Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Young women who expect to go into factory and store employment should be taught to study the construction of buildings used for such purposes and they should refuse to risk their lives in fire traps or places where proper precautions are not observed.

Scores of young girls lost their lives in a factory fire at Binghamton, N. Y., recently. It was the old story of a building which was inevitably a fire trap. They claim they had fire drills in this place, but the girls were burned to death just the same.

Employers are often willing to expose their employees to fire risks to save a few dollars in rent. Ignorant girls do not know the danger and would be afraid to protest if they did for fear of losing employment.

This is one of the reforms which can be brought about by women’s clubs. They can insist that factories are placed in fireproof buildings. They, and they alone, can create the public sentiment which will prevent the awful sacrifice of life which now goes on because nobody takes the trouble to secure real fire prevention.

“Will You Be a Fire Warden and Saver of Life” is the heading of a fire prevention placard which the Texas Federation of Club Women is sending throughout the State. The card indicates measures for fire prevention in the home which every housewife can readily observe.

Texas club women are lowering insurance rates by their active fire prevention work and what is far more important—saving many lives.

The women’s clubs are being asked in New York to start a campaign of education to keep things clean, after the accumulations of rubbish have been carted away. The Women’s National Fire Prevention Association is distributing leaflets, printed in several languages, urging housewives to dispose of waste paper and other inflammable refuse daily. Strict cleanliness is one of the best of fire preventives.

In Baltimore, the fire chief testified publicly to the fact that the clean-up crusade carried on by the women had been his greatest aid in fire prevention work. It is an obvious fact that proper disposal of rubbish eliminates fuel for the flames.

One of the most vigorous anti-fire campaigns ever carried on by women was that waged by the working women of Newark, New Jersey, just after a terrible factory holocaust in that city of numberless factories. The women’s trade unions of Newark actually brought about changed conditions in the factories through their splendid organization and fighting spirit. In New York, soon after the Newark experience, about 150 girls were burned in the Triangle Factory fire and women again led the agitation against the evils that exist in shops and factories all over New York. The Women’s Trade Union League, many of whose members were burned at this time, started the campaign. A Fire Complaint Committee was formed and through it circulars were distributed broadcast among the workers requesting them to observe conditions where they worked and report certain definite evils to it. Every mail for weeks brought a vast pile of complaints, intelligent and eager, which were turned over by the Committee to those in authority, an effort being made to follow-up results.

A Citizens’ Committee was formed at the instigation of the women of the Trade Union League which maintained enthusiasm through a typical nine days of horror, and then largely subsided, although some influence is undoubtedly seen in the present work of the Fire Prevention Bureau recently organized in New York. More definite results as far as factories are concerned seem to have been obtained by the Cloak and Suit Makers’ Unions through their Board of Sanitary Control. Many of the women who were so aroused by the Triangle fire feel that better results would now be seen if they had waged all the public agitation through the workers themselves whose own interest it is to maintain fire safeguards in their places of toil.