How the Other Half Lives

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1890

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Chapters 20-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 20 Summary and Analysis: “The Working Girls of New York”

New York’s working women and girls face unique obstacles. When they manage to find honorable work—and finding it is no easy task—they often receive starvation wages. One “gentle and refined woman” who descended into “direst poverty” died by suicide “after a vain search for work in a driving storm” (234-35). Approximately 150,000 New-York women and girls “earn their own living,” and many others contribute income to their families (235). In city department stores, Riis finds that salesgirls can be fined for the crime of sitting down or fired for passing out in close spaces with poor ventilation. Elsewhere, competition from tenement-house sweatshops has reduced wages for shirtmakers. The situation is bleak for all clothing manufacturers. In short, “[t]here is scarce a branch of woman’s work outside of the home in which wages, long-since at low-water mark, have not fallen to the actual point of starvation” (240). A photograph (“Sewing and Starving in an Elizabeth Street Attic”) shows two women, one older and the other younger perhaps by 20-30 years, performing this “woman’s work.” In such conditions, Riis asks rhetorically, can anyone blame young women “if their feet find the paths of shame” (241)? Riis concludes, however, on a hopeful note. He applauds the New York City working girl, for “only in the rarest instances does she go astray,” and he insists that a “better day is dawning,” for she “will yet wring from an unfair world the justice too long denied her” (242).

Chapter 21 Summary and Analysis: “Pauperism in the Tenements”

The Charity Organization Society records that, in the past eight years, 135,595 families sought or received charitable assistance. Based on a very conservative estimate of three and a half people per family, this means that nearly half a million New Yorkers have subsisted at least in part on charity. Likewise, the most recent statistics show that more than 10% of those who die in New York City are buried in the mass graves of Potter’s Field. These are indices of pauperism, a measure of how many New Yorkers each year are reduced to destitution and “beggary.” A photograph (“A Flat in the Pauper Barracks, West Thirty-Eighth Street, with All Its Furniture”) shows a flat with only a single mattress and a bucket on top of a small stool. These are not even tenements but instead are better classified as “barracks” or “shanties” (245). Still, for these families, they are what passes for housing. Riis blames the tenements for creating the conditions in which pauperism grows, becoming one of the only options for the truly destitute and desperate person, who Riis describes as being “as hopeless as his own poverty” (246). Riis distinguishes the “honest” impoverished person, who works for low wages, from the unemployed individual who, like the thief, believes “that the world owes him a living” (247). Here Riis refers to the “permanent pauper,” not the “honest poor” temporarily reduced even further by life’s misfortunes. Riis regards those who persistently ask for money as nuisances and sometimes frauds. In keeping with his ethnic analyses, Riis notes that a combined 27% of those who ask for money or resources are either Irish or white American. The reason is simple: Italians and other immigrants go to the United States to work, whereas “no beggar would ever emigrate from anywhere unless forced to do so” (249). Individuals who are blind and ask for money occupy city streets. Riis claims that fraudulent “beggars” use the tenements to deceive well-meaning benefactors into believing that they are hopelessly destitute when in fact they are merely lazy. Riis uses this chapter to illustrate that thoughtless charity often does more harm than good, that the people of the tenements need “work and living wages” to raise themselves from the “rut of pauperism into a proud, if modest, independence” (253).