“Scanty Meals Are Forced on Working Girls"
Excerpts from a speech by Miss Martha C. Sears,
head of woman’s department of the Bank of United States:
[. . .] "Not long since a girl who was getting $23 a week came in to see me. I found that she was eating at cheap self-serve restaurants and spent only $2 a week on lunch and carfare, but she wasn’t saving anything to speak of, and she wanted me to tell her how she could. I asked her how much she paid for the hat she was wearing. Ten dollars, she said. I was shocked. No girl who is earning only $23 a week and saving next to nothing should spend that much for a hat. There are plenty of shops where becoming millinery can be bought for $3. But she said she had seen that hat and had liked it so she took it.”
“The average wage for a woman in New York is $20 a week, and of that seven or eight dollars must be spent for a room. If she spends six or seven more each week, on an average, for clothes and attempts to save anything out of the balance, she cuts down on her food allowance until she impairs her efficiency and can hardly hope for better pay in the future. One serious effect of high rentals is that they make wage-earning women hopeless and get them into a rut, so that they do their work mechanically and indifferently.”
“This country spends $200,000,000 a year for sweets, more than half as much for soda and ice cream cones, and $13,000,000 for chewing gum. How much is spent for lipsticks and rouge I don’t know. But it is safe to say that working women contribute a large share to these items of extravagance.”
“American women are gamblers; that’s the truth of it. They gamble on cosmetics and Hudson seal. They gamble on flashy, shoddy garments. Their extravagances are mainly a gamble. All extravagance is a refusal to face the facts, and the gambling instinct is an attempt to escape reality.”
[The reporter concludes that working girls ] "have dressed at the expense of their stomachs. Heightened efficiency would come from spending less on clothes and more on food.”
[New York Times, 1924]
head of woman’s department of the Bank of United States:
[. . .] "Not long since a girl who was getting $23 a week came in to see me. I found that she was eating at cheap self-serve restaurants and spent only $2 a week on lunch and carfare, but she wasn’t saving anything to speak of, and she wanted me to tell her how she could. I asked her how much she paid for the hat she was wearing. Ten dollars, she said. I was shocked. No girl who is earning only $23 a week and saving next to nothing should spend that much for a hat. There are plenty of shops where becoming millinery can be bought for $3. But she said she had seen that hat and had liked it so she took it.”
“The average wage for a woman in New York is $20 a week, and of that seven or eight dollars must be spent for a room. If she spends six or seven more each week, on an average, for clothes and attempts to save anything out of the balance, she cuts down on her food allowance until she impairs her efficiency and can hardly hope for better pay in the future. One serious effect of high rentals is that they make wage-earning women hopeless and get them into a rut, so that they do their work mechanically and indifferently.”
“This country spends $200,000,000 a year for sweets, more than half as much for soda and ice cream cones, and $13,000,000 for chewing gum. How much is spent for lipsticks and rouge I don’t know. But it is safe to say that working women contribute a large share to these items of extravagance.”
“American women are gamblers; that’s the truth of it. They gamble on cosmetics and Hudson seal. They gamble on flashy, shoddy garments. Their extravagances are mainly a gamble. All extravagance is a refusal to face the facts, and the gambling instinct is an attempt to escape reality.”
[The reporter concludes that working girls ] "have dressed at the expense of their stomachs. Heightened efficiency would come from spending less on clothes and more on food.”
[New York Times, 1924]
posted by A. Mattson at 11:31 PM
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