Salome Shepard, reformer

by Helen M. Winslow

XV.

One evening in January, Salome and Marion went over early to Newbern Shepard Hall. Marion’s duties called her there every evening, and she was seldom unaccompanied by her friend.

The success of Salome’s schemes for the interest of the working-girls seemed already assured. Although the Hall had been open but little more than two months, classes in dressmaking and millinery and in domestic science were already established, and were well attended. Some girls there were, it is true, who felt that, after working all day, they were entitled to an idle evening, or to the right of amusing themselves after their own fashion. But plenty of young women had been found to open the classes, and the number was steadily increasing. No strong measures had been taken to induce these girls to join. Marion had talked with some of them individually, at first, and found a few who, half skeptically, had consented to try the dressmaking class, as an experiment. Then the announcement was made that a class would be opened on a certain night, and twenty-six girls were present. Instruction in sewing, cutting and fitting was given free to any woman connected with the Shawsheen Mills. As the girls had been paying exorbitant prices for having cheap material poorly made up, and as Salome had provided instructors from the best dressmaking establishment Shepardtown afforded, the girls were not slow to see the benefit that would come to them.

The young wives of operatives, too, women with houses and children to care for, then began to avail themselves of the privileges which the class afforded. So that, on this January evening, there were over a hundred and fifty women in the classes, and another room had been opened to them on the ground floor.

It was the same with other classes. At first, the young women had joined with the older ones in “pooh-poohing” the cooking and housekeeping lectures and demonstrations. The idea that they and their mothers did not know how to cook, and that Salome, who knew absolutely nothing of such matters, essayed to teach them, was a most distasteful one. But when they found that a celebrated teacher was to come out twice a week from Boston, and give demonstrations in the model class-rooms below, and that a graduate of the Boston Cooking School had been engaged to take charge of the lessons every evening, they, the young married women from the cottages, especially, dropped in from curiosity; and although they had come to scoff, they remained to cook. In short, they had become deeply interested in the new ways of housekeeping, and were surprised and delighted to find a way of making their few dollars go farther and procure a better and more healthful living. Consequently, these classes, too, were full, although the older matrons did not yet give up their prejudices.

Among the girls who had not yet joined the classes, there were many who sat quietly in their own rooms or in the large reading-rooms, and enjoyed the current magazines and papers, or gossiped quietly and harmlessly about the fashions and each other—not altogether unlike women of higher pretensions. It was astonishing, even to Salome, who had, from the first, believed in her girls, how few of them went out on the streets at night.

“It is not astonishing to me,” said Marion, that January evening, in reply to a remark from her friend to this effect. “The girls are tired at night and are only too glad to have a pleasant, light and steam-heated place to stay in. Their rooms at the old boardinghouses were cold, barren and dismal. In winter weather they could not sit in them, and the so-called parlor was not much better. When I was at Mme. Blanc’s one of her servant girls went wrong. I shall never forget something she said. When Madame heard of it, she sent for the girl and asked her, bitterly, what had made her bring such a scandalous thing upon a select house like hers. I was in her room at the time. The poor girl looked up at Mme. Blanc and said, ‘O, ma’am, you’re awful particular about where your young ladies spend their evenings,—girls that you’re paid for looking after. But us servant girls—how did you look after us? You didn’t allow us a light in our own rooms, or to speak above a whisper in the kitchen, or seem to think we was human beings at all. What else could we do, but go out on the street when we wanted a bit of freedom? And once, on the street, ma’am, girls like us ain’t never safe. If you’d looked out for me, ma’am, and treated me as well as you treat your own dog or cat, it would never have happened.’ Poor Madame was overcome entirely, and the girl left her white with rage. But she looked after her servants more closely afterward, and kept them in at night in warm rooms. I don’t believe our girls want to do wrong,—especially if we make it comfortable for them to do right.”

On the young men’s side, things had gone equally well. There was a class of them who, like their fathers before them, were sturdy, honest and faithful. It was a small class, but upon these John Villard depended to counteract the influence of the lower foreign element that had crept in; and to the pride of these he appealed, both directly and indirectly, in his efforts to establish a better social atmosphere among the operatives.

With a few of these to begin with, he had opened an evening school on the other wing of the Hall; and, as in the case of the women’s classes, it had increased in numbers and interest from the start. The overseers, almost to a man, gladly availed themselves of its opportunities for the education that the true American always feels the need for; and they, with the better class of men from the looms and mules, set the example for others to follow.

No better man for the work could have been chosen than John Villard. He had come up under much the same conditions that governed them. He had begun on the lowest round, and worked up to the position he now occupied, by hard work and the closest application to business. This fact, together with his attitude toward them during the strike, had made him a favorite with nearly every man on the works. They felt that they could place the utmost confidence in Villard; and in the Shawsheen Mills, as everywhere, a rugged sincerity and honesty of purpose carried a weight that even the most unstable felt.