The American factory girl has endless ambition. She has a hunger for knowledge, for opportunities to better herself, to get on in the world, to improve. There is ample material in the factories as they exist for forming a new, higher, superior class of industrial art labourers. There is a great work to be accomplished by those who are willing to give their time and their money to lifting the non-breadwinners from the slavish, brutalizing machines at which they work, ignorant of anything better, and placing them by education, by cultivation, in positions of comparative freedom--freedom of thought, taste and personality.
Classes in industrial art already exist at the Simmons School in Boston and Columbia University in New York. New classes should be formed. Individual enterprise should start the ball and keep it rolling until it is large enough to be held in Governmental hands. It is not sufficient merely to form classes. The right sort of pupils should be attracted. There is not a factory which would not furnish some material. The recompense for apprenticeship would be the social and intellectual advancement dear to every true American's heart. The question of wages would be self-regulating. At Hull House, Chicago, in the Industrial Art School it has been proved that, provided the models be simple in proportion to the ability of the artisan, the work can be sold as fast as it is turned out. The public is ready to buy the produce of hand-workers. The girls I speak of are fit for advancement. It is not a plan of charity, but one to ameliorate natural conditions.
I make an appeal to all those whose interests and leisure permit them to help in this double emancipation of the woman who toils for bread and the girl who works for luxuries.
There are no words too noble to extol the courage of mankind in its brave, uncomplaining struggle for existence. Idealism and estheticism have always had much to say in praise of the "beauty of toil." Carlyle has honoured it as a cult; epics have been written in its glory. When one has turned to and performed, day in and day out, this labour from ten to thirteen hours out of the twenty-four, with Sundays and legal holidays as the sole respite--to find at the month's end that the only possible economics are pleasures--one is at least better fitted to comprehend the standpoint of the worker; and one realizes that part of the universe is pursuing means to sustain an existence which, by reason of its hardship, they perforce cling to with indifference. I laid aside for a time everything pertaining to the class in which I was born and bred and became an American working-woman. I intended, in as far as was possible, to live as she lived, work as she worked. In thus approaching her I believed that I could share her ambitions, her pleasures, her privations.