How would you like to live on $10 a week?
Because You See Rouge and Furs Is No Sign of Decaying Morals
Says Factory Girls are Good-Hearted, Clean-Charactered Little Things.
MARRIAGE MAIN OBJECTIVE
Won’t Take Work Seriously, but Live in Dream of Having a Home.
How would you like to live on $10 a week? Or even $16.25, which is the medium weekly earnings of girls in four factory industries in New York City—candy, paper box, shirt and collar and tobacco? Thousands are getting less than $10.
In mercantile industries they do a little better: $17.25 a week is the average. If you pay envelope contains $25 or more you are among the seven per cent of factory workers who get that much or of the thirteen per cent of mercantile employees who do.
Gloria Swanson receives $2,500 a week. In the ten-cent store a prettier youngster than Gloria told us yesterday she got $13. Which started us wondering.
We asked Nellie Swartz about it. Miss Swartz is director of the bureau of women in industry, State Department of Labor, with offices at No. 124 East Twentieth-eighth street, and she knows a lot about the poor working girl.
We wanted to know what sets wage scales? Does Gloria contribute more to the sum of the country’s well-being then a Supreme Court Justice or a bank president? And why does Sophie Bazitz, in the candy wrapping factory, get less pay for wrapping caramels than we do for writing a piece in the paper about her? (Editor:--please don’t delete our wages until you see us about it.)
“That,” says Nellie Swartz, “has always puzzled me, too. I suppose it is bargaining ability. Environment, education, initiative and the law of supply and demand enter into it. But in the end it all comes down to bargaining power.
Worker Sees Only Marriage.
“The world is willing to pay highly or entertainment and only a few qualify. But the main trouble with the working girl is that her work is not serious to her. Marriage is her career, her life. It is an old, old story and a deep, deep psychology. Give the average working girl her choice between working slowly up to the head of her department, with $50 a week pay, and sticking at a $12 job for three years, with marriage at the end of it, and she’ll choose marriage without an instant’s hesitation.
“It may be the poorest kind of marriage, with drudgery, many babies, sickness, poverty and a drab tenement, but it is marriage. A man wants her. She is chosen. She is the mistress of a home. She has her own time to some extent. She has her rightful place in life.”
This, says Miss Swartz, is why employers do not bother to train girls for high places. They won’t stick. Even the exceptional ones won’t. They won’t join unions as men do.
It is estimated by the Minimum Wage Commission that at the rate of growth now shown by the trade unions it will be 129 years before all the women of the State are organized.
It is now more to a boss’ advantage to keep a girl pulling out basting threads, so that he can replace her without difficulty, than to encourage her to be forewoman or office manager and have her quit as soon as Sam Right comes along.
How They Do It on $15 Per.
But all this does not tell us how a girl manages to live on $10 or $15 a week until Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong does arrive with the wedding ring and three-room flat.
We know that in France a girl is not supposed to live on her meager pay. Wages are upon a quite different and extremely sophisticated social standard, just as marriages are arranged, not upon a basis of love and personal happiness, but with a view to expediency and family cohesion.
In this country it is different. Wages are supposed to be lived on. Miss Swartz says the ARE, to. And that because the working-girl is over-lavish with lipstick and rouge-puff, wears ball gowns to business and sports a fur coat, you are not to assume her morals are less stable than those of her Ritzy little sister of Fifth avenue.
“On the contrary,” Nellie Swartz assures us, “I believe they are better. Factory girls are decent, good-hearted, clean-charactered little things for the most part. But they have the fetish of clothes.”
We decided to ask Sophie herself about it. We picked up a Sophie wearing a tricky little stew-pot hat, a sleeveless frock, seal dolman and “nude” silk hose.
“I make gen’ly twelve,” said Sophie, when the preliminaries were over and confidence established, “Sometimes fourteen-fifty. SURE it’s hard getting along—” Here a shrug that said “But what can you do?” “Live? Say lissen, don’t blab this to the boss, he thinks I live at home. He only hires girls that live home. But my folks live an hour’s subway ride from where I work and believe me, I had enough of that.”
“I got a room in a flat over on East Third. I sleep with the kids—three-a them. Three-fifty a week. I make my own breakfast—oh I dunno, tea and bread sometimes coffee-cake. Twenty cents' lunch, or maybe a quarter. Dinners? Well I ain’t such a chromo I can’t get a few dinners out?
“Fellows?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Why not, indeed? What would life be with nothing to do but pack chocolates, eat with the folks on East Third and sleep with the hausfrau’s three kids!
But in Sophie’s level gaze we read just what Miss Swartz said:—Decency, a good heart, the love of clothes and the determination to get married. Speaking of clothes:—
“The fur coat?” echoed Sophie. “Division street. $195. Ten down and the rest gradual. Underthings by Woolworth,” she added with a glint of fun.
Sophie confided that her “fellow” was nearly to the point of proposing, that he was a cutter and she met him “to a dance.”
We shall probably come across Sophie on Riverside Drive in 1927 fulfilling her destiny in a mink coat and limousine while we step back to avoid its splashings.
[Zoe Beckley, “Because You See Rouge . . .” New York Telegraph and Evening Mail, c. January, 1924.]
Says Factory Girls are Good-Hearted, Clean-Charactered Little Things.
MARRIAGE MAIN OBJECTIVE
Won’t Take Work Seriously, but Live in Dream of Having a Home.
Shop Girl Philosophy;
Clean Bill of Health
“Unions would help win higher wages. But the only union working girls will join is marriage.”
“More than 30,000 girls in New York earn $10 a week, yet somehow they manage to keep decent.”
“Fur coats and lipsticks don’t mean decadent morals. The American working girl is clean-charactered.”
“The ‘life’ of the average working girl in business is three years. Then she exchanges the factory for the kitchen.”
How would you like to live on $10 a week? Or even $16.25, which is the medium weekly earnings of girls in four factory industries in New York City—candy, paper box, shirt and collar and tobacco? Thousands are getting less than $10.
In mercantile industries they do a little better: $17.25 a week is the average. If you pay envelope contains $25 or more you are among the seven per cent of factory workers who get that much or of the thirteen per cent of mercantile employees who do.
Gloria Swanson receives $2,500 a week. In the ten-cent store a prettier youngster than Gloria told us yesterday she got $13. Which started us wondering.
We asked Nellie Swartz about it. Miss Swartz is director of the bureau of women in industry, State Department of Labor, with offices at No. 124 East Twentieth-eighth street, and she knows a lot about the poor working girl.
We wanted to know what sets wage scales? Does Gloria contribute more to the sum of the country’s well-being then a Supreme Court Justice or a bank president? And why does Sophie Bazitz, in the candy wrapping factory, get less pay for wrapping caramels than we do for writing a piece in the paper about her? (Editor:--please don’t delete our wages until you see us about it.)
“That,” says Nellie Swartz, “has always puzzled me, too. I suppose it is bargaining ability. Environment, education, initiative and the law of supply and demand enter into it. But in the end it all comes down to bargaining power.
Worker Sees Only Marriage.
“The world is willing to pay highly or entertainment and only a few qualify. But the main trouble with the working girl is that her work is not serious to her. Marriage is her career, her life. It is an old, old story and a deep, deep psychology. Give the average working girl her choice between working slowly up to the head of her department, with $50 a week pay, and sticking at a $12 job for three years, with marriage at the end of it, and she’ll choose marriage without an instant’s hesitation.
“It may be the poorest kind of marriage, with drudgery, many babies, sickness, poverty and a drab tenement, but it is marriage. A man wants her. She is chosen. She is the mistress of a home. She has her own time to some extent. She has her rightful place in life.”
This, says Miss Swartz, is why employers do not bother to train girls for high places. They won’t stick. Even the exceptional ones won’t. They won’t join unions as men do.
It is estimated by the Minimum Wage Commission that at the rate of growth now shown by the trade unions it will be 129 years before all the women of the State are organized.
It is now more to a boss’ advantage to keep a girl pulling out basting threads, so that he can replace her without difficulty, than to encourage her to be forewoman or office manager and have her quit as soon as Sam Right comes along.
How They Do It on $15 Per.
But all this does not tell us how a girl manages to live on $10 or $15 a week until Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong does arrive with the wedding ring and three-room flat.
We know that in France a girl is not supposed to live on her meager pay. Wages are upon a quite different and extremely sophisticated social standard, just as marriages are arranged, not upon a basis of love and personal happiness, but with a view to expediency and family cohesion.
In this country it is different. Wages are supposed to be lived on. Miss Swartz says the ARE, to. And that because the working-girl is over-lavish with lipstick and rouge-puff, wears ball gowns to business and sports a fur coat, you are not to assume her morals are less stable than those of her Ritzy little sister of Fifth avenue.
“On the contrary,” Nellie Swartz assures us, “I believe they are better. Factory girls are decent, good-hearted, clean-charactered little things for the most part. But they have the fetish of clothes.”
We decided to ask Sophie herself about it. We picked up a Sophie wearing a tricky little stew-pot hat, a sleeveless frock, seal dolman and “nude” silk hose.
“I make gen’ly twelve,” said Sophie, when the preliminaries were over and confidence established, “Sometimes fourteen-fifty. SURE it’s hard getting along—” Here a shrug that said “But what can you do?” “Live? Say lissen, don’t blab this to the boss, he thinks I live at home. He only hires girls that live home. But my folks live an hour’s subway ride from where I work and believe me, I had enough of that.”
“I got a room in a flat over on East Third. I sleep with the kids—three-a them. Three-fifty a week. I make my own breakfast—oh I dunno, tea and bread sometimes coffee-cake. Twenty cents' lunch, or maybe a quarter. Dinners? Well I ain’t such a chromo I can’t get a few dinners out?
“Fellows?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Why not, indeed? What would life be with nothing to do but pack chocolates, eat with the folks on East Third and sleep with the hausfrau’s three kids!
But in Sophie’s level gaze we read just what Miss Swartz said:—Decency, a good heart, the love of clothes and the determination to get married. Speaking of clothes:—
“The fur coat?” echoed Sophie. “Division street. $195. Ten down and the rest gradual. Underthings by Woolworth,” she added with a glint of fun.
Sophie confided that her “fellow” was nearly to the point of proposing, that he was a cutter and she met him “to a dance.”
We shall probably come across Sophie on Riverside Drive in 1927 fulfilling her destiny in a mink coat and limousine while we step back to avoid its splashings.
[Zoe Beckley, “Because You See Rouge . . .” New York Telegraph and Evening Mail, c. January, 1924.]
posted by A. Mattson at 10:50 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home