Charities and the Commons: The Pittsburgh Survey, Part I. The People

by Various

To understand fully the place that women have taken in the industries of Pittsburgh, we should need to know the history of the "forks of the Ohio," from trading post, frontier settlement, mill-town, to the growing, complex city of to-day. We should need to follow the women's share in the life of the district from the time of the woman pioneer, who was herself a producer of goods and of values, on through the active days of life in a small and struggling town, and later, into the ramifications of the industrial city, when the days came that English speaking labor did not suffice and a new immigrant population was brought in.

We know a little of the life of the frontier women and the work that they did. We have hints here and there, of the home industries of intermediate decades, of the weaving and the stogy making[9] especially, of production for the use of the individual home, that helped to make the lives of women in miners' households active and significant. There are gaps in our recorded knowledge of the process of change, of the forces that little by little have been a call to the high-strung girl of American birth, to the unconquerable exiled Russian, to the field worker from Austria, and to the fair-haired Pole,—a call away from the four walls that sheltered the industries of the home, and toward factory and shop, toward division of labor and specialization of work at a machine. The census in the first half of the nineteenth century is small help to us. Even in later years, we can learn from it comparatively little about the industrial life in individual cities.

[9] See Jour. Pol. Econ. 5: 1-25.

One fact significant of the situation in Pittsburgh to-day is that according to the last census, the excess of male over female population is a trifle less than 10,000. When the industries of the district grew to a magnitude that drew on foreign labor forces, it was the men of Ireland and Germany, of Italy, Austria and Poland who came. Later, in smaller numbers, the women followed. They came because their husbands and brothers were here; not often for the purpose of forging out a life of their own. The women of the later immigrant races, the Slavs and the southern Europeans, are lagging behind. Giuseppina is still keeping the little Italian cottage with the thought that Pietro will return or will have made his way more surely before he sends for her. Life in America for her is not a settled destiny. It is a probability of growing importance for those populations whose need exceeds the productive power of the soil; but even to the strong it is something of an experiment, something for which women,—not industrially adjusted,—must await the issue before they too follow in numbers equal to the men.

In the different districts of the city, one can trace something of the effect of this varying feeling of permanence on the ways of life among earlier and later immigrants. Irish and German, in fact, we no longer think of as immigrants. They are as much wrought into the fabric of the nation as those whom we are pleased to call American. The Jewish immigrants from Austria, Germany, and Russia, while their coming has been hastened by religious persecution, have yet been part of the life of the city for so long, that among them there is a distinct family grouping; and there is a normal proportion between men and women. This is in part due to race tradition as well as to length of settlement, but the latter has unquestionably served to diminish the proportion of single men, who from this race as from others, have come to make a place for themselves in the new country.

In the congested Italian neighborhoods, on the other hand, women are but an unimportant factor in the industrial life of the city. In the midst of the city itself, there are to be sure streets of Italian families; streets where the women still honor the custom of life in their households. A scattered few roll paste-smeared tobacco leaves into tobies after the Italian fashion, or follow with painstaking docility the signs of the forewoman in a garment workshop. But there are not many of these pioneers of congregate activity. The ties of tradition that keep the girl to her house and early marriage are still too strong for more than the very few to break. There is small opportunity in this smoke-filled city among the hills for the Italian girl to preserve her self-respect by staying at home, and at the same time to increase her income by sewing or making flowers. Flowers of delicate tints and fine embroidered fabrics, belong rather to the trade of eastern cities. The garment industry here is of a different sort from that which has nourished and given employment to its thousands of out-workers in New York city. Such outwork as there is dates to a time before the Italian women were here in numbers, or had grouped themselves into particular districts, and it fell naturally into the hands of Irish and Germans whose homes were, and still remain, in the early settled regions in the coal filled hills.

A CANNERY GIRL—BOTTLING PICKLES WITH A GROOVED STICK.

Leave "the hill," and go down toward the mills and to some of the outlying sections, and you will find still fewer women in the colonies of young Italian laborers, advance guards from their native towns. Some of these men are workers on the railroads, others are day-laborers in the mills. They bring up the numbers of the Italian population and contribute to the excess male population of the entire city. Among still later immigrants, this situation is intensified. Near the Pressed Steel Car Works, there are streets of low unpainted houses, each exactly like the other, each filled with its family of "boarders,"—single men who club together and rent a house or hire a bed by turns in order to make their pay serve both for their own support and for the help of those at home in the old country. They are Slavs,—"Hunkies." They are the under-workmen in mill and mine and machine shop, who have helped push the earlier comers a step higher and push themselves into the subordinate jobs. Some of the first comers have since brought their families. Some few sisters and friends with the desire to try new fortune have come, too, leaving their families behind. But the bulk of the "boarding house" population is made up of single men, immigrants of this race. Where families and single women have come, they have tended to settle in the glass-making district, or near the manufactories of iron and steel products that can use quick fingers as well as strong untrained arms.