1913. In Philadelphia the field work was conducted by the Con- 
sumers' League and at their expense under Miss Perry's direct 
supervision. Fortunately the information on the trade in Boston 
was brought up to date by the courtesy of a number of Boston em- 
ployers who permitted their entire pay rolls to be copied from 
their books by the secretaries of our Research Department. Tabu- 
lations of this data and retabulations of the earlier Boston ma- 
terial by our secretaries enabled Miss Perry to unify the two 
studies and to revise most of her earlier work and that prepared 
by Miss Riedell. Those sections dealing with the effect of seasons 
on Boston employees and on Boston workers in the trade as se- 
cured from personal interviews are therefore the combined work 
of the two students. 
  The method of attack, the range of inquiry and the extent of 
returns in the investigation are all presented in the introductory 
chapter. As this was one of the first studies of the type by the de- 
partment and indeed in the country, the schedules were far from 
perfect resulting in an incompleteness which in later studies of 
the series has been avoided. It is to be regretted that the oppor- 
tunity to use pay rolls came only within the last year so that de- 
tailed information as to wages was not obtained from the workers 
who were visited in their homes, as was done in the study of 
The Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts as a Vocation for 
Women. It is also unfortunate that pay rolls could not be se- 
cured in Philadelphia. 
  Prepared for the purpose of affording students training in so- 
cial investigation, the study must lack in finish of presentation 
and completeness of interpretation; but the work has been care- 
fully supervised and supplemented by every means available to 
the Research Department. In order that the survey may serve 
as large a group as possible, the material is often presented in 
much greater detail and the tables arranged with much smaller 
class intervals than might at first appear necessary or desirable, 
although discussions in the text often deal with larger groupings. 
Indeed in many tables the facts are presented for each case, espe- 
cially where subclassification has made the number considered 
too small for generalization. We hope that agencies inter- 
ested in a study of minimum wage laws, in other regulation of 
 
 
ix 
 
 
PREACE