In some of the reminiscences related by working women I was surprised, not so much by the fact that memory could integrate the individual experience into a sense of relation with the more impersonal aspects of life, as that the larger meaning had been obtained when the fructifying memory had had nothing to feed upon but the harshest and most monotonous of industrial experiences.
I held a conversation with one such woman when she came to confess that her long struggle was over and that she and her sister had at last turned their faces to the poorhouse. She clearly revealed not only that she had caught a glimpse of the great social forces of her day, but that she had had the ability to modify her daily living by what she had perceived.
Perhaps, under the shadow of a tragic surrender, she had obtained a new sense of values, or at least had made up her mind that it was not worth while any longer to conceal her genuine experiences, for she talked more fully of her hard life than I had ever heard her before in the many years I had known her. She related in illuminating detail an incident in her long effort of earning, by ill-paid and unskilled labor, the money with which to support her decrepit mother and her imbecile sister. For more than fifty years she had never for a moment considered the possibility of sending either of them to a public institution, although it had become almost impossible to maintain such a household after the mother, who lived to be ninety-four years old, had become utterly distraught.
She was still sharing her scanty livelihood with the feeble-minded sister, although she herself was unable to do anything but wash vegetables and peel potatoes in a small restaurant of her neighborhood. The cold water necessary to these processes made her hands, already crippled with rheumatism, so bad that on some days she could not hold anything smaller than a turnip, although the other people in the kitchen surreptitiously helped her all they could and the cooks gave her broken food to carry home to the ever hungry sister.
She told of her monotonous years in a box factory, where she had always worked with the settled enmity of the other employes. They regarded her as a pace setter, and she, obliged to work fast and furiously in order to keep three people, and full of concern for her old mother’s many unfulfilled needs, had never understood what the girls meant when they talked about standing by each other.
She did not change in her attitude even when she found the prices of piece work went down lower and lower, so that at last she was obliged to work overtime late into the night in order to earn the small amount she had previously earned by day. She was seventy years old when the legality of the Illinois Ten Hour Law was contested, and her employer wanted her to testify in court that she was opposed to the law because she could not have supported her old mother all those years unless she had been allowed to work nights. She found herself at last dimly conscious of what it was that her long time enemies, the union girls, had been trying to do, and a subconscious loyalty to her own kind made it impossible for her to bear testimony against them. She did not analyze her motives but told me that, fearing she might yield to her employer’s request, in sheer panic she had abruptly left his factory and moved her helpless household to another part of the city on the very day she was expected to appear in court. In her haste she left four days unpaid wages behind her, and moving the family took all the money she had painstakingly saved for the coming winter’s coal. She had unknowingly moved into a neighborhood of cheap restaurants, and from that time on she worked in any of them which would employ her until now at last she was too feeble to be of much use to anybody.
Although she had never joined the Union which finally became so flourishing in the box factory she had left, she was conscious that in a moment of great temptation she had refrained from seeking her own advantage at the expense of others. As she bunglingly tried to express her motives, she said: “The Irish—you know I was ten years old when we came over—often feel like that; it isn’t exactly that you are sorry after you have done a thing, nor so much that you don’t do it because you know you will be sorry afterwards, nor that anything in particular will happen to you if you do it, but that you haven’t the heart for it, that it goes against your nature.”
When I expressed my admiration for her prompt action she replied: “I have never told this before except to one person, to a woman who was organizing for the garment workers and who came to my house one night about nine o’clock, just as I was having my supper. I had it late in those days because I used to scrub the restaurant floor after everybody left. My sister was asleep back of the stove, I looked sharp not to wake her up and I don’t believe the Union woman ever knew that she wasn’t just like other people. The organizer was looking for some of the women living in our block who had been taking work from the shops ever since the strike was on. She was clean tired out, and when I offered her a cup of tea she said as quick as a flash, ‘You are not a scab, are you?’ I just held up my poor old hands before her face, swollen red from scrubbing and full of chilblains, and I told her that I couldn’t sew a stitch if my life depended on it.
“When I offered her the second cup of tea—a real educated-looking woman she was, and she must have been used to better tea than mine boiled out of the old tea leaves the restaurant cook always let me bring home—I said to her, ‘My hands aren’t the only reason I’m not scabbing. I see too much of the miserable wages these women around here get for their sweatshop work, and I’ve done enough harm already with my pace setting, and my head so full of my poor old mother that I never thought of anybody else.’ She smiled at me and nodded her head over my old cracked cup. ‘You are a Union woman all right,’ she said. ‘You have the true spirit whether you carry a card or not. I am mighty glad to have met you after all the scabs I have talked to this day.’”
The old woman repeated the words as one who solemnly recalls the great phrase which raised him into a knightly order, revealing a secret pride in her unavowed fellowship with Trades Unions, for she had vaguely known at the time of the Ten Hour trial that powerful federations of them had paid for the lawyers and had gathered the witnesses. Some dim memory of Irish ancestors, always found on the side of the weak in the unending struggle with the oppressions of the strong, may have determined her action. She may have been dominated by a subconscious suggestion “from the dust that sleeps,” a suggestion so simple, so insistent and monotonous that it had victoriously survived its original sphere of conduct.