Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1895 — WOMEN IN BRICKYARDS. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

WOMEN IN BRICKYARDS.

Chicago Give* a New Field for Feminine Activity. Chicago furnishes women with an occupation which is most unusual. In several brickyards they are employed to stack the bricks, and they do the work neatly and well. A writer, describing a visit to one of these yards, says: Scattered about the yard to the number of fifteen or twenty are women and girls at work. Their figures, their faces and their talk, when they did talk, indicate clearly that they came from another country. They are from Poland. Not one of them speaks a word of English. Their dress is less than that of the modern ballet girl. The latter at least wears tights and flounces of gauze. These women of this brick yard have neither. Their

frocks of coarse material, stop at the knee, and a loose waist of some other material is gathered about the bust and shoulders. Otherwise these women and girls are as nature made them, and are as bare in feet as Du Maurier’s Trilby of the Latin quarter. Their limbs are as bare and brown and crisp as the roofs of thq, houses in the vicinity where they live. These women are at work stacking brick preparatory to its removal to. the kiln. They are the wives and daughters of the men who work in the yards and kiln. While the men are asleep these women come out between 5 and 6 o’clock in the morning and pick up the brick which the men have made and put out the day and night before. In this particular yard these rows of brick are as long as onequarter of an average block. There are usually about four of these rows. They represent about 10,000 brick. Two women and two girls pick up these rows and stack them under a shelter. There are from ten to twenty of these sections of rows, according to the previous day’s work, and in every section there are usually two women and two girls—not always. They are as apt and quick and accurate as an avenue miss With her fancy needle work. They seem to do this work with strange contentment. There is not a day In the week In seasonable weather when they do not come out to this work. As before given, it requires an hour. Then they return to their homes, prepare the morning meal for the men and the men come to the yards to grind the clay, to fill the molds and to lay down the newmade brick on the sandy level.

WOMEN AT WORK IN A CHICAGO BRICKYARD.