Working With the Working Woman
by Cornelia Stratton Parker · English · Gutenberg #24959 · 401,721 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Working With the Working Woman
Author: Cornelia Stratton Parker
Release date: March 30, 2008 [eBook #24959]
Language: English
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WORKING WITH THE WORKING WOMAN
_By_
CORNELIA STRATTON PARKER
_Author of_ "AN AMERICAN IDYLL"
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
_MCMXXII_
WORKING WITH THE WORKING WOMAN
Copyright, 1922, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
I. NO. 1075 PACKS CHOCOLATES 1
II. 286 ON BRASS 42
III. 195 IRONS "FAMILY" 75
IV. IN A DRESS FACTORY 109
V. NO. 536 TICKETS PILLOW CASES 137
VI. NO. 1470, "PANTRY GIRL" 173
CONCLUSION 226
INTRODUCTION
The number of books on the labor problem is indeed legion. The tragedy
of the literature on any dynamic subject is that most of it is written
by people who have time to do little else. Perhaps the best books on
many subjects will never be written because those folk, who would be
most competent to do the writing, through their vital connection with
the problem at hand, never find the spare minutes to put their
findings down on paper.
There could be no more dynamic subject than labor, since labor is
nothing less than human beings, and what is more dynamic than human
beings? It is, therefore, the last subject in the world to be
approached academically. Yet most of the approach to the problems of
labor is academic. Men in sanctuaries forever far removed from the
endless hum and buzz and roar of machinery, with an intellectual
background and individual ambitions forever far removed from the
interests and desires of those who labor in factory and mill,
theorize--and another volume is added to the study of labor.
But, points out some one, there are books on labor written by
bona-fide workers. First, the number is few. Second, and more
important, any bona-fide worker capable of writing any kind of book on
any subject, puts himself so far above the rank and file that one is
justified in asking, for how many does he speak?
Suppose that for the moment your main intellectual interest was to
ascertain what the average worker--not the man or woman so far
advanced in the cultural scale that he or she can set his ideas
intelligently on paper--thought about his job and things in general.
To what books could you turn? Indeed I have come to feel that in the
pages of O. Henry there is more to be gleaned on the psychology of the
working class than any books to be found on economic shelves. The
outstanding conclusion forced upon any reader of such books as
consciously attempt to give a picture of the worker and his job is
that whoever wrote the books was bound and determined to find out
everything that was wrong in every investigation made, and tell all
about the wrongs and the wrongs only. Goodness knows, if one is
hunting for the things which should be improved in this world, one
life seems all too short to so much as make a start. In all honesty,
then, such books on labor should be classified under "Troubles of
Workers." No one denies they are legion. Everybody's troubles are, if
troubles are what you want to find.
The Schemer of Things has so arranged, praise be, that no one's life
shall be nothing but woe and misery. Yea, even workers have been known
to smile.
* * * * *
The experiences lived through in the following pages may strike the
reader as superficial, artificial. In a way they were. Yet, they
fulfilled their object in my eyes, at least. I wanted to feel for
myself the general "atmosphere" of a job, several jobs. I wanted to
know the worker without any suspicion on the part of the girls and
women I labored among that they were being "investigated." I wanted to
see the world through their eyes--for the time being to close my own
altogether.
There are no startling new facts or discoveries here recorded. Nothing
in these pages will revolutionize anything. To such as wish the lot of
the worker painted as the most miserable on earth, they will be
disappointing.
Yet in being as honest as I could in recording the impressions of my
experiences, I am aware that I have made possible the drawing of false
conclusions. Already such false conclusions have been drawn. "See,"
says an "old-fashioned" employer, "the workers are happy--these
articles of Mrs. Parker's show it. Why should they have better
conditions? They don't want them!"
A certain type of labor agitator, or a "parlor laborite," prefer to
see only the gloomy side of the worker's life. They are as dishonest
as the employer who would see only the contentment. The picture must
be viewed in its entirety--and that means considering the workers not
as a labor problem, but as a social problem. Workers are not an
isolated group, who keep their industrial adversities or industrial
blessings to themselves. They and their families and dependents are
the majority of our population. As a nation, we rise no higher in the
long run than the welfare of the majority. Nor can the word "welfare,"
if one thinks socially, ever be limited to the word "contentment." It
is quite conceivable--nay, every person has seen it in actuality--that
an individual may be quite contented in his lot and yet have that lot
incompatible with the welfare of the larger group.
It is but as a part of the larger group that worker, employer, and the
public must come to view the labor problem. When a worker is found who
appears perfectly amenable to long hours, bad air, unhygienic
conditions in general--and many are--somebody has to pay the price.
There are thousands of contented souls, as we measure contentment, in
the congested tenement districts of East Side New York. Does that fact
add to our social welfare? Because mothers for years were willing to
feed their children bad milk, was then the movement to provide good
milk for babies a waste of time and money? Plenty of people always
could be found who would willingly drink impure water. Society found
that too costly, and cities pride themselves to-day on their pure
water supply and low typhoid rate.
There are industrial conditions flourishing which insidiously take a
greater toll of society than did ever the death of babies from unclean
milk, the death of old and young from impure water. The trouble is
that their effects permeate in ways difficult for the unwilling eye to
see.
Perhaps in the long run, one of the most harmful phases of modern
civilization is this very contentment of not only the workers, but the
employer and society at large, under conditions which are not building
up a wholesome, healthy, intelligent population. Indeed, it is not so
much the fault of modern industrialism as such. Perhaps it is because
there are so many people in the world and the ability of us human
beings, cave men only ten thousand years ago, to care for so many
people has not increased with the same rapidity as the population. Our
numbers have outrun our capacities. Twentieth century development
calls for large-scale organization for which the human mind has shown
itself inadequate.
It is well to keep in mind that no situation is the product of its own
day. The working woman, for instance, we have had with us since the
beginning of women--and they began a good spell ago. The problem of
the working woman, as we think of it to-day, began with the beginning
of modern industry. Nor is it possible to view her past without
realizing that the tendency has ever been, with but few interruptions,
toward improvement.
In the early factory days in our country it is known that women rose
at four, took their breakfast with them to the mills, and by five were
hard at work in badly constructed buildings, badly heated, badly
lighted. From seven-thirty to eight-thirty there was an hour for
breakfast, at noon half an hour, and from then on steady work until
half past seven at night. It would be perhaps eight o'clock before the
mill girls reached home, sometimes too tired to stay awake till the
end of supper. Later, hours were more generally from five in the
morning until seven at night. In Lowell the girls worked two hours
before breakfast and went back to the mills again in the evening after
supper. By 1850 twelve hours had come to be the average working
day.[1]
[Footnote 1: Abbot, _Women in Industry_.]
Wages were very low--around seventy-five cents or a dollar a week with
board. Mills and factories were accustomed to provide room and board
in the corporation boarding houses, poorly constructed, ill-ventilated
buildings, girls often sleeping six and eight in a room. In 1836 it
was estimated that the average wage for women in industry (excluding
board) was thirty-seven and one-half cents a day, although one
thousand sewing women investigated received on an average twenty-five
cents a day. In 1835 the New York _Journal of Commerce_ estimated that
at the beginning of the century women's labor brought about fifty
cents a week, which was equivalent to twenty-five cents in 1835. In
1845 the New York _Tribune_ reported fifty thousand women averaging
less than two dollars a week wages, and thousands receiving one dollar
and fifty cents. Another investigation in 1845 found "female labor in
New York in a deplorable degree of servitude, privation and misery,
drudging on, miserably cooped up in ill-ventilated cellars and
garrets." Women worked fifteen to eighteen hours a day to earn one to
three dollars a week.
And yet authorities tell us that some of the mill towns of New
England, Lowell in particular, are looked back upon as being almost
idyllic as regards the opportunities for working women. On examination
it is found that what was exceptional from our point of view was not
the conditions, but the factory employees. In those days work in the
mills was "socially permissible." Indeed there was practically no
other field of employment open to educated girls. The old domestic
labors had been removed from the household--where could a girl with
spirit and ability make the necessary money to carry out her
legitimate desires? Her brothers "went west"--she went into the
factories--with the same spirit. Ambitious daughters of New England
farmers formed the bulk of cotton mill employees the first half of the
nineteenth century. Their granddaughters are probably college
graduates of the highest type to-day. After the long factory hours
they found time for reading, debating clubs, lectures, church
activities, French, and German classes. Part of the time some of the
mill operatives taught school. Many of them looked forward to
furthering their own education in such female seminaries as existed in
those days, the expense to be met from their mill earnings. Poorly
paid as mill hands were, it was often six to seven times what teachers
received.
"The mills offered not only regular employment and higher wages, but
educational advantages which many of the operatives prized even more
highly. Moreover, the girl who had worked in Lowell was looked upon
with respect as a person of importance when she returned to her rural
neighborhood. Her fashionable dress and manners and her general air of
independence were greatly envied by those who had not been to the
metropolis and enjoyed its advantages."[2]
[Footnote 2: Abbot, _Women in Industry_.]
By 1850 the situation had altered. With the opening of the west,
opportunities for women of gumption and spirit increased. The
industrial depression of 1848-49 lowered wages, and little by little
the former type of operative left the mill, her place being filled
largely by Irish immigrants.
The Civil War saw a great change in the world of working women.
Thousands of men were taken from industry into war, and overnight
great new fields of opportunity were opened to women. The more
educated were needed as nurses, for teaching positions, and for
various grades of clerical work deserted by men. After the close of
the war farmers became more prosperous and their daughters were not
forced to work for the wherewithal to acquire advantages. Add to all
this the depression caused in the cotton industry due to the war--and
the result of these new conditions was that when the mills reopened it
was with cheap immigrant labor. What then could have been considered
high wages were offered in an attempt to induce the more efficient
American women operatives back to the mills, but the cost of living
had jumped far higher even than high wages. The mills held no further
attractions. Even the Irish deserted, their places being filled with
immigrants of a lower type.
Since the Civil War look at us--8,075,772 women in industry, as
against 2,647,157 in 1880. Almost a fourth of the entire female
population over ten years of age are at work, as against about
one-seventh in 1880. The next census figures will show a still larger
proportion. Those thousands of women the World War threw into
industry, who never had worked before, did not all get out of industry
after the war. Take just the railroads, for example. In April, 1918,
there were 65,816 women employed in railroad work; in October, 1918,
101,785; and in April, 1919, 86,519. In the 1910 census, of all the
kinds of jobs in our country filled by men, only twelve were not also
filled by women--and the next census will show a reduction there:
firemen (either in manufacturing or railroads), brakemen, conductors,
plumbers, common laborers (under transportation), locomotive
engineers, motormen, policemen, soldiers, sailors, and marines. The
interesting point is that in only one division of work are women
decreasing in proportion to men--and that was women's work at the
beginning--manufacturing. In agriculture, in the professions, in
domestic and personal service, in trade and transportation, the number
of women is creeping up, up, in proportion to the number of men. From
the point of view of national health and vitality for this and the
next generation, it is indeed a hopeful sign if women are giving way
to men in factories, mills, and plants, and pushing up into work
requiring more education and in turn not demanding such physical and
nervous strain as does much of the machine process. Also, since on
the whole as it has been organized up to date, domestic service has
been one of the least attractive types of work women could fill, it is
encouraging (though not to the housewife) to find that the proportion
of women going into domestic and personal service has fallen from
forty-four and six-tenths per cent, in 1880, to thirty-two and
five-tenths per cent, in 1910.
Women working at everything under the sun--except perhaps being
locomotive engineers and soldiers and sailors. Why?
First, it is part of every normal human being to want to work.
Therefore, women want to work. Time was when within the home were
enough real life-sized jobs to keep a body on the jump morning and
night. Not only mother but any other females handy. There are those
who grumble that women could find enough to do at home now if they
only tried. They cannot, unless they have young children or unless
they putter endlessly at nonessentials, the doing of which leaves them
and everybody else no better off than before they began. And it is
part of the way we are made that besides wanting to work, we need to
work at something we feel "gets us some place." We prefer to work at
something desirable and useful. Perhaps what we choose is not really
so desirable and useful, looked at in the large, but it stacks up as
more desirable and more useful than something else we might be doing.
And with it all, if there is to be any real satisfaction, must go some
feeling of independence--of being on "one's own."
So, then, women go out to work in 1921 because there is not enough to
do to keep them busy at home. They follow in part their age-old
callings, only nowadays performed in roaring factories instead of by
the home fireside. In part they take to new callings. Whatever the job
may be, women _want_ to work in preference to the nonproductiveness of
most home life to-day.
Graham Wallas, in his _Great Society_, quotes the answers given by a
number of girls to a woman who held their confidence as to why they
worked. He wished to learn if they were happy. The question meant to
the girls evidently, "Are you happier than you would have been at
home?" and practically every answer was "Yes."
In a "dismal and murky," but fairly well-managed laundry, six Irish
girls all answered they were happy. One said the work "took up her
mind, she had been awfully discontented." Another that "you were of
some use." Another, "the hours went so much faster. At home one could
read, but only for a short time. Then there was the awful lonesome
afternoon ahead of you." "Asked a little girl with dyed hair but a
good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It made her feel she was
worth something."
At another laundry, the first six girls all answered they were happy
because the "work takes up your mind," and generally added, "It's
awful lonesome at home," or "there is an awful emptiness at home."
However, one girl with nine brothers and sisters was happy in the
collar packing room just because "it was so awful lonesome"--she
could enjoy her own thoughts. An Irishwoman at another laundry who had
married an Italian said, "Sure I am always happy. It leaves me no time
to think." At a knitting plant one girl said "when she didn't work,
she was always thinking of dead people, but work always made her cheer
up directly."
The great industrial population comes from crowded tenements. It is
inconceivable that enough work could be found within those walls to
make life attractive to the girls and young women growing to maturity
in such households.
So much for the psychological side. The fact remains that the great
bulk of women in industry work because they _have_ to work--they enter
industrial life to make absolutely necessary money. The old tasks at
which a woman could be self-supporting in the home are no longer
possible in the home. She earns her bread now as she has earned it for
thousands of years--spinning, weaving, sewing, baking, cooking--only
to-day she is one of hundreds, thousands in a great factory. Nor is
she longer confined to her traditional tasks. Men are playing a larger
part in what was since time began and up to a few years ago woman's
work. Women, in their need, are finding employment at any work that
can use unskilled less physically capable labor.
Ever has it been the very small proportion of men who could by their
unaided effort support the entire family. At no time have all the men
in a country been able to support all the women, regardless of
whether that situation would be desirable. Always must the aid of
womenfolk be called in as a matter of course. We have a national ideal
of a living wage to the male head of the family which will allow him
to support his family without forcing his wife and children into
industry. Any man who earns less than that amount during the year must
depend on the earnings of wife and children or else fall below the
minimum necessary to subsistence, with all which that implies. In
1910, four-fifths of the heads of families in the United States earned
under eight hundred dollars a year. At that same time, almost
nine-tenths of the women workers living at home in New York City
working in factories, mills, and such establishments, paid their
entire earnings to the family. Of 13,686 women investigated in
Wisconsin in 1914, only 2 per cent gave nothing to the family support.
Of girls in retail stores living at home in New York City, 84 per cent
paid their entire earnings to the family. Work, then, for the majority
of women, is more apt to be cold economic necessity--not only for
herself, but for her family.
Besides the fact that great numbers of women must work and many want
to work, there are the reasons for women's work arising in modern
industry itself. First, a hundred years ago, there was the need for
hands in the new manufactures, and because of the even more pressing
agricultural demands, men could not be spared. The greater the
subdivisions of labor up to a certain point, the simpler the process,
and the more women can be used, unskilled as they are ever apt to be.
Also they will work at more monotonous, more disagreeable work than
men, and for less wages. Again, women's entrance into new industries
has often been as strike breakers, and once in, there was no way to
get them out. Industrial depressions throw men out of work, and also
women, and in the financial pressure following, women turn to any sort
of work at any sort of pay, and perhaps open a new wedge for women's
work in a heretofore untried field, desirable or undesirable.
The freedom from having to perform every and all domestic functions
within the four walls of home is purchased at the expense of millions
of toilers outside the home, the majority of whom do not to-day
receive enough wages, where they are the menfolk, to support their own
families; nor where they are single women, to support themselves. The
fact that men cannot support their families forces women in large
numbers into industry. There would be nothing harmful in that, if only
industry were organized so that participation in it enriched human
lives. Remembering always that where industry takes women from the
care of young children, society and the nation pay dearly; for,
inadequate and ignorant as mothers often are regarding child care,
their substitutes to-day are apt to be even less efficient.
Pessimists marshal statistics to show that modern industrialism is
going to rack and ruin. Maybe it is. But pessimism is more a matter of
temperament than statistics. An optimist can assemble a most cheerful
array of figures to show that everything is on the up. Temperament
again. Industry is what industry does. If you are feeling gloomy
to-day, you can visit factories where it is plain to see that no human
being could have his lot improved by working there. Such factories
certainly exist. If you would hug your pessimism to your soul, then
there are many factories you must stay away from. Despite all the
pessimists, there is a growing tendency to increase the welfare of
human beings in industry.
It is but an infinitesimal drop any one individual can contribute to
hasten a saner industrialism. Yet some of us would so fain contribute
our mite! Where the greatest need of all lies is that the human beings
in industry, the employer and the employees, shall better understand
one another, and society at large better understand both. My own
amateur and humble experiences here recorded have added much to my own
understanding of the problems of both manager and worker.
Can they add even a fraction to the understanding of anyone else?
CORNELIA STRATTON PARKER.
Woods Hole,
_August_, 1921.
WORKING WITH THE WORKING WOMAN
I
_No. 1075 Packs Chocolates_
Wise heads tell us we act first--or decide to act first--and reason
afterward. Therefore, what could be put down in black and white as to
why we took up factory work is of minor value or concern. Yet everyone
persists in asking why? So then, being merely as honest as the Lord
allows, we answer first and foremost because we wanted to. Isn't that
enough? It is the why and wherefore of almost everything anyone does
any place at any time. Only the more adept can concoct much weightier
reasons as an afterthought. There is only one life most of us doubting
humans are absolutely sure of. That one life gets filled with so much
of the same sort of performance day in and day out; usually only an
unforeseen calamity--or stroke of luck--throws us into a way of living
and doing things which is not forever just as we lived and did things
yesterday and the day before.
Yet the world is so full of the unexplored! To those who care more for
people than places, around every corner is something new--a world only
dreamt of, if that. Why should all one's life be taken up with the
kind of people we were born among, doing the sort of things our aunts
and our uncles and our cousins and our friends do? Soon there creeps
in--soon? yes, by six years or younger--that comforting belief that as
we and our aunts and our uncles and our cousins and our friends do, so
does--or should do--the world. And all the time we and our aunts and
our uncles and our cousins and our friends are one little
infinitesimal drop in one hundred million people, and what those above
and below and beyond and around about think and do, we know nothing,
nor care nothing, about. But those others are the world, with us, a
speck of--well, in this case it happened to be curiosity--in the midst
of it all.
Therefore, being curious, we decided to work in factories. In addition
to wanting to feel a bona-fide part of a cross section of the world
before only viewed second or third hand through books, there was the
desire better to understand the industrial end of things by trying a
turn at what some eight million or so other women are doing. "Women's
place is the home." All right--that side of life we know first hand.
But more and more women are not staying home, either from choice or
from necessity. Reading about it is better than nothing. Being an
active part of it all is better still. It is one thing to lounge on an
overstuffed davenport and read about the injurious effect on women of
long hours of standing. It is another to be doing the standing.
Yet another reason for giving up some months to factory work, besides
the adventure of it, besides the desire to see other angles of life
for oneself, to experience first hand the industrial end of it. So
much of the technic of the world to-day we take as a matter of course.
Clothes appear ready to put on our backs. As far as we know or care,
angels left them on the hangers behind the mirrored sliding doors.
Food is set on our tables ready to eat. It might as well have been
created that way, for all our concern. The thousands of operations
that go into an article before the consumer buys it--no, there is no
reason why use and want should make us callous and indifferent to the
hows and wherefores. Never was there such an age. Let's poke behind
the scenes a bit.
So, factories it was to be. Not as a stranger snooping in to
"investigate." As a factory girl working at her job--with all that, we
determined to peek out of the corner of our eyes, and keep both ears
to the wind, lest we miss anything from start to finish. Artificial,
of course. Under the circumstances, since we were born how and as we
were, and this had happened and that, we were not an honest Eyetalian
living in a back bedroom on West Forty-fourth Street near the river.
We did what we could to feel the part. Every lady in the land knows
the psychology of dress--though not always expressed by her in those
terms. She feels the way she looks, not the other way round. So then,
we purchased large green earrings, a large bar pin of platinum and
brilliants ($1.79), a goldy box of powder (two shades), a lip stick.
During the summer we faded a green tam-o'shanter so that it would not
look too new. For a year we had been saving a blue-serge dress
(original cost $19) from the rag bag for the purpose. We wore a pair
of old spats which just missed being mates as to shade, and a button
off one. Silk stockings--oh yes, silk--but very darned. A blue
sweater, an orange scarf, and last, but not least--
If you had been brought up in a fairly small city by female relatives
who were one and all school-teachers, who had watched over your
vocabulary (unsuccessfully) as they hung over your morals; if you had
been taught, not in so many words, but insidiously, that breaking the
Ten Commandments (any one or the entire ten), split infinitives, and
chewing gum, were one in the sight of God, or the devil--then you
could realize the complete metamorphosis when, in addition to the
earrings and the bar pin, the green tam and the lip stick, you stepped
up to the Subway newsstand and boldly demanded a package of--chewing
gum. And then and there got out a stick and chewed it, and chewed it
on the Subway and chewed it on the streets of New York. Some people
have to go to a masquerade ball to feel themselves some one else for a
change. Others, if they have been brought up by school-teachers, can
get the same effect with five cents' worth of chewing gum.
After all, one of the most attractive features about being "well
brought up" is the fun of sloughing off. The fun of sloughing off a
lot at once! Had it ever been known ahead of time the fascination of
doing forbidden things, just that first factory morning would have
been worth the whole venture. To read the morning paper over other
people's shoulders--not furtively, but with a bold and open eye. To
stare at anything which caught one's attention. (Bah! all that is
missed in New York because it has been so ground into the bone that it
is impolite to stare!) And to talk to any one, male or female, who
looked or acted as if he or she wanted to talk to you. Only even a
short experience has taught that that abandon leads to more trouble
than it is worth. What a pity mere sociability need suffer so much
repression! We hate to make that concession to our upbringers.
When the time for beginning factory work came there appeared but one
advertisement among "Help Wanted--Female" which did not call for
"experience." There might have to be so much lying, direct and
indirect, to do. Better not start off by claiming experience when
there was absolutely none--except, indeed, had we answered
advertisements for cooks only, or baby tenders, or maids of all work.
One large candy factory bid for "girls and women, good wages to start,
experience not necessary," and in a part of town which could be
reached without starting out the night before. At 7.15 of a Monday
morning we were off, with a feeling something akin to stage fright.
Once we heard a hobo tell of the first time he ever tried to get on a
freight train in the dark of night when it was moving. But we chewed
our gum very boldly.
One of the phases of finding a job often criticized by those who would
add somewhat of dignity to labor is the system of hiring. Like a lot
of other things, perhaps, you don't mind the present system if you get
by. Here was this enormous good-looking factory. On one side of the
front steps, reaching all the way up into the main entrance hall,
stood a line of men waiting for jobs; on the other side, though not
near so long a line, the girls. The regular employees file by. At
last, about eight o'clock, the first man is beckoned. Just behind the
corner of a glassed-in telephone booth, but in full view of all, he is
questioned by an employee in a white duck suit. Man after man is sent
on out, to the growing discouragement, no doubt, of those remaining in
line. At last, around a little corner in the stairs, the first girl is
summoned. The line moves up. A queer-looking man with pop eyes asks a
few questions. The girl goes on upstairs. I am fourth in line--a steam
heater next and the actions of my insides make the temperature seem
120 at least. My turn.
"How much experience you've had?"
"None."
"What you work in last?"
"Didn't work in a factory--been doin' housework--takin' care of kids."
"Well, I start you packing. You get thirteen dollars this week,
fourteen dollars next--you understand?"
He writes something on a little card and I go upstairs with it. There
I am asked my name, age (just did away with ten years while I was at
it). Married or single? Goodness! hadn't thought of that. In the end a
lie there would make less conversation. Single. Nationality--Eyetalian?
No, American. It all has to be written on a card. At that point my eye
lights on a sign which reads: "Hours for girls 8 A.M.-6 P.M. Saturdays
8-12." Whew! My number is 1075. The time clock works so. My key hangs
on this hook; then after I ring up, it hangs here. (That was an
entrancing detail I had not anticipated--made me wish we had to ring up
at noon as well as morning and night.) Locker key 222. A man takes me
in the elevator to the third floor and there hands me over to Ida. The
locker works thus and so. Didn't I have no apron? No--but to-morrow I'd
bring it, and a cap. Sure.
Three piles of boxes and trucks and barrels and Ida opens a great door
like a safe, and there we are in the packing room--from the steam
heater downstairs to the North Pole. Cold? Nothing ever was so cold.
Ten long zinc-topped tables, a girl or two on each side. At the right,
windows which let in no air and little light, nor could you see out at
all. On the left, shelves piled high with wooden boxes. Mostly all a
body can think of is how cold, cold, cold it is. Something happens to
chocolates otherwise.
That first day it is half-pound boxes. My side of the table holds some
sixty at a time. First the date gets stamped on the bottom, then
partitions are fitted in. "Here's your sample. Under the table you'll
find the candies, or else ask Fannie, there. You take the paper cups
so, in your left hand, give them a snap so, lick your fingers now and
then, slip a cup off, stick the candy in with your right hand." And
Ida is off.
The saints curse the next person who delicately picks a chocolate from
its curled casing and thinks it grew that way--came born in that paper
cup. May he or she choke on it! Can I ever again buy chocolates
otherwise than loose in a paper bag? You push and shove--not a cup
budges from its friends and relatives. Perhaps your fingers need more
licking. Perhaps the cups need more "snapping." In the end you hold a
handful of messed-up crumpled erstwhile cup-shaped paper containers,
the first one pried off looking more like a puppy-chewed mat by the
time it is loose and a chocolate planted on its middle. By then,
needless to remark, the bloom is off the chocolate. It has the look of
being clutched in a warm hand during an entire circus parade. Whereat
you glance about furtively and quickly eat it. It is nice the room is
cold; already you fairly perspire. One mussed piece of naked brown
paper in a corner of a box.
The table ahead, fingers flying like mad over the boxes, works Annie.
It is plain she will have sixty boxes done before I have one. Just
then a new girl from the line of that morning is put on the other side
of my table. She is very cold. She fares worse with brown paper cups
than I. Finally she puts down the patient piece of chocolate candy
and takes both hands to the job of separating one cup from the others.
She places what is left of the chocolate in the middle of what is left
of the paper, looks at me, and better than any ouija board I know what
is going on in her head. I smile at her, she smiles back, and she eats
that first chocolate. Tessie and I are friends for life.
Then we tackle the second union of chocolate and paper. Such is life.
Allah be praised, the second goes a shade less desperately than the
first, the third than the second, and in an hour chocolate and paper
get together without untoward damage to either. But the room stays
feeling warm. Anon a sensation begins to get mixed up with the hectic
efforts of fingers. Yes, yes--now it's clear what it is--feet! Is one
never to sit down again as long as one lives? Clumsy fingers--feet.
Feet--clumsy fingers. Finally you don't give a cent if you never learn
to pry those paper cups loose without wrenching your very soul in the
effort. If once before you die--just once--you can sit down! Till 12
and then after, 1 till 6. Help!
A bell rings. "All right, girls!" sings Ida down the line. Everyone
drops everything, and out into the warm main third floor we go. All
the world is feet. Somehow those same feet have to take their
possessor out to forage for food. Into a little dirty, crowded grocery
and delicatessen store we wedge ourselves, to stand, stand, stand,
until at last we face the wielder of a long knife. When in Rome do as
the Romans do. "A bologna and a ham sandwich and five cents' worth of
pickles." Slabs of rye bread, no butter, large, generous slices of
sausage and ham which hang down curtainlike around the bread--twenty-one
cents. Feet take me back to the factory lunch room. At last I flop on
a chair. Sing songs to chairs; write poems to chairs; paint chairs!
Dear German Tessie, pal of the morning, she who ate more chocolates
than I and thus helped to sustain my moral courage--Tessie and I eat
bologna sausage sandwiches together and _sit_. The feet of Tessie are
very, very badly off--ach!--but they feel--they feel--jus' fierce--and
till six o'clock--"Oh, my Gawd!" says Tessie, in good English.
A gong sounds. Up we go to the ice box packing room. It sends the
shivers down our spines. But already there is a feeling of sauntering
in like an old hand at the game. What's your business in life? Packing
chocolates. The half-pound boxes get finished, wax paper on top,
covered, stacked, counted, put on the truck.
"Lena! Start the girl here in on 'assorteds.'"
Pert little Lena sidles up alongside and nudges me in the ribs.
"Say, got a fella?"
I give Lena one look, for which Belasco should pay me a thousand
dollars a night. Lena reads it out loud quick as a wink. She snickers,
pokes me in the ribs again, and, "What to hell do I think you are,
hey?" That's just what I'd meant. "Gee!" says Lena. "Some fool what
can't get some kind of a dope!"
"You said it!"
"Say, got more 'n one dope?" asks Lena, hopefully. Meanwhile she sets
out, with my aid, row after row of dinky little deep boxes.
"Say now," say I to Lena, "and what would a girl be doin' with jus'
_one_ dope?"
"You said it!" says Lena.
At which follows a discussion on dopes, ending by Lena's promising
never to vamp my dope if I won't vamp hers.
"Where'd ya work last?" asks Lena.
One thing the first day taught me. If you want to act the part and
feel the part, earrings and gum help, but if there is one thing you
are more conscious of than all else, it is such proper English as you
possess--which compared to Boston is not much, but compared to Lena
and Ida and Mary and Louise and Susie and Annie is painfully flawless.
Chew hard as ever you can, if you tell Fannie, "There aren't any more
plantations," it echoes and re-echoes and shrieks at you from the four
sides of Christendom. But holler, "Fannie, there ain't no more
plantations!" and it is like the gentle purring of a home cat by
comparison. Funny how it is easier to say "My Gawd!" and "Where t'
hell's Ida!" than "I 'ain't got none." Any way round, you never do get
over being conscious of your grammar. If it is correct, it is lonesome
as the first robin. If it is properly awful, there are those
school-teacher upbringers. I am just wondering if one might not be
dining with the head of the university philosophy department and his
academic guests some night and hear one's voice uttering down a
suddenly silent table, "She ain't livin' at that address no more."
Utterly abashed, one's then natural exclamation on the stillness would
be, "My Gawd!" Whereat the hostess would busily engage her end of the
table in anguished conversation, giving her husband one look, which,
translated into Lena's language, would say, "What t' hell did we ask
her for, anyhow?"
Is one to write of factory life as one finds it, or expurgated? I can
hear the upbringers cry "expurgated"! Yet the way the girls talked was
one of the phases of the life which set the stamp of difference on it
all. What an infinitesimal portion of the population write our books!
What a small proportion ever read them! How much of the nation's
talking is done by the people who never get into print! The proportion
who read and write books, especially the female folk, live and die in
the belief that it is the worst sort of bad taste, putting it mildly,
to use the name of the Creator in vain, or mention hell for any
purpose whatsoever. Yet suddenly, overnight, you find yourself in a
group who would snap their fingers at such notions. Sweet-faced,
curly-headed Annie wants another box of caramels. Elizabeth
Witherspoon would call, "Fannie, would you be so kind as to bring me
another box of caramels?" Annie, without stopping her work or so much
as looking up, raises her voice and calls down the room--and in her
heart she is the same exactly as Elizabeth W.--"Fannie, you bum, bring
me a box of car'mels or I'll knock the hell clean out o' ya."
According to Elizabeth's notions Fannie should answer her, "One
moment, Miss Elizabeth; I'm busy just now." What Fannie (with her soul
as pure as drifted snow) does call back to Annie is, "My Gawd! Keep
your mouth shut. 'Ain't you got sense enough to see I'm busy!"
Annie could holler a hundred times, and she does, that she'd knock the
hell out of Fannie, and God would love her every bit as much as he
would love Miss Elizabeth Witherspoon, who has been taught otherwise
and never said hell in her life, not even in a dark closet. Fannie and
all the other Fannies and Idas and Louisas, say, "My Gawd!" as Miss
Elizabeth says "You don't say!" and it is all one to the Heavenly
Father. Therefore, gentle reader, it must be all one to you. There is
not the slightest shade of disrespect in Annie's or Fannie's hearts as
they shower their profanity on creation in general. There is not the
slightest shade in mind as I write of them.
So then, back that first day Lena asked, "Where'd ya work last?"
"Didn't work in a factory before."
"'Ain't ya?"
"No, I 'ain't." (Gulp.) "I took care of kids."
"Gee! but they was fresh."
"You said it!"
"Lena!" hollers Ida. "Get ta work and don't talk so much!" Whereat
Lena gives me another poke in my cold ribs and departs. And Tessie and
I pack "assorteds": four different chocolates in the bottom of each
box, four still different ones in the top--about three hundred and
fifty boxes on our table. We puff and labor on the top layer and Ida
breezes along. "My Gawd! Look at that! Where's your cardboards?"
Tessie and I look woebegone at one another. Cardboards? Cardboards?
Ida glues her Eyetalian eye on Lena down the line. "Lena, you fool,
didn't you tell these here girls about cardboards?... My Gawd! My
Gawd!" says Ida. Whereat she dives into our belabored boxes and grabs
those ached-over chocolates and hurls them in a pile. "Get all them
top ones out. Put in cardboards. Put 'em all in again." Tessie and I
almost could have wept. By that time it is about 4. We are all feet,
feet, FEET. First I try standing on one foot to let the other think I
might really, after all, be sitting down. Then I stand on it and give
the other a delusion. Then try standing on the sides, the toes, the
heels. FEET! "Ach! Mein Gott!" moans Tessie. "To-morrow I go look for
a job in a biscuit factory."
"Leave me know if you get a sit-down one."
And in that state--FEET--Ida makes us pack over the whole top layer in
three hundred and fifty boxes. Curses on Lena and her "dopes." Or
curses on me that I could so suddenly invent such picturesque love
affairs that Lena forgot all about cardboards.
About then my locker key falls through a hole in my waist pocket and
on to the floor and out of sight. In the end it takes a broom handle
poked about diligently under the bottom shelf of our table to make a
recovery. Before the key appear chocolates of many shapes and sizes,
long reposing in oblivion under the weighty table. The thrifty Spanish
woman behind me gathers up all the unsquashed ones and packs them.
"Mus' be lots of chocolates under these 'ere tables, eh?" she notes
wisely and with knit brows. As if to say that, were she boss, she'd
poke with a broom under each and every bottom shelf and fill many a
box.
At least my feet get a moment's rest while I am down on my hands and
knees among the debris from under the tables.
By five o'clock Tessie thinks she'll throw up her job then and there.
"Ach! Ach! My feet!" she moans. I secretly plan to kill the next
person who gives me a box of chocolate candy.
Surely it is almost 6.
Five minutes after 5.
The bell has forgotten to ring. It must be 7.
Quarter after 5.
Now for sure and certain it is midnight.
Half-past 5.
My earrings begin to hurt. You can take off earrings. But FEET--
Tessie says she's eaten too many candies; her stomach does her pain.
Her feet aren't so hurting now her _magen_ is so bad. I couldn't eat
another chocolate for five dollars, but my stomach refused to feel in
any way that takes my mind in the least off my feet.
Eternity has passed on. It must be beyond the Judgment Day itself.
Ten minutes to 6.
When the bell does ring I am beyond feeling any emotion. There is no
part of me with which to feel emotion. I am all feet, and feet either
do not feel at all or feel all weary unto death. During the summer I
had played one match in a tennis tournament 7-5, 5-7, 13-11. I had
thought I was ready to drop dead after that. It was mere knitting in
the parlor compared to how I felt after standing at that table in that
candy factory from 8 A.M. to 6 P.M., with a bit of a half-hour's
sitting at noon.
Somehow you could manage to endure it all if it were not for the
crowning agony of all--standing up on the Subway going home. I am no
aggressive feminist, and I am no old-fashioned clinging vine, but I
surely do hate, hate, hate every man in that Subway who sits back in
comfort (and most of them look as if they had been sitting all day)
while I and my feet stand up. When in my utter anguish I find myself
swaying with the jerks and twists of the express in front of a person
with a Vandyke beard reading _The Gospel According to St. John_, I
long with all the energy left in me (I still have some in my arms) to
grab that book out of his hands, fling it in his face, and hiss,
"Hypocrite!" at him. I do not believe I ever knew what it was really
and honestly to hate a person before. If it had been the _Police
Gazette_ I could have borne up under it. But _The Gospel According to
St. John_--my Gawd!
Thus ends my first factory day. It is small comfort to calculate I
stepped on more chocolates in those nine hours than I usually eat in a
year. To be sure, it was something new on the line of life's
experiences. If that man in front of me were only a chocolate with
soft insides and I could squash him flat! Yes, there was enough energy
in my feet for that. To get my heel square above him and then
_stamp_--ugh! the sinner! He continues reading _The Gospel According
to St. John_, nor so much as looks up to receive my last departing
glare as I drag myself off at 116th Street.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, the next morning my feet feel as if they
had never been stood on before. What if we do have to stand up in the
Subway all the way down? Who minds standing in the Subway? And then
stand in the jammed and elbowing cross-town car. Who cares? And how we
do walk up those factory steps as if we owned the world! The
chestiness of us as we take our key off left-hand hook 1075, ring up
under the clock (twenty minutes early we are) and hang up on No. 1075
right; but it seems you are late if you are not ten minutes early. It
is the little tricks like that you get wise about.
I saunter over to the elevator with a jam of colored girls--the
majority of the girls in that factory were colored. I call out,
"Third, please." Oh, glory be! Why were we ever born? That elevator
man turns around and pierces me with his eye as though I were the man
with the Vandyke beard in the Subway, and he, the elevator man, were
I. "_Third_ floor did ya say? And since when does the elevator lift
ya to the _third_ floor? If ya want the sixth floor ya can ride.
_Third_ floor! My Gawd! _Third_ floor!" And on and on he mutters and
up and up I go, all the proud feelings of owning the world stripped
from me--exposed before the multitudes as an ignoramus who didn't know
any better than to ride in the elevator when she was bound only for
the third floor. "_Third_ floor," continues muttering the elevator
man. At last there is no one left in the elevator but the muttering
man and me. "Well," I falter, chewing weakly on my Black Jack, "What
shall I do, then?"
"I'll leave ya off at the third this time, but don't ya try this trick
again."
"Again? Goodness! You don't think I'd make this mistake twice, do
you?"
"_Twice?_" he bellows. "_Twice?_ Didn't I have this all out with ya
yesterday mornin'?"
"Goodness, no!" I try to assure him, but he is putting me off at third
and calling after me: "Don't I know I did tell ya all this yesterday
mornin'? And don't ya forget it next time, neither." It must be awful
to be that man's wife. But I love him compared to the Vandyke beard in
the Subway reading _The Gospel According to St. John_.
Everybody is squatting about on scant corners and ledges waiting for
the eight o'clock bell. I squat next the thrifty Spanish lady, whereat
she immediately begins telling me the story of her life.
"You married?" she asks. No. "Well don' you do it," says the fat and
mussy Espaniole, as the girls called her. "I marry man--five years,
all right. One morning I say, 'I go to church--you go too?' He say
'No, I stay home.' I go church. I come home. I fin' him got young girl
there. I say, 'You clear out my house, you your young girl!' Out he
go, she go. 'Bout one year 'go he say he come back. I say no you don'.
He beg me, beg me come home. I say no, no, no. He write me letter,
letter, letter. I say no, no, no. Bymby I say alright, you come live
my house don't you _touch_ me, hear? Don' you _touch_ me. He live one
room, I live one room. He no touch me. Two weeks 'go he die. Take all
my money, put him in cemetery. I have buy me black waist, black skirt.
I got no money more. I want move from that house--no want live that
house no more--give me bad dreams. I got no money move. Got son
thirteen. He t'ink me fool have man around like that. I no care. See
he sen's letter, letter, letter. Now I got no money. I have work." The
bell rings. We shiver ourselves into the ice box.
No Tessie across the table. Instead a strange, unkempt female who
sticks it out half an hour, announces she has the chills in her feet,
and departs. Her place is taken by a slightly less disheveled young
woman who claims she'd packed candy before where they had seats and
she thought she'd go back. They paid two dollars less a week, but it
was worth two dollars to sit down. How she packs! The sloppiest work I
ever saw. It outrages my soul. The thrill of new pride I have when Ida
gets through swearing at her and turns to me.
"Keep your eye on this girl, will ya? Gee! she packs like a fright!"
And to the newcomer: "You watch that girl across the table" (me, she
means--me!) "and do the way she does."
No first section I ever got in economics gave me such joy.
But, ah! the first feeling of industrial bitterness creeps in. Here is
a girl getting fourteen dollars a week. Tessie was promised fourteen
dollars a week. I packed faster, better, than either of them for
thirteen dollars. I would have fourteen dollars, too, or know the
reason why. Ida fussed and scolded over the new girls all day. The
sweetness of her entire neglect of me!
By that noon my feet hardly hurt at all. I sit in a quiet corner to
eat rye-bread sandwiches brought from home, gambling on whom I will
draw for luncheon company. Six colored girls sit down at my table. A
good part of the time they spend growling on the subject of overtime.
I am too new to know what it is all about.
The lunch room is a bare, whitewashed, huge affair, with uplifting
advice on the walls here and there. "Any fool can take a chance; it
takes brains to be careful," and such like. One got me all upset:
"America is courteous to its women. Gentlemen will, therefore, please
remove their hats in this room." That Vandyke beard in the Subway!
By 4.30 again I think my feet will be the death of me. That last hour
and a half! Louie, the general errand boy of our packing room, brushes
by our table with some trays and knocks about six of my carefully
packed boxes on the floor. "You Louie!" I holler, and I long to have
acquired the facility to call lightly after him, as anyone else would
have done, "Say, you go to hell!" Instead, mustering all the reserve
force I can, the best showing I am able to make is, "You Louie! Go off
and die!" I almost hold my own--468 boxes of "assorteds" do I pack.
And again the anguishing stand in the Subway. I hate men--hate them. I
just hope every one of them gets greeted by a nagging wife when he
arrives home. Hope she nags all evening.... If enough of those wives
really did do enough nagging, would the men thereupon stay downtown
for dinner and make room in the Subway for folk who had been standing,
except for one hour, from 7.15 A.M.? At last I see a silver lining to
the dark cloud of marital unfelicity....
* * * * *
Lillian of the bright-pink boudoir cap engaged me in conversation this
morning. Lillian is around the Indian summer of life--as to years, but
not atmosphere. Lillian has seen better days. Makes sure you know it.
Never did a lick of work in her life. At that she makes a noise with
her upper lip the way a body does in southern Oregon when he uses a
toothpick after a large meal. "No, sir, never did a lick." Lillian
says "did" and not "done." Practically no encouragement is needed for
Lillian to continue. "After my husband died I blew in all the money he
left me in two years. Since then I have been packing chocolates." How
long ago was that?
"Five years."
"My Gawd," I say, and it comes natural-like. "What did you do with
your feet for five years?"
"Oh, you get used to it," says Lillian. "For months I cried every
night. Don't any more. But I lie down while I'm warmin' up my supper,
and then I go to bed soon as its et."
Five years!
"Goin' to vote?" asks Lillian.
"Sure."
"I'm not," allows Lillian. "To my notions all that votin' business is
nothing for a lady to get mixed up in. No, sir." Lillian makes that
noise with her upper lip again. Lillian's lips are very red, her
eyebrows very black. I'll not do anything, though, with my eyebrows.
Says Lillian: "No, siree, not for a lady. I got a good bet up on the
election. Yes, sir!--fifty dollars on Harding."
And five years of going to bed every night after supper.
Tessie is back. I do love Tessie, and I know Tessie loves me. She had
not gone hunting for another job, as I thought. Her husband had had
his elbow broken with an electric machine of some sort where he works
on milk cans. The morning before she had taken him to the hospital.
That made her ten minutes late to the factory. The little pop-eyed man
told her, "You go on home!" and off she went. "But he tell me that
once more I no come back again," said Tessie, her cheeks very red.
I begin to get the "class feeling"--to understand a lot of things I
wanted to know first hand. In the first place, there is no thought
ever, and I don't see in that factory how there can be, for the boss
and his interests. Who is he? Where is he? The nearest one comes to
him is the pop-eyed man at the door. Once in a while Ida hollers "For
Gawd's sake, girls, work faster!" Now that doesn't inspire to
increased production for long. There stands Tessie across the table
from me--peasant Tessie from near Muenchen, with her sweet face and
white turned-up cap. She packs as fast as she can, but her hands are
clumsy and she can't seem to get the difference between chocolates
very well. It is enough to drive a seer crazy. They change the
positions on the shelves every so often; the dipping-machine tenders
cut capers and mark the same kind of chocolates differently to-day
from yesterday. By three in the afternoon you're too sick of
chocolates to do any more investigating by sampling. Even Ida herself
has sometimes to poke a candy in the bottom--if it feels one way it's
"marsh"; another, it's peach; another, it's coconut. But my feeling is
not educated and I poke, and then end by having to bite, and then,
just as I discover it is peach, after all, some one has run off with
the last box and Ida has to be found and a substitute declared.
Tessie gives up in despair and hurls herself on me. So then Tessie is
nearest to me in the whole factory, and Tessie is slow. The faster I
pack the more it shows up Tessie's slowness. If Ida scolded Tessie it
would break my heart. The thought of the man who owns that factory,
and his orders and his profits and his obligations, never enter my or
any other packer's head. I will not pack so many boxes that Tessie
gets left too far behind.
Then a strange thing happens. All of a sudden I get more interested in
packing chocolates than anything else on earth. A little knack or
twist comes to me--my fingers fly (for me). I forget Tessie. I forget
the time. I forget my feet. How many boxes can I pack to-day? That is
all I can think of. I don't want to hear the noon bell. I can't wait
to get back after lunch. I fly out after the big boxes to pack the
little boxes in. In my haste and ignorance I bring back covers by
mistake and pack dozens of little boxes in covers. It must all be done
over again. Six hundred boxes I pack this day. I've not stopped for
breath. I'm not a bit tired when 6 o'clock comes round. I ask Ida when
she will put me on piecework--it seems the great ambition of my life
is to feel I am on piecework. "When you can pack about two thousand
boxes a day," says Ida. Two thousand! I was panting and proud over six
hundred! "Never mind," says Ida, "you're makin' out fine." Oh, the
thrill of those words! I asked her to show me again about separating
the paper cups. I didn't have it just right, I was sure. "My Gawd!"
sighed Ida, "what ambition!" Yes, but the ambition did not last more
than a few days at that pitch.
Tessie wanted to tell me something about her _Mann_ to-day so badly,
but could not find the English words. Her joy when I said, "Tell me in
German"! How came I to speak German? I'd spent three years in Germany
with an American family, taking care of the children. Honest for once.
"That was luck for you," says Tessie.
"That was sure luck for me," says I--honest again.
Wherever Lena works there floats conversation for a radius of three
tables. The subject matter is ever the same--"dopes." "Is he big?...
Gee! I say!... More like a sister to him.... He never sees the
letters." "Lena" (from Ida), "shut up and get to work!" ... "I picked
him up Sunday.... Where's them waxing papers?... Third she vamped in
two days.... Sure treats a girl swell.... Them ain't pineapples...."
"Lee-na! get to work or I'll knock the hell out a ya!" And pretty Lena
giggles on: "He says.... She says to him.... Sure my father says if he
comes 'round again...."
And Tessie and I; I bend over to hear Tessie's soft, low German as she
tells me how good her _Mann_ is to her; how he never, never scolds, no
matter if she buys a new hat or what; how he brings home all his pay
every week and gives it to her. He is such a good _Mann_. They are
saving all their money. In two years they will go back near Muenchen
and buy a little farm.
Tessie and her poor _Mann_, with his broken elbow and his swollen arm
all black and blue, couldn't sleep last night. Oh dear! this New York!
One man at one corner he talk about Harding, one man other corner he
talk about Cox; one man under their window he talk MacSwiney--New York
talk, talk, talk!
Looked like rain to-day, but how can a body buy an umbrella
appropriate to chocolate packing at thirteen dollars a week when the
stores are all closed before work and closed after? I told Lillian my
troubles. I asked Lillian if a cheap umbrella could be purchased in
the neighborhood.
"Cheap," sniffs Lillian. "I don't know. I got me a nice one--sample
though--at Macy's for twelve-fifty." Lillian may take to her bed after
supper, but while she is awake she is going to be every inch to the
manner born.
By the time I pack the two thousandth box of "assorteds" my soul turns
in revolt. "If you give me another 'assorted' to pack," says I to Ida,
"I'll lie down here on the floor and die."
"The hell you will," says Ida. But she gets me fancy pound boxes with
a top and bottom layer, scarce two candies alike, and Tessie beams on
me like a mother with an only child. "That takes the brains!" says
Tessie. "Not for me! It gives me the ache in my head to think of it."
Indeed it near gives me the ache in mine. Before the next to the last
row is packed the bottom looks completely filled. Where can four fat
chocolates in cups find themselves? I push the last row over gently to
make room,--three chocolates in the middle rear up and stand on end.
Press them gently down and two more on the first row get out of hand.
At last the last row is in--only to discover four candies here and
there have all sprung their moorings. For each one I press down
gently, another some place else acts up. How long can my patience
hold out? Firmly, desperately I press that last obstreperous chocolate
down in its place. My finger goes squash through the crusty brown, and
pink goo oozes up and out. A fresh strawberry heart must be found.
"Ain't no more," announces Fannie. Might just as well tell an artist
there is only enough paint for one eye on his beautiful portrait. Of
course another chocolate can be substituted. But a strawberry heart
was what belonged there!
At last the long rows of boxes are packed, wax paper laid over
each--to blow off every time Louie goes by. Then come covers with
lovely ladies in low-neck dresses on the tops--and the room so cold,
anyhow. Why are all the pictures on all the boxes smiling ladies in
scanty attire, instead of wrapped to the ears in fur coats so that a
body might find comfort in gazing on them in such a temperature?
Ida comes along and peers in one box. "You can consider yourself a
fancy packer now--see?" Harding the night of the election felt less
joyous than do I at her words.
This night there is a lecture at the New School for Social Research to
be attended. If some of those educated foreigners in our room can go
to night school, I guess I can keep up my school. They are all
foreigners but Lillian and Sadie and I. Sadie is about the same
Indian-summer stage as Lillian and uses even better English. Her
eyebrows are also unduly black; her face looks a bit as if she had
been trying to get the ring out of the flour with her teeth
Halloween. Her lips are very red. Sadie has the air of having just
missed being a Vanderbilt. Her boudoir cap is lacy. Her smile is
conscious kindness to all as inferiors. One wonders, indeed, what
brought Sadie to packing chocolates in the autumn of life--a very
wrinkly, powdered autumn. So Lillian, Sadie, and I are the
representatives of what the nation produces--not what she gets
presented with. As for the rest, there are a Hungarian, two Germans,
four Italians, two Spaniards, a Swede, an Englishwoman, and numerous
colored folk. Louie is an Italian. Fannie (bless her dear heart! I
love Fannie) is colored, with freckles. She is Indian summer too--with
a heart of gold. Fannie trudges on her feet all day. Years and years
she has been there. At noon she sits alone in the lunch room, and
after eating puts her head on her arms and, bending over the cold
marble-topped table, gets what rest she can. She was operated on not
so long ago, and every so often still has to go to the hospital for a
day or so. Everything is at sixes and sevens when Fannie is away.
So then, that night I take my sleepy way to a lecture on "The Role of
the State in Modern Civilization." And it comes over me in the course
of the evening, what a satisfactory thing packing chocolates is. The
role of the State--some say this, some say that. A careful teacher
guards against being dogmatic. When it comes to the past, one
interpreter gives this viewpoint, due to certain prejudices; another
that viewpoint, due to certain other prejudices. When it comes to the
future, no sane soul dare prophesy at all. Thus it is with much which
one studies nowadays--we have evolved beyond the era of intellectual
surety. What an almighty relief to the soul, then, when one can pack
six rows of four chocolates each in a bottom layer, seven rows of four
chocolates each in the top, cover them, count them, stack them, pile
them in the truck, and away they go. One job _done_--done now and
forever. A definite piece of work put behind you--and no one coming
along in six months with documents or discoveries or new theories or
practices to upset all your labors. I say it is blessed to pack
chocolates when one has been studying labor problems for some years.
Every professor ought to have a fling at packing chocolates.
Folks wonder why a girl slaves in a factory when she could be earning
good money and a home thrown in doing housework. I think of that as I
watch Annie. Imagine Annie poking about by her lonesome, saying, "No,
ma'm," "Yes, ma'm," "No, sir," "Yes, sir." "Can I go out for a few
moments, Mrs. Jones?" "Oh, all right, ma'm!" Annie, whose talk echoes
up and down the room all day. She is Annie to every Tom, Dick, and
Harry who pokes his nose in our packing room, but they are Tom, Dick,
and Harry to her. It is not being called by your first name that makes
the rub. It is being called it when you must forever tack on the Mr.
and the Mrs. and the Miss. Annie is in awe of no human being. Annie is
the fastest packer in the room and draws the most pay. Annie sasses
the entire factory. Annie never stops talking unless she wants to.
Which is only now and then when her mother has had a bad spell and
Annie gets a bit blue. Little Pauline, an Italian, only a few months
in this country, only a few weeks in the factory, works across the
table from Annie. Pauline is the next quickest packer in our room. She
cannot speak a word of English. Annie gives a sigh audible from one
end of the room to the next. "My Gawd!" moans Annie to the entire
floor. "If this here Eyetalian don't learn English pretty soon I gotta
learn Eyetalian. I can't stand here like a dead one all day with
nobody to talk to." Pauline might perhaps be reasoning that, after
all, why learn English, since she would never get a silent moment in
which to practice any of it.
I very much love little Pauline. All day long her fingers fly; all day
long not a word does she speak, only every now and then little Pauline
turns around to me and we smile at each other. Once on the street, a
block or so from the factory, little Pauline ran up to me, put her arm
through mine, and caught my hand. So we walked to work. Neither could
say a word to the other. Each just smiled and smiled. For the first
time in all my life I really felt the melting pot first hand. To
Pauline I was no agent of Americanization, no superior proclaiming the
need of bathtubs and clean teeth, no teacher of the "Star-spangled
banner" and the Constitution. To Pauline I was a fellow-worker, and
she must know, for such things are always known, that I loved her. To
myself, I felt suddenly the hostess--the generation-long inhabitant
of this land so new and strange to little Pauline. She was my guest
here. I would indeed have her care for my country, have her glad she
came to my home. That day Pauline turned around and smiled more often
than before.
I finally settled down to eating lunch daily between Tessie and Mrs.
Lewis, the Englishwoman. We do so laugh at one another's jokes. I know
everything that ever happened to Tessie and Mrs. Lewis from the time
they were born; all the heartbreaking stories of the first homesick
months in this my land, all the jobs they have labored at. Mrs. Lewis
has worked "in the mills" ever since she was born, it would seem,
first in England, later in Michigan. Tessie and her husband mostly
have hired out together in this country for housework, and she likes
that better than packing chocolates standing up, she says. Mrs. Lewis
is--well, she's Indian summer, too, along with Lillian and Sadie and
Fannie, only she makes no bones about it (nor does black Fannie, for
that matter). Mrs. Lewis is thin and wrinkled, with a skimpy little
dust cap on her head. Her nose is very long and pointed, her teeth
very false. Her eyes are always smiling. She loves to laugh. One day
we were talking about unemployment.
"Don't you know, it's awful in Europe," volunteers Mrs. Lewis.
"One hundred thousand unemployed in Paris alone--saw it in headlines
this morning," I advance.
"Paris?" said Tessie. "Paris? Where's Paris?"
If one could always be so sure of one's facts.
"France."
Mrs. Lewis wheels about in her chair, looks at me sternly over the top
of her spectacles, and:
"Do you know, they're telling me that's a pretty fast country, that
France."
"You don't say!" I look interested.
"No--no I haven't got the details _yet_"--she clasped her chin with
her hand--"but 'fast' was the word I heard used."
Irene is a large, florid, bleached blonde. She worked at the table
behind me about four days. "Y'know"--Irene has a salon air--"y'know, I
jus' can't stand steppen on these soft chocolates. Nobody knows how I
suffer. It just goes through me like a knife." She spent a good part
of each day scraping off the bottoms of her French-heeled shoes with a
piece of cardboard. It evidently was too much for her nerves. She is
no more.
The sign reads, "Saturdays 8-12." When Saturday came around Ida
hollered down the room, "Everybody's gotta work to-day till five." The
howl that went up! I supposed "gotta" meant "gotta." But Lena came up
to me.
"You gonna work till five? Don't you do it. We had to strike to get a
Saturday half holiday. Now they're tellin' us we gotta work till
five--pay us for it, o' course. If enough girls'll stay, pretty soon
they'll be sayin: 'See? What ud we tell ya? The girls want to work
Saturday afternoons'; and they'll have us back regular again." In the
end not a girl in our room stayed, and Ida wrung her hands.
Monday next, though, Ida announced, "Everybody's gotta work till seven
to-night 'cause ya all went home Saturday afternoon. Three nights a
week now you gotta work till seven." To stand from 1 to 7! One girl in
the room belonged to some union or other. She called out, "Will they
pay time and a half for overtime?" At which everyone broke into
laughter. "Gee! Ida, here's a girl wants time and a half!" Tessie,
Mrs. Lewis, Sadie, and I refused to work till 7. Ida used threats and
argument. "I gotta put down your numbers!" We stood firm--6 o'clock
was long enough. "Gee! You don't notice that last hour--goes like a
second," argued Ida. We filed out when the 6-o'clock bell rang.
The girls all fuss over the hour off at noon. It takes at best twenty
minutes to eat lunch. For the rest of the hour there is no place to
go, nothing to do, but sit in the hard chairs at the marble-topped
tables in the whitewashed room for half an hour till the bell rings at
12.50, and you can sit on the edge of a truck upstairs for ten minutes
longer. They all say they wish to goodness we could have half an hour
at noon and get off half an hour earlier at night.
* * * * *
A tragedy the first pay day. I was so excited when that Saturday came
round, to see what it would all be like--to get my first pay envelope.
About 11.30 two men came in, one carrying a wooden box filled with
little envelopes. Girls appear suddenly from every place and crowd
around the two men. One calls out a number, the girl takes her
envelope and goes off. I keep working away, thinking you are not
supposed to step up till your number is called. But, lo! everyone
seems paid off and the men departing, whereat I leave my work with
beating heart and announce: "You didn't call 1075." But it seems I was
supposed to step up and give 1075. I get handed my little envelope.
Connie Parker in one corner, 1075 in the other, the date, and $6.81.
Six dollars and eighty-one cents, and I had expected fourteen dollars.
(I had told Ida at last that I thought I ought to get fourteen
dollars, and she thought so, too, and said she'd "speak to the man"
about it.) I clutched Ida--"only six dollars and eighty one cents!"
"Well, what more do ya want."
"But you said fourteen dollars."
It seems the week goes Thursday to Thursday, instead of Monday to
Saturday, so my first pay covered only three days and a deduction for
my locker key.
At that moment a little cry just behind me from Louisa. Louisa had
been packing with Irene--dark little, frail little Yiddish Louisa; big
brawny bleached-blond Irene.
"I've lost my pay envelope!"
Wan little Louisa! She had been talking to Topsy, Fannie's helper. Her
envelope had slipped out of her waist, and when she went to pick it
up, lo! there was nothing there to pick--fourteen dollars gone! There
was excitement for you. Fourteen dollars in Wing 13, Room 3, was equal
to fourteen million dollars in Wall Street. Everybody pulled out
boxes and searched, got down on hands and knees and poked, and the
rest mauled Louisa from head to foot.
"Sure it ain't in your stocking? Well, look _again_."
"What's this?"--jabbing Louisa's ribs--"this?"
Eight hands going over Louisa's person as if the anguished slip of a
girl could not have felt that stiff envelope with fourteen dollars in
it herself had it been there. She stood helpless, woebegone.
Ida rose Napoleon-like to the rescue. "I'll search everybody in the
room!"
Whereat she made a grab at Topsy and removed her. "They" say Topsy was
stripped to the breezes in Ida's fury, but no envelope.
Topsy, be it known, was already a suspicious character. That very week
Fannie's purse had disappeared under circumstances pointing to Topsy.
Which caused a strained relationship between the two. One day it
broke--such relationship as existed.
Fannie up at her end of the boxes was heard to screech down the line
to where Topsy was sorting chocolate rolls:
"How dare you talk to me like that?"
"I ain't talkin' to you!"
"You am. You called me names."
"I never. I called you nothin', you ole white nigger."
"You stand lie to me like that and call me names?"
"Who say lie? I ain't no liar. You shut up; you ain't my boss. I'll
call you anythin' I please, sassin' me that way!"
"I didn't sassed you. You called me names."
"I don't care what I called you--I know what you _is_." Here Topsy
gathered all her strength and shouted up to Fannie, "You're a
_heifer_, you is."
Now there is much I do not know about the world, and maybe heifer is a
word like some one or two others you are never supposed to set down in
so many letters. If so, it is new to me and I apologize. The way Topsy
called it, and the way Fannie acted on hearing herself called it,
would lead one to believe it is a word never appearing in print.
"You--call--me a _heifer_?" shrieked Fannie. "I'll tell ya landlady on
ya, I will!"
"Don' yo' go mixin' up in my private affairs. You shut yo' mouth, yo'
hear me? yo' _heifer_!"
"I _ain't_ no heifer!"
Fortunately Ida swung into our midst about then and saved folk from
bodily injury. A few days later Fanny informed me privately that she
don't say nothin' when that nigger starts rowin' with her, but if she
jus' has her tin lunch box with her next time when that nigger starts
talkin' fresh--callin' her a heifer--_her!_--she'll slug her right
'cross the face with it.
So Topsy was searched. When she got her garments back on she appeared
at the door--a small black goddess of fury. "Yo' fresh Ida,
yo'--yessa--yo' jus' searched me 'cause I'm black. That's all, 'cause
I'm black. Why don't you search all that white trash standin' there?"
And Topsy flung herself out. Monday she appeared with a new maroon
embroidered suit. Cost every nickel of thirty-eight dollars, Fannie
informed me. In the packing room she had a hat pin in her cap. Some
girl heard Topsy tell some other girls she was going stick that pin in
Fannie if Fannie got sassin' her again. Ida made her remove the hat
pin. In an hour she disappeared altogether and stayed disappeared
forever after. "Went South," Fannie told me. "Always said she was
goin' South when cold weather started.... Huh! Thought she'd stick me
with a hat pin. I was carryin' a board around all mornin'. If she so
much as come near me I was goin' to give her a crack aside the head."
* * * * *
But there was little Louisa--and no longer could she keep back the
tears. Nor could ever the pay envelope be unearthed. Later I found her
sitting on the pile of dirty towels in the washroom, sobbing her heart
out. It was not so much that the money was gone--that was awful
enough--fourteen dollars!--fourteen dollars!--oh-h-h,--but her mother
and father--what would they do to her when she came home and told 'em?
They mightn't believe it was lost and think she'd spent it on
somethin' for herself. The tears streamed down her face. And that was
the last we ever saw of Louisa.
Had "local color" been all we were after, perhaps Wing 13, Room 3,
would have supplied sufficient of that indefinitely, with the
combination of the ever-voluble Lena and the ever-present labor
turnover. Even more we desired to learn the industrial feel of the
thing--what do some of the million and more factory women think about
the world of work? Remaining longer in Wing 13 would give no deeper
clue to that. For all that I could find out, the candy workers there
thought nothing about it one way or the other. The younger unmarried
girls worked because it seemed the only thing to do--they or their
families needed the money, and what would they be doing otherwise?
Lena claimed, if she could have her way in the world, she would sleep
until 12 every day and go to a show every afternoon. But that life
would pall even on Lena, and she giggled wisely when I slangily
suggested as much.
The older married women worked either because they had to, since the
male breadwinner was disabled (an old fat Irishwoman at the chocolate
dipper had a husband with softening of the brain. He was a discharged
English soldier who "got too much in the sun in India") or because his
tenure of job was apt to be uncertain and they preferred to take no
chances. Especially with the feel and talk of unemployment in the air,
two jobs were better than none. A few, like Mrs. Lewis, worked to lay
by toward their old age. Mrs. Lewis's husband had a job, but his wages
permitted of little or no savings. Some of her friends told her: "Oh,
well, somebody's bound to look out for you somehow when you get old.
They don't let you die of hunger and cold!" But Mrs. Lewis was not so
sure. She preferred to save herself from hunger and cold.
Such inconveniences of the job as existed were taken as being all in
the day's work--like the rain or a cold in the head. At some time they
must have shown enough ability for temporary organization to strike
for the Saturday half holiday. I wish I could have been there when
that affair was on. Which girls were the ringleaders? How much
agitation and exertion did it take to acquire the momentum which would
result in enforcing their demands? Had I entered factory work with any
idea of encouraging organization among female factory workers, I
should have considered that candy group the most hopeless soil
imaginable. Those whom I came in contact with had no class feeling, no
ideas of grievances, no ambitions over and above the doing of an
uninteresting job with as little exertion as possible.
I hated leaving Tessie and Mrs. Lewis and little Pauline. Already I
miss the life behind those candy scenes. For the remainder of my days
a box of chocolates will mean a very personal--almost too personal for
comfort!--thing to me. But for the rest of the world....
* * * * *
Some place, some moonlight night, some youth, looking like a collar
advertisement, will present his fair love with a pound box of fancy
assorted chocolates--in brown paper cups; and assured of at least a
generous disposition, plus his lovely collar-advertisement hair, she
will say yes. On the sofa, side by side, one light dimly shining, the
nightingale singing in the sycamore tree beside the front window,
their two hearts will beat as one--for the time being. They will eat
the chocolates I packed and life will seem a very sweet and peaceful
thing indeed. Nor will any disturbing notion of how my feet felt ever
reach them, no jarring "you heifer!" float across the states to where
they sit. Louie to them does not exist--Louie, forever on the run
with, "_Louie_, move these trays!" "_Louie_, bottoms!" "_Louie_,
tops!" "_Louie_, cardboards!" "_Louie_, the truck!" "_Louie_, sweep
the floor! How many times I told you that to-day!" "_Louie_, get me a
box a' ca'mels, that's a good dope!" "_Louie_, turn out them lights!"
"_Louie_, turn on them lights!" "_Louie_, ya leave things settin'
round like that!" "_Louie_, where them covers?" and then Louie smashes
his fingers and retires for ten minutes.
Nor is Ida more than a strange name to those two on the sofa. No
echoes reach them of, "Ida, where them wax papers?" "Ida, where's
Fannie?" "Ida, where them picture tops?" "Ida, ain't no more
'coffees.' What'll I use instead?" "Ida! Where's Ida? Mike wants ya by
the elevator." "Ida, I jus' packed sixty; ten sixty-two is my number."
"Ida, Joe says they want 'drops' on the fifth." "Ida, ain't no more
trays." "Ida, gimme the locker-door key. 'M cold--want ma sweater.
(Gee! it 'u'd freeze the stuffin' outa ya in this ice box!)"
Those chocolates appeared in a store window in Watertown, and that's
enough. Not for their moonlit souls the clang of the men building a
new dipper and roller in our room--the bang of the blows of metal on
metal as they pierce your soul along about 5 of a weary afternoon.
Lena's giggles and Ida's "Lee-na, stop your talk and go to work!...
Louie, stop your whistlin'!... My Gawd! girls, don' you know no better
n' to put two kinds in the same box? ... Hey, Lena, this yere
Eyetalian wants somethin'; come here and find out what's ailin'
her.... Fannie, ain't there no more plantations?... Who left that door
open?... Louie, for Gawd's sake how long you gonna take with that
truck?... Lena, stop your talkin' and go to work...."
And 'round here, there, and every place, "My Gawd! my feet are like
ice!" "Say, len' me some of yo'r cardboards--hey?" "You Pearl White
[black as night], got the tops down there?" "Hey, Ida, the Hungarian
girl wants somethin'. I can't understand her...."
Those two sit on the sofa. The moon shines on the nightingale singing
in the sycamore tree. Nor do they ever glimpse a vision of little
Italian Pauline's swift fingers dancing over the boxes, nor do they
ever guess of wan Louisa's sobs.
II
_286 On Brass_
Sweetness and Light.
So now appears the candy factory in retrospect.
Shall we stumble upon a job yet that will make brass seem as a haven
of refuge? Allah forbid!
After all, factory work, more than anything so far, has brought out
the fact that life from beginning to end is a matter of comparisons.
The factory girl, from my short experience, is not fussing over what
her job looks like compared to tea at the Biltmore. She is comparing
it with the last job or with home. And it is either slightly better or
slightly worse than the last job or home. Any way round, nothing to
get excited over. An outsider, soul-filled college graduate with a
mission, investigates a factory and calls aloud to Heaven: "Can such
things be? Why do women _stay_ in such a place?"
The factory girl, if she heard those anguished cries, would as like as
not shrug her shoulders and remark: "Ugh! she sh'u'dda seen ----'s
factory where I worked a year ago." Or, "Gawd! what does she think a
person's goin' to do--sit home all day and scrub the kitchen?"
And yet the fact remains that some things get too much on even a
philosophical factory girl's nerves. Whereat she merely walks out--if
she has gumption enough. The labor turnover, from the point of view of
production and efficiency, can well be a vital industrial concern. To
the factory girl, it saves her life, like as not. Praise be the labor
turnover!
If it were not for that same turnover, I, like the soul-filled college
graduate, might feel like calling aloud, not to Heaven, but to the
President of the United States and Congress and the Church and Women's
clubs: "Come quick and rescue females from the brassworks!" As it is,
the females rescue themselves. If there's any concern it's "the boss
he should worry." He must know how every night girls depart never to
cross those portals again, so help them Gawd. Every morning a new
handful is broken in, to stay there a week or two, if that long, and
take to their heels. Praise be the labor turnover, as long as we have
such brassworks.
Before eight o'clock of a cold Monday morning (thank goodness it was
not raining, since we stood in shivering groups on the sidewalk) I
answered the Sunday-morning "ad":
GIRLS AND WOMEN
between 16 and 36; learners and experienced assemblers and
foot-press operators on small brass parts; steady; half day
Saturday all year around; good pay and bonus. Apply
Superintendent's office.
The first prospects were rather formidable--some fifty men and boys,
no other girl or woman. Soon two cold females made their appearance
and we shivered together and got acquainted in five minutes, as is
wont under the circumstances. One rawboned girl with a crooked nose
and frizzled blond hair had been married just two months. She went
into immediate details about a party at her sister-in-law's the night
before, all ending at a dance hall. The pretty, plump Jewess admitted
she had never danced.
"What?" almost yelled the bride, "Never _danced_? Good Gawd! girl, you
might as well be _dead_!"
"You said it!" I chimed in. "Might as well dig a hole in the ground
and crawl in it."
"You said it!" and the husky bride and erstwhile (up to the week
before) elevator operator at twenty-three dollars a week (she said)
gave me a smart thump of understanding. "Girl, you never _danced_?
It's--it's the grandest thing in _life_!"
The plump Jewess looked a little out of things. "I know," she sighed,
"they tell me it 'u'd make me thin, too, but my folks don't let me go
out no place."
Whereat we changed to polishing off profiteers and the high cost of
living. The Jewish girl's brother knew we were headin' straight for
civil war. "They'll be comin' right in folks' homes and killen 'em
before a year's out. See if they don't." I asked her if she'd ever
worked in a union shop. "Na, none of that stuff for me! Wouldn't go
near a union." Both girls railed over the way people were losing their
jobs. Anyhow, the bride was goin' to a dance that night, you jus' bet.
At last some one with a heart came out and told the girls we could
step inside. By that time there were some ten of us, all ages and
descriptions. What would a "typical" factory girl be like, I wonder.
Statistics prove she is young and unmarried more than otherwise, but
each factory does seem to collect the motleyest crew of a little of
everything--old, young, married, single, homely, stupid, bright,
pretty, sickly, husky, fat, thin, and so on down the line. Certain it
is that they who picture a French-heeled, fur-coated, dolled-up
creature as the "typical factory girl" are far wide of the mark. The
one characteristic which so far does seem pretty universal is that one
and all, no matter what the age or looks, are perfectly willing to
tell you everything they know on short acquaintance. At first I felt a
hesitancy at asking questions about their personal lives, yet I so
much wanted to know what they did and thought, what they hoped and
dreamed about. It was early apparent that sooner or later everything
would come out with scant encouragement, and no amount of questioning
ever is taken amiss. They in turn ask me questions, and I lie until I
hate myself.
The plump Jewess was the first interviewed. When she heard the pay she
departed. The elevator bride and I were taken together, and together
we agreed to everything--wages thirteen dollars a week, "with one
dollar a week bonus" (the bonus, as was later discovered, had numerous
strings to it. I never did get any). Work began at 7.45, half hour for
lunch, ended at 5. The bride asked if the work was dangerous. "That's
up to you. Goin' upstairs is dangerous if you don't watch where you
put your feet. Eh?" We wanted to start right in--I had my apron under
my arm--but to-morrow would be time. I got quite imploring about
beginning on that day. No use.
The bride and I departed with passes to get by with the next morning.
That was the last I saw of the bride--or any of that group, except one
little frozen thing without a hat. She worked three days, and used to
pull my apron every time she went by and grin.
The factory was 'way over on the East Side. It meant gettin' up in the
dark and three Subways--West Side, the Shuttle, East Side which could
be borne amicably in the morning, but after eight and three-quarter
hours of foot-press work, going home with that 5-6 rush--that mob who
shoved and elbowed and pushed and jammed--was difficult to bear with
Christian spirit. Except that it really is funny. What idea of human
nature must a Subway guard between the hours of 5 and 6 be possessed
of?
At noon I used to open my lunch anxiously, expecting to see nothing
but a doughy mass of crumpled rye bread and jam. Several times on the
Subway the apple got shoved into my ribs over a period where it seemed
as if either the apple or the ribs would have to give in. But by noon
my hunger was such that any state of anything edible was as nectar and
ambrosia.
I am thinking that even a hardened factory hand might remember her
first day at the brassworks. Up three flights of stairs, through a
part of the men's factory, over a narrow bridge to a back building,
through two little bobbing doors, and there you were admitted to that
sanctuary where, according to the man who hired you, steady work and
advancement to a rosy future awaited one.
True, I had only the candy factory as a basis of comparison, as far as
working experience went. But I have been through factories and
factories of all sorts and descriptions, and nothing had I ever seen
like the brassworks. First was the smell--the stale smell of gas and
metal. (Perhaps there is no such smell as stale metal, but you go down
to the brassworks and describe it better!) Second, the darkness--a
single green-shaded electric light directly over where any girl was
working, but there were areas where there were no workers. Up the end
of the floor, among the power presses, all belts and machines and
whirring wheels, there were only three or four shaded lights. Windows
lined both sides of the floor, but they had never been washed since
the factory was built, surely. Anyhow, it was dark and rainy outside.
The walls once had been white, but were now black. Dim, dirty, uneven
boxes containing brass parts filled the spaces between the long tables
where the foot presses stood. Third, the noise--the clump of the foot
presses, the whirring of the pattern cutters--one sounded ever like a
lusty woodpecker with a metal beak pecking on metal; rollings and
rumblings from the floor above; jarrings and shakings from below.
Two-thirds of the entire floor was filled with long tables holding the
foot presses--tables which years ago were clean and new, tables which
now were worn, stained, and uneven, and permanently dirty. On each
side of each long table stood five black iron presses, but there
seemed to be never more than one or two girls working at a side. Each
press performed a different piece of work--cut wick holes, fitted or
clamped parts together, shaped the cones, and what not, but with only
two general types of operation so far as the foot part went. One type
took a long, firm, forward swing on the pedal; the other a short,
hard, downward "kick." With the end of the pressure the steel die cut
through the thin brass cone, or completed whatever the job was. As the
pedal and foot swung back to position the girl removed the brass part,
dropping it in a large box at her right. She kept a small bin on the
table at the left of the press filled with parts she was to work on.
Around the sides of the floor were the table workers--girls adjusting
parts by hand, or soldering.
The other third of the floor was taken up with the machine presses,
which mostly clicked away cutting patterns in the brass parts to hold
the lamp chimney. In a far corner were the steaming, bleaching tubs
where dull, grimy brass parts were immersed in several preparations, I
don't know what, to emerge at last shining like the noonday sun.
The cold little girl with no hat, a strange, somewhat unsociable, new
person, and I stood there waiting one hour. Some one took our names.
The experienced feeling when they asked me where I had worked last
and how long was I there, and why did I leave! At the end of an hour
the forelady beckoned me--such a neat, sweet person as she was--and I
took my initial whack at a foot press. If ever I do run an automobile
the edge of first enjoyment is removed. A Rolls-Royce cannot make me
feel any more pleased with life than the first ten minutes of that
foot press. In ten minutes the job was all done and there I sat for an
hour and a half waiting for another. Hard on a person with the
foot-press fever. The times and times later I would gratefully have
taken any part of that hour and a half to ease my weary soul!
Be it known, if I speak feelingly at times of the weariness of a foot
press, that, though nothing as to size, I am a very husky
person--perhaps the healthiest of the eight million women in industry!
It was a matter of paternal dismay that I arrived in the world female
instead of male. What Providence had overlooked, mortal ability would
do everything possible to make up for--so argued a disappointed
father. From four years of age on I was taught to do everything a boy
could or would do; from jumping off cars while they were moving to
going up in a balloon. A good part of my life I have played tennis and
basketball and hockey, and swum, and climbed mountains, and ridden
horseback, and rowed, and fished. I do not know what it is to have an
ache or a pain from one end of the year to the other. All of which is
mentioned merely because if certain work taxes my strength, who
seldom has known what it is to be weary, what can it do to the average
factory worker, often without even a fighting physical chance from
birth on?
The jobs on our third floor where the girls and women worked concerned
themselves with lamps--the old-fashioned kind, city folks are apt to
think. Yet goodness knows we seemed during even my sojourn to make
more lamp parts than creation ever had used in the heyday of lamps.
Well, all but five per cent of farm women still use kerosene lamps, so
the government tells us. Also fat Lizzie informed me, when I asked her
who in the world could ever use just them lamp cones I made some one
particular day, "Lor', child, they send them lamps all over the
world!" She made a majestic sweep with both arms. "Some of 'em goes as
far--as far--as _Philadelphia_!" Once we were working on a rush order
for fifty thousand lamps of one certain kind. Curiosity got the better
of me and I took occasion to see where the boxes were being addressed.
It was to a large mail-order house in Chicago.
The first noon whistle--work dropped--a rush for the washroom. Let no
one think his hands ever were dirty until he labors at a foot press in
a brassworks. Such sticky, grimy, oily, rough blackness never was--and
the factory supplies no soap nor towels. You are expected to bring
your own--which is all right the second day when you have found it out
and come prepared.
The third floor had seemed dark and dismal enough during the morning;
at noon all lights are turned off. Many of the workers went out for
lunch, the rest got around in dismal corners, most of them singly, and
ate by their machines, on the same hard seats they have been on since
a quarter to 8. What a bacchanal festival of color and beauty now
appeared the candy-factory whitewashed lunch room with the
marble-topped tables! The airy sociability of it! I wandered about
with my lunch in my hand, to see what I could see. Up amid the belts
and power machines sat one of the girls who began that morning--not
the cold, hatless one.
"You gonna stick it out?" she asked me.
"Sure. I guess it's all right."
"Oh gee! Ain't like no place I ever worked yet. Don't catch me
standin' this long."
She did stand it four days. Minnie suggested then she stick it out
till Christmas. "You'll need the money for Christmas y'know, an' you
might not get the next job so easy now."
"Damn Christmas!" was all the new girl had to say to that.
"Sure now," said Irish Minnie, "an' she's takin her chances. It's an
awful disgrace y'know, to be gettin' presents when y'ain't got none to
give back. Ain't it, now? I'd never take no chances on a job so close
to Christmas."
I talked to five girls that noon. None of them had been there longer
than a week. None of them planned to stay.
All afternoon I worked the foot press at one job. My foot-press
enthusiasm weakened--four thousand times I "kicked"--two thousand
lamp-wick slots I make in the cones. Many of the first five hundred
looked a bit sad and chewed at. The "boss" came by and saw that I was
not one hundred per cent perfect. He gave me pointers and I did
better. Each cone got placed over a slanted form just so; kick, and
half the slot is made. Lift the cone up a wee bit, twist it round to
an exact position, hold it in place, kick, and the other half is cut.
The kick must be a stout kick--bing! down hard, to make a clean job of
it. The thing they gave you to sit on! A high, narrow, homemade-looking,
wooden stool, the very hardest article of furniture under the blue
canopy of heaven. Some of them had little, narrow, straight backs--just
boards nailed on behind. All of them were top heavy and fell over if
you got off without holding on. By 4.30 standing up at the candy job
seemed one of the happiest thoughts on earth. What rosy good old days
those were! Dear old candy factory! Happy girls back there bending
over the chocolates!
Next sat Louisa, an Italian girl who stuttered, and I had to stop my
press to hear her. She stopped hers to talk. She should worry. It's
the worst job she ever saw, and for thirteen dollars a week why should
she work? She talked to me, kicked a few times, got a drink, kicked,
talked, stood up and stretched, kicked, talked, got another drink. She
is married, has a baby a year old, another coming in three months. She
will stay her week out, then she goes, you bet. Her husband was
getting fifty dollars a week in a tailor job--no work now for
t-t-t-two months. He does a little now and then in the b-b-barber
business. Oh, but life was high while the going was good! She leaned
way over and told me in a hushed, inspired tone, to leave me
awestruck, "When we was m-m-married we t-t-took a h-h-h-honeymoon!" I
gasped and wanted details. To West Virginia they'd gone for a month.
The fare alone, each way, had come to ten dollars apiece, and then
they did no work for that month, but lived in a little hotel. Her
husband was crazy of her, and she was of him now, but not when she was
married. He's very good to her. After dinner every single night they
go to a show.
"Every night?"
"Sure, every night, and Sundays two times."
It all sounded truly glowing.
"You married?"
"No."
"Well, don' you do it. Wish I wasn't married. Oh gee! Wish I wasn't
married. I'm crazy of my husband, but I wish I wasn't married.
See--once you married--pisht!--there you are--stay that way."
I agreed I was in no hurry about matrimony.
"Hurry? Na, no hurry; that's right. The h-h-hurrier you are the
b-b-b-badder off you get!"
The next morning the Italian girl was late. The forelady gave her
locker to some one else. Such a row! Louisa said: "I got mad, I did. I
told her to go to hell. That's only w-w-w-way anybody gets anything in
this world--get mad and say you go to h-h-hell. Betcha."
A little later the forelady, when the Italian was on one of her trips
after a drink, leaned over and gave me her side of the story. She is
such a very nice person, our forelady--quiet, attractive, neat as a
pin. Her sister addresses boxes and does clerical work of one sort or
another. Two subdued old maids they are; never worked any place but
right on our third floor. "Ain't like what it used to be," she told
me. "In the old days girls used to work here till they got married. We
used to have parties here and, say! they was nice girls in them days.
Look at 'em now! Such riffraff! New ones comin' in all the time, new
ones worse each time. Riffraff, that's what they are. It sure looks
nice to see a girl like you." (What good were the earrings doing?)
"We'll make it just as nice here for you as we can." (Oh, how guilty I
began to feel!)
She looked around to see if the Italian was about.
"Now you take this Eyetalian girl next to you. Gee! she's some fright.
Oughtta heard her this morning. 'Spected me to keep her locker for her
when she was late. How'd I know she was comin' back? I gave it to
another girl. She comes tearin' at me. 'What the hell you think you're
doin'?' she says to me. Now I ain't used to such talk, and I was for
puttin' my hat and coat on right then and there and walkin' out. I
must say I gotta stand all sorts of things in my job. It's awful what
I gotta put up with. I never says nothin' to her. But any girl's a
fool 'l talk to a person that way. Shows she's got nothin' up here
[knocking her head] or she sure'd know better than get the forelady
down on her like that. Gee! I was mad!"
Louisa returned and Miss Hibber moved on. "Some fright, that
forelady," remarked Louisa. That night Louisa departed for good.
The second day I kicked over six thousand times. It seemed a lot when
you think of the hard stool. It was a toss between which was the
worse, the stool or the air. This afternoon, I was sure it must be
3.30. I looked back at the clock--1.10. It had seemed like two hours
of work and it was forty minutes. No ventilation whatever in that
whole room--not a crack of air. Wonder if there ever was any since the
place was built decades ago. Once Louisa and I became desperate and
got Tony to open a window. The forelady had a fit; so did Tillie. Both
claimed they'd caught cold.
Tony is the Louis of the brassworks. He is young and very lame--one
leg considerably shorter than the other. It makes me miserable to see
him packing heavy boxes about. He told me he must get another job or
quit. Finally they did put him at a small machine press. So many
maimed and halt and decrepit as they employed about the works! Numbers
of the workers were past-telling old, several were very lame, one
errand boy had a fearfully deformed face, one was cross-eyed. I
remarked to Minnie that the boss of the works must have a mighty good
heart. Minnie has been working twenty-three years and has had the
bloom of admiration for her fellow-beings somewhat worn off in that
time. "Hm!" grunted Minnie. "He gets 'em cheaper that way, I guess."
The elevator man is no relation to the one at the candy factory. He is
red faced and grinning, most of his teeth are gone, and he always
wears a derby hat over one eye. One morning I was late. He jerked his
head and thumb toward the elevator. "Come on, I'll give ya a lift up!"
and when we reached our floor, though it was the men's side, "Third
Avenue stop!" he called out cheerily, and grinned at the world. He had
been there for years. The boss on our floor had been there for
years--forty-three, to be exact. Miss Hibber would not tell how many
years she had worked there, nor would Tillie. Tillie said she was born
there.
If it were only the human element that counted, everyone would stay at
the brassworks forever. I feel like a snake in the grass, walking off
"on them" when they all were so nice. Nor was it for a moment the
"dearie" kind of niceness that made you feel it was orders from above.
From our floor boss down, they were people who were born to treat a
body square. All the handicaps against them--the work itself, the
surroundings, the low pay--had so long been part of their lives, these
"higher ups" seemed insensible to the fact that such things were
handicaps.
To-day was sunny and the factory not so dark--in fact, part of the
time we worked with no electric lights. The crisp early morning air
those four blocks from the Subway to the factory--it sent the spring
fever through the blood. In the gutter of that dirty East Side street
a dirty East Side man was burning garbage. The smoke curled up lazily.
The sun just peeping up over the hospital at the end of the street
made slanting shafts through the smoke. As I passed by it suddenly was
no longer the East Side of New York City....
Now the Four Way Lodge is open,
Now the hunting winds are loose,
Now the smokes of spring go up to clear the brain....
Breakfast in a canon by the side of a stream--the odor of pines....
The little bobbing doors went to behind me and there I stood in floor
three, the stale gas and metal smell ... the whirs of the belts ...
the jarring of the presses....
Next to me this glorious morning sat a snip of a little thing all in
black--so pretty she was, so very pretty. I heard the boss tell her
it's not the sort of work she's been used to, she'll find it hard. Is
she sure she wants to try it? And in the course of the morning I heard
the story of Mame's life.
Mame's husband died three weeks ago. They had been married one month
and two days--after waiting three years. Shall I write a story of Mame
on the sob-sister order to bring the tears to your eyes? It could
easily be done. But not honestly. Little Mame--how could her foot ever
reach the press? And when she walked off after a drink, I saw that she
was quite lame. A widow only three weeks. She'd never worked before,
but there was no money. She lived all alone, wandered out for her
meals--no mother, no father, no sisters or brothers. She cried every
night. Her husband had been a traveling salesman--sometimes he made
eighty-five dollars a week. They had a six-room apartment and a
servant! She'd met him at a dance hall. A girl she was with had dared
her to wink at him. Sure she'd do anything anybody dared her to. He
came over and asked her what she was after, anyhow. That night he left
the girl he'd taken to the dance hall to pilot her own way back to
home and mother, and he saw Mame to her room. He was swell and tall.
She showed me his picture in a locket around her neck. Meanwhile Mame
kicked the foot press about twice every five minutes.
Why had they waited so long to get married? Because of the war. He was
afraid he'd be killed and would leave her a widow. "He asked me to
promise never to get married again if he did marry me and died.
But,"--she leaned over my way--"that only meant if he died during the
war, ain't that so? Lookit how long the war was over before he died."
He was awful good to her after they got married. He took her to a show
every night--jes swell; and she had given him a swell funeral--you bet
she did. The coffin had cost eighty-five dollars--white with real
silver handles; and the floral piece she bought--"Gee! What's your
name?... Connie, you oughtta seen that floral piece!" and Mame laid
off work altogether to use her hands the better. It was shaped so, and
in the middle was a clock made out of flowers, with the hands at the
very minute and hour he'd died. (He passed away of a headache--very
sudden.) Then below, in clay, were two clasped hands--his and hers.
"Gee! Connie, you never seen nothin' so swell. Everybody seen it said
so."
Once he bought her a white evening dress, low neck, fish-tail train,
pearls all over the front--cost him one whole week's salary,
eighty-five dollars! She had diamond earrings and jewels worth at
least one thousand dollars. She had lovely clothes. Couldn't she just
put a black band around the arms and go on wearing them? She took a
look at my earrings. Gee! they were swell. She had some green ones
herself. Next morning she appeared in her widow's weeds with
bright-green earrings at least a quarter of an inch longer than mine.
From the first Mame clung to me morning and night. Usually mornings
she threw her arms around me in the dressing room. "Here's my Connie!"
I saw myself forced to labor in the brassworks for life because of
Mame's need of me. This need seemed more than spiritual. One day her
pocketbook with twelve dollars had been stolen in the Subway. I lent
her some cash. Another time she left her money at the factory. I lent
her the wherewithal to get home with, etc. One day I was not at work.
Somehow the other girls all were down on Mame. I have pondered much on
that. When it came to the needed collection Mame found it hard
pickings. She got a penny from this girl, another from that one, until
she had made up a nickel to get home with. Irish Minnie gave her a
sandwich and an apple. The girls all jumped on me: "The way you let
that Frenchie work ya! Gee! you believe everything anybody tells ya."
"But," says I, "she's been a widow only three weeks and I'm terrible
sorry for her."
"How d'ya know she ever had a husband?" "How d'ya know he's dead?"
"How'd ya...."
The skepticism of factory workers appals me. They suspect everybody
and everything from the boss down. I believed almost everything about
Mame, especially since she paid back all she ever borrowed. No one
else in that factory believed a word she said. They couldn't "stand
her round."
"How d'ya know she lost her pocketbook?" (Later she advertised and got
it back--a doctor's wife found it on the early Subway.)
"Doctor's wife," sniffed Minnie. "Who ever heard of a doctor's wife up
at seven o'clock in the mornin'?"
And now I have walked off and left Mame to that assemblage of
unbelievers. At least Mame has a tongue of her own she is only too
glad of a chance to use. It is meat and drink to Mame to have a man
look her way. "Did you see that fella insult me?" and she calls back
protective remarks for half a block. Sentiments that usually bring in
mention of the entertained youth's mother and sisters, and wind up
with allusions to a wife, which if he doesn't possess now, he may some
day. Once I stopped with Mame while she and Irene phoned a "fella" of
Irene's from a drug-store telephone booth. Such gigglings and goings
on, especially since the "fella" was unknown to Mame at the time.
Outside in the store a pompous, unromantic man grew more and more
impatient for a turn at that booth. When Mame stepped out he remarked
casually that he hoped she felt she'd gotten five cents' worth. The
dressing down Mame then and there heaped upon that startled gentleman!
Who was he to insult her? I grew uneasy and feared a scene, but the
pompous party took hasty refuge in the telephone booth and closed the
door. Mame was very satisfied with the impression she must have made.
"The fresh old guy!"
Another time Mame sought me out in the factory, her eyes blazing.
"Connie, I been insulted, horribly insulted, and I don't see how I can
stay in this factory! You know that girl Irene? Irene she says to me,
'Mamie, you plannin' to get married again?'
"'I dunno,' I says to her, 'but if I do it'll be to some single
fella.'
"'Huh!' Irene says to me, 'You won't get no single fella; you'll have
to marry a widower with two or three children.' Think of her insultin'
me like that! I could 'a' slapped her right in the face!"
I asked Mame one Saturday what she'd be doing Sunday. She sighed.
"I'll be spendin' the day at the cemetery, I expect."
Monday morning I asked Mame about Sunday. She'd been to church in the
morning (Mame, like most of the girls at the brassworks, was a
Catholic), a show in the afternoon, cabaret for dinner, had danced
till 1, and played poker until 4 A.M. "If only my husband was alive,"
said Mame, "I'd be the happiest girl on earth."
One night Mame's landlady wanted to go out and play poker. She asked
Mame to keep her eye and ear out for the safety of the house. Every
five minutes Mame thought she heard a burglar or somethin'. "Gee! I
hardly slept at all; kep' wakin' up all the time. An' that landlady
never got in till six this mornin'!"
"My Gawd!" I exclaimed. "Hope she was lucky after playin' poker that
long!"
"She sure was," sighed Mame. "Gee! I jus' wish ya c'u'd see the swell
prize she won!--the most beau-teful statue--stands about three feet
high--of Our Blessed Lady of the Immaculate Conception."
Mame's friendship could become almost embarrassing. One day she
announced she wanted me to marry one of her brothers-in-law. "I got
two nice ones and we'll go out some Sunday afternoon and you can have
your pick. One's a piano tuner; the other's a detective." I thought
offhand the piano tuner sounded a bit more domestic. He was swell,
Mame said.
Mame didn't think she'd stay long in the brassworks. It was all
right--the boss she thought was sort of stuck on her. Did he have a
wife? (The boss, at least sixty years old.) Also Charlie was making
eyes at her. (Charlie was French; so was Mame. Charlie knew six words
of English. Mame three words of French. Charlie was sixteen). No,
aside from matrimony, Mame was going to train in Bellevue Hospital and
earn sixty dollars a week being a children's nurse. She'd heard if you
got on the right side of a doctor it was easy, and already a doctor
was interested in getting Mame in.
And I've just walked off and left Mame.
* * * * *
Kicked the foot press 7,149 times by the meter to-day and expected to
die of weariness. Thumped, thumped, thumped without stopping. As with
candy, I got excited about going on piecework. Asked Miss Hibber what
the rates were for my job--four and a half cents for one hundred and
fifty. Since I had to kick twice for every cone top finished, that
would have meant around one dollar fifteen cents for the day. Vanished
the piece-rate enthusiasm. Tillie seemed the only girl on our floor
doing piecework. Tillie, who "was born there." She was thin and stoop
shouldered, wore spectacles, and did her hair according to the
pompadour styles of some twenty years ago. The work ain't so bad.
Tillie don't mind it. There's just one thing in the world Tillie
wants. What's that? "A man!" Evidently Tillie has made no bones of her
desire. The men call back kindly to Tillie as she picks her way up the
dark stairs in the morning, "Hello there, sweetheart!" That week had
been a pretty good one for Tillie--she'd made sixteen dollars
forty-nine cents.
"Ain't much, p'raps, one way, but there's jus' this about it, it's
steady. They never lay anybody off here, and there's a lot. You hear
these girls 'round here talk about earnin' four, five, six dollars a
day. Mebbe they did, but why ain't they gettin' it now? 'Shop closed
down,' or, 'They laid us off.' That's it. Add it up over a year and my
sixteen forty-nine'll look big as their thirty dollars to forty
dollars a week, see if it don't."
Tillie's old, fat, wheezy mother works on our floor--maybe Tillie
really was born there.
One day I decided to see what could be done if I went the limit.
Suppose I had a sick mother and a lame brother--a lot of factory girls
have. I was on a press where you had to kick four separate times on
each piece--small lamp cones, shaped, slot already in. My job was to
punch four holes for the brackets to hold the chimney. The day before
I had kicked over 10,000 times. This morning I gritted my teeth and
started in. Between 10 and 11 I had gotten up to 2,000 kicks an hour.
Miss Hibber went by and I asked her what piece rates for that machine
were. She said six and one-quarter cents for one hundred and fifty. I
did not stop then to do any figuring. Told her rather chestily I could
kick 2,000 times an hour. "That all? You ought to do much more than
that!" Between 11 and 12 I worked as I had never worked. It was
humanly impossible to kick that machine oftener than I did. Never did
I let my eyes or thoughts wander. When the whistle blew at 12 I had
kicked 2,689. For a moment I figured. It takes about an hour in the
morning to get on to the swing. From 11 to 12 was always my best
output. After lunch was invariably deadly. From 12.30 until 2.30 it
seemed impossible to get up high speed. That left at best 2.30 to 4
for anything above average effort. From 4 to 5 it was hard again on
account of physical weariness. But say I could average 2,500 an hour
during the day. That would have brought me in, four kicks to each
cone, around two dollars and a quarter a day. The fact of the matter
was that after kicking 8,500 times that morning I gave up the ghost as
far as that job went. I ached body and soul. By that time I had been
on that one job several days and was sick to death of it. Each cone I
picked up to punch those four holes in made something rub along my
backbone or in the pit of my stomach or in my head--or in all of them
at once. Yet the old woman next me had been at her same job for over a
week. The last place she'd worked she'd done the identical thing six
months--preferred it to changing around. Most of the girls took that
attitude. Up to date that is the most amazing thing I have learned
from my factory experiences--the difference between my attitude toward
a monotonous job, and the average worker's. In practically every case
the girl has actually preferred the monotonous job to one with any
variety. The muscles in my legs ached so I could almost have shed
tears. The day before I had finished at 5 tired out. That morning I
had wakened up tired--the only time in my life. I could hardly kick at
all the first half hour. There was a gnawing sort of pain between my
shoulders. Suppose I really had been on piecework and had to keep up
at that breaking rate, only to begin the next morning still more worn
out? My Gawd!
Most of the girls kick with the same leg all the time. I tried
changing off now and then. With the four-hole machine, using the left
leg meant sitting a little to the right side. Also I tried once using
my left hand to give the right a rest. Thus the boss observed me.
"Now see here, m'girl, why don't you do things the way you're taught?
That ain't the right way!"
He caught me at the wrong moment. I didn't care whether the earth
opened up and swallowed me.
"I know the right way of runnin' this machine good as you do," I
fairly glared at him. "I'm sick and tired of doin' it the right way,
and if I want to do it wrong awhile for a change I guess I can!"
"You ain't goin' to get ahead in this world if you don't do things
_right_, m'girl." And he left me to my fate.
At noon that day the girls got after me. "You're a fool to work the
way you do. You never took a drink all this mornin'--jus' sit there
kickin', kickin', kickin'. Where d'ya think ya goin' to land? In a
coffin, that's where. The boss won't thank ya for killin' yourself on
his old foot press, neither. You're jus' a fool, workin' like that."
And that's just what I decided. "Lay off now and then." Yes indeed, I
was going to lay off now and then.
"I see myself breakin' my neck for thirteen dollars a week," Bella
chipped in.
"You said it!" from all the others.
So I kicked over 16,000 times that day and let it go as my final swan
song. No more breaking records for me. My head thumped, thumped,
thumped all that night. After that I strolled up front for a drink and
a gossip or back to a corner of the wash room where two or three were
sure to be squatting on some old stairs, fussing over the universe.
When the boss was up on the other end of the floor, sometimes I just
sat at my machine and did nothing. It hurt something within my soul at
first, but my head and hands and legs and feet and neck and general
disposition felt considerably better.
Lunch times suited me exactly at the brassworks, making me feel I was
getting what I was after. Three of us used to gather around Irish
Minnie, put two stools lengthwise on the floor, and squat along the
sides. Bella, who'd worked in Detroit for seven dollars a day (her
figures), a husky good-looking person; Rosie, the prettiest little
sixteen-year-old Italian girl; and I. Such conversations! One day they
unearthed Harry Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit and redid their past, present,
and probable future. We discussed whether Olive Thomas had really
committed suicide or died of an overdose of something. How many nights
a week could a girl dance and work next day? Minnie was past her
dancing days. She'd been married 'most twenty years and was getting
fat and unformed-looking; shuffled about in a pair of old white tennis
shoes and a pink boudoir cap. (No one else wore a cap at the
brassworks.) Minnie had worked fifteen years at a power press, eleven
years at her last job. She was getting the generous stipend of
fourteen dollars a week (one dollar more than the rest of us). She had
earned as much as twenty-five dollars a week in her old job at the tin
can company, piecework. Everybody about the factory told her troubles
to Minnie, who immediately told them to everybody else. It made for a
certain community interest. One morning Minnie would tell me, as I
passed her machine, "Rosie 'n' Frank have had a fight." With that cue
it was easy to appear intelligent concerning future developments.
Frank was one of the machinists, an Italian. Rosie had let him make
certain advances--put his arm around her and all that--but she told us
one lunch time, "he'd taken advantage of her," so she just sassed him
back now. Bella announced Frank was honeying around her. "Well, watch
out," Rosie advised, with the air of Bella's greataunt.
As to dancing, Bella's chum in Detroit used to go to a dance every
single night and work all day. Sundays she'd go to a show and a dance.
Bella tried it one week and had to lay off three days of the next week
before she could get back to work. Lost her twenty-one dollars. No
more of that for Bella. Just once in a while was enough for her.
They did not talk about "vamping dopes" at the brassworks. Everyone
asked you if you were "keepin' company," and talked of fellas and
sweethearts and intended husbands. That was the scale. As before, all
the married ones invariably advised against matrimony. Irish Minnie
told us one lunch time that it was a bad job, this marrying business.
"Of course," she admitted, pulling on a piece of roast pork with her
teeth, "my husband ain't what you'd call a _bad_ man." That was as far
as Minnie cared to go.
Perhaps one reason why the brassworks employed so many crooked and
decrepit was as an efficiency measure. The few males who were whole
caused so many flutterings among the female hands that it seriously
interfered with production. Rosie's real cause for turning Frank down
was that she was after Good Lookin'. Good Lookin' would not have been
so good lookin' out along the avenue, but in the setting of our third
floor he was an Adonis. Rosie worked a power press. I would miss the
clank of her machine. There she would be up in the corner of the floor
where Good Lookin' worked. Good Lookin' would go for a drink. Rosie
would get thirsty that identical moment. They would carry on an
animated conversation, to be rudely broken into by a sight of the boss
meandering up their way. Rosie would make a dash for her machine, Good
Lookin' would saunter over to his.
* * * * *
From the start I had pestered the boss to be allowed on a power press,
for two reasons: one just because I wanted to--the same reason why a
small boy wants to work at machinery; secondly, I wanted to be able to
pose at the next job as an experienced power-press worker and sooner
or later get a high-power machine. One day the boss was watching me
at the foot press. "Y'know, m'girl, I think you really got
intelligence, blessed if I don't. I'm goin' to push you right ahead.
I'll make a machinist out of you yet, see if I don't. You stay right
on here and you'll be making big money yet." (Minnie--eleven years in
her last job--fourteen dollars a week now.) Anyway, one morning he
came up--and that morning foot presses of every description had lost
all fascination for me--and he said, "You still want a power press?"
"Bet your life I do!"
And he gave me a power press deserted that morning by one of the boys.
Life looked worth living again. All I had to do to work miracles was
press ever so lightly a pedal. The main point was to get my foot off
it as quick as I got it on, or there was trouble. I wasn't to get my
fingers here or there, or "I'd never play the piano in this life." If
the belt flew off I wasn't to grab it, or I'd land up at the ceiling.
For the rest, I merely clamped a round piece on the top of a nail-like
narrow straight piece--the part that turned the lamp wick up and down.
Hundreds and thousands of them I made. The monotony did not wear on me
there; it was mixed with no physical exertion. I could have stayed on
at the brassworks the rest of my life--perhaps.
One night I was waiting at a cold, windy corner on Fifth Avenue for a
bus. None came. A green Packard limousine whirled by. The chauffeur
waved and pointed up the Avenue. In a flash I thought, now if I really
were a factory girl I'd surely jump at a chance to ride in that green
Packard. Up half a block I ran, and climbed in the front seat, as was
expected of me. He was a very nice chauffeur. His mistress, "the old
lady," was at a party and he was killing time till 11.30. Would I like
to ride till then? No, I wanted to get home--had to be up too early
for joy riding. Why so early? The factory. And before I realized it
there I sat, the factory girl. Immediately he asked me to dinner any
night I said. Now I really thought it would be worth doing; no one
else I knew had been out to dine with a chauffeur. Where would he take
me? What would he talk about? But my nerve failed me. No, I didn't
think I'd go. I fussed about for some excuse. I was sort of new in New
York--out West, it was different. There you could pick up with
anybody, go any place. "Good Gawd! girl," said the chauffeur,
earnestly, "don't try that in New York; you'll get in awful trouble!"
All through Central Park he gave me advice about New York and the
pitfalls it contained for a Westerner. He'd be very careful about me
if I'd go out with him, any place I said, and he'd get me home early
as I said. But I didn't say. I'd have to think it over. He could
telephone to me. No, he couldn't. The lady I lived with was very
particular. Well, anyhow, stormy days he'd see to it he'd be down by
the factory and bring me home. Would I be dressed just the way I was
then? Just the way--green tam and all.
The next day while I thumped out lamp parts I tried to screw my
courage up to go out with that chauffeur. Finally I decided to put it
up to the girls. I meandered back to the wash room. There on the old
stairs sat Irish Minnie and Annie, fat and ultradignified. They were
discussing who the father of the child really was. I breezed in
casually.
"Vamped a chauffeur last night."
"Go-an."
"Sure. He asked me to ride home with him an' I did."
"Got in the machine with him?"
"Sure!"
"You _fool_! You young _fool_!"
Goodness! I was unprepared for such comment.
"What did he do to ya?"
"Nothin'. An' he wants me to go to dinner with him. What'll I say?"
Both pondered. "Sure," said Minnie, "I b'lieve in a girl gettin' all
that's comin' to her, but all I want to tell ya is, chauffeurs are a
bad lot--the worst, I tell ya."
"You said it!" nodded fat Annie, as if years of harrowing experience
lay behind her. "He was all right to ya the first time so as to lure
you out the next."
"But," says Minnie, "if ya go to dinner with him, don't you go near
his machine. Steer clear of machines. Eat all ya can off him, but
don't do no ridin'."
"You said it!" again Annie backed her up. Annie was a regular sack
slinger. She could have hurled two men off Brooklyn Bridge with one
hand. "If you was as big an' strong as me you c'u'd take 'most any
chance. I'd like to see a guy try to pull anythin' on me." I'd like to
see him, too.
"Some day"--Minnie wanted to drive her advice home by concrete
illustration--"some day a chauffeur'll hold a handkerchief under your
nose with somethin' on it. When ya come to, goodness knows where
you'll be."
I began to feel a little as if I'd posed as too innocent.
"You see, out West--" I began.
"My Gawd!"--Minnie waved a hand scornfully--"don't be tryin' to tell
me all men are angels out West."
Just then Miss Hibber poked her head in and we suddenly took ourselves
out.
"You go easy, now," Minnie whispered after me.
I lacked the nerve, anyhow, and they put on the finishing touches. A
bricklayer would not have been so bad. How did I know the chauffeur
was not working for a friend of mine? That, later on, would make it
more embarrassing for him than me. I should think he would want to
wring my neck.
It was about time to find a new job, anyhow. But leaving the
brassworks is like stopping a novel in the middle. What about Rosie
and good looking Bella and her brother she was trying to rescue from
the grip of the poolroom? Mame--Mame and her kaleidoscope romances,
insults, and adventures? I just hate walking off and leaving it all.
And the boss and Miss Hibber so nice to me about everything.
Before a week is gone Minnie will be telling in an awed voice that she
knows what happened. She told me not to go out with that chauffeur. I
went, anyhow, and they found my mangled body in the gutter in
Yonkers.
III
_195 Irons "Family"_
How long, I wonder, does one study or work at anything before one
feels justified in generalizing?
I have been re-reading of late some of the writings of some of the
women who at one time or another essayed to experience first hand the
life of the working girl. They have a bit dismayed me. Is it exactly
fair, what they do? They thought, because they changed their names and
wore cheap clothes, that, presto! they were as workers and could pass
on to an uninformed reading public the trials of the worker.
(Incidentally they were all trials.) I had read in the past those
heartrending books and articles and found it ever difficult to hold
back the tears. Sometimes they were written by an immigrant, a
bona-fide worker. The tragedy of such a life in this business-ridden
land of ours tore one's soul.
An educated, cultured individual, used to a life of ease, or easier,
if she had wished to make it that, would find the life of the factory
worker well-nigh unbearable. An emotional girl longing for the higher
things of life would find factory life galling beyond words. It is to
be regretted that there are not more educated and cultured
people--that more folk do not long for the higher things of life--that
factory work is not galling to everybody. But the fact seems to be, if
we dare generalize, that there are a very great many persons in this
world who are neither educated nor "cultured" nor filled with
spiritual longings. The observation might be made that all such are
not confined to the working classes; that the country at large, from
Fifth Avenue, New York, to Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Market
Street, San Francisco, is considerably made up of folk who are not
educated or "cultured" or of necessity filled with unsatiable longings
of the soul.
It is partly due to the fact that only recently--as geologic time is
reckoned--we were swinging in trees, yearning probably for little else
than a nut to crack, a mate, a shelter of sorts, something of ape
company, and now and then a chance for a bit of a scrap. It is partly
due to the fact that for the great majority of people, the life they
live from the cradle up is not the sort that matures them with a
growing ambition or opportunity to experience the "finer" things of
life. One point of view would allow that the reason we have so few
educated, cultured, and aspiring people is due to a combination of
unfortunate circumstances to do with heredity and environment. They
would be cultured and spiritual if only....
The other viewpoint argues that the only reason we have as many cultured
and spiritual people as we have is due to a fortunate--"lucky"--combination
of circumstances to do with heredity and environment. These more
advanced folk would be far fewer in number if it had not happened
that....
It is mostly the "educated and cultured" persons who write the more
serious books we read and who tell us what they and the rest of the
world think and feel and do--or ought to do. The rest of the world
never read what they ought to think and feel and do, and go
blithely--or otherwise--on their way thinking and feeling and
doing--what they please, or as circumstances force them.
After all, the world is a very subjective thing, and what makes life
worth living to one person is not necessarily what makes it worth
living to another. Certain fundamental things everybody is apt to
want: enough to eat (but what a gamut that "enough" can run!); a mate
(the range and variety of mates who do seem amply to satisfy one
another!); a shelter to retire to nights (what a bore if we all had to
live complacently on the Avenue!); children to love and fuss over--but
one child does some parents and ten children do others, and some
mothers go into a decline if everything is not sterilized twice a day
and everybody clean behind the ears, and other mothers get just as
much satisfaction out of their young when there is only one
toothbrush, if that, for everybody (we are writing from the mother's
viewpoint and not the welfare of the offspring); some possessions of
one's own, but not all stocks and bonds and a box of jewels in the
bank, or a library, or an automobile, or even a house and lot, before
peace reigns.
Everyone likes to mingle with his kind now and then; to some it is
subjectively necessary to hire a caterer, to others peanuts suffice.
Everyone likes to wonder and ponder and express opinions--a prize
fight is sufficient material for some; others prefer metaphysics.
Everyone likes to play. Some need box seats at the Midnight Frolic,
others a set of second-hand tools, and yet others a game of craps in
the kitchen.
No one likes to be hungry, to be weary, to be sick, to be worried over
the future, to be lonely, to have his feelings hurt, to lose those
near and dear to him, to have too little independence, to get licked
in a scrap of any kind, to have no one at all who loves him, to have
nothing at all to do. The people of the so-called working class are
more apt to be hungry, weary, and sick than the "educated and
cultured" and well-to-do. Otherwise there is no one to say--because
there is no way it can be found out--that their lives by and large are
not so rich, subjectively speaking, as those with one hundred thousand
dollars a year, or with Ph. D. degrees.
Most folk in the world are not riotously happy, not because they are
poor, or "workers," but because the combination making for riotous
happiness--shall we say health, love, enough to do of what one longs
to do--is not often found in one individual. The condition of the
bedding, of the clothing; the pictures on the wall; the smells in the
kitchen--and beyond; the food on the table--have so much, and no more,
to do with it. Whether one sorts soiled clothes in a laundry, or
reclines on a chaise-longue with thirty-eight small hand-embroidered
and belaced pillows and a pink satin covering, or sits in a library
and fusses over Adam Smith, no one of the three is in a position to
pass judgment on the satisfaction or lack of satisfaction of the other
two.
All of which is something of an impatient retort to those who look at
the world through their own eyes and by no means a justification of
the _status quo_. And to introduce the statement--which a month ago
would have seemed to me incredible--that I have seen and heard as much
contentment in a laundry as I have in the drawing-room of a Fifth
Avenue mansion or a college sorority house--as much and no more. Which
is not arguing that no improvements need ever be made in laundries.
* * * * *
There was one place I was not going to work, and that was a laundry! I
had been through laundries, I had read about laundries, and it was too
much to ask anyone--if it was not absolutely necessary--to work in a
laundry. And yet when the time came, I hated to leave the laundry. I
entered the laundry as a martyr. I left with the nickname, honestly
come by without a Christian effort, of "Sunbeam." But, oh! I have a
large disgust upon me that it takes such untold effort every working
day, all over the "civilized," world to keep people "civilized." The
labor, and labor, and labor of first getting cloth woven and buttons
and thread manufactured and patterns cut and garments made up, and
fitted, or not, and then to keep those garments _clean_! We talk with
such superiority of the fact that we wear clothes and heathen savages
get along with beads and rushes. For just that some six hundred and
fifty thousand people work six days a week doing laundry work
alone--not to mention mother at the home washboard--or electric
machine. We must be clean, of course, or we would not be civilized,
but I do not see why we need be so fearfully sot up about it.
A new Monday morning came along, and I waited from 7.40 to 9.15 in a
six-by-nine entry room, with some twenty-five men and women, to answer
the advertisement:
GIRLS, OVER 18
with public school education, to learn machine ironing,
marking, and assorting linens; no experience necessary;
splendid opportunity for right parties; steady positions;
hours 8 to 5.30; half day Saturday.
What the idea was of advertising for superior education never became
clear. No one was asked how far she had progressed intellectually. I
venture to say the majority of girls there had had no more than the
rudiments of the three r's. It looked well in print. One of the girls
from the brassworks stood first in line. She had tried two jobs since
I saw her last. She did not try the laundry at all.
I was third in line. The manager himself interviewed us inside, since
the "Welfare Worker" was ill. What experience had I? I was experienced
in both foot and power presses. He phoned to the "family" floor--two
vacancies. I was signed up as press ironer, family. I wouldn't find it
so hard as the brassworks--in fact, it really wasn't hard at all. He
would start me in at fourteen dollars a week, since I was experienced,
instead of the usual twelve. At the end of two weeks, if I wasn't
earning more than fourteen dollars--it was a piecework system, with
fourteen dollars as a minimum--I'd have to go, and make room for some
one who could earn more than fourteen dollars.
I wonder if the Welfare Worker would have made the same speech. That
manager was a fraud. On our floor, at least, no one had ever been
known to earn more than her weekly minimum. He was a smart fraud. Only
I asked too many questions upstairs, he would have had me working like
a slave to hold my job.
By the time clock, where I was told to wait, stood the woman just
ahead of me in the line. She was the first really bitter soul I had
run across in factory work. Her husband had been let out of his job,
along with all workers in his plant, without notice. After January 1st
they might reopen, but at 1914 wages. There was one child in the
family. The father had hunted everywhere for work. For one week the
mother had searched. She had tried a shoe polish factory; they put her
on gluing labels. The smell of the glue made her terribly sick to her
stomach--for three days she was forced to stay in bed. Three times she
had tried this laundry. Each day, after keeping her waiting in line an
hour or so, they had told her to come back the next day. At last she
had gotten as far as the time clock. I saw her several times in the
evening line after that; she was doing "pretty well"--"shaking" on the
third floor. Her arms nearly dropped off by evening, but she sure was
glad of the thirteen dollars a week. Her husband had found nothing.
The third to join our time-clock ranks was a Porto-Rican. She could
speak no English at all. They put her at scrubbing floors for twelve
dollars a week. About 4 that afternoon she appeared on our floor, all
agitated. She needed a Spanish girl there to tell the boss she was
leaving. She was one exercised piece of temper when it finally
penetrated just what her job was.
"Family" occupied two-thirds of the sixth and top floor--the other
third was the "lunch room." Five flights to walk up every morning. But
at least there was the lunch room without a step up at noon. And it
was worth climbing five flights to have Miss Cross for a forelady.
Sooner or later I must run into a disagreeable forelady, for the
experience. To hear folks talk, plenty of that kind exist. Miss Cross
was glad I was to be on her floor. She told the manager and me she'd
noticed me that morning in line and just thought I'd made a good press
ironer. Was I Eyetalian?
She gave me the second press from the door, right in front of a
window, and a window open at the top. That was joy for me, but let no
one think the average factory girl consciously pines for fresh air.
Miss Cross ironed the lowers of a pair of pajamas to show me how it
was done, then the coat part. While she was instructing me in such
intricacies, she was deftly finding out all she could about my past,
present, and future--married or single, age, religion, and so on. And
I watched, fascinated, crumpled pajama legs, with one mighty press of
the foot, appear as perfect and flawless as on the Christmas morning
they were first removed from the holly-decorated box.
"Now you do it."
I took the coat part of a pair of pink pajamas, smoothed one arm a bit
by hand as I laid it out on the stationary side of the ironing press,
shaped somewhat like a large metal sleeve board. With both hands I
gripped the wooden bar on the upper part, all metal but the bar. With
one foot I put most of my weight on the large pedal. That locked the
hot metal part on the padded, heated, lower half with a bang. A press
on the release pedal, the top flew up--too jarringly, if you did not
keep hold of the bar with one hand. That ironed one side of one
sleeve. Turn the other side, press, release. Do the other sleeve on
two sides. Do the shoulders all around--about four presses and
releases to that. Another to one side of the front--two if it is for a
big fat man. One under the arm, two or three to the back, one under
the other arm, one or two to the other half of the front, one, two, or
three to the collar, depending on the style. About sixteen clanks
pressing down, sixteen releases flying up, to one gentleman's pajama
coat. I had the hang of it, and was left alone. Then I combined
ironing and seeing what was what. If a garment was very damp--and most
of them were--the press had to be locked several seconds before being
released, to dry it out. During those seconds one's eyes were free to
wander.
On my left, next the door, worked a colored girl with shell-rimmed
spectacles, very friendly, whose name was Irma. Of Irma later. On my
right was the most woebegone-looking soul, an Italian widow, Lucia, in
deep mourning--husband dead five weeks, with two daughters to support.
She could not speak a word of English, and in this country sixteen
years. All this I had from the forelady in between her finding out
everything there was to know about me. Bless my soul, if Lucia did not
perk up the second the forelady left, edge over, and direct a volume
of Italian at me. What won't green earrings do! Old Mrs. Reilly called
out, "Ach, the poor soul's found a body to talk to at last!" But,
alas! Lucia's hope was short lived. "What!" called Mrs. Reilly, "you
ain't Eyetalian? Well, you ought to be, now, because you look it, and
because there ought to be somebody here for Lucy to talk to!" Lucia
was diseased-looking and unkempt-looking and she ironed very badly.
Everyone tried to help her out. They instructed her with a flow of
English. When Lucia would but shake her head they used the same flow,
only much louder, several at once. Then Lucia would mumble to herself
for several minutes over her ironing. At times, late in the afternoon,
Miss Cross would grow discouraged.
"Don't you understand that when you iron a shirt you put the sleeves
over the puffer _first_?"
Lucia would shake her head and shrug her shoulders helplessly. Miss
Cross would repeat with vehemence. Then one girl would poke Lucia and
point to the puffer--"Puffer! puffer!" Another would hold up a shirt
and holler "Shirt! shirt!" and Lucia would nod vaguely. The next shirt
she did as all the others--puffer last, which mussed the ironed
part--until some one stopped her work and did a whole shirt for Lucia
correct, from beginning to end.
Next to Lucia stood Fanny, colored. She was a good-hearted, helpful,
young married thing, not over-cleanly and not overstrong. That first
morning she kept her eye on me and came to my rescue on a new article
of apparel every so often. Next to Fanny stood the three puffers for
anyone to use--oval-shaped, hot metal forms, for all gathers, whether
in sleeves, waists, skirts, or what not. Each girl had a large
egg-shaped puffer on her own table as well. Next to the puffers stood
the two sewing machines, where Spanish Sarah and colored Hattie darned
and mended.
At the side, behind the machines, stood Ida at her press. All the
presses were exactly alike. Ida was a joy to my eyes. At first glance
she appeared just a colored girl, but Ida was from Trinidad; her skin
was like velvet, her accent Spanish. As the room grew hot from the
presses and the steam, along about 4, and our feet began to burn and
grow weary, I would look at Ida. It was so easy to picture the exact
likes of her, not more than a generation or two ago, squatting under
a palm tree with a necklace of teeth, a ring through her nose, tropic
breezes playing on that velvet skin. (Please, I know naught of
Trinidad or its customs and am only guessing.) And here stood Ida,
thumping, thumping on the ironing press, nine hours, lacking ten
minutes, a day, on the sixth floor of a laundry in Harlem, that we in
Manhattan might be more civilized.
Once she told me she had lost fifteen pounds in this country. "How?"
"Ah, child," she said, "it's tha mother sickness. Don't you ever know
it? Back home in Trinidad are my mother, my father, my two little
boys. Oh, tha sickness to see them! But what is one to do when you
marry a poor man? He must come to this country to find work, and then,
after a while, I must come, too."
Behind Ida stood two other colored girls, and at the end press a white
girl who started the day after I did. She stayed only five days, and
left in disgust--told me she'd never seen such hard work. Beyond the
last press were the curtain frames and the large, round padded table
for ironing fancy table linen by hand. Then began the lunch tables.
Behind the row of presses by the windows stood the hand ironers who
did the fancy work. First came Ella, neat, old, gray-haired, fearfully
thin, wrinkled, with a dab of red rouge on each cheek. After all, one
really cannot be old if one dabs on rouge before coming to work all
day in a laundry. Ella had hand ironed all her life. She had been ten
years in her last job, but the place changed hands. She liked
ironing, she said. Ella never talked to anybody, even at lunch time.
Behind Ella ironed Anna Golden, black, who wore striped silk
stockings. She always had a bad cold. Most of the girls had colds most
of the time--from the steam, they said. Anna had spent two dollars on
medicine that week, which left her fourteen dollars. Anna was the one
person to use an electric iron. It had newly been installed. The
others heated their irons over gas flames. Every so often Miss Cross
would call out, "I smell gas!" So did everybody else. After Anna,
Lucile, blackest of all and a widow. And then--Mrs. Reilly.
Mrs. Reilly and Hattie were the characters of the sixth floor. Mrs.
Reilly was old and fat and Irish. She had stood up hand ironing so
long the part of her from the waist up seemed to have settled down
into her hips. Eleven years had Mrs. Reilly ironed in our laundry. She
was the one pieceworker in the building. In summer she could make from
twenty to twenty-five dollars a week, but she claimed she lost a great
part of it in winter. She said she was anxious to get on timework. One
afternoon I saw Mrs. Reilly iron just two things--the rest of the
while, nothing to do, she sat on an old stool with her eyes closed.
The first afternoon, Mrs. Reilly edged over to me on pretext of
ironing out a bit of something on my press.
"An' how are you makin' out?"
"All right, only my feet are awful tired. Don't your feet never get
tired?
"Shure, child, an' what good would it do for my feet to get tired when
they're all I got to stand on? An' did you ever try settin' nine hours
a day? Shure an' that would be the death of anybody.
Mrs. Reilly's indoor sport was marrying the sixth floor off. Poor
Lucia's widow's weeds of five weeks were no obstacle to Mrs. Reilly.
She frequently made the whole floor giggle, carrying on an animated
Irish conversation with Lucia over the prospects of a second
marriage--or rather, a monologue it was, since Lucia never knew she
was being talked to. If ever there was a body with a "sex complex it
was old Mrs. Reilly! When I asked her once why she didn't get busy
marrying off herself, she called back: "The Lord be praised! And
didn't I get more than enough of the one man I had?"
At least twice a week Mrs. Reilly saw a ghost, and she would tell us
about it in the morning. She laughed then, and we all laughed, but you
could easily picture the poor old fearful soul meeting that inevitable
2 A.M. guest, quaking over it in her lonely bed. Once the ghost was
extra terrifying. "It may have been the banama sauce," admitted Mrs.
Reilly. And Mrs. Reilly's feet did hurt often. She used sometimes to
take off her worn shoes and try tying her feet up in cardboards.
The other workers on our floor were Mabel and Mary, two colored girls
who finished off slight rough edges in the press ironing and folded
everything; Edna, a Cuban girl who did handkerchiefs on the mangle;
Annie, the English girl, lately married to an American. She had an
inclosure of shelves to work in and there she did the final sorting
and wrapping of family wash. Annie was the most superior person on our
floor.
And Miss Cross. In face, form, neatness, and manners Miss Cross could
have held her own socially anywhere. But according to orthodox
standards Miss Cross's grammar was faulty. She had worked always in
our laundry, beginning as a hand ironer. She knew the days when hours
were longer than nine and pay lower than fourteen dollars a week. She
remembered when the family floor had to iron Saturdays until 10 and 11
at night, instead of getting off at 12.45, as we did now. They stood
it in those days; but how? As it was now, not a girl on our floor but
whose feet ached more or less by 4 or 4.30. Ordinarily we stopped at
5.30. Everyone knew how everyone else felt that last half hour. During
a week with any holiday the girls had to work till 6.15 every night,
and Saturday afternoon. They all said--we discussed it early one
morning--that in such weeks they could iron scarcely anything that
last hour, their feet burned so.
The candy factory was hard--one stood nine hours, but the work was
very light.
The brassworks was hard--one sat, but the foot exercise was wearying
and the seat fearfully uncomfortable.
Ironing was hardest--one stood all day and used the feet for hard
pressure besides. Yet I was sorry to leave the laundry!
Perhaps it was just as well for me that Lucia could not talk English.
She might have used it on me, and already the left ear was talked off
by Irma. Miss Cross stood for just so much conversation, according to
her mood. Even if she were feeling very spry, our sixth-floor talk
could become only so general and lively before Miss Cross would call:
"Girls! girls! not so much noise!" If it were late in the afternoon
that would quiet us for the day--no one had enough energy to start up
again.
The first half hour Irma confided in me that she had cravings.
"Cravings? Cravings for what?" I asked her.
"Cravings for papers."
It sounded a trifle goatlike.
"Papers?"
"Yes, papers. I want to read papers on the lecture platform."
Whereat I heard all Irma's spiritual longings--cravings. She began in
school to do papers. That was two years ago. Since then she has often
been asked to read the papers she wrote in school before church
audiences. Just last Sunday she read one at her church in New York,
and four people asked her afterward for copies.
What was it about?
It was about the True Woman. When she wrote it, she began, "Dear
Teacher, Pupils, and Friends." But when she read it in churches she
skipped the Teacher and Pupils and began: "Dear Friends, ... now we
are met together on this memorable occasion to consider the subject of
the True Woman. First we must ask" (here Irma bangs down on a helpless
nightshirt and dries it out well beyond its time into a nice bunch of
wrinkles) "What is woman? Woman was created by God because Dear
Friends God saw how lonely man was and how lonesome and so out of
man's ribs God created woman to be man's company and helpmate...."
"Irma!" Miss Cross's voice had an oft-repeated tone to it. She called
out from the table where she checked over each girl's work without so
much as turning her head. "You ironed only one leg of these pajamas!"
Irma shuffled over on her crooked high heels and returned with the
half-done pajamas. "That fo'-lady!" sighed Irma, "she sure gets on ma
nerves. She's always hollerin' at me 'bout somethin'. She never
hollers at the other girls that way--she just picks on me."
And Irma continued with the True Woman: "There's another thing the
True Woman should have and that's a good character...."
"Irma!" (slight impatience in Miss Cross's tone) "you ironed this
nightgown on the wrong side!"
Irma looked appealingly at me. "There she goes again. She makes me
downright nervous, that fo'-lady does."
Poor, persecuted Irma!
During that first morning Irma had to iron over at least six things.
Then they looked like distraction. I thought of the manager's
introductory speech to me--how after two weeks I might have to make
way for a more efficient person.
"How long you been here?" I asked Irma.
"Four months."
"What you makin'?"
"Thirteen a week."
"Ever get extra?"
"Na."
Suspicions concerning the manager.
Irma had three other papers. One was on Testing Time. What was Testing
Time? It might concern chemical tubes. It might be a bit of romance.
And she really meant Trysting Time. No, to everybody a time comes when
he or she must make a great decision. It was about that.
"Irma! you've got your foot in the middle of that white apron!"
Another paper was on Etee-quette (q pronounced).
"Irma! you creased one of these pajama legs down the middle! Do it
over."
I pondered much during my laundry days as to why they kept Irma. She
told me she first worked down on the shirt-and-collar floor and used
to do "one hundred and ten shirts an hour," but the boss got down on
her. It took her sometimes three-quarters of an hour to do one boy's
shirt on our floor, and then one half the time she had it to do over.
Her ironing was beyond all words fearful to behold (there must be an
Irma in every laundry). She was all-mannered slow. She forgot to tag
her work. She hung it over her horse so that cuffs and apron strings
were always on the floor. Often she was late. Sometimes Miss Cross
would grow desperate--but there Irma remained. Below, in that little
entryway, were girls waiting for jobs. Did they figure that on the
whole Irma wrecked fewer garments than the average new girl, or what?
And the manager had tried to scare me!
The noon bell rings--we dash for the lunch-room line. You can purchase
pies and soup and fruit, hash and stew, coffee and tea, cafeteria
style. There are only two women to serve--the girls from the lower
floors have to stand long in line. I do not know where to sit, and by
mistake evidently get at a wrong table. No one talks to me. I surely
feel I am not where I belong. The next day I get at another wrong
table. It is so very evident I am not wanted where I am. Rather
disconcerting. I sit and ponder. I had thought factory girls so much
more friendly to one another on short acquaintance than "cultured"
people. But it is merely that they are more natural. When they feel
friendly they show it with no reserves. When they do not feel friendly
they show that without reserve. Which is where the unnaturalness of
"cultured" folk sometimes helps.
It seems etee-quette at the laundry requires each girl sit at the
table where her floor sits. That second day I was at the
shirt-and-collar table, and they, I was afterward told, are
particularly exclusive. Indeed they are.
At 12.45 the second bell rings. Miss Cross calls out, "All right,
girls!" Clank, the presses begin again, and all afternoon I iron
gentlemen's underpinnings. During the course of my days in the laundry
I iron three sets round for every man in New York and thereby acquire
a domestic attitude toward the entire male sex in the radius sending
wash to our laundry. Nobody loves a fat man. But their underclothes do
fit more easily over the press.
I iron and I iron and I iron, and along about 4.30 the first afternoon
it occurs to my cynical soul to wonder what the women are doing with
themselves with the spare time which is theirs, because I am thumping
that press down eight hours and fifty minutes a day. Not that it is
any of my business.
Also along about five o'clock it irritates me to have to bother with
what seems to me futile work. I am perfectly willing to take great
pains with a white waistcoat--in one day I learn to make a work of art
of that. But why need one fuss over the back of a nightshirt? Will a
man sleep any better for a wrinkle more or less? Besides, so soon it
is all wrinkles.
The second day I iron soft work all morning--forever men's
underclothes, pajamas, and nightshirts. Later, when I am promoted to
starched work, I tend to grow antifeminist. Why can men live and move
and have their beings satisfactorily incased in soft garments, easy to
iron, comfortable to wear, and why must women have everything starched
and trying on the soul to do up? One minute you iron a soft
nightshirt; the next a nightgown starched like a board, and the worst
thing to get through with before it dries too much that ever appears
in a laundry.
After lunch I am promoted to hospital work. All afternoon I iron
doctors' and interns' white coats and trousers. It is more interesting
doing that. But a bit hard on the soul. For it makes you think of
sickness and suffering. Yet sickness and suffering white-coated men
relieve. It makes you think, too, of having babies--that being all you
know of hospitals personally. But on such an occasion you never
noticed if the doctor had on a white coat or not, and surely spent no
time pondering over who ironed it. Yet if a doctor wore a coat Irma
ironed I think the woman would note it even in the last anguished
moments of labor.
Irma did an officer's summer uniform once. I do wish I could have
heard him when he undid the package. While Irma was pounding down on
it she was discoursing to me how, besides papers, she had cravings for
poetry.
"You remember that last snowstorm? I sat at my window and I wrote:
"Oh, beautiful snow
When will you go?
Not until spring,
When the birds sing."
There were several other stanzas. And about then Miss Cross dumped a
bundle of damp clothes into Irma's box and said, "Iron these next and
do them decent!" I peered suspiciously into the box. It was my own
family laundry!
"Hey, Irma," I said, cannily, "leave me do this batch, eh?"
I might as well be paying myself for doing up my own wash, and it
would look considerably better than if Irma ironed it.
The third day my feet are not so weary, and while I iron I mull over
ideas on women in industry. After all, have not some of us with the
good of labor at heart been a bit too theoretical? Take the welfare
idea so scoffed at by many. After all, there is more to be said for
than against. Of course, provided--It is all very well to say labor
should be allowed to look after itself, and none of this paternalism.
Of course, the paternalism can be overdone and unwisely done. But, at
least where women workers are concerned, if we are going to wait till
they are able to do things for themselves we are going to wait,
perhaps, too long for the social good while we are airing our
theories. It is something like saying that children would be better
off and have more strength of character if they learned to look after
themselves. But you can start that theory too young and have the child
die on your hands, or turn into a gutter waif. The child needs entire
looking after up to a point where he can begin little by little to
look after himself. And after he has learned to dress himself it does
not necessarily mean he can select his own food, his hour of retiring,
his habits of cleanliness and hygiene.
I look about at the laundry workers and think: Suppose we decide
nothing shall be done for these girls until they demand it themselves
and then have charge of it themselves. In other words, suppose we let
welfare work and social legislation wait on organization. The people
who talk that way are often college professors or the upper crust of
labor. They have either had no touch or lost touch with the rank and
file of women workers. It is going to be years and years and years, if
ever, before women in this country organize by and large to a point
where they can become permanently effective. What organization demands
more than any other factor is, first, a sense of oppression; second,
surplus energy. Women have been used to getting more or less the tag
end of things for some thousands of years. Why expect them suddenly,
in a second of time, as it were, to rear up and say, "We'll not stand
for this and that"? If we are going to wait for working women to feel
oppressed enough to weld themselves together into a militant class
organization, capable of demanding certain conditions and getting
them, we shall wait many a long day. In the meantime, we are putting
off the very situation we hope for--when women, as well as men, shall
have reached the point where they can play a dignified part in the
industrial scheme of things--by sending them from work at night too
weary and run down to exert themselves for any social purpose. I say
that anything and everything which can be done to make women more
capable of responsibility should be done. But the quickest and sanest
way to bring that about is not to sit back and wait for factory women
to work out their own salvation. Too few of them have the intelligence
or gumption to have the least idea how to go about it, did it ever
occur to them that things might be radically improved. (And the pity
of it is that so often telling improvements could be made with so
little effort.)
Nor is it anything but feminist sentimentality, as far as I can see,
to argue against special legislation for women. What women can do
intellectually as compared with men I am in no position to state. To
argue that women can take a place on a physical equality with man is
simply not being honest. Without sentimentalizing over motherhood, it
seems allowable to point out the fact that women are potential
mothers, and this fact, with every detail of its complexities,
feminists or no to the contrary, is a distinct handicap to women's
playing a part in the industrial field on a par with man. And society
pays more dearly for a weary woman than for a tired man.
Therefore, why not lunch rooms, and attractive lunch rooms, and good
food, well cooked? Yes, it is good business, and besides it puts a
woman on a much more efficient level to herself and society. At our
tables the girls were talking about different lunch-room conditions
they had come across in their work. One girl told of a glass company
she had worked for that recently was forced to shut down. She dwelt
feelingly on the white lunch room and the good food, and especially
the paper napkins--the only place she had worked where they gave
napkins. She claimed there was not a girl who did not want to cry when
she had to quit that factory. "Everybody loved it," she said. I tried
to find out if she felt the management had been paying for the
polished brass rails, the good food, and the napkins out of the
workers' wages. "Not on your life!" she answered. She had been a file
clerk.
Take dental clinics in the factories. Four teeth on our floor were
extracted while I was at the laundry. For a couple of days each girl
moaned and groaned and made everybody near her miserable. Then she got
Miss Cross's permission to go to some quack dentist, and out came the
tooth. Irma had two out at one dollar each. It was going to cost her
forty dollars to get them back in. A person with his or her teeth in
good condition is a far better citizen than one suffering from the
toothache.
If I had my way I should like to see a rest room in every factory
where women are employed, and some time, however short, allowed in the
middle of the afternoon to make use of it.
Eight hours is long enough for any woman to do sustained physical
work, with no possibility for overtime.
Nor have we so much as touched on what it means to live on thirteen
dollars or fourteen dollars a week.
"But then you have taken away all the arguments for organization!"
Should organization be considered as an end in and of itself, or as
one possible means to an end?
Word was passed this morning that "company" was coming! The bustling
and the hustling and the dusting! Every girl had to clean her press
from top to bottom, and we swept the floor with lightning speed. Miss
Cross dashed to her little mirror and put powder on her nose. Hattie
tied a curtain around her head to look like a Red Cross nurse. Every
time the door opened we all got expectant palpitations. We were not
allowed to speak, yet ever and anon Hattie or Mrs. Reilly would let
out some timely remarks. Whereat we all got the giggles. Miss Cross
would almost hiss, "GIRLS!" whereat we subsided. It was nerve
wracking. And the company never came! They got as far as the third
floor and gave out. But it was not until afternoon that we knew
definitely that our agony was for naught.
Lucia's machine got out of order--steam escaped at a fearful rate.
While the mechanic was fixing it he discoursed to me on the laundry.
He had been there nine months--big, capable-looking six-footer. Out of
the corner of his mouth he informed me, "Once anybody comes to work
here they never leave!" It surely does seem as if they had no end of
people who had worked there years and years. Miss Cross says they used
to have more fun than nowadays, before so many colored girls were
employed. They gave parties and dances and everyone was chummy with
everyone else.
To-day, in the midst of hilarity and all unannounced, "company" did
appear. We subsided like a schoolroom when the teacher suddenly
re-enters. A batch of women, escorted by one of the management. He
gesticulated and explained. I could not catch his words, for the noise
of the presses, though goodness knows I craned my ears. They
investigated everything. Undoubtedly their guide dwelt eloquently on
the victrola in the lunch room; it plays every noon. On their way out
two of the young women stopped by my press. "Didn't this girl iron
that nightgown nicely?" one said to the other. I felt it obligatory to
give them the "once over."
The second the door was closed I dashed for Miss Cross. "Who were them
females?" I asked her.
Miss Cross grunted. "Them were Teachers College girls." She wrinkled
her nose. "They send 'em over here often. And let me tell _you_, I
never seen _one_ of 'em with any class _yet_.... They talk about
college girls--pooh! I never seen a college girl yet looked any
classier than us laundry girls. Most of 'em don't look _as_ classy.
Only difference is, if you mixed us all up, they're gettin' educated."
One of my erstwhile jobs at the University of California had been
piloting college girls around through factories in just that fashion.
I had to laugh in my sleeve as I suspected the same remarks may have
been passed on us after our departure!
* * * * *
We have much fun at our lunch table. A switchboard operator and file
clerk from the office eats with us. She and I "guy" each other a good
deal during the meal. Miss Cross wipes her eyes and sighs: "Gee!
Ain't it fun to laugh!" and Eleanor and I look pleased with ourselves.
In the paper this morning appeared a picture of one of New York's
leading society women "experiencing the life of the working girl first
hand." She was shown in a French bonnet, a bunch of orchids at her
waist, standing behind a perfumery counter. What our table did to Mrs.
X!
"These women," fusses Miss Cross, "who think they'll learn what it's
like to be a working girl, and stand behind a perfumery counter!
Somebody's always trying to find out what it's like to be a
worker--and then they get a lot of noteriety writin' articles about
it. All rot, I say. Pity, if they really want to know what workin's
like, they wouldn't try a laundry."
"She couldn't eat her breakfast in bed if she did that!" was my
cutting remark.
"Or quit at three," from Annie.
"Hisst!" I whisper, "I'm a lady in disguise!" And I quirk my little
finger as I drink my coffee and order Eleanor to peer without to see
if my limousine waits.
We discuss rich folk and society ladies, and no one envies or is
bitter. Miss Cross guesses some of them think they get as weary flying
around to their parties and trying on clothes as we do in the laundry.
I guess she is partly right.
Then we discuss what a bore it would be not to work. At our table sit
Miss Cross, Edna (Miss Cross calls her Edner), the Cuban girl, who
refused to eat with the colored girls; Annie, the English girl, who
had worked in a retail shoe shop in London; Mrs. Reilly, who is always
morose at lunch and never speaks, except one day when she and Miss
Cross nearly came to blows over religion. Each got purple in the face.
Then it came out that there was a feud between them--two years or more
it had lasted--and neither ever speaks to the other. (Yet Mrs. Reilly
gave one dollar, twice as much as the rest of us, toward Miss Cross's
Christmas present.) Then there are three girls from the office
downstairs. Everyone there had had some experience in being out of
work or not working. To each of them at such a time life has been a
wearisome thing. Each declared she would 'most rather work at any old
thing than stay home and do nothing.
Between the first and second bells after lunch the sixth-floor girls
foregather and sit on the ironing tables, swing our heels, and pass
the time of day. To-day I start casually singing, "Jesus Wants Me for
a Sunbeam." Everyone on our floor knows the song and there the whole
lot of us sit, swinging our heels, singing at the top of our lungs, "A
_sunbeam_, a _sunbeam_, Jesus wants me for a _sunbeam_," which is how
I got the name of "Sunbeam" on our floor. Except that Miss Cross, for
some reason of her own, usually called me "Constance."
I teach them "My Heart's a Little Bird Cage," and we add that to our
repertoire. Then we go on to "Nearer, My God, to Thee," "Lead, Kindly
Light," "Rock of Ages."
It appears we are a very religious lot on our floor. All the colored
girls are Baptists. Miss Cross is an ardent Presbyterian, Annie is an
Episcopalian, Edna and Mrs. Reilly are Catholics, but Edna knows all
the hymns we daily sing.
And, lo! before many days I am startled by hearing Lucia
sing--woebegone Lucia. She sings to no tune whatever and smiles at me,
"Sunbeam, Sunbeam, Sunbeam, Sunbeam." So she has learned one English
word in sixteen years. That is better in quality than German Tessie
did. She told me, at the candy factory, that the first thing she
learned in English was "son of a gun."
But as a matter of fact Lucia does know two other words. Once I ironed
a very starched nightgown. It was a very, very large and gathered
nightgown. I held it up and made Lucia look at it.
Lucia snickered. "Da big-a, da fat-a!" said Lucia.
Mrs. Reilly let out a squeal. "She's learnt English!" Mrs. Reilly
called down the line.
"And," I announce, "I'll teach her 'da small-a, da thin-a.'"
Thereafter I held up garments to which those adjectives might apply,
and tried to "learn" Lucia additional English. Lucia giggled and
giggled and waited every evening to walk down the six flights of
stairs with me, and three blocks until our ways parted. Each time I
patted her on the back when we started off and chortled: "Hey, Lucia,
da big-a, da fat-a!" Lucia would giggle again, and that is all we
would have to say. Except one night Lucia pointed to the moon and
said, "Luna." So I make the most of knowing that much Italian.
Oh yes, Lucia and I had one other thing in common. One day at the
laundry I found myself humming a Neapolitan love song, from a victrola
record we have. Lucia's face brightened. The rest of the afternoon I
hummed the tune and Lucia sang the words of that song, much to Mrs.
Reilly's delight, who informed the floor that now, for sure, Lucia was
in love again.
There was much singing on our floor. Irma used often to croon negro
religious songs, the kind parlor entertainers imitate. I loved to
listen to her. It was not my clothes she was ironing. Hattie, down the
line, mostly dwelt on "Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam." Hattie had
straight, short hair that stood out all over her head, and a face like
a negro kewpie. She was up to mischief seven hours of the nine, nor
could Miss Cross often subdue her. Hattie had been on our floor four
years. One lively day Irma was singing with gusto "Abide With Me." For
some reason I had broken into the rather unfactory-like ballad of
"Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms," and Lucia was
caroling some Italian song lustily--all of us at one and the same
time. Finally Miss Cross called over, "For land's sakes, two of you
girls stop singing!" Since Irma and I were the only two of the three
to understand her, we made Christian martyrs of ourselves and let
Lucia have the floor.
Miss Cross was concerned once as to how I happened to know so many
hymns. Green earrings do not look particularly hymny. The fact was, I
had not thought of most of the hymns our sixth floor sang since I was
knee high. In those long ago days a religious grandmother took me once
to a Methodist summer camp meeting, at which time I resolved before my
Maker to join the Salvation Army and beat a tambourine. So when Miss
Cross asked me how I knew so many hymns, and the negro-revivalist
variety, I answered that I once near joined the Salvation Army. "You
don't say!" said the amazed Miss Cross.
One day Miss Cross and Jacobs, a Jew who bossed some department which
brought him often to our floor, to see, for instance, should they wash
more curtains or do furniture covers, had a great set-to on the
subject of religion. Jacobs was an iconoclast. Edna left her
handkerchiefs to join in. I eavesdropped visibly. Jacobs 'lowed there
was no hell. Whereat Miss Cross and Edna wanted to know the sense of
being good. Jacobs 'lowed there was no such thing as a soul. Miss
Cross and Edna fairly clutched each other.
"Then what is there that makes you happy or unhappy, if it ain't your
soul?" asked Miss Cross, clenchingly.
"Oh, hell!" grunted Jacobs, impatiently, after having just argued
there was no such place.
Jacobs uttered much heresy. Miss Cross and Edna perspired in anguish.
Then I openly joined the group.
Miss Cross turned to me. "I tell you how I feel about Christianity. If
a lot of these educated college professors and lawyers and people
like that, when they read all the books they do and are smart as they
are--if Christianity is good enough for them, it's good enough for
me!"
Jacobs was so disgusted that he left.
Whereat Edna freed her soul of all the things she wanted to say about
hell and punishment for sins. She went too far for Miss Cross. Edna
spoke of thieves and murderers and evildoers in general, and what they
ought to get in both this world and the next. Quite a group had
collected by this time.
Then Miss Cross turned to us all and said: "We're in no position to
pass judgment on people that do wrong. Look at us. Here we are, girls
what have everything. We got nice homes, enough to eat and wear, we
have 'most everything in the world we want. We don't know what it's
like to be tempted, 'cause we're so fortunate. An' I say we shouldn't
talk about people who go wrong."
That--in a laundry.
And only Edna seemed not to agree.
* * * * *
To-day at lunch the subject got around to matrimony. Eleanor said:
"Any girl can get married, if she wants to so bad she'll take any old
thing, but who wants to take any old thing?"
"Sure," I added, cockily. "Who wants to pick up with anyone they can
vamp in the Subway?"
Whereupon I get sat upon and the line of argument was interesting.
Thus it ran:
After all, why wasn't a man a girl vamped in the Subway the safest
kind? Where did working girls get a chance to meet men, anyhow? About
the only place was the dance hall, and goodness knows what kind of men
you did meet at a dance hall. They were apt to be the kind to make
questionable husbands; like as not they were "sports." But the Subway!
Now there you were more likely to pick up with the dependable kind.
Every girl at the table knew one or several married couples whose
romances had begun on the Subway, and "every one of 'em turned out
happy." One girl told of a man she could have vamped the Sunday before
in the Subway, but he was too sportily dressed and she got scared and
quit in the middle. The other girls all approved her conduct. Each
expressed deep suspicion of the "sporty" man. Each supported the
Subway romance.
I withdrew my slur on the same.
* * * * *
A guilty feeling came over me as the day for leaving the laundry
approached. Miss Cross and I had become very friendly. We planned to
do all sorts of things together. Our floor was such a companionable,
sociable place. It didn't seem square to walk off and leave those
girls, black and white, who were my friends. In the other factories I
just disappeared as suddenly as I came. After a few days I could not
stand it and penned a jiggly note to Miss Cross. Unexpectedly, I was
going to have to move to Pennsylvania (that was true, for Christmas
vacation). I hated to leave her and the girls, etc., etc. I was her
loving friend, "Constance," alias "Sunbeam."
IV
_In a Dress Factory_
Fingers poke through cold holes in the wool mittens; the old coat with
two buttons gone flaps and blows about the knees; dirt, old papers,
spiral upward on the chill gusts of a raw winter day. Close your eyes,
duck your head, and hurry on. Under one arm is clutched the paper bag
with lunch and the blue-checked apron. Under the other the old
brown-leather bag. In the old brown-leather bag is an old black purse.
In the old black purse are fifty-five cents, a key, and a safety pin.
In the old brown bag are also two sticks of Black Jack chewing gum, a
frayed handkerchief, and the crumpled list of possibilities. If you
should lose the list!
That list was copied from the Sunday _World_--from the "Female Help
Wanted, Miscellaneous." The future looked bright Sunday. Now after
four attempts to land jobs had ended in being turned down cold, the
future did not look bright at all. Because, you understand, we are
going on the assumption that the old black purse in the old brown bag
with fifty-five cents and a key and a safety pin were all that stood
between us and--well, a number of dismal things. Which was fifty-five
cents and a key and a safety pin more than some folk had that Monday
morning in New York.
You must know in days of unemployment that it is something of a
catastrophe if you do not land the first job you apply for Monday
morning. For by the time you reach the second place on the list, no
matter how fast you go, it is apt to be filled up from the group who
were waiting there from 7.30 on, as you had waited at your first hope.
The third chance is slimmer still by far, and if you keep on until 10
or 11 it is mostly just plain useless.
And if you do not land a job Monday, that whole week is as good as
lost. Of course, there is always a chance--the smallest sort of
hopeless chance--that something can be found later on in the week. The
general happening is that you stake your all on the 7.30 to 8.30 wait
Monday morning. Often it is 9 before the firm sees fit to announce it
wants no more help, and there you are with fifty-five cents and a key
and a safety pin--or less--to do till Monday next.
Strange the cruel comfort to be felt from the sight of the countless
others hurrying about hopelessly, hopefully, that raw Monday morning.
On every block where a firm had advertised were girls scanning their
already worn-looking lists, making sure of the address, hastening on.
Nor were they deterred by the procession marching away--even if some
one called, "No use goin' up there--they don't want no more." Perhaps,
after all, thought each girl to herself, the boss would want _her_.
The boss did not.
First, early in the morning and full of anticipation I made for the
bindery on West Eighteenth Street. That sounded the likeliest of the
possibilities. No need to get out the paper to make sure again of the
number. It must be where that crowd was on the sidewalk ahead, some
thirty girls and as many men and boys. Everyone was pretty
cheerful--it was twenty minutes to eight and most of us were young.
Rather too many wanted the same job, but there were no worries to
speak of. Others might be unlucky--not we. So our little group talked.
Bright girls they were, full of giggles and "gee's." Finally the
prettiest and the brightest of the lot peered in through the street
doors. "Say, w'at d'ye know? I see a bunch inside! Come on!"
In we shoved our way, and there in the dismal basement-like first
floor waited as many girls and men as on the sidewalk. "Good night! A
fat show those dead ones outside stand!" And we passed the time of day
a bit longer. The pretty and smart one was not for such tactics long.
"W'at d'ye say we go up to where the firm is and beat the rest of 'em
to it!" "You said it!" And we tore up the iron stairs. On the second
flight we passed a janitor. "Where's the bindery?"
"Eighth floor."
"My Gawd!" And up seven flights we puffed in single file, conversation
impossible for lack of wind.
The bright one opened the door and our group of nine surged in. There
stood as many girls and men as were down on the first floor and out on
the sidewalk.
"My Gawd!" There was nothing else to say.
We edged our way through till we stood by the time clock. The bright
one was right,--that was the strategic point. For at 8.30 a forelady
appeared at that very spot, just suddenly was--and in a pleasant tone
of voice announced, "We don't need any more help, male or female, this
morning!" Two scared-looking girls just in front of me screwed up
their courage and said, pleadingly, "But you told us Saturday we
should come back this morning and you promised us work!"
"Oh, all right! Then you two go to the coat room."
Everyone looked a bit dazed. At least one hundred girls and over that
many men had hopes of landing a job at that bindery--and they took on
two girls from Saturday.
We said a few things we thought, and dashed for the iron stairs. We
rushed down pell-mell, calling all the way. By this time a steady
procession was filing up. "No use. Save your breath." Some kept on,
regardless.
From the bindery I rushed to a factory making muslin underwear. By the
time I got there--only six blocks uptown--the boss looked incredulous
that I should even be applying at such an advanced hour, although it
was not yet 9. No, he needed no more. From there to the address of an
"ad" for "light factory work," whatever it might turn out to be. A
steady stream of girls coming and going. Upstairs a young woman,
without turning her head, her finger tracing down a column of
figures, called out, "No more help wanted!"
A rush to a wholesale millinery just off Fifth Avenue--the only
millinery advertising for learners. The elevator was packed going up,
the hallway was packed where we got out. The girls already there told
us newcomers we must write our names on certain cards. Also we must
state our last position, what sort of millinery jobs we expected to
get, and what salary. The girl ahead of me wrote twenty-eight dollars.
I wrote fourteen dollars. She must have been experienced in some
branch of the trade. All the rest of us at our crowded end of the
entry hall were learners. The "ad" here had read "apply after 9.30."
It was not yet 9.30. A few moments after I got there, my card just
filled out, the boss called from a little window: "No more learners.
All I want is one experienced copyist." There was apparently but one
experienced copyist in the whole lot. Everyone was indignant. Several
girls spoke up: "What made you advertise learners if you don't want
none?" "I did want some, but I got all I want." We stuffed the
elevator and went on down.
As a last try, my lunch and apron and I tore for the Subway and Park
Place, down by the Woolworth Building. By the time I reached that
bindery there were only two girls ahead of me. A man interviewed the
younger. She had had a good bit of bindery experience. The man was
noncommittal. The very refined middle-aged woman had had years of
experience. She no sooner spoke of it than the man squinted his eyes
at her and said: "You belong to the union then, don't you?" "Yes," the
woman admitted, with no hesitation, "I do, but that makes no
difference. I'm perfectly willing to work with nonunion girls. I'm a
good worker and I don't see what difference it should make." The man
turned abruptly to me. "What bindery experience have you had?" I had
to admit I had had no bindery experience, but I made it clear I was a
very experienced person in many other fields--oh, many other--and so
willing I was, and quick to learn.
"Nothing doing for you."
But he had advertised for learners.
"Yes, but why should I use learners when I turned away over seventy
experienced girls this morning, ready to do any work for any old
price?"
I was hoping to hear what else he might say to the union member, but
the man left me no excuse for standing around.
I ate my lunch at home.
When the next Sunday morning came, again the future looked bright. I
red-penciled eleven "ads"--jobs in three different dress factories,
sewing buttons on shoes. You see, I have to pick only such "ads" as
allow for no previous experience--it is only unskilled workers I am
eligible to be among as yet; girls to pack tea and coffee, to work for
an envelope company, in tobacco, on sample cards; girls to pack hair
nets, learners on fancy feathers, and learners to operate book-sewing
machines.
The rest of the newspaper told much of trouble in the garment trades.
I decided to try the likeliest dress factory first. I was hopeful, but
not enough so to take my lunch and apron.
At the first dress factory address before eight o'clock there were
about nine girls ahead of me. We waited downstairs by the elevator, as
the boss had not yet arrived. The "ad" I was answering read:
"WANTED--Bright girls to make themselves useful around dress factory."
Some of us looked brighter than others of us.
Upstairs in the hall we assembled to wait upon the pleasure of the
boss. The woodwork was white, the floor pale blue--it was all very
impressive.
Finally, second try, the boss glued his eye on me.
"Come in here." A white door closed behind us, and we stood in a
little room which looked as if a small boy of twelve had knocked it
together out of old scraps and odds and ends, unpainted.
"What experience you have had?"
He was a nice-looking, fairly young Jew, who spoke with a considerable
German accent.
"None in a dress factory, but ..." and I regaled him with the vast
amount of experience in other lines that was mine, adding that I had
done a good deal of "private dressmaking" off and on, and also
assuring him, almost tremblingly, I did so want to land a job--that I
was the most willing of workers.
"What you expect to get?"
"What will you pay me?"
"No, I'm asking you. What do you expect to get?"
"Fourteen dollars."
"All right, go on in."
If the room where the boss had received me could have been the work of
a twelve-year-old, the rest of the factory must have been designed and
executed by a boy of eight, or a lame, halt, and blind carpenter just
tottering to his grave. There was not a straight shelf. There was not
a straight partition. Boards of various woods and sizes had been used
and nothing had ever been painted. Such doors as existed had odd ways
of opening and closing. The whole place looked as if it had cost about
seven dollars and twenty-nine cents to throw together. But, ah! the
white and pale blue of the show rooms!
* * * * *
The dress factory job was like another world compared with candy,
brass, and the laundry. In each of those places I had worked on one
floor of a big plant, doing one subdivided piece of labor among
equally low-paid workers busy at the same sort of job as myself. Of
what went on in the processes before and after the work we did, I knew
and saw nothing. We packed finished chocolates; we punched slots in
already-made lamp cones; we ironed already washed, starched, and
dampened clothes. Such work as we did took no particular skill, though
a certain improvement in speed and quality of work came with practice.
One's eyes could wander now and then, one's thoughts could wander
often, and conversation with one's neighbors was always possible.
Behold the dress factory, a little complete world of its own on one
small floor where every process of manufacture, and all of it skilled
work, could be viewed from any spot. Not quite every process--the
designer had a room of her own up front nearer where the woodwork was
white.
"Ready-made clothing!" It sounds so simple--just like that. Mrs. Fine
Lady saunters into a shop, puts up her lorgnette, and lisps, "I'd like
to see something in a satin afternoon dress." A plump blonde in
tight-fitting black with a marcel wave trips over to mirrored doors,
slides one back, takes a dress off its hanger--and there you are! "So
much simpler than bothering with a dressmaker."
But whatever happened to get that dress to the place where the blonde
could sell it? "Ready-made," indeed! There has to be a start some
place before there is any "made" to it. It was at that point in our
dress factory when the French designer first got a notion into her
head--she who waved her arms and gesticulated and flew into
French-English rages just the way they do on the stage. "_Mon Dieu!
Mon Dieu!_"--gray-haired Madame would gasp at our staid and portly Mr.
Rogers. Ada could say "My Gawd!" through her Russian nose to him and
it had nothing like the same wilting effect.
Ready-made--yes, ready-made. But first Madame got her notion, and then
she and her helpers concocted the dress itself. A finished article, it
hung inside the wire inclosure where the nice young cutter kept
himself and his long high table. The cutter took a look at the
finished garment hanging on the side of his cage, measured a bit with
his yardstick, and then proceeded to cut the pattern out of paper.
Whereupon he laid flat yards and yards of silks and satins on his
table and with an electric cutter sliced out his parts. One
mistake--one slice off the line--_Mon Dieu!_ it's too terrible to
think of! All these pieces had to be sorted according to sizes and
colors, and tied and labeled. (Wanted--bright and useful girl right
here.)
Next came the sewing machine operators (electric power)--a long narrow
table, nine machines at a side, but not more than fourteen operators
were employed--thirteen girls and one lone young man. They said that
on former piece rates this man used to make from ninety dollars to one
hundred dollars a week. The operators were all well paid, especially
by candy, brass, and laundry standards, but they were a skilled lot. A
very fine-looking lot too--some of the nicest-looking girls I've seen
in New York. Everyone had a certain style and assurance. It was good
for the eyes to look on them after the laundry thirteen-dollar-a-week
type.
When the first operators had done their part the dresses were handed
over to the drapers. There were two drapers; they were getting around
fifty dollars a week before the hard times. One of the drapers was as
attractive a girl as I ever saw any place--bobbed hair, deep-set eyes,
a Russian Jewess with features which made her look more like an
Italian. She spoke English with hardly any accent. She dressed very
quietly and in excellent taste. All day long the two draped dresses on
forms--ever pinning and pinning. The drapers turned the dresses over
to certain operators, who finished all machine sewing. The next work
fell to the finishers.
In that same end of the factory sat the four finishers, getting "about
twenty dollars a week," but again no one seemed sure. Two were
Italians who could talk little English. One was Gertie, four weeks
married--"to a Socialist." Gertie was another of the well-dressed
ones. If you could know these dress factory girls you would realize
how, unless gifted with the approach of a newspaper reporter--and I
lack that approach--it was next to impossible to ask a girl herself
what she was earning. No more than you could ask a lawyer what his
fees amounted to. The girls themselves who had been working long
together in the same shop did not seem to know what one another's
wages were. It was a new state of affairs in my factory experience.
The finishers, after sewing on all hooks and eyes and fasteners and
doing all the remaining handwork on the dresses, turned them over to
the two pressers, sedate, assured Italians, who ironed all day long
and looked prosperous and were very polite.
They brought the dresses back to Jean and her helper--two girls who
put the last finishing touches on a garment before it went into the
showroom--snipping here and there, rough edges all smoothed off. It
was to Jean the boss called my second morning, very loud so all could
hear: "If you find anything wrong mit a dress, don't _look_ at it,
don't _bodder wid_ it--jus' t'row it in dere faces and made dem do it
over again! It's not like de old days no more!" (Whatever he meant by
that.) So--there was your dress, "ready-made."
Such used to be the entire factory, adding the two office girls; the
model, who was wont to run around our part of the world now and then
in a superior fashion, clad in a scanty pale-pink-satin petticoat
which came just below her knees and an old gray-and-green sweater;
plus various male personages, full of business and dressed in their
best. Goodness knows what all they did do to keep the wheels of
industry running--perhaps they were salesmen. They had the general
appearance of earning at least ten to twenty thousand dollars a year.
It may possibly have risen as high as two thousand.
And Peters--who was small though grown, and black, and who cleaned up
with a fearful dust and snitched lead pencils if you left them around.
At present, in addition, there were the sixteen crochet beaders,
because crochet beading is stylish in certain quarters--this
"department" newly added just prior to my arrival. But before the
beaders could begin work the goods had to be stamped, and before they
could be stamped Mr. Rogers (he was middle-aged and a dear and an
Italian and his name wasn't "Rogers," but some unpronounceable thing
the Germans couldn't get, so it just naturally evolved into something
that began with the same letter which they could pronounce) had to
concoct a design. He worked in the cage at a raised end of the
cutting table. He pricked the pattern through paper with a machine, at
a small table outside by the beaders, that was always piled high with
a mess of everything from spools to dresses, which Mr. Rogers
patiently removed each time to some spot where some one else found
them on top of something she wanted, and less patiently removed them
to some other spot, where still less patiently they were found in the
way and dumped some place else. Such was life in one factory. And Ada
would call out still later: "Mr. Rogers, did you see a pile of dresses
on this table when you went to work?"
Whereat in abject politeness and dismay Mr. Rogers would dash from
"inside" to "outside" and explain in very broken English that there
had been some things on the table, but "vaire carefully" he had placed
them--here. And to Mr. Rogers's startled gaze the pile had
disappeared.
If a dress had to be beaded, Mr. Rogers took the goods after the
cutter finished his job, and he and his helpers stamped the patterns
on sleeves, front and back, skirt, by rubbing chalk over the paper.
Upon the scene at this psychological moment enters the bright girl to
make herself useful. The bright girl "framed-up" the goods for the
beaders to work on. (In fact, you noted she entered even earlier, by
helping the cutter tie the bundles according to size and color.)
"Frame-up" means taking boards the proper length with broad tape
tacked along one edge. First you pin the goods lengthwise, pins close
together. Then you find side boards the desired length and pin the
goods along the sides. Then with four iron clamps you fasten the
corners together, making the goods as tight as a drum. There is a real
knack to it, let me tell you--especially when it com
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