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Working Women and the Limits of Welfare Capitalism “UN LOVE D AN D HALF PAI D” Writing for the Los Angeles Express newspaper in 1903, reporter Elizabeth Banks interviewed a cross section of the city’s working women: servants, office clerks, retail workers, and so on. These women told Banks that a woman should expect to pay thirty dollars a month for room and board in a “desirable and convenient” place, and that clerical workers, for example, received on average twenty-five dollars a month. Puzzled, Banks mused in one of her articles that she had “put in all yesterday morning trying to do an arithmetical sum in simple division. I tried to make thirty go into twentyfive and have something left, and much to my disgust I could not manage it.” Banks’s informants directed her to the Los Angeles Young Women’s Christian Association’s building, where she was pleased and surprised to find a restaurant offering low-cost meals as part of the organization’s “noon rest” program. The restaurant offered bread and butter for three cents. A “bit of fish” could be had for five cents. For those girls with no pennies at all, a free glass of water would wash down “a cracker from her pocket. . . . Here, God help her! She could go hungry and not be caught in the act!” The American-born Banks had gotten her start writing for American newspapers before relocating to Great Britain. Her work appeared regularly in London’s Weekly Sun, and she continued to submit articles to American papers like the Los Angeles Express. During her sojourn in Los Angeles, Banks reflected on her own experiences as a working woman in London, when she had been too poor to fill up on anything other than crackers and cheap buns at lunchtime: “But that was in London, the great city of the world’s poor. . . . I did not expect to find California working girls up to the tricks of the London girls in the matter of making both ends meet. It seems however, there is 54 E A R N I N G P O W E R this touch of womanly nature that makes the London and Los Angeles girl akin. The girl who has no home and earns small wages gets a furnished room and proceeds to go hungry in order to dress and pay car fare. This is the first thing I have found out in my observation of the working girl problem in Los Angeles.” The “working girl problem” Banks observed was only one of several changes that profoundly altered Los Angeles at the turn of the twentieth century. Women’s clubs like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Friday Morning Club, and the Young Women’s Christian Association did their best to promote their ideological vision of “reform” both for the city and for working women. But, like their male counterparts in the business world, club women did not see any value in organizing working women into unions. Instead, they created and promoted a system of charities, clubs, and evening classes to try to protect the health, morality, and well-being of female workers. “Club women wanted to ease their [working women’s] lot and at the same time ensure that unattached women in the city were neither exploited nor exploiters of changing conditions and standards of behavior for women,” Sandra Haarsager explains. This chapter looks at the creation of women’s clubs in Southern California and at club women’s relationship with working women. The Los Angeles branch of the ywca is used as a case study of the often conflicting needs of these two groups of women. Clubs’ charity networks excluded most minority women and those in the unskilled trades. In many instances middle- and upper-class women ultimately supported capital by using their unpaid “charity ” labor to compensate for working-class women’s underpaid labor. First Steps: The Los Angeles Woman’s Club The growth of Los Angeles in the 1880s and 1890s not only produced changes in the spatial, economic, and ethnic composition of the city but also coincided with the growth of a new mass movement in the United States. Called “organized womanhood” to emphasize the power found in solidarity with one another, affluent native-born Anglo-American Protestant women across the United States sought to improve their political and economic position in society. While these clubs initially instituted a variety of measures and events they hoped would...

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