A significant point is that among all but factory workers the excess of expenditures over incomes is greatest among those who live at home.  This disproves the statement often made that those who live at home do not need a living wage.  In conclusion, the Report of the Oregon Survey says:  “The investigation has proved beyond a doubt that a large majority of self-supporting women in the State are earning less than it costs them to live decently; that many are receiving subsidiary help from their homes, which thus contribute to the profits of their employers; that those who do not receive help from relatives are breaking down in health from lack of proper nourishing food and comfortable lodging quarters, or are supplementing their wages by money received from immoral living."[9]

The Massachusetts Commission on Minimum Wage Boards reports even lower standards in wages for women.  Among wage-earning girls and women over 18 years of age, 93 per cent of the candy-workers, 60 per cent of the workers in retail stores, and 75 per cent of laundry-women receive less than $8 a week.[10] In the cotton textile industry, among the 8021 women over 18 years of age whose wages were investigated, 38 per cent received less than $6 a week.[11] Among the individual stories that are buried in the Report, the following are typical:—­

Ernestine is an eighteen-year-old Canadian girl, very pretty and neatly dressed.  Her parents both died several months ago and left her utterly alone, without living relatives.  She worked as a stock girl at $4.50 a week for two months, was laid off, and went to a summer hotel as waitress for $3 a week, room and board.  She worked there for two months, or until the season was over, and then came to another store for $5 a week.  She pays $1.50 for her room, including light and heat, has no carfare, does her laundering, except for shirt waists which cost her $.30 during the summer.  She goes without breakfast or eats only a banana, gets her lunch for ten or fifteen cents, and her dinners for twenty or twenty-five cents.  She has never paid more than twenty-five cents for a meal since she started to work.  She is just a child, and is quite bewildered over the problem of facing life on $5 a week, and is terribly afraid of debt.  She is intelligent and clever.[12]

Jennie is a frail little body, about 40 years old.  After working 16 years in a Boston department store her wage was $5 a week....  For eleven years Jennie’s little $5 a week had been the sole support of herself and her aged mother....  When her astonished employer learned that she had worked 16 years in his store and attained a wage of only $5 a week, he raised it $1.  So the wage is supplemented by the girls (in the store) underpaid themselves, but comprehending the woman’s need....  Thus seventeen years of faithful service to one master has won for Jennie this position of semi-dependence upon charity, increasing anxiety over an unprovided-for future,