for laundering clothes was almost half as much as the amount spent for
lodging and nearly two-thirds as much as the amount originally spent for
clothing.

Where this large expense of laundry cannot be met financially by
saleswomen, it has to be met by sheer personal strength. One
department-store girl, who needed to be especially neat because her
position was in the shirt-waist department, told us that sometimes, after
a day's standing in the store, she worked over tubs and ironing-boards at
home till twelve at night.

It is worth noting, as one cause of the numerous helpless shifts of the
younger salesgirls, that, living, as most of them do, in a
semidependence, on either relatives or charitable homes, it is almost
impossible for them to learn any domestic economy, or the value of money
for living purposes. It seems significant that quite the most practical
spender encountered among the saleswomen was a widow, Mrs. Green, whose
accounts will be given below, who was for years the manager of her own
household and resources, and not a wage-earner until fairly late in life.

This helplessness of a semidependent and uneducated girl may be further
illustrated by the chronicle of Alice Anderson, a girl of seventeen, who
had been working in the department stores for three years and a half.

She was at first employed as a check girl in a Fourteenth Street store,
at a wage of $2.62-1/2 a week; that is to say, she was paid $5.25 twice a
month. Her working day was nine and a half hours long through most of the
year. But during two weeks before Christmas it was lengthened to from
twelve to thirteen and a half hours, without any extra payment in any
form. She was promoted to the position of saleswoman, but her wages still