For had I accepted that promotion I would have taken the place of some woman who really needed the dollar a week raise. Besides, I would have given Jane the trouble of training me. No such qualms of conscience had troubled me when the manager of the premium station offered me permanent employment, though I was perfectly aware that fifty-six other women had been hoping and working for the position.
Before turning away from the biscuit factory I wish to state that even to-day, after my experience in so many different lines of work, I have but one criticism to make: There is no reason why women should be forced to stand while packing crackers.
This may seem a small matter, but to the woman worker it is most serious. In all my experience I have never found any work so fatiguing as standing on my feet continuously for several hours at a time. The fact that the feet are incased in pointed-toed shoes with high heels does not lessen the strain.
Women should have better sense than to wear such shoes to work. Indeed? Let any one making such a protest try to buy, in New York, a pair of shoes with round toes and moderately low heels when the other style is in fashion. I have tried, and though I succeeded, it was after much searching and always at an additional cost of several dollars. Besides, because a woman works for her living does not make her any less a woman; and every woman, unless she is a fool, wishes to appear well dressed—in the fashion.
Though I was up and out before eight o’clock the next morning, I returned to my room late in the afternoon without having secured a position. It was not for the lack of trying. I called at nine places advertising for workers. At the first place there were twenty-two applicants for two vacancies. At another there were forty women waiting when I arrived, and several came later—only six vacancies. Before the door of a down-town candy factory I was one of more than fifty women and girls. Many of them had been waiting since eight o’clock. At twelve a man came out and roughly ordered us all off. When some of us protested he burst out laughing and informed us that all vacancies had been filled before eight-thirty.
The next day I was more fortunate—that is, I was taken on at the first place to which I applied. This was a candy factory. After packing fancy chocolates during the morning I was sent to another department and assigned to the task of helping a chocolate-dipper. This position, so my fellow packers informed me, was very desirable since the next step up is chocolate-dipping, a work that always commands a good wage.
“It’s grand!” one little girl, who looked as though she had not washed her face or combed her hair for a week, assured me. “You’ll learn how to dip. They make big money, dippers do. I’ve gotter cousin who married a dipper. She used to make as much as eighteen a week. She has the swellest clothes!”
During my first day in this candy factory I imagined that the unneat appearance of my fellow workers was caused by dirt accumulated since their arrival that morning. The next day taught me better. There were precious few of them, either men or women, who had the appearance of having washed their faces before leaving home.
The apron handed me on my second day was so soiled that I asked the woman in charge how often she had them washed.
“Wash these things,” she cried, laughing, as she held up another apron in a worse condition than the one she had given me, “they ain’t never washed sence I been here. When they gets so sticky and stuck up that they spoil your clothes they take ’em away and give me some more. I guess they burn ’em. They ain’t fitten for nothing else.”