The daily Gate City. [volume] (Keokuk, Iowa) 1855-1916, 1913-06-29
Many Of Them Work Twelve Hours
Per Day for Less Than So Per
Week in Free Trade
England.
THE SONG OF THE SHIRT
Farm Laborers Are Doing Well II
They Get as High as SIS Per
Week and Their
House.
by Ed L. Keen, London correspond
ont nf the IInifad prese

[By Ed l.. Keen, London correspond
ent OF the United Press
LONDON, June 2S.-"I arraign the
government and men Of England for
the shocking mismanagement which
makes it possible for women to be
employed from twelve to fourteen
hours day in order to earn s1.75 a
week The state has tinkered with
this terrible problem of sweated la
Dor, but it has failed simply because
ii has never recognized that the ques-
ton is one that must be dealt with
by women. 1t should be borne in
mind that 95 per cent of the sweated
workers of this country are women.
If the men of England we're worth
their salt they would have altered
such conditions as these long ago.
The speaker was Mrs. Flora Annie
Steel, one of Britain's foremost wom-
en- novelists and social reformers, and
she was describing to an audience of
thoughtful men and women at the
Knightsbridge Palace hotel the
wretched lives of the human exhibits
gathered by the Women Writer'S Suf-
frage league and the Mems League for
Woman Suffrage to illustrate the
economic argument in favor of votes
for women.
In the gilded hotel drawing room
temporarily fitted up as workshop,
from whose windows could be caught
glimpses of fashionabIy clad mem
bers of London society as they flash
ed past in carriage and motor car,
dozen sad-eyed, care-worn women
were feverishly plying their various
trades-some of them for a wage of
only two cents an hour
At one table strewn with artificial
flowers of her own fashioning sat a
frail, gray-haired woman, bent with
aching years. She was Mrs. Mary
Chisholm who had come from her
little home in Dalston to show how
II was possible by working twelve
hours a day at top speed sometimes
to earn 50 a week. She had done
this for fifty years.
IF it weren't that | love the flow
ers so,' she said pathetically, I'm
sure couldn't have kept on yea6
after year, even though l have blind
husband to care for" She is paid
six cents a gross for buttercups. 81
used to get only a cent and half a
gross for yiolets. but they don't pay
even that now, as they can be i'm
ported cheaper from Germany, so I've
had to quit making violets,'' she ex-
planned.
worker who for sixty years since tho
age of six, has been making brushes.
She is paid at the rate of 121a cents
G thousand holes, and although she Is
one of the most expert women en-
ployed at this trade in London the
greatest number of holes she can fill
in twelve hours continuous work is
5000.
One of the toilers, Mrs. Ellen Alb
bott woman with failing eyesight.
who for the last four years has sup
ported herself and her four children
on 50 week, told how in her small!
kitchen in the back streets of Dept
ford, she sews buttonholes for sew
enteen hours out of the twenty-four.
For each three dozen buttonholes she
is paid seven cents.
There was an aged maker Of match
boxes who has toiled all her life for
an average daily wage of less than
thirty cents; a maker Of black braid
trimming who has to puzzle out the
complicated patterns set for her to
copy and whose pay is fourteen cents
dozen yards which take sight hours
In the making; woman who makes
hose for other women to dance in,
at twenty cents a dozen pairs, and
considers $50 a fair weeks income
a maker of stuffed dolls, who sun
plies her own materials and receives
only dollar gross and seam
stress who makes dozen blouses in
a workday of twelve hours, for sixty
cents.
1t was the Song of the Shirt
revised and brought up to date.
A determined effort is to be made