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“I’ve mothered ’em so far, and I’ll see ’em through,” she said, “but the saints only knows how. If I can’t do it by honest work, there’s one way left that’s sure, an’ I’ll try that.”

There came a Saturday night when she took her bundle of work, shirts again, and now eighty-five cents a dozen. There were five dozen, and when the $1.50 was laid aside for rent it was easy to see what remained for food, coal, and light. Clothing had ceased to be part of the question. The children were barefoot. They had a bit of meat on Sundays, but for the rest, bread, potatoes, and tea were the diet, with a cabbage and bit of pork now and then for luxuries. Norah had been failing, and to-night Rose planned to buy her “something with a taste to it,” and looked at the sausages hanging in long links with a sudden reckless determination to get enough for all. She was faint with hunger, and staggered as she passed a basement restaurant, from which came savory smells, snuffed longingly by some half-starved children. Her turn was long in coming, and as she laid her bundle on the counter she saw suddenly that her needle had “jumped,” and that half an inch or so of a band required resewing. As she looked the foreman’s knife slipped under the place, and in a moment half the band had been ripped.

“That’s no good,” he said. “You’re getting botchier all the time.”

“Give it to me,” Rose pleaded. “I’ll do it over.”

“Take it if you like,” he said indifferently, “but there’s no pay for that kind o’ work.”

He had counted her money as he spoke, and Rose cried out as she saw the sum.

“Do you mean you’ll cheat me of the whole dozen because half an inch on one is gone wrong?”

“Call it what you like,” he said. “R. & Co. ain’t going to send out anything but first-class work. Stand out of the way and let the next have a chance. There’s your three dollars and forty cents.”

Rose went out silently, choking down rash words that would have lost her work altogether, but as she left the dark stairs and felt again the cutting wind from the river, she stood still, something more than despair on her face. The children could hardly fare worse without her than with her. The river could not be colder than this cold world that gave her no chance, and that had no place for anything but rascals. She turned toward it as the thought came, but some one had her arm, and she cried out suddenly and tried to wrench away.

“Easy now,” a voice said. “You’re breakin’ your heart for trouble, an’ here I am in the nick o’ time. Come with me an’ you’ll have no more of it, for my pocket’s full to-night, an’ that’s more ’n it’ll be in the mornin’ if you don’t take me in tow.”

It was a sailor from a merchantman just in, and Rose looked at him for a moment. Then she took his arm and walked with him toward Roosevelt Street.

It might be dishonor, but it was certainly food and warmth for the children, and what did it matter? She had fought her fight for twenty years, and it had been a vain struggle. She took his money when morning came, and went home with the look that is on her face to-day.

“I’ll marry you out of hand,” the sailor said to her; but Rose answered, “No man alive’ll ever marry me after this night,” and she has kept her word. She has her trade, and it is a prosperous one, in which wages never fail. The children are warm and have no need to cry for hunger any more.

“It’s not a long life we live,” Rose says quietly. “My kind die early, but the children will be well along, an’ all the better when the time comes that they’ve full sense for not having to know what way the living comes. But let God Almighty judge who’s to blame most – I that was driven, or them that drove me to the pass I’m in.”

CHAPTER THIRD.
SOME METHODS OF A PROSPEROUS FIRM

“The emancipation of women is certainly well under way, when all underwear can be bought more cheaply than it is possible to make it up at home, and simple suits of very good material make it hardly more difficult for a woman to clothe herself without thought or worry, than it has long been for a man.”

This was the word heard at a woman’s club not long ago, and reinforced within the week by two well-known journals edited in the interests of women at large. The editorial page of one held a fervid appeal for greater simplicity of dress and living in general, followed by half a column of entreaty to women to buy ready-made clothing, and thus save time for higher pursuits and the attainment of broader views. With feebler pipe, but in the same key, sounded the second advocate of simplification, adding: —

“Never was there a time when women could dress with as much real elegance on as small an expenditure of money. Bargains abound, and there is small excuse for dowdiness. The American woman is fast taking her place as the best-dressed woman in the civilized world.”

Believing very ardently that the right of every woman born includes not only “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but beauty also, it being one chief end of woman to include in her own personality all beauty attainable by reasonable means, I am in heartiest agreement with one side of the views quoted. But in this quest we have undertaken, and from which, once begun, there is no retreat, strange questions arise; and in this new dawn of larger liberty and wider outlook is seen the little cloud which, if no larger than a man’s hand, holds the seed of as wild a storm as has ever swept over humanity.

For emancipation on the one side has meant no corresponding emancipation for the other; and as one woman selects, well pleased, garment after garment, daintily tucked and trimmed and finished beyond any capacity of ordinary home sewing, marvelling a little that a few dollars can give such lavish return, there arises, from narrow attic and dark, foul basement, and crowded factory, the cry of the women whose life-blood is on these garments. Through burning, scorching days of summer; through marrow-piercing cold of winter, in hunger and rags, with white-faced children at their knees, crying for more bread, or, silent from long weakness, looking with blank eyes at the flying needle, these women toil on, twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours even, before the fixed task is done. The slice of baker’s bread and the bowl of rank black tea, boiled to extract every possibility of strength, are taken, still at the machine. It is easier to sit there than in rising and movement to find what weariness is in every limb. There is always a child old enough to boil the kettle and run for a loaf of bread; and all share the tea, which gives a fictitious strength, laying thus the foundation for the fragile, anæmic faces and figures to be found among the workers in the bag-factories, paper-box manufactories, etc.

“Why don’t they go into the country?” is often asked. “Why do they starve in the city when good homes and ample pay are waiting for them?”

It is not with the class to whom this question is applicable that we deal to-day. Of the army of two hundred thousand who battle for bread, nearly a third have no resource but the needle, and of this third many thousands are widows with children, to whom they cling with a devotion as strong as wiser mothers feel, and who labor night and day to prevent the scattering into asylums, and consequent destruction of the family as a family. They are widows through many causes that can hardly be said to come under the head of “natural.” Drunkenness leads, and the thousand accidents that are born of drunkenness, but there are other methods arising from the same greed that underlies most modern civilization. The enormous proportion of accidents, which, if not killing instantly, imply long disability and often death as the final result, come nine tenths of the time from criminal disregard of any ordinary means of protecting machinery. One great corporation, owning thousands of miles of railroad, saw eight hundred men disabled in greater or less degree in one year, and still refused to adopt a method of coupling cars which would have saved the lives of the sixty-eight brakemen who were sacrificed to the instinct of economy dominating the superintendent. The same man refused to roof over a spot where a number of freight-handlers were employed during a stormy season, rheumatism and asthma being the consequences for many, and his reason had at least the merit of frankness, – a merit often lacking in explanations that, even when most plausible, cover as essential a brutality of nature.

“Men are cheaper than shingles,” he said. “There’s a dozen waiting to fill the place of one that drops out.”

In another case, in a great saw-mill, the owner had been urged to protect a lath-saw, swearing at the persistent request, even after the day when one of his best men was led out to the ambulance, his right hand hanging by a bit of skin, his death from lockjaw presently leaving one more widow to swell the number. It is of such men that a sturdy thinker wrote last year, “Man is a self-damnable animal,” and it is on such men that the curse of the worker lies heaviest. That they exist at all is hardly credited by the multitude who believe that, for this country at least, oppression and outrage are only names. That they exist in numbers will be instantly denied; yet to one who has heard the testimony given by weeping women, and confirmed by the reluctant admissions of employers themselves, there comes belief that no words can fully tell what wrong is still possible from man to man in this America, the hope of nations.

Is this a digression hardly to be pardoned in a paper on the trades and lives of women, – a deliberate turning toward an issue which has neither place nor right in such limits? On the contrary, it is all part of the same wretched story. The chain that binds humanity in one has not one set of links for men and another for women; and the blow aimed at one is felt also not only by those nearest, but by successive ranks to whom the shock, though only by indirect transmission, is none the less deadly in effect. And thus the wrong done on the huge scale appropriate to a great corporation finds its counterpart in a lesser but quite as well organized a wrong, born also of the spirit of greed, and working its will as pitilessly.

“If you employed on a large scale you would soon find that you ceased to look at your men as men,” said an impatient iron-worker not long ago. “They are simply so much producing power. I don’t propose to abuse them, but I’ve no time even to remember their faces, much less their names.”

Precisely on this principle reasons the employer of women, who are even less to be regarded as personalities than men. For the latter, once a year at least the employer becomes conscious of the fact that these masses of “so much producing power” are resolvable into votes, and on election day, if on no other, worthy of analysis. There is no such necessity in the case of women. The swarming crowd of applicants are absolutely at the mercy of the manager or foreman, who, unless there is a sudden pressure of work, makes the selections according to fancy, youth and any gleam of prettiness being unfailing recommendations. There are many firms of which this could not be said with any justice. There are many more in which it is the law, tacitly laid down, but none the less a fact. With such methods of selection go other methods supposed to be confined to the lowest grade of work and the lowest type of employer, both being referred to regions like Baxter or Division Streets. But they are to be found east or west indifferently, the illustration at present in mind being on Canal Street, within sound of Broadway. It is a prosperous firm, one whose trade-mark can be trusted; and here are a few of the methods by which this prosperity has been attained, and goes on in always-increasing ratio.

In the early years of their existence as a firm they manufactured on the premises, but, like many other firms, found that it was a very unnecessary expense. A roof over the heads of a hundred or more women, with space for their machines, meant not less than twenty-five hundred dollars a year to be deducted from the profits. Even floors in some cheaper quarter were still an expense to be avoided if possible. The easy way out of the difficulty was to make the women themselves pay the rent, not in any tangible imposition of tax, but none the less certainly in fact. Nothing could be simpler. Manufacturing on the premises had only to cease, and it could even be put as a favor to the women that they were allowed to work at home. The rule established itself at once, and the firm, smiling serenely at the stoppage of this most damaging and most unnecessary leak, proceeded to make fresh discoveries of equally satisfactory possibilities. To each woman who applied for work it was stated: —

“We send all packages from the cutting-room by express, the charges to be paid by you. It’s a small charge, only fifteen cents, to be paid when the bundle comes in.”

“We can come for ours. We live close by. We don’t want to lose the fifteen cents,” a few objected, but the answer was invariable: —

“It suits us best to make up the packages in the cutting-room, and if you don’t like the arrangement there are plenty waiting that it will suit well enough.”

Plenty waiting! How well they knew it, and always more and more as the ships came in, and the great tide of “producing power” flowed through Castle Garden, and stood, always at high-water mark, in the wards where cheap labor may be found. Plenty waiting; and these women who could not wait went home and turned over their small store of pennies for the fifteen cents, the payment of which meant either a little less bread or an hour or two longer at the sewing-machine, defined as the emancipator of women.

In the mean time the enterprising firm had made arrangements with a small express company to deliver the packages at twelve cents each, and could thus add to the weekly receipts a clear gain of three cents per head. It is unnecessary to add that they played into each other’s hands, and that the wagon-drivers had no knowledge of anything beyond the fact that they were to collect the fifteen cents and turn it over to their superiors. But in some manner it leaked out; and a driver whose feelings had been stirred by the sad face of a little widow on Sixth Street told her that the fifteen cents was “a gouge,” and they had all better put their heads together and refuse to pay more than twelve cents.

“If we had any heads, it might do to talk about putting them together,” the little widow said bitterly. “For my part, I begin to believe women are born fools, but I’ll see what I can do.”

This “seeing” involved earning a dollar or two less for the week, but the cheat seemed so despicable a one that indignation made her reckless, and she went to the woman who had first directed her to the firm and had been in its employ almost from the beginning.

“It’s like ’em; oh, yes, it’s like ’em!” she said, “but we’ve no time to spend in stirring up things, and you know well enough what would be the end of it if we did, – discharged, and somebody else getting our wages. You’d better not talk too much if you want to keep your place.”

“That isn’t any worse than the thread dodge,” another woman said. “I know from a clerk in the house where they buy their thread, that they charge us five cents a dozen more than it costs them, though they make a great point of giving it to us at cost and cheaper than we could buy it ourselves.”

“Why don’t you club together and buy, then?” the little widow asked, to hear again the formula, “And get your walking-ticket next day? We know a little better than that.”

A few weeks later a new system of payment forced each worker to sacrifice from half an hour to an hour of precious time, her only capital. Hitherto payments had been made at the desk when work was brought in, but now checks were given on a Bowery bank, and the women must walk over in heat and storm alike, and wait their turn in the long line on the benches. If paid by the week this would make little difference, as any loss of time would be the employers’, but this form of payment is practically abolished, piece-work done at home meaning the utmost amount of profit to the employer, every loss in time being paid by the workers themselves. When questioned as to why the check system of payment had been adopted by this and various other firms, the reply was simply: —

“It saves trouble. The bank has more time to count out money than we have.”

“But the women? Does it seem quite fair that they should be the losers?”

“Fair? Anything’s fair in business. You’d find that out if you undertook to do it.”

As the case then at present stands, for this firm, and for many which have adopted the same methods, the working-woman not only pays the rent that would be required for a factory, but gives them a profit on expressage, thread, time lost in going to bank, and often the price on a dozen of garments, payment for the dozen being deducted by many foremen if there is a flaw in one. This foreman becomes the scapegoat if unpleasant questions are asked by any whose investigation might bring discredit on the firm. In some cases they refuse positively to give any information, but in most, questions are answered with suspicious glibness, and if reference is made to any difficulties encountered by the women in their employ, they take instant refuge in the statement: —

“Oh, that was before the last foreman left. We discharged him as soon as we found out how he had served the women.”

“Do you see those goods?” another asked, pointing to a counter filled with piles of chemises. “How do you suppose we make a cent when you can buy a chemise like that for fifty cents? We don’t. The competition is ruining us, and we’re talking of giving up the business.”

“That’s so. It’s really more in charity to the women than anything else that we go on,” his partner remarked, with a look toward him which seemed to hold a million condensed winks. “That price is just ruin; that’s what it is.”

Undoubtedly, but not for the firm, as the following figures will show, – figures given by a competent forewoman in a large establishment where she had had eleven years’ experience: twenty-seven yards and three-quarters are required for one dozen chemises, the price paid for such cotton as is used in one selling at fifty cents being five cents per yard, or $1.40 for the whole amount; thirty yards of edging at 4½ cents a yard furnishes trimming for the dozen, at $1.35; and four two-hundred-yard spools of cotton are required, at twenty-five cents per dozen, or eight cents per dozen garments. The seamer who sews up and hems the bodies of the garments receives thirty cents a dozen, and the “maker” – this being the technical term for the more experienced worker who puts on band and sleeves – receives from ninety cents to one dollar a dozen, though at present the rates run from seventy-five to ninety cents. Our table, then, stands as follows: —

The chemise which sells at seven dollars per dozen has the additional value in quality of cloth and edging, the same price being paid the work-women, this price varying only in very slight degree till the excessively elaborate work demanded by special orders. One class of women in New York, whose trade has been a prosperous one since ever time began, pay often one hundred dollars a dozen for the garments, which are simply a mass of lace and cobweb cambric, tucked and puffed, and demanding the highest skill of the machine operator, who even in such case counts herself happy if she can make eight or nine dollars a week. And if any youth and comeliness remain to her, why need there be wonder if the question frame itself: “Why am I the maker of this thing, earning barest living, when, if I choose, I, too, can be buyer and wearer and live at ease?”

Wonder rather that one remains honest when the only thing that pays is vice.

For the garments of lowest grade to be found in the cheapest quarters of the city the price ranges from twenty-five to thirty cents, the maker receiving only thirty cents a dozen, and cloth, trimming, and thread being of the lowest quality. The profit in such case is wellnigh imperceptible; but for the class of employer who secures it, content to grovel in foul streets, and know no joy of living save the one delight of seeing the sordid gains roll up into hundreds of thousands, it is still profit, and he is content. As I write, an evening paper containing the advertisement of a leading dry-goods firm is placed before me, and I read: “Chemises, from 12½ cents up.” Here imagination stops. No list of cost prices within my reach tells me how this is practicable. But one thing is certain. Even here it is not the employer who loses; and if it is a question of but a third of a cent profit, be sure that that profit is on his side, never on the side of the worker.