Part 13

Mackenzie, in his above mentioned book, states that “there was no machinery in these English coal-pits to drag the coal to the surface, and women climbed long wooden stairs with baskets of coal upon their backs. Children of six were habitually employed. Their hours of labor were fourteen to sixteen daily. The horrors among which they lived induced disease and early death. Law did not seem to reach to the depths of a coal-pit, and the hapless children were often mutilated and occasionally killed with perfect impunity by the brutalized miners among whom they labored.”

Other authorities state that the women were paid less than 20 cents per day! For the same kind of work men got three times as much pay; but the employers preferred girls and women to do the work “because of their lower wages and greater docility!” In the iron districts of the Midlands women earned for very hard work 4 to 5 shillings a week, (=$1.25) while the men received 14 shillings.

These small wages, which forced upon the laborers the most barren mode of living, were, however, taken away again from them through the meanest tricks, devised by the employers particularly through the so-called Truck System. Under this abominable system the employers, instead of paying the wages in cash, forced their employees to take checks or orders, redeemable in all kinds of necessities and goods, but valid only in those “truck stores” or “tommy shops” run by the employers, or in which they had an interest. By cheating the workmen with goods of inferior quality, by overcharging them at the same time, by pressing them to take goods far beyond their need and wages, and by making long intervals—often from 40 to 60 days—between the real pay days, they forced the laborers into debt and absolute slavery.

The situation of many thousands of those women who tried to make a living as seamstresses was also desperate. Always put off with wages far below the demands of a modest existence, they were real martyrs of labor. Thomas Hood, one of the foremost English poets of the first half of the 19th Century, gave in his famous “Song of the Shirt” a most touching picture of such woman’s toil and misery, of woman in her wasted life and in her hurried death. His poem reads:

With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread— Stitch! stitch! stitch! In poverty, hunger and dirt, And still with a voice of dolorous pitch, She sang the “Song of the Shirt!”

“Work! work! work! While the cock is crowing aloof! And work—work—work, Till the stars shine through the roof! It’s Oh! to be a slave Along with the barbarous Turk, Where woman has never a soul to save, If this is Christian work!

“Work—work—work Till the brain begins to swim; Work—work—work Till the eyes are heavy and dim! Seam, and gusset, and band, Band, and gusset, and seam, Till over the button I fall asleep, And sew them on in a dream!

“Oh, Men, with Sisters dear! Oh, Men, with Mothers and Wives! It is not linen you’re wearing out, But human creatures’ lives! Stitch—stitch—stitch, In poverty, hunger, and dirt, Sewing at once, with a double thread, A Shroud as well as a Shirt.

“But why do I talk of Death? That Phantom of grisly bone, I hardly fear his terrible shape, It seems so like my own, Because of the fasts I keep; Oh, God! that bread be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!

“Work—work—work! My labor never flags; And what are its wages? A bed of straw, A crust of bread—and rags. That shatter’d roof—and this naked floor— A table—a broken chair— And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank For sometimes falling there!

“Work—work—work! From weary chime to chime, Work—work—work— As prisoners work for crime! Band, and gusset, and seam, Seam, and gusset, and band, Till the heart is sick, and the brain benumb’d As well as the weary hand.

“Work—work—work, In the dull December light, And work—work—work, When the weather is warm and bright— While underneath the eaves The brooding swallows cling, As if to show me the sunny backs And twit me with the spring.

“Oh! but to breathe the breath Of the cowslip and primrose sweet— With the sky above my head, And the grass beneath my feet, For only one short hour To feel as I used to feel, Before I knew the woes of want And the walk that costs a meal.

“Oh! but for one short hour! A respite however brief! No blessed leisure for Love or Hope, But only time for Grief! A little weeping would ease my heart, But in their briny bed My tears must stop, for every drop Hinders needle and thread!”

With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread thread— Stitch! stitch! stitch! In poverty, hunger, and dirt, And still with a voice of dolorous pitch, Would that its tone could reach the Rich! She sang the “Song of the Shirt!”

Constantly struggling with want and poverty and seeing health menaced by the machines, the working classes of England were filled with bitterness, when they found that their complaints brought no relief, while the law-makers, sitting in Parliament, favored any demands of the employers and of the big interests. To forget for a few hours their hopeless existence, large numbers of men and women resorted to liquor, hereby hastening their final collapse and ruin.

Such was the life led by English laborers during the greater part of the Nineteenth Century. Feeble attempts to improve these deplorable conditions were made through a series of “Factory Acts,” the immediate cause for which was the fearful spread of epidemic diseases which wrought dreadful havoc among the laborers, especially among the women and children. If we glance over these factory acts, as they are sketched in the Encyclopædia Britannica, we find that even under these acts children below the age of nine were permitted in silk factories, and that they were required to work twelve hours a day, exclusive of an hour and a half for meal times. An act of 1833 provided that young persons from thirteen to eighteen and women were restricted to 68 hours a week. Ten years later a mining act was passed which prohibited underground work for children under ten and for women. In 1867 the Workshop Regulation Act fixed the working day for children from 6 a. m. to 8 p. m. = 14 hours, and for young persons and women from 5 a. m. to 9 p. m. = 16 hours! After having made such sad disclosures, the Encyclopædia Britannica dared to say: “By these various enactments the state has emphatically taken under its protection the whole class of children and young persons employed in manufacturing industries. It has done this in the name of the moral and physical health of the community.”

* * * * *

The despicable methods employed by the British mine and factory owners in their dealings with the working classes spread to the Continent as well as to America. In France, Germany and Austria they led to those desperate struggles between capital and labor, out of which was born that most remarkable movement of the 19th Century called “Socialism.”

In the United States soon enough attempts were made to imitate the detestable methods of the British mine and factory owners. But as the character of the population was quite different, the abuse of the working men and women never became so appalling as in Great Britain.

The first industry to be established in factories was the weaving of cotton in the New England States, where a number of rapid streams, among them the Merrimac, the Connecticut and the Housatonic, furnished excellent water-power. And as during the pioneer and colonial times the housewives and daughters had spun and woven all the cloth and linen for family use, there was an ample number of expert workers at hand. After the first weaving machines were brought over from Europe, in 1814, Dover, Lowell, Waltham, Great Falls and Newmarket became the principal centers of the cotton industry.

Here the daughters of the farmers and settlers did the work that formerly their mothers had done at home. Only they did it faster, by tending the machines all day long. At first the girls did not know that the employers might try to make the people in the factories work longer hours without any rest and adequate pay. Soon enough they found this out. But as the girls had inherited the independent spirit of their fathers and grandfathers, trouble began to brew. In December, 1828, four hundred girls in Dover, New Hampshire, formed a procession and marched out of the factory, in order to show their indignation at the growing oppression by their employers. They clad their complaints in verses, one of which ran:

“Who among the Dover girls could ever bear The shocking fate of slaves to share!”

Unorganized as they were at that time, they did not succeed in gaining all they desired. But five years later they walked out again, eight hundred strong, adopting resolutions stating that they had not been treated as “daughters of freemen” by their employers and the unfriendly newspapers. At the same time in Lowell, Mass., at a signal given by a Dover girl, two thousand girls, who had formed a “=Factory Girls’ Association=,” joined in a sympathy strike, marched around town and issued the following proclamation:

“Union Is Power.”

“Our present object is to have union and exertion, and we remain in possession of our own unquestionable rights. We circulate this paper, wishing to obtain the names of all who imbibe the spirit of our patriotic ancestors, who preferred privation to bondage and parted with all that renders life desirable—and even life itself—to produce independence for their children. The oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us, and to gain their object they very gravely tell us of the pressure of the times; this we are already sensible of and deplore it. If any are in want of assistance, the ladies will be compassionate and assist them, but we prefer to have the disposing of our charities in our own hands, and, as we are free, we would remain in possession of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us, and remain daughters of freemen still.

“All who patronize this effort we wish to have discontinue their labor until terms of reconciliation are made.

“Resolved. That we will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are continued to us as they have been.

“Resolved, That none of us will go back unless they receive us all as one.

“Resolved, That if any have not money enough to carry them home they shall be supplied.

“Let oppression shrug her shoulders, And a haughty tyrant frown, And little upstart Ignorance In mockery look down. Yet I value not the feeble threats, Of Tories in disguise, While the flag of independence, O’er our noble nation flies.”

In 1843 the girls in the cotton mills of Pittsburg, Pa., whose working hours had been from five o’clock in the morning till a quarter of seven in the evening, rebelled also, when their employers attempted to increase the time one hour each day without extra pay. Two years later they co-operated with the factory girls of New England, concurring in the proposal to “declare their independence of the oppressive manufacturing power” unless the work day was limited to ten hours.

The policy of these fighters for better conditions is outlined in the constitution of the “=Lowell Female Labor Reform Association=,” which had been organized in 1845. Article IX says:

“The members of this association disapprove of all hostile measures, strikes and turn-outs until all pacific measures prove abortive, and then that it is the imperious duty of everyone to assert and maintain that independence which our brave ancestors bequeathed to us and sealed with their blood.”

The spirit of these working women is likewise shown in the preamble adopted at the annual meeting of the association in January, 1846. It reads:

“It now only remains for us to throw off the shackles which are binding us in ignorance and servitude and which prevent us from rising to that scale of being for which God designed us. With the present system of labor it is impossible. There must be reasonable hours for manual labor and a just portion of time allowed for the cultivation of the mental and moral faculties, and no other way can the great work be accomplished. It is evident that with the present system of labor the minds of the mass must remain uncultivated, their morals unimproved. Shall we, operatives of America, the land where democracy claims to be the principle by which we live and by which we are governed, see the evil daily increasing which separates more widely and more effectually the favored few and the unfortunate many without one exertion to stay the progress? God forbid! Let the daughters of New England kindle the spark of Philanthropy in every heart till its brightness shall fill the whole earth.”

Not satisfied with securing thousands of signatures of factory operatives, who petitioned the legislature for a ten-hour day, prominent members of the union went before the Massachusetts legislative committee early in 1845 and testified as to the conditions in textile mills. This was the first American governmental investigation of labor conditions, and it was due almost solely to the petitions of the working women. About the same time the union appointed a committee to investigate and expose false statements published in newspapers concerning the factory operatives. Nor was this all. In their work of publicity they did not hesitate to call public men to account for assailing or ignoring their movement.

The chairman of the legislative committee, before whom the working girls had testified, was the representative from the Lowell district, and should, therefore, have shown special interest in the complaints of the girls. Instead, he had treated them in a high-handed manner, withholding at the same time from the Legislature some of the most important facts presented by the Lowell girls. The latter expressed their just indignation in the following resolution, which was circulated before the elections of that year:

“Resolved, That the Female Labor Reform Labor Association deeply deplore the lack of independence, honesty and humanity in the committee to whom were referred sundry petitions relative to the hours of labor, especially in the chairman of that committee; and as he is merely a corporation machine, or tool, we will use our best endeavors and influence to keep him in the “City of Spindles,” where he belongs, and not trouble Boston folks with him.”

That the “endeavors” of the girls met with full success is evident from a second resolution published after election day:

“Resolved, That the members of this association tender their grateful acknowledgments to the voters of Lowell for consigning William Schouler to the obscurity he so justly deserves for treating so ungentlemanly the defense made by the delegates of this association before the special committee of the legislature, to whom was referred petitions for the reduction of the hours of labor, of which he was chairman.”

The result of all this agitation against long hours of work was that in 1847, 1848, and 1851 the first ten-hour laws were passed in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The success, won by the textile workers, inspired women workers in the tailoring and sewing trade, in the manufacture of shoes, cigars, and other necessities to similar efforts. In the tailoring and sewing trade wages were extremely low, as sweat-shop conditions existed from the beginning, and the trade was overcrowded.

In 1845 New York City alone had over 10,000 sewing women, the majority of whom worked from twelve to sixteen hours a day to earn only from two to three dollars a week!

As similar conditions prevailed in other occupations, the number of poorly paid women wage-earners in New York City in 1865 was between 50,000 to 70,000, of whom 20,000 were in a constant fight with starvation, and of whom 7,000 lived in cellars. Their situation grew from bad to worse, as at the same time that they were falling into a state of physical and mental deterioration, the improvements in many machines made greater and greater demands on the capability of those who were operating them.

Thus the situation became such as was sketched by W. I. Thomas in an article written some fifteen years ago for the “American Magazine,” in which he said:

“The machine is a wonderful expression of man’s ingenuity, of his effort to create an artificial workman, to whom no wages have to be paid, but it falls just short of human intelligence. It has no discriminative judgment, no control of the work as a whole. It can only finish the work handed out to it, but it does this with superhuman energy. The manufacturer has, then, to purchase enough intelligence to supplement the machine, and he secures as low a grade of this as the nature of the machine will permit. The child, the woman and the immigrant are frequently adequate to furnish that oversight and judgment necessary to supplement the activity of the machine, and the more ignorant and necessitous the human being the more the profit to the industry. But now comes the ironical and pitiful part. The machine which was invented to save human energy, and which is so great a boon when the individual controls it, is a terrible thing when it controls the individual. Power-driven, it has almost no limit to its speed, and no limit whatever to its endurance, and it has no nerves. When, therefore, under the pressure of business competition the machine is speeded up and the girl operating it is speeded up to its pace, =we have finally a situation in which the machine destroys the worker=.”

The rapidly increasing misery among such exhausted women workers aroused public attention and led to the formation of a number of woman’s organizations with the purpose to investigate abuses among such women workers, to teach them the value of trade unions, to agitate equal pay for equal work, to shorten the number of working hours, and to abolish child labor and prison work. The first national women’s trade union, formed in the United States, was that of the “=Daughters of St. Crispin=.” It held its first convention on July 28, 1869, at Lynn, Massachusetts. The delegates represented not only the local lodges of that state, but also lodges of Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California.

With the organization of the “=Knights of Labor=” in 1869, and the “=American Federation of Labor=” the position of woman in the American labor movement became more firmly established, as both federations made it one of their principal objects “to secure for both sexes equal pay for equal work.” They also appointed special committees to investigate the conditions of working women, and to organize them for concerted action.

Other potent factors arising in this line were the “=National Consumers’ League=” and the “=Women’s Trade Union League=.” The founding of the first federation was due to efforts to better the conditions of women in department stores. In 1890 a group of saleswomen of New York City pointed to the fact that girls in fashionable department stores were receiving wages too low to allow them a decent living. They also complained that these girls were forced to stand from ten to fourteen hours a day, and that sanitary conditions in the cloak and lunch rooms were such as to endanger health and life. While the plan of these saleswomen, to unite all women clerks of the city into a labor union, failed, their complaints, however, attracted the attention of a number of influential ladies interested in philanthropic efforts. They investigated the charges against the department stores, and what they discovered made them resolve that conditions demanded radical changes. In May, 1890, they called a mass meeting of prominent women and proposed a constructive plan for raising the standard in shop conditions, not by =blacklisting= any firm guilty of bad conduct, but by =white-listing= those firms which treated their employees humanely. “We can make and publish,” so the presiding lady said, “a list of all the shops where employees receive fair treatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops. By acting openly, and publishing our White List we shall be able to create an immense public opinion in favor of just employers.” In other words, it was by the spirit of praise rather than condemnation that these ladies sought to stimulate stores to raise their standards.

Adopting the name “=Consumers’ League of New York=,” the society organized on January 1, 1891, and published its first White List. It was a disappointingly small one, as it contained the names of only eight firms. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the many hundred other firms toward this reform movement. But soon enough these firms found that the League had also introduced into the New York Assembly a bill which became known as the “Mercantile Employers Bill.” It aimed to regulate the employment of women and children in all mercantile establishments, and to place all retail stores, from the smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory Department.

Of course the merchants took prompt steps to defeat this obnoxious bill, and they were most complacent when their representatives in the Assembly succeeded in strangling it. But the bill appeared again and again, finally resulting in the appointment of a State Commission for the investigation of the conditions. As Reta Childe Dorr in her book “What Eight Million Women Want” graphically relates, “The findings of this Commission were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified to employing grown women at a salary of =thirty-three cents a day=. They confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they should not expect to sit down in business hours, anyhow. They defended, on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated overtime. They defended their system of fines, which sometimes took away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless girls would be thrown out of employment, and forced to appeal to charity.”