ery at a cheap store, and such
style and taste as she displays is "ready made."

Not having learned to work, either at school or at home, she goes to the
factory, to the workshop, or to the store, crude, incompetent, and,
worst of all, with an instinctive antagonism toward her task. _She
cannot work, and she does not work. She is simply "worked."_ And there
is all the difference in the world between "working" and "being worked."
To work is a privilege and a boon to either man or woman, and, properly
regulated, it ought to be a pleasure. To be worked is degrading. To work
is dignified and ennobling, for to work means the exercise of the mental
quite as much as the physical self. But the average working girl puts
neither heart nor mind into her labor; she is merely a machine, though
the comparison is a libel upon the functions of first-class machinery.

The harsh truth is that, hard as the working girl is "worked," and
miserable as her remuneration is, she is usually paid quite as much as
she is worth.

For her incompetency she is not entirely to blame; rather is it a matter
of heredity and environment. Being a girl, it is not natural to her to
work systematically. The working woman is a new product; in this country
she is hardly three generations old. As yet she is as new to the idea of
what it really means to work as is the Afro-American citizen. The
comparison may not be flattering to our vanity, but, after a reading of
Booker Washington's various expositions of the industrial abilities of
the negro, I cannot but be convinced that the white working woman is in
a corresponding process of evolution, so far as her specific functions
for labor have been developed.

Conditions in the "Pearl," from the view-point of mere physical labor,
were the most brutal in all my experience; but, from what I can learn,
the "Pearl" is no worse than many other similar establishments. Young
women will work in such places only as a last resort, for young women
cannot work long under conditions so detrimental to bodily health. The
regular workers are old women--women like Mrs. Mooney and her cronies.
The steady workers at the "Pearl" were, with the exception of the
"queen," all old women. Every day saw the arrival of a new force of
young hands who were bound to "play out" at the end of three or four
days' apprenticeship, if not sooner. I played out completely: I didn't
walk a step for a week after I went home with Minnie Plympton that
Sat