Part 12

In the study of wage-earning girls made by the research department of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, the cost of living of girls who reside with their families is considered separately. Since the aim is primarily to discover the cost of living of the self-dependent girl, the number of the other class studied is small, consisting chiefly of immigrant girls and girls in the suburbs earning a good salary and living at home or with relatives.

On the other hand, the study of the savings bank insurance committee deals very largely with girls living at home, so that the two studies supplement each other. The low contributions to the family reported by Miss Bosworth show that the girl earning three to five dollars is barely able to live, but her evidence that the higher-paid girl contributes a larger sum (about four dollars and a half a week) to the family, and supplements her payments by labor in the home indicates that she is really self-supporting, because she is living practically under a coöperative system. What she thus saves over the girl who spends five or six dollars a week for sustenance results in a higher standard of living or an opportunity to save. It is doubtless due to this lower cost of board and room while living at home that the girl who in Miss Bosworth’s study does not receive a living wage is in Miss French’s experience able to begin to save. Here, furthermore, is doubtless the explanation of the fact that while a girl living alone is generally not able to live on a satisfactory standard under a wage of nine dollars a week, the girl living at home, or coöperatively, begins to save on a six to nine-dollar wage.

Taking up simply the woman living alone, we find ourselves confronted with a study of factory workers, waitresses, clerks, saleswomen and kitchen workers. A standard of housing is far easier to determine than one of food. Size of room and location naturally affect rents; but it is hard to reach satisfactory conclusions concerning number of windows, sunlight, heat, bathroom accommodations, and number of roommates. Provision for food is made in the following ways:

1. Cooking in one’s own room.

2. Basement dining rooms.

3. Working girls’ homes.

4. Meals included for service in restaurants and hotels.

They are presented in order of excellence. “Home cooking” means serious danger to health; over-fatigue results in cold meals or no meals rather than expenditure of the energy necessary for preparation. The basement dining room serving twenty-one meals for $3 is “invariably poor,” says Miss Bosworth. Strictly speaking, the subsidized working girls’ home should not be considered in a discussion of the standards of independent working girls. To calculate a “living wage” on such a basis does injustice to thousands of girls who could not if they would find accommodation in working girls’ homes.

What standard, then, are these girls able to attain? Miss Bosworth says: “Between the three, four and five-dollar woman and the next higher division there is a big increase in food expenditures, corresponding to the jump in rent found at this same point. Also corresponding to the rent, the difference between the six, seven and eight-dollar group and the next higher is less marked. Either, then, the increase in wage up to eight dollars goes at once into food and rent, or as is probable, this marks the point of departure from the intolerably crowded share in a tenement dweller’s home to the perhaps equally comfortless but more independent room in a lodging house. In paying the increased amount of room rent the three advantages the girl on higher wages gains are a room to herself, heat of some sort, and sunshine. These advantages come to the majority only when the wage has reached at least $9.” In securing food, the girl on the higher wage patronizes the $4 dining rooms, which are “so attractive in appearance, and so adequate in food as to be thoroughly satisfactory.”

The subject of clothing brings at once two great problems. Here the measure of the standard of living is apparent. A girl may make sacrifices in room and board without immediate effect upon her opportunities to secure employment: but a sacrifice in dress may mean the loss of position--such is the consensus of opinion. The custom of instalment buying follows as a natural result. It is in the field of dress that the individual ability of the girl is most apparent. Innate taste, knowledge of materials, physical strength and opportunity to hunt bargains, readiness to forfeit sleep in order to get time to remodel or make clothes--all these things tell. Home and school training may help raise standards. Miss Bosworth concludes: “The average working woman, with only the average ability to manage her wardrobe economically, with the average trade demands on it, and with the average amount of time for sewing and mending, cannot dress on less than $1 a week as a minimum, and does not need as a dress allowance more than $2 a week.” Elsewhere she states: “The severest strain of providing clothes comes on incomes under $9; when an income of $12 is reached, the strain is perceptibly lessened.”

Apparently a satisfactory standard--one which affords a room meeting reasonable requirements, nourishing food, respectable clothing, medical attendance, and incidentals of simple type, requires a wage of not less than $9.

I regret that the shortness of space prevents a glance at the contributions of the working girl to church, charity and the support of others, or her expenditures for self-education and recreation. Suffice it to say that the amount which goes for charity, for necessary incidentals and for education bears a creditable relation to that expended for recreation.

The savings bank insurance study is most significant in its confirmation of the inadequacy of a three to five-dollar or even a six to eight-dollar wage. Even though the girls whose records were thus secured came largely from the group living at home, it was only in the nine to twelve-dollar wage group that real savings became possible.

One scarcely dares accept the conclusion suggested by these facts, that the minimum wage should be not less than $9, there are so many modifying circumstances. Nor dares one assert that certain sums represent the “cost of living”, it is so hard to determine a standard of living. How can we fix the minimum or average of rent? How can we place a limit on expenditure for food and clothing? How can we tell how much of inefficiency is due to inadequacy of food, clothing and shelter, how much to lack of training, how much to youth? All results thus far obtained are only indicative; intensive scientific investigation and cautious interpretation are needed to establish conclusions that shall command general assent.

FOOTNOTES:

See report on “The Economic Efficiency of College Women,” by the writer of this paper, published in the Magazine of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, February, 1910.

Miss Davida C. French was director of the savings bank insurance committee of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, 1909-1910, under which this study was made.

The results of the investigation will be published this year. Information with regard to this publication may be secured from the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, 264 Boylston St., Boston, Mass.

A NEW SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT

MARY KINGSBURY SIMKHOVITCH

Greenwich House, New York City

The entrance of women into industry means that they are going out from the home. Closely related to the new economic status of women is a new social adjustment to a larger world. I shall not attempt in this paper to go beyond the consideration of what is happening before our eyes in New York.

It is very interesting to see how much more concerned people are about growing boys in great cities than they are about girls. This is really illogical, for what is happening to girls is happening in a very special way to the race. Everyone says glibly enough that the position of woman in any society is an index of that society’s civilization. This fact seems to be perceived, however, rather as some sort of bookish generalization than as a subject of social concern, which ought to be connected with a positive social purpose.

It would be idle to claim that the situation of the young girl entering industry in New York to-day is in any way socially satisfactory. It is not. There is a social--or as some prefer to call it, moral--instability at the present time that is very serious. The purity of the working girl is under a terrific strain, and it is criminal to close our eyes to the fact. Those who know this to be the case seem almost committed to a policy of silence. While they realize the gravity of the facts, they are also among the sincerest admirers and friends of the working girl, and they do not want to create the impression that there is anything inherently debased about this army of youthful women workers. It would, in fact, be a total misrepresentation to picture the working girl as in any way different from any other girl. She is, of course, the same sort of person as the society girl or the so-called middle-class girl, but her position at just this juncture is a more difficult one than that of any other young woman, for she is stepping out from the most old-fashioned type of family into the newest type of industry. This new social adjustment is just as inevitable as the economic adjustments that followed the industrial revolution.

The working girl is stepping out of the most intimate, the most mutually conscious type of family life that exists, that of humble people. This old patriarchal family has a strength and an intensive character that other families lack. Exceptions to the type in no way alter the general rule. The father is an unremitting toiler but his pleasures are centered in the home and the family. The mother is the disburser of the weekly income handed to her intact in the Saturday night envelope. Her power and influence are supreme as long as the family holds together. The children early absorb the traditional ideas of the parents undiluted by the variations presented to families of larger income where tutors, dancing instructors and music teachers share or supersede the parents’ care. There is thus built up a solid structure of tradition, interdependence and loyalty with which the family life of other economic groups cannot compare. This structure, seemingly almost absolutely firm, is undergoing under modern city conditions a strain never met before, and the family is not holding its own. What cause is at work to alter the ancient type? Undoubtedly the breakup is a byproduct of the industrial revolution. Many of the old duties and opportunities of women have been taken from them. The introduction of a greater variety of diet involving less cooking, the greater simplicity in decoration involving less cleaning, the communal care of garbage, the central system of heating and lighting, the cheapness of ready-made clothing, all these changes have lessened the burden of housework and to a certain extent have freed the housewife from drudgery. The care of children is increasingly being taken over by the community with its kindergartens, its public schools, its parks, its recreation centers, its nurses and its hospitals. Thus while the woman is still the dominating figure in the home, the center of gravity of that home so to speak has shifted; and we find the life that was once that of the home is now that of the community as well. It is the old process of differentiation from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. It is because there is less to do at home that the children must of economic necessity find their life outside. The daughter who would once have stayed at home to help with the children now becomes the public school teacher and helps many children. The daughter who would once have made the clothes of her sister is now making the clothes of other sisters at the dressmaker’s or in the factory.

The entrance of women into industry is an act of necessity. Women have in the beginning gone to work in factories and in shops and in all occupations outside the home, not from choice but because the industrial revolution has so altered the conditions of life that such a departure from the home was rendered inevitable. Woman has entered industry half-heartedly. She is not work-conscious as she is home-conscious. The old home tradition remains with her as a powerful sentiment. Her interest is the home. She expects to return to a home life of her own. Industrial work is a mere interlude. It is this work interlude that is so fraught with danger from the very fact that it is a makeshift. It is still unrelated to the deepest conscious or unconscious purpose of the girl.

When we say the New York working girl whom do we mean? We mean to a certain extent the American girl, i. e., the girl who has drifted to New York from up state or from other states. Such girls are homeless here. The difficulty is not the inadequacy of home life, but its absolute lack. For these girls some substitute must be provided. But the great bulk of girls in industry in New York are not American, but Irish, Jewish, and last of all, Italian. Taken as a whole, it cannot be said that the Irish girl’s entrance into industry has corrupted her as a woman. Surrounded by temptation, keenly enjoying pleasure, the Irish girl yet possesses that combination of reserve, good taste and self-possession that protects her more surely than any mere parental inhibition. But in addition to the protection of the family, she enjoys the aid of religion, which constantly inculcates the preservation of purity. The Irish girl is a religious girl, a devoted Catholic. Ever before her is a picture of the ideal woman, Mary the Mother of God. “Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and in the hour of death,” is said daily by thousands of Irish girls before they go to work and before they lie down to sleep. Mechanical as this may often be, it is a mental habit as strong as a physical habit. And habits serve as a prop to the will when stress comes. It would be near the truth to say that whatever the reason,--Catholic training, native chastity, an inborn sense of restraint and good taste, or all these together, Irish girls form but a small element of the group of women workers in danger of corruption.

This danger is more intimately connected with Jewish and Italian girls. The Jewish girl comes from a protected and highly developed family life. She also has been brought up in a great traditional religion as her spiritual environment. But the orthodox Jewish religion, though fundamentally social in character, is often apperceived as merely a racial custom. The Jewish ideas of the family and of religion are so intimately connected that the child who is ceasing to be held by one will not be held by the other. In this respect there is a great difference between the Catholic and the Jew. The Catholic girl thinks of her religion as greater than anything else, including the family; the Jewish girl thinks of her religion as part of her family life, to stand or fall together with it. Moreover, though in both religions man is priest--in one as head of the church and in the other as head of the family--yet in the Jewish religion there is nothing corresponding to that devotion to the Virgin which naively and almost hypnotically involves an unconscious idealism of womanhood. The Jewish girl also, while perhaps not personally so proud as the Irish, is in many ways more ambitious and purposive. She desires to have all that the world offers. This purposive characteristic, so noble if devoted to high ends, and so dangerous if directed to pleasure alone, is seen more evidently in the Jewish girl than in any other.