Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/49

 corporation boarding house as being "absolutely choked with beds, trunks, bandboxes, clothes, umbrellas and people; that one finds it difficult to stir, even to breathe freely."

Poor ventilation was an evil complained of in both the boarding houses and the factories themselves. In 1849 a physician, Dr. Curtis, published an investigation of hygienic conditions in Lowell in which he stated, among other things, that bad ventilation in the mills was the chief cause of deteriorated health among the mill hands. As early as 1836 other physicians pointed out the connection between factory labor and tuberculosis. Edith Abbott, in the seventh chapter of "Women in Industry," gives the following account of the early mills: "They were for the most part narrow and extremely high buildings, sometimes with seven stories; they were low-studded, heated by stoves, badly ventilated and badly lighted. Weavers depended on the old 'petticoat lamps,' as they were called, which were fastened to the loom and filled with whale-oil, to be ready when the light failed. Moreover slight attention was given to apparatus for removing the fine dust, which is so unhealthful in cotton mills, or to any artificial means of ventilation."

The excesses of corporation control were another and even more evident evil. The working girl was not only compelled to live in a corporation boarding house, she was also obliged to trade at a corporation store and to support a corporation church. Hours were notoriously long in the early mills. It was a common occurrence that work was begun before breakfast and continued after supper. In fact, the fourteen-hour system was in general use during the first half of the nineteenth century, and not infrequently overtime work was insisted upon without extra pay. Wages of women were always low and were always strikingly lower than men's. Our earliest authentic information on that subject dates from the year 1833, when the actual relation between the wages of men and women was said to be as 4 to 1; that is, a woman could earn only 25 cents for the same kind of work for which a man earned a dollar. At about the same time it was stated in Philadelphia that "women do not