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Making Both Ends Meet - The income and outlay of New York working girls by Edith Wyatt;Sue Ainslie Clark
page 92 of 237 (38%)
fair wage, but, owing to the uncertain and spasmodic nature of the work,
she was unable to depend upon earning enough to maintain even a fair
standard of living.

A point that should be accentuated in Molly Davousta's account is the
price of shoes. No one item of expense among working girls is more
suggestive. The cost of shoes is unescapable. A girl may make over an old
hat with a bit of ribbon or a flower, or make a new dress from a
dollar's worth of material, but for an ill-fitting, clumsy pair of shoes
she must pay at least $2; and no sooner has she bought them than she must
begin to skimp because in a month or six weeks she will need another
pair. The hour or two hours' walk each day through streets thickly
spread, oftener than not, with a slimy, miry dampness literally dissolves
these shoes. Long after up-town streets are dry and clean, those of the
congested quarters display the muddy travesty of snow in the city. The
stockings inside these cheap shoes, with their worn linings, wear out
even more quickly than the shoes. It is practically impossible to mend
stockings besides walking to work, making one's waists, and doing one's
washing.

All Molly Davousta's cares, her anxiety about shoes and her foreboding
concerning seasonal work, were increased by her position of family
responsibility.

In the same way, in the course of her seasonal work, family
responsibility pressed on Rita Karpovna. She was a girl of nineteen, who
had come to America a few years before with her older brother, Nikolai.
Together they were to earn their own living and make enough money to
bring over their widowed mother, a little brother, and a sister a year or
two younger than Rita.
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