that one girl operated each machine, there were 73,290 women displaced
by the machines on which these savings were made.
Contemporary with the general acceptance of the sewing-machine, and
intensifying the distress of the wage-worker, was the Civil War, which,
in 1860, began to decimate the ranks of men and to convert into
wage-earners large numbers of women who had been wage-expenders.
Delicate women in the South, reared in affluence, waited upon by slaves,
were thrown, by losses of male relatives and property, among the
bread-winners. Numbers of these journeyed to Northern cities to hide
their poverty as well as to gain entrance into the larger field of
industries the North was supposed to offer. But here they were met by
thousands of other women, native to the North, who, like their sisters
of the South, through the death of those who had hitherto fought the
battle of life for them, were obliged to become producers in the place
of being consumers.
The distress experienced by workers of this class wrought that great
revolution in thought which involved the education of women. This is one
of the accepted factors of the present period. At that time agitation
was rife as to what should be done for the advancement of women as
workers. Miss Virginia Penny, in a book called “Think and Act,”[175]
advocated the entrance of women into the trades and professions that
were monopolized by men. “Apprentice,” she says, “ten thousand women to
watchmakers; train ten thousand for teachers to the young; make ten
thousand good accountants; put ten thousand more to be deaconesses
trained by Florence Nightingale; put some thousands in the electric
telegraph offices all over the country; educate one thousand lecturers
for mechanics’ institutes; one thousand to read the best books to the
working-people; train up ten thousand to manage washing-machines,
sewing-machines, etc. Then the distressed needle-woman will vanish, the
decayed gentlewoman and broken-down governess cease to exist.”
Writers like Gail Hamilton in the North and Catherine Cole in the South
urged the higher education of women; their right to be educated the same
as man; “to enter the same pursuits, receive the same wages, occupy the
same posts and professions, wield the same influence, and, in a word, be
independent of man as a means of support.”
These strangely reasonable, though novel propositions, met with as much
public condemnation at the time as though, in place of being suggestions
for elevating women into skillful, rational workers, they had advocated
turning them into gamblers and drunkards. The fact was ignored that the
majority of women had always been engaged in carrying on some kind of
necessary industry, if only in untaught, helpless ways. Hence it became
fashionable to say that “woman as a worker was a product of modern
times.” Her entrance into the ranks of wealth-producers and wage-earners
was called the “New Departure,” and was deplored by writers as
calculated, by thwarting nature’s evident design in making her
child-bearer, child-trainer, and house-mother, to rob her of special
gifts of grace, beauty, and tenderness. The error of the day, it was
argued, lay in the thought that woman should be self-supporting, and she
was implored to stop and consider what homes would become,
Where woman reigns, the mother, daughter, wife,
Strews with fresh flowers the narrow way of life,
if “woman was to take her place beside man in every field of coarse,
rough toil.”
The peculiarity of these arguments, intended to dissuade women from
being workers, was, that while poets, philosophers, and essayists were
picturing women as weak, tender creatures, clinging for protection to
man as the vine to the oak, the lovely presiding geniuses of homes, the
expenders of wealth produced by man, there were, according to the census
of 1860, one million women working by the side of men in various domains
of “coarse, rough toil.” These writers, clergymen for the most part,
made the mistake, common to people in comfortable circumstances, of
looking on the small, glittering world of dazzling drawing-rooms and
boudoirs, where an elegant, dainty womanhood presides, as “woman’s
world.” Living in this, they became blinded to that other, larger world
of women without homes, with no time for the cultivation of the graces
or personal adornment, who were obliged to work if they would live.
According to the newspapers of 1867 and of 1870, out of seventy thousand
women (wage-earners) in the city of New York, not including domestics,
twenty thousand were in a constant fight with starvation and pauperism.
Seven thousand lived in cellars. Those who got sewing to do worked from
seven in the morning until midnight making shirts at six cents apiece.
The most rapid workers could scarcely, even with those long hours, make
one dozen shirts and thus earn their seventy-two cents per day. The pay
for drawers, undershirts, and blouses was in proportion. We read that in
Boston there were, in 1868, “twenty thousand women working at starvation
rates; eight thousand workers at twenty to twenty-five cents per day,
twelve thousand workers for less than fifty cents, and even at these
rates there was little work.” These women lived at times, it is said,
“on one cracker a day for breakfast, dinner, and supper,” working from
“dawn to dawn” to “get one mouthful of food.” In this same year, the New
York journals reported thirty thousand girls struggling in that city
with starvation and cold, making shirts and furnishing the thread at
sixpence each. The condition of seventy-five thousand working women in
the city beggared description. The New York _Herald_ described them as
living in “nasty tenement houses, in cellars unfit for human habitation,
in pools of foulness, where every impurity is matured and every vice
flourishes.” Women who could get sewing-machines worked at them for
$2.50 per week, and the forty-one cents per day that they earned
represented the work, if not the wages, of six other women.
The helplessness, the misery, the degradation of womanhood, laboring and
starving on beggarly wages in rich and prosperous cities, arrested the
attention of the thinking class to woman’s needs as it has never been
arrested before. How to help woman to better her condition became, in
1868, one of the burning questions of the day. Gail Hamilton, Mrs.
Stephens, Miss Penny, and others, attributed the distress of the factory
and needle-women to the lack of educational training which obliged women
to crowd into occupations requiring little, if any, skill. To remedy
this, the establishment of industrial schools was advocated. Men, it was
reasoned, had their trades’ apprenticeship system, schools, and
universities, by which they were educated into a knowledge of many
things; and by applying the same method to women, giving some thousands
of them a professional training in each of the various trades, arts, and
sciences useful to mankind, the ranks of the factory-seekers and
needle-women in search of employment would be thinned sufficiently to
cause the anomaly to vanish of millions of adult human beings laboring
as men for the pay of children, and yet paying as men for whatever they
got. Other remedies agitated were those of woman suffrage and the
organization of women into societies for mutual protection and benefit.
Small private attempts at industrial schools for the advancement of
women, such as the “Wilson Industrial School” in New York, had been
started by the benevolence of individuals as early as 1856; but the
first serious attempt to give practical shape to the question of higher
education for women was undertaken when Peter Cooper made the advantages
of the institute founded by him and bearing his name, free in all its
departments, to women as to men. The Cooper Institute, opened to the
public in 1859, had its free art classes for women, where art was taught
in its application to the industries. The Cooper Art School is said to
be, even now, “the largest in the world for women.” From its inception a
few women were found ready to avail themselves of the opportunity given
them to study art in its various income-producing forms. But not until
after the close of the war, when conditions made it urgent upon women to
work on new lines, did the classes increase to any extent. (Then
hundreds more than could be accommodated applied for admission.) Names
were placed in the roll-book a year ahead, and the classes, through
their increased size, overflowed into rooms not intended for their use.
The number of students in the free art classes, for the season of
1889–90, was 310. For this season there were 693 applicants for
admission to the free art classes. The accommodations do not admit of
but few over 300.
In this one phase of work accomplished for women in the United States,
there was much that was attractive to the class drawn into the Cooper
Institute, a class that belonged neither to the rich nor to the
extremely poor. The large, light, airy rooms were formed, many of them,
into charming studios, filled with tasteful studies, articles of
bric-a-brac, stuffs, and, occasionally, growing plants. Books, pictures,
and engravings on art were supplied them in the art rooms. Descending
three flights of broad stone steps, lined on each side with studies in
plaster and on paper, there was the free library, a room of magnificent
proportions, 125 × 30 feet, glass-domed, and containing 21,276 bound
volumes, nearly 5000 unbound, and having always on file 189 magazines
and 393 of the best newspapers, American and foreign. It can be imagined
what godsends these treasures of art and literature were to women of
talent, whose work had hitherto been conducted without any, or the most
meager, advantages. To add to their value, the work of training pupils
was intrusted to teachers capable of drawing out latent possibilities.
The line of industrial work done in the Cooper Institute consisted of
the arts of design as applied to making patterns for stained glass,
wall-papers, oilcloths, textile fabrics, carpets, and adapting the
patterns of Oriental rugs for the American market. Other forms of art
consisted in coloring photographs, portrait crayon drawing, and in late
years wood-engraving, for which women developed an unusual aptitude.
When pupils attained sufficient proficiency in any of these branches,
they were permitted to add to their incomes by executing orders from
business firms for pay. Profits from this source almost maintained some
of the most expert during their last school years. The students in 1889,
and the graduates of May, 1888, earned in this way, during the year,
$17,805.
A wise discretionary power given the trustees of the Cooper Institute,
“to add such other art or trade to the curriculum as would tend to
furnish women with suitable employment,” led to the establishment, in
1869, of a class in telegraphy and in 1884, of a stenographic and
type-writing class. Both of these combined, educated about one hundred
women yearly in those professions. The expense of carrying on all the
departments of woman’s work was, in 1889, one-fifth of the whole
expenses of the building, and barely reached $10,000—an outlay
surprisingly small for the equipment of about four hundred women,
educated to maintain themselves, and influence, by teaching and example,
the minds of the many with whom they come into contact.
Significant as was the work performed by this institution, devoted to
art and science, it was, nevertheless, felt by charitable individuals
that something more was needed in the way of instruction for the mass of
women who toiled without chance of coming within the sphere of its
beautiful influence. Wealthy philanthropists, whose sympathies were
touched by the lives of the workers, sought to help women in many other
ways. The Young Women’s Christian Association of New York recognized
early the necessity of educating self-supporting women in many of the
skilled industries. This association, which, of late years, has become a
power for good in almost all the large cities of the United States,
instituted in New York, as part of its plan of work, free classes for
training women in commercial arithmetic, penmanship, book-keeping, and
type-writing. An industrial department was created for teaching
dressmaking in all its branches of cutting, fitting, hand and machine
sewing. In imitation of the Cooper, art classes were formed for teaching
the retouching of photo-negatives, photo-coloring, mechanical and
free-hand drawing, modeling, and design. To still further carry out its
program “to care for the temporal, mental, and moral welfare of the
self-supporting women of New York City,” a free library was attached to
the building and a series of free concerts, readings, and lectures
provided for. Through these and other means of physical culture, Bible
and choir classes, employment bureaus, board directories, and a
department for the sale of goods made in sewing-classes, about five
thousand persons were reached during the year of 1887. The number of
pupils in all classes was reported as 965. But with the best intentions,
this organization, like the Cooper, failed to reach the women who live
and work in the city’s slums. Its applicants were those who had first
graduated from the public schools and then, helpless as babes, had
availed themselves of the splendid opportunity it offered for gratuitous
instruction in some wage-earning industry. When Miss Graffenried, of the
United States Labor Bureau for 1889, went among the women in tenements,
factories, and shops, out of three thousand interviewed, she said, “Not
one was known to have come under the influence of this noble
organization.”
Besides schools such as the Cooper and the Woman’s Christian Union, that
were specially designed for educating women in industrial trades, so
many other ways were thought out for bettering their condition, that one
might well call the years from 1868 on, the philanthropic era for women.
So numerous were the societies started for their relief that scarcely a
need existed that an organization of some kind did not attempt to fill,
and each in its particular way emphasized Emerson’s truth, “there is
more kindness in the world than ever was spoken.” Through the efforts of
a few liberal-minded, energetic men and women, there was established in
New York, in 1868, a society called the “Working Woman’s Protective
Union,” that purposed to provide “women with legal protection against
the frauds and impositions of unscrupulous employers, to assist them in
procuring employment, and to secure them such suitable departments of
labor as are not occupied by them.” From the start, the novel work done
by this society was appreciated by the class it was intended to help.
Perfectly unsectarian, with all its services _gratis_, the rooms, first
on Bleecker Street, and for the past twenty years on Clinton Place, were
thronged by women in distress desirous of legal counsel, matronly
advice, or help to better work. At all times chance visitors could see
women waiting in the front room, while the superintendent gave
sympathetic ear in the rear apartment to some earlier comer. One day in
each week was known as “complaint day.” On that day the legal
representative of the Union received and examined the complaints that
the superintendent deemed worthy of prosecution. What the society has
done in the twenty-five years of its existence is summed up in the
statement that on an annual outlay of $5000 it has fought and won the
legal battles of 12,000 women, who would otherwise have been defrauded
of their hard-earned wages by unscrupulous employers. It has collected
by legal processes $41,000, in sums averaging $4 each, and supplied in
twenty-five years more than 300,000 applicants with employment, advice,
or relief. As many of these applications were made by the same person
three or four different times, there were represented, perhaps, 10,000
applicants annually. It was of this society that Henry Ward Beecher said
the Union’s greatest and best work was “the mere fact of its existence,”
as this fact made employers more careful in withholding from the
working-woman her just dues.
When a plan to redress a wrong succeeds, it is sure to have imitators.
Societies in other cities followed the example of the Woman’s Protective
Union, and some of these branched out in directions unthought of by the
founders of the parent institution. The Woman’s Educational and
Industrial Union, in Boston, besides securing wages unjustly withheld
from working-women, added the task of investigating advertisements for
work to be done at home, and, if found fraudulent, warning women against
them. It procured situations for the unemployed; sold on commission the
fruits of woman’s work; opened a lunch-room where women could have
varied bills of fare at moderate prices, or where they could sit and eat
the luncheons brought from home. It included in its scope the
instruction of women in various points of law, such as those regarding
the relations between employer and employed, the hiring of rooms, and
the detention of property. It detailed agents to look up titles to
furniture that, by means of mortgage or insufficient payment of the
installments, might not belong to the seller. A feature was made of
holding lectures and mothers’ meetings, the purpose of the talks being
to lead women into higher planes of thought and action. One of the most
active endeavors was made in the line of securing the appointment of
police matrons in large cities.[176]
The honor of originating the parent Woman’s Protective Union in New York
belongs to men; but the establishment of both similar and widely
different societies in the United States is due to the zealous energy of
women themselves. The Woman’s Club in Chicago instituted, in 1866, a
Protective Agency that had for its objects the protection of woman’s
purity and honor, and her deliverance from swindlers and extortionists.
In the first year of its existence, it examined 156 complaints,
fifty-one of which were claims for money,—chiefly wages. These
aggregated $992.89. It is said to be the design of this agency “to
establish in the near future a loan fund for the benefit of those in
need of temporary assistance, and who, under existing conditions, are
obliged to pay usurious interest for money.”
Better than anything else, philanthropic work undertaken by women in
America shows the difference between past and present generations. A few
decades ago, woman’s attention was absorbed in organizing small, local,
sectarian sewing societies, Sunday-school classes, and church fairs.
After the Civil War these few circumscribed channels no longer sufficed
for woman’s activity, and an expansion took place that made itself felt
in the organization of societies for working-women. These took no heed
of sects, restricted in no way the compass of the schools designed for
them, and worked for humanity as a whole. In their management of these
institutions, women displayed an amount of executive ability and
enlightened interest in public need that surprised men. Because they had
never attempted organization on a large scale, they were supposed to
lack constructive talent. Some, with true conceptions of what society
should be as a whole, endeavored here and there to take away from the
institutions they founded, and over which they presided, the semblance
of that offensive charity which plumed itself formerly in making
petticoats for the poor,—
Because we are of one flesh after all.
And need one flannel (with a proper sense
Of difference in the quality),
or distributing stale bread and thin soup, together with homilies on the
virtues of contentment and the blessing of poverty and work. Along with
men, they fell into the swim of modern thought which attempted to render
institutions self-supporting through the co-operative efforts of those
availing themselves of their privileges. It was on these broad lines of
non-sectarianism, diversity of teaching for a sisterhood of women, and
the co-operative society in which there is strength, that there was
built up for the use of the working-women the various boarding-homes,
industrial schools, and stores for the disposal of woman’s handiwork. To
soften the harshest experiences of women thrown upon their own resources
for necessities of food and shelter, philanthropic women, and men, too,
made it their business to establish “boarding-homes,” where the price of
entrance was fixed at sums low enough to come within the reach of the
average wage-earning woman. The clean, quiet streets usually chosen for
these homes, contrasted with the filthy, crowded thoroughfares where the
cheap lodging-houses—the only resorts the average friendless
working-woman could afford—were most apt to be situated. The difference
within was as great as without. In place of the cold, comfortless rooms
which, as a rule, were destitute of fire or carpet, and where there was
neither reception-room for visitors, nor bath nor laundry for inmates;
the model boarding-houses had spacious, well-ventilated bedrooms
attractively adorned, with a neat parlor, usually a library or
reading-room, well warmed, brightly lighted, and inviting. Privileges of
bath-rooms and laundries were added to increase the comforts of the
boarders. Two of the best of these homes are to be found in Boston, one
on Warrenton, the other on Berkeley Street. These structures, built
under the auspices of the Woman’s Christian Association, are provided
with electric bells, ventilating appliances, and safeguards against
fire. Both houses have, besides offices and attendants, handsome
parlors, well-stocked reading-rooms, libraries, and lecture halls. One
of them possesses a fine gymnasium. The price for board and lodging
varies from $3 to $5.50 per week, but more than one-half of the guests
pay from $3 to $4 per week. In the two homes there exist accommodations
for about three hundred women. The sums named secure pleasant rooms,
well-prepared and neatly served meals, and include, besides washing and
ironing, heating and lighting of rooms, the use of reading-rooms,
library, parlor, and admission to all entertainments of the association.