To Florence Kelley This Book Is Dedicated...

This book is composed of the economic records of self-supporting women living away from home in New York. Their chronicles were given to the National Consumers' League simply as a testimony to truth; and it is simply as a testimony to truth that these narratives are reprinted here. The League's inquiry was initiated because, three years ago in the study of the establishment of a minimum wage, only very little information was obtainable as to the relation between the income and the outlay of self

One of the most significant features of the common history of this generation is the fact that nearly six million women are now gainfully employed in this country. From time immemorial, women have, indeed, worked, so that it is not quite as if an entire sex, living at ease at home heretofore, had suddenly been thrown into an unwonted activity, as many quoters of the census seem to believe. For the domestic labor in which women have always engaged may be as severe and prolonged as commercial labo

ToC Among the active members of the Ladies Waist Makers' Union in New York, there is a young Russian Jewess of sixteen, who may be called Natalya Urusova. She is little, looking hardly more than twelve years old, with a pale, sensitive face, clear dark eyes, very soft, smooth black hair, parted and twisted in braids at the nape of her neck, and the gentlest voice in the world, a voice still thrilled with the light inflections of a child. She is the daughter of a Russian teacher of Hebrew, who li

ToC Besides the accounts of the waist makers, the National Consumers' League received in its inquiry specific chronicles from skilled and from unskilled factory workers, both hand workers and machine operatives—among others, packers of drugs, biscuits, and olives, cigarette rollers, box makers, umbrella makers, hat makers, glove makers, fur sewers, hand embroiderers, white goods workers, skirt makers, workers on men's coats, and workers on children's dresses. As will be seen, the situation occup

ToC One of the strangest effects of the introduction of machinery into industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and initiative of workers from mechanical drudgery, it has often tended to devitalize and warp these forces to the functions of machines. [22] This stupefying and wearying effect of machine-work from concentration and intensity of application and attention was frequently mentioned by the factory workers in their accounts. Tina Levin, a young girl eighteen years old, had

ToC Forty million dollars are invested in New York in the making of women's cloaks, skirts, and suits. One hundred and eighty million dollars' worth of these garments are produced in New York in a year. [23] Between sixty and seventy thousand organized men and women in the city are employed in these industries. The Union members constitute ninety-five per cent of the workers engaged in the trade, and about ten thousand of these members are women. [24] It seems at first strange to find that the m

ToC (This article is composed of the reports of Miss Carola Woerishofer, Miss Elizabeth Howard Westwood, and Miss Mary Alden Hopkins, supplemented with an account of the Federal Supreme Court's decision on the constitutionality of the Oregon Ten-Hour Law for laundry workers.) What do self-supporting women away from home in New York give in their work, and what do they get from it, when their industry involves a considerable outlay of muscular strength? For a reply to this question the National C

ToC Within the last thirty years a new method of conducting work, called Scientific Management, has been established in various businesses in the United States, including "machine shops and factories, steel work and paper mills, cotton mills and shoe shops, in bleacheries and dye works, in printing and bookbinding, in lithographing establishments, in the manufacture of type-writers and optical instruments, in constructing and engineering work—and to some extent—the manufacturing departments of t