Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/422

 4OO THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL Very interesting is the description of the social and intellectual life of those Lowell girls. The Lowell Offering, a magazine edited and written by them, of which seven volumes were published between 1840 and 1849, bears testimony to the truth of Mrs. Robinson's account of their efforts at serf-education, and makes it easy to believe ' that there were a few of the mill girls who came to Lowell solely on account of the social or literary advantages to be found there.' Mrs. Robinson contrasts the tired hopelessness of the operatives at Lowell in 1881, with ' the jubilant feeling that the old mill girls used to have'; ' The wages of these operatives are much lower than of old, and though the hours of labour are less, they are obliged to do a far greater amount of work in a given time. They tend so many looms and frames that they have no time to think. They are always on the jump. They have no time to improve themselves, nor to spend in helping others. They are too weary to read good books, and too overworked to digest what they have read .... They have more leisure than the mill girls of forty years ago, but they do not know how to improve it.' A very gloomy picture of the life of factory girls is drawn in the reports for 1871 and 1872. Both are somewhat hysterical, and evince remarkable mental confusion; but they contain trustworthy statistics of the weekly wages of a large number of working girls in Boston. From these tables of wages can be calculated the average weekly wage of each trade, the numbers of wage earners being large enough to make such an average a typical one, and the averages in the two reports proving on comparison to approximate closely. Whether the same firms gave returns in 1872 as in 1871, we are not told. TABLE OF AVERAGE Industry. WEEKLY WAGES OF FvLr WORK. 1871 Average Number of Wage. Wage Earners. WOMEN AND GIRLS IN 1872 Average Number of Wage. Wage Earners. Saleswomen .... $6'80 Hat and Capmakers. 6'90 Cloak and Dressmakers 7'71 Shirtmakers. 4'59 Pantmakers 7'92 Vestmakers  7'98 Cash Girls .... 3 1542 $7'38 6O8 644 5'07 466 1594 7'56 2790 952 5'07 845 315 8.22 440 214 7'06 516 179 7'17 555 565 2'50 244 No credence can be attached to the statistics given in 1872 of the average earnings per annum of working women in Massachusetts, which are obtained by multiplying the average weekly wage by the number of weeks in the ' busy' season. The writer assumes that the operatives earn nothing except in the ' busy' season. Dressmakers are thus supposed to work only twenty-four weeks, shirtmakers thirty-two, milliners sixteen. That the results are of doubtful value may be seen