Shoes alone consumed over one-half of the money used for clothing. They
wore out with such amazing rapidity that she had needed a new pair once a
month. At $2 each, except a best pair, costing $2.60, their price in a
year amounted to $24.60.[13]

In regard to Rachael's expenditure and conservation in strength, she had
drawn heavily upon her health and energy. Her cough continued to exhaust
her. She was worn and frail, and at eighteen her health was breaking.

Anna Klotin, another older skilled worker, an able and clever Russian
girl of twenty-one, an operative and trimmer, earned $12 a week. She had
been idle twelve weeks on account of slack work. For four weeks she had
night work for three nights a week, and payment for this extra time had
brought her income up to $480 for the year. Of this sum she paid $312 ($6
a week) for board and lodging alone in a large, pleasant room with a
friendly family on the East Side. To her family in Russia she had sent
$120, and she had somehow contrived, by doing her own washing, making her
own waists and skirts, and repairing garments left from the previous
year, to buy shoes and to pay carfare and all her other expenses from the
remaining $48. She had bought five pairs of shoes at $2 each, and a suit
for $15.

Fanny Wardoff, a shirt-waist worker of twenty, who had been in the United
States only a year, helped her family by supporting her younger brother.

For some time after her arrival in this country the ill effects of her
steerage voyage had left her too miserable to work. She then obtained
employment as a finisher in a skirt factory, where her best wage was $7.
But her earnings in this place had been so fluctuating that she was