Part 30

These strangely reasonable, though novel propositions, met with as much public condemnation at the time as though, in place of being suggestions for elevating women into skillful, rational workers, they had advocated turning them into gamblers and drunkards. The fact was ignored that the majority of women had always been engaged in carrying on some kind of necessary industry, if only in untaught, helpless ways. Hence it became fashionable to say that “woman as a worker was a product of modern times.” Her entrance into the ranks of wealth-producers and wage-earners was called the “New Departure,” and was deplored by writers as calculated, by thwarting nature’s evident design in making her child-bearer, child-trainer, and house-mother, to rob her of special gifts of grace, beauty, and tenderness. The error of the day, it was argued, lay in the thought that woman should be self-supporting, and she was implored to stop and consider what homes would become,

Where woman reigns, the mother, daughter, wife, Strews with fresh flowers the narrow way of life,

if “woman was to take her place beside man in every field of coarse, rough toil.”

The peculiarity of these arguments, intended to dissuade women from being workers, was, that while poets, philosophers, and essayists were picturing women as weak, tender creatures, clinging for protection to man as the vine to the oak, the lovely presiding geniuses of homes, the expenders of wealth produced by man, there were, according to the census of 1860, one million women working by the side of men in various domains of “coarse, rough toil.” These writers, clergymen for the most part, made the mistake, common to people in comfortable circumstances, of looking on the small, glittering world of dazzling drawing-rooms and boudoirs, where an elegant, dainty womanhood presides, as “woman’s world.” Living in this, they became blinded to that other, larger world of women without homes, with no time for the cultivation of the graces or personal adornment, who were obliged to work if they would live.

According to the newspapers of 1867 and of 1870, out of seventy thousand women (wage-earners) in the city of New York, not including domestics, twenty thousand were in a constant fight with starvation and pauperism. Seven thousand lived in cellars. Those who got sewing to do worked from seven in the morning until midnight making shirts at six cents apiece. The most rapid workers could scarcely, even with those long hours, make one dozen shirts and thus earn their seventy-two cents per day. The pay for drawers, undershirts, and blouses was in proportion. We read that in Boston there were, in 1868, “twenty thousand women working at starvation rates; eight thousand workers at twenty to twenty-five cents per day, twelve thousand workers for less than fifty cents, and even at these rates there was little work.” These women lived at times, it is said, “on one cracker a day for breakfast, dinner, and supper,” working from “dawn to dawn” to “get one mouthful of food.” In this same year, the New York journals reported thirty thousand girls struggling in that city with starvation and cold, making shirts and furnishing the thread at sixpence each. The condition of seventy-five thousand working women in the city beggared description. The New York _Herald_ described them as living in “nasty tenement houses, in cellars unfit for human habitation, in pools of foulness, where every impurity is matured and every vice flourishes.” Women who could get sewing-machines worked at them for $2.50 per week, and the forty-one cents per day that they earned represented the work, if not the wages, of six other women.

The helplessness, the misery, the degradation of womanhood, laboring and starving on beggarly wages in rich and prosperous cities, arrested the attention of the thinking class to woman’s needs as it has never been arrested before. How to help woman to better her condition became, in 1868, one of the burning questions of the day. Gail Hamilton, Mrs. Stephens, Miss Penny, and others, attributed the distress of the factory and needle-women to the lack of educational training which obliged women to crowd into occupations requiring little, if any, skill. To remedy this, the establishment of industrial schools was advocated. Men, it was reasoned, had their trades’ apprenticeship system, schools, and universities, by which they were educated into a knowledge of many things; and by applying the same method to women, giving some thousands of them a professional training in each of the various trades, arts, and sciences useful to mankind, the ranks of the factory-seekers and needle-women in search of employment would be thinned sufficiently to cause the anomaly to vanish of millions of adult human beings laboring as men for the pay of children, and yet paying as men for whatever they got. Other remedies agitated were those of woman suffrage and the organization of women into societies for mutual protection and benefit.

Small private attempts at industrial schools for the advancement of women, such as the “Wilson Industrial School” in New York, had been started by the benevolence of individuals as early as 1856; but the first serious attempt to give practical shape to the question of higher education for women was undertaken when Peter Cooper made the advantages of the institute founded by him and bearing his name, free in all its departments, to women as to men. The Cooper Institute, opened to the public in 1859, had its free art classes for women, where art was taught in its application to the industries. The Cooper Art School is said to be, even now, “the largest in the world for women.” From its inception a few women were found ready to avail themselves of the opportunity given them to study art in its various income-producing forms. But not until after the close of the war, when conditions made it urgent upon women to work on new lines, did the classes increase to any extent. (Then hundreds more than could be accommodated applied for admission.) Names were placed in the roll-book a year ahead, and the classes, through their increased size, overflowed into rooms not intended for their use. The number of students in the free art classes, for the season of 1889–90, was 310. For this season there were 693 applicants for admission to the free art classes. The accommodations do not admit of but few over 300.

In this one phase of work accomplished for women in the United States, there was much that was attractive to the class drawn into the Cooper Institute, a class that belonged neither to the rich nor to the extremely poor. The large, light, airy rooms were formed, many of them, into charming studios, filled with tasteful studies, articles of bric-a-brac, stuffs, and, occasionally, growing plants. Books, pictures, and engravings on art were supplied them in the art rooms. Descending three flights of broad stone steps, lined on each side with studies in plaster and on paper, there was the free library, a room of magnificent proportions, 125 × 30 feet, glass-domed, and containing 21,276 bound volumes, nearly 5000 unbound, and having always on file 189 magazines and 393 of the best newspapers, American and foreign. It can be imagined what godsends these treasures of art and literature were to women of talent, whose work had hitherto been conducted without any, or the most meager, advantages. To add to their value, the work of training pupils was intrusted to teachers capable of drawing out latent possibilities. The line of industrial work done in the Cooper Institute consisted of the arts of design as applied to making patterns for stained glass, wall-papers, oilcloths, textile fabrics, carpets, and adapting the patterns of Oriental rugs for the American market. Other forms of art consisted in coloring photographs, portrait crayon drawing, and in late years wood-engraving, for which women developed an unusual aptitude. When pupils attained sufficient proficiency in any of these branches, they were permitted to add to their incomes by executing orders from business firms for pay. Profits from this source almost maintained some of the most expert during their last school years. The students in 1889, and the graduates of May, 1888, earned in this way, during the year, $17,805.

A wise discretionary power given the trustees of the Cooper Institute, “to add such other art or trade to the curriculum as would tend to furnish women with suitable employment,” led to the establishment, in 1869, of a class in telegraphy and in 1884, of a stenographic and type-writing class. Both of these combined, educated about one hundred women yearly in those professions. The expense of carrying on all the departments of woman’s work was, in 1889, one-fifth of the whole expenses of the building, and barely reached $10,000—an outlay surprisingly small for the equipment of about four hundred women, educated to maintain themselves, and influence, by teaching and example, the minds of the many with whom they come into contact.

Significant as was the work performed by this institution, devoted to art and science, it was, nevertheless, felt by charitable individuals that something more was needed in the way of instruction for the mass of women who toiled without chance of coming within the sphere of its beautiful influence. Wealthy philanthropists, whose sympathies were touched by the lives of the workers, sought to help women in many other ways. The Young Women’s Christian Association of New York recognized early the necessity of educating self-supporting women in many of the skilled industries. This association, which, of late years, has become a power for good in almost all the large cities of the United States, instituted in New York, as part of its plan of work, free classes for training women in commercial arithmetic, penmanship, book-keeping, and type-writing. An industrial department was created for teaching dressmaking in all its branches of cutting, fitting, hand and machine sewing. In imitation of the Cooper, art classes were formed for teaching the retouching of photo-negatives, photo-coloring, mechanical and free-hand drawing, modeling, and design. To still further carry out its program “to care for the temporal, mental, and moral welfare of the self-supporting women of New York City,” a free library was attached to the building and a series of free concerts, readings, and lectures provided for. Through these and other means of physical culture, Bible and choir classes, employment bureaus, board directories, and a department for the sale of goods made in sewing-classes, about five thousand persons were reached during the year of 1887. The number of pupils in all classes was reported as 965. But with the best intentions, this organization, like the Cooper, failed to reach the women who live and work in the city’s slums. Its applicants were those who had first graduated from the public schools and then, helpless as babes, had availed themselves of the splendid opportunity it offered for gratuitous instruction in some wage-earning industry. When Miss Graffenried, of the United States Labor Bureau for 1889, went among the women in tenements, factories, and shops, out of three thousand interviewed, she said, “Not one was known to have come under the influence of this noble organization.”

Besides schools such as the Cooper and the Woman’s Christian Union, that were specially designed for educating women in industrial trades, so many other ways were thought out for bettering their condition, that one might well call the years from 1868 on, the philanthropic era for women. So numerous were the societies started for their relief that scarcely a need existed that an organization of some kind did not attempt to fill, and each in its particular way emphasized Emerson’s truth, “there is more kindness in the world than ever was spoken.” Through the efforts of a few liberal-minded, energetic men and women, there was established in New York, in 1868, a society called the “Working Woman’s Protective Union,” that purposed to provide “women with legal protection against the frauds and impositions of unscrupulous employers, to assist them in procuring employment, and to secure them such suitable departments of labor as are not occupied by them.” From the start, the novel work done by this society was appreciated by the class it was intended to help. Perfectly unsectarian, with all its services _gratis_, the rooms, first on Bleecker Street, and for the past twenty years on Clinton Place, were thronged by women in distress desirous of legal counsel, matronly advice, or help to better work. At all times chance visitors could see women waiting in the front room, while the superintendent gave sympathetic ear in the rear apartment to some earlier comer. One day in each week was known as “complaint day.” On that day the legal representative of the Union received and examined the complaints that the superintendent deemed worthy of prosecution. What the society has done in the twenty-five years of its existence is summed up in the statement that on an annual outlay of $5000 it has fought and won the legal battles of 12,000 women, who would otherwise have been defrauded of their hard-earned wages by unscrupulous employers. It has collected by legal processes $41,000, in sums averaging $4 each, and supplied in twenty-five years more than 300,000 applicants with employment, advice, or relief. As many of these applications were made by the same person three or four different times, there were represented, perhaps, 10,000 applicants annually. It was of this society that Henry Ward Beecher said the Union’s greatest and best work was “the mere fact of its existence,” as this fact made employers more careful in withholding from the working-woman her just dues.

When a plan to redress a wrong succeeds, it is sure to have imitators. Societies in other cities followed the example of the Woman’s Protective Union, and some of these branched out in directions unthought of by the founders of the parent institution. The Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union, in Boston, besides securing wages unjustly withheld from working-women, added the task of investigating advertisements for work to be done at home, and, if found fraudulent, warning women against them. It procured situations for the unemployed; sold on commission the fruits of woman’s work; opened a lunch-room where women could have varied bills of fare at moderate prices, or where they could sit and eat the luncheons brought from home. It included in its scope the instruction of women in various points of law, such as those regarding the relations between employer and employed, the hiring of rooms, and the detention of property. It detailed agents to look up titles to furniture that, by means of mortgage or insufficient payment of the installments, might not belong to the seller. A feature was made of holding lectures and mothers’ meetings, the purpose of the talks being to lead women into higher planes of thought and action. One of the most active endeavors was made in the line of securing the appointment of police matrons in large cities.[176]

The honor of originating the parent Woman’s Protective Union in New York belongs to men; but the establishment of both similar and widely different societies in the United States is due to the zealous energy of women themselves. The Woman’s Club in Chicago instituted, in 1866, a Protective Agency that had for its objects the protection of woman’s purity and honor, and her deliverance from swindlers and extortionists. In the first year of its existence, it examined 156 complaints, fifty-one of which were claims for money,—chiefly wages. These aggregated $992.89. It is said to be the design of this agency “to establish in the near future a loan fund for the benefit of those in need of temporary assistance, and who, under existing conditions, are obliged to pay usurious interest for money.”

Better than anything else, philanthropic work undertaken by women in America shows the difference between past and present generations. A few decades ago, woman’s attention was absorbed in organizing small, local, sectarian sewing societies, Sunday-school classes, and church fairs. After the Civil War these few circumscribed channels no longer sufficed for woman’s activity, and an expansion took place that made itself felt in the organization of societies for working-women. These took no heed of sects, restricted in no way the compass of the schools designed for them, and worked for humanity as a whole. In their management of these institutions, women displayed an amount of executive ability and enlightened interest in public need that surprised men. Because they had never attempted organization on a large scale, they were supposed to lack constructive talent. Some, with true conceptions of what society should be as a whole, endeavored here and there to take away from the institutions they founded, and over which they presided, the semblance of that offensive charity which plumed itself formerly in making petticoats for the poor,—

Because we are of one flesh after all. And need one flannel (with a proper sense Of difference in the quality),

or distributing stale bread and thin soup, together with homilies on the virtues of contentment and the blessing of poverty and work. Along with men, they fell into the swim of modern thought which attempted to render institutions self-supporting through the co-operative efforts of those availing themselves of their privileges. It was on these broad lines of non-sectarianism, diversity of teaching for a sisterhood of women, and the co-operative society in which there is strength, that there was built up for the use of the working-women the various boarding-homes, industrial schools, and stores for the disposal of woman’s handiwork. To soften the harshest experiences of women thrown upon their own resources for necessities of food and shelter, philanthropic women, and men, too, made it their business to establish “boarding-homes,” where the price of entrance was fixed at sums low enough to come within the reach of the average wage-earning woman. The clean, quiet streets usually chosen for these homes, contrasted with the filthy, crowded thoroughfares where the cheap lodging-houses—the only resorts the average friendless working-woman could afford—were most apt to be situated. The difference within was as great as without. In place of the cold, comfortless rooms which, as a rule, were destitute of fire or carpet, and where there was neither reception-room for visitors, nor bath nor laundry for inmates; the model boarding-houses had spacious, well-ventilated bedrooms attractively adorned, with a neat parlor, usually a library or reading-room, well warmed, brightly lighted, and inviting. Privileges of bath-rooms and laundries were added to increase the comforts of the boarders. Two of the best of these homes are to be found in Boston, one on Warrenton, the other on Berkeley Street. These structures, built under the auspices of the Woman’s Christian Association, are provided with electric bells, ventilating appliances, and safeguards against fire. Both houses have, besides offices and attendants, handsome parlors, well-stocked reading-rooms, libraries, and lecture halls. One of them possesses a fine gymnasium. The price for board and lodging varies from $3 to $5.50 per week, but more than one-half of the guests pay from $3 to $4 per week. In the two homes there exist accommodations for about three hundred women. The sums named secure pleasant rooms, well-prepared and neatly served meals, and include, besides washing and ironing, heating and lighting of rooms, the use of reading-rooms, library, parlor, and admission to all entertainments of the association.

In thirteen other cities in the United States there have been established, by the same energetic society, one “home,” smaller, but similar in character to the Boston homes. Connected with all of these, and adding greatly to their usefulness, are departments for giving instruction in sewing, teaching the art of dressmaking, and training woman in housework. Chautauqua circles were organized among the residents, and classes gotten up in which, for nominal sums, girls could be taught the languages, book-keeping, type-writing, stenography, painting, drawing, calisthenics, etc. Employment bureaus were attached, which, by personal application or through correspondence, obtained situations for those who were on its registers for services to be given, or received. To still further extend their helpfulness, another department, called the “Travelers’ Aid,” employed agents to meet incoming steamers and direct unprotected girls to the Association Homes, advise them as to the best and most economical means of transportation, and the best way to secure employment. Several smaller organizations, such as the “Helping Hand,” “Girls’ Friendly Society,” etc., instituted homes that were carried on in much the same way. The benefits of ventilation, cleanliness, and decent behavior were rigidly enforced, while in general the most strenuous efforts were put forth to make the homes so far self-supporting that their residents could look on them as co-operative enterprises, in which, by combination and judicious management, the funds each expended singly, brought them all unitedly, comforts which would have been impossible without such action.

To propagate the idea of the value of co-operation among women, whether workers or not, was perhaps the most useful thing accomplished by the boarding-home societies. So far the number of these institutions has been limited, so that they suggest what could be done rather than indicate what has been accomplished in brightening the lives of the great mass of homeless working-women. In Boston, where these “homes” are most numerous, there are, for a population of eighty thousand wage-earning women, but six of these dwellings. Altogether, the limit of their accommodations is about 387 boarders. In these meager results, for so much energetic, philanthropic work, the abortiveness is shown of private individualistic attempts to supplant by means of model co-operative boarding-homes, the cheap and nasty tenement lodging-houses, situated too often in close proximity to gin-shops, gambling dens and brothels. By the numbers who vainly seek admission into the few boarding-homes that have been established in various large cities, the fact is proved that were the idea of co-operative homes carried out to largest national issues and placed everywhere within reach of wage-earning women, all but the most debased would avail themselves of their privileges, and thus secure the comforts and good living enjoyed so rarely by women whom circumstances compel to labor.