The tyranny of the strong and powerful over the weak and helpless,—which found expression in the exaction of fines from those who were termed variously “white slaves,” “slave girls,” “prisoners of poverty,” etc.,—existed in another form in the long hours of labor demanded by the Legrees of the industrial world from the wage-working women. While in many factories the legal limit of sixty hours per week for minors, and women under twenty-one, was observed, there were grave and numerous exceptions to this rule among tobacco-workers, seamstresses, bakery employees, etc., etc. In the cigar factories, the great majority of bunch-makers and rollers, whether employed at home or in the factory proper, were worked fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and even eighteen hours a day. Operatives on clothing worked from nine to sixteen hours per day. In the collar, cuff, and shirt-making factories in Troy, as well as the laundries in that place, the hours were uniformly ten, and in New York from eight to twelve. Milliners worked nine hours in factories and from fourteen to sixteen at home. Feather-workers in factories nine to ten. Operatives on ladies’ underwear eight to ten in factories; twelve to fourteen hours at home. While this made a good showing for the factories engaged in these industries, it must be remembered that much of the work quoted as done “at home” was only a continuation of factory labor, as work was in many cases taken home from these, either to supplement the day’s earnings, or to oblige (?) employers, who withheld extra compensation for the extra work exacted. In occupations requiring a different kind of skill, or impossible at home, the hours were found to be sometimes less than the legal limit. Those for compositors were from eight to ten. Type-foundry operatives, seven and a half to nine. Stenographers, telegraphers, and typewriters, from five and a half to six, seven, and eight. Saleswomen, again, worked many hours over-time in all except the largest houses, and during the holiday season these largest stores were no longer exceptions. In fancy-goods stores, millinery shops, bakeries, candy stores, etc., etc., no limit was placed through the holidays,—that were in no sense holidays to employees,—except the limit of physical endurance. In return no portion of the extra profit this extra work brought was shared by proprietors with their overtaxed employees.
Economically speaking, the worst of all the evils society perpetrated against the working-women was that of forcing her into long hours of continuous labor; for, whether standing at the looms and in the stores, or sitting at the sewing-machine, specific diseases of the sexual organs were induced, causing marriage to be followed by miscarriage or sickly children. No original statistics were collected by the bureau to show how far the health and morals of women engaged in industries were affected by their employments, and what relation this influence exerted in reference to woman’s position in the State. While this prevented the report from being of full service to the political economist, to the historian its pages were valuable as forming a succession of genre pictures, otherwise unattainable, of the proletarian women, as they lived, labored, and suffered in New York City in 1885.
An epidemic of investigation into women’s condition as wage-workers followed the New York report. Five States—Maine, California, Colorado, Iowa, and Minnesota—prepared separate chapters on the subject of the working-women for their Bureaus of Labor Statistics for 1887–1888. In New Jersey, although no original investigation was made by the State, the bureau reprinted in 1887 a large portion of an excellent report on “Woman’s Work and Wages,” gathered by Mrs. Barry in 1886 by order of the Knights of Labor. The latest, and what should have been the best report, was a national research into the social and economic environments of wage-earning women in twenty-two of the largest and most representative cities in the United States. This investigation, conducted under the auspices of the Central Bureau at Washington, comprehended statistics gained through interviewing and questioning personally 17,427 women engaged in industrial pursuits. Undertaken in 1888, this national report was printed in 1889, under the title of “Working-women in Large Cities.” It formed a volume of 631 pages, mostly statistical tables, framed so as to seem to cover the most important points concerning women as industrial workers.
To two grades of readers these bureau publications were most welcome. First, to the more intelligent among the working-class, “in whose humble cabins,” it was said,[[182]] “complete sets of Bureau Reports could be found preserved in calico covers having as many colors as ‘Joseph’s coat,’ and presenting as much evidence of constant use as the old-time spelling-book in a country school-house that was passed from scholar to scholar until it has made the round of the school.” Second, to the students of sociology, who pored over their pages, hoping to gain clear ideas of what was going on in the working world of men and women. Excellent though they were, these reports were nevertheless disappointing, at least as far as they related to facts concerning woman’s industrial position. The first and greatest disappointment for readers was the fact that the number of wage-earning women interviewed in any one place by the bureau agents was too small to give even an approximate idea of the whole; e. g. the statistical tables of all industries for New York City were founded on the testimony alone of 2984 women, while at that period (1889) the number of wage-earning women in that city and Brooklyn was estimated at 300,000.(?) As this method of taking one per cent. of the population of women as a guide by which to estimate the conditions of all the others prevailed everywhere, conclusions drawn from the presented statistics were, of necessity, vitiated. To a certain extent they had to be accepted with allowance.
With all that this limitation implies, the bureau statistics are, nevertheless, interesting as comprising the best data we have on which to base assumptions of the industrial status of wage-earning women. In regard to wages, the conclusions, though obviously inexact, still show plainly enough that wages were regulated everywhere by the prices of rent and food, and that only so much was paid as would keep life in the worker. In the appended table, taken from the National Report for 1889, it will be seen that in the South, where living is comparatively cheap, wages are lower than in the West, where life’s necessaries come higher. In the East they are a mean between the two.
| AVERAGE WEEKLY EARNINGS, BY CITIES. | |
|---|---|
| Cities. | Average Weekly Earnings. |
| Atlanta | $4.05 |
| Baltimore | 4.18 |
| Boston | 5.64 |
| Brooklyn | 5.76 |
| Buffalo | 4.27 |
| Charleston | 4.22 |
| Chicago | 5.74 |
| Cincinnati | 4.59 |
| Cleveland | 4.63 |
| Indianapolis | 4.67 |
| Louisville. | 4.51 |
| Newark | 5.10 |
| New Orleans | 4.31 |
| New York | 5.85 |
| Philadelphia | 5.34 |
| Providence | 5.51 |
| Richmond | 3.93 |
| St. Louis | 5.19 |
| St. Paul | 6.02 |
| San Francisco | 6.91 |
| San Jose | 6.11 |
| Savannah | 4.99 |
| All Cities | $5.24 |
In the 343 industries named in this report, for 1889, it will be seen that the conditions under which women gained their livelihood had not been bettered, and that, on the contrary, the testimony as published in the other State reports disclosed a state of affairs similar to that which Engels[[183]] described as existing among the same class of laboring women in England in 1844. Nothing worse can be found in any of Engels’ descriptions than the following account (given in the New Jersey Report for 1887–1888) of the tyranny practiced upon the linen thread spinners of Paterson: “In one branch of this industry,” it is said, “women are compelled to stand on a stone floor in water the year round, most of the time barefoot, with a spray of water from a revolving cylinder flying constantly against the breast; and the coldest night in winter, as well as the warmest in summer, these poor creatures must go to their homes with water dripping from their underclothing along their path, because there could not be space or a few moments allowed them wherein to change their clothing.”[[184]] Another account, which calls up the experiences at Leeds and Lancaster in 1844, is taken from the Wisconsin Report for 1888. In the prosperous city of Janesville, in that highly favored State described as a paradise for workers, the report tells of a factory “in which some three hundred women and children are employed, who work eleven and a half to twelve hours per day and night, the night being the time most of the children are employed.” Although eight hours is the legal working day in Wisconsin, and fourteen years the age limit at which children may be employed, “many of the children are under fourteen years of age, and all have to work eleven and a half hours.” The thermometer averages, in the heated season, about 108 degrees ... and loss of health follows women by reason “of the intense heat at night and insufficient sleep in the day-time.”
These by no means exceptional cases show how conditions of work for laboring women were increasing in intensity in the United States. That they were becoming worse in other ways was evidenced in New England manufacturing towns, where employment of women and children as the cheaper wage-taking element was gradually extinguishing the male operative.[[185]] In the manufacturing towns of Fall River, Lawrence, Lowell, etc., the family life was so demoralized that men were obliged to be supported in idleness by mothers, wives, or sisters or children, because no work was to be had for them in the mills. It was said that some of these men, displaced by the light-running machinery that a child’s hand might guide, remained at home and did the housework and minded the children, while the women went forth as the bread-winners; others, less patient, took to loafing, and ended generally in prisons. “This,” as Engels termed it, “insane state of things” affected all unfavorably. Women learned to care so little for themselves that it was said “a girl in Fall River comes out of the mill with bare feet and a shawl thrown over her head, and all she cares for is a loaf of bread and a mug of beer.” Children, going too early into the mills, were corrupted, morally and physically; yet mothers, unable from their own slender wages to support the family, were tempted to swear “false oaths in regard to their children’s ages, so as to get them into the mills and thus make more money.”
This Moloch of cheap labor, which demanded both women and children, did not stop at making mothers commit perjury for the sake of bread; it rifled the eleemosynary institutions of little ones left there for safe keeping, and sent them in ship or car loads to the West.[[186]] The claim was made in New York in 1888 that[[187]] “during the last forty years not less than two hundred thousand children had been sent into the Western States, many of whom had been sold outright,” by managers of asylums, who refused to allow the names of these little ones to be known, for fear that parents or relatives, who had surrendered them in seasons of distress, might wish to reclaim them when fortunate enough to procure work. These children, not sold in the open market as their black brothers and sisters had been, but disposed of in the name of Charity, had their identity concealed by change of name; cases are on record where brothers and sisters have grown up, met, and married, and “after marriage learned to their horror that they were children of the same parents.”
Thus factory and farm-house had begun to stand in the United States as they had in England from Queen Elizabeth’s days—as the fabled ogre’s castles of ancient legend, which drew women and children into them to serve and suffer hopelessly, unless relieved from captivity and death by a stronger power. History repeated itself in this exploitation of women and children and in the plans made for their relief. The broad system of factory legislation, inspired in England by the revelations of the cruelty practiced upon the most hapless portions of its population, began to be imitated in the United States. Massachusetts, the pioneer State in introducing salutary reforms, took the initiative, and in 1874 forced its Legislature to recognize that it was the duty of the State to regulate the hours of labor of women and children engaged in the manufactures. In that year, after a long series of discussions between radicals and conservatives, the Ten-hour Factory Bill was passed. It is doubtful if the radicals would have triumphed even then, had they not been able to demonstrate that there was “a limit to human endurance, which, once transgressed, was not only disastrous to the operative but unprofitable to the mill-owners.”