Katie, who keeps house in West Forty-Ninth Street "I scrubs" “ ‘What kind of work do you do?’ I asked. ‘I scrubs,’ she replied promptly, and her look guaranteed that what she scrubbed came out clean. Katie was one of the little mothers whose work never ends. Very early the cross of her sex had been laid upon the little shoulders that bore it so stoutly. On the top floor of a tenement. . .she was keeping house for her older sister and two brothers, all of whom worked. Katie did the cleaning and the cooking of the plain kind. She scrubbed and swept and went to school all as a matter of course, and ran the house generally with an occasional lift from the neighbors, who were poorer than they.” Jacob Riis, The Children of the Poor (1892).