The Industrial Condition of Women and Girls in Honolulu: A Social StudyBlascoer, Frances
General
The Industrial Condition of Women and Girls in Honolulu: A Social Study
Blascoer, Frances
Child labor -- Hawaii -- Honolulu; Honolulu (Hawaii) -- Social conditions; Women -- Employment -- Hawaii -- Honolulu
Of this group three women were married, one was widowed and three were
young girls. One of the married women, whose husband was in jail and who
had a three-year-old child—the victim of infantile paralysis—was
receiving her rent from a church society. The woman who was widowed also
had her rent paid by a church society. Two of the girls received help
from their respective fathers in addition to their living expenses, and
one woman supported herself and invalid husband on her earnings in this
position and in the canneries where she worked during the season with
her grandchild, the two earning about $8.00 a week. She was a wiry,
industrious Hawaiian woman of about sixty, and it took much persuasion
to get her story from her. The Hawaiians are not beggars and few of the
old stock have been known to seek alms.
The proprietor, on having these facts called to his attention, said that
he could hire Chinese boys at $3.00 a week and have the work done more
efficiently. Yet even Chinese boys dependent on their own efforts cannot
subsist decently on $3.00 a week.
In her address before the National Conference of Charities and
Corrections in Cleveland, held in June, 1912, Mrs. Florence Kelly, the
dean and veritably the mother of industrial investigation, said:
“We cannot longer escape the knowledge that there is no more
efficient cause of wholesale destitution in the United States than
industry. It can be said with truth that poverty is the regular and
inevitable byproduct of our present industry, as wealth is its
normal product. We carry on our industry to produce wealth, and
incidentally we produce wholesale poverty.
“Insufficient wages underlie a vast proportion of the need for
correctional and reformatory work. They entail upon the community
child labor, tuberculosis, underfeeding, lack of refreshing sleep
and consequent nervous breakdown.
“They underlie industrial employment of mothers, whose neglected
children fail in health and morals. The children in turn crowd the
juvenile courts and custodial institutions....
“It behooves us all to put in practice as rapidly as we may some
standard of payment for the working people having due relation to
the expenditure of life itself, in the service of all, that is made
by those who work for wages.”
A typical example of the spirit being developed among employers by a
better knowledge of conditions is cited by Mrs. Kelley:
“A leading store in Boston—Filene’s—has for several months
maintained a minimum wage of $8.00 a week. For many years this store
had employed no one who had not finished the work of the eighth
grade of the public schools. It has thus set for the whole country
an example of retail trade as a field in which industry can be
carried on under all the difficulties entailed by unlimited
competition, with profit and success, and without producing poverty
as its byproduct.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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