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These shirt-waist makers, all self-supporting, whose income and outlay are described above, were all with the exception of Irena Kovalova, who supported a family of four living away from home. Natalya lived with her mother and father. She did not do her own washing, though she made her own waists and those of her sister and mother.
Among the more skilled workers than Natalya in New York to-day, Irena Kovalova, who supports her mother and her younger brother and sister, has $11 a week instead of $9. She is not obliged to work on Sunday, and her factory closes at five o'clock instead of six on Saturday. "I have four hours less a week," she said with satisfaction.
Here are the budgets of some shirt-waist operatives earning from $7 to $10 a week, less skilled than the workers described above, but more skilled than Natalya. Irena Kovalova, a girl of sixteen, supported herself and three other people, her mother and her younger brother and sister, on her slight wage of $9 a week.
She was a very beautiful girl, short, but heavily built, with grave dark eyes, a square face, and a manner more mature and responsible than that of many women of forty. Irena Kovalova had not been out of work for one whole week in the year she described. She had never done night work; but she had almost always worked half a day on Sunday except in slack weeks.
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