The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself

"One of the latest and truest stories taking up conditions of toil. The author speaks at first hand, and her book is a human document of both statistic and artistic excellence." -Success Magazine "The story is told by a girl who is both spectator and worker, a country girl, who, to earn her living at the age of eighteen, worked in New York for $3 a week, and suffered and nearly starved; but was seeing as well as working, and always with intelligence and a marvelously wide outlook and a profoundly logical brain. As the writer most cogently puts it, the average factory girl 'can not work and does not work; she is simply worked....To work is a boon and a privilege; to be worked is degrading.' The false sentiment expressed so frequently about the American working-girl is, according to this book, largely responsible for the girl's false attitude toward her work. To slight work has become an ideal of refinement. Each girl is her own heroine, and during working hours she is not listening for orders, but for the footsteps of King Cophetua....The writer had the advantage of doing her book from necessity through the terrible hardships of the sweatshop existence. She did not 'visit' the shops for literary purposes. She came to New York without friends, influence, or money, because there was a 'new-made grave on a windswept hill in western Pennsylvania.' And so she started hunting for work, using her last precious pennies to answer advertisements and to pay carfare from factory to factory....She met every discouragement, every impertinence, every covert insolence that the shabby, poverty-stricken girl who doesn't know how to work must meet in the lower East Side.... A book written with so much understanding and insight would not be complete without the suggestion born of experience of some remedy for the betterment of the enormous waste material in New York known as the working-girl." -The Literary Digest "One of the really significant books on modern social problems." -The Washington Star "It should be read by every man, woman, and child who cherishes the belief that he or she is not a selfish clod." -Jack London, San Francisco Examiner "That the experiences are real there will be no doubt." -New York Globe CONTENTS I In which I Arrive in New York II In which I Start Out in Quest of Work III I Try "Light" Housekeeping in a Fourteenth-street Lodging-house IV Wherein Fate Brings Me Good Fortune in One Hand and Disaster in the Other V In which I am "Learned" by Phoebe in the Art of Box-making VI In which Phoebe and Mrs. Smith Hold Forth upon Music and Literature VII In which I Acquire a Story-book Name and Make the Acquaintance of Miss Henrietta Manners VIII Wherein I Walk through Dark and Devious Ways with Henrietta Manners IX Introducing Henrietta's "Special Gentleman-friend" X In which I Find Myself a Homeless Wanderer in the Night XI I Become an "Inmate" of a Home for Working Girls XII In which I Spend a Happy Four Weeks Making Artificial Flowers XIII Three "Lady-friends," and the Adventures that Befall Them XIV In which a Tragic Fate Overtakes my "Lady-friends" XV I Become a "Shaker" in a Steam-laundry XVI In which it is Proved to Me that the Darkest Hour Comes Just Before the Dawn Epilogue