rself.

In spite of the monotony and speed of Yetta's work, it did not exhaust
her powers of living, because it neither required intense application nor
was pursued beyond a reasonable number of hours.

Barbara Cotton, an American woman of thirty-two, a skilled hand-worker in
an electrical goods factory, had been self-supporting for more than
eighteen years, spending the last nine in her present employment.

In the electrical goods factory she separated layers of mica until it was
split into the thinnest possible sheets. She was paid by the number she
succeeded in splitting. The constant repetition of an act of such
accuracy for nine hours a day had strained her eyes excessively and made
her extremely nervous.

For six months of these nine-hour days, she earned $8 or $8.50 a week.
During the other six months there was no work on Saturdays, and she
earned about $7 a week. She had a week's vacation with pay. She had lost
during the year she described two months' work from illness, due to her
run-down condition. This she said, however, was not caused by her work,
but by combining with it, in an emergency, the care of the children of a
sister, who had been sick.

Miss Cotton belonged to a benefit society and through her own illness she
had received an allowance of $5 a week.

Her income for the year had been about $367, an average of $7.06 a week.

Miss Cotton had tried living in boarding-houses and furnished rooms, and
although the expense was about the same, the places were much less
attractive in every way than the hotel for working girls where she was
staying at the time of the interview.

For half of a room a little larger than an ordinary hall bedroom and for
breakfasts and dinners, she paid $4.50 a week. Luncheons in addition cost
her $1 a week. As she was within walking distance of work, she had no
other expense but 35 cents for part of her washing. The rest she did
herself.

She bought very little clothing, as out of the $1.15 a week she had left
after paying every necessary expense, she generously helped to support a
sick sister and niece. After eighteen years of hard, steady work--nine
years of it skilled work--she had saved nothing except in the form of
benefit fees, and she had no prospect of saving.

Although she was nervously worn, and her eyesight was strained, she was
less exhausted by her industrial experience than Katherine Ryan, an Irish
worker of forty-five, who had been cutting and sewing tr