Fifteen years later conditions were little better. An investigation of “female labor” in New York in 1845 led to the assertion by the New York Tribune that there were in that city about 50,000 working women, onehalf of whom earned wages averaging less than $2 per week, and to the further statement that the girls who flocked to that city from every part of the country to work as shoe binders, type rubbers, artificial-flower makers, match-box makers, straw braiders, etc., found competition so keen that they were obliged “to snatch at the privilege of working on any terms.” “They find,” said the Tribune, “that by working from fifteen to eighteen hours a day they cannot possibly earn more than from one to three dollars a week, and this, deducting the time they are out of employment every year, will barely serve to furnish them the scantiest and poorest food, which, from its monotony and its unhealthy quality, induces disgust, loathing and disease. They have thus absolutely nothing left for clothes, recreation, sickness, books or intellectual improvement.”[8]
In 1863 the average wages paid to women in New York, taking all the trades together, were said to have been about $2 a week, and the hours ranged from eleven to sixteen a day.[9] And in 1887 it was stated that in New York City nine thousand and in Chicago over five thousand women earned less than $3 per week.[10]
Some of these statements may be exaggerations, but there can be no doubt that, throughout the entire history of women in industry in this country, their wages, in thousands of cases, have been inadequate for decent support. Their wages, too, have been far below those of men. In 1833[11] and again in 1868[12] it was stated that women’s wages were, on an average, only about one fourth what men received. Moreover, it has been authoritatively stated that during the civil war period the wages of women increased less than those of men, while their cost of living rose out of all proportion.[13]
It is probable that, in general, women’s wages have been less flexible, more subject to the influence of custom and less to the influence of demand and supply, than men’s. Unfortunately custom in this case has furnished a standard of exploitation and not of protection. It is probable, too, that working women have suffered more than working men from periods of panic and depression, for such periods, like war, have thrown upon their own resources thousands of women who in normal times are supported by their male relatives.
In the textile industries wages, during the first half of the nineteenth century at least, were higher than in the clothing trades. The Lowell girls during the so-called “golden era” earned from $1.50 to $2 per week in addition to their board of $1.25. Their day’s work, however, varied from 11 hours and 24 minutes in December and January to 13 hours and 31 minutes in April, and averaged 12 hours and 13 minutes, or 73¹⁄₂ hours per week.[14] It must be remembered, moreover, that there were in this country, during these early years, two distinct systems of factory labor, the factory boarding-house system of Lowell, Dover, N. H., and other places in that neighborhood, and the family system which prevailed in Fall River, throughout Rhode Island, and generally in New York, New Jersey and Maryland. In the factories operated on the family system of labor wages were distinctly lower than in those of the Lowell type, and were frequently paid in store orders. In these factories, too, hours were longer, being in summer 13³⁄₄ per day and averaging throughout the year 75¹⁄₂ per week[15]. Girls, moreover, went to work at an earlier age. Child laborers whom the Lowell manufacturers could not afford to keep in their factory boarding houses were employed in large numbers.
The general conditions under which women have toiled in this country have been little if any better than their wages and their hours. During the years when Lowell is supposed to have been a busy paradise, with flowers blooming in the factory windows, poetry and hymns pasted on the walls, and the Lowell Offering furnishing an outlet for the exuberant literary activities of the operatives, the ventilation, both of factories and of boarding houses, was absolutely inadequate. In the boarding houses from four to six and sometimes even eight girls slept in one room about 14 by 16 ft., and from twelve to sixteen girls in a hot, ill-ventilated attic. In winter the factories were lighted by lamps. One woman who testified before the Massachusetts Committee on Hours of Labor in 1845 stated that, in the room where she worked, along with about 130 other women, 11 men and 12 children, there were 293 small lamps and 61 large lamps which were sometimes lighted in the morning as well as in the evening[16]. The lack of ventilation in the mills and boarding houses of Lowell was in 1849 made the subject of a report to the American Medical Association by Dr. Josiah Curtis, and in the same year the physician of the Lowell Hospital, established by the manufacturing corporations exclusively for the use of operatives, attributed to lack of ventilation in the cotton mills the fact that, since the founding of the hospital nine years before, over half the patients had suffered from typhoid fever.
Typhoid fever, however, was doubtless a far less general result of these conditions than consumption. Even the Lowell Offering, which found no evils in factory labor except long hours and excused these on the ground that long hours were universal throughout New England, bears evidence in practically every number that tuberculosis of the lungs was the great scourge of the factories. The labor papers, moreover, as early as 1836, began to point out the direct connection between factory labor and consumption. In 1845, too the United States Journal published a poem by Andrew McDonald, the first verse of which reads:[17]
Go look at Lowell’s pomp and gold
Wrung from the orphan and the old;
See pale consumption’s death-glazed eye—
The hectic cheek, and know not why.
Yes, these combine to make thy wealth
“Lord of the Loom,” and glittering pelf.
There is no reason to believe that conditions were any better, if as good, in other manufacturing districts. In the clothing industry, moreover, which has long been concentrated in cities, overcrowding and unsanitary housing conditions in horrible variety have furnished the environment of working women. Whole blocks of tenements, too, have been rented out to families in New York for the manufacture of cigars. As early as 1877 the United Cigar Manufacturers’ Association, an organization of small employers, condemned as unsanitary these tenement cigar factories where the babies rolled on the floor in waste tobacco, and the housework, the cooking, the cleaning of children and the trade of cigar making were all carried on in one room.[18]
From these evil conditions, low wages, long hours and unwholesome sanitary arrangements, immigrant women have naturally been the greatest sufferers, for, like their husbands and brothers, they have been obliged to begin at the bottom. Irish women first entered the factories of New England, for example, as waste pickers and scrub women. But their daughters became spinners and weavers. There have been, however, certain exceptions to this rule. The skilled Bohemian women cigar makers who came to New York in the seventies, for instance, earned from the first comparatively high wages. Foreign girls who have gone into domestic service, moreover, have frequently earned higher wages than American girls who have chosen to be, for example, saleswomen.