The Leaven in a Great City Part 6

The club must give every educational and social opportunity that will meet the needs of the members. As the college meets the demands of its students in the electives it offers, so must the working-girls' club. As the college student must meet the financial obligations he a.s.sumes when he enters college, so must the member of the working-girls' club keep her financial engagement. As the college makes it possible for the worthy student to complete his course of study after financial disaster makes it impossible for him to meet his financial obligations, so must the working girl who has contributed to the life of the club, or who has shown her desire to profit by what it offers, be kept in good and regular standing when financial disaster makes personal independence impossible. In short, the working-girls' clubs that are conducted on the broader lines, and with the most comprehensive knowledge of our social conditions, are in management and purpose a college for working girls. The idea of self-support may have been strained for a time, but it was an error in the right direction, and led to the truer conception which regulates the management of the best clubs to-day.

It was curious, is curious, the att.i.tude of mind with which some girls approach the club idea. There comes to mind now the effort to form a second club in the rooms of a club of several years' standing. The need of the second club had grown out of the refusal of the girls who earned from five to nine dollars a week in various employments to a.s.sociate with a number of girls working in a tobacco factory, and earning on an average three dollars and a half per week. The last-named were rough in speech and manner, and far from stylish in dress--the standard of the elder club. The introduction of the girls from the tobacco factory to the club was the result of the sentiment of one of the members of the club, a bright, wealthy, healthy girl, a great favorite with the other club girls. She had wanted for two years to work with girls less prosperous than the girls in the club of which she was a member.

A large tobacco factory not far from where the club met attracted her attention, and she invited the girls working there to join the club.

Twenty-two came to the club-room. Mentally they were in a state of nature.

This group of girls represented just what intermittent school attendance, uninterrupted freedom of the streets, from the time they could walk alone to the present time, might be expected to produce. They were strangers even to the degree of social opportunities the members of the club represented.

Their standards of manners and morals were what the neighborhood in which they grew up made them. Their homes were in one of the worse sections of the city, in which an inst.i.tution wholly charitable pretending to do educational work had been, not what was intended, an elevating influence, but the reverse for the children of this section. When these girls went to school they alternated between this and the public school, so that it was impossible to compel their attendance at the public school through officers of the law. The neighborhood in which most of these girls had been born and grew up was a section as remote from the life of the city of which it was a part as though it were in another country. Through it ran a thoroughfare in which were stores that could supply every want. It was another political unit where one man ruled, whose approval meant work in the city department, in the street railroads, on the docks; even in the factories, of which there were many in the section. The streets were in a shocking condition, unpaved and dirty, and no one objected because no one cared.

The tenement houses were formerly the residences of the prosperous. These houses were badly kept, old and unsanitary. Liquor saloons were on two, and sometimes three, corners of the streets through the whole section.

Beer-sodden women were so common a sight that the women who did not bear evidence of over-indulgence were remarkable. These girls had never known personal owners.h.i.+p, even in a bureau drawer; not so much as the right to one peg on which to hang their clothes to the exclusion of others. It is doubtful if they ever owned a change of under-clothing that another child of the family could not claim.

Naturally, the girls took possession of the club-rooms. Quite as naturally the older members resented it. It was seen at once that an attempt to have the new girls elected as club members would be equivalent to ejection. They were tolerated, but not tolerable to the older members. At the end of four weeks the two sets of girls lined up on opposite sides of the room, utterly refusing to intermingle. This pa.s.sive att.i.tude changed to the aggressive, which approached open hostilities so closely as to make the danger line.

When this point was reached it was decided to form the new girls into a club by themselves. The rooms were not used every evening by the club for which they were hired. Sub-letting would give more money for educational purposes.

As this attempt at club-making is one of the worst, and for that reason one of the failures, it would be well to describe it:

The directors hired rooms each fall, in September or October, until the first of May following. As one recalls this club, it presents one of the best evidences of the barrenness of the working-girl's life in New York.

Every fall for years a few notes written to the leading girls, and a group of twenty or twenty-five working girls, would gather and start anew on this club life. This method of conducting a club made it seem useless to spend money in making the rooms attractive. They were usually on the second floor of a house occupied by two or more families; the halls dark and bare; the rooms rarely clean as to walls and ceiling, barren of ornament. The floors were bare, and not infrequently stood sadly in need of scrubbing. They were lighted by smoking kerosene lamps, which but added to their unattractiveness. Frequently the caretaker started the fires a few minutes before the time for the girls to appear. Yet the girls came and remained winter after winter.

The new girls accepted the same conditions, and a.s.sembled one stormy night to form their own club, with several additions to their number of their own selection, among the rest their forewoman. The leaders of the club realized that she might be an element of strength; she might be the source of infinite trouble. She had been young many years before, a fact of which she was wholly unconscious. She was dressed in what at the time was called laquer--a warm shade of tan--silk, trimmed with bead tr.i.m.m.i.n.g; a lace collar, and a most remarkable hat completed the kind of a costume that always is discouraging to a true club worker.

Naturally the forewoman was the spokeswoman for the girls. It was useless to attempt to draw out a personal opinion from the girls, all of whom worked under her. Knowing the wages of the girls, it had been decided that five cents per month should be the dues, leaving the girls a margin from which they might pay for cla.s.ses. The indignation of the forewoman at the suggestion of five cents a month dues would have been amusing if it had not revealed her utter blindness to the poverty of the girls. Being determined that no girl there should be kept out of her club by poverty, the suggestion was made to the forewoman that as her wages equalled the wages of any three of the girls, and as she chose to join a club where the others received such small wages, she might pay the same dues, and each month make a donation to the club to meet its current expenses. She could see the dues alone would not do that.

The forewoman, after a few minutes, consented to accept the condition. The worried look left the faces of the young girls, and they beamed on the gracious lady who consented to waive her own dignity in their behalf.

Perhaps it is well to state here that the forewoman never made any donation, and that she would have been dropped from the club for non-payment of dues but for the knowledge that such a step would mean that she would make the girls leave the club. She was by them considered a good forewoman, kind, and ready to help a girl if a girl tried to earn more money. She had to be consulted in everything attempted for the girls.

Fortunately she was so afraid of revealing her ignorance, which was dense outside of her work, that she always supported the workers directing the club affairs.

This woman was taken ill. The director of the club found that she boarded with a family consisting of a father, mother and three children, living in three rooms. She was found lying on a mattress on the floor, dest.i.tute of sheets or pillow-cases. She did not own a nightdress. The tan silk dress with the bead tr.i.m.m.i.n.g hung on a nail over her head, surmounted by the gorgeous hat. She was very ill and penniless; yet the poor about her were devoted to her and considered her most remarkable.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION.]

Several years ago both of the clubs referred to consolidated with another club whose directors kept the club-rooms open throughout the entire year.

After the consolidation a house of three stories in a good neighborhood was rented, and devoted entirely to the use of the club. Only those who have watched the development of these girls could appreciate what the club has done for them. Cooking and sewing cla.s.ses, lectures on city government, talks on books, on art and nature; the weekly contact with women of culture and refinement, who carry the conviction that club work is a pleasure, that service for others is a delight, has borne fruit, and the girls in turn give their service to those whom they may help--oftenest the members of their own club.

The evolution of character through the contact with others is, after all, the highest attainment of the working-girls' club movement. It brought the working girl into entirely new relations. Constantly she was forced to see the folly of placing emphasis on the wrong thing.

A nice-looking girl, very well dressed, joined a working-girls' club. Her face indicated character and intelligence. She was elected to office, but never re-elected, for she was ignorant--too ignorant to perform the smallest duties in club life. She came every week on the social evening, always the best-dressed girl in the club. As she grew more familiar she grew sn.o.bbish. She lived in a very poor neighborhood, where her clothes must have been even more out of place than in the club-room. She held a position which required special manual skill, and in her own field was an expert. Unfortunately, she obtained an influence over certain girls and headed a clique. Every week she became a greater problem. One night a rather rough, but frank and intelligent, girl was introduced as a candidate for members.h.i.+p by a member who worked in the same shop. The girl who was the club problem had been away two weeks working overtime, and did not come to the club until after the new girl had been elected a member. The amazement of both as they faced each other as members of the same club aroused questions as to their social and family background. All that appeared was that they were neighbors.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OPPOSITE A CORNER IN AN OLD SECTION.]

The first reception to mothers was given by the club about this time. When the night of the reception came, the "problem" came in a new dress having a jetted front. Her appearance amazed the members, and made it clear that the "problem" must be solved or eliminated. The new member appeared with two mothers, both plainly dressed, one not warmly enough. This one was timid, reluctant to enter the room, and but for the urging of the new member and her mother she would have gone home. She refused to remove the shabby shawl she wore, and adjusted again and again the straw hat, on which a narrow black ribbon was pinned. The "problem" stood in front of the mantel, surrounded by an admiring crowd. The two mothers and the new member walked into the room. It was a dramatic moment. The new member, with an expression of deep scorn, said: "You forgot to ask your mother; we brought her." The "problem" grew white and then crimson. The girls fell back and gazed spellbound at the shabby, uncomfortable, timid mother. The scales fell from their eyes. The "problem," so far as influence in the club was concerned, ceased to be a problem. A girl who would sacrifice her mother's comfort, who used her simply to keep house for her, could not hold any position in a working-girls' club.

The story crept out. The "problem" felt the loss of prestige. Clothes had satisfied her ambition; she had through them enjoyed a sense of power. The experience of that evening doubtless opened her eyes to things in life to which she had been blind. Again and again she was seen during that evening reception to look at her mother searchingly. She seemed to see her in a new light, and by its reflection, herself. The mother was afraid of her and showed it. The daughter, it was evident, discovered that fear for the first time and sought to overcome it. It was determined to hold fast to the "problem" and help her solve herself. Great progress was made. Her dress no longer astonished; her mother came to the club receptions comfortably and suitably dressed. Out of consideration for her mother, she remained in the wretched tenement, because the mother and the house had grown old together; but the rooms were now furnished. The new member had supplanted the "problem" as an influence in the club. The "problem" became engaged, and the club lost her. The man was a store-keeper in a town not far from New York. The girl married and forgot to take her mother to her new home. The mother remained a club legacy for two years, when she died. The daughter sent the money to bury her, but did not come to the funeral. Her husband is successful, and she is a social power in the Church to-day; a devoted mother and wife, strange as it may seem.

The centering of experience, the revelations of character inevitable in a working-girls' club, are the largest factors in educating the members. As the years go on, emphasis is laid on the right things. Harmony results, because a sense of proportion is gained. Girls who have had the benefit of a public school education that enables them to fill positions that prove they have had such opportunities, often in the beginning of their club life will manifest a feeling of superiority over the girl who works with her hands. But eventually some experience will reveal to them the pettiness of their estimate, and a readjustment of values is made.

A girl, long a member of a club, had won the love and admiration of all connected with it. She earned wages far above the average of working girls, a fact well understood in the club. She was always an officer, and a dependable power in the management of the club. The girls were to give a play. No amount of urging won this girl's consent to take part in the play.

A girl who had taken a part dropped out, and some one must take her place at once. Now the girls refused to take "no" for an answer, and the favorite went down in the bas.e.m.e.nt with the others who were in the play. Each had her book to read her part, as a help to the girl pressed into the service.

When it came her turn to read there was absolute silence. The girl sat white and trembling, trying to speak. At last jerkingly the words came: "I cannot read. I never learned beyond the small words. I had to take care of the children when mother went to work, while my father was sick. I went to work as soon as I could and helped keep them in school. They all read and write. I cannot. Now you know why I did not say 'yes.'"

There was silence for the s.p.a.ce of several minutes. No one could speak.

Then the baby of the club, the one everybody petted, whose very naughtiness was attractive, ran around the table, threw her arms around the speaker's neck, saying: "You're worth all the rest of us put together. We'll never give the old play. We all hate it." This followed by a half dozen kisses placed wherever she could touch the crimson, tear-stained face of the girl through her hands.

Education had been put in its right place in the field of accomplishment.

When the entertainment was given, the girl who could not read was made manager, because no one could do so well.

For more than twenty years the working-girls' club has been a power in thousands of lives. The process of character building through accretion and elimination has been going on. Through its influence the club method has been applied under every guise, but perhaps it is just to say that it has been at its best where its formation and management has been purely democratic and absolutely non-sectarian. In the nature of things, in affiliation with any organization, it must take its place as the fraction of a unit, and be in its management considered always as only a part of a whole to whose success it owes an allegiance.

Now the working-girls' clubs have their State organizations, even their national organization. The Pan-American Exposition brought working girls to the number of five hundred together in a convention to consider the questions vital to club life and management. Can any one doubt the effect of this journey into the world, the first that hundreds of these girls had ever made? Of the readjustment of ideas, the revelation of beauty, the new birth of values, because of the vision of a larger world lying beyond factory, workshop, office, school-room? For it has come to this: that the professional as well as the manual worker finds inspiration in the working-girls' club.

As the years went on, a new problem grew out of the working-girls' club movement. The members married, but they were not willing to lose the social affiliations of girlhood; they were unwilling often, reluctant always, to sever club relations.h.i.+p. On the other hand, the members felt that a married woman should remain home in the evening with her husband. Often the married member would come carrying her baby, for the club represented the mother's social relations. The next step was natural, the forming of a club of the married members to meet in the afternoon. The first working-girls'

club, of which Miss Dodge is still president, formed, as the Domestic Circle, a club of married members.

The A. O. V. Matrons at the Cottage Settlement are the married members of the A. O. V. Club, formed when the matrons were little girls. Other working-girls' clubs have contributed to the members.h.i.+p of other married women's clubs.

Naturally, the subjects discussed in these clubs are those bearing on housekeeping and the training of children. The training received in the clubs enables the married members to conduct their business with dignity and dispatch. They are trained to club life, and have learned how to avoid unnecessary friction.

Some clubs plan a winter's work ahead. These programmes show a broadening of interest and sympathy, not only in the technical affairs, the home and the care of children, but the larger affairs outside of the home that makes its environment. It must be that the girls who have been club members make more companionable wives than the women who have not had their opportunities. The children are always present at the meetings of the mothers. Various devices and methods are employed to entertain and interest them. What the mothers' club means to the little ones was unconsciously revealed very recently in the statement of a young mother: "---- is always home from school five minutes earlier club day. She runs home to get ready."

The working-girls' club has in the process of its evolution become a family inst.i.tution.

CHAPTER VI.

A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT.

The Residents of the College Settlement learned in the first year of their work in Rivington Street to sympathize deeply with the married women, the mothers in the region.

Mothers, after nights spent in overcrowded, unventilated bedrooms caring for nursing babies, began getting breakfast at five o'clock in the morning.

Husband and children of every age must be wakened for work or for school, often irritable because of the unhygienic conditions under which they had slept. Friction and quarreling is to be expected when there is one wash-basin for the use of the whole family; one sink for the morning bath of the family when there is running water in the rooms. Breakfast of bread and strong coffee, perhaps with the family waiting turns because only three sides of the table are available, as there is not room to pull the table out from the wall to make the four sides useful. Floor s.p.a.ce costs in the tenements.

Friction, adjustment and hurry do not tend to develop a serene spirit in the house-mother whose office is purely executive. How much less in the house-mother whose hands must do all the work of the home? When the working and school-going members of the family are cared for and have gone their several ways, there is left to the house-mother almost always a baby and another child too young to go to school, to care for and amuse. In addition there is the round of work--was.h.i.+ng, ironing, mending, making, cooking--all to be done under limitations of s.p.a.ce and conveniences; often with the handicap of ignorance. Whatever the advantage of self-made money-makers, the self-made housekeeper, taught only by experience, not only pays dearly for her education, but is more than apt to be satisfied with her self-taught accomplishments, thus increasing her disadvantages in the use of time and money.

Even with a small family the house-mother with the usual round of work would not have many moments of leisure. When it is a large family, with all the disadvantages of the tenement-house home, the days are not long enough for the work to be done. It crowds the hours, and acc.u.mulates until often discouragement and nervous exhaustion follow. If the mother have a conscience, she wars with herself, battling against conditions that she feels but cannot understand nor overcome.

Three hundred and sixty-five days in the year the Residents found these mothers who needed the change of pleasure that made no demands on purses.

Even good wages did not permit these families money to buy pleasure and recreation. Mothers, good mothers, grew old before their time. They often grew careless of their personal appearance, and by this risked their influence in their homes, separation from their children, alert and often overconscious on the subject of dress.

Then there were semi-apathetic mothers because of discouragement; the mothers who drifted, never having an aim in life or an ideal; then the mothers who long ago ceased to make any struggle against environment, every year becoming more inert; the mothers, now grand-mothers, who were remembered only in time of need by their children. The Residents saw the need of the mothers of all types. How could the apathetic be awakened, the discouraged stimulated, the overworked rested and cheered? Hundreds, thousands of mothers were losing the best things of life because for them the activities that increase interest and sympathies could not be brought into their lives. Their environment made social opportunities in their own homes impossible. Husband and children, through contact with life in shop, factory, store, street and school, enlarged their interest every day; while the wife and mother came to a mental standstill, often losing interest in everything outside of her home; often failing through lack of knowledge and discouragement in making that a place of rest and refres.h.i.+ng.

The Settlement was the bright spot in the lives of hundreds of young people and children. The mothers who could be stimulated must be reached and held in a center where pleasure would be the controlling element and education an incident. There were mothers who had lost all desire for social life. It was found difficult to arouse in them even a momentary interest in the thought of seeing new things, new people. The grind of life had blunted all social instincts. There were women who on the social side of their natures were dead; could not be roused by any thought outside of the routine of their lives. Interest enough to do for their families what required the least effort of mind and body was all that was left. The hope in these homes was the children. To them the Settlement must give inspiration and ideals; the home would never give either.

In the second year of the College Settlement's activity a persistent effort was made to reach the mothers, especially the mothers of the more alert and active boys and girls affiliated with the Settlement, in clubs and cla.s.ses.

These mothers came, but never the same group twice. The smallest obstacle would prevent the very women who most needed social opportunity from accepting it. When they needed help, they came to the Settlement; they were most cordial hostesses when the Residents called; delighted in the opportunities the Settlement made for their children; but the habit of staying indoors, out of touch with any life but that of the tenement-house halls, was a fixed habit most difficult to dislodge.