THE AMERICAN
JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
THE SWEAT-SHOP IN SUMMER.[1]
The exploration of fields of industrial labor by those who from circumstances belong outside of the manual laboring class has become so common that one feels constrained to apologize to the long-suffering public for thrusting upon it still another "experience." The only excuse for this, as for many another, is the hope that it may rouse to thought and action some people who have heretofore been apathetic or listless, and this time in regard to a vigorous relic of an earlier industrial system—the sweat-shop.
From the time of Paul Göhre[2] and Frau Dr. Minna Wettstein-Adelt[3] to Walter Wycoff,[4] many educated people have been actively interested in the hardships of some phases of industry, and from time to time have thrown light upon actual conditions by experiencing the toil. Others again, in a dilettante fashion, have gone down and mixed with the so-called dregs of society long enough to focus a figurative kodak on little groups of workers here and there, for the purpose of ekeing out "copy." To the serious student of society such work is valueless, to the general reader it may have a morbid sort of interest, and to the toiler it is an insult; whereas an honest portrayal of the conditions under which the people work may be of inestimable value
- ↑ Photographs of Chicago sweaters furnished by courtesy of the Chicago American.
- ↑ Three Months in a Workshop (1895).
- ↑ 3½ Monate Fabrik-Arbeiterin (1897).
- ↑ The Workers (1898).
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