Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-Workers, Their Trades and Their Lives

“If it were not for the Grossvater,” she said, “and the children, I should have a place and work in the country and grow strong, but I cannot. If I die before them what can they do?”

There was other trouble. Gretchen’s light little head could never guard her pretty face. She was fourteen now, and tall and fair, fretting against the narrow life and refusing to stay indoors when evening came. One day she did not come home; and when Lotte sought her she saw only the evil smile and triumphant eyes of the foreman who had followed her a year ago and who laughed in her face as he shut the door.

“You’d better come in yourself,” he called. “You’d fare better if you did.”

Lotte went home dumb, and sat down at her machine. There was no money in the house, nor would be till she had taken home this work; but as she bent over it the blood poured in a stream from her mouth. She tried to rise, but fell back; and when the screaming children had brought in neighbors, Lotte’s struggle was quite over. When they had buried her in the Potter’s Field by Lisa, they took the bundle of work stained with her life-blood and carried it back to its owners.

“She’ll need no more,” said the old neighbor from the floor above as she laid it on the counter. “You’ve cut her down and cut her down, till there wasn’t life left to stand it longer. There’s not one of you to blame, you say, but I that know, know you’ve fastened her coffin-lid with nails o’ your own makin’, an’ that sooner or later you’ll come face to face, an’ find that red-hot is cowld to the hate that’s makin’ ready for you. An’ as for him that stands there smilin’, if it weren’t for the laws that spare the guilty and send the innocent to their deaths, God knows it would be the best thing these hands ever did to tear him to bits. But there’s no one to blame. Ye’re sure o’ that. Wait a while. The day’s comin’ when you’ll maybe think different; an’ may God speed it!”

CHAPTER NINTH.

THE EVOLUTION OF A JACKET

“If underwear, whether for men or women, has proven itself a most excellent medium for starvation; if suits and dresses in general rank but a grade above; if shirts, whether of cotton or woollen, are a despair; and in each and all competition has cheapened material and manufacture and brought labor to the ‘life limit’ and below, at least it cannot be so bad with cloaks and jackets. Here are single garments, often of the most expensive material and put together in the most finished and perfect manner. Skilled labor is demanded, careful handling, spotless neatness. Here is one industry which must give not only a living wage, but a surplus. These women must be on the way to at least semi-prosperity.”

This was the thought in the days in which one phase after another of the underwear problem presented itself, each one more bewildering, more heart-sickening, than the last. Here and there had been the encounter with one who had always been sure of work and who had never failed to receive a fair return. But the summary had been inevitably as it stands recorded, – overwork, under-pay; a fruitless struggle against overwhelming odds.

With this thought the quest began anew. The manufacturers of cloaks and jackets reported “piece-work” as the rule. The great dry-goods establishments had the same word. Here and there was one where work was done on the premises, and where skilled hands held the same places year after year, the wages ranging from six to ten dollars, hardly varying. But for most of them the same causes stated in the third chapter, “The Methods of a Prosperous Firm,” have operated, and it has been found expedient to settle upon “piece-work” and let rent be paid and space be furnished by the workers themselves.

“They like it better,” said the business manager of the great firm against whom there have never been charges of dishonesty or unkindness in their treatment of employees. “It would be impossible to do all our work on the premises. We should want the entire block if we even half did it. But we know some of the women, and we pay as high as anybody; perhaps higher. It saves them car fares and going out in all weathers, and a great many other inconveniences, when they work at home, and I don’t see why there should be any objections made. The amount of it is, there are too many women. The best thing to be done is to ship them West. They say they’re wanted there, and there is certainly not room enough for them here. Machinery will soon take their place, anyway. I have one in mind now that ought to do the work of ten women perfectly, and require simply a tender and finisher. We shall get the thing down to a fine point very soon. Hard on the women? Why, no. We always hold on to first-class workers, and there’s nothing much to be done with second and third class except to use them through the busy season, and let them go in the dull.”

“Go where?”

The manager paused and looked reflectively at his well-kept finger-nails.

“My dear madam, that’s a question I have no time to consider. I dare say they earn a living somehow. Indeed, I’m told they go into cigar factories. There’s always plenty of work.”

“Plenty of work,” – a form of words so familiar that I looked for it now from both employer and employed. But for the last was an addition finding no place on the lips of the first: “Plenty of work? Oh, yes! I can always get plenty of work. The trouble is to get the wages for it.”

A block or so below, and further west, one great window of a cheaper establishment held jackets and wraps large and small, marked down for the holidays, their advertisement in a morning paper having read, “Jackets from $4 up.” Still further over, another window displayed numbers as great, and a placard at one side announced: “These elegant jackets from $2.87 up.” The cloth might be shoddy, but here was a garment, fashionably cut, well finished to all appearance, and unexceptionable in pattern and color. All along the crowded avenue the story was the same, and as east took the place of west, and Grand Street and the Bowery and Third Avenue gave in their returns, “These elegant jackets from $2.35 up” gave the final depth to which cheapness could descend.

If this was retail, what could be the wholesale price, and what was likely to be the story of the worker from whose hands they had come? It is worth while to follow these jackets as they emerge from the cutting-room, and in packages holding such number of dozens as has been agreed upon, pass to the express wagon which distributes them among the workers, the firm in mind at present, like many others, preferring this arrangement to any which involves dealing directly with the women.

First on the list stands the name of a woman a little over fifty years old, whose husband is a painter and who left Germany eight years ago, urged to come over by a daughter more adventurous than the rest, who had married and emigrated at once. Work was plentiful when they arrived, and the husband found immediate employment at his trade, with wages so high that the wife had no occasion for any employment outside her own rooms. The youngest child, a girl of nine, went to school. They lived in comfortable rooms on a decent street, put money in a savings bank, and felt that America held more good even than the name had always seemed to promise. Then came the financial troubles of 1879 and 1881, the gradual fall of wages, the long seasons when there was no work, and last, the fate that overtakes the worker in lead, whether painter or in any other branch, – first painter’s colic, and the long train of symptoms preceding the paralysis which came at last, the stroke a light one, but leaving the patient with the “drop hand” and all the other complications, testifying that the working days were over. Strength enough returned for an odd job now and then, and the little man accepted his fate cheerily, and congratulated himself that the bank held a little fund and that thus the lowering wages could be pieced out. The bank settled this question by almost immediate failure; a long and expensive illness for the wife followed; and when it ended furniture and small valuables of every sort had been pawned, and they left the empty rooms for narrower quarters and sought for work in which all could share. To add to the complication, the daughter, who had had good sense enough to take a place as child’s nurse, broke her leg, and became, even when able to walk again, too disabled to return to this work. She could run the machine, and her mother was an expert buttonhole-maker and had already learned various forms of work on cloth, both in cheap coats and pantaloons, and in jackets and cloaks. The jackets seemed to promise most, for in 1884 each one brought to the maker sixty cents, buttonholes being $1.50 per hundred, the presser receiving ten cents each and the finisher six cents, these amounts being deducted from the price paid on each. To save this amount the husband learned how to press, and though his crippled hands can barely grasp the iron, and often his wife must help him place the cramped fingers in position, he stands there smiling and well content to add this mite to the fund. For a year their home has been in a deep basement, where, save at noonday, it is impossible to run the machines without artificial light. A dark room opens from the one in which they work, itself dark, unventilated save from the hall, and chosen as abiding place because it represents but four dollars a month in rent. Two machines run by mother and daughter stand as near the window as possible, and close by is the press-board and the pale but optimistic little man, who looks proudly at each seam as he lays it open. Jackets are everywhere, – piled on chairs and scattered over the floor, – waiting the various operations necessary before they can at last be bundled on the ex-painter’s back, who smiles to himself as he toils down to the firm’s headquarters, reflecting that he has saved the expressage another week. What are the returns? Lisa will give them, – the wife whose English is still uncertain, and whose gentle, anxious eyes grow eager and bright as she talks, the husband nodding confirmation, or shaking his head as he sees the tears come suddenly, with a “Not so, not so, Lisa.”

“I know not if we shall live at all,” she says. “For see. We two, my Gretchen and I, we make but ten for a day. Tree dollar? Yes, but you must take from it de buttonhole an’ finish and much else, and it is so short – so short that we can work on them. The season, that is it – six weeks – two months, maybe, and then pantaloon till spring jacket come. See. It is early that we begin, – seven, maybe, – and all day we shall sew and sew. We eat no warm essen. On table dere is bread and beer in pitcher and cheese to-day. We sit not down, for time goes away so. No, we stand and eat as we must, and sew more and more. Ten jackets to one day – so Gretchen and me can make ten jackets to one day, but we sit always – we go not out. It is fourteen hours efery day – yes, many time sixteen – we work and work. Then we fall on bed and sleep, and when we wake again it is work always. And I must stop a leetle; not much, but a leetle, for my back have such pain that I fall on the bed to say, ‘Ach Gott! is it living to work so in this rich, free America?’ But he is sick always, my man, even if he will laugh. He say he must laugh alway for two because I cannot. For when this work is past it is only pantaloons, and sew so hard as we may it is five, six pair maybe, for Gretchen and me all day, and that not always. Many day we do nothing because they say work is dull, and then goes away all we save before. But we need not to ask help. So much is good that we work and earn, but I think I die soon of my pain, and who then helps his fingers so stiff to press or thinks how he will ache even when he will laugh? It is because America is best that we come, but how is it best to die because it is always work and no joy, no hope, never one so small stop?”

“Never one so small stop.” The attic had the same story, and the white-faced, hollow-eyed woman who tried to smile as she spoke turned also from the waiting pile of jackets and drew one or two back to the sheet spread for them on the floor to which they had slipped. A table and two chairs, a small stove in which burned bare handful of coals, the two machines, at one of which a girl of twenty still sewed on, and in the corner a bed, on which lay another girl of the same age, but with the crimson spot on her cheeks and the shining eyes of advanced consumption. It had been one of the faces so often seen behind the counters of the great stores, delicate in features and coloring, with soft dark eyes and fair masses of hair loose on the pillow.

“I try to keep her tidy,” the mother said, “but she can’t bear her hair up a minute, it’s so heavy on her head, an’ I’ve no time to ’tend to it but the minute I take in the morning. It’s jackets now that I’m on. I thought maybe there’d be less risk in them than cloaks. Cloaks seem to give ’em so much chance to cheat. I wouldn’t work at all at home, I’d be out doing by the day, for I had a good run of work, but there’s Maggie, and I can’t leave her, though God knows she gets little good of me but the knowing I’m here. I’ll tell you what they did to me on cloaks. I work for S – & Co., far down on Broadway, and they give out the most expensive kind of cloaks, and nine dollars a dozen for the making; other kinds, too, but I’d been on them a good while and knew just how. The pay was regular, but before I’d had work from them a month I saw they were bound to make complaints and dock pay whether there was any fault in the work or not. One and another took their turn, and no help for it; for if they complained the foreman just said: ‘You needn’t take any work unless you like. There are plenty waiting to fill your place.’ Poor souls! What could they do but go on?

“At last came my turn. He tossed them all over. ‘It’s poor work,’ he said. ‘They’re not finished properly. You can’t be paid for botching. There’s three dollars, and that’s too much.’ ‘The work is the same it’s always been. There’s no botching,’ I said; but he held out the three dollars. ‘No,’ I said, ‘If you won’t pay fair I’ll go to the Woman’s Protective Union and see what they’ll do.’ His face was black as thunder. ‘Take your money,’ he says, holding out the rest, ‘but you may sing for more work from this establishment,’ and he flung the money on the floor. That didn’t trouble me, because I knew I could get work just below, and I did that same day; twenty cloaks, ten to be made at sixty cents apiece, and ten at fifty-five cents. I had Angie here to help, and when they were done I carried them down. This man was a Jew, but there’s small difference. If the Jew knew best how to cheat in the beginning, the Christian caught up with him long ago. ‘The buttons are all on wrong,’ he said. ‘I told you to set them an inch further back. We’ll have to alter them every one and charge you for the time.’ ‘I can take oath they are on as I was told to put them on,’ I said, ‘but if they must be changed I’ll change them myself and save the money.’

“It took long talking to make him agree, but at last he said I could come next morning but one, and he’d let me alter them as a great favor. I did come down, but he said they couldn’t wait and had made the change, and he charged me six dollars for what he said was my mistake. It was no use to complain. He could swear I had done the job wrong, and so I went home with $5.50 instead of eleven dollars for nearly a fortnight’s work. I changed the place, and so far nobody has docked me; but doing my best, and Angie working as steady as I do, we can’t make more than twenty cents on a jacket, and it’s a short season. When it’s over I do coats, but it’s less pay than jackets, and there’s living and Maggie’s medicine and the doctor, though he won’t take anything. I’d feel better if he did, but he won’t. Angie used to be in a factory, but there’s the baby now, and she doesn’t know what way to turn but this. See, he’s here by Maggie.” The sick girl lifted a corner of the quilt, and something stirred, – a baby of seven or eight months whose great eyes looked out from a face weazened and sharpened, deep experience seeming graven in every line.

“He’s a wise one,” the sick girl said. “He’s found it’s no use to cry, and he likes to be by me because it’s warm. But he frightens me sometimes, for he just lies and looks at me as if he knew a million things and could tell them every one. He’s always hungry, and maybe that makes him wiser. I’m sure I could tell some things that people don’t know.”

The words came with gasps between. It was plain that what she had to tell must find speedy listener if it were to be heard at all, but for that day at least the story must wait. Here, as in other places, the cloakmaker was earning from sixty to seventy cents a day, but even this was comfort and profusion compared with the facts that waited in a Fourth Ward street, and in a rookery not yet reached by any sanitary laws the city may count as in operation. Here and there still remains one of the old wooden houses with dormer windows, a remnant of the city’s early days and given over to the lowest uses, – a saloon below and tenements above. In one of these, in a room ten feet square, low-ceiled, and lighted by but one window whose panes were crusted with the dirt of a generation, seven women sat at work. Three machines were the principal furniture. A small stove burned fiercely, the close smell of red-hot iron hardly dominating the fouler one of sinks and reeking sewer-gas. Piles of cloaks were on the floor, and the women, white and wan, with cavernous eyes and hands more akin to a skeleton’s than to flesh and blood, bent over the garments that would pass from this loathsome place saturated with the invisible filth furnished as air. They were handsome cloaks, lined with quilted silk or satin, trimmed with fur or sealskin, and retailing at prices from thirty to seventy-five dollars. A teapot stood at the back of the stove; some cups and a loaf of bread, with a lump of streaky butter, were on a small table absorbing their portion also of filth. An inner room, a mere closet, dark and even fouler than the outer one, held the bed; a mattress, black with age, lying on the floor. Here such as might be had was taken when the sixteen hours of work ended, – sixteen hours of toil unrelieved by one gleam of hope or cheer; the net result of this accumulated and ever-accumulating misery being $3.50 a week. Two women, using their utmost diligence, could finish one cloak per day, receiving from the “sweater,” through whose hands all must come, fifty cents each for a toil unequalled by any form of labor under the sun, unless it be that of the haggard wretches dressed in men’s clothes, but counted as female laborers, in Belgian mines. They cannot stop, they dare not stop, to think of other methods of earning. They have no clothing in which they could obtain even entrance to an intelligence office. They have no knowledge that could make them servants of even the meanest order. They are what is left of untrained, hopelessly ignorant lives, clinging to these lives with a tenacity hardly higher in intelligence than that of the limpet on the rock, but turning to one with lustreless eyes and blank faces, holding only the one question, – “Lord, how long?” They are one product of nineteenth-century civilization, and these seven are but types, hundreds of their kind confronting the searcher, who looks on aghast and who, as the list lengthens and case after case gives in its unutterably miserable details, turns away in a despair only matched by that of the worker. Yet they are here, this army of incompetents, marching through torture to their graves; and till we have found some method by which torture may lessen, these lives as they vanish pass on to the army of avengers, and will face us by and by when excuses fall away and Justice comes face to face with the weak souls that failed in the flesh to know its nature or its demand.

CHAPTER TENTH.

BETWEEN THE RIVERS

“The nearer the river the nearer to hell.”

It was a strong word, and the big chest from which it issued held more of the same sort, – a tall worker, carpenter apparently, hurrying on with his box of tools and talking, as he went, with a companion half his size, but with quite his power of expression, interjecting strange German oaths as he listened to the story poured out to him. With that story we have at present nothing to do. But the first words lingered, and they linger still as the summary of such life as is lived by many workers on east and west sides alike.

Were the laws governing a volume of this nature rigidly observed, the present phase of this investigation could hardly be the point at which to stop for any detail of how these workers live from day to day. But as the search has gone on through these hours when Christmas joy is in the air, when the smallest shop hangs out its Christmas token, and the great stores are thronged with buyers far into the evening, I think of the lives in which Christmas has no place, of the women for whom all days are alike, each one the synonyme of relentless, unending toil; of the children who have never known a childhood and for whom Christmas is but a name. For even when mission and refuge have done their utmost, there is still the army unreached by any effort and in great part unreachable, no method recorded in any system of the day having power to drag them to the light and thus make known to us what manner of creature it is that cowers in shadowy places and has no foothold in the path we call progress. That their own ignorance holds them in these shadows, bound as with chains; that even a little more knowledge would break the bonds, in part at least, has no present bearing on the fact that thousands are alive among us to whom existence has brought only pain, and that fresh thousands join this dumb throng of martyrs with every added year. If they had learned in any degree how to use to the best advantage the pittance earned, there would be less need of these chapters; yet as I read the assurances of our political economists, that a wage of four dollars per week is sufficient, if intelligently used, to supply all the actual necessities of the worker, the question pushes itself between the lines: “Why should they be forced to know only necessities; and is this statement made of any save those too ignorant to define their wants and needs, too helpless to dare any protestation, even if more knowledge had come?”

The professional political economist of the old school, the school to which all but a handful belong, takes refuge in the census returns as the one reply to any arraignment of the present. Blind as a bat to any figures save his own, he answers all complaint with the formula: “In 1860 the property of this country, equally divided, would have given every man, woman, and child $514 each. In 1870 the share would have been $624; in 1880, $814. In 1886 returns are not in, but $900 and more would be the division per capita. What madness to talk of suffering when this flood of wealth pours through the land. Admitting that the lowest class suffer, it is chiefly crime, drunkenness, etc., that bring suffering. The majority are perfectly comfortable.”

Having read this statement in many letters and heard it in interviews as well, it seems plain that the conviction embodied in both has fastened itself upon that portion of the public whose thinking is done for them, and who range themselves by choice with that order who would not be convinced “even though one rose from the dead.” “The majority are perfectly comfortable.” Let us see how comfortable.

I turn first to the pair, a mother and daughter, a portion of whose experience found place in the chapter on “More Methods of Prosperous Firms.” Here, as in so many cases, there had been better days, and when these suddenly ended a period of bewildered helplessness, in which the widow felt that respectability like hers must know no compromise, and that any step that would involve her “being talked about” was a step toward destruction. She must live on a decent street, in a house where she need not be ashamed to have the relations come, and she did till brought face to face with the fact that there were no more dollars to spend upon respectability, and that her quarters must hereafter conform to her earnings. She had been a dweller in that curious triangle, the remnant of “Greenwich village,” the stronghold still of old New York, and she went at once to a region as unfamiliar to her conservative feet as Baxter or Hester, or any other street given over to evil. Far over toward the North River, in the first floor of a great tenement-house inhabited by the better class of Irish chiefly, she took two rooms, one a mere closet where the bed could stand; bestowed in them such furniture as remained, and at fifty, with no clew left that any friend could trace, began the fight for bread.