For, although the labor at the machines in the laundry wash-rooms is done by men, and all work in laundries consists largely of machine tending, still women's part in the industry can be performed only by unusually strong women.[[33]]

In the winter of 1907-1908 the National Consumers' League had received from different parts of New York a series of letters filled with various complaints against specified laundries in this city—complaints stating that hours were long and irregular, wages unfair, the laundries dirty, and the girls seldom allowed to sit down, and containing urgent pleas to the women of the Consumers' League to help the women laundry workers.

After consulting some of the laundry women, the League determined to secure through a special inquiry a well-ascertained statement of conditions as a basis for State factory legislation for uniform improvements. A few months before, the constitutionality of the present New York legislation, as well as of almost all of the State legislation concerning the hours of work of adult women in this country, had been virtually determined by the decision of the Federal Supreme Court in regard to the ten-hour law for women laundry workers in Oregon. The opinion of the National Supreme Court, which practically confirmed the passed New York laundry laws and made future laws for fair regulation for the women workers seem practicable, will be given after the account of women's work in laundries in New York.

Miss Carola Woerishofer conducted the inquiry, which was confined to steam laundries, as hand laundries were more favorably described by many reliable authorities. Among these, the large laundries were commercial laundries, such as we all patronize, and hotel and hospital laundries. The features chiefly observed in all these establishments were sanitation, the danger of injury, and wages and hours of labor. For the account of the hospital and hotel laundries the Consumers' League of the city of New York obtained the services of Miss Elizabeth Howard Westwood of Smith College and Miss Mary Alden Hopkins of Wellesley College. As a means of investigating commercial laundries, Miss Woerishofer, answering advertisements as they came, worked in laundries in trade employed in nearly every branch of the industry in which women are engaged throughout the borough of Manhattan. Her report follows.

I

"Naturally, the first question which faced me was that of finding a job. For this I turned to the laundry want 'ads' in the newspapers. To my surprise, as my investigation was made in the summer, which is, curiously enough, by far the slackest season in New York commercial laundries, I was never without work for more than a day at a time, although I changed continually, for the sake of experience, averaging about a week in a place.

"The first establishment to which I went was known as a model laundry. It was large and well ventilated and had a dry floor. These sanitary conditions may be said to be fairly typical. In only one laundry did I find a girl who was compelled to stand in a wet place, though water overflowed sometimes into the girls' quarters from the wash-rooms, where the men worked. In some of these wash-rooms the water is at times ankle-deep, a condition due only to bad drainage, as other wash-rooms are absolutely dry. Whatever the condition of the work-rooms, the women's dressing-rooms frequently had insanitary plumbing, and were verminous and unhealthful. In one laundry the water supply was contaminated, smelling and tasting offensively when it came from the faucet, and worse after it had passed through the cooler. The women here at first kept bottles of soda-water. Some old women had beer. But on a series of hot days, with hours from half past seven to twelve, and from one till any time up to ten at night, 10 cents' worth of beer or soda-water a day did not go far to alleviate thirst, and soon drank a big hole in a wage of $5 a week. A complaint was sent to the Board of Health. After nearly three weeks, the Board of Health replied that the complaint must be sent to the Water Department. From the Water Department no reply could possibly come for several weeks more. And in the meantime, all the women workers in the laundry, impelled by intolerable thirst, drank the contaminated water.

"The work-room where I was employed had, on the whole, plenty of windows. These were left open. But when a room is large and full of machinery, artificial light is needed all day, and the outside air does not come in very far to drive away the heat and the dampness. On going out at noon from a laundry where I had dipped shirts in hot starch all the morning at a breakneck pace, I was struck by the coolness of the day. That night I discovered that the thermometer had been registering 96° in the shade. A few fans should be put in each laundry. They could be run by the power that runs the machines.

"In the 'model laundry,' I worked at first at a mangle, running spreads and sheets and towels between two revolving cylinders. Here I found there was danger of slipping my fingers too far under the cylinders in the process of feeding. The mangle had a guard, to be sure,—a flexible metal bar about three-quarters of an inch above the feeding-apron in front of the cylinder. But I learned that this acted as a warning rather than a protection. 'Once you get your fingers in, you never get them out,' Jenny, the Italian girl beside me, said repeatedly. The Italian girls Anglicized their names, and Jenny had probably been Giovanna at home.

"At the collar machine, at which I was stationed after lunch, there was an adequate guard where the collars were slipped in. Where they came out, however, they had to be pushed in rapid succession under the farther side of a burning hot cylinder with no guard at all. To avoid touching the cylinder with my arm in this process, I was obliged either to raise it unnaturally high, or to stand on tiptoe. 'You didn't get burned to-day or yesterday,' said Jenny, 'but you sure will sometime. Everybody does on that machine.'