Part 31

Another phase of work initiated by women, and which, like the boarding-homes, needs only to be carried out on the broad and liberal lines of a national co-operation to become a power for universal good, were the exchanges, or stores, instituted for the purpose of selling hand or machine-made articles of woman’s manufacture, and which gave the maker the full price they brought, less a ten per cent. commission and a membership fee of $5 for maintaining the establishment. In this way, the founder of the Woman’s Exchange hoped to solve the ever-perplexing problem of finding a remunerative market for the work that women had been taught to do in the various art and industrial schools. At the time the first exchange was planned in New York, some ten years ago, thousands of women, graduates from the various art schools, were at work in stores and factories decorating china, painting household adornments such as portières, screens, wall-hangings, and doing all kinds of fancy work at prices but little, if any, beyond the wages of the average worker on men’s and women’s clothing. To direct this work into a channel, where the maker and not the employer would receive the profit, was what the originator of the exchange proposed to do for women pressed by poverty into the ranks of the bread-winners.

From the first, the exchange became popular with a certain class, and had a most phenomenal growth, forty having come into existence during the last decade, all of which are working successfully on the same general plan. A walk through the rooms of the parent institution, now established in a handsome building at 329 Fifth Avenue, shows the number and variety of workers who availed themselves of its privileges. In the salesrooms, hand-painted and embroidered tapestries hang on the walls; artistic screens, painted or embroidered on all conceivable materials, stand in every nook and corner; elaborately decorated china for ornament or table use lies piled on shelves; while textile fabrics of all kinds, made up into articles for wall decorations, bed and table use, or personal wear, are tastefully arranged on counters or within glass cases. On the upper floors in the building, women are kept constantly at work inspecting, marking, and ticketing goods sent in by consignees. In the basement are the storehouse and restaurant for receiving and selling cakes, pickles, preserves, and other edibles, sent to be disposed of for the benefit of the makers.

In this one establishment the sales for the year 1888 amounted to $51,180.26. The aggregate sold in the cake and preserve department amounted to $13,256.89. One consignee of chicken jelly, etc., got during the year $1,256.89. Of two consignees in the cake and preserve department one received $1,019.73, the other $772.42. Things sent to the lunch-room for Sunday night teas brought one consignee the comfortable little income of $965.78. From the sale of children’s wrappers alone, one consignee received $548.66, and one woman for screens, decorated frames, etc., $1105.71. One consignee received during the spring and fall months $217.35 for articles which she had previously made for manufacturers at $2.50 apiece, and which were sold for $35 each. In the order department connected with the exchange, the work done consisted of 1263 pieces of plain sewing, 1784 pieces of English embroidery, 1100 painted articles, and 2033 fancy articles. From the forty other societies then in existence the reports showed a grand aggregate of over one million dollars from sales during the year.

These figures demonstrate how thoroughly practical the scheme is of sending hand-made articles to special magazines to be disposed of for the makers’ benefit. The woman who, by sending her work to the exchange, got $35 for what she, as a wage-earner, had received $2.50 from the manufacturer, got the profit that had previously gone to swell the bank-account of the manufacturer, middle men, and retail dealers. This was the same with all contributors to the exchanges; by employing their own labor they accumulated the premiums which, under the old factory and store system, inured to the benefit of their employers. In establishing the woman’s exchanges, the difficulty was to secure enough women of intelligence to be their own employers and to interest enough women in woman’s work to become patrons of the exchanges instead of the stores. For instance, to meet the expenses of the Fifth Avenue establishment in 1888, the income from all sources was $13,589.56, while the expenses of carrying on the business amounted to $16,318.48. This left a deficit of $2723.92 that had to be met by donations, and which kept the institution on a partly charitable instead of wholly self-supporting basis. As this deficit had lessened with each year, some optimistic thinkers began to hope that the time was coming when it would disappear altogether, and thus allow them to become strictly co-operative instead of philanthropic concerns. A conclusion reached was, that were they once to become independent of charitable donations, they would branch out largely enough in most of the worst paid departments of woman’s work so as to force out those employed on such labor for the vast retail stores. But it was found that an insuperable obstacle to the extension of the exchanges lay in the utter lack of system with which contributors worked. In the matter of production, the regular stores had but little system; still some attempt was made in them to regulate the supply of manufactured goods to meet a possible or expected demand. Contributors to the exchanges had no such guide. Those who made and sent articles for sale could have no opportunity for knowing what others were making and sending. The result was that women living near or afar off in town and country worked completely in the dark. With no finger on the public pulse in the matter of supply and demand for goods, they were obliged for this haphazard work to purchase their own material in small quantities in the retail markets, while the merchant-manufacturers bought theirs in bulk in the cheapest. This could only mean more failures than successes in the disposal of goods made under such conditions. Again, only women possessed of some means could afford to lay out money for materials and wait the uncertain chances of its returning to them with a profit. In consequence, most of those contributing articles to the exchanges for sale were “reduced gentlewomen,” who made use of this means of becoming their own employers, not so much for support, as to better their conditions of living, without the publicity consequent upon working for manufacturers. This in itself made it impossible for the exchanges (as was claimed by their supporters) to have “_helped women in general to have hushed the ‘Song of the Shirt.’_”[177] To the women of the proletariat, the exchanges were not only unknown mediums by reason of their situation in fashionable thoroughfares, but forbidden factors because of their attendant risks and expenses. The number of sewing women helped in them to increased earnings was too insignificant to warrant any hope that the co-operative principles underlying their business methods would ever spread far enough to leave any impress upon prevailing modes of work in the business world. Like all other remedies, instituted by wealthy philanthropists to assist the working-women, they were palliatives for the ills of a few, not curatives for the sufferings of the many.

Much more satisfactory than anything which had been accomplished in the name of philanthropy or charity for working-women were the labor organizations founded by the proletariat and sustained by their own energy and contributions. About 1870, associations of working-people (including women) were inaugurated for the purpose of gaining better social conditions. These were more attractive and beneficial to the laboring class because they lacked that element of restitution of a modicum of withheld wages which tainted all that wealth did for the alleviation of the condition of wage-earning women,[178] and, moreover, was built upon the sounder philosophy of an endeavor to organize into bodies capable of striving collectively for their own deliverance, that class of women whom the industrial schools, women’s exchanges, etc., could not reach. The most important of these bodies was the Knights of Labor. Organized openly in 1881 at the Detroit Convention, but more secretly some years before, this body welcomed women into its ranks on the ground of seeking “to gather into one fold all branches of honorable toil, without regard to nationality, sex, creed, or color.” Trade assemblies, composed entirely of working-women, were formed, and the members were taught the beautiful principles on which the order was founded. In amalgamating with knights, women assumed the duties of the new chivalry. Engaging as equals in the undertaking, helping with time and money to carry out the new mission, they sought by Agitation, Education, and Organization to lighten the burden of toil, and to elevate the moral and social condition of mankind. In 1883, one local assembly, composed entirely of women, counted fifteen hundred members. These must all have given adherence to that order’s doctrine of “Equal pay for equal work,” and “woman’s equitable consideration with man in the Nation’s government.” Mrs. Leonora Barry, who had been a factory worker for some years in Central New York, became the chief officer of a trade assembly of nine hundred and twenty-seven women. Later, in 1886, she was elected a delegate to the general assembly, by which she was commissioned “to go forth and educate her sister working-women and the public generally as to their needs and necessities.”

The open declaration of this powerful organization,—that women possessed equal rights with men,—showed, as much as anything else, the advance of public sentiment in regard to women. Its educational influence extended outside the ranks of the order. Most of the women members were drawn from the employees in factories producing clothing, textile fabrics, food, tobacco, etc., and from the trades of typography, telegraphy, and stenography. In the mixed local assemblies women have an equal chance with men to express their views upon subjects bearing on the labor question. And even where women sat quiet, as most frequently happened, without taking share in the debates, one of the valuable purposes of the order was said to be served by the information and larger views which came to them through these discussions. In assemblies composed entirely of women, of whom not one, perhaps, could boast of more than a minor part of a common school education, ideas were advanced for their financial as well as educational benefit. Factory operatives, coming under their influence, became shareholders in co-operative concerns. Co-operative shirt factories, conducted solely by women, were established in Baltimore and New York. A co-operative knitting mill was set up at Little Falls, N. Y., while other co-operative industries throughout the land came, through co-operative principles, into the possession of the workers. A co-operative tailoring establishment in Chicago had its rise in the lock-out of a few factory girls who attended a labor parade without permission. With the luck that comes with pluck, they became possessed of $400, through soliciting subscriptions. With this they went into business and succeeded. It is claimed, that inside of nine months they had done $36,000 worth of business, besides having the gratification of being their own employers.

This departure from the custom prevailing among the proletariat to sell their services for wage-hire, was due largely to the demand made in the nineteenth plank of the platform of the Knights of Labor for the abolition of the wage system and a national system of co-operation in lieu thereof. The insertion of such a demand proved the founders of the order to have been thinkers radical enough to go a step beyond the old idea of trades organizations with their petty notions of each trade working solely in its own interests. In comparison with the broad and lofty conception of the Knights of Labor, which sought to include in its benefits all women and men engaged in every department of industrial work, other organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor, which is a mere rope of sand, showed themselves away in the rear-guard of progressive civilization by placing themselves solely on the old competitive and selfish trades union basis.

The next largest organization that took women into its body on terms of equality was “The Granger Association of Western Farmers.”[179] Founded in 1870, this association of the agriculturists of the country proposed to do for women on the farms what the societies had done for them in the other industries. They formulated as a principle “that no Grange should be organized, or exist, without women.” This act was held to be the emancipation of women on the farms, as that of the Knight of Labor had been in the trades. In their public meetings, women were invited to take part in the discussions of plans for mutual benefit, for usefulness and culture. The principles of co-operation, which brought them together, extended to the buying of all descriptions of goods in bulk. This, by increasing the purchasing power of limited incomes, increased the comforts and attractions of homes that would otherwise have been deprived of them. The women who entered the Granges held a conspicuous place in the national census of agricultural operators and producers of national wealth. They were engaged in the farm labors of milking, making butter and cheese, raising poultry, preserving eggs, and gathering honey for market and home consumption. Vegetable gardens, fruit orchards, viticulture, berry plants, and shrubs of many millions’ value were largely attended to by them; while planting, weeding, haying, harvesting, tilling the soil, and caring for live-stock were rapidly added to the list of women’s occupations on the farm. To bring a new brightness into the lives of these toilers was an avowed object of the Grange. It proposed, by bringing men and women together with communities of interests, to effect a great moral and social good, and thus elevate them from slaves and drudges into a “better and higher manhood and womanhood.”

As “the thoughts of men were widened by the processes of the suns,” the idea gained ground that if organization was good for women in one direction, it might be good in all. Men began, about 1884, to receive women into their trades’ unions, and a few energetic women in various States started working-women’s unions that comprised the members of different trades. The Cigar and Typographical Unions were among the first to admit women into their bodies. The Cigar-Makers’ Union of Denver, a branch of the International Cigar-Makers’ Union, admitted women to membership and made no distinction on account of color. Through the efforts of the union, the hours of labor were reduced from ten to eight, and the rate of wages, as they expressed it, “raised from a mere pittance to respectable living wages.” Typographical unions were much praised for their gallantry in forcing employers to agree to their terms of “Equal work, equal pay, equal terms of apprenticeship for both sexes.” This chivalric aspect was somewhat dimmed by the refusal afterward of some union men to work in the same offices with women. Employers were frequently given the option of choosing between having all men or all women at the cases, and the struggle usually ended in favor of the men. How this worked to the disadvantage of women can be seen by referring to the California Bureau of Labor Statistics for 1889, where the statement is that the book and job printing houses in San Francisco employing union help had only three women in three separate printing establishments as against one hundred and nineteen men; while in the non-union, the proportion was forty-eight women against eighty-five men. Since the investigations of the Bureau, the number of union women employed is said to be “much increased.” This in regard to wages means a great deal to women, as the unions have a fixed scale which ranges from eighteen to thirty dollars for week or time work. In one of the largest printing establishments in San Francisco, women compositors not in the unions received as wages nine dollars per week as against fifteen dollars for men; proof-readers, nine dollars against eighteen dollars for men. Forewomen and foremen were paid in the same ratio. Discrepancies like these, of fifty per cent. difference in the wages of women, because they were women, proved the value of an association that insisted upon the justice of “equal pay for equal work.”

Trade organizations composed exclusively of women were instituted timidly and tentatively in the large cities.[180] Though protective rather than educational, the instruction given in the few trades unions established by and for women possessed a very broadening character. Able speakers, frequenting the meetings, familiarized the members with the economic theories advanced as to the value of the co-operative principle, the duties owed by the strong to the weak, and the correlation between woman’s best interests and the interests of the State. The experience of the trades unions proved the absurd fallacy of the time-worn objection against women’s guilds, “that it would unsex them,” for the effect of their organizations was to make their members more unselfish and more womanly, more apt to think of the good of all than of a part, and, through the importance of being one of a large body working for some common weal, less inclined to frivolous ends.

To wage-working women, one important practical result of labor combinations was the concession made by legislators, through fear of losing the labor vote, to the demand for Bureaus of Labor Statistics, which should show the actual condition of men and women engaged in any and every department of labor. Massachusetts, always first in the field of reform, established such a bureau of labor statistics in 1869. Other States followed slowly in her wake. By 1887 twenty-two States had recognized the importance of having similar bureaus. Among them was “the Department of Labor,” instituted in Washington in 1885, for the purpose of doing collectively for the whole people what the individual States were to accomplish separately. When the Massachusetts Labor Bureau went into operation, its chief, General Henry K. Oliver, a man of liberal views, endeavored to ascertain the conditions under which industrial women worked. The means employed were:

I. Personal investigation.

II. Distribution of printed forms with blanks for employed and employers to fill.

III. Summons to witnesses from the employed and employing classes to testify.

IV. Soliciting information through correspondence.

Through the recommendation of ladies interested in the question of ascertaining the conditions of working-women, General Oliver associated one of their own sex, Miss Adeline Bryant, with the work of the bureau. In the third year of the bureau’s existence five women were placed on the staff of helpers. The precedent set by Massachusetts of employing women as investigators was followed in turn by the other State bureaus and by the “Department of Labor” at Washington.

The investigations of the bureau of 1869 covered the thirty-five industries in which the working-women of Massachusetts were then engaged. Published in 1870, the report of the bureau corroborated the accounts given by the press of that year concerning the low wages, long hours of work, and miserable state of living that was the lot of the wage-earning women in the manufacturing towns of Massachusetts. General Oliver himself assisted in the personal investigation carried on in Boston. Accompanied by the Chief of Police, he visited the homes of “poor-paid laborers,”—women and men,—and found that the homes of the laborers are a pretty accurate index of the social, industrial, sanitary, educational, and moral standard of the laborers themselves. The result of his work was a recommendation for further and more thorough research. “Such investigations,” he said, “will reveal a state of things at which the people of Massachusetts will gaze with amazement, disgust, and anger, and demand a bettering of the wrong.”

Investigations by blanks and by summons to witnesses was less successful than the personal interview. The mass of the people were ignorant of what the bureau sought to accomplish by their questions; hence not more than twenty per cent. of the employers and thirty-three per cent. of the employed addressed returned replies. A dread on the part of manufacturers and shopkeepers, lest “out of their own mouths they should be condemned,” prevented them from answering, and those under them were restrained to silence through fear of losing employment. In spite of the risk, courageous women replied to the blanks and gave personal testimony sufficient to enable the commission to form a partial estimate of the social and economic conditions of the whole. The statistics presented by the bureau were said to have reached “the very verge of human society.” Said Mrs. Atkinson, speaking of the reports on the working-women, “The stern fact, the thrilling incident, the woeful spectacle, the harrowing sight of squalor and wretchedness are marshaled before our eyes in a great and terrible array.” The subjects investigated were: Housework, Hotel and Saloon work, Home work, Store work. Under the Home work was classified sale work; under Store work, clerks, accountants, saleswomen, and cash girls. All that could be found out concerning women in these employments was printed and presented by General Oliver to the Legislature and to the public, without any of the softening touches common to later reports.

The next extended investigation into the occupations and history of wage-earning women was made in 1884, at the instigation of Mr. Carroll D. Wright, who, in 1874, had superseded General Oliver as chief of the Massachusetts Bureau. The research undertaken by Mr. Wright had for its object the ascertainment of the “moral, sanitary, physical, and economical” condition of all wage-earning women in Boston, except those employed in domestic service. This was a larger field than that covered in 1869. Woman’s occupations had multiplied in the earlier year five-fold over what they were in 1840, when, to Harriet Martineau’s surprise, seven vocations, outside of housework, were all into which the women of the United States had entered. In 1884 they were more than ten times seven. Methods of working had also become more difficult to classify. One by one domestic industries were relegated from the home to the factory. And in most of these, what had been done by one person had become differentiated into numerous parts, requiring the co-operation of many workers. Thus, in the occupation of making men’s and women’s clothing, there were classified in 1884 as many as 103 subdivisions. Altogether, in the seventy distinct industries catalogued, there were 354 subdivisions of industries, and each one of these parts employed a different set of workers. It was important that a number of representative women should be interviewed in each of these departments; for, even where each branch formed part of a distinct whole, each worker in those branches had interests at variance with the others.