can collect their wages, and he does. Very, very often he squanders the money they earn, and no one may interfere.
A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay day at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her pay envelope, unopened. It was his regular day for getting drunk and indulging in an orgy of gambling. Often more than half of the girls’ wages would have vanished before night. Twice the entire amount was wasted in an hour. This kept on until the girls passed their childhood and were mature enough to rebel successfully.
It is the father and not the mother that may claim the potential services of a child.
Many times have these unjust laws been protested against. In every State in the Union where they exist they have been protested against by organized groups of intelligent women. But their protests have been received with apathy, and, in some instances, with contempt by legislators. Only last year a determined fight was made by the women of California for a law giving them equal guardianship of their children. The women’s bill was lost in the California Legislature, and lost by a large majority.
What arguments did the California legislators use against the proposed measure? Identically the same that were made in Massachusetts and New York a quarter of a century ago. If women had the guardianship of their children, would anything prevent them from taking the children and leaving home? What would become of the sanctity of the home, with its lawful head shorn of his paternal dignity? In California a husband is head of the family in very fact, or at least a law of the State says so.
At one time the law which made the husband the head of the home guaranteed to the family support by the husband. It does not do that now. There are laws on the statute books of many States obliging the wife to support her husband if he is disabled, and the children, if the husband defaults. There are no laws compelling the husband to support his wife. The husband is under an assumed obligation to support his family, but there exists no means of forcing him to do his duty. Family desertion has become one of the commonest and one of the most baffling of modern social problems. Everybody is appalled by its prevalence, but nobody seems to know what to do about it. The Legal Aid Society of New York City reports about three new cases of family desertion for every day in the year. Other agencies in other cities report a state of affairs quite as serious.
Laws have been passed in most States making family desertion a misdemeanor, and in New York a recent law has made it a felony. Unfortunately there has been devised no machinery to enforce these laws, so they are practically non-existent. It is true that if the deserting husband is arrested he may be sent to jail or to the rock pile.
But that does not cure him nor support his family. Mostly he is not arrested. He has only to take himself out of the reach of the local authorities. In New York a deserting husband, though he is counted a felon, needs only to cross the river to New Jersey to be reasonably safe. Imagine the State of New York spending good money to chase a man whom it does not want as a citizen, and whom it can only punish by sending to jail for a short period. The State is better off without such a man. To bring him back would not even benefit his deserted family.
Women, far more law abiding than men, insist that a system which evolved out of feudal conditions, and has for its very basis the assumption of the weakness, ignorance, and dependence of women, has no place in twentieth century civilization.
American women are no longer weak, ignorant, dependent. The present social order, in which military force is subordinated to industry and commerce, narrows the gulf between them, and places men and women physically on much the same plane. As for women’s intellectual ability to decide their own legal status, they are, taken the country over, rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher grammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. As for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less, but their general intelligence is not less than men’s.
Increasingly women are ceasing to depend on men for physical support. Increasingly even married women are beginning to think of themselves as independent human beings. Their work of bearing and rearing children, of managing the household, begins to assume a new dignity, a real value, in their eyes.
In New Zealand at the present time statutes are proposed which shall determine exactly the share a wife may legally claim in her husband’s income. American women may not need such a law, but they insist that they need something to take the place of that one which in eleven States makes it possible for a husband to claim all of his wife’s income.
CHAPTER V
WOMEN’S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY
The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual discomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, and recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: “Corsets, millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants’ wear, and ladies’ shoes, second floor; no ma’am, carpets and rugs on the third floor; this car don’t go to the restaurant; take the other side; groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs, men’s shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor.”
Buying and selling, serving and being served–women. On every floor, in every aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, which covers several acres, women. Waiting their turn at the long line of telephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Down in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer frocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts, attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan department store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floors between, women. At every cashier’s desk, at the wrappers’ desks, running back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling the aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk, and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.
To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the United States are working outside of the home for wages is a simple, unanalyzed fact. You grasp it as an intellectual abstraction, without much appreciation of its human significance. The mere reading of statistics does not help you to realize the changed status of women, and of society. You need to see the thing with your own eyes.
Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, when the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city’s great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. From factory, office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousands of girls. Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of the electric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting of hucksters, the laughter and oaths of men, their voices float, a shrill, triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil.
You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of the interdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrate into the operating-room of a telephone exchange. Any hour will do. Any day in the week. There are no nights, nor Sundays, nor holidays in a telephone exchange. The city could not get along for one single minute in one single hour of the twenty-four without the telephone girl. Her hands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long, silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes of the switch board. The wires cross and recross, until the switch board is like a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of the telephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of a city.
What would happen if this army of women was suddenly withdrawn from the telephone exchanges? Men could not take their places. That experiment has been tried more than once, and it has always failed.
Having seen how well women serve industry, go back to the department store and see how they dominate it also.
The department store apparently exists for women. The architect who designed the building studied her necessities. The makers of store furniture planned counters, shelves, and seats to suit her stature. Buyers of goods know that their jobs are forfeit unless they can guess what her taste in gowns and hats is going to be six months hence.
WOMEN’S DEMAND ON INDUSTRY Woman dominates the department store for the plain reason that she supports it. Whoever earns the income, and that point has been somewhat in question lately, there is no doubt at all as to who spends it. She does. Hence, she is able to control the conditions under which this business is conducted.
You can see for yourself that this is so. Walk through any large department store and observe how much valuable space is devoted to making women customers comfortable. There is always a drawing-room with easy-chairs and couches; plenty of little desks with handsome stationery where the customer may write notes; here, and in the retiring-room adjoining, are uniformed maids to offer service. But these things are not all that the women who support industry demand of the men in power. They demand that industry be carried on under conditions favorable to the health and comfort of the workers.
Not until the development of the department store were women able to observe at close range the conduct of modern business. Not unnaturally it was in the department store that they began one of the most ambitious of their present-day activities,–that of humanizing industry.
It was just twenty years ago that New York City was treated to a huge joke. It was such a joke that even the miserable ones with whom it was concerned were obliged to smile. An obscure group of women, calling themselves the Working Women’s Society, came out with the announcement that they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a labor union.
These women said that the girls in the department stores were receiving wages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign woman in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a half.
They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for saleswomen was habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand from ten to fourteen hours a day. They said that sanitary conditions in the cloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as to endanger health and life. They said that the whole situation was so bad that no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years. Mostly they were used up in two years. They proposed a labor union of retail clerks as the only possible resource. Their effort failed.
The trades union idea at that time had not reached the girl behind the counter. As a matter of fact it has not reached her yet, and it probably never will. The department-store clerk considers herself a higher social being than the ordinary working-girl, and in a way she is justified. The exceptionally intelligent department-store clerk has one chance in a thousand of rising to the well-paid, semi-professional post of buyer. Also the exceptionally attractive girl has possibly one chance in five thousand of marrying a millionaire. It is a long chance now, and it was a longer chance a dozen years ago, because there were fewer millionaires then than now, but it served well enough to cause the failure of the trades union plan.
There is one thing that never fails, however, and that is a righteous protest. Out of the protest of that little, obscure group of working women in New York City was born a movement which has spread beyond the Atlantic Ocean, which has effected legislation in many States of the Union, which has even determined an extremely important legal decision in the Supreme Court of the United States.
A group of rich and influential women, prominent in many philanthropic efforts, became interested in the Working Women’s Society. They investigated the charges brought against the department stores, and what they discovered made them resolve that conditions must be changed.
In May, 1890, the late Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. Frederick Nathan, and others, called a large mass meeting in Chickering Hall. Mrs. Nathan had a constructive plan for raising the standard in shop conditions, especially those affecting women employees.
If women would simply withdraw their patronage from the stores where, during the Christmas season, women and children toiled long hours at night without any extra compensation, sooner or later the night work would cease. A few stores, said Mrs. Nathan, maintained a standard above the average. It was within the power of the women of New York to raise all the others to that standard, and afterwards it might be possible to go farther and establish a standard higher than the present highest.
“We do not desire to blacklist any firm,” declared Mrs. Nathan, “but we can _whitelist_ those firms which treat their employees humanely. We can make and publish a list of all the shops where employees receive fair treatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops. By acting openly and publishing our White List we shall be able to create an immense public opinion in favor of just employers.”
Thus was the Consumers’ League of New York ushered into existence. Eight months after the Chickering Hall meeting the committee appointed to co-operate with the Working Women’s Society in preparing its list of fair firms had finished its work and made its report. The new League was formally organized on January 1, 1891.
[Illustration: Mrs. Frederick Nathan]
THE CONSUMERS’ LEAGUE “WHITE LIST”
The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm names. The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew the conditions. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the other firms to their outcast position. Far from evincing a desire to earn a place on the White List, they cast aspersions on a “parcel of women” who were trying to “undermine business credit,” and scouted the very idea of an organized feminine conscience.
“Wait until the women want Easter bonnets,” sneered one merchant. “Do you think they will pass up anything good because the store is not on their White List?”
Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for. Even as far back as 1891 a few women had begun to doubt the efficacy of that indirect influence, supposed to be woman’s strongest weapon. What was the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the Mercantile Employers’ Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory Department.
The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, and still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it. A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into conditions of working women in New York City.
The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in two large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified to employing grown women at a salary of _thirty-three cents a day_. They confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended, on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.
The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite of the merchants’ protests the women’s bill was passed without a dissenting vote.
The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which it placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of seats,–one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of children, except those holding working certificates from the authorities. These, and other minor provisions, affected all retail stores, as far as the law was obeyed.
As a matter of fact the Consumers’ League’s bill carried a “joker” which made its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter of inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health, supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it proved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after a year of this inadequate inspection, political forces were brought to bear, and then there were no store inspectors.
Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers’ League tried to persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed inspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a year ago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores under factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants’ Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto what they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. Governor Hughes, however, signed the bill.
In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. No less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were sent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Con sumers’ League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been justified.
To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To women capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition, a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterly fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply business men, with the business man’s contracted vision. They could think only in terms of money profit and money loss.
In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the stores supported by their patronage.
The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers’ League would concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season. Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one. The League stands firm on the point, and up to the present so do the stores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the custom whereby _thousands of young girls and women are compelled every holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of uncompensated labor_.
No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extorted in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to five months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchase after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six o’clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in the bookkeeping and auditing departments.
That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it seems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified.
I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of one of the largest and most respectable stores in New York. In this store, and, according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the accounting force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school, ignorant and incapable–but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day’s sales are posted and audited before the close of the day following, the business force has to work until nine and ten o’clock several nights in the week. In some cases they work every night.
Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the Consumers’ League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.
The Consumers’ League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in this early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. City after city, State after State, formed Consumers’ Leagues, until, in 1899, a National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was organized. The National League, far from being a philanthropic society, has be come a scientific association for the study of industrial economics.
When the original Consumers’ League undertook its first piece of legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their claim. The New York League and all of the others have been collecting reasons ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized collection of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they should not work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in tenements; why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speed of machines should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should be extended; why minimum wage rates should be established.
In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group of trained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body of facts concerning the human side of industry. It is ammunition which tells. One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry in Portland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of blowing a large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of women in factories and laundries should be ten hours long. The law was constantly violated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland. One night a factory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and found working there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher. The inspector promptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller.
The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars. Instead of paying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the other laundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for women workers was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the right freely to contract. A man or a woman may contract with an employer to work as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whatever dangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions, _unless_ “there is fair ground to say that there is material danger to the public health or safety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the general welfare….” This is the legal decision on which most protective legislation in the United States has been based.
Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day for women was declared unconstitutional because nobody’s health or safety was endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New York law forbidding all-night employment of women.
So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had reason to believe that they could attack the Oregon law. The case was appealed, and appealed again, by the laundrymen, and finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States. Then the Consumers’ League took a hand.
The brief for the State of Oregon, “defendant in error,” was prepared by Louis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of the most effective workers in the League’s New York headquarters. This brief is probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence. It consists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a few paragraphs were written by the attorney for the State. All the rest was contributed, under Miss Goldmark’s direction, from the Consumers’ League’s wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should be protected.
The League’s reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to work their women employees far into the night was, “The World’s Experience upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is Based.” It is simply a mass of testimony taken from hearings before the English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical books; from reports of boards of health.
REASONS FOR PROTECTING WOMEN WORKERS The brief included a short and interesting chapter, containing a number of things the League had collected on the subject of laundries. Supreme Court judges cannot be expected to know that laundry work is classed by experts among the dangerous trades. That washing clothes, from a simple home or backyard occupation, has been transformed into a highly-organized factory trade full of complicated and often extremely dangerous machinery; that the atmosphere of a steam laundry is more conducive to tuberculosis and the other occupational diseases than cotton mills; that the work in laundries, being irregular, is conducive to a general low state of morals; that, on the whole, women should not be required to spend more time than necessary in laundries; all this was set forth.
Medical testimony showed the physical differences between men and women; the lesser power of women to endure long hours of standing; the heightened susceptibility of women to industrial poisons–lead, naphtha, and the like. A long chapter of testimony on the effect of child-bearing in communities where the women had toiled long hours before marriage, or afterwards, was included.
The testimony of factory inspectors, of industrial experts, of employers in England, Germany, France, America, revealed the bad effect of long hours on women’s safety, both physical and moral. It revealed the good effect, on the individual health, home life, and general welfare, of short hours of labor.
Nor was the business aspect of the case neglected. That people accomplish as much in an eight-hour day as in a twelve-hour day has actually been demonstrated. The brief stated, for one instance, the experience of a bicycle factory in Massachusetts.
In this place young women were employed to sort the ball bearings which went into the machines. They did this by touch, and no girl was of use to the firm unless her touch was very sensitive and very sure. The head of this firm became convinced that the work done late in the afternoon was of inferior quality, and he tried the experiment of cutting the hours from ten to nine. The work was done on piece wages, and the girls at first protested against the nine-hour day, fearing that their pay envelopes would suffer. To their astonishment they earned as much in nine hours as they had in ten. In time the employer cut the working day down to eight hours and a half, and in addition gave the girls ten-minute rests twice a day. Still they earned their full wages, and they continued to earn full wages after the day became eight hours long. The employer testified before the United States Industrial Commission of 1900 that he believed he could successfully shorten the day to seven hours and a half and get the same amount of work accomplished.
What can you do against testimony like that? The Consumers’ League convinced the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Oregon ten-hour law was upheld.
The importance of this decision cannot be overestimated. On it hangs the validity of nearly all the laws which have been passed in the United States for the protection of women workers. If the Oregon law had been declared unconstitutional, laws in twenty States, or practically all the States where women work in factories, would have been in perpetual danger, and the United States might easily have sunk to a position occupied now by no leading country in Europe.
Great Britain has had protective legislation for women workers since 1844. In 1847 the labor of women in English textile mills was limited to ten hours a day, the period we are now worrying about, as being possibly contrary to our Constitution. France, within the past five years, has established a ten-hour day, broken by one hour of rest. Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy, limit the hours of women’s labor. In several countries there are special provisions giving extra time off to women who have household responsibilities. What would our Constitution-bound law makers say to such a proposition, if any one had the hardihood to suggest it?
If this law had not been upheld by the United States Supreme Court the women of no State could have hoped to secure further legislation for women workers. As it is, women in many States are preparing to establish what is now known as “The Oregon Standard,” that is, a ten-hour day for all working women.
Nothing in connection with the woman movement is more significant, certainly nothing was more unexpected, than the voluntary abandonment, on the part of women, of class prejudice and class distinctions. Where formerly the interest of the leisured woman in her wage-earning sisters was of a sentimental or philanthropic character, it has become practical and democratic.
The Young Women’s Christian Association has had an industrial department, which up to a recent period concerned itself merely with the spiritual welfare of working girls. Prayer meetings in factories, clubs, and classes in the Association headquarters, working-girls’ boarding homes, and other philanthropic efforts were the limits of the Association’s activities. The entire policy has changed of late, and under the capable direction of Miss Annie Marian MacLean, of Brooklyn, New York, the industrial department of the Association is doing scientific investigation of labor conditions of women.
In a cracker factory I once saw a paid worker in the Young Women’s Christian Association pause above a young girl lying on the floor, crimson with fever, and apparently in the throes of a serious illness. With angelic pity on her face the Association worker stooped and slipped a tract into the sick girl’s hand. The kind of industrial secretary the Association now employs would send for an ambulance and see that the girl had the best of hospital care. She would inquire whether the girl’s illness was caused by the conditions under which she worked, and she would know if it were possible to have those conditions changed.
WOMEN’S CLUBS STUDYING LABOR PROBLEMS Nearly every state federation of women’s clubs has its industrial committee, and many large clubs have a corresponding department. It is these industrial sections of the women’s clubs which are such a thorn in the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr., the new president of the National Manufacturers’ Association. In his inaugural address Mr. Kirby warned his colleagues that women’s clubs were not the ladylike, innocuous institutions that too-confiding man supposed them to be. In those clubs, he declared, their own wives and daughters were listening to addresses by the worst enemies of the Manufacturers’ Association, the labor leaders. By which he meant that the club women were inviting trade-union men and women to present the worker’s side of industrial subjects. “Soon,” exclaimed Mr. Kirby, “we shall have to fight the women as well as the unions.”
The richest and most aristocratic woman’s club in the country is the Colony Club of New York. The Colony Club was organized by a number of women from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the manner of men’s clubs. The women built a magnificent clubhouse on Madison Avenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderful roof-garden. For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing more than a beautiful toy which its members played with. But soon it began to develop into a sort of a woman’s forum, where all sorts of social topics were discussed. Visiting women of distinction, artists, writers, lecturers, were entertained there.
Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course in industrial economics. The women did not invite lecturers from Columbia University to address them. They asked John Mitchell and many lesser lights of the labor world. They wanted to learn, at first hand, the facts concerning conditions of industry. Most of them are stockholders in mills, factories, mines, or business establishments. Many own real estate on which factories stand.
“It is not fair,” they have openly declared, “that we should enjoy wealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death. We do not want wealth on such terms.”
The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to the National Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in the working and living conditions of wage earners in industries and in governmental institutions. A few conscientious employers have spent a part of their profits to make their employees comfortable. They have given them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, and comfortable seats. They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacation houses, and the like.
No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers. Equally, no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem. Nor should they be used as a substitute for justice.
Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed, untactfully administered. Too often it has been instituted, not to benefit the workers, but to advertise the business. Too often its real object was a desire to play the philanthropist’s role, to exact obsequience from the wage earner.
[Illustration: MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New York, the most exclusive Women’s Club in the country]
I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of the perfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected, the girls are required to stop work and clean the rooms. Since they work on a piece-work scale, the “perfect sanitary conditions” exist at their expense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday. This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their employers. It always fails.
It seems to the women who have studied these things that proper sanitary conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision for rest, vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wage earner’s due. They are a part of the laborer’s hire, and should be guaranteed by law, exactly as wages are guaranteed. An employer deserves gratitude for overtime pay no more than for fire escapes.
Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers’ League, women’s clubs, and women’s labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that good working conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastly increase the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits of the employers.
The New York Telephone Company does not set itself up to be a benevolent institution. Its directors know that its profits depend on the excellence of its service. There is one exchange in the Borough of Brooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic. This traffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summer resorts along the coast. In the fall and winter the traffic is very light. Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work only half the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round. “We cannot afford to do anything else,” explains the traffic manager. “We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages.”
[Illustration: MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY]
The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his business would suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen. He believed that he would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks human working conditions. Then came the Consumers’ League and mercantile laws, and a new pressure of public opinion, and the dry-goods merchant found out that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than one that is exhausted and uncomfortable.
The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has proved itself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligent employers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws will provide for it.
It used to be the invariable custom in stores–it is so still in a few–to lay off many clerks during the dull seasons. Now the best stores find that they can better afford to give all their employees vacations with pay. A clerk coming home after a vacation can sell goods, even in dull times. More and more employers are coming to appreciate the money value of the Saturday half-holiday in summer. Hearn, in New York, closes his department store all day Saturday during July and August. The store sells more goods in five days than it previously sold in six.
THE FILENE SYSTEM OF DEVELOPING EFFICIENT WORKERS There is one department store which has demonstrated that it is profitable to pay higher wages than its competitors, and that it pays to allow the employees to fix the terms of their own employment. This is the Filene store in Boston, which has developed within the past ten years from a conservative, old-fashioned dry-goods business into an extremely original and interesting experiment station in commercial economics.
The entire policy of the Filene management is bent on developing to the highest possible point the efficiency of each individual clerk. The best possible material is sought. No girl under sixteen is employed, and no girl of any age who has not graduated with credit from the grammar schools. There are a number of college-bred men and women in the Filene employ.
[Illustration: A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN]
Good wages are paid, even to beginners, and experienced employees are rewarded, not according to a fixed rate of payment, but according to earning capacity. Taken throughout the store, wages, plus commissions, which are allowed in all departments, average about two dollars a week higher than in other department stores in Boston.
No irresponsible, automatic employee can develop high efficiency. She does not want to become efficient; she wants merely to receive a pay envelope at the end of the week. In order to develop responsibility and initiative in their employees the Filenes have put them on a self-governing basis. The workers do not literally make their own rules, but the vote of the majority can change any rule made by the firm. The firm furnishes its employees with a printed book of rules, in which the policy of the store is set forth. If the employees object to any of the rules, or any part of the policy, they can vote a change.
The medium through which the clerks express their opinions and desires is the Filene Co-operative Association, of which every clerk and every employee in the place is a member. No dues are exacted, as is the custom in the usual employees’ association. The executive body, called the Store Council, and all other officers are elected by the members. All matters of grievance, all subjects of controversy, are referred to the Store Council, which, as often as occasion demands, calls a meeting of the entire association after business hours.
For example: Christmas happens on a Friday. The firm decides to keep the store open on the following day–Saturday. There is an expression of dissatisfaction from a number of clerks. A meeting of the association is called, and a vote taken as to whether the majority want the extra holiday or not; whether the majority are willing to lose the commissions on a day’s sales, for, of course, salaries continue. The vote reveals that the majority want the holiday. The Store Council so reports to the firm, and the firm must grant the holiday.
All matters of difficulty arising between employers and employed, in the Filene store, are settled not by the firm, but by the Arbitration Board of Employees, also elected by popular vote. All disagreements as to wages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue between saleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to the Board of Arbitration, and the board’s decision is final. There is no tyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of a department. Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as she is an efficient saleswoman.
Surely it is not too much to hope that, in a future not too far distant, all women who earn their bread will serve a system of industry adjusted by law to human standards. In enlightened America the courts, presided over by men to whom manual labor is known only in theory, have persistently ruled that the _Constitution forbade the State to make laws protecting women workers_. It has seemed to most of our courts and most of our judges that the State fulfilled its whole duty to its women citizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract–even though they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts which involved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and future generations. The women of this country have done nothing more important than to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyond this terrible delusion.
CHAPTER VI
MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE
The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. The Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable opportunity to get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the Illinois State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years later the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that it was unconstitutional.
The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without precedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States, until it had become almost a principle of American law that protective legislation for working women was invalid.
The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusion that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women would be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may appear obscure.
The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men, and they know something–not much, but still something–about the men of the working classes. They know, for example, something about the conditions under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor, twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these are bad things,–bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners’ hours of labor comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.
The learned judges, I say this with all due respect, do not know anything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts of their decisions, denying the constitutionality of protective measures, are amazing in the ignorance they display,–ignorance of industrial conditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects of certain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect of women’s arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions in trades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the home resulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, the learned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, the happiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about the inhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display of the real facts.
We have seen how the women of the Consumers’ League taught the United States Supreme Court something about working women; showed them a few of the calamities resulting from the unrestricted labor of women and immature girls. The Supreme Court’s decision forever abolished the old fallacy that the American Constitution _forbids_ protective legislation for women workers. It remains for women’s organizations in the various States to educate local courts up to the knowledge that community interest _demands_ protective legislation.
Following the decision of the Supreme Court in the Oregon case, which flatly contradicted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, the working women of Illinois began their educational campaign. They had now, for the first time, a fighting chance to secure the restoration of their shortened work day. The women of fifteen organized trades in the city of Chicago determined to take that chance.
The women first appealed to the Industrial Commission, appointed early in 1908 by Governor Dineen, to investigate the need of protective legislation for workers, men and women alike.
The women were given a courteous hearing, but were told frankly that limited hours of work for women was not one of protective measures to be recommended by the Commission.
The Waitresses’ Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists, led by a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary of the union. Miss Maloney and her associates drafted and introduced into the Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day for every woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store, laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for enforcing the measure.
The “Girls’ Bill,” as it immediately became known, was the most hotly contested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during the session. Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing on the bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek and tired women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their working day made shorter. Another presented a petition signed by his women employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven hours a day!
Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after learned counsel for the Manufacturers’ Association had argued against the measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers’ Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girls confined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of the Glove Makers’ Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two girls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea: Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses’ Union, was the other speaker.
They described details in the daily lives of working women not generally known except to the workers themselves. Among these was the piece-work system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speed is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage. The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; to consider how many stitches the operator’s hand must guide in a week, a month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease of earning power.
“I am a waitress,” said Miss Maloney, “and I work ten hours a day. In that time a waitress who is tolerably busy _walks_ ten miles, and the dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred to two thousand pounds. Don’t you think eight hours a day is enough for a girl to walk?”
Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after that day. The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too grave for the friends of the workers to overcome. It was decided to substitute a ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the “Oregon Standard” established by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle of limitation upon the hours of women’s work once established in Illinois, the workers could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.
The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a law of the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers’ Association, through the W.C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suit to test the constitutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Their appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hours to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them by the ten-hour law.
There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched state of women’s wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature years–one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over thirty years–are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?
There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department, forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.
Immediately a number of women’s organizations joined hands with the women’s trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up in the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers’ League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had toiled for many months. The World’s Experience Against the Illinois Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on the succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three pages of law.
The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was the testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.
“Medical Science has demonstrated,” says this most important paragraph, “that while fatigue is a normal phenomenon … excessive fatigue or exhaustion is abnormal…. It has discovered that fatigue is due not only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue, entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that when artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin causes death. The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to be counteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body. But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not produced fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin.”
The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the American Constitution was never intended to shield manufacturers in their willingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. The ten-hour law was sustained.
That the “Girls’ Bill” passed, or that it was even introduced, was due in large measure to an organization of women, more militant and more democratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women’s Trade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, the League consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organized trades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of these latter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-union principle, but more are women who work in the professional ranks,–teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlement workers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, who ever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federation of Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners, to appear in Labor Day parades.
The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities,–New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland,–is to educate women wage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains and supports organizers among all classes of workers. As quickly as a group in any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. It raises funds to assist women in their trade struggles. It acts as arbitrator between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes.
The Women’s Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factory trades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until lately believed themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundred and fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventy stenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers’ Federation of Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before the Women’s Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated. The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized.
The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League was brilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-waist makers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story of this strike will bear retelling.
On the evening of November 22, 1909, there was a great mass meeting of workers held at Cooper Union in New York. Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, presided, and the stage was well filled with members of the Women’s Trade Union League. The meeting had been called by the League in conjunction with Shirt-Waist Makers’ Union, Local 25, to consider the grievances of shirt-waist makers in general, and especially of the shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, who had been, for more than two months, on strike.
The story of the strike, the causes that led up to it, and the bitter injustice which followed it were rehearsed in a dozen speeches. It was shown that for four to five dollars a week the girl shirt-waist makers worked from eight in the morning until half-past five in the evening two days in the week; from eight in the morning until nine at night four days in the week; and from eight in the morning until noon one day in the week–Sunday.
The shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, in hope of bettering their conditions, had formed a union, and had informed their employers of their action. The employers promptly locked them out of the shop, and the girls declared a strike.
The strike was more than two months old when the Cooper Union meeting was held, and the employers showed no signs of giving in. It was agreed that a general strike of shirt-waist makers ought to be declared. But the union was weak, there were no funds, and most of the shirt-waist makers were women and unused to the idea of solidarity in action. Could they stand together in an industrial struggle which promised to be long and bitter?
President Gompers was plainly fearful that they could not.
Suddenly a very small, very young, very intense Jewish girl, known to her associates as Clara Lemlich, sprang to her feet, and, with the assistance of two young men, climbed to the high platform. Flinging up her arms with a dramatic gesture she poured out a flood of speech, entirely unintelligible to the presiding Gompers, and to the members of the Women’s Trade Union League. The Yiddish-speaking majority in the audience understood, however, and the others quickly caught the spirit of her impassioned plea.
The vast audience rose as one man, and a great roar arose. “Yes, we will all strike!”
“And will you keep the faith?” cried the girl on the platform. “Will you swear by the old Jewish oath of our fathers?”
Two thousand Jewish hands were thrust in air, and two thousand Jewish throats uttered the oath: “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither and drop off from this arm I now raise.”
Clara Lemlich’s part in the work was accomplished. Within a few days forty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike.
The Women’s Trade Union League, under the direction of Miss Helen Marot, secretary, at once took hold of the strike.
There were two things to be done at once. The forty thousand had to be enrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing to accept the terms of the strikers had to be “signed up.” Clinton Hall, one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, and for several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the street outside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and women strikers, anxious and perspiring “bosses,” and busy, active associates of the Women’s Trade Union League.
The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied the League members undertook the work of picketing the shops. Picketing, if this activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling the neighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakers are going to and from their nefarious business, and importuning them to join the strike.
Peaceful picketing is legal. The law permits a striker to speak to the girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on the other’s arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence.
Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a little of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence. After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girls who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members. Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany’s Superintendent of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a millionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College, Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association of Collegiate Alumnae. These young women went out day after day with girl strikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered arrest on more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation of magistrates who–well, who did not understand.
The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and organizations of women other than the Women’s Trade Union League began to take an interest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss Gertrude Barnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial world of women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike. They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women in person.
The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest social eminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan and several others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the president of the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the strikers’ own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. More than thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozen women promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers.
A week later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, mother of the Duchess of Marlborough, leader of a large Woman Suffrage Association, engaged the Hippodrome, and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators. Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting.
At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses were involved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis of increased pay, a fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of the union. Others settled later, and under the influence of the “uptown scum,” as the employers’ association gallantly termed the Women’s Trade Union League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still others reluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out of the five hundred had settled with the union, and only about three thousand of the workers were still out of work.
Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they would ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of the intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all, that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.
Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are becoming the co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of the leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the situation, espouse the cause of their working sisters. The woman in the factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.
The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury, Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of the working women.
That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and wages were good enough to compensate for the long day’s labor.
The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were “hands.”
The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated machinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred times more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women who had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and eight dollars.
The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the mills as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.
There you have the story of women’s realization of themselves as a group. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women. The Boston Branch of the Women’s Trade Union League, through its secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined the strikers. Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks of anxiety and deprivation.
The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business before treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, exists as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and conferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to exist. An employers’ association is a necessity of business life. A labor union is an insult to capital.
This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor car stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs. Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay personified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer. Her powers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercial connections, were sufficient to wring consent from the firm to receive John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers.
John Golden, intelligent, honest, a fine type of workingman, educated in the English school of unionism, held two conferences with the firm. He was able to make the employers see the whole situation in an entirely new light. They were men of probity; they wanted to be fair; and when they saw the human side of the struggle they surrendered. When they perceived the justice of the collective bargain, the advantages to both sides of a labor organization honestly conducted, they consented to recognize the union. And the women went back, their group unbroken.
Thus are women working, women of all classes, to humanize the factory. From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and the judiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women of the toiling masses in their struggle to make over the factory from the inside. Together they are impressing the men of the working world, law makers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of the race.
Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protective legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not yet complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the late Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not every court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more valuable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn.
In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in which a number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to the owner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did not strike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in that country a substitute for the strike is provided by law. To this substitute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. The employer in his answer declared, just as employers in this country might have done, that his business would not stand an increase in wages. He explained that the match industry was newly established in New Zealand, and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could not afford to pay high wages.
The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been an inquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiry into the cost of living in the town where the match factory was located. And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court of Arbitration, and this is what he said to the man:
“It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on the wages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that they should have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls and bodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance than your profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better for the community for you to close your factory. _It would be better to send the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back to flints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter._ My award is that you pay what they ask.”
Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the eight million women in the world who have learned to think in human terms.
CHAPTER VII
BREAKING THE GREAT TABOO
At the threshold of that quarter of old New York called Greenwich Village stands Jefferson Market Court. Almost concealed behind the towering structure of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, the building by day is rather inconspicuous. But when night falls, swallowing up the neighborhood of tangled streets and obscure alleyways, Jefferson Market assumes prominence. High up in the square brick tower an illuminated clock seems perpetually to be hurrying its pointing hands toward midnight. From many windows, barred for the most part, streams an intense white light. Above an iron-guarded door at the side of the building floats a great globe of light, and beneath its glare, through the iron-guarded door, there passes, every week-day night in the year, a long procession of prodigals.
The guarded door seldom admits any one as important, so to speak, as a criminal. The criminal’s case waits for day. The Night Court in Jefferson Market sits in judgment only on the small fry caught in the dragnet of the police. Tramps, vagrants, drunkards, brawlers, disturbers of the peace, speeding chauffeurs, licenseless peddlers, youths caught red-handed shooting craps or playing ball in the streets,–these are the men with whom the Night Court deals. But it is not the men we have come to see.
[Illustration: MISS MAUDE E. MINER]
The women of the Night Court. Prodigal daughters! Between December, 1908, and December, 1909, no less than five thousand of them passed through the guarded door, under the blaze of the electric lights. There is never an hour, from nine at night until three in the morning, when the prisoners’ bench in Jefferson Market Court is without its full quota of women. Old–prematurely old, and young–pitifully young; white and brown; fair and faded; sad and cynical; starved and prosper ous; rag-draped and satin-bedecked; together they wait their turn at judgment.
Quietly moving back and forth before the prisoners’ bench you see a woman, tall, graceful, black-gowned. She is the salaried probation officer, modern substitute for the old-time volunteer mission worker. The probation officer’s serious blue eyes burn with no missionary zeal. There is no spark of sentimental pity in the keen gaze she turns on each new arrival.
When the bench is full of women the judge turns to her to inquire: “Anybody there you want, Miss Miner?”
Miss Miner usually shakes her head. She diagnoses her cases like a physician, and she wastes no time on incurables.
Once in a while, perhaps several times in the course of a night, Miss Miner touches a girl on the arm. At once the girl rises and follows the probation officer into an adjoining room. If she is what she appears, young in evil, if she has a story which rings true, a story of poverty and misfortune, rather than of depravity, she goes not back to the prisoners’ bench. When her turn at judgment comes Miss Miner stands beside her, and in a low voice meant only for the judge, she tells the facts. The girl weeps as she listens. To hear one’s troubles told is sometimes more terrible than to endure them.
Court adjourns at three in the morning, and this girl, with the others–if others have been claimed by the probation officer–goes out into the empty street, under the light of the tall tower, whose clock has begun all over again its monotonous race toward midnight. No policeman accompanies the group. The girls are under no manner of duress. They have promised to go home with Miss Miner, and they go. The night’s adventure, entered into with dread, with callous indifference, or with thoughtless mirth, ends in a quiet bedroom and a pillow wet with tears.
[Illustration: IN THE NIGHT COURT, NEW YORK.]
Waverley House, as Miss Miner’s home is known, has sheltered, during the past year, over three hundred girls. Out of that number one hundred and nineteen have returned to their homes, or are earning a living at useful work.
One hundred and nineteen saved out of five thousand prodigals! In point of numbers this is a melancholy showing, but in comparison with other efforts at rescue work it is decidedly encouraging.
Nothing quite like Waverley House has appeared in other American cities, but it is a type of detention home for girls which is developing logically out of the probation system. Delinquent girls under sixteen are now considered, in all enlightened communities, subjects for the Juvenile Court. They are hardly ever associated with older delinquents. But a girl over sixteen is likely to be committed to prison, and may be locked in cells with criminal and abandoned women of the lowest order. Waverley House is the first practical protest against this stupid and evil-encouraging policy.
The house, which stands a few blocks distant from the Night Court, was established and is maintained by the Probation Association of New York, consisting of the probation officers in many of the city courts, and of men and women interested in philanthropy and social reform. The District Attorney of New York County, Charles S. Whitman, is president of the Association, Maude E. Miner is its secretary, Mrs. Russell Sage, Miss Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, president of the New York Women’s Trade Union League, Mrs. Richard Aldrich, formerly president of the Women’s Municipal League, Andrew Carnegie, Edward T. Devine, head of New York’s organized charities, Homer Folks, and Fulton Cutting are among the supporters of Waverley House. Miss Stella Miner is the capable and sympathetic superintendent of the house.
The place is in no sense a reformatory. It is an experiment station, a laboratory where the gravest and most baffling of all the diseases which beset society is being studied. Girls arrested for moral delinquency and paroled to probation officers are taken to Waverley House, where they remain, under closest study and searching inquiry, until the best means of disposing of them is devised. Some are sent to their homes, some to hospitals, some to institutions, some placed on long probation.
Maude E. Miner, who declined a chair of mathematics in a woman’s college to work in the Night Court, is one of an increasing number of women who are attempting a great task. They are trying to solve a problem which has baffled the minds of the wisest since civilization dawned. They have set themselves to combat an evil fate which every year overtakes countless thousands of young girls, dragging them down to misery, disease, and death. At the magnitude of the effort these women have undertaken one stands appalled. Will they ever reach the heart of the problem? Can they ever hope to do more than reclaim a few individuals? This much did the missionaries before them.
“We could reclaim fully seventy-five per cent,” declares Miss Miner, “if only we could find a way to begin nearer the beginning.”
To begin the reform of any evil at the beginning, or near the beginning, instead of near the end is now regarded as an economy of effort. That is what educators are trying to do with juvenile delinquency; what physicians are doing with disease; what philanthropists are beginning to do with poverty.
Hardly any one has suggested that the social evil might have a cause, and that it might be possible to attack it at its source. Yet that any large number of girls enter upon such a horrible career, willingly, voluntarily, is unbelievable to one who knows anything of the facts. There must be strong forces at work on these girls, forces they find themselves entirely powerless to resist.
Miss Miner and her fellow probation officers are the visible signs of a very important movement among women to discover what these forces are. Meager, indeed, are the facts at hand. We have had, and we still have, in cities east and west, committees and societies and law and order leagues earnestly engaged in “stamping out” the evil. It is like trying to stamp out a fire constantly fed with inflammables and fanned by a strong gale. The protests of most of these leagues amount to little more than vain clamor against a thing which is not even distantly comprehended.
The _personnel_ of these agencies organized to “stamp out” the evil differs little in the various cities. It is largely if not wholly masculine in character, and the evil is usually dealt with from the point of view of religion and morals. Women, when they appear in the matter at all, figure as missionaries, “prison angels,” and the like. As evangelists to sinners women have been permitted to associate with their fallen sisters without losing caste. Likewise, when elderly enough, they have been allowed to serve on governing boards of “homes” and “refuges.” Their activities were limited to rescue work. They might extend a hand to a repentant Magdalene. A Phryne they must not even be aware of. In other words, this evil as a subject of investigation and intelligent discussion among women was absolutely prohibited. It has ever been their Great Taboo.
Nevertheless, when eight million women, in practically every civilized country in the world, organized themselves into an International Council of Women, and began their remarkable survey of the social order in which they live, one of their first acts was to break the Great Taboo.
[Illustration: MISS SADIE AMERICAN]
At early congresses of the International Council Miss Sadie American, Mrs. Kate Waller Barrett, Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis, among American delegates, Miss Elizabeth Janes of England, Miss Elizabeth Gad of Denmark, Dr. Agnes Bluhm of Germany, and others interested in the moral welfare of girls, urged upon the Council action against the “White Slave” traffic. No extensive argument was required to convince the members of the Council that the “White Slave” traffic and the whole subject of the moral degradation of women was a social phenomenon too long neglected by women.
These women declared with refreshing candor that it was about time that the social evil was dealt with intelligently, and if it was to be dealt with intelligently women must do the work. The fussy old gentlemen with white side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other well meaning amateurs, who are engaged in “stamping out” the evil, deserve to be set aside. In their places the women propose to install social experts who shall deal scientifically with the problem.
The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle, in every community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actually forbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for the first time repudiated by a body of organized women. The arguments on which the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time, seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance. The desirability of the descent of property in legal paternal line seemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid standard of morals to women. But they found reasons infinitely greater why the same rigid standard should be applied to men.
The International Council of Women and women’s organizations in every country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and through these physicians they have been able to consider the social evil from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare of children, were brought forth–facts concerning infantile blindness, almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women, and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases among men. The horrible results to innocent women and children of these maladies, and their frightful prevalence,–seventy-five per cent of city men, according to reliable authority, being affected,–aroused in the women a sentiment of indignation and revolt. The International Council of Women put itself on record as protesting against the responsibility laid upon women, the unassisted task of preserving the purity of the race.
In the United States, women’s clubs, women’s societies, women’s medical associations, special committees of women in many cities have courageously undertaken the study of this problem, intending by means of investigation and publicity to lay bare its sources and seek its remedy.
The sources of the evil are about the only phase of the problem which has never been adequately examined. It is true that we have suspected that the unsteady and ill-adjusted economic position of women furnished some explanation for its existence, but even now our information is vague and unsatisfactory.
A number of years ago, in 1888 to be exact, the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics made an interesting investigation. This was an effort to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world, usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations of nearly four thousand fallen women in twenty-eight American cities.
Of these unfortunates over eight hundred had worked in low-waged trades such as paper-box making, millinery, laundry work, rope and cordage making, cigar and cigarette making, candy packing, textile factory and shoe factory work.
About five hundred women had been garment workers, dressmakers, and seamstresses, but how far these were skilled or unskilled was not stated.
The department store, at that time little more than a sweat shop so far as wages and long hours of work were concerned, contributed one hundred and sixteen recruits to the list.
On the whole, these groups were what the investigators had expected to find.
There were two other large groups of prodigals, and these were entirely unexpected by the investigators. Of the 3,866 girls examined 1,236, or nearly thirty-two per cent, reported no previous occupation. The next largest group, 1,115, or nearly thirty per cent, had been domestic servants. The largest group of all had gone straight from their homes into lives of evil. A group nearly as large had gone directly from that occupation which is constantly urged upon women as the safest and most suitable means of earning their living–housework.
Now you may, if you want to drop the thing out of your mind as something too disagreeable to think about, infer from this that at least sixty-two per cent of those 3,866 women deserved their fate. Some of them were too lazy to work, and the rest preferred a life of soiled luxury to one of honest toil in somebody’s nice kitchen. Apparently this was the view taken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, because it never carried the investigation any farther. It never tried to find out _why_ so many girls left their homes to enter evil lives. It never tried to find out _why_ housework was a trade dangerous to morals.
Fortunately it did occur to the women’s organizations to examine the facts a little more carefully. In this article I am going to take you over some of the ground they have covered and show you where their investigations have led them.
South Chicago is a fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,–enormous drab structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The steel workers and their families live as a rule in two and three family houses, built of wood, generally unpainted, and always dismally utilitarian as to architectural details.
In South Chicago, four years ago, there was not such a thing as a park, or a playground, or a recreation center. One lone social settlement was just seeking a home for itself. There were public schools, quite imposing buildings. But these were closed and locked and shuttered for the day as soon as the classes were dismissed.
In a certain neighborhood of South Chicago there lived a number of young girls, healthy, high-spirited, and full of that joy of life which always must be fed–if not with wholesome food, then husks. For parents these girls had fathers who worked twelve hours a day in the steel mills and came home at night half dead from lack of rest and sleep; and mothers who toiled equally long hours in the kitchen or over the washtub and were too weary to know or care what the girls did after school. For social opportunity the girls had “going downtown.” Perhaps you know what that means. It means trooping up and down the main street in lively groups, lingering near a saloon where a phonograph is bawling forth a cheerful air, visiting a nickel theater, or looking on at a street accident or a fight.
About this time the panic of 1907 descended suddenly on South Chicago and turned out of the steel mills hundreds of boys and men. Some of these were mere lads, sixteen to eighteen years old. They, too, went “downtown.” There was no other place for them to go.
As a plain matter of cause and effect, what kind of a moral situation would you expect to evolve out of these materials?
Eventually a woman probation officer descended on the neighborhood. Many of the girls whom she rescued from conditions not to be described in these pages were so young that their cases were tried in the Juvenile Court. Most of them went to rescue homes, reformatories, or hospitals. Some slipped away permanently, in all human probability to join the never-ceasing procession of prodigals.
This is what “no previous occupation” really means in nine cases out of ten. It means that the girl lived in a home which was no home at all, according to the ideals of you who read these pages.
Sometimes it was a cellar where the family slept on rags. Sometimes it was an attic where ten or twelve people herded in a space not large enough for four. Some of these homes were never warm in winter. In some there was hardly any furniture. But we need not turn to these extreme cases in order to show that in many thousands of American homes virtue and innocence are lost because no facilities for preserving them are possible.
Annie Donnelly’s case will serve as further illustration. Annie Donnelly’s father was a sober, decent man of forty, who drove a cab from twelve to fifteen hours every day in the year, Sundays and holidays included. Before the cab drivers’ strike, a year or two ago, Donnelly’s wages were fifteen dollars a week, and the family lived in a four-room tenement, for which they paid $5.50 a week. You pay rent weekly to a tenement landlord. Since the strike wages are fourteen dollars a week for cab drivers, and this fall the Donnelly rent went up fifty cents a week.
The Donnelly tenement was a very desirable one, having but a single dark, windowless room, instead of two or three, like most New York tenements. There were three children younger than Annie, who was fourteen. The family of five made a fairly tight fit in four rooms. Nevertheless, when the rent went up to six dollars Mrs. Donnelly took a lodger. She had to or move and, remember, this was a desirable tenement because it had only one dark room.
One day the lodger asked Annie if she did not want to go to a dance. Annie did want to, but she knew very well that her mother would not allow her to go. Once a year the entire family, including the baby, attended the annual ball of the Coachman’s Union, but that was another thing. Annie was too young for dances her mother declared.
The Donnellys paid for and occupied three rooms, but they really lived in one room, the others being too filled with beds to be habitable except at night. The kitchen, the one living-room, was uncomfortably crowded at meal times. At no time was there any privacy. It was impossible for Annie to receive her girl friends in her home. Every bit of her social life had to be lived out of the house.
When the weather was warm she often stayed in the street, walking about with the other girls or sitting on a friend’s doorstep, until ten or even eleven o’clock at night. Every one does the same in a crowded city neighborhood. There comes a time in a girl’s life when this sort of thing becomes monotonous. The time came when Annie found sitting on the doorstep and talking about nothing in particular entirely unbearable. So one balmy, inviting spring night she slipped away and went with the lodger to a dance.
The dance hall occupied a big, low-ceiled basement room in a building which was a combination of saloon and tenement house. In one of the front windows of the basement room was hung a gaudy placard: “The Johnny Sullivan Social Club.”
The lodger paid no admission, but he deposited ten cents for a hat check, after which they went in. About thirty couples were swinging in a waltz, their forms indistinctly seen through the clouds of dust which followed them in broken swirls through air so thick that the electric lights were dimmed. Somewhere in the obscurity a piano did its noisiest best with a popular waltz tune.
In a few minutes Annie forgot her timidity, forgot the dust and the heat and the odor of stale beer, and was conscious only that the music was piercing, sweet, and that she was swinging in blissful time to it. When the waltz tune came to an end at last the dancers stopped, gasping with the heat, and swaying with the giddiness of the dance.
“Come along,” said the lodger, “and have a beer.” When Annie shook her head he exclaimed: “Aw, yuh have to. The Sullivans gets the room rent free, but the fellers upstairs has bar privileges, and yuh have to buy a beer off of ’em oncet in a while. They’ve gotta get something out of it.”
I do not know whether Annie yielded then or later. But ultimately she learned to drink beer for the benefit of philanthropists who furnish dance halls rent free, and also to quench a thirst rendered unbearable by heat and dust. They seldom open the windows in these places. Sometimes they even nail the windows down. A well-ventilated room means poor business at the bar.
Annie Donnelly became a dance-hall _habitue_. Not because she was viciously inclined; not because she was abnormal; but because she was decidedly normal in all her instincts and desires.
Besides, it is easy to get the dance-hall habit. At almost every dance invitations to other dances are distributed with a lavish hand. These invitations, on cheap printed cards, are scattered broadcast over chairs and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself. They are locally known as “throw-aways.” Here are a few specimens, from which you may form an idea of the quality of dance halls, and the kind of people–almost the only kind of people–who offer pleasure to the starved hearts of girls like Annie Donnelly. These are actual invitations picked up in an East Side dance hall by the head worker of the New York College Settlement:
“_Second annual reception and ball, given by Jibo and Jack, at New Starlight Hall, 143 Suffolk Street, December 25. Music by our favorite. Gents ticket 25 cents, Ladies 15 cents._”
“_Don’t miss the ball given by Joe the Greaser, and Sam Rosenstock, at Odd Fellows’ Hall, January 29th._”
“_See the Devil Dance at the Reception and Ball given by Max Pascal and Little Whity, at Tutonia Hall, Tuesday evening, November 20th.”_
_ “Reception and Ball given by two well known friends, Max Turk and Sam Lande, better known as Mechuch, at Appollo Hall, Chrystmas night. Floor manager, Young Louis. Ticket admit one 25 cents._”
In addition to these private affairs which are arranged purely for the profit of “Jibo and Jack” and their kind, men who make a living in this and in yet more unspeakable ways, there are hundreds of saloon dance halls, not only in New York, but in other cities. These are simply annexes to drinking places, and people are not welcome there unless they drink. No admission is charged.
There are also numberless dancing academies. Dancing lessons are given four nights in the week, as a rule, and the dancing public buys admission the other three nights and on Sunday afternoons. Some dancing academies, even in tenement house quarters, are reputable institutions, but to most of them the lowest of the low, both men and women, resort. There, as in the dance halls, the “White Slaver” plies his trade, and the destroyer of womanliness lays his nets.
Annie Donnelly soon learned the ways of all these places. She learned to “spiel.” You spiel by holding hands with your partner at arms’ length, and whirling round and round at the highest possible speed. The girl’s skirts are blown immodestly high, which is a detail. The effect of the spiel is a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for liquor, and a temporary recklessness of the possible results of strong drink.
Annie also learned to dance what is known as the “half time,” or the “part time” waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crude peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it to immigrant girls in New York dancing academies and dance halls, and tell the girls that it is the _American_ fashion of waltzing.
Annie Donnelly’s destruction was accomplished in less than a year. It was the more rapid because of the really superior character of her home. There was nothing the matter with that home except that it was too crowded for the family to stay in it. Father and mother were respectable, hard-working people, and after Annie’s first real misadventure, into which she fell almost unwittingly, she was afraid to go home.
The dance hall, as we have permitted it to exist, practically unregulated, has become a veritable forcing house of vice and crime in every city in the United States. It is a straight chute down which, every year, thousands of girls descend to the way of the prodigal. No one has counted their number. All we know of the unclassed is that they exist, apparently in ever-increasing masses.
It was estimated in Chicago, not long ago, that there were about six thousand unfortunate women known to the police, and something like twenty thousand who managed to avoid actual collision with the law. That is, the latter lived quietly and plied their trade on the street so unostentatiously that they were seldom arrested. How many of these unfortunates reached the streets through the dance hall is impossible to know–we only know that it constantly recruits the ranks of the unclassed.
[Illustration: A DANCE HALL]
The dance hall may be in the rear of a saloon, or over a saloon; it may occupy a vacant store building, or a large loft. Somewhere in its immediate vicinity there is a saloon. A dance lasts about five minutes, and the interval between dances is from ten to twenty minutes. Waiters circle among the dancers, importuning them to drink. The dance hall without a bar, or some source of liquid supply, does not often exist, except as it has been established by social workers to offset the influence of the commercial dance hall.
Some dance halls are small and wretchedly lighted. Others are large and pretentious. Some of them have direct connections with Raines Law hotels and their prototypes. Of hardly a single dance hall can a good word be said. They are almost entirely in the hands of the element lowest in society, in business, and in politics.
From the old-fashioned German family picnic park to Coney Island in New York, Revere Beach in Boston, The White City in Chicago, Savin Rock in New Haven, and their like, is a far cry.
Some of these summer parks try to keep their amusements clean and decent, and some, notably Euclid Park, Cleveland, succeed. But drink and often worse evils are characteristic of most of them. There are parts of Coney Island where no beer is sold, where the vaudeville and the moving pictures are clean and wholesome, where dancing is orderly. But the nearest side street has its “tough joint.” The same thing is true of the big summer resorts of other cities.
The dance hall, both winter and summer types, have had a deteriorating effect upon the old-fashioned dancing academy. Formerly these were respectable establishments where people paid for dancing lessons. Now they are a _melange_ of dancing classes and public entertainments. The dancing masters, unable to compete with the dance hall proprietors, have been obliged to transfer many of the dance hall features to their establishments.
Oddly enough it is rather an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted to a dance in any kind of a dance hall. The girls go alone, with a friend, or with a group of girls. The exceptional girl, who is attended by a man, must dance with him, or if she accepts another part ner, she must ask his permission. An escort is deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage. Those who go unattended are always sure of partners. Often they meet “fellows” they know, or have seen on the streets. Introductions are not necessary. Even if a girl is unacquainted with any “fellows,” if she possesses slight attractions, she is still sure of partners.
The amount of money spent by working girls for dance-hall admissions is considerable. A girl receiving six or seven dollars a week in wages thinks nothing of reserving from fifty cents to a dollar for dancing.
In going about among the dance halls one is struck with the number of black-gowned girls. The black gown might almost be called the mark of the dance-hall _habitue_, the girl who is dance mad and who spends all her evenings going from one resort to another. She wears black because light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.
An indispensable feature of the dancing academy is the “spieler.” This is a young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilled and untiring dancer. The business of the spieler is to look after the wall-flowers. He seeks the girl who sits alone against the wall; he dances with her and brings other partners to her. It would not do for a place to get the reputation of slowness. The girls go back to those dance halls where they have had the best time.
The spieler is not uncommonly a worthless fellow; sometimes he is a sinister creature, who lives on the earnings of unfortunate girls. The dance hall, and especially the dancing academy, because of the youth of many of its patrons, is a rich harvest field for men of this type.
Beginning with the saloon dance hall, unquestionably the most brutally evil type, and ending with the dancing academy, where some pretense of chaperonage is made, the dance hall is a vicious institution. It is vicious because it takes the most natural of all human instincts, the desire of men and women to associate together, and distorts that instinct into evil. The boy and girl of the tenement-dwelling classes, especially where the foreign element is strong, do not share their pleasures in the normal, healthy fashion of other young people. The position of the women of this class is not very high. Men do not treat her as an equal. They woo her for a wife. In the same manner the boy does not play with the girl. The relations between young people very readily degenerate. The dance hall, with its curse of drink, its lack of chaperonage and of reasonable discipline, helps this along its downward course.
Sadie Greenbaum, as I will call her, was an exceptionally attractive young Jewish girl of fifteen when I first knew her. Although not remarkably bright in school she was industrious, and aspired to be a stenographer. She was not destined to realize her ambition. As soon as she finished grammar school she was served, so to speak, with her working papers. The family needed additional income, not to meet actual living expenses, for the Greenbaums were not acutely poor, but in order that the only son of the family might go to college. Max was seventeen, a selfish, overbearing prig of a boy, fully persuaded of his superiority over his mother and sisters, and entirely willing that the family should toil unceasingly for his advancement.
Sadie accepted the situation meekly, and sought work in a muslin underwear factory. At eighteen she was earning seven dollars a week as a skilled operator on a tucking machine. She sat down to her work every morning at eight o’clock, and for four hours watched with straining eyes a tucking foot which carried eight needles and gathered long strips of muslin into eight fine tucks, at the rate of four thousand stitches a minute. The needles, mere flickering flashes of white light above the cloth, had to be watched incessantly lest a thread break and spoil the continuity of a tuck. When you are on piece wages you do not relish stopping the machine and doing over a yard or two of work.
So Sadie watched the needle assiduously, and ignored the fact that her head ached pretty regularly, and she was generally too weary when lunch time came to enjoy the black bread and pickles which, with a cup of strong tea, made her noon meal. After lunch she again sat down to her machine and watched the needles gallop over the cloth.
At the end of each year Sadie Greenbaum had produced for the good of the community _four miles_ of tucked muslin. In return, the community had rendered her back something less than three hundred dollars, for the muslin underwear trade has its dull seasons, and you do not earn seven dollars every week in the year.
Each week Sadie handed her pay envelope unopened to her mother. The mother bought all Sadie’s clothes and gave her food and shelter. Consequently, Sadie’s unceasing vigil of the needle paid for her existence and purchased also the proud consciousness of an older brother who would one day own a doctor’s buggy and a social position.
The one joy of this girl’s life, in fact all the real life she lived, was dancing. Regularly every Saturday night Sadie and a girl friend, Rosie by name, put on their best clothes and betook themselves to Silver’s Casino, a huge dance hall with small rooms adjoining, where food and much drink were to be had.
There was a good floor at Silver’s and a brass band to dance to. It was great! The girls never lacked partners, and they made some very agreeable acquaintances.
In the dressing room, between dances, all the girls exchanged conversation, views on fashions, confidences about the young men and other gossip. Some of the girls were nice and some, it must be admitted, were “tough.” What was the difference? The tough girls, with their daring humor, their cigarettes, their easy manners, and their amazingly smart clothes, furnished a sort of spice to the affair.
Sadie and Rosie sometimes discussed the tough girls, and the conversation nearly always ended with one remarking: “Well, if they don’t get anything else out of livin’, look at the clothes they put on their backs.”
Perhaps you can understand that longing for pretty gowns, perhaps you can even sympathize with it. Of course, if you have a number of other resources, you can keep the dress hunger in its proper place. But if you have nothing in your existence but a machine–at which you toil for others’ benefit;
Sadie and Rosie continued to spend their Saturday evenings and their Sunday evenings at Silver’s Casino. At first they went home together promptly at midnight. After midnight these casino dance halls change their character. Often professional “pace makers” are introduced, men and women of the lowest class, who are paid to inspire the other dancers to lewd conduct. These wretched people are immodestly clothed, and they perform immodest or very tough dances. They are usually known as “Twisters,” a descriptive title. When they make their appearance the self-respecting dancers go home, and a much looser element comes in. The pace becomes a rapid one. Manners are free, talk is coarse, laughter is incessant. The bar does a lively business. The dancing and the revels go on until daylight.
The first time Sadie and Rosie allowed themselves to be persuaded to stay at Silver’s after midnight they were rather horrified by the abandoned character of the dancing, the reckless drinking, and the fighting which resulted in several men being thrown out. The second time they were not quite so horrified, but they decided not to stay so late another time. Then came a great social event, the annual “mask and shadow dance” of a local political organization. Sadie and Rosie attended.
A “mask and shadow dance” is as important a function to girls of Sadie’s and Rosie’s class as a cotillion is to girls of your class. Such affairs are possible only in large dance halls, and to do them impressively costs the proprietor some money. The guests rent costumes and masks and appear in very gala fashion indeed. They dance in the rays of all kinds of colored lights thrown upon them from upper galleries. During part of a waltz the dancers are bathed in rose-colored lights, which change suddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects are made, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers’ shadows are thrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor. At intervals a rain of bright-colored confetti pours down from above. The scene becomes bacchanalian. Color, light, music, confetti, the dance, together combine to produce an intense and voluptuous intoxication which the revelers deepen with drink.
The events of the latter part of that night were very vague in Sadie’s memory when she awoke late the next morning. She remembered that she had tolerated familiarities which had been foreign to her experience heretofore, and that she had been led home by some friendly soul, at daylight, almost helpless from liquor.
Frightened, haunted by half-ashamed memories of that dance, Sadie spoiled a good bit of her work on Monday morning. The forewoman descended on her with a torrent of coarse abuse, whereupon Sadie rose suddenly from her machine, and in a burst of hysterical profanity and tears rushed out of the factory, vowing never to return. There was only one course, she decided, for her to take, and she took it.
“Sadie, why did you do it?” wailed Rosie the next time they met.
“It’s better than the factory,” said Sadie.
Tucking muslin underwear is dull work, but it is, in most ways, a more agreeable task than icing cakes in a St. Louis biscuit factory. All day Edna M—- stood over a tank filled with thick chocolate icing. The table beside Edna’s tank was kept constantly supplied with freshly baked “lady-fingers,” and these in delicate handfuls Edna seized and plunged into the hot ooze of the chocolate. Her arms, up to the elbows, went into the black stuff, over and over again all day. At noon, over their lunch, the girls talked of their recreations, their clothes, their “fellows.”
Edna had not very much to contribute to the girls’ stories of gayety and adventure. She led a quieter existence than most of the other girls, although her leanings were toward lively pleasures. She was engaged to a young man who worked in a foundry and who was steady and perhaps rather too serious. He was very jealous of Edna and exacted a stern degree of fidelity of her.
Before her engagement Edna had gone to a decent dancing school and dearly loved the dance. Now she was not permitted to dance with any one but her prospective husband. The bright talk at the noon hour made Edna feel that she was a very poor sport.
The young man’s work in the foundry alternated weekly between day and night duty. It occurred to Edna that her young man could not possibly know what she did with those evenings he remained in the foundry. If she chose to go with a group of girls to a dance hall, what harm? The long years of married life stretched themselves out somewhat drably to Edna. She decided to have a good time beforehand.
This girl from now on literally lived a double life. Evenings of the weeks her young man was free from the foundry, she spent at home with him, placidly playing cards, reading aloud, or talking. On the other evenings she danced, madly, incessantly. Her mother thought she spent the evenings with her girl friends. The dancing, plus the deceit, soon had its effect on Edna. She began to visit livelier and livelier resorts, curious to see all phases of pleasure.
Suspicion entered into the mind of her affianced. He questioned her; she lied, and he was unconvinced. A night or two later the young man stayed away from the foundry and followed Edna to a suburban resort. She went, as usual, with a group of girls, but their men were waiting for them near the door of the open-air dancing pavilion. Standing just outside, the angry lover watched the girl “spiel” round and round with a man of doubtful respectability. Soon she joined a noisy, beer-drinking group at one of the tables, and her behavior grew more and more reckless. Finally, amid laughter, she and another girl performed a suggestive dance together.
Walking swiftly up to her, the outraged foundryman grasped her by the shoulder, called her a name she did not yet deserve, and threw her violently to the floor. A terrific fight followed, and the police soon cleared the place.
Edna did not dare go home. An over-rigid standard of morals, an