You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Saturday January 16, 1915
New York, New York - Unemployed Women Facing Starvation as Winter Deepens
The unemployment crisis of the winter of 1914 and 15 will surely be remembered as one of the worst that this city has ever known. In today's edition of The Scranton Truth, Nixola Greeley-Smith describes the grim situation facing the unemployed women of New York City:
MORE WOMEN NEAR STARVATION IN
NEW YORK THAN EVER BEFORE
BY NIXOLA GREELEY-SMITH.
Melinda Scott
NEW YORK, N. Y., Jan. 16.-There are just three times as many women on the brink of starvation in this city as ever before in its history of famine and despair.
"More women are unemployed and looking vainly for work in New York than at any past time-that I can say. But figures are impossible to get," replied Miss Melinda Scott, president of the Woman's Trade Union league, when I asked her to tell me how many women are out of work here.
"I know there are 1,500 idle waistmakers alone; that there are thousands of white goods workers, garment workers and women bookbinders seeking employment. But how many thousands? Ask the Russell Sage Foundation. They've got the time and the money to collect such facts. Why don't they?"
I had asked the Russell Sage Foundation and they didn't know. Nobody knows accurately. From one source I gathered that there are 20,000 women stenographers out of work in this city, from another that there are 18,000 girl clerks of department stores walking New York's grim pavements in search of work.
Elizabeth Dutcher, of the Retail Clerks' union, had this to say:
In normal times, 100,000 clerks are employed in New York city. Many of these are idle now, as the stores laid off hundreds of employes in November. In the union we get only the most ambitious, intelligent girls. Thousands of girl clerks are too indifferent or too thriftless or poor to pay union dues. In normal years in New York 20,000 extra clerks are employed for the holiday season. this year only 2,000 were employed, leaving 18,000 without work.
Rose Scheiderman
Rose Schneiderman, of the Woman's Trade Union League, the foremost figure in New York's famous shirtwaist strike, says there are at least 20,000 unorganized women in New York looking vainly for work.
Perhaps the most careful estimate of a situation unparalleled in the city's history was that furnished me by Mrs. P. J. O'Connell, superintendent of the Alliance Employment bureau, a philanthropic enterprise backed by Mrs. Andrew Carnegie, Mrs. James Speyer and other notable New York women.
"We have every day three times as many applications for work as in normal times," Mrs. O'Connell said. Her office at 64 Madison avenue was thronged with pale, anxious, pitifully young girl-workers as we talked. "Here we do not place any girl in a position until we have investigated it," she explained.
So long as an underpaid girl is surrounded by pretty things she can never hope to buy, the temptation of theft waits at her elbow; so long as an underpaid girl may be spoken to across the counter by anyone, on any pretext, there is the peril of an immoral life.
This is, even normally, a dull season. But at this season in normal years we begin to get applications for girls to work on straw hats. This year we have done. In normal years, we are able to place many girls who are good dressmakers. Beginning with the Fall season, we have been unable to pace any.
The worst feature of the unemployment situation as I see it is the fact that the youngest workers are the first to suffer. Owing to the short hours prescribed by law-and I'm glad it does prescribe them-the employer lays off the youngest workers first-the boys and girls between fourteen and eighteen years of age.
This seems to me the most harrowing fact of the unemployment crisis as it affects women. The girls who are the first to be discharged are precisely those young, impressionable, fond of pretty clothes, and feeling the call of sex at its most urgent hour. To them vice will offer its insidious alternatives of ease and luxury.
Vice has no dull season. It never lays anybody off except for age. For this reason, the unemployment situation in this grim city is much more critical for its women than its men.
[photographs added]
SOURCE
The Scranton Truth
(Scranton, Pennsylvania)
-Jan 16, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/...
IMAGES
Melinda Scott
http://query.nytimes.com/...
Rose Schneiderman
http://jwa.org/...
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The Banks Are Made of Marble - Pete Segeer
I've seen my people working
Throughout this mighty land
I prayed we'd get together
And together take a stand
Then we'd own those banks of marble,
With a guard at every door;
And we'd share hose vaults of silver,
That we have sweated for.
-Les Rice
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