at home?" I ask.
"Yes; I don't have to work. I don't pay no board. My father and my
brothers supports me and my mother. But," and her eyes twinkle, "I
couldn't have the clothes I do if I didn't work."
"Do you spend your money all on yourself?"
"Yes."
I am amazed at the cheerfulness of my companions. They complain of
fatigue, of cold, but never at any time is there a suggestion of
ill-humour. Their suppressed animal spirits reassert themselves when the
forewoman's back is turned. Companionship is the great stimulus. I am
confident that without the social _entrain_, the encouragement of
example, it would be impossible to obtain as much from each individual
girl as is obtained from them in groups of tens, fifties, hundreds
working together.
When lunch is over we are set to scrubbing. Every table and stand, every
inch of the factory floor must be scrubbed in the next four hours. The
whistle on Saturday blows an hour earlier. Any girl who has not finished
her work when the day is done, so that she can leave things in perfect
order, is kept overtime, for which she is paid at the rate of six or
seven cents an hour. A pail of hot water, a dirty rag and a
scrubbing-brush are thrust into my hands. I touch them gingerly. I get a
broom and for some time make sweeping a necessity, but the forewoman is
watching me. I am afraid of her. There is no escape. I begin to scrub.
My hands go into the brown, slimy water and come out brown and slimy. I
slop the soap-suds around and move on to a fresh place. It appears there
are a right and a wrong way of scrubbing. The forewoman is at my side.
"Have you ever scrubbed before?" she asks sharply. This is humiliating.
"Yes," I answer; "I have scrubbed ... oilcloth."
The forewoman knows how to do everything. She drops down on her knees
and, with her strong arms and short-thumbed, brutal hands, she shows me
how to scrub.
The grumbling is general. There is but one opinion among the girls: it
is not right that they should be made to do this work. They all echo the
same resentment, but their complaints are made in whispers; not one has
the courage to openly rebel. What, I wonder to myself, do the men do on
scrubbing day. I try to picture one of them on his hands and knees in a
sea of brown mud. It is impossible. The next time I go for a supply of
soft soap in a department where the men are working I take a look at the
masculine interpretation of house cleaning. One man is playing a hose on
the floor and the rest are rubbing the boards down with long-handled
brooms and rubber mops.
"You take it easy," I say to the boss.
"I won't have no scrubbing in my place," he answers emphatically. "The
first scrubbing day, they says to me 'Get down on your hands and knees,'
and I says--'Just pay me my money, will you; I'm goin' home. What
scrubbing can't be done with mops ain't going to be done by me.' The
women wouldn't have to scrub, either, if they had enough spirit all of
'em to say so."
I determined to find out if possible, during my stay in the factory,
what it is that clogs this mainspring of "spirit" in the women.
I hear fragmentary conversations about fancy dress balls, valentine
parties, church sociables, flirtations and clothes. Almost all of the
girls wear shoes with patent leather and some or much cheap jewelry,
brooches, bangles and rings. A few draw their corsets in; the majority
are not laced. Here and there I see a new girl whose back is flat, whose
chest is well developed. Among the older hands who have begun work early
there is not a straight pair of shoulders. Much of the bottle washing
and filling is done by children from twelve to fourteen years of age.
On their slight, frail bodies toil weighs heavily; the delicate child
form gives way to the iron hand of labour pressed too soon upon it.
Backs bend earthward, chests recede, never to be sound again.
* * * * *
After a Sunday of rest I arrive somewhat ahead of time on Monday
morning, which leaves me a few moments for conversation with a
piece-worker who is pasting labels on mustard jars. She is fifteen.
"Do you like your job?" I ask.
"Yes, I do," she answers, pleased to tell her little history. "I began
in a clothing shop. I only made $2.50 a week, but I didn't have to
stand. I felt awful when papa made me quit. When I came in here, bein'
on my feet tired me so I cried every night for two months. Now I've got
used to it. I don't feel no more tired when I get home than I did when I
started out." There are two sharp blue lines that drag themselves down
from her eyes to her white cheeks.
"Why, you know, at Christmas they give us two weeks," she goes on in the
sociable tone of a woman whose hands are occupied. "I just didn't know
what to do with myself."
"Does your mother work?"
"Oh, my, no. I don't have to work, only if I didn't I couldn't have the
clothes I do. I save some of my money and spend the rest on myself. I
make $6 to $7 a week."
The girl next us volunteers a share in the conversation.
"I bet you can't guess how old I am."
I look at her. Her face and throat are wrinkled, her hands broad, and
scrawny; she is tall and has short skirts. What shall be my clue? If I
judge by pleasure, "unborn" would be my answer; if by effort, then "a
thousand years."
"Twenty," I hazard as a safe medium.
"Fourteen," she laughs. "I don't like it at home, the kids bother me so.
Mamma's people are well-to-do. I'm working for my own pleasure."
"Indeed, I wish I was," says a new girl with a red waist. "We three
girls supports mamma and runs the house. We have $13 rent to pay and a
load of coal every month and groceries. It's no joke, I can tell you."
The whistle blows; I go back to my monotonous task. The old aches begin
again, first gently, then more and more sharply. The work itself is
growing more mechanical. I can watch the girls around me. What is it
that determines superiority in this class? Why was the girl filling
pickle jars put on piece-work after three weeks, when others older than
she are doing day-work at fifty and sixty cents after a year in the
factory? What quality decides that four shall direct four hundred?
Intelligence I put first; intelligence of any kind, from the natural
penetration that needs no teaching to the common sense that every one
relies upon. Judgment is not far behind in the list, and it is soon
matured by experience. A strong will and a moral steadiness stand
guardians over the other two. The little pickle girl is winning in the
race by her intelligence. The forewomen have all four qualities,
sometimes one, sometimes another predominating. Pretty Clara is smarter
than Lottie. Lottie is more steady. Old Mrs. Minns' will has kept her at
it until her judgment has become infallible and can command a good
price. Annie is an evenly balanced mixture of all, and the five hundred
who are working under the five lack these qualities somewhat, totally,
or have them in useless proportions.
Monday is a hard day. There is more complaining, more shirking, more
gossip than in the middle of the week. Most of the girls have been to
dances on Saturday night, to church on Sunday evening with some young
man. Their conversation is vulgar and prosaic; there is nothing in the
language they use that suggests an ideal or any conception of the
abstract. They make jokes, state facts about the work, tease each other,
but in all they say there is not a word of value--nothing that would
interest if repeated out of its class. They have none of the
sagaciousness of the low-born Italian, none of the wit and penetration
of the French _ouvriere_. The Old World generations ago divided itself
into classes; the lower class watched the upper and grew observant and
appreciative, wise and discriminating, through the study of a master's
will. Here in the land of freedom, where no class line is rigid, the
precious chance is not to serve but to live for oneself; not to watch a
superior, but to find out by experience. The ideal plays no part, stern
realities alone count, and thus we have a progressive, practical,
independent people, the expression of whose personality is interesting
not through their words but by their deeds.
When the Monday noon whistle blows I follow the hundreds down into the
dining-room. Each wears her cap in a way that speaks for her
temperament. There is the indifferent, the untidy, the prim, the vain,
the coquettish; and the faces under them, which all looked alike at
first, are becoming familiar. I have begun to make friends. I speak bad
English, but do not attempt to change my voice and inflection nor to
adopt the twang. No allusion is made to my pronunciation except by one
girl, who says:
"I knew you was from the East. My sister spent a year in Boston and when
she come back she talked just like you do, but she lost it all again.
I'd give anything if I could talk _aristocratic_."
I am beginning to understand why the meager lunches of
preserve-sandwiches and pickles more than satisfy the girls whom I was
prepared to accuse of spending their money on gewgaws rather than on
nourishment. It is fatigue that steals the appetite. I can hardly taste
what I put in my mouth; the food sticks in my throat. The girls who
complain most of being tired are the ones who roll up their newspaper
bundles half full. They should be given an hour at noon. The first half
of it should be spent in rest and recreation before a bite is touched.
The good that such a regulation would work upon their faulty skins and
pale faces, their lasting strength and health, would be incalculable. I
did not want wholesome food, exhausted as I was. I craved sours and
sweets, pickles, cake, anything to excite my numb taste.
So long as I remain in the bottling department there is little variety
in my days. Rising at 5:30 every morning, I make my way through black
streets to offer my sacrifice of energy on the altar of toil. All is
done without a fresh incident. Accumulated weariness forces me to take a
day off. When I return I am sent for in the corking-room. The forewoman
lends me a blue gingham dress and tells me I am to do "piece"-work.
There are three who work together at every corking-table. My two
companions are a woman with goggles and a one-eyed boy. We are not a
brilliant trio. The job consists in evening the vinegar in the bottles,
driving the cork in, first with a machine, then with a hammer, letting
out the air with a knife stuck under the cork, capping the corks,
sealing the caps, counting and distributing the bottles. These
operations are paid for at the rate of one-half a cent for the dozen
bottles, which sum is divided among us. My two companions are earning a
living, so I must work in dead earnest or take bread out of their
mouths. At every blow of the hammer there is danger. Again and again
bottles fly to pieces in my hand. The boy who runs the corking-machine
smashes a glass to fragments.
"Are you hurt?" I ask, my own fingers crimson stained.
"That ain't nothin'," he answers. "Cuts is common; my hands is full of
'em."
The woman directs us; she is fussy and loses her head, the work
accumulates, I am slow, the boy is clumsy. There is a stimulus
unsuspected in working to get a job done. Before this I had worked to
make the time pass. Then no one took account of how much I did; the
factory clock had a weighted pendulum; now ambition outdoes physical
strength. The hours and my purpose are running a race together. But,
hurry as I may, as we do, when twelve blows its signal we have corked
only 210 dozen bottles! This is no more than day-work at seventy cents.
With an ache in every muscle, I redouble my energy after lunch. The girl
with the goggles looks at me blindly and says:
"Ain't it just awful hard work? You can make good money, but you've got
to hustle."
She is a forlorn specimen of humanity, ugly, old, dirty, condemned to
the slow death of the overworked. I am a green hand. I make mistakes; I
have no experience in the fierce sustained effort of the bread-winners.
Over and over I turn to her, over and over she is obliged to correct me.
During the ten hours we work side by side not one murmur of impatience
escapes her. When she sees that I am getting discouraged she calls out
across the deafening din, "That's all right; you can't expect to learn
in a day; just keep on steady."
As I go about distributing bottles to the labelers I notice a strange
little elf, not more than twelve years old, hauling loaded crates; her
face and chest are depressed, she is pale to blueness, her eyes have
indigo circles, her pupils are unnaturally dilated, her brows
contracted; she has the appearance of a cave-bred creature. She seems
scarcely human. When the time for cleaning up arrives toward five my
boss sends me for a bucket of water to wash up the floor. I go to the
sink, turn on the cold water and with it the steam which takes the place
of hot water. The valve slips; in an instant I am enveloped in a
scalding cloud. Before it has cleared away the elf is by my side.
"Did you hurt yourself?" she asks.
Her inhuman form is the vehicle of a human heart, warm and tender. She
lifts her wide-pupiled eyes to mine; her expression does not change from
that of habitual scrutiny cast early in a rigid mould, but her voice
carries sympathy from its purest source.
There is more honour than courtesy in the code of etiquette. Commands
are given curtly; the slightest injustice is resented; each man for
himself in work, but in trouble all for the one who is suffering. No
bruise or cut or burn is too familiar a sight to pass uncared for.
It is their common sufferings, their common effort that unites them.
When I have become expert in the corking art I am raised to a better
table, with a bright boy, and a girl who is dignified and indifferent
with the indifference of those who have had too much responsibility. She
never hurries; the work slips easily through her fingers. She keeps a
steady bearing over the morning's ups and downs. Under her load of
trials there is something big in the steady way she sails.
"Used to hard work?" she asks me.
"Not much," I answer; "are you?"
"Oh, yes. I began at thirteen in a bakery. I had a place near the oven
and the heat overcame me."
Her shoulders are bowed, her chest is hollow.
"Looking for a boarding place near the factory, I hear," she continues.
"Yes. You live at home, I suppose."
"Yes. There's four of us: mamma, papa, my sister and myself. Papa's
blind."
"Can't he work?"
"Oh, yes, he creeps to his job every morning, and he's got so much
experience he kind o' does things by instinct."
"Does your mother work?"
"Oh, my, no. My sister's an invalid. She hasn't been out o' the door for
three years. She's got enlargement of the heart and consumption, too, I
guess; she 'takes' hemorrhages. Sometimes she has twelve in one night.
Every time she coughs the blood comes foaming out of her mouth. She
can't lie down. I guess she'd die if she lay down, and she gets so tired
sittin' up all night. She used to be a tailoress, but I guess her job
didn't agree with her."
"How many checks have we got," I ask toward the close of the day.
"Thirteen," Ella answers.
"An unlucky number," I venture, hoping to arouse an opinion.
"Are you superstitious?" she asks, continuing to twist tin caps on the
pickle jars. "I am. If anything's going to happen I can't help having
presentiments, and they come true, too."
Here is a mystic, I thought; so I continued:
"And what about dreams?"
"Oh!" she cried. "Dreams! I have the queerest of anybody!"
I was all attention.
"Why, last night," she drew near to me, and spoke slowly, "I dreamed
that mamma was drunk, and that she was stealing chickens!"
Such is the imagination of this weary worker.
The whole problem in mechanical labour rests upon economy of force. The
purpose of each, I learned by experience, was to accomplish as much as
possible with one single stroke. In this respect the machine is superior
to man, and man to woman. Sometimes I tried original ways of doing the
work given me. I soon found in every case that the methods proposed by
the forewoman were in the end those whereby I could do the greatest
amount of work with the least effort. A mustard machine had recently
been introduced to the factory. It replaced three girls; it filled as
many bottles with a single stroke as the girls could fill with twelve.
This machine and all the others used were run by boys or men; the girls
had not strength enough to manipulate them methodically.
The power of the machine, the physical force of the man were simplifying
their tasks. While the boy was keeping steadily at one thing, perfecting
himself, we, the women, were doing a variety of things, complicated and
fussy, left to our lot because we had not physical force for the simpler
but greater effort. The boy at the corking-table had soon become an
expert; he was fourteen and he made from $1 to $1.20 a day. He worked
ten hours at one job, whereas Ella and I had a dozen little jobs almost
impossible to systematize: we hammered and cut and capped the corks and
washed and wiped the bottles, sealed them, counted them, distributed
them, kept the table washed up, the sink cleaned out, and once a day
scrubbed up our own precincts. When I asked the boy if he was tired he
laughed at me. He was superior to us; he was stronger; he could do more
with one stroke than we could do with three; he was by _nature_ a more
valuable aid than we. We were forced through physical inferiority to
abandon the choicest task to this young male competitor. Nature had
given us a handicap at the start.
For a few days there is no vacancy at the corking-tables. I am sent back
to the bottling department. The oppressive monotony is one day varied by
a summons to the men's dining-room. I go eagerly, glad of any change. In
the kitchen I find a girl with skin disease peeling potatoes, and a
coloured man making soup in a wash-boiler. The girl gives me a stool to
sit on, and a knife and a pan of potatoes. The dinner under preparation
is for the men of the factory. There are two hundred of them. They are
paid from $1.35 up to $3 a day. Their wages begin above the highest
limit given to women. The dinner costs each man ten cents. The $20 paid
in daily cover the expenses of the cook, two kitchen maids and the
dinner, which consists of meat, bread and butter, vegetables and coffee,
sometimes soup, sometimes dessert. If this can pay for two hundred
there is no reason why for five cents a hot meal of some kind could not
be given the women. They don't demand it, so they are left to make
themselves ill on pickles and preserves.
The coloured cook is full of song and verse. He quotes from the Bible
freely, and gives us snatches of popular melodies.
We have frequent calls from the elevator boy, who brings us ice and
various provisions. Both men, I notice, take their work easily. During
the morning a busy Irish woman comes hurrying into our precincts.
"Say," she yells in a shrill voice, "my cauliflowers ain't here, are
they? I ordered 'em early and they ain't came yet."
Without properly waiting for an answer she hurries away again.
The coloured cook turns to the elevator boy understandingly:
"Just like a woman! Why, before I'd _make a fuss_ about cauliflowers or
anything else!"
About eleven the head forewoman stops in to eat a plate of rice and
milk. While I am cutting bread for the two hundred I hear her say to the
cook in a gossipy tone:
"How do you like the new girl? She's here all alone."
I am called away and do not hear the rest of the conversation. When I
return the cook lectures me in this way:
"Here alone, are you?"
"Yes."
"Well, I see no reason why you shouldn't get along nicely and not kill
yourself with work either. Just stick at it and they'll do right by you.
Lots o' girls who's here alone gets to fooling around. Now I like
everybody to have a good time, and I hope you'll have a good time, too,
but you mustn't carry it too far."
My mind went back as he said this to a conversation I had had the night
before with a working-girl at my boarding-house.
"Where is your home?" I asked.
She had been doing general housework, but ill-health had obliged her to
take a rest.
She looked at me skeptically.
"We don't have no homes," was her answer. "We just get up and get
whenever they send us along."
And almost as a sequel to this I thought of two sad cases that had come
close to my notice as fellow boarders.
I was sitting alone one night by the gas stove in the parlour. The
matron had gone out and left me to "answer the door." The bell rang and
I opened cautiously, for the wind was howling and driving the snow and
sleet about on the winter air. A young girl came in; she was seeking a
lodging. Her skirts and shoes were heavy with water. She took off her
things slowly in a dazed manner. Her short, quick breathing showed how
excited she was. When she spoke at last her voice sounded hollow, her
eyes moved about restlessly. She stopped abruptly now and then and
contracted her brows as though in an appeal for merciful tears; then she
continued in the same broken, husky voice:
"I suppose I'm not the only one in trouble. I've thought a thousand
times over that I would kill myself. I suppose I loved him--but I _hate_
him now."
These two sentences, recurring, were the story's all.
The impotence of rebellion, a sense of outrage at being abandoned, the
instinctive appeal for protection as a right, the injustice of being
left solely to bear the burden of responsibility which so long as it was
pleasure had been shared--these were the thoughts and feelings breeding
hatred.
She had spent the day in a fruitless search for her lover. She had been
to his boss and to his rooms. He had paid his debts and gone, nobody
knew where. She was pretty, vain, homeless; alone to bear the
responsibility she had not been alone to incur. She could not shirk it
as the man had done. They had both disregarded the law. On whom were the
consequences weighing more heavily? On the woman. She is the sufferer;
she is the first to miss the law's protection. She is the weaker member
whom, for the sake of the race, society protects. Nature has made her
man's physical inferior; society is obliged to recognize this in the
giving of a marriage law which beyond doubt is for the benefit of woman,
since she can least afford to disregard it.
Another evening when the matron was out I sat for a time with a young
working woman and her baby. There is a comradeship among the poor that
makes light of indiscreet questions. I felt only sympathy in asking:
"Are you alone to bring up your child?"
"Yes, ma'am," was the answer. "I'll never go home with _him_."
I looked at _him_: a wizened, four-months-old infant with a huge flat
nose, and two dull black eyes fixed upon the gas jet. The girl had the
grace of a forest-born creature; she moved with the mysterious strength
and suppleness of a tree's branch. She was proud; she felt herself
disgraced. For four months she had not left the house. I talked on,
proposing different things.
"I don't know what to do," she said. "I can't never go home with _him_,
and if I went home without him I'd never be the same. I don't know what
I'd do if anything happened to _him_." Her head bowed over the child;
she held him close to her breast.
But to return to the coloured cook and my day in the kitchen. I had
ample opportunity to compare domestic service with factory work. We set
the table for two hundred, and do a thousand miserable slavish tasks
that must be begun again the following day. At twelve the two hundred
troop in, toil-worn and begrimed. They pass like locusts, leaving us
sixteen hundred dirty dishes to wash up and wipe. This takes us four
hours, and when we have finished the work stands ready to be done over
the next morning with peculiar monotony. In the factory there is
stimulus in feeling that the material which passes through one's hands
will never be seen or heard of again.
On Saturday the owner of the factory comes at lunch time with several
friends and talks to us with an amazing _camaraderie_. He is kindly,
humourous and tactful. One or two missionaries speak after him, but
their conversation is too abstract for us. We want something dramatic,
imaginative, to hold our attention, or something wholly natural. Tell us
about the bees, the beavers or the toilers of the sea. The longing for
flowers has often come to me as I work, and a rose seems of all things
the most desirable. In my present condition I do not hark back to
civilized wants, but repeatedly my mind travels toward the country
places I have seen in the fields and forests. If I had a holiday I would
spend it seeing not what man but what God has made. These are the things
to be remembered in addressing or trying to amuse or instruct girls who
are no more prepared than I felt myself to be for any preconceived ideal
of art or ethics. The omnipresence of dirt and ugliness, of machines and
"stock," leave the mind in a state of lassitude which should be roused
by something natural. As an initial remedy for the ills I voluntarily
assumed I would propose amusement. Of all the people who spoke to us
that Saturday, we liked best the one who made us laugh. It was a relief
to hear something funny. In working as an outsider in a factory girls'
club I had always held that nothing was so important as to give the poor
something beautiful to look at and think about--a photograph or copy of
some _chef d'oeuvre_, an _objet d'art_, lessons in literature and art
which would uplift their souls from the dreariness of their
surroundings. Three weeks as a factory girl had changed my beliefs. If
the young society women who sacrifice one evening every week to talk to
the poor in the slums about Shakespeare and Italian art would instead
offer diversion first--a play, a farce, a humourous recitation--they
would make much more rapid progress in winning the confidence of those
whom they want to help. The working woman who has had a good laugh is
more ready to tell what she needs and feels and fears than the woman who
has been forced to listen silently to an abstract lesson. In society
when we wish to make friends with people we begin by entertaining them.
It should be the same way with the poor. Next to amusement as a means
of giving temporary relief and bringing about relations which will be
helpful to all, I put instruction, in the form of narrative, about the
people of other countries, our fellow man, how he lives and works; and,
third, under this same head, primitive lessons about animals and plants,
the industries of the bees, the habits of ants, the natural phenomena
which require no reasoning power to understand and which open the
thoughts upon a delightful unknown vista.
My first experience is drawing to its close. I have surmounted the
discomforts of insufficient food, of dirt, a bed without sheets, the
strain of hard manual labour. I have confined my observations to life
and conditions in the factory. Owing, as I have before explained, to the
absorption of factory life into city life in a place as large as
Pittsburg, it seemed to me more profitable to centre my attention on the
girl within the factory, leaving for a small town the study of her in
her family and social life. I have pointed out as they appeared to me
woman's relative force as a worker and its effects upon her economic
advancement. I have touched upon two cases which illustrate her relative
dependence on the law. She appeared to me not as the equal of man either
physically or legally. It remained to study her socially. In the factory
where I worked men and women were employed for ten-hour days. The
women's highest wages were lower than the man's lowest. Both were
working as hard as they possibly could. The women were doing menial
work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do. The men were
properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and
pickles. Why was this? It is of course impossible to generalize on a
single factory. I can only relate the conclusions I drew from what I saw
myself. The wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at
the level of bare subsistence. This level and its accompanying
conditions are determined by competition, by the nature and number of
labourers taking part in the competition. In the masculine category I
met but one class of competitor: the bread-winner. In the feminine
category I found a variety of classes: the bread-winner, the
semi-bread-winner, the woman who works for luxuries. This inevitably
drags the wage level. The self-supporting girl is in competition with
the child, with the girl who lives at home and makes a small
contribution to the household expenses, and with the girl who is
supported and who spends all her money on her clothes. It is this
division of purpose which takes the "spirit" out of them as a class.
There will be no strikes among them so long as the question of wages is
not equally vital to them all. It is not only nature and the law which
demand protection for women, but society as well. In every case of the
number I investigated, if there were sons, daughters or a husband in the
family, the mother was not allowed to work. She was wholly protected. In
the families where the father and brothers were making enough for bread
and butter, the daughters were protected partially or entirely. There is
no law which regulates this social protection: it is voluntary, and it
would seem to indicate that civilized woman is meant to be an economic
dependent. Yet, on the other hand, what is the new force which impels
girls from their homes into the factories to work when they do not
actually need the money paid them for their effort and sacrifice? Is it
a move toward some far distant civilization when women shall have become
man's physical equal, a "free, economic, social factor, making possible
the full social combination of individuals in collective industry"? This
is a matter for speculation only. What occurred to me as a possible
remedy both for the oppression of the woman bread-winner and also as a
betterment for the girl who wants to work though she does not need the
money, was this: the establishment of schools where the esthetic
branches of industrial art might be taught to the girls who by their
material independence could give some leisure to acquiring a profession
useful to themselves and to society in general. The whole country would
be benefited by the opening of such schools as the Empress of Russia has
patronized for the maintenance of the "petites industries," or those
which Queen Margherita has established for the revival of lace-making in
Italy. If there was such a counter-attraction to machine labour, the
bread-winner would have a freer field and the non-bread-winner might
still work for luxury and at the same time better herself morally,
mentally and esthetically. She could aid in forming an intermediate
class of labourers which as yet does not exist in America: the
hand-workers, the _main d'oeuvre_ who produce the luxurious objects of
industrial art for which we are obliged to send to Europe when we wish
to beautify our homes.
The American people are lively, intelligent, capable of learning
anything. The schools of which I speak, founded, not for the
manufacturing of the useful but of the beautiful, could be started
informally as classes and by individual effort. Such labour would be
paid more than the mechanical factory work; the immense importation from
abroad of objects of industrial art sufficiently proves the demand for
them in this country; there would be no material disadvantage for the
girl who gave up her job in a pickle factory. Her faculties would be
well employed, and she could, without leaving her home, do work which
would be of esthetic and, indirectly, of moral value.
I was discouraged at first to see how difficult it was to help the
working girls as individuals and how still more difficult to help them
as a class. There is perhaps no surer way of doing this than by giving
opportunities to those who have a purpose and a will. No amount of
openings will help the girl who has not both of these. I watched many
girls with intelligence and energy who were unable to develop for the
lack of a chance a start in the right direction. Aside from the few
remedies I have been able to suggest, I would like to make an appeal for
persistent sympathy in behalf of those whose misery I have shared. Until
some marvelous advancement has been made toward the reign of justice
upon earth, every man, woman and child should have constantly in his
heart the sufferings of the poorest.
On the evening when I left the factory for the last time, I heard in the
streets the usual cry of murders, accidents and suicides: the mental
food of the overworked. It is Saturday night. I mingle with a crowd of
labourers homeward bound, and with women and girls returning from a
Saturday sale in the big shops. They hurry along delighted at the
cheapness of a bargain, little dreaming of the human effort that has
produced it, the cost of life and energy it represents. As they pass,
they draw their skirts aside from us, the labourers who have made their
bargains cheap; from us, the coöperators who enable them to have the
luxuries they do; from us, the multitude who stand between them and the
monster Toil that must be fed with human lives. Think of us, as we herd
to our work in the winter dawn; think of us as we bend over our task
all the daylight without rest; think of us at the end of the day as we
resume suffering and anxiety in homes of squalour and ugliness; think of
us as we make our wretched try for merriment; think of us as we stand
protectors between you and the labour that must be done to satisfy your
material demands; think of us--be merciful.
[Illustration: "WAVING ARMS OF SMOKE AND STEAM, A SYMBOL OF SPENT
ENERGY, OF THE LIVES CONSUMED, AND VANISHING AGAIN"
Factories on the Alleghany River at the 16th Street bridge, just below
the pickle works]
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PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN
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