When the first operators had done their part the dresses were handed over to the drapers. There were two drapers; they were getting around fifty dollars a week before the hard times. One of the drapers was as attractive a girl as I ever saw any place—bobbed hair, deep-set eyes, a Russian Jewess with features which made her look more like an Italian. She spoke English with hardly any accent. She dressed very quietly and in excellent taste. All day long the two draped dresses on forms—ever pinning and pinning. The drapers turned the dresses over to certain operators, who finished all machine sewing. The next work fell to the finishers.
In that same end of the factory sat the four finishers, getting “about twenty dollars a week,” but again no one seemed sure. Two were Italians who could talk little English. One was Gertie, four weeks married—“to a Socialist.” Gertie was another of the well-dressed ones. If you could know these dress factory girls you would realize how, unless gifted with the approach of a newspaper reporter—and I lack that approach—it was next to impossible to ask a girl herself what she was earning. No more than you could ask a lawyer what his fees amounted to. The girls themselves who had been working long together in the same shop did not seem to know what one another's wages were. It was a new state of affairs in my factory experience.
The finishers, after sewing on all hooks and eyes and fasteners and doing all the remaining handwork on the dresses, turned them over to the two pressers, sedate, assured Italians, who ironed all day long and looked prosperous and were very polite.
They brought the dresses back to Jean and her helper—two girls who put the last finishing touches on a garment before it went into the showroom—snipping here and there, rough edges all smoothed off. It was to Jean the boss called my second morning, very loud so all could hear: “If you find anything wrong mit a dress, don't _look_ at it, don't _bodder wid_ it—jus' t'row it in dere faces and made dem do it over again! It's not like de old days no more!” (Whatever he meant by that.) So—there was your dress, “ready-made.”
Such used to be the entire factory, adding the two office girls; the model, who was wont to run around our part of the world now and then in a superior fashion, clad in a scanty pale-pink-satin petticoat which came just below her knees and an old gray-and-green sweater; plus various male personages, full of business and dressed in their best. Goodness knows what all they did do to keep the wheels of industry running—perhaps they were salesmen. They had the general appearance of earning at least ten to twenty thousand dollars a year. It may possibly have risen as high as two thousand.