Everyone likes to mingle with his kind now and then; to some it is subjectively necessary to hire a caterer, to others peanuts suffice. Everyone likes to wonder and ponder and express opinions—a prize fight is sufficient material for some; others prefer metaphysics. Everyone likes to play. Some need box seats at the Midnight Frolic, others a set of second-hand tools, and yet others a game of craps in the kitchen.
No one likes to be hungry, to be weary, to be sick, to be worried over the future, to be lonely, to have his feelings hurt, to lose those near and dear to him, to have too little independence, to get licked in a scrap of any kind, to have no one at all who loves him, to have nothing at all to do. The people of the so-called working class are more apt to be hungry, weary, and sick than the “educated and cultured” and well-to-do. Otherwise there is no one to say—because there is no way it can be found out—that their lives by and large are not so rich, subjectively speaking, as those with one hundred thousand dollars a year, or with Ph. D. degrees.
Most folk in the world are not riotously happy, not because they are poor, or “workers,” but because the combination making for riotous happiness—shall we say health, love, enough to do of what one longs to do—is not often found in one individual. The condition of the bedding, of the clothing; the pictures on the wall; the smells in the kitchen—and beyond; the food on the table—have so much, and no more, to do with it. Whether one sorts soiled clothes in a laundry, or reclines on a chaise-longue with thirty-eight small hand-embroidered and belaced pillows and a pink satin covering, or sits in a library and fusses over Adam Smith, no one of the three is in a position to pass judgment on the satisfaction or lack of satisfaction of the other two.
All of which is something of an impatient retort to those who look at the world through their own eyes and by no means a justification of the status quo. And to introduce the statement—which a month ago would have seemed to me incredible—that I have seen and heard as much contentment in a laundry as I have in the drawing-room of a Fifth Avenue mansion or a college sorority house—as much and no more. Which is not arguing that no improvements need ever be made in laundries.
There was one place I was not going to work, and that was a laundry! I had been through laundries, I had read about laundries, and it was too much to ask anyone—if it was not absolutely necessary—to work in a laundry. And yet when the time came, I hated to leave the laundry. I entered the laundry as a martyr. I left with the nickname, honestly come by without a Christian effort, of “Sunbeam.” But, oh! I have a large disgust upon me that it takes such untold effort every working day, all over the “civilized,” world to keep people “civilized.” The labor, and labor, and labor of first getting cloth woven and buttons and thread manufactured and patterns cut and garments made up, and fitted, or not, and then to keep those garments clean! We talk with such superiority of the fact that we wear clothes and heathen savages get along with beads and rushes. For just that some six hundred and fifty thousand people work six days a week doing laundry work alone—not to mention mother at the home washboard—or electric machine. We must be clean, of course, or we would not be civilized, but I do not see why we need be so fearfully sot up about it.
A new Monday morning came along, and I waited from 7.40 to 9.15 in a six-by-nine entry room, with some twenty-five men and women, to answer the advertisement:
GIRLS, OVER 18
with public school education, to learn machine ironing, marking, and assorting linens; no experience necessary; splendid opportunity for right parties; steady positions; hours 8 to 5.30; half day Saturday.
What the idea was of advertising for superior education never became clear. No one was asked how far she had progressed intellectually. I venture to say the majority of girls there had had no more than the rudiments of the three r's. It looked well in print. One of the girls from the brassworks stood first in line. She had tried two jobs since I saw her last. She did not try the laundry at all.
I was third in line. The manager himself interviewed us inside, since the “Welfare Worker” was ill. What experience had I? I was experienced in both foot and power presses. He phoned to the “family” floor—two vacancies. I was signed up as press ironer, family. I wouldn't find it so hard as the brassworks—in fact, it really wasn't hard at all. He would start me in at fourteen dollars a week, since I was experienced, instead of the usual twelve. At the end of two weeks, if I wasn't earning more than fourteen dollars—it was a piecework system, with fourteen dollars as a minimum—I'd have to go, and make room for some one who could earn more than fourteen dollars.