The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-10-19
AMERICAN WOMEN WORK
 IN METAL MACHINE SHOPS

It used to be said that in America wo- men did no work outside of their homes or the homes of others by whom they were employed in domestic service. lit- tie later after women had broken into almost every profession and trade in the country, there was still room to boast that in the United States, at least, heavy work was done entirely by men. Even this has been changed. Writing in the De- tober Charities and the Commons on "Pittsburg Women in the Metal Trades Elizabeth Beardsley Butler shows how women are doing heavy, dirty ill-paid machine work. Consider these sentences:
 In the largest foundry where women are employed there are fifty women core makers. Through the narrow entrance, one can see them moving about among wreaths of coal smoke and black dust. working at their benches at molds, or carrying trays to the ovens, all of them women of a strong. peasant maturity, their dark hair roughly combed back, their waists half open and their sleeves rolled high At one bench is a group or Polish girls, round featured, with high foreheads and fair hair, but the rest are of the Hungarian type, it's dark skin and muscular boise seeming for the mo- ment an incarnation of the activities of smoking ovens, boiling crucibles. and iron molten with fierce heat. The dim light through the windows olouded with black dust hardly reaches the center Of the room where the rows of ovens are, and even the glare of an electric bulb cannot dispel the impression of unreality, of re- moteness, the notion that these are crea- lures of race born underground to work on the metals of the earth.
 Unlike men core-makers, women are paid by the piece. As trades go, the re- turns are not high, on taking Into consid- eration the length of time necessary to learn. It Is two years before a girl Is considered expert. In some places, the girls do not earn more than $lOO day even after they have learned, but Sl-a is more usual, and there are two foun- dries from which the core-makers regu- larly draw a days pay of q. 40. An Amer ican girl who had worked for five years, said that she usually made from S7 to S a week. although in poor weeks she had fallen as low as s6. There is tradition in the core room of this foundry that a girl once made $2 a day at new kind of work and that when the firm found it out, the rate was cut so that no girl thereaf- ter should be able to make more than S1 50 or a maximum, rarely reached, of s1.S5
 To unorganized men, employed on the small work for which girls are otherwise used, the minimum days pay is $2.5O. l am told by men in the trade that there are 800 men core-makers in Pittsburg and the Northside, and that 75 per cent of them are organized. The union rate or wages is $350 a day up.
 In an electrical appliance shop there are 650 women, having work of less impor- tance than apprentices. They are used for the execution of a few mechanical pro- cesses in connection with the building of armatures and coils. For them there Is da of promotion Most of them work in huge room streets wide and of a length to be counted in fractions of mile rather than in feet. At one side, men are at work at lathes and bores: on the other there are girls, row back of row to the number of 300, all of them young and usually pale and a little tired. One guesses that from the droop of the shoulders and from the lines about the mouth, not from the pace, for every girl Is working with tireless zeal at winding by hand or machine. or at pasting mica at the long tables at the far end. One must speak close to ones neighbours ears for a word to be heard in the midst of this ceaseless whirr of a thousand wheels The girls arms keep pace with the power and the power is set to keep pace with the industrial demand.
 Most of the women are employed at coil winding. The machine process is simple and easily learned, as each girl simply starts the machine and holds in her hands coil and tape while the rapid revolutions of the wheels wind both together. The power action is so strong that the opera tor sways backward and forward and IS often forced to exert good deal of phys ical strength to keep the tape in place.
 Rate cutting and the consequent high speeding tend to produce an atmosphere of nervous haste which results in fre- quent changes in the working force and