case of a man named Benson. I was hunting for the wife of a brakeman,
who had been killed in the same wreck with the engineer Macdougal of
whom I have spoken. I was told that I could learn about her at this
Benson's house. I went there and found it a tumble-down, three-room
shanty with a small shed for a kitchen, crowded in between brick
tenements. There was no carpet on the floor and only a bare table and
two kitchen chairs in the living room. The man's wife was unspeakably
slovenly and, I think, half-witted.
When Benson came in, however, I could see that he was different. He was
only twenty-six. His father had been a river-man, and he himself was
born in a "shanty-boat." Owing to his mother's early carelessness he had
lost one eye. When he grew up, he left the river and became a teamster,
and in good times he made a living. At the time I saw him, however, he
had had only one or two days' work a week for four months. The hard
times, and the wife, I am sure,--not any natural shiftlessness in the
man,--accounted for the desolation of his home. There was something fine
in Benson's face, a certain modest look of steadfastness and pride,--the
pride of the "family protector." This protector-ship extended even to
the remote connections by marriage of the miserable creature who was
his wife, for I found that the brakeman's widow, whom he had taken in
and cared for after her husband's death, was his wife's sister-in-law.
Further questioning revealed that this widow had an old mother who had
also been dependent on the earnings of the brakeman.
"And what has become of the mother?" I asked.
"Oh," he said, "she lives here, too. She makes her home with me."
There he sat, this one-eyed teamster, in his barren, rented, three-room
castle, and told me in a simple, serious way, as though it were to be
expected in good families, that his wife's sister-in-law's mother "made
her home with him."
It is not uncommon to find a loyalty like this in relations where one
would least expect it. I have quite lost faith in the unkind stepmother
of fairy-tale tradition. It is a step-daughter whom Mrs. Frederick, the
Swiss woman, is caring for in the midst of her struggle. Three or four
times I found a woman utterly uncomforted after the loss of a stepson.
There was Conley, for instance, a car inspector who was killed in a
wreck. A stepmother had brought him up since he was ten years old,
loving him as few mothers love their own sons. And he gave her back a
real devotion. When his friends would ask him why he didn't have some
fun with his money instead of giving it all to his folks, he used to say,
"Well, fellows, home ain't a boarding house."
It is not unusual to find young men giving up their own prospects, to
take up the burden of the family at the sudden death of the father. But
the most memorable instance I remember of self-sacrifice on the part
of a son was that of James Brennan, a switchman, who was killed on the
Baltimore and Ohio in November, 1906. He, too, was only stepson and
stepbrother to the family he fathered. Thomas Brennan, an Englishman,
had married in the seventies and come to America, where his wife bore
him two sons and then died. Soon after, he went back to England and
married a sister of his first wife and brought her here to take care of
his children. He soon proved worthless as a provider. He lived off and
on with his family, but contributed less and less to their support, and
finally left them entirely. The second wife was not strong, and after
the birth of her last child, became an invalid. The burden of the family
thus fell upon the shoulders of the two boys, her nephews and stepsons.
They went to work at eleven and twelve. Arthur, the younger, was drowned
at eighteen, leaving James, the older son, as the only support.
This young man never deserted his post. During the later years his
burden increased. His stepsister made a runaway marriage at eighteen and
in two years was deserted by her husband and came home with a child.
A feeble old grandmother of eighty-eight came over from England to be
taken care of. His stepmother became crippled with rheumatism and lay in
bed for two years. In June of the year he was killed, he sent her away
to a sanatorium to get well. She had been there for five months, had
gained twelve pounds and was doing well when the telegram came to tell
her of his death. She came home to face the struggle of life without
him,--an aged mother on her hands, a boy of ten, and an in-consequent
daughter with a baby,--and she herself an invalid, suffering constantly.
One would say that the mere problem of existence would be all absorbing
for that woman. Yet, when I found her a year later, it was the emptiness
of her life without this son rather than the loss of his income that was
her tragedy.
There are all kinds of people everywhere. This is the only final
conclusion. It is not easy therefore, to describe the spirit in which
the working people meet trouble. They meet it in all the ways there are.
But most of those I met, had an "everyday" attitude toward misfortune.
This seems to support the opinion many hold, that poor people do not
feel their tragedies deeply. But I think it is to be explained rather
by the fact that they are too busy to entertain grief, that trouble is
too common among them to arouse exclamation, and that they make no show
of feeling where there is none. That they know the deepest sorrow, is
obvious to one who has seen the loyalties and lasting affections which
make up so much of their lives. I found usual in families, a generous
affection which could rise to self-sacrifice and devotion in time of
trial; and sometimes between two members of a family, a rare love,
exclusive and complete, so that the death of one left the other in an
empty world.
* * * * *
Tales of trouble like these are worth listening to, chiefly as they
reveal the spirit of the people who suffered. It is with this thought
that I have told them. But if by revealing a dreary recurrence of
the same kind of misfortune in home after home, these stories have
roused in the reader's mind a question, perhaps a protest, this too,
is worth while. In a later issue, by a study of these work accidents
in their happening, by a counting of the cost to the worker and his
family, to the employer, and to society,--as at present the cost is
distributed,--we hope to answer that question. Possibly we shall justify
that protest.
THE WORKING WOMEN OF PITTSBURGH
ELIZABETH BEARDSLEY BUTLER
FORMER SECRETARY NEW JERSEY STATE CONSUMERS LEAGUE
It requires a moment's readjustment of our angle of vision to see
Pittsburgh as a city of working women. To dig crude ores, to fuse and
forge them, are not among the lighter handicrafts at which women can
readily be employed. The old cry of the dwarfs under the earth, the
first metal smiths, rings out in Pittsburgh in the tap of the miner's
tools and in the shouts of gangs of furnace-men and engine crews in the
winding recesses of the mill.
Yet even in a city whose prosperity is founded in steel and iron and
coal, there has come into being beside the men a group of co-laborers.
If we listen again, we hear the cry of the dwarfs (the productive
forces of earth) not only in the shouts of gangs of furnace-men, but
from the mobile group of workers at the screw and bolt works, and
among the strong-armed women who make sand-cores in rooms planned like
Alberich's smithy in the underworld. Listen still more closely, and
we hear the dwarf voices in the hum of machines in a garment factory,
in the steady turn of metal rolls in a laundry, and even in the clip
of the stogy roller's knife in the tiny workroom of a tenement loft.
Side by side with the men, the women workers have found a place in
the industry of the steel district in the Alleghenies. In a district
that calls pre-eminently for strength in its workmen, and if not for
strength, for a high degree of training and skill, there is yet place
in the congregate activity of factories and shops for women. Individual
and group necessities have forced them out into an increasing number of
occupational ways and byways, winding net-like over the city.
[Illustration: STOGY SWEATSHOP WORKERS ON "THE HILL."]
To understand fully the place that women have taken in the industries
of Pittsburgh, we should need to know the history of the "forks of
the Ohio," from trading post, frontier settlement, mill-town, to the
growing, complex city of to-day. We should need to follow the women's
share in the life of the district from the time of the woman pioneer,
who was herself a producer of goods and of values, on through the
active days of life in a small and struggling town, and later, into the
ramifications of the industrial city, when the days came that English
speaking labor did not suffice and a new immigrant population was
brought in.
We know a little of the life of the frontier women and the work that
they did. We have hints here and there, of the home industries of
intermediate decades, of the weaving and the stogy making[9] especially,
of production for the use of the individual home, that helped to make
the lives of women in miners' households active and significant. There
are gaps in our recorded knowledge of the process of change, of the
forces that little by little have been a call to the high-strung girl of
American birth, to the unconquerable exiled Russian, to the field worker
from Austria, and to the fair-haired Pole,--a call away from the four
walls that sheltered the industries of the home, and toward factory and
shop, toward division of labor and specialization of work at a machine.
The census in the first half of the nineteenth century is small help to
us. Even in later years, we can learn from it comparatively little about
the industrial life in individual cities.
[9] See Jour. Pol. Econ. 5: 1-25.
One fact significant of the situation in Pittsburgh to-day is that
according to the last census, the excess of male over female population
is a trifle less than 10,000. When the industries of the district grew
to a magnitude that drew on foreign labor forces, it was the men of
Ireland and Germany, of Italy, Austria and Poland who came. Later, in
smaller numbers, the women followed. They came because their husbands
and brothers were here; not often for the purpose of forging out a life
of their own. The women of the later immigrant races, the Slavs and the
southern Europeans, are lagging behind. Giuseppina is still keeping
the little Italian cottage with the thought that Pietro will return or
will have made his way more surely before he sends for her. Life in
America for her is not a settled destiny. It is a probability of growing
importance for those populations whose need exceeds the productive power
of the soil; but even to the strong it is something of an experiment,
something for which women,--not industrially adjusted,--must await the
issue before they too follow in numbers equal to the men.
In the different districts of the city, one can trace something of the
effect of this varying feeling of permanence on the ways of life among
earlier and later immigrants. Irish and German, in fact, we no longer
think of as immigrants. They are as much wrought into the fabric of
the nation as those whom we are pleased to call American. The Jewish
immigrants from Austria, Germany, and Russia, while their coming has
been hastened by religious persecution, have yet been part of the life
of the city for so long, that among them there is a distinct family
grouping; and there is a normal proportion between men and women. This
is in part due to race tradition as well as to length of settlement,
but the latter has unquestionably served to diminish the proportion of
single men, who from this race as from others, have come to make a place
for themselves in the new country.
In the congested Italian neighborhoods, on the other hand, women are
but an unimportant factor in the industrial life of the city. In the
midst of the city itself, there are to be sure streets of Italian
families; streets where the women still honor the custom of life in
their households. A scattered few roll paste-smeared tobacco leaves into
tobies after the Italian fashion, or follow with painstaking docility
the signs of the forewoman in a garment workshop. But there are not
many of these pioneers of congregate activity. The ties of tradition
that keep the girl to her house and early marriage are still too strong
for more than the very few to break. There is small opportunity in this
smoke-filled city among the hills for the Italian girl to preserve her
self-respect by staying at home, and at the same time to increase her
income by sewing or making flowers. Flowers of delicate tints and fine
embroidered fabrics, belong rather to the trade of eastern cities.
The garment industry here is of a different sort from that which has
nourished and given employment to its thousands of out-workers in New
York city. Such outwork as there is dates to a time before the Italian
women were here in numbers, or had grouped themselves into particular
districts, and it fell naturally into the hands of Irish and Germans
whose homes were, and still remain, in the early settled regions in the
coal filled hills.
[Illustration: A CANNERY GIRL--BOTTLING PICKLES WITH A GROOVED STICK.]
Leave "the hill," and go down toward the mills and to some of the
outlying sections, and you will find still fewer women in the colonies
of young Italian laborers, advance guards from their native towns. Some
of these men are workers on the railroads, others are day-laborers in
the mills. They bring up the numbers of the Italian population and
contribute to the excess male population of the entire city. Among still
later immigrants, this situation is intensified. Near the Pressed Steel
Car Works, there are streets of low unpainted houses, each exactly
like the other, each filled with its family of "boarders,"--single men
who club together and rent a house or hire a bed by turns in order to
make their pay serve both for their own support and for the help of
those at home in the old country. They are Slavs,--"Hunkies." They are
the under-workmen in mill and mine and machine shop, who have helped
push the earlier comers a step higher and push themselves into the
subordinate jobs. Some of the first comers have since brought their
families. Some few sisters and friends with the desire to try new
fortune have come, too, leaving their families behind. But the bulk of
the "boarding house" population is made up of single men, immigrants of
this race. Where families and single women have come, they have tended
to settle in the glass-making district, or near the manufactories of
iron and steel products that can use quick fingers as well as strong
untrained arms.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE SOUTH SIDE GLASS-WORKERS.]
The Polish women have not the conservatism which keeps the Italian
girl at home. They have not the same standard of close-knit family
relationship. There is a flexibility in their attitude toward life and
toward their part in it. In numbers and in kind of work, they are an
element of industrial importance.
Altogether, 22,185 women wage earners outside of agricultural,
professional, and domestic service, are employed in Pittsburgh. These
figures are based on a careful census of the women-employing trades made
during the winter of 1907-8. This working force is distributed in 448
factories and shops, and can be arranged according to the numerical
importance of the different trade groups as shown in the accompanying
table.
TABLE SHOWING DISTRIBUTION IN TRADE GROUPS.
1 MERCANTILE HOUSES 7540
2 FOOD PRODUCTION:
CANNERIES
CONFECTIONERY
CRACKERS
MOLASSES
2726
3 CLEANING INDUSTRIES:
DYEING AND CLEANING
LAUNDRIES
2685
4 STOGY INDUSTRY 2611
5 METAL TRADES 1954
6 MISCELLANEOUS:
CORK
PAPER BOXES
SOAP
CASKETS
PAINT
BROOMS AND BRUSHES
TRUNKS AND SUIT-CASES
1137
7 NEEDLE TRADES:
GARMENTS
AWNINGS
MATTRESS AND BEDDING
GLOVES
1088
8 LAMPS AND GLASS 864
9 TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH 777
10 MILLINERY (WHOLESALE) 406
11 PRINTING TRADES 397
------
TOTAL WOMEN WORKERS 22185
In the U. S. census of 1900, women's work is grouped under the headings:
Agricultural Pursuits, Domestic and Personal Service, Professional
Service, Trade and Transportation, Manufacturing and Mechanical
Pursuits. In the accompanying table, agricultural pursuits, and
professional service are excluded. Under domestic and personal service
come only the cleaning industries, with 2,685 women, 12.10 per cent of
the number under consideration. Under trade and transportation, come
saleswomen and telephone and telegraph operators to the number of 8,317
(37.48 per cent). The remainder, 11,183 women (50.4 per cent), are
included in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits.
It is worth while to consider not only the broad groupings and the
characteristics of the several trades, but the women whom they have
called to them, old and young, native born, or from the fields and towns
of another country. Each trade has its characteristic racial group,
and in some cases a secondary racial group; and on the other hand one
racial group may be found in several trades. When the work room is a
mercantile house, there is small need to describe it. We know something
of the work and of its demands; we know, too, that no other occupation
seems so desirable as "clerking" to the girl with some personal ambition
but without the training necessary for an office position. A majority
of the girls are native-born of Irish or German parents, but there is a
scattering of bright Jewish girls who have a characteristic dislike for
the noise of machines.
The mercantile houses, the stogy factories and the garment factories
are employers of Jewish girls. In all three industries many Americans
are to be found, but they are in the more desirable positions, in shops
of the better class, with provision for light and air. These girls
have the nervous readiness to learn new ways, the adaptability, the
measure of skill, which tend to bring them the best work, the better
workplaces. But where the cheap, hustling business is done, the Jewish
girls predominate. They endure the drive in the rarely cleaned upper
room, where between narrow walls, faint daylight finds its way toward
the machines and where drifting lint and ten hours' stooping over a
power-driven needle, have their effect in time on a girl even with the
strength of rugged generations behind her.
Newcomers cannot choose either workshop or wages. With the subordination
of the industrially unadjusted, they crave a chance to learn, whether it
be by the whirr of the needle or by team work at cheap mold stogies to
supply the workingman's demand. In one or two of the small box factories
on "the hill," one finds occasionally a Jewish girl. Box makers paste
the bright colored strips of paper along the box edges. They stay the
corners by the clamp of a machine. For heavier boxes they glue into
place the wooden supports. Such work for a Jewish girl is exceptional,
however, and in violence to tradition. The three industries mentioned
above make up her circle of possible choices.
[Illustration: TOBACCO STRIPPERS IN A HILL SWEATSHOP. WORKERS OF THE
LOWEST INDUSTRIAL GRADE.]
Yet each industry, notably stogy making and the needle trades, has
drawn upon a second racial element in response to a specific industrial
demand. When the garment makers, spurred to production by the presence
of an army of laborers in mills and mines, began to increase and cheapen
their output, they gave the jeans and railroad jumpers to Irish and
German women who would make them at home. The sweating system, as old
and older than the ready-made trade, has adapted itself to the city, and
has taken a form scarcely recognizable to one familiar with the contract
shops on New York's East Side. There is no contract system here. Outwork
entrenched itself in individual homes before Italians and immigrant
Russians had settled into districts, and the only available out-workers
were the wives of Irish and German workingmen in Carrick and Lower St.
Clair. Even to-day, it takes a rambling journey along muddy foot-paths,
across brooks and fields and along the edges of the barren hills to
bring you to the sweated district. The workroom here is not a crowded
tenement, but a small wooden house with six machines someway placed in
the living room, and there is occupation for the whole family, from
father to baby. The family has to pay the driver a percentage on every
dozen garments that he brings, according to the distance from town. As
the driver knows the people and often gives them the chance to work,
his position is in some respects that of a middleman. The workers are
obliged to meet his terms or to turn to some other means of livelihood.
A seemingly inaccessible hill country within city limits, wooden shacks
swarming with chickens and children, a whirr of machines audible from
the field below,--these contradictions characterize the sweating system
of Pittsburgh.
[Illustration: STOGY WORKERS TRANSPLANTED TO AMERICA.]
We have seen that Jewish and American girls are in the garment
factories, while Irish and German women, the hill-dwelling wives of the
miners, hold the subordinate place in the trade. In the stogy industry,
the Polish women, some of them married and others immigrant girls,
have the inferior and unpleasant work. The least desirable occupation
for women in stogy factories is tobacco stripping, pulling the stems
out of the moist leaves and weighing and tying them in pounds for the
rollers. In tenement shops, one may find the strippers in a cellar,
their backs against a damp wall, working by the light of a flaring gas
jet. In a large factory, one will see them sitting in their low stalls,
row behind row, stemming and weighing and throwing the waste to one
side. "They would work all night," one foreman said, "if I would give
them the chance. We never have any trouble with them; we can't give
them enough work to do." They were married women in this case; but the
rule holds good and there is seldom trouble with the Polish hands in a
stogy factory. They are there too much on sufferance for grievances to
be worth their while. They have entrenched themselves in the stripping
rooms and are found now and then at a bunching machine or rolling
stogies at the suction table, but this more skilled work is still
largely in the hands of American and Jewish girls.
[Illustration: A LAUNDRY WORKER AT A BODY IRONING MACHINE. ONE OF THE
SKILLED HANDS.]
The Polish women have pushed their way into a wider circle of industries
than have the Jewish girls. They are limited by lack of training and
by trade indifference, as well as by the stolid physical poise that
cannot be speeded at the high pressure to which an American girl will
respond. They have not an industrial standard that would tend to react
progressively upon the character of their work and the arrangement of
the workrooms. They accept factory positions that girls of other races
regard as socially inferior. They consent to do the rough and unpleasant
work, the work that leads and can lead to nothing except coarsening
of fiber and a final break in strength. They change from one place to
another with an irresponsibility, an independence, born perhaps of
long-slumbering memories of revolution in their own land.