[question] It seemed like freedom to us, I know we weren’t getting so much money, but you can’t judge from how it is now, you have to judge from where we came from, how it seemed to us then. We were happy, you can’t tell me now we weren’t happy when I know we were, even with the long days and the work. That was one of my arguments with the unions, they were always telling the girls what they didn’t have and how they should ask for more or have a strike, but they didn’t always understand that for most of the girls, what we had, it felt like a lot, it felt like being a success, to be in America and have a good job and work every day with all the other girls like we did.

[question] I didn’t get headaches so much. I know a lot of girls suffered with their eyes because of the work. My sister had bad eyes, sometimes she had to squint over her work when the light was poor, and that gave her the headaches. I was lucky, with sharp eyes. I didn’t need glasses. I never needed glasses to read or look at something close up, like to thread a needle, until I was fifty and I got tired of holding it out, a book or a newspaper, to be far away from me so I could see. My sister ruined her eyes sewing, that’s what they told her, but she was vain, so she didn’t like to wear the glasses they gave her, she would take them off where anyone could see her, she thought it made her look old and plain, like a schoolteacher.

[question] The language some of the men used was very vulgar. A lot of the girls came from these little villages, these shtetlach, where girls and boys were always kept apart, the boys were in the cheder all day long while the girls were at home doing the work for the family. And now we come to America and we’re all mixed up together, nothing is separate, sometimes even with the same toilets to use, and it was shocking how the men would speak so coarse and vulgar, like they don’t know any better but you know, most of those men, they would never talk like that at home, before they came to America. So for them maybe it was part of being an American big shot, to talk about sex all the time. Maybe some of them were lonely for their families, I don’t know.

[question] It made me very uncomfortable but what can you do? I had brothers, I wasn’t so surprised as some of the other girls maybe. I wasn’t born yesterday, even then. And I was tough. My sister and I just stopped our ears and kept our heads down. If they saw you didn’t like it, they would just do it more, so we decided we would never show our feelings, but my sister, sometimes she would blush very red, and then one of the cutters or the boss saying the dirty things would see how red she got, and that would make him satisfied and then he would just say more, or say it louder right beside us.