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

“In me always are two peoples, – one that loves work well, that must work ever to be happy, and one that will think and think ever how hard is life even with work that is good and with much to love. In village or in city, for I begin with one and go on to the other, in both alike it is work always that is too much; long hours when strength is gone and there should be rest, but when always man and woman, yes, and child, must go on for the little more that more hours will earn. For myself, I want not what is called pleasure when the day is done. A book that is good contents me, and is friend and amusement in one. But as I love a book more and more, and desire more time to be with them, I begin first to think, why should so many hours be given to work that there are none in which men have strength or time or desire left for something that is better? These things I think much of before I come to America. I have my trade from my father and his father. We are silk-weavers from the time silk is known, but for myself I have chosen ribbons, and it is ribbons I make all my life and that my son will make after me.

“At first when I come here to this country that for years I hope for and must not reach, because I am held to my father who is old – at first I have little money and can only be with another who manufactures. But already some dishonesties have come in. The colors are not firm; the silk has weight given it, so that more body than is belongs to the ribbon; there is an inch, maybe, cut short in the lengths. There is every way to make the most and give the least. And there is something that from the days I begin to think at all, seems ever injustice and wrong. Side by side it may be, men and women work together at the looms; but for the women it is half, sometimes two thirds, what the man can earn, yet the work the same. This is something to alter when time is ripe, and at last it is come. I have saved as I earned and added to what I bring with me, and I buy for myself the plant of a man who retires, and get me a place, this place where I am, and that changes little. His workers come with me, – a few, for I begin with four looms only, but soon have seven, and so go on. At first I think only of how I may shorten hours and make time for them to rest and learn what they will, but a good friend of mine from the beginning is doctor, and as I go on he speaks to me much of things I should do for health. And then I think of them and study, and I see that there is much I have never learned and that they must learn also with me.

“There is one thing that Americans will, more than all peoples of the earth. They will have a place so hot that breath is nowhere, and women more even than men. I begin to think how I shall keep them warm yet give them to breathe. The place is old, as you see. No builder thought ever of air in such time as this was built, and if they think to-day, it is chiefly wrong, for in all places I go one breathes the breath of all others, never true air of heaven. At first I open windows from top and before they come; but when they see it they cry out and say, ‘O Mr. B – ! You want to freeze us!’ ‘Not so,’ I say; ‘I would make you healthy.’ And they say, ‘We’re healthy enough. We don’t want draughts.’ It is true. There were draughts, and I begin to think how this shall be changed, and try many things, and all of them they pull down or push out or stop up tight, whichever way will most surely abolish air. At last I bring up my doctor who is wise and can explain better than I, and I say that work may stop and all listen and learn. They listen but they laugh, all but one, and say, ‘How funny! What is use of so much fuss?’

“While I do these things which I keep on and will not stop, finding best at last a shaft and a hole above, that they cannot pull out or reach to fill, I think of other things. They eat at noon what they bring, – pie that is dear to Americans, and small cakes, many of them; but good bread that has nourishment, or good drink like soup or coffee, no. They stand many hours and: faint and weak. So I say there must be good coffee for them, and I tell them, ‘Girls, I will buy a big urn and there shall be coffee and milk, and for two cents you have a big cup so sweet as you will, or if you like better it shall be hot soup.’ Above in a room was a a Swiss that knew good soup, and that would, if I pay her a little, buy all that is wanted and a make a big pot, so that each could have a bowl. This also I would have them pay for, three cents a bowl, and they like this best, and it is done for three weeks. They go up there and have full bowls, and I have a long table made before a bench where sometimes they rest, with oil-cloth, and here they eat and are comfortable. Three days soup, three days hot coffee; and I have place where the men can heat what is in their pails.

“But they do such things! They pick out vegetable from soup and throw on the floor. They pour away coffee. They make the place like a home of animals, and when I say, ‘Girls, I want much that all should be clean and nice, and that you never waste,’ they laugh again. I find that difficult, for what answer can be made to laugh? I go on, but they break bowls and insult the Swiss that make the soup, and tell her I buy dog-meat and such, and she say she will no more of it. Then I call the doctor again and say to them, ‘Listen while he tells you what is good to eat.’ They were not all so fools, but the fool ones rule, and they listen, but they laugh always. That is American, – to laugh and think everything joke and not see what earnest must be for any good living. I give the coffee-urn to the best girl and tell her to have care of it, but do what we will they think somehow I am silly, and like best to eat their pie and then talk. A small pie at the corner is three cents, and they buy one, sometimes two, and it is sweet and fills and they are content. It is only men that think that will change a habit. I find for the worker always till thought begins they are conservative, and an experiment, a change, is distress to them. So I say, ‘Let them do they will. Air is here and that they cannot stop, but for food I will do no more.’

“These all were small things, and as I went on I said, as in the beginning, that for those who did the same work must be the same wage. My men had always ten dollars, and sometimes twelve or fifteen dollars a week; but the best woman had ten dollars, and she had worked five years and knew all. It is a law – unwritten, but still a law – that women shall not have what men earn; and when I say one is good as another, the brother of the woman I make equal with him said first this should never be; and when I said ‘It must,’ he talk to all the men at noon, and before the looms begin again they come and tell me that if I do so they will work no more. I talk to them all: ‘This is a country where men boast always that woman has much honor, but I see not that she has more justice than where there is less honor. Shame on men that will let women work all the hours and as well as they, – yes, many times better, – and then threaten strike if they are paid the same!’ But it was all no good. For that time I must yield, because I had much work that was promised; but I said: ‘For now I do as you will. With January, that is but a month away, it shall be as I will.’

“Well, I have tried. Many changes have been made, much time lost, much money. I call them to my house in the evening. I talk with them and try to teach them justice, and some are willing, but most not. New men spoil my work, and I lose much profit and take the old ones again. But this, too, is a small thing. My own mind goes on and I see that they should share with me. I read of co-operation, and to me it is truer than profit-sharing. I have seventy men and girls at work. I say they must understand this business. I will try to teach them. Two evenings a week I meet them all and talk and listen to them. One or two feel it plain. For most they say, ‘Old B – wants to get a rise out of us somehow.’ At last I see that they are too foolish to understand co-operation, but it may be they will let profit-sharing be a step. Over and over, many times over and over, I tell it all, and in the end some agree, and for a year it does well. But the next year was bad. Silk was high, and my ribbons honest ribbons and profit small; and when they saw how small, they cried that they were cheated and that I kept all for myself. I read them the books. I said, ‘Here, you may see with your eyes. This year I make not enough to live if there were not other years in which I saved. I am almost failed. The business might stop, but I will go on for our names’ sake.’ ‘All a dodge,’ they said. No words were plain enough to make them know. They even called me cheat and liar, there in the place where I had tried to work for them.

“And so I share profits no more. I give large wage. I never cut down, do the market what it will. But some things are plain. It is not alone oppression and greed from above that do what you call grind the worker. No, I am not alone. There are men like me with a wish for humanity and wiser than I, and alike they are not heard when they speak; alike their wish is naught and their effort vain. It is ignorance that rules. There is no knowledge, no understanding. In my trade and in all trades I know it is the same. A man will not believe a fact, and he will believe that to cheat is all one over him can wish. Even my workers that care for me, a few of them, they laugh no more to my face, but they say: ‘Oh, he has notions, that man! He will never get very rich, he has so many notions.’ They listen and they think a little. One man said yesterday: ‘If this had been put in my head when I was a growing lad it would have straightened many a thing. Why ain’t we taught?’ And I said to him: ‘Jacob, teachers are not taught. There is only one here, one there, that thinks what only it is well to learn, – justice for all the world. I who would do justice am made to wait, but the sin is with you, not with me.’

“So to-day I wait for such time as wisdom may come. My son is one with me in this. He has a plan and soon he will try, and where I failed his more knowledge may do better. But for me, I think that this generation must suffer much, and in pain and want learn, it may be, what is life. To-day it knows not and cares not, save a few. How shall the many be made to know?”

CHAPTER FOURTEENTH.

THE WIDOW MALONEY’S BOARDERS

To the old New-Yorker taking his pensive way through streets where only imagination can supply the old landmarks, long ago vanished, there is a conviction that he knows the city foot by foot as it has crept northward; and he repudiates the thought that its growth has ended such possibility, and that many a dark corner is as remote from his or any knowledge save that of its occupants as if in Caffre-land. The newest New-Yorker has small interest in anything but the west side and the space down-town occupied by his store or office.

And so it chances that in spite of occasional series of descriptive articles, in spite of an elaborately written local history and unnumbered novels whose background is the city life and thought, there is little real knowledge, and, save among charitable workers, the police, and adventurous newspaper men, no thought of what life may be lived not a stone’s-throw from the great artery of New York, Broadway.

On one point there can be no doubt. Not Africa in its most pestilential and savage form holds surer disease or more determined barbarians than nest together under many a roof within hearing of the rush and roar of the busy streets where men come and go, eager for no knowledge or wisdom under the sun save the knowledge that will make them better bargainers. There comes even a certain impatient distrust of those who persist in unsavory researches and more unsavory details of the results. If there is not distrust; if the easy-going kindliness that is a portion of the American temperament is stirred, it is but for the moment; and when the hand that sought the pocket or the check-book instinctively has presented its gift, interest is over. A fresh sensation wipes out all trace of the transient feeling, and though it may again be roused by judicious effort, how rarely is it that more than the automatic movement toward the pocket results! What might come if for even one hour the impatient giver walked through the dark passages, stood in the foul, dimly lighted rooms and saw what manner of creature New York nourishes in her slums, giving to every child in freest measure that training in all foulness that eye or ear or mind can take in that will fit it in time for the habitation in prison or reformatory on which money is never spared, – who shall say? They are filled by free choice, these nests of all evil. The men and women who herd in them know nothing better; indeed, may have known something even worse. They are Polish Jews, Bohemians, the lowest order of Italians, content with unending work, the smallest wage, and an order of food that the American, no matter how low he may be brought, can never stomach. Yet they assimilate in one point, being as bent upon getting on as the most determined American, and accepting to this end conditions that seem more those of an Inferno than anything the upper world has known. It is among these people, chiefly Polish Jews and Bohemians, with the inevitable commixture of Irish, that one finds the worst forms of child-labor; children that in happy homes are still counted babies here in these dens beginning at four or five to sew on buttons or pick out threads.

It is not of child-labor and the outrages involved in it that I speak to-day, save indirectly, as it forms part of the mass of evil making up the present industrial system and to be encountered at every turn by the most superficial investigation. It is rather of certain specific conditions, found at many points in tenement-house life, but never in such accumulated degree of vileness at any point save one outside the Fourth Ward. And if the reader, like various recent correspondents, is disposed to believe that I am merely “making up a case,” using a little experience and a great deal of imagination, I refer him or her to the forty-third annual report of the New York Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor. There, in detail to a degree impossible here, will be found the official report of the inspector appointed to examine the conditions of life in the building known as “The Big Flat,” in Mulberry Street. There are smaller houses that are worse in construction and condition, but there is none controlled by one management where so many are gathered under one roof. The first floor has rooms for fourteen families, the remaining five for sixteen each; and the census of 1880 gave the number of inhabitants as 478, a sufficient number to make up the population of the average village. The formal inspection and the report upon it were made in September, 1886, and the report is now accessible to all who desire information on these phases of city life. It is Mrs. Maloney herself whose methods best give us the heart of the matter, and who, having several callings, is the owner of an experience which appears to hold as much surprise for herself as for the hearer.

“Shure I foind things that interestin’ that I’m in no haste to be through wid ’em, an’ on for me taste o’ purgatory, not hintin’ that there mightn’t be more ’n a taste,” Mrs. Maloney said, on a day in which she unfolded to me her views of life in general, her small gray eyes twinkling, her arms akimbo on her mighty hips, and her cap-border flapping about a face weather-beaten and high-colored to a degree not warranted even by her present profession as apple-woman. Whether whiskey or stale beer is more responsible is unknown. It is only certain that, having submitted with the utmost cheerfulness to the perennial beatings of a husband only half her size, she found consolation in a glass now and then with a sympathizing neighbor and at last in a daily resort to the same friend. There had been a gradual descent from prosperity. Dennis, if small, was wiry and phenomenally strong, and earned steady wages as porter during their first years in the country. But the children, as they grew, went to the bad entirely, living on the earnings of the mother, who washed and scrubbed and slaved, with a heart always full of excuses for the hulking brutes, who came naturally at last to the ends that might have been foretold. Their education had been in the Fourth Ward; they were champion bullies and ruffians of whom the ward still boasts, Mrs. Maloney herself acquiring a certain distinction as the mother of the hardest cases yet sent up from Cherry Street. But if she had no power to save her own, life became easier for whomsoever she elected to guard. Wretched children crept under her wing to escape the beating awaiting them when they had failed to bring home the amount demanded of them. Women, beaten and turned out into the night, fled to her for comfort, and the girl who had lost her place, or to whom worse misfortune had come, told her story to the big-hearted sinner, who nodded and cried and said, “It’s the Widdy Maloney that’ll see you’re not put upon more. Hold on an’ be aisy, honey, an’ all’ll come out the way you’d be havin’ it, an’ why not?”

It was at this stage of experience that Mrs. Maloney decided to remove to the Big Flat. The last raid of Dennis, the youngest and only boy not housed at the expense of the State, had reduced her belongings to their lowest terms, and she took possession of her new quarters, accompanied only by a rickety table, three chairs, a bed with two old straw mattresses, and some quilts too ragged to give any token of their original characteristics, a stove which owned but one leg, – the rest being supplied by bricks, – and such dishes and other small furniture as could be carried in a basket. But there went with her a girl kicked out by the last man who had temporarily called her his mistress, – a mere child still, who at ten had begun work in a bag-factory passing through various grades of slightly higher employment, till seduced by the floor-walker of the store that it had been her highest ambition to reach. Almost as much her fault as his undoubtedly, her silly head holding but one desire, that for fine clothes and never to work any more, but a woman’s heart waking in her when the baby came, and prompting her to harder work and better life than she had ever known. There was no chance of either with the baby, and when at last she farmed out the encumbrance to an old couple in a back building who made this their business, and took a place again in the store, it was relief as well as sorrow that came when the wretched little life was over. But the descent had been a swift one. When what she had called life was quite over, and she sat dumb and despairing in the doorway to which she had been thrust, thinking of the river as the last refuge left, the widow had pushed her before her up the stairs and said, —

“Poor sowl, if there’s none to look out for ye, then who but me should do it?”

This was the companion who lay by her side under the ragged quilts, life still refusing to give place to death, though every paroxysm of coughing shortened the conflict.

“She’s that patient that the saints themselves – all glory to their blessed names! – couldn’t be more so; but I’d not know how to manage if it wasn’t for the foot-warmer I call her; that’s Angela there, wid eyes that go through you an’ the life beaten out of her by the man that called himself her father, an’ wasn’t at all, at all. It’s she that does the kaping of the house, an’ sleeps across the foot, an’ it’s mine they think the two av ’em, else they’d never a let me in, the rules bein’, ‘no lodgers.’ It’s not lodgers they are. It’s me boarders, full fledged, an’ who’s a better right than me, though I’d not be sayin’ so to the housekeeper that’d need forty pair o’ eyes to her two to see what’s goin’ on under her nose.”

The “foot-warmer’s” office had ceased for one of them before the month ended, and when the Potter’s Field had received the pine coffin followed only by the two watchers, the widow made haste to bring in another candidate for the same position; one upon whom she had kept her eye for a month, certain that worse trouble was on the way than loss of work.

“There was the look on her that manes but the one thing,” she said afterward. “There’s thim that sthand everything an’ niver a word, an’ there’s thim that turns disperate. She was a disperate wan.”

Never had a “disperate wan” better reason. A factory girl almost from babyhood, her apprenticeship having begun at seven, she had left the mill at fourteen, a tall girl older than her years in look and experience. New York was her Mecca, and to New York she came, with a week’s wages in her pocket on which to live till work should be found, and neither relative nor friend save a girl who had preceded her by a few months and was now at work in a fringe and gimp factory, earning seven dollars a week and promising the same to the child after a few weeks’ training. But seven years in a cotton-mill, if they had given quickness in one direction, had blunted all power in others. The fingers were unskilful and clumsy and her mind too wandering and inattentive to master details, and the place was quickly lost. She entered her name as candidate for the first vacancy in a Grand Street store, and in the mean time went into a coffee and spice mill and became coffee-picker at three dollars a week. This lasted a month or two, but even here there was dissatisfaction with lack of thoroughness, and she was presently discharged. The vacancy had come, and she went at once into the store, her delicate face and pretty eyes commending her to the manager, who lost no time in telling her what impression she could produce if she were better dressed. Weak, irresponsible, hopelessly careless, and past any power to undo these conditions, there was some instinct in the untaught life that put her instantly on the defensive.

“I’m not good for much,” she said, “but I’m too good for that. There’s nothing you could promise would get you your will and there won’t be.”

Naturally, as the siege declared itself a hopeless one, the manager found it necessary to fill her place by some more competent hand. There was an interval of waiting in which she pawned almost the last article of clothing remaining that could be dispensed with, and then went into a bakery, where the hours were from seven A. M. to ten P. M., sometimes later. She was awkward at making change, but her gentle manners attracted customers, and the baker himself soon cast a favorable eye upon her, and speedily made the same proposition that had driven her from her last employment. The baker’s wife knew the symptoms, and on the same day discharged the girl.

“I don’t say it’s your fault,” she said, “but he’s started about you, and it’s for your own good I tell you to go. The best thing for you is to go back to your mother, or else take a place with some nice woman that’ll keep an eye to you. You’ll always be run after. I know your kind, that no man looks at without wanting to fool with ’em. You take my advice and go into a place.”

The chance came that night. The mistress of a cheap boarding-house in East Broadway, her patrons chiefly young clerks from Grand and Division Street stores, offered her home and eight dollars a month, and Lizzie, who by this time was frightened and discouraged, accepted on the instant. She was well accustomed to long hours, and she had never minded standing as many of the girls did, her apprenticeship in the mill having made it comparatively easy.

But the drudgery undergone here was beyond anything her life had ever known. Her day began at five and it never ended before eleven. She slept on an old mattress on the kitchen floor, and as her strength failed from the incessant labor, lost all power of protest and accepted each new demand as something against which there could be no revolt. There was abundance of coarse food and thus much advantage, but she had no knowledge that taught her how to make work easier, nor had her mistress any thought of training her. She was a dish-washing machine chiefly, and broke and chipped even the rough ware that formed the table furniture, till the exasperated mistress threatened to turn her off if another piece were destroyed. It was a case of hopeless inaptitude; and when in early spring she sickened, and the physician grudgingly called in declared it a case of typhus brought on by the conditions in which she had lived, she was sent at once to the hospital and left to such fate as might come.