City Working Women

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 28, 1871

City Working Women.

To those girls and young women who have an unquenchable ambition to leave home and go to the city to learn trades, and become sewing girls, the following may be read with profit:—

“A few weeks since, the city papers related how a young lady had been arrested for pawning a sewing machine for which she had not yet paid. She bought it of one of the many firms who advertise machines, promising to furnish work to enable buyers to pay for them. The offer seemed good on the face; but the sequel showed too sadly the actual fraudulency of the arrangement. I know the lady well. Day by day she would pass me in the halls of our lodging place, looking more like a frightened ghost than anything earthly. I visited her in her room. It was an inner room, lighted only from the halls, such as we often see in our large public buildings. The only furniture she possessed, was her sewing machine and trunk. Her bed consisted of a mattress placed upon either a box or chairs. A few chairs belonging to the building had been lent her, and these completed the furniture of this room, where she toiled early and late, at her machine. She told me one day that, work as hard as she could, she could only make seventy-five cents per day. I know for some time her sole food was bread and milk, and that not too often. Her work was tucking skirts, and she usually managed to finish three a day, working late. She showed me one. It was tucked half way of the skirt, in half-inch tucks, and it seemed to me as if every tuck should have been marked indelibly, ‘One step nearer destruction.’ For so it was to her. When she found health and strength failing, and her face grew thinner each day, and the look in her eyes grew more wild and desperate; when her hope of anything better failed, she resorted to what many a poor, proud woman has done before—she pawned her machine, trusting in Providence for the help to enable her to redeem it. She did not mean to defraud her creditors; but they ascertained the facts at length, and she was arrested, imprisoned, and suffered everything a proud, sensitive nature could suffer under the circumstances. A friend assisted her at this point, and she was liberated on bail. The next we heard she had disappeared, and what part of the earth holds her poor, aching heart we do not know; but the memory of her white face will ever haunt me, as I wish it could ever follow and haunt those Shylocks of our city who wear out ‘human creatures’ in this unholy lust for gain. Cannot this matter be agitated once more in a more forcible manner than ever before? Ye who weep and groan over the steady and fearful growth of the ‘social evil’ among us, turn your philanthropic eyes to this one great cause of its growth. Regard this one evil in the light of a social upas tree, and uproot it in our midst, and thousands of hearts will thank you and bless you, and thousands of homes be made comfortable, where now lurk the fiends of want and their sister sin, waiting to seize upon their despairing prey.”—Ed.

THE TOILERS.—With the foregoing extract Bro. Clarke sends us the following thoughts:

How little do we think of the misery endured by the ill-fated daughters of misfortune, who are doomed to a life of toil in pent-up cities; whose wages are but an insult to humanity, and an aggravation to sorrow.

Why do not legislators take the matter in hand? and why do not community arise en masse, and vindicate, at least in some degree, the cause of those forlorn ones, who toil day and night, for only enough, and hardly that, to keep the breath of life in them? It is astonishing; it is shameful; it is almost unpardonable. If there is a soul in the public body, let us see it show itself.

JOS. CLARKE.