Women’s wages have always been excessively low and their hours excessively long. About 1830 Mathew Carey estimated that in Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Baltimore there were between 18,000 and 20,000 working women, at least 12,000 of whom could not earn, by constant employment for 16 hours out of the 24, more than $1.25 per week. At this rate he figured that, allowing for the loss of one day a week through sickness, unemployment or the care of children, and counting lodging at 50 cents and fuel at 12¹⁄₂ cents a week, a woman would have left for food and clothing just $22.50 per year. A good seamstress without children and employed all the time he figured could earn $1.12¹⁄₂ per week or $58.50 per year, out of which she would have to pay 50 cents per week for rent, 15 cents per week for fuel, 8 cents per week for soap, candles, etc., and $10 for shoes and clothing--which would leave her for food and drink 2³⁄₄ cents per day. If she was hampered by the care of children, was unemployed one day a week, or was slow or unskilled, he figured that, at the same rates of expenditure, she would have a yearly deficit of $11.56.[6] The situation of the working women in the cities of this country during the early decades of the nineteenth century was, indeed, as characterized by the New York _Daily Sentinel_, the first daily labor paper in this country, “frightful, nay disgraceful to our country, ... a gangrenous spot on the body politic, a national wound that ought to be visited and dressed, lest it rankle and irritate the whole system.”[7] Fifteen years later conditions were little better. An investigation of “female labor” in New York in 1845 led to the assertion by the _New York Tribune_ that there were in that city about 50,000 working women, onehalf of whom earned wages averaging less than $2 per week, and to the further statement that the girls who flocked to that city from every part of the country to work as shoe binders, type rubbers, artificial-flower makers, match-box makers, straw braiders, etc., found competition so keen that they were obliged “to snatch at the privilege of working on any terms.” “They find,” said the _Tribune_, “that by working from fifteen to eighteen hours a day they cannot possibly earn more than from one to three dollars a week, and this, deducting the time they are out of employment every year, will barely serve to furnish them the scantiest and poorest food, which, from its monotony and its unhealthy quality, induces disgust, loathing and disease. They have thus absolutely nothing left for clothes, recreation, sickness, books or intellectual improvement.”[8] In 1863 the average wages paid to women in New York, taking all the trades together, were said to have been about $2 a week, and the hours ranged from eleven to sixteen a day.[9] And in 1887 it was stated that in New York City nine thousand and in Chicago over five thousand women earned less than $3 per week.[10]