wage-earning women was made in 1884, at the instigation of Mr. Carroll
D. Wright, who, in 1874, had superseded General Oliver as chief of the
Massachusetts Bureau. The research undertaken by Mr. Wright had for its
object the ascertainment of the “moral, sanitary, physical, and
economical” condition of all wage-earning women in Boston, except those
employed in domestic service. This was a larger field than that covered
in 1869. Woman’s occupations had multiplied in the earlier year
five-fold over what they were in 1840, when, to Harriet Martineau’s
surprise, seven vocations, outside of housework, were all into which the
women of the United States had entered. In 1884 they were more than ten
times seven. Methods of working had also become more difficult to
classify. One by one domestic industries were relegated from the home to
the factory. And in most of these, what had been done by one person had
become differentiated into numerous parts, requiring the co-operation of
many workers. Thus, in the occupation of making men’s and women’s
clothing, there were classified in 1884 as many as 103 subdivisions.
Altogether, in the seventy distinct industries catalogued, there were
354 subdivisions of industries, and each one of these parts employed a
different set of workers. It was important that a number of
representative women should be interviewed in each of these departments;
for, even where each branch formed part of a distinct whole, each worker
in those branches had interests at variance with the others.
The force of women engaged in the industries of Boston had also
seemingly almost doubled in the five years from 1880 to 1885. Exclusive
of domestic service, the number of women in all other industries was
estimated in the United States census of 1880 at 20,000; in the
Massachusetts Census Report for 1885 at 39,647. With this apparent
doubling of the population, the amount distributed in wages had not
doubled, and so all that had been bad in the conditions of wage-earning
women in previous years was heightened because there was nothing to
relieve it. On account of all this, the appearance of the report of 1884
was anxiously looked for by large numbers of persons who had become
familiar with the line of work of the bureaus. Great, therefore, was the
public surprise at finding the whole report so biased in favor of the
law-making, shop-keeping, manufacturing class as to prove valueless as
an investigation into the condition of women dependent on wages for
their living. The statistical information it contained, although
arranged in the formidable manner common to the expert statistician,
needed no careful scrutiny of its figures to establish the truth of
Disraeli’s proposition that “nothing is so unreliable as facts, unless
it is figures.”
However, the work done by the Boston Bureau, although misleading in
itself, had the good effect of stimulating similar research in other
places. In the following year, 1885, the first part of the Third New
York Report was devoted to an investigation of the condition of the
working-women of New York City. It was estimated that in that year over
two hundred thousand women were employed in the various trades of that
city, exclusive of those in Brooklyn. The number of industries,
exclusive of domestic service, and without counting subdivisions, was
ninety. Scarcely any European city offered so wide and diversified a
field for inquiry as this; and yet the commissioner, Mr. Charles F.
Peck, claimed that, through lack of time, in place of any close and
searching inquiry “into special conditions of the effects of these
employments on the physical development of women and its relation to the
social, commercial, and industrial prosperity of the State,” he was
obliged to content himself “with a general survey, instead of that
minute and detailed examination which the subject would justify.”
Mr. Peck discovered, as his predecessors in Massachusetts had done, that
at all times the questions involved in the conditions of working-women
resolved themselves into those of “wages, hours, health, and morals.”
With regard to the first, he found that the wages of women, as a rule,
were, in 1885 as in 1869, less than one-half that obtained by men,—the
remuneration being widely different even where the work performed was
the same. In those professions or trades in which women were organized,
and for equal work received equal pay with men,—as printers,
cigar-makers, and hatters,—the men themselves received very low pay. In
the tenement-house factories, the women engaged in cigar-making numbered
four thousand. These were employed in the branches paying the lowest
wages, as stripping and binding. For these, the pay seldom averaged $5
per week, and then was not steady the year round. The manufacturers gave
as reason for hiring so many women, “That they could get them for fifty
per cent. less than men.” Capmakers earned from $3 to $4.50 per week;
compositors all the way from $8 to $16 per week. One of the new branches
of work into which women had entered was that of polishing marble. The
manager of the Niagara Marble Works testified that they employed from
twenty-five to thirty women, whose wages averaged from $4.50 to $8 per
week, men getting for the same kind of work from $1.50 to $3 per day.
When asked if “they could get men to work for the same wages as women?”
the reply was, “Hardly, unless they were boys, and then they would not
be so skillful.”
But it was in the class of work that has always been called “woman’s
work” that the bureaus found the most beggarly wages paid. A
manufacturer of pants, vests, shirts, and overalls testified that he
gave from fifteen to thirty-five cents apiece for making vests;
seventy-five cents to $1.50 per dozen for shirts, and from twelve and a
half cents to twenty-five cents a pair for pants. Boy’s gingham waists,
with trimming on neck and sleeves, were paid for at the rate of two and
a half cents each. By working steadily at the machine from six o’clock
in the morning until one at night, the seamstress could make twenty-five
cents a day at this “shop work.” The inmates of several charitable
institutions in the city were found by the commissioner crocheting
ladies’ shawls for twenty-five cents apiece. An expert, he was told,
could finish one in two days. This was all that the several Blanks & Co.
would pay, because competition for this kind of work was so great they
were able to get the work done for almost any price.[181] On woman’s
wear, the wages had been so reduced that it was alleged that a full
day’s work on a cloak brought from fifty to sixty cents. The visits of
the commissioner to some of the attic tenement-house rookeries, where
this work was carried on under the direction of “sweaters,” disclosed
numbers of cloak-makers working sixteen hours a day for fifty cents. In
those dens he saw stacks of cloaks piled on the floors ready to be sewn
together by women scantily clad, with hair unkempt, and whose pale,
abject countenances formed such pictures of physical suffering and want
as he trusted “he might never again be compelled to look upon.” The
style and quality of the cloaks upon which these women toiled were of
the latest and best. They were lined with quilted silk or satin and
trimmed with sealskin or other expensive material, and found ready sale
in the largest retail stores in the city at from thirty-five to
seventy-five dollars each.
To give some idea of how the cloak-makers lived on this pittance the
bureau gave a realistic engraving, done from a drawing taken on the
spot, in which it was endeavored to reproduce the outlines of one room
(as a sample exhibit of the rest) where six women sat at work under the
directions of sweaters. In size the room might possibly have measured
twelve by fourteen feet, and perhaps nine feet high. The atmosphere was
next to suffocating and dense with impurities. On one end of a table, at
which four of the women sat, was a dinner-pail partially filled with
soup (that is what they called it) and a loaf of well-seasoned bread.
These two courses, served with one spoon and one knife, satiated the
thirst and hunger of four working-women. In an adjoining side room,
without means for ventilation or light, the deadly sewer gas rose in
clouds from a sink. On the floor lay a mattress which partook in
appearance of the general filth found throughout the building. On this
mattress the cloak-makers, tired out by the long day’s work and faint
for want of food, threw themselves down and awaited the coming day’s
awful toil for bread. This, it was claimed, was neither a fanciful nor
exceptional picture; that a degree of want, misery, and degradation
existed among the working-women living in tenement houses next to
impossible to describe. “Certainly,” said the commissioner, “no words of
mine can convey to the public any adequate conception of the truly awful
condition of thousands of these suffering people. Formerly,” he wrote,
“Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ gave sentimental celebrity to the wrongs of
the sewing-women, but it is not the shirt (alone) now, but the woman’s
cloak and the man’s coat or pants that draw tears and groans from the
overdone sewing-woman.”
Testimony elicited as to the workers in some of the trades, particularly
tobacco, was even more revolting than that concerning the sewing-woman.
In the report, wood-cuts were given of rooms such as a large proportion
of cigar-makers worked, lived, ate, and slept in. “These people,” it was
said, “worked till twelve P. M. or one o’clock A. M., then slept by the
machine a few hours, and commenced work again.” The description of women
sitting “surrounded by filth, with children waddling in it, whose hands,
faces, and bodies were covered with sores,” were sickening. Cankerous
sores were “even on the lips of the workers, they all the time handling
the tobacco that was made into cigars.” In the scale of sanitary
conditions of homes and workrooms, the cigar-makers were among the
lowest. Of bunch-makers and rollers, who replied to the questions of the
sanitary condition of their homes, but two out of 118 answered, “good.”
All of the rest wrote, “bad,” “very bad,” the “worst you ever saw,”
“miserable,” and “poor.” As to their workrooms, out of one hundred and
thirty, one hundred and three were without means for free circulation of
air. _One_ only possessed no offensive odors. The unhealthfulness of the
workrooms of the cigar-makers, the coat-makers, the tailoresses, and the
cloak-makers was about the same. Among this latter class of seamstresses
38 out of 41 answered that their surroundings were very offensive
through being “near offensive stables.” The order of the day was,
“general filth, water-closets, bad sewerage, dirty neighborhoods,
overcrowding, and poor ventilation.” Similar complaints came from
compositors in printing-offices, women in type-foundries, kid-glove
sewers, carpet-factory operators, and silk weavers.
While in many of the large factories the sanitary conditions were good
and proper, ventilation being secured,—when it did not interfere with
the work carried on,—there were other features that if less injurious to
health were quite as objectionable to the wage-worker. In the carpet and
silk factories, women were obliged to stand all day, as, though seats
were provided in many instances, fines were exacted from those using
them. It was the same with washing facilities; women employed in silk
establishments in weaving light-colored or white silks were fined as
high as fifty cents for washing their hands, and fines were also imposed
if spots got on the goods. Women testified that they were fined “if
discovered reading a letter, or a paper, or spoke to one another.” The
proprietor of one of these factories stated that the fines he collected
in this way he gave away in “charity,” and, “That five dollars a week
was enough for a girl to live on.” In some carpet factories the system
of fines was even more excessive. Women were docked as much as five
dollars if any accident happened to the machinery, which they were
compelled to clean while it was in motion. In one mill, they were “not
allowed to talk to one another during working hours or at noon, under
penalty of being docked or discharged.” The fine in some places for
being five minutes late was twenty-five cents, while a half-hour
over-time was exacted. How disproportionate this punishment was is
evident; those women who were fined at the rate of thirty dollars per
day, were being paid at the rate of eight cents an hour. When women were
not fined for being five minutes behind time, they were “locked out” for
two hours. These were the hands employed on piece work, and the loss of
two hours made, as it was intended, a large hole in the day’s earnings.
In most cases it was claimed that the amount of fines exacted was
optional with the foreman or superintendent, and that frequently they
were so excessive as to affect the whole pay of employees for weeks
ahead.
The tyranny of the strong and powerful over the weak and helpless,—which
found expression in the exaction of fines from those who were termed
variously “white slaves,” “slave girls,” “prisoners of poverty,”
etc.,—existed in another form in the long hours of labor demanded by the
Legrees of the industrial world from the wage-working women. While in
many factories the legal limit of sixty hours per week for minors, and
women under twenty-one, was observed, there were grave and numerous
exceptions to this rule among tobacco-workers, seamstresses, bakery
employees, etc., etc. In the cigar factories, the great majority of
bunch-makers and rollers, whether employed at home or in the factory
proper, were worked fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and even eighteen hours
a day. Operatives on clothing worked from nine to sixteen hours per day.
In the collar, cuff, and shirt-making factories in Troy, as well as the
laundries in that place, the hours were uniformly ten, and in New York
from eight to twelve. Milliners worked nine hours in factories and from
fourteen to sixteen at home. Feather-workers in factories nine to ten.
Operatives on ladies’ underwear eight to ten in factories; twelve to
fourteen hours at home. While this made a good showing for the factories
engaged in these industries, it must be remembered that much of the work
quoted as done “_at home_” was only a continuation of factory labor, as
work was in many cases taken home from these, either to supplement the
day’s earnings, or to oblige (?) employers, who withheld extra
compensation for the extra work exacted. In occupations requiring a
different kind of skill, or impossible at home, the hours were found to
be sometimes less than the legal limit. Those for compositors were from
eight to ten. Type-foundry operatives, seven and a half to nine.
Stenographers, telegraphers, and typewriters, from five and a half to
six, seven, and eight. Saleswomen, again, worked many hours over-time in
all except the largest houses, and during the holiday season these
largest stores were no longer exceptions. In fancy-goods stores,
millinery shops, bakeries, candy stores, etc., etc., no limit was placed
through the holidays,—that were in no sense holidays to
employees,—except the limit of physical endurance. In return no portion
of the extra profit this extra work brought was shared by proprietors
with their overtaxed employees.
Economically speaking, the worst of all the evils society perpetrated
against the working-women was that of forcing her into long hours of
continuous labor; for, whether standing at the looms and in the stores,
or sitting at the sewing-machine, specific diseases of the sexual organs
were induced, causing marriage to be followed by miscarriage or sickly
children. No original statistics were collected by the bureau to show
how far the health and morals of women engaged in industries were
affected by their employments, and what relation this influence exerted
in reference to woman’s position in the State. While this prevented the
report from being of full service to the political economist, to the
historian its pages were valuable as forming a succession of _genre_
pictures, otherwise unattainable, of the proletarian women, as they
lived, labored, and suffered in New York City in 1885.
An epidemic of investigation into women’s condition as wage-workers
followed the New York report. Five States—Maine, California, Colorado,
Iowa, and Minnesota—prepared separate chapters on the subject of the
working-women for their Bureaus of Labor Statistics for 1887–1888. In
New Jersey, although no original investigation was made by the State,
the bureau reprinted in 1887 a large portion of an excellent report on
“Woman’s Work and Wages,” gathered by Mrs. Barry in 1886 by order of the
Knights of Labor. The latest, and what should have been the best report,
was a national research into the social and economic environments of
wage-earning women in twenty-two of the largest and most representative
cities in the United States. This investigation, conducted under the
auspices of the Central Bureau at Washington, comprehended statistics
gained through interviewing and questioning personally 17,427 women
engaged in industrial pursuits. Undertaken in 1888, this national report
was printed in 1889, under the title of “Working-women in Large Cities.”
It formed a volume of 631 pages, mostly statistical tables, framed so as
to seem to cover the most important points concerning women as
industrial workers.
To two grades of readers these bureau publications were most welcome.
First, to the more intelligent among the working-class, “in whose humble
cabins,” it was said,[182] “complete sets of Bureau Reports could be
found preserved in calico covers having as many colors as ‘Joseph’s
coat,’ and presenting as much evidence of constant use as the old-time
spelling-book in a country school-house that was passed from scholar to
scholar until it has made the round of the school.” Second, to the
students of sociology, who pored over their pages, hoping to gain clear
ideas of what was going on in the working world of men and women.
Excellent though they were, these reports were nevertheless
disappointing, at least as far as they related to facts concerning
woman’s industrial position. The first and greatest disappointment for
readers was the fact that the number of wage-earning women interviewed
in any one place by the bureau agents was too small to give even an
approximate idea of the whole; e. g. the statistical tables of all
industries for New York City were founded on the testimony alone of 2984
women, while at that period (1889) the number of wage-earning women in
that city and Brooklyn was estimated at 300,000.(?) As this method of
taking one per cent. of the population of women as a guide by which to
estimate the conditions of all the others prevailed everywhere,
conclusions drawn from the presented statistics were, of necessity,
vitiated. To a certain extent they had to be accepted with allowance.
With all that this limitation implies, the bureau statistics are,
nevertheless, interesting as comprising the best data we have on which
to base assumptions of the industrial status of wage-earning women. In
regard to wages, the conclusions, though obviously inexact, still show
plainly enough that wages were regulated everywhere by the prices of
rent and food, and that only so much was paid as would keep life in the
worker. In the appended table, taken from the National Report for 1889,
it will be seen that in the South, where living is comparatively cheap,
wages are lower than in the West, where life’s necessaries come higher.
In the East they are a mean between the two.
AVERAGE WEEKLY EARNINGS, BY CITIES.
═════════════╤════════════════════════
CITIES. │AVERAGE WEEKLY EARNINGS.
─────────────┼────────────────────────
Atlanta │ $4.05
Baltimore │ 4.18
Boston │ 5.64
Brooklyn │ 5.76
Buffalo │ 4.27
Charleston │ 4.22
Chicago │ 5.74
Cincinnati │ 4.59
Cleveland │ 4.63
Indianapolis │ 4.67
Louisville. │ 4.51
Newark │ 5.10
New Orleans │ 4.31
New York │ 5.85
Philadelphia │ 5.34
Providence │ 5.51
Richmond │ 3.93
St. Louis │ 5.19
St. Paul │ 6.02
San Francisco│ 6.91
San Jose │ 6.11
Savannah │ 4.99
│ ————
All Cities │ $5.24
─────────────┴────────────────────────
In the 343 industries named in this report, for 1889, it will be seen
that the conditions under which women gained their livelihood had not
been bettered, and that, on the contrary, the testimony as published in
the other State reports disclosed a state of affairs similar to that
which Engels[183] described as existing among the same class of laboring
women in England in 1844. Nothing worse can be found in any of Engels’
descriptions than the following account (given in the New Jersey Report
for 1887–1888) of the tyranny practiced upon the linen thread spinners
of Paterson: “In one branch of this industry,” it is said, “women are
compelled to stand on a stone floor in water the year round, most of the
time barefoot, with a spray of water from a revolving cylinder flying
constantly against the breast; and the coldest night in winter, as well
as the warmest in summer, these poor creatures must go to their homes
with water dripping from their underclothing along their path, because
there could not be space or a few moments allowed them wherein to change
their clothing.”[184] Another account, which calls up the experiences at
Leeds and Lancaster in 1844, is taken from the Wisconsin Report for
1888. In the prosperous city of Janesville, in that highly favored State
described as a paradise for workers, the report tells of a factory “in
which some three hundred women and children are employed, who work
eleven and a half to twelve hours per day and night, the night being the
time most of the children are employed.” Although eight hours is the
legal working day in Wisconsin, and fourteen years the age limit at
which children may be employed, “many of the children are under fourteen
years of age, and all have to work eleven and a half hours.” The
thermometer averages, in the heated season, about 108 degrees ... and
loss of health follows women by reason “of the intense heat at night and
insufficient sleep in the day-time.”
These by no means exceptional cases show how conditions of work for
laboring women were increasing in intensity in the United States. That
they were becoming worse in other ways was evidenced in New England
manufacturing towns, where employment of women and children as the
cheaper wage-taking element was gradually extinguishing the male
operative.[185] In the manufacturing towns of Fall River, Lawrence,
Lowell, etc., the family life was so demoralized that men were obliged
to be supported in idleness by mothers, wives, or sisters or children,
because no work was to be had for them in the mills. It was said that
some of these men, displaced by the light-running machinery that a
child’s hand might guide, remained at home and did the housework and
minded the children, while the women went forth as the bread-winners;
others, less patient, took to loafing, and ended generally in prisons.
“This,” as Engels termed it, “insane state of things” affected all
unfavorably. Women learned to care so little for themselves that it was
said “a girl in Fall River comes out of the mill with bare feet and a
shawl thrown over her head, and all she cares for is a loaf of bread and
a mug of beer.” Children, going too early into the mills, were
corrupted, morally and physically; yet mothers, unable from their own
slender wages to support the family, were tempted to swear “false oaths
in regard to their children’s ages, so as to get them into the mills and
thus make more money.”