THE COLORED WOMAN AS A BREAD WINNER
The life of the Negro woman of New York, if she belong to the laboring
class, differs in some important respects from the life of the white
laboring woman. Generalizations on so comprehensive a subject must, of
course, meet with many exceptions, but the observing visitor, familiar
with white and colored neighborhoods, quickly notes marked contrasts
between the two, contrasts largely the result of different occupational
opportunities. These pertain both to the married woman and the unmarried
working girl.
The generality of white women in New York, wives of laboring men,
infrequently engage in gainful occupations. In the early years of
married life the wife relies on her husband's wage for support, and
within her tiny tenement-flat bears and rears her children and performs
her household duties--the sewing, cooking, washing, and ironing, and the
daily righting of the contracted rooms. She is a conscientious wife and
mother, and rarely, either by night or by day, journeys far from her own
home. When unemployment visits the family wage earner, she turns to
laundry work and day's cleaning for money to meet the rent and to supply
the household with scanty meals; but as soon as her husband resumes work
she returns to her narrow round of domestic duties.
After a score of these monotonous years more prosperous times come to
the housewife. Every morning two or three children go out to work, and
their wages make heavier the family purse. Son and daughter, having
entered factory or store, bring home their pay envelopes unbroken on
Saturday nights, and the augmentation of the father's wage gives the
mother an income to administer. After the young people's wants in
clothing and entertainment have been in part supplied, it becomes
possible to buy new furniture on the instalment plan, to hire a piano,
even to move into a better neighborhood. The earnings of a number of
children, supplementing the wage of the head of the family, make life
more tolerable for all.
These days, however, do not last long. Sons and daughters marry and
assume new responsibilities; the husband, his best strength gone, finds
unemployment increasing; and since saving, except for wasteful
industrial insurance, has seemed impossible without sacrificing the
decencies and pleasures of the children, the end of the woman's married
life is likely to be hard and comfortless.
This rough description may fairly be taken to represent the life of the
average New York white woman of the laboring class. It is not, however,
the life of the average colored woman. With her, self-sustaining work
usually begins at fifteen, and by no means ceases with her entrance upon
marriage, which only entails new financial burdens. The wage of the
husband, as we have seen, is usually insufficient to support a family,
save in extreme penury, and the wife accepts the necessity of
supplementing the husband's income. This she accomplishes by taking in
washing or by entering a private family to do housework. Sometimes she
is away from her tenement nearly every day in the week; again the bulk
of her earnings comes from home industry. Her day holds more diversity
than that of her white neighbor; she meets more people, becomes familiar
with the ways of the well-to-do,--their household decorations, their
dress, their refinements of manner; but she has but few hours to give to
her children. With her husband she is ready to be friend and helpmate;
but should he turn out a bad bargain, she has no fear of leaving him,
since her marital relations are not welded by economic dependence. An
industrious, competent woman, she works and spends, and in her scant
hours of leisure takes pride in keeping her children well-dressed and
clean.
At the second period of her married life, when her boys and girls, few
in number if she be a New Yorker, begin to engage in self-supporting
work, her condition shows less improvement than that of the white woman
of her class. Sometimes her children hand her their whole wage, far
oftener they bring her only such part as they choose to spare. The
strict accounting of the minor to the parent, usual among Northerners in
the past, and today common among the immigrant class, is not a part of
the Negro's training. Rather, as the race has attained freedom it has
copied the indulgent attitude of the once familiar "master," and regrets
that its offspring must enter upon any work. Children with this
tradition about them use the money they earn largely for the
gratification of their vanity, not for the lessening of their mother's
tasks. But a more potent factor than lack of discipline keeps the mother
from being the administrator of the family's joint earnings. White boys
and girls in New York enter work that makes it possible and advantageous
for them to dwell at home; Negroes must go out to service, accept long
and irregular hours in hotel or apartment, travel for days on boat or
train. The family home is infrequently available to them, and money
given in to it brings small return. Under these circumstances it is not
strange if the mother must continue her round of washing and scrubbing.
The last years of life of the Negro woman, probably a little more than
the last years of the white, are likely to bring happiness. With a
mother at work a grandmother becomes an important factor, and elderly
colored women are often seen bringing up little children or helping in
the laundry--that great colored home industry. Accustomed all their
lives to hard labor, it is easy for them to find work that shall repay
their support, and in their children's households they are treated with
respect and consideration.
The contrast in the lives of the colored and white married women is not
more strongly marked than the contrast in the lives of their unmarried
daughters and sisters. Unable to enter any pursuit except housework, the
unskilled colored girl goes out to service or helps at home with the
laundry or sewing. Factory and store are closed to her, and rarely can
she take a place among other working girls. Her hours are the long,
irregular hours of domestic service. She brings no pay envelope home to
her mother, the two then carefully discussing how much belongs
rightfully for board, and how much may go for the new coat or dress,
but takes the eighteen or twenty dollars given her at the end of the
month, and quite by herself determines all her expenditures. Far oftener
than any class of white girls in the city she lives away from the
parental home.
These are some of the differences found by the observer who looks into
the Negro and the white tenement. They need not, however, rest alone
upon any observer's testimony. We have in the census abundant statistics
for their verification. Scattered among the volumes on Population,
Occupations, and Women at Work are many facts concerning Negro women
workers of New York, all of them confirmatory of the description just
given. We may note the most important.
In 1900, whereas 4.2 per cent of the white married women in New York
were engaged in gainful occupations, 31.4 per cent of the Negro married
women were earning their living, over seven times as many in proportion
as the whites.[1]
Again, in the total population of New York's women workers, 80 per cent
were single, 10 per cent married, and 10 per cent widowed and divorced;
while among the Negroes, the single women were only 53 per cent, the
married 25 per cent, and the widowed 22.[2]
Statistics of the age period at which women are at work, show the
Negro's long continuing wage-earning activity. Between sixteen and
twenty is a busy time for the women of both races. Among the whites 59
per cent are in gainful occupations, among the Negroes 66 per cent. But
as the girl arrives at the period when she is likely to marry, the per
cent of workers among the whites drops rapidly, until for white women,
forty-five and over, it is 13.5, about one in seven. With the colored,
among the women forty-five years of age and over, 53 per cent, more
than half, still engage in gainful toil.[3]
Family life can be studied in the census table. While 59 per cent of the
unmarried white girls at work live at home, this is found to be true
of but 25 per cent of the colored girls; that is, 75 per cent,
three-quarters of all the colored unmarried working women, live with
their employers or board.[4]
The census volume on occupations reveals at once the narrow range of the
New York colored woman's working life. Personal and domestic service
absorbs 90 per cent of her numbers against 40 per cent among the white.
But before considering more fully the colored girl at work, we need to
notice another statistical fact, the preponderance in the city of Negro
women over Negro men.
Like the foreigner, the youth of the Negro race comes first to the city
to seek a livelihood. The colored population shows 41 per cent of its
number between the ages of 20 and 35. But unlike the foreigner, the
Negro women find larger opportunity and come in greater numbers than the
men. Their range of work is narrow, but within it they can command
double the wages they receive at home, and if they are possessed of
average ability, they are seldom long out of work. With the immense
growth of wealth in New York the demand for servants continually
increases, and finding little response from the white native born
population, many mistresses receive readily the services of the
English-speaking southern and West Indian blacks. So the boats from
Charleston and Norfolk and the British West Indies bring scores and
hundreds of Negro women from country districts, from cities where they
have spent a short time at service, girls with and girls without
experience, all seeking better wages in a new land.
Mr. Kelly Miller was the first to call attention to the presence in
American cities of surplus Negro women.[5] The phenomenon is not
peculiar to New York. Baltimore, Washington, New Orleans, all show the
same condition. In Atlanta the women number 143 to every hundred colored
men. New York shows 123 to every masculine one hundred. These surplus
women account in part for the number of Negro women workers in New York
not living at home. Some are with their employers, but others lodge in
the already crowded tenements, for the southern servant, unaccustomed to
spending the night at her employer's, in New York also, frequently
arranges to leave her mistress when her work is done. In their hours of
leisure the surplus women are known to play havoc with their neighbors'
sons, even with their neighbors' husbands, for since lack of men makes
marriage impossible for about a fifth of New York's colored girls,
social disorder results. Surplus Negro women, able to secure work,
support idle, able-bodied Negro men. The lounger at the street corner,
the dandy in the parlor thrumming on his banjo, means a Malindy of the
hour at the kitchen washboard. In a town in Germany, where men were
sadly scarce, I was told that a servant girl paid as high as a mark to
a soldier to walk with her in the Hofgarten on a Sunday afternoon.
Colored men in New York command their "mark," and girls are found who
keep them in polished boots, fashionable coats, and well-creased
trousers. Could the Negro country boy be as certain as his sister of
lucrative employment in New York, or could he oftener persuade her to
remain with him on the farm, he would better city civilization. But the
demand for servants increases, and the colored girl continues to be
attracted to the city where she can earn and spend.
The table on the following page shows in condensed form the occupations
of the Negro women in New York. As we see, the Negro women number
forty-four in every thousand women workers.
FEMALES TEN YEARS OF AGE AND OVER, ENGAGED IN GAINFUL OCCUPATIONS IN
NEW YORK
============================================================
| | | Number to
| Total | Negro | every 1000
| | | workers
----------------------------+---------+--------+------------
Professional service | 22,422 | 281 | 12
| | |
Domestic and personal | | |
service | 146,722 | 14,586 | 100
Laundresses | 16,102 | 3,224 | 200
Servants and waitresses | 103,963 | 10,297 | 99
All others | 24,657 | 1,065 | 43
| | |
Trade and transportation | 65,318 | 106 | Between one
| | | and two
Manufacturing and | | |
mechanical pursuits | 132,535 | 1,138 | 7
Dressmakers | 37,514 | 813 | 22
Seamstresses | 18,108 | 249 | 14
All others | 76,913 | 76 | 1
| | |
Total including some | | |
occupations not specified | 367,437 | 16,114 | 44
============================================================
Federal Census 1900: Occupations, Table 43, p. 638
Ninety per cent of all the Negro women workers of New York are in
domestic and personal service. This includes a variety of positions.
Some Negro girls work in stores, dusting stock, taking charge of cloak
or toilet rooms, scrubbing floors. Their hours are regular, but the pay,
five or six, or very occasionally eight dollars a week, means a scanty
livelihood without hope of advancement. The position of maid in a
theatre where perquisites are larger is prized, and a new and pleasant
place is that of a maid on a limited train. But the bulk of the girls
are servants in boarding-houses, or are with private families as nurses,
waitresses, cooks, laundresses, maids-of-all-work, earning from sixteen
and eighteen to twenty-five and even thirty dollars a month.
Occasionally a very skilful cook can command as high a monthly wage as
fifty dollars.
The colored girl is frequently found engaged at general housework in a
small apartment. Her desire to return to her lodging at night makes her
popular with families living in contracted space. With the conveniences
of a New York flat, dumb-waiter, clothes-dryer, gas, and electricity,
general housework is not severe. Work begins early, seven at the latest,
and lasts until the dinner is cleared away, at half-past eight or nine.
Released then from further tasks, the young girl goes to her tiny inner
tenement room, dons a fresh dress, and then, as chance or her training
determines, walks the streets, goes to the theatre, or attends the class
meeting at her church. Entertainments among the Negroes are rarely under
way until ten o'clock, and short hours of sleep in ill-ventilated rooms
soon weaken the vitality of the new-comer. Housework under these
conditions does not create much ambition; the mistress moves, flitting,
in New York fashion, from one flat to another, and the girl also flits
among employers, changing with the whim of the moment.
Few subjects present so fascinating a field for discussion as domestic
service, and the housewife of today enters into it with energy,
sometimes decrying the modern working girl, again planning household
economics that shall lure her from factory or shop. The only point we
need to consider now is the dissatisfaction that results when 64 per
cent of the women of a race are forced by circumstances into one
occupation. Those with native ability along this line succeed and make
others and themselves happy. The faithful, patient, loyal Negro servant
is well-known, the black mammy has passed into American literature, but
not every colored woman can wisely be given this position. Some of the
Negro girls who take up housework in New York are capable of more
intelligent labor, and chafe under their limitations; others have not
the ability to do good housework; for domestic service requires more
mental capacity than is demanded in many factories. In short, a great
many colored girls in New York are round pegs in square holes, and the
community is the loser by it.
Among these round pegs are girls who, determining no longer to drudge in
lonely kitchens, contrive, as we shall see later, to find positions at
other more attractive reputable work. Others, deciding in favor of
material betterment at whatever cost, lower their moral standard and
secure easier and more remunerative jobs. A well-paying place, with
short hours and high tips, at once offers itself to the colored girl who
is willing to work for a woman of the demi-monde. In the sporting house
also she is preferred as a servant, her dark complexion separating her
from other inmates. In 1858, Sanger wrote in his "History of
Prostitution," "The servants (in these houses) are almost always colored
women. Their wages are liberal, their perquisites considerable, and
their work light." Untrained herself, bereft of home influence, with an
ancestry that sometimes cries out her parent's weakness in the contour
and color of her face, the Negro girl in New York, more even than the
foreign immigrant, is subject to degrading temptation. The good people,
who are often so exacting, want her for her willingness to work long
hours at a lower wage than the white; and the bad people, who are often
so carelessly kind, offer her light labor and generous pay. It is small
wonder that she sometimes chooses the latter.
Not all the colored girls who work in questionable places and with
questionable people take the jobs from choice; some are sent without
knowing the character of the house they enter. A few years ago an
agitation was started for the protection of helpless Negro immigrants
who had fallen into the hands of unscrupulous employment agencies. A
system existed, and still exists, by which employment agencies were able
to advance the travelling expenses of southern girls, who on their
arrival in New York were held in debt until the cost of the journey had
been many times repaid. Helpless in the power of the agent, the
new-comer was forced to work where he wished. Under the city's
department of licenses some of the more unscrupulous of these agencies
have been closed, and philanthropy has placed a visitor at the docks to
give aid and advice to unprotected girls. But the danger is by no means
over. Those familiar with the subject assert that there is a
proportionately larger black slave than white slave traffic.
There is a gainful occupation for women, black and white, too important
to be left unnoticed. The census does not tabulate it. The best people
strive to ignore it, and carefully sheltered girls grow up unconscious
of its existence. But the employment agent understands its commercial
value, and little children in the red light neighborhood are as familiar
with it as with the vending of peanuts on the street. To the poor it is
always an open door affording at least a temporary respite from
dispossession and starvation. How many of the colored turn to it, we do
not know--certainly not a few. Some gain from it a meagre livelihood,
but others, for a time at least, achieve comfort and even luxury.
Among the round pegs that the square holes so uncomfortably chafe are
colored girls of intelligence and charm who deliberately join the
anti-social class. Probably a few in any case would lead this life, but
the history of many shows an unsuccessful struggle for congenial work,
ending with a choice of material comfort however high the moral cost. In
One Hundred and Thirty-fourth and One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Streets
are apartments where such girls live, two or three together, surrounded
by comforts that their respectable neighbors who go out to cook, wash,
and iron may fruitlessly long for all their lives. A colored
philanthropic worker, stopping by chance at the door of one of these
places, saw an old college friend. "How can you do it!" she cried as she
recognized the life the girl was leading, "How can you do it! I would
rather kill myself scrubbing!" "There is the difference between us,"
came the answer, "I am not willing to die, and I cannot and will not
scrub."
It is pleasant and encouraging to turn from colored women who have given
up the struggle, to ambitious, successful workers. Some among these are
in the domestic service group and enjoy with heartiness their tasks as
nurse-maid or cook. "This is my piano day," an expert colored
washerwoman says of a Monday morning. Among the domestic service
workers, as classified by the census, is the trained nurse, filling an
increasingly important position in New York. In 1909, Lincoln Hospital
graduated twenty-one colored nurses, some of whom remain in New York to
do excellent work.
In the professions, with the women as with the men, the first place
numerically is occupied by performers upon the stage. So much has been
said of the Negro as an actor that there is little to add. A rather
better class of colored than of white women join musical comedy chorus
troupes, for fifteen or eighteen dollars a week that will attract a
Negro to the stage can be made by a white girl in a dozen other ways.
Lightness of color seems a requisite for a stage position, unless a dark
skin is offset by very great ability, as in the case of Aida Walker, one
of the most graceful and charming women in musical comedy.
No record is kept of the number of colored teachers in the city's public
schools, but each year Negro graduates from the normal college secure
positions. These are found from the kindergarten through the primary
and up to the highest grammar grade. The colored girl with intellectual
ability, particularly if she comes of an old New York family, is apt to
turn to teaching. Her novitiate is long, but a permanent certificate
secured, she is sure of a good salary, increasing with her years of
service, and ending in a pension. This path of security has perhaps
tended to keep New York colored girls from going into other lines of
work. I have not yet found one who has graduated from a university.
Pratt Institute and the Teachers' College have colored normal students,
but they are usually from the South or West, not New Yorkers born.
Philanthropy is opening up important lines of opportunity to the Negro
woman in New York. In 1903, a colored graduate nurse secured an
interview with the Secretary of the New York Charity Organization
Society, and so ably presented to him the need of Negro visitors among
Negroes that she was appointed visiting nurse for the colored sick who
came under the notice of the Society. In time the position changed into
that of a colored district visitor, other colored nurses entering in
numbers into district nursing work. In 1910, three nurses were employed
by the Nurses' Settlement, two by the Association for Improving the
Condition of the Poor of Manhattan, and two by the District Nursing
Association of Brooklyn. With increased knowledge of the sickness and
suffering amid the Negro poor, and of their need of proper care in their
homes, the number of these nurses will doubtless increase. Colored women
rank high among the trained nurses of New York.
Other philanthropic work lately has been undertaken by Negro women in
New York. In 1910, besides the nurses of whom we have spoken, there were
at the head of societies in salaried positions, two settlement workers,
two matrons of day nurseries, two matrons of homes in which much social
work was carried on, many employees in colored orphan asylums, a teacher
of domestic science in a home-keeping flat, a traveller's aid visitor,
a playground instructor, besides workers in various religious
organizations. This does not include the many colored women doing
social and recreation work in the public schools and on the city's
playgrounds. Indeed, the difficulty in New York is to secure trained
colored women for philanthropic work, the Negro's attitude still being
that of the great majority of white women a few years ago, that love for
children and a sentimental kindness constitute the requisites for work
among the poor. But the school of experience is training workers, and as
the schools of philanthropy of New York, Boston, and Chicago also
graduate colored students, we shall have in the North the intelligent,
trained workers whom we need.
The little kindergarten girl who, with head erect, walked past the
jeering line of boys to the green trees and soft grass of the park has
her counterpart in many young women of New York. In 1909, a colored girl
graduated from one of the city's dental colleges, the first woman of her
race to take this degree in the state. From the first her success was
remarkable. Colored girls with ability and steady purpose and dogged
determination have won success in clerical and business work; but the
last large and efficient group is that classified in the census under
mechanical and manufacturing pursuits: the dressmakers, seamstresses,
milliners.
Colored women have always been known as good sewers, and recently they
have studied at their trade in some of the best schools. From 1904 to
1910, the Manhattan Trade School graduated thirty-four colored girls in
dressmaking, hand sewing, and novelty making. The public night school on
West Forty-sixth Street, under its able colored principal, Dr. W. L.
Bulkley, since 1907, has educated hundreds of women in sewing,
dressmaking, millinery, and artificial flower-making. While the majority
of the pupils have taken the courses for their private use, a large
minority are entering the business world. They meet with repeated
difficulties; white girls refuse to work in shops with them, private
employers object to their color, but they have, nevertheless, made
creditable progress. The census reports the number of Negro dressmakers
to have quadrupled in the United States from 1890 to 1900. Something
comparable to this increase in dressmaking and allied trades has taken
place among the Negroes of New York, and it has come through education
and persistence, and the increase of trade among the colored group
itself. Numbers of these dressmakers and milliners earn a livelihood,
though often a scanty one, from the patronage of the people of their own
race.
But despite her efforts and occasional successes, the colored girl in
New York meets with severer race prejudice than the colored man, and is
more persistently kept from attractive work. _She gets the job that the
white girl does not want._ It may be that the white girls want the wrong
thing, and that the jute mill and tobacco shop and flower factory are
more dangerous to health and right living than the mistress's kitchen,
but she knows her mind, and follows the business that brings her liberty
of action when the six o'clock whistle blows. What she desires for
herself, however, she refuses to her colored neighbor. Occasionally an
employer objects to colored girls, but the Manhattan Trade School
repeatedly, in trying to place its graduates, has found that opposition
to the Negro has come largely from the working girls. Race prejudice
has even gone so far as to prevent a colored woman from receiving home
work when it entailed her waiting in the same sitting-room with white
women. Of course, this is not the universal attitude. In friendly talks
with hundreds of New York's white women workers, I have found the
majority ready to accept the colored worker. Jewish girls are especially
tolerant. They believe that good character and decent manners should
count, not color; but an aggressive, combative minority is quite sure
that no matter how well educated or virtuous she may be, no black woman
is as good as a white one. So the few but belligerent aristocrats
triumph over the many half-ashamed, timid democrats.
The shirtwaist makers' strike of 1910 was so profoundly important in its
breaking down of feeling between nationalities, its union of all working
women in a common cause, that the colored girl, while very slightly
concerned in the strike itself, may profit by the more generous feeling
it engendered. Certainly an entrance into store and workshop would be to
her immense advantage. She needs the discipline of regular hours, of
steady training, of order and system. She needs also to become part of a
strong labor group, to share its working class ideal, to feel the weight
of its moral opinion; instead of looking into the mirror of her wealthy
mistress, she needs to reflect the aspirations of the strong, earnest
women who toil.
Before bringing the story of the life of the New York colored working
woman to a close, it may not be amiss to look closely at the
discrimination practised against her, not only in her work, but in her
daily life. The Negro comes North and finds himself half a man. Does the
woman, too, come to be but half a woman? What is her status in the city
to which she turns for opportunity and larger freedom?
Four years ago, within a few hours' time, two stories were told me,
illustrative of the colored woman's status. Neither occurred in the city
of New York, but both are indicative of its temper. The first I heard
from a woman skilled in a difficult profession, a Canadian now residing
in the United States, and the descendant of a fugitive slave. Her
youthful companions had all been white, and while an African in the
darkness of her skin and her musical voice, her rearing had been that of
an Englishwoman. "Shortly after coming to New York, I went for the first
time," she told me, "to a little resort on the Jersey coast. A board
walk flanked the ocean, and on the other side were shops and places of
amusement. Going out one morning with two companions, a colored man and
woman, we turned into an enclosure to examine a gaily painted
merry-go-round. The place was open to the public, and a few nursery
maids with their charges were seated about. The man in our party,
interested in the mechanism of the machine, went up to it and began to
explain it to us. Quite suddenly a rough fellow, in charge of the place,
walked over and called out, 'Get out of here! We don't allow niggers.'
The attack, to me at least, was so overwhelming that I did not move at
once. Thereupon I was again called 'nigger,' and ordered out.
"When I reached the beach, I asked my companions to leave me, and I sat
on a bench looking upon the waves. After a time an old woman came to my
side, and said a little timidly, 'What are you thinking about, dearie?'
Looking in her face I saw that she feared that I would commit suicide.
'I am thinking,' I said turning to her, 'that I wish the ocean might
rise up and drown every white person on the face of the earth.' 'Oh, you
mustn't say that,' she cried horrified, and left me. After I cannot tell
how many minutes or hours, I returned to my boarding-house, and then to
my home in New York. I had had a great many white friends in my native
home; I had played with them, eaten with them, slept with them. Now I
destroyed their letters, and resolved never to know them again. That was
my first affront in the United States, and while I have learned to feel
somewhat differently, a little to discriminate, I can never forget that
the white people in the North stand for the insult which was cast upon
me."
On the evening of the same day I had learned of this happening, a man
from a prominent college in New York State told me of a Negro classmate.
"He was a pleasant, intelligent fellow from the South," he said, "and
while I never knew him well, I was always glad to see him. One day, at
commencement time, when we were all having our relatives about, he
boarded my car with a young colored woman, evidently his sister. Without
a thought I rose, lifted my hat, and gave her my seat. Never again shall
I see such a look of gratitude as that which lighted up his face when he
bowed in acknowledgment of my courtesy. It revealed the race question to
me, and yet I had performed only the simplest act of a gentleman."
In these two incidents we see the undecided, perplexing position of the
Negro woman in New York. Today she may be turned out of a public resort
as a "nigger," tomorrow she may receive the dues of a gentlewoman. And
since, while I write, I hear the cry of a class in the community who
adjudge the expulsion necessary since the other course must lead at once
to social equality, I make haste to add that the second story did not
end in wedlock. As far as I have seen, it never does. Intermarriage of
white and black in New York is so slight as to be a negligible quantity,
but amalgamation between the two races is not uncommon. And this we may
say with certainty, the man most blatant against the "nigger" in New
York as all over the country is the man most ready to enter into illicit
relationship with the woman whom he claims to despise. The raising of
the hat to the colored woman brings a diminution in sexual immorality.
If the Negro civilization of New York is to be lifted to a higher level,
the white race must consistently play a finer and more generous part
toward the colored woman. There are many inherent difficulties against
which she must contend. Slavery deprived her of family life, set her to
daily toil in the field, or appropriated her mother's instincts for the
white child. She has today the difficult task of maintaining the
integrity and purity of the home. Many times she has succeeded, often
she has failed, sometimes she has not even tried. A vicious environment
has strengthened her passions and degraded her from earliest girlhood.
Beyond any people in the city she needs all the encouragement that
philanthropy, that human courtesy and respect, that the fellowship of
the workers can give,--she needs her full status as a woman.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] These figures are obtained by a combination of tables, one in
Population, Vol. II, Part II, p. 332, describing the whole of Greater
New York, the other in Women at Work, pp. 266 to 275, describing
Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. The error through the omission of
Richmond and Queens is probably negligible.
[2] Federal Census 1900: Women at Work, Table 28, pp. 266 to 274. Among
800 married and widowed colored women whom I myself visited, I found
only 150, 19 per cent, who were not engaged in gainful occupations.
[3] Federal Census 1900: Women at Work, Table 10, pp. 147 to 151.
[4] Federal Census 1900: Women at Work, Table 28, pp. 266 to 275.
[5] This is incorporated in a chapter in Mr. Miller's volume on "Race
Adjustment."