PROCEEDINGS
OF THE
ACADEMY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF WOMEN

The Academy of Political Science
Columbia University, New York
1910

Copyright, 1910
BY
The Academy of Political Science

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Of all the problems that have come in the train of the industrial revolution none are more perplexing than those that concern women. It is a wearisome commonplace that the factory has taken over much of the industrial work of the home, and that women have followed their work into the factory; but the fundamental change thus introduced into their life has not always been clearly seen. Formerly home and industry were synonymous terms for them; training for industry was training in household management. To-day industrial work is sharply separated from the management of the home, and there has come into the occupation of women a dualism that finds no parallel in the life of men. Most of the difficulties of women in industry relate themselves in some way to this fact.

An unregulated competitive system is good only for the strong. Women, by virtue of their double relation as industrial producers and as homemakers and mothers, are industrially weak. Most women are fundamentally interested in the home rather than the factory, and industrial occupation is only an interlude in their real business. Working women so-called are mostly mere girls under twenty-five who go to work with no thought of industry as a permanent career. Uninterested, untrained, unskilled, they are on a low level of efficiency, and they have little motive for climbing to a higher level. In industry a few years, then out of it into the home, they lack the discipline and solidity that come with a permanent life task. Small wonder that they crowd the unskilled labor market, and that their work commands a mere pittance.

Inefficient in their industrial work, they tend to become quite as inefficient in their function of homekeepers: for during the very years when they might otherwise be acquiring the household arts, they are busy in shop or factory, subject to a discipline requiring obedience to mechanical routine rather than that power of thoughtful initiative which marks the skilful homemaker. Moreover, they become accustomed to the stimulus and excitement of the crowd, so that they do not want to be alone, and home life they too often find monotonous and uninteresting. The untrained, unskilled factory hand becomes the untrained, unskilled wife and mother.

Working women are not only untrained and inefficient, but industrially ignorant and lacking in standards. Hence they put up with whatever conditions the employer imposes. They do not “make a fuss,” and therefore they get treatment to which no man would submit. Moreover, such a large proportion of them are mere “pin-money girls” that there is no minimum standard of wages, such as is furnished for men by the necessary cost of maintaining a family. Women’s wages are perhaps in a majority of cases simply supplementary earnings, and the wages of all women, self-dependent or not, tend to be fixed on the assumption that they will live parasitically on their relatives. As a result of this lack of standards, the whole subject of the pay and conditions of women’s work is a veritable chaos. Standardization has been well worked out in many men’s trades, and technical progress has followed. In women’s occupations it is often easier for an unprogressive employer to throw the burden of his backwardness on docile women employes by paying low wages than it is to keep up with the march of improvement in machinery and methods. So much for the human element in this problem.

On the industrial side we find, as is more than once pointed out in these papers, that industry as now organized takes no cognizance of the special needs of the worker. Competitive cheapness must be obtained at all costs. If the worker does not insist on his rights, he gets small part of the benefits of progress. Hence changes in machinery and organization bring little advantage to women workers; such changes, in fact, are frequently carried through with distinct loss to them, however great the gain to society in general. But more than this, our present industry is made for men, and it wants only standard workers, working standard hours at standard speed. The workers must conform to this inelastic system or go without a job. Most women are physically incapable, without permanent injury to themselves and the race, of enduring for ten hours a day the strain to which modern industry subjects them; yet they are trying to conform to its mechanical routine instead of insisting that it be changed to meet their needs. So long as this change is not made, so long will women’s industrial work continue a social menace.

We face, then, a double difficulty. In the first place, woman’s twofold function apparently necessitates a double preparation and a divided interest and life; in the second place, our industry demands a standardized worker for the whole of his time. In consequence of this situation, women throughout the period of factory labor have been among the greatest sufferers from low wages, long hours, and unsanitary conditions. They are the very type of worker to whom the Marxian analysis in all its rigor most nearly applies, uninterested, inefficient, ignorant, untrained, standardless. With the exception of children, they constitute the most easily exploited labor force in existing society, and they are mercilessly exploited. The new social freedom of industrial life combines with low wages to tempt and drive working girls to easier means of obtaining the pleasure they normally must have, and a grave social problem thus emerges. The changed industrial situation evidently demands a new economic and social adjustment.

A glance at the state of public opinion throws some light on the general nature of the adjustment required. Women are paid less then men primarily because they will take less, not because their work is worth less or because they need less; and public opinion acquiesces without protest. If the school pays women less than men simply because it can get them for less, how much more will the factory do the same. The public does not object because it thinks of women as dependent on their male relatives and hence not requiring a living wage. This was natural enough so long as they earned their living by household management and production, leaving to men the provision of money income. But the moment women entered the industrial field the whole situation changed. Public opinion has not yet taken cognizance of this fact. Economic conditions and social organization are out of joint. We need to readjust our ideas and our organization to the new economic facts; but in consequence of an ignorant public opinion and a sluggish social conscience the readjustment is delayed and women are suffering sadly from overwork, underpay, injurious working conditions and neglect of training for industry and the home.

We are just beginning to feel our way toward this readjustment, which involves at least four things: 1. Giving women the training necessary for their home work. 2. Making them efficient industrial producers. 3. Making them “work conscious” and giving them industrial standards. 4. Insuring them proper pay, hours and conditions, by adjusting the demands of industry to their needs and capacity. To accomplish these ends three chief means are commonly urged, industrial training, trade unionism and legislation.

Industrial, or perhaps better vocational training, is as yet scarcely past the first stages of experimentation, and we do not clearly understand its proper aims or methods. Apparently we may rightly demand of the school that it give girls a reasonable training for their work as mothers and homekeepers, at the same time that it imparts to them a degree of technical skill in industrial work, and above all, that power of adaptation to changing conditions so imperatively demanded by modern economic life. A vague statement of this kind, indeed, means little, and discussions of industrial training are at present too full of vague generalizations. What we need is a series of careful studies of particular trades in particular places, and of the possibilities of the schools in connection therewith. It is only when we get this intimate knowledge of economic conditions and build our training on it, that the training becomes of much value in the large process of social readjustment. Otherwise we may help a few girls to get better wages, but that is about all, and even that is problematical. The combination, however, of an efficient system of trade investigation, a scientifically organized and conducted employment bureau, and an intelligent educational scheme is full of promise.

Permanent organization of women workers has hitherto proved difficult, if not impossible, by reason of the youth, inexperience, ignorance and short trade life of the young women concerned. Women’s unions have come and gone, often leaving behind them certain permanent gains. In making girls industrially self-conscious, in setting standards of work and pay, in arousing public interest and awaking public conscience, thus preparing the way for legislation, they have performed valuable service even when short-lived. Sometimes a situation like that created by the New York shirtwaist strike gives opportunity to focus public attention on the condition of women workers. Great as its immediate services may be, organization at present reaches but a small fraction of women workers, and its permanent value in the larger view perhaps lies chiefly in educating working women, employers and the public to higher standards of employment and pay.

There remains the method of legislation. While law follows in the wake of public opinion in a democracy, industrial betterment often lags considerably behind the general progress of public intelligence, and the law can push the backward employer up to the level of the more enlightened one. The great advantage of the legal method is its uniformity; it puts all employers and establishments on the same basis. Moreover, its gains are usually fairly secure. A standard once embodied in law is harder to break down than a mere trade standard attained by union pressure, for example. Hence in the case of women workers, where conditions for individual improvement are unfavorable, where union methods are difficult of application, the process of readjustment will doubtless go forward largely by legal enactment. We shall see an increasing body of law governing the conditions under which women work. As the community finds that it has no other way of protecting itself against the injury it suffers from present conditions of employment of women, it will more and more resort to the prescribing of minimum legal limits below which they may not be crowded.

Fortunately for progress in this respect, our courts have generally looked with relative favor on legislation for women. The right of the state to exercise the police power to protect the health of women for the sake of future generations is now clearly established in the court of last resort. All that is necessary for the incorporation of a new requirement into the legal standard is to convince the courts of its relation to health—a method employed with success in the Oregon and Illinois ten-hour cases. Thus far such legislation has dealt chiefly with hours, but the principle is capable of almost indefinite extension. As we approach the question of general working conditions and the more purely economic consideration of wages, the limitations of the legal method come more clearly into view; none the less the use of that method must extend beyond the present limits.

Fortunately also the method of legal enactment can be applied in some measure to bring about those modifications in the demands of industry that are necessary for women. Abandoning the fatuous attempt to keep women out of industrial life, we shall set about the task of humanizing industry by ridding it of the conditions that make wholesome life difficult for workers to attain. Realizing the greater needs of women, we may first set legal standards for them alone; and then, just as was the case in the early fight for a shorter workday, the advantage legally conceded to women may be extended to men as well. Slowly public opinion advances toward more enlightened views, and social and legal organization gradually improve with it. Following the economic upheaval that we call the economic revolution, a tremendously complex and difficult readjustment has been necessary, one made more difficult by the fact that it must be worked out in a democratic society. In the peculiarly difficult and trying situation of women during this readjustment we find abundant justification for social action to protect them against the dangers to which they are exposed, and abundant demand for the most thoroughgoing investigation on which to base such action. The present collection of papers is an attempt to state some of the manifold aspects of the problem and to discuss some of the proposed means of solution.

H. R. M.

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN’S WORK IN THE UNITED STATES

HELEN L. SUMNER

Washington, D. C.

The history of women’s work in the United States is the story of an economic and industrial readjustment which is by no means yet complete. Women have worked since the world began, and at the dawn of history their labor was probably as important in family or tribal economy as it is to-day in the industrial world. Since early colonial days in this country, moreover, women have worked for gain, sometimes selling to the local storekeeper the products of leisure hours spent in spinning, weaving, knitting or sewing, sometimes themselves keeping little shops, and sometimes hiring themselves out to work in the families of their neighbors. But during the nineteenth century a great transformation occurred which has materially changed woman’s economic position.

Woman’s work may be divided into five general categories: unpaid labor, independent gainful labor, domestic service, wage labor in manufacturing industries and wage labor in trade and transportation. In all these varieties of work great changes have taken place. In the first place technical improvements have removed from the home to the factory and workshop a large part of the labor formerly carried on almost exclusively by women. Women naturally followed their occupations, and in doing so changed their economic status from that of unpaid laborers to that of paid laborers. Though the number gainfully employed has materially increased, however, the amount of unremunerated home work performed by women must still be considerably larger than the amount of gainful labor, for in 1900 only about one fifth of all females 16 years of age and over were breadwinners.[1]

Not only have unpaid, home-working women been transformed into paid factory operatives, but both independent home workers and wage-earning home workers have been transferred to factories and workshops. This change is especially evident in the comparatively backward clothing industries, which the sewing machine and artificial power have gradually driven from the home to the shop and, in some branches, to the factory. In the early days of wholesale clothing manufacture in this country all the work, except the cutting, was done for piece wages in the homes of the workers. Gradually, however, the industry has been drawn into sweatshops and factories. Independent domestic production, meanwhile, except in certain lines like dressmaking and to a slight extent the preserving of fruit and making of jelly, has practically become a thing of the past. The movement away from home work can hardly be regretted, however, in view of the fact that the entire history of women’s work shows that their wage labor under the domestic system has almost invariably been under worse conditions of hours, wages and general sanitation than their wage labor under the factory system.

There has probably been, moreover, a material increase in the proportion of women wage earners as compared with independent producers. Before the introduction of machinery wage labor generally meant domestic service. There were, of course, exceptions. Early instances are well known of women spinners gathered together in groups and paid fixed sums, and women were early employed to sort and cut rags in paper mills. But the range of wage-earning occupations open to them has enormously increased, while it is doubtful whether any larger proportion are now engaged in independent industry than were so engaged two centuries ago. In commercial and professional pursuits, it is true, the opportunities for independent business have very greatly increased, but in manufacturing industries, as a result of the unprecedented growth of wholesale production, they have materially narrowed for women as well as for men.

The wage-earning opportunities of women in the three great groups of occupations, domestic service, manufacturing industries, and trade and transportation, have also changed decidedly. Thousands, of course, have always been employed in domestic service, which has acted as the complement of the industrial pursuits. The opportunity to “hire out” has continually confronted the working woman and frequently, when she complained that her conditions of work were hard and her pay inadequate, she has been admonished by philanthropists and even by economists to betake herself to the kitchen, whose homelike conditions, high wages and pressing need of her labor have always been loudly proclaimed. The conditions and problems of domestic service, indeed, have changed far less than those of any other occupation. Nevertheless, the proportion of all gainfully employed women engaged in domestic and personal service has steadily decreased.[2]

In the manufacturing industries, on the other hand, great changes have taken place. The entrance of women into these industries may be attributed to three principal causes, machinery, artificial power and division of labor. All of these are in part the cause and in part the effect of an unprecedented development of wholesale, as opposed to retail production, and this growth of wholesale trade is itself primarily the result of improved means of communication and transportation.

These three factors have also caused a considerable amount of shifting of occupations. Under the domestic system of labor woman’s work and man’s work were clearly defined, women doing the spinning, part of the weaving, the knitting, the sewing and generally the cooking. But with the introduction of machinery for spinning and weaving thousands of hand workers were thrown out of employment. It is not surprising to learn that the first spinners and weavers by machinery were women. Later, however, mule spindles, operated by men, were introduced for part of the work. In certain other cases, too, machinery has caused the substitution of men for women in industries formerly considered as belonging to woman’s sphere. Women’s suits, for instance, are now largely made by men tailors, and men dressmakers and milliners are not uncommon. Men bake our bread and brew our ale and wash our clothes in the steam laundry. At present men even clean our houses by the vacuum process.

One result has been that thousands of women who, under the old régime, would have sat calmly like Priscilla by the window spinning, have been forced to seek other occupations. When the industrial revolution transformed the textile industries they naturally turned to the only other employment for which they were trained, sewing. This, however, only increased the pressure of competition in the sewing trades, already sufficiently supplied with laborers. In the middle of the century, moreover, before any effective readjustment had taken place, the sewing machine was introduced, greatly increasing productivity and at the same time further sharpening competition.

Thus the increased productivity due to machinery and the simultaneous loss, by reason of the greater adaptability of men to certain machines, of woman’s practical monopoly of the textile trades has caused intense competition and has forced many women into other industries, not traditionally theirs. From the beginning, however, their choice of occupations has been hampered by custom. As early as 1829 a writer in the Boston Courier[3] said:

Custom and long habit have closed the doors of very many employments against the industry and perseverance of woman. She has been taught to deem so many occupations masculine, and made only for men, that, excluded by a mistaken deference to the world’s opinion, from innumerable labors, most happily adapted to her physical constitution, the competition for the few places left open to her, has occasioned a reduction in the estimated value of her labor, until it has fallen below the minimum, and is no longer adequate to present comfortable subsistence, much less to the necessary provision against age and infirmity, or the every day contingencies of mortality.

Economic necessity, however, with division of labor as its chief tool, sometimes aided by power machinery and sometimes alone, has gradually opened up new industries to women. As early as 1832 they were employed in as many as one hundred different occupations. In many of these, to be sure, they were as rare as women blacksmiths are today. But in 1836 a committee of the National Trades’ Union, appointed to inquire into the evils of “female labor,” reported that in the New England States “printing, saddling, brush making, tailoring, whip making and many other trades are in a certain measure governed by females,” and added that of the fifty-eight societies composing the Trades’ Union of Philadelphia, twenty four were “seriously affected by female labor.”[4] The census of 1850 enumerated nearly one hundred and seventy-five different manufacturing industries in which women were employed, and the number has steadily increased until there is now scarcely an industry in which they are not to be found.

Usually, however, they have been employed, in the first instance, only in the least skilled and most poorly paid occupations, and have not competed directly with men. This has been due in part to custom and prejudice, perhaps, but primarily it has been due to lack of training and ambition, and to general irresponsibility. One of the causes, to be sure, of the lack of training and ambition is the knowledge that well-paid positions are seldom given to women. A much more vital cause, however, is to be found in the lack of connection between the work and the girl’s natural ambitions. Before the industrial revolution women were probably as skilful and efficient in their lines of industry as men in theirs. The occupations taught girls at that time were theirs for life and naturally they took great pride and pleasure in becoming proficient in work which prepared them for marriage and for the career which nearly every young girl, with wholesome instincts, looks forward to as her ideal, the keeping of the home and the care of children. But when the connection was lost between work and marriage, when girls were forced by machinery and division of labor to undertake tasks which had no vital interest to them, there grew up a hybrid class of women workers in whose lives there is contradiction and internal if not external discord. Their work no longer fits in with their ideals and has lost its charm.

Even in industries which, like the textile and sewing trades, belong to women by long inheritance, machinery and division of labor have so transformed processes that both the individuality of their work and the original incentive to industry have been wholly lost in a standardized product. Moreover, in their traditional sphere of employment and especially in the sewing trade, competition has been so keen that the conditions under which they have worked have been, upon the whole, more degrading and more hopeless than in any other class of occupations. From the very beginning of the wholesale clothing manufacture in this country, indeed, five elements, home work, the sweating system, the contract and sub-contract systems increasing the number of middlemen between producer and consumer, the exaggerated overstrain due to piece payment, and the fact that the clothing trades have served as the general dumping ground of the unskilled, inefficient and casual women workers, have produced a condition of almost pure industrial anarchy.

It is interesting to note, in this connection, that the greatest economic success of women wage earners in manufacturing industries has been attained in occupations in which they have competed directly with men. Women printers and cigarmakers, who in many cases have been introduced as the result of strikes, have generally earned higher wages than their sisters who have made shirts and artificial flowers. Usually, however, when, as in certain classes of cigar making, they have entirely displaced men, they have soon lost their economic advantage. And it is exceedingly doubtful whether, in such cases, women have gained as much as men have lost. Certainly they have not regained what they themselves have lost through being displaced by men in their customary sphere of employment.

The occupations grouped under the title “trade and transportation,” most of which are new and offer, therefore, no problems of displacement, have furnished working women, in general, their most remunerative employments. This, too, is the group of industries in which, within recent years, the most rapid increase in the number and proportion of women workers has taken place.[5] Though the number of saleswomen, stenographers, clerks, bookkeepers, telegraph and telephone operators, and so forth, is still small as compared with the number of women textile factory operatives, seamstresses, boot and shoemakers, paper box makers, and so on, it is rapidly increasing. In this movement, moreover, there is evident more than anywhere else a certain hopeful tendency for working women to push up from the level of purely mechanical pursuits to the level of semi-intellectual labor. The trade and transportation industries are, roughly speaking, middle-class employments, as contrasted with the manufacturing industries, which are, roughly speaking, working-class employments.

Women’s wages have always been excessively low and their hours excessively long. About 1830 Mathew Carey estimated that in Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Baltimore there were between 18,000 and 20,000 working women, at least 12,000 of whom could not earn, by constant employment for 16 hours out of the 24, more than $1.25 per week. At this rate he figured that, allowing for the loss of one day a week through sickness, unemployment or the care of children, and counting lodging at 50 cents and fuel at 12¹⁄₂ cents a week, a woman would have left for food and clothing just $22.50 per year. A good seamstress without children and employed all the time he figured could earn $1.12¹⁄₂ per week or $58.50 per year, out of which she would have to pay 50 cents per week for rent, 15 cents per week for fuel, 8 cents per week for soap, candles, etc., and $10 for shoes and clothing—which would leave her for food and drink 2³⁄₄ cents per day. If she was hampered by the care of children, was unemployed one day a week, or was slow or unskilled, he figured that, at the same rates of expenditure, she would have a yearly deficit of $11.56.[6] The situation of the working women in the cities of this country during the early decades of the nineteenth century was, indeed, as characterized by the New York Daily Sentinel, the first daily labor paper in this country, “frightful, nay disgraceful to our country, ... a gangrenous spot on the body politic, a national wound that ought to be visited and dressed, lest it rankle and irritate the whole system.”[7]

Fifteen years later conditions were little better. An investigation of “female labor” in New York in 1845 led to the assertion by the New York Tribune that there were in that city about 50,000 working women, onehalf of whom earned wages averaging less than $2 per week, and to the further statement that the girls who flocked to that city from every part of the country to work as shoe binders, type rubbers, artificial-flower makers, match-box makers, straw braiders, etc., found competition so keen that they were obliged “to snatch at the privilege of working on any terms.” “They find,” said the Tribune, “that by working from fifteen to eighteen hours a day they cannot possibly earn more than from one to three dollars a week, and this, deducting the time they are out of employment every year, will barely serve to furnish them the scantiest and poorest food, which, from its monotony and its unhealthy quality, induces disgust, loathing and disease. They have thus absolutely nothing left for clothes, recreation, sickness, books or intellectual improvement.”[8]

In 1863 the average wages paid to women in New York, taking all the trades together, were said to have been about $2 a week, and the hours ranged from eleven to sixteen a day.[9] And in 1887 it was stated that in New York City nine thousand and in Chicago over five thousand women earned less than $3 per week.[10]

Some of these statements may be exaggerations, but there can be no doubt that, throughout the entire history of women in industry in this country, their wages, in thousands of cases, have been inadequate for decent support. Their wages, too, have been far below those of men. In 1833[11] and again in 1868[12] it was stated that women’s wages were, on an average, only about one fourth what men received. Moreover, it has been authoritatively stated that during the civil war period the wages of women increased less than those of men, while their cost of living rose out of all proportion.[13]

It is probable that, in general, women’s wages have been less flexible, more subject to the influence of custom and less to the influence of demand and supply, than men’s. Unfortunately custom in this case has furnished a standard of exploitation and not of protection. It is probable, too, that working women have suffered more than working men from periods of panic and depression, for such periods, like war, have thrown upon their own resources thousands of women who in normal times are supported by their male relatives.

In the textile industries wages, during the first half of the nineteenth century at least, were higher than in the clothing trades. The Lowell girls during the so-called “golden era” earned from $1.50 to $2 per week in addition to their board of $1.25. Their day’s work, however, varied from 11 hours and 24 minutes in December and January to 13 hours and 31 minutes in April, and averaged 12 hours and 13 minutes, or 73¹⁄₂ hours per week.[14] It must be remembered, moreover, that there were in this country, during these early years, two distinct systems of factory labor, the factory boarding-house system of Lowell, Dover, N. H., and other places in that neighborhood, and the family system which prevailed in Fall River, throughout Rhode Island, and generally in New York, New Jersey and Maryland. In the factories operated on the family system of labor wages were distinctly lower than in those of the Lowell type, and were frequently paid in store orders. In these factories, too, hours were longer, being in summer 13³⁄₄ per day and averaging throughout the year 75¹⁄₂ per week[15]. Girls, moreover, went to work at an earlier age. Child laborers whom the Lowell manufacturers could not afford to keep in their factory boarding houses were employed in large numbers.

The general conditions under which women have toiled in this country have been little if any better than their wages and their hours. During the years when Lowell is supposed to have been a busy paradise, with flowers blooming in the factory windows, poetry and hymns pasted on the walls, and the Lowell Offering furnishing an outlet for the exuberant literary activities of the operatives, the ventilation, both of factories and of boarding houses, was absolutely inadequate. In the boarding houses from four to six and sometimes even eight girls slept in one room about 14 by 16 ft., and from twelve to sixteen girls in a hot, ill-ventilated attic. In winter the factories were lighted by lamps. One woman who testified before the Massachusetts Committee on Hours of Labor in 1845 stated that, in the room where she worked, along with about 130 other women, 11 men and 12 children, there were 293 small lamps and 61 large lamps which were sometimes lighted in the morning as well as in the evening[16]. The lack of ventilation in the mills and boarding houses of Lowell was in 1849 made the subject of a report to the American Medical Association by Dr. Josiah Curtis, and in the same year the physician of the Lowell Hospital, established by the manufacturing corporations exclusively for the use of operatives, attributed to lack of ventilation in the cotton mills the fact that, since the founding of the hospital nine years before, over half the patients had suffered from typhoid fever.

Typhoid fever, however, was doubtless a far less general result of these conditions than consumption. Even the Lowell Offering, which found no evils in factory labor except long hours and excused these on the ground that long hours were universal throughout New England, bears evidence in practically every number that tuberculosis of the lungs was the great scourge of the factories. The labor papers, moreover, as early as 1836, began to point out the direct connection between factory labor and consumption. In 1845, too the United States Journal published a poem by Andrew McDonald, the first verse of which reads:[17]

Go look at Lowell’s pomp and gold
Wrung from the orphan and the old;
See pale consumption’s death-glazed eye—
The hectic cheek, and know not why.
Yes, these combine to make thy wealth
“Lord of the Loom,” and glittering pelf.

There is no reason to believe that conditions were any better, if as good, in other manufacturing districts. In the clothing industry, moreover, which has long been concentrated in cities, overcrowding and unsanitary housing conditions in horrible variety have furnished the environment of working women. Whole blocks of tenements, too, have been rented out to families in New York for the manufacture of cigars. As early as 1877 the United Cigar Manufacturers’ Association, an organization of small employers, condemned as unsanitary these tenement cigar factories where the babies rolled on the floor in waste tobacco, and the housework, the cooking, the cleaning of children and the trade of cigar making were all carried on in one room.[18]

From these evil conditions, low wages, long hours and unwholesome sanitary arrangements, immigrant women have naturally been the greatest sufferers, for, like their husbands and brothers, they have been obliged to begin at the bottom. Irish women first entered the factories of New England, for example, as waste pickers and scrub women. But their daughters became spinners and weavers. There have been, however, certain exceptions to this rule. The skilled Bohemian women cigar makers who came to New York in the seventies, for instance, earned from the first comparatively high wages. Foreign girls who have gone into domestic service, moreover, have frequently earned higher wages than American girls who have chosen to be, for example, saleswomen.

The chief forces which have tended to improve the condition of working women have been trade unions, industrial education and legislation. In certain industries, especially shoe making, cigar making, printing and collar and cuff making, trade unions have brought about higher wages, shorter hours or better conditions in certain localities. Women shoe-binders, about one thousand in number, won a strike for higher wages at Lynn as early as 1834,[19] and during the sixties and seventies the Daughters of St. Crispin protected the working women of their craft. Women members were admitted into the Cigar Makers’ International Union in 1867 and were prominent in the great strike of 1877. The International Typographical Union admitted women in 1869. Probably no organization of women workers, however, has been more effective than the Collar Laundry Union of Troy, N. Y., the predecessor of the Shirt, Waist and Laundry Workers’ International Union. During the sixties the Collar Laundry Union is said to have raised the wages of its members from $2 or $3 to $14 a week, and to have contributed $1000 in aid of Troy iron molders on strike against a reduction of wages, and $500 in aid of striking bricklayers in New York.[20]

The tailoresses of New York, moreover, were organized as early as 1825, and in 1831 sixteen hundred tailoresses and seamstresses of that city went on strike for an elaborate wage scale covering a large variety of work, and remained out for four or five weeks.[21] Considering that the population of New York in 1830 was under 200,000, this strike bears comparison with the great shirt-waist workers’ strike of 1909-1910. Two years later the journeyman tailors of Baltimore were assisting the tailoresses of that city in a “stand-out” for higher wages,[22] and in the summer of 1844 the Boston tailors aided a large and apparently successful strike of sewing women.[23] In 1851 an effort to assist some six thousand shirt sewers in New York led to the foundation of a shirt sewers’ coöperative union, which prospered for several years.[24] Many other organizations of sewing women have been formed and have conducted strikes, which have sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed.

In the textile industries, too, a long series of efforts by operatives to improve their own situation began with the picturesque strike of four hundred women and girls in Dover, N. H., in 1828, when the operatives paraded the town with flags and inscriptions and the factory agent advertised for two or three hundred “better-behaved women.”[25] The long and bitterly contested but successful strike of the Fall River weavers against a reduction of wages in 1875 was led by women who went out after the Weavers’ Union, composed of men, had voted to accept the reduction.[26]

Many other examples of effective trade-union activity among women workers might be cited. These women’s organizations, moreover, have proved powerful factors in the fight for ten-hour laws.

The industrial schools and business colleges which began to spring up in the sixties and seventies have also furnished important aid to working women. Apprenticeship for girls has always been a farce. Even in colonial days girl apprentices were rarely taught a trade of any kind, and early in the nineteenth century apprenticeship for girls, as well as for boys, came to be generally a means of securing cheap child labor. After the industrial revolution, indeed, the condition of working women, as regards skill and efficiency, was probably distinctly lower than before they became wage earners. Industrial schools, however, have been very slow of development. Business colleges, on the other hand, began during the eighties to receive large numbers of women students, and have materially aided in opening up in the trade and transportation industries remunerative occupations for women.

Some progress, moreover, has been made through legislation. Laws compelling seats for women employees have helped wherever they have been enforced. Sanitary legislation, too, has effected certain improvements, though it is doubtful whether, on the whole, such legislation has as yet more than balanced the ill results of the greater concentration of population and the greater strain of work.

In a number of states legislation has also brought an answer to the prayer of the “unknown factory girl” of 1846,

God grant, that, in the mills, a day
May be but “Ten Hours” long.[27]

But at the same time the speed and intensity of work have been greatly increased. Until about 1836, for example, a girl weaver tended, as a rule, only two looms, and if she wished to be absent for half a day, it was customary for her to ask two of her friends to tend an extra loom apiece so she should not lose her wages. By 1876 one girl tended six and sometimes eight looms. Meanwhile, too, the speed had been increased. In 1873 it was estimated that a girl spinner tended from two to three times as many spindles as she did in 1849.[28] This tendency to multiply the amount of work to be performed in a given time has continued active. Piece wages have meanwhile fallen so that the total earnings of the operatives have not been increased, but, taking into consideration the cost of living, have rather been decreased.

In the sewing trades, too, the intensity of work has been very greatly increased by the use of the sewing machine, particularly when power-driven, by the resulting minute subdivision of labor, and by the sweating system. A certain amount of division of labor was practised, it is true, long before the invention of the sewing machine. Vest making, for example, was a separate and distinct business. But it was not until after the introduction of the machine that much progress was made in dividing the work upon a single garment. The sub-contract or sweating system, too, appears to have originated at least as early as 1844,[29] but probably did not assume an important place until introduced about 1863 by contractors for army clothing. At first, moreover, the work for the sub-contractors was nearly all done in the homes. The need, however, for capital to invest in machines and later in power to run the machines, naturally tended to gather the workers into sweat shops, into small establishments, and then into factories where every possible incentive was offered to the most intense concentration of energies and to excessive speed. As in the textile factories, too, piece-rate wages have fallen automatically with productivity so that, whatever the exertion required and the number of garments turned out, remuneration has remained near the subsistence level.

The history of women in industry is, in short, the story of the transfer of women workers from the home to the factory, from labor in harmony with their deepest ambitions to monotonous, nerve-racking work, divided and subdivided until the woman, like the traditional tailor who is called the ninth part of a man, is merely a fraction, and sometimes an almost infinitesimal fragment, of an artisan. It is a story of long hours, overwork, unwholesome conditions of life and labor and miserably low wages. It is a story of the underbidding of men bread winners by women, who have been driven by dire necessity, by a lower standard of living, or by the sense of ultimate dependence upon some man, even if he be only a hypothetical husband, to offer their services upon the bargain counter of the labor market. It is a story of the futile efforts of misdirected charity, whether that of fathers and brothers, of factory boarding houses or of philanthropic organizations, to aid the oppressed working women by offering them partial support, thereby enabling them to accept wages below the subsistence level, and still hold together soul and body. It is, finally, a story of wasted human lives, some of them wasted in the desperate effort to snatch from the world a little share of joy, and some of them wasted through disease and death or through the loss of the powers of body and mind required for efficient motherhood.

That such has been the history of women in industry is due in part to their lack of training, skill and vital interest in their work. In part it is due to excessive competition in their traditional occupations, combined with a variety of impediments, some of them rooted in established customs and ideals and some of them perhaps inherent in woman herself, to their free movement into new occupations, into the higher paid positions and into less congested communities. In part, however, it is due to the lack of appreciation of the need for legislative action.

The four great curses of working women have always been, as they are today, insufficient wages, intense and often unfair competition, overstrain due to long hours, heavy work or unhygienic conditions, and the lack of diversified skill, or of any opportunity or incentive to acquire and display ability and wisely-directed energy. The story of woman’s wage labor is, therefore, pitifully sad and in many respects discouraging. But it is the story of an industrial readjustment which is not yet near completion, and there is good reason to believe that the turning point has been reached and that better things are in store for the working woman. When we realize, however, what the economic position of women has been in the past and through how many generations large numbers of them have toiled under conditions which involved not only terrible suffering to themselves, but shocking waste to the community, it becomes evident that the present problem will not solve itself, but demands of our generation the best thought, the best energy, and the most thorough legislative regulation designed to conserve the human resources bound up in the mothers of the nation.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] In 1870, the earliest year for which statistics are available, 14.7%, and in 1900 20.6% of the female population 16 years of age and over were breadwinners.

[2] In 1870, 58.1% and in 1900 only 39.4% of all females 10 years of age and over engaged in gainful occupations were in the division “domestic and personal service.”

[3] Boston Courier, July 13, 1829.

[4] From the proceedings of the National Trades’ Union, published in the National Laborer, Nov. 12, 1836, and reprinted in the Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vol. vi, pp. 285-6.

[5] In 1870 nearly 20% of all females 10 years of age and over engaged in gainful occupations were in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits and only 1% in trade and transportation, but in 1900, while the proportion of women in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits had increased to 24.7%, the proportion in trade and transportation had increased to 9.4%.

[6] Carey, Miscellaneous Pamphlets, Phila., 1831, “To the Ladies who have undertaken to establish a House of Industry in New York,” and “To the Editor of the New York Daily Sentinel,” Select Excerpta (A collection of newspaper clippings made by Matthew Carey, now in the Ridgway Branch of the Library Company, Philadelphia), vol. 13, pp. 138-142; Appeal to the Wealthy of the Land, 3d ed., p. 15.

[7] Quoted in Carey, Miscellaneous Pamphlets, No. 12, Philadelphia, 1831.

[8] New York Daily Tribune, July 9, August 19, 1845.

[9] Fincher’s Trades’ Review, Nov. 21, 1863.

[10] Industrial Leader, July 9, 1887.

[11] Workingman’s Shield, Cincinnati, Jan. 12, 1833.

[12] Workingman’s Advocate, Chicago, June 6, 1868.

[13] Mitchell, History of the Greenbacks, p. 307.

[14] Montgomery, Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture of the United States, 1840, pp. 173-174.

[15] Montgomery, op. cit.

[16] Massachusetts House Document, no. 50, 1845, p. 3.

[17] Quoted in the Voice of Industry, a labor paper published in Lowell, Nov. 28, 1845.

[18] New York Sun, Dec. 3, 1877.

[19] Lynn Record, Jan. 1, 8, March 12, 1834.

[20] The American Workman, Boston, Aug. 7, 1869; Workingman’s Advocate, Chicago, April 28, 1866; The Revolution, N. Y., Oct. 8, 1868.

[21] Carey’s Select Excerpta, Vol. 4, pp. 11-12.

[22] Baltimore Republican, Oct. 2, 1833.

[23] Peoples’ Paper, Cincinnati, Sept. 22, Oct. 6, 1844.

[24] New York Daily Tribune, July 31, Sept. 11, 1851; June 8, 1853.

[25] Mechanics’ Free Press, Phila., Jan. 17, 1829; New York American, Jan. 5, 1829; National Gazette, Phila., Jan. 7, 1829.

[26] Baxter, C. H., History of the Fall River Strike, 1875.

[27] Voice of Industry, Feb. 20, 1846.

[28] Gray, Argument on Petition for Ten-Hour Law, 1873, pp. 21-22.

[29] In that year it was said that a man and two women working together from twelve to sixteen hours a day earned a dollar among them, and that the women, if they did not belong to the family, received each about $1.25 a week for their work. Workingman’s Advocate, July 27, 1844.

CHANGES IN WOMEN’S WORK IN BINDERIES[30]

MARY VAN KLEECK

Committee on Women’s Work, New York City

“Bookbinding is a very uncertain trade,” said a forewoman who had held her position fourteen years; “I wouldn’t advise any young girl to go into it. There is so much machinery now. Where a girl used to make eight or nine dollars, she now makes five or six, and that’s not a living. Also you never know when you’ll be laid off. Take the magazine binderies. They don’t keep the girls a full month. Ten days is their month. Twelve days is a long month. It’s a bad arrangement to do thirty days’ work in twelve. You have to pay board every week.”

Remarks like these were made by many girls employed in the bookbinding trade in New York. For the most part they did not see reasons or remedies for the conditions which they faced, but by daily experience they had learned this fact of change as it appeared in numerous guises, irregular employment, irregular hours, hit-or-miss methods of learning, cuts in wages, and the displacement of workers by the coming of machines. If their impressions be correct, more important than any photographic description of their economic position, regarded as a static thing, is an account of changes in conditions and their effect on women workers.

If we attempt to verify the statements of the workers by the official figures in the census, showing the proportion of men and women employed in binderies at successive enumerations,[31] we shall be surprised and somewhat bewildered. In 1870 30% were women, 70% were men; in 1880 39.7% were women, 60.3% were men; in 1890 48.5% were women, 51.5% were men; in 1900 51.6% were women, 48.4% were men.

This rapid shifting of the relative proportion of men and women would lead the statistician to suppose that in this trade was to be found a perfect example of the displacement of men by women. Behind the figures one seems to read the story of a struggle in which men have been the losers. Yet the comments of workers and employers, and the conditions actually witnessed in binderies in New York contradict this reading of census figures. Evidently more facts are needed in order to understand what is happening in the trade.

The bindery trade in New York employs about five thousand women, a third of all the women at work in binderies in the United States. A few are at work in hand binderies, where craftsmen of two or three centuries ago would find tools and methods not entirely unfamiliar. Others work in “edition binderies,” where machines bind books by the thousands. Others work in pamphlet binderies, or magazine binderies. The methods and conditions differ in these different branches of the trade.

Whether a book is bound by hand or machine, whether it is covered with levant or paper, whether it is sewed with linen thread or stitched with wire, certain processes are necessary. The sheets must be folded into portable size, the folded sections must be held together in proper order, and the whole must be covered. It is in the matter of the covering that the branches of the trade differ most widely. The making of the hand-bound book, designed to last longest, demands the most numerous processes. At the other extreme is the paper-covered pamphlet.

The machine method of binding books omits many processes of hand binding, and combines others into one simple operation. In hand binding, one book is the center of attention until it is finished, and each volume requires slightly different treatment. In machine binding, the method is to repeat one process thousands of times, adopting the factory system with its division of processes and its labor-saving machines. A pamphlet should be folded and its sections placed in proper order as accurately as a book bound in cloth or morocco, but as it is to be covered only with heavy paper, it requires no such careful pressing, trimming, and retrimming, rounding and backing, glueing, lining-up, drawing-in, and all the other diverse manipulations by which the artistic binder assures the preservation of the sheets in a solid and substantial cover made by hand. A periodical is a species of pamphlet, but it is distinguished by uniformity of size week after week or month after month. Thus it lends itself admirably to machine production.

Women are standing on the threshold of the bindery trade. All the work of preparing the sheets is theirs, folding, placing them in sequence, and attaching them together with paste, thread or wire. In pamphlet binding they put on the covers, but in edition binderies, they have no share at all in the important work of the forwarding department, and they enter the finishing department only in order to lay the gold on the covers and to examine and wrap the completed volumes. Will the process of change give them greater or less opportunities?

The machine is the great fact which looms large before the eyes of bindery women, when they describe changes in their trade. They accept it as they would accept a rainy day but it usually spells “out of work” for someone in the bindery, and the calamity of unemployment is more immediate and real to the workers than are the advantages of better methods of production.

The different methods of folding sheets illustrate the development of machinery. Often these different methods are found together in one workroom. For example, in an edition bindery in New York the sheets are fed into one of the six point folding machines or placed in the automatic folder or, very rarely, folded by hand. In the first case, girls sitting on high stools feed each separate sheet into the machine, placing the printed dots on needle-like points, which serve as guides, while their helpers, the learners, take out the folded sections and “jog” them straight on tables. If the pages are to be folded by the automatic machine, they are placed in the proper position under two rubber knuckles, which push them toward the folding rollers. The forewoman, in addition to her other work, keeps watch to see that the folding is properly done, but no hand work is required except to pile the sheets under the rubber fingers and to lift the folded sections from the boxes into which the machine delivers them. Between the “point” machine and the “automatic” was another invention not found in this bindery. In it the points gave place to automatic gauges, and the girl who fed it need only flick the sheet from the pile so that the machine could grip it. By dispensing with the points on which each sheet must be fitted much time was saved. Obviously the next step was to supply an automatic feeder.

The stories of displaced workers illustrate what happens when new machines are introduced. One girl had been employed in bindery work three years. As a learner, she had “knocked up” sections folded by the “point” machine. She was paid three dollars a week, and continued the same process one year. Then when a vacancy occurred, she was given a chance to operate the machine. It was not easy to learn, nor could it be done in a day or a week. At first she received a weekly wage of four dollars and fifty cents, but “advanced rapidly” until she was earning nine dollars.

One day an automatic machine appeared in the workroom and proved so successful that it was used in preference to the point folders. This girl was given hand folding, which is “terrible work.” It is hard to earn a living wage by hand folding. The worker is paid a cent or a cent and a half for folding one hundred sheets if one fold is necessary. If the sheets are large and heavy like those in a dictionary the work of folding is very exhausting, although the pay may be higher. If one is paid four cents for one hundred sheets, she must fold nearly three thousand sheets in a day or seventeen thousand five hundred in a week to earn seven dollars. Moreover, each sheet must be folded three times, and each fold creased smooth by drawing the bone folding knife across the heavy paper. This girl was paid four cents a hundred for folding the pages of an encyclopedia, but she could not earn more than seven dollars a week, in spite of her efforts to work rapidly. She left because she was not needed for hand folding and the forewoman thought that there would be no more work for “point feeders.” She advised her to learn some other process.

An employment bureau sent her to a bindery where a point feeder was needed, but the machine was not the same make as the one which she had been operating, and therefore she was not employed. After a fruitless search for work in her trade, she was employed by a manufacturer of neckwear as a learner without wages. Later, as an experienced operator, she earned seven to nine dollars a week.

Another girl had operated a point folding machine in a large edition bindery. Newer inventions were introduced, and gradually more and more work was transferred to them. This girl was a piece worker, and her wages were depressed steadily as the machine which she was operating fell into disuse. She had learned only two other processes, hand folding and filling the boxes of the gathering machine. There was no gathering machine in this bindery, and the prices for hand folding were not high enough to yield a living wage. This girl and her sister, also a bookbinder, lived alone, and were dependent on their own earnings. She had decided to look for work in another bindery, when the forewoman offered to teach her to gather by hand. Gathering is not easy work. “At first,” she said, “I was so tired at night I could hardly keep my eyes open at supper. I said yesterday I wished I had one of those things you put on your feet to measure the distance you walk; I’d like to know how many miles I walk in a day. There’s no boys to carry our work. The folding machines are at the other end of the bindery, and we carry the work the distance from one street to another. That’s a block. If there are forty sections in a book, we walk it forty times for that one book.” Nevertheless her experience in handling sheets made it possible for her to learn the new process easily, so that by the end of six months she was earning approximately ten to eleven dollars a week piece work, whereas the point folding machine had yielded her a maximum of nine or ten dollars.

An expert wirestitcher in a magazine bindery sometimes earned twenty-four dollars in the busiest week of the month when she worked overtime. When a combined gathering and wirestitching machine was introduced for binding small magazines, she was transferred to work on a weekly periodical whose pages were too large to fit the new machine. Her work was inserting during part of the week and mailing during the rest of the time. She earned ten to eleven dollars piece work, and had steadier employment than if she had continued to stitch the monthly magazine.

A gatherer, who had had long experience, “made a fuss” when the gathering machine was introduced, and was given an opportunity to operate it at a wage of eighteen dollars, the regular rate paid to men for this work. Young girls were employed to fill the boxes. The other gatherers were obliged to learn other processes in this establishment or seek work elsewhere.

The important fact common to these stories is that there was no systematic effort to prevent the maladjustment which was due not to the inefficiency of the workers but to change in industrial organization. The displaced employes had not been in a position accurately to foresee these changes; the appearance of the machine in the workroom was usually their first warning that they must seek other occupations. Time was lost in the effort to make the required readjustments. It does not appear that this loss of time was a necessary evil. On the other hand, it is evident that solutions were possible, and that the suffering of the workers was due to the fact that readjustments were matters of chance rather than forethought.

There is another fact, almost as important as the introduction of machinery, and that is the failure to introduce it. Of the 306 binderies visited in the course of this investigation, including temporary departments of printing offices, lithographing establishments and other branches of the industry, there were only nine in which no handworkers were employed.

In 234 some machine was used.
In 66 no machines were used.
In 6 the use of machines was not ascertained.
In 20 a gathering machine was found.
In 269 no gathering machine was found.
In 17 the use of a gathering machine was not ascertained.
In 112 a folding machine was found.
In 181 no folding machine was found.
In 13 the use of a folding machine was not ascertained.

Several employers discussed the use of machinery and gave their reasons for not introducing it. Small firms could not run the risk of investing capital in machines which might change soon again. It was better to be a specialist in one process and give out part of the work to other establishments. Others did not have large enough orders to keep a machine for one process in motion all day. High rents prevented others from providing larger space for machinery. Others were inert. As long as there were girls willing to take low wages for handwork, it was just as well to continue in the old way.

This failure to introduce machines brings about a diversity in methods which is very confusing to the worker. It prevents the establishment of a standard and makes necessary a different bargain in each factory. “You see every bindery is a little different,” said one woman; “when you go to a new place you never can tell what it will be like.” In so far as machines compel uniformity, they help to standardize both processes and conditions of work.

The way in which machinery breaks up a trade into establishments making a specialty of one branch of work has been noted. The other form of specialization is illustrated in the case of employes who practise only one process in the workroom. This sort of specialization does not seem to be inevitable. In a bindery in New York where there were machines for every process, “all round” workers were in demand, and those who could turn from one process to another were not laid off. But, however great may be the demand for employes experienced in more than one line of work, it is the tendency of machinery to force a worker to practise only one. If you are a piece-worker, to lose practise means to lose wages. On the other hand, the machine will not yield its maximum profit unless it be kept in constant operation. Thus while general practise in all branches of the trade brings to the worker the desirable power of adjustment to changing conditions, nevertheless the employer’s wish to keep his machines in motion, and the piece worker’s eagerness not to lose the speed which comes from constant practise, both tend to organize the bindery force in separate departments, whose workers are not interchangeable. The same demand of the machine, that it be fed with enough work to keep it in constant motion, forces the employer either to specialize in one department, or to secure more orders and to enlarge his establishment.

It is obvious that the larger the establishment, the more successful will be the attempt to keep every machine in motion throughout the working day. The feeder of the machine will then have little opportunity to practise other processes. “Establishments are now so large that a woman learns only one process,” said one superintendent; “for example, she becomes a sewer and does nothing but that.” In the light of this fact, the census figures showing the size of establishments are significant. In New York State in 1905, 53.9% of the total number of wage earners were employed in 26 binderies, 8.6% of the total number of establishments in the trade. There were 6 more binderies counted in New York State in 1905 than in 1900 (304 in 1905, 298 in 1900) while wage earners increased 11.6% or 832 in number.

Specialization shows itself in another way, namely, in an inability to turn from one kind of product to another. There is a large bindery in New York where several periodicals are bound. A girl employed there complained of the irregularity of her work. “It seems pretty hard on a girl,” she said, “to have to stay home two days in the week and then have to work so hard the other days.” Her employment was due to the different methods of binding different periodicals. Two weekly magazines were brought to the bindery on Tuesday and must be mailed on Thursday. Hand folders and wirestitchers were needed to bind them. An engineer’s magazine must be bound between Tuesday and Friday. The work on this was hand folding, gathering by machine, and sewing by machine, instead of wirestitching. Another publication was brought from the printer on Friday and issued on Monday. It was folded by machine and wirestitched. On Friday evening and Saturday there was no work for a hand folder or an operator of the sewing machine. Wednesday was the busiest day in the bindery; two magazines must be completed for the mailers on Thursday. Overtime was usual on that day. This girl could fold by hand, fill the gathering machine and operate the sewing machine. She worked from Tuesday to Friday. The issues of the magazine had been smaller than usual and her earnings were reduced. She reported that at hand folding, if there were plenty of work, she could earn seventy-five cents or a dollar a day. For filling the gathering machine the rate was eighteen cents an hour or one dollar fifty-three cents a day. But there had been so little work that her earnings in the past three weeks had been:

January 4th-10th, $3.19;
January 11th-17th, $7.75;
January 18th-26th, $3.21.

If she had been steadily employed, she could have earned five or six dollars a week as a hand folder, or nine dollars and nine cents for filling the gathering machine. “There isn’t much chance for a sewer any more in magazine binderies,” she said; “you know nearly all the magazines used to be sewed, but now they are wirestitched.”

When different kinds of orders demand different processes, the specialist must be prepared to face not only change in machinery, but change in the size or character of her employer’s orders. This sort of change may affect the organization of the workroom. Recently a magazine, which had been gathered by machine, was enlarged by doubling the size of its pages. Thereafter a force of inserters was employed, and there was no work for gatherers. It may affect the process and its demands on the worker. In one bindery a little girl was employed to cut off books for one machine, earning four dollars. “I can keep up with the machine when the books are the right size,” she said; “but it’s awful when they’re thin.” It may affect wages. One girl who had been employed to operate the sewing machine in the book department was transferred to the magazine department where her work was to look over sheets folded by machine and to fill the boxes of the gathering machine. Her pay was reduced from ten dollars to a wage varying from five to seven dollars according to the kind of work assigned to her. This transfer from work on one product to another requiring different processes was due to the fact that much of the book work formerly done by this firm was withdrawn by a large publishing house which had recently organized its own bindery.

If we trace the history of the folding machine or the gathering machine we find that with the development of automatic feeding devices the tendency is to dispense with the work of women and to employ men to care for the machines. It is not a displacement of women by men; it is rather the substitution of rubber fingers or other automatic feeders for women’s hands, and as a result a reorganization of the force.

What then is the meaning of the census figures which tell us that in 1870 30% of the bookbinders were women and 70% were men, while in 1900, 51.6% were women and 48.4% were men? In the absence of any data as to the number employed in different branches of the trade in 1870 and in 1900, the answer must be in part merely hypothetical. Judging by present tendencies in the trade the cause of change in the proportion of men and women would appear to be twofold. It has been pointed out that the share of women in hand binding is relatively small, that they do only the folding, gathering and sewing, and that the numerous processes of forwarding and finishing are usually in the hands of men. Hence in the early days of the trade, when hand binderies predominated, men were in the majority. In the development of the industry two important changes have taken place. With the introduction of machinery, many processes of forwarding and finishing were omitted, while others were combined in one simple operation. At the same time there was a great increase in the production of pamphlets, which need only to be folded, gathered, stitched and covered. The first decreased the relative number of men needed in edition binderies; the second increased the demand for the processes always performed by women. Thus it would appear that without any shifting of the line between men’s work and women’s work, the proportion of women steadily increased between 1870 and 1900.

If during the three decades between 1870 and 1900 there was a struggle between men and women and a transfer of processes to women, it seems to have left no trace on present trade conditions. The instances of this kind of transfer are so scattered as to seem the exceptions that prove the rule. The possibility of carrying on more processes than their present share in the trade does not appear to be a burning question among the women. One employer, in charge of an edition bindery, said that the issue had never been raised. “The women would just say, ‘It’s men’s work.’” One girl, who had fed a ruling machine, work requiring no skill, was asked if she had ever wished to learn to operate the machine. “Oh, no,” she said; “ruling is gentlemen’s work. There are no lady rulers. The gentlemen have their hands in the ink pots all day, and no lady wants to get her hands inked like that.” “A woman can learn to feed the ruling machine in a day,” said another; “she doesn’t need to bother with managing it.” “The smell of the glue is awful,” said another, speaking of covering; “it’s men’s work.” Another, describing a machine which could fold, gather and insert, said, “It’s men’s work,” although each one of these processes formerly had belonged to women.

Nor do employers appear to have given much thought to the question. One, an “art binder,” said that the work of women was restricted only by the trade union, and that they were capable of doing men’s work. He added, however, that a woman would find it difficult to do the work fast enough to make it profitable. Another, the superintendent of an edition bindery, said that the work of women was restricted by capacity, not by the rule of any organization; they would not have strength to handle the machines which the men operate. Another, a “job binder,” said that he employed women for temporary work only, because they were not strong enough to lift books and be “generally useful.” “If you employ a woman, you can’t give her anything but sewing,” said another job binder; “while a man can turn his hand to other things.”

But the superintendent of a magazine bindery said that there was no process in his workroom which could not be done by women. “I could put a girl to work operating the cutting machine,” he said, “if I paid her eighteen dollars a week. I could have a woman tend the large folding machines if I paid the union scale. I don’t know why I don’t, except that I don’t see any good reason why I should.”

In the course of the inquiry, there have been more numerous instances of the transfer of women’s work to men and boys. Men have been found operating folding machines and sewing machines, feeding the ruling machines and folding and sewing by hand. Boys have been found emptying boxes of the folding machine, sewing by hand, cleaning off the books after they have been stamped, and operating the wirestitching machine. The development of automatic feeding devices for the folding machine and the invention of gathering machines and covering machines have caused these processes to be transferred to men in many binderies. Indeed, the census of 1905 showed that in the five years since 1900 the number of bindery women had not increased so rapidly as the number of men, and that women no longer outnumbered men.

A woman who had fed a point folding machine and was displaced by the “automatic” tended by a man, remarked, “A man is paid according to what he knows, and not according to what he does.” It is certainly true that the tender of a large complex machine, with all the devices for feeding itself, must be one who knows rather than one who does. Women, without mechanical training, have small chance of adjusting themselves to new occupations.

In view of these changes, the future of women’s work in binderies is hard to predict. In art binding a few well-educated women have proved themselves capable of performing every process from the folding of the sheets to the tooling of the cover. There would seem to be an opportunity for growth in this branch of the trade, and it is the opinion of some binders that women could be trained to carry on this work in all its departments. In machine binderies it would seem to be largely the lack of mechanical skill, or of opportunity to acquire it, which prevents women’s adjusting themselves to new inventions.

The bookbinding trade is not an example of extraordinary industrial evils. Its significance is to be found rather in its illustration of the common lot of women in many occupations. It is not alone in binderies that conditions of industry change rapidly; that machines cause a reorganization of work and then give place to new inventions and new conditions; that speed seems to be the most essential requirement; that women work exhaustingly long hours in the busy season; that specialization appears inevitable, although the continual repetition of one process weakens the power of adjustment which is most needed in a changing environment; that irregularity of employment means loss of all or part of the wages in the dull season; and that the income at best is scarcely sufficient for self support. The experiences of bindery girls illustrate these conditions, yet they also point to several possible methods of improvement.

The encouraging facts in connection with women’s work in binderies in New York are, first, that the state has already begun a policy of deliberate intervention. It has prohibited the employment of children under fourteen years of age. It has safeguarded them between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, limiting their working hours to eight in a day. It has made increasingly strict demands regarding the sanitary conditions of factories. It has recognized the principle of limiting the hours of labor of women, however faulty its provision may be for this purpose.

Second, there is a growing interest in industrial education in public schools.

Third, more than twelve hundred bindery women in New York are members of the women’s local of the bookbinders’ union, while a league of employers has been formed to deal collectively with the union and thus to “abolish in the bindery trade the system of making individual labor contracts, and to introduce the more equitable system of forming collective labor contracts.”

The bindery girls’ experiences indicate that in so far as adaptation to change is a matter of chance, women are not profiting by changes or gaining new opportunities. On the contrary their standard of living is menaced by uncertainty. The danger to be feared is the danger of neglect. The remedy would seem to be the substitution of forethought for chance, the safeguarding of minimum standards by education, organization and legislation.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] This article is based on a chapter of a report not yet published on women’s work in binderies in New York. It is the result of an investigation carried on for the Alliance Employment Bureau of New York from the autumn of 1907 until the spring of 1909. Every bindery in the borough of Manhattan was visited, and 205 women employed in the trade were interviewed at their homes or in the office of the bureau.

[31] U. S. Census, 1900. Occupations, pp. LII, CXXXVI.

THE TRAINING OF MILLINERY WORKERS

ALICE P. BARROWS

Committee on Women’s Work, New York City

“We have no time for learners.”—“Learning is nothing but running errands.”—“It’s always experience, experience they want, and I didn’t have it, so what was the use?”—“Trade schools are no good. It is altogether different outside.” These were some of the remarks heard at the beginning of an investigation of workers in the millinery trade[32] which led to an intensive study of the training of girls for that occupation. “Industrial education” is a large, general term. What it meant to the workers in one trade throws much light upon it, and suggests a method for dealing with a subject which is at present rather topheavy with theories.

Probably no trade in which girls are employed could illustrate better than millinery the present status of industrial education for girls in New York City. There are more women in this trade than in any other except the clothing trades. There are more classes in millinery than in any other women’s trade except dress making. It is one of the first industrial subjects introduced into the school curriculum. Yet an investigation of workers in millinery showed that these classes were being formed when there was little information upon the most important factors in the problem of trade training—that is, the girls, the schools where they had received their previous instruction, and the trade in which they worked.

It is not easy to describe the millinery trade clearly because the essence of the description is to show that it cannot be made clear. If the next few paragraphs leave the reader with an impression of chaos then the description has been successful. “The millinery trade is about twenty-five different trades,” said one employer. This statement does not give a true impression because it does not show that each branch overlaps and penetrates into every other in a most confusing manner. Millinery shops are of all types, in all parts of the city, with all kinds of work. Broadly speaking, the establishments can be divided into wholesale and retail, and in general it may be said that in wholesale shops “it’s speed we want,” and in retail, “careful, neat hand workers.” Actually, such definitions of the trade are not true to fact. Every variety of hat is made in all kinds of ways whether manufactured at wholesale or retail. There are “trimmed hats” and “untrimmed hats,” “ready-to-wear hats,” “artistic millinery,” “home-made hats,” and “tailor hats.” At first glance, it would seem that the trade is an excellent example of the subdivision of labor. The important point to the worker, however, is that sometimes it illustrates this subdivision of labor and sometimes it does not. Trimmed hats are found in the same establishments with untrimmed and ready-to-wear hats, or with only one or with neither. Artistic millinery is found in exclusive private shops and in sweatshops. Tailor hats are made in the same establishments with trimmed and untrimmed hats or in shops by themselves. Home-made hats are found to be contract work for great factories, or “neighborhood work for a few friends.”

Naturally, this lack of system and standard is reflected in the demands made upon workers. In general, it may be said that there are four stages in making a hat,—designing it, making the frame, covering the frame, and trimming it. And in general it may be stated that there are seven kinds of positions open to a girl looking for work in millinery. She may be a learner, an improver, a preparer, a milliner, a copyist, a trimmer, or a designer. But when a girl starts to look for work as preparer, for example, she may turn toward a Fifth avenue shop where she must be a “neat worker” who can make frames accurately by hand, and “have an eye for color and form”; here she may advance from preparer to designer; or she may find her way into a shop a few doors away where she does not need to make frames because they have two girls who make all the frames; or she may apply at a department store where in one department she will have an opportunity to do all the kinds of work found in the Fifth avenue shop, “only not so particular”; or she may go into the ready-to-wear department where “you never make a frame but cover with straw and stick on a rosette”; or she may join the throng of girls pouring into a Broadway wholesale house, and as she walks up the stairs she may stop at any one of the five floors and enter a “millinery establishment.” But in one she will be asked to do straw operating all day; in another to make dozens of wire frames a day; in another to trim hats by the dozen and never make frames; in another to work at nothing but millinery ornaments. In the autumn of 1908 she finds it difficult to get a position as preparer because “the machines are driving them out”; and in the spring of 1909 preparers are in great demand because “the styles have changed this season, and hand work has come back this month.” In any case, she thinks herself fortunate if she works more than six months a year at $5 a week in not more than three or four positions. No prophecy can be made about the kind of skill which will be demanded in any shop.

But if no two establishments are alike in methods of work, they all have one characteristic in common. The slack season descends upon employers and workers alike. Taking the employers’ statements, the millinery year is at best only seven or eight months long, divided into fall and spring seasons. The fall season, starting on Division street and lower Broadway in July, gains headway in August, rushes up Fifth avenue in September, and then gradually spreads out north and south, east and west, lingering for the longest time where the current is least swift. Third avenue and Fifth avenue, Grand street and Harlem cannot buy early and all at once. In any case, the season disappears before Christmas. The spring season begins in January, and gains speed until the Easter rush, after which workers are laid off in great numbers.

“It is terrifically hard work while it lasts,” said one employer. If it is terrifically hard work for the employer with some capital, credit and business shrewdness, it is obvious that to the girl with no capital, no credit and no knowledge of trade conditions except as represented by her place, “laid off—slack” means an even more serious loss. According to census figures, 64% of the women employed in retail establishments are out of work in January. In August 65% are unemployed. In September, the busy wholesale month in the autumn, there is no room for 11% of the number needed in the spring. In June 45% are out of work. Of 639 positions in millinery held by the group of workers investigated, 447, or more than two-thirds, lasted less than six months. Although they sometimes found work in other trades when laid off from millinery, 60% of those who could estimate the time lost were unemployed more than three months in the year. “Millinery gets on my nerves,” said one girl, “because there is always the worry about the seasons.”

The following is a calendar of a girl who had worked in millinery for a year. She was particularly fortunate in getting subsidiary work.

August—Worked 3 weeks at millinery on Third avenue. Worked 1 week on Broadway. Laid off—slack.

September—Looked for work.

October—Worked at millinery on Sixth avenue 4 weeks.

November—Worked at millinery on Sixth avenue 3 weeks. Laid off—slack. Sold candy one week. Left to return to millinery.

December—Worked 3 weeks at millinery on Sixth avenue until the day before Christmas. Laid off—slack. Sold candy one week.

January—Sold candy one month.

February—Returned to millinery.

March—Worked at millinery.

April—Worked at millinery.

May—Worked at millinery. Laid off—slack.

June—Looked for work.

July—Looked for work.

The season also has its effect upon workroom conditions. “It’s rush, rush all the time and then nothing to do.” In 62% of the shops investigated the girls worked nine to nine and a half hours daily. A large majority had a working week of fifty to fifty-five hours. In only eight was the week less than fifty hours. In 86% of the shops the day’s work lasted regularly until six o’clock or later—an important fact when the question of evening school work is to be considered. 71% of the girls worked overtime in the busy season. During the overtime season the total hours varied from less than ten up to fifteen a day.

The wages which workers in millinery receive are not such as to compensate them for short seasons and long hours. The average wage is between seven and eight dollars. Considered from the point of view of yearly income, the weekly average of seven or eight dollars is reduced 25 or even 50% by the slack season. A liberal estimate of the average wage, allowing for loss of time, would be five dollars. But the keynote of the wage question in millinery is lack of standard. The workers have no trade union large enough to sign contracts with employers. The only bargain is the individual bargain. If the method of payment is by the piece, “you never know what you are going to get.” As one girl expressed it: “Piece work is bad because you are always fussing about the price. At that French place, they said they’d pay you seventeen cents a hat but at the end of the week you would find they had made it fourteen cents. It was awful. You had the same fight every season over the prices. Instead of giving you what you ought to get they’d say to themselves, ‘We’ll make it $2.50 a dozen, and if they will work for that, all right; if not we can make it $3.’”

A tabulation of wages received in 738 positions held by 201 workers shows what a variation in wages there is in positions called by the same name. The variations are as follows:

Learners: 0 to $5.
Improvers: less than $2 to $8.
Preparers: $2 to $15.
Milliners: $4 to $12 or $15.
Makers: $4 to $9.
Copyists: $4 to $15 or more.
Trimmers: $6 to $25 or more.

Facts such as these have been used in other countries as an argument for the establishment of minimum wage boards in millinery. Public opinion in this country does not yet demand such action.

If these facts about conditions in the millinery trade prove anything they prove that “learning to make hats” is a very different thing from “learning the millinery trade.” The experiences of millinery workers would seem to suggest that in modern times, perhaps even more than in the days when industrial conditions were less complex, apprenticeship must include learning the trade as well as one process in it, if the workers are to be efficient. A milliner who does not know that millinery means machine work and hand work, speed work and careful work, that the seasons are irregular, that the wages are unstandardized, and that conditions are constantly changing, is in no position to become efficient. Such knowledge is part of her job, and it is as necessary that she should understand her various relations to the trade in which she is working as that she should master the technique of the machine that she is operating. Power to adapt to different types of establishments, to varied kinds of work, and to fluctuating seasons, rather than specialization in a particular process, is a practical necessity for the girl who would earn her own living. According to the testimony of both workers and employers she does not get this power in the trade itself; employers have no time for learners, and the girl finds that “learning is nothing but running errands.” According to the same testimony, the schools do not know the trade and do not prepare their pupils to do any one thing well. In order to test the truth of these criticisms, millinery classes were investigated in the course of this study, and their graduates were interviewed.

The visits to these classes were profitable in three ways. They brought out the prevalent ideals in regard to women’s work, the tendencies in the past with respect to methods of teaching trade courses, and the possible questions which need to be considered in plans for the industrial education of girls. Half the group of workers investigated had attended classes where millinery was taught. There were sixty-two of these classes in the city, of which only three aimed specifically to prepare girls for trade. The others gave courses “for home and trade use”; that is, they aimed primarily to teach women to make their own hats, but girls could also enter the class if they wished to prepare for trade.

The three schools which aimed at trade preparation dealt with three different types of girls. One was founded in order to prepare the fourteen-year-old girl who is forced to leave school at the earliest time allowed by law; one would take no girls under sixteen years of age; the third gave training to immigrant girls of any age. They were all alike in that they knew little about their pupils’ previous schooling or their experiences after they went to work. Only one attempted to make any investigation of trade conditions. In regard to methods of instruction, only one sifted its applicants by requiring them to state whether they intended to work at the trade. Only one tried to eliminate the unfit by taking girls on trial. Only one attempted any instruction in trade conditions, and that one found it difficult to give such instruction to the type of girls with whom it was dealing. The aim of this “academic” work was to supply the lack in the general education of the fourteen-year-old girl. To do this, courses in English, arithmetic and civics were given. Civics included “industrial history, cultivation, manufacture, and transportation of materials, citizenship, commerce, philanthropics, history of Manhattan and social ethics.” The time allotted to English, arithmetic and civics was one hour a week for each. The course was six months long. All preparation on these subjects had to be done by the pupils during this one hour in the classroom. The graduates from only one of these schools had anything favorable to say about the work. After visiting the schools and following up the experience of the pupils who had taken courses there, it was easy to understand why the girls thought that it was “altogether different outside.” On the other hand, daily indications of the complexities of the conditions “outside” gave us a sympathetic realization of the size of the task which the schools had undertaken.

As classes in industrial training will ultimately find their way into the public school system, not only is it important to understand the aims and methods of the trade schools, but it is also desirable to know what has already been done in the way of industrial training in the public schools. At the time of this investigation millinery was taught in forty-five evening schools in New York City. Thirty-nine of these were elementary schools. The investigation of these schools was profitable because it threw light upon the function of evening schools, their connection with day schools, their conception of the aim of industrial courses for girls, and finally the effect of these ideals upon the actual formation of a trade class in one evening school.

The school buildings are very imposing. One finds no difficulty in locating them at night even at a distance of two or three blocks. A great dark building occupying about one-third of the noisy, crowded block, gives notice to the visitor that she is headed in the right direction. The school always looks impressively quiet and remote. Few windows are lighted and only one door is open. After picking her way through crowded streets, stepping around small children, narrowly avoiding collisions with innumerable boys and girls darting in and out among the crowds, the visitor finds the inside of the building quite deserted, and her footsteps echo in the great, gray, empty basement. She can find no one to direct her to the principal, but presently seeing a few girls straggling up the fireproof stairs she follows them to the assembly room, a waste of empty desks. At one end is a long desk where the principal is seated. Often she has been teaching all day in a day school. Soon a girl enters slowly and hesitatingly, and slips into a chair near the door, where she stays until the principal turns to her with, “What can I do for you?” Bashfully the girl comes up to the desk and whispers down into it that she wants “to take up millinery.”—“Your name?”—“Sadie Schwartz.”—“Address?”—“— East ——.”—“Age?”—“Fourteen.”—“Have you left school?”—“Yes.” Sometimes the question is asked, “Are you working? At what occupation?” Sometimes it is omitted. Then the principal concludes, “Here are two cards. Keep one and give one to the teacher. The millinery class is down the hall on the right-hand side.” This is the extent of the consultation before entering a class.

After the girl has been in the class a short time, she learns that most of the girls are taking the course so that they can learn to make their own hats. More and more girls come as Easter approaches. They can stay as long as they like, and go when they like. They can even keep on making their own hats for two years or more.

“It is rather unfortunate that the board of education supplies the materials,” said one teacher; “because I have known of cases where the girls come simply to get a hat and then leave. For example, I know of one case where a girl at the end of a few weeks asked to be transferred from the millinery class and when asked her reason, said that she wanted to go into dressmaking because ‘I’ve got a hat and now I would like a dress to match.’”

“You don’t learn anything in evening school,” said a girl who was in trade; “every night it is a little on a hat, and one hat a year.”

During the year 1908-9, a well-known educator asked the following question in a course upon social life and the school curriculum: “Upon what questions in the community would you desire to be informed so as to adapt a course of study to the social conditions in that community?” That question sums up the problem of industrial education. The schools which have just been described exemplify some of the chief methods advocated at present for making this adaptation. A study of them also shows what happens when there is little or no information, or desire for information, about the social conditions of the community in which such courses are being given. One of the best known city superintendents of schools writes in a recent report:[33]

“The establishment of trade schools by the public school authorities is now a matter of discussion in every manufacturing city in the land. Manufacturers and philanthropists alike are clamoring for the introduction of industrial training into the public schools.... The true reason for industrial education lies ... in the fundamental conception of modern education—to fit the child for his life environment.... In the public discussion of this subject there has been much exhortation, much denunciation, much eloquence, but little practical wisdom or suggestion.”

Such a quotation is itself full of practical wisdom, for it goes to the root of the difficulty in stating that the object of education is to fit the child for his environment. Yet if this is the purpose of schools, it is obvious that accurate knowledge of the environment is a first essential in educational plans. This raises a fundamental question in regard to trade-school training. Should we not start a department of investigation even before we form the trade school, and should we not continue such a department as long as the school continues? If the trade schools which everyone is advocating are not based upon accurate knowledge of the conditions they have to meet, it seems safe to say that they will result only in the disappointment of the girls, the increased exasperation of the employers, and the humiliation of the schools. Familiarity with some establishments, and “being in touch” with trade is not knowledge of trade conditions. Trade is complex. Preparing for trade is like preparing for the weather. You never can tell what is going to happen next. Weather prophets are not infallible, yet experience has proved that it is desirable at least to attempt to work out a scientific method of studying weather conditions. There seems to be no good reason why we should not apply scientific methods to the study of social as well as physical conditions.

For instance, investigation of the millinery trade proved it to be an industry in process of transition from home to factory, with all the confusion in processes that is involved in such transition. Yet only one of all the schools studied made any attempt to discover the demands of this trade. Investigation showed that an understanding of industrial conditions is as necessary for efficiency as ability to make a hat. Yet only one school tried to give an understanding of those conditions, and the time given to such study was totally inadequate. Investigation proved that one cause contributing to short seasons and low wages was the oversupply of workers. Yet there were more classes in millinery than in any other trade in the city, except one. Investigation revealed the fact that instead of specialization, the ability to adapt is of primary importance to the worker. Yet psychology and practical experience alike make it clear that such ability cannot be given in a six months’ course.

This brings us to the second factor in the problem about which there is little information—the workers themselves. When the whole subject of industrial training is in such an experimental stage it is unfortunate that only one school has attempted to keep systematic records of pupils. To fail to keep such records is like trying to erect a building with no knowledge of the materials. If such records had been kept it is probable that the attempt to train immature fourteen-year-old girls in six months for a trade like millinery would have been abandoned long ago. It is even possible that the advocates of trade education would have been driven to realize that efficiency in industry, as in everything else, depends not upon a desk knowledge of the three R’s, but upon a sound, vital, general education which gives power of adaptation. Even a slight acquaintance with women workers in industry brings out the fact that they lack this power, which comes from training of the mind. Why have girls been permitted to leave school without receiving this training? If the first essential for fitness to survive in modern life is the adaptability which comes from a well-trained mind, and if the function of the schools is to develop such fitness, are they giving the required training? If not, can the curriculum be changed so that the general schooling shall be more real, more connected with life? It is a matter of concern to school authorities that so many children leave the grammar school before graduation. Out of 201 millinery workers, 104 began work when they were between fourteen and sixteen years of age; eight started before they were fourteen; twenty left school before they were fourteen. Of these 201 girls, 152 attended school in New York City. Of these 152, eight attended parochial schools, 144 public schools. Of the 144 who attended public schools, only thirty-three were graduated. Such facts are used as arguments for starting trade schools which shall prepare girls and boys for their life work. To some of us they seem to be cogent reasons for trying to discover how these grammar schools can be revitalized so that the graduates will be prepared for life. It is said that the pupils leave because they do not see that school is preparing them to earn their own living. The one hundred millinery workers who had studied in trade classes said that the instruction there did not help them to earn their living.

Where does the fault lie? A study of one trade in which girls are working suggests that reorganization of general education is the most vital factor in industrial training. This suggestion may be mistaken; for it is based upon knowledge of conditions in only three trades for women—millinery, and two others investigated at the same time. It is evident that the question can be conclusively answered only after exhaustive study of girls, of schools and of trades. From the point of view of manufacturers, workers and educators, such investigation is of primary importance. To those who are eager for plans by which individual girls may get training immediately, the comparatively slow gathering of information does not appeal. Nevertheless, such information will have to be obtained sometime. Such investigation should be systematically made. It is not easy, but it is practicable, if we reduce the problem to its simplest terms. We should divide up each city into comparatively small units for investigation, the village communities, as it were, that make up the city. By taking the schools as the center of these communities and by studying the pupils—their personal and family history, their education, and their experiences in trade,—it would be possible to collect information which would give a sound basis either for reconstruction of the general school education or for the formation of a system of trade schools.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] This article is based upon a report not yet published on women at work in millinery shops in New York City. It is the result of an investigation carried on for the Alliance Employment Bureau of New York from the autumn of 1907 until the spring of 1909. Two hundred millinery girls were interviewed at home or in the office of the bureau and questioned about their wages, hours, trade history, regularity of employment and training for work. Their names were secured from girls’ clubs, trade classes, employment bureaus, and fellow-workers. More than two hundred shops, including all in which the two hundred workers had been employed since July, 1907, were visited and questions asked about training of learners, wages, hours, seasons, demand and opportunities for experts, and the employer’s opinion of trade-school training.

[33] Tenth Annual Report of the City Superintendent of Schools, New York City, July, 1908.

TRAINING FOR SALESMANSHIP

ELIZABETH B. BUTLER

Bureau of Social Research, New York City

Since women began to be employed in mercantile houses, the public has gradually become accustomed to inefficient service. Since their employment has been extended from a few departments to most of the departments, and since public school children and ambitious factory girls alike have competed by thousands for department-store positions, the public has gradually accepted this kind of inefficiency as characteristic of retail employes. Yet at times customers grow restive. At times the marginal increase in buying which can be stimulated by intelligent service is abruptly checked by the absence of intelligence. This is a serious matter to competing concerns. The volume of sales is influenced not only by the quality of goods and the appearance of the store, but by fractional differences in courtesy and understanding. How to acquire employes with such qualities, or how to develop such qualities in employes, has become a managerial issue.

The acuteness of this issue is illustrated in the everyday experience of the department-store customer. You go into a store with the intent, we will say, of buying a linen collar. Having discovered the counter where such articles are for sale, you make toward it and glance with an unkindly eye over the stock displayed. Such collars as hang suspended from the steel display form have eyelet decorations too obviously machine made, whereas your desire is for something less pretentious and more genuine. You attract the eye of a young person and make known your wants. “I don’t wait on collars,” she replies; “the saleslady at the end of the counter will attend to you.” Thereupon you pursue “the saleslady at the end of the counter,” who has been conversing with her friend who “waits on neckwear.” You ask her if she can wait on you, and somewhat reluctantly she returns. Signifying your taste as to collars, you casually observe the expression of disapproval with which she pulls out a box and sets it before you. She waits in silence while you look over the contents of the box. If you ask her the price, she tells you but vouchsafes no further information. Then with a desire to solve the situation rapidly, you seize the first collar that appears to you at all suitable, order half a dozen like it, look at your watch and discover that over twenty minutes have passed since you entered the store, receive your change and depart.

You have your collars, and your unreasoned feeling is that you have secured them as against the enemy. You have a sense of having been actively combating a negative opposition to something, an indifference not fundamentally hostile perhaps, but translated into hostility because of your too definite intention to purchase a specific article. You reflect that had you removed two of the much-eyeletted collars from the steel display form and handed them to the lady with the remark that you would take them, she might have viewed your interruption of her conversation with more complacency. But you required her to lift down a box. Your choice was not to her taste. Your order might perhaps have been called conservative. The result was a perceptible variation in the density of the atmospheric waves between the saleslady and yourself.

Yet on further reflection you realize that after all your saleslady cannot be held accountable for duties which she does not understand. You have wanted attention, advice, understanding service. After some difficulty you have secured a collar. The saleslady thought that you were quite capable of knowing what you wanted and choosing it for yourself. In the concrete both the saleslady and yourself have meant the same thing. Where you have differed was in your interpretation of ways of reaching the concrete. You have wanted an expert; you have met a “counterserver.”

And what but “counterservice” can we expect of the thousands of young girls drafted yearly into this occupation? Neither training nor experience is required of them. They may be and are both casual and unskilled. Saleswomen longer with the house show the newcomer where stock is kept, and if kindly disposed, give her suggestions as to the personal peculiarities of the buyer. Some one tells her the custom of the house as regards saleschecks and other records, and with this preliminary information she sallies forth to represent her employer to his clientele. Her time is occupied by her duties so far as she understands them. She stays in the department to which she is assigned, keeps her stock dusted and in order, tries to remember what new stock comes in, and when customers are around does not converse more than necessary with her co-workers; if a customer asks for something that is in stock, she produces it and awaits decision; if a customer asks for something that is not in stock, she states the fact.

She may not be notably careless and inattentive. Floor-walkers and department managers seek constantly to eradicate careless employes, to arouse in their force a feeling of loyalty, a desire to give conscientious service. It is more difficult to set forth a notion of adequate service. When a girl is doing her best, it is not always clear how to suggest to her that her “best” might be higher in standard, that instead of merely producing an article asked for, she might be of real service to the customer in suggestions and in information about the stock, that in other words she might be an expert instead of a mere counter attendant. To quote from a recent book:[34] “For a salesperson to know what gives the article its price value, whether it is style, novelty, utility, bulk, rarity of material, to know under what circumstances it can best be used as a staple, for beauty, for use, for occasional service, for steady wear—and many points other than these—and to adapt this knowledge to each customer—is to become a specialist and to be sought after for advice as the man or woman in the private office is, not to be approached as a mere lackey to pass goods back and forth over the counter.”

But how is this expert knowledge to be obtained? How is the salesperson to learn to recognize types of personality, to grasp what selling points make the strongest appeal to each type—to whom she should emphasize utility, to whom beauty, to whom durability—and by what personal qualities she may gain the attention of each type, focus attention till it becomes interest and finally clinch the decision to buy? How is she to be taught the use of her own personality as a business asset?

Nothing in the past experience of most saleswomen can give them a clue as to the “how.” Few have bought extensively, and few have an environment which would make them judges of quality. Even inborn taste must suffer through inexperience. The saleswoman cannot rely on her own judgment for the ability to give expert advice, and who is there to teach her? Her co-workers are not competent, the floor managers are not competent, the department buyers are too busy. As to understanding her customers, she is still more hopelessly without a source of instruction. She continues to do her best, and her best is ineffective.

Her work is routine, monotonous. She regards it and herself mechanically. As an unskilled laborer, she can command no more than the wages of unskilled labor. She finds herself confronted with the need of dressing and appearing “like a lady,” when her pay, which represents the worth of her service to her employer, cannot be regarded as more than a supplementary wage. Advancement is slow, and the limit to advancement appears to the majority inexorable. Low wages in themselves tend to chill and depress ambition. The girl’s mechanical attitude toward her work is intensified. Lack of training, low wages, lack of opportunity for training: these characteristics of the situation form a circle within which the saleswoman stands bound.

And not only saleswomen, but customers and merchants suffer from this state of things. Constantly annoyed by the inadequacy of their force, some merchants have already made a beginning toward stemming the tide of unsatisfactory service. Many a store now has classes to instruct newcomers for an hour or so each morning in making out saleschecks, and to inform them as to the policy of the store. In some cases regular morning talks for a half hour every day must be attended by new and old hands as well, with the idea that matters of common interest may be freely discussed and that ideas of loyalty may thereby be instilled. Yet while these classes tend to produce right feeling toward the work and hence are fundamentally useful, they represent only the germ of vocational training.

For that is what saleswomen need—training for their particular occupation, instruction in the definite principles of applied psychology upon which their day’s work is based. What form such instruction will ultimately take is still matter for conjecture. No one will assert that experiments now in the making are final, but simply that by their initial success they point the way to more conclusive organization. It may be of interest if a statement is made here about the training for saleswomen now offered in Boston and New York.

The Boston experiment was begun in 1905 under the auspices of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union. A class was started with eight young girls who were given lectures and some practise selling in the food salesroom and handwork shop of the Union, but after their three months’ course those who found store positions had to go in as stock or cash girls. In January, 1906, when the second class was started, the coöperation of one store was secured. The Union class was allowed to sell in the store on Mondays for the experience and a small compensation, and the firm expressed a willingness to consider promising candidates for positions in their store. Yet as the school had nothing definite to offer its pupils, it failed to attract the type of girl most wanted by the stores.

It was felt that more coöperation with the stores was necessary. The plans of the course were explained to several of the merchants and the coöperation of six leading stores was obtained to the extent that the superintendents formed an advisory committee, meeting once a month with the president of the Union and the director of the class for conference. The policy, as planned with the advisory committee, was that candidates should be sent to the Union class from the stores, and admitted to the school if approved by the director. After one month in the class, candidates were promised store experience in the store which had accepted them, on Mondays, and the stores paid for this service $1 per day. They were also guaranteed permanent positions in these stores at the close of the course, if their work was satisfactory after one month’s probation.[35] On this basis, a class with sixteen pupils opened in October, 1906. It was found, however, that more store experience was necessary for the best results, and the time schedule was accordingly changed so that every day from 8.30 to 11. and from 4.30 to 5.30 the pupils were in school and the rest of the day in the stores. This half-time work was paid for by the stores at the rate of three dollars a week.

When the next class opened in February, there were nearly one hundred applicants, from which the school selected twenty-one, the limit of the class room. Many applicants gave up positions which they had already secured, for the sake of the training, and others for whom there was then no room, filled a waiting list. Since then, the school has been busy making history. The following statements by Mrs. Prince, director of the school, explain the most recent changes: “At first, the stores paid the girls $3 a week for half time, but since last September (1908), the girls have been given full-time wages and allowed the three hours each morning for three months of training. The stores found the graduates so efficient that they cordially made this concession, and at the same time asked if I would choose candidates from the stores. This I do now, going to the superintendents’ offices and interviewing the girls there.

“The girls chosen are usually from the bargain counter, or those who are to be promoted from cash and bundle work or those who have shown good spirit, but who have gone to work at fourteen years and lack training and right standards. Sometimes girls who have just entered the store are chosen. Wages of candidates range from $5 to $8, but at the end of the course a graduate is guaranteed $6 as a minimum wage, and her advance depends upon her own ability.

“The girls are in the school every day from 8.30 to 11.30; then after an hour for luncheon, they go to the stores for the rest of the day, that is, from 12.30 to 5.30. My plan with the class is to take one big subject every day: all lectures are reviewed orally and the girls write all significant points in note books.”

The subject matter of the class, planned with the view of making efficient, successful saleswomen, has emphasized five main lines of study: 1. The development of a wholesome, attractive personality. Hygiene, especially personal hygiene. This includes study of daily menus for saleswomen, ventilation, bathing, sleep, exercise, recreation. 2. The general system of stores: sales-slip practice, store directory, business arithmetic, business forms and cash accounts, lectures. 3. Qualities of stock: color, design, textiles. 4. Selling as a science: discussion of store experiences, talks on salesmanship, such as attitude to firm, customer, and fellow-employe, demonstration of selling in class, salesmanship lectures. 5. The right attitude toward the work.

The following schedule gives the present arrangement of lectures and talks in the Boston school:

The New York experiment is of more recent date, and has shaped itself differently. Its beginnings in the fall of 1908 are due chiefly to the efforts of Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, who persuaded the officers of the board of education to introduce a class in salesmanship in the public night schools, and to Miss Diana Hirschler, formerly welfare secretary in Wm. Filene’s Sons Co. of Boston, who conducted the class. The class was intended primarily for saleswomen already at work who wished to equip themselves more thoroughly. The first night there was not a single enrolment, but as news of the course spread, the attendance reached an average of twenty-five. This in itself—this attendance night after night of girls already tired by their work during the day—is evidence of the strong appeal made by the class.

Unlike most other kinds of industrial training, salesmanship classes require neither tools nor special equipment. They do require teachers and a text book. While Miss Hirschler was teaching her classes, she began writing a text book and making plans for training other teachers so that the value of the class might be extended to more than could be enrolled for her instruction. The newly-established New York Institute of Mercantile Training engaged Miss Hirschler and adopted her plans. Classes for window trimmers and sign writers were already under way. To them were added offices and staff for a school of salesmanship. It was a moot point for a while whether classes for salespersons should actually be held in these offices, or whether the scope of the work should be extended to reach the present directors of salespersons,—the store superintendents who now in so many cases hold morning classes for sections of their force. This latter course, Miss Hirschler decided, would be the best one to follow. Whereas by the former plan she might make more efficient a handful out of the thousands of salespeople in this one city, by the latter plan she would indirectly be reaching thousands not only in New York, but in as many other American cities as had stores to coöperate with her. The essential thing, she felt, was to train teachers. At present there were few even would-be teachers. While we were waiting for them, we might use the present situation by helping to make more efficient the involuntary teachers, the men at the head of stores who now ineffectually seek to grapple with the difficulties of their selling force.

Accordingly a correspondence school was started for store superintendents. While the general outline of the text book is followed, this course is adapted individually to each student. In a number of cases Miss Hirschler has visited the stores, personally looked over the situation, and made suggestions as to the organization of salesmanship classes, the selection of applicants, and the best methods of securing the coöperation of the salespeople. Enrolled in her course are store superintendents from New England, the South and the far West. Each one of these men is in turn reaching hundreds, sometimes thousands of salespeople.

The next step neither Miss Hirschler nor we who are the consumers can prophesy with certainty. Yet it seems reasonable to expect that in time store officials, who at best can give only a small part of their time to teaching their employes, will wish to be relieved of this task by professional teachers of salesmanship who, like other vocational teachers, give all their time to their work. By that time we shall have passed out of the period of experimentation. We shall have reached a point where we can say with definiteness what part of the student’s time should be spent in the study of textiles, what part in the study of color and design, what part in the study of applied psychology. We shall have reached a conclusion as to the relative value of lecture work and practise selling.

Selling goods may thus have become as definite and recognized a vocation as plumbing or dressmaking. Thus defined and established, this vocation which could have been taught in the beginning only by the faith and courage of private interests, may come to its own by recognition among the vocational day courses now being started in our system of public instruction.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] The Art of Retail Selling, by Diana Hirschler. New York Institute of Mercantile Training, 1909.

[35] Training for Saleswomen, by Lucinda W. Prince. Federation Bulletin, February, 1908.

THE EDUCATION AND EFFICIENCY OF WOMEN[36]

EMILY GREENE BALCH

Wellesley College

Women in modern production are a misfit. They are like the dog that puzzled the expressman in the classic story. “He don’t know where he wants to go, and we don’t know where he wants to go; he’s eat his tag.”

Is not this sense of misadjustment, of being astray, due to the fact that, industry being arranged to meet its end of private profits, human nature has to adjust itself as best it can to industrial conditions, instead of industrial conditions adjusting themselves to human nature? The troubles that result from this system make themselves felt everywhere, among men as well as women, but most seriously among the weakest competitors, and especially among wage-earning children and women.

My subject is education and efficiency, but I do not propose to go over the well-worn arguments to show that we ought at once to establish schools for trade training. It is now pretty generally understood that this is true. I want to raise a more far-reaching question—can women be economically efficient in production, production being organized as it now is?

The lives of both men and women have certain permanent aspects; whether in the stone age or in the twentieth century they must rear their descendants, they must between them produce material support for themselves and for the growing generation, they must lead their own personal lives and feed and discipline and “invite” their own souls and minds. There is always this trinity of their racial, their economic, and their inner life.

But while both men and women have this three-fold function, the differences in their racial life involve far-reaching economic consequences. Motherhood is an occupation as fatherhood is not, and this deeply affects woman’s industry. Even in the primitive world, where industry is largely a household matter for all, woman’s activity is bound to the hearthstone more closely than man’s, for the bearing and rearing of children is intertwined with all her other business, and conditions it. This makes housework with all its ramifications and outlying branches the great feminine profession throughout the ages.

Consequently when industry, passing from the control of the worker to that of the owner of the business, assumed its modern specialized form and took work and workers out of the home into the factory and workshop, this change, carried out with no regard for the results on the workers themselves, affected the lives of women in ways which are not paralleled in those of men. Besides other consequences, it greatly lessened woman’s efficiency both as mother and as worker.

Under the old régime there was an effective unity in women’s lives, an organic harmony of function with function. The claims of motherhood and of work upon woman harmonized, because she herself was in control and arranged the conditions of her industry to fit her duties and disabilities as wife and mother. For herself and for her household she planned the various tasks with a view to strength, convenience and training for development. Besides the unity of motherhood and industry, there was unity of education and industry, of preparation and practise. The girl was essentially an apprentice of the housekeeper, whether mother or mistress. Her lessons were indistinguishable from her labor. From a little child she was working as well as learning, and also till she was at the head of her own home she was learning as well as working. Read Solomon’s description, or even better, Xenophon’s charming sketch in his Economicus, for a picture of feminine household industry on a rather large scale. We need not conceive this stage as ideal. The point is that there was a natural adjustment of work to worker which modern industry undermines in three ways—in separating work from the home, in separating work from education, and in shaping the conditions and concomitants of work without regard to the powers, tastes, or needs of the workers.

Before endeavoring to analyze these effects let us consider various types of modern women in whose lives all the different difficulties interact, shaping their fate, too often, in most strange and inharmonious fashion.

First let us take the professional woman. If she leads a single life she cuts the Gordian knot of the incompatibility of work and marriage. This is simple, certainly, but quite abnormal. While it is doubtless a happy solution in many cases, it is certainly undesirable that large numbers of women should adopt it, especially if we may suppose that a class of celibate professional women withdraw from the race the inheritance of some degree of picked intellectual ability. It has been argued, by Sidney Webb if I remember rightly, that the rule disqualifying married women for public-school teaching tends to keep a selected group of women out of marriage; a practical exclusion from marriage of women who succeed in medicine, law, architecture, art and business would be, from this point of view, at least an equally serious loss as regards quality if not quantity.

If a woman is able to combine professional activity with marriage and motherhood, as some have been so brilliantly successful in doing, this is because professional work is often more like the old housework than is factory work as regards elasticity and the possible adjustment of time and amount of work to personal convenience.

As our second group let us take well-to-do married women who command domestic service and nursery assistance. Such a woman has the maximum of freedom in ordering her own life, yet, even so, under the mould of the general situation, how chaotic her life history is likely to be. Suppose that she is at a finishing school till she “comes out” in society, or that she goes to college and at twenty-two comes home again to live, not choosing a professional career. Although she is only half conscious of the situation she practically waits for a few years to see whether or not marriage is to be her lot. Probably her natural mates are not yet financially able to offer marriage, and, again, more or less conscious of her rather humiliating situation, she becomes seriously and definitely interested in some specialized activity. By distinct preparation or simply by practise she fits herself for the work that she has found to do; then, just as she is well engaged in this work, the critical moment arrives and she marries. For some years her profession is motherhood, though this is the last thing for which she has thought of fitting herself; and then again her life takes a new turn. Her children are no longer children; they are at college or at work or married; or her daughter at home, perhaps without liking to say so, yearns to be intrusted with the home administration, for a while at least. Whether or not the mother resigns any of her housekeeping duties, motherhood is no longer a business that fills her days and gives adequate employment to her powers; again she seeks for occupation.

Such women, with the unmarried women of leisure, make the most disposable force in our society, but one very variously disposed. Some of them, the spenders, live purely parasitic lives, absorbing the services of others and consuming social wealth without rendering any return. Others, at the opposite extreme, perform work that is unpaid and that could not be paid for, work that demands experimentation, initiative and devotion. The work of a man or woman who combines with the chance gift of economic freedom the chance gift of genius consecrated to service—the work of a Charles Darwin, a William Morris, a Josephine Shaw Lowell, or a Jane Addams—is a pearl beyond price, but probably common people (that is, most of us) work better under a reasonable degree of pressure.

Our next social class is the married women who do their own work, as we say. For them life retains in the main its primitive harmony, except that they are less likely than women of old to come to their life work adequately prepared to carry on a household on the highest plane practicable with the resources available under contemporary conditions.

Our last class is the working women. The woman who does her own work is not, in the curious development of our phraseology, a working woman, though we may believe that the mother of a brood of children for whom she cleans, cooks, sews, washes and nurses does some work. On the other hand, the working woman is not, in our common phrase, occupied in “doing her own work,” and truly, the work at which she is set might appear to be almost anybody’s rather than hers, if its unsuitability to her needs and powers is any criterion. While her school, however imperfect it may have been, was designed to meet her needs, was administered with the object of advancing her interests, her workshop, on the contrary, seeks quite a different end—the owner’s profits. If she prospers or suffers through its conditions, that is a wholly alien consideration. The work is not her own, both because the product is not hers and because the conditions under which the work is carried on have no relation to her needs.

The education of the girl who is to enter industry generally fails as yet, however well intended, to fit her effectively for her working career. Most working girls, indeed, leave school at fourteen, when they are in any case too young to be efficient. Then come the proverbial wasted years of casual and demoralizing employment, till at eighteen or so the young workers find their footing and for five years, it may be, rank as working women. Then to most of them comes marriage. They entered industry untrained, now they enter married life untrained, if not unfitted, for such life, and at a less adaptable age than earlier. To a considerable extent the economic virtues of the factory are virtues that the girl cannot carry over into her housework, and its weaknesses are weaknesses that lessen her success as wife and mother. Industry tends to unfit her for home making if it tends to make her a creature of mechanical routine, unused to self-direction, unplastic, bored by privacy and not bored by machine monotony; if it accustoms her to an inapplicable scale and range of expenditure which assigns too much money to clothes (which are necessary to the status and earning power of the worker as they are not to mothers and children) and too little to adequate nourishment which, important to the adult, is fundamental to the health of children. Worst of all, the employments of working women tend, as has now been shown, more commonly and more seriously than has been at all generally understood, to unfit women, nervously and physically, for bearing children.

When we try to disentangle the confusions illustrated in these varying types of lives we see that one of the main causes of trouble is the fact that modern industry is largely incompatible, while work lasts, with the functions of wife and mother or that at least it militates against them. We have seen some of the ways in which this simple fact of the incompatibility of two fundamental functions distracts and deforms women’s lives.

A result of this divorce of industrial and married life is the fact that it is impossible to predict whether a given girl will spend her life in the home or in the working world, commercial, industrial or professional, and that consequently she commonly fails to prepare for either. We have indeed some professional training, some business training, and are just beginning to have some trade training; training for the home vocations has hardly got commonly beyond some cooking and sewing in the grades—most desirable as far as it goes. In Utopia, I dare say that every girl when she becomes engaged to be married, receives, besides her general education and her trade training, six months of gratuitous and compulsory vocational preparation for homemaking, and that this training for the bride, and a course in the ethics and hygiene of marriage for both bride and groom, is there required before a marriage license can be issued; moreover, I imagine that there every woman expecting her first child is given a scholarship providing instruction and medical advice for some months before and after the child is born, the conditions depending upon individual circumstances. In the real world some of our grossest evils are related to the lack of preparation for the most vital relations of life. Uncertainty as to her vocation not only prevents a girl’s being trained for either household or industrial life, but it makes her a most destructive element in competitive wage earning. She does not care to make herself efficient in industry, for she hopes soon to marry, and meanwhile the semi-self-supporting woman drags down the pay of women wholly dependent on their own earnings and also that of men, perhaps including that of the man who might marry her but cannot afford it, thus increasing the chances against her in the lottery of marriage.

While this conflict between the call to industry and the call to marriage confuses women’s lives but not men’s, the divorce of education from practise is much the same for men and for women both in its grounds and in its results. And first as to the causes.

Industry being organized by the employer for his own purposes, the worker is regarded simply as a means to the commercial end of maximum cheapness of production. This cheapness is attained, or at any rate has been commonly supposed to be attained, by the maximum of specialization and the maximum of routine and uniformity. The specialization of functions has appeared to the employer to make any education of the worker unnecessary and to make it possible to eliminate from the workshop the costly and troublesome business of teaching the trade, a policy that has had consequences to industry and citizenship that we are just beginning to realize. Up to this time the school has not averted these consequences by creating an effective substitute for apprenticeship. In the old days it could properly devote itself to academic branches, and even today, largely as a matter of habit inherited from those days, schooling continues as a general thing to have no bearing on the productive labor that the pupils engage in later, but is wholly general, with the marked defects as well as the merits of education of this type.

Not only has industrial training thus fallen between two stools, having been dropped from the workroom and not undertaken by the school, but the whole program of general education is controlled by the industrial situation. The routine and uniformity of modern production mean that the worker must work at the standard pace for the standard number of hours or drop out. This is less true of piece work, at least in theory; in practise the worker’s need of money is likely to force the pace and stretch the hours to the limit of possibility. As regards occupation it is all or nothing; the employer will not accept workers who cannot give themselves entire. This is, I think, the element of truth in the emphasis of socialists on their thesis that the worker sells not his labor, but his labor power. So children once surrendered to competitive industry are surrendered altogether and for good—they are absorbed and exhausted.

Because work is so organized that it is not fit for young people immature in body and mind and that they are not fit for it, we keep them out of all real work until we are ready to have them do nothing but work. And conversely, until they go to work once for all they are occupied with schooling and schooling only. Consequently life is broken into great indigestible lumps—first all study, then all work,—into unrelated phases which fail mutually to strengthen each other. Work and study ought to go on together, work beginning in the kindergarten years and education continuing to the end of life or at least so long as the mind remains receptive.

When boys and girls are needed to help at home while they are getting their schooling the situation is more natural, and if the child is not under too much pressure, better. But the child of the tenement or the fashionable apartment house cannot get this training in helpful labor parallel with his schooling as does the boy on the farm. So all work is postponed till school days are over and all schooling stops when work begins. One result is that some of us are busy teaching subjects fit only for mature minds to immature boys and girls on the assumption that they will never have another chance at education. I was once in a French boarding-school where the pupils learned by heart critical estimates of classical authors whom they had not read. On my questioning the practise I was told that though these sentences were not intelligible now they would recur to the pupils’ minds when in later life they read the authors in question.

We need to study the psychology of intellectual hunger and the history of the ripening of the human mind. Surely there should be opportunities for the mature to study history, economics, politics, natural science, religion, literature and philosophy,—opportunities, I mean, for intervals of continuous, intensive study by those inclined to it, not solely opportunities for weary, sleepy men and women in fag ends of time to hear lectures or to prepare for examinations.

In work planned as employers have planned it not only is education eliminated from employment and employment deferred to the close of the generally meager period of education, but the advantage of the individual is disregarded in the arrangement of the work, to the great disadvantage of the worker and the community at large, if not, in the first instance, of the employer.

One of the effects of this is the waste or misuse of all laborers, like the married woman or child, who cannot give standard work under standard conditions. In the work of the school or the household, which is planned with reference to the worker, there is room for the delicate, the dull, the special student, the child and the elderly person. No one is unemployable, no portion of strength or capacity is unusable. In the factory of the Amana community, which is conducted, as one might say, on family principles, I was struck by the large number of really old men at the looms. Those who can no longer endure the hot work in the hay fields find occupation here, and those who can advantageously work irregularly for a few hours a day, but not more, are given the employment that they are fit for and that is good for them. This capacity to use all available labor power is one reason, perhaps, why the Amana communists wax richer year by year and hire outside workers to do much of their hardest work; perhaps, too, it makes for a happier and longer, because more occupied, old age.

But in competitive employment workers who are below the standard, if not excluded and therefore wasted, are likely to be forced to conform to unsuitable hours and working arrangements. Moreover they are likely to drag down wages and to render more difficult the attempts of the normal workers to improve conditions. The standard minimum wage, with provision of “sub-minimum” wage scales for the handicapped, seems the only device to prevent their destructive effect on wage standards. As regards children, society adopts the policy of complete withdrawal from industry, not because it is good for a child to spend all his time in schooling, but because, as has been said, industry will not adapt its routine to juvenile requirements, and precludes almost all chance for education after work is once entered upon.

As regards married women in industry, the situation is much the same as the situation with regard to children. They should stay out wholly because it is disastrous to the family for them to go in wholly and unreservedly, because their subsidized competition is likely to be injurious, and finally because the conditions of work are apt to be ruinous to their health. And yet for women after marriage to abstain from all employment outside the household is often wasteful and altogether undesirable. If married women could work some hours a day, or some days a week, or some months a year, or some years and not others, as circumstances indicated (as they conceivably might do under a more elastic and adaptable organization of employment), and if they could do so without damage to wage standards or workshop discipline, it would seem advantageous, in more ways than one, for them not to drop out of industry at marriage. Both marriage and employment might become sufficiently universal to make it usual to train every girl for both, at least in a general way. If marriage did not appear to girls (quite fallaciously in most cases) as a way of getting supported without working, their interest in increasing their earning power would be greater; if wives were normally and properly contributors in some degree to the money income of the family, marriage would be more general and, above all, earlier, especially if the giving of allowances to mothers, of which Mr. Wells dreams, ever came into practice.

All this troubling of the waters of life is so familiar that it is perhaps not possible for us fully to appreciate or understand it. The conditions can doubtless be much ameliorated, but no reforms can make right a system that sins in its foundations. As has been said, the system sins because it puts production before people, with the results, so far as women are concerned, that we have seen. Two of the fundamental parts of their activity are made almost incompatible, so that we have unmarried workers and unworking wives, and workers and wives alike untrained because of the paralyzing uncertainty of the future. Moreover, men and women alike suffer from the separation of education and work, which makes work dull and education unreal and gives to the boy and girl more lessons than they can digest and to the man and woman too few; they both suffer also, if not equally, from the industrial system which shapes all the conditions of industrial life to ends extraneous to the welfare of the workpeople.

That our lives are made thus to fit the convenience of industry, not industry to fit the convenience of human lives, is historically explicable and even justifiable. So long as there is difficulty in getting the bare necessities of living every other consideration must give way. The overriding object must be the amount of product, not comfort or development by the way. Health and happiness are then a necessary sacrifice to mammon. They are luxuries which the poverty-stricken do not afford themselves. Moreover, to do things pleasantly, or even to do them in the way that is most economical and effective in the long run requires not only capital but a social direction of capital that can be the fruit only of a long and painful evolution. Because our industry is conducted piecemeal by dividend hunters it is carried on, if we regard it as a whole, in a near-sighted and extravagant way. Above all, it wastes talent and physical stamina, beside devastating the private happiness of employes, and nowhere is it more uneconomical than in its use of women’s strength and capacity and, above all, in its wastage of her health.

We are just on the eve of being socially conscious enough to perceive these things and prosperous enough to afford a different policy. Is it insane to hope that in the fulness of time industry will be so arranged as to advance human life by its process as well as by its produce; to hope that we shall have, as one might say, a maternal government acting on the principles of the mother of a great and busy household who makes education and work coöperate throughout, who cares for her family and economizes and develops their powers and makes their complete welfare her controlling object? My contention is that while we cannot make women efficient in any complete sense under conditions which so militate against their efficiency, we can make them less and less inefficient as we shape education to that end, and as we get increasing control of industrial conditions in the interests of human life in its wholeness.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] A paper presented at the meeting of the Academy of Political Science, December 3, 1909.

STANDARDS OF LIVING AND THE SELF-DEPENDENT WOMAN

SUSAN M. KINGSBURY

Simmons College, and Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, Boston

An investigation of the cost of living may look ultimately toward minimum wage laws, or it may aim at the creation of opportunities for industrial education which shall result in ability to earn a certain desired wage; but the immediate object of all such study is to determine a desirable standard, and every consideration of the cost of living is prefaced by a discussion of the importance and difficulty of fixing standards. The method must be to discover what expenditure the average family or individual under normal conditions finds actually necessary; but heretofore essential study of the habits and needs of self-supporting women has been lacking.

The following significant differences between wage-earning women and men have become apparent from an examination of census returns and a study of more than a thousand working women in and around Boston, in connection with the promotion of savings-bank insurance:

1. A large majority of wage-earning women are under thirty years of age. In our cities the average age is below twenty-five.

2. The larger part are living at home, or in the families of relatives, friends or acquaintances.

3. A very large proportion of those living at home turn in all their earnings to the family purse and receive back only so much as is necessary, without knowing whether their contribution is above or below the expenditure on their account. The young men of the family, on the other hand, are not expected to contribute to the family income, unless it be to pay board.

4. A woman is not usually responsible for the support of a family, nor is she looking forward to the carrying of such a burden.

5. She often has obligations for the full or partial support of members of the family, but these obligations decrease or cease as she grows older.

6. She enters a gainful occupation with a different point of view from that of a man. It may be that she has obligations to meet, or it may be that she is a “pin-money girl”; but in most cases she is not looking forward to continuous self-support.

How, then, is the standard for women to be set? To attain a certain standard they may spend much less money, or with a given expenditure they may reach a much higher standard than would be the case if their conditions and outlook were the same as men’s. On the other hand, the obligations resting on women may be, and often are, much greater than the demands on men of similar age. The income necessary to maintain a given standard of living may therefore be much less than we should anticipate, or it may be much greater. One thing seems evident—that the burdens will probably decrease rather than increase. Therefore the necessity for advancement and the responsibility for saving is recognized neither by the worker nor by the public.

These difficulties make intensive investigation the more essential, in order to discover the actual present cost of living of self-dependent women and to find out the significance of variations in this cost. Modern tendencies to reduce wages to the minimum cost of living or to force them up to meet the demands of increasing luxury may mean too serious results to permit of continued ignorance. The danger of setting the standard according to the needs of one group, thus working injury to another, must be averted.

The studies upon which this paper is based fall into two groups. One, of college graduates, members of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, mostly teachers (317 in number), is easiest to interpret, because it is the result of study by persons of the same class or thoroughly conversant with the needs of that class.[37] The material for this study was secured from schedules filled out by 413 women, who are graduates of about forty colleges, and who are at present residing in almost every state in the union. It is furthermore representative in that it includes women whose homes are in large, medium and small towns, and whose experience ranges from one to forty-one years of service.

The other two studies are of women engaged in industrial and commercial pursuits. One of these is the result of a year’s experience in preaching the gospel of saving to thirteen hundred women through savings bank insurance.[38] The women are engaged in unskilled industries such as laundering, in the semi-skilled industry of making knitted underwear, and in the skilled industry of straw-hat manufacture. Naturally in this study the cost of living is approached through a consideration of ability or inability to save. Savings should of course be included as a necessary part of living expenses, and where pay is insufficient to make saving possible, the wage received is certainly not a living wage. The general responsibility for the support of the family, whether the girl is living at home or boarding, the tendency to give all earnings to the mother, the effort to save and its success or failure—all these conditions are portrayed in this study.

The most important contribution, however, is that which comes from the research department of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, through its fellow, Miss Louise Marion Bosworth,—a study commenced under Miss Mabel Parton, director.[39] This study by Miss Bosworth contains a discussion of the general economic history, the income, and the expenditures for rent, food, clothing, health, savings, and other purposes, of four hundred fifty working women, thirty of whom kept account books for Miss Bosworth for a year or more, and two hundred twenty of whom Miss Bosworth interviewed personally. One hundred fifty were interviewed by Miss Jane Barclay, a fellow of the department, and fifty by other research fellows. Miss Bosworth’s study deals with three hundred fifty women living independently, and presents also the standards of one hundred living at home. The Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, working for the betterment of industrial conditions among self-supporting women by both direct and indirect educational methods, has unusual opportunities for continuous study of the actual expenses and the standards of living of such women, together with the effect of those standards on their efficiency.

A study of the budgets of self-dependent women has a twofold object: first, to enable the public to know in how far women are self-supporting; and second, to discover what income is required to make a woman self-supporting. In other words, such study should show what income is necessary for each group in order to maintain and increase its efficiency. Merely to state that a certain number actually live on a certain income is to neglect the essential question of how they live. The less educated woman cannot be expected to use the same ability in spending as her more highly trained sister; nor can the latter be satisfied with the taste of the less educated woman. The average demands of the average woman in each group must always be kept in mind.

It may be well first to present briefly the more pertinent conclusions of the study of professional women, since the general standards are more familiar to us. The expenditures reported by college women are arranged in three groups, minimum, medium and maximum. The total expenditures of the first group range from $550 to $725, in which an allowance of $200 to $350 is made for “living expenses,” and $150 to $175 for clothing. A woman whose income is at this minimum cannot save; it represents the cost of living of an apprentice. The medium expenditures are from $785 to $1,075 exclusive of savings, and the maximum $1,225 to $1,750 exclusive of savings. The medium figures include $300 to $450 for living, and $200 to $250 for clothing; the maximum, $500 to $700 for living, and $275 to $350 for clothing.

A woman of experience voices the general opinion that the medium range of expenditure in the teaching profession today is too low for thorough efficiency; for in such a budget no account can be made of many of the essentials of life. Thus it omits:

1. Any peculiar demands upon one’s purse through obligations to one’s family.

2. Expenses of the vacation season like extra board, extra laundry bills, railroad fares and extra sundries.

3. Expenses which come from social convention and social relations, such as Christmas, birthday and wedding gifts, even small ones, occasional lunching with friends, possible college class reunions, and the like.

4. Expression of one’s esthetic tastes in concerts and pictures.

5. Recreation of any sort during the working year.

6. Miscellaneous trifling but accumulating expenses which are sure to occur.

At the present time 72% of the women prepared for teaching by college training are earning the medium salary or less. Grouping this class by years of experience, salaries do not reach the medium figure until a woman has been at work ten to fifteen years. If we accept these expenditures as a standard, then we find only a small proportion of college women able to attain it. The unfortunate method of determining necessary expenditure by estimate is well illustrated by the returns from these college women. The cost of actual living and clothing is often accepted as covering the essentials; but in fact the items for incidentals, carfares, professional expenses and sundries sum up to almost the same amount as the cost of sustenance, especially in the smaller budgets. Such an allowance would usually be considered excessive, but a careful review of the items indicates that this proportion of expenditure for sundries is legitimate.

In addition to this general but important conclusion that the standard of living based on the returns quoted above is too low in most cases to secure efficiency, and hence promotion and advancement, the following significant conditions must be faced by those concerned with the problem of salaries:

1. To maintain and increase efficiency and earning capacity in the teaching profession, women must be prepared to give from two to five years to graduate study.

2. Independent income ought not to be counted on to supplement earned income.

3. The relation of cost of living to efficiency should be better understood in order to lead teachers to insist upon advancement, even at sacrifice of personal preference for locality and conditions of living.

4. Although there is no prevailing standard of living, and the relation between expenditure and income or between the various phases of expenditure does not seem to be set, college women should try to set a standard as quickly as possible.

In the study of wage-earning girls made by the research department of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, the cost of living of girls who reside with their families is considered separately. Since the aim is primarily to discover the cost of living of the self-dependent girl, the number of the other class studied is small, consisting chiefly of immigrant girls and girls in the suburbs earning a good salary and living at home or with relatives.

On the other hand, the study of the savings bank insurance committee deals very largely with girls living at home, so that the two studies supplement each other. The low contributions to the family reported by Miss Bosworth show that the girl earning three to five dollars is barely able to live, but her evidence that the higher-paid girl contributes a larger sum (about four dollars and a half a week) to the family, and supplements her payments by labor in the home indicates that she is really self-supporting, because she is living practically under a coöperative system. What she thus saves over the girl who spends five or six dollars a week for sustenance results in a higher standard of living or an opportunity to save. It is doubtless due to this lower cost of board and room while living at home that the girl who in Miss Bosworth’s study does not receive a living wage is in Miss French’s experience able to begin to save. Here, furthermore, is doubtless the explanation of the fact that while a girl living alone is generally not able to live on a satisfactory standard under a wage of nine dollars a week, the girl living at home, or coöperatively, begins to save on a six to nine-dollar wage.

Taking up simply the woman living alone, we find ourselves confronted with a study of factory workers, waitresses, clerks, saleswomen and kitchen workers. A standard of housing is far easier to determine than one of food. Size of room and location naturally affect rents; but it is hard to reach satisfactory conclusions concerning number of windows, sunlight, heat, bathroom accommodations, and number of roommates. Provision for food is made in the following ways:

1. Cooking in one’s own room.

2. Basement dining rooms.

3. Working girls’ homes.

4. Meals included for service in restaurants and hotels.

They are presented in order of excellence. “Home cooking” means serious danger to health; over-fatigue results in cold meals or no meals rather than expenditure of the energy necessary for preparation. The basement dining room serving twenty-one meals for $3 is “invariably poor,” says Miss Bosworth. Strictly speaking, the subsidized working girls’ home should not be considered in a discussion of the standards of independent working girls. To calculate a “living wage” on such a basis does injustice to thousands of girls who could not if they would find accommodation in working girls’ homes.

What standard, then, are these girls able to attain? Miss Bosworth says: “Between the three, four and five-dollar woman and the next higher division there is a big increase in food expenditures, corresponding to the jump in rent found at this same point. Also corresponding to the rent, the difference between the six, seven and eight-dollar group and the next higher is less marked. Either, then, the increase in wage up to eight dollars goes at once into food and rent, or as is probable, this marks the point of departure from the intolerably crowded share in a tenement dweller’s home to the perhaps equally comfortless but more independent room in a lodging house. In paying the increased amount of room rent the three advantages the girl on higher wages gains are a room to herself, heat of some sort, and sunshine. These advantages come to the majority only when the wage has reached at least $9.” In securing food, the girl on the higher wage patronizes the $4 dining rooms, which are “so attractive in appearance, and so adequate in food as to be thoroughly satisfactory.”

The subject of clothing brings at once two great problems. Here the measure of the standard of living is apparent. A girl may make sacrifices in room and board without immediate effect upon her opportunities to secure employment: but a sacrifice in dress may mean the loss of position—such is the consensus of opinion. The custom of instalment buying follows as a natural result. It is in the field of dress that the individual ability of the girl is most apparent. Innate taste, knowledge of materials, physical strength and opportunity to hunt bargains, readiness to forfeit sleep in order to get time to remodel or make clothes—all these things tell. Home and school training may help raise standards. Miss Bosworth concludes: “The average working woman, with only the average ability to manage her wardrobe economically, with the average trade demands on it, and with the average amount of time for sewing and mending, cannot dress on less than $1 a week as a minimum, and does not need as a dress allowance more than $2 a week.” Elsewhere she states: “The severest strain of providing clothes comes on incomes under $9; when an income of $12 is reached, the strain is perceptibly lessened.”

Apparently a satisfactory standard—one which affords a room meeting reasonable requirements, nourishing food, respectable clothing, medical attendance, and incidentals of simple type, requires a wage of not less than $9.

I regret that the shortness of space prevents a glance at the contributions of the working girl to church, charity and the support of others, or her expenditures for self-education and recreation. Suffice it to say that the amount which goes for charity, for necessary incidentals and for education bears a creditable relation to that expended for recreation.

The savings bank insurance study is most significant in its confirmation of the inadequacy of a three to five-dollar or even a six to eight-dollar wage. Even though the girls whose records were thus secured came largely from the group living at home, it was only in the nine to twelve-dollar wage group that real savings became possible.

One scarcely dares accept the conclusion suggested by these facts, that the minimum wage should be not less than $9, there are so many modifying circumstances. Nor dares one assert that certain sums represent the “cost of living”, it is so hard to determine a standard of living. How can we fix the minimum or average of rent? How can we place a limit on expenditure for food and clothing? How can we tell how much of inefficiency is due to inadequacy of food, clothing and shelter, how much to lack of training, how much to youth? All results thus far obtained are only indicative; intensive scientific investigation and cautious interpretation are needed to establish conclusions that shall command general assent.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] See report on “The Economic Efficiency of College Women,” by the writer of this paper, published in the Magazine of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, February, 1910.

[38] Miss Davida C. French was director of the savings bank insurance committee of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, 1909-1910, under which this study was made.

[39] The results of the investigation will be published this year. Information with regard to this publication may be secured from the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, 264 Boylston St., Boston, Mass.

A NEW SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT[40]

MARY KINGSBURY SIMKHOVITCH

Greenwich House, New York City