rl of twenty-one, an operative and trimmer, earned $12 a week. She had
been idle twelve weeks on account of slack work. For four weeks she had
night work for three nights a week, and payment for this extra time had
brought her income up to $480 for the year. Of this sum she paid $312 ($6
a week) for board and lodging alone in a large, pleasant room with a
friendly family on the East Side. To her family in Russia she had sent
$120, and she had somehow contrived, by doing her own washing, making her
own waists and skirts, and repairing garments left from the previous
year, to buy shoes and to pay carfare and all her other expenses from the
remaining $48. She had bought five pairs of shoes at $2 each, and a suit
for $15.

Fanny Wardoff, a shirt-waist worker of twenty, who had been in the United
States only a year, helped her family by supporting her younger brother.

For some time after her arrival in this country the ill effects of her
steerage voyage had left her too miserable to work. She then obtained
employment as a finisher in a skirt factory, where her best wage was $7.
But her earnings in this place had been so fluctuating that she was
uncertain what her total income had been before the last thirteen weeks.
At the beginning of this time she had left the skirt factory and become
a finisher in a waist factory, where she earned from $10 to $12 a week,
working nine and a half hours a day.

Her place to sleep, and breakfast and dinner, in a tenement, cost $2.50 a
week. She paid the same for her younger brother, who still attended
school. The weekly expense was palpably increased by 60 cents a week for
luncheon and 30 cents for carfare to ride to work. She walked home,
fifteen blocks.

Her clothing, during the eight months of work, had cost about $40. Of
this, $8 had been spent for four pairs of shoes. Two ready-made skirts
had cost $9, and a jacket $10. Her expense for waists was only the cost
of material, as she had made them herself.

She spent 35 cents a week for the theatre, and economized by doing her
own washing.

Here are the budgets of some shirt-waist operatives earning from $7 to
$10 a week, less skilled than the workers described above, but more
skilled than Natalya.

Irena Kovalova, a girl of sixteen, supported herself and three other
people, her mother and her younger brother and sister, on her slight wage
of $9 a week. She was a very beautiful girl, short, but heavily built,
with grave dark eyes, a