Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/202

 tent, plainly underpaid, underfed Polish girls, all of them sewing on the type of shirt-waist that makes the Monday morning bargain sales possible.

There are factories and factories. In New England, there are cotton mills where 500 girls work in one room, where dust and vapor are so thick that they form a peculiar haze. In California, fruit packers work under ideal conditions. On the lower end of Manhattan Island I visited a candy factory which a few days later was raided by the municipal food inspectors and whose owner was heavily fined. Here the girls worked in a fire-trap of a building, with halls dark as midnight and smells foul enough to outweigh that of the sickeningly-sweet chocolate. A fifteen-minute ride on the elevated road brought me to a huge loft, where a hundred girls and a few men made candy in rooms that would have put the average fussy housewife to shame.

Very often factories are what employees make them. Many firms who have tried to improve the environment of their employees have been discouraged by the abuse of their property by the very employees they were trying to help.

It is impossible in this space to discuss the economic position of the woman factory-worker. Investigators have proven that her presence in