To this truth, Betty's expense of $3 to $4 for her father from her average wage of $6, and little Molly's item of nine weeks' board and lodging for her sister, bear eloquent testimony. On the girls' part they were mentioned merely as "all in the day's work," and with the tacit simplicity of that common mortal responsibility which is heroic.

The other fact to be remarked in Betty's account is that she spent 60 cents a week for club dues and the theatre, and only 50 cents for all her casual sidewalk breakfasts and luncheons from the push carts. Such an eager hunger for complete change of scene and thought, such a desire for beauty and romance as these two comparative items show, appear in themselves a true romance. Nearly all the Russian shirt-waist makers visit the theatre and attend clubs and night classes, whatever their wage or their hours of labor. Most of them contribute to the support of a family.

These shirt-waist makers, all self-supporting, whose income and outlay are described above, were all—with the exception of Irena Kovalova, who supported a family of four—living away from home. Natalya lived with her mother and father.

She did not do her own washing, though she made her own waists and those of her sister and mother. But her story is given because in other ways—in casual employment, long hours, unfair and undignified treatment from her employers, and in the conditions of her peaceable effort to obtain juster and better terms of living—her experience has seemed characteristic of the trade fortunes of many of the forty thousand shirt-waist makers employed in New York for the last two years.

In conditions such as described above, Natalya and other shirt-waist makers were working last fall, when one day she saw a girl, a piece-worker, shaking her head and objecting sadly to the low price the foreman was offering her for making a waist. "If you don't like it," said the foreman, with a laugh, "why don't you join your old 'sisters' out on the street, then?"

Natalya wondered with interest who these "sisters" were. On making inquiry, she found that the workers in other shirt-waist factories had struck, for various reasons of dissatisfaction with the terms of their trade.

The factories had continued work with strike breakers. Some of the companies had stationed women of the street and their cadets in front of the shops to insult and attack the Union members whenever they came to speak to their fellow-workers and to try to dissuade them from selling their work on unfair terms. Some had employed special police protection and thugs against the pickets.

There is, of course, no law against picketing. Every one in the United States has as clear a legal right to address another person peaceably on the subject of his belief in selling his work as on the subject of his belief in the tariff. But on the 19th of October ten girls belonging to the Union, who had been talking peaceably on the day before with some of the strike breakers, were suddenly arrested as they were walking quietly along the street, were charged with disorderly conduct, arraigned in the Jefferson Market Court, and fined $1 each. The chairman of the strikers from one shop was set upon by a gang of thugs while he was collecting funds, and beaten and maimed so that he was confined to his bed for weeks.

A girl of nineteen, one of the strikers, as she was walking home one afternoon was attacked in the open daylight by a thug, who struck her in the side and broke one of her ribs. She was in bed for four weeks, and will always be somewhat disabled by her injury. These and other illegal oppressions visited on the strikers roused a number of members of the Woman's Trade-Union League to assist the girls in peaceful picketing.

Early in November, a policeman arrested Miss Mary E. Dreier, the President of the Woman's Trade-Union League, because she entered into a quiet conversation with one of the strike breakers. Miss Dreier is a woman of large independent means, socially well known throughout New York and Brooklyn. When the sergeant recognized her as she came into the station, he at once discharged her case, reprimanded the officer, and assured Miss Dreier that she would never have been arrested if they had known who she was.

This flat instance of discrimination inspired the officers of the Woman's Trade-Union League to protest to Police Commissioner Baker against the arbitrary oppression of the strikers by the policemen. He was asked to investigate the action of the police. He replied that the pickets would in future receive as much consideration as other people. The attitude of the police did not, however, change.

It was to these events, as Natalya Urusova found, that the foreman of the Bruch factory had referred when he asked the girls, with a sneer, why they didn't join their "sisters." Going to the Union headquarters on Clinton Street, she learned all she could about the Union. Afterward, in the Bruch factory, whenever any complaints arose, she would say casually, in pretended helplessness, "But what can we do? Is there any way to change this?" Vague suggestions of the Union headquarters would arise, and she would inquire into this eagerly and would pretend to allow herself to be led to Clinton Street. So, little by little, as the long hours and low wages and impudence from the foreman continued, she induced about sixty girls to understand about organization and to consider it favorably.

On the evening of the 22d of November, Natalya, and how many others from the factory she could not tell, attended a mass meeting at Cooper Union, of which they had been informed by hand-bills. It was called for the purpose of discussing a general strike of shirt-waist workers in New York City. The hall was packed. Overflow meetings were held at Beethoven Hall, Manhattan Lyceum, and Astoria Hall. In the Cooper Union addresses were delivered by Samuel Gompers, by Miss Dreier, and by many others. Finally, a girl of eighteen asked the chairman for the privilege of the floor. She said: "I have listened to all the speeches. I am one who thinks and feels from the things they describe. I, too, have worked and suffered. I am tired of the talking. I move that we go on a general strike."

The meeting broke into wild applause. The motion was unanimously indorsed. The chairman, Mr. Feigenbaum, a Union officer, rapped on the table. "Do you mean faith?" he called to the workers. "Will you take the old Jewish oath?" Thousands of right hands were held up and the whole audience repeated in Yiddish:[14] "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise."

This was the beginning of the general shirt-waist strike. A committee of fifteen girls and one boy was appointed at the Cooper Union meeting, and went from one to the other of the overflow meetings, where the same motion was offered and unanimously indorsed.

II

"But I did not know how many workers in my shop had taken that oath at that meeting. I could not tell how many would go on strike in our factory the next day," said Natalya, afterward. "When we came back the next morning to the factory, though, no one went to the dressing-room. We all sat at the machines with our hats and coats beside us, ready to leave. The foreman had no work for us when we got there. But, just as always, he did not tell when there would be any, or if there would be any at all that day. And there was whispering and talking softly all around the room among the machines: 'Shall we wait like this?' 'There is a general strike,' 'Who will get up first?' 'It would be better to be the last to get up, and then the company might remember it of you afterward, and do well for you,' But I told them," observed Natalya, with a little shrug, "'What difference does it make which one is first and which one is last?' Well, so we stayed whispering, and no one knowing what the other would do, not making up our minds, for two hours. Then I started to get up." Her lips trembled. "And at just the same minute all—we all got up together, in one second. No one after the other; no one before. And when I saw it—that time—oh, it excites me so yet, I can hardly talk about it. So we all stood up, and all walked out together. And already out on the sidewalk in front the policemen stood with the clubs. One of them said, 'If you don't behave, you'll get this on your head.' And he shook his club at me.

"We hardly knew where to go—what to do next. But one of the American girls, who knew how to telephone, called up the Woman's Trade-Union League, and they told us all to come to a big hall a few blocks away. After we were there, we wrote out on paper what terms we wanted: not any night work, except as it would be arranged for in some special need for it for the trade; and shorter hours; and to have wages arranged by a committee to arbitrate the price for every one fairly; and to have better treatment from the bosses.

"Then a leader spoke to us and told us about picketing quietly, and the law.[15]

"Our factory had begun to work with a few Italian strike breakers.[16] The next day we went back to the factory, and saw five Italian girls taken in to work, and then taken away afterward in an automobile. I was with an older girl from our shop, Anna Lunska. The next morning in front of the factory, Anna Lunska and I met a tall Italian man going into the factory with some girls. So I said to her: 'These girls fear us in some way. They do not understand, and I will speak to them, and ask them why they work, and tell them we are not going to harm them at all—only to speak about our work.'

"I moved toward them to say this to them. Then the tall man struck Anna Lunska in the breast so hard, he nearly knocked her down. She couldn't get her breath. And I went to a policeman standing right there and said, 'Why do you not arrest this man for striking my friend? Why do you let him do it? Look at her. She cannot speak; she is crying. She did nothing at all,' Then he arrested the man; and he said, 'But you must come, too, to make a charge against him.' The tall Italian called a man out of the factory, and went with me and Anna Lunska and the three girls to the court."

But when Natalya and Anna reached the court, and had made their charge against the tall Italian, to their bewilderment not only he, but they, too, were conducted downstairs to the cells. He had charged them with attacking the girls he was escorting into the factory.

"They made me go into a cell," said Natalya, "and suddenly they locked us in. Then I was frightened, and I said to the policeman there, 'Why do you do this? I have done nothing at all. The man struck my friend. I must send for somebody.'

"He said, 'You cannot send for any one at all. You are a prisoner.'

"We cried then. We were frightened. We did not know what to do.

"After about an hour and a half he came and said some one was asking for us. We looked out. It was Miss Violet Pike. A boy I knew had seen us go into the prison with the Italian, and not come out, and so he thought something was wrong and he had gone to the League and told them.

"So Miss Pike had come from the League; and she bailed us out; and she came back with us on the next day for our trial."

On the next morning the case against the tall Italian was rapidly examined, and the Italian discharged. He was then summoned back in rebuttal, and Natalya and Anna's case was called. Four witnesses, one of them being the proprietor of the factory, were produced against them, and stated that Natalya and Anna had struck one of the girls the Italian was escorting. At the close of the case against Natalya and Anna, Judge Cornell said:[17] "I find the girls guilty. It would be perfectly futile for me to fine them. Some charitable women would pay their fines or they could get a bond. I am going to commit them to the workhouse under the Cumulative Sentence Act, and there they will have an opportunity of thinking over what they have done."

"Miss Violet Pike came forward then," said Natalya, "and said, 'Cannot this sentence be mollified?'

"And he said it could not be mollified.

"They took us away in a patrol to the Tombs.

"We waited in the waiting-room there. The matron looked at us and said, 'You are not bad girls. I will not send you down to the cells. You can do some sewing for me here.' But I could not sew. I felt so bad, because I could not eat the food they gave us at noon for dinner in the long hall with all the other prisoners. It was coffee with molasses in it, and oatmeal and bread so bad that after one taste we could not swallow it down. Then, for supper, we had the same, but soup, too, with some meat bones in it. And even before you sat down at the table these bones smelled so it made you very sick. But they forced you to sit down at the table before it, whether you ate or drank anything or not. And the prisoners walked by in a long line afterward and put their spoons in a pail of hot water, just the same whether they had eaten anything with the spoons or not.

"Then we walked to our cells. It was night, and it was dark—oh, so dark in there it was dreadful! There were three other women in the cell—some of them were horrid women that came off the street. The beds were one over the other, like on the boats—iron beds, with a quilt and a blanket. But it was so cold you had to put both over you; and the iron springs underneath were bare, and they were dreadful to lie on. There was no air; you could hardly breathe. The horrid women laughed and screamed and said terrible words.

"Anna Lunska felt so sick and was so very faint, I thought what should we do if she was so much worse in the night in this terrible darkness, where you could see nothing at all. Then I called through the little grating to a woman who was a sentinel that went by in the hall all through the night, 'My friend is sick. Can you get me something if I call you in the night?'

"The woman just laughed and said, 'Where do you think you are? But if you pay me, I will come and see what I can do.'

"In a few minutes she came back with a candle, and shuffled some cards under the candlelight, and called to us, 'Here, put your hand through the grate and give me a quarter and I'll tell you who your fellows are by the cards.' Then Anna Lunska said, 'We do not care to hear talk like that,' and the woman went away.

"All that night it was dreadful. In the morning we could not eat any of the breakfast. They took us in a wagon like a prison with a little grating, and then in a boat like a prison with a little grating. As we got on to it, there was another girl, not like the rest of the women prisoners. She cried and cried. And I saw she was a working girl. I managed to speak to her and say, 'Who are you?' She said, 'I am a striker. I cannot speak any English.' That was all. They did not wish me to speak to her, and I had to go on.

"From the boat they made us go into the prison they call Blackwell's Island. Here they made us put on other clothes. All the clothes they had were much, much too large for me, and they were dirty. They had dresses in one piece of very heavy, coarse material, with stripes all around, and the skirts are gathered, and so heavy for the women. They almost drag you down to the ground. Everything was so very much too big for me, the sleeves trailed over my hands so far and the skirts on the ground so far, they had to pin and pin them up with safety-pins.

"Then we had the same kind of food I could not eat; and they put us to work sewing gloves. But I could not sew, I was so faint and sick. At night there was the same kind of food I could not eat, and all the time I wondered about that shirt-waist striker that could not speak one word of English, and she was all alone and had the same we had in other ways. When we walked by the matron to go to our cells at night, at first she started to send Anna Lunska and me to different cells. She would have made me go alone with one of the terrible women from the street. But I was so dreadfully frightened, and cried so, and begged her so to let Anna Lunska and me stay together, that at last she said we could.

"Just after that I saw that other girl, away down the line, so white, she must have cried and cried, and looking so frightened. I thought, 'Oh, I ought to ask for her to come with us, too' But I did not dare. I thought, 'I will make that matron so mad that she will not even let Anna Lunska and me stay together,' So I got almost to our cell before I went out of the line and across the hall and went back to the matron and said: 'Oh, there is another Russian girl here. She is all alone. She cannot speak one word of English. Please, please couldn't that girl come with my friend and me?'

"She said, 'Well, for goodness' sake! So you want to band all the strikers together here, do you? How long have you known her?'

"I said, 'I never saw her until to-day.'

"The matron said, 'For the land's sake, what do you expect here?' but she did not say anything else. So I went off, just as though she wasn't going to let that girl come with us; for I knew she would not want to seem as though she would do it, at any rate.

"But, after we were in the cell with an Irish woman and another woman, the door opened, and that Russian girl came in with us. Oh, she was so glad!

"After that it was the same as the night before, except that we could see the light of the boats passing. But it was dark and cold, and we had to put both the quilt and the blanket over us and lie on the springs, and you must keep all of your clothes on to try to be warm. But the air and the smells are so bad. I think if it were any warmer, you would almost faint there. I could not sleep.

"The next day they made me scrub. But I did not know how to scrub. And, for Anna Lunska, she wet herself all over from head to foot. So they said, very cross, 'It seems to us you do not know how to scrub a bit. You can go back to the sewing department.' On the way I went through a room filled with negresses, and they called out, 'Look, look at the little kid,' And they took hold of me, and turned me around, and all laughed and sang and danced all around me. These women, they do not seem to mind at all that they are in prison.

"In the sewing room the next two days I was so sick I could hardly sew. The women often said horrid things to each other, and I sat on the bench with them. There was one woman over us at sewing that argued with me so much, and told me how much better it was for me here than in Russian prisons, and how grateful I should be.

"I said, 'How is that, then? Isn't there the same kind of food in those prisons and in these prisons? And I think there is just as much liberty.'"

On the last day of Natalya's sentence, after she was dressed in her own little jacket and hat again and just ready to go, one of the most repellent women of the street said to her, "I am staying in here and you're going out. Give me a kiss for good-by." Natalya said that this woman was a horror to her. "But I thought it was not very nice to refuse this; so I kissed her a good-by kiss and came away."

The officers guarded the girls to the prison boat for their return to New York. There, at the ferry, stood a delegation of the members of the Woman's Trade-Union League and the Union waiting to receive them.

Such is the account of one of the seven hundred arrests made during the shirt-waist strike, the chronicle of a peaceful striker.

As the weeks went on, however, in spite of the advice of the Union officers, there were a few instances of violence on the part of the Union members. Among thirty thousand girls it could not be expected that every single person should maintain the struggle in justice and temperance with perfect self-control. In two or three cases the Union members struck back when they were attacked. In a few cases they became excited and attacked strike breakers. In one factory, although there was no violence, the workers conducted their negotiations in an unfair and unfortunate manner. They had felt that all their conditions except the amount of wages were just, and they admired and were even remarkably proud of the management, a firm of young and well-intentioned manufacturers. Early in the general strike, however, they went out without a word to the management, without even signifying to it in any way the point they considered unjust. The management did not send to inquire. After a few days it resumed work with strike breakers. The former employees began picketing. The management sent word to them that it would not employ against them, so long as they were peaceful and within the law, any of the means of intimidation that numbers of the other firms were using—special police and thugs. The girls sent word back that they would picket peacefully and quietly. But afterward, on their own admission, which was most disarming in its candor, they became careless and "too gay." They went picketing in too large numbers and were too noisy. Instantly the firm employed police. Before this, however, the girls had begun to discuss and to realize the unintelligence of their behavior in failing to send a committee to the management to describe their position clearly and to obtain terms. They now appointed and instructed such a committee, came rapidly to terms with the management, and have been working for them in friendly relations ever since.

While in general the strike was both peaceful in conduct and just in demand and methods of demand on the part of the strikers, these exceptions must, of course, be mentioned in the interests of truth. Further, it would convey a false impression to imply that every striker arrested had as much sense and force of character as Natalya Urusova. Natalya was especially protected in her ordeal by a vital love of observation and a sense of humor, charmingly frequent in the present writer's experience of young Russian girls and women. With these qualities she could spend night after night locked up with the women of the street, in her funny, enormous prison clothes, and remain as uninfluenced by her companions as if she had been some blossoming geranium or mignonette set inside a filthy cellar as a convenience for a few minutes, and then carried out again to her native fresh air. But such qualities as hers cannot be demanded of all very young and unprotected girls, and to place them wantonly with women of the streets has in general an outrageous irresponsibility and folly quite insufficiently implied by the experience of a girl of Natalya's individual penetration and self-reliance.

III

In the period since the strike began many factories had been settling upon Union terms. But many factories were still on strike, and picketing on the part of the Union was continuing, as well as unwarranted arrests, like Natalya's, on the part of the employers and the police. The few exceptions to the general rule of peaceful picketing have been stated. Over two hundred arrests were made within three days early in December. On the 3d of December a procession of ten thousand women marched to the City Hall, accompanying delegates from the Union and the Woman's Trade-Union League, and visited Mayor McClellan in his office and gave him this letter:—

HONORABLE GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN, Mayor of the City of New York.

We, the members of the Ladies' Shirt-waist Makers' Union, a body of thirty thousand women, appeal to you to put an immediate stop to the insults and intimidations and to the abuses to which the police have subjected us while we have been picketing. This is our lawful right.

We protest to you against the flagrant discrimination of the Police Department in favor of the employers, who are using every method to incite us to violence.

We appeal to you directly in this instance, instead of to your Police Commissioner.

We do this because our requests during the past six months have had no effect in decreasing the outrages perpetrated upon our members, nor have our requests been granted a fair hearing.

Yours respectfully, S. SHINDLER, Secretary.

The Mayor thanked the committee for bringing the matter to his attention, and promised to take up the complaint with the Police Commissioner.

But the arrests and violence of the police continued unchecked.

On the 5th of December the Political Equality League, at the instigation of Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, held a packed meeting for the benefit of the Shirt-waist Makers' Union. Many imprisoned girls were present, and gave to the public clear, straightforward stories of the treatment they had received at the hands of the city. The committee of the meeting had offered the Mayor and other city officials a box, but they refused to be present.

Again the arrests and violence continued without protection for the workers. Nevertheless their cause was constantly gaining, and although all attempts at general arbitration were unsuccessful, more and more employers settled with the operatives. They continued to settle during December and January until the middle of February. All but thirteen of the shops in New York had then made satisfactory terms with the Union workers. It was officially declared that the strike was over.

Natalya's shop had settled with the operatives on the 23d of January, and she went back to work on the next day.

She had an increase of $2 a week in wages—$8 a week instead of $6. Her hours were now fifty-two a week instead of sixty—that is to say, nine and one-half hours a day, with a Saturday half-holiday. But she has since then been obliged to enter another factory on account of slack work.

Among the more skilled workers than Natalya in New York to-day, Irena Kovalova, who supports her mother and her younger brother and sister, has $11 a week instead of $9. She is not obliged to work on Sunday, and her factory closes at five o'clock instead of six on Saturday. "I have four hours less a week," she said with satisfaction. The family have felt able to afford for her a new dress costing $11, and material for a suit, costing $6. A friend, a neighbor, made this for Irena as a present.

Among the older workers of more skill than Irena, Anna Klotin, who sent $120 home to her family last year, has now, however, only $6, $7, and $8 a week, and very poor and uncertain work, instead of her former $12 a week. Hers was one of the thirteen factories that did not settle. Of their one hundred and fifty girls, they wished about twenty of their more skilled operators to return to them under Union conditions, leaving the rest under the old long hours of overtime and indeterminate, unregulated wages. Anna was one of the workers the firm wished to retain on Union terms, but she felt she could not separate her chances in her trade from the fortunes of her one hundred and thirty companions. She refused to return under conditions so unjust for them. She has stayed on in her boarding place, as her landlady, realizing Anna's responsible character, is always willing to wait for money when work is slack. She has bought this year only two pairs of shoes, a hat for 50 cents, and one or two muslin waists, which she made herself. She has lived on such work as she could find from time to time in different factories. Anna did not grudge in any way her sacrifice for the less skilled workers. "In time," she said, "we will have things better for all of us." And the chief regret she mentioned was that she had been unable to send any money home since the strike.

The staunchest allies of the shirt-waist makers in their attempt to obtain wiser trade conditions were the members and officers of the Woman's Trade-Union League, whose response and generosity were constant from the beginning to the end of the strike. The chronicle of the largest woman's strike in this country is not yet complete. A suit is now pending against the Woman's Trade-Union League and the Union for conspiracy in restraint of trade, brought by the Sittomer Shirt-waist Co. A test suit is pending against Judge Cornell for false imprisonment, brought by one of the shirt-waist strikers.

The whole outcome of the strike in its effect on women's wages in the shirt-waist trade, their income and outlay in their work, both financially and in vitality, cannot, of course, yet be fully known. The statement that there has been a general rise of wages must be modified in other ways than that suggested by the depletion of Anna Klotin's income in the year since the strike. In factories where price on piece-work is subject to arbitration between a Union committee of the workers and the firm, the committee is not always able to obtain a fair price for labor. One of the largest factories made a verbal agreement to observe Union conditions, but it signed no written contract, and has since broken its word. It discriminates against Union members, and it insists on Sunday work and on night work for more than two nights a week. Further, during the seventeen weeks of the strike many shirt-waist orders ordinarily filled in New York were placed with New Jersey and Pennsylvania firms. The present New York season has been unusually dull, and now, on this writing, early in August, many girls are discouraged on account of the slight amounts they earn through slack work.

"But that is not the fault of the employers," said one of the workers. "You must be reasonable for them. You cannot ask them for work they are not able to obtain to give you." Her remark is quoted both from its wisdom and for another purpose. She was the girl who will always be disabled by the attack of her employer's thug. Her quiet and instinctive mention of the need of justice in considering conditions for employers had for the listener who heard her a most significant, unconscious generosity and nobility.

Looking back upon the shirt-waist strike nearly a year afterward, its profoundest common value would appear to an unprejudiced onlooker to be its spirit. Something larger than a class spirit, something fairer than a mob spirit, something which may perhaps be called a mass spirit, manifested itself in the shirt-waist makers' effort for better terms of life.

"The most remarkable feature of the strike," says a writer in the Call,[18] "is the absence of leaders. All the girls seem to be imbued with a spirit of activity that by far surpasses all former industrial uprisings. One like all are ready to take the chairmanship, secretaryship, do picket duty, be arrested, and go to prison."

There has never before been a strike quite like the shirt-waist makers' strike. Perhaps there never will be another quite like it again. When every fair criticism of its conduct has been faced, and its errors have all been admitted, the fact remains that the New York strike said, "All for one and one for all," with a magnetic candor new and stirring in the voice of the greatest and the richest city of our country—perhaps new in the voice of the world. Wonderful it is to know that in that world to-day, unseen, unheard, are forces like those of that ghetto girl who, in the meanest quarter of New York, on stinted food, in scanty clothes, drained with faint health and overwork, could yet walk through her life, giving away half of her wage by day to some one else, enjoying the theatre at night, and, in the poorest circumstances, pouring her slight strength out richly like a song for pleasure and devotion. Wonderful it is to know that when Natalya Urusova was in darkness, hunger, fright, and cold on Blackwell's Island, she still could be responsibly concerned for the fortunes of a stranger and had something she could offer to her nobly. Wonderful to know that, after her very bones had been broken by the violence of a thug of an employer, one of these girls could still speak for perfect fairness for him with an instinct for justice truly large and thrilling. Such women as that ennoble life and give to the world a richer and altered conception of justice—a justice of imagination and the heart, concerned not at all with vengeance, but simply with the beauty of the perfect truth for the fortunes of all mortal creatures.

Besides the value to the workers of the spirit of the shirt-waist strike, they gained another advantage. This was of graver moment even than an advance in wages and of deeper consequences for their future. They gained shorter hours.

What, then, are the trade fortunes of some of those thousands of other women, other machine operatives whose hours and wages are now as the shirt-waist makers' were before the shirt-waist strike? What do some of these other women factory workers, unorganized and entirely dependent upon legislation for conserving their strength by shorter working hours, give in their industry? What do they get from it? For an answer to these questions, we turn to some of the white goods sewers, belt makers, and stitchers on children's dresses, for the annals of their income and outlay in their work away from home in New York.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Union Label Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. I, p. 1.]

[Footnote 13: This expense would at this date probably be heavier, as the working girls at one of the St. George's Working Girls' Clubs estimated early this summer that shoes of a quality purchasable two years ago at $2 would now cost $2.50.]

[Footnote 14: Constance Leupp, in the Survey.]

[Footnote 15: The circular of advice issued a little later by the Union reads as follows:—

RULES FOR PICKETS

Don't walk in groups of more than two or three. Don't stand in front of the shop; walk up and down the block. Don't stop the person you wish to talk to; walk along side of him. Don't get excited and shout when you are talking. Don't put your hand on the person you are speaking to. Don't touch his sleeve or button. This may be construed as a "technical assault." Don't call any one "scab" or use abusive language of any kind. Plead, persuade, appeal, but do not threaten. If a policeman arrest you and you are sure that you have committed no offense, take down his number and give it to your Union officers.]

[Footnote 16: In the factories where the Russian and Italian girls worked side by side, their feeling for each other seems generally to have been friendly. After the beginning of the strike an attempt was made to antagonize them against each other by religious and nationalistic appeals. It met with little success. Italian headquarters for Italian workers wishing organizations were soon established. Little by little the Italian garment workers are entering the Union.]

[Footnote 17: Extract from the court stenographer's minutes of the proceedings in the Per trial.]

[Footnote 18: Therese Malkiel, December 22.]



CHAPTER III

THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK FACTORY WORKERS

[Unskilled and Seasonal Factory Work]

I

Besides the accounts of the waist makers, the National Consumers' League received in its inquiry specific chronicles from skilled and from unskilled factory workers, both hand workers and machine operatives—among others, packers of drugs, biscuits, and olives, cigarette rollers, box makers, umbrella makers, hat makers, glove makers, fur sewers, hand embroiderers, white goods workers, skirt makers, workers on men's coats, and workers on children's dresses.

As will be seen, the situation occupied and described by any individual girl may in a year or five years be no longer hers, but that of some other worker. So that the synthesis of these chronicles is presented, not as a composite photograph of the industrial experiences in any one trade, but rather as an accurate kinetoscope view of the yearly life of chance passing factory workers.

For the purposes of record these annals may be loosely divided into those of unskilled and seasonal factory workers, and those whose narratives expressed the effects of monotony and fatigue, from speeding at their tasks. This division must remain loose to convey a truthful impression. For the same self-supporting girl has often been a skilled and an unskilled worker, by hand, at a machine, and in several industries.

Discouragement at the lack of opportunity to advance was expressed by almost all the narrators of their histories who were engaged in unskilled factory work. Among them, Emily Clement, an American girl, was one of the first workers who gave the League an account of her experience.

Emily was tending an envelope machine, at a wage of $6 a week. She was about twenty years old; and before her employment at the envelope machine she had worked, at the age of fourteen, for a year in a carpet mill; then for two years in a tobacco factory; and then for two years had kept house for a sister and an aunt living in an East Side tenement.

She still lived with them, sharing a room with her sister, and paying $3 a week for her lodging, with board and part of her washing. She did the rest of her washing, and made some of her sister's clothes and all of her own. This skill had enabled her to have for $5.20, the cost of the material, the pretty spring suit she wore—a coat, skirt, and jumper, of cloth much too thin to protect her from the chill of the weather, but stylishly cut and becoming.

In idle times she had done a little sewing for friends, for her income had been quite inadequate. During the twenty-two weeks she had been in the factory she had had full work for eleven and one-half weeks, at $6; half-time for eight and one-half weeks, at $3; and two weeks of slack work, in each of which she earned only $1.50.

She had no money at all to spend for recreation; and, in her hopelessness of the future and her natural thirst for pleasure, she sometimes accepted it from chance men acquaintances met on the street.

Another unskilled worker of twenty, Sarina Bashkitseff, intended to escape from her monotonous work and low wage by educating herself in a private evening school.

For this she contrived to save $4 a month out of her income of $4 a week. Sarina packed powders in a drug factory from eight to six o'clock, with three-quarters of an hour for lunch. She was a beautiful and brilliant girl, who used to come to work in the winter dressed in her summer coat, with a little woollen under-jacket to protect her from the cold, and a plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the American girls. Sarina scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to spend for dress, money with which she could learn to read "Othello" and "King Lear" in the original; and scorned to spend in giggling the lunch hour, in which she might read in Yiddish newspapers the latest tidings of the struggle in Russia.

In the drug factory, and in her East Side hall bedroom, she lived in a world of her own—a splendid, generous world of the English tragedies she studied at night school, and of the thrilling hopes and disappointments of the Russian revolution.

She had been in New York a year. In this time she had worked in an artificial flower factory, earning from $2 to $2.25 a week; then as a cutter in a box factory, where she had $3 a week at first, and then $5, for ten hours' work a day. She left this place because the employer was very lax about payment, and sometimes cheated her out of small amounts. She then tried finishing men's coats; but working from seven-thirty to twelve and from one to six daily brought her only $3 a week and severe exhaustion.[19]

From her present wage of $4 she spent 60 cents a week for carfare and $4.25 a month for her share of a tenement hall bedroom. Although she did not live with them, her mother and father were in New York, and she had her dinners with them, free of cost. Her luncheon cost her from 7 to 10 cents a day, and her breakfast consisted of 1-1/2 cents' worth of rolls.

All that made Sarina Bashkitseff's starved and drudging days endurable for her was her clear determination to escape from them by educating herself. Her fate might be expressed in Whitman's words, "Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune."

Whatever her circumstances, few persons in the world could ever be in a position to pity her.

Marta Neumann, another unskilled factory worker, an Austrian girl of nineteen, was also trying to escape from her present position by educating herself at night school, but was drained by cruel homesickness.

Marta had spent all her youth, since her childhood, at home,—four years in New York,—in factory work, without the slightest prospect of advancement. Her work was of the least skilled kind—cutting off the ends of threads from men's suspenders, and folding and placing them in boxes. She earned at first $3 a week, and had been advanced to $5 by a 50-cent rise at every one of the last four Christmases since she had left her mother and father. But she knew she would not be advanced beyond this last price, and feared to undertake heavier work, as, though she had kept her health, she was not at all strong.

She worked from eight to six, with half an hour at noon. On Saturday the factory closed at five in winter and at one in summer. Her income for the year had been $237.50. She had spent $28.50 for carfare; $13 for a suit; $2 for a hat; and $2 for a pair of shoes she had worn for ten months. Her board and lodging with a married sister had cost her $2.50 a week, less in one way than with strangers. But she slept with part of her sister's family, did her own washing and her sister's, scrubbed the floor, and rose every day at half past five to help with the work and prepare her luncheon before starting for the factory at seven.

Marta could earn so little that she had never been able to save enough to make her deeply desired journey back to Austria to see her mother and father. Although both their children were in the new country, her mother and father would not be admitted under the immigration law, because her father was blind.

The lack of opportunity to rise, among older unskilled factory workers, may be illustrated by the experience of Mrs. Hallett, an American woman of forty, a slight, gentle-voiced little widow, who had been packing candies and tying and labelling boxes for sixteen years. In this time she had advanced from a wage of $4 a week to a wage of $6, earned by a week of nine-hour days, with a Saturday half-holiday.

However, as with Marta, this had represented payment from the company for length of service, and not an advance to more skilled or responsible labor with more outlook. In Mrs. Hallett's case this was partly because the next step would have been to become a clerk in one of the company's retail stores, and she was not strong enough to endure the all-day standing which this would require. Mrs. Hallett liked this company. The foreman was considerate, and a week's vacation with pay was given to the employees.

Mrs. Hallett lived in an excessively small, unheated hall bedroom, on the fourth floor of an enormous old house filled with the clatter of the elevated railroad. On the night of the inquirer's call, she was pathetically concerned lest her visitor should catch cold because "she wasn't used to it." She lighted a small candle to show her the room, furnished with one straight hard chair, a cot, and a wash-stand with a broken pitcher, but with barely space besides for Mrs. Clark and her kind, public-spirited little hostess. They sat, drowned at times in the noise of the elevated, in almost complete darkness, as Mrs. Hallett insisted on making a vain effort to extract some heat for her guest from the single gas-jet, by attaching to it an extremely small gas-stove.

For this room, which was within walking distance of the candy factory, Mrs. Hallett paid $1.75 a week. Her breakfast of coffee and rolls in a bakery near by cost her 10 cents daily. She apportioned 15 or 25 cents each for her luncheon or dinner at restaurants. In her hungriest and most extravagant moments she lunched for 30 cents. Her allowance for food had to be meagre, because, as she had no laundry facilities, she was obliged to have her washing done outside. Sometimes she contrived to save a dollar a week toward buying clothing. But this meant living less tidily by having less washing done, or going hungrier. During the last year her expense for clothing had been a little more than $23: summer hat, $1; winter hat, $1.98; best hat, $2; shoes (2 pairs at $2.98, 2 pairs rubbers), $7.16; wrap (long coat), $2.98; skirt (a best black brilliantine, worn two years), at $5.50, $2.75; underskirt (black sateen), 98 cents; shirtwaist (black cotton, worn every day in the year), 98 cents; black tights, 98 cents; 2 union suits at $1.25 (one every other year), $1.25; 6 pairs stockings at 25 cents, $1.50; total, $23.56.

She said with deprecation that she sometimes went to the theatre with some young girl friends, paying 25 cents for a seat, "because I like a good time now and then."

These trade fortunes represent as clearly as possible the usual industrial experience of the women workers in unskilled factory labor who gave accounts of their income and outlay in their work away from home in New York.

II

The chronicles printed below, taken from establishments of different kinds and grades, express as clearly as possible the several features most common to the trade fortunes the workers described—uncertain and seasonal employment, small exploitations, monotony in occupation, and fatigue from speeding.

Because of uncertain and seasonal employment, machine operatives in the New York sewing industries frequently change from one trade to another. This had been the experience of Yeddie Bruker, a young Hungarian white-goods worker living in the Bronx.

The tenements of the Bronx appear as crowded as those of the longer-settled neighborhoods of Manhattan, the lower East Side, Harlem, Chelsea, and the cross streets off the Bowery, where so many self-supporting factory workers live. These newer-built lodgings, too, have close, stifling halls, and inner courts hung thick with washing. Here, too, you see, through the windows, flower makers and human hair workers at their tasks; and in the entries, hung with Hungarian and German signs, the children sit crowded among large women with many puffs of hair and a striking preference for frail light pink and blue princess dresses. These blocks of Rumanian and Hungarian tenement districts, their fire-escapes hung with feather beds and old carpets, and looking like great overflowing waste-baskets, are scattered in among little bluff ledges, scraggy with walnut brush, some great rocks still unblasted, and several patches of Indian corn in sloping hillside empty lots—small, strange heights of old New York country, still unsubmerged by the wide tide of Slav and Austrian immigration.

In this curious and bizarre neighborhood, Yeddie Bruker and her sister lived in a filthy tenement building, in one room of an extremely clean little flat owned by a family of their own nationality.

Yeddie was a spirited, handsome girl of twenty-one, though rather worn looking and white. At work for six years in New York, she had at first been a machine operative in a large pencil factory, where she fastened to the ends of the pencils the little corrugated tin bands to which erasers are attached. Then she had been a belt maker, then a stitcher on men's collars, and during the last four years a white-goods worker.

In the pencil factory of her first employment there was constant danger of catching her fingers in the machinery; the air was bad; the forewoman was harsh and nagging, and perpetually hurrying the workers. The jar of the wheels, the darkness, and the frequent illnesses of workers from breathing the particles of the pencil-wood shavings and the lead dust flying in the air all frightened and preyed upon her. She earned only $4 a week for nine and one-half hours' work a day, and was exhausting herself when she left the place, hastened by the accident of a girl near her, who sustained hideous injuries from catching her hair in the machinery.

In the collar factory she again earned $4 a week, stitching between five and six dozen collars a day. The stitch on men's collars is extremely small, almost invisible. It strained her eyes so painfully that she was obliged to change her occupation again.

As an operative on neckwear, and afterward on belts, she was thrown out of work by the trade seasons. These still leave her idle, in her present occupation as a white-goods worker, for more than three months in every year.

In the remaining nine months, working with a one-needle machine on petticoats and wash dresses, in a small factory on the lower East Side, she has had employment for about four days in the week for three months, employment for all the working days in the week for another three months, and employment with overtime three nights in a week and an occasional half day on Sunday, for between two and three months. Legal holidays and a few days of illness made up the year.

In full weeks her wage is $8. Her income for the year had been $366, and she had been able to save nothing. She had paid $208 for her board and lodging, at the rate of $4 a week; a little more than $100 for clothing; $38 for carfare, necessitated by living in the Bronx; $3 for a doctor; $2.60 to a benefit association, which assures her $3 a week in case of illness; $5 for the theatre; and $6 for Union dues.

Her work was very exhausting. Evenly spaced machine ruffling on petticoats is difficult, and she had a great deal of this work to do. She sewed with a one-needle machine, which carried, however, five cottons and was hard to thread. It may be said here that the number of needles does not necessarily determine the difficulty of working on sewing-machines; two-needle machines are sometimes harder to run than five or even twelve-needle machines, because they are more cheaply and clumsily constructed and the material is held less firmly by the metal guide under the needle-point. It was not her eyes, Yeddie said, that were tired by the stitching, but her shoulders and her back, from the jar of the machines. Every month she suffered cruelly, but, because she needed every cent she made, she never remained at home, when the factory was open.

One of the most trying aspects of machine-speeding, in the sewing trades, is the perpetual goading and insistence of the foremen and forewomen, frequently mentioned by other workers besides Yeddie. Two years ago, in a waist and dress factory where 400 operatives—more than 300 girls and about 20 men—were employed for the company by a well-known subcontractor, Jake Klein, a foreman asked Mr. Klein to beset some of the girls for a degree of speed he said he was unwilling to demand. The manager discharged him. He asked to speak to the girls before he went away. The manager refused his request. As Mr. Klein turned to the girls, his superior summoned the elevator man, who seized Klein's collar, overpowered him, and started to drag him over the floor toward the stairs. "Brothers and sisters," Klein called to the operatives, "will you sit by and see a fellow-workman used like this?" In one impulse of clear justice, every worker arose, walked out of the shop with Jake Klein, and stayed out till the company made overtures of peace. This adventure, widely related on the East Side, serves to show the latent fire, kindled by the accumulation of small overbearing oppressions, which smolders in many sewing shops.

The uncertainty of employment characterizing the sewing trades fell heavily on Sarah Silberman, a delicate little Austrian Jewish girl of seventeen, who finished and felled women's cloaks.

She had always lived in poverty. She had worked in a stocking factory in Austria when she was a little thing of nine, and had been self-supporting ever since she was fourteen, machine-sewing in Vienna and London and New York.

She had been in New York for about a year, lodging, or rather sleeping at night, in the tenement kitchen of some distant cousins of hers, practically strangers. The kitchen opened on an air-shaft, and it was used, not only as a kitchen, but as a dining room and living-room. For the first four months after her arrival Sarah earned about $5 a week, working from nine and one-half to ten hours a day as a finisher of boys' trousers. From this wage she paid $3 a week for her kitchen sleeping space and breakfast and supper. Luncheon cost her 7 cents a day. She had been able to buy so very little clothing that she had kept no account of it. She did her own washing, and walked to work.

She had never had any education until she came to America, and she now attended a night school, in which she was keenly interested. She was living in this way when her factory closed.

She then searched desperately for employment for two weeks, finding it at last in a cloak factory[20] where she was employed from half past seven in the morning until half past six or seven in the evening, with a respite of only a few minutes at noon for a hasty luncheon. Her wage was $3 a week. Working her hardest, she could not keep the wolf from the door, and was obliged to go hungry at luncheon time or fail to pay the full rent for her place to sleep in the kitchen.

Sarah was very naturally unstrung and nervous in this hardness of circumstance and her terror of destitution. As she told her story, she sobbed and wrung her hands. In the next six months she had better occupation, however, in spasmodically busy shops, where the hours were shorter than in the cloak factory, and she managed to earn an average wage of $6 a week. She was then more serene; she said she had "made out good."

During her six weeks of better pay at $6 a week, however, which so few people would consider "making out good," she had suffered an especially mean exploitation.

She applied at an underwear factory which constantly advertises, in an East Side Jewish paper, for operatives. The management told her they would teach her to operate if she would work for them two weeks for nothing and would give them a dollar. She gave them the dollar; but on the first day in the place, as she received no instructions, and learned through another worker that after her two weeks of work for nothing were over she would not be employed, she came away, losing the dollar she had given to the firm.

Another worker who was distressed by the dull season, and had witnessed unjust impositions, was Katia Markelov, a young operative on corsets. She was a tiny, grave-looking girl of nineteen, very frail, with smooth black hair, a lovely refinement of manner, and a very sweet smile. Like many other operatives, she wore glasses. Katia was a good manager, and an industrious and clever student, a constant attendant at night school.

In the factory where she was employed she earned about $10 a week as a week worker, a skilled worker making an entire corset, after it was cut and before it was trimmed. But she had only twelve full weeks' work in the year; for two and a half months she was entirely idle, and for the remaining six and a half months she worked from two to five days a week. Her income for the year had been about $346.

Katia worked with a one-needle machine in a small factory off lower Broadway. Before that she had been employed as a week worker in a Fifth Avenue corset factory, which may be called Madame Cora's. Shortly before Katia left this establishment, Madame Cora changed her basis of payment from week work to piece-work. The girls' speed increased. Some of the more rapid workers who had before made $10 were able to make $12. On discovering this, Madame Cora cut their wages, not by frankly returning to the old basis, but by suddenly beginning to charge the girls for thread and needles. She made them pay her 2 cents for every needle. Thread on a five-needle machine, sometimes with two eyes in each of the needles, stitches up very rapidly. The girls were frequently obliged to pay from a dollar and a half to two dollars a week for the thread sewed into Madame Cora's corsets, and for needles. They rebelled when Madame Cora refused to pay for these materials herself. From among the three hundred girls, thirty girls struck, went to Union headquarters, and asked to be organized. But Madame Cora simply filled their places with other girls who were willing to supply her with thread for her corsets, and refused to take them back. Katia did not respect Madame Cora's methods, and had left before the strike.

Katia spent $2.50 a week for breakfast and dinner and for her share of a room with a congenial friend, another Russian girl, in Harlem. The room was close and opened on an air-shaft, but was quiet and rather pleasant. She paid from $1.25 to $1.50 for luncheons, and, out of the odd hundred dollars left from her income, had contrived, by doing her own washing and making her own waists, to buy all her clothing, and to spend $5 for books and magazines, $7 for grand opera, which she deeply loved, and $30 for an outing. On account of her cleverness Katia was less at the mercy of unjust persons than some of the less skilful and younger girls.

Among these, Molly Davousta, another young machine operative, was struggling to make payments to an extortionate ticket seller, who had swindled her in the purchase of a steamboat ticket.

When Molly was thirteen, her mother and father, who had five younger children, had sent her abroad out of Russia, with the remarkable intention of having her prepare and provide a home for all of them in some other country.

Like Dick Whittington, the little girl went to London, though to seek, not only her own fortune, but that of seven other people. After she had been in London for four years, her father died. She and her next younger sister, Bertha, working in Russia, became the sole support of the family; and now, learning that wages were better in America, Molly, like Whittington, turned again and came to New York.

Here she found work on men's coats, at a wage fluctuating from $5 to $9 a week. She lived in part of a tenement room for a rent of $3 a month. For supper and Saturday meals she paid $1.50 a week. Other food she bought from groceries and push carts, at a cost of about $2 a week. As she did her own washing, and walked to work, she had no other fixed expenses, except for shoes. Once in every two months these wore to pieces and she was forced to buy new ones; and, till she had saved enough to pay for them, she went without her push cart luncheon and breakfast.

In this way she lived in New York for a year, during which time she managed to send $90 home, for the others.

Her sister Bertha, next younger than herself, had then come to New York, and obtained work at sewing for a little less than $6 a week. Between them, in the following six months, the two girls managed to buy a passage ticket from Russia to New York for $42, and to send home $30. This, with the passage ticket and two other tickets, which they purchased on the instalment plan from a dealer, at a profit to him of $20, brought all the rest of the family into New York harbor—the girls' mother, their three younger sisters of fifteen, fourteen, and eight, and a little brother of seven.

Five months afterward Molly and Bertha were still making payments for these extortionate tickets.

In New York, the sister of fifteen found employment in running ribbons into corset covers, earning from $1 to $1.50 a week. The fourteen-year-old girl was learning operating on waists. The family of seven lived in two rooms, paying for them $13.50 a month; their food cost $9 or $10 a week; shoes came to at least $1 a week; the girls made most of their own clothing, and for this purpose they were paying $1 a month for a sewing-machine; and they gave $1 a month for the little brother's Hebrew schooling.

Molly was seen in the course of a coat makers' strike. She wept because the family's rent was due and she had no means of paying it. She said she suffered from headache and from backache. Every month she lost a day's work through illness.

She was only nineteen years old. By working every hour she could make a fair wage, but, owing to the uncertain and spasmodic nature of the work, she was unable to depend upon earning enough to maintain even a fair standard of living.

A point that should be accentuated in Molly Davousta's account is the price of shoes. No one item of expense among working girls is more suggestive. The cost of shoes is unescapable. A girl may make over an old hat with a bit of ribbon or a flower, or make a new dress from a dollar's worth of material, but for an ill-fitting, clumsy pair of shoes she must pay at least $2; and no sooner has she bought them than she must begin to skimp because in a month or six weeks she will need another pair. The hour or two hours' walk each day through streets thickly spread, oftener than not, with a slimy, miry dampness literally dissolves these shoes. Long after up-town streets are dry and clean, those of the congested quarters display the muddy travesty of snow in the city. The stockings inside these cheap shoes, with their worn linings, wear out even more quickly than the shoes. It is practically impossible to mend stockings besides walking to work, making one's waists, and doing one's washing.

All Molly Davousta's cares, her anxiety about shoes and her foreboding concerning seasonal work, were increased by her position of family responsibility.

In the same way, in the course of her seasonal work, family responsibility pressed on Rita Karpovna. She was a girl of nineteen, who had come to America a few years before with her older brother, Nikolai. Together they were to earn their own living and make enough money to bring over their widowed mother, a little brother, and a sister a year or two younger than Rita.

Soon after she arrived, she found employment in finishing men's vests, at $6 or $7 a week, for ten hours' work a day. Living and saving with her brother, she contrived to send home $4 a month. Between them, Nikolai and Rita brought over their mother and the little brother. But, very soon after they were all settled together, their mother died. They were obliged to put the little brother into an institution. Then Nikolai fell from a scaffolding and incapacitated himself, so that, after his partial recovery, his wage was sufficient only for his own support, near his work.

Rita now lived alone, spending $3.50 a month for a sleeping place in a tenement, and for suppers $1.25 a week. Her luncheons and breakfasts, picked up anywhere at groceries or push carts, amounted, when she was working, to about 12 cents a day. At other times she often went without both meals. For in the last year her average wage had been reduced to $4.33 a week by over four months and a half of almost complete idleness. Through nine weeks of this time she had an occasional day of work, and for nine weeks none at all.

When she was working, she paid 60 cents a week carfare, 25 cents a month to the Union, of which she was an enthusiastic member, and 10 cents a month to a "Woman's Self-Education Society." The Union and this club meant more to Rita than the breakfasts and luncheons she dispensed with, and more, apparently, than dress, for which she had spent only $20 in a year and a half.

Some months afterward, Mrs. Clark received word that Rita had solved many of her difficulties by a happy marriage, and could hope that many of her domestic anxieties were relieved.

The chief of these, worry over the situation of her younger sister, still in Russia, had been enhanced by her observations of the unhappiness of a friend, another girl, working in the same shop—a tragedy told here because of its very serious bearing on the question of seasonal work. Rita's younger sister was in somewhat the same position as this girl, alone, without physical strength for her work, and, indeed, so delicate that it was doubtful whether her admission to the United States could be secured, even if Rita could possibly save enough for her passage money. The friend in the shop, hard pressed by the dull season, had at last become the mistress of a man who supported her until the time of the birth of their child, when he left her resourceless. Slack and dull seasons in factory work must, of course, expose the women dependent on their wage-earning powers, most of them young and many of them with great beauty, to the greatest dangers and temptations.[21] Especially at the mercy of the seasons were some of the fur sewers, and the dressmakers, and milliners working, not independently, but in factories and workshops.

Helena Hardman, an Austrian girl, a fur sewer, had been employed for only twenty weeks in the year. She sewed by hand on fur garments in a Twelfth Street shop, for $7 a week, working nine hours a day, with a Saturday half-holiday. The air and odors in the fur shop were very disagreeable, but had not affected her health.

At the end of the twenty weeks she had been laid off, and had looked unsuccessfully for work for seventeen weeks, before she found employment as an operative in an apron factory. Here, however, in this unaccustomed industry, by working as an operative nine hours a day for five days a week, and six hours on Saturday, she could earn only $3 or $4.

She paid $4 a week for board and a tenement room shared with another girl. She had been obliged to go in debt to her landlady for part of her long idle time, after her savings had been exhausted.

During this time she had been unable to buy any clothing, though her expense for this before had been slender: a suit, $18; a hat, $3; shoes, $3; waists, $3; and underwear, $2.50. She looked very well, however, in spite of the struggle and low wages necessitated by learning a secondary trade.

The dull season is tided over in various ways. A few fortunate girls go home and live without expense. Many live partly at the expense of philanthropic persons, in subsidized homes. In these ways they save a little money for the dull time, and also store more energy from their more comfortable living.

On the horizon of the milliner the dull season looms black. All the world wants a new hat, gets it, and thinks no more of hats or the makers of hats. On this account a fast and feverish making and trimming of hats, an exhausting drain of the energy of milliners for a few weeks, is followed by weeks of no demand upon their skill.

Girl after girl told the investigator that the busy season more than wore her out, but that the worry and lower standard of living of the dull season were worse. The hardship is the greater because the skilled milliner has had to spend time and money for her training.

Many of these girls try to find supplementary work, as waitresses in summer hotels, or in some other trade. A great difficulty here is the overlapping of seasons. The summer hotel waitress is needed until September, at least, but the milliner must begin work in August. To obtain employment in a non-seasonal industry, it is often necessary to lie. In each new occupation it is necessary to accept a beginner's wage.

Regina Siegerson had come alone, at the age of fifteen, from Russia to New York, where she had been for seven years. The first winter was cruel. She supported herself on $3 a week. She had been forced to live in the most miserable of tenements with "ignorant" people. She had subsisted mainly by eating bananas, and had worn a spring jacket through the cold winter. It seemed, however, that no hardship had ever prevented her from attending evening school, where her persistence had taken her to the fourth year of high school. She was thinking of college at the time of the interview. Regina was a Russian revolutionist, and keenly thirsting for knowledge. She talked eagerly to the inquirer about Victor Hugo, Gorky, Tolstoy, and Bernard Shaw. With no less interest she spoke of the trade fortunes of milliners in New York, and her own last year's experience. She had worked through May, June, and July as a trimmer, making $11 in a week of nine hours a day, with Saturday closing at five. During August and September and the first weeks in October she had only six weeks' work, as a maker in a ready-to-wear hat factory, situated on the lower West Side over a stable, where she made $10 in a week of nine hours a day.

Regina and a girl friend had managed to furnish a two-room tenement apartment with very simple conveniences, and there they kept house. Rent was $10.50 a month; gas for heating and cooking, $1.80; and food for the two, about $5 a week. As Regina did her own washing, the weekly expense for each was but $3.67, less than many lodgers pay for very much less comfort.

The greatest pleasure the girls had in their little establishment was the opportunity it gave them for entertaining friends. Before, it had been impossible for them to see any one, except in other people's crowded living-rooms, or on the street.

Regina was engaged to a young apothecary student, whom she expected to marry in the spring. Like her, he was in New York without his family, and he took his meals at the two girls' little flat with them.

Regina's father, who was living in Russia with a second wife, had sent her $100 when she wrote him of her intended marriage. This, and about $40 saved in the six weeks of earning $10, were her reserve fund in the long dull season.

The inquirer saw Regina again a few days before Thanksgiving. She was still out of work, but was learning at home to do some mechanical china decorating for the Christmas trade.

Among the milliners, several girls were studying to acquire, not only a training in a secondary trade, but the better general education which Frances Ashton, a young American girl of twenty, had obtained through better fortunes.

Her father, a professional man, had been comfortably situated. Without anticipating the necessity of supporting herself, she had studied millinery at Pratt Institute for half a year. Then, because it was rather a lark, she had gone to work in New York. Most of her wage was spent for board and recreation, her father sending her an allowance for clothes.

After a year, his sudden death made it necessary for her to live more economically, as her inheritance was not large. The expenses of an attack of typhoid one summer, and of an operation the next year, entirely consumed it.

In the year she described, she had been a copyist in one of the most exclusive shops on Fifth Avenue. The woman in charge was exceptionally considerate, keeping the girls as long as possible. She used to weep when she was obliged to dismiss them, for she realized the suffering and the temptation of the long idle period.

However, the season had lasted only three or three and a half months at a time, from February 1 to May 15, and from August 18 to December 4. During the six busy weeks in the spring and the autumn, while the orders were piling up, work was carried on with feverish intensity. The working day lasted from eight-thirty until six, with an hour at noon for luncheon. Many employees, however, stayed until nine o'clock, receiving $1, besides 30 cents supper money, for overtime. But by six o'clock Frances was so exhausted that she could do no more, and she always went home at that hour.

In addition to her thirty weeks in the Fifth Avenue order establishment, Frances had two weeks' work in a wholesale house, where the season began earlier; so that she had been employed for thirty-two weeks in the year, and idle for twenty. She was a piece-worker and she had earned from $8 to $14 a week.

The twenty idle weeks had been filled with continuous futile attempts to find anything to do. Application at department stores had been ineffectual, so had answered advertisements. She said she had lost all scruples about lying, because, the moment it was known that she wanted a place during the dull season only, she had no chance at all.

Frances lived in one of the pleasantest and most expensive subsidized homes for working girls, paying for board, and a large, delightful room shared with two other girls, $4.50 a week. Although she walked sometimes from work, carfare usually amounted to 50 cents a week. Laundering two sets of underwear and one white waist a week cost 60 cents. Thus, for a reasonable degree of cleanliness and comfort, partly provided by philanthropic persons, she spent $5.60 a week aside from the cost of clothing.

She dressed plainly, though everything she had was of nice quality. She said she could spend nothing for pleasure, because of her constant foreboding of the dull season, and the necessity of always saving for her apparently inevitable weeks of idleness. She was, at the time she gave her account, extremely anxious because she did not know how she was to pay another week's board.

Yet she had excellent training and skill, the advantage of living comfortably and being well nourished, and the advantage of a considerate employer, who did as well as she could for her workers, under the circumstances.

Something, then, must be said about these circumstances—this widespread precariousness in work, against which no amount of thrift or industriousness or foresight can adequately provide. Where industry acts the part of the grasshopper in the fable, it is clearly quite hopeless for workers to attempt to attain the history of the ant. Among the factory workers, the waist makers' admirable efforts for juster wages were, as far as yearly income was concerned, largely ineffectual, on account of this obstacle of slack and dull seasons, whose occurrence employers are as powerless as employees to forestall.

These chronicles, showing the effect of seasonal work on the fortunes of some self-supporting operatives and hand workers in New York factories and workshops, concern only one corner of American industry, in which, as every observer must realize, there are many other enormous fields of seasonal work. These histories are nevertheless clear and authentic instances of a strange and widespread social waste. Neither trade organization nor State legislation for shorter hours is primarily directed toward a more general regular and foresighted distribution of work among all seasonal trades and all seasonal workers. Until some focussed, specific attempt is made to secure such a distribution, it seems impossible but that extreme seasonal want, from seasonal idleness, will be combined with exhausting seasonal work from overtime or exhausting seasonal work in speeding, in a manner apparently arranged by fortune to devastate human energy in the least intelligent manner possible.

Further effects of speeding and of monotony in this labor were described by other self-supporting factory workers whose chronicles, being also concerned with industry in mechanical establishments, will be placed next.



FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 19: See Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-earners in the United States. Volume II, Men's Ready-made Clothing, pages 141-157; 160-165; 384-395.]

[Footnote 20: The income and outlay of other cloak makers will be separately presented.]

[Footnote 21: In the first report of the New York Probation Association the statement is made that out of 300 girls committed by the courts during the year to the charge of Waverley House, 72 had been engaged in factory work. Of these many had been at one time or other employed as operatives. On questioning the probation worker, Miss Stella Miner, who had lived with them and knew their stories most fully, it was learned, however, that almost every one of these girls had gone astray while they were little children, had been remanded by courts to the House of the Good Shepherd, where they had learned machine operating, and on going out of its protection to factories had drifted back again to their old ways of life. How far their early habit and experience had dragged these young girls in its undertow cannot of course, be known. The truth remains that factory work, when it is seasonal, must increase temptation by its economic pressure.]



CHAPTER IV

THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK FACTORY-WORKERS

[Monotony and Fatigue in Speeding]

One of the strangest effects of the introduction of machinery into industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and initiative of workers from mechanical drudgery, it has often tended to devitalize and warp these forces to the functions of machines.[22]

This stupefying and wearying effect of machine-work from concentration and intensity of application and attention was frequently mentioned by the factory workers in their accounts.

Tina Levin, a young girl eighteen years old, had worked two years in an underwear factory in New York; and before her arrival in America, six years in an underwear factory in Russia. She had come from abroad to her fiance, Ivan Levin, whom she had recently married. She still worked in the underwear factory, although she was not entirely self-supporting. She and her young husband met the League's Inquirer at a Jewish Girls' Self-Education Club, where they gave between them the account of Tina's self-supporting years.

Before her marriage, Tina had worked at a machine ten hours a day for an underwear manufacturer on Canal Street. In the height of the season the shop often worked overtime until 8 o'clock, two or three nights a week. Besides this, many of the girls took hand work home, where they sewed till eleven or twelve o'clock. But Tina was so exhausted by her long day that she never did this. Working as hard as possible, she earned $7, and sometimes $8 a week, during the six busy months.

For part of this time she lived a full hour-and-a-half's car ride from the factory. So that with dressing, and eating two meals at her lodging, when she was at the machine twelve hours a day, she had only about six hours sleep.

At least half the year was so dull that she could earn only $3 or $3.50 a week; and she was so worn out that every month she was utterly unable to work for three or four days. This loss had reduced her income by $32. She had been obliged to pay $9 for medicine. Her income for the year had been about $262. For board and lodging in a tenement she had paid $3.50 a week; for carfare 60 cents a week; and she had sent $5 home in the year; and given $9 for medicine; $36 for the dentist; and $1 a month to the Jewish Girls' Self-Education Society. She had less than $10 left for dress for the year. But her lover had helped her with many presents; and had given her many good times and pleasures, besides those obtainable at the Jewish Girls' Self-Education Society.

Tina had the advantage of a knowledge of English. This lack of opportunity to learn the tongue of the country in which she lived was poignantly regretted by another machine operative, Fanny Leysher, a white-goods operative of twenty-one who had been in America four years. She lived in one room of a tenement off the Bowery, where she boarded and lodged for $4 a week. She worked in a factory within walking distance, earning $7 a week in the busy season.

Fanny was a pretty, fair girl, with a graceful presence, a wistful smile, and the charm peculiar to blond Russians with long gray eyes. She looked, however, painfully frail and white. In the factory she had worked for four years, first at time work, then at piece-work. She could earn $7 a week by stitching up and down the fronts and stitching on the belts of 108 corset covers—9 dozen a day. This was the most she could possibly complete. The unremitting speeding and close attention this amount of stitching required left her too exhausted at six o'clock to be able to attend night school, or to learn English. She suffered greatly from headache and from backache.

Fanny worked in this way for forty-one weeks of the year. For six weeks she worked three days in the week. For two weeks the factory closed. For three weeks she had been ill.

She was a girl of quick nervous intelligence, eager for life and with a nice sense of quality. When she talked of her inability to go to night school because of her frailness and weariness, tears flooded her eyes. Her room was very nicely kept, and she had on a shelf a novel of Sudermann's and a little book of Rosenthal's sweat shop verses. Everything she wore was put on carefully and with good taste. Her dress showed the quickest adaptability, and in correctness, and simplicity of line and color might have belonged to a college freshman "with every advantage." It was a little trim delft-blue linen frock with a white pique collar and a loose blue tie. She had tan stockings and low russet shoes. Fanny belonged to the Working-man's Circle. She said she went as often as she could possibly afford it to the theatre. And when she was asked what plays she liked, she replied with an unforgettable keenness and eagerness, "Oh, I want nothing but the best. Only what will tell me about real life."

She said she had spent too much money for dress last year; but she had been able to buy clothing of a quality which she thought would last her for a long time. The little plain gold watch in her list she had partly needed and partly had been unable to resist. One of the three summer dresses costing $14 was her blue linen dress, for which she had given $7. She expected to wear it for two summers with alterations.

Last year's suit cleaned $ 3 Shoes 11 Hat 10 Dresses (1 winter, $10; 3 summer, $14) 24 Coat 9 Every-day hat 4.50 Muslin (for white waists and corset covers made by herself) 5 Umbrella 2 Gloves 2 Pocket-book 1 Watch 11 _ $82.50

Painful as it was in some ways to see Fanny Leysher, who liked "nothing but the best," pouring her life force into stitching 108 corset covers a day, she yet seemed less helpless than some still younger workers.

Minna Waldemar, a girl of sixteen, an operative in an umbrella factory, had been in the United States for six months. For five months of this time she had been stitching the seams and hems of umbrella covers for 35 cents a hundred. Her usual output was about 200 a day. By working very fast, she could in a full day make 300, but when she did, it left her thumb very sore.

Minna paid $3 a month for sleeping space in a tenement; $1.75 a week for suppers; and for breakfasts and luncheons, from 15 to 30 cents a day.

She wore a black sateen waist, which had cost $1. A suit had cost $8; a hat, $3; and a pair of shoes, $2. Working her hardest and fastest, she had not received enough money to pay for even these meagre belongings, and was obliged to have assistance from her brother, her only relative in New York.

Every line of Minna's little figure looked overworked. This was true, too, of Sadie, a little underfed, grayish Austrian girl of seventeen, who had come to New York as the advance guard of her family.

In the last year since her arrival, two and one-half years before, she had first been employed for seven months in a neckwear factory, where she earned from $2.50 a week to $6 and $7 on piece-work. In two very busy weeks she had earned $9 a week.

After the slack season, the factory closed. Hunting desperately for a way to make money, Sadie found employment as an operative on children's dresses, running a foot-power machine in a tenement work-room for $2.50 a week. In the second week her wage was advanced to $3 and continued at this for the next three or four months.

After this, the demand for neckwear had increased again. She had returned to the neckwear factory, and was earning $6 a week. Her busiest days were eleven hours long, and her others nine.

She spent nothing for pleasure. She could send nothing to her family. In the course of two years and a half she had bought one hat for $3 and a suit for $12. She went to night school, but was generally so weary that she could learn really nothing. She did her own washing, and for $3 a month she rented a sleeping space in the kitchen of a squalid, crowded East Side tenement. It was the living-room of her poverty-stricken landlady's family; and she had to wait until they all left it, sometimes late at night, before she dragged her bed out of an obscure corner and flung it on the floor for her long-desired sleep. Supper with the landlady cost her 20 cents a night. Sadie's breakfasts and dinners depended absolutely upon her income and her other expenses. As in the weeks when she was earning $3 she had only 90 cents for fourteen meals a week and her clothing, and in the weeks when she earned $2.50, only 40 cents a week for fourteen meals and her clothing, her depleted health is easily understood.

Sadie's custom of paying rent and yet dragging a pallet out of the corner and finding or waiting for a place to throw it in, like a little vagrant, is very characteristic of East Side tenements. She paid $36 a year for lodging, and yet can scarcely be said to have received for this sum any definite space at all under a roof-tree, honestly provided for her as her own, but simply the chance of getting such a place when she could.

If she had attempted to find a better and less expensive place for sleeping, in a less congested quarter of the city, she would have been obliged to pay, besides her rent, a sum at least half as large, for transportation. In the same way, for this really very large sum of $15 or $20 paid yearly to the city railroads, she would not have received in their cars any definite place at all, honestly provided for her as her own, but simply a chance of getting a foothold when she could on a cross-town car or the Bronx elevated during the rush hours. The yearly sums paid to the car companies by factory workers too exhausted to walk home are very striking in these budgets. Tina Levin had paid nearly $30—more than she had spent for her clothing during the year. This expense of carfare and the wretched conditions in transportation which most of the car companies supply to the workers compelled to use their lines in rush hours is a difficulty scarcely less than that of New York rents and congestion, and inseparably connected with them.

Anna Flodin, a girl of eighteen, forced by illness to leave the congested quarters of New York for the Bronx, did not attempt to return to work until she was able to live again within walking distance of the factory.

Anna Flodin was a pale, quiet girl with smooth black hair and a serious, almost poignant expression. All her life had been one of poverty, a sheer struggle to keep the wolf from the door. She spoke no English, though she could understand a little.

She stitched regularly in the busy season 1568 yards of machine sewing daily in fastening belts to cheap corset covers. The forewoman gave her in the course of the day 28 bundles, each containing 28 corset covers with the belts basted to the waist lines and the loose ends of the belts basted ready to finish.

The instant Anna failed to complete this amount, or seemed to drop behind in the course of the day, the forewoman blamed her, and threatened to reduce her wage.

Anna worked in this manner ten hours a day, for $6 a week. If she were five minutes late, she was docked for half an hour. She was docked for every needle she broke in the rapid pace she was obliged to keep, and in the first year she was obliged to pay out of her wage, which had then been only $5 a week, for all the many hundred yards of thread she stitched into the white-goods company's output.

In order to complete 784 yards of belting a day—over 1600 yards of stitching, for she fastened both edges of the belt—she was forced, of course, to work as fast as she could feed and guide belts under the needle. She had strong eyes. But her back ached from the stooping to guide the material, and she suffered cruelly from pain in her shoulders.

There had been seventeen weeks of this work. Then there had been ten weeks of two or three days' work a week, when it seemed impossible to earn enough to live on. Then, ten weeks when the factory closed. Then she had an illness lasting over two months, which began a few weeks after the factory closed.

She said the doctor had told her that her illness was consumption and that he had cured it. It must have been, of course, not consumption or not arrested in that space of time. But, during it, she had paid him $28.50 and given $22.50 for her board and lodging, with an uncle in the Bronx, and for milk and eggs.

Almost as soon as she was declared able to return to stitching seven hundred belts a day, she hurried back to work. But within a few days the girls struck against the company's practice of making them buy thread, and were out for five weeks. At the end of this time they won their point.

Altogether her income for the year had been about $150; and the severity and amount of labor she had given in earning it had left her cruelly spent.

She could not possibly live on this amount, as board and lodging alone had cost her $3 a week—$126 for the year. She had been obliged to borrow $50 for her treatment in her illness; and she had not yet paid back this sum. Besides, her landlady had trusted her for some board bills she had not yet paid. For clothing she had spent $26.59,—one dress for $7; one hat for $2; one jacket for $6; two pairs of shoes at $2; a pair for $4; 36 pairs of stockings at 10 cents a pair for $3.60; three waists at 98 cents each for $2.94; and three suits of winter underwear for $1.05. But she said winter underwear of this quality failed to keep her really warm.

In the evening she was too tired to leave the tenement for night school or for anything else. She did her own washing. In the course of a year her only pleasure had been a trip to the theatre for 35 cents.

Anna Flodin lived in a very poor tenement off the Bowery; and she told her experiences in her work, in spite of her muteness and struggle to express herself, with a sort of public spirit, and an almost ambassadorial dignity, which was inexpressibly touching.

That spirit—a fine freedom from personal self-consciousness and clear interest in testifying to the truth about women's work, and wages, and expenditure of strength—was evinced by countless girls. None, indeed, were pressed for any facts they did not wish to give, nor sought, unless they wished to help in the inquiry. But perhaps because it arose from such an immured depth of youth spent in foreboding poverty, the voice of Anna Flodin's chronicle was distinctively thrilling.

She told her experience in her work with great clearness, sitting in a little dark, clean room in a tenement, looking out on a filthy, ill-smelling inner court. The only brightening of her grave, young face throughout her story and our questions was her smile when she spoke of her one visit to the theatre, and another change of expression when she spoke of the other girls in the shop, in connection with the strike about thread. She was a member of the Union. In the shop there were girls not members who were willing to continue to buy the management's thread indefinitely. Anna Flodin said quietly, with a look of quick scorn, that she would never have anything to do with such girls.

Her mute life and mechanical days could make one understand in her with every sympathy all kinds of unreasoning prejudices and aversions.

She was very young; and it was partly her youth which deepened all the sense of dumb oppression and exhaustion her still presence and appealing eyes imparted. There is a great deal of talk about the danger and sadness of dissipation in youth. Too little is said of the fact that such an enclosing monotony and stark poverty of existence as Anna Flodin's is in youth sadness itself, as cruel to the pulses in its numb passage as the painful sense of wreck. All tragedies are not those of violence, but of depletion, too, and of starvation.

The drain and exhaustion experienced after a day of speeding at a machine was described by another worker, a girl of good health and lively mind, who afterwards found more attractive employment. She said that in her factory days she used to walk home, a distance of a mile, at nine o'clock, after her work was done, with a cousin. The cousin was another clever and spirited Russian girl of the same age. They had a hundred things to talk about, but as they left the factory, one would almost always say to the other: "Please do not speak to me on my way home. I am so tired I can scarcely answer." Instantly after supper they went to bed. In the morning they hurried through breakfast to be at the factory at eight, to go through the round of the day before.

"We only went from bed to work, and from work to bed again," one of the girls said, "and sometimes if we sat up a little while at home, we were so tired we could not speak to the rest, and we hardly knew what they were talking about. And still, although there was nothing for us but bed and machine, we could not earn enough to take care of ourselves through the slack season."

It is significant to compare with the account of these ill-paid operatives, exhausted from speeding, the chronicle of a skilled worker in a belt-factory, Theresa Luther, earning $17 a week.

She was a young German-American Protestant woman of 27, born in New York. After her father died, she instantly helped her older brother shoulder the support of the family, as readily as though she had been a capable and adventurous boy. Strong, competent, and high-spirited, Miss Luther was a tall girl, fair-haired, with dark blue eyes, and a very beautiful direct glance.

Her father had been a wood-carver, an artist responsible for some of the most interesting work in his craft done in New York. Theresa, too, had dexterity with her hands. At the age of fifteen she entered a leather belt factory as a "trimmer." She was so quick that she earned almost immediately $7 a week, a remarkable wage for a beginner of fifteen. Soon she was permitted to fold and pack. Not long afterwards, overhearing a forewoman lamenting the absence of machine operatives, she observed that she could run a sewing-machine at home. The forewoman, amused, placed her at the machine. After that she had stitched belts for eleven years, though not in the same factory.

Leather belt stitching is at once heavy and skilled work. The row of stitching is placed at the very edge of the belt. The slightest deviation from a straight line in the stitch spoils the entire piece of work. Running the needle-point through the leather is hard, and requires so much strength that the stitching through the doubled leather, necessitated by putting on the buckle, can be performed only by men. Theresa used to complete two gross of belts a day. She and other Americans in the factory were hard-pressed by some Russian girls, who could finish in a day four gross of very badly sewed belts with enormous stitches and loose threads. When the forewoman blamed Theresa for finishing less work than these girls, she freely expressed her contempt for their slovenly belts. She had a strong handicraft pride, and it was pleasant to see her instinctive scorn in quoting the forewoman's reply that "None of them (the badly made belts) ever came back"—as though their selling quality were the one test of their workmanship.

She had left the factory because of a complete breakdown from long hours of overwork. In one winter she had been at the machine seventy-one hours a week for ten weeks. After this severe experience, she had a long prostration and was depleted, exhausted, in a sort of physical torpor in which she was unable to do anything for months.