Prisoners Of Poverty: Women Wage-Workers, Their Trades And Their Lives

WOMEN WAGE-WORKERS, THEIR TRADES AND THEIR LIVES.

By HELEN CAMPBELL AUTHOR OF “MRS. HERNDON’S INCOME,” “MISS MELINDA’S OPPORTUNITY,” ETC. BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1900 Copyright, 1887 , By Helen Campbell University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge...

13 minute read

Read Chapter

PREFACE.

The chapters making up the present volume were prepared originally as a series of papers for the Sunday edition of “The New York Tribune,” and were based upon minutest personal research into the conditions described. Sketchy as the record may seem at points, it is a photograph from life; and the various characters, whether employers or employed, were all registered in case corroboration were needed. While research was limited to New York, the facts given are much the same for any large city, and

55 minute read

Read Chapter

WORKER AND TRADE.

In that antiquity which we who only are the real ancients look back upon as the elder world, counting those days as old which were but the beginning of the time we reckon, there were certain methods with workers that centuries ago ceased to have visible form. The Roman matron, whose susceptibilities from long wear and tear in the observation of fighting gladiators and the other mild amusements of the period, were a trifle blunted, felt no compunction in ordering a disobedient or otherwise object

12 minute read

Read Chapter

THE CASE OF ROSE HAGGERTY.

“The case of Rose Haggerty.” So it stands on the little record-book in which long ago certain facts began to have place, each one a count in the indictment of the civilization of to-day, and each one the story not only of Rose but of many another in like case. For the student of conditions among working-women soon discovers that workers divide themselves naturally into four classes: (1) those who have made deliberate choice of a trade, fitted themselves carefully for it, and in time become exper

13 minute read

Read Chapter

SOME METHODS OF A PROSPEROUS FIRM.

“The emancipation of women is certainly well under way, when all underwear can be bought more cheaply than it is possible to make it up at home, and simple suits of very good material make it hardly more difficult for a woman to clothe herself without thought or worry, than it has long been for a man.” This was the word heard at a woman’s club not long ago, and reinforced within the week by two well-known journals edited in the interests of women at large. The editorial page of one held a fervid

14 minute read

Read Chapter

THE BARGAIN COUNTER.

The problem of the last chapter is, if not plain, at least far plainer than when it left the pen, and it has become possible to understand how the garment sold at twelve and a half cents may still afford its margin of profit. It has also been made plain that that profit is, as there stated, “never on the side of the worker,” but that it is wrung from her by the sharpest and most pitiless of all the methods known to unscrupulous men and the women who have chosen to emulate them. For it has been m

13 minute read

Read Chapter

A FASHIONABLE DRESSMAKER.

“Come now, be reasonable, won’t you? You’ve got to move on, you know, and why don’t you do it?” “I’m that reasonable that a bench of judges couldn’t be more so; and I’ll not move on for anything less than dynamite, and I ain’t sure I would for that. It’s only a choice between starvation and going into the next world in little bits, and I don’t suppose it makes much difference which way it’s done.” The small, pale, dogged-looking little woman who announced this conviction did not even rise from t

12 minute read

Read Chapter

MORE METHODS OF PROSPEROUS FIRMS.

To do justice to employer as well as employed is the avowed object of our search, yet as it goes on, and the methods made necessary by competition become more and more clear, it is evident that back of every individual case of wrong and oppression lies a deeper wrong and a more systematized oppression. Master and servant alike are in the same bonds, and the employer is driven as mercilessly as he drives. He may deny it. He may even be quite unconscious of his own subjection, or, if he thinks at

11 minute read

Read Chapter

NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE GOSPEL.

From the fig-leaf down, it would seem as if a portion of the original curse accompanying it had passed on to each variation or amplification of first methods, its heaviest weight falling always on the weak shoulders that, if endurance could make strong, should belong to-day to a race of giants. Of the ninety and more trades now open to women, thirty-eight involve some phase of this question of clothing, about which centre some of the worst wrongs of modern civilization. It is work that has legit

14 minute read

Read Chapter

THE TRUE STORY OF LOTTE BAUER.

It was the Prussian War that seemed to settle the question. So far as Grossvater Bauer himself was concerned, he would still have toiled on contentedly. To be alive at all on German soil was more than honor or wealth or any good thing that the emigrant might report as part of his possession in that America to which all discontented eyes looked longingly. The reports might all be true; yet why should one for the sake of better food or more money be banished from the Vaterland and have only a Pres

13 minute read

Read Chapter

THE EVOLUTION OF A JACKET.

“If underwear, whether for men or women, has proven itself a most excellent medium for starvation; if suits and dresses in general rank but a grade above; if shirts, whether of cotton or woollen, are a despair; and in each and all competition has cheapened material and manufacture and brought labor to the ‘life limit’ and below, at least it cannot be so bad with cloaks and jackets. Here are single garments, often of the most expensive material and put together in the most finished and perfect ma

15 minute read

Read Chapter

BETWEEN THE RIVERS.

“The nearer the river the nearer to hell.” It was a strong word, and the big chest from which it issued held more of the same sort,—a tall worker, carpenter apparently, hurrying on with his box of tools and talking, as he went, with a companion half his size, but with quite his power of expression, interjecting strange German oaths as he listened to the story poured out to him. With that story we have at present nothing to do. But the first words lingered, and they linger still as the summary of

15 minute read

Read Chapter

UNDER THE BRIDGE AND BEYOND.

Between east and west side poverty and its surroundings exists always this difference, that the west is newer and thus escapes the inherited miseries that hedge about life in such regions as the Fourth Ward. There, where old New York once centred, and where Dutch gables and dormer windows may still be seen, is not only the foulness of the present, each nationality in the swarming tenements representing a distinct type of dirt and a distinct method of dealing with it and in it, but the foulness a

15 minute read

Read Chapter

ONE OF THE FUR-SEWERS.

“I suppose if you’d been born on the top of a hill in New Hampshire with the stones so thick ten miles of stone wall couldn’t have used ’em up, an’ the steeple of the Methodist meetin’-house the only thing in sight, maybe you’d have wanted to get where you could see folks too. It was just Elkins luck to have another hill between us an’ the village so’t I couldn’t see beyond the woods between. If there was a contrary side to anything it always fell to father, an’ I’m some like him, though I’ve go

15 minute read

Read Chapter

SOME DIFFICULTIES OF AN EMPLOYER WHO EXPERIMENTED.

The business face in the great cities is assimilating to such degree that all men are brothers in a sense and to an extent unrealized by themselves. Competition has deepened lines, till one type of the employer in his first estate, while the struggle is still active and success uncertain, loses not only youth and freshness, but with them, too often, any token of owning a soul capable of looking beyond the muckrake by which money is drawn in. If he acquires calm and graciousness, it is the calmne

13 minute read

Read Chapter

THE WIDOW MALONEY’S BOARDERS.

To the old New-Yorker taking his pensive way through streets where only imagination can supply the old landmarks, long ago vanished, there is a conviction that he knows the city foot by foot as it has crept northward; and he repudiates the thought that its growth has ended such possibility, and that many a dark corner is as remote from his or any knowledge save that of its occupants as if in Caffre-land. The newest New-Yorker has small interest in anything but the west side and the space down-to

15 minute read

Read Chapter

AMONG THE SHOP-GIRLS.

Why this army of women, many thousand strong, is standing behind counters, over-worked and underpaid, the average duration of life among them as a class lessening every year, is a question with which we can at present deal only indirectly. It is sufficient to state that the retail stores of wellnigh every order, though chiefly the dry-goods retail trade, have found their quickness and aptness to learn, the honesty and general faithfulness of women, and their cheapness essentials in their work; a

14 minute read

Read Chapter

TWO HOSPITAL BEDS.

Why and how the money-getting spirit has become the ruler of American life and thought no analyzer of social conditions has yet made plain. That New York might be monopolist in this respect could well be conceived, for the Dutch were traders by birthright and New Amsterdam arose to this one end. But why the Puritan colony, whose first act before even the tree stumps were brown in their corn-fields was the founding of a college, and whose corner-stone rested on a book,—why these people should hav

15 minute read

Read Chapter

CHILD-WORKERS IN NEW YORK.

Political economists in general, with the additional number of those who for one purpose and another turn over statistics of labor, nodded approvingly as they gazed upon the figures of the last general census for the State of New York, which showed that among the myriad of workers in factory and other occupations, but twenty-four thousand children were included. “Fifty-six million and more inhabitants, and all faring so well that only one fortieth part of one of these millions is employed too ea

12 minute read

Read Chapter

STEADY TRADES AND THEIR OUTLOOK.

“I used to think there were steady trades; but somehow now everything gets mixed, and you can’t tell what’s steady and what isn’t.” “What makes the mix?” “The Lord only knows! I’ve studied over it till I’m dazed, and sometimes I’ve wondered if my mind was weakening.” The speaker, a middle-aged Scotchwoman, whose tongue still held a little of the burr that thirty years of American life had not been able to extract, put her hand to her head as if the fault must concentrate there. “If it was my tra

11 minute read

Read Chapter

DOMESTIC SERVICE AND ITS PROBLEMS.

At last we have come to the problem to which there has necessarily been incidental reference here and there, but which has otherwise bided its time. That these pages or any pages written by mortal hand in this generation can solve it, the writer doubts, its solution being inextricably involved with that of other social problems for which time is the chief key. State the question as we may, there is always a fresh presentation to be made, and replies are as various as the minds of the staters. It

14 minute read

Read Chapter