was thin and stoop
shouldered, wore spectacles, and did her hair according to the
pompadour styles of some twenty years ago. The work ain't so bad.
Tillie don't mind it. There's just one thing in the world Tillie
wants. What's that? "A man!" Evidently Tillie has made no bones of her
desire. The men call back kindly to Tillie as she picks her way up the
dark stairs in the morning, "Hello there, sweetheart!" That week had
been a pretty good one for Tillie--she'd made sixteen dollars
forty-nine cents.

"Ain't much, p'raps, one way, but there's jus' this about it, it's
steady. They never lay anybody off here, and there's a lot. You hear
these girls 'round here talk about earnin' four, five, six dollars a
day. Mebbe they did, but why ain't they gettin' it now? 'Shop closed
down,' or, 'They laid us off.' That's it. Add it up over a year and my
sixteen forty-nine'll look big as their thirty dollars to forty
dollars a week, see if it don't."

Tillie's old, fat, wheezy mother works on our floor--maybe Tillie
really was born there.

One day I decided to see what could be done if I went the limit.
Suppose I had a sick mother and a lame brother--a lot of factory girls
have. I was on a press where you had to kick four separate times on
each piece--small lamp cones, shaped, slot already in. My job was to
punch four holes for the brackets to hold the chimney. The day before
I had kicked over 10,000 times. This morning I gritted my teeth and
started in. Between 10 and 11 I had gotten up to 2,000 kicks an hour.
Miss Hibber went by and I asked her what piece rates for that machine
were. She said six and one-quarter cents for one hundred and fifty. I
did not stop then to do any figuring. Told her rather chestily I could
kick 2,000 times an hour. "That all? You ought to do much more than
that!" Between 11 and 12 I worked as I had never worked. It was
humanly impossible to kick that machine oftener than I did. Never did
I let my eyes or thoughts wander. When the whistle blew at 12 I had
kicked 2,689. For a moment I figured. It takes about an hour in the
morning to get on to the swing. From 11 to 12 was always my best
output. After lunch was invariably deadly. From 12.30 until 2.30 it
seemed impossible to get up high speed. That left at best 2.30 to 4
for anything above average effort. From 4 to 5 it was hard again on
account of physical weariness. But say I could average 2,500 an hour
during the day. That would have brought me in, four