The whole problem in mechanical labour rests upon economy of force.  The purpose of each, I learned by experience, was to accomplish as much as possible with one single stroke.  In this respect the machine is superior to man, and man to woman.  Sometimes I tried original ways of doing the work given me.  I soon found in every case that the methods proposed by the forewoman were in the end those whereby I could do the greatest amount of work with the least effort.  A mustard machine had recently been introduced to the factory.  It replaced three girls; it filled as many bottles with a single stroke as the girls could fill with twelve.  This machine and all the others used were run by boys or men; the girls had not strength enough to manipulate them methodically.

The power of the machine, the physical force of the man were simplifying their tasks.  While the boy was keeping steadily at one thing, perfecting himself, we, the women, were doing a variety of things, complicated and fussy, left to our lot because we had not physical force for the simpler but greater effort.  The boy at the corking-table had soon become an expert; he was fourteen and he made from $1 to $1.20 a day.  He worked ten hours at one job, whereas Ella and I had a dozen little jobs almost impossible to systematize:  we hammered and cut and capped the corks and washed and wiped the bottles, sealed them, counted them, distributed them, kept the table washed up, the sink cleaned out, and once a day scrubbed up our own precincts.  When I asked the boy if he was tired he laughed at me.  He was superior to us; he was stronger; he could do more with one stroke than we could do with three; he was by nature a more valuable aid than we.  We were forced through physical inferiority to abandon the choicest task to this young male competitor.  Nature had given us a handicap at the start.

For a few days there is no vacancy at the corking-tables.  I am sent back to the bottling department.  The oppressive monotony is one day varied by a summons to the men’s dining-room.  I go eagerly, glad of any change.  In the kitchen I find a girl with skin disease peeling potatoes, and a coloured man making soup in a wash-boiler.  The girl gives me a stool to sit on, and a knife and a pan of potatoes.  The dinner under preparation is for the men of the factory.  There are two hundred of them.  They are paid from $1.35 up to $3 a day.  Their wages begin above the highest limit given to women.  The dinner costs each man ten cents.  The $20 paid in daily cover the expenses of the cook, two kitchen maids and the dinner, which consists of meat, bread and butter, vegetables and coffee, sometimes soup, sometimes dessert.  If this can pay for two hundred there is no reason why for five cents a hot meal of some kind could not be given the women.  They don’t demand it, so they are left to make themselves ill on pickles and preserves.

The coloured cook is full of song and verse.  He quotes from the Bible freely, and gives us snatches of popular melodies.