From the Water Department no reply could possibly come for
several weeks more. And in the meantime, all the women workers in the
laundry, impelled by intolerable thirst, drank the contaminated water.
"The work-room where I was employed had, on the whole, plenty of windows.
These were left open. But when a room is large and full of machinery,
artificial light is needed all day, and the outside air does not come in
very far to drive away the heat and the dampness. On going out at noon
from a laundry where I had dipped shirts in hot starch all the morning at
a breakneck pace, I was struck by the coolness of the day. That night I
discovered that the thermometer had been registering 96 deg. in the shade.
A few fans should be put in each laundry. They could be run by the power
that runs the machines.
"In the 'model laundry,' I worked at first at a mangle, running spreads
and sheets and towels between two revolving cylinders. Here I found there
was danger of slipping my fingers too far under the cylinders in the
process of feeding. The mangle had a guard, to be sure,--a flexible metal
bar about three-quarters of an inch above the feeding-apron in front of
the cylinder. But I learned that this acted as a warning rather than a
protection.
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