The Massachusetts Commission on Minimum Wage Boards reports even lower
standards in wages for women. Among wage-earning girls and women over 18
years of age, 93 per cent of the candy-workers, 60 per cent of the workers
in retail stores, and 75 per cent of laundry-women receive less than $8 a
week.[10] In the cotton textile industry, among the 8021 women over 18
years of age whose wages were investigated, 38 per cent received less than
$6 a week.[11] Among the individual stories that are buried in the
_Report_, the following are typical:--

Ernestine is an eighteen-year-old Canadian girl, very pretty and
neatly dressed. Her parents both died several months ago and left her
utterly alone, without living relatives. She worked as a stock girl at
$4.50 a week for two months, was laid off, and went to a summer hotel
as waitress for $3 a week, room and board. She worked there for two
months, or until the season was over, and then came to another store
for $5 a week. She pays $1.50 for her room, including light and heat,
has no carfare, does her laundering, except for shirt waists which
cost her $.30 during the summer. She goes without breakfast or eats
only a banana, gets her lunch for ten or fifteen cents, and her
dinners for twenty or twenty-five cents. She has never paid more than
twenty-five cents for a meal since she started to work. She is just a
child, and is quite bewildered over the problem of facing life on $5 a
week, and is terribly afraid of debt. She is intelligent and
clever.[12]

Jennie is a frail little body, about 40 years old. After working 16
years in a Boston department store her wage was $5 a week.... For
eleven years Jennie's little $5 a week had been the sole support of
herself and her aged mother.... When her astonished employer learned