THE MEANING OF IT ALL
Before concluding the recital of my experiences as a working girl, I
want to sum up the general conclusions at which I arrived and to trace
in a few words the history of my impressions. What, first of all, was my
purpose in going to live and work among the American factory hands? It
was not to gratify simple curiosity; it was not to get material for a
novel; it was not to pave the way for new philanthropic associations; it
was not to obtain crude data, such as fill the reports of labour
commissioners. My purpose was to _help_ the working girl--to help her
mentally, morally, physically. I considered this purpose visionary and
unpractical, I considered it pretentious even, and I cannot say that I
had any hope of accomplishing it. What did I mean by _help_? Did I mean
a superficial remedy, a palliative? A variety of such remedies occurred
to me as I worked, and I have offered them gladly for the possible aid
of charitable people who have time and money to carry temporary relief
to the poor. It was not relief of this kind that I meant by _help_. I
meant an _amelioration in natural conditions_. I was not hopeful of
discovering any plan to bring about this amelioration, because I
believed that the conditions, deplorable as they appear to us, of the
working poor, were natural, the outcome of laws which it is useless to
resist. I adopted the only method possible for putting my belief to the
test. I did what had never been done. I was a skeptic and something of a
sentimentalist when I started. I have become convinced, as I worked,
that certain of the most unfortunate conditions are not natural, and
that they can therefore be corrected. It is with hope for the material
betterment of the breadwinning woman, for the moral advancement of the
semi-breadwinner and the esthetic improvement of the country, that I
submit what seems a rational plan.
For the first three weeks of my life as a factory girl I saw among my
companions only one vast class of slaves, miserable drudges, doomed to
dirt, ugliness and overwork from birth until death. My own physical
sufferings were acute. My heart was torn with pity. I revolted against a
society whose material demands were satisfied at the cost of minds and
bodies. Labour appeared in the guise of a monster feeding itself on
human lives. To every new impression I responded with indiscriminate
compassion. It is impossible for the imagination to sustain for more
than a moment at a time the terrible fatigue which a new hand like
myself is obliged to endure day after day; the disgust at foul smells,
the revulsion at miserable food soaked in grease, the misery of a straw
mattress, a sheetless bed with blankets whose acrid odour is stifling.
The mind cannot grasp what it means to be frantic with pain in the
shoulders and back before nine in the morning, and to watch the clock
creep around to six before one has a right to drop into the chair that
has stood near one all day long. Yet it is not until the system has
become at least in a great measure used to such physical effort that one
can judge without bias. When I had grown so accustomed to the work that
I was equal to a long walk after ten hours in the factory; when I had
become so saturated with the tenement smell that I no longer noticed it;
when any bed seemed good enough for the healthy sleep of a working girl,
and any food good enough to satisfy a hungry stomach, then and then only
I began to see that in the great unknown class there were a multitude of
classes which, aside from the ugliness of their esthetic surroundings
and the intellectual inactivity which the nature of their occupation
imposes, are not all to be pitied: they are a collection of human
individuals with like capacities to our own. The surroundings into which
they are born furnish little chance for them to develop their minds and
their tastes, but their souls suffer nothing from working in squalour
and sordidness. Certain acts of impulsive generosity, of disinterested
kindness, of tender sacrifice, of loyalty and fortitude shone out in
the poverty-stricken wretches I met on my way, as the sun shines
glorious in iridescence on the rubbish heap that goes to fertilize some
rich man's fields.
My observations were confined chiefly to the women. Two things, however,
regarding the men I noticed as fixed rules. They were all breadwinners;
they worked because they needed the money to live; they supported
entirely the woman, wife or mother, of the household who did not work.
In many cases they contributed to the support of even the wage-earning
females of the family: the woman who does not work when she does not
need to work is provided for.
The women were divided into two general classes: Those who worked
because they needed to earn their living, and those who came to the
factories to be more independent than at home, to exercise their
coquetry and amuse themselves, to make pin money for luxuries. The men
formed a united class. They had a purpose in common. The women were in a
class with boys and with children. They had nothing in common but their
physical inferiority to man. The children were working from necessity,
the boys were working from necessity; the only industrial unit
complicating the problem were the girls who worked without being obliged
to--the girls who had "all the money they needed, but not all the money
they wanted." To them the question of wages was not vital. They could
afford to accept what the breadwinner found insufficient. They were
better fed, better equipped than the self-supporting hand; they were
independent about staying away from the factory when they were tired or
ill, and they alone determined the reputation for irregularity in which
the breadwinners were included.
Here, then, it seemed to me, was the first chance to offer help.
The self-supporting woman should be in competition only with other
self-supporting industrial units. The problem for her class will settle
itself, according to just and natural laws, when the purpose of this
class is equally vital to all concerned. Relief, it seemed to me, could
be brought to the breadwinner by separating from her the girl who works
for luxuries.
How could this be done?
There is, I believe, a way in which it can be accomplished naturally.
The non-self-supporting girls must be attracted into some field of work
which requires instruction and an especial training, which pays them as
well while calling into play higher faculties than the brutalizing
machine labour. This field of work is industrial art: lace-making,
hand-weaving, the fabrication of tissues and embroideries,
gold-smithery, bookbinding, rug-weaving, woodcarving and inlaying, all
the branches of industrial art which could be executed by woman in her
home, all the manual labour which does not require physical strength,
which would not place the woman, therefore, as an inferior in
competition with man, but would call forth her taste and skill, her
training and individuality, at the same time being consistent with her
destiny as a woman.
The American factory girl has endless ambition. She has a hunger for
knowledge, for opportunities to better herself, to get on in the world,
to improve. There is ample material in the factories as they exist for
forming a new, higher, superior class of industrial art labourers. There
is a great work to be accomplished by those who are willing to give
their time and their money to lifting the non-breadwinners from the
slavish, brutalizing machines at which they work, ignorant of anything
better, and placing them by education, by cultivation, in positions of
comparative freedom--freedom of thought, taste and personality.
Classes in industrial art already exist at the Simmons School in Boston
and Columbia University in New York. New classes should be formed.
Individual enterprise should start the ball and keep it rolling until it
is large enough to be held in Governmental hands. It is not sufficient
merely to form classes. The right sort of pupils should be attracted.
There is not a factory which would not furnish some material. The
recompense for apprenticeship would be the social and intellectual
advancement dear to every true American's heart. The question of wages
would be self-regulating. At Hull House, Chicago, in the Industrial Art
School it has been proved that, provided the models be simple in
proportion to the ability of the artisan, the work can be sold as fast
as it is turned out. The public is ready to buy the produce of
hand-workers. The girls I speak of are fit for advancement. It is not a
plan of charity, but one to ameliorate natural conditions.
Who will act as mediator?
I make an appeal to all those whose interests and leisure permit them to
help in this double emancipation of the woman who toils for bread and
the girl who works for luxuries.
* * * * *
MARIE VAN VORST
INTRODUCTORY
VII. A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN
VIII. THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS
IX. THE CHILD IN THE SOUTHERN MILLS
* * * * *