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Working Women of the Old Port

Park Avenue, Portland, ca. 1950

Park Avenue, Portland, ca. 1950

Item 12847 info
Maine Historical Society

Wage-earning women often faced challenging working conditions. The pay was low, the hours long. That fact did not go unnoticed.

The 1907 Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics report noted that, "The woman wage-earner of Portland is a person, and not merely a screw in a machine, as she would be in a larger city."

Yet, they concluded, "If some arrangement could be devised to leave a larger margin between the amount of wages received and the price paid for living expenses, the problem of the women wage-earners of Portland would be greatly simplified."