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

It was the second machine that stopped now, and the haggard woman running it faced about suddenly. “Do you know what come to my girl,” she said, – “my girl that I brought up decent and that was a good girl? I said to myself a trade was no good, for it was more an’ more starvation wages, and I’d put her with folks that would be good to her, even if the other girls did look down on her for going into service. She was fifteen, and a still little thing with soft eyes and a pretty, soft way, if she did come of a drinking father. I put her with a lady that wanted a waitress and said she’d train her well. She’d three boarders in the house, and all gentlemen to look at, and one that’s in a bank to-day he did his best to turn her head on the sly, and when he found he couldn’t, one Sunday when she was alone in the house and none to hear or help, he had his will. The mistress turned her off the hour she heard it, for Nettie went to her when she come home. ‘Such things don’t happen unless the girl is to blame,’ she said. ‘Never show your shameless face here again.’ Nettie came home to me kind of dazed, and she stayed dazed till she went to a hospital and a baby was born dead, and she dead herself a week after. An’ it isn’t one time alone or my girl alone. It’s over an’ over an’ over that that thing happens. There’s plenty that go to the bad of their own free will, but I know plenty more with the same chance that doesn’t, an’ there’s many a mother that’s been in service herself that says, ‘Whatever the mistress may know about it she can’t tell, but the devil’s let loose when the master or a son maybe is around, an’ they’ll not have their girls standing what they had to stand and then turned off without a character because they were found with the master talkin’ to ’em.’ It’s women that keeps women down an’ is hard on ’em. I’ll take my chances with any Jew you’ll bring along before I’ll put myself in the power of women that calls themselves ladies an’ hasn’t as much heart as a broomstick; an’ I’ll warn every girl to keep to herself an’ learn a trade, an’ not run the risk she’ll run if she goes out to service, letting alone the way you’re looked down on.”

There was no time for discussion. The machines must go on; but, as usual, much more than the fact of which I was in search had come to me, and, strangely enough, in this house and in others of its kind inspected one after another, much the same story was told. In the “improved tenements” close at hand, where comparative comfort reigned, more than one woman gave willingly the detail of the weekly expenditure for food, and added, as if the underlying question had made itself felt, “It’s betther to be a little short even an’ your own misthress,” with other words that have their place elsewhere. On the upper floor of one of these houses a pantaloon-maker sat in a fireless room, finishing the last of a dozen which when taken back would give her money for coal and food. She had been ill for three days, and on the bed, – an old mattress on a dry-goods box in the corner. “Even that’s more than I had for a good while,” she said. “I’d pawned everything before my husband died, except the machine. I couldn’t make but twenty-two cents a pair on the pants, an’ as long as he could hold up he did the pressing. With him to help a little I made three a day. That seems little, but there was so many pieces to each pair, – side and watch and pistol pockets, buckle strap, waistband, and bottom facings and lap; six buttonholes and nine buttons. We lived – I don’t just know how we lived. He was going in consumption an’ very set about it. ‘I’ll have no medicine an’ no doctor to make me hang an’ drag along,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to go, an’ I know it, an’ I’ll do it as fast as I can.’ He was Scotch, an’ took his porridge to the last, but I came to loathe the sight of it. He could live on six cents a day. I couldn’t. ‘I’m the kind for your contractors,’ he’d say. ‘It’s a glorious country, and the rich’ll be richer yet when there’s more like me.’ He didn’t mind what he said, an’ when a Bible-reader put her head in one day, ‘Come in,’ he says. ‘My wife’s working for a Christian contractor at sixty-six cents a day, an’ I’m what’s left of another Christian’s dealings with me, keeping me as a packer in a damp basement and no fire. Come in and let’s see what more Christianity has to say about it.’ He scared her, his eyes was so shiny an’ he most gone then. But there’s many a one that doesn’t go over fifty cents a week for what she’ll eat. God help them that’s starving us all by bits, if there is a God, but I’m doubting it, else why don’t things get better, an’ not always worse an’ worse?”

For east and west, however conditions might differ, the final word was the same, and it stands as the summary of the life that is lived from day to day by these workers, – “never better, always worse and worse.”

CHAPTER TWELFTH.

ONE OF THE FUR-SEWERS

“I suppose if you’d been born on the top of a hill in New Hampshire with the stones so thick ten miles of stone wall couldn’t have used ’em up, an’ the steeple of the Methodist meetin’-house the only thing in sight, maybe you’d have wanted to get where you could see folks too. It was just Elkins luck to have another hill between us an’ the village so’t I couldn’t see beyond the woods between. If there was a contrary side to anything it always fell to father, an’ I’m some like him, though I’ve got mother’s way of never knowing when I’m knocked flat, though I’ve had times enough to find out. But I said straight through, ‘If ever there’s a chance of getting to New York I’ll take it. Boston won’t do. I want the biggest an’ the stirringest thing there is in the United States,’ an’ Leander felt just as I did.

“Leander lived down the valley a way, an’ such cobble-stones as hadn’t come to our share had come to his. He’d laid wall from the time he was ten years old, and he’d sat on the hay an’ cried for pure lonesomeness. His folks weren’t any hands to talk, an’ he couldn’t even have the satisfaction of meetin’ Sundays, because they was Seventh Day Baptists, an’ so set a minister couldn’t get near ’em. An’ Leander was conscientious an’ thought he ought to stay by. I didn’t. I told him from the time we went to school together that I was bound to get to New York, an’ that sort of fired him up, an’ we’ve talked hours to time about what it was like, an’ what we’d do if we ever got there. My folks were set against the notion, an’ so were his, but he went after a while, with some man that was up in the summer an’ that gave him a place in a store. I couldn’t go on account of father’s dying sudden an’ mother’s holdin’ on harder’n ever to me, but she was took within the year, an’ there I was, free enough, an’ not a soul in the world but Leander’s folks that seemed to think much one way or another how I was likely to come out.

“There was a mortgage on the farm, an’ Dr. Grayson foreclosed an’ had most of the money for his bill; an’ when things were all settled I had forty dollars in cash an’ the old furniture. Leander’s folks was dreadful short for things, for they’d been burned out once, an’ so I just turned everything over to them but some small things I could pack in my trunk, mother’s teaspoons an’ such, an’ walked down to the village an’ took the stage for Portsmouth. I wasn’t scared. I didn’t care nor think how I looked. It was heaven to think I was on the way to folks an’ the things folks do. I ain’t given to crying, but that day I sat back in the stage an’ cried just for joy to think I was going to have something different.

“All this time I hadn’t thought much what I’d do. Forty dollars seemed a big lot, enough for weeks ahead. I’d done most everything about a house, an’ I could make everything I wore. I had only to look at a pattern an’ I could go home an cut out one like it. The dress I had on was cheap stuff, but when I looked at other folks’s I saw it wasn’t so much out o’ the way. So I said, most likely some dressmaker would take me, an’ I’d try my luck that way. This was before I got to Boston, an’ I went round there all the afternoon before it was time to take the train, for the conductor told me just what to do, an’ I hadn’t a mite of trouble. I never do going to a strange place. I was half a mind to stay in Boston when I saw the Common an’ the crowds of folks. I sat still there an’ just looked at ’em, an’ cried again for joy to think I’d got where there were so many. ‘But there’ll be more in New York,’ I said, ‘an’ there’ll be sure to be plenty ready to do a good turn.’ I could have hugged ’em all. I didn’t think then the time would ever come that I’d hate the sight of faces an’ wish myself on top of the hill in the cobble-stones, but it did, an’ it does now sometimes.

“I went on board the boat that night sort of crazy. I’d gone an’ got some sandwiches an’ things at a place the conductor told me, an’ I sat on the deck in the moonlight an’ ate my supper. I’d been too happy to eat before, an’ I was so happy then I could hardly keep still. There was a girl not far off, a kind of nice-looking girl, an’ she watched me, an’ at last she began to talk. In half an hour I knew all about her an’ she about me. She was a Rhode Island girl an’ had worked in a mill near Providence, an’ gone to New York at last an’ learned fur-sewing. She said it was a good trade, an’ she made ten an’ twelve dollars a week while the season lasted an’ never less than five. This seemed a mint of money, an’ when she said one of their old hands had died, an’ she could take me right in as her friend an’ teach me herself, I felt as if my fortune was made.

“Well, I went with her next day. She had a room in Spring Street, near Hudson, – an old-fashioned house that belonged to two maiden sisters, an’ I went in with her the first night, an’ afterward for a while had the hall bedroom. It didn’t take me long to learn. It was a Jew place an’ there were thirty girls, but he treated us well. For my part I’ve fared just as well with Jews as ever I did with Christians, an’ sometimes better. I’d taken to Hattie so that I couldn’t bear to think of leaving her, an’ so I let my dressmaking plan go. But I’ll tell you what I found out in time. These skins are all dressed with arsenic. The dealers say there’s nothing poisonous about them, but of course they lie. Every pelt has more or less in it, an’ the girls show it just as the artificial-flower girls show it. Your eyelids get red an’ the lids all puffy, an’ you’re white as chalk. The dealers say the red eyes come from the flying hairs. Perhaps they do, but the lids don’t, an’ every fur-sewer is poisoned a little with every prick of her needle. What the flying hair does is just to get into your throat an’ nose and everywhere, an’ tickle till you cough all the time, an’ a girl with weak lungs hasn’t a chance. The air is full of fur, an’ then the work-room is kept tight shut for fear of moths getting in. The work is easy enough. It’s just an everlasting patchwork, for you’re always sewing together little bits, hundreds of them, that you have to match. You sew over an’ over with linen thread, an’ you’re always piecing out an’ altering shapes. It’s nothing to sew up a thing when you’ve once got it pieced together. If it’s beaver, all the long hairs must be picked out, an’ it’s the same with sealskin. We made up everything; sable an’ Siberian squirrel, bear, fox, marten, mink, otter, an’ all the rest. There were some girls very slow in learning that only got a dollar a week, an’ in the end four, but most of them can average about five. I was seventeen when I began, an’ in a year I had caught all the knack there is to it, an’ was an expert, certain of ten dollars in the season an’ about six in between. It’s generally piece-work, with five or six months when you can earn ten or twelve dollars even, an’ the rest of the time five or six dollars. In the busiest times there’d be fifty girls perhaps, but this was only for two or three months, an’ then they discharged them. ’Tisn’t a trade I’d ever let a girl take up if I could help it; I suppose somebody’s got to do it, but there ought to be higher wages for those that do.

“This went on five years. I won’t take time telling about Leander, but he’d got to be a clerk at Ridley’s an’ had eight hundred dollars a year, an’ we’d been engaged for two years, an’ just waiting to see if he wouldn’t get another rise. I knew we could manage on that. Leander was more ambitious than me. He said we ought to live in a showy boarding-house an’ make our money tell that way, but I told him I was used to the Spring Street house, an’ we could have a whole floor an’ be snug as could be an’ Hattie board with us. He gave in, an’ it’s well he did; for we hadn’t been married six months before he had a hemorrhage an’ just went into quick consumption. I’d kept right on with my trade, but I was pulled down myself an’ my eyelids so swollen sometimes I could hardly see out of ’em. But I got a sewing-machine from money I’d saved, an’ I took in work from a place on Canal Street, – a good one, too, that always paid fair. The trouble was my eyes. I’d used ’em up, an’ they got so I couldn’t see the needle nor sew straight, an’ had to give up the sewing, an’ then I didn’t know which way to turn, for there was Leander. The old folks were up there still, wrastling with the stones, but poorer every year, an’ I couldn’t get him up there. Leander was patient as a saint, but he fretted over me an’ how I was to get along.

“‘You’re not to worry,’ says I. ‘There’s more ways than one of earning, an’ if my eyes is bad, I’ve got two hands an’ know how to use ’em. I’ll take a place an’ do housework if I can’t do nothing else.’

“You’d never believe how the thought o’ that weighed on him. He’d wake me up in the night to say, ‘Now, Almiry, jest give up that thought an’ promise me you’ll try something else. I think I’d turn in my grave if I had to know you was slavin’ in anybody’s kitchen.’

“‘What’s the odds?’ I said. ‘You have to be under orders whatever you do. I think it won’t be a bad change from the shop.’

“He took on so, though, that to quiet him I promised him I wouldn’t do it unless I had to, an’ ’twasn’t long after that that he died. Between the doctor’s bill – an’ he was a kind man, I will say, an’ didn’t charge a tenth of what he had ought to – an’ the funeral an’ all, I was cleaned out of everything. I’d had to pawn a month before he died, an’ was just stripped. Sewing was no good. My eyes went back on me like everything else, an’ in a fortnight I knew there wasn’t anything for it but getting a place. I left such things as I had in charge of the old ladies an’ answered an advertisement for ‘a capable girl willing to work.’

“Well, it was a handsome house an’ elegant things in the parlors an’ bedrooms, but my heart sunk when she took me into the kitchen. The last girl had gone off in a rage an’ left everything, an’ there was grease and dirt from floor to ceiling. It was a deep basement, with one window an’ a door opening right into the area with glass set in it, an’ iron bars to both; but dirty to that degree you couldn’t see three feet beyond; cockroaches walking round at their ease an’ water-bugs so thick you didn’t know where to lay anything.

“‘You’ll have things quite your own way,’ the lady said, ‘for I never come into the kitchen. Bridget attends to upstairs, but you attend to fires and the meals and washing and ironing, and I expect punctuality and everything well done.’

“‘At least it sounds independent,’ I thought, and I made up my mind to try it, for the wages were fifteen dollars a month, an’ that with board seemed doing well. Bridget came down presently. She was seventeen an’ a pretty girl rather, but she looked fit to drop, an’ fell down in a chair.

“‘It’s the bell,’ she said. ‘The comin’ an’ goin’ here niver ceases, an’ whin ’tisn’t the front door it’s her own bell, an’ she’ll jingle it or holler up the tube in the middle o’ the night if she takes a notion.’

“I wouldn’t ask questions, for I thought I should find out soon enough, so I said I’d like to go up to my room a minute.

“‘It’s our room you’ll mane,’ she said. ‘There’s but the one, an’ it’s hard enough for two to be slapin’ on a bed that’s barely the width o’ one.’

“My heart sank then, for I’d always had a place that was comfortable all my life, but it sunk deeper when I went up there. A hall bedroom, with a single bed an’ a small table, with a washbowl an’ small pitcher, one chair an’ some nails in the door for hanging things; that was all except a torn shade at the window. I looked at the bed. The two ragged comfortables were foul with long use. I thought of my nice bed down at Spring Street, my own good sheets an’ blankets an’ all, an’ I began to cry.

“‘You don’t look as if you was used to the likes of it,’ Bridget said. ‘There’s another room the same as this but betther. Why not ax for it?’

“I started down the stairs an’ came right upon Mrs. Melrose, who smiled as if she thought I had been enjoying myself.

“‘I’m perfectly willing to try an’ do your work as well as I know how,’ I said, ‘but I must have a place to myself an’ clean things in it.’

“‘Highty-tighty!’ says she. ‘What impudence is this? You’ll take what I give you and be thankful to get it. Plenty as good as you have slept in that room and never complained.’

“‘Then it’s time some one did,’ I said. ‘I don’t ask anything but decency, an’ if you can’t give it I must try elsewhere.’

“‘Then you’d better set about it at once,’ she says, an’ with that I bid her good-afternoon an’ walked out. I had another number in my pocket, an’ I went straight there; an’ this time I had sense enough to ask to see my room. It was bare enough, but clean. There were only three in the family, an’ it was a little house on Perry Street. There I stayed two years. They were strange years. The folks were set in their ways an’ they had some money. But every day of that time the lady cut off herself from the meat what she thought I ought to have, an’ ordered me to put away the rest. She allowed no dessert except on Sunday, an’ she kept cake and preserves locked in an upstairs closet. I wouldn’t have minded that. What I did mind was that from the time I entered the house till I left it there was never a word for me beyond an order, any more than if I hadn’t been a human being. She couldn’t find fault. I was born clean, an’ that house shone from top to bottom; but a dog would have got far more kindness than they gave me. At last I said I’d try a place where there were children an’ maybe they’d like me. Mrs. Smith was dumb with surprise when I told her I must leave. ‘Leave!’ she says. ‘We’re perfectly satisfied. You’re a very good girl, Almira.’ ‘It’s the first time you’ve ever told me so,’ I says, ‘an’ I think a change is best all round.’ She urged, but I was set, an’ I went from there when the month was up.

“Well, my eyes stayed bad for sewing, an’ I must keep on at housework. I’ve been in seven places in six years. I could have stayed in every one, an’ about every one I could tell you things that make it plain enough why a self-respecting girl would rather try something else. I don’t talk or think nonsense about wanting to be one of the family. I don’t. I’d much rather keep to myself. But out of these seven places there was just one in which the mistress seemed to think I was a human being with something in me the same as in her. I’ve been underfed an’ worked half to death in two of the houses. The mistress expected just so much, an’ if it failed she stormed an’ went on an’ said I was a shirk an’ good for nothing an’ all that. There was only one of them that had a decently comfortable room or that thought to give me a chance at a book or paper now an’ then. As long as I had a trade I was certain of my evenings an’ my Sundays. Now I’m never certain of anything. I’m not a shirk. I’m quick an’ smart, an’ I know I turn off work. In ten hours I earn more than I ever get. But I begin my day at six an’ in summer at five, an’ it’s never done before ten an’ sometimes later. This place I’m in now seems to have some kind of fairness about it, an’ Mrs. Henshaw said yesterday, ‘You can’t tell the comfort it is to me, Almira, to have some one in the house I can trust. I hope you will be comfortable an’ happy enough to stay with us.’ ‘I’ll stay till you tell me to go,’ I says, an’ I meant it. My little room looks like home an’ is warm and comfortable. My kitchen is bright an’ light, an’ she’s told me always to use the dining-room in the evenings for myself an’ for friends. She tries to give me fair hours. If there were more like her there’d be more willing for such work, but she’s the first one I’ve heard of that tries to be just. That’s something that women don’t know much about. When they do there’ll be better times all round.”

Here stands the record of a woman who has become invaluable to the family she serves, but whose experiences before this harbor was reached include every form of oppression and even privation. Many more of the same nature are recorded and are arranging themselves under heads, the whole forming an unexpected and formidable arraignment of household service in its present phases. This arraignment bides its time, but while it waits it might be well for the enthusiastic prescribers of household service as the easy and delightful solution of the working-woman’s problem to ask how far it would be their own choice if reduced to want, and what justice for both sides is included in their personal theory of the matter.

CHAPTER THIRTEENTH.

SOME DIFFICULTIES OF AN EMPLOYER WHO EXPERIMENTED

The business face in the great cities is assimilating to such degree that all men are brothers in a sense and to an extent unrealized by themselves. Competition has deepened lines, till one type of the employer in his first estate, while the struggle is still active and success uncertain, loses not only youth and freshness, but with them, too often, any token of owning a soul capable of looking beyond the muckrake by which money is drawn in. If he acquires calm and graciousness, it is the calmness of subtlety and the graciousness of the determined schemer, who, finding every man’s hand practically against him, arranges his own life on the same basis, and wages war against the small dealer or manufacturer below and the monopolist above, his one passionate desire being to escape from the ranks of the first and find his name enrolled among the last. He retains a number of negative virtues. He is, as a rule, “an excellent provider” where his own family is concerned, and he is kind beyond those limits if he has time for it. He would not deliberately harm man or woman who serves him; but to keep even with his competitors – if possible, to get beyond them – demands and exhausts every energy, leaving none to spare for other purposes. Such knowledge as comes from perpetual contact with the grasping, scheming side of humanity is his in full. As the fortune grows and ease becomes certain, a well-fed, well-groomed look replaces the eager sharpness of the early days. He may at this stage turn to horses as the most positive source of happiness. He is likely also, with or without this tendency, to acquire a taste for art, measuring its value by what it costs, and to plan for himself a house representing the utmost that money can buy. But the house and its treasures is, after all, but a mausoleum, and the grave it covers holds the man that might have been. Life in its larger meanings has remained a sealed book, and the gold counted as chief good becomes at last an impenetrable barrier between him and any knowledge of what might have been his portion. He is content, and remains content till the end, and that new beginning in which the starved soul comes to the first consciousness of its own most desperate and pitiful poverty.

This for one type, and a type more and more common with every year of the system in which competition is king. But here and there one finds another, – that of the man whose conscience remains sensitive, no matter what familiarity with legalized knavery may come, and who ponders the question of what he owes to those by whose aid his fortune is made. Nor is he the employer who evades the real issue by a series of what he calls benefactions, and who organizes colonies for his work-people, in which may be found all the charm of the feudal system, and an underlying despotism no less feudal. He would gladly make his workers copartners with him were intelligence enough developed among them to admit such action, and he experiments faithfully and patiently.

It is such an employer whose own words best give the story he has to tell. It is not an American that speaks but a German Jew, – a title often the synonyme for depths of trickery, but more often than is known meaning its opposite in all points. Keen sagacity rules, it is true, but there is also a large and tender nature, sorrowing with the sorrow of humanity and seeking anxiously some means by which that sorrow may lessen. A small manufacturer, fighting his way against monopoly, he is determinately honest in every thread put into his goods, in every method of his trade; his face shrewd yet gentle and wise, – a face that child or woman would trust, and the business man be certain he could impose upon until some sudden turn brought out the shrewdness and the calm assurance of absolute knowledge in his own lines. For thirty years and more his work has held its own, and he has made for himself a place in the trade that no crisis can affect. His own view of the situation is distinctly serious, but even for him there was a flickering smile as he recalled some passages of the experience given here in part. His English limps slightly at moments of excitement, but his mastery of its shades of meaning never, and this is his version of the present relation between employer and employed: —