_195 Irons "Family"_
How long, I wonder, does one study or work at anything before one
feels justified in generalizing?
I have been re-reading of late some of the writings of some of the
women who at one time or another essayed to experience first hand the
life of the working girl. They have a bit dismayed me. Is it exactly
fair, what they do? They thought, because they changed their names and
wore cheap clothes, that, presto! they were as workers and could pass
on to an uninformed reading public the trials of the worker.
(Incidentally they were all trials.) I had read in the past those
heartrending books and articles and found it ever difficult to hold
back the tears. Sometimes they were written by an immigrant, a
bona-fide worker. The tragedy of such a life in this business-ridden
land of ours tore one's soul.
An educated, cultured individual, used to a life of ease, or easier,
if she had wished to make it that, would find the life of the factory
worker well-nigh unbearable. An emotional girl longing for the higher
things of life would find factory life galling beyond words. It is to
be regretted that there are not more educated and cultured
people--that more folk do not long for the higher things of life--that
factory work is not galling to everybody. But the fact seems to be, if
we dare generalize, that there are a very great many persons in this
world who are neither educated nor "cultured" nor filled with
spiritual longings. The observation might be made that all such are
not confined to the working classes; that the country at large, from
Fifth Avenue, New York, to Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Market
Street, San Francisco, is considerably made up of folk who are not
educated or "cultured" or of necessity filled with unsatiable longings
of the soul.
It is partly due to the fact that only recently--as geologic time is
reckoned--we were swinging in trees, yearning probably for little else
than a nut to crack, a mate, a shelter of sorts, something of ape
company, and now and then a chance for a bit of a scrap. It is partly
due to the fact that for the great majority of people, the life they
live from the cradle up is not the sort that matures them with a
growing ambition or opportunity to experience the "finer" things of
life. One point of view would allow that the reason we have so few
educated, cultured, and aspiring people is due to a combination of
unfortunate circumstances to do with heredity and environment. They
would be cultured and spiritual if only....
The other viewpoint argues that the only reason we have as many cultured
and spiritual people as we have is due to a fortunate--"lucky"--combination
of circumstances to do with heredity and environment. These more
advanced folk would be far fewer in number if it had not happened
that....
It is mostly the "educated and cultured" persons who write the more
serious books we read and who tell us what they and the rest of the
world think and feel and do--or ought to do. The rest of the world
never read what they ought to think and feel and do, and go
blithely--or otherwise--on their way thinking and feeling and
doing--what they please, or as circumstances force them.
After all, the world is a very subjective thing, and what makes life
worth living to one person is not necessarily what makes it worth
living to another. Certain fundamental things everybody is apt to
want: enough to eat (but what a gamut that "enough" can run!); a mate
(the range and variety of mates who do seem amply to satisfy one
another!); a shelter to retire to nights (what a bore if we all had to
live complacently on the Avenue!); children to love and fuss over--but
one child does some parents and ten children do others, and some
mothers go into a decline if everything is not sterilized twice a day
and everybody clean behind the ears, and other mothers get just as
much satisfaction out of their young when there is only one
toothbrush, if that, for everybody (we are writing from the mother's
viewpoint and not the welfare of the offspring); some possessions of
one's own, but not all stocks and bonds and a box of jewels in the
bank, or a library, or an automobile, or even a house and lot, before
peace reigns.
Everyone likes to mingle with his kind now and then; to some it is
subjectively necessary to hire a caterer, to others peanuts suffice.
Everyone likes to wonder and ponder and express opinions--a prize
fight is sufficient material for some; others prefer metaphysics.
Everyone likes to play. Some need box seats at the Midnight Frolic,
others a set of second-hand tools, and yet others a game of craps in
the kitchen.
No one likes to be hungry, to be weary, to be sick, to be worried over
the future, to be lonely, to have his feelings hurt, to lose those
near and dear to him, to have too little independence, to get licked
in a scrap of any kind, to have no one at all who loves him, to have
nothing at all to do. The people of the so-called working class are
more apt to be hungry, weary, and sick than the "educated and
cultured" and well-to-do. Otherwise there is no one to say--because
there is no way it can be found out--that their lives by and large are
not so rich, subjectively speaking, as those with one hundred thousand
dollars a year, or with Ph. D. degrees.
Most folk in the world are not riotously happy, not because they are
poor, or "workers," but because the combination making for riotous
happiness--shall we say health, love, enough to do of what one longs
to do--is not often found in one individual. The condition of the
bedding, of the clothing; the pictures on the wall; the smells in the
kitchen--and beyond; the food on the table--have so much, and no more,
to do with it. Whether one sorts soiled clothes in a laundry, or
reclines on a chaise-longue with thirty-eight small hand-embroidered
and belaced pillows and a pink satin covering, or sits in a library
and fusses over Adam Smith, no one of the three is in a position to
pass judgment on the satisfaction or lack of satisfaction of the other
two.
All of which is something of an impatient retort to those who look at
the world through their own eyes and by no means a justification of
the _status quo_. And to introduce the statement--which a month ago
would have seemed to me incredible--that I have seen and heard as much
contentment in a laundry as I have in the drawing-room of a Fifth
Avenue mansion or a college sorority house--as much and no more. Which
is not arguing that no improvements need ever be made in laundries.
* * * * *
There was one place I was not going to work, and that was a laundry! I
had been through laundries, I had read about laundries, and it was too
much to ask anyone--if it was not absolutely necessary--to work in a
laundry. And yet when the time came, I hated to leave the laundry. I
entered the laundry as a martyr. I left with the nickname, honestly
come by without a Christian effort, of "Sunbeam." But, oh! I have a
large disgust upon me that it takes such untold effort every working
day, all over the "civilized," world to keep people "civilized." The
labor, and labor, and labor of first getting cloth woven and buttons
and thread manufactured and patterns cut and garments made up, and
fitted, or not, and then to keep those garments _clean_! We talk with
such superiority of the fact that we wear clothes and heathen savages
get along with beads and rushes. For just that some six hundred and
fifty thousand people work six days a week doing laundry work
alone--not to mention mother at the home washboard--or electric
machine. We must be clean, of course, or we would not be civilized,
but I do not see why we need be so fearfully sot up about it.
A new Monday morning came along, and I waited from 7.40 to 9.15 in a
six-by-nine entry room, with some twenty-five men and women, to answer
the advertisement: