What eight million women want

by Rheta Childe Dorr

THE CONSUMERS' LEAGUE "WHITE LIST"

The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm names. The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew the conditions. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the other firms to their outcast position. Far from evincing a desire to earn a place on the White List, they cast aspersions on a "parcel of women" who were trying to "undermine business credit," and scouted the very idea of an organized feminine conscience.

"Wait until the women want Easter bonnets," sneered one merchant. "Do you think they will pass up anything good because the store is not on their White List?"

Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for. Even as far back as 1891 a few women had begun to doubt the efficacy of that indirect influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What was the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the Mercantile Employers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory Department.

The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, and still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it. A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into conditions of working women in New York City.

The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in two large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified to employing grown women at a salary of thirty-three cents a day. They confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended, on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.

The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite of the merchants' protests the women's bill was passed without a dissenting vote.

The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which it placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of seats,—one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of children, except those holding working certificates from the authorities. These, and other minor provisions, affected all retail stores, as far as the law was obeyed.

As a matter of fact the Consumers' League's bill carried a "joker" which made its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter of inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health, supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it proved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after a year of this inadequate inspection, political forces were brought to bear, and then there were no store inspectors.

Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers' League tried to persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed inspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a year ago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores under factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants' Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto what they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. Governor Hughes, however, signed the bill.

In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. No less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were sent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Consumers' League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been justified.

To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To women capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition, a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterly fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply business men, with the business man's contracted vision. They could think only in terms of money profit and money loss.

In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the stores supported by their patronage.

The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League would concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season. Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one. The League stands firm on the point, and up to the present so do the stores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the custom whereby thousands of young girls and women are compelled every holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of uncompensated labor.

No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extorted in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to five months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchase after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six o'clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in the bookkeeping and auditing departments.

That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it seems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified.

I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of one of the largest and most respectable stores in New York. In this store, and, according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the accounting force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school, ignorant and incapable—but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day's sales are posted and audited before the close of the day following, the business force has to work until nine and ten o'clock several nights in the week. In some cases they work every night.

Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the Consumers' League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.

The Consumers' League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in this early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. City after city, State after State, formed Consumers' Leagues, until, in 1899, a National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was organized. The National League, far from being a philanthropic society, has become a scientific association for the study of industrial economics.

When the original Consumers' League undertook its first piece of legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their claim. The New York League and all of the others have been collecting reasons ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized collection of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they should not work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in tenements; why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speed of machines should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should be extended; why minimum wage rates should be established.

In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group of trained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body of facts concerning the human side of industry. It is ammunition which tells. One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry in Portland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of blowing a large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of women in factories and laundries should be ten hours long. The law was constantly violated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland. One night a factory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and found working there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher. The inspector promptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller.

The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars. Instead of paying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the other laundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for women workers was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the right freely to contract. A man or a woman may contract with an employer to work as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whatever dangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions, unless "there is fair ground to say that there is material danger to the public health or safety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the general welfare...." This is the legal decision on which most protective legislation in the United States has been based.

Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day for women was declared unconstitutional because nobody's health or safety was endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New York law forbidding all-night employment of women.

So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had reason to believe that they could attack the Oregon law. The case was appealed, and appealed again, by the laundrymen, and finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States. Then the Consumers' League took a hand.

The brief for the State of Oregon, "defendant in error," was prepared by Louis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of the most effective workers in the League's New York headquarters. This brief is probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence. It consists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a few paragraphs were written by the attorney for the State. All the rest was contributed, under Miss Goldmark's direction, from the Consumers' League's wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should be protected.

The League's reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to work their women employees far into the night was, "The World's Experience upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is Based." It is simply a mass of testimony taken from hearings before the English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical books; from reports of boards of health.