“High wages generally involved long hours.  For instance, in one laundry, young American women between twenty and thirty were employed as hand starchers at piece-work.  They made $10 a week, when times were slack, by working once or twice a week, from seven in the morning until eleven at night.  In busy times they sometimes made $22 a week by working occasionally from seven o’clock one morn till two o’clock the following morning.[36]

“Although Italians, Russians, Irish, Polish, Germans, Americans, and Swedes are employed in New York laundries, the greater part of the work is done by Irish and Italians.  The Irish receive the higher prices, the Italians the lower prices.  The best-paid work, the hand starching of shirts and collars and the hand ironing, is done by Irish women, by colored women, and by Italian and Jewish men.  The actual process of hand starching may be learned in less than one hour.  Speed in the work may be acquired in about ten days.  On the other hand, to learn the nicer processes of the ill-paid work of feeding and folding at the mangle—­the passing of towels and napkins through the machine without turning in or wrinkling the edges, the passing of table-covers between cylinders in such a way that the work will never come out in a shape other than square—­to learn these nicer processes requires from thirteen to fifteen days.  The reason for the low wages listed for mangle work seems to lie only in nationality.  Mangle work, as a rule, is done by Italians.  In two laundries I found, working side by side with American and Irish girls, Italians, who were doing exactly the same work, and were paid less, solely because they were Italians.  The employer said he never paid the Italians more than $4 a week.

“In the next best-paid work after hand starching, the work of hand ironing, paying roughly from $8 to $18 a week, Italian women are practically never employed.

“The worst part of mangle work, the shaking, is done by young girls and by incapable older women of many nationalities.  One of the ill-paid girls, who had $4.50 a week, gave $3.50 a week board to an aunt, who never let her delay payment a day.  She had only $1 a week left for every other expense.  This girl was ‘keeping company’ with a longshoreman, who had as much as $25 in good weeks.  She had been engaged to him, and had broken her engagement because he drank—­’he got so terribly drunk.’  But when I saw her she was in such despair with her low wage, her hard hours of standing, and only $5 a week ahead of her, that she was considering whether she should not swallow her well-founded terror of the misery his dissipation might bring upon them, and marry him, after all.

“The shakers are the worst paid and the hardest worked employees.  The young girls expect to become folders and feeders.  The older women are widows with children, or women with husbands sick or out of work or in some way incapacitated.  Indeed, many of all these laundry workers, probably a larger proportion than in any other trade, are widows with children to support.  ‘The laundry is the place,’ said one of the women, ‘for women with bum husbands, sick, drunk, or lazy.’  The lower the pay and the damper and darker the laundry, the older and worse off these women seem to be.