THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

MRS. JOHN VAN VORST AS "ESTHER KELLY"
Wearing the costume of the pickle factory

MISS MARIE VAN VORST AS " B E L L BALLARD"
At work in a shoe factory

The Woman Who
Toils
Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen
as Factory Girls
BY

MRS. JOHN VAN VORST and
MARIE VAN VORST

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK:

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1903

Copyright, 1902, 1903, by
John Wanamaker
Copyright, 1903, by
Doubleday, Page & Company
Published, February, 1903

DEDICATION

To Mark Twain
In loving tribute to his genius, and
to his human sympathy, which in
Pathos and Seriousness, as well as
in Mirth and Humour, have made
him kin with the whole world:—
this book is inscribed by
BESSIE and

MARIE VAN VORST.

80281?

PREFATORY LETTER FROM THEODORE
ROOSEVELT
Written after reading Chapter III. when published serially
W H I T E HOUSE, WASHINGTON, October 18,1902.

My Dear Mrs. Van Vorst:
I must write you a line to say how much I have appreciated your article, "The Woman Who Toils."
But to
me there is a most melancholy side to it, when you touch
upon what is fundamentally infinitely more important
than any other question in this country—that is, the question of race suicide, complete or partial.
An easy, good-natured kindliness, and a desire to he
"independent"—that is, to live one's life purely according
to one's own desires—are in no sense substitutes for the
fundamental virtues, for the practice of the strong, racial
qualities without which there can he no strong races—the
qualities of courage and resolution in both men and women,
of scorn of what is mean, base and selfish, of eager desire to
work or fight or suffer as the case may be provided the end
to be gained is great enough, and the contemptuous putting
aside of mere ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere avoidance
of toil and worry. I do not know whether I most pity or
most despise the foolish and selfish man or woman who
does not understand that the only things really worth having
vii

viii

PREFATORY LETTER

in life are those the acquirement of which normally means
cost and effort. If a man or woman, through no fault of
his or hers, goes throughout life denied those Highest of all
joys which spring only from home life, from the having
and bringing up of many healthy children, I feel for them
deep and respectful sympathy—the sympathy one extends
to the gallant fellow killed at the beginning of a campaign,
or the man who toils hard and is brought to ruin by the
fault of others. But the man or woman who deliberately
avoids marriage, and has a heart so cold as to know no
passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike
having children, is in effect a criminal against the race,
and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all
healthy people.
^
Of course no one quality makes a good citizen, and no
one quality will save a nation. But there are certain great
qualities for the lack of which no amount of intellectual
brilliancy or of material prosperity or of easiness of life
can atone, and which show decadence and corruption in
the nation just as much if they are produced by selfishness
and coldness and ease-loving laziness among comparatively poor people as if they are produced by vicious or
frivolous luxury in the rich. If the men of the nation are
not anxious to work in many different ways, with all their
might and strength, and ready and able to fight at need,
and anxious to be fathers of families, and if the women do
not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be
a good wife and mother, why, that nation has cause to be
alarmed about its future.

PREFATORY LETTER

ix

There is no physical trouble among us Americans, The
trouble with the situation you set forth is one of character,
and therefore we can conquer it if we only will.
Very sincerely yours,
THEODORE

ROOSEVELT.

PREFATORY

NOTE

A portion of the material in this book
appeared serially under the same title in
Everybody's Magazine. Nearly a third
of the volume has not been published in
any form.

CONTENTS

By MRS. JOHN VAN VORST
CHAPTER

I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.

PAGE

Introductory
.
.
.
.
.
.
In a Pittsburg Factory
. . . .
Perry, a New York Mill Town
.
Making Clothing in Chicago .
The Meaning of It All . , .
.

o
,

I
7
59
99
155

By MARIE VAN VORST
CHAPTER

PAGE

VI. Introductory
VII. A Maker of Shoes at Lynn .
VIII. T h e Southern Cotton Mills .

•

.

165
169
215

T h e Child in the Southern Mills .

.

275

.

.

The Mill Village
T h e Mill

IX.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Miss Marie and Mrs. John Van Vorst in their factory
COStUmeS, >

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Frontispiece
FACING PAGE

" The streets are covered with snow, and over the snow the
soot falls softly like a mantle of perpetual mourning,"

12

" Waving arms of smoke and steam, a symbol of spent
energy, of the lives consumed, and vanishing again,"

58

" T h e y trifle with love,"

70

After Saturday nights shopping,

84

Sunday evening at Silver Lake,
" The breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid,
heavy with the odour of death as it blew across
the stockyards/'

96

In a Chicago theatrical costume factory,

.

.

.114

Chicago types,
The rear of a Chicago tenement,

102

128
.

144

A delicate type of beauty at work in a Lynn shoe factory,

172

One of the swells of the factory : a very expert "vamper,"
an Irish girl, earning from $10 to $14 a week,

.

172

" L e a r n i n g " a new hand,

184

The window side of Miss K.'s parlour at Lynn, Mass.,

196

L I S T O F ILLUSTRATIONS

(Continued)
FACING PAGE

"Fancy gumming"

210

An all-round, experienced hand,

210

"Mighty mill—pride of the architect and the commercial
magnate,"
" The Southern mill-hand's face is unique, a fearful type,"

220
240

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
CHAPTER I—INTRODUCTORY
BY

MRS. JOHN VAN VORST

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

ANY journey into the world, any research in
literature, any study of society, demonstrates the
existence of two distinct classes designated as the
rich and the poor, the fortunate and the unfortunate, the upper and the lower, the educated and
the uneducated—and a further variety of opposing
epithets. Few of us who belong to the former category have come into more than brief contact with
the labourers who, in the factories or elsewhere, gain
from day to day a livelihood frequently insufficient
for their needs. Yet all of us are troubled by their
struggle, all of us recognize the misery of their
surroundings, the paucity of their moral and esthetic
inspiration, their lack of .opportunity for physical
development. All of us have a longing, pronounced
or latent, to help them, to alleviate their distress,
to better their condition in some, in every way.
Now concerning this unknown class whose oppression we deplore we have two sources of information:
the financiers who, for their own material advancement, use the labourer as a means, and the philanthropists who consider the poor as objects of charity,
3

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
to be treated sentimentally, or as economic cases to
be studied theoretically. It is not by economics nor
by the distribution of bread alone that we can find
a solution for the social problem. More important
for the happiness of man is the hope we cherish of
eventually bringing about a reign of justice and
equality upon earth.
It is evident that, in order to render practical aid
to this class, we must live among them, understand
their needs, acquaint ourselves with their desires,
their hopes, their aspirations, their fears. We must
discover and adopt their point of view, put ourselves
in their surroundings, assume their burdens, unite
with them in their daily effort. In this way alone,
and not by forcing upon them a preconceived ideal,
can we do them real good, can we help them to find
a moral, spiritual, esthetic standard suited to their
condition of life. Such an undertaking is impossible
for most. Sure of its utility, inspired by its practical importance, I determined to make the sacrifice
it entailed and to learn by experience and observation what these could teach. I set out to surmount
physical fatigue and revulsion, to place my intellect
and sympathy in contact as a medium between the
working girl who wants help and the more fortunately situated who wish to help her. In the papers
which follow I have endeavoured to give a faithful
picture of things as they exist, both in and out of
the factory, and to suggest remedies that occurred

INTRODUCTORY

5

to me as practical. My desire is to act as a mouthpiece for the woman labourer. I assumed her mode
of existence with the hope that I might put into
words her cry for help. It has been my purpose
to find out what her capacity is for suffering and for
joy as compared with ours; what tastes she has, what
ambitions, what the equipment of woman is as compared to that of man: her equipment as determined,
ist. By nature,
2d. By family life,
3d. By social laws;
what her strength is and what her weaknesses are
as compared with the woman of leisure; and finally,
to discern the tendencies of a new society as manifested by its working girls.
After many weeks spent among them as one of
them I have come away convinced that no earnest
effort for their betterment is fruitless. I am hopeful
that my faithful descriptions will perhaps suggest,
to the hearts of those who read, some ways of
rendering personal and general help to that
class who, through the sordidness and squalour of
their material surroundings, the limitation of their
opportunities, are condemned to slow death—
mental, moral, physical death! If into their
prison's midst, after the reading of these lines, a
single death pardon should be carried, my work
shall not have been in vain.

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY

CHAPTER II
I N A PITTSBURG FACTORY

IN choosing the scene for my first experiences, I
decided upon Pittsburg, as being an industrial centre
whose character was determined by its working
population. It exceeds all other cities of the country
in the variety and extent of its manufacturing
products. Of its 321,616 inhabitants, 100,000 are
labouring men employed in the mills. Add to these
the great number of women and girls who work in the
factories and clothing shops, and the character of the
place becomes apparent at a glance. There is, moreover, another reason which guided me toward this
Middle West town without its like. This land which
we are accustomed to call democratic, is in reality
composed of a multitude of kingdoms whose despots
are the employers—the multi-millionaire patrons—•
and whose serfs are the labouring men and women.
The rulers are invested with an authority and a
power not unlike those possessed by the early barons,
the feudal lords, the Lorenzo de Medicis, the Cheops;
but with this difference, that whereas Pharaoh by
his unique will controlled a thousand slaves, the steel
magnate uses, for his own ends also, thousands of
9

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
separate wills. It was a submissive throng who built
the pyramids. The mills which produce half the
steel the world requires are run by a collection of
individuals. Civilization has undergone a change.
The multitudes once worked for one; now each man
works for himself first and for a master secondarily.
In our new society where tradition plays no part,
where the useful is paramount, where business
asserts itself over art and beauty, where material
needs are the first to be satisfied, and where the
country's unclaimed riches are our chief incentive
to effort, it is not uninteresting to find an analogy
with the society in Italy which produced the Renaissance. Diametrically opposed in their ideals, they
have a common spirit. In Italy the rebirth was of
the love of art, and of classic forms, the desire to
embellish—all that was inspired by culture of the
beautiful; the Renaissance in America is the rebirth
of man's originality in the invention of the useful,
the virgin power of man's wits as quickened in the
crude struggle for life. Florence is par excellence
the place where we can study the Italian Renaissance;
Pittsburg appealed to me as a most favourable spot
to watch the American Renaissance, the enlivening
of energies which give value to a man devoid of
education, energies which in their daily exercise with
experience generate a new force, a force that makes
our country what it is, industrially and economically.
So it was toward Pittsburg that I first directed my

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
steps, but before leaving New York I assumed my
disguise. In the Parisian clothes I am accustomed
to wear I present the familiar outline of any
woman of the world. With the aid of coarse woolen
garments, a shabby felt sailor hat, a cheap piece of
fur, a knitted shawl and gloves I am transformed
into a working girl of the ordinary type. I was born
and bred and brought up in the world of the fortunate—I am going over now into the world of the
unfortunate. I am to share their burdens, to lead
their lives, to be present as one of them at the
spectacle of their sufferings and joys, their ambitions
and sorrows.
I get no farthef than the depot when I observe
that I am being treated as though I were ignorant
and lacking in experience. As a rule the gateman
says a respectful "To the right" or "To the left, ,,
and trusts to his well-dressed hearer's intelligence.
A word is all that a moment's hesitation calls forth.
To the working girl he explains as follows: "Now
you take your ticket, do you understand, and I'll
pick up your money for you; you don't need to pay
anything for your ferry—just put those three cents
back in your pocket-book and go down there to
where tjiat gentleman is standing and he'll direct
you to your train."
This without my having asked a question. I had
divested myself of a certain authority along with my
good clothes, and I had become one of a class which,

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
as the gateman had found out, and as I find out
later myself, are devoid of all knowledge of the
world and, aside from their manual training, ignorant on all subjects.
My train is three hours late, which brings me at
about noon to Pittsburg. I have not a friend or an
acquaintance within hundreds of miles. With my
bag in my hand I make my way through the dark,
busy streets to the Young Women's Christian
Association. It is down near a frozen river. The
wind blows sharp and biting over the icy water; the
streets are covered with snow, and over the snow the
soot falls softly like a mantle of perpetual mourning.
There is almost no traffic. Innumerable tramways
ring their way up and down wire-lined avenues;
occasionally a train of freight cars announces itself
with a warning bell in the city's midst. It is a black
town of toil, one man in every three a labourer.
They have no need for vehicles of pleasure. The
trolleys take them to their work, the trains transport the products of the mills.
I hear all languages spoken: this prodigious town
is a Western bazaar where the nations assemble not
to buy but to be employed. The stagnant scum of
other countries floats hither to be purified in the
fierce bouillon of live opportunity. It is a cosmopolitan procession that passes me: the dusky
Easterner with a fez of Astrakhan, the gentle-eyed
Italian with a shawl of gay colours, the loose-lipped

THE STREETS ARE COVERED WITH SNOW, AND OVER THE SNOW THE
LIKE A MANTLE OF PERPETUAL MOURNING"

SOOT FALLS SOFTLY

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
Hungarian, the pale, mystic Swede, the German
with wife and children hanging on his arm.
In this giant bureau of labour all nationalities
gather, united by a common bond of hope, animated
by a common chance of prosperity, kindred through
a common effort, fellow-citizens in a new land of
freedom.
At the central office of the Young Women's
Christian Association I receive what attention a
busy secretary can spare me. She questions and I
answer as best I can.
"What is it you want ?"
"Board and work in a factory."
"Have you ever worked in a factory?"
"No, ma'am."
"Have you ever done any housework?"
She talks in the low, confidential tone of those
accustomed to reforming prisoners and reasoning
with the poor.
"Yes, ma'am, I have done housework."
"What did you make ?"
"Twelve dollars a month."
" I can get you a place where you will have a
room to yourself and fourteen dollars a month. Do
you want it?"
"No, ma'am."
"Are you making anything now ?"
"No, ma'am."
"Can you afford to pay board ?"

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
"Yes, as I hope to get work at once."
She directs me to a boarding place which is at
the same time a refuge for the friendless and a
shelter for waifs. The newly arrived population of
the fast-growing city seems unfamiliar with the
address I carry written on a card. I wait on cold
street corners, I travel over miles of half-settled
country, long stretches of shanties and saloons
huddled close to the trolley line. The thermometer
is at zero. Toward three o'clock I find the waif
boarding-house.
The matron is in the parlour hovering over a
gas stove. She has false hair, false teeth, false
jewelry, and the dry, crabbed, inquisitive manner
of the idle who are entrusted with authority. She
is there to direct others and do nothing herself, to
be cross and make herself dreaded. In the distance
I can hear a shrill, nasal orchestra of children's
voices. I am cold and hungry. I have as yet no
job. The noise, the sordidness, the witchlike'matron
annoy me. I have a sudden impulse to flee, to seek
warmth and food and proper shelter—to snap my
fingers at experience and be grateful I was born
among the fortunate. Something within me calls
Courage ! I take a room at three dollars a week
with board, put my things in it, and while my feet
yet ache with cold I start to find a factory, a
pickle factory, which, the matron tells me, is run
by a Christian gentleman.

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY

15

I have felt timid and even overbold at different
moments in my life, but never so audacious as
on entering a factory door marked in gilt letters:
"Women Employees''
The Cerberus between me and the fulfilment
of my purpose is a gray-haired timekeeper with
kindly eyes. He sits in a glass cage and about him
are a score or more of clocks all ticking soundly and
all surrounded by an extra dial of small numbers
running from one to a thousand. Each number
means a workman—each tick of the clock a moment
of his life gone in the service of the pickle company.
I rap on the window of the glass cage. It opens.
"Do you need any girls?" I ask, trying not to
show my emotion.
"Ever worked in a factory ?"
"No, sir; but I'm very handy."
"What have you done?"
"Housework," I respond with conviction, beginning to believe it myself.
"Well," he says, looking at me, "they need help
up in the bottling department; but I don't know as it
would pay you—they don't give more than sixty
or seventy cents a day."
1
' I am awfully anxious for work,'' I say. '' Couldn't
I begin and get raised, perhaps?"
"Surely—there is always room for those who
show the right spirit. You come in to-morrow
morning at a quarter before seven. You can try it,

16

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

and you mustn't get discouraged; there's plenty of
work for good workers/'
The blood tingles through my cold hands. My
heart is lighter. I have not come in vain. I have a
place!
When I get back to the boarding-house it is
twilight. The voices I had heard and been annoyed
by have materialized. Before the gas stove there
are nine small individuals dressed in a strange combination of uniform checked aprons and patent
leather boots worn out and discarded by the babies
of the fortunate. The small feet they encase are
crossed, and the freshly washed faces are demure, as
the matron with the wig frowns down into a newspaper from which she now and-then hisses a command to order. Three miniature members are
rocking violently in tiny rocking chairs.
"Quit rocking!" the false mother cries at them.
"You make my head ache. Most of 'em have no
parents,'' she explains to me. "None of 'em have
homes."
Here they are, a small kingdom, not wanted,
unwelcome, unprovided for, growled at and grumbled over. Yet each is developing in spite of chance;
each is determining hour by hour his heritage from
unknown parents. The matron leaves us; the
rocking begins again. Conversation is animated.
The three-year-old baby bears the name of a threeyear-old hero. This "Dewey" complains in a plain-

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
tive voice of a too long absent mother. His rosy
lips are pursed out even with his nose. Again and
again he reiterates the refrain: "My mamma don't
never come to see me. She don't bring me no
toys." And then with pride, "My mamma buys rice
and tea and lots of things," and dashing to the window as a trolley rattles by, "My mamma comes in the
street cars, only," sadly, "she don't never come."
Not one of them has forgotten what fate has
willed them to do without. At first they look
shrinkingly toward my outstretched hand. Is it
coming to administer some punishment ? Little by
little they are reassured, and, gaining in confidence,
they sketch for me in disconnected chapters the
short outlines of their lives.
"I've been to the hospital," says one, "and so's
Lily. I drank a lot of washing soda and it made me
sick."
Lily begins her hospital reminiscences. " I had^
typhoy fever—I was in the childun's ward
awful long, and one night they turned down the
lights—it was just evening—and a man came in and
he took one of the babies up in his arms, and we all
said, * What's the row? What's the row?' and he
says 'Hush, the baby's dead.' And out in the hall
there was something white, and he carried the baby
and put it in the white thing, and the baby had a
doll that could talk, and he put that in the white
thing too, right alongside o' the dead baby. Another

18

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

time," Lily goes on, "there was a baby in a crib
alongside of mine, and one day he was takin' his
bottle, and all of a suddint he choked, and he kept
on chokin' and then he died, and he was still takin'
his bottle."
Lily is five. I see in her and in her companions
a familiarity not only with the mysteries but with
the stern realities of life. They have an understanding look at the tiiention of death, drunkenness and all domestic difficulties or irregularities.
Their vocabulary and conversation image the violent and brutal side of existence—the only one with
which they are acquainted.
At bedtime I find my way upward through dark
and narrow stairs that open into a long room with a
slanting roof. It serves as nursery and parlour.
In the dull light of a stove and an oil lamp four or
five women are seated with babies on their knees.
They have the meek look of those who doom themselves to acceptance of misfortune, the flat, resigned
figures of the overworked. Their loose woolen jackets
hang over their gaunt shoulders; their straight hair
is brushed hard and smooth against high foreheads.
One baby lies a comfortable bundle in its mother's
arms; one is black in the face after a spasm of coughing ; one howls its woes through a scarlet mask. The
corners of the room are filled with the drones—
those who "work for a bite of grub." The cook, her
washing done, has piled her aching bones in a heap;

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
her drawn face waits like an indicator for some fresh
signal to a new fatigue. Mary, the woman-of-allwork, who has spent more than one night within a
prison's walls, has long ago been brutalized by the
persistence of life in spite of crime; her gray hair
ripples like sand under receding waves; her profile
is strong and fine, but her eyes have a film of
misery over them—dull and silent, they deaden
her face. And Jennie, the charwoman, is she a
cripple or has toil thus warped her body? Her
arms, long and withered, swing like the broken
branches of a gnarled tree; her back is twisted and
her head bowed toward earth. A stranger to rest,
she seems a mechanical creature wound up for
work and run down in the middle of a task.
What could be hoped for in such surroundings?
With every effort to be clean the dirt accumulates
faster than it can be washed away. It was impossible, I found by my own experience, to be really
clean. There was a total absence of beauty in
everything—not a line of grace, not a pleasing sound,
not an agreeable odour anywhere. One could get
used to this ugliness, become unconscious even of
the acrid smells that pervade the tenement. It
was probable my comrades felt at no time the
discomfort I did, but the harm done them is not the
physical suffering their condition causes, but the
moral and spiritual bondage in which it holds them.
They are not a class of drones made differently

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
from us. I saw nothing to indicate that they were
not born with like capacities to ours. As our bodies
accustom themselves to luxury and cleanliness,
theirs grow hardened to deprivation and filth. As
our souls develop with the advantages of all that
constitutes an ideal—an intellectual, esthetic and
moral ideal—their souls diminish under the oppression of a constant physical effort to meet
material demands. The fact that they become
physically callous to what we consider unbearable
is used as an argument for their emotional insensibility. I hold such an argument as false. From all
I saw I am convinced that, given their relative preparation for suffering and for pleasure, their griefs and
their joys are the same as ours in kind and in degree.
When one is accustomed to days begun at will by
the summons of a tidy maid, waking oneself at halfpast five means to be guardian of the hours until this
time arrives. Once up, the toilet I made in the
nocturnal darkness of my room can best be described
by the matron's remark to me as I went to bed: "If
you want to wash," she said, "you'd better wash
now; you can't have no water in your room, and there
won't be nobody up when you leave in the morning."
My evening bath is supplemented by a whisk of the
sponge at five.
Without it is black—a more intense black than
•night's beginning, when all is astir. The streets are

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
silent, an occasional train whirls past, groups of men
hurry hither and thither swinging their arms, rubbing their ears in the freezing air. Many of them
have neither overcoats nor gloves. Now and then
a woman sweeps along. Her skirts have the same
swing as my own short ones; under her arm she
carries a newspaper bundle whose meaning I have
grown to know. My own contains a midday meal:
two cold fried oysters, two dried preserve sandwiches, a pickle and an orange. My way lies across
a bridge. In the first gray of dawn the river shows
black under its burden of ice. Along its troubled
banks innumerable chimneys send forth their hot
activity, clouds of seething flames, waving arms of
smoke and steam—a symbol of spent energy, of the
lives consumed and vanishing again, the sparks that
shine an instant against the dark sky and are spent
forever.
As I draw nearer the factory I move with a stream
of fellow workers pouring toward the glass cage of the
.timekeeper. He greets me and starts me on my
upward journey with a wish that I shall not get discouraged, a reminder that the earnest worker always
makes a way for herself.
" What will you do about your name? " " What
will you do with your hair and your hands ? "
" How can you deceive people?'' These are some
of the questions I had been asked by my friends.
Before any one had cared or needed to know my

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
name it was morning of the second day, and my
assumed name seemed by that time the only one I
had ever had. As to hair and hands, a half-day's
work suffices for their undoing. And my disguise is
so successful I have deceived not only others but
myself. I have become with desperate reality a
factory girl, alone, inexperienced, friendless. I am
making $4.20 a week and spending 4 3 of this for
board alone, and I dread not being strong enough
to keep my job. I climb endless stairs, am given
a white cap and an apron, and my life as a factory
girl begins. I become part of the ceaseless,
unrelenting mechanism kept in motion by the poor.
The factory I have chosen has been built contemporaneously with reforms and sanitary inspection.
There are clean, well-aired rooms, hot and cold water
with which to wash, places to put one's hat and
coat, an obligatory uniform for regular employees,
hygienic and moral advantages of all kinds, ample
space for work without crowding.
Side by side in rows of tens or twenties we stand
before our tables waiting for the seven o'clock whistle
to blow. In their white caps and blue frocks and
aprons, the girls in my department, like any unfamiliar class, all look alike. My first task is an easy
one; anybody could do it. On the stroke of seven my
fingers fly. I place a lid of paper in a tin jar-top,
over it a cork; this I press down with both hands,
tossing the cover, when done, into a pan. In spite

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
of myself I hurry; I cannot work fast enough—I
outdo my companions. How can they be so slow?
I have finished three dozen while they are doing two.
Every nerve, every muscle is offering some of its
energy. Over in one corner the machinery for sealing the jars groans and roars; the mingled sounds of
filling, washing, wiping, packing, comes to my eager
ears as an accompaniment for the simple work
assigned to me. One hour passes, two, three hours;
I fit ten, twenty, fifty dozen caps, and still my energy
keeps up.
The forewoman is a pretty girl of twenty. Her
restless eyes, her metallic voice are the messengers
who would know all. I am afraid of her. I long to
please her. I am sure she must be saying " How
well the new girl works."
Conversation is possible among those whose work
has become mechanical. Twice I am sent to the
storeroom for more caps. In these brief moments
my companions volunteer a word of themselves.
" I was out to a ball last night," the youngest one
says. " I stayed so late I didn't feel a bit like getting
up this morning."
"That's nothing," another retorts. "There's
hardly an evening we don't have company at the
house, music or somethin'; I never get enough rest."
And on my second trip the pale creature with me
says:
" I ' m in deep mourning. My mother died last

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
Friday week. It's awful lonely without her. Seems
as though I'd never get over missing her. I miss
her dreadful. Perhaps by and by I'll get used to
it."
"Oh, no, you won't," the answer comes from a
girl with short skirts. "You'll never get used to
it. My ma's been dead eight years next month
and I dreamt about her all last night. I can't get
her out o' me mind."
Born into dirt and ugliness, disfigured by effort,
they have the same heritage as we: joys and sorrows,
grief and laughter. With them as with us gaiety is
up to its old tricks, tempting from graver rivals,
making duty an alien. Grief is doing her ugly work:
hollowing round cheeks, blackening bright eyes,
putting her weight of leaden loneliness in hearts
heretofore light with youth.
When I have fitted n o dozen tin caps the forewoman comes and changes my job. She tells me to
haul and load up some heavy crates with pickle jars.
I am wheeling these back and forth when the twelve
o'clock whistle blows. Up to that time the room has
been one big dynamo, each girl a part of it. With
the first moan of the noon signal the dynamo comes
to life. It is hungry; it has friends and favourites—
news to tell. We herd down to a big dining-room
and take our places, five hundred of us in all. The
newspaper bundles are unfolded. The menu varies
little: bread and jam, cake and pickles, occasionally

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
a sausage, a bit of cheese or a piece of stringy cold
meat. In ten minutes the repast is over. The
dynamo has been fed; there are twenty minutes of
leisure spent in dancing, singing, resting, and
conversing chiefly about young men and "sociables."
At 12:30 sharp the whistle draws back the life
it has given. I return to my job. My shoulders
are beginning to ache. My hands are stiff,
my thumbs almost blistered. The enthusiasm I
had felt is giving way to a numbing weariness. I
look at my companions now in amazement. How
can they keep on so steadily, so swiftly ? Cases are
emptied and refilled; bottles are labeled, stamped
and rolled away; jars are washed, wiped and loaded,
and still there are more cases, more jars, more
bottles. Oh ! the monotony of it, the never-ending
supply of work to be begun and finished, begun and
finished, begun and finished! Now and then some
one cuts a finger or runs a splinter under the flesh;
once the mustard machine broke—and still the work
goes on, on, on! New girls like myself, who had
worked briskly in the morning, are beginning to
loiter. Out of the washing-tins hands come up red
and swollen, only to be plunged again into hot dirty
water. Would the whistle never blow ? Once I
pause an instant, my head dazed and weary, my ears
strained to bursting with the deafening noise.
Quickly a voice whispers in my ear:

26

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

" You'd better not stand there doin' nothin\ If
she catches you she'll give it to you."
On! on! bundle of pains! For you this is one
day's work in a thousand of peace and beauty. For
those about you this is the whole of daylight, this is
the winter dawn and twilight, this is the glorious
summer noon, this is all day, this is every day, this
is life. Rest is only a bit of a dream, snatched when
the sleeper's aching body lets her close her eyes for
a moment in oblivion.
Out beyond the chimney tops the snowfields and
the river turn from gray to pink, and still the work
goes on. Each crate I lift grows heavier, each bottle
weighs an added pound. Now and then some one
lends a helping hand.
"Tired, ain't you? This is your first day, ain't
it?"
The acid smell of vinegar and mustard penetrates
everywhere. My ankles cry out pity. Oh! to sit
down an instant!
"Tidy up the table," some one tells me; ''we're
soongoin' home."
Home ! I think of the stifling fumes of fried food,
the dim haze in the kitchen where my supper waits
me; the children, the band of drifting workers, the
shrill, complaining voice of the hired mother. This
is home.
I sweep and set to rights, limping, lurching along.
At last the whistle blows ! In a swarm we report;

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
we put on our things and get away into the cool
night air. I have stood ten hours; I have fitted
1,300 corks; I have hauled and loaded 4,000 jars
of pickles. My pay is seventy cents.
The impressions of my first day crowd pell-mell
upon my mind. , The sound of the machinery dins
in my ears. I can hear the sharp, nasal voices of the
forewoman and the girls shouting questions and
answers.
A sudden recollection comes to me ' of a
Dahomayan family I had watched at work in their
hut during the Paris Exhibition. There was a
magic spell in their voices as they talked together;
the sounds they made had the cadence of the wind
in the trees, the running of water, the song of birds:
they echoed unconsciously the caressing melodies
of nature. My factory companions drew their vocal
inspiration from the bedlam of civilization, the
rasping and pounding of machinery, the din which
they must out-din to be heard.
For the two days following my first experience I
am unable to resume work. Fatigue has swept
through my blood like a fever. Every bone and
joint has a clamouring ache. I pass the time visiting other factories and hunting for a place to board
in the neighbourhood of the pickling house. At the
cork works they do not need girls; at the cracker
company I can get a job, but the hours are longer,
the advantages less than where I am; at the broom

28

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

factory they employ only men. I decide to continue with tin caps and pickle jars.
My whole effort now is to find a respectable
boarding-house. I start out, the thermometer near
zero, the snow falling. I wander and ask, wander
and ask. Up and down the black streets running
parallel and at right angles with the factory I tap
and ring at one after another of the two-story redbrick houses. More than half of them are empty,
tenantless during the working hours. What hope
is there for family life near the hearth which is
abandoned at the factory's first call ? The sociableness, the discipline, the division of responsibility
make factory work a dangerous rival to domestic
care. There is something in the modern conditions
of labour which acts magnetically upon American
girls, impelling them to work not for bread alone,
but for clothes and finery as well. Each class in
modern society knows a menace to its homes: sport,
college education, machinery—each is a factor in the
gradual transformation of family life from a united
domestic group to a collection of individuals with
separate interests and aims outside the home.
I pursue my search. It is the dinner hour. At last
a narrow door opens, letting a puff of hot rank air
blow upon me as I stand in the vestibule questioning :
"Do you take boarders ?"
The woman who answers stands with a spoon
in her hand, her eyes fixed upon a rear room

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
where a stove, laden with frying-pans, glows and
sputters.
"Come in," she says, "and get warm."
I walk into a front parlour with furniture that
evidently serves domestic as well as social purposes.
There is a profusion of white knitted tidies and
portieres that exude an odour of cooking. Before
the fire a workingman sits in a blue shirt and overalls. Fresh from the barber's hands, he has a clean
mask marked by the razor's edge. Already I feel
at home.
"Want board, do you?" the woman asks. "Well,
we ain't got no place; we're always right full
up."
My disappointment is keen. Regretfully I leave
the fire and. start on again.
"I guess you'll have some trouble in finding what
you want," the woman calls to me on her way back
to the kitchen, as I go out.
The answer is everywhere the same, with slight
variations. Some take "mealers" only, some only
"roomers," some "only gentlemen." I begin to
understand it. Among the thousands of families
who live in the city on account of the work provided
by the mills, there are girls enough to fill the factories.
There is no influx such as creates in a small town the
necessity for working-girl boarding-houses. There
is an ample supply of hands from the existing homes.
There is the same difference between city and

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
country factory life that there is between university
life in a capital and in a country town.
A sign on a neat-looking corner house attracts
me. I rap and continue to rap; the door is opened
at length by a tall good-looking young woman. Her
hair curls prettily, catching the light; her eyes are
stupid and beautiful. She has on a black skirt and
a bright purple waist.
" Do you take boarders ?"
"Why, yes. I don't generally like to take ladies,
they give so much trouble. You can come in if you
like. Here's the room," she continues, opening a
door near the vestibule. She brushes her hand
over'her forehead and stares at me; and then, as
though she can no longer silence the knell that is
ringing in her heart, she says to me, always staring:
"My husband was killed on the railroad last week.
He lived three hours. They took him to the hospital
—a boy come running down and told me. I went
up as fast as I could, but it was too late; he never
spoke again. I guess he didn't know what struck
him; his head was all smashed. He was awful good
to me—so easy-going. I ain't got my mind down
to work yet. If you don't like this here room," she
goes on listlessly, "maybe you could get suited
across the way."
Thompson Seton tells us in his book on wild
animals that not one among them ever dies a natural
death. As the opposite extreme of vital persistence

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
we have the man whose life, in spite of acute disease,
is prolonged against reason by science; and midway
comes the labourer, who takes his chances unarmed
by any understanding of physical law, whose only
safeguards are his wits and his presence of mind.
The violent death, the accidents, the illnesses to
which he falls victim might be often warded off
by proper knowledge. Nature is a zealous enemy;
ignorance and inexperience keep a whole class
defenseless.
The next day is Saturday. I feel a fresh excitement at going back to my job; the factory draws me
toward it magnetically. I long to be in the hum and
whir of the busy workroom. Two days of leisure
without resources or amusement make clear to me
how the sociability of factory life, the freedom from
personal demands, the escape from self can prove a
distraction to those who have no mental occupation,
no money to spend on diversion. It is easier to
submit to factory government which commands
five hundred girls with one law valid for all, than to
undergo the arbitrary discipline of parental authority.
I speed across the snow-covered courtyard. In a
moment my cap and apron are on and I am sent to
report to the head forewoman.
"We thought you'd quit," she says. "Lots of
girls come in here and quit after one day, especially
Saturday. To-day is scrubbing day," she smiles at
me. "Now we'll do right by you if you do

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
right by us. What did the timekeeper say he'd give
you?"
"Sixty or seventy a day."
"We'll give you seventy," she says. "Of course,
we can judge girls a good deal by their looks, and
we can see that you're above the average."
She wears her cap close against her head. Her
front hair is rolled up in crimping-pins. She has
false teeth and is a widow. Her pale, parched face
shows what a great share of life has been taken by
daily over-effort repeated during years. As she talks
she touches my arm in a kindly fashion and looks
at me with blue eyes that float about under weary
lids. "You are only at the beginning," they seem
to say. "Your youth and vigour are at full tide,
but drop by drop they will be sapped from you, to
swell the great flood of human effort that supplies
the world's material needs. You will gain in experience," the weary lids flutter at me, "but you will pay
with your life the living you make."
There is no variety in my morning's work. Next
to me is a bright, pretty girl jamming chopped
pickles into bottles.
"How long have you been here?" I ask, attracted
by her capable appearance. She does her work
easily and well.
"About five months."
"How much do you make?"
"From 90 cents to $1.05. I'm doing piece-work,"

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
she explains. " I get seven-eighths of a cent for every
dozen bottles I fill. I have to fill eight dozen to make
seven cents. Downstairs in the corking-room you
can make as high as $1.15 to $1.20. They won't let
you make any more than that. Me and them two
girls over there are the only ones in this room doing
piece-work. I was here three weeks as a day-worker.''
"Do you live at home ?" I ask.
"Yes; I don't have to work. I don't pay no board.
My father and my brothers supports me and my
mother. But," and her eyes twinkle, " I couldn't
have the clothes I do if I didn't work."
"Do you spend your money all on yourself?"
"Yes."
I am amazed at the cheerfulness of my companions.
They complain of fatigue, of cold, but never at any
time is there a suggestion of ill-humour. Their
suppressed animal spirits reassert themselves when
the forewoman's back is turned. Companionship
is the great stimulus. I am confident that without
the social entrain, the encouragement of example, it
would be impossible to obtain as much from each
individual girl as is obtained from them in groups
of tens, fifties, hundreds working together.
When lunch is over we are set to scrubbing.
Every table and stand, every inch of the factory
floor must be scrubbed in the next four hours. The
whistle on Saturday blows an hour earlier. Any
girl who has not finished her work when the day is

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
done, so that she can leave things in perfect order, is
kept overtime, for which she is paid at the rate of
six or seven cents an hour. A pail of hot water, a
dirty rag and a scrubbing-brush are thrust into my
hands. I touch them gingerly. I get a broom
and for some time make sweeping a necessity, but
the forewoman is watching me. I am afraid of her.
There is no escape. I begin to scrub. My hands go
into the brown, slimy water and come out brown
and slimy. I slop the soap-suds around and move
on to a fresh place. It appears there is a right
and a wrong way of scrubbing. The forewoman
is at my side.
"Have you ever scrubbed before ?" she asks
sharply. This is humiliating.
"Yes," I answer; " I have scrubbed . . . oildoth."
The forewoman knows how to do everything.
She drops down on her knees and, with her strong
arms and short-thumbed, brutal hands, she shows
me how to scrub.
The grumbling is general. There is but one
opinion among the girls: it is not right that they
should be made to do this work. They all echo the
same resentment, but their complaints are made in
whispers; not one has the courage to openly rebel.
What, I wonder to myself, do the men do on scrubbing day. I try to picture one of them on his hands
and knees in a sea-of brown mud. It is impossible.

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY

35

The next time I go for a supply of soft soap in a
department where the men are working I take a
look at the masculine interpretation of house cleaning. One man is playing a hose on the floor and the
rest are rubbing the boards down with long-handled
brooms and rubber mops.
"You take it easy," I say to the boss.
" I won't have no scrubbing in my place," he
answers emphatically. "The first scrubbing day,
they says to me 'Get down on your hands and knees/
and I says—'Just pay me my money, will you; I'm
goin' home. What scrubbing can't be done with
mops ain't going to be done by me.' The women
wouldn't have to scrub, either, if they had enough
spirit all of 'em to say so."
I determined to find out if possible, during my stay
in the factory, what it is that clogs this mainspring
of "spirit" in the women.
I hear fragmentary conversations about fancy
dress balls, valentine parties, church sociables,
flirtations and clothes. Almost all of the girls wear
shoes with patent leather and some or much cheap
jewelry, brooches, bangles and rings. A few draw
their corsets in; the majority are not laced. Here
and there I see a new girl whose back is flat, whose
chest is well developed. Among the older hands
who have begun work early there is not a straight
pair of shoulders. Much of the bottle washing and
filling is done by children from twelve to fourteen

36

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

years of age. On their slight, frail bodies toil weighs
heavily; the delicate child form gives way to the
iron hand of labour pressed too soon upon it.
Backs bend earthward, chests recede, never to
be sound again.
•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

After a Sunday of rest I arrive somewhat ahead,
of time on Monday morning, which leaves me a few
moments for conversation with a piece-worker who
is pasting labels on mustard jars. She is fifteen.
"Do you like your job ?" I ask.
"Yes, I do," she answers, pleased to tell her little
history. "I began in a clothing shop. I only made
$2.50 a week, but I didn't have to stand. I felt
awful when papa made me quit. When I came in
here, bein' on my feet tired me so I cried every
night for two months. Now I've got used to it.
I don't feel no more tired when I get home than I
did when I started out." There are two' sharp
blue lines that drag themselves down from her
eyes to her white cheeks.
"Why, you know, at Christmas they give us two
weeks," she goes on in the sociable tone of a woman
whose hands are occupied. " I just didn't know
what to do with myself."
"Does your mother work ?"
"Oh, my, no. I don't have to work, only if I
didn't I couldn't have the clothes I do. I save

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
some of my money and spend the rest on myself. I
make $6 to $7 a week."
The girl next us volunteers a share in the conversation.
" I bet you can't guess how old I am."
I look at her. Her face and throat are wrinkled,
her hands broad and scrawny; she is tall and has
short skirts. What shall be my clue ? If I judge
by pleasure, " u n b o r n " would be my answer; if by
effort, then " a thousand years."
"Twenty," I hazard as a safe medium.
"Fourteen," she laughs. " I don't like it at home,
the kids bother me so. Mamma's people are wellto-do. I'm working for my own pleasure."
"Indeed, I wish I was," says a new girl with a red
waist. "We three girls supports mamma and runs
the house. We have $13 rent to pay and a load of
coal every month and groceries. It's no joke, I can
tell you."
The whistle blows; I go back to my monotonous
task. The old aches begin again, first gently, then
more and more sharply. The work itself is growing
more mechanical. I can watch the girls around me.
What is it that determines superiority in this class ?
Why was the girl filling pickle jars put on piecework after three weeks, when others older than she
are doing day-work at fifty and sixty cents after a
year in the factory ? What quality decides that four
shall direct four hundred ? Intelligence I put first";

3.8

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

intelligence of any kind, from the natural penetration that needs no teaching to the common sense
that every one relies upon. Judgment is not far
behind in the list, and it is soon matured by experience. A strong will and a moral steadiness stand
guardians over the other two. The little pickle
girl is winning in the race by her intelligence. The
forewomen have all four qualities, sometimes one,
sometimes another predominating. Pretty Clara
is smarter than Lottie. Lottie is more steady.
Old Mrs. Minns' will has kept her at it until her
judgment has become infallible and can command a
good price. Annie is an evenly balanced mixture of
all, and the five hundred who are working under the
five lack these qualities somewhat, totally, or have
them in useless proportions.
Monday is a hard day. There is more complaining, more shirking, more gossip than in the middle of
the week. Most of the girls have been to dances on
Saturday night, to church on Sunday evening with
some young man. Their conversation is vulgar and
prosaic; there is nothing in the language they use
that suggests an ideal or any conception of the
abstract. They make jokes, state facts about the
work, tease each other, but in all they say there is
not a word of value—nothing that would interest if
repeated out of its class. They have none of the
sagaciousness of the low-born Italian, none of the wit
and penetration of the French ouvriere. The Old

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
World generations ago divided itself into classes;
the lower class watched the upper and grew observant and appreciative, wise and discriminating,
through the study of a master's will. Here in the
land of freedom, where no class line is rigid, the
precious chance is not to serve but to live for oneself;
not to watch a superior, but to find out by experience. The ideal plays no part, stern realities alone
count, and thus we have a progressive, practical,
independent people, the expression of whose personality is interesting not through their words but
by their deeds.
When the Monday noon whistle blows I follow the
hundreds down into the dining-room. Each wears
her cap in a way that speaks for her temperament.
There is the indifferent, the untidy, the prim, the
vain, the coquettish; and the faces under them,
which all looked alike at first, are becoming familiar,
I have begun to make friends. I speak bad English,
but do not attempt to change my voice and inflection
nor to adopt the twang. No allusion is made to
my pronunciation except by one girl, who says:
" I knew you was from the East. My sister spent
a year in Boston and when she come back she talked
just like you do, but she lost it all again. Fd give
anything if I could talk aristocratic"
I am beginning to understand why the meager
lunches of preserve-sandwiches and pickles more
than satisfy the girls whom I was prepared to

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
accuse of spending their money on gewgaws rather
than on nourishment. It is fatigue that steals the
appetite. I can hardly taste what I put in my
mouth; the food sticks in my throat. The girls who
complain most of being tired are the ones who roll
up their newspaper bundles half full. They should
be given an hour at noon. The first half of it should be
spent in rest and recreation before a bite is touched.
The good that such a regulation would work upon
their faulty skins and pale faces, their lasting strength
and health, would be incalculable. I did not want
wholesome food, exhausted as I was. I craved
sours and sweets, pickles, cake, anything to excite
my numb taste.
So long as I remain in the bottling department
there is little variety in my days. Rising at 5 '.30
every morning, I make my way through black
streets to offer my sacrifice of energy on the altar of
toil. All is done without a fresh incident. Accumulated weariness forces me to take a day off. When
I return I am sent for in the corking-room. The
forewoman lends me a blue gingham dress and tells
me I am to do "pieces-work. There are three who
work together at every corking-table. My two
companions are a woman with goggles and a oneeyed boy. We are not a brilliant trio. The job
consists in evening the vinegar in the bottles, driving
the cork in, first with a machine, then with a hammer, letting out the air with a knife stuck under the

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
cork, capping the corks, sealing the caps, counting
and distributing the bottles. These operations are
paid for at the rate of one-half a cent for the dozen
bottles, which sum is divided among us. My two companions are earning a living, so I must work in dead
earnest or take bread out of their mouths. At every
blow of the hammer there is danger. Again and again
bottles fly to pieces in my hand. The boy who runs
the corking-machine smashes a glass to fragments.
"Are you hurt?" I ask, my own fingers crimson
stained.
"That ain't nothing" he answers. "Cuts is
common; my hands is full of 'em."
The woman directs us; she is fussy and loses her
head, the work accumulates, I am slow, the boy is
clumsy. There is a stimulus unsuspected in working
to get a job done. Before this I had worked to make
the time pass. Then no one took account of how
much I did; the factory clock had a weighted pendulum; now ambition outdoes physical strength. The
hours and my purpose are running a race together.
But, hurry as I may, as we do, when twelve blows
its signal we have corked only 210 dozen bottles!
This is no more than day-work at seventy cents.
With an ache in every muscle, I redouble my energy
after lunch. The girl with the goggles looks at me
blindly and says:
"Ain't it just awful hard work? You can make
good money, but you've got to hustle."

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
She is a forlorn specimen of humanity, ugly, old,
dirty, condemned to the slow death of the overworked. I am a green hand. I make mistakes; I
have no experience in the fierce sustained effort of
the bread-winners. Over and over I turn to her,
over and over she is obliged to correct me. During
the ten hours we work side by side not one murmur
of impatience escapes her. When she sees that I
am getting discouraged she calls out across the
deafening din, "That's all right; you can't expect to
learn in a day; just keep on steady.''
As I go about distributing bottles to the labelers
I notice a strange little elf, not more than twelve
years old, hauling loaded crates; her face and chest
are depressed, she is pale to blueness, her eyes have
indigo circles, her pupils are unnaturally dilated,
her brows contracted; she has the appearance of a
cave-bred creature. She seems scarcely human.
When the time for cleaning up arrives toward five
my boss sends me for a bucket of water to wash up
the floor. I go to the sink, turn on the cold water
and with it the steam which takes the place of hot
water. The valve slips; in an instant I am enveloped
in a scalding cloud. Before it has cleared away the
elf is by my side.
"Did you hurt yourself?" she asks.
Her inhuman form is the vehicle of a human
heart, warm and tender. She lifts her wide-pupiled
eyes to mine; her expression does not change from

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
that of habitual scrutiny cast early in a rigid mould,
but her voice carries sympathy from its purest
source.
There is more honour than courtesy in the code
of etiquette. Commands are given curtly; the
slightest injustice is resented; each man for himself
in work, but in trouble all for the one who is suffering.
No bruise or cut or burn is too familiar a sight to pass
uncared for.
It is their common sufferings, their common effort
that unites them.
When I have become expert in the corking art I
am raised to a better table, with a bright boy, and a
girl who is dignified and indifferent with the indifference of those who have had too much responsibility.
She never hurries; the work slips easily through her
fingers. She keeps a steady bearing over the
morning's ups and downs. Under her load of trials
there is something big in the steady way she sails.
"Used to hard work?" she asks me.
''Not much,'' I answer; ''are you ?''
"Oh, yes. I began at thirteen in a bakery. I had
a place near the oven and the heat overcame me."
Her shoulders are bowed, her chest is hollow.
"Looking for a boarding place near the factory, I
hear," she continues.
"Yes. You live at home, I suppose."
"Yes. There's four of us: mamma, papa, my
sister and myself. Papa's blind."

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
"Can't he work?"
"Oh, yes, he creeps to his job every morning, and
he's got so much experience he kind o' does things
by instinct."
' ' Does your mother work ?" '
"Oh, my, no. My sister's an invalid. She
hasn't been out o' the door for three years. She's
got enlargement of the heart and consumption, too,
I guess; she 'takes' hemorrhages. Sometimes she
has twelve in one night. Every time she coughs the
blood comes foaming out of her mouth. She can't
lie down. I guess she'd die if she lay down, and she
gets so tired sittin' up all night. She used to be a
tailoress, but I guess her job didn't agree with her."
"How many checks have we got," I ask toward
the close of the day.
"Thirteen," Ella answers.
"An unlucky number," I venture, hoping to
arouse an opinion.
"Are you superstitious?" she asks, continuing to
twist tin caps on the pickle jars. "I am. If
anything's going to happen I can't help having
presentiments, and they come true, too."
Here is a mystic, I thought; so I continued:
"And what about dreams ?"
"Oh!" she cried. "Dreams! I have the queerest
of anybody!"
I was all attention.
"Why, last night," she drew near to me and spoke

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
slowly, " I dreamed that mamma was drunk, and
that she was stealing chickens I"
Such is the imagination of this weary worker.
The whole problem in mechanical labour rests
upon economy of force. The purpose of each, I
learned by experience, was to accomplish as much
as possible with one single stroke. In this respect
the machine is superior to man, and man to woman.
Sometimes I tried original ways of doing the work
given me. I soon found in every case that the
methods proposed by the forewoman were in the end
those whereby I could do the greatest amount of
work with the least effort. A mustard machine had
recently been introduced to the factory. It replaced
three girls; it filled as many bottles with a single
stroke as the girls could fill with twelve. This
machine and all the others used were run by boys or
men; the girls had not strength enough to manipulate them methodically.
The power of the machine, the physical force of
the man were simplifying their tasks. While the
boy was keeping steadily at one thing, perfecting
himself, we, the women, were doing a variety of
things, complicated and fussy, left to our lot because
we had not physical force for the simpler but greater
effort. The boy at the corking-table had soon
become an expert; he was fourteen and he made
from $i to $1.20 a day. He worked ten hours at
one job, whereas Ella and I had a dozen little jobs

46

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

almost impossible to systematize: we hammered
and cut and capped the corks and washed and wiped
the bottles, sealed them, counted them, distributed
them, kept the table washed up, the sink cleaned
out, and once a day scrubbed up our own precincts.
When I asked the boy if he was tired he laughed at
me. He was superior to us; he was stronger; he
could do more with one stroke than we could do with
three; he was by nature a more valuable aid than
we. We were forced through physical inferiority
to abandon the choicest task to this young male
competitor. Nature had given us a handicap at
the start.
For a few days there is no vacancy at the corkingtables. I am sent back to the bottling department.
The oppressive monotony is one day varied by a
summons to the men's dining-room. I go eagerly,
,. glad of any change. In the kitchen I find a girl with
skin disease peeling potatoes, and a coloured man
making soup in a wash-boiler. The girl gives me a
stool to sit on, and a knife and a pan of potatoes.
The dinner under preparation is for the men of the
factory. There are two hundred of them. They are
paid from $1.35 up to $3 a day. Their wages begin
above the highest limit given to women. The dinner
costs each man ten cents. The $20 paid in daily
cover the expenses of the cook, two kitchen maids
and the dinner, which consists of meat, bread and
butter, vegetables and coffee, sometimes soup,

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY

47

sometimes dessert. If this can pay for two hundred
there is no reason why for five cents a hot meal of
some kind could not be given the women. They
don't demand it, so they are left to make themselves
ill on pickles and preserves.
The coloured cook is full of song and verse. He
quotes from the Bible freely, and gives us snatches of
popular melodies.
We have frequent calls from the elevator boy, who
brings us ice and various provisions. Both men,
I notice, take their work easily. During the morning
a busy Irish woman comes hunying into our precincts.
"Say/* she yells in a shrill voice, "my cauliflowers
ain't here, are they ? I ordered 'em early and they
ain't came yet."
Without properly waiting for an answer she
hurries away again.
The coloured cook turns to the elevator boy
understandingly:
"Just like a woman ! Why, before I'd make a fuss
about cauliflowers or anything else !"
About eleven the head forewoman stops in to eat
a plate of rice and milk. While I am cutting
bread for the two hundred I hear her say to the
cook in a gossipy tone:
"How do you like the new girl? She's here all
alone."
I am called away and do not hear the rest of the

48

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

conversation. When I return the cook lectures me
in this way:
"Here alone, are you?"
"Yes."
"Well, I see no reason why you shouldn't get
along nicely and not kill yourself with work either.
Just stick at it and they'll do right by you. Lots o'
girls who's here alone gets to fooling around. Now
I like everybody to have a good time, and I hope
you'll have a good time, too, but you mustn't carry
it too far."
My mind went back as he said this to a conversation I had had the night before with a working-girl
at my boarding-house.
"Where is your home?" I asked.
She had been doing general housework, but illhealth had obliged her to take a rest.
She looked at me skeptically.
" W e don't have no homes," was her answer.
" W e just get up and get whenever they send us
along."
And almost as a sequel to this I thought of two
sad cases that had come close to my notice as fellow
boarders.
I was sitting alone one night by the gas stove in
the parlour. The matron had gone out and left me
to "answer the door." The bell rang and I opened
cautiously, for the wind was howling and driving
the snow and sleet about on the winter air. A

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
young girl came in; she was seeking a lodging. Her
skirts and shoes were heavy with water. She took
off her things slowly in a dazed manner. Her short,
quick breathing showed how excited she was. When
she spoke at last her voice sounded hollow, her eyes
moved about restlessly. She stopped abruptly now
and then and contracted her brows as though in an
appeal for merciful tears; then she continued in the
same broken, husky voice:
" I suppose I'm not the only one in trouble. I 've
thought a thousand times over that I would kill
myself. I suppose I loved him—but I hate him
now."
These two sentences, recurring, were the story's
all.
The impotence of rebellion, a sense of outrage at
being abandoned, the instinctive appeal for protection as a right, the injustice of being left solely to bear
the burden of responsibility which so long as it was
pleasure had been shared—these were the thoughts
and feelings breeding hatred.
She had spent the day in a fruitless search for her
lover. She had been to his boss and to his rooms.
He had paid his debts and gone, nobody knew
where. She was pretty, vain, homeless; alone to
bear the responsibility she had not been alone to
incur. She could not shirk it as the man had done.
They had both disregarded the law. On whom were
the consequences weighing more heavily? On the

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
woman. She is the sufferer; she is the first to miss
the law's protection. She is the weaker member
whom, for the sake of the race, society protects.
Nature has made her man's physical inferior; society
is obliged to recognize this in the giving of a marriage
law which beyond doubt is for the benefit of woman,
since she can least afford to disregard it.
Another evening when the matron was out I sat
for a time with a young working woman and her
baby. There is a comradeship among the poor that
makes light of indiscreet questions. I felt only
sympathy in asking:
"Are you alone to bring up your child?"
"Yes, ma'am," was the answer. " T i l never go
home with Mm"
I looked at Mm: a wizened, four-months-old infant
with a huge flat nose, and two dull black eyes fixed
upon the gas jet. The girl had the grace of a forestborn creature; she moved with the mysterious
strength and suppleness of a tree's branch. She
was proud; she felt herself disgraced. For four
months she had not left the house. I talked on,
proposing different things.
" I don't know what to do," she said. " I can't
never go home with Mm, and if I went home without
him I'd never be the same. I don't know what I'd
do if anything happened to Mm"
Her head bowed
over the child; she held him close to her breast.
But to return to the coloured cook and my day in

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
the kitchen. I had ample opportunity to compare
domestic service with factory work. We set the
table for two hundred, and do a thousand miserable
slavish tasks that must be begun again the
following day. At twelve the two hundred troop
in, toil-worn and begrimed.
They pass like
locusts, leaving us sixteen hundred dirty dishes
to wash up and wipe. This takes us four hours,
and when we have finished the work stands
ready to be done over the next morning with
peculiar monotony. In the factory there is stimulus
in feeling that the material which passes through
one's hands will never be seen or heard of again.
On Saturday the owner of the factory comes at
lunch time with several friends and talks to us with
an amazing camaraderie. He is kindly, humourous
and tactful. One or two missionaries speak after
him, but their conversation is too abstract for us.
We want something dramatic, imaginative, to hold
our attention, or something wholly natural. Tell
us about the bees, the beavers or the toilers of the
sea. The longing for flowers has often come to me
as I work, and a rose seems of all things the most
desirable. In my present condition I do not hark
back to civilized wants, but repeatedly my mind
travels toward the country places I have seen in the
fields and forests. If I had a holiday I would spend
it seeing not what man but what God has made.
These are the things to be remembered in addressing

£&
^ # #

11 OF ILL LIB.

# # /

&<£?&?

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
or trying to amuse or instruct girls who are no more
prepared than I felt myself to be for any preconceived ideal of art or ethics. The omnipresence of
dirt and ugliness, of machines and " stock," leave the
mind in a state of lassitude which should be roused
by something natural. As an initial remedy for the
ills I voluntarily assumed I would propose amusement. Of all the people who spoke to us that
Saturday, we liked best the one who made us
laugh. It was a relief to hqar something funny. In
working as an outsider in a factory girls' club I had
always held that nothing was so important as to
give the poor something beautiful to look at and
think about—a photograph or copy of some chef
d'oeuvre, an objet d'art, lessons in literature and
art which would uplift their souls from the dreariness
of their surroundings. Three weeks as a factory
girl had changed my beliefs. If the young society
women who sacrifice one evening every week to talk
to the poor in the slums about Shakespeare and
Italian art would instead offer diversion first—a
play, a farce, a humourous recitation—they would
make much more rapid progress in winning the
confidence of those whom they want to help. The
working woman who has had a good laugh is more
ready to tell what she needs and feels and fears than
the woman who has been forced to listen silently to an
abstract lesson. In society when we wish to make
friends with people we begin by entertaining them.

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY

53

It should be the same way with the poor. Next to
amusement as a means of giving temporary relief
and bringing about relations which will be helpful to
all, I put instruction', in the form of narrative, about
the people of other countries, our fellow man, how
he lives and works; and, third, under this same head,
primitive lessons about animals and plants, the
industries of the bees, the habits of ants, the natural
phenomena which require no reasoning power to
understand and which open the thoughts upon a
delightful unknown vista.
My first experience is drawing to its close. I have
surmounted the discomforts of insufficient food, of
dirt, a bed without sheets, the strain of hard manual
labour. I have confined my observations to life
and conditions in the factory. Owing, as I have
before explained, to the absorption of factory life
into city life in a place as large as Pittsburg, it
seemed to me more profitable to centre my attention
on the girl within the factory, leaving for a small
town the study of her in her family and social life.
I have pointed out as they appeared to me woman's
relative force as a worker and its effects upon her
economic advancement. I have touched upon two
cases which illustrate her relative dependence on
the law. She appeared to me not as the equal of
man either physically or legally. It remained to
study her socially. In the factory where I worked
men and women were employed for ten-hour days.

54

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

The women's highest wages were lower than the
man's lowest. Both were working as hard as they
possibly could. The women were doing menial
work, such as scrubbing, which the men refused to
do. The men were properly fed at noon; the
women satisfied themselves with cake and pickles.
Why was this? It is of course impossible to generalize on a single factory. I can only relate the
conclusions I drew from what I saw myself. The
wages paid by employers, economists tell us, are
fixed, at the level of bare subsistence. This level
and its accompanying conditions are determined by
competition, by the nature and number of labourers
taking part in the competition. In the masculine
category I met but one class of competitor: the
bread-winner. In the feminine category I found
a variety of classes: the bread-winner, the semibread-winner, the woman who works for luxuries.
This inevitably drags the wage level. The selfsupporting girl is in competition with the child, with
the girl who lives at home and makes a small contribution to the household expenses, and with the
girl who is supported and who spends all her money
on her clothes. It is this division of purpose which
takes the "spirit" out of them as a class. There will
be no strikes among them so long as the question
of wages is not equally vital to them all. It is not
only nature and the law which demand protection
for women, but society as well. In every case of

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
the number I investigated, if there were sons,
daughters or a husband in the family, the mother
was not allowed to work. She was wholly protected.
In the families where the father and brothers were
making enough for bread and butter, the daughters
were protected partially or entirely. There is no
law which regulates this social protection: it is
voluntary, and it would seem to indicate that
civilized woman is meant to be an economic dependent. Yet, on the other hand, what is the new force
which impels girls from their homes into the factories
to work when they do not actually need the money
paid them for their effort and sacrifice? Is it a
move toward some far distant civilization when
women shall have become man's physical equal, a
"free, economic, social factor, making possible the
full social combination of individuals in collective
industry'' ? This is a matter for speculation only.
What occurred to me as a possible remedy both for
the oppression of the woman bread-winner and also
as a betterment for the girl who wants to work
though she does not need the money, was this: the
establishment of schools where the esthetic branches
of industrial art might be taught to the girls who by
their material independence could give some leisure
to acquiring a profession useful to themselves and
to society in general. The whole country would be
benefited by the opening of such schools as the
Empress of Russia has patronized for the main-

56

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

tenance of the " petites industries," or those which
Queen Margherita has established for the revival of
lace-making in Italy. If there was such a counterattraction to machine labour, the bread-winner
would have a freer field and the non-bread-winner
might still work for luxury and at the same time
better herself morally, mentally and esthetically.
She could aid in forming an intermediate class of
labourers which as yet does not exist in America:
the hand-workers, the main d'oeuvre who produce
the luxurious objects of industrial art for which we
are obliged to send to Europe when we wish to
beautify our homes.
The American people are lively, intelligent, capable
of learning anything. The schools of which I speak,
founded, not for the manufacturing of the useful but
of the beautiful, could be started informally as
classes and by individual effort. Such labour would
be paid more than the mechanical factory work; the
immense importation from abroad of objects of
industrial art sufficiently proves the demand for them
in this country; there would be no material disadvantage for the girl who gave up her job in a pickle
factory. Her faculties would be well employed, and
she could, without leaving her home, do work which
would be of esthetic and, indirectly, of moral value.
I was discouraged at first to see how difficult it
was to help the working girls as individuals and how
still more difficult to help them as a class. There is

IN A PITTSBURG FACTORY
perhaps no surer way of doing this than by giving
opportunities to those who have a purpose and a
will. No amount of openings will help the girl who
has not both of these. I watched many girls with
intelligence and energy who were unable to develop
for the lack of a chance a start in the right direction.
Aside from the few remedies I have been able to
suggest, I would like to make an appeal for persistent
sympathy in behalf of those whose misery I have
shared. Until some marvelous advancement has
been made toward the reign of justice upon earth,
every man, woman and child should have constantly
in his heart the sufferings of the poorest.
On the evening when I left the factory for the last
time, I heard in the streets the usual cry of murders, accidents and suicides: the mental food of the
overworked. It is Saturday night. I mingle with a
crowd of labourers homeward bound, and with
women and girls returning from a Saturday sale in
the big shops. They hurry along delighted at the
cheapness of a bargain, little dreaming of the human
effort that has produced it, the cost of life and
energy it represents. As they pass, they draw
their skirts aside from us, the labourers who have
made their bargains cheap; from us, the cooperators
who enable them to have the luxuries they do; from
us, the multitude who stand between them and the
monster Toil that must be fed with human lives.
Think of us, as we herd to our work in the winter

58

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

dawn; think of us as we bend over our task all
the daylight without rest; think of us at the end
of the day as we resume suffering and anxiety in
homes of squalour and ugliness; think of us as we
make our wretched try for merriment; think of
us as we stand protectors between you and the
labour that must be done to satisfy your material
demands; think of us—be merciful.

'

"WAVING ARMS OF SMOKE AND STEAM, A SYMBOL O? SPENT
ENERGY, OF THE LIVES CONSUMED, AND VANISHING AGAIN "
Factories on the Alleghany River at the 16th Street bridge, just below
the pickle works

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN

CHAPTER III
PERRY, A N E W YORK MILL TOWN

No pl&ce in America could have afforded better
than Pittsburg a chance to study the factory life of
American girls, the stimulus of a new country upon
the labourers of old races, the fervour and energy
of a people animated by hope'and stirred to activity
by the boundless opportunities for making money.
It is the labourers' city par excellence; and in my
preceding chapters I have tried to give a clear
picture of factory li r e between the hours of seven
and six, of the economic conditions, of the natural
social and legal equipment of woman as a working
entity, of her physical, moral and esthetic development.
Now, since the time ticked out between the morning summoning whistle to that which gives release
at night is not half the day, and only two-thirds
of the working hours, my second purpose has been
to find a place where the factory girl's own life
could best be studied: her domestic, religious and
sentimental life.
Somewhere in the western part of New York State,
one of my comrades at the pickle works had told me,
61

62

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

there was a town whose population was chiefly
composed of mill-hands. The name of the place
was Perry, and I decided upon it as offering the
typical American civilization among the working
classes. New England is too free of grafts to give
more than a single aspect; Pittsburg is an international bazaar; but the foundations of Perry are
laid with bricks from all parts of the world, held
together by a strong American cement.
Ignorant of Perry further than as it exists, a black
spot on a branch of a small road near Buffalo, I set
out from New York toward my destination on the
Empire State Express. There was barely time to
descend with my baggage at Rochester before the
engine had started onward again, trailing behind it
with world-renowned rapidity its freight of travelers
who, for a few hours under the car's roof, are united
by no other common interest than that of journeying
quickly from one spot to another, where they disperse
never to meet again. My Perry train had an altogether different character. I was late for it, but the
brakeman saw me coming and waved to the engineer
not to start until my trunk was checked and safely
boarded like myself. Then we bumped our way
through meadows quickened to life by the soft
spring air; we halted at crossroads to pick up stray
travelers and shoppers; we unloaded plowing
machines and shipped crates of live fowl; we
waited at wayside stations with high-sounding names

* P E R R Y / A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 63
for family parties whose unpunctuality was indulgently considered by the occupants of the train.
My companions, chiefly women, were of the
homely American type whose New England drawl
has been modified by a mingling of foreign accents.
They took advantage of this time for "visiting" with
neighbours whom the winter snows and illnesses
had rendered inaccessible. Their inquiries for each
other were all kindliness and sympathy, and the
peaceful, tolerant, uneventful way in which we
journeyed from Rochester to Perry was a symbol of
the way in which these good people had journeyed
across life. Perry, the terminus of the line, was a
frame station lodged on stilts in a sea of surrounding mud. When the engine had come to a standstill
and ceased to pant, when the last truck had been
unloaded, the baggage room closed, there were no
noises to be heard except those that came from a
neighbouring country upon whose peace the small
town had not far encroached; the splash of a horse
and buggy through the mud, a monotonous voice
mingling with the steady tick of the telegraph
machine, some distant barnyard chatter, and the
mysterious, invisible stir of spring shaking out upon
the air damp sweet odours calling the earth to colour
and life. Descending the staircase which connected
the railroad station with the hill road on which it
was perched, I joined a man who was swinging along
in rubber boots, with several farming tools, rakes

64

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

and hoes, slung over his shoulder. A repugnance I
had felt in resuming my toil-worn clothes had led me
to make certain modifications which I feared in so
small a town as Perry might relegate me to the class
I had voluntarily abandoned. The man in rubber
boots looked me over as I approached, bag in hand,
and to my salutation he replied:
"Going down to the mill, I suppose. There's lots
o' ladies comes in the train every day now."
He was the perfection of tact; he placed me in
one sentence as a mill-hand and a lady.
"I'll take you down as far as Main Street," he
volunteered, giving me at once a feeling of kindly
interest which " city folks" have not time to show.
We found our way by improvised crossings through
broad, soft beds of mud. Among the branches of
the sap-fed trees which lined the unpaved streets
transparent balls of glass were suspended, from
which, as twilight deepened, a brilliant artificial
light shot its rays, the perfection of modern invention, over the primitive, unfinished little town of
Perry, which was all contrast and energy, crudity
and progress.
"There's a lot of the girls left the mill yesterday,"
my companion volunteered. "They cut the wages,
and some of the oldest hands got right out. There's
more than a thousand of 'em on the pay-roll, but I
guess you can make good money if you're ready to
work."

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 65
We had reached Main Street, which, owing to the
absence of a trolley, had retained a certain individuality. The rivers of mud broadened out into a
sea, flanked by a double row of two-story, flat-roofed
frame stores, whose monotony was interrupted by
a hotel and a town hall. My guide stopped at a
corner butcher shop. Its signboard was a couple
of mild-eyed animals hanging head downward, presented informally, with their skins untouched, and
having more the appearance of some ill-treated
pets than future beef and bouillon for the Perry
population.
"Follow the boardwalk!" was the simple command I received. "Keep right along until you
come to the mill."
I presently fell in with a drayman, who was calling alternately to his horse as it sucked in and
out of the mud and to a woman on the plank
walk. She had on a hat with velvet and ostrich
plumes, a black frock, a side bag with a lace
handkerchief. She was not young and she wore
spectacles; but there was something nervous about
her step, a slight tremolo as she responded to the
drayman, which suggested an adventure or the hope
of it. The boardwalk, leading inevitably to the
mill, announced our common purpose and saved
us an introduction.
"Going down to get work?" was the question we
simultaneously asked of each other. My companion,

66

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

all eagerness, shook out the lace handkerchief in her
side bag and explained:
" I don't have to work; my folks keep a hotel; but
I always, heard so much about Perry I thought I'd
like to come up, and," she sighed, with a flirt of the
lace handkerchief and a contented glance around
at the rows of white frame houses, " I ' m up now."
"Want board ?" the drayman called to me. "You
kin count on me for a good place. There's Doctor
Meadows, now; he's got a nice home and he just
wants two boarders."
The middle-aged woman with the glasses glanced
up quickly.
"Doctor Meadows of Tittihute?" she asked. "I
wont go there; he's too strict. He's a Methodist
minister. You couldn't have any fun at all."
I followed suit, denouncing Doctor Killjoy as she
had, hoping that her nervous, frisky step would lead
me toward the adventure she was evidently seeking.
"Well," the drayman responded indulgently, "I
guess Mr. Norse will know the best place for you
folks."
We had come at once to the factory and the end
of the boardwalk. It was but a few minutes before
Mr. Norse had revealed himself as the pivot, the
human hub, the magnet around which the mechanism
of the mill revolved and clung, sure of finding its
proper balance. Tall, lank and meager, with a
wrinkled face and a furtive mustache, Mr. Norse

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 67
made his rounds with a list of complaints and comments in one hand, a pencil in the other and a black
cap on his head which tipped, indulgent, attentive
to hear and overhear. His manner was professional.
He looked at us, placed us, told us to return at one
o'clock, recommended a boarding-house, and, on his
way to some other case, sent a small boy to accompany us on future stretches of boardwalk to our
lodgings. The street we followed ended in a rolling
hillside, and beyond was the mysterious blue that
holds something of the infinite in its mingling of
clouds and shadows. The Genesee Valley lay near
us like a lake under the sky, and silhouetted against
it were the factory chimney and buildings. The
wood's edge came close to the town, whose yards
prolong themselves into green meadows and farming
lands. We knocked at a rusty screen door and
were welcomed with the cordiality of the country
woman to whom all folks are neighbours, all strangers
possible boarders. The house, built without mantelpiece or chimney, atoned for this cheerlessness with a
large parlour stove, whose black arms carried warmth
through floor and ceiling. A table was spread in the
dining-room. A loud-ticking clock with a rusty
bell marked the hour from a shelf on the wall, and
out of the kitchen, seen in vista, came a spluttering
sound of frying food. Our hostess took us into
the parlour. Several family pictures of stony-eyed
women and men with chin beards, and a life-sized

68

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

Frances Willard in chromo, looked down at our
ensuing interview.
Board, lodging, heat and light we could have at
$2.75 a week. Before the husky clock had struck
twelve, I was installed in a small room with the
middle-aged woman from Batavia and a second
unknown roommate.
Now what, I asked myself, is the mill's attraction
and what is the power of this small town? ' Its
population is 3,346. Of these, 1,000 work in the
knitting-mill, 200 more in a cutlery factory and
300 in various flour, butter, barrel, planing mills and
salt blocks. Half the inhabitants are young hands.
Not one in a hundred has a home in Perry; they
have come from all western parts of the State to work.
There are scarcely any children, few married couples
and almost no old people. It is a town of youthful
contemporaries, stung with the American's ambition
for independence and adventure, charmed by the
gaiety of being boys and girls together, with an ever
possible touch of romance which makes the hardest
work seem easy. Within the four board walls of
each house, whose type is repeated up and down
Perry streets, there is a group of factory employees
boarding and working at the mill. Their names
suggest a foreign parentage, but for several generations they have mingled their diverse energies in a
common effort which makes Americans of them.
As I lived for several weeks among a group of this

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 69
kind, who were, fairly representative, I shall try to
give, through a description of their life and conversation, their personalities and characteristics, their
occupations out of working hours, a general idea of
these unknown toilers, who are so amazingly like
their more fortunate sisters that I became convinced
the difference is only superficial—not one of kind
but merely of variety. The Perry factory girl is
separated from the New York society girl, not by a
few generations, but by a few years of culture and
training. In America, where tradition and family
play an unimportant part, the great educator is the
spending of money. It is through the purchase of
possessions that the Americans develop their taste,
declare themselves, and show their inherent capacity
for culture. Give to the Perry mill-hands a free
chance for growth, transplant them, care for them,
and they will readily show how slight and how merely
a thing of culture the difference is between the wild
rose and the American beauty.
What were my first impressions of the hands who
returned at noon under the roof which had extended
unquestioning its hospitality ? Were they a band of
slaves, victims to toil and deprivation ? Were they
making the pitiful exchange of their total vitality
for insufficient nourishment? Did life mean to
them merely the diminishing of their forces?
On the contrary, they entered gay, laughing
young, a youth guarded intact by freedom and

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
hope. What were the subjects of conversation
pursued at dinner? Love, labour, the price paid
for it, the advantages of town over country life, the
neighbour and her conduct. What was the appearance of my companions? There was nothing in it
to shock good taste. Their hands and feet were
somewhat broadened by work, their skins were
imperfect for the lack of proper food, their dresses
were of coarse material; but in small things the
differences were superficial only. Was it, then, in
big things that the divergence began which places
them as a lower class ? Was it money alone that
kept them from the places of authority ? What
were their ambitions, their perplexities? What
part does self-respect play ? How well satisfied are
they, or how restless ? What can we learn from
them? What can we teach them?
We ate our dinner of boiled meat and custard pie
and all started back in good time for a one o 'clock
beginning at the mill. For the space of several
hundred feet its expressionless red brick walls lined
the street, implacable, silent. Within all hummed
to the collective activity of a throng, each working
with all his -force for a common end. Machines
roared and pounded; a fine dust filled the air—a
cloud of lint sent forth from the friction of thousands
of busy hands in perpetual contact with the shapeless
anonymous garments they were fashioning. There
were, on their way between the cutting- and the

1

THEY TRIFLE WITH LOVE

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 71
finishing-rooms, 7,000 dozen shirts. They were to
pass by innumerable hands; they were to be held and
touched by innumerable individuals; they were to
be begun and finished by innumerable human beings
with distinct tastes and likings, abilities and failings;
and when the 7,000 dozen shirts were complete they
were to look alike, and they were to look as though
made by a machine; they were to show no trace
whatever of the men and the women who had made
them. Here we were, 1,000 souls hurrying from
morning until night, working from seven until six,
with as little personality as we could, with the
effort to produce, through an action purely mechanical, results as nearly as possible identical one to the
other, and all to the machine itself.
What could be the result upon the mind and
health of this frantic mechanical activity devoid of
thought ? It was this for which I sought an answer;
it is for this I propose a remedy.
At the threshold of the mill door my roommate
and I encountered Mr. Norse. There was irony in
the fates allotted us. She was eager to make
money; I was indifferent. Mr. Norse felt her in his
power; I felt him in mine. She was given a job at
twenty-five cents a day and all she could make; I
was offered the favourite work in the mill—shirt
finishing, at thirty cents a day and all I could make ;
and when I shook my head to see how far I could
exploit my indifference and said, " Thirty cents is

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
too little/' Mr. Norse's answer was: "Well, I
suppose you, like the rest of us, are trying to earn a
living. I will guarantee you seventy-five cents a
day for the first two weeks, and all you can make
over it is yours." My apprenticeship began under
the guidance of an "old girl" who had been five
years in the mill. A dozen at a time the woolen
shirts were brought to us, complete all but the adding
of the linen strips in front where the buttons and
buttonholes are stitched. The price of this operation is paid for the dozen shirts five, five and a half
and six cents, according to the complexity of the
finish. My instructress had done as many as forty
dozen in one day; she averaged $1.75 a day all the
year around. While she was teaching me the factory
paid her at the rate of ten cents an hour.
A touch of the machine's pedal set the needle to
stitching like mad. A second touch in the opposite
direction brought it to an abrupt standstill. For
the five hours of my first afternoon session there
was not an instant's harmony between what I did
and what I intended to do. I sewed frantically into
the middle of shirts. I watched my needle, impotent
as it flew up and down, and when by chance I made
a straight seam I brought it to so sudden a stop
that the thread raveled back before my weary
eyes. When my back and fingers ached so that I
could no longer bend over the work, I watched
my comrades with amazement. The machine was

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 73
not a wild animal in their hands, but an instrument
that responded with niceness to their guidance.
Above the incessant roar and burring din they called
gaily to each other, gossiping, chatting, telling
stories. What did they talk about? Everything,
except domestic cares. The management of an
interior, housekeeping, cooking were things I never
once heard mentioned. What were the favourite
topics, those returned to most frequently and with
surest interest ? Dress and men. Two girls in the
seaming-room had got into a quarrel that day over
a packer, a fine looking, broad-shouldered fellow
who had touched the hearts of both and awakened
in each an emotion she claimed the right to defend.
The quarrel began lightly with an exchange of
unpleasant comment; it soon took the proportions
of a dispute which could not give itself the desired
vent in words alone. The boss was called in. He
made no attempt to control what lay beyond his
power, but applying factory legislation to the case,
he ordered the two Amazons to "register o u t " until
the squabble was settled, as the factory did not
propose to pay its hands for the time spent in fights.
So the two girls " r a n g o u t " past the timekeeper
and took an hour in the open air, hand to hand,
fist to fist, which, as it happens to man, had its
calming effect.
We stitched our way industriously over the 7,000
dozen. Except for the moments when some girl

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
called a message or shouted a conversation, there was
nothing to occupy the mind but the vibrating,
pulsing, pounding of the machinery. The body
was shaken with it'; the ears strained.
The little girl opposite me was a new hand. Her
rosy cheeks and straight shoulders announced this
fact. She had been five months in the mill; the
other girls around her had been there two years,
five years, nine years. There were 150 of us at the
long, narrow tables which filled the room. By the
windows the light and air were fairly good. At the
centre tables the atmosphere was stagnant, the
shadows came too soon. - The wood's edge ran
within a few yards of the factory windows. Between
it and us lay the stream, the water force, the power
that had called men to Perry. There, as everywhere
in America, for an individual as for a place, the
attraction was industrial possibilities. As Niagara
has become more an industrial than a picturesque
landscape, so Perry, in spite of its serene and
beautiful surroundings, is a shrine to mechanical
force in whose temple, the tall-chimneyed mill, a
human sacrifice is made to the worshipers of gain.
My vis-a-vis was talkative. "Say," she said to
her neighbour, " Jim Weston is the worst flirt I ever
seen."
"Who's Jim Weston?" the other responded,
diving into the box by her side for a handful of gray
woolen shirts.

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 75
" Why, he's the one who made my teeth—he made
teeth for all of us up home," and her smile reveals the
handiwork of Weston.
" If I had false teeth," is the comment made upon
this, " I wouldn't tell anybody."
"I thought some," continues the implacable new
girl, unruffled, " of having a gold filling put in one of
my front teeth. I think gold fillings are so pretty,"
she concludes, looking toward me for a response.
This primitive love of ornament I found manifest
in the same medico-barbaric fancy for wearing eyeglasses. The nicety of certain operations in the mill,
performed not always in the brightest of lights, is
a fatal strain upon the eyes. There are no oculists
in Perry, but a Buffalo member of the profession
makes a monthly visit to treat a new harvest of
patients. Their daily effort toward the monthly
finishing of 40,000 garments permanently diminishes
their powers of vision. Every thirty days a new set
of girls appears with glasses. They wear them as
they would an ornament of some kind, a necklace,
bracelet or a hoop through the nose.
When the six o'clock whistle blew on the first
night I had finished only two dozen shirts. "You've
got a good job," my teacher said, as we came out
together in the cool evening air. "You seem to be
taking to it." They size a girl up the minute she
comes in. If she has quick motions she'll get on
all right. "I guess you'll make a good finisher."

76

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

Once more we assembled to eat and chat and relax.
After a moment by the kitchen pump we took our
places at table. Our hostess waited upon us. "It
takes some grit/' she explained, "and more grace to
keep boarders/' Except on Sundays, when all men
might be considered equals in the sight of the Lord,
she and her husband did not eat until we had finished.
She passed the dishes of our frugal evening meal—
potatoes, bread and butter and cake—and as we
served ourselves she held her head in the opposite
direction, as if to say, "I'm not looking; take the
biggest piece."
It was with my roommates I became the soonest
acquainted. The butcher's widow from Batavia
was a grumbler.- "How do you like your job?" I
asked her as we fumbled about in the dim light of
our low-roofed room.
"Oh, Lordy," was the answer, "I didn't think it
would be like this. I'd rather do housework any
day. I bet you won't stay two weeks." She was
ugly and stupid. She had been married young to
a butcher. Left alone to battle with the world, she
might have shaken out some of her dullness, but the
butcher for many years had stood between her and
reality, casting a still deeper shadow on her ignorance.
She had the monotony of an old child, one who
questions constantly but who has passed the age
when learning is possible. The butcher's death had
opened new possibilities. After a period of respectful

PERRY, A . N E W YORK MILL TOWN 77
mourning, she had set out, against the wishes of
her family, with a vague, romantic hope that was
expressed not so much in words as in a certain
picture hat trimmed with violet chiffon and carried
carefully in a bandbox by itself, a new, crisp sateen
petticoat, and a golf skirt she had sat up until one
o'clock to finish the night before she left home. It
was inevitable that the butcher's widow should be
disappointed. There was too much grim reality in
ten-hour days spent over a machine in the stifling
mill room to feed a sentimentalist whose thirty odd
years were no accomplice to romance. She grumbled
and complained. Secret dissatisfaction preyed upon
her. She was somewhat exasperated at the rest of
us, who worked cheerily and with no arriere pensee.
At the end of the first week the picture hat was
tucked away in the bandbox; the frou-frou of the
sateen petticoat and the daring swish of the golf
skirt were packed up, like the remains of a bubble
that had reflected the world in its brilliant sides one
moment and the next lay a little heap of soap-suds.
She had gone behind in her work steadily at the
factory; she was not making more than sixty cents a
day. She left us and went back to do housework in
Batavia.
My other roommate was of the Madonna type.
In our class she would have been called an invalid.
Her hands trembled, she was constantly in pain, and
her nerves were rebellious without frequent doses of

78

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

bromide. We found her one night lying in a heap
on the bed, her moans having called us to her aid.
It was the pain in her back that never stopped, the
ache between her shoulders, the din of the machines
in her ears, the vibration, the strain of incessant
hours upon her tired nerves. We fixed her up as
best we could, and the next day at quarter before
seven she was, like the rest of us, bending over her
machine again. She had been a school-teacher, after
passing the necessary examination at the Geneseo
Normal School. She could not say why schoolteaching was uncongenial to her, except that the
children "made her nervous'' and she wanted to try
factory work. Her father was a cheese manufacturer up in the Genesee Valley. She might have
lived quietly at home, but she disliked to be a
dependent. She was of the mystic, sentimental type.
She had a broad forehead, straight auburn hair, a
clear-cut mouth, whose sharp curves gave it sweetness. Though her large frame indicated clearly an
Anglo-Saxon lineage, there was nothing of the sport
about her. She had never learned to skate or swim,
but she could sit and watch the hills all day long.
Her clothes had an esthetic touch. Mingled with
her nervous determination there was a sentimental
yearning. She was an idealist, impelled by some
controlling emotion which was the mainspring of
her life.
Little by little we became friends. Our common

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 79
weariness brought us often together after supper in
a listless, confidential mood before the parlour stove.
We let the conversation drift inevitably toward the
strong current that was marking her with a touch
of melancholy, like all those of her type whose
emotional natures are an enchanted mirror, reflecting
visions that have no place in reality. We talked
about blondes and brunettes, tall men and short
men, our favourite man's name; and gradually the
itixpersonal became personal, the ideal took form.
Her voice, like a broken lute that might have given
sweet sounds, related the story. It was inevitable
that she should love a dreamer like herself. Nature
had imbued her with a hopeless yearning. She
slipped a gold locket from a chain on her throat. It
framed her hero's picture, the source of her courage,
the embodiment of her heroic energy: a man of
thirty, who had failed at everything; good-looking,
refined, a personage in real life who resembled the
inhabitants of her enchanted mirror. In the story
she told there were stars and twilight, summer
evenings, walks, talks, hopes and vague projects.
Any practical questions I felt ready to ask would
have sounded coarse. The little school-teacher
with shattered nerves embodied a hope that was
more to her than meat and drink and money. She
was of those who do not live by bread alone.
Among the working population of Perry there are
all manner of American characteristics manifest.

80

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

In a country where conditions change with such
rapidity that each generation is a revelation to the
one which preceded it, it is inevitable that the family
and the State should be secondary to the individual.
We live with our own generation, with our contemporaries. We substitute experience for tradition.
Each generation lives for itself during its prime. As
soon as its powers begin to decline it makes way
with resignation for the next: "We have had our
day; now you can have yours." Thus in the important decisions of life, the choosing of a career, matrimony or the like, the average American is much
more influenced by his contemporaries than by his
elders, much more stimulated or determined by the
friends of his own age than by the older members of
his family. This detaching of generations through
the evolution of conditions is inevitable in a new
civilization; it is part of the country's freedom. It
adds fervour and zest and originality to the effort
of each. But it means a youth without the peace of
protection; an old age without the harvest of consolation. The man in such a battle as life becomes
under these circumstances is better equipped than the
woman, whose nature disarms her for the struggle.
The American woman is restless, dissatisfied. Society, whether among the highest or lowest classes,
has driven her toward a destiny that is not normal.
The factories are full of old maids ; the colleges are
full of old maids; the ballrooms in the worldly

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 81
centres are full of old maids. For natural obligations are substituted the fictitious duties of clubs,
meetings, committees, organizations, professions, a
thousand unwomanly occupations.
I cannot attempt to touch here upon the classes
who have not a direct bearing on our subject, but the
analogy is striking between them and the factory
elements of which I wish to speak. I cannot dwell
upon details that, while full of interest, are yet somewhat aside from the present point, but I want to
state a fact, the origin of whose ugly consequences
is in all classes and therefore concerns every living
American woman. Among the American born
women of this country the sterility is greater, the
fecundity less than those of any other nation in the
world, unless it be France, whose anxiety regarding
her depopulation we would share in full measure
were it not for the foreign immigration to the United
States, which counteracts the degeneracy of the
American.* The original causes for this increasing
sterility are moral and not physical. When this is
known, does not the philosophy of the American
working woman become a subject of vital interest ? Among the enemies to fecundity and a natural destiny there are two which act as potently in.
the lower as in the upper classes: the triumph
of individualism, the love of luxury. America
* George Engelman, M. D., " The Increasing Sterility of
American Women," from the Journal of the American Medical
Association, October 5, 1901.

82

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

is not a democracy, the unity of effort between the
man and the woman does not exist. Men were too
long in a majority. Women have become autocrats
or rivals. A phrase which I heard often repeated
at the factory speaks by itself for a condition:
"She must be married, because she don't work."
And another phrase pronounced repeatedly by the
younger girls: "I don't have to work; my father
gives me all the money I need, but not all the money
I want. I like to be independent and spend my
money as I please."
What are the conclusions to be drawn? The
American-born girl is an egoist. Her whole
effort (and she makes and sustains one in the
life of mill drudgery) is for herself. She works
for luxury until the day when a proper husband
presents himself. Then she stops working and lets
him toil for both, with the hope that the budget shall
not be diminished by increasing family demands.
In those cases where the woman continues to work
after marriage, she chooses invariably a kind of
occupation which is inconsistent with child-bearing.
She returns to the mill with her husband. There
were a number of married couples at the knitting
factory at Perry. They boarded, like the rest of us.
I never saw a baby nor heard of a baby while I was
in the town.
I can think of no better way to present this love of
luxury, this triumph of individualism, this passion

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 83
for independence than to continue my account of
the daily life at Perry.
On Saturday night we drew our pay and got out
at half-past four. This extra hour and a half was
not given to us; we had saved it up by beginning
each day at fifteen minutes before seven. In reality
we worked ten and a quarter hours five days in the
week in order to work eight and a half on the sixth.
By five o'clock on Saturdays the village street
was animated with shoppers—the stores were
crowded. At supper each girl had a collection of
purchases to show: stockings, lace, fancy buckles,
velvet ribbons, elaborate hairpins. Many of them,
when their board was paid, had less than a dollar left
of the five or six it had taken them a week to earn.
" I am not working to save," was the claim
of one girl for all. " I'm working for pleasure."
This same girl called me into her room one
evening when she was packing to move to another
boarding-house where were more young men and
better food. I watched her as she put her things
into the trunk. She had a quantity of dresses,
underclothes with lace and tucks, ribbons, fancy hair
ornaments, lace boleros, handkerchiefs. The bottom of her trunk was full of letters from her beau.
The mail was always the source of great excitement
for her, and having noticed that she seemed especially
hilarious over a letter received that night, I made
this the pretext for a confidence.

84

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

" You got a letter to-night, didn't you?" I asked
innocently. "Was it the one you wanted?"
"My, yes," she answered, tossing up a heap of
missives from the depths of her trunk. * * It was from
the same one that wrote me these. I've been going
with him three years. I met him up in the grape
country where I went to pick grapes. They give
you your board and you can make twenty-seven or
thirty dollars in a fall. He made up his mind as
soon as he saw me that I was about right. Now he
wants me to marry him. That's what his letter said
to-night. He is making three dollars a day and he
owns a farm and a horse and wagon. He bought
his sister a $300 piano this fall."
"Well, of course," I said eagerly, "you will accept
him?"
She looked half shy, half pleased, half surprised.
"No, m y ! no," she answered, shaking her head.
" I don't want to be married."
" B u t why not? Don't you think you are
foolish? It's a good chance and you have already
• been 'going with him' three years."
" Yes, I know that, but I ain't ready to marry him
yet. Twenty-five is time enough. I'm only twentythree. I can have a good time just as I am. He
didn't want me to come away and neither did my
parents. I thought it would 'most kill my father.
He looked like he'd been sick the day I left, but he

AFTER SATURDAY N I G H T ' S SHOPPING

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 85
let me come 'cause he knew I'd never be satisfied
until I got my independence/'
What part did the love of humanity play in this
young egoist's heart ? She was living, as she had so
well explained it, ''not to save, but to give herself
pleasure"; not to spare others, but to exercise her
will in spite of them. Tenderness, reverence,
gratitude, protection are the feelings which one
generation awakens for another. Among the thousand contemporaries at Perry, from the sameness
of their ambitions, there was inevitable rivalry and
selfishness. The closer the age and capacity the
keener the struggle.
There are seven churches in Perry of seven
different denominations. In this small town of
3,000 inhabitants there are seven different forms of
worship. The church plays an important part in
the social life of the mill hands. There are
gatherings of all sorts from one Sunday to
another, and on Sunday there are almost continuous
services. There are frequent conversions. When
the Presbyterian form fails they " t r y " the
Baptist. There is no moral instruction; it is all
purely religious; and they join one church or
another more as they would a social club than an
ordained religious organization.
Friday was "social" night at the church. Sometimes there was a "poverty" social, when every one
put on shabby clothes, and any one who wore a

86

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

correct garment of any sort was fined for the benefit
of the church. Pound socials were another variety
of diversion, where all the attendants were weighed
on arriving and charged a cent admission for every
pound of avoirdupois.
The most popular socials, however, were box
socials, and it was to one of these I decided to go
with two girls boarding in the house. Each of us
packed a box with lunch as good as we could afford
—eggs, sandwiches, cakes, pickles, oranges—and
arrived with these, we proceeded to the vestry-room,
where we found an improvised auctioneer's table
and a pile of boxes like our own, which were marked
and presently put up for sale. The youths of the
party bid cautiously or recklessly, according as their
inward conviction told them that the box-was packed
by friend or foe.
My box, which, like the rest, had supper for
two, was bid in by a tall, nice-looking mill hand,
and we installed ourselves in a corner to eat and
talk. He was full of reminiscence and had had
a checkered career. His first experience had been
at night work in a paper mill. He worked eleven
hours a night one week, thirteen hours a night the
next week, in and out of doors, drenched to the skin.
He had lost twenty-five pounds in less than a year,
and his face was a mere mask drawn over the
irregular bones of the skull.
" I always like whatever I am doing," he responded

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN

87

at my protestation of sympathy. " I think that's
the only way to be. I never had much appetite at
night. They packed me an elegant pail, but somehow all cold food didn't relish much. I never did
like a pail. . . . How would you like to take
a dead man's place?" he asked, looking at me
grimly.
I begged him to explain.
" One of my best friends," he began, " was working
alongside of me; and I guess he got dizzy or something, for he leaned up against the big belt that ran
all the machinery and he was lifted right up in the
air and tore to pieces before he ever knew what struck
him. The boss came in and seen it, and the second
question he asked, he says, 'Say, is the machinery
running all right?' It wasn't ten minutes before
there was another man in there doing the dead man's
work."
I began to undo the lunch-box, feeling very little
inclined to eat. We divided the contents, and my
friend, seeing perhaps that I was depressed, told me
about the " shows" he had been to in his wanderings.
"Now, I don't care as much for comedy as some
folks," he explained. " I like' Puddin' Head Wilson'
first rate, but the finest thing I ever seen was two of
Shakespeare's: * The Merchant of Venice' and ' Julius
Caesar.' If you ever get a chance I advise you to go
and hear them; they're great."
I responded cordially, and when we had exhausted

88

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

Shakespeare I asked him how he liked Perry
people.
" Oh, first rate," he said. " I've been here only a
month, but I think there's too much formality. It
seems to me that when you work alongside of a girl
day after day you might speak to' her without an
introduction, but they won't let you here. I never
seen such a formal place."
I said very little. The boy talked on of his life
and experiences. His English was good except for
certain grammatical errors. His words were well
chosen. There was between him and the fortunate
boys of a superior class only a few years of
training.
The box social was the beginning of a round of
gaieties. The following night I went with my boxsocial friend to a ball. Neither of us danced, but we
arrived early and took good places for looking on.
The barren hall was dimly lighted. In the corner
there was a stove; at one end a stage. An old man
with a chin beard was scattering sand over the floor
with a springtime gesture of seed sowing. He had
his hat on and his coat collar turned up, as though to
indicate that the party had not begun. By and by
the stage curtain rolled up and the musicians came
out and unpacked a violin, a trombone, a flute and
a drum. They sat down in the Medieval street
painted on the scenery back of them, crossed their
legs and asked for sol la from an esthetic young

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 89
lady pianist, with whom they seemed on very
familiar terms. The old man with the chin beard
made an official entree from the wing, picked up
the drum and became a part of the orchestra. The
subscribers had begun to arrive, and when the first
two-step struck up there were eight or ten couples
on the floor. They held on to each other closely,
with no outstretched arms as is the usual form, and
they revolved very slowly around and around the
room. The young men had smooth faces, patent
leather boots, very smart cravats and a sheepish,
self-conscious look. The girls had elaborate constructions in frizzed hair, with bows and tulle; black
trailing skirts with coloured ruffled under-petticoats,
light-coloured blouses and fancy belts. They
seemed to be having a very good time.
On the way home we passed a brightly lighted
grocery shop. My friend looked in with interest.
" Goodness,'' he said, " but those Saratoga chips look
good. Now, what would you order," he went on,
"if you could have anything you liked?" We
began to compose a menu with oysters and chicken
and all the things we never saw, but it was not long
before my friend cried "Mercy! Oh, stop; I can't
stand it. It makes me too hungry."
The moon had gone under a cloud. The wooden
sidewalks were rough and irregular, and as we
walked along toward home I tripped once or twice.
Presently I felt a strong arm put through mine,

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
with this assurance: "Now if you fall we'll both
fall together."
After four or five days' experience with a machine
I began to work with more ease and with less pain
between my shoulders. The girls were kind and
sympathetic, stopping to help and encourage the
"new girl." One of the shirt finishers, who had
not been long in the mill herself, came across from
her table one day when I was hard at work with a
pain like a sword stab in my back.
" I know how you ache," she said. " I t just
makes me feel like crying when I see how you keep
at it and I can guess how tired you are."
Nothing was so fatiguing as the noise. In certain
places near the eyelet and buttonhole machines it
was impossible to make one's neighbour hear without
shouting. My teacher, whose nerves, I took it, were
less sensitive than mine, expressed her sensations in
this way:
" It's just terrible sitting here all day alone, worrying and thinking all by yourself and hustling from
morning until night. Lots of the girls have nervous
prostration. My sister had it and I guess I'm
getting it. I hear the noise all night. Quite a few
have consumption, too, from the dust and the lint."
The butcher's widow, the school-teacher and I
started in at about the same time. At the end of
two weeks the butcher's widow had long been gone.
The school-teacher had averaged seventy-nine cents

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 91
a day and I had averaged eighty-nine. My best
day I finished sixteen dozen shirts and netted $1.11.
My board and washing cost me three dollars, so that
from the first I had a living insured.
There was one negress in the factory. She
worked in a corner quite by herself and attended
to menial jobs, such as sweeping and picking up
scraps. A great many of the girls and boys took
correspondence courses in stenography, drawing,
bookkeeping, illustrating, etc., etc. The purely
mechanical work of the mill does not satisfy them.
They are restless and ambitious, exactly the material
with which to form schools of industrial art, the class
of hand-workers of whom I have already spoken.
One of the girls who worked beside us as usual in
the morning, left a note on her machine at noon one
day to say that she would never be back. She was
going up to the lake to drown herself, and we needn't
look for her. Some one was sent in search. She
was found sitting at the lake's edge, weeping.
She did not speak. We all talked about it in our
leisure moments, but the work was not interrupted.
There were various explanations: she was out of her
mind; she was discouraged with her work; she was
nervous. No one suggested that an unfortunate
love affair be the cause of her .desperate act.
There was not a word breathed against her
reputation. I would have felt impure in proposing
what to me seemed most probable.

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
The mill owners exert, as far as possible, an
influence over the moral tone of their employees,
assuming the right to judge their conduct both in
and out of the factory and to treat them as they
see fit. The average girls are self-respecting. They
trifle with love. The attraction they wish to exert
is ever present in their Blinds and in their conversation. The sacrifices they make for clothes are the
first in importance. They have superstitions of all
kinds: to sneeze on Saturday means the arrival of a
beau on Sunday; a big or little tea leaf means a tall
or a short caller, and so on. There is a book of
dreams kept on one table in the mill, and the girls
consult it to find the interpretation of their nocturnal
reveries. They are fanciful, sentimental, cold,
passionless. The accepted honesty of married life
.makes them slow to discard the liberty they love, to
dismiss the suitors who would attend their wedding
as one would a funeral.
There is, of course, another category of girl, who
goes brutally into passionate pleasures, follows the
shows, drinks and knocks about town with the
boys. She is known as a "bum," has sacrificed
name and reputation and cannot remain in the mill.
We discussed one night the suitable age for a girl
to become mistress of herself. The boy of the household maintained that at eighteen a girl could marry,
but that she must be twenty-one before she could
have her own way. All the girls insisted that they

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 93
could and did boss themselves and had even before
they were eighteen.
Two chums who boarded in my house gave a
charming illustration of the carelessness and the
extravagance, the independence and love of it which
characterizes feminine America. One of these was
a deracinee, a child with a foreign touch in her
twang; a legend of other climes in the dexterity
of her deft fingers; some memory of an exile
from France in her name: Lorraine. Her friend
was a mondaine. She had the social gift, a subtle
understanding of things worldly, the glissey mortel
n'appuyez jamais attitude toward life. By a touch
of flippancy, an adroit turn of mind, she kept the
knowing mastery over people which has mystified
and delighted in all great hostesses since the days
of Esther.
When the other girls waited feverishly for love
letters, she was opening a pile of invitations to socials
and theatre parties. Discreet and condescending,
she received more than she gave.
As soon as the posters were out for a Tuesday
performance of " Faust," preparations began in
the household to attend. Saturday shopping and
supper were hurried through and by six o'clock
Lorraine was at the sewing machine tucking chiffon
for hats and bodices. After ten hours' work in the
mill, she began again, eager to use the last of the
spring twilight, prolonged by a quarter moon*

94

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

There was a sudden, belated gust of snow; in the
blue mist each white frame house glowed with a
warm, pink light from its parlour stove. Lorraine's
fingers flew. A hat took form and grew from a
heap of stuff into a Parisian creation; a bolero was
cut and tucked and fitted; a skirt was ripped and
stitched and pressed; a shirt-waist was started and
finished. For two nights the girls worked until
twelve o'clock so that when the "show" came they
might have something new to wear that nobody had
seen. This must have been the unanimous intention
of the Perry populace, for the peanut gallery was a
bower of fashion. Styles, which I had thought
were new in Paris, were familiarly worn in Perry by
the mill hands. White kid gloves were en regie. The
play was " Faust." All allusions to the triumph of
religion over the devil; all insinuations on the part
of Mephistopheles in regard to the enviable escape
of Martha's husband and of husbands in general,
from prating women in general; all invocations of
virtue and moral triumph, were greeted with bursts
of applause. Between the acts there was music, and
the ushers distributed showers of printed advertisements, which the audience fell at once to reading
as though they had nothing to talk about.
I heard only one hearty comment about the play:
"That devil," said Lorraine, as we walked home
together, "was a corker ! "
I have left until the last the two friends who held

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 95
a place apart in the household: the farmer and his
wife, the old people of another generation with
whom we boarded. They had begun life together
forty years ago. They lived on neighbouring farms.
There was dissension between the families such as
we read of in " Pyramus and Thisbe,"/' Romeo and
Juliet." The young people contrived a means of
corresponding. An old coat that hung in the barn,
where nobody saw it, served as post-office. Truman
pleaded his cause ardently and won his Louisa. They
fixed a day for the elopement. A fierce snowstorm piled high its drifts of white, but all the afternoon long the little bride played about, burrowing a
path from the garden to her bedroom window, and
when night came and brought her mounted hero
with it, she climbed up on to the saddle by his side
and rode away to happiness, leaving ill nature and
quarrels far behind. Side by side, as on the night
of their wedding ride, they had traversed forty years
together. Ill health had broken up their farm
home. When Truman could no longer work they
came in to Perry to take boarders, having no children.
The old man never spoke. He did chores about the
house, made the fire mornings, attended to the
parlour stove; he went about his work and no one
ever addressed a word to him; he seemed to have
no more live contact with the youth about him
than driftwood has with the tree's new shoots.
He had lived his life on a farm; he was a land captain;

96

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

he knew the earth's secrets as a ship's captain knows
the sea's. He paced the mild wooden pavements of
Perry, booted and capped for storm and wind, deep
snow and all the inimical elements a pioneer might
meet with. His new false teeth seemed to shine
from his shaggy gray beard as a symbol of this new
town experience in a rough natural existence, out
of keeping, ill assorted. Tempted to know what
his silence hid, I spent an hour with him by the
kitchen stove one Sunday afternoon. His memory
went easily back to the days when there were no
railroads, no telegraphs, no mills. He was of a
speculative turn of mind:
" I don't see," he said, "what makes men so crazy
after gold. They're getting worse all the time. Gold
ain't got no real value. You take all the gold out of
the world and it wouldn't make no difference whatever. You can't even make a tool to get a living with,
out of gold; but just do away with the iron, and
where would you b e ? " And again, he volunteered:
"I think Mr. Carnegie would have done a deal
nobler if he had paid his men a little more straight
along. He wouldn't have had such a name for
himself. But don't you believe it would have been
better to have paid those men more for the work
they were doing day by day than it is now to give
pensions to their families? I know what I think
about the matter."
I asked him how he liked city life.

SUNDAY EVENING AT SILVER LAKE
The mill girls' excursion resort A special train and 'busses run on Sundays,
and "everybody" goes.

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN 97
"Give me a farm every time," was his answer.
"Once you've seen a town you know it all. It's the
same over and over again. But the country's
changing every day in the year. It's a terrible thing,
being sick," he went on. "It seems sometimes as
though the pain would tear me to pieces when I
walk across the floor. I wasn't no good on the
farm any more, so my wife took a notion we better
come in town and take boarders."
Thus it was with this happily balanced couple;
as his side grew heavier she took on more ballast and
swung even with him. She had the quick adaptability common to American women. During the
years of farm life religious meetings and a few
neighbours had kept her in touch with the outside
world. The church and the kitchen were what she
had on the farm; the church and the kitchen were
what she had in town; family life supplemented by
boarders, a social existence kept alive by a few
faithful neighbours. She had retained her activity
and sympathy because she was intelligent, because
she lived with the young. The man could not make
himself one of another generation, so he lived alone.
He had lost his companions, the "cow kind and the
sheep kind"; he had lost control over the earth that
belonged to him; he was disused; he suffered; he
pined. But as they sat together side by side at
table, his look toward her was one of trust and
comfort. His glance traveled back over a long

98

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

vista of years seen to them as their eyes met, invisible
to those about—years that had glorified confidence
in this life as it passed and transfigured it into the
promise of another life to come.

MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

CHAPTER IV
MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

ON arriving in Chicago I addressed myself to the
ladies of Hull House, asking for a tenement family
who would take a factory girl to board. I intended
starting out without money to see at least how far
I could go before putting my hand into the depths
where an emergency fund was pinned in a black
silk bag.
It was the first day of May. A hot wind blew
eddies of dust up and down the electric car tracks;
the streets were alive with children; a group
swarmed in front of each doorstep, too large to fit
into the house behind it. Down the long, regular
avenues that stretched right and left there was a
broken line of 'tenements topped by telegraph wires
and bathed in a soft cloud of black soot falling from
a chimney in the neighbourhood. The sidewalks
were a patchwork of dirt, broken paving-stones and
wooden boards. The sunshine was hot and gloomy.
There were no names on the corner lamps and the
house numbers were dull and needed repainting.
It was already late in the afternoon: I had but an
hour or two before dark to find a lodging. The
IOI

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
miserable, overcrowded tenement houses repelled
me, yet I dreaded that there should not be room
among them for one more bread-winner to lodge. I
hailed a cluster of children in the gutter:
"Say," I said, "do you know where Mrs. Hicks
lives t o ? "
They crowded around, eager. The tallest boy,
with curly red hair and freckles, pointed out Mrs.
Hicks' residence, the upper windows of a brick flat
that faced the world like a prison wall. After I had
rung and waited for the responding click from
above, a cross-eyed Italian woman with a baby
in her arms motioned to me from the step where
she was sitting that I must go down a side alley to
find Mrs. Hicks. Out of a promiscuous heap of
filth, a broken-down staircase led upward to a row of
green blinds and a screen door. Somebody's housekeeping was scattered around in torn bits of linen
and tomato cans.
The screen door opened to my knock and the
Hicks family gushed at me—ever so many children
of all ages and an immense mother in an underwaist and petticoat. The interior was neat; the
wooden floors were scrubbed spotless. I congratulated myself. Mrs. Hicks clucked to the family
group, smiled at me, and said:
"I never took a boarder in my life. I ain't got
room enough for my own young ones, let alone
strangers."

" THE BREATH OF THE
BLACK, SWEET NIGHT
REACHED THEM,FETID,
HEAVY WITH THE ODOUR OF DEATH AS
IT BLEW ACROSS THE STOCKYARDS "
^*C~'

MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

103

There were two more names on my list. I proceded to the nearest and found an Irish lady living
in basement.rooms ornamented with green crochet
work, crayon portraits, red plaid table-cloths and
chromo picture cards.
She had rheumatism in her " limbs'' and moved
with difficulty. She was glad to talk the matter
over, though she had from the first no intention of
taking me. From my then point of view nothing
seemed so desirable as a cot in Mrs. Flannagan's
front parlour. I even offered in my eagerness to
sleep on the horsehair sofa. Womanlike, she gave
twenty little reasons for not taking me before she
gave the one big reason, which was this:
"Well, to tell you the truth, I wouldn't mind
having you myself, but I've got three sons, and
you know boys is queer."
It was late, the sun had set and only the twilight
remained for my search before night would be upon
me and I would be driven to some charity refuge.
I had one more name, and climbed to find its
owner in a tenement flat. She was a German woman
with a clubfoot. Two half-naked children incrusted
with dirt were playing on the floor. They waddled
toward me as I asked what my chances were for
finding a room and board. The mother struck first
one, then the other, of her offspring, and they fell
into two little heaps, both wailing. From a hole
back of the kitchen came the sympathetic response

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
of a half-starved shaggy dog. He howled and the
babes wailed while we visited the dusky apartment.
There was one room rented to a day lodger who
worked nights, and one room without a window
where the German family slept. She proposed that
I share the bed with her that night until she could
get an extra cot. Her husband and the children
could sleep on the parlour lounge. She was hideous
and dirty. Her loose lips and half-toothless mouth
were the slipshod note of an entire existence. There
was a very dressy bonnet with feathers hanging on a
peg in the bedroom, and two gala costumes belonging
to the tearful twins.
"I'll come back in an hour, thank you," I said.
"Don't expect me if I am not here in an hour," and
I fled down the stairs. Before the hour was up
I had found, through the guidance of the Irish lady
with rheumatism, a clean room in one street and
board in another. This was inconvenient, but safe
and comparatively healthy.
My meals were thirty-five cents a day, payable at
the end of the week; my room was $1.25 a week,
total $3.70 a week.
My first introduction to Chicago tenement life
was supper at Mrs. Wood's.
I could hear the meal sputtering on the kitchen
stove as I opened the Wood front door.
Mrs. Wood, combining duties as cook and hostess,
called to me to make myself at home in the front

MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

105

parlour. I seated myself on the sofa, which exuded
the familiar acrid odour of the poor. Opposite me
there was a door half open leading into a room
where a lamp was lighted. I could see a young
girl and a man talking together. He was sitting
and had his hat on. She had a halo of blond hair,
through which the lamplight was shining, and she
stood near the man, who seemed to be teasing her.
Their conversation was low, but there was a familiar
cry now and then, half vulgar, half affectionate.
When we had taken our places at the table, Mrs:
Wood presented us.
"This is Miss Ida," she said, pointing to the blonde
girl; "she's been boarding over a year with me, and
this," turning to the young man who sat near by
with one arm hanging listlessly over the back of a
chair, "this is Miss Ida's intended."
The other members of the household were a fox
terrier, a canary and "Wood"—Wood was a man
over sixty. He and Mrs. Wood had the same
devoted understanding that I have observed so often
among the poor couples of the older generation.
This good little woman occupied herself with the
things that no longer satisfy. She took tender care
of her husband, following him to the door with
one hand on his shoulder and calling after him as
he went on his way: " Good-by; take care of yourself." She had a few pets, her children were married and gone, she had a miniature patch of garden,

io6

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

a trust in the church guild—which took some time
and attention for charitable works, and she did her
own cooking and housework. "And," she explained
to me in the course of our conversation at supper,
"I never felt the need of joining these University
Settlement Clubs to get into society." Wood and
his wife were a good sort. Miss Ida was kind in
her inquiries about my plans.
"Have you ever operated a power machine?"
she asked.
"Yes," I responded—with what pride she little
dreamed. "I've run an electric Singer."
"I guess I can get you a job, then, all right, at
my place. It's piece-work; you get off at five, but
you can make good money."
I thanked her, not adding that my Chicago career
was to be a checkered one, and that I was determined
to see how many things I could do that I had never
done before.
But social life was beginning to wear on Miss Ida's
intended. He took up his hat and swung along
toward the door. I was struggling to extract with
my fork the bones of a hard, fried fish. Mrs. Wood
encouraged me in a motherly tone:
"Oh, my, don't be so formal; take your knife."
"Say," called a voice from the door, "say, come on,
Ida, I'm waiting for you." And the blonde fiancee
hurried away with an embarrassed laugh to join her
lover. She was refined and delicate, her ears were

MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

107

small, her hands white and slender, she spoke
correctly with a nasal voice, and her teeth (as is not
often the case among this class, whose lownesses seem
suddenly revealed when they open their mouths)
were sound and clean.
The man's smooth face was all commonness and
vulgarity.
"He's had appendicitis,'' Mrs. Wood explained
when we were alone. "He's been out of work a
long time. As soon as he goes to his job his side
bursts out again where they operated on him. He
ain't a bit strong."
"When are they going to be married?" I asked.
"Oh, dear me, they don't think of that yet; they're
in no hurry."
"Will Miss Ida work after she's married ?"
"No, indeed."
Did they not have their share of ideal then, these
two young labourers who could wait indefinitely,
fed by hope, in their sordid, miserable surroundings ?
I returned to my tenement room; its one window
opened over a narrow alley flanked on its opposite
side by a second tenement, through whose shutters
I could look and see repeated layers of squalid
lodgings. The thermometer had climbed up into
the eighties. The wail of a newly born baby came
from the room under mine. The heat was stifling.
Outdoors in the false, flickering day of the arc lights
the crowd swarmed, on the curb, on the sidewalk, on

io8

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

the house steps. The breath of the black, sweet
night reached them, fetid, heavy with the odour of
death as it blew across the stockyards. Shouts,
calls, cries, moans, the sounds of old age and of
infancy, of despair and of joy, mingled and became
the anonymous murmur of a hot, human multitude.
The following morning I put ten cents in my pocket
and started out to get a job before this sum should
be used up. How huge the city seemed when I
thought of the small space I could cover on foot,
looking for work ! I walked toward the river, as the
commercial activity expressed itself in that direction
by fifteen- and twenty-story-buildings and streams
of velvet smoke. Blocks and blocks of tenements,
with the same dirty people wallowing around them,
answered my searching eyes in blank response.
There was an occasional dingy sign offering board
and lodging. After I had made several futile
inquiries at imposing offices on the river front I felt
that it was a hopeless quest. I should never get
work unknown, unskilled, already tired and discouraged. My collar was wilted in the fierce heat;
my shabby felt sailor hat was no protection against
the sun's rays; my hands were gloveless; and as I
passed the plate glass windows I could see the
despondent droop of my skirt, the stray locks of
hair that blew about free of comb or veil. A sign
out: "Manglers wanted ! " attracted my attention in
the window of a large steam laundry. I was not a

MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

109

''mangier,'' but I went in and asked to see the boss.
"Ever done any mangling?" was his first question.
"No," I answered, "but I am sure I could learn."
I put so much ardour into my response that the
boss at once took an interest.
"We might give you a place as shaker; you could
start in and work up."
"What do you pay?'
"Four dollars a week until you learn. Then
you would work up to five, five and a half."
Better than nothing, was all I could think, but I
can't live on four a week.
"How often do you pay ?"
"Every Tuesday night."
This meant no money for ten days.
"If you think you'd like to try shaking come round
Monday morning at seven o'clock."
Which I took as my dismissal until Monday.
At least I had a job, however poor, and strengthened b y t h i s thought I determined to find something
better before Monday. The ten-cent piece lay an
inviting fortune in my hand. I was to part with
one-tenth of it in exchange for a morning newspaper.
This investment seemed a reckless plunge, but
"nothing venture, nothing have," my pioneer spirit
prompted, and soon deep in the list of Wanted,
Females, I felt repaid. Even in my destitute
condition I had a choice in mind. If possible I
wanted to work without machinery in a shop where

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS
the girls used their hands alone as power. Here
seemed to be my heart's content—a short, concise
advertisement, "Wanted, hand sewers." After a
consultation with a policeman as to the whereabouts of my future employer, it became evident
that I must part with another of my ten cents, as the
hand sewers worked on the opposite side of the city
from the neighbourhood whither I had strayed in
my morning's wanderings. I took a car and alighted
at a busy street in the fashionable shopping centre
of Chicago. The number I looked for was over a
steep flight of dirty wooden stairs. If there is such
a thing as luck it was now to dwell a moment with
one of the poorest. I pushed open a swinging door
and let myself into the office of a clothing manufacturer.
The owner, Mr. P., got up from his desk and
came toward me.
" I seen your advertisement in the morning paper/'
"Yes," he answered in a kindly voice. "Are you
a tailoress?"
"No, sir; I've never done much sewing except on
a machine."
"Well, we have machines here."
"But," I almost interrupted, beginning to fear
that my training at Perry was to limit all further
experience to an electric Singer, "I'd rather work
with my hands. I like the hand-work."
He looked at me and gave me an answer which

MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

in

exactly coincided with my theories. He said this,
and it was just what I wanted him to say.
"If you do hand-work you'll have to use your mind.
Lots of girls come in here with an idea they can let
their thoughts wander; but you've got to pay strict
attention. You can't do hand-work mechanically."
"All right, sir," I responded. "What do you
pay?"
"I'll give you six dollars a week while you're
learning." I could hardly control a movement of
delight. Six dollars a week ! A dollar a day for an
apprentice!
"But"—my next question I made as dismal as
possible—"when do you pay?"
"Generally not till the end of the second week,"
the kindly voice said; "but we could arrange to pay
you at the end of the first if you needed the money."
"Shall I come in Monday?"
"Come in this afternoon at 12130 if you're ready."
" I ' m ready," I said, "but I ain't brought no lunch
with me, and it's too late now to get home and back
again."
The man put his hand in his pocket and laid down
before me a fifty-cent piece, advanced on my pay.
"Take that," he said, with courtesy; "get yourself a lunch in the neighbourhood and come back at
half-past twelve."
I went to the nearest restaurant. It was an
immense bakery patronized by office girls and men,

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS
hard workers who came for their only free moment
of the day into this eating-place. Everything that
could be swallowed quickly was spread out on a
long counter, behind which there were steaming tanks
of tea, coffee and chocolate. The men took their
food downstairs and the ladies climbed to the floor
above. I watched them. They were self-supporting
women—independent; they could use their money
as they liked. They came in groups—a rustling
frou-frou announced silk unclerfittings; feathers,
garlands of flowers, masses of trimming weighed
down their broad-brimmed picture hats, fancy veils,
kid gloves, silver side-bags, embroidered blouses and
elaborate belt buckles completed the detail of
their showy costumes, the whole worn with the air
of a manikin. What did these busy women order
for lunch ? Tea and buns, ice-cream and buckwheat
cakes, apple pie a la mode and chocolate were the
most serious menus. This nourishing food they ate
with great nicety and daintiness, talking the while
about clothes. They were in a hurry, as all of them
had some shopping to do before returning to work,
and they each spent a prinking five minutes before
the mirror, adjusting the trash with which they had
bedecked themselves exteriorly while their poor
hard-working systems went ungarnished and
hungry within.
This is the wound in American society whereby
its strength sloughs away. It is in this class that

MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

113

campaigns can be made, directly and indirectly, by
preaching and by example. What sort of women
are those who sacrifice all on the altar of luxury?
It is a prostitution to sell the body's health and
strength for gewgaws. What harmony can there
be between the elaborate get-up of these young
women and the miserable homes where they live?
The idolizing of material things is a religion nurtured
by this class of whom I speak. In their humble
surroundings the love of self, the desire to possess
things, the cherished need for luxuries, crowd out
the feelings that make character. They are but one
manifestation of the egoism of the unmarried
American woman.
For what and for whom do they work ?
Is their fundamental thought to be of benefit
to a family or to some member of a family?
Is their indirect object to be strong, thrifty members of society? No. Their parents are secondary,
their health is secondary to the consuming vanity
that drives them toward a ruinous goal. They scorn
the hand-workers; they feel themselves a noblesse by
comparison. They are the American snobs whose
coat of arms marks not a well-remembered family
but prospective luxuries. . . . Married, they
bring as a portion thriftless tastes, to satisfy which
more than one business man has wrecked his career.
They work like men; why should they not live as
men do, with similar responsibilities ? What should

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
we think of a class of masculine clerks and employees
who spent all their money on clothes ?
The boss was busy when I got back to the clothing
establishment. From the bench where I waited for
orders I could take an inventory of the shop's
productions. Arrayed in rows behind glass cases
there were all manner of uniforms: serious uniforms
going to the colonies to be shot to pieces, militia
uniforms that would hear their loudest heart-beats
under a fair head; drum-majors' hats that would
never get farther than the peaceful lawn of a military
post; fireman's hats; the dark-blue coat of a lonely
lighthouse guardian; the undignified short jacket of
a /'buttons." All that meant parade and glory, the
uniforms that make men identical by making each
proud of himself for his brass buttons and gold lace.
Even in the heavy atmosphere of the shop's rear,
•though they appeared somewhat dingy and tarnished,
they had their undeniable charm, and I thought
with pity of the hands that had to sew on plain
serge suits.
As soon as the boss saw me, the generous Mr. F.
who advanced me the fifty cents smiled at the
skeptical Mr. F. who had never expected to see me
again. One self said to the other: "I told you so !"
and all the kindly lines in the man's face showed
that he had looked for the best even in his inferiors
and that he had found mankind worth trusting.
He was the most generous employer I met with

IN A C H I C A G O T H E A T R I C A L

COSTUME

FACTORY

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anywhere; I also took him to be the least businesslike. But, as though quickly to establish the law of.
averages, his head forewoman counterbalanced all his
mercies by her ferocious crossness. She terrorized
everybody, even Mr. F. It was to her, I concluded,
that we owed our $6 a week. No girl would stay
for less; it was an atelier chiefly of foreign employees;
the proud American spirit would not stand the lash
of Frances' tongue. She had been ten years in
the place whose mad confusion was order to her.
Mr. F. did not dare to send her away; he
preferred keeping a perpetual advertisement in the
papers and changing hands every few days.
The workroom on our floor was fifty or sixty feet
long, with windows on the street at one end and
on a court at the other. The middle of the
room was lighted by gas. The air was foul and the
dirt lay in heaps at every corner and was piled up
under the centre tables. It was less like a workshop
than an old attic. There was the long-accumulated
disorder of hasty preparation for the vanities of life.
It had not at all the aspect of a factory which makfes
a steady provision of practical things. There were
odds and ends of fancy costumes hanging about—•
swords, crowns, belts and badges. Under the sewing
machines' swift needles flew the scarlet coats of a
regiment; gold and silver braid lay unfurled on the
table; the hand-workers bent over an armful of
khaki; a row of young girls were fitting military

n6

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

caps to imaginary soldier's heads; the ensigns of
glory slipped through the fingers of the humble;
chevrons and epaulets were caressed never so
closely by toil-worn hands. In the midst of us sits
a man on a headless hobby horse, making small
gray trunks bound in red leather, such boxes as
might contain jewels for Marguerite, a game of
lotto, or a collection of jack-straws and mother-ofpearl counters brought home from a first trip abroad.
The trunk maker wears a sombrero and smokes a
corn-cob pipe. He is very handsome with dark
eyes and fine features, and he has the ''average
figure," so that he serves as manikin for the atelier;
and I find him alternately a workman in overalls and
a Turkish magnate with turban and flowing robes.
It is into this atmosphere of toil and unreality that
I am initiated as a hand sewer. Something of the
dramatic and theatrical possesses the very managers
themselves. Below, a regiment waits impatient for
new brass buttons; we sew against time and break
all our promises. Messengers arrive every few
minutes with fresh reports of rising ire on the part
of disappointed customers. Down the stairs pellmell comes an elderly partner of the firm with a
gold-and-purple crown on his head and after him
follows the kindly Mr. P. in an usher's jacket. "If
you don't start now," he calls, "that order'll be left
on our hands,"
Amid such confusion the regular rhythm of the

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needle as it carries its train of thread across the yards
of coloured cloth is peaceful, consoling. I have on
one side of me a tailor who speaks only Polish, on
the other side a seamstress who speaks only German.
Across the frontier I thus become they communicate
with signs, and I get my share of work planned out
by each. Every woman in the place is cross except
the girl next to me. She has only just come in and
the poison of the forewoman has not yet stung her
into ill nature. She is, like all the foreigners,
neatly, soberly dressed in a sensible frock of good
durable material. The few Americans in the shop
have on elaborate shirt-waists in light-coloured silks
with fancy ribbon collars. We are well paid, there
is no doubt of it. We begin work at 8 A. M. and have
a generous half-hour at noon. Most of the girls are
Germans and Poles, and they have all received
training as tailoresses in their native countries. To
the sharp onslaught of Frances' tongue they make no
response,except in dogged silent obedience, whereas
the dressy Americans with their proper spirit of
independence touch the limit of insubordination at
every new command. Insults are freely exchanged;
threats ring out on the tired ears. Frances is
ubiquitous. She scolds the tailors with a torrent of
abuse, she terrorizes the handsome manikin, she
bewilders the kindly Mr. F., and before three days
have passed she has dismissed the neat little Polish
girl, in tears. This latter comes to me, her face

n8

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

wrought with emotion. She was receiving n ne
dollars a week; it is her first place in America. This
sudden dismissal, its injustice, requires an explanation. She cannot speak a word of English and
asks me to put my poor German at her service as
interpreter.
Mr. F. is clearly a man who advocates everything
for peace, and as there is for him no peace when
Frances is not satisfied, we gain little by our appeal
to him except a promise that he will attend later to
the troubles of the Polish girl. But later, as earlier,
Frances triumphs, and I soon bid good-by to my
seatmate and watch her tear-stained face disappear
down the dingy hallway. She was a skilled tailoress,
but she could not cut out men's garments, so Frances
dismissed her. I wonder when my turn will come,
for I am a green hand and yet determined to keep
the American spirit. For the sake of justice I will
not be downed by Frances.
It is hard to make friends with the girls; we dare
not converse lest a fresh insult be hurled at us. For
every mistake I receive a loud, severe correction.
When night comes I am exhausted. The work is
easy, yet the moral atmosphere is more wearing than
the noise of many machines. My job is often
changed during the week. I do everything as a
greenhorn, but I work hard and pay attention, so
that there is no excuse to dismiss me.
" I am only staying here between jobs/' the girl

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119

next me volunteers at lunch. "My regular place
burnt out. You couldn't get me to work under her.
I wouldn't stand it even if they do pay well." She
is an American.
" You're lucky to be so independent," says a
German woman whose dull silence I had hitherto
taken for ill nature. " I ' m glad enough to get the
money. I was up this morning at five, working.
There's myself and my mother and my little girl,
and not a cent but what I make. My husband is
sick. " He's in Arizona."
"What were you doing at five?" I asked.
" I have a trade," she answers. " I work on hair
goods. It don't bring me much, but I get in a few
hours night and morning and it helps some. There's
so much to pay."
She was young, but youth is no lover of discomfort. Hardships had chased every vestige of
jeunesse from her high, wrinkled brow and tired
brown eyes. Like a mirror held against despair her
face reflected no ray of hope. She was not rebellious,
but all she knew of life was written there in lines
whose sadness a smile now and again intensified.
Added to the stale, heavy atmosphere there is now
a smell of coffee and tobacco smoke. The old hands
have boiled a noon beverage on the gas; the tailors
smoke an after-dinner pipe. Put up in newspaper
by Mrs. Wood, at my matinal departure, my lunches,
after a ourney across the city, held tightly under my

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
arm, become, before eating, a block of food, a composite meal in which I can distinguish original bits
of ham sandwich and apple pie. The work, however,
does not seem hard to me. I sew on buttons, rip
trousers, baste coat sleeves—I do all sorts of odd
jobs from eight until six, without feeling, in spite of
the bad air, any great physical fatigue which ten
minutes' brisk walk does not shake off. But never
have the hours dragged so; the moral weariness in
the midst of continual scolding and abuse are
unbearable. Each night I come to a firm decision
to leave the following day, but weakly I return, sure
of my dollar and dreading to face again the giant
city in search of work. About four one afternoon,
well on in the week, Frances brings me a pair of
military trousers; the stripes of cloth at the side
seam are to be ripped off. I go to work cheerfully
cutting the threads and slipping one piece of cloth
from the other.
Apparently Frances is exasperated that I should
do the job in an easy way. It is the only way I
know to rip, but Frances knows another way that
breaks your back and almost puts your eyes out,
that makes you tired and behindhand and sure of
a scolding. She shows me how to rip her way. The
two threads of the machine, one from above and
one from below, which make the stitch, must be
separated. The work must be turned first on the
wrong, then on the right side, the scissors must lift

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121

first the upper, then the under thread. I begin by
cutting a long hole in the trousers, which I hide so
Frances will not see it. She has frightened me into
dishonesty. Arrived at the middle of the stripe I
am obliged to turn the trousers wrong side out and
right side out again every other stitch. While I
was working in this way, getting more enraged
every moment, a bedbug ran out of the seam
between my fingers. I killed it. It was full of blood
and made a wet red spot on the table. Then I put
down the trousers and drew away my chair. It was
useless saying anything to the girl next me. She
was a Pole, dull, sullen, without a friendly word;
but the two women beyond had told me once that
they pitied Prances' husband, so I looked to them
for support in what I was about to do.
"There's bedbugs in them clothes," I said. " I
won't work on 'em. No, sir, not if*-she sends me
away this very minute."
In a great hurry Frances passed me twice. She
called out angrily both times without waiting for an
answer:
" Why don't you finish them pants ?"
Frances was a German. She wore two rhinestone
combs in her frizzes, which held also dust and burnt
odds and ends of hair. She had no lips whatever.
Her mouth shut completely over them after each
tirade. Her eyes were separated by two deep scowls
and her voice was shrill and nasal.

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
On her third round she faced me with the same
question:
''Why don't you finish them pants?"
"Because," I answered this time, "there's bedbugs in 'em and I ain't goin' to touch 'em!"
" O h ! m y ! " she taunted me, in a sneering voice,
"that's dreadful, ain't it? Bedbugs! Why, you
need only just look on the floor to see 'em running
around anywhere!"
I said nothing more, and this remark was the
last Frances ever addressed to me.
"Mike!" she called to the presser in the
corner, "will you have this young lady's card made
out."
She gave me no further work to do, but, too
humiliated to sit idle, I joined a group of girls who
were sewing badges.
We had made up all description of political
badges—badges for the court, for processions, school
badges, military badges, flimsy bits of coloured ribbon and gold fringe which go the tour of the
world, rallying men to glory. In the dismal twilight our fingers were now busied with black-andsilver ''in memoriam" badges, to be worn as a last
tribute to some dead member of a coterie who
would follow him to the grave under the emblem
that had united them.
We were behindhand for the dead as well as for
the living. At six the power was turned off, the

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123

machine hands went home, there was still an
unfinished heap of black badges.
I got up and put on my things in the dark closet
that served for dressing-room. Frances called to
the hand sewers in her rasping voice:
"You darsn't leave till you've finished them
badges.''
How could I feel the slavery they felt ? My nerves
were sensitive; I was unaccustomed to their familiar
hardships. But on the other hand, my prison had an
escape; they were bound within four walls; I dared
to rebel knowing the resources of the black silk
emergency bag, money lined. They for their living
must pay with moral submission as well as physical
fatigue. There was nothing between them and
starvation except the success of their daily effort.
What opposition could the German woman place,
what could she risk, knowing that two hungry
mouths waited to be fed beside her own ?
With a farewell glance at the rubbish-strewn
room, the high, grimy windows, the group of
hand sewers bent over their work in the increasing darkness, I started down the stairs. A hand
was laid on my arm, and I looked up and saw
Mike's broad Irish face and sandy head bending
toward me.
" I suppose you understand," he said, " t h a t
there'll be no more work for you."
"Yes," I answered, " I understand," and we

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
exchanged a glance that meant we both agreed
it was Frances' fault.
In the shop below I found Mr. P. and returned
the fifty cents he had advanced me. He seemed
surprised at this.
" I'm sorry," he said, in his gentle voice, " that we
couldn't arrange things."
" I ' m sorry, too," I said. But I dared not add a
word against Frances. She had terrorized me like
the rest, and though I knew I never would see her
again, her pale, lifeless mask haunted me. I remembered a remark the German woman had made when
Frances dismissed the Polish girl: "People ought
to make it easy, and not hard, for others to earn
a living."
At the end of this somewhat agitating day I
returned to my tenement lodgings as to a haven of
rest. There was one other lodger besides myself:
she was studying music on borrowed money at four
dollars a lesson. Obviously she was a victim to
luxury in the same degree as the young women with
whom I had lunched at the bakery. Nothing that
a rich society girl might have had been left out of her
wardrobe, and borrowed money seemed as good as
any for making a splurge.
Miss Arnold was something of a snob, intellectual
and otherwise. It was evident from my wretched
clothes and poor grammar that I was not
accustomed to ladies of her type, but, far from

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125

sparing me, she humiliated me with all sorts of
questions.
" I ' m tired of taffeta jackets, aren't y o u ? " she
would ask, apropos of my flimsy ulster. " I had
taffeta last year, with velvet and satin this winter;
but I don't know what I'll get yet this summer."
After supper, on my return, I found her sitting in
the parlour with Mrs. Brown. They never lighted
the gas, as there was an electric lamp which sent its
rays aslant the street and repeated the pattern of
the window curtains all over Mrs. Brown's face and
hands.
Drawn up on one end of the horsehair sofa,
Miss Arnold, in a purple velvet blouse, chatted to
Mrs. Brown and me.
" I'm from Jacksonville," she volunteered, patting
her masses of curly hair. "Do you know anybody
from Jacksonville? It's an elegant town, so much
wealth, so many retired farmers, and it's such an
educational centre. Do you like reading?" she
asked me.
" I don't get time," is my response.
"Oh, m y ! " she rattles on. " I ' m crazy about
reading. I do love blank verse—it makes the
language so choice, like in Shakespeare."
Mrs. Brown and I, being in the majority as opposed
to this autocrat, remain placid. A current of understanding exists between us. Miss Arnold, on the
other hand, finds our ignorance a flattering back-

i26

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

ground for her learning and adventures. She is so
obviously a woman of the world on the tenement
horsehair sofa.
" I n case you don't like your work," she Lady
Bountifuls me, " I can get you a stylish place as
maid with some society people just out of Chicago
—friends of mine, an elegant family."
" I don't care to live out," I respond, thanking her.
" I like my Sundays and my evenings off."
Mrs. Brown pricks up her ears at this, and I notice
that thereafter she keeps close inquiry as to how my
Sundays and evenings are spent.
But the bell rings. Miss Arnold is called for by
friends to play on the piano at an evening entertainment. Mrs. Brown and I, being left alone, begin a
conversation of the personal kind, which is the only
resource among the poor. If she had had any
infirmity—a wooden leg or a glass eye—she would
naturally have begun by showing it to me, but as
she had been spared intact she chose second best.
" I ' v e had lots of shocks," she said, rocking back
and forth in a squeaky rocking-chair. The light
from over the way flickered and gleamed. Mrs.
Brown's broad, yellow face and gray hair were now
brilliant, now somber, as she rocked in and out of
the silver rays. Her voice was a metallic whine,
and when she laughed against her regular, even, false
teeth there was a sound like the mechanical yelp of a
toy cat. Married at sixteen, her whole life had been

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127

Brown on earth below and God in His heaven above.
Childless, she and Brown had spent over fifty years
together. It was natural in the matter of shocks
the first she should tell me about was Brown's death.
\The story began with " a breakfast one Sunday morning at nine o'clock. . . . Brown always made
the fire, raked down the ashes, set the coffee to boil,
and when the toast and eggs were ready he called me.
And that wasn't one morning, mind you—it was
every morning for fifty years. But this particular
morning I noticed him speaking strange; his tongue
was kind o' thick. He didn't hardly eat nothing,
and as soon as I'd done he got up and carried the
ashes downstairs to dump 'em. When he come up
he seemed dizzy. I says to him, * Don't you feel
good ?' but he didn't seem able to answer. He made
like he was going to undress. He put his hand in his
pocket for his watch, and he put it in again for his
pocketbook; but the second time it stayed in—he
couldn't move it no more; it was dead and cold when
I touched it. He leaned up against the wall, and I
tried to get him over on to the sofa. When I looked
into his eyes I see that he was gone. He couldn't
stand, but I held on to him with all my force; I
didn't let his head strike as he went down. When
he fell we fell together." Her voice was choked; even
now after three years as she told the story she could
not believe it herself.
Presently when she is calm again she continues

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THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

the recital of her shocks—three times struck by
lightning and once run over. Her simple descriptions
are straightforward and dramatic. As she talks
the wind blows against the windows, the shutters
rattle and an ugly white china knob, against which
the curtains are draped, falls to the floor. Tenderly,
amazed, she picks it up and looks at it.
" Brown put that up," she says; "there hasn't no
hand touched it since his'n."
Proprietor of this house in which she lives,
Mrs. Brown is fairly well off. She rents one floor to
an Italian family, one to some labourers, and one
to an Irishman and his wife who get drunk from
time to time and rouse us in the night with tumult
and scuffling. She has a way of disappearing for a
week or more and returning without giving any
account of herself. Relations are strained, and
Mrs. Brown in speaking of her says:
"I don't care what trouble I was in, I wouldn't
call in that Irish woman. I don't have anything to
do with her. I'd rather get the Dago next door."
And hereafter follows a mild tirade against the
Italians—the same sentiments I have heard
expressed before in the labouring centres.
"They're kind folks and good neighbours," Mrs.
Brown explains, "but they're different from us.
They eat what the rest of us throw away, and there's
no work they won't do. They're putting money
aside fast; most of 'em owns their own houses; but

CHICAGO TYPES

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129

since they've moved into this neighbourhood the
price of property's gone down. I don't have nothing
to do with 'em. We don't any of us. They're not
like us; they're different."
Without letting a day elapse I started early the
following morning in search of a new job. The
paper was full of advertisements, but there was
some stipulation in each which narrowed my possibilities of getting a place, as I was an unskilled hand.
There was, however, one simple "Girls wanted!"
which I answered, prepared for anything but an
electric sewing machine.
The address took me to a more fashionable side of
the city, near the lake; a wide expanse of pale,
shimmering water, it lay a refreshing horizon for
eyes long used to poverty's quarters. Like a sea,
it rolled white-capped waves toward the shore from
its far-away emerald surface where sail-freighted
barks traveled at the wind's will. Free from man's
disfiguring touch, pure, immaculate, it appeared
bridelike through a veil of morning mist. And at
its very brink are the turmoil and confusion of
America's giant industries. In less than an hour I
am receiving wages from a large picture frame
company in East Lake Street. Once more I have
made the observation that men are more agreeable
bosses than women. The woman, when she is not
exceptionally disagreeable, like Frances, is always
annoying. She bothers and nags; things must be

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
done her way; she enjoys the legitimate minding of
other people's business. Aiming at results only,
the masculine mind is more tranquil. Provided you
get your work done, the man boss doesn't care what
methods you take in doing it. For the woman
boss, whether you get your work done or not, you
must do it her way The overseer at J.'s picture
frame manufactory is courteous, friendly, considerate. I have a feeling that he wishes me to
cooperate with him, not to be terrorized and driven
to death by him. My spirits rise at once, my ambition is stimulated, and I desire his approval. The
work is all done by the piece, he explains to me,
telling me the different prices. The girls work
generally in teams of three, dividing profits. Nothing
could be more modern, more middle-class, more
popular, more philistine than the production of J.'s
workrooms. They are the cheap imitations fed to a
public hungry for luxury or the semblance of it.
Nothing is genuine in the entire shop. Water
colours are imitated in.chromo, oils are imitated in
lithograph, white carved wood frames are imitated
in applications of pressed brass. Great works of art
are belittled by processes cheap enough to be within
reach of the poorest pocket. Framed pictures are
turned out by the thousand dozens, every size, from
the smallest domestic scene, which hangs over the
baby's crib in a Harlem flat, to the large weddingpresent size placed over the piano in the front parlour.

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131

The range of subjects covers a familiar list of comedies or tragedies—the partings before war, the
interior behind prison bars, the game of marbles,
the friendly cat and dog, the chocolate girl, the
skipper and his daughter, etc., etc.
My job is easy, but slow. With a hammer and
tacks I fasten four tin mouldings to the four corners
of a gilt picture frame. Twenty-five cents for a
hundred is the pay given me, and it takes me half a
day to do this many; but my comrades don't allow
me to get discouraged.
"You're doing well," a red-haired vis-a-vis calls
to me across the table. And the foreman, who comes
often to see how I am getting along, tells me that the
next day we are to begin team-work, which pays
much better.
The hours are ten a day: from seven until five
thirty, with twenty-five minutes at noon instead
of half an hour. The extra five minutes a day
mount up to thirty minutes a week and let us off
at five on Saturdays.
The conversation around me leads me to suppose
that my companions are not downtrodden in any
way, nor that they intend letting work interfere
with happiness. They have in their favour the
most blessed of all gifts—youth. The tragic faces
one meets with are of the women breadwinners
whose burdens are overwhelming and of the children
in whom physical fatigue arrests development and

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
all possibility of pleasure. My present team-mates
and those along the rest of the room are Americans
between fourteen and twenty-four years of age, full
of unconscious hope for the future, which is natural
in healthy, well-fed youth, taking their work cheerily
as a self-imposed task in exchange for which they can
have more clothes and more diversions during their
leisure hours.
* The profitable job given us on the following day
is monotonous and dirty, but we net $1.05 each.
There is a mechanical roller which passes before us,
carrying at irregular intervals a large sheet of
coloured paper covered with glue. My vis-a-vis and
I lay the palms of our right hands on to the glue
surface and lift the sheet of paper to its place on the
table before us, over a stiff square of bristol board.
The boss of the team fixes the two sheets together
with a brush which she manipulates skilfully. We
are making in this way the stiff backs which hold
the pictures into their frames. When we have
fallen into the proper swing we finish one hundred
sheets every forty-five minutes. We could work
more rapidly, but the sheets are furnished to us at
this rate, and it is so comfortable that conversation
is not interrupted. The subjects are the same as
elsewhere—dress, young men, entertainments. The
girls have ''beaux'' and '' steady beaux/' The expression, "Who is she going with?" means who is her
steady beau. "I've got Jim Smith now, but I don't

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133

know whether 111 keep him," means that Jim Smith
is on trial as a beau and may become a "steady."
They go to Sunday night subscription dances and
arrive Monday morning looking years older than on
Saturday, after having danced until early morning.
"There's nothing so smart for a ball," the mundane
of my team tells us, "as a black skirt and white
silk waist."
About ten in the morning most of us eat a pickle
or a bit of cocoanut cake or some titbit from the
lunch parcel which is opened seriously at twelve.
The light is good, the air is good, the room where
we work is large and not crowded, the foreman is
kind and friendly, the girls are young and cheerful;
one can make $7 to $8 a week.
The conditions at J. 's are too favourable to be
interesting, and, having no excuse to leave, I disappear one day at lunch time and never return to get
my apron or my wages. I shall be obliged to draw
upon the resources of the black silk bag, but before
returning to my natural condition of life I wish to
try one more place: a printing job. There are
quantities of advertisements in the papers for girls
needed to run presses of different sorts, so on the
very afternoon of my self-dismissal I start through
the hot summer streets in search of a situation. On
the day when my appearance is most forlorn I find
policemen always as officially polite as when I am
dressed in my best. Other people of whom I inquire

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
my way are sometimes curt, sometimes compassionate, seldom indifferent, and generally much
nicer or not nearly as nice as they would be to a
rich person. Poor old women to whom I speak
often call me "dear" in answering.
Under the trellis of the elevated road the " cables"
clang their way. Trucks and automobiles, delivery
wagons and private carriages plunge over the rough
pavements. The sidewalks are crowded with people
who are dressed for business, and who, whether men
or women, are a business type; the drones who taste
not of the honey stored in the hives which line the
streets and tower against the blue sky, veiling it with
smoke. The orderly rush of busy people, among
whom I move toward an address given in the paper,
is suddenly changed into confusion and excitement
by the bell of a fire-engine which is dragged clattering
over the cobbles, followed closely by another and
another before the sound of the horses' hoofs have
died away. Excitement for a moment supersedes
business. The fire takes precedence BSbre the office,
and a crowd stands packed against policemen's
arms, gazing upward at a low brick building which
sends forth flames hotter than the brazen sun,
smoke blacker than the perpetual veil of soot.
I compare the dingy gold number over the burning
door with the number in print on the newspaper slip
held between my thumb and forefinger. Decidedly
this is not one of my lucky days. The numbers

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135

correspond. But there are other addresses and I
collect a series of replies. The employer in a box
factory on the West Side takes my address and
promises to let me know if he has a vacancy for an
unskilled hand. Another boss printer, after much
urging on my part, consents to give me a trial the
following Monday at three dollars a week. A
kindly forelady in a large printing establishment on
Wabash Avenue sends me away because she wants
only trained workers. "I'm real sorry/' she says.
"You're from the East, aren't you? I notice you
speak with an accent.''
By this time it is after three in the afternoon; my
chances are diminishing as the day goes on and
others apply before me. There is one more possibility at a box and label company which has advertised for a girl to feed a Gordon press. I have never
heard of a Gordon press, but I make up my
mind not to leave the label company without the
promise of a job for the very next day. The stairway is dingy and irregular. My spirits are not
buoyant as I open a swinging door and enter a room
with a cage in the middle, where a lady cashier,
dressed in a red silk waist, sits on a high stool overlooking the office. Three portly men, fat, well
nourished, evidently of one family, are installed
behind yellow ash desks, each with a lady typewriter
at his right hand. I go timidly up to the fattest of
the three. He is in shirt sleeves, evidently feeling

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THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

the heat painfully He pretends to be very busy
and hardly looks up when I say:
" I seen your ad. in the paper this morning."
"You're rather late," is his answer. "I've got two
girls engaged already."
"Too late !" I say with an intonation which interrupts his work for a minute while he looks at me.
I profit by this moment, and, changing from tragedy
to a good-humoured smile, I ask:
"Say, are you sure those girls '11 come? You
can't always count on us, you know."
He laughs at this. "Have you ever run a Gordon
press?"
"No, sir'; but I'm awful handy."
"Where have you been working?"
"At J.'s in Lake Street."
"What did you make?"
"A dollar a day."
"Well, you come in to-morrow about eleven and
I'll tell you then whether I can give you anything to
do."
"Can't you be sure now ?"
Truly disappointed, my voice expresses the eagerness I feel.
"Well," the fat man says indulgently, "y o t L come
in to-morrow morning at eight and I'll give you a
job."
The following day I begin my last and by far my
most trying apprenticeship.

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137

The noise of a single press is deafening. In the
room where I work there are ten presses on my row,
eight back of us and four printing machines back of
them. On one side of the room only are there
windows. The air is heavy with the sweet, stifling
smell of printer's ink and cheap paper. A fine rain
of bronze dust sifts itself into the hair and clothes of
the girls at our end of the room, where they are
bronzing coloured advertisements. The work is all
done standing; the hours are from seven until six,
with half an hour at noon, and holiday at one thirty
on Saturdays. It is to feed a machine that I am paid
three dollars a week. The expression is admirably
chosen. The machine's iron jaws yawn for food;
they devour all I give, and when by chance I am
slow they snap hungrily at my hand and would
crush my fingers did I not snatch them away,
feeling the first cold clutch. It is nervous work.
Each leaf to be printed must be ^handled twice;
5,000 circulars or bill-heads mean 10,000 gestures
for the printer, and this is an afternoon's work.
Into the square marked out for it by steel guards
the paper must be slipped with the right hand, while
the machine is open; with the left hand the printed
paper must be pulled out and a second fitted in its
place before the machine closes again. What a
master to serve is this noisy iron mechanism animated by steam! It gives not a moment's respite
to the worker, whose thoughts must never wander

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THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

from her task. The girls are pale. Their complexions
without exception are bad.
We are bossed by men. My boss is kind, and,
seeing that I am ambitious, he comes now and then
and prints a few hundred bill-heads for me. There
is some complaining sotto voce of the other boss, who,
it appears, is a hard taskmaster. Both are very
young, both chew tobacco and expectorate long,
brown, wet lines of tobacco juice on to the floor.
While waiting for new type I get into conversation
with the boss of ill-repute. He has an honest,
serious face; his eyes are evidently more accustomed
to judging than to trusting his fellow beings. He is
communicative.
" Do you like your job ?" he asks.
"Yes, first rate.''
"They don't pay enough. I give notice last week
and got a raise. I guess I'll stay on here until about
August."
"Then where are you going?"
"Going home," he answers. " I ' v e been away
from home for seven years. I run away when I was
thirteen and I've been knocking around ever since,
takin' care of myself, makin' a livin' one way or
another. My folks lives in California. I've been
from coast to coast—and I tell you I'll be mighty
glad to get back."
"Ever been sick?"
"Yes, twice. It's no fun. No matter how much

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139

licking a boy gets he ought never to leave home.
The first year or so you don't mind it so much, but
when you've been among strangers two years, three
years, all alone, sick or well, you begin to feel you
must get back to your own folks."
" Are you saving up ?" I ask.
He nods his head, not free to speak for tobacco
juice.
" 111 be able to leave here in August," he explains,
when he has finished spitting, " for Omaha. In three
months I can save up enough to get on as far as
Salt Lake, and in another three months I can move
on to San Francisco. I tell you," he adds, returning
to his work, " a person ought never to leave home."
He had nine months of work and privation before
reaching the goal toward which he had been yearning
for years. With wThat patience he appears possessed
compared to our fretfulness at the fast express trains,
which seem to crawl when they carry us full speed
homeward toward those we love! Nine months,
two hundred and seventy days, ten-hour working
days, to wait. He was manly. He had the spirit of
adventure; his experience was wide and his knowledge'of men extended; he had managed to take care
of himself in one way or another for seven years, the
most trying and decisive in a boy's life. He had not
gone to the bad, evidently, and to his credit he was
homeward bound. His history was something out
of the ordinary; yet beyond the circle where he

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
worked and was considered a hard taskmaster he
was a nonentity—a star in the milky way, a star
whose faint rays, without individual, brilliancy,
added to the general luster.
The first day I had a touch of pride in getting
easily ahead of the new girl who started in when I
did. From my machine I could see only the back of
her head; it was shaking disapproval at every stroke
she made and had to make over again. She had a
mass of untidy hair and a slouchy skirt that slipped
out from her belt in the back. If not actually
stupid, she was slow, and the foreman and the girl
who took turns teaching her exchanged glances,
meaning that they were exhausting their patience
and would readily give up the job. - I was pleased at
being included in these glances, and had a miserable
moment of vanity at lunch time when the old girls,
the habitues, came after me to eat with them. The
girl with the untidy hair and the long skirt sat quite
by her self. Without unfolding her newspaper
bundle, she topk bites of things from it, as though
she were a little ashamed of her lunch. My moment
of vanity had passed. I went over to her, not
knowing whether her appearance meant a slipshod
nature or extreme poverty. As we were both new
girls, there was no indiscretion in my direct question:
"Like your job?"
I could not understand what she answered, so I
continued: '' Ever worked before ?''

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141

She opened her hands and held them out to me.
In the palm of one there was a long scar that ran
from wrist to forefinger. Two nails had been worn
off below the quick and were cracked through the
middle. The whole was gloved in an iron callous,
streaked with black.
"Does that look like work?" was her response.
It was almost impossible to hear what she said.
Without a palate, she forced the words from her
mouth in a strange monotone. She was one of
nature's monstrous failures. Her coarse, opaque
skin covered a low forehead and broad, boneless nose;
her teeth were crumbling with disease, and into her
full lower lip some sharp tool had driven a double
scar. She kept her hand over her mouth when she
talked, and .except for this movement of selfconsciousness her whole attitude was one of resignation and humility. Her eyes in their dismal
surroundings lay like clfear pools in a swamp's midst
reflecting blue sky.
" W h a t was you doing to get your hands like
t h a t ? " I asked.
"Tipping shoe-laces. I had to quit,''cause they
cut the pay down. I could do twenty-two gross in
a day, working until eight o'clock, and I didn't care
how hard I worked so long as I got good pay—$9
a week. But the employer'd been a workman
himself, and they're the worst kind. He cut me
down to $4 a week, so I quit."

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
" Do you live home ? "
"Yes. I give all I make to my mother, and she
gives me my clothes and board. Almost anywhere
I can make $7 a week, and I feel when I earn that
much like I was doing right. But it's hard to work
and make nothing. I'm slow to learn," she smiled
at me, covering her mouth with her hand, "but I'll
get on to it by and by and go as fast as any one; only
I'm not very strong."
"What's the matter with you?"
"Heart disease for one thing, and then I'm so
nervous. It's kind of hard to have to work when
you're not able. To-day I can hardly stand, my
head's aching so. They make the poor work for just
as little as they can, don't they ? It's not the work
I mind, but if I can't give in my seven a week at
home I get to worrying."
Now and then as she talked in her inarticulate
pitiful voice the tears added luster to her eyes as
her emotions welled up within her.
The machines began to roar and vibrate again.
The noon recess was over. She went back to her
job. Her broad, heavy hands began once more to
serve a company on whose moderate remuneration
she depended for her daily bread. Her silhouette
against the window where she stood was no longer
an object for my vain eyes to look upon with a sense
of superiority. I could, hear the melancholy intonation of her voice, pronouncing words of courage over

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143

her disfigured underlip. She was one of nature's
failures—one of God's triumphs.
Saturday night my fellow lodger, Miss Arnold, and
I made an expedition to the spring opening of a large
dfy-goods shop in the neighbourhood of Mrs.
Brown's. I felt rather humble in my toil-worn
clothes to accompany the young woman, who had
an appearance of prosperity which borrowed money
alone can give. But she encouraged me, and we
started together for the principal street of the quarter
whose history was told in its show-case windows.
Pawnshops and undertakers, bakeries and sodawater fountains were ranged side by side on this highway, as the necessity for them is ranged with
incongruous proximity in the existence of those who
live pell-mell in moral and material disorder after
the manner of the poor. There was even a wedding
coach in the back of the corner undertaker's establishment, and in the front window a coffin, small and
white, as though death itself were more attractive
in the young, as though the little people of the
quarter were nearer Heaven- and more suggestive of
angels than their life-worn elders. The spotless tiny
coffin with its fringe and satin tufting had its share
of the ideal, mysterious, unused and costly; in the
same store with the wedding coach, it suggested
festivity: a reunion to celebrate with tears a small
pilgrim's right to sleep at last undisturbed.
The silver rays of the street lamps mingled with

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
the yellow light of the shop windows, and on the
sidewalk there was a cosmopolitan public. Groups
of Italian women crooned to each other in their soft
voices over the bargains for babies displayed at the
spring opening; factory girls compared notes,
chattered, calculated, tried to resist, and ended by
an extravagant choice; the German women looked
and priced and bought nothing; the Hungarians had
evidently spent their money on arriving. From the
store window wax figures of the ideal woman, clad in
latest Parisian garb, with golden hair and blue eyes,
gazed down benignly into the faces uplifted with
envy and admiration. Did she not plainly say to
them "For $17 you can look as I do" ?*
The store was apparently flourishing, and except
for such few useful articles as stockings and shirts
it was stocked with trash. Patronized entirely by
labouring men and women, it was an indication to
their needs. Here, for example, was a stand hung
with silk dress skirts, trimmed with lace and velvet.
They were made after models of expensive dressmakers and were attempts at the sort of thing a
Mme. de Rothschild might wear at the Grand Prix
de Paris.
Varying from $11 to '$20, there was not one of the
skirts made of material sufficiently solid to wear for
more than a few Sunday outings. On another
counter there were hats with extravagant garlands
of flbwers, exaggerated bows and plumes, wraps

THE KEAR OF A CHICAGO TENEMENT

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145

with ruffles of lace and long pendant bows; silk
boleros; a choice of things never meant to be
imitated in cheap quality.
I watched the customers trying on. Possessed
of grace and charm in their native costumes, hatless,
with gay-coloured shawls on their shoulders, the
Italian women, as soon as they donned the tawdry
garb of the luxury-loving labourer, were common
like the rest. In becoming prosperous Americans,
animated by the desire for material possession which
is the strength and the weakness of our countrymen,
they lost the character that pleases us, the beauty
we must go abroad to find.
Miss Arnold priced everything, compared quality
and make with Jacksonville productions, and decided
to buy nothing, but in refusing to buy she had an air
of opulence and taste hard to please which surpassed
the effect any purchase could have made.
Sunday morning Mrs. Brown asked me to join her
and Miss Arnold for breakfast They were both in
slippers and dressing-gowns. We boiled the coffee
and set the table with doughnuts and sweet cakes,
which Miss Arnold kept in a paper bag in her room.
" I hardly ever eat, except between meals/' she
explained. l' A nibble of cake or candy is as much as I
can manage, my digestion is so poor."
".Ever since Brown died," the widow responded,
" IVe had my meals just the same as though he were
here. All I want," she went on, as we seated our-

i46

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

selves and exchanged courtesies in passing the bread
and butter, "all I want is somebody to be kind to
me. IVe got a young niece that IVe tried to have
with me. I wrote to her and says: 'Your auntie's
heart's just crying out for you F And I told her I'd
leave her all IVe got. But she said she didn't feel
like she could come."
As soon as breakfast is over the mundane
member of the household starts off on a day's round
of visits. When the screen door has shut upon
her slender silhouette, Mrs. Brown settles down
for a chat. She takes out the brush and comb,
unbraids her silver locks and arranges them while
she talks.
"Miss Arnold's always on the go; she's awful
nervous. These society people aren't happy. Xife's
not all pleasure for them. You can be sure they
have their ups and downs like the rest of us."
" I guess that's likely," is my response.
" They don't tell the truth always, in the first place.
They say there's got to be deceit in society, and that
these stylish people pretend all sorts of things. Well,
then, all I say is," and she pricks the comb into the
brush with emphasis, "all I say is, you better keep
out of society."
She had twisted her gray braids into a coil at the
b&ck of her head, and dish-washing is now the order
of the day. As we splash and wipe, Mrs. Brown
looks at me rather closely. She is getting ready to

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147

speak. I can feel this by a preliminary rattle of her
teeth.
" You're a new girl here," she begins; "you ain't
been long in Chicago. I just thought I'd tell you
about a girl who was workin' here in the General
Electric factory. She was sixteen—a real nicelookin' girl from the South. She left her mother and
come up here alone. It wasn't long before she got to
foolin' round with one of the young men over to the
factory. They were both young; they didn't mean
no harm; but one day she come an' told me, cryin'
like anythin', that she was in trouble, and her young
man had slipped off up to Michigan."
Here Mrs. Brown stopped to see if I was interested,
and as I responded with a heartfelt " Oh, m y ! " she
went on:
" Well, you ought to have seen that girl's sufferin',
her loneliness for her mother. I'd come in her room
sometimes at midnight—the very room you have
now—and find her on the floor, weepin' her heart
out. I want to tell you never to get discouraged.
Just you listen to what happened. The gentleman
from the factory got a sheriff and they started up
north after the young man, determined to get him
by force if they couldn't by kindness. Well, they
found him and they brought him back; he was willin'
to come, and they got everythin' fixed up for the
weddin' without tellin' her a thing about it, and one
day she was sittin' right there," she pointed to the

148

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

rocking chair in the front parlour window, "when
he come in. He was carryin' a big bunch of cream
roses, tied with long white ribbons. He offered 'em
to her, but she wouldn't look at them nor at him.
After awhile they went together into her room and
talked for half an hour, and when they come back
she had consented to marry him. He was real kind.
He kept askin' me if she had cried much and thankin'
me for takin' care of her. They were married, and
when the weddin' was over she didn't want to stay
with him. She said she wanted her mother, but we
talked to her and told her what was right, and things
was fixed up between them."
She had taken down from its hook in the corner
sunlight the canary bird and his cage. She put
them on the table and prepared to give the bird his
bath and fresh seed.
"You see," she said, drawing up a chair, "that's
what good employers will do for you. If you're
working in a good place they'll do right by you,
and it don't pay to get down-hearted."
I thanked her and showed the interest I truly felt
in the story. Evidently I must account for my
Sundays! It was with the bird now that Mrs. Brown
continued her conversation. He was a Rip Van
Winkle in plumage. His claws trailed over the sand
of the cage. Except when Mrs. Brown had a lodger
or two with her, the bird was the only living thing
in her part of the tenement.

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149

"I've had him twenty-five years," she said t©
me. "Browti give him to me. I guess I'd miss him
if he died." And presently she repeated again:
" I don't believe I even know how much I'd miss
him."
On the last evening of my tenement residence I
was sitting in a restaurant of the quarter, having
played truant from Mrs. Wood's, whose Friday
fish dinner had poisoned me. My hands had been
inflamed and irritated in consequence, and I was
now intent upon a good clean supper earned by
ten hours' work. My back was turned to the door,
which I knew must be open, as I felt a cold wind.
The lake brought capricious changes of the temperature: the thermometer had fallen the night before
from seventy to thirty. I turned to see who the
newcomer might be. The sight of him set my
heart beating faster. The restaurant keeper was
questioning the man to find out who he was. . . .
He was evidently nobody—a fragment of anonymous humanity lashed into debris upon the edge of a
city's vortex; a remnant of flesh and bones for human
appetites to feed on; a battleground of disease and
vice; a beggar animated by instinct to get from
others what he could no longer earn for himself; the
type par excellence who has worn out charity organizations ; the poor wreck of a soul that would create
pity if there were none of it left in the world. He
was asking for food. The proprietor gave him the

150

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

address of a free lodging-house and turned him
away. He pulled his cap over his head; the door
opened and closed, letting in a fresh gale of icy air.
The man was gone. I turned back to my supper.
Scientific philanthropists would have means of
proving that such men are alone to blame for
their condition; that this one was in all probability
a drunkard, and that it would be useless, worse
than useless, to help him. But he was cold and
hungry and penniless, and I knew it. I went
as swiftly as I could to overtake him. He had
not traveled far, lurching along at a snail's pace,
and he was startled when I came up to him. One
of his legs was longer than the other; it had been
crushed in an accident. They were not pairs, his
legs, and neither were his eyes pairs; one was big
and blind, with a fixed pupil, and the other showed
all his feelings. Across his nose there was a scar, a
heavy scar, pale like the rest of his face. He was
small and had sandy hair. The directors of charity
bureaus could have detected perhaps a faint resemblance to the odour of liquor as he breathed a halo
of frosty air over his scraggly red beard.
Through the weather-beaten coat pinned over it
his bare chest was visible.
"It's a cold night!" I began. "Are you out of a
job?"
With his wistful eye he gave me a kind glance.
"I've been sick. There's a sharp pain right in

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151

through here." He showed me a spot under
his arm. "They thought at the hospital that I
'ad consumption. "But," his face brightened, " I
haven't got it." He showed in his smile the
life-warrant that kept him from suicide. He wanted
to live.
"Where did you sleep last night?" I asked. " I t
was a cold night."
"To tell you the truth," he responded in his
strong Scotch accent, " I slept in a wagon."
I proposed that we do some shopping together;
he looked at me gratefully and limped along to a
cheap clothing store, kept by an Italian. The
warmth within was agreeable; there was a display
of garments hung across the ceiling under the gaslight. My companion waited, leaning against the
glass counter, while I priced the flannel shirts. To
be sure, my own costume promised little bounty.
The price of the shirt was seventy-five cents, and as
soon as he heard this the poor man said:
"Oh, you mustn't spend as much as that."
Looking first at the pauper, then at me, the Italian
leaned over and whispered to me, " I think I understand. You can have the shirt for sixty, and I'll
put in a pair of socks, too."
Thus we had become a fraternity; all were
poor, the stronger woe helping the weaker. . . .
When his toilet was complete the poor man looked
half a head taller.

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS
"Shall I wrap up your old cap for you ?" the salesman asked, and the other laughed a broken, longdisused laugh.
" I guess I won't need it any more," he said, turning
to me.
His face had changed like the children's valentines that grow at a touch from a blank card to a
glimpse of paradise.
Once in the street again we shook hands. I was
going back to my supper. He was going, the charity
directors would say, to pawn his shirt and coat.
The man had evidently not more than a few
months to live; I was leaving Chicago the following
day. We would undoubtedly never meet again.
As his bony hand lay in mine, his eyes looked
straight at me. "Thank you," he said, and his last
words were these :
"I'll stand by you."
It was a pledge of fraternity at parting. There
was no material substance to promise. I took it to
mean that he would stand by any generous impulses
I might have; that he would be, as it were, a
patron of spontaneous as opposed to organized
charity; a patron of those who are never too
poor to give to some one poorer; of those who have
no scientific reasons for giving, no statistics, only
compassion and pity; of those who want to aid not
only the promising but the hopeless cases; of those
whose charity is tolerant and maternal, patient with

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153

the helpless, prepared for disappointments; not
looking for results, ever ready to begin again, so
long as the paradox of suffering and inability are
linked together in humanity.

THE MEANING OF IT ALL

CHAPTER V
T H E MEANING OF I T ALL
BEFORE concluding the recital of my experiences
as a working girl, I want to sum up the general
conclusions at which I arrived and to trace in a few
words the history of my impressions What, first
of all, was my purpose in going to live and work
among the American factory hands? It was not
to gratify simple curiosity; it was not to get material
for a novel; it was not to pave the way for new
philanthropic associations; it was not to obtain
crude data, such as fill the reports of labour commissioners. My purpose was to help the working
girl—to help her mentally, morally, physically. I
considered this purpose visionary and unpractical,
I considered it pretentious even, and I cannot say
that I had any hope of accomplishing it. What did
I mean by help? Did I- mean a superficial remedy,
a palliative ? A variety of such remedies occurred
to me as I worked, and I have offered them gladly
for the possible aid of charitable people who have
time and money to carry temporary relief to the
poor. It was not relief of this kind that I meant by
help. I meant an amelioration in natural conditions.

157

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I was not hopeful of discovering any plan to bring
about this amelioration, because I believed that the
conditions, deplorable as they appear to us, of the
working poor, were natural, the outcome of laws
which it is useless to resist. I adopted the only
method possible for putting my belief to the test.
I did what had never been done. I was a skeptic
and something of a sentimentalist when I started.
I have become convinced, as I worked, that certain
of the most unfortunate conditions are not natural,
and that they can therefore be corrected. It is with
hope for the material betterment of the breadwinning woman, for the moral advancement of the
semi-breadwinner and the esthetic improvement of
the country, that I submit what seems a rational
plan.
For the first three weeks of my life as a factory
girl I saw among my companions only one vast class
of slaves, miserable drudges, doomed to dirt, ugliness
and overwork from birth until death. My own
physical sufferings were acute. My heart was torn
with pity. I revolted against a society whose material demands were satisfied at the cost of minds
and bodies. Labour appeared in the guise of a
monster feeding itself on human lives. To every
new impression I responded with indiscriminate
compassion. It is impossible for the imagination
to sustain for more than ,a moment at a time the
terrible fatigue which a new hand like myself is

T H E MEANING OP IT ALL

159

obliged to endure day after day; the disgust at
foul smells, the revulsion at miserable food soaked
in grease, the misery of a straw mattress, a sheetless
bed with blankets whose acrid odour is stifling.
The mind cannot grasp what it means to be frantic
with pain in the shoulders and back before nine in
the morning, and to watch the clock creep around
to six before one has a right to drop into the chair
that has stood near one all day long. Yet it is
not until the system has become at least in a great
measure used to such physical effort that one can
judge without bias. When I had grown so accustomed to the work that I was equal to a long walk
after ten hours in the factory; when I had become
so saturated with the tenement smell that I no longer
noticed it; when any bed seemed good enough for
the healthy sleep of a working girl, and any food
good enough to satisfy a hungry stomach, then and
then only I began to see that in the great unknown
class there were a multitude of classes which, aside
from the ugliness of their esthetic surroundings and
the intellectual inactivity which the nature of
their occupation imposes, are not all to be pitied:
they are a collection of human individuals with like
capacities to our own. The surroundings into which
they are born furnish little chance for them to develop
their minds and their tastes, but their souls suffer
nothing from working in squalour and sordidness.
Certain acts of impulsive generosity, of disinterested

i6o

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

kindness, of tender sacrifice, of loyalty and fortitude
shone out , in the poverty-stricken wretches I met
on my way, as the sun shines glorious in iridescence on the rubbish heap that goes to fertilize
some rich man's fields.
My observations were confined chiefly to the
women. Two things , however, regarding the men I
noticed as fixed fules. They were all breadwinners;
they worked because they needed the money to live;
they supported entirely the woman, wife or mother,
of the'household who did not work. In many cases
they contributed to the support of even the wageearning females of the family: the woman who
does not work when she does not need to work is
provided for.
The women were divided into two general
classes: Those who worked because they needed
to earn their living, and those who came to the
factories to be more independent than at home,
to exercise their coquetry and amuse themselves,
to make pin money for luxuries. The men formed
a united class. They had a purpose in common.
The women were in a class with boys and with
children. They had nothing in common but their
physical inferiority to man. The children were
working from necessity, the boys were working
from necessity; the only industrial unit complicating the problem were the girls who worked
without being obliged to—the girls who had "all the

T H E MEANING OP IT ALL

161

money they needed, but not all the money they
wanted." To them the question of wages was not
vital. They could afford to accept what the breadwinner found insufficient. They were better fed,
better equipped than the self-supporting hand ;
they were independent about staying away from
the factory when they were tired or ill, and they
alone determined the reputation for irregularity in
which the breadwinners were included.
Here, then, it seemed to me, was the first chance
to offer help.
The self-supporting woman should be in competition only with other self-supporting industrial units.
The problem for her class will settle itself, according
to just and natural laws, when the purpose of this
class is equally vital to all concerned. Relief, it
seemed to me, could be brought to the breadwinner
by separating from her the girl who works for
luxuries.
How could this be done?
There is, I believe, a way in which it can be
accomplished naturally. The non-self-supporting
girls must be attracted into some field of work which
requires instruction and an especial training, which
pays them as well while calling into play higher
faculties than the brutalizing machine labour. This
field of work is industrial art: lace-making, handweaving, the fabrication of tissues and embroideries,
gold-smithery, bookbiiiding, rug-weaving, wood-

i62

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

carving and inlaying, all the branches of industrial
art which could be executed by woman in her home,
all the manual labour which does not require physical
strength, which would not place the woman, therefore, as an inferior in competition with man, but
would call forth her taste and skill, her training and
individuality, at the same time being consistent
with her destiny as a woman.
The American factory girl has endless ambition.
She has a hunger for knowledge, for opportunities to better herself, to get on in the world,
to improve. There is ample material in the
factories as they exist for forming a new, higher,
superior class of industrial art labourers. There is a
great work to be accomplished by those who are
willing to give their time and their money to lifting
the non-breadwinners from the slavish, brutalizing
machines at which they work, ignorant of anything better, and placing them by education, by
cultivation, in positions of comparative freedomfreedom of thought, taste and personality.
Classes in industrial art already exist at the
Simmons School in Boston and Columbia University
in New York. New classes should be formed.
Individual enterprise should start the ball and keep
it rolling until it is large enough to be held in
Governmental hands. It is not sufficient merely
to form classes. The right sort of pupils should be
attracted. There is not a factory which would not

THE MEANING OP IT ALL

163

furnish some material. The recompense f®r apprenticeship would be the social and intellectual advancement dear to every true American's heart. The
question of wages would.be self-regulating. At Hull
House, Chicago, in the Industrial Art School it has
been proved that, provided the models be simple in
proportion to the ability of the artisan, the work
can be sold as fast as it is turned out. The public
is ready to buy the produce of hand-workers. The
girls I speak of are fit for advancement. It is not a
plan of charity, but one to ameliorate natural
conditions.
Who will act as mediator ?
I make an appeal to all those whose interests
and leisure permit them to help in this double
emancipation of the woman who toils for bread
and the. girl who works for luxuries.

MARIE VAN VORST
INTRODUCTORY
VII. A MAKER OP SHOES AT LYNN
VIII. THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS
IX.

THE CHILD IN THE SOUTHERN MILLS

CHAPTER VI
INTRODUCTORY
THERE are no words too noble to extol the courage of mankind in its brave, uncomplaining struggle
for existence. Idealism and estheticism have
always had much to say in praise of the "beauty
of toil." Carlyle has honoured it as a cult; epics
have been written in its glory. When one has
turned to and performed, day in and day out, this
labour from ten to thirteen hours out of the
twenty-four, with Sundays and legal holidays as
the sole respite—to find at the month's end that
the only possible economics are pleasures—one is
at least better fitted to comprehend the standpoint
of the worker; and one realizes that part of the
universe is pursuing means to sustain an existence
which, by reason of its hardship, they perforce cling
to with indifference. I laid aside for a time everything pertaining to the class in which I was born
and bred and became an American working-woman.
I intended, in as far as was possible, to live as she
lived, work as she worked. In thus approaching
her I believed that I could share her ambitions,
her pleasures, her privations.

167

INTRODUCTORY

i6S

Working by her side day after day, I hoped to
be a mirror that should reflect the woman who
toils, and later, when once again in my proper
sphere of life, to be her expositor in an humble
way—to be a mouthpiece for her to those who
know little of the realities of everlasting labour.
I have in the following pages attempted to solve
no problem—I have advanced no sociologic schemes.
Conclusions must be drawn by those who read the
simple, faithful description of the woman who toils
as I saw her, as I worked beside her, grew to
understand in a measure her point of view and to
sympathize with her struggle.
MARIE VAN VORST.

Riverdale-on-Hudson,
1902.

A MAKER OP SHOES AT LYNN

CHAPTER VII
A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

" THOSE who work neither with their brains nor
their hands are a menace to the public safety.''—
Roosevelt.
Well and good! In the great mobs and riots of
history, what class is it which forms the brawn and
muscle and sinew of the disturbance? The workmen and workwomen in whom discontent has bred
the disease of riot, the abnormality, the abortion
known as Anarchy, Socialism. The hem of the
uprising is composed of idlers and loungers, indeed,
but it is the labourer's head upon which the red cap
of protest is seen above the vortex of the crowd.
That those who labour with their hands may have
no cause to menace society', those who labour with their
brains shall strive to encompass.
Evils in,any system American progress is sure to
cure. Shops such as the Plant shoe factory in
Boston, with its eight-hour labour, ample provision
for escape in case of fire, its model ventilating,
lavish employment of new machinery—tell^ on the
great manufacturing world.
171

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS
Reason, human sympathy, throughout history
have been enemies to slavery or its likeness:
reason and sympathy suggest that time and place
be given for the operative man and woman to rest,
to benefit by physical culture, that the bowed
figures might uplift the flabby muscles. Time
is securely past when the manufacturers' greed
may sweat the labourers' souls through the
bodies' pores in order that more stuff may be turned
out at cheaper cost.
The people through social corporations, through
labour unions, have made their demands for shorter
hours and better pay.
LYNN

Luxuries to me are what necessities are to another.
A boot too heavy, a dress ill-hung, a stocking too
thick, are annoyances which to the self-indulgent
woman of the world are absolute discomforts. To
o*mit the daily bath is a little less than a crime in the
calendar; an odour bordering on the foul creates
nausea to nostrils ultra-refined; undue noises are
nerve exhausting. If any three things are more
unendurable to me than others, they are noises, bad
smells and close air.
I am in no wise unique, but represent a class as real
as the other class whose sweat, bone and fiber make
up a vast human machine turning out necessities
and luxuries for the market.

A DELICATE TYPE OF BEAUTY
At work in a Lynn shoe factory

ONE OF THE SWELLS OF THE FACTORY
A very expert " vamper," an Irish girl, earning from $10 to $14 a week

A MAKER OP SHOES AT LYNN

173

The clothes I laid aside on December 18, 1901,
were as follows:
Hat
Sealskin coat .
Black cloth dress
Silk underskirt
Kid gloves . .
Underwear

.
.
.

.

,

.
.
,

.
«

.
.

.

.

$40
200
150
25
2
30

.
.

$447

The clothes I put on were as follows:
Small felt hat
.
.
.
.
. $ .25
Woolen gloves.
.
»
.
.
.2$
Flannel shirt-waist
.
•
.
.1.95
Gray serge coat
.
.
.
.
3.00
Black skirt
2.00
Underwear
.
.
.
.
.
1.00
Tippet
iioo
$9.45

.

•

•

.

.

•

•

When I outlined to my friends my scheme of
presenting myself for work in a strange town with
no introduction, however humble, and no friends
to back me, I was assured that the chances were
that I would in the end get nothing. I was told
that it would be impossible to disguise my class,
my speech; that I would be suspected, arouse
curiosity and mistrust.
One bitter December morning in 1901 I left
Boston for Lynn, Mass. The route of my train
ran close to marshes; frozen hard ice many feet

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
thick covered the rocks and hillocks of earth, and
on the dazzling winter scene the sun shone brilliantly.
No sooner had I taken my place in my plain attire
than my former personality slipped from me as
absolutely as did the garments I had discarded. I
was Bell Ballard. People from whose contact I had
hitherto pulled my skirts away became my companions as I took my place shoulder to shoulder with
the crowd of breadwinners.
Lynn in winter is ugly. The very town itself
seemed numbed and blue in the intense cold well
below zero. Even the Christmas-time greens in
the streets and holly in the store windows could
not impart festivity to this city of workers. The
thoroughfares are trolley lined, of course, and a
little beyond the town's centre is a common, a
white wooden church stamping the place New
England.
Lynn is made up of factories—great masses of
ugliness, red brick, many-windowed buildings. The
General Electric has a concern in this town, but the
industry is chiefly the making of shoes. The shoe
trade in our country is one of the highest paying
manufactures, and in it there are more women
employed than in any other trade. Lynn's population is 70,000; of these 10,000 work in shoe-shops.
The night must not find me homeless, houseless.
I went first to a directory and found the address of

A MAKER OP SHOES AT LYNN

175

the Young Women's Christian Association: a room
upstairs in a building on one of the principal streets.
Here two women faced me as I made my appeal,
and I saw at once displayed the sentiments of
kindness thenceforth to greet me throughout my
first experience—qualities of exquisite sympathy,
rare hospitality and human interest.
" I am looking for work. I want to get a room in
a safe place for the night."
I had not for a moment supposed that anything
in my attire of simple decorous work-clothes could
awaken pity. Yet pity it was and nothing less in the
older woman's face.
"Work in the shops?"
"Yes, ma'am."
The simple fact that I was undoubtedly to make
my own living and my own way in the hard handto-hand struggle in the shops aroused her sympathy.
She said earnestly: " You must not go anywhere
to sleep that you don't know about, child."
She wrote an address for me on a slip of paper.
" Go there; I know the woman. If she can't take
you, why, come back here. I'll take you to my own
house. I won't have you sleep in a strange town just
anywheres! You might get into trouble."
She was not a matron; she was not even one of the
staff of managers or directors. She was only a
woman who had come in to ask some question,
receive some information; and thus in marvelous

176

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

friendliness she turned and outstretched her hand—
I was a stranger and this was her welcome.
I had proved a point at the first step; help had
been extended. If I myself failed to find shelter I
could go to her for protection. I intended to find my
lodging place if possible without any reference or any
aid.
Out of the town proper in a quiet side street I saw
a little wooden tenement set back from the road.
"Furnished Room to Rent," read the sign in the
window. A sweet-faced woman responded to the
bell I had rung. One glance at me and she said:
" Ve only got a 'sheep' room."
At the compliment I was ill-pleased and told her
I was looking for a cheap room: I had come to Lynn
to work. Oh! that was all right. That was the
kind of people she received.
I followed her into the house. I must excuse her
broken English. She was French. A h ! was she ?
That made my way easier. I told her I was from
Paris and a stranger in this part of the country, and
thenceforth our understanding was complete. In 28
Viger Street we spoke French always.
My room in the attic was blue-and-white papered;
a little, clean, agreeable room.
Madam begged that I would pardon the fact that
my bed had no sheets. She would try to arrange
later. She also insinuated that the " young ladies "
who boarded with her spoiled all her floor and her

A MAKER OP SHOES AT LYNN

177

furniture by slopping the water around. I assured
her that she should not have to complain of me—I
would take care.
The room was $1.25 a week. Could I pay her in
advance? I did so, of course. I would have to
carry up my water for washing from the first floor
morning and night and care for my room. On the
landing below I made arrangements with the tenant
for board at ten cents a meal. Madame Courier was
also a French Canadian, a mammoth creature with
engaging manners.
''Mademoiselle Ballard has work?"
" Not yet."
"Well, if you don't get a job my husband will
speak for you. I have here three other young
ladies who work in the shops; they'll speak for
you!"
Before the door of the first factory I failed
miserably. I could have slunk down the street and
gladly taken the first train away from Lynn!
My garments were heavy; my skirt, lined with a
sagging cotton goods, weighed a ton; the woolen
gloves irritated.
The shop fronted the street, and the very sight
through the window of the individuals representing
power, the men whom I saw behind the desks,
frightened me. I could not go in. I fairly ran
through the streets, but stopped finally before
a humbler shop—where a sign swung at the door:

178

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

" Hands Wanted." I went in here and opened a
door on the third floor into a small office.
I was before a lank Yankee manufacturer. Leaning against his desk, twisting from side to side in his
mouth a toothpick, he nodded to me as I entered.
His wife, a grim, spectacled New Englander, sat in
the revolving desk-chair.
" I want work. Got any ?"
"Waal, thet's jist what we hev got! Ain't we,
Mary?"
(I felt a flashing sensation of triumph.)
" Take your tippet off, set right down, ef you're in
earnest."
"Oh, I am in earnest; but what sort of work
is i t ? "
" I t ' s gluein' suspender straps."
"Suspenders ! I want to work in a shoe-shop!"
He smiled, indulgent of this whim.
"They all does! Don't they, Mary?" (She
acquiesced.)
"Then they get sick of the shop, and they come
back to me. You will !"
" Let me try the shoe-shop first; then if I can't get
a job I'll come back."
He was anxious to close with me, however, and
took up a pile of the suspender straps, tempting me
with them.
"What you ever done?"
" Nothing. I'm green!"

A ^ MAKER OP SHOES AT LYNN

179

" That don't make no difference; they're all green,
ain't they, Mary?"
"Yes," Mary said; " I have to learn them all."
"Now, to Preston's you can get in all right, but
you won't make over four dollars a week, and
here if you're smart you'll make six dollars in no
time." . . .
Preston's!
That was the first name I had heard, and to
Preston's I was asking my way, stimulated by the
fact, though I had been in Lynn not an hour and a
half, a job was mine did I care to glue suspender
straps!
I afterward learned that Preston's, a little factory
on the town's outskirts, is a model shoe-shop in its
way. I did not work there, and neither of the
factories in which I was employed was "model" to
my judgment.
A preamble at the office, where they suggested
taking me in as office help:
"But I am green; I can't do office work."
Then Mr. Preston himself, working-director in
drilling-coat, sat before me in his private office. I
told him: " I want work badly
"
He had nothing—was, indeed, turning away
hands; my evident disappointment had apparently
impressed a man who was in the habit of refusing
applicants for work.
"Look here"—he mitigated his refusal—"come

1S0

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

to-ffioirow at nine. I'm getting in a whole bale of
cloth for cutting linings."
"You'll give me a chance, t h e n ? "
"Yes, I will!"
It was then proven that I could not starve in Lynn,
nor wander houseless.
With these evidences of success, pride stirred. I
determined before nightfall to be at work in a Lynn
shoe-shop. It was now noon, streets filled with
files and lines of freed operatives. Into a restaurant
I wandered with part of the throng, and, with excitement and ambition for sauce, ate a good meal.
Factories had received back their workers when I
applied anew. This time the largest building, one of
the most important shops in Lynn, was my goal*
At the door of Parsons' was a sign reading:
*'Wanted, Vaftipers"
A vamper I was not, but if any help was wanted
there was hope. My demand for work was greeted
at the office this time with—"Any signs out ?"
"Yes,"
(What they were I didn't deem it needful to say!)
The stenographer nodded: "Go upstairs, then; ask
the forelady on the fifth floor."
Through the big building and the shipping-room,
where cases of shoes were being crated for the
market, I went, at length really within a factory's
walls. From the first to the fifth floor I went in
an elevator—a freight elevator; there are no others.

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

*8i

of course. This lift was a terrifying affair; it shook
and rattled in its shaft, shook and rattled in pitch
darkness as it rose between "safety doors"—continuations of the building's floors. These doors open
to receive the ascending elevator, then slowly close,
in order that the shaft may be covered and the
operatives in no danger of stepping inadvertently
to sudden death.
I reached the fifth floor and entered into pandemonium. The workroom was in full working swing.
At least five hundred machines were in operation
and the noise was startling and deafening,
I made my way to a high desk where a woman
stood writing. I knew her for the forelady by her
"air"; nothing else' distinguished her from the
employees. No one looked up as I entered. I was
nowhere a figure to attract attention; evidently
nothing in my voice or manner or aspect aroused
supposition that I was not of the class I simulated.
Now, into my tone, as I spoke to the forelady
bending over her account book, I put all the force I
knew. I determined she should give me something
to do! Work was everywhere: some of it should
fall to my hand.
•'Say, I've got to work. Give me anything, anything; I'm green,"
She didn't even look at me, but called—shrieked,
rather—above the machine din to her colleagues;
"Got anything for a green hand?"

182

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

The person addressed gave me one glance, the
sole and only look I got from any one in authority
in Parsons'.
"Ever worked in a shoe-shop before ?"
"No, ma'am."
"I'll have you learned pressirC; we need a presser.
Go take your things off, then get right down over
there."
I tore off my outside garment in the cloak-room,
jammed full of hats and coats. I was obliged to
stack my belongings in a pile on the dirty floor.
Now hatless, shirt-waisted, I was ready to labour
amongst the two hundred bond-women around me.
Excitement quite new ran through me as I went to
the long table indicated and took my seat. My
object was gained. I had been in Lynn two hours
and a half and was a working-woman.
On my left the seat was vacant; on my right
Maggie McGowan smiled at me, although, poor
thing, she had small cause to welcome the green
hand who demanded her time and patience. She
was to "learn me pressin'," and she did.
Before me was a board, black with stains of
leather, an awl, a hammer, a pot of foulest-smelling
glue, and a package of piece-work, ticketed. The
branch of the trade I learned at Parsons' was as
follows:
Before me was outspread a pile of bits of leather
foxings, back straps, vamps, etc. Dipping my brush

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

183

in the glue, I gummed all the extreme outer edges.
When the "case" had been gummed, the first bits
were dry, then the fingers turned down the gummed
edges of the leather into fine little seams; these
seams are then plaited with the awl and the ruffled
hem flattened with the hammer—this is "pressing."
The case goes from presser to the seaming machine.
The instruments turn in my awkward fingers. I
spread glue where it should not be: edges designated
for its reception remain innocent. All this means
double work later. "Twict the work / " my teacher
remarks. Little by little, however, the simplicity
of the manual action, the uniformity, the mechanical
movement declare themselves. I glance from time
to time at my expert neighbours, compare our work;
in an hour I have mastered the method—skill and
rapidity can be mine only after many days; but I
worked alone, unaided.
As raw edges, at first defying my clumsiness, fell
to fascinating rounds, as the awl creased the leather
into the fluting folds, as the hammer mashed the
gummed seam down, I enjoyed the process; it was
kindergarten and feminine toil combined, not too
hard; but it was only the beginning !
Meanwhile my teacher, patient-faced, lightningfingered, sat close to me, reeking perspiration, tired
with the ordeal of instructing a greenhorn. With
no sign of exhausted patience, however, she gummed
my vamps with the ill-smelling glue.

i84

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

"This glue makes lots of girls sick! In the other
shops where I worked they just got sick, one by one,
and' quit. I stuck it out. The forelady said to me
when I left: 'My! I never thought anybody could
stand it's long's you have/ "
I asked, "What would you rather do than this?"
She didn't seem to know.
" I don't do this for fun, though! Nor do you—
I bet you!"
(I didn't—but not quite for her reason.)
As I had yet my room to make sure of, I decided
to leave early. I told Maggie McGowan I was going
home,
"Tiredalready?" There was still an hour to dark.
As I explained to her my reasons she looked at
my amateur accomplishment spread on the board
before us. I had only pressed a case of shoes—three
dozen pairs.
"I guess I'll have to put it on my card," she
soliloquized, " 'cause I learned you."
"Do—do—"
"It's only about seven cents, anyway."
"Three hours' work and that's all I've made?" *
She regarded me curiously, to see how the amount
tallied with my hope of gain and wealth.
"Yet you tell me I'm not stupid. How long
have you been at i t ? "
* An expert presser can do as many as 400 shoes a day.
is rare and maximum.

This

" L E A R N I N G " A N E W HAND
Miss P., an experienced "gummer" on vamp linings, is a New
England girl, and makes $8 or $9 a week. The new hand makes
from $2.50 to $3 a week at the same work

A MAKER OP SHOES AT LYNN

185

"Ten years/'
"And you make?"
"Well, I don't want to discourage you." . . .
(If Maggie used this expression once she used it a
dozen times; it was her pat on the shoulder, Jier
word of cheer before coming ill news.)
". . . I don't want to discourage you, but it's
slow! I make about twelve dollars a week."
"Then I will make four!"
(Four ? Could it be possible I dreamed of such
sums at this stage of ignorance!)
" / don't want to discourage you, but I guess you'd
better do housework!"
It was clear, then, that for weeks I was to drop in
with the lot of women wage-earners who make under
five dollars a week for ten hours a day labour.
"Why don't you do housework, Maggie?"
" I do. I get up at five and do all the work of our
house, cook breakfast, and clean up before I come to
the shop. I eat dinner here. When I go home
at night I get supper and tidy up !"
My expression as I fell to gumming foxings was
not pity for my own fate, as she, generous creature,
took it to be.
"After you've been, here a few years," she said,
"you'll make more than I do. I'm not smart.
You'll beat me."
Thus with tact she told me bald truth, and yet
had not discouraged!

186

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

Novel situations, long walks hither and thither
through Lynn, stairs climbed, and three hours of
intense application to work unusual were tiring
indeed. Nevertheless, as I got into my jacket and
put on my hat in the suffocation of the cloak-room
I was still under an exhilarating spell. I belonged,
for time never so little, to the giant machine of which
the fifth floor of Parsons' is only an infinitesimal
humming, singing part. I had earned seven cents!
Seven cents of the $4,000,000 paid to Lynn shoe
employees were mine. I had bought the right to one
piece of bread by the toil of my unskilled labour.
As I fastened my tippet of common black fur and
drew on my woolen gloves, the odour from my glueand leather-stained hands came pungent to my
nostrils. Friends had said to me: "Your hands
will betray you !" If the girls at my side in Parsons'
thought anything about the matter they made no
such sign as they watched my fingers swiftly lose
resemblance to those of the leisure class under the use
of instruments and materials damning softness and
beauty from a woman's hands.
Yet Maggie had her sensitiveness on this subject.
I remarked once to her: " I don't see how you
manage to keep your hands so clean. Mine are
twice as black." She coloured, was silent for a
time, then said: "I never want anybody to speak
to me of my hands. I'm ashamed of 'em; they used
to be real nice, though." She held the blunted

A MAKER OP SHOES AT LYNN

187

ends up. "They're awful! I do love a nice
hand."
The cold struck sharp as a knife as I came out
of the factory. Fresh air, insolent with purity,
cleanness, unusedness, smiting nostrils, sought lungs
filled too long with unwholesome atmosphere.*
Heated by a brisk walk home, I climbed the stairs
to my attic room, as cold as Greenland. It was
nearly six thirty, supper hour, and I made a shift
at a toilet.
Into the kitchen I was the last comer. AH of the
supper not on the table was on the stove, and between
this red-hot buffet and the supper table was just
enough room for the landlady to pass to and fro
as she waited upon her nine guests.
No sooner did I open the door into the smoky
atmosphere, into the midst of the little world here
assembled, than I felt the quick kindness of welcome.
My place was at the table's end, before the Irish
stew.
"Miss Ballard!" The landlady put her arm
about my waist and introduced me, mentioning the
names of every one present.
There were four
women besides myself and four men.
" I don't want Miss Ballard to feel strange," said
my hostess in her pretty Canadian patois. "I want
her to be at home here."
I sat down.
*At Plant's, Boston, fresh air cylinders ventilate the shop.

i88

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

"Oh, she'll be at home all right!" A frowzyheaded, pretty brunette from the table's other end
raised kind eyes to me and nodded a smiling goodfellowship.
"Come to work in the shops ?"
"Yes."
"Ever been to Lynn before?"
"No; live in Paris—stranger."
"My, but that's hard—all alone here! Got a
job?"
"Yes."
And I explained to the attentive interest of all.
From the Irish stew before me they helped
themselves, or passed to me the plates from the
distance. If excitement had not taken from me
every shred of appetite, the kitchen odours, smoke
and frying, the room's stifling heat would have
dulled hunger.
Let it go ! I was far too interested to eat.
The table was crowded with all manner of substances passing for food—cheese, preserves, onion
pickles, cake and Irish stew, all eaten at one time and
at will; the drink was tea.
At my left sat a well-dressed man who would
pass anywhere for a business man of certain distinction. He was a common operator. Next him
was a bridal couple, very young and good looking;
then came the sisters, Mika and Nannette, their
brother, a packer at a shop, then Mademoiselle

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

189

Frances, expert hand at fourteen dollars a week
(a heavy swell indeed), then Maurice.
Although I was evidently an object of interest,
although countless questions were put to me, let me
say that curiosity was markedly absent. Their
attitude was humane, courteous, sympathetic, agreeable, which qualities I firmly believe are supreme
in those who know hardship, who suffer privation,
who labour.
Great surprise was evinced that I had so soon
found a job* Mika and Nannette, brunette Canadians,
with voices sweet and carrying, talked in good
English and mediocre French.
" It's wonderful you got a job right off 1 Ain't she
in luck! Why, most has to get spoken of weeks in
advance—introduced by friends, t o o ! "
Mika said: "My name's been up two months at
my sister's shop. The landlady told us about your
coming, Miss Ballard. We was going to speak for
you to our foreladies."
Here my huge hostess, who during my stay stood
close to my side as though she thought I needed her
motherliness, put her hand on my shoulder.
"Yes, mon enfant, we didn't want you to get
discouraged in a strange place. Ici nous sommes
toute une funtitle "
"AH one family?" Oh, no, no, kind creature,
hospitable receiver of a stranger, not all one family!
I belong to the class of the woman who, one day by

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
chance out of her carriage, did she happen to sit by
your side in a cable car, would pull her dress from
the contact of your clothes, heavy with tenement
odours; draw back as you crushed your huge form
down too close to her; turn no look of sisterhood
to your face, brow-bound by the beads of sweat, its
signet of labour.
Not one family! I am one with the hostess,
capable even of greeting her guest with insolent
discourtesy did such a one chance to intrude at an
hour when her presence might imperil the next step
of the social climber's ladder.
Not one family, but part of the class whose tongues
turn the truffle buried in pate de foie gras; whose lips
are reddened with Burgundies and cooled with iced
champagnes; who discuss the quality of a canard a
la presse throughout a meal; who have no leisure,
because they have no labour such as you know the
term to mean; who create disease by feeding bodies
unstimulated by toil, whilst you, honestly tired,
really hungry, eat Irish stew in the atmosphere of
your kitchen dining-hall.
Not one family, I blush to say ! God will not have
it so.
The Irish stew had all disappeared, every vestige.
"But mademoiselle eats nothing—a bird's appetite." And here was displayed the first hint of
vulgarity we are taught to look for in the other class.
She put her hands about my arms. " Tiens! un

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

191

bras tout de memel" and she looked at Maurice, the
young man on my right.
"Maurice c'est toi qui devrait £ informer des bras
d* mademoiselle.''
(" Maurice, it is you who should inform yourself
of mademoiselle's arms.")
Maurice laughed with appreciation, as did the
others. He was the sole American at table; out of
courtesy for him we talked English from time to time,
although he assured us he understood all we said in
" t h e jargon."
To Maurice a master pen could do justice; none
other. His type is seen stealing around corners in
London's Whitechapel and in the lowest quarters of
New York: a lounger, indolent, usually drunk.
Maurice was the type, with the qualities absent.
Tall, lank, loosely hung together, made for muscular
effort, he wore a dark flannel shirt, thick with grease
and oil stains, redolent with tobacco, a checked waistcoat, no collar or cravat. From the collarless circle
of his shirt rose his strong young neck and bullet
head; his forehead was heavy and square below the
heavy brows; his black eyes shone deep sunken in
their caverns.
His black hair, stiff as a brush, came low on his
forehead; his mouth was large and sensual, his teeth
brilliant. But his hands! never to be forgotten!
Scrubbed till flesh might well have parted from the

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
bones! clean, even if black and mutilated with toil;
fingers forever darkened; stained ingrained ridges
rising around the nails, hard and ink-black as
leather. Maurice was Labour — its Symbol — its
Epitome.
At the landlady's remark he had blushed and
addressed me frankly:
"Say, I work to de 'Lights.'"
(Lights! Can such a word be expressive of the
factory which has daily blackened and scarred and
dulled this human instrument ?)
"To the 'Lights,' and it ain't no cinch, I can tell
you! I got to keep movin'. Every minute I'm
late I get docked for wages—it's a day's work to the
'Lights.' When she calls me at six—why, I don't
turn over and snooze another! I just turn right
out. I walk two miles to my shop—and every man
in his place at 6 ."45 ! Don't you forgit i t ! "
He cleaned his plate of food.
" I jest keep movin' all de time."
He wiped his mouth—rose unceremoniously, put
6n his pot-like derby ajaunt, lit a vile cigar, slipped
into a miserable old coat, and was gone, the odour
of his weed blending its new smell with kitchen
fumes.
He is one of the absolutely real creatures I have
ever seen. Of his likeness types of crime are drawn.
Maurice—blade keen-edged, hidden in its battered
sheath,* its ugly case—terrible yet attractive speci-

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

193

men of strength and endurance—Youth and Manhood in you are bound to labour as on the rack,
and in the ordeal you keep (as does the mass of
humanity) Silence!
Eat by this man's side, heap his plate with coarse
victuals, feel the touch of his flannel sleeve against
your own flannel blouse, see his look of brotherhood
as he says:
"Say, if de job dey give you is too hard, why, I
guess I kin get yer in to the ' Lights'!"
These are sensations facts alone can give.
After dinner we sit all together in the parlour, the
general living-room: carpet-covered sofa, big table,
few chairs—that's all. We talk an hour—and on
what? We discuss Bernhardt, the divine Sarah.
" Good shows don't come to Lynn much; it don't pay
them. You can't g;et more than fifty cents a seat.
Now Bernhardt dorft like to act for fifty-cent houses !
But the theatres are crowded if ever there's a good
show. We get tired of the awful poor shows to the
Opera House." Maude Adams was a favourite.
Rejane had been seen. Of course, the vital American
interest—money—is touched upon, let me say
lightly, and passed. The packer at Rigger's, intelligent and well-informed and well-read, discoursed in
good French about English and French politics
and on the pleasure it would be to travel and
see the world.

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
At nine, friendly handshaking. " Good-night.
You're tired. You'll like it all right to the shops,
see if you don't! You'll make money, too. The
forelady must a-seen that you were ambitious.
Why, to my shop when a new hand applies for a
job the foreman asks: ' What does he look like ?
Ambitious lookin' ? Well, then—there's room."
Ambitious to make shoes! To grind out all you
can above the average five dollars a week, all you
may by conscientious, unflagging work during 224
hours out of a month.
Good-night to the working world ! Landlady and
friendly co-labourers.
"17 ne faut pas vous gener, mademoiselle; nous
sommes toute une famille."
Upstairs in my room the excitement died quite
out of me. I lay wakeful in the hard, sheetless bed.
It was cold, my window-pane freezing rapidly. I
could not sleep. On either side, through the thin
walls of the house, I could hear my neighbours
settling to repose. Maurice's room was next to mine.
He whistled a short snatch of a topical song as he
undressed. On the other side slept the landlady's
children; opposite, the packer from Rigger's. The
girls' room was downstairs. When Maurice's song
had reached its close he heaved a profound sigh,
and then followed silence, as slumber claimed the
sole period of his existence not devoted to work.
The tenement soon passed to stillness complete.

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

195

Before six the next morning-—black as night—
the call: "Mau—rice! Mau—rice!" rang through
the hall. Summons to us all, given through him on
whom the exigencies of life fell the heaviest.
Maurice worked by day system—the rest of us were
freed men and women by comparison.
The night before, timid and reluctant to descend
the two flights of pitch dark stairs with a heavy
water-pitcher in my hand, I had brought up no
water! It is interesting to wonder how scrupulous
we would all be if our baths were carried up and
down two flights of stairs pitcher by pitcher. A
little water nearly frozen was at hand for my toilet.
By six I was dressed and my bed made; by 6115 in
the kitchen, dense with smoke from the frying breakfast. Through the haze the figures of my friends
declared themselves. Codfish balls, bread and
butter and coffee formed the repast.
Maurice is the first to finish, standing a moment to
light his pipe, his hat acock; then he is gone. The
sisters wash at the sink, Mika combing her mass of
frowzy dark hair, talking meanwhile. The sisters'
toilet, summary and limited, is frankly displayed.
At my right the bride consumes five enormous
fish balls, as well as much bread. Her husband, a
young, handsome, gentle creature, eats sparingly.
His hand is strapped up at the wrist.
"What's wrong?"
"Strained tendons. Doctor says they'd be all

196

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

right if I could just hold up a little. They don't get
no chance to rest."
"But why not 'hold up' awhile?" He regards
me sympathetically as one who says to an equal, a
fellow: '' You know why!—for the same reason that
you yourself will work sick or well."
" On fait ce que Von pent!1'
("One does one's best!")
When the young couple had left the room, our
landlady said:
"The little woman eats well, doesn't she! She
needs no tonic ! All day long she sits in my parlour
and rocks—and rocks."
"She does nothing?"
Madame shrugged.
'' But yes! She reads novels !''
It was half-past six when I got into the streets.
The midwinter sky is slowly breaking to dawn. The
whole town white with fresh snow, and still halfwedded to night, is nevertheless stirring to life.
I become, after a block or two, one of a hurrying
throng of labour-bound fellows—dark forms appear
from streets and avenues, going in divers directions toward their homes. Homes? Where one
passes most of one's life, is it not Home?
These figures to-day bend head and shoulders
against the wind as it blows neck-coverings about,
forces bare hands into coat pockets.
By the time the town has been traversed, railroad

THE WINDOW SIDE OF MISS K. S PARLOUR AT LYNN, MASS.

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

197

track crossed, and Parsons' in sight, day has nearly
broken. Pink clouds float over factory roofs in a
sky growing bluer, flushing to day.
From now on the day is shut out for those who
here and there enter the red-brick factories. An
hour at noon? Of course, this magnificent hour is
theirs! Time to eat, time to feed the human
machine. One hour in which to stretch limbs, to pull
to upright posture the bent body. Meanwhile daylight progresses from glowing beauty to high noon,
and there the acme of brilliance seems to pause, as
freed humanity stares half-blinded at God's midday
rest.
All the remaining hours of daylight are for the
leisure world. Not till night claims Lynn shall the
factory girl be free.
Ascending the five flights of dirty stairs, my steps
fell side by side those of a young workman in
drilling coat. He gave me a good-morning in a
cheery tone.
'' Working here ? Got it good ?''
" I guess so."
" That's all right. Good-day."
Therefore I began my first labour day with a good
wish from my new class!
On the fifth floor I was one of the very first
arrivals. If in the long, low-ceiled room windows
had been opened, the flagging air gave no sign to the
effect. It was fetid and cold. Daylight had not

i98

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

fully found the workshop, gas was lit, and no work
prepared. I was eager to begin, but was forced to
wait before idle tools till work was given me—hard
ordeal for ambitious piece-worker. At the tick of
seven, however, I had begun my branch of the shoemaking trade. One by one my mates arrived; the
seats beyond me and on either side were filled.
Opposite me sat a ghost of girlhood. A tall,
slender creature, cheeks like paper, eyes sunken.
She, too, had the smile of good-fellowship—coin
freely passed from workwoman to workwoman.
This girl's job was filthy. She inked edges of the
shoes with a brush dipped in a pot of thick black
fluid. Pile after pile of piece-work was massed in
front of her; pile by pile disappeared. She worked
like lightning.
"Do you like your job?" I ventured. This
seemed to be the open sesame to all conversations in
the shops. She shrugged her narrow shoulders but
made no direct reply. " I used to have what you're
doing; it's awful. That glue made me sick. I was
in bed. So when I came back I got this.79 She was
separated from my glue-pot by a table's length only.
"But don't you smell it from here?"
"Not so bad; this here" (pointing to her black
fluid) "smells stronger; it drownds it.
" I make my wages clear," she announced to me a
few minutes later.
"How do you mean?"

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

199

"Why, at noon I wait in a restaurant; they give
me my dinner afterward. I go back there and wait
on the table at supper, too. My vittles don't cost
me anything!''
So that is where your golden noon hour is spent,
standing, running, waiting, serving in the ill-smelling
restaurant I shall name later; and not your dinner
hour alone, but the long day's fag end !
" I ain't from these parts," she continued, confidentially, "I'm down East. I used to run a machine,
but it hurts my side."
My job went well for an amateur. I finished one
case of shoes (thirty-six pairs) in little more than an
hour. By ten o'clock the room grew stifling hot. I
was obliged to discard my dress skirt and necktie,
loosen collar, roll up my sleeves. My warmer
blooded companions did the like. It was singular
to watch the clock mark out the morning hours,
and at ten, already early, very early in the forenoon, feel tired because one had been three hours
at work.
A man came along with nuts and apples in a basket
to sell. I bought an apple for five cents. It was
regarded by my teacher, Maggie, as a prodigal
expenditure! I shared it with her, and she in turn
shared her half with her neighbours, advising me
wisely.
"Say, you'd better earn an apple before you buy
one!"

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
My companion on the other side was a pretty
country girl. She regarded her work with goodhumoured indifference; indeed, her labour was of
very indifferent quality. I don't believe she was
ever intended to make shoes. In a cheerful undertone she sang topical songs the morning long. It
drove Maggie McGowan "mad," so she said.
"Say, why don't some of youse sing?" said the
little creature, looking down our busy line. "I
never hear no singing in the shops."
Maggie said, "Sing! Well, I don't come hereto
sing."
The other laughed sweetly.
"Well, I jest have to sing."
"You seem happy; are you?" She looked at me
out of her pretty blue eyes.
"You b e t ! That's the way to be !" Then after
a little, in an aside to me alone, she whispered:
"Not always. Sometimes I cry all to myself.
"See the sun?" she exclaimed, lifting her head.
(It shone golden through the window's dirty, cloudy
pane.) "He's peekin' at m e ! He'll find you soon.
Looks like he was glad to see us sitting here!"
Sun, friend, light, air, seek them—seek them!
Pour what tide of pure gold you may in through the
sullied pane; touch, caress the bowed heads at the
clicking machines! Shine on the dusty, untidy
hair! on the bowed shoulders ! on the flying hands !
At noon I made a reluctant concession to wisdom

A MAKER OP SHOES AT LYNN

201

and habit. Unwilling to thwart my purposes and
collapse from sheer fatigue, at the dinner hour I
went to a restaurant and ordered a meal in keeping
with my appetite. I had never been so hungry.
I almost wept with joy when the chicken and cranberry and potato appeared. Never was sauce more
poignant than that which seasoned the only real
repast I had in Lynn.
The hours from one to three went fairly well, but
by 3:30 I was tired out, my fingers had grown
wooden with fatigue, glue-pot and folding-line,
board, hammer and awl had grown indistinct. It
was hard-to continue. The air stifled. Odours
conspired together. Oil, leather, glue (oh, that
to-heaven-smelling glue !), tobacco smoke, humanity.
Maggie asked me, "How old do I look?" I gave
her thirty. Twenty-five it seemed she was. In
guessing the next girl's age no better luck. "It's
this," Maggie nodded to the workroom; "it takes it
out of you! Just you wait till you've worked ten
years in Lynn."
Ten years! Heaven forbid! Already I could
have rushed from the factory, shaken its dust from
my feet, and with hands over ears shut out the
horrid din that inexorably cried louder than human
speech.
Everything we said was shrieked in the friendly
ear bent close.

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
Although Maggie McGowan was curious about
me, in posing her questions she was courtesy itself.
"Say," to her neighbour, "where do you think
Miss Ballard's from? Paris !"
My neighbour once-removed leaned forward to
stare at me. "My, but that's a change to Lynn!
Ain't it ? Now don't you think you'll miss it ?"
She fell to work again, and said after a little:
"Paris! Why, that's like a dream. Is it like real
places ? I can't never guess what it is like !"
The girl at the machine next mine had an ear like
a sea-shell, a skin of satin. Her youth was bound,
strong shoulders already stooped, chest fast narrowing. At 7 A. M. she came: albeit fresh, pale still and
wan; rest of the night too short a preparation for the
day's work. By three in the afternoon she was
flushed, by five crimson. She threw her hands up
over her head and exclaimed: "My back's broke,
and I've only made thirty-five cents to-day."
Maggie McGowan (indicating me): "Here's a
girl who's had the misfortune never to work in a
shoe-shop."
"Misfortune ? You don't mean t h a t ! "
Maggie: "Well, I guess I don't! If I didn't
make a joke now and then I'd jump into the river!"
She sat close to me patiently directing my clumsy
fingers.
"Why do you speak so strongly? 'Jump into
the river!' That's saying a lot!"

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

203

" I am sick of the shoe-shops."
"How long have you been.at this work?"
"Ten years. When you have worked ten years
in Lynn you will be sick of the shops."
I was sick of the shops, and I had not worked ten
years. And for my hard-toiling future, such as she
imagined that it would be, I could see that she
pitied me. Once, supposing that since I am so
green and so ill-clad, and so evidently bent on learning my trade the best I knew, she asked me in a voice
quick with sisterhood:
"Say, are you hungry?"
"No, no, no."
"You'll be all right! No American girl need to
starve in America."
In the shops the odours are more easily endured
than is the noise. All conversation is shrieked out,
and all the vision that one has as one lifts one's eyes
from time to time is a sky seen through dirty windowpanes, distant chimney-pots, and the roof-lines of
Eke houses of toil.
I gathered this from our interrupted talk that
flowed unceasingly despite the noise of our hammers
and the noise of the general room.
They worked at a trade uncongenial. Not one
had a good word to say for shop-labour there, despite
its advantages, in this progressive land of generous
pay. Each woman in a narrow, touching degree

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
was a dreamer. Housework I too servile; but then,
compared to shopwork it was leisure.
By four the gas was lit here and there where
burners were available. Over our heads was no
arrangement for lighting. We bent lower in semiobscurity. In the blending of twilight and gaslight
the room became mysterious, a shadowy corridor.
Figures grew indistinct, softened and blurred. The
exhausted air surrotinded the gas jets in misty
circles.
Unaltered alone was the ceaseless thud, the
chopping, pounding of the machinery, the long
soughing of the power-engine.
Here and there a woman stops to rest a second,
her head sunk in her hand; or she rises, stretches
limbs and body. A man wanders in from the next
room, a pipe in his mouth, or a bad cigar, and pausing
by one of the pale operators, whose space of rest is
done, he flings down in front of her a new pile of
piece-work from the cutting machines.
We are up five flights of stairs. There are at least
two hundred girls. Machine oil, rags, refuse, cover
the floor—such debris as only awaits a spark from a
lighted match or cigar to burst into flames. Despite
laws and regulations the building is not fire-proof.
There is no fire-escape. A cry of fire, and great
Heaven! what escape for two hundred of us from
this mountain height, level with roofs of the
distant town!

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

205

Thus these women, shapes mysterious in gaslight
and twilight, labour: life is at stake; health, youth,
vigour, supply little more than bread. I rise; my
bruised limbs, at first numb, then aching, stir for
the first time after five hours of steady work. The
pile of shoes before me is feeble evidence of the last
hours' painful effort.
I get into my clothes—skirt, jacket and hat, all
impregnated now with factory and tenement odours,
and stumble downstairs and out into the street. I
have earned fifty cents to-day—but then, I am
green!
When once more in the cool, fresh air, released,
I draw in a long and grateful breath.
Lynn on this winter night is a snow-bound,
midwinter village. In the heavens is the moon's
ghost, a mist-shrouded, far-away disk. But it is
the Christmas moon, shining on the sleeping thousands in the town, where night alone is free.
The giant factories are silent, the machines at
last quiet, the long workrooms moon-invaded.
Labour is holy, but serfdom is accursed, and toil
which demands that every hour of daylight should
be spent in the race for existence—all of the daylight—is kin to slavery! There is no time for mental
or physical upright-standing, no time for pleasure.
One day I decided to consider myself dismissed
from Parsons'. They had taught me all they could,

2o6

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

unless I changed my trade, in that shop; I wished
to learn a new one in another. Therefore, one morning I applied at another factory, again one of the
largest in Lynn. The sign read:
"Cleaner Wanted!"
" Cleaner'' sounded easy to learn. My experience
this time was with a foreman instead of a forelady.
The workroom I sought was on the second floor, a
room filled with men, all of them standing. Far
down the room's centre I saw the single figure of a
woman at her job. By her side I was soon to be,
and we two the sole women on the second floor.
The foreman was distinctly a personage. Small,
kind, alive, he wore a straw hat and eye-glasses.
He had decided in a moment that my short
application for " something to do" was jiot to be
gainsaid.
"Ever worked before ?"
This time I had a branch of a trade at my fingers'
ends.
"Yes, sir; presser."
I was proud of my trade.
I did not even know, as I do now, that "cleaning"
is the filthiest job the trade possesses. It is in bad
repute and difficult to secure a woman to do the
unpleasant work.
"You come with me," he said cheerfully; "I'll
teach you."
The forelady at Parsons' did not know whether I

A MAKER OP SHOES AT LYNN

207

worked well or not. She never came to see. The
foreman in Marches' taught me himself.
Two high desks, like old-time school desks, rose
in the workshop's centre. Behind one of these I
stood, whilst the foreman in front of me instructed
my ignorance. The room was filled with high
crates rolled hither and thither on casters. These
crates contained anywhere from thirty-two to fifty
pairs of boots. The cases are moved from operator
to operator as each man selects the shoes to apply
to them the especial branch of his trade. From the
crate of boots rolled to my side I took four boots and
placed them on the desk before me. With the heel
of one pressed against my breast, I dipped my forefinger in a glass of hot soap and water, water which
soon became black as ink. I passed my wet, soapy
finger all around the boot's edges, from toe to heel.
This loosened, in the space between the sole and
vamp, the sticky dye substance on the leather and
particles so-called " dirt." Then with a bit of wood
covered with Turkish toweling I scraped the shoe
between the sole and vamp and with a third cloth
polished and rubbed the boot clean. In an hour's
time I did one-third as well as my companion.
I cleaned a case in an hour, whilst she cleaned three.
When my employer had left me I observed the
woman at my side: an untidy, degraded-looking
creature, long past youth. Her hands beggared
description; their covering resembled skin not at

2o8

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

all, but a dark-blue substance, leatherlike, bruised,
ingrained, indigo-hued. Her nails looked as though
they had been beaten severely. One of her thumbs
was bandaged.
"I lost one nail; rotted off."
'1 Horrible ! How, pray ?''
' T h a t there water: it's poison from the shoe-dye."
Swiftly my hands were changing to a faint likeness
of my companion's.
" Don't tell him," she said, "that I told you that.
He'll be mad; he'll think I am discouraging you.
But you'll lose your forefinger nail, all right!" Then
she gave a little laugh as she turned her boot around
to polish it.
"Once I tried to clean my hands up. Lord ! it's
no good! I scrub 'em with a scrubbin'-brush on
Sundays."
"How long have you been at this job ?"
"Ten months."
They called her "Bobby"; the men from their
machines nodded to her now and then, bantering
her across the noise of their wheels. She was ignorant of it, too stupid to know whether life took her in
sport or in earnest! The men themselves worked in
their flannel shirts. Not far from us was a wretchedly
ill-looking individual, the very shadow of manhood.
I observed that once he cast toward us a look of
interest. Under my feet was a raised platform on
which I stood, bending to my work. During the

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

209

morning the consumptive man strolled over and
whispered something to " Bobby.'' He made her
dullness understand. When he had gone back to his
job she said to me:
"Say, w'y don't yer push that platform away and
stand down on the floor? You're too tall to need
that. It makes yer bend."
'' Did that man come over to tell you this ?''
'' Yes. He said it made you tired.''
From my work, across the room, I silently blessed
the pale old man, bowed, thin, pitiful, over the shoe
he held, obscured from me by the cloud of sawdustlike flying leather that spun scattered from the sole
he held to the flying wheel.
I don't believe the shoe-dye really to be poisonous.
I suppose it is scarcely possible that it can be so;
but the constant pressure against forefinger nail is
enough to induce disease. My fingers were swollen
sore. The effects of the work did not leave my hands
for weeks.
" B o b b y " was not talkative or communicative
simply because she had nothing to say. Over and
over again she repeated the one single question to
me during the time I worked by her side: "Do you
like your job?" and although I varied my replies as
well as I could with the not too exhausting topic
she offered, I could not induce her to converse. She
took no interest in my work, absorbed in her own.

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
Every now and then she would compute the sum
she had made, finally deciding that the day was to
be a red-bean day and she would make a dollar and
fifty cents. During the time we worked together
she had cleaned seventeen cases of shoes.
In this shop it was hotter than in Parsons'. We
sweltered at our work. Once a case of shoes was
cleaned,! wrote my initial " B " on the tag and rolled
the crate across the floor to the man next me, who
took it into his active charge.
The foreman came to me many times to inspect,
approve and encourage. He was a model teacher
and an indefatigable superintendent. Just how far
personal, and just how far human, his kindness,
who can say ?
"You've been a presser long at the shoe-shops?"
"No."
" I like your pluck. When a girl has never had to
work, and takes hold the way you do, I admire it.
You will get along all right."
"Thank you; perhaps I won't, though."
"Now, don't get nervous. I am nervous myself,"
he said; " I know how that is."
On his next visit he asked me: "Where you goin'
to when you get out of here to-night ?"
I told him that I was all right—that I had a place
to stay.
"If you're hard up, don't get discouraged; come
to me."

FANCY GUMMING
Mrs. T. earns $8 or $10 a week. Her husband also
works in a factory, and between them they have
made enough to build a pretty little cottage

AN AT.T.-ROUND, EXPERIENCED HAND
Mrs. P . , who has worked in the factory more than twenty years, once as a
forewoman, now earns only $5 or $6 a week

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

211

I thanked him again and said that I could not
take charity."
*' Nonsense! I don't call it charity ! If I was hard
put, don't you s'pose I'd go to the next man if he
offered me what I offer you ? The world owes you a
livinY'
When the foreman had left me I turned to look at
" Bobby." She was in the act of lifting to her lips
a glass of what was supposed to be water.
''You're not going to drink that!" I gasped,
horrified. " Where did you get it ?"
"Oh, I drawed it awhile ago," she said.
It had stood gathering microbes in the room,
visible ones evidently, for a scum had formed on the
glass that looked like stagnant oil. She blew the
stuff back and drank long. Her accent was so bad
and her English so limited I took her to be a foreigner
beyond doubt. She proved to be an American.
She had worked in factories all her life, since she was
eight years old, and her brain was stunted.
At dinner time, when I left Marches', I had stood,
without sitting down once, for five hours, and according to Bobby's computation I had made the large
sum of twenty-five cents, having cleaned a little
more than one hundred shoes. To all intents, at
least for the moment, my hands were ruined. At
Weyman's restaurant I went in with my fellow
workwomen and men.
Weyman's restaurant smells very like the steerage

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS
in a vessel. The top floor having burned out a few
weeks before, the ceiling remained blackened and
filthy. The place was so close and foul-smelling that
eating was an ordeal. If I had not been so famished,
it would have been impossible for me to swallow a
mouthful. I bought soup and beans, and ate, in
spite of the inconveniences, ravenously, and paid
for my dinner fifteen cents. Most of my neighbours
took one course, stew or soup. I rose half-satisfied,
dizzy from the fumes and the bad air. I am safe
in saying that I never smelled anything like to
Weyman's, and I hope never to again. Never again
shall I hear food dnd drink discussed by the gourmet
—discuss, indeed, with him over his repast—but
there shall rise before me Weyman's restaurant, lowceiled, foul, crowded to overflowing. I shall see
the diners bend edged appetites to the unpalatable
food. These Weyman patrons, mark well, are the
rich ones, the swells of labour—able to squander
fifteen to twenty cents on their stew and tea. There
are dozens, you remember, still in the unaired fourth
and fifth stories—at "lunching" over their sandwiches. Far more vivid, more poignant even must
be to me the vision of "Bobby." I shall see her
eat her filthy sandwich with her, blackened hands,
see her stoop to blow the scum of deadly matter
from her typhoid-breeding glass.
In Lynn, unless she boards at home, a girl's living

A MAKER OF SHOES AT LYNN

213

costs her at best $3.75 a week. If she be of the
average* her month's earnings are $32. Reduce
this by general expenses and living and her surplus
is $16, to earn which she has toiled 224 hours. You
will recall that there are, out of the 22,000 operatives
in Massachusetts, 5,000 who make under $5 a week.
I leave the reader to compute from this the luxuries
and possible pleasures consistent with this income.
A word for the swells of the trade, for swells exist.
One of my companions at 28 Viger Street made
$14 a week. Her expenses were $4; she therefore had at her disposition about $40 a month. She
had no family—every cent of her surplus she spent on
her clothes.
" I like to look down and see myself dressed nice,"
she said; "it makes me feel good. I don't like
myself in poor clothes."
She was well-dressed—her furs good, her hat
charming. We walked to work side by side, she
the lady of us. Of course she belongs to the Union.
Her possible illness is provided for; her death will
bring $100 to a distant cousin. She is only tired
out, thin, undeveloped, pale, that's all. She is
almost a capitalist, and extremely well dressed.
Poor attire, if I can judge by the reception I met
with in Lynn, influences only those who by reason
of birth, breeding and education should be above
such things. In Viger Street I was more simply
* Lynn's average wages are $8 per week.

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
clad than my companions. My aspect called forth
only sisterhood and kindness.
Fellowship from first to last, fellowship from their
eyes to mine, a spark kindled never to be extinguished. The morning I left my tenement lodging
Mika took my hand at the door.
"Good-by." Her eyes actually filled. " I ' m
awful sorry you're going. If the world don't treat
you good come back to us."
I must qualify a little. One member of the
working class there was on whom my cheap clothes
had a chilling effect—the spoiled creature of the
traveling rich, a Pullman car porter on the train
from Boston to New York ! Although I called him
first and purposely gave him my order in time, he
viewed me askance and served me the last of all.
As I watched my companions in their furs and
handsome attire eat, whilst I sat and waited, my
woolen gloves folded in my lap, I wondered if any
one of the favoured was as hungry, as famished as the
presser from Parsons', the cleaner from Marches'.

THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

CHAPTER VIII
T H E SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS
THE MILL VILLAGE

Columbia, Sotith Carolina, of course is conscious
that there are mills without its city precincts. It is
proud of the manufacture that gives the city
precedence and commercial value all over the world.
The trolley runs to the mills empty, as a rule, after
the union depot is passed.
Frankly, what is there to be seen in these dusty
suburbs ? Entry to the mills themselves is difficult,
if not absolutely impossible. And that which forms
the background for the vast buildings, the Mill
Village, is a section to be shunned like the plague.
Plague is not too strong a word to apply to the
pest-ridden, epidemic-filled, filthy settlement where
in this part of the country the mill-hand lives,
moves and has his being, horrible honeycomb of
lives, shocking morals and decency.
Around Columbia there lie five mills and their
respective settlements — Excelsior, the Granton,
Calcutta, the Richland and the Capital City. Each
of these mills boasts its own so-called town. When
217

2i8

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

these people are free on Saturday afternoon and
Sunday they are too exhausted to do anything but
turn into their hovels to sleep. At most on Saturday
afternoons or Sundays they board a trolley and
betake themselves to a distant park which, in the
picturesque descriptions of Columbia, reads like an
Arcadia and is in reality desolation.
The mill-hands are not from the direct section of
Columbia. They are strangers brought in from
" t h e hills' * by the agents of the company, who go
hither and thither through the different parts of the
country describing to the poor whites and the hill
dwellers work in the mills as a way to riches and
success. Filled with dreams of gain and possessions,
with hopes of decent housing and schooling for their
children, they leave their distant communities and
troop to the mills. These immigrants are picturesque, touching to see. They come with all they
own in the world on their backs or in their hands;
penniless; burrs and twigs often in the hair of the
young girls. They are hatless, barefooted, ignorant;
innocent for the most part—and hopeful! What the
condition of these labourers is after they have
tested the promises of the manufacturer and fpund
them empty bubbles can only be understood and
imagined when one has seen their life, lived among
them, worked by their side, and comprehended the
tragedy of this population—a floating population,
going from Granton to Excelsior, from Excelsior

THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

219

to Richland, hither and thither, seeking—seeking
better conditions. They have no affiliation with the
people of the town; they are looked down upon as
scum: and in good sooth, for good reason, scum
they are!
It is spring, warm, gracious. This part of the
world seems to be well-nigh treeless! There is no
generous foliage, but wherever there are branches
to bear it the first green has started out, delicate,
tender and beautiful.
In my simple work garb I leave Columbia and take
a trolley to the mill district. I have chosen Excelsior
as best for my purpose. Its reputation is most at
stake; its prospectus dazzling; its annals effective.
If such things are done in Gath . . .!
I cannot say with what timidity I descend from
the tram in this strange country, foreign to my
Northern habitation and filled with classes whose
likeness I have never seen and around which the
Southern Negro makes a sad and gloomy background.
Before the trolley has arrived at the corporation
stores Excelsior has spoken—roared, clicked forth
so vibrantly, so loudly, I am prepared to feel the
earth shake. This is the largest mill in the world
and looks i t ! A model, too, in point of view of
architecture. I have read in the prospectus that it
represents $1,750,000 capital, possesses 104,000
spindles, employs 1,200 hands, and can, with crowding, employ 3,000. Surely it will have place for one

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS
more, then! I am impressed with its grandeur as
it rises, red-bricked, with proud, straight towers
toward its centre—impressed and frightened by its
insistent call as it rattles and hums to me across the
one-sixteenth of a mile of arid sand track. At one
side Christianity and doctrine have constructed a
church: a second one is building. On the other side,
at a little distance, lies Granton, second largest mill.
All this I take in as I make my way Excelsiorward.
Between me and the vast mill itself there is not a
soul. A thick, sandy road winds to the right; in the
distance I can see a black trestle over which the
freight cars take the cotton manufactures to the
distant railroad and ship them to all parts of the
world. Beyond the trestle are visible the first
shanties of the mill town.
Work first and lodgings afterward are my goals.
At the door of Excelsior I am more than overwhelmed
by its magnificence and its loud voice that makes
itself so far-reachingly heard. There is no entry for
me at the front of the mill, and I toil around to the
side; not a creature to be seen. I venture upon the
landing and make my way along a line of freight cars
—between the track and the mill.
A kind-faced man wanders out from an unobserved doorway; a gust of roar follows him!
He sees me, and lifts his hat with the ready
Southern courtesy not yet extinct. I hasten to
ask for work.

" MIGHTY MILL PRIDE O? THE ARCHITECT AND THE COMMERCIAL MAGNATE
' Charnel house, destroyer of homes, of all that mankind calls hallowed , breeder of strife, of strike, of immorality,
of sedition and riot "

T H E SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

221

"Well, thar's jest plenty of work, I reckon! Go in
that do'; the overseer will tell you."
Through the door open behind him I catch
glimpses of a room enormous in dimensions. Cotton
bales lie on the floor, stand around the walls and are
piled in the centre. Leaning on them, handling
them, lying on them, outstretched, or slipping like
shadows into shadow, are the dusky shapes of the
black Negro of true Southern blood. I have been
told there is no Negro labour in the mills. I take
advantage of my guide's kind face to ask him if he
knows where I can lodge.
"Hed the measles? Well, my gyrl got 'em.
Thar's a powerful sight of measles hyar. I'd take
you-all to bo'd at my house ef you ain't 'fraid of
measles. Thar's the hotel." (He points to what at
the North would be known as a brick shanty.) " A
gyrl can bo'd thar for $2.25 a week. You won't
make that at first."
With extreme kindness he leads me into the roaring
mill past picturesque black men and cotton bales:
we reach the " weave-room." I am told that
carpet factories are celebrated for their uproar, but
the weave-looms of a cotton mill to those who know
them need no description! This is chaos before
order was conceived: more weird in that, despite the
din and thunder, everything is so orderly, so perfectly carried forth by the machinery. Here the
cotton cloth is woven. Excelsior is so vast that from

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
one end to the other of a room one cannot distinguish
a friend.
I decide instantly that the weave-room
shall not be my destination! An overseer comes
up to me. He talks with me politely and kindly—
that is, as well as he can, he talks! It is
almost impossible to hear what he says. He asks
me simple and few questions and engages me
promptly to work that "evening," as the Southerner
calls the hours after midday.
"You can see all the work and choose a sitting
or a standing job." This is an improvement on
Pittsburg and Lynn.
I have been told there is always work in the mills
for the worker.
It is not strange that every inducement consistent
with corporation rules should be made to entice the
labouring girl! The difficulty is that no effort is
made to keep her ! The ease with which, in all these
experiences, work has been obtained, goes definitely
to prove that there is a demand everywhere for
labourers.
Organize labour, therefore, so well that the workwoman who obtains her task may be able to continue it
and keep her health and her self-respect.
With Excelsior as my future workshop I leave
the mill to seek lodging in the mill village.
The houses built by the corporation for the hands
are some five or six minutes' walk, not more, from
the palace-like structure of the mill proper. To reach

T H E SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

223

them I plod through a roadway ankle-deep in red
clay dust. The sun is bright and the air heavy,
lifeless and dull; the scene before me is desolate,
meager and poverty-stricken in the extreme.
The mill houses are all built exactly alike. Painted
in sickly greens and yellows, they rise on stilt-like
elevations above the malarial soil. Here the
architect has catered to the different fanlilies,
different individual tastes in one point of view alone,
regarding the number of rooms: They are known as
"four- or six-room cottages." In one of the first
cottages to the right a wholesome sight—the single
wholesome sight I see during my experience—meets
my eye. Human kindness has transformed one of
the houses into a kindergarten—"Kindergarten''
is over the door. A pretty Southern girl, a lady,
stands surrounded by her little flock. The handful
of half a dozen emancipated children who are not in
the mills is refreshing to see. There are very few;
the kindergarten flags for lack of little scholars.
I accost her. "Can you tell me any decent place
to board ?" She is sorry, regards me kindly with the
expression I have grown to know—the look the eyes
adopt when a person of one class addresses her
sister in a lower range.
" I am a stranger come out to work in the mills."
But the young lady takes little interest in me.
Children are her care. They surround her, clinging,
laughing, calling—little birds fed so gently by the

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
womanly hand. She turns from the workingwoman to them, but not before indicating a shanty
opposite:
1
'Mrs. Green lives there in that four-room
cottage. She is a good woman."
Through the door's crack I interview Mrs. Green,
a pallid, sickly creature, gowned, as are most of the
women, in a calico garment made all in one piece.
She permits me to enter the room which forms (as
do all the front rooms in a mill cottage) bedroom
and general living-room.
Here is confusion incarnate—and filthy disorder.
The tumbled, dirty bed fills up one-half the room.
In it is a little child, shaking with chills. On the
bare floor are bits of food, old vegetables, rags, dirty
utensils of all sorts of domestic description. The
house has a sickening odour. The woman tells me
she is too ill to keep tidy—too ill to keep boarders.
We do not strike a bargain. " I am only here four
months," she said. "Sick ever since I come, and
my little girl has fevernaygu."
I wander forth and a child directs me to a sixroom cottage, " a real bo'din'-house." I attack it
and thus discover the dwelling where I make my
home in Excelsior.
From the front room of this dwelling a kitchen
opens. Within its shadow I see a Negro washing
dishes. A tall woman, taller than most men,
angular, white-haired, her face seared by toil and

T H E SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

225

stricken with age, greets me: she is the landlady.
At her skirts, catching them and staring at a stranger,
wanders a very young child—a blue-eyed, clean
little being; a great relief, in point of fact, to the
general filth hitherto presented me. The room
beyond me is clean. I draw a breath of gratitude.
"Mrs. Jones?"
" Yes, this is Jones' bo'din'-house."
The old woman has a comb in her hand; she
has "jest ben com'in' Letty's hair." Letty smiles
delightedly.
"This yere's the child of the lady upstairs. The
mother's a pore sick thing." Mrs. Jones bends
the stiffness of sixty-eight years over the stranger's
child. "And grandmaw keeps Letty clean, don't
she, Letty? She don't never whip her, neither; jest
a little cross to her."
"Can I find lodging here?"
She looks at me. "Yes, ma'am, you kin. I'm
full up; got a lot of gentlemen bo'ders, but not many
ladies. I got one bed up aloft; you can't have it
alone neither, and the baby's mother is sick up there,
too. Nuthin' ketchin'. She come here a stranger;
the mill was too hard on her; she's ben sick fo' days."
I had made a quick decision and accepted half a
bed. I would return at noon.
"Stranger hyar, I reckon?"
"Yes; from Massachusetts. A shoe-hand."
She shakes her head: "You wont like the mills."

226

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

She draws Letty between her old stiff knees, seats
herself on a straight chair, and combs the child's
hair on either side its pathetic, gentle little face.
So I leave her for the present to return to Columbia
and fetch baek with me my bundle of clothes.
When I return at noon it is dinner time. I enter
and am introduced, with positive grace and courtesy,
by my dear old landlady to her son-in-law, " Tommy
Jones," a widower, a man in decent store clothes
and a Derby hat surrounded by a majestic crape
sash. He is nonchalantly loading a large revolver,
and thrusts it in his trousers pocket: "Always
carry it," he explains; "comes handy!" Then I
am presented to the gentlemen boarders. I beg to
go upstairs, with my bundles, and I see for the first
time my dwelling part of this shanty.
A ladderlike stair leading directly from the kitchen
takes me into the loft. Heavens ! the sight of that
sleeping apartment! There are three beds in it,
sagging beds, covered by calico comforters. The
floor is bare; the walls are bare. I have grown to
know that "Jones' " is the cleanliest place in the
Excelsior village, and yet to our thinking it lacks
perfection. Around the bare walls hang the garments of the other women who share the room with
me. What humble and pathetic decorations ! poor,
miserable clothes—a shawl or two, a coat or two, a
cotton wrapper, a hat; and on one nail the miniature

THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

227

clothes of Letty—a little night-dress and a tiny blue
cotton dress. I put my bundle down by the side
of my bed which I am to share with another woman,
and descend, for Mrs. Jones' voice summons me
to the midday meal.
The nourishment provided for these thirteen-houra-day labourers is as follows: On a tin saucepan
there was a little salt pork and on another dish a pile
of grease-swimming spinach. A ragged Negro
hovered over these articles of diet; the room was
full of the smell of frying. After the excitement
of my search for work, and the success, if success it
can be called that so far had met me, I could not eat;
I did not even sit down. I made my excuse. I
said that I had had something to eat in Columbia,
and started out to the mill.
By the time the mill-hand has reached his home a
good fifteen minutes out of the three-quarters of an
hour recreation is gone: his food is quickly bolted,
and by the time I have reached the little brick
hotel pointed out to me that morning and descended
to its cellar restaurant, forced myself to drink a cup
of sassafras tea, and mounted again into the air, the
troop of workers is on the march millward. I join
them.
Although the student of philanthropy and the
statistician would find difficulty in forcing the
countersign of the manufactories, the worker may
go everywhere.

228

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

I do not see my friend of the morning, the overseer, in the " weave-room"; indeed, there is no one to
direct me; but I discover, after climbing the stairs, a
room of flying spools and more subdued machinery,
and it appears that the spool-room is this man's
especial charge. He consigns to me a standing
job. A set of revolving spools is designated, and
he secures a pretty young girl of about sixteen,
who comes cheerfully forward and consents to
"learn" me.
Spooling is not disagreeable, and the room is the
quietest part of the mill—noisy enough, but calm
compared to the others. In Excelsior this room is, of
course, enormous, light and well ventilated, although
the temperature, on account of some quality of the
yarn, is kept at a point of humidity far from wholesome.
"Spooling" is hard on the left arm and the side.
Heart, disease is a frequent complaint amongst the
older spoolers. It is not dirty compared to shoemaking, and whereas one stands to '"spool," when
one is not waiting for yarn it is constant movement up and down the line. The fact that there are
more children than young girls, more young girls
than women, proves the simplicity of this task.
The cotton comes from the spinning-room to the
spool-room, and as the girl stands before her "side,"
as it is called, she sees on a raised ledge, whirling in
rapid vibration, some one hundred huge spools full

THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

229

of yarn; whilst below lier, each in its little case, lies a
second bobbin of yarn wound like a distaff.
Her task controls machinery in constant motion,
that never stops except in case of accident.
With one finger of her right hand she detaches
the yarn from the distaff that lies inert in the
little iron rut before her. With her left hand she
seizes the revolving circle of the large spool's top in
front of her, holding this spool steady, overcoming
the machinery for the moment not as strong as her
grasp. This demands a certain effort. Still controlling the agitated spool with her left hand, she
detaches the end of yarn with the same hand from
the spool, and by means of a patent knotter harnessed
around her palm she joins together the two loosened
ends, one from the little distaff and one from this
large spool, so that the two objects are set whirling
in unison and the spool receives all the yarn from
the distaff. Up and down this line the spooler must
walk all day long, replenishing the iron grooves with
fresh yarn and reknitting broken strands. This is all
that there is of "spooling." It demands alertness,
quickness and a certain amount of strength from the
left arm, and that is all! To conceive of a woman of
intelligence pursuing this task from the age of eight
years to twenty-two on down through incredible
hours is not salutary. You will say to me, that if
she demands nothing more she is fit for nothing
more, I cannot think it.

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
The little girl who teaches me spooling is fresh and
cheerful and jolly; I grant her all this. She lives at
home. I am told by my subsequent friends that she
thinks herself better than anybody. This pride and
ambition has at least elevated her to neat clothes and
a sprightliness of manner that is refreshing. She
does not hesitate to evince her superiority by making
sport of me. She takes no pains to teach me well.
Instead of giving me the patent knotter, which would
have simplified my job enormously, she teaches me
what she expresses "the old-fashioned way"—knotting the yarn with the fingers. I have mastered this
slow process by the time that the overseer discovers
her trick and brings me the harness for my left hand.
She is full of curiosity about me, asking me every
sort of question, to which I give the best answers
that I can. By and by she slips away from me. I
turn to find her; she has vanished, leaving me under
the care of a truly kind, sad little creature in a
wrapper dress. This little Maggie has a heart of gold.
"Don't you-all fret," she consoles. "That's like
Jeannie: she's so mean. When you git to be a
remarkable fine spooler she'll want you on her side,
you bet."
She assists my awkwardness gently.
"I'll learn you all.right. You-all kin stan' hyar
by me all day. Jeannie clean fergits she was a
greenhorn herself onct; we all wuz. Whar you
come from?"

T H E SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

231

"Lynn, Massachusetts."
"Did ypu-all git worried with the train? I only
bin onto it onct, and it worried me for days I"
She tells me her simple annals with no question:
"My paw he married ag'in, and me stepmother
peard like she didn't care for me; so one day I sez
to paw, 'I'm goin' to work in the mills'—an' I lef
home all alone and come here." After a little—
"When I sayd good-by to my father peard like he
didn't care neither. I'm all alone here. I bo'ds
with that girl's mother."
I wore that day in the mill a blue-checked apron.
So did Maggie, but mine was from Wanamaker's in
New York, and had, I suppose, a certain style, for
the child said:
" I suttenly dew think that yere's a awful pretty
apron: where'd you git it?"
"Where I came from," I answered, and, I am sorry
to say, it sounded brusque. For the little thing
blushed, fearful lest she had been indiscreet. . . .
(Oh, I assure you the qualities of good breeding are
there! Some of my factory and mill friends can
teach the set in which I move lessons salutary!)
" I didn't mean jest 'xactly wherebouts," she
murmurs; " I only meant it warn't from these
parts."
During the afternoon the gay Jeannie returns and
presents to me a tin box. It is filled with a black

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS
powder. "Want some?" • Well, what is it? She
greets my ignorance with shrieks of laughter. In
a trice half a dozen girls have left their spooling
and cluster around me.
"She ain't never seen i t ! " and the little creature
fills her mouth with the powder which she keeps
under her tongue. " I t is snuff! "
They all take it, old and young, even the smallest children. Their mouths are brown with it;
their teeth are black with it. They take it
and smell it and carry it about under their
tongues all day in a black wad, spitting it all
over the floor. Others "dip," going about with
the long sticks in their mouths. The air of the room
is white with cotton, although the spool-room is
perhaps the freest. These little particles are breathed
into the nose, drawn into the lungs. Lung disease
and pneumonia—consumption—are the constant,
never-absent scourge of the mill village. The girls
expectorate to such an extent that the floor is
nauseous with it; the little girls practise spitting
and are adepts at it.
Over there is a woman of sixty, spooling; behind
the next side is a child, not younger than eight,
possibly, but so small that she has to stand on a
box to reach her side. Only the very young girls
show any trace of buoyancy; the older ones have
accepted with more or less complaint the limitation
of their horizons. They are drawn from the hill

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233

district with traditions no better than the loneliness,
desertion and inexperience of the fever-stricken
mountains back of them. They are illiterate,
degraded; the mill has been their widest experience;
and all their tutelage is the intercourse of girl to girl
during the day and in the evenings the few moments
before they go to bed in the mill-houses, where they
either live at home with parents and brothers all
working like themselves, or else they are fugitive
lodgers 111 a boarding-house or a hotel, where their
morals are in jeopardy constantly. As soon as a
girl passes the age, let us say of seventeen or eighteen,
there is no hesitation in her reply when you ask her:
"Do you like the mills ?" Without exception the
answer is, " I hate them."
Absorbed with the novelty of learning my trade,
the time goes swiftly, Yet even the interest and
excitement does not prevent fatigue, and from
12:45 to 6:45 seems interminable ! Even when the
whistle blows we are not all free—Excelsior is
behindhand with her production, and those whom
extra pay can beguile stay on. Maggie, my little
teacher, walks with me toward our divided destinations, her quasi-home and mine.
Neither in the mill nor the shoe-shops did I take
precaution to change my way of speaking—and not
once had it been commented upon. To-day Maggie
says to me:
"I reckon you-all is Tiscopal?"

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
"Why?"
"Why, you-all talks 'Piscopal."
So much for a tribute to the culture of the church.
At Jones' supper is ready, spread on a bare
board running the length of the room—a bare board
supported by saw-horses; the seats are boards again,
a little lower in height. They sag in the middle
threateningly. One plate is piled high with fish—
bones, skin and flesh all together in one odourous
mass. Salt pork graces another platter and hominy
another. I am alone in the supper room. The
guests, landlord and landlady are all absent. Some
one, as he rushes by me, gives me the reason for the
desertion:
"They've all gone to see the fight; all the white
fellers is after a nigger."
y
Through the window I can see the fleeing forms of
the settlers—women, sunbonnets in hand, the men
hatless. It appears that all the world has turned
out to see what lawless excitement may be in store.'
The whirling dust and sand in the distance denote
the group formed by the Negro and his pursuers.1
This, standing on the little porch of my lodginghouse, I see and am glad to find that the chase is
fruitless. The black man, tortured to distraction,
dared at length to rebel, and from the moment that
he showed spirit his life was not worth a farthing,1
but his legs were, and he got clear of Excelsior. The

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235

lodgers troop back. Molly, my landlady's niece,
breathing and panting, disheveled, leads the procession and is voluble over the affair.
"They-all pester a po'r nigger's life out 'er him,
ye'es, they dew so ! Ef a nigger wants ter show his
manners to me, why, I show mine to him," she said
generously, "and ef he's a mannerly nigger, why, I
ain't got nothin' ag'in him; no, sir, I suttenly ain't! "
It is difficult to conceive how broad and philanthropic, how generous and unusual this poor mill
girl's standpoint is contrasted with the sentiment
of the people with which she moves.
I slip into my seat at the table in the centre of
the sagging board and find Molly beside me, the girl
from Excelsior with the pretty hair on the other side.
The host, Mr. Jones, honours the head of the
table, and "grandmaw" waits upon us. Opposite
are the three men operatives, flannel-shirted and
dirty. The men are silent for the most part, and
bend over their food, devouring the unpalatable stuff
before them. I feel convinced that if they were not
so terribly hungry they could not eat it. Jones
discourses affably on the mill question, advising
me to learn " speeding," as it pays better and is the
only advanced work in the mill.
Molly, my elbow-companion, seems to take up
the whole broad seat, she is so big and so pervading;
and her close proximity—unwashed, heavy with
perspiration as she is, is not conducive to appetite.

236

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

She is full of: news and chatter and becomes the
leading spirit of the meal.
" I reckon you-all never did see anything like the
fight to the mill to-day.''
She arouses at once the interest of even the dull
men opposite, who pause, in the applying of their
knives and forks, to hear.
" Amanda Wilcox she dun tol' Ida Jacobs that
she'd do her at noon, and Ida she sarst her back.
It was all about a sport *—Bill James. He's been
spo'tin' Ida Jacobs these three weeks, I reckon,
and Amanda got crazy over it and 'clared she'd
spile her game. And she tol' Ida Jacobs a lie
about Bill—sayd he' been spo'tin' her down to the
Park on Sunday.
" Well, sir, the whole spinnin'-room was out to
see what they-all'd do at noon, and they jest resh'd
for each other like's they was crazy; and one man
he got between 'em and sayd, ' Now the gyrl what
spits over my hand first can begin the fight.'
"They both them spit right into each other's
faces, they did so; and arter that yer couldn't get
them apart. Ida Jacobs grabbed Amanda by the
ha'r and Amanda hit her plump in the chest with
her fist. They was suttenly like to kill each other
ef the men hadn't just parted them; it took three
men to part 'em."
, Her story was much appreciated,
*A beau,

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237

" Ida was dun fer, I can tell ye; she suttenly was.
She can't git back to work fer days."
The spinning-room is the toughest room in the
mill.
After supper the men went out on the porch with
their pipes and we to the sitting-room, where Molly,
the story-teller, seated herself in a comfortable chair,
her feet outstretched before her. She made a lap, a
generous lap, to which she tried to beguile the baby,
Letty. Mrs. White had disappeared.
" You-all come here to me, Letty." She held out
her large dirty hands to the blue-eyed waif. In its
blue-checked apron, the remains of fish and ham
around its mouth, its large blue eyes wandering
from face to face in search of the pale mother who
had for a time left her, Letty stood for a moment ^
motionless and on the verge of tears.
" You-all come to Molly and go By-O."
There was some magic in that word that at long
past eight charmed the eighteen-months'-old baby.
She toddled across the floor to the mill-girl, who
lifted her tenderly into her ample lap. The big,
awkward girl, scarcely more than a child herself,
uncouth, untutored, suddenly gained a dignity and
a grace maternal—not too much to say it, she had
charm.
Eetty leaned her head against Molly's breast and
smiled contentedly, whilst the mill-girl rocked softly
to and fro.

238

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

"Shall Molly sing By-O?"
She should. The little face, lifted, declared its
request.
"Letty must sing, too," murmured the young
girl. " Sing By-0 I We'll all sing it together."
Letty covered her eyes with one hand to feign
sleep and sang her two words sweetly, " B y - O !
By-0 ! " and Molly joined her. Thus they rocked
and hummed, a picture infinitely touching to see.
One of these two would soon be an unclaimed
foundling when the unknown woman had faded out
of existence. The other—who can say how to her
maternity would come!
In the room where we sit Jones' wife died a
few weeks before, victim to pneumonia that all
winter has scourged the town—"the ketchin' kind"
—that is the way it has been caught, and fatally by
many.*
In one corner stands a sewing machine, in another
an. organ—luxuries: in these cases, objects of art.
They are bought on the installment plan, and some
of these girls pay as high as $100 for the organ in
monthly payments of $4 at a time. The mill-girl is
too busy to use the machine and too ignorant to play
the organ.
Jones is a courteous host. His lodgers occupy
*There are no statistics, they tell me, kept of births, marriages
or deaths in this State; it is less surprising that the mill village
has none.

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239

the comfortable seats, whilst he perches himself on
the edge of a straight high-backed chair and converses with us, not lighting his pipe until urged,
then deprecatingly smoking in little smothered puffs.
I feel convinced that Jones thinks that Massachusetts shoe-hands are a grade higher in the social
scale than South Carolina mill-girls! Because,
after being witness more than once to my morning
and evening ablutions on the back steps, he said:
" Now, I am goin' to dew the right thing by you-all;
I'm goin' to fix up a wash-stand in that there loft."
This is a triumph over the lax, uncleanly shiftlessness
of the Southern settlement. Again:
"You-all must of had good food whar you come
from: your skin shows it; 'tain't much like hyar'bouts. Why, I'd know a mill-hand anywhere, if I
met her at the North Pole—salla, pale, sickly."
I might have added for him, deathlike, . . .
skeleton, . . . doomed. But I listen, rocking
in the best chair, whilst Mrs. White glides in from
the kitchen and, unobserved, takes her place on a
little low chair by the sewing machine behind Jones.
Her baby rocks contentedly in Molly's arms.
Jones continues: " I worked in the mill fifteen
years. I have done a little of all jobs, I reckon, and
I ain't got no use for mill-work. If they'd pay me
fifty cents a side to run the 'speeders' I'd go in fer
an hour or two now and then. Why, I sell sewing
machines and organs to the mill-hands all over the

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
country. I make $60 a month, and / touch all my
money" he said significantly. " It's the way to do.
A man don't feel no dignity unless he does handle
his own money, if it's ten cents or ten dollars." He
then explains the corporation's methods of paying
its slaves. Some of the hands never touch their
money from month's end to month's end. Once in
two weeks is pay-day. A woman has then worked
122 hours. The corporation furnishes her house.
There is the rent to be paid; there are also the
corporation stores from which she has been getting
her food and coal and what gewgaws the cheap
stuff on sale may tempt her to purchase. There is a
book of coupons issued by the mill owners which are
as good as gold. It is good at the stores, good for
the rent, and her time is served out in pay for this
representative currency. This is of course not
obligatory, but many of the operatives avail themselves or bind themselves by it. When the people
are ill, Jones says, they are docked for wages.
When, for indisposition or fatigue, they knock a day
off, there is a man, hired especially for this purpose,
who rides from house to house to find out what is the
matter with them, to urge them to rise, and if they
are not literally too sick to move, they are hounded
out of their beds and back to their looms.
Jones himself, mark you, is emancipated! He
has set himself free; but he is still a too-evident
although a very innocent partisan of the corporation.

:,

THE SOUTHERN MILL H A N D ' S FACE IS UNIQUE, A FEARFUL T Y P E "

THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

241

" I think," he says, " t h a t the mill-hand is meaner
to the corporation than the corporation is to the
mill-hand."
"Why?"
"Why, they would strike for shorter hours and
better pay."
Unconsciously with one word he condemns his
own cause.
"What's the use of these hyar mill-hands try-in' to
fight corporations? Why, Excelsior is the biggest
mill under one roof in the world; its capital is over a
million; it has 24,500 spindles. The men that run
these mills have got all their stuff paid for; they've
got piles of money. What do they care for a few
penniless lot of strikers ? They can shut down and
not feel it. Why, these hyar people might just as
well fight against a stone wall."
The wages of these people, remember, pay
Jones for the organs upon which they cannot play
and the machines which they cannot use. His home
is a mill corporation house; he makes a neat sum by
lodging the hands. He has fetched down from the
hills Molly, his own niece, to work for him.
He
perforce will speak well. I do not blame him.
He is by all means the most respectable-looking
member of the colony. He wears store clothes; he
dresses neatly; he is shaven, brushed and washed.
" Don't you let the mill hands discourage you with
des about the mill. Any of 'em would be jealous of

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
you-all." Then he warns, again forced to plead for
another side: "You-all won't come out as you go
in, I tell you ! You're the picture of health. Why,''
he continues, a little later, "you ain't got no idea
how light-minded the mill-girl is. Why, in the summer time she'll trolley four or five miles to a dancehall they've got down to
and dance there
till four o'clock—come home just in time to get into
the mills at 5:45/' Which fact convinces me of
nothing but that the women are still, despite their
condition and their white slavery, human beings,
and many of them are young human beings (Thank
God, for it is a prophecy for their future!) not yet
crushed to the dumb endurance of beasts.
Rather early I bid them all good-night and climb
the attic stairs to my loft. There the three beds
arrayed in soggy striped comforters greet me. Old
boots and downtrodden shoes are thrown into the
corners and the lines of clothing already describe
fantastic shapes in the dark, suggesting pendant
sinister figures. Windows are large, thank Heaven !
In the mill district the air is heavy, singularly
lifeless; the night is warm and stifling.
Close to an old trunk I sit down with a slip of paper
on my knee and try to take a few notes. But no
sooner have I begun to write than a step on the stair
below announces another comer. Before annoyance
can deepen too profoundly the big, awkward form of
the landlady's niece slouches into sight. Sheepishly

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243

she comes across the room to me—sits down on the
nearest bed. Molly's costume is typical: a dark
cotton wrapper whose colours have become indistinct
in the stains of machinery oil and perspiration. The
mill girl boasts no coquetry of any kind around her
neck and waist, but her headdress is a tribute to
feminine vanity! Compactly screwed curl papers,
dozens of them, accentuate the hard, unlovely lines
of her face and brow. Her features are coarse,
heavy and square, but her eyes are clear, frank and
kind. She has an appealing, friendly expression;
Molly is a distinctly whole-souled, nice creature.
One elbow sinks in the bed and she cradles her
crimped head in her large, dirty hand.
"My, ef I could write as fast as you-all I'd write
some letters, I reckon. Ust ter write; like it good
enough, tew; but I ain't wrote in months. I was
thinkin' th' other day ef I didn't take out the
pencile I'd dun forgit how to spell."
Without the window through which she gazes is
seen the pale night sky and in the heavens hangs the
thread of a moon. Its light is unavailing alongside
of the artificial moon—an enormous electric light.
This lifts its brilliant, dazzling circumference high in
the centre of the mill street. I have but to move a
trifle aside from the window coping's shelter to
receive a blinding blaze. But Molly has been
subtle enough to discover the natural beauty of the
night. She sees, curiously enough, past this modern

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
illumination: the young moon has charm for her.
"Ain't it a pretty night?" she asks me. Its beauty
has not much chance to enhance this room and the
crude forms, but it has awakened something akin to
sentiment in the breast of this young savage.
" I don't guess ever any one gets tired of hearing
sweet music* does you-all?"
"What is the nicest music you have ever heard,
Molly?"
"Why, a g;ui-taar an' a mandolin. It's so sweet!
I could sit for hours an' hyar 'em pick." Her curlpaper head wags in enthusiasm.
" Up to the hills, from whar I cum, I ust' ter hyar
'em a serenadin' of some gyrl an' I ust ter set up in
bed and lis'en tel it died out; it warn't for me, tho*!"
"Didn't they ever serenade you?"
" No, ma'am) I don't pay no 'tention to spo'tin'."
Without, the moon's slender thread holds in a
silvery circle the half-defined misty ball that shall
soon be full moon. Thank heavens I shall not see
this golden globe form, wane, decline in this town,
forgotten of gods and men! But the woman at my
side must see it mark its seasons; she is inscrutably
part of the colony devoted to unending toil! Here
all she has brought of strong youth shall fade and
perish; womanly sentiment be crushed; die out in
sterility; or worse, coarsen to the animal like to those
whose companion she is forced to be.
*The Southern term for stringed instruments.

T H E SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

245

" I live to the Rockies, an' Uncle Tom he come up
after me and carried me down hyar. My auntie died
two weeks ago in the livin'-room; she had cat chin*
pneumonia. I tuk care of her all through her
sickness, did every mite for her, and there was
bo'ders, tew—I guess half a dozen of 'em—and I
cooked and washed and everything for 'em all. When
she died I went to work in the mill. Say, I reckon
you-all didn't see my new h a t ? " It was fetched,
done up with care in paper. She displayed it, a
white straw round hat, covered with roses. At
praise of it and admiration the girl flushed with
pleasure.
"My, you dew like it?. Why, I didn't think it
pretty, much. Uncle Tom dun buy it for me."
She gives all her wages to Uncle Tom, who in turn
brings her from time to time such stimulus to labour
as some pretty feminine thing like this. This shall
crown Molly's hair freed from the crimpers when the
one day of the week, Sunday, comes! Not from
Sunday till Sunday again are those hair crimpers
unloosed.
Despite Uncle Tom's opposition to mill work for
women, despite his cognizance of the unhealthfulness
of the mills, he knew a thing or two when he put his
strapping innocent niece to work thirteen hours a
day and pocketed himself the spoils.
" I can't go to bade awful early, because I don't
sleep ef I do; I'm too tired to sleep. When I feel

246

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

real sick I tries to stay home a day, and then the
overseer he rides around and worries me to git up. I
declare ef I wouldn't near as soon git up as to be
roused up. They don't give you no peace, rousing
you out of bed when you can scarcely stand. I
suttenly dew feel bade to-night; I suttenly can't
scarcely get to bed !"
Here into our discourse, mounting the stairs, comes
the pale mother and her little child. This ghost
of a woman, wedding-ringless, who called herself
Mrs. White, could scarcely crawl to her bed. She
was whiter than the moon and as slender. Molly's
bed is close to mine. The night toilet of this girl
consisted of her divesting herself of her sh9es,
stockings and her cotton wrapper, then in all the
other garments she wore during the day she turned
herself into bed, nightgownless, unwashed.
Mrs. White undressed her child, giving it very
good care. It was a tiny creature, small-boned
and meager. Every time I looked over at it it
smiled appealingly, touchingly. Finally when she
went downstairs to the pump to get a drink
of water for it, I went over and in her absence
stroked the little hand and arm: such a small hand
and such an infinitesimal arm! Unused to attention
and the touch, but not in the least frightened, Letty
extended her miniature member and looked up at,
me in marvel. Mrs. White on her return made
herself ready for the night. She said in her frail

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247

voice: " L e t t y ' s a powerful hand for vegetubbles,
and she eats everything."
Memory of the ham and the putrid fish I had seen
this eighteen-months-old child devour not an hour
ago came to my mind.
Mrs. White let down her hair—a nonchalance that
Molly had not been guilty of. This woman's hair
was no more than a wisp. It stood out thin, wiry,
almost invisible in the semilight. This was the
extent of her toilet. She slipped out of her shoes,
but she did not even take off her dress. Then she
turned in by her child. She was very ill; it was plain
to be seen. Death was fast upon this woman's
track; it should clutch her inevitably within the next
few weeks at most, if that emaciated body had
resistance for so long. Her languor was slow and
indicative, her gray, ashen face like death itself.
"Lie still, Letty," she whispers to the baby;
" don't touch mother—she can't stand it to-night."
My mattress was straw and billowy, the bed
sheetless, and under the weight of the cotton comforter I tried to compose myself. There were five
of us in the little loft. My bedfellow was peaceful
and lay still, too tired to do anything else. In front
of me was the open window, through which shone
the electric light, blatant and insistent; behind this,
the clock of Excelsior—brightly lit and incandescent
—glared in upon us, giant hands going round, seeming to threaten the hour of dawn and frightening

248

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

sleep and mocking, bugbearing the short hours
which the working-woman might claim for repose.
It was well on to nine o 'clock and the mills were
working overtime. Molly turned restlessly on her
bed and murmured, " I suttenly dew feel bad
to-night." A little later I heard her say over to
herself: " My, I forgot to say my prayers.'' She was
the sole member of the loft to whom sleep came; it
came to her soon. I lay sleepless, watching the
clock of Excelsior. The ladder staircase openly led
to the kitchen: there was no door, no privacy
possible to our quarters, and the house was full
of men.
A little later Letty cries: "A drink, a drink!"
and the tone of the mother, who replies, is full of
patience, but fuller still of suffering.
"Hush, Letty, hush! Mother's too sick to get
it." But the child continues to fret and plead.
Finally with a groan Mrs. White stretches out her
hand and gets the tin mug of water, of that vile and
dirty water which has brought death to so many in
the mill village. The child drinks it greedily. I
can hear it suck the fluid. Then the woman herself
staggers to her feet, rises with dreadful illness upon
her, and all through the hot stuffy night in the close
air of the loft growing momentarily more fetid,
unwholesome, intolerable—she rises to be violently
sick over and over again. It seems an indefinite
number of times to one who lies awake listening,

THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

249

and must seem unceasing to the poor wretch who
returns to her bed only to rise again.
She groans and suffers and bites her exclamations
short. Twice she goes to the window and by the
light of the electric lamp pours laudanum into a
glass and takes it to still her pain and her need.
The odours become so nauseous that I am fain to
cover my face and head. The child fed on salt ham
and pork is restless and thirsty all night and begs for
water at short intervals. At last the demand is too
much for the poor agonized mother—she takes
refuge in > silencing unworthy, and to which one feels
her gentleness must be forced. " H a r k ! The cat will
get you, Letty! See that c a t ? " And the feline
horror in nameless form, evoked in an awe-inspiring
whisper, controls the little creature, who murmurs,
sobs and subsides.
What spirit deeper than her character has hitherto
displayed stirs the mill-girl in the bed next to me ?
Possibly the tragedy in the other bed; possibly the
tragedy of her own youth. At all events, whatever
burden is on her, her cross is heavy ! She murmurs
in her dreams, in a voice more mature, more serious
than any tone of hers has indicated:
"Oh, my God!"
It is a strange cry—call—appeal. It rings solemn
to me as I lie and watch and pity. Hours of night
which should be to the labourer peaceful, full of
repose after the day, drag along from nine o'clock,

250

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

when we went to bed, till three. At three Mrs.
White falls into a doze. I envy her. Over me the
vermin have run riot; I have killed them on my neck
and my arms. When it seemed that flesh and blood
must succumb, and sleep, through sheer pity, take
hold of us, a stirring begins in the kitchen below
which in its proximity seems a part of the very
room we occupy. The landlady, Mrs. Jones, has
arisen; she is making her fire. At a quarter to four
Mrs. Jones begins her frying; at four a deep, blue,
ugly smoke has ascended the stairway to us. This
smoke is thick with odours—the odour of bad grease
and bad meat. Its cloud conceals the beds from me
and I can scarcely pierce its curtain to look through
the window. It settles down over the beds like a
creature; it insinuates itself into the clothes that
hang upon the wall. So permeating is it that the
odour of fried food clings to everything I wear and
haunts me all day. I can hear the sputtering of
the saucepan and the fall and flap of the pieces of
meat as she drops them in to fry. I know what they
are, for I have seen them the night before—great
crimson bits of flesh torn to pieces and arranged
in rows by the fingers of a ragged Negro as he
crouched by the kitchen table.
This preparation continues for an hour: it takes
an abnormally long time to cook abnormally bad
food ! Long before five the clock of Excelsior rings
and the cry of the mill is heard waking whomsoever

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might be lucky enough to be asleep. Mrs. Jones
calls Molly. "Molly!" The girl murmurs and
turns. "Come, you-all git up; you take so powerful
long to dress yo'self!" Long to dress ! It is difficult to see how that would be possible. She rises
reluctantly, yawning, sighing; lifts her scarcely
rested body, puts on her stockings and her shoes and
the dirty wrapper. Her hair is untouched, her face
unwashed, but she is ready for the day ! Mrs. White
has actually fallen asleep, the small roll, her baby,
curled up close to her back.
Molly's summons is mine as well. I am a millhand with her. I rise and repeat my ablutions of
the evening before. Unhooking the tin basin,
possessing myself of a bit of soap on the kitchen
stairs, I wash my face and hands. Although the
water is dipped from the pail on y^hich a scum has
formed, still it is so much more cool, refreshing and
stimulating than anything that has come in contact
with me for hours that it is a positive pleasure.

T H E MILL

By this time the morning has found us all, and
unlovely it seems as regarded from this shanty
environment. At 4:50 Excelsior has shrieked every
settler awake. At half-past five we have breakfasted
and I pass out of the house, one of the half-dozen
who seek the mill from our doors.

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
We fall in with the slowly moving, straggling file,
receiving additions from each tenement as we pass.
Beside me walks a boy of fourteen in brown
earth-coloured clothes. He is so thin that his
bones threaten to pierce his vestments.
He
has a slender visage of the frailness I have
learned to know and distinguish: it represents
the pure American type of people known as
"poor white trash/' and with whose blood has
been scarcely any admixture of foreign element. A
painter would call his fine, sensitive face beautiful:
it is the face of a'martyr. His hat of brown felt
slouches over bright red hair; one cufHess hand, lank
and long, hangs down inert, the other sleeve falls
loose; he is one-armed. His attitude and gait
express his defrauded existence. Cotton clings to
his clothes; his shoes, nearly falling off his feet, are
red with clay stains. I greet him; he is shy and
surprised, but returns the salutation and keeps step
with me. He is "from the hills," an orphan, perfectly friendless. He boards with a lot of men;
evidently their companionship has not been any
solace to him, for, as he is alone this day, I see him
always alone.
He works from 5:45 to 6:45, with three-quarters
of an hour at noon, and has his Saturday afternoons
and his Sundays free. He is destitute of the quality
we call joy and has never known comfort. He
makes fifty cents a day; he has no education, no way

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of getting an education; he is almost a man, crippled
and condemned. At my exclamation when he tells
me the sum of his wages he looks up at me; a faint
likeness to a smile comes about his thin lips: "It
keeps me in existence!" he says in a slow drawl. He
used just those words.
At the different doors of the mill we part. He is
not unconscious of my fellowship with him, that I
feel and know. A kindling light has come across his
face. "Good luck to you!" I bid him, and he lifts
his head and his bowed shoulders and with something like warmth replies, " I hope you~all will have
good luck, tew."
As we come into the spooling-room from the hot
air without the mill seems cold. I go over to a green
box destined for the refuse of the floors and sit
down, waiting for work. On this day I am to have my
own "side"—lam a full-fledged spooler. Excelsior
has gotten us all out of our beds before actual daylight, but that does not mean we are to have a
chance to begin our money-making piece-work job
at once ! "Thar ain't likely to be no yarn for an hour
to-day," Maggie tells me. She is no less dirty than
yesterday, or less smelly, but also she is no less kind.
" I reckon you-all are goin' to make a remarkable
spooler," she cheers me on. "You'll get tired out
at first, but then I gets tired, tew, right along, only
it ain't the same kind—it's not so sharp"
Her
distinction is clever.

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
Across the room at one of the "drawing-in frames"
I see the figure of an unusally pretty girl with curly
dark hair. She bends to her job in front of the
frame she runs; it has the effect of tapestry, of that
work with which women of another—oh, of quite
another class—amuse their leisure, with which they
kill their time. "Drawing-in/'* although a sitting
job, is considered to be a back-breaker. The girls
are ambitious at this work; they make good wages.
They sit close to their frames, bent over, for twelve
hours out of the day. This girl whom I see across
the floor of the Excelsior is an object to rest the eyes
upon; she is a beauty. There is not much beauty
of any kind or description in sight. Maggie has
noticed her esthetic effect. "You-all seen that
girl; she's suttenly prob'ly am peart"
She is a new hand from a distance. This is her
first day. What miserable chance has brought her
here ? If she stays the mill will claim her body and
soul. The overseer has marked her out; he hovers
in the part of the room where she works. She has
colour and her difference to her pale companions is
marked. Excelsior will not leave those roses unwithered. I can foretell the change as yellow unhealthfulness creeps upon her cheeks and the red forever
goes. There are no red cheeks here, not one. She
has chosen a sitting-down job thinking it easier. I
saw her lean back, put her hands around her waist
*A good drawer-in makes $1.25 a day.

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255

and rest, or try to, after she has bent four hours
over her close task. I go over to her.
"They say it's awful hard on the eyes, but they
tell me, too, that I'll be a remarkable fine hand."
I saw her apply for work, and saw, too, the man's
face as he looked at her when she asked: "Got any
work?"
"We've got plenty of work for a good-looking
woman like you," he said with significance, and took
pains to place her within his sight.
• The yarn has come in, and I return to my part of
the mill; Maggie flies to her spools and leaves me to
seek my distant place far away from her. I set my
work in order; whilst my back is turned some girl
possesses herself of my hand-harness. Mine was a
new one, and the one she leaves for me is broken.
This delays, naturally, and the overseer, after proving to his satisfaction that I am hampered, gets me a
new one and I set to work.
Many of the older hands come without breakfast,
and a little later tin pails or paper parcels appear.
These operatives crouch down in a Turkish fashion
at the machines' sides and take a hasty mouthful
of their unwholesome, unpleasant-looking food,
eating with their fingers more like animals than
human beings. By eight the full steam power is
on, to judge by the swift turning, the strong resistance of the spools. Not one of the women near me
but is degrading to look upon and odourous to

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T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

approach. These creatures, ill clad, with matted,
frowsy hair and hands that look as though they had
never, never been washed, smell like the byre.
As for the children, I must pass them by in this
recital. The tiny, tiny children! The girls are
profane, contentious, foul-mouthed. There is much
partisanship and cliqueism; you can tell it by the
scowls and the low, insulting words as an enemy
passes. To protect the hair from the flying pieces
of cotton the more particular women, and oftentimes children as well, wear felt hats pulled down
well over the eyes. The cotton, indeed, thistledownlike, flies without cessation through the air—spins
off from the spools; it rises and floats, falling on the
garments and in the hair, entering the nostrils and
throat and lungs. I repeat, the expectoration,
the coughing and the throat-cleaning is constant.
Over there two girls have taken advantage of a
wait for yarn to go to sleep on the floor; their heads
are pillowed on each others' shoulders; they rest
against a cotton bale. Maggie wanders over to me to
see "how you-all is gettin' on." "Tired ?" "Well, I
reckon I am. Thank God we get out in a little while
now."
One afternoon I went up to the loft to rest a few
moments before going to the mill. Mrs. White was
sitting on her bed, a slender figure in the blue-checked
wrapper she always wore. Her head was close to

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the window, her silhouette in the light, pale and
slender. " I wa'n't sick when I come hyar, but them
mills! They's suttinly tew hyard on a woman!
Weave-room killed me, I guess. I couldn't hyar at
all when I come out and scarcely could stan' on ma
feet when I got home. Tew tyred to eat, tew; and
the water hyar is regularly pisen; hev you-all seen
it ? It's all colours. Doctor done come to see me;
ain't helpin' me any; 'pears like he-all ain't goin' to
come no mo'!"
"If you have a husband, why don't you go to him
and let him care for you?"
She was silent, turning her wedding-ringless hand
over and over on her lap: the flies came buzzing in
around us, and in the near distance Excelsior
buzzed, the loudest, most insistent creature on this
part of the earth.
"Seems like a woman ought to help a man—
some," she murmured. Downstairs Mrs. Jones
sums her up in a few words.
"She-all suttinly ain't no 'Mrs' in the world!
Calls herself 'White' " (The intonation is not to
be mistaken.) "Pore thing's dyin'—knows it, tew!
Come hyar to die, I reckon. She'll die right up thar
in that baed, tew. Doctor don't come no mo'. Know
she cayn't pay him nothin'. You-all come hyar
to grandmaw, Letty!"
The child around whom the threads of existence
are weaving fabric more intricate than any woof or

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THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

warp of the great mills goes confidingly to the old
woman, who lifts her tenderly into her arms. With
every word she speaks this aged creature draws her
own picture. To these types no pen save Tolstoi's
could do justice. Mine can do no more than display
them by faithfully transcribing their simple dialectspeech.
"I am sixty-four years old, an' played out. Worked
too hyard. Worked every day since I was a child,
and when I wasn't workin' had the fevar. Come from
the hills las' month. When his wife dyde, the son
he come an' fetched me cross the river to help him/'
How has she lived so long and so well, with life
"so hyard on her " ?
" I loved my husban', yes, ma'am, I regularly loved
him; reckon no woman didn't ever love a man mo',
and he loved me, tew, jest ez much. Seems tho' God
couldn't bayr to see us-all so happy—couldn't las';
he dyde."
Mrs. Jones' figure is a case of bones covered with
a brown substance—you could scarcely call it skin;
a weather-beaten, tanned hide; nothing more. This
human statue, ever responsive to the eternal moulding, year after year has been worked upon by the
titan instrument, Labour: struggle, disease, want.
But this hill woman has known love. It has transfigured her, illumined her. This poor deformed body
is a torch only for an immortal flame. I know
now why it seems good to be near her, why her

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259

eyes are inspired. . . .
I rise to leave her and
she comes forward to me, puts out her hand first,
then puts both thin, old arms about me and kisses
me.
In speaking of the settlement, it borders on the
humourous to use the word sanitation. In the
mill district, as far as my observation reached, there
is none. Refuse not too vile for the public eye is
thrown into the middle of the streets in front of the
houses. The general drainage is performed by
emptying pans and basins and receptacles into the
backyards, so that as one stands at the back steps
of one's own door one breathes and respires the
filth of half a dozen shanties. Decaying vegetables,
rags, dirt of all kinds are the flowers of these people,
the decorations of their miserable garden patches.
To walk through Granton (which the prospectus
tells us is well drained) is to evoke nausea; to
inhabit Granton is an ordeal which even necessity
cannot rob of its severity.
These settlers, habitants of dwellings built by
finance solely for the purpose of renting, are
celebrated for their immorals—" a rough, lying,
bad lot." "Oh, the mill-hands!" . . . Sufficient, expressive designation. Nevertheless, these
people, simple, direct and innocent, display qualities that we have been taught are enviable—a
lack of curiosity, for the most part, in the affairs of

2 6o

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

others, a warm Southern courtesy, a human
kindliness. I found these people degraded because
of their habits and not of their tendencies, which
statement I can justify; whatever may be their
natural instincts, born, nurtured in their unlovely
environment, they have no choice but to fall into
the usages of poverty and degradation. They have
seen nothing with which to compare their existences;
they have no time, no means to be clean, and no
stimulus to be decent.
A job at Granton was no more difficult to secure
than w a s ' ' spoolin' " at the other mill. I applied one
Saturday noon, when Granton was silent and the
operatives within their doors asleep, for the most
part, leaving the village as deserted as it is on a
workday. A like desolation pervades the atmosphere on holiday and day of toil. I was so lucky as
to meet a shirt-sleeved overseer in the doorway.
Preceding him were two ill-clad, pale children of nine
and twelve, armed with a long, mop-like broom with
which their task was to sweep the cotton from the
floors—cotton that resettled eternally as soon as it
was brushed away. The superintendent regarded me
curiously, I thought penetratingly, and for the first
time in my experience I feared detection. My
dread was enhanced by the loneliness, the lawlessness of the place, the risk and boldness of my
venture.
By this I was most thoroughly a mill-girl in

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261

appearance, at least; my clothes were white with
cotton, my hair far from, tidy; fatigue and listlessness unassumed were in my attitude. I had not
heard the Southern dialect for so long not to be
able to fall into it with little effort. I told him I
had been a "spooler" and did not like it—" wanted
to spin." He listened silently, regarding me with
interest and with what I trembled to fear was disbelief. I desperately pushed back my sunbonnet
and iii Southern drawl begged for work.
"Spinnin' ?" he asked. "What do you want to
spin for?"
He was a Yankee, his accent sharp and keen.
How clean and decent and capable he appeared, the
dark mill back of him; shantytown, vile, dirty,
downtrodden, beside him!
I told him that I was tired of spooling and knew I
could make more by something else.
He thrust his hands into his pockets. "To-night
is Saturday; alone here?"
"Yes."
"Where you going to stay in Granton?"
" I don't know yet."
"Don't learn spinnin , ," he said decidedly. " I
am head of the speedin'-room. I'll give you a job
in my room on Monday morning."
My relief was immense. His subsequent questions
I parried, thanked him, and withdrew to keep secret
from Excelsior that I had deserted for Granton.

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THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

Although these mills are within three hundred
feet of each other, the villagers do not associate.
The workings of Granton are unknown to Excelsior
and vice versa.
The speeding-room in Granton is second only in
noise to the weave-room. Conversation must be
entrancing and vital to be pursued here! The
speeder has under her care as many machines as her
skill can control.
My teacher, Bessie, ran four sides, seventy-six
speeders on a side, her work being regulated by a
crank that marked the vibrations. To the lay mind
the terms of the speeding-room, can mean nothing.
This girl made from $1.30 to $1.50 a day. She
controlled in all 704 speeders; these she had to replenish and keep running, and to clean all the machinery gear with her own hands; to oil the steel, even
to bend and clean under the lower shelf and come
into contact with the most dangerous parts of the
mechanism. The girl at the speeder next to me had
just had her hand mashed to a jelly. The speeder
watches her ropers run out; these stand at the top
and back of the line. The ropers are refilled and
their ends attached to the flying speeders by a quick
motion. The yarn from the ropers is wound off on
to the speeders. When the speeders are full of yarn
they are detached from the nest of steel in which they
whirl and are thrown into a hand-car which is pushed
about the room by the girls themselves. Speeding

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263

is excessively dirty work and greasy; the oiling and
cleaning is only fit for a man to do.
The girl who teaches me has been at her work
for ten years; she entered the factory at eight.
She was tall, raw-boned, an expert, deft and
capable, and, as far as I could judge in our
acquaintance, thoroughly respectable.
There are long waits in this department of the
cotton-spinning life. On tall green stools we sit at
the end of our sides during the time it takes for one
well-filled roper to spin itself out; we talk, or rather
contrive to make ourselves heard. She has a sweet,
gentle face; she is courtesy and kindness itself.
" What do you think about all day ?"
"Why, I couldn't even begin to tell all my
thoughts."
" Tell me some."
" Why, I think about books, I reckon. Do you-all
likereadin' ?"
"Yes."
"Ain't nuthin' I like so good when I ain't tyrd."
"Are you often tired?" And this question
surprises her. She looks up at me and smiles.
" Why, I'm always tyrd ! I read novels for the most
part; like to read love stories and about fo'ran
travel."
(For one short moment please consider: This
hemmed-in life, this limited existence, encompassed
on all sides by the warfare and battle and din of

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THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

maddening sounds, vibrations around her "during
twelve hours of the day, vibrations which mean that
her food is being gained by each pulse of the engine
and its ratio marked off by the disk at her side.
Before her the scene is unchanged day after day,
month after month, year after year. It is not an
experience to this woman who works beside me so
patiently; it is her life. The forms she sees are
warped and scarred; the intellects with which she
comes in contact are dulled and undeveloped. All
they know is toil, all they know of gain is a fluctuation in a wage that ranges from cents to a dollar and
cents again, never touching a two-dollar mark. The
children who, barefooted, filthy, brush past her,
sweeping the cotton from the infected floors, these
are the only forms of childhood she has ever seen.
The dirty women around her, low-browed, sensual,
are the forms of womanhood that she knows; and the
men ? If she does not feed the passion of the overseer,
she may find some mill-hand who will contract a ' 'mill
marriage'' with this daughter of the loom, a marriage
little binding to him and which will give her children
to give in time to the mill. This is the realism of her
love story: She reads books that you, too, may
have read; she dares to dream of scenes, to picture
them—scenes that you have sought and wearied of.
A tithe of our satiety would mean her banquet, her
salvation! . . . Her happiness ? That question
who can answer for her or for you ?)

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265

She continues: " I ' m very fond of fo'ran travel,
only I ain't never had much occasion for it."
This pathos and humour keep me silent. A few
ropers have run out; she rises. I rise, too, to
replace, to attach, and set the exhausted line taut
and complete again.
Ten years! Ten years! All her girlhood and
youth has been given to keeping ropers supplied with
fresh yarn and speeders a-whirling. During this
travail she has kept a serenity of expression, a depth
of sweetness at which I marvel. Her voice is
peculiarly soft and, coupled with the dialect drawl,
is pleasant to hear.
" I hate the mills !" she says simply.
"What would you be if you could choose?" I
venture to ask. She has no hesitation in answering.
" I ' d love to be a trained nurse." Then, turn
about is fair play in her mind, I suppose, for she asks:
"What would you-all b e ? "
And ashamed not to well repay her truthfulness I
frankly respond: " I'd like to write a book."
" I dee-claret
She stares at me. "Why, you-all
is ambitious. Did you ever write anything?"
" A letter or two."
She is interested and kindles, leaning forward.
" I suttenly ain't so high in my ambitions," she says
appreciatively. "Wish you'd write a love story for
me to read," and she ponders over the idea, her eyes
on my snowy flying speeders.

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THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

"Look a-hyar, got any of your scrappin's on
writin' hyar ? Ef you don't mind anybody's messin'
with your things, bring your scrappin's to me an' I'll
soon tell you ef you can write a book er not," she
whispered to me encouragingly, confidentially, a
whisper reaching farther in the mills than a loud
sound.
I thanked her and said: "Do you think that
you'd know?"
"Well, I guess I would!" she said confidently.
" I ain't read all my life sense I was eight years old
not to know good writin' from bad. Can you-all
sing?"
"No."
" Play sweet music ?"
"No."
" I jest love it." She enthuses. " Every Saturday
afternoon I take of a music teacher on the gee-tar.
It costs me a quarter."
I could see the scene: a shanty room, the tall,
awkward figure bending over her instrument; the
type that the teacher made, the ambition, the
eagerness—all of which qualities we are so willing to
deny to the slaves of toil.
"They ain't much flowers here in Granton," she
said again. "'Tain't no use to try to have even
a few geraneums; it's so dry; ain't no yards nor
gardens, nuther."
Musing on this desolation as she walks up and

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267

down the line, she says: " I dew love flowers, don't
you?"
Over and over again I am asked by those whose
wish I suppose is to prove to themselves and their
consciences that the working-girl is not so actively
wretched, her outcry is not so audible that we are
forced to respond:
"The working people are happy? The factory
girls are happy, are they not ? Don't you find them
so?"
Is it a satisfaction to the leisure class, to the
capitalist and employer, to feel that a woman poorly
housed, ill-fed, in imminent moral danger, every
temptation rampant over barriers down, overworked, overstrained by labour varying from ten
to thirteen hours a day, by all-night labour, and
destruction of body and soul, is happyf
Do you wish her to be so ? Is the existence ideal?
I can speak only for the shoe manufacturing girl
of Lynn and for the Southern mill-hand.
I thank Heaven that I can say truthfully, that
of all who came under my observation, not one who
was of age to reflect was happy. I repeat, the
working-woman is brave and courageous, but
the most sane and hopeful indication for the future
of the factory girl and the mill-hand is that
she rebels, dreams of something better, and will
in the fullness of time stretch toward it. They

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have no time to think, even if they knew how.
All that remains for them in the few miserable
hours of relief from labour and confinement and
noise is to seek what pastime they may find under
their hand. We have never realized, they have
never known, that their great need—given the work
that is wrung from them and the degradation in
which they are forced to live—is a craving for
amusement and relaxation. Amusements for this
class are not provided; they can laugh, they rarely
do. The thing that they seek—let me repeat: I
cannot repeat it too often—in the minimum of
time that remains to them, is distraction. They
do not want to read; they do not want to study;
they are too tired to concentrate. How can you
expect it ? I heard a manufacturer say: " We gave
our mill-hands everything that we could to elevate
them—a natatorium, a reading library—and these
halls fell into disuse." I ask him now, through
these pages, the questions which I did not put to
him then as I listened in silence to his complaint.
He said he thought too much was done for the millhands. What time would he suggest that they
should spend in the reading-room, even if they have
learned to read? They rise at four; at a quarter
before six they are at work. The day in winter is
not born when they start their tasks; the night has
fallen long before they cease. In summer they are
worked long into their evenings. They tell me that

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269

they are too tired to eat; that all they want to do is to
turn their aching bones on to their miserable mattresses and sleep until they are cried and shrieked
awake by the mill summons. Therefore they solve
their own questions. Nothing is provided for them
that they can use, and they turn to the only thing
that is within their reach—animal enjoyment, human
intercourse and companionship. They are animals,
as are their betters, and with it, let us believe, more
excuse.
The mill marriage is a farce, and yet they
choose to call their unions now and again a marriage.
Many a woman has been a wife several times in the
same town, in the same house. The bond-tying is a
form, and, of course, mostly ignored. The settlements swarm with illegitimate children. Next to
me work two young girls, both under seventeen,
both ringless and with child.
Let me picture the Foster household, where I
used to call Saturday evenings.
Mrs. Poster herself, dirty, slipshod, a frowzy
mass, hugs her fireside. Although the day is
warm, she kindled a fire to stimulate the thin,
poor blood exhausted by disease and fevers. Two
flatirons lie in a dirty heap on the floor. As usual,
the room is a nest of filth and untidiness.
Mrs. Foster is half paralyzed, but her tongue is
free. She talks fluently in her soft Southern drawl,

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS
more Negro than white as to speech and tone. Up
to her sidles a dirty, pretty little boy of four.
"This yere is too little to go to the mill, but he's
wild to go; yes, ser, he is so. Las' night he come to
me en say, 'Auntie, you-all wake me up at fo' 'clock
sure; I got ter go ter the mill.' "
Here the little blond child, whose mouth is set on a
pewter spoon dripping over with hominy, grins
appreciatively. He throws back his white and
delicate little face, and his aunt, drawing him close
to her, caresses him and continues: "Yes, ma'am,
to-day he dun wake up after they-all had gone and
he sayd, 'My goodness, I dun oversleep mase'f!'
He sha'n't go to the mill," she frowned, " not ef we
can help it. Why, I don't never let him out en my
sight; 'fraid lest those awful mill children would
git at him."
Thus she sheltered him with what care she knew—
care that unfortunately could not go far enough back
to protect him! His mother came in at the noon
hour, as we sat there rocking and chatting. She
was a straight, slender creature, not without grace
in her shirt-waist and her low-pulled felt hat that
shadowed her sullen face. She was very young,
not more than twenty-two, and her history indicative
and tragic. With a word only and a nod she passes
us; she has now too many vital things and incidents
in her own career to be curious regarding a strange
mill-hand. She goes with her comrade—and cousin

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271

—Mamie, into the kitchen to devour in as short a
time as possible the noon dinner, served by the
grandmother: cabbage and hominy. "They don't
have time 'nough to eat," the aunt says; "no sooner
then they-all come in and bolt their dinner then it is
time to go back." Her child has followed her.
Minnie was married at thirteen; in less than a year
she was a grass widow. "My goodness, there's lots
of grass widows !" my frowsled hostess nods. "Why,
in one weave-room hyar there ain't a gyrl but what's
left by her husband. One day a new gyrl come for
to run a loom and they yells out at her, 'Is you-all a
grass widow ? Yer can't come in hyar ef you ain't.' "
But it was after her grass widowhood that Minnie's
tragedy began. The mill was her ruin. So much
grace and good looks could not go, cannot go, does
not go unchallenged by the attentions of the men
who are put there to run these women's work. The
overseer was father of her child, and when she tried to
force from him recognition and aid he threw over his
position and left Columbia and this behind him.
This, one instance under my own eyes observed.
There are many.
"Mamie works all night" (she spoke of the other
girl)—"makes more money. My, but she hates the
mills! Says she ain't ever known a restful minute
sence she left the hills."
My hostess has drawn the same conclusion from
my Northern appearance that the Joneses drew.

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS
"You-all must eat good where you come from!
you look so healthy. Do you-all know the Banks
girl over to Calcutta ?"
"No."
"They give her nine months." (Calcutta is the
roughest settlement round here.) "Why, that gyrl
wars her hair cut short, and she shoots and cuts like a
man. She drew her knife on a man last week—cut
his face all up and into his side through his lung.
Tried to pass as she was his wife, but when they had
her up, ma'am, they proved she had been three
men's wives and he four gyrl's husbands. He liked
to died of the cut. They've given her nine months,
but he ain't the only man that bears her marks.
Over to Calcutta it's the knife and the gun at a
wink. This yere was an awful pretty gyrl. My Min
seed her peekin' out from behind the loom in the
weave-room, thought she was a boy, and said: ' Who's
that yere pretty boy peekin' at me?' And that
gyrl told Min that she couldn't help knife the men,
they all worried on her so ! 'Won't never leave me
alone; I jest have to draw on 'em; there ain't no
other way.' " . . .
For the annals of morality and decency do not
take up this faithful account and picture the cottonmill village. You will not find it in these scenes
drawn from the life as it is at this hour, as it is portrayed by the words that the very people themselves will pour into your ears. Under the walls of

THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

273

Calcutta Negroes are engaged in laying prospective
flower beds, so that the thirteen-hour workers may
look out from time to time and see the forms of
flowers. On the other side rise some twenty shanties.
These houses of Calcutta village are very small,
built from the roughest unpainted boards. Here
it is, in this little settlement, that the knife comes
flashing out at a word—that the women shoot as
well as men, and perhaps more quickly.
"Richmondaint so bad as the other!" I can
hear Mrs. Foster drawl out this recommendation to
us. " They ain't so much chills here. We dun move
up from town first; had to—too high rents for we-all;
now we dun stay hyar. Why, some of the gyrls and
boys works to Granton and bo'ds hyar; seems like
it's mo' healthy."
Moving, ambulant population ! tramping from hill
to hill, from sand-heap to sand-heap to escape the
slow or quick death, to prolong the toiling, bitter
existence—pilgrims of eternal hope; born in the
belief, in the sane and wholesome creed that, no
matter what the horror is, no matter what the
burden's weight must be, one must live! It takes a
great deal to wake in these inexpressive, indifferent
faces illumination of interest. At what should they
rejoice?
I have made the destitution of beauty clear. I
believe there is an absolute lack of every form or

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
sight that might inspire or cause a soul to awake.
There is nothing to lift these people from the earth
and from labour. There should be a complete
readjustment of this system. I have been interested
in reading in the New York Sun of April 20th of the
visit of the bishops to the model factories in Ohio.
I am constrained to wish that bishops and clergy
and philanthropists and millionaires and capitalists
might visit in bodies and separately the mills of
South Carolina and their tenement population. It
is difficult to know just what the ideas are of the
people who have constructed these dwellings. They
tell us in this same prospectus, which I have read
with interest after my personal experience, that these
villages are'' picturesque.'' This is the only reference
I find to the people and their conditions. I have
seen nothing but horror, and yet I went into these
places without prejudice, prepared to be interested
in the industry of the Southern country, and with
no idea of the tragedy and nudity of these people's
existence. The ultimate balance is sure to come;
meanwhile, we cannot but be sensible of the vast
individual sacrifices that must fall to destruction
before the scales swing even..

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS

CHAPTER IX
T H E CHILD IN THE SOUTHERN MILLS

IN the week before I left for the South I dined
in
with a very charming woman and her
husband. Before a table exquisite in its appointments, laden with the best the market could
offer and good taste display, sat the mistress, a
graceful, intelligent young woman, full of philanthropic, charitable interests, and one whom I know
to be devoted to the care and benefiting of little
children in her city. During the meal I said to her
casually:
"Do you know that in your mills in South
Carolina to-night, as we sit here, little children are
working at the looms and frames—little children,
some of them not more than six years old ? "
She said, in astonishment, " I don't know it;
and I can't believe it."
I told her I should soon see just how true the
reports were, and when I returned to New York I
would tell her the facts. She is not alone in her
ignorance. Not one person, man or woman, to
whom I told the facts of the cases I observed
"dreamed that children worked in any mills in the
277

278

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

United States/99 After my experience amongst the
working class, I am safe in saying that I consider
their grievances to be the outcome of the ignorance and greed of the manufacturer abetted,
aided and made possible by the ignorance and
poverty of the labourer.
There is nothing more conscience-silencing than
to accuse the writers of the different articles on
child-labour of sentimentality. The comfort in
which we live makes it easy to eliminate thoughts
that torture us to action in the cause of others. I
will be delighted to meet an accusation of sentimentality and exaggeration by any man or woman
who has gone to a Southern mill as an operative and
worked side by side with the children, lived with
them in their homes. It is defamation to use the
word "home" in connection with the unwholesome
shanty in the pest-ridden district where the remnant
of the children's lives not lived in the mill is passed.
This handful of unpainted huts, raised on stilts
from the soil, fever-ridden and malarious; this blank,
ugly line of sun-blistered shanties, along a road,
yellow-sand deep, is a mill village. The word
village has a cheerful sound. It summons a country
scene, with the charms of home, however simple
and unpretentious. There is nothing to charm or
please in the villages I have already, in these pages,
drawn for you to see and which with veritable sick
reluctance I summon again before your eyes.

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 279
Every house is like unto its neighbour—a shelter
put up rapidly and filled to the best advantage.
There is not a garden within miles, not a flower,
scarcely a tree. Arid, desolate, beautyless, the pale
sand of the State of South Carolina nurtures as
best it can a stray tree or shrub—no more. At
the foot of the shanties' black line rises the cotton
mill. New, enormous, sanitary (!!). Its capital
runs into millions; its prospectuses are pompous;
its pay-roll mysterious. You will not be able to say
how many of the fifteen hundred odd hands at
work in this mill are adults, how many children.
In the State of South Carolina there are statistics of
neither births, marriages nor deaths. What can
you expect of a mill village!
At 5:45 we have breakfasted—the twelve of us
who live in one small shanty, where we have slept,
all five of us in one room, men to the right of the
kitchen, women and children on the left. To leave
the pestilence of foul air, the stench of that dwelling,
is blessed, even if the stroke that summons is the
mill whistle.
As we troop to work in the dawn, we leave
behind us the desert-like town; all day it drowses,
haunted by a few figures of old age and infirmity—
but the mill is alive! We have given up, in order
to satisfy its appetite, all manner of flesh and blood,
and the gentlest morsel between its merciless jaws
is the little child.

2 8o

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

So long as I am part of its food and triumph I
will study the mill.
Leaving the line of flashing, whirling spools, I
lean against the green box full of cotton refuse and
regard the giant room.
It is a wonderful sight. The mill itself, a model
of careful, well-considered building, has every facility
for the best and most advantageous manufacture
of textiles. The fine frames of the intricate "warping," the well-placed frames of the "drawing-in"
all along the window sides of the rooms; then lines
upon lines of spool frames. Great piles of stuff lie
here and there in the room. It is early-—"all the
yarn ain't come yet." Two children whose work
has not been apportioned lie asleep against a cotton
bale. The terrible noise, the grinding, whirling,
pounding, the gigantic burr renders other senses
keen. By my side works a little girl of eight.
Her brutal face, already bespeaking knowledge of
things childhood should ignore, is surrounded by a
forest of yellow hair. She goes doggedly at her
spools, grasping them sullenly. She walks well on
her bare, filthy feet. Her hands and arms are no
longer flesh colour, but resemble weather-roughened
hide, ingrained with dirt. Around the tangle of
her hair cotton threads and bits of lint make a
sort of aur'eole. (Her nimbus of labour, if you
will!) There is nothing saint-like in that face, nor
in the loose-lipped mouth, whence exudes a black

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 281
stain of snuff as between her * lips she turns the
root she chews.
"She's a mean girl," my little companion says;
"we-all don't hev nothin' to say to her."
"Why?"
"Her maw hunts her to the mill; she don't want
to go—no, sir—so she's mad most the time."
Thus she sets, her dogged resistance in scowling
black looks, in quick, frantic gestures and motions
against the machinery that claims her impotent
childhood. The nimbus around her furze of hair
remains; there are other heads than saints—-there
are martyrs ! Let the child wear her crown.
Through the looms I catch sight of Upton's, my
landlord's, little child. She is seven; so small that
they have a box for her to stand upon. She is
a pretty, frail, little thing, a spooler—" a good
spooler, t e w ! " Through the frames on the other
side I can only see her fingers as they clutch at the
flying spools; her head is not high enough, even with
the box, to be visible. Her hands are fairy hands,
fine-boned, well-made, only they are - so thin and
dirty, and her nails—claws; she would do well to
have them cut. A nail can be torn from the finger,
is torn from the finger frequently,* by this flying
* In Huntsville, Alabama, a child of eight lost her index and
middle fingers of the right hand in January, 1902. One doctor
told me that he had amputated the fingers of more than a hundred babies. A merchant told me he had frequently seen children whose hands had been cut off by the machinery,—American
Federationist.

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spool. I go over to Upton's little girl. Her
spindles are not thinner nor her spools whiter.
" How old are you ?"
"Ten."
She looks six. It is impossible to know if what
she says is true. The children are commanded both
by parents and bosses to advance their ages when
asked.
"Tired?"
She nods, without stopping. She is a " remarkable
fine hand." She makes forty cents a day. See the
value of this labour to the manufacturer—cheap,
yet skilled; to the parent it represents $2.40 per
week.
I must not think that as I work beside them I will
gain their confidence! They have no time to talk.
Indeed, conversation is not well looked upon by the
bosses, and I soon see that unless I want to entail a
sharp reproof for myself and them I must stick to
my "side." And at noon I have no heart to take
their leisure. At twelve o'clock, Minnie, a little
spooler, scarcely higher than her spools, lifts her
hands above her head and exclaims: " Thank God,
there's the whistle!" I watched them disperse:
some run like mad, always bareheaded, to fetch
the dinner-pail for mother or father who work in
the mill and who choose to spend these little legs
and spare their own. It takes ten minutes to go,
ten to return, and the little labourer t has ten to

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 283
devote to its own food, which, half the time, he is
too exhausted to eat.
I watch the children crouch on the floor by the
frames; some fall asleep between the mouthfuls of
food, and so lie asleep with food in their mouths until
the overseer rouses them to their tasks again. Here
and there totters a little child just learning to walk;
it runs and crawls the length of the mill. Mothers
who have no one with whom to leave their babies
bring them to the workshop, and their lives begin,
continue and end in the horrible pandemonium.
One little boy passes by with his broom; he is
whistling. I look up at the cheery sound that
pierces fresh but faint and natural above the
machines' noise. His eyes are bright; his good
spirits surprise me: here is an argument for my
comfortable friends who wish to prove that the
children "are happy !" I stop him.
"You seem very jolly!"
He grins.
" How long have you been working?"
" Two or three days."
The gay creature has just begun his servitude
and brings into the dreary monotony a flash of the
spirit which should fill childhood.
I think it will be granted that it takes a great deal
to discourage and dishearten a child. The hopefulness of the mill communities lies in just those
elements that overwork in the adult and that child

284

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

labour will ultimately destroy. When hope is gone
in the adult he must wreak some vengeance on the
bitter fate that has robbed him. There is no more
tragic thing than the hopeless child. The adult who
grows hopeless can affiliate with the malcontents
and find in the insanity of anarchy what he calls
revenge.
It seems folly to insult the common sense of the
public by asking them whether they think that
thirteen hours a day, with a half to three-quarters
of an hour for recreation at noon, or the same amount
of night-work in a mill whose atmosphere is vile with
odours, humid with unhealthfulness, filled with
the particles of flying cotton, a pandemonium of
noise and deafening roar, so deafening that the loss
of hearing is frequent and the keenness of hearing
always dulled . . . whether the atmosphere
combined with the association of men and women
whose morals or lack of morals is notorious all over
the world, is good for a growing child ? Is it conducive to progressive development, to the making
of decent manhood or womanhood? What kind
of citizen can this child—if he is fit enough in the
economic struggle of the world to survive—turn
out to be? Not citizens,at all: creatures scarcely
fit to be called human beings.
I asked the little girl who teaches me to spool
who the man is whom I have seen riding around
on horseback through the town.

T H E CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 285
"Why, he goes roun' rousin' up the hands who
ain't in their places. Sometimes he takes the
children .outen thayre bades an' brings 'em back
to the mill."
And if the child can stand, it spins and spools
until it drops, till constitution rebels, and death, the
only friend it has ever known, sets it free.
Besides being spinners and spoolers, and occasionally weavers even, the children sweep the cottonstrewed floors. Scarcely has the miserable little
object, ragged and odourous, passed me with his
long broom, which he drags half-heartedly along,
than the space he has swept up is cotton-strewn
again. It settles with discouraging rapidity; it has
also settled on the child's hair and clothes, and
his eyelashes, and this atmosphere he breathes
and fairly eats, until his lungs become diseased.
Pneumonia—fatal in nearly all cases here—and
lung fever had been a pestilence, "a regular plague,"
before I came. There were four cases in the village
where I lived, and fever and ague, malaria and
grippe did their parts.
"Why, thar ain't never a haouse but's got somebody sick," my little teacher informed me in her
soft Southern dialect. " I suttinly never did see a
place like this for dyin' in winter time. I reckon
et's funerals every day."
Here is a little child, not more than seven years
old. The land is a hot enough country, we will

286

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

concede, but not a savage South Sea Island ! She
has on one garment, if a tattered sacking dress
can so be termed. Her bones are nearly through
her skin, but her stomach is an unhealthy pouch,
abnormal. She has dropsy. She works in a new
mill—in one of the largest mills in South Carolina.
Here is a slender little boy—a birch rod (good old
simile) is not more slender, but the birch has the
advantage: it is elastic—it bends, has youth in it.
This boy looks ninety. He is a dwarf; twelve years
old, he appears seven, no more. He sweeps the
cotton off the floor of "the baby mill." (How
tenderly and proudly the owners speak of their
brick and mortar.) He sweeps the cotton and lint
from the mill aisles from 6 P. M. to 6 A. M. without a
break in the night's routine. He stops of his own
accord, however, to cough and expectorate—he has
advanced tuberculosis.
At night the shanties receive us. On a pine board
is spread our food—can you call it nourishment?
The hominy and molasses is the best part; salt pork
and ham are the strong victuals.
It is eight o'clock when the children reach their
homes—later if the mill work is behindhand and
they are kept over hours. They are usually beyond
speech. They fall asleep at the table, on the stairs;
they are carried to bed and there laid down as
they are, unwashed, undressed; and the inanimate
bundles of rags so lie until the mill summons them

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 287
with its imperious cry before sunrise, while they^re
still in stupid sleep.
"What do you do on Sundays ?" I asked one little
girl.
"Why, thare ain't nothing much to dew. I go to
the park sometimes."
This park is at the end of a trolley line; it is their
Arcadia. Picture i t ! A few yellow sand hills with
clusters of pine trees and some scrubby undergrowth; a more desolate, arid, gloomy pleasure
ground cannot be conceived. On Sundays the
trolleys bring those who are not too tired to so spend
the day. On Sundays the mill shanties are full of
sleepers.
The park has a limited number of devotees.
Through the beautyless paths and walks the
figures pass like shadows. There come three mill
girls arm in arm; their curl papers, screwed tight
all the week, are out on Sunday, in greasy, abundant
curls. Sunday clothes are displayed in all their
superbness. Three or four young men, town fellows,
follow them; they are all strangers, but they will go
home arm in arm.
Several little children, who have no clothes but
those they wear, cling close to the side of a gaunt,
pale-faced man, who carries in his arms the youngest.
The little girl has become a weight to be carried on
Sundays; she has worked six days of the week—
shall she not rest on the seventh? She shall; she

288

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

claims this, and lies inert on the man's arm, her
face already seared with the scars of toil.
I ran such risk taking pictures that I relinquished
the task, and it was only the last day at the mill,
while still in my working clothes with a camera
concealed in my pocket, that I contrived to get a
picture or two. I ventured to ask two little boys
who swept the mill to stand for their pictures.
" I don't kyar to," the older one said. I explained
that it would not hurt them, as I thought he was
afraid; but his little companion vouchsafed: "We-all
ain't got no nickel." When they understood it was
a free picture they were as delighted as possible and
posed with alacrity, making touching apologies for
their greasy, dirty condition.
When I asked one of them if he was ever clean,
he said: "On Sunday I wash my hands."
It was noon, on the day I chose to leave
-,
turning my back on the mill that had allured me to
its doors and labour. In South Carolina early
April is torrid, flies, and mosquitoes are rampant.
What must this settlement be in midsummer heat ?
There is no colour in the Southern scene; the clothes
of the mill-hands, the houses, the soil are of one
tone—and, more strange, there is not one line of
red, one dash of life, in the faces of the hundreds of
women and children that pass me on, their way back
to work.
Under the existing circumstances they have no

T H E CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 289
outlook, these people, no hope; their appearance
expresses accurately the changeless routine of an
existence devoted to eternal ignorance, eternal toil.
From their short half-hour of mid-noon rest, the
whistle, piercing, inanimate call, has dared to command the slavish obedience of animate and intelligent beings. I pause by the trestle over which
rumble the cars, heavily laden with the cotton cloth
whose perfection has made this Southern mill justly
famous.
The file of humanity that passes me I shall never
forget! The Blank Mill claims 1,500 of these
labourers; at least 200 are children. The little
things run and keep step with the older men and
women; their shaggy, frowzled heads are bent, their
hands protrude pitifully from their sleeves; they are
barefooted, bareheaded. With these little figures
the elements wanton; they can never know the
fullness of summer or the proper maturity of autumn.
Suns have burned them, rains have fallen upon
them, as unprotected through storms they go to
their work. The winter winds have penetrated
the tatters with blades like knives; gray and dusty
and earth-coloured the line passes. These are
children? No, they are wraiths of childhood—
they are effigies of youth! What can Hope work
in this down-trodden soil for any future harvest?
They can curse and swear; they chew tobacco and
take snuff. When they speak at all their voices

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
are feeble; ears long dulled by the thunder of the mill
are no longer keen to sound; their speech is low
and scarcely audible. Over sallow cheeks where the
skin is tightly drawn their eyes regard you suspiciously, malignantly even, never with the frank look
of childhood. As the long afternoon goes by in its
hours of leisure for us fatigue settles like a blight
over their features, their expressions darken to
elfish strangeness, whilst sullen lines, never to be
eradicated, mark the distinctive visages of these
children of labour.
At certain seasons of the year they actually die
off like flies. They fall subject, not to children's
diseases exactly—nothing really natural seems to
come into the course of these little existences—
they fall a prey to the maladies that are the outcomes of their conditions. They are always halfclad in the winter time; their clothes differ nothing
at all from their summer clothes; they have no
overcoats or coats; many of them go barefoot all
winter long. They come out from the hot mills
into cold, raw winds and fall an easy prey to pneumonia, scourge of the mill-town. Their general
health is bad all the year round; their skins and
complexions have taken the tone of the sandy soil
of the Southern country in which they are bred
and in which their martyrdom is accomplished. I
never saw a rosy cheek nor a clear skin: these
are the parchment editions of childhood on which

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 291
Tragedy is written indelibly. You can there read
the eternal condemnation of those who have
employed them for the sake of gain.
It is a melancholy satisfaction to believe that
mill labour will kill off little spinners and spoolers.
Unfortunately, this is not entirely true. There are
constitutions that survive all the horrors of existence. I have worked, both in Massachusetts and
the South beside women who entered the mill service
at eight years of age. One of these was still in her
girlhood when I knew her. She was very strong,
very good and still had some illusions left. I do not
know what it goes to prove, when I say that at
twenty, in spite of twelve years of labour, she still
dreamed, still hoped, still longed and prayed for
something that was not a mill. If this means
content in servitude, if this means that the poor
white trash are born slaves, or if, on the contrary,
it means that there is something inherent in a woman
that will carry her past suicide and past idiocy and
degradation, all of which is around her, I think it
argues well for the working women.
The other woman was forty. She had no illusions
left—please remember she had worked since eight;
she had reached, if you like, the idiot stage. She
had nothing to offer during all the time I knew her
but a few sentences directly in connection with
her toil.
It is useless to advance the plea that spooling is

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
not difficult. No child (we will cancel under
twelve!) should work at all. No human creature
should work thirteen hours a day. No baby of
six, seven or eight should be seen in the mills.
It is also useless to say that these children tell you
that they "like the mill." They are beaten by
their parents if they do not tell you this, and,
granted that they do not like their servitude, when
was it thought expedient that a child should direct
its existence? If they do not pass the early years
of their lives in study, when should they learn ? At
what period of their lives should the children of the
Southern mill-hand be educated? Long before
they reach their teens their habits are formed—
ignorance is ingrained; indeed, after a few years they
are so vitally reduced that if you will you cannot
teach them. Are these little American children,
then, to have no books but labour ? No recreation ?
To be crushed out of life to satisfy the ignorance
and greed of their parents, the greed of the
manufacturers?
Whatever else we are, we are
financiers per se. The fact that to-day, as for years
past, Southern cotton mills are employing the
labour of children under tender age—employing an
army of them to the number of twenty thousand
under twelve—can only be explained by a frank
admittal that infantile labour has been considered
advantageous to the cause of gain.
This gain, apparent by the facts that a mill can be

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 293
run for thousands of dollars less in the South than a
like mill can be run in the North, and its net surplus
profits be the same as those of the Northern manufactory, is one by which one generation alone will
profit. The attractiveness of the figures is fallacious.
What I imply is self-evident. The infant population (its numbers give it a right to this dignity of
term) whose cheap toil feeds the mills is doomed. I
mean to say that the rank and file of humanity are
daily weeded out; that thousands of possibly strong,
healthy, mature labouring men and women are
being disease-stricken, hounded out of life; the
cotton mill child cannot develop to the strong
normal adult working-man and woman. The fiber
exhausted in the young body cannot be recreated.
Early death carries hundreds out of life, disease rots
the remainder, and the dulled maturity attained by
a creature whose life has been passed in this labour
is not fit to propagate the species.
The excessively low wages paid these little millhands keep under, of necessity, the wage paid the
grown labourer. It is a crying pity that children
are equal to the task imposed upon them. It is a
crying pity that machines (since they have appeared,
with their extended, all-absorbing power) should
not do all! Particularly in the Southern States do
they evince, at a fatal point,, their limit, display
their inadequacy. When babies can be employed
successfully for thirteen hours out of the twenty-

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
four at all machines with men and women; when
infants feeds mechanism with labour that has not
one elevating, humanizing effect upon them physically or mentally, it places human intelligence below
par and cheapens and distorts the nobler forms of
toil. Not only is it "no disgrace to work," but on
the contrary it is a splendid thing to be able to
labour, and those who gain their bread by the sweat
of their brow are not the servants of mankind in the
sense of the term, but the patriarchs and controllers
of the world's march and the most subtle signs
of the times. But there are distinctly fitnesses of
labour, and the proper presentation to the workingman and woman and child is a consideration.
No one to-day would be likely for an instant to
concede that to replace the treadmill horse with a
child (a thing often seen and practised in times past)
would be an advantage. And yet the march of the
child up and down before its spooling frame is more
suggestive of an animal—of the dog hitched to the
Belgian milk cart; of the horse on the mill-tread—
than another analogy.
Contrast this pallid automaton with the children
of the poor in a New York kindergarten, where the
six- or seven-year-old child of the German, the
Hungarian, the Polish emigrant, may have its
imagination stimulated, its creative and individual
faculties employed as it is taught to make things—
construct, combine, weave, sew$ mould. Every

T H E CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 295
power latent is cajoled to expression, every talent
encouraged. Thus work in its first form is rendered
attractive, and youth and individuality are encouraged. In the South of this American country
whose signet is individualism, whose strength
(despite our motto, "United we stand") is in the
individual freedom and vast play of original thought,
here in the South our purest born, the most unmixed
blood of us, is being converted into machines of
labour when the forms of little children are bound in
youth to the spindle and loom.
In a certain mill in Alabama there are seventyfive child-labourers who work twelve hours out of
the twenty-four; they have a half-hour at noon for
luncheon. There is a night school in connection
with this mill corporation. Fancy it, a night school
for the day-long child labourer! Fifty out of
seventy-five troop to it. Although they are so tired
they cannot keep awake on the benches, and the
littlest of them falls asleep over its letters, although
they weep with fatigue, they are eager to learn!
Is there a more conclusive testimony to the quality
of the material that is being lost to the States
and the country by the martyrdom of intelligent
children ?
One hears two points of view expressed on this
subject. The capitalist advances that the greed of
the parents forces the children into the mills; the
people themselves tell you that unless they are

296

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS

willing to let their available children work, their
own lives are made impossible by the overseers.
A widow who has children stands a fair chance of
having her rent free; if she refuses this tithe of
flesh and blood she is too often thrust into the
street. So I am told. Now, which of these facts
is the truth ? It seems to be clearly too much left
to the decision of private enterprise or parental
incapability. The Legislature is the only school in
which to decide the question. During my stay in
South Carolina I never heard one woman advocate
the mills for children. One mother, holding to her
breast her illegitimate child, her face dark with dislike, said: "Them mills ! I would not let my little
boy work in 'em! No, sir ! He would go over my
dead body.'' Another woman said: ' lMy little girl
work? No, ma'am; she goes to school!" and the
child came in even as she spoke—let me say the only
cheerful specimen of childhood, with the exception
of the few little creatures in the kindergarten, that
I saw in the mill district.
South Carolina has become very haughty on this
topic and has reached a point when she tells us she
is to cure the sore in her own body without aid or
interference. At a late session of the Legislature
the bill for the restriction of child labour—we must
call it this, since it legislates only for the child
under ten—this bill was defeated by only two
dissenting voices. A humane gentleman who laid

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 297
claim to one of these voices was heard to ejaculate as
the bill failed to pass: ''Thank God !" Just why, it
is not easy to understand.
When I was so arrogant as to say to the editor of
The State, the leading paper in South Carolina, that
I hoped my article might aid the cause, I made an
error clearly, for he replied:
"We need no aid. The people of South Carolina
are aroused to the horror and will cure it themselves."
Georgia is not roused to the horror; Alabama is
stirring actively; but the Northerners who own
these mills—the capitalists, the manufacturers, the
men who are building up a reputation for the
wealth of South Carolina and Alabama mills, are
the least aroused of all. We must believe that many
directors of these mills are ignorant of the state of
affairs, and that those who are enlightened willingly
blind their eyes.
The mill prospectuses are humourous when read
by the investigator. We are told "labour-uiiions
cut no figure here !"
Go at night through the mills with the head of
the Labour Federation and with the instigator of the
first strikes in this district-—with men who are the
brain and fiber of the labour organization, and see
the friendly looks flash forth, see the understanding
with which they are greeted all through certain
mills. Consider that not 200 miles away at the

298

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

moment are 22,000 labourers on strike.
these statements with a smile!

Then greet

On my return to the North I made an especial
effort to see my New England friend. We lunched
together this time, and at the end of the meal her
three little children fluttered in to say a friendly
word. I looked at them, jealous for their little
defrauded fellows, whose twelve-hour daily labour
served to purchase these exquisite clothes and to
heap with dainties the table before us. But I was
nevertheless rejoiced to see once again the forms of
real childhood for whom air and freedom and wealth
were doing blessed tasks. When we were alone I
drew for my friend as well as I could pictures of what
I had seen. She leaned forward, took a brandied
cherry from the dish in front of her, ate it delicately
and dipped her fingers in the finger-bowl; then she
said:
"Dear friend, I am going to surprise you very
much."
I waited, and felt that it would be difficult to
surprise me with a tale of a Southern mill.
"Those little children—love the mill! They like
to work. It's a great deal better for them to be
employed than for them to run the streets !"
She smiled over her argument, and I waited.
"Do you know," she continued, " t h a t I believe
they are really very happy."

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 299
She had well presented her argument. She had
said she would surprise me—and she did.
"You will not feel it a breach of affection and
hospitality if I print what you say?" I asked her.
" It's only fair that the capitalist's view should be
given here and there first hand. You own one-half
the mill in
, Carolina?"
"Yes."
"What do you think of a model mill with only
nine hours a day labour, holidays and all nights
free, schools, where education is enforced by the
State; reading-rooms open as well as churches—
amusement halls, music, recreation and pleasure,
as well as education and religion ?"
" I think," she said keenly, "that united, concentrated action on the part of the cotton mill
owners might" make such a thing feasible; for us to
try it alone would mean ruin."
"Not ruin," I amended; " a reduction of income."
"Ruin," she said, firing. "We couldn't compete.
To compete," she said with the conviction of an
intelligent, well-informed manufacturer, " I must
have my sixty-six hours a week!"
The spirit of discontent is always abroad when
false conditions exist. Its restless presence is controlled by one spirit alone—humanity—when reasonably are weighed and justly decided the questions
of balance between Capital and Labour.
We must believe that there is no unsolvable

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
problem before us in considering the presence of
the child in the Southern mills.
There is nothing in the essence of the subject to
discourage the social economist. The question
should not be left to the decision of the private
citizen. This stuff is worth saving. There is the
making in these children of first-class citizens. I
quote from the illustrated supplement of the South
Carolina State that you may see what the mill
manufacturers think of the quality of the "poor
white t r a s h " :
" The operatives in the South Carolina mills are the common
people—the bone and sinew who have left the fields to the
Negroes. They are industrious, intelligent, frugal, and have
the native instincts of honesty and integrity and of fidelity
which are essential to good citizenship."

If such things are true of the mill-hands of South
Carolina, it is worth while to save their children.
Henceforth, to my vision across the face of the
modern history of labour and manufacture will
eternally defile the gray, colourless column of the
Southern mill - hands : an earth - hued line of
humanity—a stream that divides not.
Here there are no stragglers. At noon and night
the pace is quick, eager. Steady as a prison gang,
it goes to food, rest and freedom. But this alacrity
is absent in the morning. On the hem of night, the
fringe of day, the march is slow and lifeless. Many

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 301
of the heads are bent and downcast; some of the faces
peer forward, and sallow masks of human countenances lift, with a look set beyond the mill—toward
who can say what vain horizon! The Stream wanders slowly toward the Houses of Labour, although
whipped by invisible scourge of Need. Without
this incentive and spur, think you it would pursue
a direction toward thirteen hours of toil, shut from air
and sunlight and day, taking in its rank the women,
the young girl and the little child ?
The tone of the garments is somber and gray,
blending with the gray of the dawn; or red, blending
with the earth stains of the peculiar Southern soil;
or claylike and pale yellow. Many of the faces are
pallid, some are tense, most of them are indifferent,
dulled by toil and yet not all unintelligent. Those
who are familiar with the healthy type of the decent
workmen of the West and East must draw their
distinctions as they consider this peculiar, unfamiliar
class. The Southern mill-hand's face is unique—a
fearful type, whose perusal is not pleasant or
cheerful to the character-reader, to the lover of
humanity or to the prophet of the future. Thus they
defile: men with felt hats drawn over their brows;
women, sunbonneted or hatless; children barefoot,
bareheaded, ragged, unwashed. Unwashed these
labourers have gone to bed; unwashed they have
arisen. To their garments cling the bits of cotton,
the threads of cotton, the strands of roping, badges

T H E WOMAN WHO TOILS
of their trade, brand of their especial toil. As they
pass over the red clay, over the pale yellow sand, the
earth seems to claim them as part of her unchanging
phase; cursed by the mandate primeval—"by the
sweat of thy brow"—Earth-Born!
In the early morning the giant mill swallows its
victims, engorges itself with entering humanity; then
it grows active, stirring its ponderous might to life,
movement and sound. Hear it roar, shudder,
shattering the stillness for half a mile! It is full
now of flesh and blood, of human life and brain and
fiber: it is content! Triumphantly during the
long, long hours it devours the tithe of body and
soul.
Behind lies the deserted, accursed village, destitute of life during the hours of day, condemned to the
care of a few women, the old, the bedridden and the
sick—of which last there are plenty.
Mighty Mills—pride of the architect and the
commercial magnate; charnel houses, devastators,
destructors of homes and all that mankind calls
hallowed; breeders of strife, of strike, of immorality,
of sedition and riot—buildings tremendous—you
give your immutable faces, myriads-windowed, to the
dust-heaps, to the wind-swept plains of sand. When
South Carolina shall have taken from you (as its
honour and wisdom and citizenship is bound to do)
the youngest of the children, do you think that you
shall inevitably continue to devour what remains?

THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS 303
There is too much resistance yet left in the mass of
human beings. Youth will then rebel at a servitude
beginning at ten years of age: and the women will lift
their arms above their heads one day in desperate
gesture of appeal and cry out—not for the millionaire's surplus; not a tirade anarchistic against
capital. . . . What is this woman of the hills
and woman of the mills that she should so demand ?
She will call for hours short enough to permit her to
bear her children; for requital commensurate with
the exigence of progressive civilization; for wages
equal to her faithful toil.
This is not too fantastic a demand or too ideal a
state to be divinely hoped for, believed in and
brought to pass.*
Not inapt here is the pagan idea of Nous, moving
upon chaos, stirring the stagnant, unresponsive
forces into motion; agitating these forces into action;
the individual elements separate and go forth, each
one on its definitely inspired mission. Some inevitable hour shall see the universal agitation of the
vast body known as the " labouring class." For the
welfare of the whole world, may it not come whilst
they are so ignorant and so down-pressed.
* Of the 21,000,000 spindles in the United States, the South
has 6,000,000. $35,381,000 of Carolina's wealth is in cotton
mills.
NOTE. I have seen, in Aragon, Georgia, hope for the future
of the mill-hands. The Aragon Cotton Mills are an improve-

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS
ment on the South Carolina Mills and are under the direct
supervision of an owner whose sole God is not gain. Mr. Walcott
is an agitator of the nine-hours-a-day movement; he is opposed
to Child Labour, and in all his relations with his hands he is
humane and kindly. I look to the time when Aragon shall set a
perfect pattern of what a mill-town should be. It is already
quite the best I have seen. Its healthfulness is far above the
average, and its situation most fortunate.