Making Both Ends Meet: The income and outlay of New York working girls

ory workers, both hand workers and machine operatives-among others, packers of drugs, biscuits, and olives, cigarette rollers, box makers, umbrella maker

that of some other worker. So that the synthesis of these chronicles is presented, not as a composite photograph of the industri

ives expressed the effects of monotony and fatigue, from speeding at their tasks. This division must remain loose to convey a truthful impr

s of their histories who were engaged in unskilled factory work. Among them, Emily Clement, a

ment at the envelope machine she had worked, at the age of fourteen, for a year in a carpet mill; then for two years

f her washing, and made some of her sister's clothes and all of her own. This skill had enabled her to have for $5.20, the cost of the material, the pr

twenty-two weeks she had been in the factory she had had full work for eleven and one-half weeks, at $6; half

essness of the future and her natural thirst for pleasure, she som

, intended to escape from her monotonous work and low

to work in the winter dressed in her summer coat, with a little woollen under-jacket to protect her from the cold, and a plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the American girls. Sarina scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to

her own-a splendid, generous world of the English tragedies she studied at night

e had $3 a week at first, and then $5, for ten hours' work a day. She left this place because the employer was very lax about payment, and sometimes cheated her out of sm

edroom. Although she did not live with them, her mother and father were in New York, and she had her dinners with them

clear determination to escape from them by educating herself. Her fate might be expre

persons in the world could eve

nineteen, was also trying to escape from her present position by educ

e ends of threads from men's suspenders, and folding and placing them in boxes. She earned at first $3 a week, and had been advanced to $5 by a 50-cent rise at every one of the last four Christmases sin

or a suit; $2 for a hat; and $2 for a pair of shoes she had worn for ten months. Her board and lodging with a married sister had cost her $2.50 a week, less in one way than with strangers. But she slept with p

ney back to Austria to see her mother and father. Although both their children were in the new country

an woman of forty, a slight, gentle-voiced little widow, who had been packing candies and tying and labelling boxes for sixteen years.

n Mrs. Hallett's case this was partly because the next step would have been to become a clerk in one of the company's retail stores, and she was not strong enough to end

tch cold because "she wasn't used to it." She lighted a small candle to show her the room, furnished with one straight hard chair, a cot, and a wash-stand with a broken pitcher, but with barely space besides for Mrs. Clark and her kind, public-spirited lit

because, as she had no laundry facilities, she was obliged to have her washing done outside. Sometimes she contrived to save a dollar a week toward buying clothing. But this meant living less tidily by having less washing done, or going hungrier. During the last year her expense for clothing had been a little more than $23: summer hat, $1; winter hat, $1.98; best hat, $2;

e theatre with some young girl friends, paying 25 cents

l experience of the women workers in unskilled factory labor who gave acc