ELIZABETH BEARDSLEY BUTLER

FORMER SECRETARY NEW JERSEY STATE CONSUMERS LEAGUE

It requires a moment's readjustment of our angle of vision to see Pittsburgh as a city of working women. To dig crude ores, to fuse and forge them, are not among the lighter handicrafts at which women can readily be employed. The old cry of the dwarfs under the earth, the first metal smiths, rings out in Pittsburgh in the tap of the miner's tools and in the shouts of gangs of furnace-men and engine crews in the winding recesses of the mill.

Yet even in a city whose prosperity is founded in steel and iron and coal, there has come into being beside the men a group of co-laborers. If we listen again, we hear the cry of the dwarfs (the productive forces of earth) not only in the shouts of gangs of furnace-men, but from the mobile group of workers at the screw and bolt works, and among the strong-armed women who make sand-cores in rooms planned like Alberich's smithy in the underworld. Listen still more closely, and we hear the dwarf voices in the hum of machines in a garment factory, in the steady turn of metal rolls in a laundry, and even in the clip of the stogy roller's knife in the tiny workroom of a tenement loft. Side by side with the men, the women workers have found a place in the industry of the steel district in the Alleghenies. In a district that calls pre-eminently for strength in its workmen, and if not for strength, for a high degree of training and skill, there is yet place in the congregate activity of factories and shops for women. Individual and group necessities have forced them out into an increasing number of occupational ways and byways, winding net-like over the city.

To understand fully the place that women have taken in the industries of Pittsburgh, we should need to know the history of the "forks of the Ohio," from trading post, frontier settlement, mill-town, to the growing, complex city of to-day. We should need to follow the women's share in the life of the district from the time of the woman pioneer, who was herself a producer of goods and of values, on through the active days of life in a small and struggling town, and later, into the ramifications of the industrial city, when the days came that English speaking labor did not suffice and a new immigrant population was brought in.

We know a little of the life of the frontier women and the work that they did. We have hints here and there, of the home industries of intermediate decades, of the weaving and the stogy making[9] especially, of production for the use of the individual home, that helped to make the lives of women in miners' households active and significant. There are gaps in our recorded knowledge of the process of change, of the forces that little by little have been a call to the high-strung girl of American birth, to the unconquerable exiled Russian, to the field worker from Austria, and to the fair-haired Pole,—a call away from the four walls that sheltered the industries of the home, and toward factory and shop, toward division of labor and specialization of work at a machine. The census in the first half of the nineteenth century is small help to us. Even in later years, we can learn from it comparatively little about the industrial life in individual cities.

One fact significant of the situation in Pittsburgh to-day is that according to the last census, the excess of male over female population is a trifle less than 10,000. When the industries of the district grew to a magnitude that drew on foreign labor forces, it was the men of Ireland and Germany, of Italy, Austria and Poland who came. Later, in smaller numbers, the women followed. They came because their husbands and brothers were here; not often for the purpose of forging out a life of their own. The women of the later immigrant races, the Slavs and the southern Europeans, are lagging behind. Giuseppina is still keeping the little Italian cottage with the thought that Pietro will return or will have made his way more surely before he sends for her. Life in America for her is not a settled destiny. It is a probability of growing importance for those populations whose need exceeds the productive power of the soil; but even to the strong it is something of an experiment, something for which women,—not industrially adjusted,—must await the issue before they too follow in numbers equal to the men.

In the different districts of the city, one can trace something of the effect of this varying feeling of permanence on the ways of life among earlier and later immigrants. Irish and German, in fact, we no longer think of as immigrants. They are as much wrought into the fabric of the nation as those whom we are pleased to call American. The Jewish immigrants from Austria, Germany, and Russia, while their coming has been hastened by religious persecution, have yet been part of the life of the city for so long, that among them there is a distinct family grouping; and there is a normal proportion between men and women. This is in part due to race tradition as well as to length of settlement, but the latter has unquestionably served to diminish the proportion of single men, who from this race as from others, have come to make a place for themselves in the new country.

In the congested Italian neighborhoods, on the other hand, women are but an unimportant factor in the industrial life of the city. In the midst of the city itself, there are to be sure streets of Italian families; streets where the women still honor the custom of life in their households. A scattered few roll paste-smeared tobacco leaves into tobies after the Italian fashion, or follow with painstaking docility the signs of the forewoman in a garment workshop. But there are not many of these pioneers of congregate activity. The ties of tradition that keep the girl to her house and early marriage are still too strong for more than the very few to break. There is small opportunity in this smoke-filled city among the hills for the Italian girl to preserve her self-respect by staying at home, and at the same time to increase her income by sewing or making flowers. Flowers of delicate tints and fine embroidered fabrics, belong rather to the trade of eastern cities. The garment industry here is of a different sort from that which has nourished and given employment to its thousands of out-workers in New York city. Such outwork as there is dates to a time before the Italian women were here in numbers, or had grouped themselves into particular districts, and it fell naturally into the hands of Irish and Germans whose homes were, and still remain, in the early settled regions in the coal filled hills.

Leave "the hill," and go down toward the mills and to some of the outlying sections, and you will find still fewer women in the colonies of young Italian laborers, advance guards from their native towns. Some of these men are workers on the railroads, others are day-laborers in the mills. They bring up the numbers of the Italian population and contribute to the excess male population of the entire city. Among still later immigrants, this situation is intensified. Near the Pressed Steel Car Works, there are streets of low unpainted houses, each exactly like the other, each filled with its family of "boarders,"—single men who club together and rent a house or hire a bed by turns in order to make their pay serve both for their own support and for the help of those at home in the old country. They are Slavs,—"Hunkies." They are the under-workmen in mill and mine and machine shop, who have helped push the earlier comers a step higher and push themselves into the subordinate jobs. Some of the first comers have since brought their families. Some few sisters and friends with the desire to try new fortune have come, too, leaving their families behind. But the bulk of the "boarding house" population is made up of single men, immigrants of this race. Where families and single women have come, they have tended to settle in the glass-making district, or near the manufactories of iron and steel products that can use quick fingers as well as strong untrained arms.

The Polish women have not the conservatism which keeps the Italian girl at home. They have not the same standard of close-knit family relationship. There is a flexibility in their attitude toward life and toward their part in it. In numbers and in kind of work, they are an element of industrial importance.

Altogether, 22,185 women wage earners outside of agricultural, professional, and domestic service, are employed in Pittsburgh. These figures are based on a careful census of the women-employing trades made during the winter of 1907-8. This working force is distributed in 448 factories and shops, and can be arranged according to the numerical importance of the different trade groups as shown in the accompanying table.

In the U. S. census of 1900, women's work is grouped under the headings: Agricultural Pursuits, Domestic and Personal Service, Professional Service, Trade and Transportation, Manufacturing and Mechanical Pursuits. In the accompanying table, agricultural pursuits, and professional service are excluded. Under domestic and personal service come only the cleaning industries, with 2,685 women, 12.10 per cent of the number under consideration. Under trade and transportation, come saleswomen and telephone and telegraph operators to the number of 8,317 (37.48 per cent). The remainder, 11,183 women (50.4 per cent), are included in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits.

It is worth while to consider not only the broad groupings and the characteristics of the several trades, but the women whom they have called to them, old and young, native born, or from the fields and towns of another country. Each trade has its characteristic racial group, and in some cases a secondary racial group; and on the other hand one racial group may be found in several trades. When the work room is a mercantile house, there is small need to describe it. We know something of the work and of its demands; we know, too, that no other occupation seems so desirable as "clerking" to the girl with some personal ambition but without the training necessary for an office position. A majority of the girls are native-born of Irish or German parents, but there is a scattering of bright Jewish girls who have a characteristic dislike for the noise of machines.

The mercantile houses, the stogy factories and the garment factories are employers of Jewish girls. In all three industries many Americans are to be found, but they are in the more desirable positions, in shops of the better class, with provision for light and air. These girls have the nervous readiness to learn new ways, the adaptability, the measure of skill, which tend to bring them the best work, the better workplaces. But where the cheap, hustling business is done, the Jewish girls predominate. They endure the drive in the rarely cleaned upper room, where between narrow walls, faint daylight finds its way toward the machines and where drifting lint and ten hours' stooping over a power-driven needle, have their effect in time on a girl even with the strength of rugged generations behind her.

Newcomers cannot choose either workshop or wages. With the subordination of the industrially unadjusted, they crave a chance to learn, whether it be by the whirr of the needle or by team work at cheap mold stogies to supply the workingman's demand. In one or two of the small box factories on "the hill," one finds occasionally a Jewish girl. Box makers paste the bright colored strips of paper along the box edges. They stay the corners by the clamp of a machine. For heavier boxes they glue into place the wooden supports. Such work for a Jewish girl is exceptional, however, and in violence to tradition. The three industries mentioned above make up her circle of possible choices.

Yet each industry, notably stogy making and the needle trades, has drawn upon a second racial element in response to a specific industrial demand. When the garment makers, spurred to production by the presence of an army of laborers in mills and mines, began to increase and cheapen their output, they gave the jeans and railroad jumpers to Irish and German women who would make them at home. The sweating system, as old and older than the ready-made trade, has adapted itself to the city, and has taken a form scarcely recognizable to one familiar with the contract shops on New York's East Side. There is no contract system here. Outwork entrenched itself in individual homes before Italians and immigrant Russians had settled into districts, and the only available out-workers were the wives of Irish and German workingmen in Carrick and Lower St. Clair. Even to-day, it takes a rambling journey along muddy foot-paths, across brooks and fields and along the edges of the barren hills to bring you to the sweated district. The workroom here is not a crowded tenement, but a small wooden house with six machines someway placed in the living room, and there is occupation for the whole family, from father to baby. The family has to pay the driver a percentage on every dozen garments that he brings, according to the distance from town. As the driver knows the people and often gives them the chance to work, his position is in some respects that of a middleman. The workers are obliged to meet his terms or to turn to some other means of livelihood. A seemingly inaccessible hill country within city limits, wooden shacks swarming with chickens and children, a whirr of machines audible from the field below,—these contradictions characterize the sweating system of Pittsburgh.

We have seen that Jewish and American girls are in the garment factories, while Irish and German women, the hill-dwelling wives of the miners, hold the subordinate place in the trade. In the stogy industry, the Polish women, some of them married and others immigrant girls, have the inferior and unpleasant work. The least desirable occupation for women in stogy factories is tobacco stripping, pulling the stems out of the moist leaves and weighing and tying them in pounds for the rollers. In tenement shops, one may find the strippers in a cellar, their backs against a damp wall, working by the light of a flaring gas jet. In a large factory, one will see them sitting in their low stalls, row behind row, stemming and weighing and throwing the waste to one side. "They would work all night," one foreman said, "if I would give them the chance. We never have any trouble with them; we can't give them enough work to do." They were married women in this case; but the rule holds good and there is seldom trouble with the Polish hands in a stogy factory. They are there too much on sufferance for grievances to be worth their while. They have entrenched themselves in the stripping rooms and are found now and then at a bunching machine or rolling stogies at the suction table, but this more skilled work is still largely in the hands of American and Jewish girls.

The Polish women have pushed their way into a wider circle of industries than have the Jewish girls. They are limited by lack of training and by trade indifference, as well as by the stolid physical poise that cannot be speeded at the high pressure to which an American girl will respond. They have not an industrial standard that would tend to react progressively upon the character of their work and the arrangement of the workrooms. They accept factory positions that girls of other races regard as socially inferior. They consent to do the rough and unpleasant work, the work that leads and can lead to nothing except coarsening of fiber and a final break in strength. They change from one place to another with an irresponsibility, an independence, born perhaps of long-slumbering memories of revolution in their own land.

In canneries and cracker factories, we find Polish girls who are lighter-handed, fairer, more delicately built than those of the metal trades and the glass houses. These girls have rapid work to do. They have the nervous energy to pack or to fill cans at high speed. They stand beside the travelling conveyor which carries cans of beans, and slip a bit of pork into each can as it passes. Without turning their heads or changing their position, working with high concentration and intensity, they can keep pace with the chains. While they do much of the mechanical work, the hulling and stemming of berries, the preparing of fruit, the filling and labeling of cans, they are found too among the bottling girls on whom responsibility for the appearance of the finished product largely rests. These latter place each pickle or piece of preserved fruit after the model design taught them in the beginning. They use a grooved stick to slip the pickles into place, and are obliged to be accurate as well as quick, for they work under inspection on a piece basis. A piece of onion misplaced in a bottle of mixed pickles is held sufficient ground for requiring the bottler to do the work over at the expense of her own time. The odor of vinegar and of preserves, an odor that seems to have saturated the air in nearby streets, has made the cannery unpopular among Americans who have acquired fastidiousness in the choice of a trade.

It is possible that between the Polish women in this latter industrial group and those in the metal trades, there is the difference between the child of the city and the child whose life and the life of whose parents has been near the earth. At any rate, there is the general difference between the small, slight, fair-haired girl, and the rough-skinned stolid women, whom even a piece-rate scarcely avails to keep up to the pace of the machine. These latter are the women who with knee and hand and metal-centered glove, open the sheets of tin still warm from the furnaces of the sheet and tin plate mill; these are the women who screw nuts on bolts by a fish-oil process, and these are the women who carry trays of sand-cores in the foundries where they have displaced men. They are the packers in glass factories, the riveters and foot-press operators in lamp works. They have a hundred miscellaneous things to do, no one of which is a trade, or can be a trade so long as a shifting group of women, women with muscular strength and the readiness to do disagreeable things, is at hand for the odd jobs about a factory. They learn to operate one machine, but they are not among the hands who know the ways of the shop, and work up to better occupations. Either through the barrier of language, or in part through their own indifference, they are used for the least desirable work in those occupations which in a measure they have made their own.

Polish girls of both types are to be found in laundries, but in most cases they are employed in the mangle room only. Their work is to feed in sheets under the metal rolls, to shake them out before feeding, or to receive and fold them at the other end while steam rises from the hot metal and from the huge washing cylinders below.

There remain unaccounted for the workers in the candy industry, in many of the miscellaneous trades, in telephone and telegraph offices, in the wholesale millinery houses, and in press rooms and bookbinderies. Here there is variation as the individual and the location rather than as the trade group. In large measure, the employes are of American birth. Telephone and telegraph work share with mercantile houses the advantage of social esteem, and by reason of this, claim the American girl. The same is true of the millinery workroom, in spite of its irregular hours and short seasons. Perhaps a reflected "odor of sanctity," an association by proxy with clerical work, has made press rooms and binderies favored above more obviously manufacturing pursuits. Perhaps, too, the location of the binderies in the business section of the city has given them a force of American employes, for the Polish girl, like her Jewish co-worker, is limited in her imaginings to factories and shops within the few streets that make up the sum of her experience. Yet to an extent press rooms and binderies employ girls of foreign birth, and in the cork factory, many of the sorters are Poles. For some reason, the candy trade is largely in the hands of Americans, and is in high esteem among women workers.

Surveying the city, then, we see American and German girls holding the positions for which a few months' training is needed, a knowledge of English, or of reading and writing. We see them yielding the inferior and unpleasant work to newcomers from Poland and Russia and we see these same newcomers, sometimes by sheer physical strength, sometimes by personal indifference and a low standard, competing on the basis of lower wages with men. Work that otherwise would never have been given to girls to do has come into the hands of Polish women. Workrooms that would not long be tolerated by Americans,—they have been regarded with indifference, perhaps because of inability to share the sensations of a foreigner. The place of the Polish women, scrubbing floors and sorting onions in a cannery, packing crackers, stripping tobacco for the stogy makers, or making sand-cores in a machine shop,—this place is lowest industrially among the women workers of Pittsburgh. It is the place of the woman who is fighting her way but has not yet thought whither she is going. A determination to work and to earn is uppermost. Marriage is not suffered to act as a hindrance. There is notable absence of standard as to conditions of work and rate of wages. With light foothold here and there, the Italian girl scarcely figures, but within a limited circle of industries immigrant Jewesses hold positions beside girls of native birth.

From trading post and frontier settlement, from ambitious mill-town, Pittsburgh has come to be a city whose workrooms number a force of over 22,000 women. From home industry and from household work, the younger generation of girls has entered the field of collective service. From doing the whole of a thing and from knowing the user, the younger generation has gradually found its work more and more minutely subdivided; the individual worker makes not even a whole hinge but a tenth part of it, and knows neither the use nor the destination of the finished product. She does not know the relation of her fraction of the work to the other fractions or to the interwoven threads of industry that make up the plant. These younger women have pushed past the traditional activities of cleaning and cooking and sewing; even the congregate form of these industries engages but a few of them. They have not only gone into press rooms and binderies, into cork factories, and into workrooms where candies are made and where fruit is preserved, but they help finish the glass tumblers that the men in the next room blow, they make the cores for the foundry-men, and they are among the shapers of metal for lamps and for hinges and bolts and screws. In a city that is preeminent for the making of steel and iron and the products of steel and iron, women have taken to-day a place in industries that seemed wholly in the province of men.