Making Both Ends Meet Part 2

The charmlessness of existence noticeable in most of the working girls'

homes was emphasized by a saleswoman in the china department of a Broadway department store, Kate McCray, a pretty young Irishwoman of about twenty-three, who was visited in a hotel she said she didn't like to mention to people, for fear they would think it was queer. "You see, it's a boat, a liner that a gentleman that has a large plantation gave for a hotel for working girls. It seems peculiar to some people for a girl to be living on the river."

Miss McCray paid $3.50 a week board at the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel. Her salary was $8 a week. She had been in the same department for four years, and considered it wrong that she received no promotion. She could save nothing, as she did none of her own was.h.i.+ng on account of its inroads of fatigue, and she was obliged to dress well. She was, however, in excellent health and especially praised the store's policy of advising the girls to sit down and to rest whenever no customers were present.

It was misty and raining on the occasion of my visit to the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel, a liner anch.o.r.ed in the East River; and Miss McCray conducted me into the cabin to a large party of boys, elderly women, and children, most of them visitors like myself, and all listening to a powerful-wristed youth happily playing, "You'll Come Back and Hang Around," with heavily accented rag-time, on an upright piano.

"About seventy girls board on this boat. That young lady going into the pantry now is a stenographer--such a bright girl."

Absorbed in the spectacle of a hotel freedom which permitted a guest to go to a pantry at will, whatever the force of her brightness, I followed Miss McCray about the boat. It was as if the hotel belonged to the girls, while in the Christian homes it had been as if everything belonged, not to the girls, but to benevolent though carefully possessive Christians.

Miss McCray praised highly the manager and his wife.

"About twenty men and boys stay on a yacht anch.o.r.ed right out here. They board on this boat, and go to their own boat when the whistle blows at ten o'clock," she continued, leading me to the smoking-room, where she introduced a number of very young gentlemen reading magazines and knocking about gutturally together. They, too, seemed proud of their position as boarders, proud of the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel. They were nice, boyish young fellows, who might have been young mechanicians.

She showed me the top deck with especial satisfaction as we came out into the fresh, rainy air. The East River s.h.i.+pping and an empty recreation pier rose black on one side, with the water sparkling in jetted reflection between; and on the other quivered all the violet and silver lights of the city. There were perhaps half a dozen tents pitched on deck.

"Some of the girls sleep outdoors up here," said Miss McCray in her gentle voice. "They like it so, they do it all winter long. Have plenty of cover, and just sleep here in the tents. Oh, we all like it! Some of the men that were here first have married; and they like it so well, they keep coming back here with their wives to see us. It's so friendly," said the girl, quietly; "and no matter how tired I am when I come here in the evening, I sit out on the deck, and I look at the water and the lights, and it seems as if all my cares float away."

The good humor of the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel, its rag-time, its boarders from the yacht, the charm of the row of tents with the girls in them sleeping their healthful sleep out in the midst of the river wind, the masts, the chimneys, stars, and city lights, all served to deepen the impression of the lack of normal pleasure in most of the shop-girls'

lives.

This starvation in pleasure, as well as low wages and overwork, subjects the women in the stores to a temptation readily conceivable.

The girls in the stores are importuned, not only by men from without these establishments, but also, to the shame of the managements, by men employed within the stores.

The constant close presence of this gulf has more than one painful aspect. On account of it, not only the poor girls who fall suffer, but also the girls who have the constant sense of being "on guard," and find it wise, for fear of the worst suspicion, to forego all sorts of normal delights and gayeties and youthful pleasures. Many girls said, "I keep myself to myself"; "I don't make friends in the stores very fast, because you can't be sure what any one is like." This fear of friends.h.i.+p among contemporaries sharing the same fortune, fear, indeed, of the whole world, seemed the most cruel comment possible on the atmosphere of the girls' lives in their occupation.

Another kind of meanness in human relations was abundantly witnessed by Miss Johnson, the League's inquirer, who worked in one of the stores during the week of Christmas good-will.

The "rush" had begun when Miss Johnson was transferred in this Christmas week from the neckwear to the m.u.f.fler department on the first floor of one of the cheaper stores. All the girls stood all day long--from eight to twelve and from one to eight at night on the first days; from one at noon to ten and eleven at night, as the season progressed; and, on the last dreadful nights, from noon to the following midnight. The girls had 35 cents supper money. Except for that, all this extra labor was unpaid for.

The work was incessant. The girls were nervous, hateful, spiteful with one another. The manager, a beautiful and extremely rough girl of nineteen, swore constantly at all of them. The customers were grabbing, insistent, unreasonable from morning to evening, from evening to midnight. Behind the counter, with the advance of the day, the place became an inferno of nervous exhaustion and exasperation. In the two weeks of Miss Johnson's service one customer once thanked her; and one tipped her 5 cents for the rapid return of a parcel. Both these acts of consideration took place in the morning. Miss Johnson said that this was fortunate for her, as, at one word of ordinary consideration toward the end of her long day's work, she thought she must have burst into tears.

There was a little bundler in the department, Catriona Malatesta, a white, hungry-looking little North Italian of fourteen with a thin chin and a dark-shadowed, worried face. She had an adored sick sister of four, besides six other younger brothers and sisters, and a wors.h.i.+pped mother, to whom she gave every cent of her wages of three dollars and a half a week. An older brother, a day laborer, paid the rent and provided food for all of them. Every other family expense was met by Catriona's three dollars and a half, so that she was in the habit of spending only five cents for her own lunch, and, on the nights of overtime, five cents for her own dinner, in order to take home the extra thirty cents; and every day she looked whiter and older.

At the beginning of the week before Christmas, the store raised Catriona's wage to four dollars. Her mother told her she might have the extra half dollar for herself for Christmas. Though Catriona had worked for some months, this was the first money of her own she had ever had.

With pride she told the department how it was to be spent. She was going to surprise her mother with a new waist for Christmas, a waist Catriona had seen in the store marked down to forty-nine cents. A ten per cent discount was allowed to employees, so that the waist would cost forty-five cents. With the remaining five cents Catriona would buy her sick Rosa a doll. All her life Rosa had wanted a doll. Now, at last, she could have one.

On the day when she received the money, Catriona kept it close at hand, in a little worn black leather purse, in a shabby bag hanging from her arm, and not out of sight for an instant.

Her purchases were to be made in the three-quarters of an hour allowed for supper. The time Catriona consumed in eating her five-cent meal was never long, so that, even allowing for prolonged purchasing, her absence of an hour was strange.

"D---- your soul, where in h.e.l.l have you been all this time, Catie?" the manager screamed at her, angrily, without glancing at her, when she came back at last.

Catriona looked more anxious and white than ever before. Her face was stained with weeping. "I lost my purse," she said in a dazed, unsteady voice. "It was gone when I opened my bag in the lunch-room. I've looked for it everywhere."

There was a sudden breathless change in the air of the department. You could have heard a pin drop.

"Better go down to the bas.e.m.e.nt and wash your face," said the manager, awkwardly, with unbelievable gentleness.

"Well," she continued suddenly, the minute Catriona was out of ear-shot, "I'm not so poor but I can help to make _that_ up." She took a dollar bill from her pocket-book. Every one contributed something, though several girls went without their supper for this purpose, and one girl walked home four miles after midnight. Altogether they could give nearly ten dollars.

The manager sidled awkwardly toward Catriona, when she came back from was.h.i.+ng her face. "Here, kid," she muttered sheepishly, pus.h.i.+ng the money into the little girl's hand. Catriona, pale and dazed, looked up at her--looked at the money, with a shy excitement and happiness dawning in her eyes. Then she cried again with excitement and joy, and every one laughed, and sent her off again to wash her face.

That night everything was different in the department. There had been a real miracle of transfiguration. The whole air of intercourse was changed. All the girls were gentle and dignified with each other.

Catriona's eyes sparkled with pleasure. Her careworn air was gone. She was a child again. She had never had any physical loveliness before; but on that night hundreds of pa.s.sing shoppers looked with attention at the delight and beauty of her face.

On the next day everything went on as before. The girls snapped at each other and jostled each other. The beautiful manager swore. One girl came, looking so ill that Miss Johnson was terrified.

"Can't you stop, Kitty? You look so sick. For heaven's sake, go home and rest."

"I can't afford to go home."

Cross and snappish as the girls were, they managed to spare Kitty, and to stand in front of her to conceal her idleness from the floor-walker, and give her a few minutes' occasional rest sitting down. She went through the first hours of the morning as best she might, though clearly under pressure of sharp suffering. But at about ten the floor-walker, for whom it must be said that he was responsible for the sales and general presentability of the department, saw her sitting down. "Why aren't you busy?" he called. "Get up."

At midnight on Christmas eve, as the still crowd of girls walked wanly out of the great store into the brilliant New York street, some one said, "How are you, Kitty?"

She made no reply for a minute. Then she said wretchedly, "Oh--I hope I'll be dead before the next Christmas."

V

The sheer and causeless misery this girl endured was, of course, attributable, not only to the long hours and to the standing demanded by her occupation, but to the fact that this occupation was continued at a period when the normal health of great numbers of women demands reasonable quiet and rest.

With a few honorable exceptions[5] it may be said to be the immemorial custom of department stores in this country to treat women employees, in so far as ability to stand and to stand at all seasons goes, exactly as if they were men.

The expert testimony collected by the publication secretary of the National Consumers' League, Miss Josephine Goldmark, for the brief which obtained the Illinois Ten-Hour Law, gives the clearest possible record of the outlay of communal strength involved in these long hours of standing for women.

_Report of "Lancet" Sanitary Commission on Sanitation in the Shop_. 1892

Without entering upon the vexed question of women's rights, we may nevertheless urge it as an indisputable physiological fact that, when compelled to stand for long hours, women, especially young women, are exposed to greater injury and greater suffering than men.

_British Sessional Papers_. Vol. XII. 1886. Report from Select Committee on Shop Hours Regulation Bill

Witness, W. Abbott, M.D.

"Does their employment injuriously affect them, as child-bearing women in after years?"

"According to all scientific facts, it would do so."

"And you, as a medical man of a considerable number of years'

experience, would not look to girls who have been worked so many hours in one position as the bearers of healthy, strong children?"

"I should not."

"Then it naturally follows, does it not, that this is a very serious matter in the interest of the nation as a whole, apart from the immediate injury to the person concerned?"

"Yes. As regards the physical condition of the future race."