Produced by Markus Brenner, Irma Spehar and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) WORKING WITH THE WORKING WOMAN _By_ CORNELIA STRATTON PARKER _Author of_ “AN AMERICAN IDYLL” NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS _MCMXXII_ WORKING WITH THE WORKING WOMAN Copyright, 1922, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION vii I. NO. 1075 PACKS CHOCOLATES 1 II. 286 ON BRASS 42 III. 195 IRONS “FAMILY” 75 IV. IN A DRESS FACTORY 109 V. NO. 536 TICKETS PILLOW CASES 137 VI. NO. 1470, “PANTRY GIRL” 173 CONCLUSION 226 INTRODUCTION The number of books on the labor problem is indeed legion. The tragedy of the literature on any dynamic subject is that most of it is written by people who have time to do little else. Perhaps the best books on many subjects will never be written because those folk, who would be most competent to do the writing, through their vital connection with the problem at hand, never find the spare minutes to put their findings down on paper. There could be no more dynamic subject than labor, since labor is nothing less than human beings, and what is more dynamic than human beings? It is, therefore, the last subject in the world to be approached academically. Yet most of the approach to the problems of labor is academic. Men in sanctuaries forever far removed from the endless hum and buzz and roar of machinery, with an intellectual background and individual ambitions forever far removed from the interests and desires of those who labor in factory and mill, theorize—and another volume is added to the study of labor. But, points out some one, there are books on labor written by bona-fide workers. First, the number is few. Second, and more important, any bona-fide worker capable of writing any kind of book on any subject, puts himself so far above the rank and file that one is justified in asking, for how many does he speak?