Katia spent $2.50 a week for breakfast and dinner and for her share of a room with a congenial friend, another Russian girl, in Harlem. The room was close and opened on an air-shaft, but was quiet and rather pleasant. She paid from $1.25 to $1.50 for luncheons, and, out of the odd hundred dollars left from her income, had contrived, by doing her own washing and making her own waists, to buy all her clothing, and to spend $5 for books and magazines, $7 for grand opera, which she deeply loved, and $30 for an outing. On account of her cleverness Katia was less at the mercy of unjust persons than some of the less skilful and younger girls.
Among these, Molly Davousta, another young machine operative, was struggling to make payments to an extortionate ticket seller, who had swindled her in the purchase of a steamboat ticket.
When Molly was thirteen, her mother and father, who had five younger children, had sent her abroad out of Russia, with the remarkable intention of having her prepare and provide a home for all of them in some other country.
Like Dick Whittington, the little girl went to London, though to seek, not only her own fortune, but that of seven other people. After she had been in London for four years, her father died. She and her next younger sister, Bertha, working in Russia, became the sole support of the family; and now, learning that wages were better in America, Molly, like Whittington, turned again and came to New York.
Here she found work on men's coats, at a wage fluctuating from $5 to $9 a week. She lived in part of a tenement room for a rent of $3 a month. For supper and Saturday meals she paid $1.50 a week. Other food she bought from groceries and push carts, at a cost of about $2 a week. As she did her own washing, and walked to work, she had no other fixed expenses, except for shoes. Once in every two months these wore to pieces and she was forced to buy new ones; and, till she had saved enough to pay for them, she went without her push cart luncheon and breakfast.
In this way she lived in New York for a year, during which time she managed to send $90 home, for the others.
Her sister Bertha, next younger than herself, had then come to New York, and obtained work at sewing for a little less than $6 a week. Between them, in the following six months, the two girls managed to buy a passage ticket from Russia to New York for $42, and to send home $30. This, with the passage ticket and two other tickets, which they purchased on the instalment plan from a dealer, at a profit to him of $20, brought all the rest of the family into New York harbor—the girls' mother, their three younger sisters of fifteen, fourteen, and eight, and a little brother of seven.
Five months afterward Molly and Bertha were still making payments for these extortionate tickets.
In New York, the sister of fifteen found employment in running ribbons into corset covers, earning from $1 to $1.50 a week. The fourteen-year-old girl was learning operating on waists. The family of seven lived in two rooms, paying for them $13.50 a month; their food cost $9 or $10 a week; shoes came to at least $1 a week; the girls made most of their own clothing, and for this purpose they were paying $1 a month for a sewing-machine; and they gave $1 a month for the little brother's Hebrew schooling.
Molly was seen in the course of a coat makers' strike. She wept because the family's rent was due and she had no means of paying it. She said she suffered from headache and from backache. Every month she lost a day's work through illness.