The first process at which women are employed is that of keeping cloth running evenly through a tentering machine.  The machine holds on tenter hooks—­the hooks of the metaphorical reference—­the damp cloth brought from the process of bleaching, and rolls it through evenly into a drier, where it slips off.  There are two kinds of tentering machines.  At one kind two girls sit, each watching an edge of the cloth and keeping it straight on the tenter hooks, so it will feed evenly.  The newer machines run in such a manner that one girl who may either stand or sit can watch both edges.  Because of the nearness of the drying closet, the air would be hot and dry here but that outside air is driven in constantly by fans through pipes with vents opening close to the workers.

The tentering machines used to run slowly.  This slowness enhanced the natural monotony and wearisomeness of the work.  The girls used to receive wages of $6 a week, and to rest three-quarters of an hour in the morning and three-quarters of an hour in the afternoon, with the same period for dinner at noon in the middle of a ten-and-one-half hour day.  After Scientific Management was introduced, the girls sat at the machine only an hour and twenty minutes at a time.  They then had a twenty-minute rest, and these intervals of work and rest were continued throughout the day by an arrangement of spelling with “spare hands.”  The machines were run at a more rapid rate than before.  The girl’s task was set at watching 32,000 yards in a day; and if she achieved the bonus, as she did without any difficulty, she could earn $9 a week.  The output of the tentering machines was increased about sixty per cent.

The girls at the tentering machines praised the bonus system eagerly.  They said they could not bear to return to the former method of work; that now the work was easier and more interesting than before, and the payment and the hours were better.  One of the “spare hands” showed me, as a memento of a new era at tenter-hooking machines, the written slip of paper the efficiency engineer had given to her, explaining to her how to arrange the intervals of rest, and to start the “rest” with a different girl on each Saturday—­a five-hour day—­so that the same girls would not have three intervals of rest every Saturday.

But in another part of the factory the girls at the tentering machines had wished to lump their rest intervals and to take them altogether in fifty-minute periods in the middle of the morning and of the afternoon.  Here the “spare hands” intervals at the machines fell awkwardly, and they were obliged to work for an unduly long time.  The girls became exhausted with the monotony in these longer stretches of work; and further wearied themselves by embroidering and sewing on fancy work in the long rest periods.  Here the girls were much less contented than in the other departments.[50]