Page:Theresa Serber Malkiel - Woman of Yesterday and To-day.djvu/7

 your own living you are still free to do very much as you like. YOU can go where you want, have a number of interests all your own, spend your free time with whomever you please. Not so the girls of a century ago. To them the factory boarding houses with their few hours of evening recreation meant a new freedom heretofore undreamt of. Unfortunately, more girls wanted to go, or had to go, to work than there was work for them to do.

You must bear in mind that we did not make all the things in the beginning of the century that we are producing to-day. Railroads did not criss-cross the country, the telephone and telegraph had not been invented, we had no department stores and big offices for girls to work in. When girls did go out to work in those days they had only six trades that they could turn to—sewing, spinning, carding, domestic service, book-binding and weaving.

The machine worked faster than the demand on ready-made cloth warranted. And, while it worked with terrific speed, it required but few hands to man it. This left a surplus of idle women at home, who could not remain there since the work had been taken out of it. These women, unable to find work in the cotton and woolen mills, flocked to the sewing trades. They became tailors, seamstresses, boot and shoe workers, and umbrella sewers in such great numbers that the supply again exceeded the demand. Wages fell to a mere pittance—girls sewed pantaloons by hand at the rate of 4 cents a pair, and shirts at 7 cents a piece, underbidding one another at every step.

One could hardly blame them for it. On the one