Every tourist has seen those unhappy
wretches at work, sometimes alone, sometimes in gangs of three or
four, men and women together. There is no distinction of sex in this
branch of industry, as indeed there is in none of the lowest fields of
labor in Paris. Women and girls are quite often ragpickers; among the
street-sweepers they form a good half of the force; they are also
street--peddlers, dragging cartloads of vegetables about and crying
aloud their wares; they are porters, lugging bundles on their backs;
they are oyster-openers, hacking away with iron knife at coarse
shells; they even drive drays and big market-wagons; they split wood
and shovel coal, and in a hundred ways confound and confuse those
theorizers who pretend that male bone and muscle is by nature brawnier
than female. The female scavengers are quite as strong, quite as
coarse, quite as dirty, and can smoke their pipes with quite as much
gusto as their male compeers.
The scavengers are six thousand in number, and are employed by
contractors, who pay them at the rate of four to eight sous per hour.
They use up seventy thousand brooms a year, and the filth they gather
is rotted in pits and sold for manure, yielding about seven hundred
thousand dollars a year. Until the rubbish of New York streets is made
to yield a profit in a similar manner our streets will never be
cleaned as they should be.
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