Working With the Working Woman Part 10

"You remember that last snowstorm? I sat at my window and I wrote:

"Oh, beautiful snow When will you go?

Not until spring, When the birds sing."

There were several other stanzas. And about then Miss Cross dumped a bundle of damp clothes into Irma's box and said, "Iron these next and do them decent!" I peered suspiciously into the box. It was my own family laundry!

"Hey, Irma," I said, cannily, "leave me do this batch, eh?"

I might as well be paying myself for doing up my own wash, and it would look considerably better than if Irma ironed it.

The third day my feet are not so weary, and while I iron I mull over ideas on women in industry. After all, have not some of us with the good of labor at heart been a bit too theoretical? Take the welfare idea so scoffed at by many. After all, there is more to be said for than against. Of course, provided-It is all very well to say labor should be allowed to look after itself, and none of this paternalism.

Of course, the paternalism can be overdone and unwisely done. But, at least where women workers are concerned, if we are going to wait till they are able to do things for themselves we are going to wait, perhaps, too long for the social good while we are airing our theories. It is something like saying that children would be better off and have more strength of character if they learned to look after themselves. But you can start that theory too young and have the child die on your hands, or turn into a gutter waif. The child needs entire looking after up to a point where he can begin little by little to look after himself. And after he has learned to dress himself it does not necessarily mean he can select his own food, his hour of retiring, his habits of cleanliness and hygiene.

I look about at the laundry workers and think: Suppose we decide nothing shall be done for these girls until they demand it themselves and then have charge of it themselves. In other words, suppose we let welfare work and social legislation wait on organization. The people who talk that way are often college professors or the upper crust of labor. They have either had no touch or lost touch with the rank and file of women workers. It is going to be years and years and years, if ever, before women in this country organize by and large to a point where they can become permanently effective. What organization demands more than any other factor is, first, a sense of oppression; second, surplus energy. Women have been used to getting more or less the tag end of things for some thousands of years. Why expect them suddenly, in a second of time, as it were, to rear up and say, "We'll not stand for this and that"? If we are going to wait for working women to feel oppressed enough to weld themselves together into a militant cla.s.s organization, capable of demanding certain conditions and getting them, we shall wait many a long day. In the meantime, we are putting off the very situation we hope for-when women, as well as men, shall have reached the point where they can play a dignified part in the industrial scheme of things-by sending them from work at night too weary and run down to exert themselves for any social purpose. I say that anything and everything which can be done to make women more capable of responsibility should be done. But the quickest and sanest way to bring that about is not to sit back and wait for factory women to work out their own salvation. Too few of them have the intelligence or gumption to have the least idea how to go about it, did it ever occur to them that things might be radically improved. (And the pity of it is that so often telling improvements could be made with so little effort.)

Nor is it anything but feminist sentimentality, as far as I can see, to argue against special legislation for women. What women can do intellectually as compared with men I am in no position to state. To argue that women can take a place on a physical equality with man is simply not being honest. Without sentimentalizing over motherhood, it seems allowable to point out the fact that women are potential mothers, and this fact, with every detail of its complexities, feminists or no to the contrary, is a distinct handicap to women's playing a part in the industrial field on a par with man. And society pays more dearly for a weary woman than for a tired man.

Therefore, why not lunch rooms, and attractive lunch rooms, and good food, well cooked? Yes, it is good business, and besides it puts a woman on a much more efficient level to herself and society. At our tables the girls were talking about different lunch-room conditions they had come across in their work. One girl told of a gla.s.s company she had worked for that recently was forced to shut down. She dwelt feelingly on the white lunch room and the good food, and especially the paper napkins-the only place she had worked where they gave napkins. She claimed there was not a girl who did not want to cry when she had to quit that factory. "Everybody loved it," she said. I tried to find out if she felt the management had been paying for the polished bra.s.s rails, the good food, and the napkins out of the workers' wages. "Not on your life!" she answered. She had been a file clerk.

Take dental clinics in the factories. Four teeth on our floor were extracted while I was at the laundry. For a couple of days each girl moaned and groaned and made everybody near her miserable. Then she got Miss Cross's permission to go to some quack dentist, and out came the tooth. Irma had two out at one dollar each. It was going to cost her forty dollars to get them back in. A person with his or her teeth in good condition is a far better citizen than one suffering from the toothache.

If I had my way I should like to see a rest room in every factory where women are employed, and some time, however short, allowed in the middle of the afternoon to make use of it.

Eight hours is long enough for any woman to do sustained physical work, with no possibility for overtime.

Nor have we so much as touched on what it means to live on thirteen dollars or fourteen dollars a week.

"But then you have taken away all the arguments for organization!"

Should organization be considered as an end in and of itself, or as one possible means to an end?

Word was pa.s.sed this morning that "company" was coming! The bustling and the hustling and the dusting! Every girl had to clean her press from top to bottom, and we swept the floor with lightning speed. Miss Cross dashed to her little mirror and put powder on her nose. Hattie tied a curtain around her head to look like a Red Cross nurse. Every time the door opened we all got expectant palpitations. We were not allowed to speak, yet ever and anon Hattie or Mrs. Reilly would let out some timely remarks. Whereat we all got the giggles. Miss Cross would almost hiss, "GIRLS!" whereat we subsided. It was nerve wracking. And the company never came! They got as far as the third floor and gave out. But it was not until afternoon that we knew definitely that our agony was for naught.

Lucia's machine got out of order-steam escaped at a fearful rate.

While the mechanic was fixing it he discoursed to me on the laundry.

He had been there nine months-big, capable-looking six-footer. Out of the corner of his mouth he informed me, "Once anybody comes to work here they never leave!" It surely does seem as if they had no end of people who had worked there years and years. Miss Cross says they used to have more fun than nowadays, before so many colored girls were employed. They gave parties and dances and everyone was chummy with everyone else.

To-day, in the midst of hilarity and all unannounced, "company" did appear. We subsided like a schoolroom when the teacher suddenly re-enters. A batch of women, escorted by one of the management. He gesticulated and explained. I could not catch his words, for the noise of the presses, though goodness knows I craned my ears. They investigated everything. Undoubtedly their guide dwelt eloquently on the victrola in the lunch room; it plays every noon. On their way out two of the young women stopped by my press. "Didn't this girl iron that nightgown nicely?" one said to the other. I felt it obligatory to give them the "once over."

The second the door was closed I dashed for Miss Cross. "Who were them females?" I asked her.

Miss Cross grunted. "Them were Teachers College girls." She wrinkled her nose. "They send 'em over here often. And let me tell _you_, I never seen _one_ of 'em with any cla.s.s _yet_.... They talk about college girls-pooh! I never seen a college girl yet looked any cla.s.sier than us laundry girls. Most of 'em don't look _as_ cla.s.sy.

Only difference is, if you mixed us all up, they're gettin' educated."

One of my erstwhile jobs at the University of California had been piloting college girls around through factories in just that fashion.

I had to laugh in my sleeve as I suspected the same remarks may have been pa.s.sed on us after our departure!

We have much fun at our lunch table. A switchboard operator and file clerk from the office eats with us. She and I "guy" each other a good deal during the meal. Miss Cross wipes her eyes and sighs: "Gee!

Ain't it fun to laugh!" and Eleanor and I look pleased with ourselves.

In the paper this morning appeared a picture of one of New York's leading society women "experiencing the life of the working girl first hand." She was shown in a French bonnet, a bunch of orchids at her waist, standing behind a perfumery counter. What our table did to Mrs.

X!

"These women," fusses Miss Cross, "who think they'll learn what it's like to be a working girl, and stand behind a perfumery counter!

Somebody's always trying to find out what it's like to be a worker-and then they get a lot of noteriety writin' articles about it. All rot, I say. Pity, if they really want to know what workin's like, they wouldn't try a laundry."

"She couldn't eat her breakfast in bed if she did that!" was my cutting remark.

"Or quit at three," from Annie.

"Hisst!" I whisper, "I'm a lady in disguise!" And I quirk my little finger as I drink my coffee and order Eleanor to peer without to see if my limousine waits.

We discuss rich folk and society ladies, and no one envies or is bitter. Miss Cross guesses some of them think they get as weary flying around to their parties and trying on clothes as we do in the laundry.

I guess she is partly right.

Then we discuss what a bore it would be not to work. At our table sit Miss Cross, Edna (Miss Cross calls her Edner), the Cuban girl, who refused to eat with the colored girls; Annie, the English girl, who had worked in a retail shoe shop in London; Mrs. Reilly, who is always morose at lunch and never speaks, except one day when she and Miss Cross nearly came to blows over religion. Each got purple in the face.

Then it came out that there was a feud between them-two years or more it had lasted-and neither ever speaks to the other. (Yet Mrs. Reilly gave one dollar, twice as much as the rest of us, toward Miss Cross's Christmas present.) Then there are three girls from the office downstairs. Everyone there had had some experience in being out of work or not working. To each of them at such a time life has been a wearisome thing. Each declared she would 'most rather work at any old thing than stay home and do nothing.

Between the first and second bells after lunch the sixth-floor girls foregather and sit on the ironing tables, swing our heels, and pa.s.s the time of day. To-day I start casually singing, "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam." Everyone on our floor knows the song and there the whole lot of us sit, swinging our heels, singing at the top of our lungs, "A _sunbeam_, a _sunbeam_, Jesus wants me for a _sunbeam_," which is how I got the name of "Sunbeam" on our floor. Except that Miss Cross, for some reason of her own, usually called me "Constance."

I teach them "My Heart's a Little Bird Cage," and we add that to our repertoire. Then we go on to "Nearer, My G.o.d, to Thee," "Lead, Kindly Light," "Rock of Ages."

It appears we are a very religious lot on our floor. All the colored girls are Baptists. Miss Cross is an ardent Presbyterian, Annie is an Episcopalian, Edna and Mrs. Reilly are Catholics, but Edna knows all the hymns we daily sing.

And, lo! before many days I am startled by hearing Lucia sing-woebegone Lucia. She sings to no tune whatever and smiles at me, "Sunbeam, Sunbeam, Sunbeam, Sunbeam." So she has learned one English word in sixteen years. That is better in quality than German Tessie did. She told me, at the candy factory, that the first thing she learned in English was "son of a gun."

But as a matter of fact Lucia does know two other words. Once I ironed a very starched nightgown. It was a very, very large and gathered nightgown. I held it up and made Lucia look at it.

Lucia snickered. "Da big-a, da fat-a!" said Lucia.

Mrs. Reilly let out a squeal. "She's learnt English!" Mrs. Reilly called down the line.

"And," I announce, "I'll teach her 'da small-a, da thin-a.'"

Thereafter I held up garments to which those adjectives might apply, and tried to "learn" Lucia additional English. Lucia giggled and giggled and waited every evening to walk down the six flights of stairs with me, and three blocks until our ways parted. Each time I patted her on the back when we started off and chortled: "Hey, Lucia, da big-a, da fat-a!" Lucia would giggle again, and that is all we would have to say. Except one night Lucia pointed to the moon and said, "Luna." So I make the most of knowing that much Italian.

Oh yes, Lucia and I had one other thing in common. One day at the laundry I found myself humming a Neapolitan love song, from a victrola record we have. Lucia's face brightened. The rest of the afternoon I hummed the tune and Lucia sang the words of that song, much to Mrs.

Reilly's delight, who informed the floor that now, for sure, Lucia was in love again.

There was much singing on our floor. Irma used often to croon negro religious songs, the kind parlor entertainers imitate. I loved to listen to her. It was not my clothes she was ironing. Hattie, down the line, mostly dwelt on "Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam." Hattie had straight, short hair that stood out all over her head, and a face like a negro kewpie. She was up to mischief seven hours of the nine, nor could Miss Cross often subdue her. Hattie had been on our floor four years. One lively day Irma was singing with gusto "Abide With Me." For some reason I had broken into the rather unfactory-like ballad of "Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms," and Lucia was caroling some Italian song l.u.s.tily-all of us at one and the same time. Finally Miss Cross called over, "For land's sakes, two of you girls stop singing!" Since Irma and I were the only two of the three to understand her, we made Christian martyrs of ourselves and let Lucia have the floor.

Miss Cross was concerned once as to how I happened to know so many hymns. Green earrings do not look particularly hymny. The fact was, I had not thought of most of the hymns our sixth floor sang since I was knee high. In those long ago days a religious grandmother took me once to a Methodist summer camp meeting, at which time I resolved before my Maker to join the Salvation Army and beat a tambourine. So when Miss Cross asked me how I knew so many hymns, and the negro-revivalist variety, I answered that I once near joined the Salvation Army. "You don't say!" said the amazed Miss Cross.

One day Miss Cross and Jacobs, a Jew who bossed some department which brought him often to our floor, to see, for instance, should they wash more curtains or do furniture covers, had a great set-to on the subject of religion. Jacobs was an iconoclast. Edna left her handkerchiefs to join in. I eavesdropped visibly. Jacobs 'lowed there was no h.e.l.l. Whereat Miss Cross and Edna wanted to know the sense of being good. Jacobs 'lowed there was no such thing as a soul. Miss Cross and Edna fairly clutched each other.

"Then what is there that makes you happy or unhappy, if it ain't your soul?" asked Miss Cross, clenchingly.