It is as student, not as professional philanthropist, that I write; and the years that have brought experience have brought also a conviction, sharpened by every fresh series of facts, that no words, no matter what fire of fervor may lie behind, can make plain the sorrow of the poor. To ears that will hear, to souls that seek forever some way that may help in truth and not in name, even to them it loses power at moments. To souls that sit at ease and leave to “the power that works for righteousness” the evolution of humanity from its prison of poverty and ignorance and pain, it is quite useless to speak. They have their theory, and the present civilization contents them. But for the men and women who are neither Georgeites merely, nor philanthropists merely, nor certain that any sect or creed or ism will help, but who know that the foulest man is still brother, and the wretchedest, weakest woman still sister, whose shame and sorrow not only bear a poison that taints all civilization, but are forever our shame and our sorrow till the world is made clean,—for these men and women I write, not what I fancy, but what I see and know.
Most happily for humanity, they are stronger, more numerous, with every year; but the hardest fact for them remains ever that their battle is a double one, and that, exhausted as they may be with long conflict against lowest forms of evil, they must rally to a sharper one against the army of the Philistines. Strong soul and high endeavor: never since time began has man more needed them; never was there harder work to do.
The story of the working-woman in one great city is, with slight variations in conditions, the story of the working-woman in all; and when we have once settled conclusively what monopoly or competition has done and is doing for New York, we know sufficiently well what Boston and Philadelphia and Chicago and all the host of lesser cities could easily tell us in detail. With the mass of poor who work chiefly to obtain money for drink, and who, with their progeny, are filling the institutions in which we delight, we have absolutely nothing to do. It is seldom from their ranks that workers are recruited. A small proportion, rescued by societies or mission schools, may be numbered among them, but the greater part are a grade above, and while perhaps wellnigh as ignorant, have an inheritance of better instincts, and could under any reasonable conditions of living find their fate by no means intolerable.
I have chosen to-day, instead of passing on to another form of the clothing trade, to return to that of underwear, and this because it is the record most crowded with cases in which the subjects could not enter household service and have not been reduced to poverty by intemperance. Nor is the selection made with a view to working up as startling a case as possible. On the contrary, it has been made almost at random from the many recorded, any separate mention of which would be impossible in the space at command. First on the long list comes Catherine E——, an “expert” in underwear, and living on the top floor of a large, old-fashioned house in Clinton Place; the lower part stores and offices, the upper a tenement. She earned three years ago $1.50 a day; at times, $1.75. The same work now brings her eighty-five cents, and now and then but seventy-five. The husband was a “boss painter,” and they were comfortable, even prosperous, till the fate of his calling came upon him, and first the “drop hand,” and later blood-poisoning and heart-disease followed. He is just enough alive to care a little for the children and to oversee the pitiful household affairs; the oldest girl, a child of seven, doing the marketing, boiling the kettle, etc., and this season going to school. They are fair-faced, gentle children, and this is their mother’s story:—
“I can run the machine, and I did with every one of them when they were two weeks old, for I’ve always been strong. Nothing that happens is bad enough to kill me, and it’s lucky it’s so, for it’s two years and over since William there could earn a dollar. He helps me; but you see for yourself he’s half dead and no getting well, because we’ve nothing to buy food with, or medicine, or anything that could help him. We were both brought up here in the city. We don’t know anything about the country, but sometimes I wish we did, and that I could take the children and live somehow. But I don’t know how people live there. I’m certain of work here, and I’d be afraid to go anywhere else. I’m making babies’ slips now; three tucks and a hem and find your own cotton, and it takes eighteen hours to make a dozen, and these are seventy-five cents a dozen. I can buy cotton at eighteen cents a dozen, but we have to take it from the manufacturer at twenty cents—sometimes twenty-five cents. Last week I was on corset-covers; I take whatever they send up, for I’m an old hand, and always sure of work. They were plain corset-covers, and I got forty cents a dozen without the buttonholes. If I did them it would be five cents on every dozen, and sometimes I do. That pile in the corner is extra-size chemises. I get $1.50 a dozen for making them, and if I cord the bands, fifty cents a dozen for them. I can do seven or eight a day; but there are no more just now, they say. I work fourteen hours a day; yes, I’ve often worked sixteen, for you see there are six of us, and we must be clothed and fed. William is handy, but, poor soul! he’s only a man, and he’s sick past cure, and nobody but me for us all. God help us! I wouldn’t mind if wages were steady, but they cut and cut, and always some excuse for making them lower, and here am I, that can do anything, private orders and all, down to eighty-five cents a day. I could earn more by family sewing, but I can’t leave William or the children, for he’s likely to go any minute, the doctors say, if he over-exerts himself; and suppose it came, and I not here, and the baby and Willie and all! I’ve turned all ways. I think and think as I sit here, and there’s no help in God or man. It’s all wrong somehow, but we don’t know why nor how, and the only way I can see is just to die. There’s no place for honesty or hard work. You must lie and cheat if you want standing room. God help us!—if there is a God; but I’ve my doubts. Why don’t he help, if there is one?”
Here the average earnings were twenty-five dollars a month, the rent of the room they occupied seven dollars, leaving eighteen dollars for food, fire, light, and clothing.
Another disabled husband, recovering, but for many months unable to work, was found in a tenement-house in East Eleventh Street. In this case work and earnings were almost identical with the last, but there were but two children, and thus less demand for food, etc. For a year and a half the wife, though also an “expert,” had never exceeded eighty-five cents a day and had sometimes fallen as low as seventy. She had sometimes gone to the factory instead of working at home, and the last firm employing her in this way had charged ten cents on the dollar for the steam used in running the machine which she operated.
“It didn’t pay,” the little woman said, with a laugh that ended as a sob, checked instantly. “I could earn eight dollars a week, but there was the steam, ten cents on the dollar, and my car fares, for there was no time to walk,—sixty cents for them,—$1.40, you see, altogether. I might as well work at home and have the comfort of seeing that the children were all right. There’s plenty of work, it seems. It’s wages that’s the trouble, and do you know how they cut them? If I could work any other way I would, but I like to sew, and I don’t know any other trade. I’m not strong, but somehow I can run the machines, and there’s nothing else. But we’re clean discouraged. It isn’t living, and we don’t know what way to turn.”
In East Sixth Street, near the Bowery, Mrs. W., a widow still young and with a nervously energetic face and manner, gave her experience. She had been forewoman in a factory before her husband’s death, having supported him through his last year of life, working all day and nursing him at night. In this way her own health broke down, and she was at last taken to the hospital, where she remained nearly six months, coming out to find her place filled, but a subordinate one open to her.
“I had to wait for that,” she said, “and I had to learn. I knew a sewing-machine place where often you could get ruffling for skirts to do, and I went up there one morning. It was the three tucks and a hem ruffling, and I did one hundred and forty-two yards from eight in the morning till half-past four, and they paid me twenty-three cents. ‘We could get it done for that by steam power,’ they said, ‘so we can’t give more. It’s a favor anyway to give it out at all.’ That was my first day’s work. The next I went down to my place on Canal Street. They think a good deal of me there, and they put me on drawers right away; thirty-five cents a dozen for making them. I can make two dozen a day sometimes, but fine ones not over a dozen, though they pay fifty cents. You wonder how they make anything. I’ve been forewoman, and I know the prices. Why, even at forty cents a pair they make on them. Twenty-one yards of cloth at five cents makes a dozen; that’s $1.05; and eighteen yards of edge at four and a half cents, that’s eighty-one cents; and the making thirty-five cents; that’s $2.21. Thread and all, they won’t cost over $2.25, and they sell at wholesale at three dollars a dozen and retail at $4.80. There’s profit even when you think a cent couldn’t be made. Take skirts, three yards of cloth in each at six cents. They pay thirty cents a dozen for tucking, twenty-five cents a dozen for ruffling, and thirty cents for seaming,—eighty-five cents a dozen for the entire skirt; and the cloth makes it, at eighteen cents apiece, $3.01 for the dozen. Those skirts retail at sixty cents apiece, and wholesale at fifty cents. There’s profit on them all, no matter what they say, for I’ve figured every penny over and over, down to the tape and thread. But they swear to you they are ruined by competition, and so the wages go down and down and down. Leave the city? I don’t know how to live anywhere else. I’ve never learned. It’s something to be sure of your work, even if it is starvation wages. But there’s distress all around me. I don’t see what it means. There’s a girl in the room next to me, with an invalid mother. She does flannel shirts, but before she got them she nearly starved on underwear. Now she earns a dollar a day, but she works fourteen hours for it, seven cents an hour. That’s nice pay in a Christian land. Christian! Bah! I used to believe there was Christianity, but I’ve given it up, like many another. There’s just one religion left, and that is the worship of money. The Golden Calf is God, and every man sells his soul for a chance to bow to it. I don’t know but what I would myself. So far I’ve kept decent; I came of decent folks; but it’s no fault of many a man that I’ve worked for that I can say so still. I’ve had to leave three places because they wouldn’t let me alone, and I stay where I am now because they’re quiet, respectable people, and no outrageousness. But if you know what it all means I wish you’d tell me, for I’m dazed, and I can’t make out the reason of anything any more.”