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Updated: June 24, 2025
They were calling him, with all poor men, to the sweat-shop and the forge, to the great mill of life. The new era had begun, dawning bright and clear to disperse the gloom in his soul. Leaning against the casement and wondering where he could earn the first dollar for the Peggy Brewster that was Peggy Gray, he rose to meet it with a fine unflinching fearlessness.
Budlong once figured that if sweat-shop proprietors paid wages at the scale Mrs. Budlong established for herself, all the seamstresses and seamsters would curl up round their machines and die of starvation the first week. But he never told Mrs. Budlong this. Fancy stitching did not earn much, but it did not cost much; and it kept her mysteriously contented.
The Pennsylvania law is similar to the New York law, and in addition, all persons are forbidden to bargain for sweat-shop labor, that is, labor in any kitchen, living-room, or bedroom in any tenement house except by the family actually resident therein, who must have a certificate from the board of health.
Simple as this procedure seemed it really worked a revolution in agriculture; for the first time since the pronouncement of the primal curse, the farmer abandoned his hunchback attitude and did his work standing erect. Yet this device also had its disqualifications, the chief one being that it converted the human sheaf-binder into a sweat-shop worker.
In these lived the latest graduates from the slum. I had just come from the clothing factory hard by the depot, in which a hundred of them or more were at work, and had compared the bright, clean rooms with the traditional sweat-shop of the city, wholly to the disadvantage of the latter. I had noticed the absence of the sullen looks that used to oppress me.
They had no exercise court to their prison, and the inmates were not permitted to speak to one another, but ate their meals in dead silence, and walked back to their cells with folded arms, and had their only occupation working for a sweat-shop contractor; this on the outskirts of the capital city of Wilmington, with no less than ninety-one churches!
These women said that the girls in the department stores were receiving wages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign woman in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a half.
Thompson, has written a novel entitled, "The Sweater's Victim," which has for its burden the ruin of girls through the "plague of the sweat-shop." It is easy to say, "Oh, well, these horrible things you are telling us about belong to the Old World!"
"I don't know what ails Nance these days," Mrs. Snawdor complained to Uncle Jed. "She sasses back if you look at her, an' fergits everything, an' Snawdor says she mutters an' jabbers something awful in her sleep." "Seems to me she works too hard," said Uncle Jed, still ignorant of her extra two hours in the sweat-shop.
In these regions and in others like them darkness and filth hold forth together where the macaroni are drying; broken pipes discharge sewage in the basement living quarters where the bananas are ripening; darkness and filth dwell together in the tenement cellars where the garment-worker sews the buttons on for the sweat-shop taskmaster; goats live amiably with human kids in the cob-webbed basements where little hands are twisting stems for flowers; in the unlovely stable lofts where dwell a dozen persons in a place never intended for one; in windowless attics of tall tenements where frail lives grow frailer day by day.
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