The investigations of the bureau of 1869 covered the thirty-five industries in which the working-women of Massachusetts were then engaged. Published in 1870, the report of the bureau corroborated the accounts given by the press of that year concerning the low wages, long hours of work, and miserable state of living that was the lot of the wage-earning women in the manufacturing towns of Massachusetts. General Oliver himself assisted in the personal investigation carried on in Boston. Accompanied by the Chief of Police, he visited the homes of “poor-paid laborers,”—women and men,—and found that the homes of the laborers are a pretty accurate index of the social, industrial, sanitary, educational, and moral standard of the laborers themselves. The result of his work was a recommendation for further and more thorough research. “Such investigations,” he said, “will reveal a state of things at which the people of Massachusetts will gaze with amazement, disgust, and anger, and demand a bettering of the wrong.”
Investigations by blanks and by summons to witnesses was less successful than the personal interview. The mass of the people were ignorant of what the bureau sought to accomplish by their questions; hence not more than twenty per cent. of the employers and thirty-three per cent. of the employed addressed returned replies. A dread on the part of manufacturers and shopkeepers, lest “out of their own mouths they should be condemned,” prevented them from answering, and those under them were restrained to silence through fear of losing employment. In spite of the risk, courageous women replied to the blanks and gave personal testimony sufficient to enable the commission to form a partial estimate of the social and economic conditions of the whole. The statistics presented by the bureau were said to have reached “the very verge of human society.” Said Mrs. Atkinson, speaking of the reports on the working-women, “The stern fact, the thrilling incident, the woeful spectacle, the harrowing sight of squalor and wretchedness are marshaled before our eyes in a great and terrible array.” The subjects investigated were: Housework, Hotel and Saloon work, Home work, Store work. Under the Home work was classified sale work; under Store work, clerks, accountants, saleswomen, and cash girls. All that could be found out concerning women in these employments was printed and presented by General Oliver to the Legislature and to the public, without any of the softening touches common to later reports.
The next extended investigation into the occupations and history of wage-earning women was made in 1884, at the instigation of Mr. Carroll D. Wright, who, in 1874, had superseded General Oliver as chief of the Massachusetts Bureau. The research undertaken by Mr. Wright had for its object the ascertainment of the “moral, sanitary, physical, and economical” condition of all wage-earning women in Boston, except those employed in domestic service. This was a larger field than that covered in 1869. Woman’s occupations had multiplied in the earlier year five-fold over what they were in 1840, when, to Harriet Martineau’s surprise, seven vocations, outside of housework, were all into which the women of the United States had entered. In 1884 they were more than ten times seven. Methods of working had also become more difficult to classify. One by one domestic industries were relegated from the home to the factory. And in most of these, what had been done by one person had become differentiated into numerous parts, requiring the co-operation of many workers. Thus, in the occupation of making men’s and women’s clothing, there were classified in 1884 as many as 103 subdivisions. Altogether, in the seventy distinct industries catalogued, there were 354 subdivisions of industries, and each one of these parts employed a different set of workers. It was important that a number of representative women should be interviewed in each of these departments; for, even where each branch formed part of a distinct whole, each worker in those branches had interests at variance with the others.
The force of women engaged in the industries of Boston had also seemingly almost doubled in the five years from 1880 to 1885. Exclusive of domestic service, the number of women in all other industries was estimated in the United States census of 1880 at 20,000; in the Massachusetts Census Report for 1885 at 39,647. With this apparent doubling of the population, the amount distributed in wages had not doubled, and so all that had been bad in the conditions of wage-earning women in previous years was heightened because there was nothing to relieve it. On account of all this, the appearance of the report of 1884 was anxiously looked for by large numbers of persons who had become familiar with the line of work of the bureaus. Great, therefore, was the public surprise at finding the whole report so biased in favor of the law-making, shop-keeping, manufacturing class as to prove valueless as an investigation into the condition of women dependent on wages for their living. The statistical information it contained, although arranged in the formidable manner common to the expert statistician, needed no careful scrutiny of its figures to establish the truth of Disraeli’s proposition that “nothing is so unreliable as facts, unless it is figures.”
However, the work done by the Boston Bureau, although misleading in itself, had the good effect of stimulating similar research in other places. In the following year, 1885, the first part of the Third New York Report was devoted to an investigation of the condition of the working-women of New York City. It was estimated that in that year over two hundred thousand women were employed in the various trades of that city, exclusive of those in Brooklyn. The number of industries, exclusive of domestic service, and without counting subdivisions, was ninety. Scarcely any European city offered so wide and diversified a field for inquiry as this; and yet the commissioner, Mr. Charles F. Peck, claimed that, through lack of time, in place of any close and searching inquiry “into special conditions of the effects of these employments on the physical development of women and its relation to the social, commercial, and industrial prosperity of the State,” he was obliged to content himself “with a general survey, instead of that minute and detailed examination which the subject would justify.”
Mr. Peck discovered, as his predecessors in Massachusetts had done, that at all times the questions involved in the conditions of working-women resolved themselves into those of “wages, hours, health, and morals.” With regard to the first, he found that the wages of women, as a rule, were, in 1885 as in 1869, less than one-half that obtained by men,—the remuneration being widely different even where the work performed was the same. In those professions or trades in which women were organized, and for equal work received equal pay with men,—as printers, cigar-makers, and hatters,—the men themselves received very low pay. In the tenement-house factories, the women engaged in cigar-making numbered four thousand. These were employed in the branches paying the lowest wages, as stripping and binding. For these, the pay seldom averaged $5 per week, and then was not steady the year round. The manufacturers gave as reason for hiring so many women, “That they could get them for fifty per cent. less than men.” Capmakers earned from $3 to $4.50 per week; compositors all the way from $8 to $16 per week. One of the new branches of work into which women had entered was that of polishing marble. The manager of the Niagara Marble Works testified that they employed from twenty-five to thirty women, whose wages averaged from $4.50 to $8 per week, men getting for the same kind of work from $1.50 to $3 per day. When asked if “they could get men to work for the same wages as women?” the reply was, “Hardly, unless they were boys, and then they would not be so skillful.”
But it was in the class of work that has always been called “woman’s work” that the bureaus found the most beggarly wages paid. A manufacturer of pants, vests, shirts, and overalls testified that he gave from fifteen to thirty-five cents apiece for making vests; seventy-five cents to $1.50 per dozen for shirts, and from twelve and a half cents to twenty-five cents a pair for pants. Boy’s gingham waists, with trimming on neck and sleeves, were paid for at the rate of two and a half cents each. By working steadily at the machine from six o’clock in the morning until one at night, the seamstress could make twenty-five cents a day at this “shop work.” The inmates of several charitable institutions in the city were found by the commissioner crocheting ladies’ shawls for twenty-five cents apiece. An expert, he was told, could finish one in two days. This was all that the several Blanks & Co. would pay, because competition for this kind of work was so great they were able to get the work done for almost any price.[[181]] On woman’s wear, the wages had been so reduced that it was alleged that a full day’s work on a cloak brought from fifty to sixty cents. The visits of the commissioner to some of the attic tenement-house rookeries, where this work was carried on under the direction of “sweaters,” disclosed numbers of cloak-makers working sixteen hours a day for fifty cents. In those dens he saw stacks of cloaks piled on the floors ready to be sewn together by women scantily clad, with hair unkempt, and whose pale, abject countenances formed such pictures of physical suffering and want as he trusted “he might never again be compelled to look upon.” The style and quality of the cloaks upon which these women toiled were of the latest and best. They were lined with quilted silk or satin and trimmed with sealskin or other expensive material, and found ready sale in the largest retail stores in the city at from thirty-five to seventy-five dollars each.
To give some idea of how the cloak-makers lived on this pittance the bureau gave a realistic engraving, done from a drawing taken on the spot, in which it was endeavored to reproduce the outlines of one room (as a sample exhibit of the rest) where six women sat at work under the directions of sweaters. In size the room might possibly have measured twelve by fourteen feet, and perhaps nine feet high. The atmosphere was next to suffocating and dense with impurities. On one end of a table, at which four of the women sat, was a dinner-pail partially filled with soup (that is what they called it) and a loaf of well-seasoned bread. These two courses, served with one spoon and one knife, satiated the thirst and hunger of four working-women. In an adjoining side room, without means for ventilation or light, the deadly sewer gas rose in clouds from a sink. On the floor lay a mattress which partook in appearance of the general filth found throughout the building. On this mattress the cloak-makers, tired out by the long day’s work and faint for want of food, threw themselves down and awaited the coming day’s awful toil for bread. This, it was claimed, was neither a fanciful nor exceptional picture; that a degree of want, misery, and degradation existed among the working-women living in tenement houses next to impossible to describe. “Certainly,” said the commissioner, “no words of mine can convey to the public any adequate conception of the truly awful condition of thousands of these suffering people. Formerly,” he wrote, “Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ gave sentimental celebrity to the wrongs of the sewing-women, but it is not the shirt (alone) now, but the woman’s cloak and the man’s coat or pants that draw tears and groans from the overdone sewing-woman.”
Testimony elicited as to the workers in some of the trades, particularly tobacco, was even more revolting than that concerning the sewing-woman. In the report, wood-cuts were given of rooms such as a large proportion of cigar-makers worked, lived, ate, and slept in. “These people,” it was said, “worked till twelve P. M. or one o’clock A. M., then slept by the machine a few hours, and commenced work again.” The description of women sitting “surrounded by filth, with children waddling in it, whose hands, faces, and bodies were covered with sores,” were sickening. Cankerous sores were “even on the lips of the workers, they all the time handling the tobacco that was made into cigars.” In the scale of sanitary conditions of homes and workrooms, the cigar-makers were among the lowest. Of bunch-makers and rollers, who replied to the questions of the sanitary condition of their homes, but two out of 118 answered, “good.” All of the rest wrote, “bad,” “very bad,” the “worst you ever saw,” “miserable,” and “poor.” As to their workrooms, out of one hundred and thirty, one hundred and three were without means for free circulation of air. One only possessed no offensive odors. The unhealthfulness of the workrooms of the cigar-makers, the coat-makers, the tailoresses, and the cloak-makers was about the same. Among this latter class of seamstresses 38 out of 41 answered that their surroundings were very offensive through being “near offensive stables.” The order of the day was, “general filth, water-closets, bad sewerage, dirty neighborhoods, overcrowding, and poor ventilation.” Similar complaints came from compositors in printing-offices, women in type-foundries, kid-glove sewers, carpet-factory operators, and silk weavers.
While in many of the large factories the sanitary conditions were good and proper, ventilation being secured,—when it did not interfere with the work carried on,—there were other features that if less injurious to health were quite as objectionable to the wage-worker. In the carpet and silk factories, women were obliged to stand all day, as, though seats were provided in many instances, fines were exacted from those using them. It was the same with washing facilities; women employed in silk establishments in weaving light-colored or white silks were fined as high as fifty cents for washing their hands, and fines were also imposed if spots got on the goods. Women testified that they were fined “if discovered reading a letter, or a paper, or spoke to one another.” The proprietor of one of these factories stated that the fines he collected in this way he gave away in “charity,” and, “That five dollars a week was enough for a girl to live on.” In some carpet factories the system of fines was even more excessive. Women were docked as much as five dollars if any accident happened to the machinery, which they were compelled to clean while it was in motion. In one mill, they were “not allowed to talk to one another during working hours or at noon, under penalty of being docked or discharged.” The fine in some places for being five minutes late was twenty-five cents, while a half-hour over-time was exacted. How disproportionate this punishment was is evident; those women who were fined at the rate of thirty dollars per day, were being paid at the rate of eight cents an hour. When women were not fined for being five minutes behind time, they were “locked out” for two hours. These were the hands employed on piece work, and the loss of two hours made, as it was intended, a large hole in the day’s earnings. In most cases it was claimed that the amount of fines exacted was optional with the foreman or superintendent, and that frequently they were so excessive as to affect the whole pay of employees for weeks ahead.