Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [934]
Lowell would also be deeply influenced by Henry George, though in her case the connection was an intensely personal one. Before her father, Francis George Shaw, died in 1882, the old Fourierist and radical abolitionist found his moral energies rekindled by George’s writings, so much so that he funded the printing of a thousand copies of Progress and Poverty for distribution to libraries. Shaw became George’s financial angel and made him virtually a member of the family. Josephine found George’s views to be far closer to the compassionate and religious values that had drawn her into the antislavery movement than were the secular Darwinian beliefs held by the men with whom she worked in the charity movement. By 1885 George’s explication of the connections between unemployment and poverty had so colored her thinking that in a speech at the Congregational Club, pointedly entitled “The Bitter Cry of the Poor in New York,” Lowell declared that “if the working people had all they ought to have we should not have the paupers and criminals.”
Lowell’s rethinking was furthered by a belated recognition of just how difficult it was for young working women to survive in New York City. This insight was pressed upon her by a nineteen-year-old labor organizer named Leonora O’Reilly, whose background was light-years removed from the genteel Mrs. Lowell’s. O’Reilly grew up on the Lower East Side in the 1870s and 1880s in a household of Irish rebels. As a child she was enchanted by the reminiscences of family friend Victor Drury, who was an acquaintance of Marx, had fought with Mazzini for Italian independence, and had survived the Paris Commune. In 1881, aged eleven, she went to work in a collar factory; in 1886, aged sixteen, she was recruited into the Knights of Labor by another Commune fighter and O’Reilly family friend, Jean Baptiste Hubert.
Soon O’Reilly helped organize a Working Women’s Society to investigate and expose conditions in the clothing trades. They leveled a litany of charges at manufacturers, ranging from locked doors in tenement house sweatshops to unsanitary working conditions. But what touched off a public uproar was their description of life in the great department stores.
The picture was indeed a pathetic one. Within a decade of the founding of Macy’s, the retail sales trade was relying on women—chiefly young girls—for 80 percent of its labor force. Managers liked them because lady customers could discuss intimate apparel with them, because they seemed more demure and less dishonest, but mainly because they could be paid less than men. The shopgirls (as they were known despite their desire to be called salesladies) typically made five to six dollars a week (cash girls might take home $1.50). Layoffs were common. One New York store regularly fired women after five years’ satisfactory service to forestall demands for increased salary. Discipline was harsh and arbitrary. At Macy’s sitting was forbidden while at work (and work, in busy seasons, could fill a sixteen-hour day). Lateness was fined. “Unnecessary conversations” could lead to instant dismissal. Facilities were squalid.
O’Reilly and the Working Women’s Society took these facts to several middle-class women, including Helen Campbell, whose 1882 book The Problem of the Poor had described her work in a waterfront mission where she discovered that working-class women’s wages were simply too low to qualify as a livelihood. Campbell, daughter of a New York attorney, had followed up with an influential 1886 series in the Tribune giving a first-person account of a bitter woman garment worker. Next year she produced a book, Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-Earners, Their Trades and Their Lives, that used vivid, indeed sensationalist, prose and the new methods of social science to expose, in telling and documented detail, conditions in the needle trades and department