The Woman Who Toils Part 4

The power of the machine, the physical force of the man were simplifying their tasks. While the boy was keeping steadily at one thing, perfecting himself, we, the women, were doing a variety of things, complicated and fussy, left to our lot because we had not physical force for the simpler but greater effort. The boy at the corking-table had soon become an expert; he was fourteen and he made from $1 to $1.20 a day. He worked ten hours at one job, whereas Ella and I had a dozen little jobs almost impossible to systematize: we hammered and cut and capped the corks and washed and wiped the bottles, sealed them, counted them, distributed them, kept the table washed up, the sink cleaned out, and once a day scrubbed up our own precincts. When I asked the boy if he was tired he laughed at me. He was superior to us; he was stronger; he could do more with one stroke than we could do with three; he was by _nature_ a more valuable aid than we. We were forced through physical inferiority to abandon the choicest task to this young male compet.i.tor. Nature had given us a handicap at the start.

For a few days there is no vacancy at the corking-tables. I am sent back to the bottling department. The oppressive monotony is one day varied by a summons to the men's dining-room. I go eagerly, glad of any change. In the kitchen I find a girl with skin disease peeling potatoes, and a coloured man making soup in a wash-boiler. The girl gives me a stool to sit on, and a knife and a pan of potatoes. The dinner under preparation is for the men of the factory. There are two hundred of them. They are paid from $1.35 up to $3 a day. Their wages begin above the highest limit given to women. The dinner costs each man ten cents. The $20 paid in daily cover the expenses of the cook, two kitchen maids and the dinner, which consists of meat, bread and b.u.t.ter, vegetables and coffee, sometimes soup, sometimes dessert. If this can pay for two hundred there is no reason why for five cents a hot meal of some kind could not be given the women. They don't demand it, so they are left to make themselves ill on pickles and preserves.

The coloured cook is full of song and verse. He quotes from the Bible freely, and gives us s.n.a.t.c.hes of popular melodies.

We have frequent calls from the elevator boy, who brings us ice and various provisions. Both men, I notice, take their work easily. During the morning a busy Irish woman comes hurrying into our precincts.

"Say," she yells in a shrill voice, "my cauliflowers ain't here, are they? I ordered 'em early and they ain't came yet."

Without properly waiting for an answer she hurries away again.

The coloured cook turns to the elevator boy understandingly:

"Just like a woman! Why, before I'd _make a fuss_ about cauliflowers or anything else!"

About eleven the head forewoman stops in to eat a plate of rice and milk. While I am cutting bread for the two hundred I hear her say to the cook in a gossipy tone:

"How do you like the new girl? She's here all alone."

I am called away and do not hear the rest of the conversation. When I return the cook lectures me in this way:

"Here alone, are you?"

"Yes."

"Well, I see no reason why you shouldn't get along nicely and not kill yourself with work either. Just stick at it and they'll do right by you.

Lots o' girls who's here alone gets to fooling around. Now I like everybody to have a good time, and I hope you'll have a good time, too, but you mustn't carry it too far."

My mind went back as he said this to a conversation I had had the night before with a working-girl at my boarding-house.

"Where is your home?" I asked.

She had been doing general housework, but ill-health had obliged her to take a rest.

She looked at me skeptically.

"We don't have no homes," was her answer. "We just get up and get whenever they send us along."

And almost as a sequel to this I thought of two sad cases that had come close to my notice as fellow boarders.

I was sitting alone one night by the gas stove in the parlour. The matron had gone out and left me to "answer the door." The bell rang and I opened cautiously, for the wind was howling and driving the snow and sleet about on the winter air. A young girl came in; she was seeking a lodging. Her skirts and shoes were heavy with water. She took off her things slowly in a dazed manner. Her short, quick breathing showed how excited she was. When she spoke at last her voice sounded hollow, her eyes moved about restlessly. She stopped abruptly now and then and contracted her brows as though in an appeal for merciful tears; then she continued in the same broken, husky voice:

"I suppose I'm not the only one in trouble. I've thought a thousand times over that I would kill myself. I suppose I loved him--but I _hate_ him now."

These two sentences, recurring, were the story's all.

The impotence of rebellion, a sense of outrage at being abandoned, the instinctive appeal for protection as a right, the injustice of being left solely to bear the burden of responsibility which so long as it was pleasure had been shared--these were the thoughts and feelings breeding hatred.

She had spent the day in a fruitless search for her lover. She had been to his boss and to his rooms. He had paid his debts and gone, n.o.body knew where. She was pretty, vain, homeless; alone to bear the responsibility she had not been alone to incur. She could not shirk it as the man had done. They had both disregarded the law. On whom were the consequences weighing more heavily? On the woman. She is the sufferer; she is the first to miss the law's protection. She is the weaker member whom, for the sake of the race, society protects. Nature has made her man's physical inferior; society is obliged to recognize this in the giving of a marriage law which beyond doubt is for the benefit of woman, since she can least afford to disregard it.

Another evening when the matron was out I sat for a time with a young working woman and her baby. There is a comradeship among the poor that makes light of indiscreet questions. I felt only sympathy in asking:

"Are you alone to bring up your child?"

"Yes, ma'am," was the answer. "I'll never go home with _him_."

I looked at _him_: a wizened, four-months-old infant with a huge flat nose, and two dull black eyes fixed upon the gas jet. The girl had the grace of a forest-born creature; she moved with the mysterious strength and suppleness of a tree's branch. She was proud; she felt herself disgraced. For four months she had not left the house. I talked on, proposing different things.

"I don't know what to do," she said. "I can't never go home with _him_, and if I went home without him I'd never be the same. I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to _him_." Her head bowed over the child; she held him close to her breast.

But to return to the coloured cook and my day in the kitchen. I had ample opportunity to compare domestic service with factory work. We set the table for two hundred, and do a thousand miserable slavish tasks that must be begun again the following day. At twelve the two hundred troop in, toil-worn and begrimed. They pa.s.s like locusts, leaving us sixteen hundred dirty dishes to wash up and wipe. This takes us four hours, and when we have finished the work stands ready to be done over the next morning with peculiar monotony. In the factory there is stimulus in feeling that the material which pa.s.ses through one's hands will never be seen or heard of again.

On Sat.u.r.day the owner of the factory comes at lunch time with several friends and talks to us with an amazing _camaraderie_. He is kindly, humourous and tactful. One or two missionaries speak after him, but their conversation is too abstract for us. We want something dramatic, imaginative, to hold our attention, or something wholly natural. Tell us about the bees, the beavers or the toilers of the sea. The longing for flowers has often come to me as I work, and a rose seems of all things the most desirable. In my present condition I do not hark back to civilized wants, but repeatedly my mind travels toward the country places I have seen in the fields and forests. If I had a holiday I would spend it seeing not what man but what G.o.d has made. These are the things to be remembered in addressing or trying to amuse or instruct girls who are no more prepared than I felt myself to be for any preconceived ideal of art or ethics. The omnipresence of dirt and ugliness, of machines and "stock," leave the mind in a state of la.s.situde which should be roused by something natural. As an initial remedy for the ills I voluntarily a.s.sumed I would propose amus.e.m.e.nt. Of all the people who spoke to us that Sat.u.r.day, we liked best the one who made us laugh. It was a relief to hear something funny. In working as an outsider in a factory girls'

club I had always held that nothing was so important as to give the poor something beautiful to look at and think about--a photograph or copy of some _chef d'oeuvre_, an _objet d'art_, lessons in literature and art which would uplift their souls from the dreariness of their surroundings. Three weeks as a factory girl had changed my beliefs. If the young society women who sacrifice one evening every week to talk to the poor in the slums about Shakespeare and Italian art would instead offer diversion first--a play, a farce, a humourous recitation--they would make much more rapid progress in winning the confidence of those whom they want to help. The working woman who has had a good laugh is more ready to tell what she needs and feels and fears than the woman who has been forced to listen silently to an abstract lesson. In society when we wish to make friends with people we begin by entertaining them.

It should be the same way with the poor. Next to amus.e.m.e.nt as a means of giving temporary relief and bringing about relations which will be helpful to all, I put instruction, in the form of narrative, about the people of other countries, our fellow man, how he lives and works; and, third, under this same head, primitive lessons about animals and plants, the industries of the bees, the habits of ants, the natural phenomena which require no reasoning power to understand and which open the thoughts upon a delightful unknown vista.

My first experience is drawing to its close. I have surmounted the discomforts of insufficient food, of dirt, a bed without sheets, the strain of hard manual labour. I have confined my observations to life and conditions in the factory. Owing, as I have before explained, to the absorption of factory life into city life in a place as large as Pittsburg, it seemed to me more profitable to centre my attention on the girl within the factory, leaving for a small town the study of her in her family and social life. I have pointed out as they appeared to me woman's relative force as a worker and its effects upon her economic advancement. I have touched upon two cases which ill.u.s.trate her relative dependence on the law. She appeared to me not as the equal of man either physically or legally. It remained to study her socially. In the factory where I worked men and women were employed for ten-hour days. The women's highest wages were lower than the man's lowest. Both were working as hard as they possibly could. The women were doing menial work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to do. The men were properly fed at noon; the women satisfied themselves with cake and pickles. Why was this? It is of course impossible to generalize on a single factory. I can only relate the conclusions I drew from what I saw myself. The wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are fixed at the level of bare subsistence. This level and its accompanying conditions are determined by compet.i.tion, by the nature and number of labourers taking part in the compet.i.tion. In the masculine category I met but one cla.s.s of compet.i.tor: the bread-winner. In the feminine category I found a variety of cla.s.ses: the bread-winner, the semi-bread-winner, the woman who works for luxuries. This inevitably drags the wage level. The self-supporting girl is in compet.i.tion with the child, with the girl who lives at home and makes a small contribution to the household expenses, and with the girl who is supported and who spends all her money on her clothes. It is this division of purpose which takes the "spirit" out of them as a cla.s.s.

There will be no strikes among them so long as the question of wages is not equally vital to them all. It is not only nature and the law which demand protection for women, but society as well. In every case of the number I investigated, if there were sons, daughters or a husband in the family, the mother was not allowed to work. She was wholly protected. In the families where the father and brothers were making enough for bread and b.u.t.ter, the daughters were protected partially or entirely. There is no law which regulates this social protection: it is voluntary, and it would seem to indicate that civilized woman is meant to be an economic dependent. Yet, on the other hand, what is the new force which impels girls from their homes into the factories to work when they do not actually need the money paid them for their effort and sacrifice? Is it a move toward some far distant civilization when women shall have become man's physical equal, a "free, economic, social factor, making possible the full social combination of individuals in collective industry"? This is a matter for speculation only. What occurred to me as a possible remedy both for the oppression of the woman bread-winner and also as a betterment for the girl who wants to work though she does not need the money, was this: the establishment of schools where the esthetic branches of industrial art might be taught to the girls who by their material independence could give some leisure to acquiring a profession useful to themselves and to society in general. The whole country would be benefited by the opening of such schools as the Empress of Russia has patronized for the maintenance of the "pet.i.tes industries," or those which Queen Margherita has established for the revival of lace-making in Italy. If there was such a counter-attraction to machine labour, the bread-winner would have a freer field and the non-bread-winner might still work for luxury and at the same time better herself morally, mentally and esthetically. She could aid in forming an intermediate cla.s.s of labourers which as yet does not exist in America: the hand-workers, the _main d'oeuvre_ who produce the luxurious objects of industrial art for which we are obliged to send to Europe when we wish to beautify our homes.

The American people are lively, intelligent, capable of learning anything. The schools of which I speak, founded, not for the manufacturing of the useful but of the beautiful, could be started informally as cla.s.ses and by individual effort. Such labour would be paid more than the mechanical factory work; the immense importation from abroad of objects of industrial art sufficiently proves the demand for them in this country; there would be no material disadvantage for the girl who gave up her job in a pickle factory. Her faculties would be well employed, and she could, without leaving her home, do work which would be of esthetic and, indirectly, of moral value.

I was discouraged at first to see how difficult it was to help the working girls as individuals and how still more difficult to help them as a cla.s.s. There is perhaps no surer way of doing this than by giving opportunities to those who have a purpose and a will. No amount of openings will help the girl who has not both of these. I watched many girls with intelligence and energy who were unable to develop for the lack of a chance a start in the right direction. Aside from the few remedies I have been able to suggest, I would like to make an appeal for persistent sympathy in behalf of those whose misery I have shared. Until some marvelous advancement has been made toward the reign of justice upon earth, every man, woman and child should have constantly in his heart the sufferings of the poorest.

On the evening when I left the factory for the last time, I heard in the streets the usual cry of murders, accidents and suicides: the mental food of the overworked. It is Sat.u.r.day night. I mingle with a crowd of labourers homeward bound, and with women and girls returning from a Sat.u.r.day sale in the big shops. They hurry along delighted at the cheapness of a bargain, little dreaming of the human effort that has produced it, the cost of life and energy it represents. As they pa.s.s, they draw their skirts aside from us, the labourers who have made their bargains cheap; from us, the cooperators who enable them to have the luxuries they do; from us, the mult.i.tude who stand between them and the monster Toil that must be fed with human lives. Think of us, as we herd to our work in the winter dawn; think of us as we bend over our task all the daylight without rest; think of us at the end of the day as we resume suffering and anxiety in homes of squalour and ugliness; think of us as we make our wretched try for merriment; think of us as we stand protectors between you and the labour that must be done to satisfy your material demands; think of us--be merciful.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WAVING ARMS OF SMOKE AND STEAM, A SYMBOL OF SPENT ENERGY, OF THE LIVES CONSUMED, AND VANISHING AGAIN"

Factories on the Alleghany River at the 16th Street bridge, just below the pickle works]

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN

CHAPTER III