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direct influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What was the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the Mercantile Employers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory Department. The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, and still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it. A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into conditions of working women in New York City. The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in two large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified to employing grown women at a salary of _thirty-three cents a day_. They confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended, on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity. The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite of the merchants' protests the women's bill was passed without a dissenting vote. The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which it placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of seats,--one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of children, except those holding working certificates from the authorities. These, and other minor provisions, affected all retail stores, as far as the law was obeyed.
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