CONTENTS. Page. Boarding homes and clubs for working women, by Mary S. Fergusson 1:1-196 The trade-union label, by John Graham Brooks . 197-219 Digest of recent reports of State bureaus of labor statistics: Kansas... 220-222 Pennsylvania... 222-224 Eleventh report on the annual statistics of manufactures in Massachusetts.. 225-230 Digest of recent foreign statistical publications.... 231, 232 Decisions of courts affecting labor....... 233-249 Laws of various States relating to labor enacted since January 1, 1896 . In the social life of working women, the class of homes or clubs included under this title occupies an important sphere. The class may be said to be indigenous to large cities and an outgrowth of the special conditions of life which obtain in such cities. They may be described as homes or clubs in which working girls and young women of good moral character can live at prices within their reach, in which they can find, to some considerable extent, the conveniences, social pleasures, and good influences of a real home, and in which they can secure by combination many comforts and wide opportunities for pleasure and culture. Institutions organized and conducted on a purely charitable basis have no place in this classification. It embraces within its scope only those homes or clubs founded upon the principle of mutual aid and cooperation, and which are wholly or partly self-supporting. In the present consideration of this subject, however, it matters not whether the homes owe their origin to cooperative enterprise among working women or to philanthropic effort in their behalf. NEED OF HOMES. With a large working population of women without local homes in great cities, a goodly proportion of whom are perhaps young and inexperienced and without relatives or friends; with the high price of living in ordinarily good boarding houses; with the fact that comparatively few private houses are open to strangers, and with the great disproportion of wages paid women to their necessary expenses, the question how a self-supporting woman can secure the comforts or even the neces sities of life in localities morally clean, and where independence and self-respect can be fostered, becomes one of great importance. Perhaps at no previous time has the question been of such vital moment as during the last decade, which has seen the opening of many avenues for self-support hitherto closed to women. To this fact, coupled with the fact that domestic service, with its long hours and close confinement, offers but few attractions to young women, can be attributed a considerable proportion of the gravitation toward business centers of girls who must earn their own living. To meet a need, seen and felt no less by the working woman than by the social economist and philanthropist, the boarding home or club for self-supporting women. has sprung into existence. For the purposes of this study the self-supporting women of this country should be considered as belonging to two classes, both alike interested in the question of bringing living expenses within their means, and both alike resenting the association of the institutional or charitable idea with the boarding home or club. The two classes differ, however, in the fundamental particular that the one is selfreliant, self-respecting, and perfectly able, from a moral and social point of view, to stand alone, while to the other belong the young, the inexperienced, the morally weak, the stranger within our city doors, the discouraged, and perhaps the tempted. To the former class the home stands as an exponent of comfort, ease, and pleasure; to the latter it stands for protection and prevention. While the former appreciates the advantages which a home roof, a house mother, and association give in a large city, to the latter these things are safeguards. The boarding home, with its protective supervision, its personal interest, and its moral support, becomes, therefore, a powerful social as well as economic factor in the life of the working girl; and it can be said to her credit that even under adverse circumstances, where too strict rule is perversive of happiness, or where untidiness, uncleanliness, and poorly served food make an unattractive home, she yet seeks the protection which association affords rather than the independence and freedom of lodging-house life. In some of our large cities, notably Chicago and Boston, among those visited in the pursuit of the present study, the lodging house without a parlor was found to be a distinct feature of city life. In other cities the well-recognized tendency to crowd in the very cheap boarding or tenement houses is an evil fraught with danger to health and morals alike. In the lodging house a girl living alone drifts from place to place for her meals. She receives her friends and acquaintances, male and female, in her bedchamber, or meets them in the dance hall or on the street corner. Failing to avail herself of such opportunities as these she lives a life of loneliness, detrimental alike to health and happiness. Home for such girls has no meaning except, perhaps, as a memory, and all the restraining influences of home and home ties give place to an independence which is perilous and a freedom that only the strongest can safely use. If, in the place of the lodging house, she chooses the cheap boarding house, with its dingy parlor and its 7 by 9 bedroom, or the tenement house with its common living room and its too numerous lodgers, she does not lose altogether the idea of personal interest of her fellow-beings in her welfare-she may even cherish the idea of home, but what a home! Cold and cheerless rooms, insanitary conditions, poorly cooked and poorly served food, uncultured and even uncouth associates, unattractive and filthy streets, and perhaps other social surroundings that tend to take the blush of modesty from the cheek and the sense of shame from the heart-these are the characteristics of such a home. There are here and there private homes opened to a girl at the small sum which she can pay, if she earns from $3 to $5 a week; there are lodging houses cleanly and attractive; there are tenement homes that are homes in reality as well as in name; but the vast majority of working girls alone in cities of any size who can pay but from $2.50 to $4 a week for board, lodging, and laundry are confronted with the conditions outlined above. PRESENT STATUS OF THE WORK. As far as known, the first organized effort in this country to offer a comfortable and attractive home to self-supporting women for permanent residence, at rates coming within the reach of those earning small wages, was made during the year 1856 by the Ladies' Christian Union in New York City. Baltimore came next, with its Female Christian Home, established in 1865. Following this lead, the Women's and Young Women's Christian Associations in the different cities have fallen into line, and to-day 35 associations make reports of this class of work, and a number of other associations are known to be maintaining boarding homes. In some cities the homes have assumed hotel proportions, and in several cities there are two or more association homes. The Young Women's Boarding Home Association, of Philadelphia, finds it necessary to maintain three large houses, two of them being under one roof and a third one located elsewhere. In Boston the work of the Grey Nuns has entirely outgrown its original proportions, and difficulty has been found in keeping pace with the demand. When visited by agents of this Department ten years ago this work was conducted in two small houses on Dover street, and at that time they had 18 residents only. When visited recently they were occupying a large and beautiful building 132 feet long and five stories high, accommodating 155 girls-580 girls being refused admission during the last year for want of accommodations. Yet, notwithstanding these prominent instances in which efforts have been made to keep pace with the demand for homes of this character, the tables accompanying this report show |