On the other hand, the study of the savings bank insurance committee deals very largely with girls living at home, so that the two studies supplement each other. The low contributions to the family reported by Miss Bosworth show that the girl earning three to five dollars is barely able to live, but her evidence that the higher-paid girl contributes a larger sum (about four dollars and a half a week) to the family, and supplements her payments by labor in the home indicates that she is really self-supporting, because she is living practically under a coöperative system. What she thus saves over the girl who spends five or six dollars a week for sustenance results in a higher standard of living or an opportunity to save. It is doubtless due to this lower cost of board and room while living at home that the girl who in Miss Bosworth’s study does not receive a living wage is in Miss French’s experience able to begin to save. Here, furthermore, is doubtless the explanation of the fact that while a girl living alone is generally not able to live on a satisfactory standard under a wage of nine dollars a week, the girl living at home, or coöperatively, begins to save on a six to nine-dollar wage.
Taking up simply the woman living alone, we find ourselves confronted with a study of factory workers, waitresses, clerks, saleswomen and kitchen workers. A standard of housing is far easier to determine than one of food. Size of room and location naturally affect rents; but it is hard to reach satisfactory conclusions concerning number of windows, sunlight, heat, bathroom accommodations, and number of roommates. Provision for food is made in the following ways:
1. Cooking in one’s own room.
2. Basement dining rooms.
3. Working girls’ homes.
4. Meals included for service in restaurants and hotels.
They are presented in order of excellence. “Home cooking” means serious danger to health; over-fatigue results in cold meals or no meals rather than expenditure of the energy necessary for preparation. The basement dining room serving twenty-one meals for $3 is “invariably poor,” says Miss Bosworth. Strictly speaking, the subsidized working girls’ home should not be considered in a discussion of the standards of independent working girls. To calculate a “living wage” on such a basis does injustice to thousands of girls who could not if they would find accommodation in working girls’ homes.
What standard, then, are these girls able to attain? Miss Bosworth says: “Between the three, four and five-dollar woman and the next higher division there is a big increase in food expenditures, corresponding to the jump in rent found at this same point. Also corresponding to the rent, the difference between the six, seven and eight-dollar group and the next higher is less marked. Either, then, the increase in wage up to eight dollars goes at once into food and rent, or as is probable, this marks the point of departure from the intolerably crowded share in a tenement dweller’s home to the perhaps equally comfortless but more independent room in a lodging house. In paying the increased amount of room rent the three advantages the girl on higher wages gains are a room to herself, heat of some sort, and sunshine. These advantages come to the majority only when the wage has reached at least $9.” In securing food, the girl on the higher wage patronizes the $4 dining rooms, which are “so attractive in appearance, and so adequate in food as to be thoroughly satisfactory.”
The subject of clothing brings at once two great problems. Here the measure of the standard of living is apparent. A girl may make sacrifices in room and board without immediate effect upon her opportunities to secure employment: but a sacrifice in dress may mean the loss of position—such is the consensus of opinion. The custom of instalment buying follows as a natural result. It is in the field of dress that the individual ability of the girl is most apparent. Innate taste, knowledge of materials, physical strength and opportunity to hunt bargains, readiness to forfeit sleep in order to get time to remodel or make clothes—all these things tell. Home and school training may help raise standards. Miss Bosworth concludes: “The average working woman, with only the average ability to manage her wardrobe economically, with the average trade demands on it, and with the average amount of time for sewing and mending, cannot dress on less than $1 a week as a minimum, and does not need as a dress allowance more than $2 a week.” Elsewhere she states: “The severest strain of providing clothes comes on incomes under $9; when an income of $12 is reached, the strain is perceptibly lessened.”
Apparently a satisfactory standard—one which affords a room meeting reasonable requirements, nourishing food, respectable clothing, medical attendance, and incidentals of simple type, requires a wage of not less than $9.