The house on Henry Street

by Lillian D. Wald

Though its immediate object was accomplished, this union also proved to be an ephemeral organization. For years I held the funds, amounting to sixteen dollars, because the members had scattered and we could never assemble a quorum to dispose of the money.

When, in 1903, I was asked to participate in the formation of the National Women’s Trades Union League, I recognized the importance of the movement in enlisting sympathy and support for organizations among working women. To my regret I cannot claim to have rendered services of any value in the development of the League. It was inevitable that its purpose, as epitomized in its motto—“The Eight-hour Day; A Living Wage; To Guard the Home”—should draw to it effective participants and develop strong leaders among working women themselves. Those who are familiar with factory and shop conditions are convinced that through organization and not through the appeal to pity can permanent reforms be assured. It is undoubtedly true that the enforcement of existing laws is in large measure dependent upon watchful trades unions. The women’s trades union leagues, national and state, are not only valuable because of support given to the workers, but because they make it possible for women other than wage-earners to identify themselves with working people, and thus give practical expression to their belief that with them and through them the realization of the ideals of democracy can be advanced.

The imagination of New Yorkers has been fired from time to time by young working women who have had no little influence in helping to rouse public interest in labor conditions. My associates and I, in the early years of the settlement, owed much to a mother and daughter of singularly lofty mind and character, both working women, who for a time joined the settlement family. They had been affiliated with labor organizations almost all their lives. The ardor of the daughter continually prodded us to action, and the clear-minded, intellectual mother helped us to a completer realization of the deep-lying causes that had inspired Mazzini and other great leaders, whose works we were re-reading.

More recently a young capmaker has stimulated recognition of the public’s responsibility for the well-being of the young worker. Despite her long hours, she found time to organize a union in her trade, not in a spurt of enthusiasm, but as a result of a sober realization that women workers must stand together for themselves and for those who come after them.

The inquiry that followed the disastrous fire in the factory of the Triangle Waist Company in March, 1911, when one hundred and forty-three girls were burned, or leaped from windows to their death, disclosed the fact that the owners of this factory, like many others, kept the doors of the lofts locked. Hundreds of girls, many stories above the streets, were thus cut off from access to stairs or fire-escapes because of the fear of small thefts of material. The girls in this factory had tried, a short time before the fire, to organize a union to protest against bad shop conditions and petty tyrannies.

After the tragedy, at a meeting in the Metropolitan Opera House called together by horrified men and women of the city, this young capmaker stood at the edge of the great opera-house stage and in a voice hardly raised, though it reached every person in that vast audience, arraigned society for regarding human life so cheaply. No one could have been insensitive to her cry for justice, her anguish over the youth so ruthlessly destroyed; and there must have been many in that audience for whom ever after the little, brown-clad figure with the tragic voice symbolized the factory girl in the lofts high above the streets of an indifferent metropolis.

Before the fire the “shirt-waist strike” had brought out a wave of popular sympathy. This was due in part to the youth of a majority of the workers, to a realization of the heroic sacrifices some of them were making (an inkling of which got to the public), and in part also to disapproval of the methods used to break the strike. Fashionable women’s clubs held meetings to hear the story from the lips of girl strikers themselves, and women gave voice to their disapproval of judges who sentenced the young strikers to prison, where they were associated—often sharing the same cells—with criminals and prostitutes. Little wonder that women who had never known the bitterness of poverty or oppression found satisfaction in picketing side by side with the working girls who were paying the great cost of the strike. Many, among them settlement residents, readily went bail or paid fines for the girls who were arrested.

Cruel and dramatic exploitation of workers is in the main a thing of the past, but the more subtle injuries of modern industry, due to overstrain, speeding-up, and a minimum of leisure, have only recently attracted attention. It is barely three years (1912) since the New York Factory Law was amended to prohibit the employment of girls over sixteen for more than ten hours in one day or fifty-four hours a week. The legislation reflected the new compunction of the community concerning these workers, though unlimited hours are still permitted in stores during the Christmas season.