Tag: Tenements

Hellraisers Journal: From The Coming Nation: Theresa Malkiel on the New York Garment Workers Strike, Part II

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote T Malkiel, Sisters Arise, Sc Woman p10, July 1908—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 26, 1913
New York, New York – Theresa Malkiel Observes Ten Thousand Pickets

From The Coming Nation of January 25, 1913:

Striking for the Right to Live

-by Theresa Malkiel

[Part II of III]

NY Loft Shop Garment Workers, Cmg Ntn p7, Jan 25, 1913

Ten Thousand Pickets

A tumult, a commotion, a shout and I found myself eagerly peering out of the window; many heads pressed close about and in back of me. They were coming from the field work, the pickets I mean. Not two, not ten, not a hundred, but 10,000 strong, an army of labor, a city in itself.

My God! how powerful they looked. Every stone in the street pavements, every brick of the dark grim tenements seemed to have spoken to me of it. I was moved to tears of joy. I felt like a long-lost traveler who had at last found the right road. Now I knew it. There is where the true power, the road to freedom, was to be found in the combination and solidarity of labor.

These ten thousand tailor pickets were a power that even New York could not combat. It would take the entire police force to fight them man to man, or rather man to woman, for the women are really the greater fighters, the most determined pickets of the two.

Out of the picket line came an Italian woman, a mother of six children. She was beaten up by the police while watching her shop with a few others. The brutal thugs in police uniform knocked her about, bruised her face, disheveled her hair, tore her clothes off her back and Lord knows what else they might have done to her had she not been rescued by the army of 10,000.

Thus is the working class mother treated by our capitalist government, for no other crime than the earnest desire to earn an honest living for her children.

She took it calmly, stoically, as they all take it, the true Roman matrons that they are. “It’s all for my childs,” she said. “I fight them again. I no care.”

And still the picket line marched onward like a threatening cloud from above. They feared nothing, not even the elements. Occasionally one would fall out of their midst for the same reasons as the Italian woman came out of the picket line, but the men, like the women, took the medicine dealt out to them by the police and thugs like good fellows.

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Hellraisers Journal: The Coming Nation: How the National Consumers’ League Stands with Working Women, Part II

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Mother Jones Quote ed, Suffer Little Children, CIR May 14, 1915—————

Hellraisers Journal – Friday June 9, 1911
National Consumers’ League Stands with Working Women & Children, Part II

From The Coming Nation of June 3, 1911:

How Women Help Women

By Grace Potter

[Part II of II.]

Child Labor, Making Flowers in Basement, Cmg Ntn p10, June 3, 1911

How Infection is Carried in Clothes

Not the healthiest living nor the strongest constitution is always proof against the germs of scarlet fever, for instance. They are carried readily in clothing, say, an overcoat. Perhaps, even, the man or the woman or children who worked on that overcoat, no one of them had scarlet fever. But the baby of the family where the coat was finished might have had it. The poor haven’t time to care for their sick. They don’t know what ails their children often when they are really very ill. A doctor costs money. It costs much time, which is the same as money to them, to take the little one to a dispensary and wait through hours of weary impatience for attention. Perhaps, too, their child would be taken from them and put in a hospital. And the poor have a reasonable dread of hospitals. So when the babies are taken sick they often go through a disease like diphtheria, tonsillitis, or scarlet fever, without anyone knowing what is the matter.

The little one has to be kept in the same room where the work is going on. It is the least dark room of the two or three or four in their flat. When the baby is picked up for the scant attention which is all that a tenement mother with the tenderest mother feelings in the world can give, the baby leaves infection upon its mother’s dress and the infection is the next moment transmitted to the coat mother is working with. The coat when done is carefully folded, taken back to the shop, later shipped to St. Paul, perhaps, and there bought by a prosperous business man.

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Hellraisers Journal: Appeal to Reason: “The Herding of the Workers,” Rose Hawthorne Lathrop on Slums of New York

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Plea for Justice, Not Charity, Quote Mother Jones

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Hellraisers Journal, Sunday January 30, 1898
New York City Slum Life – Charity Worker Knows Not Whom to Blame

From the Appeal to Reason of January 29, 1898:

Poverty NYC by Lathrop, AtR Jan 29, 1898

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, 1851-1926

A year ago, I started out to see what the east side of New York was like, and the street which struck me as the most astonishing in its difference from the up-town streets was Goerck Street. It was a warm August afternoon, and the inhabitants of the houses along its street were sitting on the steps and standing about the side walks, to say nothing of those upon the street itself.

I looked eagerly at the faces that should suggest dangerous depravity, and I thought I saw upon almost every countenance expressions of the most satanic cruelty and selfishness. I find that the people who visit me for investigation in this quarter of the city come in the same excited state of alarm at the character of the East Side residents. But after a few month of living among them one entirely abandons any idea of their being so different from other human beings, and there scarcely remains any surprise in one’s mind concerning them, excepting this fact of their living together in crowds, which seems dangerous to moral and physical health. I have found that it is a very common thing for a family of eight to have only one bed; so that possibly an elderly woman afflicted with a disease like rheumatism or cancerous affections in obliged to sleep upon chairs or to lie upon the floor, while the younger members of the family are piled upon the bed, and the poor little children are disposed of anywhere.

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