[THE TREND OF THINGS]
The working woman is coming up as a result of her invasion of commercial pursuits. While the department store pays poorer wages than the factory or domestic service, it has a standing, its girls a position due to their dress and their surroundings, which the others do not give. Grant it every evil ever charged against it, say Mr. Hard and Mrs. Dorr in the third article of their series on The Woman's Invasion, in the January Everybody's, make the case out as bad as long hours, poor pay, Christmas rush time, the need for expensive clothes, can total. Still it is superior socially; its hours are shorter; it draws the American as against the foreign-born girl; it offers better opportunity for marriage, and all these things appeal to a girl because she is not, consciously at least, in industry to stay, but to pass the time until marriage. That's why "a store can get for six dollars the kind of girl that will earn ten dollars in a shoe factory."
Low as the wages are,—and they are set by this social advantage and by the predominant number of department store clerks who are not wholly dependent on themselves,—there is a chance for real advancement. Woman has been in factory work for a century, but she remains an operative except for occasional forewomen, and as a result of piece work she quickly reaches her maximum earning capacity and afterwards declines. But in the department store, where she has been only a few years, she has advanced to positions of real responsibility, particularly as a buyer, and sometimes draws a salary of from $1,500 to $6,000; her wages go steadily up, and the clerks in some departments draw good, living wages with the ever-present example of the buyer and her kind just ahead, elevated from their own ranks.
The article, in parts, in a stirring description of the life of the 20,000 department store clerks on State street, Chicago, and one of the best parts of it is the contrast of the girl clerk who sells handkerchiefs, and the girl machine operative who makes handkerchiefs, the clerk "getting handkerchiefs out of boxes for querulous, exacting customers, putting handkerchiefs back in boxes for querulous, exacting stock inspectors, taking parcels to the cage of the wrapper girl, pacifying purchasers waiting for their change, attracting new purchasers coming down the aisle, discriminating between 'buyers' and 'shoppers,' drawing the 'buyers' on, edging the 'shoppers' off, rearranging the counter,—from eight or half-past in the morning to half past five in the afternoon;" the factory girl sitting before a counter on which there are a blue cross, a red cross and a machine with a clutching hand, who "takes a handkerchief, places it on the blue cross, pushes it over to the red cross, and the claw of the machine snatches it away. She takes a second handkerchief, places it on the blue cross, pushes it over to the red cross, and the machine snatches it away. She takes a third handkerchief, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, two a second, 120 a minute, 7,200 an hour, all the morning hours, all the afternoon hours, of every week, all the working weeks of every year.... The wide prevalence of this kind of sub-human toil in factories is one of the two great reasons why department store managers can often pay sub-human wages."
Mrs. Dorr has an article along very similar lines in the January Hampton's Broadway Magazine, using with effect little stories of women workers in many trades. Girls come out of school at fourteen and go to work; after a short apprenticeship they are put at the machines, and quickly earn the most they ever will earn. Gradually their nerves, their muscles, their eyes, their efficiency decline, their wages follow. Later they stand beside the young apprentices, earning the minimum wages after a life spent in a factory.
Women do hard, manual work, too, much as we have been accustomed to think of that as peculiar to some European and Asiatic countries. Indian squaws no longer till the fields and do the heavy work in America, but Mrs. Dorr has found a modern substitute: "Go into the iron and metal working factories of American cities and see Polish women working in the heat of horrible furnaces, handling heavy weights, doing work fit only for strong men. Go into the rubber factories of Boston and see Greek and Armenian women drunk in the fumes of naphtha. See them in non-union hat factories with the skin scalded from their hands as they shrink the felt in streams of boiling water. We do not want to see American women doing such things. Yet not a year ago, in the first months of the panic of 1907, I received a letter from an American woman out of employment, asking if it were not possible for her to obtain work as a street cleaner. That work, she said, seemed to her easier than the office scrubbing she was doing then."
But to return to the factory girl, Mrs. Dorr declares she is not arraigning those who own and operate factories, for they are keen for skilled workers to replace the unskilled girls who must be driven at a pace set by the machines; but rather the system under which our industries are run and by which we make our workers. The skilled worker can be made only by training, and in that she finds the keynote to the whole situation. Let us establish a great network of industrial training schools, such as the Manhattan Trade School for Girls and the Hebrew Technical School for Girls in New York, and the school maintained by the Woman's Industrial and Educational Union in Boston. Then we shall have not only skilled workers, earning fair wages, but we shall be safeguarding the mothers of to-morrow and the Children of the day after.