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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday November 28, 1908
Women Toiling at Poverty Wages, Driven to Desperation
From the Socialist Montana News of November 26, 1908:
“The Harlot’s Marching Song” by Joyce Kilmer
Young Girls, Cheap Labor, Pittsburg
SACRIFICING YOUNG GIRLS IN ROLLING MILLS.
In a Pittsburg foundry girls are employed to make simple cores for castings. A quick girl can make 10,000 a day, for which she receives $1. According to the investigator who reported to charities on “Pittsburg Women in the Metal Trades”, this work is carried on in clouds of drifting dust. As the cores are finished they are set on trays, which the women carry across the room to the ovens. A loaded tray weighs from ten to 25 pounds.
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In an electrical factory in East Pittsburg 650 women are employed on piece work in winding coils for armatures. The fastest make $1.47 a day. The work is so taxing that the employees give out readily. Only 25 have been in the factory four years. Three screw and bolt works in the same city employ 543 women. A bolt trimmer-to use one class of labor as an illustration-stands for ten hours before a machine. She feeds bolts to the mechanism at two-second intervals-16,000 times a day-for a wage of 96 cents. Bad conditions these for women to work under and likely to have an indirect effect in weakened and stunted children.
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Doubtless the employers feel that they are not to blame, that they are forced by competition for cheap goods to hire cheap labor. If any one of them should hold out and refuse to use the methods of his competitors he would be forced to the wall. So it is up to organized society to take a hand and fix the rules of the game. Conditions for the employment of women and children must be determined and enforced by the State. Otherwise society is at the mercy of a demand for cheapness that sacrifices the future of the race.-Kansas City Star.
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[Photographs and paragraph breaks added.]
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SOURCES
Quote T Malkiel, Sisters Arise, Sc Woman p10, July 1908
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA40
Montana News
“Owned and Published by
the Socialist Party of Montana”
(Helena, Montana)
-Nov 26, 1908
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024811/1908-11-26/ed-1/seq-3/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024811/1908-11-26/ed-1/seq-1/
IMAGES
Poem, Harlot’s Marching Song by J Kilmer, MtNs p3, Nov 26, 1908
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024811/1908-11-26/ed-1/seq-3/
Women Core Makers, Charities n Commons -p36, Oct 3, 1908
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=HjRHAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA36
Women Metal Workers, Charities n Commons p42, Oct 3, 1908
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=HjRHAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA42
See also:
Joyce Kilmer
https://www.poemhunter.com/joyce-kilmer/
From Charities and the Commons of October 3, 1908:
“Pittsburgh Women in the Metal Trades”
-by Elizabeth Beardsley Butler
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=HjRHAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA34
Elizabeth Beardsley Butler
https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/butler-elizabeth-beardsley-c-1885-1911
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