LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Miss Marie and Mrs. John Van Vorst in their factory costumes,
          
                                               Frontispiece

Facingpage

“The streets are covered with snow, and over the snow the soot
  falls softly like a mantle of perpetual mourning,” 12

“Waving arms of smoke and steam, a symbol of spent energy, of the
  lives consumed, and vanishing again,” 58

“They trifle with love,” 70

After Saturday night’s shopping, 84

Sunday evening at Silver Lake, 96

“The breath of the black, sweet night reached them, fetid, heavy
  with the odour of death as it blew across the stockyards,” 102

In a Chicago theatrical costume factory, 114

Chicago types, 128

The rear of a Chicago tenement, 144

A delicate type of beauty at work in a Lynn shoe factory, 172

One of the swells of the factory:  a very expert “vamper,”
  an Irish girl, earning from $10 to $14 a week, 172

“Learning” a new hand, 184

The window side of Miss K.’s parlour at Lynn, Mass., 196

“Fancy gumming,” 210

An all-round, experienced hand, 210

“Mighty mill—­pride of the architect and the commercial magnate,” 220

“The Southern mill-hand’s face is unique, a fearful type,” 240

* * * * *

THE WOMAN WHO TOILS

CHAPTER I—­INTRODUCTORY

BY

MRS. JOHN VAN VORST

* * * * *

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Any journey into the world, any research in literature, any study of society, demonstrates the existence of two distinct classes designated as the rich and the poor, the fortunate and the unfortunate, the upper and the lower, the educated and the uneducated—­and a further variety of opposing epithets.  Few of us who belong to the former category have come into more than brief contact with the labourers who, in the factories or elsewhere, gain from day to day a livelihood frequently insufficient for their needs.  Yet all of us are troubled by their struggle, all of us recognize the misery of their surroundings, the paucity of their moral and esthetic inspiration, their lack of opportunity for physical development.  All of us have a longing, pronounced or latent, to help them, to alleviate their distress, to better their condition in some, in every way.