MARGARET F. BYINGTON
CHARITY ORGANIZATION DEPARTMENT, RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION
[7]. See Federal Report on the Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United States, 19 volumes. Edited by Charles P. Neill. Volume XVI. Family Budgets of Typical Cotton Mill Workers. By Wood F. Worcester and Daisy Worthington Worcester.
Hidden in monotonous uniformity there is to be found in the volumes of the federal report on the Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United States a most illuminating analysis of the budgets of cotton mill families. It is notable for simplicity rather than for comprehensiveness. Budgets of twenty-one families employed in southern cotton mills and of fourteen in the cotton mills of Fall River, Mass., have been secured and the conditions of the families studied. Because the number is so small no attempt is made to use the figures as a basis for generalizations, but the full statement of the circumstances as well as the expenditures of each family gives the study a compensating vividness.
The study of the fourteen families in Fall River is not as satisfactory as the southern investigation because the standards of English, Italian, French Canadian, Portuguese and Polish operatives are so different. Also it was not possible, as it often was in the South, to get an almost complete record both of family income and expenditure through the books of the companies where the families worked. For these reasons the analysis of the southern families’ budgets is more deserving of attention.
Special interest attaches to the study of the twenty-one southern families as it was the first budget study of southern families, I believe. As a background we may quote from the report a brief description of life in a southern cotton mill town:
“Certain conditions of the new industrial life foster this isolation. The whole family—men, women, and children—are engaged in the same industry in which every other family in their community is engaged. They have their own churches and their own schools, in many cases furnished by the mill owners. They live, with few exceptions, in houses owned by the mill company. They buy their provisions, in many cases, from the company store. The cotton mill is the center of their lives. Their present and their future are bounded by it. In less isolated industrial communities there is always the prospect of working into some other and higher industrial group. The vision of the southern cotton operative, however, is so limited by his surroundings that this possibility rarely occurs to him. In other industries the father may feel that he can never hope for anything more for himself, but he can at least plan and struggle for a better life for his children. Here the mill demands the children as well as the fathers.”
This dependence on the mills serves to make the study more accurate than is usually possible. The rent of company houses was, of course, known and through the courtesy of the mill owners the investigators were allowed to copy from the books of the company not only the detailed expenditures for food, clothing, etc., but what was of more importance, the actual wage of the various members of the family from week to week for an entire year. The total income, in some cases practically every item of expenditure, is therefore known.
The families chosen for study are considered typical, though probably on the whole having somewhat better than average conditions. This necessity for making an arbitrary choice is, of course, the one uncertain point in the study. As the investigators, however, had taken part in the larger investigation of the cotton mill industry made by the Federal Bureau of Labor, reliance can probably be placed upon their judgment as to what families were representative. Moreover the report states that the names of the families working in one of the three mills were furnished by a mill official as representative families, and in another they were frankly avowed by the mill officials to be among the best. It may therefore be assumed that while there is really no “typical family” and while there are wide variations in circumstances, the stories of these twenty-one families give an accurate picture of the home life of cotton mill employes.
In view of the discussion of the effects of the work of young children in cotton mills it is interesting to note that of the twenty-one families studied not one was wholly dependent on the wages of the man. The average number of wage earners in these families was 3.6 and the average number of individuals 8.5.