[Footnote 38:  Laws of New York, Chapter 229, section 1, paragraph 88.  Became a law May 6, 1910.]

[Footnote 39:  Laws of New York, Chapter 31 of the Consolidated Laws, as amended to July 1, 1909, paragraph 86.  Inquirers’ suggestion:  This law would be simpler to enforce if an amending clause required that, in laundries, washing be done in a separate room from the rest of the work.]

[Footnote 40:  Laws of New York, Chapter 3 of the Consolidated Laws, as amended to July 1, 1909, paragraph 86.]

[Footnote 41:  “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States:  nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”]

[Footnote 42:  Jane Addams, “Democracy and Social Ethics.”]

CHAPTER VII

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT AS APPLIED TO WOMEN’S WORK

Within the last thirty years a new method of conducting work, called Scientific Management, has been established in various businesses in the United States, including “machine shops and factories, steel work and paper mills, cotton mills and shoe shops, in bleacheries and dye works, in printing and bookbinding, in lithographing establishments, in the manufacture of type-writers and optical instruments, in constructing and engineering work—­and to some extent—­the manufacturing departments of the Army and Navy."[43]

Three of the enterprises to a greater or less degree reorganized by this new system in this country employ women workers.  These establishments are a New Jersey cotton mill, a bleachery in Delaware, and a cloth finishing factory in New England.  The reduction of costs for the owning firms inaugurating Scientific Management has already received a wide publicity.  It is the object of this account to present as clear a chronicle as has been obtainable of the effect the methods of Scientific Management have had on the fortunes of the workers—­more especially on the hours, the wages, and the general health of the women workers in these houses who have so far experienced its training.[44]

What, then, are the new principles of management which have been inaugurated?  What is Scientific Management?  The expression may perhaps best be defined to lay readers by a lay writer by means of an outline of the growth of its working principles in this company—­an outline traced as far as possible in the words of the engineers creating the system, whose courtesy in the matter is here gratefully acknowledged.

I

In 1881, Mr. Frederick W. Taylor, the widely reverenced author of “The Art of Cutting Metals” and of “Shop Management,” then a young man of 21, closed, in grave discouragement, a long, hard, and victorious contest of his conducted as gang boss of the machinists of the Midvale Steel Company in Pennsylvania.  In the course of the last three years, as he narrates in his book “Academic and Industrial Efficiency":[45]—­