THE WOMAN WHO TOILS.*
IT is the fashion, perhaps something better and more per- manent than the fashion, in these days to take much interest in the circumstances and characters of the working classes. This interest leads to the writing of many books dealing with the conditions of their lives, to the starting of many schemes, well and ill considered, for the bettering of those conditions, and to a ceaseless desire for first-hand information about them. The two American ladies whose experiences are narrated in The Woman who Toils were inspired by this desire to such an extent that they braved the discomforts, hardships, and privations of the working girl's life, and for several weeks lived that life exactly as it is lived by hundreds of women throughout their adult years. The experiment has been tried before in England, very likely in America also. Mrs. Sidney Webb, to mention only one instance, has recorded in a short article incorporated in The Industrial Problem the impres- sions she derived from some weeks of work in an East End factory, and we have known of others who have done the same. But though Mrs. and Miss van Vont may not claim to have discovered a new method of investigatine- the industrial problem, they can claim to have gone • 7'1ie Woman who Toils. By Mrs. John van Vorst and Marie vau Vorot. London Grant Richards. [6s.
further than others along a very little trodden path ; and for English readers, at least, the fact that their experi- ment was made in America, under conditions both like and unlike those to be found in England, gives added point and interest to their descriptions. We may add that the book is particularly well and pleasantly written, especially those chapters contributed by Mrs. van Vorst, with a sober clearness of narrative which carries the conviction that both ladies are giving an accurate and unadorned description of what they actually saw and heard.
What, let us ask, have they learnt? How far can the reaults be said to be worth the suffering which such an experi- ment must have cost? First, it is well to remind ourselves that, with the best will in the world, it is impossible for ladies, accustomed all their lives to the comforts and luxuries of the rich woman's circumstances, to put themselves anywhere near the standpoint of the woman whose own experience and in- herited ideas make her take as a matter of course much which is to the lady an astonishing misery. What Mrs. van Vorst felt as she stood or sat for nine or ten hours a day among the noise and dirt and evil smells of a pickle factory, or as she tried to eat and sleep in air heavy with the accumulated dirt of years, is really of no interest as a contribution to the study of industrial problems. What she did gain by hours thus spent was an opportunity for a far more intimate and minute acquaintance with the lives of those with whom she lived than she could have obtained by years of the ordinary intercourse between women of different classes. Having acquired such an opportunity, she used it well, and had no difficulty in being accepted as an ordinary mill-hand and treated with perfect frankness by her fellow-workers. What has she to tell us of the existing conditions of labour as far as they could be observed by two intelligent and sym- pathetic women thus brought into close touch with their actual working ? In America, as in England, and apparently to an even greater extent, the problem of women's work is com- plicated by the fact that a large proportion of industrial women wish only to earn enough money to buy the luxuries of life, or to add to the sum already contributed by father or husband to the support of the family. We doubt whether in England the love of smart dress is quite as absorbing a passion as in America, where Mrs. van Vorst describes girls as working from Monday morning to Saturday midday with the avowed inten- tion of spending almost all they earn on the cheap imitations of Parisian clothing which are displayed in every " store " they pass. "By five o'clock on Saturdays the village street" (she is describing Perry, a town in the West of New York State) "was animated with shoppers—the stores were crowded. At supper each girl had a collection of purchases to show : stockings, lace, fancy buckles, velvet ribbons, elaborate hairpins." Many of them when their board was paid had less than a dollar left of the five or six it had taken them a week to earn. "I am not working to save," was the claim of one girl for all ; "I'm working for pleasure." This same girl, when asked whether she was going to marry a highly eligible young man with whom she had been " going " three years, and who was making three dollars a day, answered :
"No, my ! no. I don't want to be married Twenty- five is time enough. I'm only twenty-three. I can have a good time just as I am. He didn't want me to come away, and neither did my parents. I thought it would 'most kill my father. He looked like he'd been sick the day I left, but he let me come 'cause he knew I'd never be satisfied until I got my independence." To such a girl, who is apparently typical of hundreds more, the question of the amount of her wages is clearly of secondary importance. She can always go home if she finds the working life harder than she likes; she gets constant help from her parents; she is habitually in- different to food; her one wish is to have "a good time," which can be cheaply obtained, as it means only the possession of a quantity of showy clothes, and opportunities for displaying them on Saturdays and Sundays in the company of a suc- cession of "beaux." She is too entirely selfish and frivolous to have any thought of the harm she may be doing to the woman by whose side she is working, and who is toiling to support a mother, or children, or even herself alone without any of the help which takes all the fear out of her more fortunate sister's outlook. For such cases Mrs. van Vorst suggests a remedy. She would have these
pleasure-seeking damsels separated from the bread-winners. They "must be attracted into some field of work which re- quires instruction and an especial training, which pays them as well while calling into play higher faculties than the brutalising machine labour The American factory girl has endless ambition. She has a hunger for knowledge, for opportunities to better herself, to get on in the world, to improve. There is ample material in the factories as they exist for forming a new, higher, superior class of industrial art labourers." We feel inclined to question whether such an idea, however carefully carried out, would do much to remove the difficulty of the unfair competition we have been dwelling on. There would, no doubt, be ambitious girls who would be keen to learn the less mechanical arts, and would be willing to wait for the money they could only earn after some years of training ; but we believe that the factories which employ human beings merely as parts of the machines which whirr and thud with ceaseless activity for ten hours out of every twenty- four would still be crowded with the girls who are impatient to earn something so that they may hurry on to their poor pleasures, and who snatch eagerly at wages which mean starvation of body and mind to the bread-winner.
The second half of the book is written by Miss Marie van Vorst, and describes her terrible experiences when she plunged into the life of a worker in a Southern cotton mill. Here everything is bad,—conditions of labour, dwellings, character of the workers. It is difficult to believe that it is of modern America we are reading in such passages as this :—" I found these people degraded because of their habits, and not of their tendencies,—which statement I can justify. Whatever may be their natural instincts, born, nurtured in their unlovely environment, they have no choice but to fall into the usages of poverty and degradation. They have seen nothing with which to compare their existences, they have no time, no means to be clean, and no stimulus to be decent," under a system which allows little children of six, seven, and eight to work long hours in the same mills that reduce their mothers to such depths of degradation. So it is, however, and while we admire the courage and endurance which carried Miss van Vorst through the weeks in which she shared the hideous life of a Carolina mill-hand, we must also be grateful to her for having brought into the light of common knowledge the details of such an appalling state of things. It cannot be long, we should hope, once it is realised that such things exist, before they are swept away by the resistless force of a public opinion which must revolt against their continuance for a single day.
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