The Cost of Living for a Wage-Earner's Family in New York City

Abstract

The problem of living as it confronts the city wage-earner today not only concerns the whole question of wages and labor, but also housing conditions, the rent problem, the cost of food and fuel, his pleasure and recreation, the education of his children, and some provision for the future. The standards of a workingman's neighborhood recognize the wife as the financier of the family group. It is not an unattained ideal, but a regular standard of respectability that a husband turns over to his wife all his wages, and receives from her $1 or $2 a week for his 'spending money.' The earnings of the younger children all go to the mother, and the older children pay board to her from $3 to $8 per week. She is the manager and dispenser of the household income, and provided that income is of average size and fairly steady, the comfort of the entire family depends upon her character and ability. With no domestic training, the average working girl goes straight from the factory, store or office to start a new home. Sometimes the results are deplorable, but generally though extravagant and wasteful at first, through ignorance, an intelligent and honest woman soon works out a system of household economy that is surprising. In many cases, as we all know, good management goes far toward making adequate an income generally believed insufficient for the necessities of life. A study of expenditures in a wage-earner's family is therefore largely one of the household management of the mother. A few years ago, while resident at Greenwich House, a social settlement on the lower west side of New York City, I had the opportunity of making an intensive study of the incomes and expenditures in 200 wage-earner's families in that neighborhood. Residence in a settlement gave an unusual opportunity to know personally and often intimately the families who were carefully selected as representative