ONE OF THE SOUTH SIDE GLASS-WORKERS.
The Polish women have not the conservatism which keeps the Italian girl at home. They have not the same standard of close-knit family relationship. There is a flexibility in their attitude toward life and toward their part in it. In numbers and in kind of work, they are an element of industrial importance.
Altogether, 22,185 women wage earners outside of agricultural, professional, and domestic service, are employed in Pittsburgh. These figures are based on a careful census of the women-employing trades made during the winter of 1907-8. This working force is distributed in 448 factories and shops, and can be arranged according to the numerical importance of the different trade groups as shown in the accompanying table.
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In the U. S. census of 1900, women's work is grouped under the headings: Agricultural Pursuits, Domestic and Personal Service, Professional Service, Trade and Transportation, Manufacturing and Mechanical Pursuits. In the accompanying table, agricultural pursuits, and professional service are excluded. Under domestic and personal service come only the cleaning industries, with 2,685 women, 12.10 per cent of the number under consideration. Under trade and transportation, come saleswomen and telephone and telegraph operators to the number of 8,317 (37.48 per cent). The remainder, 11,183 women (50.4 per cent), are included in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits.
It is worth while to consider not only the broad groupings and the characteristics of the several trades, but the women whom they have called to them, old and young, native born, or from the fields and towns of another country. Each trade has its characteristic racial group, and in some cases a secondary racial group; and on the other hand one racial group may be found in several trades. When the work room is a mercantile house, there is small need to describe it. We know something of the work and of its demands; we know, too, that no other occupation seems so desirable as "clerking" to the girl with some personal ambition but without the training necessary for an office position. A majority of the girls are native-born of Irish or German parents, but there is a scattering of bright Jewish girls who have a characteristic dislike for the noise of machines.
The mercantile houses, the stogy factories and the garment factories are employers of Jewish girls. In all three industries many Americans are to be found, but they are in the more desirable positions, in shops of the better class, with provision for light and air. These girls have the nervous readiness to learn new ways, the adaptability, the measure of skill, which tend to bring them the best work, the better workplaces. But where the cheap, hustling business is done, the Jewish girls predominate. They endure the drive in the rarely cleaned upper room, where between narrow walls, faint daylight finds its way toward the machines and where drifting lint and ten hours' stooping over a power-driven needle, have their effect in time on a girl even with the strength of rugged generations behind her.
Newcomers cannot choose either workshop or wages. With the subordination of the industrially unadjusted, they crave a chance to learn, whether it be by the whirr of the needle or by team work at cheap mold stogies to supply the workingman's demand. In one or two of the small box factories on "the hill," one finds occasionally a Jewish girl. Box makers paste the bright colored strips of paper along the box edges. They stay the corners by the clamp of a machine. For heavier boxes they glue into place the wooden supports. Such work for a Jewish girl is exceptional, however, and in violence to tradition. The three industries mentioned above make up her circle of possible choices.