Clark's report.

So that it would seem that the budgets, records of the investigator, and
statements given by the young women interviewed last June may be
reasonably regarded as the most truthful composite photograph obtainable
of the trade fortunes of the army of the New York department-store girls
to-day.[2]

The limitations of such an inquiry are clear. The thousands of women
employed in the New York department stores are of many kinds. From the
point of view of describing personality and character, one might as
intelligently make an inquiry among wives, with the intent of
ascertaining typical wives. The trade and living conditions accurately
stated in the industrial records obtained have undoubtedly, however,
certain common features.

Among the fifty saleswomen's histories collected at random in stores of
various grades, those that follow, with the statements modifying them,
seem to express most clearly and fairly, in the order followed, these
common features--low wages, casual employment, heavy required expense in
laundry and dress, semidependence, uneven promotion, lack of training,
absence of normal pleasure, long hours of standing, and an excess of
seasonal work.

One of the first saleswomen who told the League her experience in her
work was Lucy Cleaver, a young American woman of twenty-five, who had
entered one of the New York department stores at the age of twenty, at a
salary of $4.50 a week.