Working girl

“ But, after all, the greatest factor in the ultimate development of the working girl as a wage-earning unit—the most potent force for the adjustment of all the difficulties besetting her at every turn, and for the righting of all her wrongs, social, economic, or moral—will be the attitude which she herself assumes toward the dispassionate consideration of those difficulties to be adjusted, and of those wrongs to be righted.
At the present time there is nobody so little concerned about herself and her condition as the working woman herself. ”

“ But the average working girl [Pg 279] puts neither heart nor mind into her labor; she is merely a machine, though the comparison is a libel upon the functions of first-class machinery.
The harsh truth is that, hard as the working girl is "worked," and miserable as her remuneration is, she is usually paid quite as much as she is worth.
For her incompetency she is not entirely to blame; rather is it a matter of heredity and environment. Being a girl, it is not natural to her to work systematically. The working woman is a new product; in this country she is hardly three generations old. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The untrained girl who enters upon domestic work at fourteen or fifteen should have opportunity—indeed the opportunity should be thrust upon her—of attending a continuation school, where the special aim should be to counteract the narrowing tendency of work which revolves about so small an orbit. Ideals of home life are either lacking or distorted in the minds of many working girls, and when such girls become wives and mothers they strive for the wrong things or they fall back without striving at all, taking merely what comes. They fail to be forces for good in their family life. ”

“ A working girl's liberty is scanty enough, goodness knows"—she spoke scornfully—"but at least she mixes with her own kind and is on an equality with most she meets. When her work is over, however long it is, she can do just exactly as she likes until it starts again. ”

“ But the factory girl, or the teacher, or the professional woman who seeks the fulfilment of all of life in the factory, the school or the consulting-room, will soon tire and clamor for relief. The housewife, or the mistress of a home, must likewise seek life away from her work if she is to love it and wake each morning with a desire to continue it. Luckily we have reached a place where working women in the home are seeking supplementary life outside, and they seem to be quite as successful in their search as are factory girls or teachers. ”

“ I used to notice one girl who was as light on her feet as a kitten, and who seemed tireless; but every noon, as soon as she had finished her lunch, she would wrap herself up in a blanket and lie motionless for the whole period. One evening a woman stumbled into a dormitory, sat down on a trunk, pulled off her shoes and stockings, and, as she rubbed her swollen foot, cursed long and methodically all her circumstances—cursed the other workers who had held back work by their slowness ”

“ No one, to look at her white hands, her slim, tapering fingers, her general appearance, even in her plain dress, would have, at first glance, taken her for a working girl, though she sewed folios in a book-bindery down town for ten hours every day sure, and often much longer when there was overwork to do. ”

“ Indeed there was practically no other field of employment open to educated girls. The old domestic labors had been removed from the household—where could a girl with spirit and ability make the necessary money to carry out her legitimate desires? ”

“ A clean room and three wholesomely cooked meals a day can be furnished to working girls at a price such as would make it possible for them to live honestly on the small wage of the factory and store. [Pg 287] We do not ask for luxuries or dainties. We do not get them in the miserable, dark warrens where we are now obliged to sleep, and we do not get them at the unappetizing boarding-house tables where countless thousands of us find sustenance. I do not know—I suppose nobody does know—how many working girls in New York City live in lodging-and boarding-houses. ”

“ I often hear rich women say, 'Oh, working-girls cannot be very poor; they wear such smart feathers.' If these women knew how the girls have to stint in underclothing and food in order to make what their employers call 'a genteel appearance,' I think they would pass quite another verdict. I will give two typical cases: A girl living just over Blackfriars Bridge, in one small room, for which she pays 5s., earns 10s. a week in a printer's business. ”

“ The 41·4 per cent unoccupied include girls of the class in which women do not work for money, girls studying who intend to follow a profession or occupation, and some girls of the higher industrial classes who attend school one, two, or three years beyond the elementary school age. There must also be in this group some proportion of working-class girls who are kept at home to help their mothers, and a small number of invalids and imbeciles who are incapable of work. ”

“ The condition of the working girl, the low salaries paid by employers, the desire for better clothes, and the great increase of the number of girls earning a livelihood contribute their share to the downfall of girls. ”

“ There are a hundred small incidental expenses met by the girl who goes out to work which are not necessary for the girl at home. She has no set hours to keep and she has time to sew, to make clothes and trim hats without over-tiring herself as the wage-earning girl often does if she is her own dressmaker and milliner. The working clothes of the girl at home may be very simple. She does not need to go out every morning to her work, and for this reason can dress more economically than her wage-earning sister, and still be neat and fresh. ”

“ I haven't always been a working-girl. I used to go to boarding-school. I thought I'd be a governess or something, and once I tried to learn bookkeeping, but my eyes give out, and the figures mixed up my brain so, and then I got sick and had to come to this box-factory. ”

“ The leisure of these women is due to their wage-earning sisters, who in factories and mills make the cloth, prepare food-stuffs, and do all sorts of tasks that formerly kept women of the upper classes at home. Through the instinct of imitation, combined with the American feeling of democracy, the habits of the well-to-do determine the ambition of many a working-girl. ”

“ And yet behind my diffidence of expression I must confess to a very honest and uncompromising belief, founded upon my own knowledge and observation, that the average working girl is even more poorly equipped for right living and right thinking than she is for intelligent industrial effort. ”

“ If a girl is deliberate and saves herself, they call her slow; if she is ambitious, and gets her work done early, and they see her sitting down in working-hours, they conclude that she is not earning her wages, and hunt up some extra job for her. ”

“ If we working girls don't stand up and help one another, I'd like to know who's going to do it for us.... So long!"
"So long!" It was not the first time that I had heard a working girl deliver herself of that laconic form of adieu, and heretofore I had always execrated it as hopelessly vulgar and silly, which no doubt it was and is. ”

“ By hard work the subsequent development of the blossoming girl is disturbed. By wage-labour girls are deprived of the opportunity of becoming acquainted with the details of household management; their mode of life is free and unsupervised, so that they are apt at an early age to enter into illegitimate sexual relationships. It will be readily understood that, in different classes of workwomen, the unfavourable influence of these factors will exert itself in different ways. It will suffice to refer to the different working conditions of female factory hands and of female domestic servants. ”

“ For the purposes of record these annals may be loosely divided into those of unskilled and seasonal factory workers, and those whose narratives expressed the effects of monotony and fatigue, from speeding at their tasks. This division must remain loose to convey a truthful impression. For the same self-supporting girl has often been a skilled and an unskilled worker, by hand, at a machine, and in several industries. ”

“ But the girl must understand that if she is earning ten dollars a week for thirty weeks in the year as a young milliner her income is only three hundred dollars. For this reason it is wise for the young milliner to have a second occupation. She may spend her summer months working in an hotel as a waitress or caring for children or picking fruit. In the winter slack season she may find a position as a saleswoman. If she can afford to remain at home, she may spend the time in replenishing her own wardrobe, and sewing for members of her family. ”

“ As will be seen, the situation occupied and described by any individual girl may in a year or five years be no longer hers, but that of some other worker. So that the synthesis of these chronicles is presented, not as a composite photograph of the industrial experiences in any one trade, but rather as an accurate kinetoscope view of the yearly life of chance passing factory workers. ”

“ She has become, and is becoming more and more, the object of such an amount of sentimentality on the part of philanthropists, sociological investigators, labor agitators, and yellow journals—and a goodly share of journalism that prides itself upon not being yellow—that the real work-girl has been quite lost sight of. Her name suggests, according to their imaginations, a proud, independent, self-reliant, efficient young woman—a young woman who works for her living and is glad of it. ”

“ All girls who work down town are at a disadvantage as compared to factory girls, who are much less open to direct inducement and to the temptations which come through sheer imitation. Factory girls also have the protection of working among plain people who frankly designate an irregular life, in harsh, old-fashioned terms. If a factory girl catches sight of the vicious life at all, she sees its miserable victims in all the wretchedness and sordidness of their trade in the poorer parts of the city. ”

“ When she discovers that it will be some time before she can carry on all the operations required, then she may be sure that she is learning an employment which will be of value to her. It is exactly the same as in school. No one was ever so clever as to be able to learn to read in one day, yet we all know how well worth while it is to be able to read.
How is the girl to choose the industry in which she hopes to find work? [2] She should make inquiries about a factory before she enters it. She may have a friend who is working in a whitewear factory, or a biscuit factory, or who is making boxes. ”

“ The majority of young girls are feeding automatic machines and working power presses, and all materials are brought and taken away by special labourers. Many girls over 16 have been substituted for men workers, but it is exceedingly difficult to gauge the effect which such work is exerting on their health. Overlookers and Welfare supervisors declare that tall strong girls are chosen for heavy processes and that very few injuries result, while a girl can be transferred to lighter work if the heavy work is too fatiguing. ”

“ One Friday I asked a group of girls at lunch if they weren't glad the next day was Saturday and the afternoon off. Four of them weren't glad at all, because they had to go home and clean house Saturday afternoons, and do other household chores. “Gee! don't you hate workin' round the house?”
I wonder how much of the women-in-industry movement is traceable to just that.
The first day I was at the dress factory a very dirty but pleasant-faced little Jewish girl said to me, “Ever try workin' at home? Ain't it just awful?” ”

“ The general trend of the evidence shows that the taking up of non-textile employment is attended by a considerable falling-off in health. Most girls become thinner and lose their colour and vitality during their first six months at the factory, and those working long hours become "like machines, able to keep on without breakdown, but lose all [Pg 40] their normal interests." ”

“ I never met factory-girls in any other line of employment who knew how to make a cup of tea or coffee that was fit to drink. The flower-girls gave every evidence of having come from homes which, humble though many of them must have been, were nevertheless well-ordered and clean. The girls I met in other places seemed never to have lived in homes at all. ”

“ It is sufficiently clear to those who have seen the personal reactions of working girls to the piecework system, that when women attain, as men in various industries have attained, the practical management of the factory, piecework will get a setback. ”

“ Few girls know how to work when they undertake the first job, whether that job be making paper boxes, seaming corset-covers, or taking shorthand dictation. Nor by the term, "knowing how to work," do I mean, necessarily, lack of experience. One may have had no experience whatever in any line of work, yet one may know how to work—may understand the general principles of intelligent labor. These general principles a girl may learn equally well by [Pg 278] means of a normal-school training or through familiarity with, and participation in, the domestic labor of a well-organized household. ”

“ Yet it was no time before Main Street characteristics came to the front.
Only four girls had so much as expressed an interest in the Bryn Mawr scheme. Within a week after the two girls received the telegrams, tongues got busy. Margaret looked ready to cry one afternoon.
“Hey! what's the matter?”
“My Gawd! This place makes you sick. Can't no one let a person get started enjoyin' themselves but what they do their best to spoil it for you!” Her hands were wrapping pillow case bundles like lightning, her head bent over her work. “Don't I know I ain't nothin' but a factory girl? ”