[27] Voice of Industry, Feb. 20, 1846.
[28] Gray, Argument on Petition for Ten-Hour Law, 1873, pp. 21-22.
[29] In that year it was said that a man and two women working together from twelve to sixteen hours a day earned a dollar among them, and that the women, if they did not belong to the family, received each about $1.25 a week for their work. Workingman’s Advocate, July 27, 1844.
CHANGES IN WOMEN’S WORK IN BINDERIES[30]
MARY VAN KLEECK
Committee on Women’s Work, New York City
“Bookbinding is a very uncertain trade,” said a forewoman who had held her position fourteen years; “I wouldn’t advise any young girl to go into it. There is so much machinery now. Where a girl used to make eight or nine dollars, she now makes five or six, and that’s not a living. Also you never know when you’ll be laid off. Take the magazine binderies. They don’t keep the girls a full month. Ten days is their month. Twelve days is a long month. It’s a bad arrangement to do thirty days’ work in twelve. You have to pay board every week.”
Remarks like these were made by many girls employed in the bookbinding trade in New York. For the most part they did not see reasons or remedies for the conditions which they faced, but by daily experience they had learned this fact of change as it appeared in numerous guises, irregular employment, irregular hours, hit-or-miss methods of learning, cuts in wages, and the displacement of workers by the coming of machines. If their impressions be correct, more important than any photographic description of their economic position, regarded as a static thing, is an account of changes in conditions and their effect on women workers.
If we attempt to verify the statements of the workers by the official figures in the census, showing the proportion of men and women employed in binderies at successive enumerations,[31] we shall be surprised and somewhat bewildered. In 1870 30% were women, 70% were men; in 1880 39.7% were women, 60.3% were men; in 1890 48.5% were women, 51.5% were men; in 1900 51.6% were women, 48.4% were men.
This rapid shifting of the relative proportion of men and women would lead the statistician to suppose that in this trade was to be found a perfect example of the displacement of men by women. Behind the figures one seems to read the story of a struggle in which men have been the losers. Yet the comments of workers and employers, and the conditions actually witnessed in binderies in New York contradict this reading of census figures. Evidently more facts are needed in order to understand what is happening in the trade.