And still, although there was nothing for us but bed
and machine, we could not earn enough to take care of ourselves through
the slack season."
It is significant to compare with the account of these ill-paid
operatives, exhausted from speeding, the chronicle of a skilled worker in
a belt-factory, Theresa Luther, earning $17 a week.
She was a young German-American Protestant woman of 27, born in New York.
After her father died, she instantly helped her older brother shoulder
the support of the family, as readily as though she had been a capable
and adventurous boy. Strong, competent, and high-spirited, Miss Luther
was a tall girl, fair-haired, with dark blue eyes, and a very beautiful
direct glance.
Her father had been a wood-carver, an artist responsible for some of the
most interesting work in his craft done in New York. Theresa, too, had
dexterity with her hands. At the age of fifteen she entered a leather
belt factory as a "trimmer." She was so quick that she earned almost
immediately $7 a week, a remarkable wage for a beginner of fifteen. Soon
she was permitted to fold and pack. Not long afterwards, overhearing a
forewoman lamenting the absence of machine operatives, she observed that
she could run a sewing-machine at home.
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