Making Both ends Meet.
MAKING BOTH ENDS MEET The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911. First edition. 8vo, xiii, 270pp; dark blue cloth with thin blank rectangular rules framing title in gold and thin blank border rules (front panel); title, author and publisher with thin rules at head and foot, all in gold, at the spine. T.e.g. Frontispiece and three text photographs by noted photographer Lewis Hine. Short (1/4”) closed tear to lower edge of frontispiece; minor offsetting at pages 30/31 and 34/35 from something laid in. Lettering at spine dimmed; light wear to tips and ends. Very good. The contents: The Income and Outlay of Some New York Saleswomen; The Shirt-Waist Makers’ Strike; The Income and Outlay of Some New York Factory Works. (Unskilled and Seasonal Work); The Income and Outlay of Some New York Factory Workers (Monotony and Fatigue in Speeding); The Cloak Makers’ Strike and the Preferential Union Shop; Women Laundry Workers in New York; Scientific Management as Applied to Women’s Work. Based on a series of articles published in McCLURE’S. In her preface, Edith Wyatt writes: “The New York of the workers is not the New York best known to the country at large. The New York of Broadway, the New York of Fifth Avenue, of Central Park, of Wall Street, of Tammany Hall,—these are by-words of common reference; and when two years ago the daily press printed the news of the strike of thirty thousand shirt-waist makers in the metropolis, many persons realized, perhaps for the first time, the presence of a new and different New York—the New York of the city’s great working population”. The articles give a profile of “self-supporting women living away from home in New York” to document their needs and provide data toward the establishment of a minimum wage.
Edith Wyatt (1873-1958), social activist and writer, attended Bryn Mawr College in the early 1890s and subsequently taught at a Chicago girls’ school. She published “Three Stories of Chicago” in 1900, a title which won the admiration and friendship of William Dean Howells. For the next three decades she produced a steady stream of fiction, short stories and novels, poetry and literary criticism with books such as EVERY ONE HIS OWN WAY (1901); TRUE LOVE (1903); THE WHOLE FAMILY (contributor, 1908); THE WIND IN THE CORN (poetry, 1917); THE INVISIBLE GODS (1923), and ART & THE WORTHWHILE (1929). She also was a founder of POETRY MAGAZINE. A close associate of Jane Addams, Wyatt also was committed to social change. She wrote numerous articles on social and labor issues for McCLURE’S and other magazines and newspapers.
The accounts of the young workers and their living conditions are riveting—the pogrom which brought one young seamstress and her family to New York; people sleeping out doors “as much as possible” (”In summer-time the children sleep on the steps, and on covered chicken coops along the sidewalk”; the imprisonment of young strikers, etc. The authenticity of the voices, the vividness of the details, as well as the accumulative factual underpinnings render MAKING BOTH ENDS MEET compelling.
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