Making Both Ends Meet

Making Both Ends Meet

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Title: Making Both Ends Meet
Author: Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
Release Date: January 25, 2005 [eBook #14798]
Language: English
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MAKING BOTH ENDS MEET
The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls

by
SUE AINSLIE CLARK and EDITH WYATT
New York The Macmillan Company
1911

[Illustration: Photograph by Lewis Hine]

TO FLORENCE KELLEY THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

PREFACE
This book is composed of the economic records of self-supporting
women living away from home in New York. Their chronicles were
given to the National Consumers' League simply as a testimony to truth;
and it is simply as a testimony to truth that these narratives are
reprinted here.
The League's inquiry was initiated because, three years ago in the study
of the establishment of a minimum wage, only very little information
was obtainable as to the relation between the income and the outlay of
self-supporting women workers. The inquiry was conducted for a year
and a half by Mrs. Sue Ainslie Clark, who obtained the workers'
budgets as they were available from young women interviewed in their
rooms, boarding places, and hotels, and at night schools and clubs.
After Mrs. Clark had collected and written these accounts, I
supplemented them further in the same manner; and rearranged them in
a series of articles for Mr. S.S. McClure. The budgets fell naturally into
certain industrial divisions; but, as will be seen from the nature of the
inquiry, the records were not exhaustive trade-studies of the several
trades in which the workers were engaged. They constituted rather an
accurate kinetoscope view of the yearly lives of chance passing
workers in those trades. Wherever the facts ascertained seemed to
warrant it, however, they were so focussed as to express definitely and
clearly the wisdom of some industrial change.
In two instances in the course of the serial publication of the budgets
such industrial changes were undertaken and are now in progress. The
firm of Macy & Co. in New York has inaugurated a monthly day of
rest, with pay, for all permanent women-employees who wish this
privilege. The change was made first in one department and then

extended through a plan supplied by the National Civic Federation to
all the departments of the store.
The Manhattan Laundrymen's Association, the Brooklyn Laundrymen's
Association, and the Laundrymen's Association of New York State held
a conference with the Consumers' League after the publication of the
Laundry report, and asked to cooperate with the League in obtaining
the establishment of a ten-hour day in the trade, additional factory
inspection, and the placing of hotels and hospital laundries under the
jurisdiction of the Department of Labor. Largely through the efforts of
the Laundrymen's Association of New York State, a bill defining as a
factory any place where laundry work is done by mechanical power
passed both houses of the last legislature at Albany. A standard for a
fair house was discussed and agreed upon at the conference. It is the
intention of the League to publish within the year a white list of the
New York steam laundries conforming to this standard in wages, hours,
and sanitation.
The New York of the workers is not the New York best known to the
country at large. The New York of Broadway, the New York of Fifth
Avenue, of Central Park, of Wall Street, of Tammany Hall,--these are
by-words of common reference; and when two years ago the daily press
printed the news of the strike of thirty thousand shirt-waist makers in
the metropolis, many persons realized, perhaps for the first time, the
presence of a new and different New York--the New York of the city's
great working population. The scene of these budgets is a corner of this
New York.
The authors of the book are many more than its writers whose names
appear upon the title-page. The second chapter is chiefly the
word-of-mouth tale of Natalya