195 Irons “Family"

How long, I wonder, does one study or work at anything before one feels justified in generalizing?

I have been re-reading of late some of the writings of some of the women who at one time or another essayed to experience first hand the life of the working girl. They have a bit dismayed me. Is it exactly fair, what they do? They thought, because they changed their names and wore cheap clothes, that, presto! they were as workers and could pass on to an uninformed reading public the trials of the worker. (Incidentally they were all trials.) I had read in the past those heartrending books and articles and found it ever difficult to hold back the tears. Sometimes they were written by an immigrant, a bona-fide worker. The tragedy of such a life in this business-ridden land of ours tore one’s soul.

An educated, cultured individual, used to a life of ease, or easier, if she had wished to make it that, would find the life of the factory worker well-nigh unbearable. An emotional girl longing for the higher things of life would find factory life galling beyond words. It is to be regretted that there are not more educated and cultured people-that more folk do not long for the higher things of life-that factory work is not galling to everybody. But the fact seems to be, if we dare generalize, that there are a very great many persons in this world who are neither educated nor “cultured” nor filled with spiritual longings. The observation might be made that all such are not confined to the working classes; that the country at large, from Fifth Avenue, New York, to Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Market Street, San Francisco, is considerably made up of folk who are not educated or “cultured” or of necessity filled with unsatiable longings of the soul.

It is partly due to the fact that only recently-as geologic time is reckoned-we were swinging in trees, yearning probably for little else than a nut to crack, a mate, a shelter of sorts, something of ape company, and now and then a chance for a bit of a scrap. It is partly due to the fact that for the great majority of people, the life they live from the cradle up is not the sort that matures them with a growing ambition or opportunity to experience the “finer” things of life. One point of view would allow that the reason we have so few educated, cultured, and aspiring people is due to a combination of unfortunate circumstances to do with heredity and environment. They would be cultured and spiritual if only....

The other viewpoint argues that the only reason we have as many cultured and spiritual people as we have is due to a fortunate-“lucky”-combination of circumstances to do with heredity and environment. These more advanced folk would be far fewer in number if it had not happened that....

It is mostly the “educated and cultured” persons who write the more serious books we read and who tell us what they and the rest of the world think and feel and do-or ought to do. The rest of the world never read what they ought to think and feel and do, and go blithely-or otherwise-on their way thinking and feeling and doing-what they please, or as circumstances force them.

After all, the world is a very subjective thing, and what makes life worth living to one person is not necessarily what makes it worth living to another. Certain fundamental things everybody is apt to want: enough to eat (but what a gamut that “enough” can run!); a mate (the range and variety of mates who do seem amply to satisfy one another!); a shelter to retire to nights (what a bore if we all had to live complacently on the Avenue!); children to love and fuss over-but one child does some parents and ten children do others, and some mothers go into a decline if everything is not sterilized twice a day and everybody clean behind the ears, and other mothers get just as much satisfaction out of their young when there is only one toothbrush, if that, for everybody (we are writing from the mother’s viewpoint and not the welfare of the offspring); some possessions of one’s own, but not all stocks and bonds and a box of jewels in the bank, or a library, or an automobile, or even a house and lot, before peace reigns.

Everyone likes to mingle with his kind now and then; to some it is subjectively necessary to hire a caterer, to others peanuts suffice. Everyone likes to wonder and ponder and express opinions-a prize fight is sufficient material for some; others prefer metaphysics. Everyone likes to play. Some need box seats at the Midnight Frolic, others a set of second-hand tools, and yet others a game of craps in the kitchen.

No one likes to be hungry, to be weary, to be sick, to be worried over the future, to be lonely, to have his feelings hurt, to lose those near and dear to him, to have too little independence, to get licked in a scrap of any kind, to have no one at all who loves him, to have nothing at all to do. The people of the so-called working class are more apt to be hungry, weary, and sick than the “educated and cultured” and well-to-do. Otherwise there is no one to say-because there is no way it can be found out-that their lives by and large are not so rich, subjectively speaking, as those with one hundred thousand dollars a year, or with Ph. D. degrees.

Most folk in the world are not riotously happy, not because they are poor, or “workers,” but because the combination making for riotous happiness-shall we say health, love, enough to do of what one longs to do-is not often found in one individual. The condition of the bedding, of the clothing; the pictures on the wall; the smells in the kitchen-and beyond; the food on the table-have so much, and no more, to do with it. Whether one sorts soiled clothes in a laundry, or reclines on a chaise-longue with thirty-eight small hand-embroidered and belaced pillows and a pink satin covering, or sits in a library and fusses over Adam Smith, no one of the three is in a position to pass judgment on the satisfaction or lack of satisfaction of the other two.

All of which is something of an impatient retort to those who look at the world through their own eyes and by no means a justification of the status quo. And to introduce the statement-which a month ago would have seemed to me incredible-that I have seen and heard as much contentment in a laundry as I have in the drawing-room of a Fifth Avenue mansion or a college sorority house-as much and no more. Which is not arguing that no improvements need ever be made in laundries.

There was one place I was not going to work, and that was a laundry! I had been through laundries, I had read about laundries, and it was too much to ask anyone-if it was not absolutely necessary-to work in a laundry. And yet when the time came, I hated to leave the laundry. I entered the laundry as a martyr. I left with the nickname, honestly come by without a Christian effort, of “Sunbeam.” But, oh! I have a large disgust upon me that it takes such untold effort every working day, all over the “civilized,” world to keep people “civilized.” The labor, and labor, and labor of first getting cloth woven and buttons and thread manufactured and patterns cut and garments made up, and fitted, or not, and then to keep those garments clean! We talk with such superiority of the fact that we wear clothes and heathen savages get along with beads and rushes. For just that some six hundred and fifty thousand people work six days a week doing laundry work alone-not to mention mother at the home washboard-or electric machine. We must be clean, of course, or we would not be civilized, but I do not see why we need be so fearfully sot up about it.

A new Monday morning came along, and I waited from 7.40 to 9.15 in a six-by-nine entry room, with some twenty-five men and women, to answer the advertisement:

GIRLS, OVER 18

with public school education, to learn machine ironing, marking, and assorting linens; no experience necessary; splendid opportunity for right parties; steady positions; hours 8 to 5.30; half day Saturday.

What the idea was of advertising for superior education never became clear. No one was asked how far she had progressed intellectually. I venture to say the majority of girls there had had no more than the rudiments of the three r’s. It looked well in print. One of the girls from the brassworks stood first in line. She had tried two jobs since I saw her last. She did not try the laundry at all.

I was third in line. The manager himself interviewed us inside, since the “Welfare Worker” was ill. What experience had I? I was experienced in both foot and power presses. He phoned to the “family” floor-two vacancies. I was signed up as press ironer, family. I wouldn’t find it so hard as the brassworks-in fact, it really wasn’t hard at all. He would start me in at fourteen dollars a week, since I was experienced, instead of the usual twelve. At the end of two weeks, if I wasn’t earning more than fourteen dollars-it was a piecework system, with fourteen dollars as a minimum-I’d have to go, and make room for some one who could earn more than fourteen dollars.

I wonder if the Welfare Worker would have made the same speech. That manager was a fraud. On our floor, at least, no one had ever been known to earn more than her weekly minimum. He was a smart fraud. Only I asked too many questions upstairs, he would have had me working like a slave to hold my job.

By the time clock, where I was told to wait, stood the woman just ahead of me in the line. She was the first really bitter soul I had run across in factory work. Her husband had been let out of his job, along with all workers in his plant, without notice. After January 1st they might reopen, but at 1914 wages. There was one child in the family. The father had hunted everywhere for work. For one week the mother had searched. She had tried a shoe polish factory; they put her on gluing labels. The smell of the glue made her terribly sick to her stomach-for three days she was forced to stay in bed. Three times she had tried this laundry. Each day, after keeping her waiting in line an hour or so, they had told her to come back the next day. At last she had gotten as far as the time clock. I saw her several times in the evening line after that; she was doing “pretty well”-“shaking” on the third floor. Her arms nearly dropped off by evening, but she sure was glad of the thirteen dollars a week. Her husband had found nothing.

The third to join our time-clock ranks was a Porto-Rican. She could speak no English at all. They put her at scrubbing floors for twelve dollars a week. About 4 that afternoon she appeared on our floor, all agitated. She needed a Spanish girl there to tell the boss she was leaving. She was one exercised piece of temper when it finally penetrated just what her job was.

“Family” occupied two-thirds of the sixth and top floor-the other third was the “lunch room.” Five flights to walk up every morning. But at least there was the lunch room without a step up at noon. And it was worth climbing five flights to have Miss Cross for a forelady. Sooner or later I must run into a disagreeable forelady, for the experience. To hear folks talk, plenty of that kind exist. Miss Cross was glad I was to be on her floor. She told the manager and me she’d noticed me that morning in line and just thought I’d made a good press ironer. Was I Eyetalian?

She gave me the second press from the door, right in front of a window, and a window open at the top. That was joy for me, but let no one think the average factory girl consciously pines for fresh air. Miss Cross ironed the lowers of a pair of pajamas to show me how it was done, then the coat part. While she was instructing me in such intricacies, she was deftly finding out all she could about my past, present, and future-married or single, age, religion, and so on. And I watched, fascinated, crumpled pajama legs, with one mighty press of the foot, appear as perfect and flawless as on the Christmas morning they were first removed from the holly-decorated box.

“Now you do it.”

I took the coat part of a pair of pink pajamas, smoothed one arm a bit by hand as I laid it out on the stationary side of the ironing press, shaped somewhat like a large metal sleeve board. With both hands I gripped the wooden bar on the upper part, all metal but the bar. With one foot I put most of my weight on the large pedal. That locked the hot metal part on the padded, heated, lower half with a bang. A press on the release pedal, the top flew up-too jarringly, if you did not keep hold of the bar with one hand. That ironed one side of one sleeve. Turn the other side, press, release. Do the other sleeve on two sides. Do the shoulders all around-about four presses and releases to that. Another to one side of the front-two if it is for a big fat man. One under the arm, two or three to the back, one under the other arm, one or two to the other half of the front, one, two, or three to the collar, depending on the style. About sixteen clanks pressing down, sixteen releases flying up, to one gentleman’s pajama coat. I had the hang of it, and was left alone. Then I combined ironing and seeing what was what. If a garment was very damp-and most of them were-the press had to be locked several seconds before being released, to dry it out. During those seconds one’s eyes were free to wander.

On my left, next the door, worked a colored girl with shell-rimmed spectacles, very friendly, whose name was Irma. Of Irma later. On my right was the most woebegone-looking soul, an Italian widow, Lucia, in deep mourning-husband dead five weeks, with two daughters to support. She could not speak a word of English, and in this country sixteen years. All this I had from the forelady in between her finding out everything there was to know about me. Bless my soul, if Lucia did not perk up the second the forelady left, edge over, and direct a volume of Italian at me. What won’t green earrings do! Old Mrs. Reilly called out, “Ach, the poor soul’s found a body to talk to at last!” But, alas! Lucia’s hope was short lived. “What!” called Mrs. Reilly, “you ain’t Eyetalian? Well, you ought to be, now, because you look it, and because there ought to be somebody here for Lucy to talk to!” Lucia was diseased-looking and unkempt-looking and she ironed very badly. Everyone tried to help her out. They instructed her with a flow of English. When Lucia would but shake her head they used the same flow, only much louder, several at once. Then Lucia would mumble to herself for several minutes over her ironing. At times, late in the afternoon, Miss Cross would grow discouraged.

“Don’t you understand that when you iron a shirt you put the sleeves over the puffer first?”

Lucia would shake her head and shrug her shoulders helplessly. Miss Cross would repeat with vehemence. Then one girl would poke Lucia and point to the puffer-“Puffer! puffer!” Another would hold up a shirt and holler “Shirt! shirt!” and Lucia would nod vaguely. The next shirt she did as all the others-puffer last, which mussed the ironed part-until some one stopped her work and did a whole shirt for Lucia correct, from beginning to end.

Next to Lucia stood Fanny, colored. She was a good-hearted, helpful, young married thing, not over-cleanly and not overstrong. That first morning she kept her eye on me and came to my rescue on a new article of apparel every so often. Next to Fanny stood the three puffers for anyone to use-oval-shaped, hot metal forms, for all gathers, whether in sleeves, waists, skirts, or what not. Each girl had a large egg-shaped puffer on her own table as well. Next to the puffers stood the two sewing machines, where Spanish Sarah and colored Hattie darned and mended.

At the side, behind the machines, stood Ida at her press. All the presses were exactly alike. Ida was a joy to my eyes. At first glance she appeared just a colored girl, but Ida was from Trinidad; her skin was like velvet, her accent Spanish. As the room grew hot from the presses and the steam, along about 4, and our feet began to burn and grow weary, I would look at Ida. It was so easy to picture the exact likes of her, not more than a generation or two ago, squatting under a palm tree with a necklace of teeth, a ring through her nose, tropic breezes playing on that velvet skin. (Please, I know naught of Trinidad or its customs and am only guessing.) And here stood Ida, thumping, thumping on the ironing press, nine hours, lacking ten minutes, a day, on the sixth floor of a laundry in Harlem, that we in Manhattan might be more civilized.

Once she told me she had lost fifteen pounds in this country. “How?”

“Ah, child,” she said, “it’s tha mother sickness. Don’t you ever know it? Back home in Trinidad are my mother, my father, my two little boys. Oh, tha sickness to see them! But what is one to do when you marry a poor man? He must come to this country to find work, and then, after a while, I must come, too.”

Behind Ida stood two other colored girls, and at the end press a white girl who started the day after I did. She stayed only five days, and left in disgust-told me she’d never seen such hard work. Beyond the last press were the curtain frames and the large, round padded table for ironing fancy table linen by hand. Then began the lunch tables.

Behind the row of presses by the windows stood the hand ironers who did the fancy work. First came Ella, neat, old, gray-haired, fearfully thin, wrinkled, with a dab of red rouge on each cheek. After all, one really cannot be old if one dabs on rouge before coming to work all day in a laundry. Ella had hand ironed all her life. She had been ten years in her last job, but the place changed hands. She liked ironing, she said. Ella never talked to anybody, even at lunch time.

Behind Ella ironed Anna Golden, black, who wore striped silk stockings. She always had a bad cold. Most of the girls had colds most of the time-from the steam, they said. Anna had spent two dollars on medicine that week, which left her fourteen dollars. Anna was the one person to use an electric iron. It had newly been installed. The others heated their irons over gas flames. Every so often Miss Cross would call out, “I smell gas!” So did everybody else. After Anna, Lucile, blackest of all and a widow. And then-Mrs. Reilly.

Mrs. Reilly and Hattie were the characters of the sixth floor. Mrs. Reilly was old and fat and Irish. She had stood up hand ironing so long the part of her from the waist up seemed to have settled down into her hips. Eleven years had Mrs. Reilly ironed in our laundry. She was the one pieceworker in the building. In summer she could make from twenty to twenty-five dollars a week, but she claimed she lost a great part of it in winter. She said she was anxious to get on timework. One afternoon I saw Mrs. Reilly iron just two things-the rest of the while, nothing to do, she sat on an old stool with her eyes closed.

The first afternoon, Mrs. Reilly edged over to me on pretext of ironing out a bit of something on my press.

“An’ how are you makin’ out?”

“All right, only my feet are awful tired. Don’t your feet never get tired?

“Shure, child, an’ what good would it do for my feet to get tired when they’re all I got to stand on? An’ did you ever try settin’ nine hours a day? Shure an’ that would be the death of anybody.

Mrs. Reilly’s indoor sport was marrying the sixth floor off. Poor Lucia’s widow’s weeds of five weeks were no obstacle to Mrs. Reilly. She frequently made the whole floor giggle, carrying on an animated Irish conversation with Lucia over the prospects of a second marriage-or rather, a monologue it was, since Lucia never knew she was being talked to. If ever there was a body with a “sex complex it was old Mrs. Reilly! When I asked her once why she didn’t get busy marrying off herself, she called back: “The Lord be praised! And didn’t I get more than enough of the one man I had?”

At least twice a week Mrs. Reilly saw a ghost, and she would tell us about it in the morning. She laughed then, and we all laughed, but you could easily picture the poor old fearful soul meeting that inevitable 2 A.M. guest, quaking over it in her lonely bed. Once the ghost was extra terrifying. “It may have been the banama sauce,” admitted Mrs. Reilly. And Mrs. Reilly’s feet did hurt often. She used sometimes to take off her worn shoes and try tying her feet up in cardboards.

The other workers on our floor were Mabel and Mary, two colored girls who finished off slight rough edges in the press ironing and folded everything; Edna, a Cuban girl who did handkerchiefs on the mangle; Annie, the English girl, lately married to an American. She had an inclosure of shelves to work in and there she did the final sorting and wrapping of family wash. Annie was the most superior person on our floor.

And Miss Cross. In face, form, neatness, and manners Miss Cross could have held her own socially anywhere. But according to orthodox standards Miss Cross’s grammar was faulty. She had worked always in our laundry, beginning as a hand ironer. She knew the days when hours were longer than nine and pay lower than fourteen dollars a week. She remembered when the family floor had to iron Saturdays until 10 and 11 at night, instead of getting off at 12.45, as we did now. They stood it in those days; but how? As it was now, not a girl on our floor but whose feet ached more or less by 4 or 4.30. Ordinarily we stopped at 5.30. Everyone knew how everyone else felt that last half hour. During a week with any holiday the girls had to work till 6.15 every night, and Saturday afternoon. They all said-we discussed it early one morning-that in such weeks they could iron scarcely anything that last hour, their feet burned so.

The candy factory was hard-one stood nine hours, but the work was very light.

The brassworks was hard-one sat, but the foot exercise was wearying and the seat fearfully uncomfortable.

Ironing was hardest-one stood all day and used the feet for hard pressure besides. Yet I was sorry to leave the laundry!

Perhaps it was just as well for me that Lucia could not talk English. She might have used it on me, and already the left ear was talked off by Irma. Miss Cross stood for just so much conversation, according to her mood. Even if she were feeling very spry, our sixth-floor talk could become only so general and lively before Miss Cross would call: “Girls! girls! not so much noise!” If it were late in the afternoon that would quiet us for the day-no one had enough energy to start up again.

The first half hour Irma confided in me that she had cravings. “Cravings? Cravings for what?” I asked her.

“Cravings for papers.”

It sounded a trifle goatlike.

“Papers?”

“Yes, papers. I want to read papers on the lecture platform.”

Whereat I heard all Irma’s spiritual longings-cravings. She began in school to do papers. That was two years ago. Since then she has often been asked to read the papers she wrote in school before church audiences. Just last Sunday she read one at her church in New York, and four people asked her afterward for copies.

What was it about?

It was about the True Woman. When she wrote it, she began, “Dear Teacher, Pupils, and Friends.” But when she read it in churches she skipped the Teacher and Pupils and began: “Dear Friends, ... now we are met together on this memorable occasion to consider the subject of the True Woman. First we must ask” (here Irma bangs down on a helpless nightshirt and dries it out well beyond its time into a nice bunch of wrinkles) “What is woman? Woman was created by God because Dear Friends God saw how lonely man was and how lonesome and so out of man’s ribs God created woman to be man’s company and helpmate....”

“Irma!” Miss Cross’s voice had an oft-repeated tone to it. She called out from the table where she checked over each girl’s work without so much as turning her head. “You ironed only one leg of these pajamas!”

Irma shuffled over on her crooked high heels and returned with the half-done pajamas. “That fo’-lady!” sighed Irma, “she sure gets on ma nerves. She’s always hollerin’ at me ‘bout somethin’. She never hollers at the other girls that way-she just picks on me.”

And Irma continued with the True Woman: “There’s another thing the True Woman should have and that’s a good character....”

“Irma!” (slight impatience in Miss Cross’s tone) “you ironed this nightgown on the wrong side!”

Irma looked appealingly at me. “There she goes again. She makes me downright nervous, that fo’-lady does.”

Poor, persecuted Irma!

During that first morning Irma had to iron over at least six things. Then they looked like distraction. I thought of the manager’s introductory speech to me-how after two weeks I might have to make way for a more efficient person.

“How long you been here?” I asked Irma.

“Four months.”

“What you makin’?”

“Thirteen a week.”

“Ever get extra?”

“Na.”

Suspicions concerning the manager.

Irma had three other papers. One was on Testing Time. What was Testing Time? It might concern chemical tubes. It might be a bit of romance. And she really meant Trysting Time. No, to everybody a time comes when he or she must make a great decision. It was about that.

“Irma! you’ve got your foot in the middle of that white apron!”

Another paper was on Etee-quette (q pronounced).

“Irma! you creased one of these pajama legs down the middle! Do it over.”

I pondered much during my laundry days as to why they kept Irma. She told me she first worked down on the shirt-and-collar floor and used to do “one hundred and ten shirts an hour,” but the boss got down on her. It took her sometimes three-quarters of an hour to do one boy’s shirt on our floor, and then one half the time she had it to do over. Her ironing was beyond all words fearful to behold (there must be an Irma in every laundry). She was all-mannered slow. She forgot to tag her work. She hung it over her horse so that cuffs and apron strings were always on the floor. Often she was late. Sometimes Miss Cross would grow desperate-but there Irma remained. Below, in that little entryway, were girls waiting for jobs. Did they figure that on the whole Irma wrecked fewer garments than the average new girl, or what? And the manager had tried to scare me!

The noon bell rings-we dash for the lunch-room line. You can purchase pies and soup and fruit, hash and stew, coffee and tea, cafeteria style. There are only two women to serve-the girls from the lower floors have to stand long in line. I do not know where to sit, and by mistake evidently get at a wrong table. No one talks to me. I surely feel I am not where I belong. The next day I get at another wrong table. It is so very evident I am not wanted where I am. Rather disconcerting. I sit and ponder. I had thought factory girls so much more friendly to one another on short acquaintance than “cultured” people. But it is merely that they are more natural. When they feel friendly they show it with no reserves. When they do not feel friendly they show that without reserve. Which is where the unnaturalness of “cultured” folk sometimes helps.

It seems etee-quette at the laundry requires each girl sit at the table where her floor sits. That second day I was at the shirt-and-collar table, and they, I was afterward told, are particularly exclusive. Indeed they are.

At 12.45 the second bell rings. Miss Cross calls out, “All right, girls!” Clank, the presses begin again, and all afternoon I iron gentlemen’s underpinnings. During the course of my days in the laundry I iron three sets round for every man in New York and thereby acquire a domestic attitude toward the entire male sex in the radius sending wash to our laundry. Nobody loves a fat man. But their underclothes do fit more easily over the press.

I iron and I iron and I iron, and along about 4.30 the first afternoon it occurs to my cynical soul to wonder what the women are doing with themselves with the spare time which is theirs, because I am thumping that press down eight hours and fifty minutes a day. Not that it is any of my business.

Also along about five o’clock it irritates me to have to bother with what seems to me futile work. I am perfectly willing to take great pains with a white waistcoat-in one day I learn to make a work of art of that. But why need one fuss over the back of a nightshirt? Will a man sleep any better for a wrinkle more or less? Besides, so soon it is all wrinkles.

The second day I iron soft work all morning-forever men’s underclothes, pajamas, and nightshirts. Later, when I am promoted to starched work, I tend to grow antifeminist. Why can men live and move and have their beings satisfactorily incased in soft garments, easy to iron, comfortable to wear, and why must women have everything starched and trying on the soul to do up? One minute you iron a soft nightshirt; the next a nightgown starched like a board, and the worst thing to get through with before it dries too much that ever appears in a laundry.

After lunch I am promoted to hospital work. All afternoon I iron doctors’ and interns’ white coats and trousers. It is more interesting doing that. But a bit hard on the soul. For it makes you think of sickness and suffering. Yet sickness and suffering white-coated men relieve. It makes you think, too, of having babies-that being all you know of hospitals personally. But on such an occasion you never noticed if the doctor had on a white coat or not, and surely spent no time pondering over who ironed it. Yet if a doctor wore a coat Irma ironed I think the woman would note it even in the last anguished moments of labor.

Irma did an officer’s summer uniform once. I do wish I could have heard him when he undid the package. While Irma was pounding down on it she was discoursing to me how, besides papers, she had cravings for poetry.

“You remember that last snowstorm? I sat at my window and I wrote:

“Oh, beautiful snow
When will you go?
Not until spring,
When the birds sing.”

There were several other stanzas. And about then Miss Cross dumped a bundle of damp clothes into Irma’s box and said, “Iron these next and do them decent!” I peered suspiciously into the box. It was my own family laundry!

“Hey, Irma,” I said, cannily, “leave me do this batch, eh?”

I might as well be paying myself for doing up my own wash, and it would look considerably better than if Irma ironed it.

The third day my feet are not so weary, and while I iron I mull over ideas on women in industry. After all, have not some of us with the good of labor at heart been a bit too theoretical? Take the welfare idea so scoffed at by many. After all, there is more to be said for than against. Of course, provided-It is all very well to say labor should be allowed to look after itself, and none of this paternalism. Of course, the paternalism can be overdone and unwisely done. But, at least where women workers are concerned, if we are going to wait till they are able to do things for themselves we are going to wait, perhaps, too long for the social good while we are airing our theories. It is something like saying that children would be better off and have more strength of character if they learned to look after themselves. But you can start that theory too young and have the child die on your hands, or turn into a gutter waif. The child needs entire looking after up to a point where he can begin little by little to look after himself. And after he has learned to dress himself it does not necessarily mean he can select his own food, his hour of retiring, his habits of cleanliness and hygiene.

I look about at the laundry workers and think: Suppose we decide nothing shall be done for these girls until they demand it themselves and then have charge of it themselves. In other words, suppose we let welfare work and social legislation wait on organization. The people who talk that way are often college professors or the upper crust of labor. They have either had no touch or lost touch with the rank and file of women workers. It is going to be years and years and years, if ever, before women in this country organize by and large to a point where they can become permanently effective. What organization demands more than any other factor is, first, a sense of oppression; second, surplus energy. Women have been used to getting more or less the tag end of things for some thousands of years. Why expect them suddenly, in a second of time, as it were, to rear up and say, “We’ll not stand for this and that”? If we are going to wait for working women to feel oppressed enough to weld themselves together into a militant class organization, capable of demanding certain conditions and getting them, we shall wait many a long day. In the meantime, we are putting off the very situation we hope for-when women, as well as men, shall have reached the point where they can play a dignified part in the industrial scheme of things-by sending them from work at night too weary and run down to exert themselves for any social purpose. I say that anything and everything which can be done to make women more capable of responsibility should be done. But the quickest and sanest way to bring that about is not to sit back and wait for factory women to work out their own salvation. Too few of them have the intelligence or gumption to have the least idea how to go about it, did it ever occur to them that things might be radically improved. (And the pity of it is that so often telling improvements could be made with so little effort.)

Nor is it anything but feminist sentimentality, as far as I can see, to argue against special legislation for women. What women can do intellectually as compared with men I am in no position to state. To argue that women can take a place on a physical equality with man is simply not being honest. Without sentimentalizing over motherhood, it seems allowable to point out the fact that women are potential mothers, and this fact, with every detail of its complexities, feminists or no to the contrary, is a distinct handicap to women’s playing a part in the industrial field on a par with man. And society pays more dearly for a weary woman than for a tired man.

Therefore, why not lunch rooms, and attractive lunch rooms, and good food, well cooked? Yes, it is good business, and besides it puts a woman on a much more efficient level to herself and society. At our tables the girls were talking about different lunch-room conditions they had come across in their work. One girl told of a glass company she had worked for that recently was forced to shut down. She dwelt feelingly on the white lunch room and the good food, and especially the paper napkins-the only place she had worked where they gave napkins. She claimed there was not a girl who did not want to cry when she had to quit that factory. “Everybody loved it,” she said. I tried to find out if she felt the management had been paying for the polished brass rails, the good food, and the napkins out of the workers’ wages. “Not on your life!” she answered. She had been a file clerk.

Take dental clinics in the factories. Four teeth on our floor were extracted while I was at the laundry. For a couple of days each girl moaned and groaned and made everybody near her miserable. Then she got Miss Cross’s permission to go to some quack dentist, and out came the tooth. Irma had two out at one dollar each. It was going to cost her forty dollars to get them back in. A person with his or her teeth in good condition is a far better citizen than one suffering from the toothache.

If I had my way I should like to see a rest room in every factory where women are employed, and some time, however short, allowed in the middle of the afternoon to make use of it.

Eight hours is long enough for any woman to do sustained physical work, with no possibility for overtime.

Nor have we so much as touched on what it means to live on thirteen dollars or fourteen dollars a week.

“But then you have taken away all the arguments for organization!”

Should organization be considered as an end in and of itself, or as one possible means to an end?

Word was passed this morning that “company” was coming! The bustling and the hustling and the dusting! Every girl had to clean her press from top to bottom, and we swept the floor with lightning speed. Miss Cross dashed to her little mirror and put powder on her nose. Hattie tied a curtain around her head to look like a Red Cross nurse. Every time the door opened we all got expectant palpitations. We were not allowed to speak, yet ever and anon Hattie or Mrs. Reilly would let out some timely remarks. Whereat we all got the giggles. Miss Cross would almost hiss, “GIRLS!” whereat we subsided. It was nerve wracking. And the company never came! They got as far as the third floor and gave out. But it was not until afternoon that we knew definitely that our agony was for naught.

Lucia’s machine got out of order-steam escaped at a fearful rate. While the mechanic was fixing it he discoursed to me on the laundry. He had been there nine months-big, capable-looking six-footer. Out of the corner of his mouth he informed me, “Once anybody comes to work here they never leave!” It surely does seem as if they had no end of people who had worked there years and years. Miss Cross says they used to have more fun than nowadays, before so many colored girls were employed. They gave parties and dances and everyone was chummy with everyone else.

To-day, in the midst of hilarity and all unannounced, “company” did appear. We subsided like a schoolroom when the teacher suddenly re-enters. A batch of women, escorted by one of the management. He gesticulated and explained. I could not catch his words, for the noise of the presses, though goodness knows I craned my ears. They investigated everything. Undoubtedly their guide dwelt eloquently on the victrola in the lunch room; it plays every noon. On their way out two of the young women stopped by my press. “Didn’t this girl iron that nightgown nicely?” one said to the other. I felt it obligatory to give them the “once over.”

The second the door was closed I dashed for Miss Cross. “Who were them females?” I asked her.

Miss Cross grunted. “Them were Teachers College girls.” She wrinkled her nose. “They send ’em over here often. And let me tell you, I never seen one of ’em with any class yet.... They talk about college girls-pooh! I never seen a college girl yet looked any classier than us laundry girls. Most of ’em don’t look as classy. Only difference is, if you mixed us all up, they’re gettin’ educated.”

One of my erstwhile jobs at the University of California had been piloting college girls around through factories in just that fashion. I had to laugh in my sleeve as I suspected the same remarks may have been passed on us after our departure!

We have much fun at our lunch table. A switchboard operator and file clerk from the office eats with us. She and I “guy” each other a good deal during the meal. Miss Cross wipes her eyes and sighs: “Gee! Ain’t it fun to laugh!” and Eleanor and I look pleased with ourselves.

In the paper this morning appeared a picture of one of New York’s leading society women “experiencing the life of the working girl first hand.” She was shown in a French bonnet, a bunch of orchids at her waist, standing behind a perfumery counter. What our table did to Mrs. X!

“These women,” fusses Miss Cross, “who think they’ll learn what it’s like to be a working girl, and stand behind a perfumery counter! Somebody’s always trying to find out what it’s like to be a worker-and then they get a lot of noteriety writin’ articles about it. All rot, I say. Pity, if they really want to know what workin’s like, they wouldn’t try a laundry.”

“She couldn’t eat her breakfast in bed if she did that!” was my cutting remark.

“Or quit at three,” from Annie.

“Hisst!” I whisper, “I’m a lady in disguise!” And I quirk my little finger as I drink my coffee and order Eleanor to peer without to see if my limousine waits.

We discuss rich folk and society ladies, and no one envies or is bitter. Miss Cross guesses some of them think they get as weary flying around to their parties and trying on clothes as we do in the laundry. I guess she is partly right.

Then we discuss what a bore it would be not to work. At our table sit Miss Cross, Edna (Miss Cross calls her Edner), the Cuban girl, who refused to eat with the colored girls; Annie, the English girl, who had worked in a retail shoe shop in London; Mrs. Reilly, who is always morose at lunch and never speaks, except one day when she and Miss Cross nearly came to blows over religion. Each got purple in the face. Then it came out that there was a feud between them-two years or more it had lasted-and neither ever speaks to the other. (Yet Mrs. Reilly gave one dollar, twice as much as the rest of us, toward Miss Cross’s Christmas present.) Then there are three girls from the office downstairs. Everyone there had had some experience in being out of work or not working. To each of them at such a time life has been a wearisome thing. Each declared she would ’most rather work at any old thing than stay home and do nothing.

Between the first and second bells after lunch the sixth-floor girls foregather and sit on the ironing tables, swing our heels, and pass the time of day. To-day I start casually singing, “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” Everyone on our floor knows the song and there the whole lot of us sit, swinging our heels, singing at the top of our lungs, “A sunbeam, a sunbeam, Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,” which is how I got the name of “Sunbeam” on our floor. Except that Miss Cross, for some reason of her own, usually called me “Constance.”

I teach them “My Heart’s a Little Bird Cage,” and we add that to our repertoire. Then we go on to “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” “Lead, Kindly Light,” “Rock of Ages.”

It appears we are a very religious lot on our floor. All the colored girls are Baptists. Miss Cross is an ardent Presbyterian, Annie is an Episcopalian, Edna and Mrs. Reilly are Catholics, but Edna knows all the hymns we daily sing.

And, lo! before many days I am startled by hearing Lucia sing-woebegone Lucia. She sings to no tune whatever and smiles at me, “Sunbeam, Sunbeam, Sunbeam, Sunbeam.” So she has learned one English word in sixteen years. That is better in quality than German Tessie did. She told me, at the candy factory, that the first thing she learned in English was “son of a gun.”

But as a matter of fact Lucia does know two other words. Once I ironed a very starched nightgown. It was a very, very large and gathered nightgown. I held it up and made Lucia look at it.

Lucia snickered. “Da big-a, da fat-a!” said Lucia.

Mrs. Reilly let out a squeal. “She’s learnt English!” Mrs. Reilly called down the line.

“And,” I announce, “I’ll teach her ‘da small-a, da thin-a.’”

Thereafter I held up garments to which those adjectives might apply, and tried to “learn” Lucia additional English. Lucia giggled and giggled and waited every evening to walk down the six flights of stairs with me, and three blocks until our ways parted. Each time I patted her on the back when we started off and chortled: “Hey, Lucia, da big-a, da fat-a!” Lucia would giggle again, and that is all we would have to say. Except one night Lucia pointed to the moon and said, “Luna.” So I make the most of knowing that much Italian.

Oh yes, Lucia and I had one other thing in common. One day at the laundry I found myself humming a Neapolitan love song, from a victrola record we have. Lucia’s face brightened. The rest of the afternoon I hummed the tune and Lucia sang the words of that song, much to Mrs. Reilly’s delight, who informed the floor that now, for sure, Lucia was in love again.

There was much singing on our floor. Irma used often to croon negro religious songs, the kind parlor entertainers imitate. I loved to listen to her. It was not my clothes she was ironing. Hattie, down the line, mostly dwelt on “Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam.” Hattie had straight, short hair that stood out all over her head, and a face like a negro kewpie. She was up to mischief seven hours of the nine, nor could Miss Cross often subdue her. Hattie had been on our floor four years. One lively day Irma was singing with gusto “Abide With Me.” For some reason I had broken into the rather unfactory-like ballad of “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” and Lucia was caroling some Italian song lustily-all of us at one and the same time. Finally Miss Cross called over, “For land’s sakes, two of you girls stop singing!” Since Irma and I were the only two of the three to understand her, we made Christian martyrs of ourselves and let Lucia have the floor.

Miss Cross was concerned once as to how I happened to know so many hymns. Green earrings do not look particularly hymny. The fact was, I had not thought of most of the hymns our sixth floor sang since I was knee high. In those long ago days a religious grandmother took me once to a Methodist summer camp meeting, at which time I resolved before my Maker to join the Salvation Army and beat a tambourine. So when Miss Cross asked me how I knew so many hymns, and the negro-revivalist variety, I answered that I once near joined the Salvation Army. “You don’t say!” said the amazed Miss Cross.

One day Miss Cross and Jacobs, a Jew who bossed some department which brought him often to our floor, to see, for instance, should they wash more curtains or do furniture covers, had a great set-to on the subject of religion. Jacobs was an iconoclast. Edna left her handkerchiefs to join in. I eavesdropped visibly. Jacobs ’lowed there was no hell. Whereat Miss Cross and Edna wanted to know the sense of being good. Jacobs ’lowed there was no such thing as a soul. Miss Cross and Edna fairly clutched each other.

“Then what is there that makes you happy or unhappy, if it ain’t your soul?” asked Miss Cross, clenchingly.

“Oh, hell!” grunted Jacobs, impatiently, after having just argued there was no such place.

Jacobs uttered much heresy. Miss Cross and Edna perspired in anguish. Then I openly joined the group.

Miss Cross turned to me. “I tell you how I feel about Christianity. If a lot of these educated college professors and lawyers and people like that, when they read all the books they do and are smart as they are-if Christianity is good enough for them, it’s good enough for me!”

Jacobs was so disgusted that he left.

Whereat Edna freed her soul of all the things she wanted to say about hell and punishment for sins. She went too far for Miss Cross. Edna spoke of thieves and murderers and evildoers in general, and what they ought to get in both this world and the next. Quite a group had collected by this time.

Then Miss Cross turned to us all and said: “We’re in no position to pass judgment on people that do wrong. Look at us. Here we are, girls what have everything. We got nice homes, enough to eat and wear, we have ’most everything in the world we want. We don’t know what it’s like to be tempted, ‘cause we’re so fortunate. An’ I say we shouldn’t talk about people who go wrong.”

That-in a laundry.

And only Edna seemed not to agree.

To-day at lunch the subject got around to matrimony. Eleanor said: “Any girl can get married, if she wants to so bad she’ll take any old thing, but who wants to take any old thing?”

“Sure,” I added, cockily. “Who wants to pick up with anyone they can vamp in the Subway?”

Whereupon I get sat upon and the line of argument was interesting. Thus it ran:

After all, why wasn’t a man a girl vamped in the Subway the safest kind? Where did working girls get a chance to meet men, anyhow? About the only place was the dance hall, and goodness knows what kind of men you did meet at a dance hall. They were apt to be the kind to make questionable husbands; like as not they were “sports.” But the Subway! Now there you were more likely to pick up with the dependable kind. Every girl at the table knew one or several married couples whose romances had begun on the Subway, and “every one of ’em turned out happy.” One girl told of a man she could have vamped the Sunday before in the Subway, but he was too sportily dressed and she got scared and quit in the middle. The other girls all approved her conduct. Each expressed deep suspicion of the “sporty” man. Each supported the Subway romance.

I withdrew my slur on the same.

A guilty feeling came over me as the day for leaving the laundry approached. Miss Cross and I had become very friendly. We planned to do all sorts of things together. Our floor was such a companionable, sociable place. It didn’t seem square to walk off and leave those girls, black and white, who were my friends. In the other factories I just disappeared as suddenly as I came. After a few days I could not stand it and penned a jiggly note to Miss Cross. Unexpectedly, I was going to have to move to Pennsylvania (that was true, for Christmas vacation). I hated to leave her and the girls, etc., etc. I was her loving friend, “Constance,” alias “Sunbeam.”