Note 17 — EDITORIAL NOTES.

It has been variously estimated by careful statisticians that we have from 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 girls and women in the United States who are making their own livings. The Commissioner of Labor, in his report for 1885, estimated that in New York City alone, there are over 200,000 employed in various wage-earning vocations. Mr. Carroll D. Wright’s fourth annual report in the U. S. Bureau of Labor gives the results of statistics gathered from twenty-two cities of women engaged in manual labor, not including the great army engaged in professional and semi-professional vocations, as something near 300,000, but the glaring discrepancy in the figures as they relate to the Empire City, shown by Helen Campbell, discredits the report. Certain it is that in the cities mentioned if one begins at the scrub women and passes through the various occupations, such as boarding-house keepers, millinery, dressmaking, cash girls, clerks, sales-women, stenographers, type-writers, book-keepers, teachers, factory girls, and slaves of the clothing trade, as well as the artists, musicians, actresses, public speakers, physicians, lawyers, and the many other professions or vocations filled by women, that the number would be swelled to the millions. The last census returns for New York City reveal the fact that there are twenty-seven thousand married men in New York who are supported by their wives, who are mainly dressmakers, milliners, boarding-house keepers, artists, teachers, musicians, and actresses. Here we have an army of shiftless, dependent men, more than a quarter of one hundred thousand strong, having each a vote to cast or perchance to sell to the highest bidder, while the real bread-winners, the actual wealth-producers, in this case have no voice in the legislative halls. Return to text