established, by the same energetic society, one “home,” smaller, but
similar in character to the Boston homes. Connected with all of these,
and adding greatly to their usefulness, are departments for giving
instruction in sewing, teaching the art of dressmaking, and training
woman in housework. Chautauqua circles were organized among the
residents, and classes gotten up in which, for nominal sums, girls could
be taught the languages, book-keeping, type-writing, stenography,
painting, drawing, calisthenics, etc. Employment bureaus were attached,
which, by personal application or through correspondence, obtained
situations for those who were on its registers for services to be given,
or received. To still further extend their helpfulness, another
department, called the “Travelers’ Aid,” employed agents to meet
incoming steamers and direct unprotected girls to the Association Homes,
advise them as to the best and most economical means of transportation,
and the best way to secure employment. Several smaller organizations,
such as the “Helping Hand,” “Girls’ Friendly Society,” etc., instituted
homes that were carried on in much the same way. The benefits of
ventilation, cleanliness, and decent behavior were rigidly enforced,
while in general the most strenuous efforts were put forth to make the
homes so far self-supporting that their residents could look on them as
co-operative enterprises, in which, by combination and judicious
management, the funds each expended singly, brought them all unitedly,
comforts which would have been impossible without such action.
To propagate the idea of the value of co-operation among women, whether
workers or not, was perhaps the most useful thing accomplished by the
boarding-home societies. So far the number of these institutions has
been limited, so that they suggest what could be done rather than
indicate what has been accomplished in brightening the lives of the
great mass of homeless working-women. In Boston, where these “homes” are
most numerous, there are, for a population of eighty thousand
wage-earning women, but six of these dwellings. Altogether, the limit of
their accommodations is about 387 boarders. In these meager results, for
so much energetic, philanthropic work, the abortiveness is shown of
private individualistic attempts to supplant by means of model
co-operative boarding-homes, the cheap and nasty tenement
lodging-houses, situated too often in close proximity to gin-shops,
gambling dens and brothels. By the numbers who vainly seek admission
into the few boarding-homes that have been established in various large
cities, the fact is proved that were the idea of co-operative homes
carried out to largest national issues and placed everywhere within
reach of wage-earning women, all but the most debased would avail
themselves of their privileges, and thus secure the comforts and good
living enjoyed so rarely by women whom circumstances compel to labor.
Another phase of work initiated by women, and which, like the
boarding-homes, needs only to be carried out on the broad and liberal
lines of a national co-operation to become a power for universal good,
were the exchanges, or stores, instituted for the purpose of selling
hand or machine-made articles of woman’s manufacture, and which gave the
maker the full price they brought, less a ten per cent. commission and a
membership fee of $5 for maintaining the establishment. In this way, the
founder of the Woman’s Exchange hoped to solve the ever-perplexing
problem of finding a remunerative market for the work that women had
been taught to do in the various art and industrial schools. At the time
the first exchange was planned in New York, some ten years ago,
thousands of women, graduates from the various art schools, were at work
in stores and factories decorating china, painting household adornments
such as portières, screens, wall-hangings, and doing all kinds of fancy
work at prices but little, if any, beyond the wages of the average
worker on men’s and women’s clothing. To direct this work into a
channel, where the maker and not the employer would receive the profit,
was what the originator of the exchange proposed to do for women pressed
by poverty into the ranks of the bread-winners.
From the first, the exchange became popular with a certain class, and
had a most phenomenal growth, forty having come into existence during
the last decade, all of which are working successfully on the same
general plan. A walk through the rooms of the parent institution, now
established in a handsome building at 329 Fifth Avenue, shows the number
and variety of workers who availed themselves of its privileges. In the
salesrooms, hand-painted and embroidered tapestries hang on the walls;
artistic screens, painted or embroidered on all conceivable materials,
stand in every nook and corner; elaborately decorated china for ornament
or table use lies piled on shelves; while textile fabrics of all kinds,
made up into articles for wall decorations, bed and table use, or
personal wear, are tastefully arranged on counters or within glass
cases. On the upper floors in the building, women are kept constantly at
work inspecting, marking, and ticketing goods sent in by consignees. In
the basement are the storehouse and restaurant for receiving and selling
cakes, pickles, preserves, and other edibles, sent to be disposed of for
the benefit of the makers.
In this one establishment the sales for the year 1888 amounted to
$51,180.26. The aggregate sold in the cake and preserve department
amounted to $13,256.89. One consignee of chicken jelly, etc., got during
the year $1,256.89. Of two consignees in the cake and preserve
department one received $1,019.73, the other $772.42. Things sent to the
lunch-room for Sunday night teas brought one consignee the comfortable
little income of $965.78. From the sale of children’s wrappers alone,
one consignee received $548.66, and one woman for screens, decorated
frames, etc., $1105.71. One consignee received during the spring and
fall months $217.35 for articles which she had previously made for
manufacturers at $2.50 apiece, and which were sold for $35 each. In the
order department connected with the exchange, the work done consisted of
1263 pieces of plain sewing, 1784 pieces of English embroidery, 1100
painted articles, and 2033 fancy articles. From the forty other
societies then in existence the reports showed a grand aggregate of over
one million dollars from sales during the year.
These figures demonstrate how thoroughly practical the scheme is of
sending hand-made articles to special magazines to be disposed of for
the makers’ benefit. The woman who, by sending her work to the exchange,
got $35 for what she, as a wage-earner, had received $2.50 from the
manufacturer, got the profit that had previously gone to swell the
bank-account of the manufacturer, middle men, and retail dealers. This
was the same with all contributors to the exchanges; by employing their
own labor they accumulated the premiums which, under the old factory and
store system, inured to the benefit of their employers. In establishing
the woman’s exchanges, the difficulty was to secure enough women of
intelligence to be their own employers and to interest enough women in
woman’s work to become patrons of the exchanges instead of the stores.
For instance, to meet the expenses of the Fifth Avenue establishment in
1888, the income from all sources was $13,589.56, while the expenses of
carrying on the business amounted to $16,318.48. This left a deficit of
$2723.92 that had to be met by donations, and which kept the institution
on a partly charitable instead of wholly self-supporting basis. As this
deficit had lessened with each year, some optimistic thinkers began to
hope that the time was coming when it would disappear altogether, and
thus allow them to become strictly co-operative instead of philanthropic
concerns. A conclusion reached was, that were they once to become
independent of charitable donations, they would branch out largely
enough in most of the worst paid departments of woman’s work so as to
force out those employed on such labor for the vast retail stores. But
it was found that an insuperable obstacle to the extension of the
exchanges lay in the utter lack of system with which contributors
worked. In the matter of production, the regular stores had but little
system; still some attempt was made in them to regulate the supply of
manufactured goods to meet a possible or expected demand. Contributors
to the exchanges had no such guide. Those who made and sent articles for
sale could have no opportunity for knowing what others were making and
sending. The result was that women living near or afar off in town and
country worked completely in the dark. With no finger on the public
pulse in the matter of supply and demand for goods, they were obliged
for this haphazard work to purchase their own material in small
quantities in the retail markets, while the merchant-manufacturers
bought theirs in bulk in the cheapest. This could only mean more
failures than successes in the disposal of goods made under such
conditions. Again, only women possessed of some means could afford to
lay out money for materials and wait the uncertain chances of its
returning to them with a profit. In consequence, most of those
contributing articles to the exchanges for sale were “reduced
gentlewomen,” who made use of this means of becoming their own
employers, not so much for support, as to better their conditions of
living, without the publicity consequent upon working for manufacturers.
This in itself made it impossible for the exchanges (as was claimed by
their supporters) to have “_helped women in general to have hushed the
‘Song of the Shirt.’_”[177] To the women of the proletariat, the
exchanges were not only unknown mediums by reason of their situation in
fashionable thoroughfares, but forbidden factors because of their
attendant risks and expenses. The number of sewing women helped in them
to increased earnings was too insignificant to warrant any hope that the
co-operative principles underlying their business methods would ever
spread far enough to leave any impress upon prevailing modes of work in
the business world. Like all other remedies, instituted by wealthy
philanthropists to assist the working-women, they were palliatives for
the ills of a few, not curatives for the sufferings of the many.
Much more satisfactory than anything which had been accomplished in the
name of philanthropy or charity for working-women were the labor
organizations founded by the proletariat and sustained by their own
energy and contributions. About 1870, associations of working-people
(including women) were inaugurated for the purpose of gaining better
social conditions. These were more attractive and beneficial to the
laboring class because they lacked that element of restitution of a
modicum of withheld wages which tainted all that wealth did for the
alleviation of the condition of wage-earning women,[178] and, moreover,
was built upon the sounder philosophy of an endeavor to organize into
bodies capable of striving collectively for their own deliverance, that
class of women whom the industrial schools, women’s exchanges, etc.,
could not reach. The most important of these bodies was the Knights of
Labor. Organized openly in 1881 at the Detroit Convention, but more
secretly some years before, this body welcomed women into its ranks on
the ground of seeking “to gather into one fold all branches of honorable
toil, without regard to nationality, sex, creed, or color.” Trade
assemblies, composed entirely of working-women, were formed, and the
members were taught the beautiful principles on which the order was
founded. In amalgamating with knights, women assumed the duties of the
new chivalry. Engaging as equals in the undertaking, helping with time
and money to carry out the new mission, they sought by Agitation,
Education, and Organization to lighten the burden of toil, and to
elevate the moral and social condition of mankind. In 1883, one local
assembly, composed entirely of women, counted fifteen hundred members.
These must all have given adherence to that order’s doctrine of “Equal
pay for equal work,” and “woman’s equitable consideration with man in
the Nation’s government.” Mrs. Leonora Barry, who had been a factory
worker for some years in Central New York, became the chief officer of a
trade assembly of nine hundred and twenty-seven women. Later, in 1886,
she was elected a delegate to the general assembly, by which she was
commissioned “to go forth and educate her sister working-women and the
public generally as to their needs and necessities.”
The open declaration of this powerful organization,—that women possessed
equal rights with men,—showed, as much as anything else, the advance of
public sentiment in regard to women. Its educational influence extended
outside the ranks of the order. Most of the women members were drawn
from the employees in factories producing clothing, textile fabrics,
food, tobacco, etc., and from the trades of typography, telegraphy, and
stenography. In the mixed local assemblies women have an equal chance
with men to express their views upon subjects bearing on the labor
question. And even where women sat quiet, as most frequently happened,
without taking share in the debates, one of the valuable purposes of the
order was said to be served by the information and larger views which
came to them through these discussions. In assemblies composed entirely
of women, of whom not one, perhaps, could boast of more than a minor
part of a common school education, ideas were advanced for their
financial as well as educational benefit. Factory operatives, coming
under their influence, became shareholders in co-operative concerns.
Co-operative shirt factories, conducted solely by women, were
established in Baltimore and New York. A co-operative knitting mill was
set up at Little Falls, N. Y., while other co-operative industries
throughout the land came, through co-operative principles, into the
possession of the workers. A co-operative tailoring establishment in
Chicago had its rise in the lock-out of a few factory girls who attended
a labor parade without permission. With the luck that comes with pluck,
they became possessed of $400, through soliciting subscriptions. With
this they went into business and succeeded. It is claimed, that inside
of nine months they had done $36,000 worth of business, besides having
the gratification of being their own employers.
This departure from the custom prevailing among the proletariat to sell
their services for wage-hire, was due largely to the demand made in the
nineteenth plank of the platform of the Knights of Labor for the
abolition of the wage system and a national system of co-operation in
lieu thereof. The insertion of such a demand proved the founders of the
order to have been thinkers radical enough to go a step beyond the old
idea of trades organizations with their petty notions of each trade
working solely in its own interests. In comparison with the broad and
lofty conception of the Knights of Labor, which sought to include in its
benefits all women and men engaged in every department of industrial
work, other organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor,
which is a mere rope of sand, showed themselves away in the rear-guard
of progressive civilization by placing themselves solely on the old
competitive and selfish trades union basis.
The next largest organization that took women into its body on terms of
equality was “The Granger Association of Western Farmers.”[179] Founded
in 1870, this association of the agriculturists of the country proposed
to do for women on the farms what the societies had done for them in the
other industries. They formulated as a principle “that no Grange should
be organized, or exist, without women.” This act was held to be the
emancipation of women on the farms, as that of the Knight of Labor had
been in the trades. In their public meetings, women were invited to take
part in the discussions of plans for mutual benefit, for usefulness and
culture. The principles of co-operation, which brought them together,
extended to the buying of all descriptions of goods in bulk. This, by
increasing the purchasing power of limited incomes, increased the
comforts and attractions of homes that would otherwise have been
deprived of them. The women who entered the Granges held a conspicuous
place in the national census of agricultural operators and producers of
national wealth. They were engaged in the farm labors of milking, making
butter and cheese, raising poultry, preserving eggs, and gathering honey
for market and home consumption. Vegetable gardens, fruit orchards,
viticulture, berry plants, and shrubs of many millions’ value were
largely attended to by them; while planting, weeding, haying,
harvesting, tilling the soil, and caring for live-stock were rapidly
added to the list of women’s occupations on the farm. To bring a new
brightness into the lives of these toilers was an avowed object of the
Grange. It proposed, by bringing men and women together with communities
of interests, to effect a great moral and social good, and thus elevate
them from slaves and drudges into a “better and higher manhood and
womanhood.”
As “the thoughts of men were widened by the processes of the suns,” the
idea gained ground that if organization was good for women in one
direction, it might be good in all. Men began, about 1884, to receive
women into their trades’ unions, and a few energetic women in various
States started working-women’s unions that comprised the members of
different trades. The Cigar and Typographical Unions were among the
first to admit women into their bodies. The Cigar-Makers’ Union of
Denver, a branch of the International Cigar-Makers’ Union, admitted
women to membership and made no distinction on account of color. Through
the efforts of the union, the hours of labor were reduced from ten to
eight, and the rate of wages, as they expressed it, “raised from a mere
pittance to respectable living wages.” Typographical unions were much
praised for their gallantry in forcing employers to agree to their terms
of “Equal work, equal pay, equal terms of apprenticeship for both
sexes.” This chivalric aspect was somewhat dimmed by the refusal
afterward of some union men to work in the same offices with women.
Employers were frequently given the option of choosing between having
all men or all women at the cases, and the struggle usually ended in
favor of the men. How this worked to the disadvantage of women can be
seen by referring to the California Bureau of Labor Statistics for 1889,
where the statement is that the book and job printing houses in San
Francisco employing union help had only three women in three separate
printing establishments as against one hundred and nineteen men; while
in the non-union, the proportion was forty-eight women against
eighty-five men. Since the investigations of the Bureau, the number of
union women employed is said to be “much increased.” This in regard to
wages means a great deal to women, as the unions have a fixed scale
which ranges from eighteen to thirty dollars for week or time work. In
one of the largest printing establishments in San Francisco, women
compositors not in the unions received as wages nine dollars per week as
against fifteen dollars for men; proof-readers, nine dollars against
eighteen dollars for men. Forewomen and foremen were paid in the same
ratio. Discrepancies like these, of fifty per cent. difference in the
wages of women, because they were women, proved the value of an
association that insisted upon the justice of “equal pay for equal
work.”
Trade organizations composed exclusively of women were instituted
timidly and tentatively in the large cities.[180] Though protective
rather than educational, the instruction given in the few trades unions
established by and for women possessed a very broadening character. Able
speakers, frequenting the meetings, familiarized the members with the
economic theories advanced as to the value of the co-operative
principle, the duties owed by the strong to the weak, and the
correlation between woman’s best interests and the interests of the
State. The experience of the trades unions proved the absurd fallacy of
the time-worn objection against women’s guilds, “that it would unsex
them,” for the effect of their organizations was to make their members
more unselfish and more womanly, more apt to think of the good of all
than of a part, and, through the importance of being one of a large body
working for some common weal, less inclined to frivolous ends.
To wage-working women, one important practical result of labor
combinations was the concession made by legislators, through fear of
losing the labor vote, to the demand for Bureaus of Labor Statistics,
which should show the actual condition of men and women engaged in any
and every department of labor. Massachusetts, always first in the field
of reform, established such a bureau of labor statistics in 1869. Other
States followed slowly in her wake. By 1887 twenty-two States had
recognized the importance of having similar bureaus. Among them was “the
Department of Labor,” instituted in Washington in 1885, for the purpose
of doing collectively for the whole people what the individual States
were to accomplish separately. When the Massachusetts Labor Bureau went
into operation, its chief, General Henry K. Oliver, a man of liberal
views, endeavored to ascertain the conditions under which industrial
women worked. The means employed were:
I. Personal investigation.
II. Distribution of printed forms with blanks for employed and employers
to fill.
III. Summons to witnesses from the employed and employing classes to
testify.
IV. Soliciting information through correspondence.
Through the recommendation of ladies interested in the question of
ascertaining the conditions of working-women, General Oliver associated
one of their own sex, Miss Adeline Bryant, with the work of the bureau.
In the third year of the bureau’s existence five women were placed on
the staff of helpers. The precedent set by Massachusetts of employing
women as investigators was followed in turn by the other State bureaus
and by the “Department of Labor” at Washington.
The investigations of the bureau of 1869 covered the thirty-five
industries in which the working-women of Massachusetts were then
engaged. Published in 1870, the report of the bureau corroborated the
accounts given by the press of that year concerning the low wages, long
hours of work, and miserable state of living that was the lot of the
wage-earning women in the manufacturing towns of Massachusetts. General
Oliver himself assisted in the personal investigation carried on in
Boston. Accompanied by the Chief of Police, he visited the homes of
“poor-paid laborers,”—women and men,—and found that the homes of the
laborers are a pretty accurate index of the social, industrial,
sanitary, educational, and moral standard of the laborers themselves.
The result of his work was a recommendation for further and more
thorough research. “Such investigations,” he said, “will reveal a state
of things at which the people of Massachusetts will gaze with amazement,
disgust, and anger, and demand a bettering of the wrong.”
Investigations by blanks and by summons to witnesses was less successful
than the personal interview. The mass of the people were ignorant of
what the bureau sought to accomplish by their questions; hence not more
than twenty per cent. of the employers and thirty-three per cent. of the
employed addressed returned replies. A dread on the part of
manufacturers and shopkeepers, lest “out of their own mouths they should
be condemned,” prevented them from answering, and those under them were
restrained to silence through fear of losing employment. In spite of the
risk, courageous women replied to the blanks and gave personal testimony
sufficient to enable the commission to form a partial estimate of the
social and economic conditions of the whole. The statistics presented by
the bureau were said to have reached “the very verge of human society.”
Said Mrs. Atkinson, speaking of the reports on the working-women, “The
stern fact, the thrilling incident, the woeful spectacle, the harrowing
sight of squalor and wretchedness are marshaled before our eyes in a
great and terrible array.” The subjects investigated were: Housework,
Hotel and Saloon work, Home work, Store work. Under the Home work was
classified sale work; under Store work, clerks, accountants, saleswomen,
and cash girls. All that could be found out concerning women in these
employments was printed and presented by General Oliver to the
Legislature and to the public, without any of the softening touches
common to later reports.