XI.

WOMAN IN INDUSTRY.

BY

ALICE HYNEMAN RHINE.

In treating of woman’s industrial career in America the subject falls naturally into periods, each one of which seems to possess some distinct characteristic. These periods can in no sense be considered arbitrary divisions, for the changes in woman’s industrial position in America have been the result of slow transitions from one state to another. The fact that is emphasized is, that certain causes can be observed which had the effect at stated times of forcing old conditions to give way to new. By taking up in their order each of these epoch-shaping factors, we can discern most easily the part women have played in the progress of American industries.

The first of these periods embraces those years of primitive social conditions when people labored to supply the simplest needs of life; when men were engaged principally in agriculture and commerce, and women carried on the work of manufacturing clothing, and attending to the wants of the household. In those days, almost every family owned a loom, spinning-wheel, reel and knitting-needles, and the family comfort depended largely on the degree of skill and industry with which these manufacturing implements were handled. In some homes, hundreds of yards of “homespun” were made yearly. The New York _Mercury_ for 1768 credits one family, living in Newport, Rhode Island, with having within four years “manufactured nine hundred and eighty yards of woolen cloth, besides two coverlids (coverlets), and two bed-ticks, and all the stocking yarn of the family.”

In those days neither wealth nor position afforded women an excuse for idleness. Nor did their labors cease with the home. It was considered so unbecoming to be unemployed that even hours of social enjoyment were devoted to useful occupations. During the enforcement of the non-importation acts, when, among other things, cloth and stockings were prevented from coming into this country from England, a letter written from Newport tells of a social gathering where “it was resolved that those who could spin ought to be employed in that way, and those who could not, should reel.” At a similar meeting in Boston, “a party of forty or fifty young women, calling themselves ‘Daughters of Liberty,’” amused themselves at the house of their pastor with spinning, during one day, “two hundred and thirty-two skeins of yarn, some very fine.” No woman considered herself too elegant

To guide the spindle and direct the loom,

or knit the stockings which, since stocking-frames were interdicted as articles of import, had to be made for the whole people by slow process of hand. As indicative of the simple and industrial habits of Mrs. Washington, it is related that when, in 1780, a party of the leading ladies of Morristown called upon her by appointment at her husband’s headquarters, Mrs. Washington appeared before them in a plain gown of “linsey woolsey,” and, while she entertained them with pleasant conversation, her busy fingers never ceased plying the knitting-needles.

Prior to and long after the Revolution, stocking knitting was an industry large enough to claim most of what were termed woman’s “spare moments.” With the assistance of child and slave labor, large quantities were made for sale or exchange. Legislators, to stimulate busy fingers to fresh exertions, offered bounties for their increased production. In Virginia, prizes of fifty pounds of tobacco (the currency then) were given “for every five hundred pairs of men’s and women’s stockings produced, worth from three to five shillings the pair, with the privilege of buying them at an advance of seventy-five per cent. on those prices.”

Except among a few German settlers in Pennsylvania, no attempt was made for many years to change stocking-making from a domestic into a factory industry. Until 1826 the manufacture of stockings remained woman’s almost exclusive province. Then knitting-machines were set up in several of the States, but, as if there was some peculiar fitness in this remaining woman’s department, the employees in knitting-works have always been, even down to 1889, “nearly all women and children.”

Never did women work harder than during this domestic period of labor. The slave women of the South, in addition to going through all the processes of manufacturing woolen and cotton cloth, which they afterward cut and made into garments, attended to both in and out-of-door labor. They tilled the rice fields, planted tobacco, sowed the cotton seed, and helped with the harvesting. The women in the North, though not “put into the ground,” as the early adventurers termed field-work, engaged energetically in other industries. History tells of women who helped build their own homes, wielding the ax and carrying the water to mix mortar with which to build chimneys. On the farms, it was women who raised the garden truck of vegetables and herbs, attended to poultry breeding, milked the cows, made butter and cheese, did the sewing, and performed all the household chores now classed in industrial statistics as “domestic service.”

Outside the strictly necessary occupations of manufacture, household service, clothing, and garden-work, from quite early times women in America turned their attention to speculative labor and to trade. When James the First, thinking to utilize mulberry trees that were indigenous to our soil, forwarded silkworm cocoons to America, when dazzling dreams of wealth to come from the successful culture of the silkworm were indulged in by people on both sides of the Atlantic, and when bounties of money and tobacco were offered for spun and woven silk, according to its weight and width, most of these prizes were obtained by women. The success obtained by women in feeding the worms, and reeling, spinning, and weaving the silk, caused this industry, during the varying fortunes that preceded the establishment of silk-weaving as a factory industry, to be carried on mainly by them. History has preserved the names of three women famous before the Revolution as silk-growers and weavers: Mrs. Pinckney, Grace Fisher, and Susanna Wright. While silkworm culture was a failure in spite of all the fostering care bestowed upon it, and none of the pioneers realized any of the golden visions of rivaling the productions of Spain and the Indies, the efforts made by them paved the way for future cultivation.

Along with the silk industry, another of scarcely less importance was growing up quietly in New England. This was the manufacture of straw goods, the products of which now amount to many millions annually. Straw, applied to so many purposes to-day, owes its origin as an article of manufacture to a young Massachusetts girl. In 1789 Miss Betsy Metcalf discovered the secret of bleaching and braiding the meadowgrass of her native town of Dedham, and of ingeniously making this braid into a bonnet. Although scarcely more than a child, the chronicles tell that she taught others to do what she had done, and started a business by which the want of bonnets and hats for summer-wear was supplied. From using straw for head-gear, its manufacture spread to other things, and developed an industry that, in 1880, employed nearly eleven thousand operatives. Of these over seven thousand were women.

Whether it was the active out-door life led by the American women of the eighteenth century, or the wide-awake interest circumstances obliged them to take in the concerns of the family and of men; whether the stirring times in which they moved, or the deferential attitude of men stimulated them to do things that the women of other nations were not doing, it is certain that the American women of a century ago were far in advance of their times in all things except a knowledge of light literature, which the circulating libraries of Europe placed within the reach of women there, and a scarcity of books denied them here. That this was more of a gain than loss, by giving women time to think, is shown in the energy with which they went to work in helping to build up the nation. They engaged in mercantile affairs with such success that, it is said, “many Boston fortunes owed their rise to women.” The active interest taken by them in politics gave, even before the Revolution, some representative women to journalism. Out of the seventy-eight newspapers published in the colonies, sixteen were edited by women, and all but two of them championed the cause of liberty and justice. The first paper to publish the Declaration of Independence was edited and printed by a Mrs. Reid. In medicine, women confined themselves into distilling herbs into remedies which it was said “could kill or cure with any of the faculty.” In the practice of midwifery, history has preserved the name of a Mrs. Robinson, of New London, who continued to practice to an advanced age, and who “delivered twelve hundred mothers without losing a patient.”

The inventive faculty, so distinctive a trait in the character of the American man, was also a gift of the American woman. How many women were inventors will never be known, as they timidly shielded their identity behind men. This is said to have been the case with the cotton-gin. Credited through all the years to Eli Whitney, modern writers claim that it was the fruit of the inventive powers of Mrs. Nathaniel Green,[172] widow of Gen. Green of revolutionary fame. The story runs that Mrs. Green, a native of Rhode Island and familiar with the working of the anchor forge belonging to her husband’s father, set her wits to work while visiting her Georgia plantations, to lessen the labor of cleansing the cotton. When this difficulty was solved, she permitted Mr. Whitney to claim the patent, through fear of the ridicule of her friends and loss of social position recognition of her work might have entailed.

By whomever invented, no other instrument has been so fruitful of consequences. In 1793, when the cotton-gin was made, cotton, instead of being King, was a humble garden plant, grown for home consumption in the regions from Georgia to New Jersey. When its snowy blossoms ripened, women gathered them, plucked the seeds from the fiber, and got it ready for spinning. So difficult was this process, that to remove the seed from one pound was considered a good day’s work. By the operation of the cotton-gin, in the time it had taken to cleanse one pound, three hundred-weight could be got ready for market. By this, cotton was transformed at once into a valuable commercial product that required for its successful cultivation an enormous increase of land and labor. It instilled such new life into the almost dying institution of slavery that the cotton-gin may well be said to have been the foster-mother of slavery in America.

As the immediate effect of the cotton-gin in the South was to give an enormous value to the slave, its invention was followed in the North by the cotton factory. The cotton factory was the northern complement of the cotton-gin. To women it had the momentous results of transferring them from the home to the factory; of taking them out of the family farm-house to the manufacturing towns and villages, and, by making them for the first time the wage-earning competitors of men, altering their whole status in the labor market of America.

With the factory came a new epoch for women in America. The War of the Revolution and the War of 1812 had been ended long enough to induce a general feeling of security concerning the future of the republic. For a large number of people, the hard work and deprivations of the past were as a dream; peace and plenty promised to abound. Wealth came flowing from all directions in a steady stream into the country through the various channels of commerce and agriculture. Numerous business enterprises were undertaken, principal among which were the factories for weaving cotton and wool into cloth. The earliest of these was built in Massachusetts, where numerous swift-flowing rivers abound, capable of being utilized for moving machinery. Through the energetic, progressive spirit of the descendants of the Puritans, it was not long before New England began to rival Old England in manufacturing the increased production of cotton grown in the United States. The first cotton mill erected in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1822, was followed so quickly by others, that by 1839 there were in Lowell ten companies incorporated with a capital of $13,000,000. These produced 2,463,000 yards of cloth per week, of which all but 91,000 were cotton. The number of operatives employed were 12,507, and in the cotton mills the majority of these were women. From the amount of capital invested and the number of operatives employed, Lowell was termed, in the period between 1840 and 1850, “the Manchester of America.”

But in nothing—except that Lowell and Manchester were places filled with the hum of machinery tended by human workers for their own livelihood and the profits of others—was there any resemblance between Manchester and Lowell. The recorded condition of the English operatives, especially women, at that time reads like a page torn from some canto of Dante’s “Inferno;” while that of Lowell, pictured by women who worked as ordinary mill-hands in the Lowell factories, seems in comparison like a Utopian idyl evolved from the brain of dreamers.

According to writers, the women operatives who entered the Lowell mills came from the New England farms, not from stress of circumstances, but to get wage-money to help lift a mortgage from the family farm, or to assist some son or brother in obtaining an otherwise impossible university education. A large majority entered the mills to secure independence, or household and dress adornments. Not a few entered so as to be near circulating libraries and schools, with the opportunities for self-culture which these afforded. Coming from the agricultural class, which considered itself among the aristocracy of America,[173] no class distinctions were made, and the factory young women were welcomed into the best social circles of Lowell. Well but simply dressed, as was the fashion of the times, they were to be seen at church, Sunday-schools, and social gatherings at the parsonages and elsewhere, receiving the same consideration as those whom circumstances had placed above the need of work. The girls themselves felt no loss of caste or diminution of self-respect. Most of them expected to marry—many did—and withdraw from the factory, and failing this, when factory work became disagreeable, to retire to the family home. The factory was an episode, not, as it later became too frequently elsewhere, the burden of this chapter in woman’s life.

The factories _per se_ were as remarkable as the women who operated them. Kept as clean as the nature of the work would admit, with plants growing in the windows trained to shade the glass, the rooms seemed redolent of the country. Fronting one side of the building were the banks and waters of the swift-flowing Merrimac, which, as it hastened on to meet the sea, turned the wheels of the machinery, ignorant as yet of steam. On the other was the bright, new village, looking, as Dickens said in 1843, “as if every kind of store had taken down its shutters for the first time and started in business yesterday.” Standing on the hill was the prettiest building in the place, which was the hospital where girls when sick were tenderly cared for. Those unable to pay the weekly charge of three dollars, had it provided for them by the corporations. Seldom were the latter put to this expense, for Yankee girls had a horror of being placed under money obligations. Boarding-houses, erected by the mill-owners, were given in charge of reputable women. The charge for board in them, including the mid-day meal,—which was taken in civilized fashion at the boarding-house tables,—and washing to a certain extent, was fixed at the small sum of $1.50. Wages, counting in those of the little doffers, averaged $3.75 per week. Weavers, drawing-in girls, warpers, and spinners, who tended extra work, could earn from six to eight dollars per week. These wages, with the low price of board and the economical style of dress common in those days, enabled the mill operatives to place a large part of their earnings in the savings bank established for their use by the corporations. In 1841, one hundred thousand dollars, a sum which was a source of pride to all concerned, was deposited to the credit of the girls of Lowell.

Happy in their social position, and in the good feeling existing between employers and employed, free from pecuniary care for the necessities of life and in command of some of the best luxuries, the Lowell girls reached an intellectual height unique in the history of industrial workers. When the twelve or fourteen hours that then constituted a day’s work were ended, buoyant with the health of generations of out-door workers, the Lowell women were fresh enough to enjoy in various ways what was left of their evenings. In most of the boarding-houses there were pianos, the joint property of the girls. Some played, others sang. Books were read, topics discussed, and poems, stories, and essays written. These formed the pages of the “Lowell Offering,” a monthly magazine composed entirely of articles by the girls. The literary merit of these articles astonished people from abroad. Harriet Martineau republished some of them in England under the title of “Mind among the Spindles,” while Dickens claimed that, independent of the fact that the articles were written by girls after a long, hard day’s work in factories, they “compared favorably with those of many English periodicals.” In character, the stories differed from the sentimental love-tales common to women’s writings of that period. Simple in style, they were mostly descriptive of human life and the beauties of nature that the girls had left behind them, and what was best in their Lowell environments. Among the contributors, who attained national reputation, were Lucy Larcom, the poet; Margaret Foley, the sculptor, and Mrs. H. H. Robinson, the author.[174] These women always spoke with affectionate respect of their factory experiences. Mrs. Robinson, at the International Council of Women, held at Washington in 1888, after telling how she had entered the Lowell mills as a “doffer” when a child, and remained there until she married in 1848, said: “I consider the Lowell mills my _alma mater_, and am as proud of them as most girls of the colleges in which they have been educated.”

When factory towns sprang up in the suburbs of the large cities of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, etc., they did so under conditions different from those of Lowell, and, of course, had other results. There was no need in these places for corporations to offer exceptional wages and treatment to women to induce them to enter the mills. Already at hand, and eager to accept any conditions, were the thousands of women who had been deposited on the shores of America by the tidal wave of immigration, which set in from Europe during the decade of 1845–55. For these women, who labored for bread and butter and not for knick-knacks, no effort was made, as in Lowell, to surround them with a favorable social atmosphere. How women spent their evenings, what were their pleasures or sorrows and how they lived, in a country where the necessities of life were dear, on their weekly wages of $2.63 to $4.99 per week (the average wages of factory women from 1850 to 1860), was inquired into by none. Employers and employed both felt that all responsibilities began and ended with the money given and received on pay-days.

This indifference concerning working-women was not confined to the factory, but was so general that even the National Census Report did not take the trouble to classify woman’s work separately from man’s, until it was found that in some departments of industry women exceeded men in point of numbers almost in the ratio of two to one. In the cotton factories of twenty-five States, in 1850, the number of women employed was 62,661, against 32,295 men. In 1860, the average number employed in the cotton factories was, according to official returns, 75,169 women against 46,859 men. It was computed that in the woolen goods manufactories of the six New England States, there were 29,886 men and 51,517 women employed. Hosiery, an industry belonging to women since days when Homer wrote of

The knitters in the sun, And the free maids who weave their thread with bones,

employed in 1860 almost three times as many women as men. Large numbers of women made rubber clothing. Half as many women as men were engaged in the manufacture of paper. Women filled places in bookbinderies, printing offices, and newspaper establishments. The number of women engaged in domestic service (never an exactly ascertainable quantity) formed a bulk equal to the factory population; while the ranks of needle-women were, as usual, larger than all of those industries combined, excepting domestic service. In 1850, the number of women engaged in the making of men’s and boys’ clothing alone numbered 61,500; the number of men being 35,061. In 1860, owing to the invention of the sewing-machine, these figures were partially reversed; the number of women employed was diminished and that of men increased.

The sewing-machine was one of several factors that about 1860 inaugurated for women another industrial period. From its invention by Elias Howe the sewing-machine properly belonged to 1846, but the business of making and selling them was not fairly started before 1853. Then the sales of all the manufacturers amounted to only 2529. In 1860 they had reached to about 50,000. This increase showed that the sewing-machine results must be dated from the year of its acceptance into popular favor. Mr. Howe’s invention, like all other labor-saving machines, intended to be a blessing by lightening the burdens of workers, proved a curse by taking away their accustomed pursuit from those who depended on the skill by which they drove

The patient needle through the woven threads.

Brought into competition with machines that could do more and better work in one day than was possible for six women, working twenty hours apiece, to accomplish, these had either to starve, or force their way into some other wage-earning industry. An example of how this displacement affected needle-women can be gleaned from Appleton’s Cyclopædia for 1862, which cites a single establishment in New York, employing four hundred machines and producing about ten thousand shirts a week, whose estimated savings (in wages) were about $240,000 per annum. In the same year, the following sums were saved in wage-time by the sewing-machines in the manufacturing industries:

Men’s and boys’ clothing in New York City $7,500,000 Hats and caps 462,500 Shirt bosoms 832,750

Calculating that each machine did the work of six girls, and estimating that one girl operated each machine, there were 73,290 women displaced by the machines on which these savings were made.

Contemporary with the general acceptance of the sewing-machine, and intensifying the distress of the wage-worker, was the Civil War, which, in 1860, began to decimate the ranks of men and to convert into wage-earners large numbers of women who had been wage-expenders. Delicate women in the South, reared in affluence, waited upon by slaves, were thrown, by losses of male relatives and property, among the bread-winners. Numbers of these journeyed to Northern cities to hide their poverty as well as to gain entrance into the larger field of industries the North was supposed to offer. But here they were met by thousands of other women, native to the North, who, like their sisters of the South, through the death of those who had hitherto fought the battle of life for them, were obliged to become producers in the place of being consumers.

The distress experienced by workers of this class wrought that great revolution in thought which involved the education of women. This is one of the accepted factors of the present period. At that time agitation was rife as to what should be done for the advancement of women as workers. Miss Virginia Penny, in a book called “Think and Act,”[175] advocated the entrance of women into the trades and professions that were monopolized by men. “Apprentice,” she says, “ten thousand women to watchmakers; train ten thousand for teachers to the young; make ten thousand good accountants; put ten thousand more to be deaconesses trained by Florence Nightingale; put some thousands in the electric telegraph offices all over the country; educate one thousand lecturers for mechanics’ institutes; one thousand to read the best books to the working-people; train up ten thousand to manage washing-machines, sewing-machines, etc. Then the distressed needle-woman will vanish, the decayed gentlewoman and broken-down governess cease to exist.”

Writers like Gail Hamilton in the North and Catherine Cole in the South urged the higher education of women; their right to be educated the same as man; “to enter the same pursuits, receive the same wages, occupy the same posts and professions, wield the same influence, and, in a word, be independent of man as a means of support.”

These strangely reasonable, though novel propositions, met with as much public condemnation at the time as though, in place of being suggestions for elevating women into skillful, rational workers, they had advocated turning them into gamblers and drunkards. The fact was ignored that the majority of women had always been engaged in carrying on some kind of necessary industry, if only in untaught, helpless ways. Hence it became fashionable to say that “woman as a worker was a product of modern times.” Her entrance into the ranks of wealth-producers and wage-earners was called the “New Departure,” and was deplored by writers as calculated, by thwarting nature’s evident design in making her child-bearer, child-trainer, and house-mother, to rob her of special gifts of grace, beauty, and tenderness. The error of the day, it was argued, lay in the thought that woman should be self-supporting, and she was implored to stop and consider what homes would become,

Where woman reigns, the mother, daughter, wife, Strews with fresh flowers the narrow way of life,

if “woman was to take her place beside man in every field of coarse, rough toil.”

The peculiarity of these arguments, intended to dissuade women from being workers, was, that while poets, philosophers, and essayists were picturing women as weak, tender creatures, clinging for protection to man as the vine to the oak, the lovely presiding geniuses of homes, the expenders of wealth produced by man, there were, according to the census of 1860, one million women working by the side of men in various domains of “coarse, rough toil.” These writers, clergymen for the most part, made the mistake, common to people in comfortable circumstances, of looking on the small, glittering world of dazzling drawing-rooms and boudoirs, where an elegant, dainty womanhood presides, as “woman’s world.” Living in this, they became blinded to that other, larger world of women without homes, with no time for the cultivation of the graces or personal adornment, who were obliged to work if they would live.

According to the newspapers of 1867 and of 1870, out of seventy thousand women (wage-earners) in the city of New York, not including domestics, twenty thousand were in a constant fight with starvation and pauperism. Seven thousand lived in cellars. Those who got sewing to do worked from seven in the morning until midnight making shirts at six cents apiece. The most rapid workers could scarcely, even with those long hours, make one dozen shirts and thus earn their seventy-two cents per day. The pay for drawers, undershirts, and blouses was in proportion. We read that in Boston there were, in 1868, “twenty thousand women working at starvation rates; eight thousand workers at twenty to twenty-five cents per day, twelve thousand workers for less than fifty cents, and even at these rates there was little work.” These women lived at times, it is said, “on one cracker a day for breakfast, dinner, and supper,” working from “dawn to dawn” to “get one mouthful of food.” In this same year, the New York journals reported thirty thousand girls struggling in that city with starvation and cold, making shirts and furnishing the thread at sixpence each. The condition of seventy-five thousand working women in the city beggared description. The New York _Herald_ described them as living in “nasty tenement houses, in cellars unfit for human habitation, in pools of foulness, where every impurity is matured and every vice flourishes.” Women who could get sewing-machines worked at them for $2.50 per week, and the forty-one cents per day that they earned represented the work, if not the wages, of six other women.

The helplessness, the misery, the degradation of womanhood, laboring and starving on beggarly wages in rich and prosperous cities, arrested the attention of the thinking class to woman’s needs as it has never been arrested before. How to help woman to better her condition became, in 1868, one of the burning questions of the day. Gail Hamilton, Mrs. Stephens, Miss Penny, and others, attributed the distress of the factory and needle-women to the lack of educational training which obliged women to crowd into occupations requiring little, if any, skill. To remedy this, the establishment of industrial schools was advocated. Men, it was reasoned, had their trades’ apprenticeship system, schools, and universities, by which they were educated into a knowledge of many things; and by applying the same method to women, giving some thousands of them a professional training in each of the various trades, arts, and sciences useful to mankind, the ranks of the factory-seekers and needle-women in search of employment would be thinned sufficiently to cause the anomaly to vanish of millions of adult human beings laboring as men for the pay of children, and yet paying as men for whatever they got. Other remedies agitated were those of woman suffrage and the organization of women into societies for mutual protection and benefit.

Small private attempts at industrial schools for the advancement of women, such as the “Wilson Industrial School” in New York, had been started by the benevolence of individuals as early as 1856; but the first serious attempt to give practical shape to the question of higher education for women was undertaken when Peter Cooper made the advantages of the institute founded by him and bearing his name, free in all its departments, to women as to men. The Cooper Institute, opened to the public in 1859, had its free art classes for women, where art was taught in its application to the industries. The Cooper Art School is said to be, even now, “the largest in the world for women.” From its inception a few women were found ready to avail themselves of the opportunity given them to study art in its various income-producing forms. But not until after the close of the war, when conditions made it urgent upon women to work on new lines, did the classes increase to any extent. (Then hundreds more than could be accommodated applied for admission.) Names were placed in the roll-book a year ahead, and the classes, through their increased size, overflowed into rooms not intended for their use. The number of students in the free art classes, for the season of 1889–90, was 310. For this season there were 693 applicants for admission to the free art classes. The accommodations do not admit of but few over 300.

In this one phase of work accomplished for women in the United States, there was much that was attractive to the class drawn into the Cooper Institute, a class that belonged neither to the rich nor to the extremely poor. The large, light, airy rooms were formed, many of them, into charming studios, filled with tasteful studies, articles of bric-a-brac, stuffs, and, occasionally, growing plants. Books, pictures, and engravings on art were supplied them in the art rooms. Descending three flights of broad stone steps, lined on each side with studies in plaster and on paper, there was the free library, a room of magnificent proportions, 125 × 30 feet, glass-domed, and containing 21,276 bound volumes, nearly 5000 unbound, and having always on file 189 magazines and 393 of the best newspapers, American and foreign. It can be imagined what godsends these treasures of art and literature were to women of talent, whose work had hitherto been conducted without any, or the most meager, advantages. To add to their value, the work of training pupils was intrusted to teachers capable of drawing out latent possibilities. The line of industrial work done in the Cooper Institute consisted of the arts of design as applied to making patterns for stained glass, wall-papers, oilcloths, textile fabrics, carpets, and adapting the patterns of Oriental rugs for the American market. Other forms of art consisted in coloring photographs, portrait crayon drawing, and in late years wood-engraving, for which women developed an unusual aptitude. When pupils attained sufficient proficiency in any of these branches, they were permitted to add to their incomes by executing orders from business firms for pay. Profits from this source almost maintained some of the most expert during their last school years. The students in 1889, and the graduates of May, 1888, earned in this way, during the year, $17,805.

A wise discretionary power given the trustees of the Cooper Institute, “to add such other art or trade to the curriculum as would tend to furnish women with suitable employment,” led to the establishment, in 1869, of a class in telegraphy and in 1884, of a stenographic and type-writing class. Both of these combined, educated about one hundred women yearly in those professions. The expense of carrying on all the departments of woman’s work was, in 1889, one-fifth of the whole expenses of the building, and barely reached $10,000—an outlay surprisingly small for the equipment of about four hundred women, educated to maintain themselves, and influence, by teaching and example, the minds of the many with whom they come into contact.

Significant as was the work performed by this institution, devoted to art and science, it was, nevertheless, felt by charitable individuals that something more was needed in the way of instruction for the mass of women who toiled without chance of coming within the sphere of its beautiful influence. Wealthy philanthropists, whose sympathies were touched by the lives of the workers, sought to help women in many other ways. The Young Women’s Christian Association of New York recognized early the necessity of educating self-supporting women in many of the skilled industries. This association, which, of late years, has become a power for good in almost all the large cities of the United States, instituted in New York, as part of its plan of work, free classes for training women in commercial arithmetic, penmanship, book-keeping, and type-writing. An industrial department was created for teaching dressmaking in all its branches of cutting, fitting, hand and machine sewing. In imitation of the Cooper, art classes were formed for teaching the retouching of photo-negatives, photo-coloring, mechanical and free-hand drawing, modeling, and design. To still further carry out its program “to care for the temporal, mental, and moral welfare of the self-supporting women of New York City,” a free library was attached to the building and a series of free concerts, readings, and lectures provided for. Through these and other means of physical culture, Bible and choir classes, employment bureaus, board directories, and a department for the sale of goods made in sewing-classes, about five thousand persons were reached during the year of 1887. The number of pupils in all classes was reported as 965. But with the best intentions, this organization, like the Cooper, failed to reach the women who live and work in the city’s slums. Its applicants were those who had first graduated from the public schools and then, helpless as babes, had availed themselves of the splendid opportunity it offered for gratuitous instruction in some wage-earning industry. When Miss Graffenried, of the United States Labor Bureau for 1889, went among the women in tenements, factories, and shops, out of three thousand interviewed, she said, “Not one was known to have come under the influence of this noble organization.”

Besides schools such as the Cooper and the Woman’s Christian Union, that were specially designed for educating women in industrial trades, so many other ways were thought out for bettering their condition, that one might well call the years from 1868 on, the philanthropic era for women. So numerous were the societies started for their relief that scarcely a need existed that an organization of some kind did not attempt to fill, and each in its particular way emphasized Emerson’s truth, “there is more kindness in the world than ever was spoken.” Through the efforts of a few liberal-minded, energetic men and women, there was established in New York, in 1868, a society called the “Working Woman’s Protective Union,” that purposed to provide “women with legal protection against the frauds and impositions of unscrupulous employers, to assist them in procuring employment, and to secure them such suitable departments of labor as are not occupied by them.” From the start, the novel work done by this society was appreciated by the class it was intended to help. Perfectly unsectarian, with all its services _gratis_, the rooms, first on Bleecker Street, and for the past twenty years on Clinton Place, were thronged by women in distress desirous of legal counsel, matronly advice, or help to better work. At all times chance visitors could see women waiting in the front room, while the superintendent gave sympathetic ear in the rear apartment to some earlier comer. One day in each week was known as “complaint day.” On that day the legal representative of the Union received and examined the complaints that the superintendent deemed worthy of prosecution. What the society has done in the twenty-five years of its existence is summed up in the statement that on an annual outlay of $5000 it has fought and won the legal battles of 12,000 women, who would otherwise have been defrauded of their hard-earned wages by unscrupulous employers. It has collected by legal processes $41,000, in sums averaging $4 each, and supplied in twenty-five years more than 300,000 applicants with employment, advice, or relief. As many of these applications were made by the same person three or four different times, there were represented, perhaps, 10,000 applicants annually. It was of this society that Henry Ward Beecher said the Union’s greatest and best work was “the mere fact of its existence,” as this fact made employers more careful in withholding from the working-woman her just dues.

When a plan to redress a wrong succeeds, it is sure to have imitators. Societies in other cities followed the example of the Woman’s Protective Union, and some of these branched out in directions unthought of by the founders of the parent institution. The Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union, in Boston, besides securing wages unjustly withheld from working-women, added the task of investigating advertisements for work to be done at home, and, if found fraudulent, warning women against them. It procured situations for the unemployed; sold on commission the fruits of woman’s work; opened a lunch-room where women could have varied bills of fare at moderate prices, or where they could sit and eat the luncheons brought from home. It included in its scope the instruction of women in various points of law, such as those regarding the relations between employer and employed, the hiring of rooms, and the detention of property. It detailed agents to look up titles to furniture that, by means of mortgage or insufficient payment of the installments, might not belong to the seller. A feature was made of holding lectures and mothers’ meetings, the purpose of the talks being to lead women into higher planes of thought and action. One of the most active endeavors was made in the line of securing the appointment of police matrons in large cities.[176]

The honor of originating the parent Woman’s Protective Union in New York belongs to men; but the establishment of both similar and widely different societies in the United States is due to the zealous energy of women themselves. The Woman’s Club in Chicago instituted, in 1866, a Protective Agency that had for its objects the protection of woman’s purity and honor, and her deliverance from swindlers and extortionists. In the first year of its existence, it examined 156 complaints, fifty-one of which were claims for money,—chiefly wages. These aggregated $992.89. It is said to be the design of this agency “to establish in the near future a loan fund for the benefit of those in need of temporary assistance, and who, under existing conditions, are obliged to pay usurious interest for money.”

Better than anything else, philanthropic work undertaken by women in America shows the difference between past and present generations. A few decades ago, woman’s attention was absorbed in organizing small, local, sectarian sewing societies, Sunday-school classes, and church fairs. After the Civil War these few circumscribed channels no longer sufficed for woman’s activity, and an expansion took place that made itself felt in the organization of societies for working-women. These took no heed of sects, restricted in no way the compass of the schools designed for them, and worked for humanity as a whole. In their management of these institutions, women displayed an amount of executive ability and enlightened interest in public need that surprised men. Because they had never attempted organization on a large scale, they were supposed to lack constructive talent. Some, with true conceptions of what society should be as a whole, endeavored here and there to take away from the institutions they founded, and over which they presided, the semblance of that offensive charity which plumed itself formerly in making petticoats for the poor,—

Because we are of one flesh after all. And need one flannel (with a proper sense Of difference in the quality),

or distributing stale bread and thin soup, together with homilies on the virtues of contentment and the blessing of poverty and work. Along with men, they fell into the swim of modern thought which attempted to render institutions self-supporting through the co-operative efforts of those availing themselves of their privileges. It was on these broad lines of non-sectarianism, diversity of teaching for a sisterhood of women, and the co-operative society in which there is strength, that there was built up for the use of the working-women the various boarding-homes, industrial schools, and stores for the disposal of woman’s handiwork. To soften the harshest experiences of women thrown upon their own resources for necessities of food and shelter, philanthropic women, and men, too, made it their business to establish “boarding-homes,” where the price of entrance was fixed at sums low enough to come within the reach of the average wage-earning woman. The clean, quiet streets usually chosen for these homes, contrasted with the filthy, crowded thoroughfares where the cheap lodging-houses—the only resorts the average friendless working-woman could afford—were most apt to be situated. The difference within was as great as without. In place of the cold, comfortless rooms which, as a rule, were destitute of fire or carpet, and where there was neither reception-room for visitors, nor bath nor laundry for inmates; the model boarding-houses had spacious, well-ventilated bedrooms attractively adorned, with a neat parlor, usually a library or reading-room, well warmed, brightly lighted, and inviting. Privileges of bath-rooms and laundries were added to increase the comforts of the boarders. Two of the best of these homes are to be found in Boston, one on Warrenton, the other on Berkeley Street. These structures, built under the auspices of the Woman’s Christian Association, are provided with electric bells, ventilating appliances, and safeguards against fire. Both houses have, besides offices and attendants, handsome parlors, well-stocked reading-rooms, libraries, and lecture halls. One of them possesses a fine gymnasium. The price for board and lodging varies from $3 to $5.50 per week, but more than one-half of the guests pay from $3 to $4 per week. In the two homes there exist accommodations for about three hundred women. The sums named secure pleasant rooms, well-prepared and neatly served meals, and include, besides washing and ironing, heating and lighting of rooms, the use of reading-rooms, library, parlor, and admission to all entertainments of the association.

In thirteen other cities in the United States there have been established, by the same energetic society, one “home,” smaller, but similar in character to the Boston homes. Connected with all of these, and adding greatly to their usefulness, are departments for giving instruction in sewing, teaching the art of dressmaking, and training woman in housework. Chautauqua circles were organized among the residents, and classes gotten up in which, for nominal sums, girls could be taught the languages, book-keeping, type-writing, stenography, painting, drawing, calisthenics, etc. Employment bureaus were attached, which, by personal application or through correspondence, obtained situations for those who were on its registers for services to be given, or received. To still further extend their helpfulness, another department, called the “Travelers’ Aid,” employed agents to meet incoming steamers and direct unprotected girls to the Association Homes, advise them as to the best and most economical means of transportation, and the best way to secure employment. Several smaller organizations, such as the “Helping Hand,” “Girls’ Friendly Society,” etc., instituted homes that were carried on in much the same way. The benefits of ventilation, cleanliness, and decent behavior were rigidly enforced, while in general the most strenuous efforts were put forth to make the homes so far self-supporting that their residents could look on them as co-operative enterprises, in which, by combination and judicious management, the funds each expended singly, brought them all unitedly, comforts which would have been impossible without such action.

To propagate the idea of the value of co-operation among women, whether workers or not, was perhaps the most useful thing accomplished by the boarding-home societies. So far the number of these institutions has been limited, so that they suggest what could be done rather than indicate what has been accomplished in brightening the lives of the great mass of homeless working-women. In Boston, where these “homes” are most numerous, there are, for a population of eighty thousand wage-earning women, but six of these dwellings. Altogether, the limit of their accommodations is about 387 boarders. In these meager results, for so much energetic, philanthropic work, the abortiveness is shown of private individualistic attempts to supplant by means of model co-operative boarding-homes, the cheap and nasty tenement lodging-houses, situated too often in close proximity to gin-shops, gambling dens and brothels. By the numbers who vainly seek admission into the few boarding-homes that have been established in various large cities, the fact is proved that were the idea of co-operative homes carried out to largest national issues and placed everywhere within reach of wage-earning women, all but the most debased would avail themselves of their privileges, and thus secure the comforts and good living enjoyed so rarely by women whom circumstances compel to labor.

Another phase of work initiated by women, and which, like the boarding-homes, needs only to be carried out on the broad and liberal lines of a national co-operation to become a power for universal good, were the exchanges, or stores, instituted for the purpose of selling hand or machine-made articles of woman’s manufacture, and which gave the maker the full price they brought, less a ten per cent. commission and a membership fee of $5 for maintaining the establishment. In this way, the founder of the Woman’s Exchange hoped to solve the ever-perplexing problem of finding a remunerative market for the work that women had been taught to do in the various art and industrial schools. At the time the first exchange was planned in New York, some ten years ago, thousands of women, graduates from the various art schools, were at work in stores and factories decorating china, painting household adornments such as portières, screens, wall-hangings, and doing all kinds of fancy work at prices but little, if any, beyond the wages of the average worker on men’s and women’s clothing. To direct this work into a channel, where the maker and not the employer would receive the profit, was what the originator of the exchange proposed to do for women pressed by poverty into the ranks of the bread-winners.

From the first, the exchange became popular with a certain class, and had a most phenomenal growth, forty having come into existence during the last decade, all of which are working successfully on the same general plan. A walk through the rooms of the parent institution, now established in a handsome building at 329 Fifth Avenue, shows the number and variety of workers who availed themselves of its privileges. In the salesrooms, hand-painted and embroidered tapestries hang on the walls; artistic screens, painted or embroidered on all conceivable materials, stand in every nook and corner; elaborately decorated china for ornament or table use lies piled on shelves; while textile fabrics of all kinds, made up into articles for wall decorations, bed and table use, or personal wear, are tastefully arranged on counters or within glass cases. On the upper floors in the building, women are kept constantly at work inspecting, marking, and ticketing goods sent in by consignees. In the basement are the storehouse and restaurant for receiving and selling cakes, pickles, preserves, and other edibles, sent to be disposed of for the benefit of the makers.

In this one establishment the sales for the year 1888 amounted to $51,180.26. The aggregate sold in the cake and preserve department amounted to $13,256.89. One consignee of chicken jelly, etc., got during the year $1,256.89. Of two consignees in the cake and preserve department one received $1,019.73, the other $772.42. Things sent to the lunch-room for Sunday night teas brought one consignee the comfortable little income of $965.78. From the sale of children’s wrappers alone, one consignee received $548.66, and one woman for screens, decorated frames, etc., $1105.71. One consignee received during the spring and fall months $217.35 for articles which she had previously made for manufacturers at $2.50 apiece, and which were sold for $35 each. In the order department connected with the exchange, the work done consisted of 1263 pieces of plain sewing, 1784 pieces of English embroidery, 1100 painted articles, and 2033 fancy articles. From the forty other societies then in existence the reports showed a grand aggregate of over one million dollars from sales during the year.

These figures demonstrate how thoroughly practical the scheme is of sending hand-made articles to special magazines to be disposed of for the makers’ benefit. The woman who, by sending her work to the exchange, got $35 for what she, as a wage-earner, had received $2.50 from the manufacturer, got the profit that had previously gone to swell the bank-account of the manufacturer, middle men, and retail dealers. This was the same with all contributors to the exchanges; by employing their own labor they accumulated the premiums which, under the old factory and store system, inured to the benefit of their employers. In establishing the woman’s exchanges, the difficulty was to secure enough women of intelligence to be their own employers and to interest enough women in woman’s work to become patrons of the exchanges instead of the stores. For instance, to meet the expenses of the Fifth Avenue establishment in 1888, the income from all sources was $13,589.56, while the expenses of carrying on the business amounted to $16,318.48. This left a deficit of $2723.92 that had to be met by donations, and which kept the institution on a partly charitable instead of wholly self-supporting basis. As this deficit had lessened with each year, some optimistic thinkers began to hope that the time was coming when it would disappear altogether, and thus allow them to become strictly co-operative instead of philanthropic concerns. A conclusion reached was, that were they once to become independent of charitable donations, they would branch out largely enough in most of the worst paid departments of woman’s work so as to force out those employed on such labor for the vast retail stores. But it was found that an insuperable obstacle to the extension of the exchanges lay in the utter lack of system with which contributors worked. In the matter of production, the regular stores had but little system; still some attempt was made in them to regulate the supply of manufactured goods to meet a possible or expected demand. Contributors to the exchanges had no such guide. Those who made and sent articles for sale could have no opportunity for knowing what others were making and sending. The result was that women living near or afar off in town and country worked completely in the dark. With no finger on the public pulse in the matter of supply and demand for goods, they were obliged for this haphazard work to purchase their own material in small quantities in the retail markets, while the merchant-manufacturers bought theirs in bulk in the cheapest. This could only mean more failures than successes in the disposal of goods made under such conditions. Again, only women possessed of some means could afford to lay out money for materials and wait the uncertain chances of its returning to them with a profit. In consequence, most of those contributing articles to the exchanges for sale were “reduced gentlewomen,” who made use of this means of becoming their own employers, not so much for support, as to better their conditions of living, without the publicity consequent upon working for manufacturers. This in itself made it impossible for the exchanges (as was claimed by their supporters) to have “_helped women in general to have hushed the ‘Song of the Shirt.’_”[177] To the women of the proletariat, the exchanges were not only unknown mediums by reason of their situation in fashionable thoroughfares, but forbidden factors because of their attendant risks and expenses. The number of sewing women helped in them to increased earnings was too insignificant to warrant any hope that the co-operative principles underlying their business methods would ever spread far enough to leave any impress upon prevailing modes of work in the business world. Like all other remedies, instituted by wealthy philanthropists to assist the working-women, they were palliatives for the ills of a few, not curatives for the sufferings of the many.

Much more satisfactory than anything which had been accomplished in the name of philanthropy or charity for working-women were the labor organizations founded by the proletariat and sustained by their own energy and contributions. About 1870, associations of working-people (including women) were inaugurated for the purpose of gaining better social conditions. These were more attractive and beneficial to the laboring class because they lacked that element of restitution of a modicum of withheld wages which tainted all that wealth did for the alleviation of the condition of wage-earning women,[178] and, moreover, was built upon the sounder philosophy of an endeavor to organize into bodies capable of striving collectively for their own deliverance, that class of women whom the industrial schools, women’s exchanges, etc., could not reach. The most important of these bodies was the Knights of Labor. Organized openly in 1881 at the Detroit Convention, but more secretly some years before, this body welcomed women into its ranks on the ground of seeking “to gather into one fold all branches of honorable toil, without regard to nationality, sex, creed, or color.” Trade assemblies, composed entirely of working-women, were formed, and the members were taught the beautiful principles on which the order was founded. In amalgamating with knights, women assumed the duties of the new chivalry. Engaging as equals in the undertaking, helping with time and money to carry out the new mission, they sought by Agitation, Education, and Organization to lighten the burden of toil, and to elevate the moral and social condition of mankind. In 1883, one local assembly, composed entirely of women, counted fifteen hundred members. These must all have given adherence to that order’s doctrine of “Equal pay for equal work,” and “woman’s equitable consideration with man in the Nation’s government.” Mrs. Leonora Barry, who had been a factory worker for some years in Central New York, became the chief officer of a trade assembly of nine hundred and twenty-seven women. Later, in 1886, she was elected a delegate to the general assembly, by which she was commissioned “to go forth and educate her sister working-women and the public generally as to their needs and necessities.”

The open declaration of this powerful organization,—that women possessed equal rights with men,—showed, as much as anything else, the advance of public sentiment in regard to women. Its educational influence extended outside the ranks of the order. Most of the women members were drawn from the employees in factories producing clothing, textile fabrics, food, tobacco, etc., and from the trades of typography, telegraphy, and stenography. In the mixed local assemblies women have an equal chance with men to express their views upon subjects bearing on the labor question. And even where women sat quiet, as most frequently happened, without taking share in the debates, one of the valuable purposes of the order was said to be served by the information and larger views which came to them through these discussions. In assemblies composed entirely of women, of whom not one, perhaps, could boast of more than a minor part of a common school education, ideas were advanced for their financial as well as educational benefit. Factory operatives, coming under their influence, became shareholders in co-operative concerns. Co-operative shirt factories, conducted solely by women, were established in Baltimore and New York. A co-operative knitting mill was set up at Little Falls, N. Y., while other co-operative industries throughout the land came, through co-operative principles, into the possession of the workers. A co-operative tailoring establishment in Chicago had its rise in the lock-out of a few factory girls who attended a labor parade without permission. With the luck that comes with pluck, they became possessed of $400, through soliciting subscriptions. With this they went into business and succeeded. It is claimed, that inside of nine months they had done $36,000 worth of business, besides having the gratification of being their own employers.

This departure from the custom prevailing among the proletariat to sell their services for wage-hire, was due largely to the demand made in the nineteenth plank of the platform of the Knights of Labor for the abolition of the wage system and a national system of co-operation in lieu thereof. The insertion of such a demand proved the founders of the order to have been thinkers radical enough to go a step beyond the old idea of trades organizations with their petty notions of each trade working solely in its own interests. In comparison with the broad and lofty conception of the Knights of Labor, which sought to include in its benefits all women and men engaged in every department of industrial work, other organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor, which is a mere rope of sand, showed themselves away in the rear-guard of progressive civilization by placing themselves solely on the old competitive and selfish trades union basis.

The next largest organization that took women into its body on terms of equality was “The Granger Association of Western Farmers.”[179] Founded in 1870, this association of the agriculturists of the country proposed to do for women on the farms what the societies had done for them in the other industries. They formulated as a principle “that no Grange should be organized, or exist, without women.” This act was held to be the emancipation of women on the farms, as that of the Knight of Labor had been in the trades. In their public meetings, women were invited to take part in the discussions of plans for mutual benefit, for usefulness and culture. The principles of co-operation, which brought them together, extended to the buying of all descriptions of goods in bulk. This, by increasing the purchasing power of limited incomes, increased the comforts and attractions of homes that would otherwise have been deprived of them. The women who entered the Granges held a conspicuous place in the national census of agricultural operators and producers of national wealth. They were engaged in the farm labors of milking, making butter and cheese, raising poultry, preserving eggs, and gathering honey for market and home consumption. Vegetable gardens, fruit orchards, viticulture, berry plants, and shrubs of many millions’ value were largely attended to by them; while planting, weeding, haying, harvesting, tilling the soil, and caring for live-stock were rapidly added to the list of women’s occupations on the farm. To bring a new brightness into the lives of these toilers was an avowed object of the Grange. It proposed, by bringing men and women together with communities of interests, to effect a great moral and social good, and thus elevate them from slaves and drudges into a “better and higher manhood and womanhood.”

As “the thoughts of men were widened by the processes of the suns,” the idea gained ground that if organization was good for women in one direction, it might be good in all. Men began, about 1884, to receive women into their trades’ unions, and a few energetic women in various States started working-women’s unions that comprised the members of different trades. The Cigar and Typographical Unions were among the first to admit women into their bodies. The Cigar-Makers’ Union of Denver, a branch of the International Cigar-Makers’ Union, admitted women to membership and made no distinction on account of color. Through the efforts of the union, the hours of labor were reduced from ten to eight, and the rate of wages, as they expressed it, “raised from a mere pittance to respectable living wages.” Typographical unions were much praised for their gallantry in forcing employers to agree to their terms of “Equal work, equal pay, equal terms of apprenticeship for both sexes.” This chivalric aspect was somewhat dimmed by the refusal afterward of some union men to work in the same offices with women. Employers were frequently given the option of choosing between having all men or all women at the cases, and the struggle usually ended in favor of the men. How this worked to the disadvantage of women can be seen by referring to the California Bureau of Labor Statistics for 1889, where the statement is that the book and job printing houses in San Francisco employing union help had only three women in three separate printing establishments as against one hundred and nineteen men; while in the non-union, the proportion was forty-eight women against eighty-five men. Since the investigations of the Bureau, the number of union women employed is said to be “much increased.” This in regard to wages means a great deal to women, as the unions have a fixed scale which ranges from eighteen to thirty dollars for week or time work. In one of the largest printing establishments in San Francisco, women compositors not in the unions received as wages nine dollars per week as against fifteen dollars for men; proof-readers, nine dollars against eighteen dollars for men. Forewomen and foremen were paid in the same ratio. Discrepancies like these, of fifty per cent. difference in the wages of women, because they were women, proved the value of an association that insisted upon the justice of “equal pay for equal work.”

Trade organizations composed exclusively of women were instituted timidly and tentatively in the large cities.[180] Though protective rather than educational, the instruction given in the few trades unions established by and for women possessed a very broadening character. Able speakers, frequenting the meetings, familiarized the members with the economic theories advanced as to the value of the co-operative principle, the duties owed by the strong to the weak, and the correlation between woman’s best interests and the interests of the State. The experience of the trades unions proved the absurd fallacy of the time-worn objection against women’s guilds, “that it would unsex them,” for the effect of their organizations was to make their members more unselfish and more womanly, more apt to think of the good of all than of a part, and, through the importance of being one of a large body working for some common weal, less inclined to frivolous ends.

To wage-working women, one important practical result of labor combinations was the concession made by legislators, through fear of losing the labor vote, to the demand for Bureaus of Labor Statistics, which should show the actual condition of men and women engaged in any and every department of labor. Massachusetts, always first in the field of reform, established such a bureau of labor statistics in 1869. Other States followed slowly in her wake. By 1887 twenty-two States had recognized the importance of having similar bureaus. Among them was “the Department of Labor,” instituted in Washington in 1885, for the purpose of doing collectively for the whole people what the individual States were to accomplish separately. When the Massachusetts Labor Bureau went into operation, its chief, General Henry K. Oliver, a man of liberal views, endeavored to ascertain the conditions under which industrial women worked. The means employed were:

I. Personal investigation.

II. Distribution of printed forms with blanks for employed and employers to fill.

III. Summons to witnesses from the employed and employing classes to testify.

IV. Soliciting information through correspondence.

Through the recommendation of ladies interested in the question of ascertaining the conditions of working-women, General Oliver associated one of their own sex, Miss Adeline Bryant, with the work of the bureau. In the third year of the bureau’s existence five women were placed on the staff of helpers. The precedent set by Massachusetts of employing women as investigators was followed in turn by the other State bureaus and by the “Department of Labor” at Washington.

The investigations of the bureau of 1869 covered the thirty-five industries in which the working-women of Massachusetts were then engaged. Published in 1870, the report of the bureau corroborated the accounts given by the press of that year concerning the low wages, long hours of work, and miserable state of living that was the lot of the wage-earning women in the manufacturing towns of Massachusetts. General Oliver himself assisted in the personal investigation carried on in Boston. Accompanied by the Chief of Police, he visited the homes of “poor-paid laborers,”—women and men,—and found that the homes of the laborers are a pretty accurate index of the social, industrial, sanitary, educational, and moral standard of the laborers themselves. The result of his work was a recommendation for further and more thorough research. “Such investigations,” he said, “will reveal a state of things at which the people of Massachusetts will gaze with amazement, disgust, and anger, and demand a bettering of the wrong.”

Investigations by blanks and by summons to witnesses was less successful than the personal interview. The mass of the people were ignorant of what the bureau sought to accomplish by their questions; hence not more than twenty per cent. of the employers and thirty-three per cent. of the employed addressed returned replies. A dread on the part of manufacturers and shopkeepers, lest “out of their own mouths they should be condemned,” prevented them from answering, and those under them were restrained to silence through fear of losing employment. In spite of the risk, courageous women replied to the blanks and gave personal testimony sufficient to enable the commission to form a partial estimate of the social and economic conditions of the whole. The statistics presented by the bureau were said to have reached “the very verge of human society.” Said Mrs. Atkinson, speaking of the reports on the working-women, “The stern fact, the thrilling incident, the woeful spectacle, the harrowing sight of squalor and wretchedness are marshaled before our eyes in a great and terrible array.” The subjects investigated were: Housework, Hotel and Saloon work, Home work, Store work. Under the Home work was classified sale work; under Store work, clerks, accountants, saleswomen, and cash girls. All that could be found out concerning women in these employments was printed and presented by General Oliver to the Legislature and to the public, without any of the softening touches common to later reports.

The next extended investigation into the occupations and history of wage-earning women was made in 1884, at the instigation of Mr. Carroll D. Wright, who, in 1874, had superseded General Oliver as chief of the Massachusetts Bureau. The research undertaken by Mr. Wright had for its object the ascertainment of the “moral, sanitary, physical, and economical” condition of all wage-earning women in Boston, except those employed in domestic service. This was a larger field than that covered in 1869. Woman’s occupations had multiplied in the earlier year five-fold over what they were in 1840, when, to Harriet Martineau’s surprise, seven vocations, outside of housework, were all into which the women of the United States had entered. In 1884 they were more than ten times seven. Methods of working had also become more difficult to classify. One by one domestic industries were relegated from the home to the factory. And in most of these, what had been done by one person had become differentiated into numerous parts, requiring the co-operation of many workers. Thus, in the occupation of making men’s and women’s clothing, there were classified in 1884 as many as 103 subdivisions. Altogether, in the seventy distinct industries catalogued, there were 354 subdivisions of industries, and each one of these parts employed a different set of workers. It was important that a number of representative women should be interviewed in each of these departments; for, even where each branch formed part of a distinct whole, each worker in those branches had interests at variance with the others.

The force of women engaged in the industries of Boston had also seemingly almost doubled in the five years from 1880 to 1885. Exclusive of domestic service, the number of women in all other industries was estimated in the United States census of 1880 at 20,000; in the Massachusetts Census Report for 1885 at 39,647. With this apparent doubling of the population, the amount distributed in wages had not doubled, and so all that had been bad in the conditions of wage-earning women in previous years was heightened because there was nothing to relieve it. On account of all this, the appearance of the report of 1884 was anxiously looked for by large numbers of persons who had become familiar with the line of work of the bureaus. Great, therefore, was the public surprise at finding the whole report so biased in favor of the law-making, shop-keeping, manufacturing class as to prove valueless as an investigation into the condition of women dependent on wages for their living. The statistical information it contained, although arranged in the formidable manner common to the expert statistician, needed no careful scrutiny of its figures to establish the truth of Disraeli’s proposition that “nothing is so unreliable as facts, unless it is figures.”

However, the work done by the Boston Bureau, although misleading in itself, had the good effect of stimulating similar research in other places. In the following year, 1885, the first part of the Third New York Report was devoted to an investigation of the condition of the working-women of New York City. It was estimated that in that year over two hundred thousand women were employed in the various trades of that city, exclusive of those in Brooklyn. The number of industries, exclusive of domestic service, and without counting subdivisions, was ninety. Scarcely any European city offered so wide and diversified a field for inquiry as this; and yet the commissioner, Mr. Charles F. Peck, claimed that, through lack of time, in place of any close and searching inquiry “into special conditions of the effects of these employments on the physical development of women and its relation to the social, commercial, and industrial prosperity of the State,” he was obliged to content himself “with a general survey, instead of that minute and detailed examination which the subject would justify.”

Mr. Peck discovered, as his predecessors in Massachusetts had done, that at all times the questions involved in the conditions of working-women resolved themselves into those of “wages, hours, health, and morals.” With regard to the first, he found that the wages of women, as a rule, were, in 1885 as in 1869, less than one-half that obtained by men,—the remuneration being widely different even where the work performed was the same. In those professions or trades in which women were organized, and for equal work received equal pay with men,—as printers, cigar-makers, and hatters,—the men themselves received very low pay. In the tenement-house factories, the women engaged in cigar-making numbered four thousand. These were employed in the branches paying the lowest wages, as stripping and binding. For these, the pay seldom averaged $5 per week, and then was not steady the year round. The manufacturers gave as reason for hiring so many women, “That they could get them for fifty per cent. less than men.” Capmakers earned from $3 to $4.50 per week; compositors all the way from $8 to $16 per week. One of the new branches of work into which women had entered was that of polishing marble. The manager of the Niagara Marble Works testified that they employed from twenty-five to thirty women, whose wages averaged from $4.50 to $8 per week, men getting for the same kind of work from $1.50 to $3 per day. When asked if “they could get men to work for the same wages as women?” the reply was, “Hardly, unless they were boys, and then they would not be so skillful.”

But it was in the class of work that has always been called “woman’s work” that the bureaus found the most beggarly wages paid. A manufacturer of pants, vests, shirts, and overalls testified that he gave from fifteen to thirty-five cents apiece for making vests; seventy-five cents to $1.50 per dozen for shirts, and from twelve and a half cents to twenty-five cents a pair for pants. Boy’s gingham waists, with trimming on neck and sleeves, were paid for at the rate of two and a half cents each. By working steadily at the machine from six o’clock in the morning until one at night, the seamstress could make twenty-five cents a day at this “shop work.” The inmates of several charitable institutions in the city were found by the commissioner crocheting ladies’ shawls for twenty-five cents apiece. An expert, he was told, could finish one in two days. This was all that the several Blanks & Co. would pay, because competition for this kind of work was so great they were able to get the work done for almost any price.[181] On woman’s wear, the wages had been so reduced that it was alleged that a full day’s work on a cloak brought from fifty to sixty cents. The visits of the commissioner to some of the attic tenement-house rookeries, where this work was carried on under the direction of “sweaters,” disclosed numbers of cloak-makers working sixteen hours a day for fifty cents. In those dens he saw stacks of cloaks piled on the floors ready to be sewn together by women scantily clad, with hair unkempt, and whose pale, abject countenances formed such pictures of physical suffering and want as he trusted “he might never again be compelled to look upon.” The style and quality of the cloaks upon which these women toiled were of the latest and best. They were lined with quilted silk or satin and trimmed with sealskin or other expensive material, and found ready sale in the largest retail stores in the city at from thirty-five to seventy-five dollars each.

To give some idea of how the cloak-makers lived on this pittance the bureau gave a realistic engraving, done from a drawing taken on the spot, in which it was endeavored to reproduce the outlines of one room (as a sample exhibit of the rest) where six women sat at work under the directions of sweaters. In size the room might possibly have measured twelve by fourteen feet, and perhaps nine feet high. The atmosphere was next to suffocating and dense with impurities. On one end of a table, at which four of the women sat, was a dinner-pail partially filled with soup (that is what they called it) and a loaf of well-seasoned bread. These two courses, served with one spoon and one knife, satiated the thirst and hunger of four working-women. In an adjoining side room, without means for ventilation or light, the deadly sewer gas rose in clouds from a sink. On the floor lay a mattress which partook in appearance of the general filth found throughout the building. On this mattress the cloak-makers, tired out by the long day’s work and faint for want of food, threw themselves down and awaited the coming day’s awful toil for bread. This, it was claimed, was neither a fanciful nor exceptional picture; that a degree of want, misery, and degradation existed among the working-women living in tenement houses next to impossible to describe. “Certainly,” said the commissioner, “no words of mine can convey to the public any adequate conception of the truly awful condition of thousands of these suffering people. Formerly,” he wrote, “Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ gave sentimental celebrity to the wrongs of the sewing-women, but it is not the shirt (alone) now, but the woman’s cloak and the man’s coat or pants that draw tears and groans from the overdone sewing-woman.”

Testimony elicited as to the workers in some of the trades, particularly tobacco, was even more revolting than that concerning the sewing-woman. In the report, wood-cuts were given of rooms such as a large proportion of cigar-makers worked, lived, ate, and slept in. “These people,” it was said, “worked till twelve P. M. or one o’clock A. M., then slept by the machine a few hours, and commenced work again.” The description of women sitting “surrounded by filth, with children waddling in it, whose hands, faces, and bodies were covered with sores,” were sickening. Cankerous sores were “even on the lips of the workers, they all the time handling the tobacco that was made into cigars.” In the scale of sanitary conditions of homes and workrooms, the cigar-makers were among the lowest. Of bunch-makers and rollers, who replied to the questions of the sanitary condition of their homes, but two out of 118 answered, “good.” All of the rest wrote, “bad,” “very bad,” the “worst you ever saw,” “miserable,” and “poor.” As to their workrooms, out of one hundred and thirty, one hundred and three were without means for free circulation of air. _One_ only possessed no offensive odors. The unhealthfulness of the workrooms of the cigar-makers, the coat-makers, the tailoresses, and the cloak-makers was about the same. Among this latter class of seamstresses 38 out of 41 answered that their surroundings were very offensive through being “near offensive stables.” The order of the day was, “general filth, water-closets, bad sewerage, dirty neighborhoods, overcrowding, and poor ventilation.” Similar complaints came from compositors in printing-offices, women in type-foundries, kid-glove sewers, carpet-factory operators, and silk weavers.

While in many of the large factories the sanitary conditions were good and proper, ventilation being secured,—when it did not interfere with the work carried on,—there were other features that if less injurious to health were quite as objectionable to the wage-worker. In the carpet and silk factories, women were obliged to stand all day, as, though seats were provided in many instances, fines were exacted from those using them. It was the same with washing facilities; women employed in silk establishments in weaving light-colored or white silks were fined as high as fifty cents for washing their hands, and fines were also imposed if spots got on the goods. Women testified that they were fined “if discovered reading a letter, or a paper, or spoke to one another.” The proprietor of one of these factories stated that the fines he collected in this way he gave away in “charity,” and, “That five dollars a week was enough for a girl to live on.” In some carpet factories the system of fines was even more excessive. Women were docked as much as five dollars if any accident happened to the machinery, which they were compelled to clean while it was in motion. In one mill, they were “not allowed to talk to one another during working hours or at noon, under penalty of being docked or discharged.” The fine in some places for being five minutes late was twenty-five cents, while a half-hour over-time was exacted. How disproportionate this punishment was is evident; those women who were fined at the rate of thirty dollars per day, were being paid at the rate of eight cents an hour. When women were not fined for being five minutes behind time, they were “locked out” for two hours. These were the hands employed on piece work, and the loss of two hours made, as it was intended, a large hole in the day’s earnings. In most cases it was claimed that the amount of fines exacted was optional with the foreman or superintendent, and that frequently they were so excessive as to affect the whole pay of employees for weeks ahead.

The tyranny of the strong and powerful over the weak and helpless,—which found expression in the exaction of fines from those who were termed variously “white slaves,” “slave girls,” “prisoners of poverty,” etc.,—existed in another form in the long hours of labor demanded by the Legrees of the industrial world from the wage-working women. While in many factories the legal limit of sixty hours per week for minors, and women under twenty-one, was observed, there were grave and numerous exceptions to this rule among tobacco-workers, seamstresses, bakery employees, etc., etc. In the cigar factories, the great majority of bunch-makers and rollers, whether employed at home or in the factory proper, were worked fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and even eighteen hours a day. Operatives on clothing worked from nine to sixteen hours per day. In the collar, cuff, and shirt-making factories in Troy, as well as the laundries in that place, the hours were uniformly ten, and in New York from eight to twelve. Milliners worked nine hours in factories and from fourteen to sixteen at home. Feather-workers in factories nine to ten. Operatives on ladies’ underwear eight to ten in factories; twelve to fourteen hours at home. While this made a good showing for the factories engaged in these industries, it must be remembered that much of the work quoted as done “_at home_” was only a continuation of factory labor, as work was in many cases taken home from these, either to supplement the day’s earnings, or to oblige (?) employers, who withheld extra compensation for the extra work exacted. In occupations requiring a different kind of skill, or impossible at home, the hours were found to be sometimes less than the legal limit. Those for compositors were from eight to ten. Type-foundry operatives, seven and a half to nine. Stenographers, telegraphers, and typewriters, from five and a half to six, seven, and eight. Saleswomen, again, worked many hours over-time in all except the largest houses, and during the holiday season these largest stores were no longer exceptions. In fancy-goods stores, millinery shops, bakeries, candy stores, etc., etc., no limit was placed through the holidays,—that were in no sense holidays to employees,—except the limit of physical endurance. In return no portion of the extra profit this extra work brought was shared by proprietors with their overtaxed employees.

Economically speaking, the worst of all the evils society perpetrated against the working-women was that of forcing her into long hours of continuous labor; for, whether standing at the looms and in the stores, or sitting at the sewing-machine, specific diseases of the sexual organs were induced, causing marriage to be followed by miscarriage or sickly children. No original statistics were collected by the bureau to show how far the health and morals of women engaged in industries were affected by their employments, and what relation this influence exerted in reference to woman’s position in the State. While this prevented the report from being of full service to the political economist, to the historian its pages were valuable as forming a succession of _genre_ pictures, otherwise unattainable, of the proletarian women, as they lived, labored, and suffered in New York City in 1885.

An epidemic of investigation into women’s condition as wage-workers followed the New York report. Five States—Maine, California, Colorado, Iowa, and Minnesota—prepared separate chapters on the subject of the working-women for their Bureaus of Labor Statistics for 1887–1888. In New Jersey, although no original investigation was made by the State, the bureau reprinted in 1887 a large portion of an excellent report on “Woman’s Work and Wages,” gathered by Mrs. Barry in 1886 by order of the Knights of Labor. The latest, and what should have been the best report, was a national research into the social and economic environments of wage-earning women in twenty-two of the largest and most representative cities in the United States. This investigation, conducted under the auspices of the Central Bureau at Washington, comprehended statistics gained through interviewing and questioning personally 17,427 women engaged in industrial pursuits. Undertaken in 1888, this national report was printed in 1889, under the title of “Working-women in Large Cities.” It formed a volume of 631 pages, mostly statistical tables, framed so as to seem to cover the most important points concerning women as industrial workers.

To two grades of readers these bureau publications were most welcome. First, to the more intelligent among the working-class, “in whose humble cabins,” it was said,[182] “complete sets of Bureau Reports could be found preserved in calico covers having as many colors as ‘Joseph’s coat,’ and presenting as much evidence of constant use as the old-time spelling-book in a country school-house that was passed from scholar to scholar until it has made the round of the school.” Second, to the students of sociology, who pored over their pages, hoping to gain clear ideas of what was going on in the working world of men and women. Excellent though they were, these reports were nevertheless disappointing, at least as far as they related to facts concerning woman’s industrial position. The first and greatest disappointment for readers was the fact that the number of wage-earning women interviewed in any one place by the bureau agents was too small to give even an approximate idea of the whole; e. g. the statistical tables of all industries for New York City were founded on the testimony alone of 2984 women, while at that period (1889) the number of wage-earning women in that city and Brooklyn was estimated at 300,000.(?) As this method of taking one per cent. of the population of women as a guide by which to estimate the conditions of all the others prevailed everywhere, conclusions drawn from the presented statistics were, of necessity, vitiated. To a certain extent they had to be accepted with allowance.

With all that this limitation implies, the bureau statistics are, nevertheless, interesting as comprising the best data we have on which to base assumptions of the industrial status of wage-earning women. In regard to wages, the conclusions, though obviously inexact, still show plainly enough that wages were regulated everywhere by the prices of rent and food, and that only so much was paid as would keep life in the worker. In the appended table, taken from the National Report for 1889, it will be seen that in the South, where living is comparatively cheap, wages are lower than in the West, where life’s necessaries come higher. In the East they are a mean between the two.

AVERAGE WEEKLY EARNINGS, BY CITIES. ═════════════╤════════════════════════ CITIES. │AVERAGE WEEKLY EARNINGS. ─────────────┼──────────────────────── Atlanta │ $4.05 Baltimore │ 4.18 Boston │ 5.64 Brooklyn │ 5.76 Buffalo │ 4.27 Charleston │ 4.22 Chicago │ 5.74 Cincinnati │ 4.59 Cleveland │ 4.63 Indianapolis │ 4.67 Louisville. │ 4.51 Newark │ 5.10 New Orleans │ 4.31 New York │ 5.85 Philadelphia │ 5.34 Providence │ 5.51 Richmond │ 3.93 St. Louis │ 5.19 St. Paul │ 6.02 San Francisco│ 6.91 San Jose │ 6.11 Savannah │ 4.99 │ ———— All Cities │ $5.24 ─────────────┴────────────────────────

In the 343 industries named in this report, for 1889, it will be seen that the conditions under which women gained their livelihood had not been bettered, and that, on the contrary, the testimony as published in the other State reports disclosed a state of affairs similar to that which Engels[183] described as existing among the same class of laboring women in England in 1844. Nothing worse can be found in any of Engels’ descriptions than the following account (given in the New Jersey Report for 1887–1888) of the tyranny practiced upon the linen thread spinners of Paterson: “In one branch of this industry,” it is said, “women are compelled to stand on a stone floor in water the year round, most of the time barefoot, with a spray of water from a revolving cylinder flying constantly against the breast; and the coldest night in winter, as well as the warmest in summer, these poor creatures must go to their homes with water dripping from their underclothing along their path, because there could not be space or a few moments allowed them wherein to change their clothing.”[184] Another account, which calls up the experiences at Leeds and Lancaster in 1844, is taken from the Wisconsin Report for 1888. In the prosperous city of Janesville, in that highly favored State described as a paradise for workers, the report tells of a factory “in which some three hundred women and children are employed, who work eleven and a half to twelve hours per day and night, the night being the time most of the children are employed.” Although eight hours is the legal working day in Wisconsin, and fourteen years the age limit at which children may be employed, “many of the children are under fourteen years of age, and all have to work eleven and a half hours.” The thermometer averages, in the heated season, about 108 degrees ... and loss of health follows women by reason “of the intense heat at night and insufficient sleep in the day-time.”

These by no means exceptional cases show how conditions of work for laboring women were increasing in intensity in the United States. That they were becoming worse in other ways was evidenced in New England manufacturing towns, where employment of women and children as the cheaper wage-taking element was gradually extinguishing the male operative.[185] In the manufacturing towns of Fall River, Lawrence, Lowell, etc., the family life was so demoralized that men were obliged to be supported in idleness by mothers, wives, or sisters or children, because no work was to be had for them in the mills. It was said that some of these men, displaced by the light-running machinery that a child’s hand might guide, remained at home and did the housework and minded the children, while the women went forth as the bread-winners; others, less patient, took to loafing, and ended generally in prisons. “This,” as Engels termed it, “insane state of things” affected all unfavorably. Women learned to care so little for themselves that it was said “a girl in Fall River comes out of the mill with bare feet and a shawl thrown over her head, and all she cares for is a loaf of bread and a mug of beer.” Children, going too early into the mills, were corrupted, morally and physically; yet mothers, unable from their own slender wages to support the family, were tempted to swear “false oaths in regard to their children’s ages, so as to get them into the mills and thus make more money.”

This Moloch of cheap labor, which demanded both women and children, did not stop at making mothers commit perjury for the sake of bread; it rifled the eleemosynary institutions of little ones left there for safe keeping, and sent them in ship or car loads to the West.[186] The claim was made in New York in 1888 that[187] “during the last forty years not less than two hundred thousand children had been sent into the Western States, many of whom had been sold outright,” by managers of asylums, who refused to allow the names of these little ones to be known, for fear that parents or relatives, who had surrendered them in seasons of distress, might wish to reclaim them when fortunate enough to procure work. These children, not sold in the open market as their black brothers and sisters had been, but disposed of in the name of _Charity_, had their identity concealed by change of name; cases are on record where brothers and sisters have grown up, met, and married, and “after marriage learned to their horror that they were children of the same parents.”

Thus factory and farm-house had begun to stand in the United States as they had in England from Queen Elizabeth’s days—as the fabled ogre’s castles of ancient legend, which drew women and children into them to serve and suffer hopelessly, unless relieved from captivity and death by a stronger power. History repeated itself in this exploitation of women and children and in the plans made for their relief. The broad system of factory legislation, inspired in England by the revelations of the cruelty practiced upon the most hapless portions of its population, began to be imitated in the United States. Massachusetts, the pioneer State in introducing salutary reforms, took the initiative, and in 1874 forced its Legislature to recognize that it was the duty of the State to regulate the hours of labor of women and children engaged in the manufactures. In that year, after a long series of discussions between radicals and conservatives, the Ten-hour Factory Bill was passed. It is doubtful if the radicals would have triumphed even then, had they not been able to demonstrate that there was “a limit to human endurance, which, once transgressed, was not only disastrous to the operative but unprofitable to the mill-owners.”

Having once committed itself to the precedent of interfering to protect the weak against the strong, Massachusetts had no alternative but to advance in the same direction. By degrees, twenty-four distinct points were covered by factory legislation.[188] Nine other States followed Massachusetts in the enaction of factory laws, and all made provision for bureaus of factory inspection to see that the laws were obeyed. These factory laws, as far as they concerned women, besides limiting the hours of labor, obliged “employers to provide seats for women and grant them permission to use them when not actively engaged in the duties for which they were employed.” Fire-escapes were to be provided, and proper safeguards thrown around machinery. Women under twenty-one years were not to be allowed to clean machinery while in motion. Suitable wash-rooms and other conveniences were to be furnished them. Forty-five minutes were to be given for the noon-day meal at a uniform and proper time. Locking of doors—that travesty upon free labor—was prohibited during working-hours. Sanitary regulations of workrooms and weekly payments were to be enforced. The trusteeing of wages was abolished. Cellars were forbidden to be used as workrooms. “No plea,” it was said, “and no subterfuge should be permitted to justify the use of any underground apartment for purposes of human habitation.”

Delegating to States the privileges of exercising supervision over manufactories, etc., for the benefit of labor, was a long step forward in the path of progress; a signal triumph of radicalism over conservative obstructionists denying the right of the State to protect its citizens. But if the reformer gained his points, the manufacturer contrived, as far as possible, to make the victory an empty one. Only so far as employers could not prevent was labor legislation effective. With the ten-hour working day, while employers complied with the letter of the law, a large majority defied the spirit. No fact was better known than that the ten-hour law for women and children was disregarded whenever possible. In factories where notice was given that ten hours would constitute a day’s work, the clause “unless otherwise ordered,” usually accompanied it; and the “otherwise ordered” came whenever the manufacturer’s convenience demanded it. Other factory legislation fared little better. When, according to law, seats were placed in mills, factories, shops, and stores, women were, in general, forbidden to use them, under penalty of discharge. Locking of doors, when employees were at work, although less common, was still continued. Labor commissioners, wishing to enter factories employing many women, “had much difficulty in getting inside, so securely was every gate and door locked and barred.” Sanitary workrooms remained the exceptions; underground places continued to be used for human habitations, workshops, and salesrooms. Cellars were converted into bazaars in which hundreds of women and children were employed, and where they lived the year round in the glare of electric lights, never seeing daylight except in the morning hours, on Saturday half-holidays, and Sundays. One obvious reason why factory laws were disregarded so flagrantly was that the working force of factory inspectors in every State but Massachusetts was so limited as to make it impossible for them to visit even once during the year half the factories under their supervision. In many cases their powers were so restricted that when they caught an offender against the laws, they had to act on Dogberry’s advice “to take no note of him, but let him go.”

Despite the fact that laws, made for the protection of women in the industries, were not always enforced,—enough good resulted from them to increase the tendency everywhere of looking to the State for further legislation. In the pages of the labor reports containing the replies made by working-women to the question of what, in their opinion, would remedy the wrongs of industrial workers, one response was, “The power to vote, as the right of suffrage, will place the services of women on an economic basis with those of men.” Women working in factories asked to have inspectors appointed of their own sex, on the ground that women could understand and protect the interests of women better than men. In States where the statutory age for protection under the eight or ten hour factory law was below twenty-one, women over twenty-one desired the law extended so as to embrace those of all ages. Employees in mercantile houses doing duty as clerks, cashiers, saleswomen, etc., desired “that the same protection given to women in factories be extended to them, as their duties are fully as onerous as those of the average female in the mill or factory.”

As almost all reforms have originated with the educated, and have gathered strength for fruition by rolling onward among the people, the value of these suggestions was enhanced by reason of being the expression of the most intelligent of the working-women interviewed by the Labor Bureau agents. Private philanthropic efforts of all kinds had yielded no effectual help to women, and it was small wonder if the more thoughtful among them turned to the power of the State as the only adequate means for relief from conditions which new inventions of machinery—dispensing with men and employing women and children as guides—and a mania for money-getting at the expense of the proletariat, had rendered intolerable. Though a few stenographers, telegraphers, typewriters, teachers, with some workers in the industrial arts, had gained better breathing-places upon the middle rungs of what was called the “social ladder,” the struggle for life had been constantly growing fiercer among those crowded _en masse_ at the bottom. Everywhere production was carried on with less regard for the life, health, and comfort of the working-women. Women were employed in even greater numbers in the poisonous, dusty, dangerous, and laborious industries, all of which were much more injurious to them, as child-bearers, than to men. The long hours of exhaustive work, destructive of family ties; the starvation wages obtained during seasons of work; the misery of seasons of lock-outs from work, led too frequently to the chaffering of their bodies on the street corners for bread, or the finding of a refuge from starvation in a leap from some house-top or a plunge into the river. The stories of the suffering endured by women engaged in the industrial occupations of the country, as told by capable investigators like Helen Campbell, proved that everything made by women, not excepting the whitest, daintiest robes, had crimson spots on them,—the blood-splashes of the toilers,—that, although unseen, no cleansing could wash away. Not a shop-made garment, a web of silk, cotton, or flax, or wool, a pair of gloves, shoes or stockings, any knitted thing,—machine or hand-made,—a woven carpet or piece of furniture, an artificial flower, feather, or piece of lace, a hat for a man or bonnet for a woman, a piece of table-glass, pottery, or cutlery, a lucifer match, an article of jewelry, or even a printed book, but over them all flitted the ghosts of women twice murdered in their making: once by their own pangs, and again by the sufferings of the little children, flesh of their own flesh, who toiled beside them wearily—

Weeping (working) in the play-time of the others, In the country of the free.

The publication of Helen Campbell’s “Prisoners of Poverty,” with frequent repetitions, from other sources, of the wrongs endured by industrial women, caused a great wave of indignation to sweep over society. Many good men and women carried on crusades against the purchase of ready-made garments—sad misnomer for things so hardly made. One of their war-cries was, “An honest woman’s back is not the place for a dishonestly manufactured article,” and another that, “It is better for a woman to wear a coat with a hole in it than one with the stain on it of blood-guiltiness.” Economically unwise and impossible of success as this crusade was, it was important as showing that a higher ideal of Justice had begun to enter into woman’s mind. Hitherto people had partaken of the fruits of labor unthinkingly. Now the time was seen to have come when an awakened public began to question the propriety of purchasing and using things made through the abuse of their fellow-beings. As Emerson said of his charity-given dollar that “it was a wicked dollar he would yet learn to withhold,” so women were teaching themselves to withstand desires for articles which helped to perpetuate wicked systems of work.

To the political economist, the part that woman was taking in the country’s industries became a subject of national importance. After frequent investigations into the nature of their occupations, the question was propounded, “Whether it would not be expedient, for the good of the State, to altogether forbid the employment of women in factories?” The position taken by Mr. Wright, the leading authority in American labor statistics,—not prominent, however, as an advanced reformer,—was “that married women ought not to be tolerated in the mills at all,” as “the employment of mothers is the most harmful wrong done to the race.” “Vital science,” he observes, “will one day demand their exclusion, as the effect of such employment is an evil that is sapping the life of our operative population and must, sooner or later, be regulated, or more probably, stopped.”[189]

It will be seen at once that this suggestion of Mr. Wright lies directly on the plane of modern socialism or nationalism. To advocate taking two million women forcibly from certain harmful occupations is a tacit admission that the individual has no right to dispose of herself to the disadvantage of the State. Physicians had long sounded notes of warning of a race deterioration that was going on in consequence of the employment of women under bad conditions of labor, and the claim was made that “at all hazards the State must protect itself.” To do this, however, involved consequences that the advisers, perhaps, foresaw. As legislation excluding women and children from factories would interfere directly with their support, the logical conclusion would be that the State, to keep them from actual starvation, would be bound to interfere again to the extent of furnishing them with such means of living as would make them—what the State wanted—happy, healthy, capable mothers of the race. And, as it would be obviously impossible to discriminate between those engaged in one pursuit at the expense of those employed in others, it would follow that the State, by supporting the factory workers, would place itself under obligations to clothe, feed, shelter, and educate all women.

This second proposition is so necessary a corollary of the first as to make Mr. Wright’s suggestion almost conclusive evidence that his investigations had led him to accept the nationalistic theory of State interference with the liberty of labor, as the sole remedy for the evils sapping the life of our female operative population. And as no student of practical economics would consent to the entire withdrawal from the productive industries of so large and capable a body of workers as the three millions women now engaged in them, Mr. Wright must have also given acceptance to that other part of the nationalistic creed—growing so fast into popular favor—of its being the duty of the State to regulate the hours of labor so that work may be the promoter of health in women in place of being its destroyer.

Even if the results of Mr. Wright’s investigations into the hard facts of woman’s industrial condition in America had been to throw him into accord with what is termed “scientific socialism,”[190] his experience would have been simply that of most honest investigators. Helen Campbell, converted to socialism while gathering material for her books illustrative of women as workers, claimed in her latest volume that “In socialism ... in its highest interpretation, lies the only solution for every problem on either side the great sea, between the eastern and western worker.” Instances of similar experience might be multiplied, but are rendered unnecessary by the rapidity with which the doctrine has spread in the past ten years throughout Europe and America, and the honored names which have become identified with its support. According to its adherents, one phase of applied socialism will consist in a consolidation of the splendid processes of organization and co-operation inaugurated by the various labor societies and speculative enterprises of to-day. In its results, it aims to benefit woman: (1) by recognizing woman as the perfect equal of man, politically and socially; (2) by fixing woman’s means of support by the State so as to render her independent of man, and thus insure her that freedom and dignity which is hers of right as the mothers of the race; (3) by permitting them to withdraw from maleficent industries; (4) by shortening the legal working day so as to afford her leisure for the higher things of life. As women are also in greatest measure the teachers of the race, socialism victorious would secure for them a complete system of technical, art, and professional schools, so as to make the education of women universal and rounded in place of partial and incomplete. To-day, scarcely one-third of the population has been taught so much as to read and write understandingly.

The students of woman’s present position in and outside the named industries make the claim that nothing less radical than such reforms as are contemplated by the socialists will avail to better their condition. A charge made and sustained by them is that existing labor legislation, as well as charitable donations of schools, libraries, etc., built by bourgeois manufacturers out of the “skimped” wages of employees, have all been futile. Whatever has been done, the fact remains, as Victor Hugo tersely put it, “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” Dives grows richer with the years, the purple and linen of his wives and daughters more costly, their fare more sumptuous. While Lazarus, with his women, whose toil supplies the fine raiment and choice delicacies, crouches outside the gates in rags, grown more beggarly, and whose food becomes daily more loathsome and scant.

Nationalism proposes to call this injustice to a halt. With Herbert Spencer it says, that “One [woman] will not be suffered to enjoy without working that which another produces without enjoying.” It preaches the brotherhood of man, the sisterhood of women; the creed heroic in its grandeur of the abolition of alms-giving Charity, and the substitution for this outgrown goddess of past ages a divine spirit of Justice, whose fiat is to be obeyed though the heavens fall. “The growth within the mass of the population of these principles is,” says a recent writer in the _Forum_, “one of the most formidable symptoms of the ‘times.’” In this remark there lies all the pungency of truth. Earnest men and women are preaching the doctrines of Nationalism with all that intensity of faith which characterized the disciples of the anti-chattel slavery movement. To most, its tenets have become a religious as well as a political belief. To hasten the time of its adoption, women’s voices are being heard in lecture halls and wayside inns, in meeting-houses, in the school-room, at the hearth-stone, and through the medium of the printing-press—speaking with the same enthusiasm for the redemption of the white slave as the Lucy Stones and Harriet Beecher Stowes did before 1866 for the enfranchisement of the black slave. That woman’s duty to woman is taking this noble shape of pleading the cause of humanity, as though every industrial worker in factory, field, mill, and shop were her own mother, children, sisters, brothers, is the light in the heavens showing that the darkest hour before dawn has been reached, and is passing away from the horizon of the industrial population.