Prisoners of Poverty Abroad

CHAPTER XIII.

WOMEN IN GENERAL TRADES

As investigation progresses, it becomes at times a question as to which of two great factors must dominate the present status of women as workers; competition, which blinds the eyes to anything but the surest way of obtaining the proper per cent, or the inherited Anglo-Saxon brutality, which, in its lowest form of manifestation, makes the English wife-beater. It is certain that the English workingwoman has not only the disabilities which her American sister also faces, – some inherent in herself, and as many arising from the press of the present system, – but added to this the apparent incapacity of the employer to see that they have rights of any description whatsoever. Even the factory act and the various attempts to legislate in behalf of women and child workers strikes the average employer as a gross interference with his constitutional rights. Where he can he evades. Where he cannot he is apt to grow purple over the impertinence of meddling reformers who cannot let well-enough alone.

Such a representative of one class of English employers is to be found in a little street, not a stone's throw from Fleet Street, the great newspaper centre, where all day long one meets authors, editors, and journalists of every degree. Toward eight in the morning, as at the same hour in the evening, another crowd is to be seen, made up of hundreds upon hundreds of girls hurrying to the countless printing establishments of every grade, which are to be found in every street and court opening from or near Fleet Street. It is not newspaper interests alone that are represented there. The Temple, Inner, Outer, and Middle, with the magnificent group of buildings, also a part of the Temple's workings – the new courts of law, have each and all their quota of law printing, and a throng made up of every order of ability, from the reader of Greek proof down to the folder of Mother Siegel's Almanac, hurries through Fleet Street to the day's work.

In a building devoted to the printing and sending out of a popular weekly of the cheaper order, the lower rooms met all requisitions as to space and proper ventilation.

"We have nothing to hide," said the manager, "nothing at all. You may go from top to bottom if you will."

This was said at what appeared to be the end of an hour or two of going from room to room, watching the girls at work at the multitudinous phases involved, and wondering how energy enough remained after twelve hours of it, for getting home.

A flight of dark little stairs led up to a region even darker, and he changed color as we turned toward them.

"This is all temporary," he said hastily. "We are very much crowded for space, and we are going to move soon. We do the best we can in the mean time. It's only temporary."

This was the reason for the darkness. Stumbling up the open stairs, hardly more than a ladder, one came into a half story added to the original building, and so low that the manager bowed his head as he entered; nor was there any point at which he could stand freely upright, this well-fed Englishman nearly six feet tall. For the girls there was no such difficulty, and nearly two hundred were packed into the space, in which folding and stitching machines ran by steam, while at long tables other branches of the same work were going on by hand. The noise and the heat from gas-jets, steam, and the crowd of workers made the place hideous. The girls themselves appeared in no worse condition than many others seen that day, but were all alike, pale and anemic. Their hours were from 8 A. M. to 8 P. M., with an hour for dinner, usually from one to two. The law also allows half an hour for tea, but in all cases investigated, this time is docked if the girl takes it. Cheap "cocoa rooms" are all about, where a cup of tea or cocoa and a bun may be had for twopence; but even this is a heavy item to a girl who earns never more than ten shillings ($2.50) a week, and as often from four to seven or eight. No arrangement for making tea on the premises was to be found here or anywhere.

"We mean to have a room," the employers said, "but we have so many expenses attendant on the growing business that there doesn't seem any chance yet."

This employer brought his wage-book forward and showed with pride that several of his girls earned a pound a week ($5.00). But on turning back some pages, the record showed only fourteen and sixteen shillings for these same names, and after a pause the manager admitted that the pound had been earned by adding night work.

This question of whether night work is ever done had been a most difficult one to determine. The girls themselves declared that it often was, and that they liked it because they got three shillings and their breakfast; but the managers had in more than one case denied the charge with fury.

"It's over-work," the present one said, his eyes on the rows of figures.

"When?" asked my companion quietly, and he burst into a laugh.

"You've got me this time," he said. "You've given your word not to mention names, so I don't mind telling you. It's like this. There's a new firm to be floated, and they want two hundred thousand circulars on two days' notice. Of course it has to be night-work, and we put it through, but we give the girls time for supper, and provide a good breakfast, and there's hundreds waiting for the chance. But you've seen for yourselves. Some of them make a pound a week. What in reason does a woman want of more than a pound a week?"

This remark is the stereotyped one of quite two-thirds the employers, whether men or women. The old delusion still holds that a man works for others, a woman solely for herself, and although each woman should appear with those dependent upon her in entire or partial degree arranged in line, it would make no difference in the conviction. It is quite true that many married women work for pocket-money, and having homes, can afford to underbid legitimate workers. But they are the smallest proportion of this vast army of London toilers, whose pitiful wage is earned by a day's labor which happily has no counterpart in length with us, save among the lowest grade of needlewomen.

In the case under present consideration pay for over-time was allowed at the rate of fourpence an hour and a penny extra. If late five minutes the workwoman is fined twopence, and if not there by nine is "drilled," that is, sent away, or kept waiting near until two, when she goes on for half a day. If tardy, as must often happen with fogs and other causes, she is often "drilled" for a week, though "drilling" in this trade is used more often with men than with women, who are less liable to irregularities caused by drink. In some establishments the bait of sixpence a week for good conduct is offered, but this is deducted on the faintest pretext, and the worker fined as well, for any violation of regulations tacit or written.

In another establishment piece-work alone was done, a popular almanac being folded at fourpence a thousand sheets. Railway tickets brought in from eight to ten shillings a week, and prize packages of stationery, fourpence a score, the folding and packing of prize doubling the length of time required and thus lessening wages in the same ratio.

I have given phases of this one trade in detail, because the same general rules govern all. The confectionery workers' wages are at about the same rate, although a pound a week is almost unknown, the girls making from three shillings and sixpence (84c.) to fourteen and sixteen shillings weekly. A large "butter-scotch" factory pays these rates and allows the weekly good-conduct sixpence which, however, few succeed in earning. This factory is managed by two brothers who take alternate weeks, and the younger one exacts from the girls an hour more a day than the older one. Here the factory act applies, and inspectors appear periodically; but this does not hinder the carrying out of individual theories as to what constitutes a day. If five minutes late, sevenpence is deducted from the week's wages, which begin at three and sixpence and ascend to nine, the latter price being the utmost to be earned in this branch of the trade.

In the cocoa rooms which are to be found everywhere in London where business of any sort is carried on, the pay ranges from ten to twelve shillings a week. The work is hard and incessant, although hours are often shorter. In both confectionery factories and the majority of factory trades, an hour is allowed for dinner, but the tea half hour refused or deducted from time. London in this respect, and indeed in most points affecting the comfort and well-being of operatives of every class, is far behind countries, the great manufacturing cities of which are doing much to lighten oppressive conditions and give some possibility of relaxation and improvement. Some of the best reforms in a factory life have begun in England, and it is thus all the more puzzling to find that indifference, often to a brutal degree, characterizes the attitude of many London employers, who have reduced wages to the lowest, and brought profits to the highest, attainable point. It is true that he is driven by a force often quite beyond his control, foreign competition, French and German, being no less sharp than that on his own soil. He must study chances of profit to a farthing, and in such study there is naturally small thought of his workers, save as hands in which the farthings may be found. Many a woman goes to her place of work, leaving behind her children who have breakfasted with her on "kettle broth," and will be happy if the same is certain at supper time.

"There's six of us have had nought but kettle broth for a fortnight," said one. "You know what that is? It's half a quarter loaf, soaked in hot water with a hap'orth of dripping and a spoonful of salt. When you've lived on that night and morning for a week or two, you can't help but long for a change, though, God forgive me! there's them that fares worse. But it'll be the broth without the bread before we're through. There's no living to be had in old England any more, and yet the rich folks don't want less. Do you know how it is, ma'am? Is there any chance of better times, do you think? Is it that they want us to starve? I've heard that said, but somehow it seems as if there must be hearts still, and they'll see soon, and then things'll be different. Oh, yes, they must be different."

Will they be different? It is unskilled workers who have just spoken, but do the skilled fare much better? I append a portion of a table of earnings, prepared a year or two since by the chaplain of the Clerkenwell prison, a thoughtful and earnest worker among the poor, this table ranking as one of the best of the attempts to discover the actual position of the workingwoman at present: —

"Making paper bags, 4½d. to 5½d. per thousand; possible earnings, 5s. to 9s. a week. Button-holes, 3d. per dozen; possible earnings, 8s. per week.

"Shirts 2d. each, worker finding her own cotton; can get six done between 6 A. M. and 11 P. M.

"Sack-sewing, 6d. for twenty-five, 8d. to 1s. 6d. per hundred; possible earnings, 7s. per week.

"Pill-box making, 1s. for thirty-six gross; possible earnings, 1s. 3d. a day.

"Button-hole making, 1d. per dozen; can do three or four dozen between 5 A. M. and dark.

"Whip-making, 1s. per dozen; can do a dozen per day.

"Trousers-finishing, 3d. to 5d. each, finding own cotton; can do four per day.

"Shirt-finishing, 3d. to 4d. per dozen."

So the list runs on through all the trades open to women. A pound a week is a fortune; half or a third of that amount the wages of two-thirds the women who earn in working London; nor are there indications that the scale will rise or that better days are in store for one of these toilers, patient, heavy-eyed, well-nigh hopeless of any good to come, and yet saying among themselves the words already given: —

"There must be hearts still, and they'll see soon, and then things'll be different. Oh, yes, they must be different."

CHAPTER XIV.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH WORKERS

It is but a narrow streak of silver main that separates the two countries, whose story has been that of constant mutual distrust, varied by intervals of armed truce, in which each nation elected to believe that it understood the other. Not only the nation as a whole, however, but the worker in each, is far from any such possibility; and the methods of one are likely to remain, for a long time to come, a source of bewilderment to the other. That conditions on both sides of the Channel are in many points at their worst, and that the labor problem is still unsolved for both England and the Continent, remains a truth, though it is at once evident to the student of this problem that France has solved one or two phases of the equation over which England is still quite helpless.

There is a famous chapter in the history of Ireland, entitled "Snakes in Ireland," the contents of which are as follows: —

"There are no snakes in Ireland."

On the same principle it becomes at once necessary in writing on the slums of Paris, to arrange the summary of the situation: "There are no slums in Paris."

In the English sense there certainly are none; and for the difference in visible conditions, several causes are responsible. The searcher for such regions discovers before the first day ends that there are none practically; and though now and then, as all byways are visited, one finds remnants of old Paris, and a court or narrow lane in which crime might lurk or poverty hide itself, as a whole there is hardly a spot where sunshine cannot come, and the hideous squalor of London is absolutely unknown. One quarter alone is to be excepted in this statement, and with that we are to deal farther on. The seamstress in a London garret or the shop-worker in the narrow rooms of the East End lives in a gloom for which there is neither outward nor inward alleviation. Soot is king of the great city, and his prime ministers, Smoke and Fog, work together to darken every haunt of man, and to shut out every glimpse of sun or moon. The flying flakes are in the air. Every breath draws them in; every moment leaves its deposit on wall and floor and person. The neatest and most determined fighter of dirt must still be bond slave to its power; and eating and drinking and breathing soot all day and every day, there comes at last an acquiescence in the consequences, and only an instinctive battle with the outward effects.

For the average worker, at the needle at least, wages are too low to admit of much soap; hot water is equally a luxury, and time if taken means just so much less of the scanty pay; and thus it happens that London poverty takes on a hopelessly grimy character, and that the visitor in the house of the workers learns to wear a uniform which shows as little as possible of the results of rising up and sitting down in the soot, which, if less evident in the home of the millionnaire, works its will no less surely.

Fresh from such experience, and with the memory of home and work room, manufactory or great shop, all alike sombre and depressing, the cleanliness of Paris, enforced by countless municipal regulations, is at first a constant surprise. The French workwoman, even of the lowest order, shares in the national characteristic which demands a fair exterior whatever may be the interior condition, and she shares also in the thrift which is equally a national possession, and the exercise of which has freed France from the largest portion of her enormous debt. The English workwoman of the lowest order, the trouser-stitcher or bag-maker, is not only worn and haggard to the eye, but wears a uniform of ancient bonnet and shawl, both of which represent the extremity of dejection. She clings to this bonnet as the type and suggestion of respectability and to the shawl no less; but the first has reached a point wherein it is not only grotesque but pitiful, the remnants of flowers and ribbons and any shadowy hint of ornamentation having long ago yielded to weather and age and other agents of destruction. The shawl or cloak is no less abject and forlorn, both being the badge of a condition from which emergence has become practically impossible. These lank figures carry no charm of womanhood, – nothing that can draw from sweater or general employer more than a sneer at the quality of the labor of those waiting always in numbers far beyond any real demand, until for both the adjective comes to be "superfluous," and employer and employed alike wonder why the earth holds them, and what good there is in an existence made up simply of want and struggle.

Precisely the opposite condition holds for the French worker, who, in the midst of problems as grave, faces them with the light-heartedness of her nation. She has learned to the minutest fraction what can be extracted from every centime, and though she too must shiver with cold, and go half-fed and half-clothed, every to-morrow holds the promise of something better, and to-day is thus made more bearable. She shares too the conviction, which has come to be part of the general faith concerning Paris, which seems always an embodied assurance, that sadness and want are impossible. Even her beggars, a good proportion of them laboriously made up for the parts they are to fill, find repression of cheerfulness their most difficult task, and smile confidingly on the sceptical observer of their methods, as if to make him a partner in the encouraging and satisfactory nature of things in general. The little seamstress who descends from her attic for the bread with its possible salad or bit of cheese which will form her day's ration, smiles also as she pauses to feel the thrill of life in the thronging boulevards and beautiful avenues, the long sweeps of which have wiped out for Paris as a whole everything that could by any chance be called slum.

Even in the narrowest street this stir of eager life penetrates, and every Parisian shares it and counts it as a necessity of daily existence. If shoes are too great a luxury, the workwoman clatters along in sabots, congratulating herself that they are cheap and that they never wear out. Custom, long-established and imperative, orders that she shall wear no head-covering, and thus she escapes the revelation bound up in the London worker's bonnet. Inherited instinct and training from birth have taught her hands the utmost skill with the needle. She makes her own dress, and wears it with an air which may in time transfer itself to something choicer; and this quality is in no whit affected by the the cheapness of the material. It may be only a print or some woollen stuff of the poorest order; but it and every detail of her dress represent something to which the English woman has not attained, and which temperament and every fact of life will hinder her attaining.

As I write, the charcoal-woman has climbed the long flights to the fifth floor, bending under the burden of an enormous sack of charbon à terre, but smiling as she puts it down. She is mistress of a little shop just round the corner, and she keeps the accounts of the wood and coal bought by her patrons by a system best known to herself, her earnings hardly going beyond three francs a day. Even she, black with the coal-dust which she wastes no time in scrubbing off save on Sundays when she too makes one of the throng in the boulevards, faces the hard labor with light-hearted confidence, and plans to save a sou here and there for the dot of the baby who shares in the distribution of coal-dust, and will presently trot by her side as assistant.

In the laundry just beyond, the women are singing or chattering, the voices rising in that sudden fury of words which comes upon this people, and makes the foreigner certain that bloodshed is near, but which ebbs instantly and peacefully, to rise again on due occasion. Long hours, exhausting labor, small wages, make no difference. The best worker counts from three to four francs daily as prosperity, and the rate has even fallen below this; yet they make no complaint, quite content with the sense of companionship, and with the satisfaction of making each article as perfect a specimen of skill as can be produced.

Here lies a difference deeper than that of temperament, – the fact that the French worker finds pleasure in the work itself, and counts its satisfactory appearance as a portion of the reward. Slop work, with its demand for speedy turning out of as many specimens of the poorest order per day as the hours will allow, is repugnant to every instinct of the French workwoman; and thus it happens that even slop work on this side of the Channel holds some hint of ornamentation and the desire to lift it out of the depth to which it has fallen. But it is gaining ground, fierce competition producing this effect everywhere; and the always lessening ratio of wages which attends its production, must in time bring about the same disastrous results here as elsewhere, unless the tide is arrested, and some form of co-operative production takes its place. With the French worker in the higher forms of needle industry we shall deal in the next chapter, finding what differences are to be met here also between French and English methods.

CHAPTER XV.

FRENCH BARGAIN COUNTERS

"Yes, it is the great shops that have done that, madame. Once, you saw what was only well finished and a credit to the worker, and, even if the reward was small, she had pride in the work and her own skill, and did always her best. But now, what will you? The thing must be cheap, cheapest. The machine to sew hurries everything, and you find the workwoman sans ambition and busy only to hurry and be one with the machine. It is wrong, all wrong, but that is progress, and one must submit. When the small shops had place to live, and the great magasins were not for ladies or any who wished the best, then it was different, but now all is changed, and work has no character. It is all the same; always the machine."