Another help in the domestic economy of the workman’s home is the existence of the co-operative stores for the sale of provisions. In 1870 there were three or four hundred such societies in Paris.
The clothing and linen in a workman’s home are said to equal in value his furniture. His own clothing costs him about $24 a year; washing and mending raising the cost by $12; the clothing of his wife and two children would be about $44 more.
The workman’s wife is extremely industrious, rising early and always assiduously engaged in domestic duties, or in some work by which she adds to the income.
Many workmen with small families are able to save sufficient to set their wives up in business as washerwomen, or in a fruit or newspaper stall. Often she undertakes the duties of a housekeeper, i. e., acting as general servant for the first few hours of the day in some family of the middle class. When she thus works she has to send her children to the crib or to the asylum; but this is not frequent, as the families of workmen in Paris are usually very small.
Those who have the largest are generally of German origin, coming from Alsace, Belgium, and countries bordering on the Rhine. That very large families sometimes are found among workmen in Paris is proved by one case where a day laborer, a native of the department of the Haut-Rhin, received a prize of $600 for bringing up a family of fifteen children respectably on a wage of fifty cents a day. In the end he was assisted by his son, who was able to earn as a skilled workman more than his father.
As a rule the workman leaves the management of the children and the spending of the money entirely to his wife. He gives her all the wages on pay-day, and she doles out to him every morning the sum necessary for his meals.
Sometimes she finds a great deficit when this time comes. Then she weeps and upbraids him, while he, confessing his fault, says reproachfully of himself, “One must not deceive when one has five or six children.”
It does not appear to be easy to outwit a French woman. Occasionally a drinking husband will try to hide a piece of money in some out of the way place, as, for instance, the peak of his hat. But his wife ransacks his clothes while he is asleep and finds the missing coin. This position of affairs being well known, the workman who will not be entrapped into drinking, or who, being one of a social gathering, insists on going home early, is chaffed as a man who buttons up his coat with pins.
It is certainly a fact that feminine influence is very powerful in Paris, and that what the mother is the home becomes. Thus while Paris workmen almost universally absent themselves from the churches, and throw all their influence politically against the priests, their children go in crowds to make their first communion, and to this end are placed under the priests for religious instruction.
To see the street in front of a Paris church on Whit Sunday, no one would believe religion was a matter not only of indifference, but of contempt, to the Paris workman. The road seen from a balcony is like an immense field of snow-drops. Hundreds of white-robed children float about among crowds of smiling parents and friends. And yet there is hardly anything in it beyond a domestic rite, something which it is respectable to go through at a certain age.