they prefer to come late and go
early, piece-work admitting of this arrangement. The woman who takes up
this trade may be confident of earning from twenty-five to thirty-five
dollars a month, but she never exceeds this amount; nor is there
promotion beyond a certain point. In paper hangings wages do not rise
above twenty-five dollars at most, and in paper collars and cuffs, as in
everything connected with clothing, the rate is much less. Rags are the
foundation industry in all these forms of paper manufacture, but the
two thousand women who work at sorting these seldom pass beyond five
dollars, and more often receive but two and a half or three dollars per
week.

Under much the same head must come the preparation of sample cards,
playing cards, and various forms of stationers' work. The latter has
short dull seasons when girls may, for two or three weeks, have no work;
but it is otherwise a steady trade, the wages running from three and a
half to seven dollars per week. They stamp initials and crests with
large hand presses, and stamp also the cheaper order of lithographs;
they run envelope machines, color mourning paper, apply mucilage to
envelopes, and pack small boxes of paper and envelopes. In all of the
last mentioned trades hours are from eight A. M. to half-past five P. M.,
with half an hour for lunch, and a girl of fifteen can earn the same
wages as the woman of fifty, a light, quick touch and care being the
only essentials.

The trades mentioned here and in preceding papers form but a portion of
the ninety and more open to women. Thirty-eight of these are directly
connected with clothing, and include every phase of ornament or use in
braid, gimp, button, clasp, lining, or other article employed in its
manufacture. In every one of these competition keeps wages at the lowest
possible figure. Outside of the army here employed come the washers and
ironers who laundry shirts and underwear, whose work is of the most
exhausting order, who "lean hard" on the iron, and in time become the
victims of diseases resulting from ten hours a day of this "leaning
hard," and who complain bitterly that prisons and reformatories underbid
them and keep wages down. It is quite true. Convict labor here as
elsewhere is the foe of the honest worker, and complicates a problem
already sufficiently complicated. These ironers can make from ten to
twelve dollars per week, but soon fail in health and turn to lighter
work, many of them takin