One of the most noted social workers in America, a woman with strength and charm of character, who is a leader in every radical movement, began her life in a cigar factory. Later on she married a man of wealth and has lived a life of ease ever since. She says of her early experiences: “For twelve years I was a cigar worker in Cleveland. I was ill-nourished and poorly clad. I worked at night as well as by day to help piece out my family’s existence. I never had anything I wanted.” This might be said of a great many of the cigar workers and their families. The only difference would be that she did not tell all of her story. In addition to the long hours there is an undermining of the health that goes with it. Now all these people are working for some one’s pleasure. They are making luxuries. The most radical person I ever knew in my life was an eighteen-year-old girl whose parents had lost their money. She was forced to go to work in a cigar factory when she was twelve years old. She was bitter toward life and had no faith or confidence in anything or in any person. Said she, “When I look around and see people who have all the money and all the clothes and all the good things that I want and can never have, I know that conditions are unjust and must be changed. I don’t care what it costs; I am going to do my part in fighting and agitating until there is a change.” This is an attitude that is now growing very common. There are deep-seated forces at work perpetuating these ideas. By valuing things more than men these conditions are made a permanent part of our life.
=Furs.= “Why do you want to wear furs in the summer-time?” I asked a young lady. It was an extremely hot day and she was wearing a white dress with very short sleeves and cut low in the neck, but she had a fox fur around her neck; there was quite a margin between the lower edge of her fur and the upper edge of her dress. “Why,” she replied, “I think it is pretty, don’t you?” This fur had come on a long journey and gone through many processes before it came into her hands. Many men and women had labored to produce it. The man who had caught the fox probably had a line of traps stretched over nine or ten miles of some stream in the northern part of Canada or Alaska. All through the bitter cold of the winter he had lived alone in a cabin, and day after day had tramped that line to take out the animals that had been caught. Bringing them back to his cabin he skinned them; turned the hide over a piece of board and stood it behind the stove to cure. Later the pelts were brought out of the wilderness and sold into the hands of a group of fur workers. They were then more fully cured, and passed on to the makers of scarfs. All of these workers were producing a luxury.