Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [935]
O’Reilly also turned to Josephine Shaw Lowell for help. Lowell and Campbell arranged a mass meeting at which the young activist and others presented their case, and Father Huntington exhorted the middle-class audience to help “correct the social evil that permits their unfortunate sisters to be so frightfully overworked and badly paid.” By 1889 Lowell was so won over—what the “poor want is fair wages and not little doles of food,” she wrote her sister-in-law—that she resigned from the State Board of Charities and threw all her formidable energies into supporting the Working Women’s Society. She had decided that helping the “five hundred thousand wage earners in this city, 200,000 of them women and 75,000 of those working under dreadful conditions or for starvation wages,” was more important than harrying the twenty-five thousand dependents of the city’s charities.
In 1891 she, Campbell, and Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi organized the New York City Consumers’ League. Lowell became its first president, the board met in her home, and its offices were established in the United Charities Building. Taking a leaf out of the Central Labor Union’s book, the women proposed boycotting department stores and retail shops that did not treat employees properly. Lowell argued that just as “most decent people object to buying stolen goods, even though they get them very cheap,” so in the case of products of sweated labor, the “time and strength of the people who made them have been virtually stolen, even though under the forms of law.” During the abolitionist crusade women shoppers had given up slave-made cotton and sugar; now they should forgo goods identified by the league as made by exploited women.
Rather than promulgate a blacklist of stores to avoid, the league drew up a White List of stores to patronize. Only eight of the large department stores were included as dealing fairly with their employees. The White List was published in the papers, printed on postal cards and mailed to four thousand names taken from the Social Register, and placed in the ladies’ parlors of the twenty largest hotels.
As with the settlement house organizers, the Consumers’ League women’s analysis and programs grew steadily more sophisticated. Soon they would be involved in campaigns seeking state intervention to ensure adequate health and safety and to regulate maximum hours and minimum wages. Lowell began denouncing capitalists’ “arbitrary and tyrannical way toward the workers,” encouraging workers to form unions, and defending strikes as legitimate. In 1893 she joined Bishop Potter and Felix Adler on CAIL’s Board of Arbitration.
Despite her new insights, Lowell remained committed to the premise that direct aid to the poor was “evil.” Awareness of the structural roots of poverty only deepened her animosity, now reinforced by a conviction that charity handouts allowed employers to underpay workers, thus hindering efforts to attain a living wage. Lowell had, nevertheless, traveled far enough from her earlier stance to declare at an 1895 charities conference that “if the charity organization societies of the country are going to take the position of defenders of the rich against the poor which I do think is the danger which stands before us, then I shall be very sorry that I ever had anything to do with the work.”
REALISTS
In the literary world, too, dissatisfaction with reigning genteel conventions produced some startling defections, none more so than that of William Dean Howells, who until the mid-1880s had been a pillar of authorial propriety, an outsider turned ultimate insider. As a self-educated country boy in rural Ohio, Howells had adulated from afar the literary elite of genteel Boston—Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell—and just after the Civil War he came east to join their ranks. Hired as assistant editor of the prestigious Atlantic magazine, Howells became its editor by 1871; after a successful decade, he resigned to devote full time to writing novels and critical