And here let me tell you some secrets of this kind of business, in which hundreds of women starve and hundreds more go down to a life of infamy.
Cap-making (the great business of Water Street of New York) gives employment to thousands of unfortunates. For embroidering caps, the wholesale dealer pays seven cents each; and for making up, three cents. To make a dozen a day, one must work for sixteen hours.
The embroidering is done in this wise: I received the cut cloth from the wholesale dealer; drew the pattern upon each cap; gave them with three cents’ worth of silk to the embroiderer, who received three cents for her work; then pressed and returned them; thus making one cent on each for myself.
By working steadily for sixteen hours, a girl could embroider fifteen in a day. I gave out about six dozen daily, earning like the rest fifty cents a day; unless I chose to do the stamping and pressing at night and to embroider a dozen during the day, in which case I earned a dollar. One can live in this way for a little while until health fails or the merchant says that the work has come to an end.
You will think this terrible again. Oh, no! This is not terrible. The good men provide another way.
They tell every woman of a prepossessing appearance that it is wrong in her to work so hard, that many a man would be glad to care for her, and that many women live quite comfortably with the help of a “friend.” They say, further, that it is lonely to live without ever going to church, to the concert and theater, and that if these women would only permit the speakers to visit them and to attend them to any of these places, they would soon find that they would no longer be obliged to work so hard.
This is the polished talk of gentlemen who enjoy the reputation of piety and respectability and who think it a bad speculation to pay women liberally for their work. So it would be, in truth, for these poor creatures would not be so willing to abandon themselves to a disreputable life if they could procure bread in any other way.
During the summer of 1854, I took work on commission from men of this sort. While in Berlin, I had learned from the prostitutes in the hospital in what manner educated women often became what they then were.
The average story was always the same. Love, even the purest, made them weak; their lover deceived and deserted them; their family cast them off by way of punishment. In their disgrace, they went to bury themselves in large cities, where the work that they could find scarcely gave them their daily bread. Their employers, attracted by their personal appearance and the refinements of their speech and manners, offered them assistance in another way, in which they could earn money without work. In despair, they accepted the proposals and sank gradually step by step to the depths of degradation, as depicted by Hogarth in the Harlot’s Progress.
In New York, I was thrown continually among men who were of the stamp that I described before, and I can say, even from my own experience, that no man is ever more polite, more friendly or more kind than one who has impure wishes in his heart. It is really so dangerous for a woman of refined nature to go to such stores that I never suffered my sister to visit them; not because I feared that she would listen to these men, but because I could not endure the thought that so innocent and beautiful a girl should come in contact with them or even breathe the same atmosphere.