CHAPTER IV

WAGE-EARNING AND NEW RELATIONS AT HOME

Our West Side girl sets out some morning, short-skirted, hair in braids, absurdly childish, to find her minute place in the great industrial world. Probably she strolls through the streets, looking for “Girl Wanted” signs. She will try at one of the big factories nearby. Or, if she is fortunate, some friend who is already working there speaks for her. The more enterprising buy the _World_ and consult its long columns of advertisements.

The West Side factories take in the majority of the work seekers. A few with especial pretensions to “refinement,” or whose families sincerely dread the physical strain and supposedly lower social and moral standards of the factory, go into department stores or become errand girls to milliners or dressmakers. But most of the girls prefer the higher wages of the factory. Lizzie Wade, herself a laundry worker, was perfectly clear in her sixteen-year-old mind as to the advantages of factory work over department store work. “In the first place,” she pointed out, “the factory girl gets better pay, and if she hasn’t any home, she can always get a family to live with. The girl that works in a store lives in the cheapest boarding houses, and gets soaked for her board just the same.”

Few sixteen-year-old workers are as wise as Lizzie. Many of them, no doubt, are vaguely influenced by reasons just as practical in preferring the factory to the store, though they are less able to express them. But if they are asked to justify their preferences, they are likely to return very childish answers. “Tootsie” O’Brien had achieved her working papers at fourteen and a half and was looking for a place. It was significant that Tootsie, who had qualified as a wage-earner, had not yet outgrown her baby name at home. She was willing to take any kind of work, she said, but liked housework best. She wanted to “live out” because her brother was always fighting with her. However, she soon changed her mind, as her sister, who had been a servant before her marriage, told her that she wouldn’t be allowed out when at service. She finally went to work in a factory.

Girls of this type do the most unskilled work in the entire scale of factory occupations. They are not equal to the high grade, skilled work of the garment trades and textile industries. An inquiry concerning the occupations of 26 girls showed the following results: One was a trimmer in a necktie factory; three were folding or slip-sheeting in bookbinderies; one was rolling wall paper; one was working in a tin can factory, operating a machine which fixed the bails in lard cans; nine were packers or wrappers in factories producing biscuits, candy, cigarettes, or drugs; three were markers and shakers in steam laundries; eight were errand girls and messengers for milliners or dressmakers.

These occupations are patently without educational value. The factory processes are the sort of lightweight machine work usually assigned to young girls after the last drop of individual responsibility has been squeezed out. Their chief characteristic is a degree of monotony in which no discipline for the young worker is possible because their effect is stupefaction. The work soon palls on the girl’s restless spirit. Martie Sheridan, after five months of this grinding monotony, secretly cut the belt of her machine just to get a day off. Another girl probably, long before the end of five months, would have thrown up her job and tried another, if not several others.

Finding a new place is always something of an adventure, and in the process of shifting she enjoys a few days of freedom. Pauline Stark, throughout her four years of wage-earning, had been a “rover.” She had had no trouble in finding new places and had tried so many that she had lost count of the number. “I see a sign up an’ I go an’ try. Then sometimes I meet some one I know. I stop an’ get to talking an’ mebbe I won’t look any more that day. But it don’t take long. Sometimes I throw up a job the first day. I can tell. I take a look around an’ see that it ain’t for me. Then I work out the day an’ don’t go back.”

It is difficult for the girls to give an accurate account as to where they have worked and the changes they have made. They are hazy as to places and quite unreliable as to the length of stay. With great effort we pieced together the industrial histories of girls who had been employed for some time. Although most of them had been at work less than a year, they had tried a great number of occupations. The 30 wage-earners in our club mustered among them 120 different jobs, an average of four apiece. Two girls of sixteen had held 12 positions each; one girl of sixteen, 10 positions; and one fifteen-year-old had had nine. One-third of the 30 had had five or more positions. These instances give some idea of the way in which the girl of fourteen and fifteen flits from job to job. It is no wonder that she is inaccurate concerning the details of her industrial experience when each connection is so brief and episodic. A further reason for her haziness is that her point of contact with the great factory and its processes is so slight. Nellie Sherin, aged fourteen, worked in one of the largest and best of the West Side factories. Her childish description of her work is the best indication of her incompetence. “I have to run a machine that pastes the labels. If you don’t get the boxes in right the knife breaks and a man comes and hollers at you.”

The girl of this class accepts in a matter-of-fact way conditions of work that impress the outsider as very hard. Sometimes she tells of having cried with weariness when she started. But complaints of the long day, the meager reward, and the monotony are few. She has not thought out the general aspects of the factory. Comparisons between individual places are constant, as also are personal grievances, usually against a “cranky forelady.” She rebels against the tediousness of her job. “You can hear talkin’ all over our room when the forelady goes out. Then we’ll hear her comin’ in an’ it stops short. Soon’s she goes, we all start again.” As often as not she throws up her job for a personal grievance--a quarrel with another worker, a grudge against a “boss.” Fanny Mullens left the Excelsior Laundry because her friend quarreled with the foreman and Fanny’s loyalty would not permit her to remain. The human factor is the strongest with these young workers.

The girl starts in a store at $3.00 or $3.50 a week; in a factory, at $4.00 or $5.00. The 26 wage-earning girls concerning whom information was obtained were receiving sums which varied from $3.00 to $7.50. Of this group, three were earning $3.00 or $3.50; eight were earning $4.00, and eight were earning $5.00. Thus 19 out of 26 were earning $5.00 or less. The remaining seven girls were receiving $6.00 or over; three received $6.00; two, $6.50; and two, $7.50.

One of the girls earning $6.00 had been working five years; another earning the same amount had been working but a few months. Of the two girls earning $7.50, one had been working four years in the same position and the other five months. As far as our little group of girls was concerned, there was no connection between age or experience and wages. Practically all the girls were doing such unskilled work that additional years and additional experience were idle commodities. There was, on the other hand, some divergence between what the different factories of the district were accustomed to pay for the same grade of labor.

Along with her first humble job and her first meager wage, there comes to the young girl her first taste of power. Her first pay envelope is the outward and visible sign of many changes. Her position at home is altered. She has more prestige, the first beginning of authority. Her family may be actually dependent for comfort on what she brings in. This gives to her desires and wishes a new importance. However autocratic her parents’ rule may have been, they must now turn to her for assistance. There must follow a certain loosening of the reins. Every now and again there is a girl who in these early, headstrong years will press her advantage to the full.

To these girls has come the age of self-assertion. The experience is common to adolescence of becoming intensely aware of oneself. With the new intensity of self-consciousness comes the desire to assume control. At this age the girl resents being “bossed.” It is the time when many families feel the increased friction between brothers and sisters. Interference and guidance need to be gentle. Because the girl is young she is apt to be extreme and her assertion will often be crass and ill-balanced. These are traits of the adolescent girl of all classes, but this phase among our girls is accentuated sharply by a very definite set of circumstances.

Tradition still upholds her parents’ authority. What they ask from her is their right. They are backed by the practical code of morals which, in any community, counts more than many sermons. Public opinion demands the continued subservience of both boy and girl. The precarious state of family wellbeing has instituted a rigid system of household economics; this is needed for mere preservation. It is zealously guarded by the mother, ever the most wary of anything which threatens the group. According to custom she is the spender. All wages come to her untouched; the broken envelope violates the social standard. Husband, sons, and daughters alike are supposed to come under this rule. There should be no exception until the children reach the age of eighteen or nineteen. The mother doles out spending money according to the needs and the earnings of each.

There is no pity felt by her world for the girl who must turn over her meager pay. This is a duty taken for granted. It is the least return for the years during which her parents have made sacrifice and effort for her. The feeling has reason for holding good while economic conditions remain as they are. Each item in the family income is far too important for the girl to escape her toll. She is born to a contest in which she, too, must take part. Only a lucky accident can free her from this inheritance,--accident or rebellion. The pay envelope passes through her hands, and this means the possibility of some independence. At least the choice is hers to give grudgingly or freely. With the responsibilities which come to her so much earlier than to those more sheltered, comes also this earlier power.

Every degree of willingness or resentment in assuming her share of the burden is met with in the various girls. Little wisps and snatches of talk are straws that point to the set of the wind. “Oh, sure, there’s a lot o’ girls that ‘knock down.’ You take this week in our place,--we all made good overtime. I know I got two forty-nine. Well, I guess there wasn’t a single girl but me that didn’t change her envelope, on our floor. Whatever you make is written outside in pencil, you know. That’s easy to fix--you have only to rub it out, put on whatever it usually is, and pocket the change. They think I’m a fool. But I wouldn’t lie to my mother. She has to work an’ she ain’t had things none too easy. Some girls are like that. They’re only too proud to make so much t’ take home.”

A common trick is to pretend to the mother that wages are smaller than they actually are. Katie at seventeen was getting $7.50 a week; in six months she had risen from $5.00. This was unusually good for her set of girls. But her mother believed that she earned only $6.00.

On the other hand, there is the “worrisome” type of girl who surrenders all. Her unselfishness is as extreme as the wilfulness of others. She accepts her hard surroundings, as the others rebel against them, without counting the cost, and sacrifices unsparingly her youthful right to gaiety and pleasure. Mamie Reilly’s mother watched with anxious regret the effect of premature care and responsibility on her daughter. Mamie had been working five years since, as a child of thirteen, she first insisted on getting a job. “She’s a good girl, Mame is, but y’ never seen anything like her. Every pay night reg’lar she’ll come in an’ sit down at that table. ‘Now, Ma,’ she’ll say like that, ‘what _are_ you goin’ to do? How ever are y’ goin’ t’ make out in th’ rent?’ ‘Land sakes,’ I’ll say, ‘one w’d think this whole house was right there on your shoulders. I’ll get along somehow.’ But y’ can’t make her see into that. ‘Now, what’ll we do, how’ll you manage, Ma?’ she’ll keep askin’. She’s too worrisome--that’s what I tell her. An’ she don’t care to go out. Mebbe she’ll take a walk, but like’s not she’ll say, ‘What’s th’ use?’ Night after night she jest comes home, eats ’er supper, sits down, mebbe reads a bit, an’ then goes t’ bed.”

Through everything Mamie had done more than her share. At eighteen she was tall and awkward, quiet and shy. Almost alone among these girls, she had never learned to dance. She had none of the frills--bangs, powder, and gewgaws--the cheap frivolities which were the joy of the rest. But she had a dignity and reliability which the other girls respected. In the whirl of excitement beckoning to the girl in New York, she had led a staid, colorless life. She had never “gone out” anywhere because she had never had any clothes. The price she had given had been the very sap of her youth. Her mother said, “She is too quiet-like an’ gettin’ humdrum at her age. It ain’t right as I know.”

There is less revolt against these early exactions among the girls than among the boys. In the midst of working hours groups of young fellows may be seen any day of the week idling on the street corners. They are significant of something badly awry in the social machinery here. But the girl who refuses to work is less usual by far. Often the loafer’s sister is going each day to her job, turning her money in to the common fund, while he is a parasite who drains the meager supply. Although she probably protests, it is amazing to find how often she tolerates a scheme so unfair. One reason, perhaps, is that a stay-at-home life is too dull to tempt her into idleness there, and to spend time on the streets speedily brands her as “tough.” But the chief reason is that she is ruled by the popular conception of duty. Inheritance and custom force her to a conformity which is not required of her brother. Her protest is fainter than his.

But within the home circle she makes her revolt felt. Rarely is a girl “worrisome,” like Mamie Reilly; few girls surrender so much. The trail of her way, a way glittering with “good times and fun,” carries her often to the other extreme. She follows the lure of her desires with an imperious insistence which does not scruple to shirk the irksome claims of her home. The result is an atmosphere surcharged with wrangling and spite. The girl who as a little child may have been devoted to her father, now switches away impatiently under his scolding. He, for his part, complains bitterly that she thinks only of dancing and new clothes.

One German father whom we knew, at home with his broken ankle bound in a cast, used his crutch on his fourteen-year-old daughter. “Don’t tell me about talkin’ to girls--I know how to take care o’ them.” He brandished his weapon with ire. The home was the scene of quarrels and threats. Amelia was given the worst of reputations by her parents. She “had been a disgrace to them.” She stayed out till two in the morning, hung around halls with boys, and had been brought home by a policeman. They had tried keeping her in and putting her under the surveillance of her nine-year-old brother, but no amount of punishment would change her fundamentally. Rancor and hatred had bitten into her soul. She was a strong, tall girl, loud, unkempt, and disorderly. She was more frank than most girls, partly from recklessness. But the bitterness with which she spoke of her parents, the coldness with which she said, “They can have my money if that’s what they want,” was that of hardened maturity.

The parents often get a settled distrust of a girl with which they do not hesitate to confront her. Distrust is too often justified, for there are few girls who scruple about telling a lie. But constant accusation and doubt serve only to deepen suspicion and drive the girl on to more crafty concealment. The crassness of the punishment administered is especially bad for her years. To this can be traced so much of the “wildness” of the children here. But familiar as she is with brutality of one kind or another, a special resentment comes to the girl at this age. Violence outrages her self-respect and the ideals which are struggling for a foothold in her imagination.

The greatest strain in such households is that between mother and daughter. The girl is starting her course, undisciplined and eager. The woman has lived through checkered and hazardous years. She has suffered the bearing of many children; she has watched the death of some. What she has attained has been hardly won. Through it all, constant labor has drained her physical strength. She is spent, dragged, and worn, in pitiful need of the younger, more vigorous life at her side. As she turns to it there creeps into her attitude the note of appeal which the girl is too young to appreciate. If she deals a rebuff with the half conscious brutality of youth, her mother may draw back into a shell of hardness. Out of the scant wisdom of her years the child has been forced to a decision pregnant with results for her future; for often upon her response to the older woman’s first appeal trembles her entire relationship with her mother and her home.

There is no getting away from the girl’s economic value to her family. It seems ugly and crass that a child’s contribution to the common purse should have any bearing on the affection or guidance she will receive. Yet it has, and her manner of contributing has even more. Out of the conditions of this engulfing, material struggle, rise the spiritual forces at work in each narrow tenement home. Whatever breeds there of loyalty or bitter estrangement works out its certain effect. And the spirit of the household is of no greater import to any member than to the young, venturesome girl.

Here is a household where the girl’s wages have been the mainstay for the whole winter. Louisa’s father, a German, has always been frugal and hardworking and was even penurious in better days. He is now seventy-four. His eyes were weakened in the days of his strength by the strain of his trade as a tailor. Later he came to porter’s work, but now he is too feeble for this. The mother, like so many women in the neighborhood, earns the rent as a janitress. Louisa’s brother, a young man of twenty-one, is a glass cutter by trade. His work might be steady and his wages good, but the common blight of the West Side has struck him; he chooses to loaf with the gang and take things easy. The old father, inveighing against him, has wished to turn him out. But his mother, although she too takes her turn at upbraiding, shields him against the others and clings to a desperate belief in his transparent excuses.

In this crisis, they have looked to the $5.00 which Louisa brings home every week from the candy factory. She is a wilful little person, frail, underdeveloped, weak of build in character as in physique. The reins have been put into her hands. She has used her new-found power to add to her long day at the factory several nights every week at dance halls where she stays until 1 or 2 o’clock. The reproaches of her parents have no effect. “You say that you like me,” she wails, “but you make me miserable here. I’ll go out if I want to, and I’ll not tell where I am going. Anyhow I don’t come home drunk like Bill and make a fuss in the hall. And I work while he hangs around doing nothing.”

Leading the Grand March at the racket of the “Harlem Four,” Louisa has forgotten her outburst, and the dull, sad, cramped existence at home. She is thin, pale, sharp-featured, yet with a certain daintiness. Her attire is “flossy” tonight. She cannot boast a ball dress, to be sure. But her scant suit of brown serge with its sateen collar is trim and new. It was bought at an Eighth Avenue store on the instalment plan. Four out of the twelve dollars have been paid down. A great encircling hat of cheap black straw reaches to the middle of her back and bends under the weight of an enormous “willow.” It sets off her hair, which has been bleached with peroxide. A long bang hangs to her eyes. Her moment of elation comes as she receives the favor for the ladies who lead, a huge bunch of variegated flowers--roses, carnations, and daffodils. But the costume in which she steps out so triumphantly has cost many bitter moments at home. She has gotten it by force, with the threat of throwing up her job.

The breach is widening between her and the parents to whom she clung as a child. There comes the time when she gets a steady “gentleman friend.” She is out now almost nightly. At last the mother appears with her tale, tearful and anxious. “I don’t know whatever I’m goin’ to do with that girl. I’ve just beat her, I have--I guess I ruined three dollars’ worth o’ clothes. But I lost my temper. She stands up and answers me back. An’ she’s comin’ in at 2 o’clock, me not knowin’ where she has been. Folks will talk, you know, an’ it ain’t right fer a girl.” So Louisa is losing her only safeguards. Foolish, childish, easily flattered, she is drifting into a maelstrom of gaiety and pleasure from which only chance will bring her out unscathed.

The great issue between the home and the girl is the question as to whether her affections will center there. Only an emotional hold will take effect on this girl. Her mind is undeveloped. She is not going to reason far. Habit has not yet fastened her in a rut of eternal work and decency. Possibilities that menace health and strength and, in the long run, happiness, hedge her round. If she becomes estranged from those who are naturally near to her, she is set adrift. She is bound to express in some way the chaotic emotional forces within her. She is dangerous then to herself and others, in surroundings like these of the far West Side.