The other point that should be emphasized is the fact that she did her own washing.  The more accurate statement would be that she did her own laundry, including the processes, not only of rubbing the clothes clean, but of boiling, starching, bluing, and ironing.  This, after a day of standing in other employment, is a vital strain more severe than may perhaps be readily realized.  Saleswomen and shop-girls have not the powerful wrists and muscular waists of accustomed washerwomen, and are in most instances no better fitted to perform laundry work than washerwomen would be to make sales and invoice stock.  But custom requires exactly the same freshness in a saleswoman’s shirt-waist, ties, and collars as in those of women of the largest income.  The amount the girls of the St. George’s Working Club found it absolutely necessary to spend in a year for laundering clothes was almost half as much as the amount spent for lodging and nearly two-thirds as much as the amount originally spent for clothing.

Where this large expense of laundry cannot be met financially by saleswomen, it has to be met by sheer personal strength.  One department-store girl, who needed to be especially neat because her position was in the shirt-waist department, told us that sometimes, after a day’s standing in the store, she worked over tubs and ironing-boards at home till twelve at night.

It is worth noting, as one cause of the numerous helpless shifts of the younger salesgirls, that, living, as most of them do, in a semidependence, on either relatives or charitable homes, it is almost impossible for them to learn any domestic economy, or the value of money for living purposes.  It seems significant that quite the most practical spender encountered among the saleswomen was a widow, Mrs. Green, whose accounts will be given below, who was for years the manager of her own household and resources, and not a wage-earner until fairly late in life.

This helplessness of a semidependent and uneducated girl may be further illustrated by the chronicle of Alice Anderson, a girl of seventeen, who had been working in the department stores for three years and a half.

She was at first employed as a check girl in a Fourteenth Street store, at a wage of $2.62-1/2 a week; that is to say, she was paid $5.25 twice a month.  Her working day was nine and a half hours long through most of the year.  But during two weeks before Christmas it was lengthened to from twelve to thirteen and a half hours, without any extra payment in any form.  She was promoted to the position of saleswoman, but her wages still remained $2.62-1/2 a week.  She lived with her grandmother of eighty, working occasionally as a seamstress, and to her Alice gave all her earnings for three years.