Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New York

When planning my adventure as Polly Preston, the heroine of my proposed novel, the idea of including domestic service did not occur to me. It was Alice who first caused me to co...

My going to live in the tenements came about in a roundabout way. While existing in the Jane Leonard I let it be known that I was looking for a small flat in a tenement. The onl...

The evening after my first day spent as a clerk of the District Board for the City of New York I reached the Jane Leonard in time to be among the first who entered the dining-ro...

“It was colossal!” Hildegarde Hook panted boisterously, as she burst into my room about four o’clock one morning during the Christmas holidays. “My ideal marriage—eleven o’clock...

The place was very beautiful. The house, Southern colonial, was large and dignified without being showy. The park and gardens surrounding it contained eleven acres—at least the...

About a week before leaving the T. Z. I had a set-to with my landlady. Stopping at the door of her room to pay my rent, I handed her two dollars and seventy-five cents—the addit...

Back again on the now deserted top floor of the rooming-house, I turned once more to the help-wanted column. An advertisement about which Alice and I had often speculated during...

“Why don’t you give our employment department a trial? I believe you’d have a wider choice. Besides, you might help the Association a lot—reporting conditions at the places wher...

On my return from lunch Mr. Spencer escorted me to a counter marked “Men’s Department” and introduced me to the head of stock, Nora Joyce, a neat young girl with serious blue ey...

Because I found social service work unsuited to my talent does not mean that I think such work unnecessary, or that I in any way disapprove of it. Quite the contrary. While I de...

Mrs. Bossman, the matron of St. Rose’s Home for Girls, which I reached after a railroad journey of several hours, received me with great cordiality. She was very much in need of...

Monday morning I jammed myself into a subway train bound for the responsible, high-salaried position which my vanity assured me waited for me in the department store. Arriving a...

A note from Alice Tompkins had been among the batch of mail handed me the night before as I left the National Art Club. She was in New York, and particularly wished to see me, a...

It was a cold, bleak morning during the November of 1920 that my work as inspector of dog licenses took me to an old tenement-house on a cross street between Avenue A and Exteri...

Jist dogs! Of all the positions held during my four years in the underbrush none appealed to me so much as that of license inspector for the American Society for the Prevention...

The day after leaving the District Board for the City of New York I called at the employment department of the Y. W. The head of the department greeted me cordially. She had ple...

For by the public he meant working people and all who are forced to travel with them. Other capitalists and near-capitalists, imagining that his expression was a formula in some...

“Twelve persons and two dogs living in three small rooms, and one of those a dark kitchen. How packed with sound—humanity and sound!” That is, provided greed be an inalienable a...

Whenever I think of the influenza epidemic in New York City there flashes before me a series of mental pictures, pictures so indelibly stamped on my mind that I believe they wil...

The happiest persons I met during the war were in the tenements. Also, I will add, the most unreasonably unhappy and discontented person I met during that period was in the tene...

On my return after this experience Mrs. Wilkins said that I had lost twenty pounds, while Alice candidly assured me that I could not look worse had I been buried and dug up. Suc...

In a preceding chapter I stated my conviction that in the district I covered as inspector of dog licenses there were representatives from every nationality on the globe. Now the...

The evening of November 8, 1916, I walked out of the National Arts Club and into the underbrush of the greatest jungle of civilization—I entered the world of the unskilled worki...

The tenements of New York City! The change that I made—working with tenement-dwellers and living in rooming-houses to working in and living in the tenements—was like that experi...

There never was a time in all my four years in the underbrush that the work itself palled on me. It was the conditions under which I was forced to work that made it objectionabl...