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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11424 ***
+
+[Illustration: A Factory or a Home?]
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+TRADE UNION WOMAN
+
+BY
+
+ALICE HENRY
+
+MEMBER OF OFFICE EMPLOYÉS' ASSOCIATION OF CHICAGO. No. 12755. AND
+FORMERLY EDITOR OF _LIFE AND LABOR_
+
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+1915
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+THE TRADE UNION WOMEN OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+This brief account of trade unionism in relation to the working-women
+of the United States has been written to furnish a handbook of the
+subject, and to supply in convenient form answers to the questions
+that are daily put to the writer and to all others who feel the
+organization of women to be a vital issue.
+
+To treat the subject exhaustively would be impossible without years of
+research, but meanwhile it seemed well to furnish this short popular
+account of an important movement, in order to satisfy the eager desire
+for information regarding the working-woman, and her attitude towards
+the modern labor movement, and towards the national industries in
+regard to which she plays so essential a part. Women are doing their
+share of their country's work under entirely novel conditions, and
+it therefore becomes a national responsibility to see that the human
+worker is not sacrificed to the material product.
+
+Many of the difficulties and dangers surrounding the working-woman
+affect the workingman also, but on the other hand, there are special
+reasons, springing out of the ancestral claims which life makes upon
+woman, arising also out of her domestic and social environment, and
+again out of her special function as mother, why the condition of the
+wage-earning woman should be the subject of separate consideration. It
+is impossible to discuss intelligently wages, hours and sanitation in
+reference to women workers unless these facts are borne in mind.
+
+What makes the whole matter of overwhelming importance is the wasteful
+way in which the health, the lives, and the capacity for future
+motherhood of our young girls are squandered during the few brief
+years they spend as human machines in our factories and stores. Youth,
+joy and the possibility of future happiness lost forever, in order
+that we may have cheap (or dear), waists or shoes or watches.
+
+Further, since the young girl is the future mother of the race, it is
+she who chooses the father of her children. Every condition, either
+economic or social, whether of training or of environment, which in
+any degree tends to limit her power of choice, or to narrow its range,
+or to lower her standards of selection, works out in a national and
+racial deprivation. And surely no one will deny that the degrading
+industrial conditions under which such a large number of our young
+girls live and work do all of these, do limit and narrow the range of
+selection and do lower the standards of the working-girl in making her
+marriage choice.
+
+Give her fairer wages, shorten her hours of toil, let her have the
+chance of a good time, of a happy girlhood, and an independent, normal
+woman will be free to make a real choice of the best man. She will not
+be tempted to passively accept any man who offers himself, just
+in order to escape from a life of unbearable toil, monotony and
+deprivation.
+
+So far, women and girls, exploited themselves, have been used as an
+instrument yet further to cheapen and exploit men. In this direction
+things could hardly reach a lower level than they have done.
+
+Now the national conscience has at length been touched regarding
+women, and we venture to hope that in proportion as women have been
+used to debase industrial standards, so in like degree as the nation
+insists upon better treatment being accorded her, the results may so
+react upon the whole field of industry that men too may be sharers in
+the benefits.
+
+But there is a mightier force at work, a force more significant
+and more characteristic of our age than even the awakened civic
+conscience, showing itself in just and humane legislation. That is the
+spirit of independence expressed in many different forms, markedly in
+the new desire and therefore in the new capacity for collective action
+which women are discovering in themselves to a degree never known
+before.
+
+As regards wage-earning working-women, the two main channels through
+which this new spirit is manifesting itself are first, their
+increasing efforts after industrial organization, and next in the more
+general realization by them of the need of the vote as a means of
+self-expression, whether individual or collective.
+
+Thus the trade union on the one hand, offering to the working-woman
+protection in the earning of her living, links up her interests with
+those of her working brother; while on the other hand, in the demand
+for the vote women of all classes are recognizing common disabilities,
+a common sisterhood and a common hope.
+
+This book was almost completed when the sound of the war of the
+nations broke upon our ears. It would be vain to deny that to all
+idealists, of every shade of thought, the catastrophe came as a
+stupefying blow. "It is unbelievable, impossible," said one. "It can't
+last," added another. Reaction from that extreme of incredulity led
+many to take refuge in hopeless, inactive despair and cynicism.
+
+Even the few months that have elapsed have enabled both the
+over-hopeful and the despairing to recover their lost balance, and to
+take up again their little share of the immemorial task of humanity,
+to struggle onward, ever onward and upward.
+
+What had become of the movement of the workers, that they could have
+permitted a war of so many nations, in which the workers of every
+country involved must be the chief sufferers?
+
+The labor movement, like every other idealist movement, contains a
+sprinkling of unpopular pessimistic souls, who drive home, in season
+and out of season, a few unpopular truths. One of these unwelcome
+truths is to the effect that the world is not following after the
+idealists half as fast as they think it is. Reformers of every kind
+make an amount of noise in the world these days out of all proportion
+to their numbers. They deceive themselves, and to a certain extent
+they deceive others. The wish to see their splendid visions a reality
+leads to the belief that they are already on the point of being
+victors over the hard-to-move and well-intrenched powers that be. As
+to the quality of his thinking and the soundness of his reasoning, the
+idealist is ahead of the world all the time, and just as surely the
+world pays him the compliment of following in his trail. But only in
+its own time and at its own good pleasure. It is in quantity that he
+is short. There is never enough of him to do all the tasks, to be
+in every place at once. Rarely has he converts enough to assure a
+majority of votes or voices on his side.
+
+So the supreme crises of the world come, and he has for the time to
+step aside; to be a mere onlooker; to wait in awe-struck patience
+until the pessimist beholds the realization of his worst fears; until
+the optimist can take heart again, and reviving his crushed and
+withered hopes once more set their fulfillment forward in the future.
+
+In spite of all, the idealist is ever justified. He is justified today
+in Europe no less than in America; justified by the ruin and waste
+that have come in the train of following outworn political creeds, and
+yielding to animosities inherited from past centuries; justified by
+the disastrous results of unchecked national economic competition,
+when the age of international coöperation is already upon us;
+justified by the utter contempt shown by masculine rulers and
+statesmen for the constructive and the fostering side of life,
+typified and embodied in the woman half of society.
+
+No! our ideals are not changed, nor are they in aught belittled
+by what has occurred. It is for us to cherish and guard them more
+faithfully, to serve them more devotedly than ever. Even if we must
+from now on walk softly all the days of our life, and prepare to
+accept unresentfully disappointment and heart-sickening delay, we can
+still draw comfort from this:
+
+  Hope thou not much, and fear thou not at all.
+
+Meanwhile we sit, as it were, facing a vast stage, in front of us a
+dropped curtain. From behind that veil there reaches our strained ears
+now and then a cry of agony unspeakable, and again a faint whisper of
+hope.
+
+But until that curtain is raised, after the hand of the war-fiend is
+stayed; until we can again communicate, each with the other as human
+beings and not as untamed, primitive savages, we can know in detail
+little that has happened, and foresee nothing that may hereafter
+happen.
+
+That some of America's industrial and social problems will be affected
+radically by the results of the European war goes without saying; how,
+and in what degree, it is impossible to foretell.
+
+Meanwhile our work is here, and we have to pursue it. Whatever
+will strengthen the labor movement, or the woman movement, goes to
+strengthen the world forces of peace. Let us hold fast to that. And
+conversely, whatever economic or ethical changes will help to insure a
+permanent basis for world peace will grant to both the labor movement
+and the woman movement enlarged opportunity to come into their own.
+
+ALICE HENRY,
+
+Chicago, July, 1915.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I. EARLY TRADE UNIONS AMONG WOMEN
+
+II. WOMEN IN THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR
+
+III. THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN ORGANIZATION
+
+IV. THE WOMEN'S TRADE UNION LEAGUE
+
+V. THE HUGE STRIKES
+
+VI. THE IMMIGRANT WOMAN AND ORGANIZATION.
+
+VII. THE WOMAN ORGANIZER
+
+VIII. THE TRADE UNION IN OTHER FIELDS
+
+IX. WOMEN AND THE VOCATIONS
+
+X. WOMAN AND VOCATIONAL TRAINING
+
+XI. THE WORKING WOMAN AND MARRIAGE
+
+XII. THE WORKING WOMAN AND THE VOTE
+
+XIII. TRADE-UNION IDEALS AND POLICIES
+
+APPENDIX I AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE HOTEL AND RESTAURANT EMPLOYÉS
+INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCE AFFILIATED WITH THE AMERICAN AND CHICAGO
+FEDERATION OF LABOR
+
+APPENDIX II. THE HART, SCHAFFNER AND MARX LABOR AGREEMENTS
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+A Factory or a Home?
+
+In a Basement Sweatshop
+
+Girl Gas Blowers
+
+A Bindery
+
+Interior of One of the Largest and Best Equipped Waist and Cloak
+Factories in New York City
+
+A Contrast
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+It was a revolutionary change in our ways of thinking when the idea of
+development, social as well as physical, really took hold of mankind.
+But our minds are curiously stiff and slow to move, and we still
+mostly think of development as a process that has taken place, and
+that is going to take place--in the future. And that change is the
+very stuff of which life consists (not that change is taking place
+at this moment, but that this moment is change), that means another
+revolution in the world of thought, and it gives to life a fresh
+meaning. No one has, as it appears to me, placed such emphasis upon
+this as has Henri Bergson. It is not that he emphasizes the mere fact
+of the evolution of society and of all human relations. That, he, and
+we, may well take for granted. It has surely been amply demonstrated
+and illustrated by writers as widely separated in their interpretation
+of social evolution as Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. But with the
+further thought in mind that, alike in the lowliest physical organism
+or in the most complex social organism, life itself is change, we view
+every problem of life from another angle. To see life steadily and
+see it whole is one stage. Bergson bids us see life on the move, ever
+changing, growing, evolving, a creation new every moment.
+
+For students of society this means that we are to aim at the
+understanding of social processes, rather than stop short with the
+consideration of facts; facts are to be studied because they go
+to make up processes. We are not to stop short with the study of
+conditions, but go on to find out what tendencies certain conditions
+encourage. All social and industrial questions therefore are to be
+interpreted in their dynamic rather than in their static aspects.
+
+In the Labor Museum of Hull House is shown a very ingenious diagram,
+representing the development on the mechanical side of the process of
+spinning, one of the oldest of the arts. It consists of a strip of
+cardboard, about a yard long, marked off into centuries and decades.
+From 2000 B.C. up to A.D. 1500 the hand spindle was the only
+instrument used. From 1500 up to the middle of the eighteenth century
+the spinning-wheel was used as well. From the middle of the eighteenth
+century up till today has been the period of the application of steam
+to spinning machinery.
+
+The profound symbolism expressed by the little chart goes beyond the
+interesting fact in the history of applied physics and mechanics which
+it tells, on to the tremendous changes which it sums up. The textile
+industries were primarily women's work, and with the mechanical
+changes in this group of primitive industries were inextricably bound
+up changes far more momentous in the social environment and the
+individual development of the worker.
+
+Yet, if a profoundly impressive story, it is also a simple and plain
+one. It is so easy to understand because we have the help of history
+to interpret it to us, a help that fails us completely when, instead
+of being able to look from a distance and see events in their due
+proportions and in their right order, we are driven to extract as best
+we can a meaning from occurrences that happen and conditions that lie
+before our very eyes. That we cannot see the wood for the trees was
+never more painfully true than when we first try to tell a clear story
+amid the clatter and din of our industrial life. Past history is
+of little assistance in interpreting the social and industrial
+development, in which we ourselves are atoms. Much information is to
+be obtained, though piecemeal and with difficulty, but especially
+as relates to women, it has not yet been classified and ordered and
+placed ready to hand.
+
+The industrial group activities of women are the inevitable, though
+belated result of the entry of women into the modern industrial
+system, and are called forth by the new demands which life is making
+upon women's faculties. We cannot stop short here, and consider these
+activities mainly in regard to what has led up to them, nor yet as to
+what is their extent and effect today. Far more important is it to try
+to discover what are the tendencies, which they as yet faintly and
+imperfectly, often confusedly, express.
+
+In the labor movement of this country woman has played and is playing
+an important part. But in its completeness no one knows the story,
+and those who know sections of it most intimately are too busy
+living their own parts in that story, to pause long enough to be its
+chroniclers. For to be part of a movement is more absorbing than to
+write about it. Whom then shall we ask? To whom shall we turn for even
+an imperfect knowledge of the story, at once noble and sordid, tragic
+and commonplace, of woman's side of the labor movement? To whom, you
+would say, but to the worker herself? And where does the worker speak
+with such clearness, with such unfaltering steadiness, as through her
+union, the organization of her trade?
+
+In the industrial maze the individual worker cannot interpret her own
+life story from her knowledge of the little patch of life which is
+all her hurried fingers ever touch. Only an organization can be an
+interpreter here. Fortunately for the student, the organization does
+act as interpreter, both for the organized women who have been drawn
+into the labor movement and for those less fortunate who are still
+struggling on single-handed and alone. The organized workers in one
+way or another come into fairly close relations with their unorganized
+sisters. Besides, the movement in its modern form is still so young
+that there is scarcely a woman worker in the unions who did not begin
+her trade life as an unorganized toiler.
+
+Speaking broadly, the points upon which the trade-union movement
+concentrates are the raising of wages, the shortening of hours,
+the diminution of seasonal work, the abolition or regulation of
+piece-work, with its resultant speeding up, the maintaining of
+sanitary conditions, and the guarding of unsafe machinery, the
+enforcement of laws against child-labor, the abolition of taxes for
+power and working materials such as thread and needles, and of unfair
+fines for petty or unproved offenses--and with these, the recognition
+of the union to insure the obtaining and the keeping of all the rest.
+
+A single case taken from a non-union trade (a textile trade, too)
+must serve to suggest the reasons that make organization a necessity.
+Twenty-one years ago in the bag and hemp factories of St. Louis, girl
+experts turned out 460 yards of material in a twelve-hour day, the pay
+being 24 cents per bolt (of from 60 to 66 yards). These girls earned
+$1.84 per day (on the bolt of from 60 to 66 yards). Four years ago a
+girl could not hold her job under 1,000 yards in a ten-hour day. "The
+fastest possible worker can turn out only 1,200 yards, and the price
+has dropped to 15 cents per hundred yards. The old rate of 24 cents
+per bolt used to net $1.80 to a very quick worker. The new rate to one
+equally competent is but $1.50. Workers have to fill a shuttle every
+minute and a half or two minutes. This necessitates the strain of
+constant vigilance, as the breaking of the thread causes unevenness,
+and for this operators are laid off for two or three days. The
+operators are at such a tension that they not only stand all day, but
+may not even bend their knees. The air is thick with lint, which the
+workers inhale. The throat and eyes are terribly affected, and it is
+necessary to work with the head bound up, and to comb the lint from
+the eyebrows. The proprietors have to retain a physician to attend the
+workers every morning, and medicine is supplied free, as an accepted
+need for everyone so engaged. One year is spent in learning the trade,
+and the girls last at it only from three to four years afterwards.
+Some of them enter marriage, but many of them are thrown on the human
+waste-heap. One company employs nearly 1,000 women, so that a large
+number are affected by these vile and inhuman conditions. The girls in
+the trade are mostly Slovaks, Poles and Bohemians, who have not long
+been in this country. In their inexperience they count $1.50 as good
+wages, although gained at ever so great a physical cost."
+
+These are intolerable conditions, and that tens of thousands are
+enduring similar hardships in the course of earning a living and
+contributing their share towards the commercial output of the country
+only aggravates the cruelty and the injustice to the helpless and
+defrauded girls. It is not an individual problem merely. It is a
+national responsibility shared by every citizen to see that such
+cruelty and such injustice shall cease. No system of commercial
+production can be permanently maintained which ignores the primitive
+rights of the human workers to such returns for labor as shall provide
+decent food, clothing, shelter, education and recreation for the
+worker and for those dependent upon him or her, as well as steadiness
+of employment, and the guarantee of such working conditions as shall
+not be prejudicial to health.
+
+If the community is not to be moved either by pity or by a sense of
+justice then perhaps it will awake to a realization of the national
+danger involved when so many of the workers, and especially when
+so many of the girls and women work under circumstances ruinous to
+health, and affording, besides, small chance for all-round normal
+development on either the individual or the social side. These are
+evils whose results do not die out with the generation primarily
+involved, but must as well through inheritance as through environment
+injure the children of the workers, and their offspring yet unborn.
+
+The passing away from the individual worker of personal control
+over the raw material and the instruments of production, which has
+accompanied the advent of the factory system, means that some degree
+of control corresponding to that formerly possessed by the individual
+should be assured to the group of workers in the factory or the trade.
+Such control is assured through the collective power of the workers,
+acting in coöperation in their trade union. One reason why the woman
+worker is in so many respects worse off than the man is because she
+has so far enjoyed so little of the protection of the trade union in
+her work. Why she has not had it, and why more and more she desires
+it, is what I will try to show in the following pages.
+
+There is one criticism, to which almost every writer dealing with a
+present-day topic, lies exposed. That is, why certain aspects of the
+subject, or certain closely related questions, have either not been
+dealt with at all, or touched on only lightly. For instance, the
+subject of the organization of wage-earning women is indeed bound up
+with the industrial history of the United States, with the legal and
+social position of women, with the handicaps under which the colored
+races suffer, and with the entire labor problem.
+
+In answer I can but plead that there had to be some limits. These
+are all matters which have been treated by many others, and I
+intentionally confined myself to a section of the field not hitherto
+covered.
+
+Though the greatest care has been taken to avoid errors, some mistakes
+have doubtless crept in and the author would be glad to have these
+pointed out. I acknowledge gratefully what I owe to others, whether
+that help has come to me through books and periodical literature or
+through personal information from those possessing special expert
+knowledge. No one can ever begin to repay such a debt, but such thanks
+as are possible, I offer here.
+
+The brief historical sketch of the early trade unions is based almost
+entirely upon the "History of Women in Trade Unions," Volume X, of the
+"Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United
+States," issued by the Commissioner of Labor, then Mr. Charles P.
+Neill. Dr. John B. Andrews deals with the earlier period, and he shows
+how persistent have been the efforts of working-women to benefit
+themselves through collective action.
+
+"Organization," he writes, "among working-women, contrary to the
+general impression, is not new. Women, from the beginning of the
+trade-union movement in this country have occupied an important place
+in the ranks of organized labor. For eighty years and over, women
+wage-earners in America have formed trade unions and gone on strike
+for shorter hours, better pay, and improved conditions. The American
+labor movement had its real beginning about the year 1825. In that
+year the tailoresses of New York formed a union."
+
+The history of women in trade unions he divides into four periods: (1)
+the beginnings of organization, extending from 1825 to about 1840; (2)
+the development of associations interested in labor reform, including
+the beginnings of legislative activity, 1840 to 1860; (3) the
+sustained development of pure trade unions, and the rise of the
+struggle over the suffrage, 1860 to 1880; and (4) the impress and
+educative influence of the Knights of Labor, 1881 to date, and the
+present development under the predominant leadership of the American
+Federation of Labor.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRADE UNION WOMAN
+
+
+I
+
+EARLY TRADE UNIONS AMONG WOMEN 1825-1840
+
+
+The earliest factory employment to engage large numbers of women was
+the cotton industry of New England, and the mill hands of that day
+seem to have been entirely native-born Americans. The first power loom
+was set up in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814, and the name of the
+young woman weaver who operated it was Deborah Skinner. In 1817 there
+were three power looms in Fall River, Massachusetts; the weavers were
+Sallie Winters, Hannah Borden and Mary Healy.
+
+The first form of trade-union activity among wage-earning women in the
+United States was the local strike. The earliest of these of which
+there is any record was but a short-lived affair. It was typical,
+nevertheless, of the sudden, impulsive uprising of the unorganized
+everywhere. It would hardly be worth recording, except that in such
+hasty outbursts of indignation against the so unequal distribution of
+the burdens of industry lies the germ of the whole labor movement.
+This small strike took place in July, 1828, in the cotton mills
+of Paterson, New Jersey, among the boy and girl helpers over the
+apparently trifling detail of a change of the dinner hour from twelve
+o'clock to one. Presently there were involved the carpenters, masons
+and machinists in a general demand for a ten-hour day. In a week the
+strike had collapsed, and the leaders found themselves out of work,
+although the point on which the young workers had gone out was
+conceded.
+
+It was among the mill operatives of Dover, New Hampshire, that the
+first really important strike involving women occurred. This was in
+December of the same year (1828). On this occasion between three
+hundred and four hundred women went out. The next we hear of the Dover
+girls is six years later, when eight hundred went out in resistance
+to a cut in wages. These women and girls were practically all the
+daughters of farmers and small professional men. For their day they
+were well educated, often teaching school during a part of the year.
+They prided themselves on being the "daughters of freemen," and while
+adapting themselves for the sake of earning a living to the novel
+conditions of factory employment, they were not made of the stuff to
+submit tamely to irritating rules of discipline, to petty despotism,
+and to what they felt was a breach of tacit agreement, involved in
+periodical cutting of wages. Although most of them may have but dimly
+understood that factory employment required the protection of a
+permanent organization for the operatives, and looked to the temporary
+combination provided by the strike for the remedy of their ills, still
+there was more in the air, and more in the minds of some of the girl
+leaders than just strikes undertaken for the purpose of abolishing
+single definite wrongs.
+
+That employers recognized this, and were prepared to stifle in the
+birth any efforts that their women employés might make towards
+maintaining permanent organizations, is evident by the allusions in
+the press of the day to the "ironclad oath" by which the employé
+had to agree, on entering the factory, to accept whatever wage the
+employer might see fit to pay, and had to promise not to join any
+combination "whereby the work may be impeded or the company's interest
+in any work injured."
+
+Also we find that no general gathering of organized workingmen could
+take place without the question of the inroad of women into the
+factories being hotly debated. All the speakers would be agreed that
+the poorly paid and overworked woman was bringing a very dangerous
+element into the labor world, but there was not the same unanimity
+when it came to proposing a remedy. Advice that women should go back
+into the home was then as now the readiest cure for the evil, for even
+so early as this the men realized that the underpayment of women meant
+the underpayment of men, while the employment of women too often
+meant the dis-employment of men. But it was not long before the more
+intelligent understood that there was some great general force at work
+here, which was not to be dealt with nor the resultant evils cured by
+a resort to primitive conditions. Soon there were bodies of workingmen
+publicly advocating the organization of women into trade unions as the
+only rational plan of coping with a thoroughly vicious situation.
+
+Meanwhile such a powerful organ as the _Boston Courier_ went so far as
+to say that the girls ought to be thankful to be employed at all.
+If it were not for the poor labor papers of that day we should have
+little chance of knowing the workers' side of the story at all.
+
+During the next few years many women's strikes are recorded among
+cotton operatives, but most of them, though conducted with spirit and
+intelligence, seemed to have ended none too happily for the workers.
+It is nevertheless probable that the possibility that these rebellious
+ones might strike often acted as a check upon the cotton lords and
+their mill managers. Indeed the strikes at Lowell, Massachusetts, of
+1834 and 1836 involved so large a number of operatives (up to 2,500
+girls at one time), and these were so brave and daring in their public
+demands for the right of personal liberty and just treatment that the
+entire press of the country gave publicity to the matter, although
+the orthodox newspapers were mostly shocked at the "wicked
+misrepresentations" of the ringleaders in this industrial rebellion.
+
+The 1836 strike at the Lowell mills throws a curious light upon the
+habits of those days. Something analogous to the "living-in" system
+was in force. In 1825 when the Lowell mills were first opened, the
+companies who owned the mills provided boarding-houses for their girl
+operatives, and the boarding-house keepers had in their lease to agree
+to charge them not more than $1.25 per week. (Their wages are said to
+have rarely exceeded $2.50 per week.) But in these thirteen years
+the cost of living had risen, and at this rate for board the
+boarding-house keepers could no longer make ends meet, and many were
+ruined. The mill-owners, seeing what desperate plight these women were
+in, agreed to deduct from the weekly rent a sum equivalent to twelve
+cents per boarder, and they also authorized the housekeepers to charge
+each girl twelve cents more. This raised the total income of the
+housekeepers to practically one dollar and fifty cents per head. As
+there was no talk of raising wages in proportion, this arrangement was
+equivalent to a cut of twelve cents per week and the girls rebelled
+and went out on strike to the number of twenty-five hundred. In all
+probability, however, it was not only the enforced lessening of their
+wages, but some of the many irritating conditions as well that always
+attend any plan of living-in, whether the employé be a mill girl, a
+department-store clerk or a domestic servant, that goaded the girls
+on, for we hear of "dictation not only as to what they shall eat and
+drink and wherewithal they shall be clothed, but when they shall eat,
+drink and sleep."
+
+The strikers paraded through the streets of Lowell, singing,
+
+  Oh, isn't it a pity that such a pretty girl as I
+  Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
+  Oh! I cannot be a slave,
+  For I'm so fond of liberty
+  That I cannot be a slave.
+
+The girls appealed to the memories, still green, of the War of
+Independence.
+
+"As our fathers resisted unto blood the lordly avarice of the British
+ministry, so we, their daughters, never will wear the yoke which has
+been prepared for us."
+
+With this and many similar appeals they heartened one another. But
+before the close of October, 1836, the strike was broken and the
+girls were back at work on the employers' terms. Still an echo of the
+struggle is heard in the following month at the Annual Convention
+of the National Trades Union, where the Committee on Female Labor
+recommended that "they [the women operatives] should immediately adopt
+energetic measures, in the construction of societies to support each
+other."
+
+Almost every difficulty that the working-woman has to face today had
+its analogue then. For instance, speeding up: "The factory girls of
+Amesbury have had a flare-up and turned out because they were told
+they must tend two looms in future without any advance of wages."
+
+A pitiful account comes from eastern Pennsylvania, where the cotton
+industry had by this time a footing. Whole families would be in the
+mill "save only one small girl to take care of the house and provide
+the meals."
+
+Yet the wages of all the members were needed to supply bare wants.
+The hours in the mills were cruelly long. In the summer, "from five
+o'clock in the morning until sunset, being fourteen hours and a half,
+with an intermission of half an hour for breakfast and an hour for
+dinner, leaving thirteen hours of hard labor." Out of repeated and
+vain protests and repeated strikes, perhaps not always in vain, were
+developed the beginnings of the trade-union movement of Pennsylvania,
+the men taking the lead. The women, even where admitted to membership
+in the unions, seem to have taken little part in the ordinary work of
+the union, as we only hear of them in times of stress and strike.
+
+The women who worked in the cotton mills were massed together by the
+conditions of their calling, in great groups, and a sense of community
+of interest would thus, one would think, be more easily established.
+Women engaged in various branches of sewing were, on the other hand,
+in much smaller groups, but they were far more widely distributed.
+One result of this was that meeting together and comparing notes was
+always difficult and often impossible. Even within the same town, with
+the imperfect means of transit, with badly made and worst lit streets,
+one group of workers had little means of knowing whether they were
+receiving the same or different rates of pay for the same work, or for
+the same number of work hours. So much sewing has always been done in
+the homes of the workers that it is a matter of surprise to learn that
+the very first women's trade union of which we have any knowledge
+was formed, probably in some very loose organization, among the
+tailoresses of New York in the year 1825. Six years later
+the tailoresses of New York were again clubbed together for
+self-protection against the inevitable consequences of reduced and
+inadequate wages. Their secretary, Mrs. Lavinia Waight, must have
+been a very new woman. She, unreasonable person, was not content with
+asking better wages for her trade and her sex, but she even wanted
+the vote for herself and her sisters. Indeed, from the expression she
+uses, "the duties of legislation," she perhaps even desired that women
+should be qualified to sit in the legislature. In this same year,
+1831, there was a strike of tailoresses reported to include sixteen
+hundred women, and they must have remained out several weeks. This
+was not, like so many, an unorganized strike, but was authorized and
+managed by the United Tailoresses' Society, of which we now hear for
+the first time. We hear of the beginning of many of these short-lived
+societies, but rarely is there any record of when they went under, or
+how.
+
+Innumerable organizations of a temporary character existed from
+time to time in the other large cities, Baltimore and Philadelphia.
+Philadelphia has the distinguished honor of being the home of Matthew
+Carey, who was instrumental in starting the first public inquiry into
+the conditions of working-women, as he was also the first in America
+to make public protest against the insufficient pay and wretched
+conditions imposed upon women, who were now entering the wage-earning
+occupations in considerable numbers. He assisted the sewing-women of
+all branches to form what was practically a city federation of women's
+unions, the first of its kind. One committee was authorized to send to
+the Secretary of War a protest against the disgracefully low prices
+paid for army clothing. Matthew Carey was also held responsible,
+rightly or wrongly, for an uprising in the book-binding establishments
+of New York.
+
+All this agitation among workers and the general public was having
+some effect upon the ethical standards of employers, for a meeting of
+master book-binders of New York disowned those of their number
+who paid "less than $3 a week." An occasional word of support and
+sympathy, too, filters through the daily press. The _Commercial
+Bulletin_ severely criticized the rates the Secretary of War was
+paying for his army clothing orders, while the _Public Ledger_ of
+Philadelphia, speaking of a strike among the women umbrella sewers
+of New York, commented thus: "In this case we decidedly approve the
+turn-out. Turning out, if peaceably conducted, is perfectly legal, and
+often necessary, especially among female laborers."
+
+The next year we again find Matthew Carey helping the oppressed
+women. This time it is with a letter and money to support the ladies'
+Association of Shoe Binders and Corders of Philadelphia, then on
+strike. Shoe-binding was a home industry, existing in many of the
+towns, and open to all the abuses of home-work.
+
+Lynn, Massachusetts, was then and for long after the center of
+the shoe trade, and the scene of some of the earliest attempts of
+home-workers to organize.
+
+1840-1860
+
+Nothing in the history of women's organizations in the last century
+leaves a more disheartening impression than the want of continuity in
+the struggle, although there was never a break nor a let-up in the
+conditions of low wages, interminably long hours, and general
+poverty of existence which year in and year out were the lot of the
+wage-earning women in the manufacturing districts.
+
+Although based in every instance upon a common and crying need, the
+successive attempts of women at organization as a means of improving
+their industrial condition are absolutely unrelated to one another.
+Not only so, but it is pathetic to note that the brave women leaders
+of women in one generation cannot even have known of the existence of
+their predecessors in the self-same fight. They were not always too
+well informed as to the conditions of their sister workers in other
+cities or states, where distance alone severed them. But where time
+made the gap, where they were separated by the distance of but one
+lifetime, sometimes by a much shorter period, the severance seems to
+have been to our way of thinking, strangely complete, and disastrously
+so. Students had not begun to be interested in the troubles of
+everyday folk, so there were no records of past occurrences of the
+same sort that the workers could read. To hunt up in old files of
+newspapers allusions to former strikes and former agreements is a
+hard, slow task for the trained student of today; for those girls it
+was impossible. We have no reason to believe that the names of Lavinia
+Waight and Louisa Mitchell, the leaders of New York tailoresses in
+1831, were known to Sarah Bagley or Huldah Stone, when in 1845 they
+stirred Lowell. Each of the leaders whose names have come down to
+us, and all of their unknown and unnamed followers had to take their
+courage in their hands, think out for themselves the meaning of
+intolerable conditions, and as best they could feel after the readiest
+remedies. To these women the very meaning of international or even
+interstate trade competition must have been unknown. They had every
+one of them to learn by bitter experience how very useless the best
+meant laws might be to insure just and humane treatment, if the ideal
+of an out-of-date, and therefore fictitious, individual personal
+liberty were allowed to overrule and annul the greatest good of the
+greatest number.
+
+This second period was essentially a seedtime, a time of lofty ideals
+and of very idealist philosophy. The writers of that day saw clearly
+that there was much that was rotten in the State of Denmark, and
+they wrought hard to find a way out, but they did not realize the
+complexity of society any more than they recognized the economic basis
+upon which all our social activities are built. They unquestionably
+placed overmuch stress upon clearing the ground in patches, literally
+as well as metaphorically. Hence it was that so many plans for general
+reform produced so little definite result, except on the one hand
+setting before the then rising generation a higher standard of social
+responsibility which was destined deeply to tinge the after conduct
+and social activities of that generation, and on the other hand much
+social experimenting upon a small scale which stored up information
+and experience for the future. For instance the work done in trying
+out small coöperative experiments like that of Brook Farm has taught
+the successors of the first community builders much that could only be
+learned by practical experience, and not the least important of those
+lessons has been how not to do it.
+
+The land question, which could have troubled no American when in
+earlier days he felt himself part proprietor in a new world, was
+beginning to be a problem to try the mettle of the keenest thinkers
+and the most eager reformers. And even so early as the beginning of
+this second period there was to be seen on the social horizon a small
+cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, which was to grow and grow till in
+a few years it was to blot out of sight all other matters of public
+concern. This was the movement for the abolition of slavery. Till that
+national anachronism was at least politically and legally cleared out
+of the way, there was no great amount of public interest or public
+effort to be spared for any other subject. And yet were there any, on
+either side of that great question, who guessed that the passing of
+that even then belated institution was to give rise to and leave in
+its train problems quite as momentous as the abolition of slavery, and
+far more tremendous in their scope and range? By these problems we
+have been faced ever since, and continue to be faced by them today.
+To grant to any set of people nominal freedom, and deny them economic
+freedom is only half solving the difficulty. To deny economic freedom
+to the colored person is in the end to deny it to the white person,
+too.
+
+The immediate cause which seems to have brought about the downfall of
+the labor organizations of the first period (1825-1840) was the panic
+of 1837, and the long financial depression which succeeded. We read,
+on the other side of the water, of the "Hungry Forties," and although
+no such period of famine and profound misery fell to the lot of the
+people of the United States, as Great Britain and Ireland suffered,
+the influence of the depression was long and widely felt in the
+manufacturing districts of the Eastern states. Secondarily the workers
+were to know of its effects still later, through the invasion of
+their industrial field by Irish immigrants, starved out by that same
+depression, and by the potato famine that followed it. These newcomers
+brought with them very un-American standards of living, and flooded
+the labor market with labor unskilled and therefore cheaper than the
+normal native supply. When the year 1845 came it is to be inferred
+that the worst immediate effects of the financial distress had passed,
+for from then on the working-women made repeated efforts to improve
+their condition. Baffled in one direction they would turn in another.
+
+As earlier, there is a long series of local strikes, and another long
+succession of short-lived local organizations. It is principally in
+the textile trade that we hear of both strikes and unions, but also
+among seamstresses and tailoresses, shoemakers and capmakers. New
+York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, Fall River and Lowell all
+contributed their quota of industrial uprisings among the exasperated
+and sorely pressed workers, with a sad similarity in the stories.
+
+In a class by themselves, however, were the female labor reform
+associations, which for some years did excellent work in widely
+separated cities. These were strictly trade unions, in spite of their
+somewhat vague name. They seem to have drawn their membership from the
+workers in the local trades. That of Lowell, perhaps the best known,
+originated among the mill girls, but admitted other workers. Lowell,
+as usual, was to the fore in the quality of its women leaders. The
+first president of the Association was the brilliant and able Sarah
+G. Bagley. She and other delegates went before the Massachusetts
+legislative committee in 1845, and gave evidence as to the conditions
+in the textile mills. This, the first American governmental
+investigation, was brought about almost solely in response to the
+petitions of the working-women, who had already secured thousands of
+signatures of factory operatives to a petition asking for a ten-hour
+law.
+
+The Lowell Association had their correspondent to the _Voice of
+Industry_, and also a press committee to take note of and contradict
+false statements appearing in the papers concerning factory
+operatives. They had most modern ideas on the value of publicity,
+and neglected no opportunity of keeping, the workers' cause well in
+evidence, whether through "factory tracts," letters to the papers,
+speeches or personal correspondence. They boldly attacked legislators
+who were false to their trust, and in one case, at least, succeeded
+in influencing an election, helping to secure the defeat of William
+Schouler, chairman of that legislative committee before which the
+women delegates had appeared, which they charged with dishonesty in
+withholding from the legislature all the most important facts brought
+forward by the trade-union witnesses.
+
+Other female labor reform associations existed about this period in
+Manchester and Dover, New Hampshire. The first-named was particularly
+active in securing the passage of the too soon wrecked ten-hour law.
+In New York a similar body of women workers was organized in 1845 as
+the Female Industrial Association. The sewing trades in many branches,
+cap-makers, straw-workers, book-folders and stitchers and lace-makers
+were among the trades represented. In Philadelphia the tailoresses in
+1850 formed an industrial union. It maintained a coöperative tailoring
+shop, backed by the support of such coöperative advocates as George
+Lippard, John Shedden, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. In
+1853 the Industrial Union published a report of its activities,
+showing that in two years the business had paid away in wages to
+tailoresses more than four thousand dollars.
+
+In the men's conventions of this time a number of women besides
+the redoubtable Sarah Bagley took an active part, being seated as
+delegates from their own labor reform associations. At the meeting in
+1846 of the New England Workingmen's Association, for instance, Miss
+Huldah J. Stone, of Lowell, was elected recording secretary, and Mrs.
+C.N.M. Quimby was appointed one of the board of six directors. At all
+the meetings of the New England Congress, which met several times a
+year, the women's point of view was well presented by the delegates
+from the various trades.
+
+The National Industrial Congress, organized first in New York in 1845,
+and which met yearly for the next ten years, was supposed to stand for
+all the interests of the workingman and woman, but gave most of its
+attention to the land question and other subjects of general reform.
+This scattered the energies of the organizations and weakened their
+power as trade unions. But in the long anti-slavery agitation, which
+was just then rising to its height on the eve of the Civil War, even
+the land question was forgotten, and the voice of the trade unionists,
+speaking for man or woman, was utterly unheeded.
+
+Imperfect as are the accounts that have come down to us, it is
+clear that this second generation of trade unionists were educating
+themselves to more competent methods of handling the industrial
+problem. The women workers of Pittsburgh coöperated with the women
+of New England in trying to obtain from the manufacturers of their
+respective centers a promise that neither group would work their
+establishments longer than ten hours a day--this, to meet the ready
+objection so familiar in our ears still, that the competition of
+other mills would make the concession in one center ruinous to the
+manufacturers who should grant it. This was the crowning effort of
+the Pittsburgh mill-workers to obtain improvement. Strikes for higher
+wages had failed. Strikes for a ten-hour day had failed. And now it is
+pitiful to write that even this interstate coöperation on the part of
+the girls for relief by a peaceful trade agreement failed, too, the
+employers falling back upon their "undoubted right" to run their
+factories as many hours as they pleased.
+
+The women then appealed to the legislatures, and between 1847 and
+1851, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Pennsylvania all passed ten-hour
+laws.[A] But they were not passed simultaneously, which gave the
+employers in the particular state dealt with, the excuse that under
+such legislation they could not face interstate competition in their
+business, and since every law contained a saving clause permitting
+contracting out by individual employers and employés, all these
+beneficial acts were so much waste paper. The manufacturers expressed
+themselves as willing enough to stand for the shorter work-day, but
+absolutely declined to risk the loss of their business in competing
+with those rival manufacturers who might take advantage of the "saving
+clause."
+
+[Footnote A: In the same year, 1847, a ten-hour law was passed in New
+Hampshire and in Great Britain, with, however, very different outcome,
+for in Great Britain the law was enforced, there being no complication
+of state and national control there.]
+
+For nearly fifty years after this period, the right to overwork
+and the "right" to be overworked remained untouched by legislative
+interference. And yet the need for labor legislation, restricting
+hours, and for uniform federal legislation was as clearly evident then
+as it is to us today, to meet the industrial needs and to satisfy the
+undoubted rights of the working folk of the twentieth century.
+
+
+1860-1880
+
+The organization of labor upon a national basis really began during
+this period. During the ten years from 1863 to 1873 there existed more
+than thirty national trade unions. Of these only two, the printers and
+the cigar-makers, admitted women to their membership. But in addition
+the women shoemakers had their own national union, the Daughters of
+St. Crispin. Women's unions of all sorts were represented in the
+National Labor Union.
+
+From this body women's local unions received every possible
+encouragement. As far as I can understand, the National Labor Union
+carried on little active work between conventions, but at these
+gatherings it stood for equal pay for equal work, although, as it
+appears to us, inconsistently and short-sightedly the delegates
+refused to incorporate into their resolutions the demand for the
+ballot as a needful weapon in the hands of women in their strivings
+after industrial equality. The need for industrial equality had
+been forced upon the apprehension of men unionists after they had
+themselves suffered for long years from the undercutting competition
+of women. That women needed to be strong politically in order that
+they might be strong industrially was a step beyond these good
+brothers.
+
+There were also two state labor unions, composed solely of women, the
+Massachusetts Working-Women's League, and the Working-Women's Labor
+Union for the state of New York.
+
+But most of the organization work among women was still local in
+character. The New England girl was now practically out of the
+business, driven out by the still more hardly pushed immigrant. With
+her departure were lost to the trades she had practiced the remnants
+of the experience and the education several generations of workers had
+acquired in trade unionism and trade-union policy and methods.
+
+Still, at intervals and under sore disadvantages the poor newcomers
+did some fighting on their own account. Although they were immigrants
+they were of flesh and blood like their predecessors, and they
+naturally rebelled against the ever-increasing amount of work that
+was demanded of them. The two looms, formerly complained of, had now
+increased to six and seven. The piece of cloth that used to be thirty
+yards long was now forty-two yards, though the price per piece
+remained the same. But strike after strike was lost. A notable
+exception was the strike of the Fall River weavers in 1875. It was led
+by the women weavers, who refused to accept a ten per cent. cut in
+wages to which the men of the organization (for they were organized)
+had agreed. The women went out in strike in the bitter month of
+January, taking the men with them. The leaders selected three mills,
+and struck against those, keeping the rest of their members at work,
+in order to have sufficient funds for their purposes. Even so, 3,500
+looms and 156,000 spindles were thrown idle, and 3,125 strikers were
+out. The strike lasted more than two months and was successful.
+
+Progress must have seemed at the time, may even seem to us looking
+back, to be tantalizingly slow, but far oftener than in earlier days
+do the annals of trade unionism report, "The strikers won." Another
+feature is the ever-increasing interest and sympathy shown in such
+industrial risings of the oppressed by a certain few among the more
+fortunate members of society. One strike of cap-makers (men and
+women), was helped to a successful issue by rich German bankers and
+German societies.
+
+The account of the condition of women in the sewing trades during
+the sixties makes appalling reading. The wonder is not that
+the organizations of seamstresses during those years were few,
+short-lived, and attended with little success, but that among women so
+crushed and working at starvation wages any attempt at organization
+should have been possible at all. A number of circumstances combined
+to bring their earnings below, far below, the margin of subsistence.
+It was still the day of pocket-money wages, when girls living at home
+would take in sewing at prices which afforded them small luxuries, but
+which cut the remuneration of the woman who had to live by her needle
+to starvation point.
+
+It was still the period of transition in the introduction of the
+sewing-machine. The wages earned under these circumstances were
+incredibly low. The true sweating system with all its dire effects
+upon the health of the worker, and threatening the very existence of
+the home, was in full force. The enormous amount of work which was
+given out in army contracts to supply the needs of the soldiers then
+on active service in the Civil War, was sublet by contractors at the
+following rates. The price paid by the Government for the making of
+a shirt might be eighteen cents. Out of that all the worker would
+receive would be seven cents. And cases are cited of old women,
+presumably slow workers, who at these rates could earn but a dollar
+and a half per week. Even young and strong workers were but little
+better off. From innumerable cases brought to light $2 and $3 a week
+seem to have been a common income for a woman. Some even "supported"
+(Heaven save the mark!) others out of such wretched pittances.
+
+Aurora Phelps, of Boston, a born leader, in 1869, gave evidence that
+there were then in Boston eight thousand sewing-women, who did not
+earn over twenty-five cents a day, and that she herself had seen the
+time when she could not afford to pay for soap and firing to wash her
+own clothes. She said that she had known a girl to live for a week on
+a five-cent loaf of bread a day, going from shop to shop in search of
+the one bit of work she was able to do. For by this time division of
+work had come in, and the average machine operator was paid as badly
+as the hand needlewoman.
+
+The circumstance that probably more than any other accentuated this
+terrible state of affairs was the addition to the ranks of the
+wage-earners of thousands of "war widows." With homes broken up and
+the breadwinner gone, these untrained women took up sewing as the only
+thing they could do, and so overstocked the labor market that a
+new "Song of the Shirt" rose from attic to basement in the poorer
+districts of all the larger cities.
+
+As early as 1864 meetings were held in order to bring pressure upon
+the officials who had the giving out of the army contracts, to have
+the work given out direct, and therefore at advanced prices to the
+worker. Only three months before his death, in January, 1865, these
+facts reached President Lincoln, and were referred by him to the
+quartermaster with a request that "he should hereafter manage the
+supplies of contract work for the Government, made up by women, so as
+to give them remunerative wages for labor."
+
+During these years a number of small unions were formed, some as far
+west as Detroit and Chicago, but in almost every case the union later
+became a coöperative society. Some of them, we know, ceased to exist
+after a few months. Of others the forming of the organization is
+recorded in some labor paper, and after a while the name drops out,
+and nothing more is heard of it.
+
+Ten years later, in New York, there was formed a large, and for
+several years very active association of umbrella-sewers. This
+organization so impressed Mrs. Patterson, a visiting Englishwoman,
+that when she returned home, she exerted herself to form unions among
+working-women and encouraged others to do the same. It was through
+her persistence that the British Women's Trade Union League came into
+existence.
+
+If the conditions in the sewing trades were at this period the very
+worst that it is possible to imagine, so low that organization from
+within was impossible, while as yet the public mind was unprepared to
+accept the alternative of legislative interference with either hours
+or wages, there were other trades wherein conditions were far more
+satisfactory, and in which organization had made considerable
+progress.
+
+The Collar Laundry Workers of Troy, New York, had in 1866 about as bad
+wages as the sewing-women everywhere, but they were spared the curse
+of homework, as it was essentially a factory trade. The collars, cuffs
+and shirts were made and laundered by workers of the same factories.
+How early the workers organized is not known, but in the year 1866
+they had a union so prosperous that they were able to give one
+thousand dollars from their treasury towards the assistance of the
+striking ironmolders of Troy, and later on five hundred dollars to
+help the striking bricklayers of New York. They had in course of time
+succeeded in raising their own wages from the very low average of
+two dollars and three dollars per week to a scale ranging from eight
+dollars to fourteen dollars for different classes of work, although
+their hours appear to have been very long, from twelve to fourteen
+hours per day. But the laundresses wanted still more pay, and in May,
+1869, they went on strike to the number of four hundred, but after a
+desperate struggle, in which they were supported by the sympathy of
+the townspeople, they were beaten, and their splendid union put out of
+existence.
+
+Miss Kate Mullaney, their leader, was so highly thought of that in
+1868 she had been made national organizer of women for the National
+Labor Union, the first appointment of the kind of which there is any
+record. She tried to save what she could out of the wreck of the
+union by forming the Coöperative Linen, Collar and Cuff Factory, and
+obtained for it the patronage of the great department store of A.T.
+Stewart, in Broadway.
+
+The experiences of the women printers have been typical of the
+difficulties which women have had to face in what is called a man's
+trade of the highly organized class. The tragic alternative that is
+too often offered to women, just as it is offered to any race or class
+placed at an economic disadvantage, of being kept outside a skilled
+trade, through the short-sighted policy of the workers in possession,
+or of entering it by some back door, whether as mere undersellers or
+as actual strike-breakers, is illustrated in all its phases in the
+printing trade.
+
+As early as 1856 the Boston Typographical Union seriously considered
+discharging any member found working with female compositors. This
+feeling, though not always so bluntly expressed, lasted for many
+years. It was not singular, therefore, that under these circumstances,
+employers took advantage of such a situation, and whenever it suited
+them, employed women. These were not even non-unionists, seeing that
+as women they were by the men of their own trade judged ineligible for
+admission to the union. It is believed that women were thus the means
+of the printers losing many strikes. In 1864 the proprietor of one of
+the Chicago daily papers boasted that he "placed materials in remote
+rooms in the city and there secretly instructed girls to set type, and
+kept them there till they were sufficiently proficient to enter the
+office, and thus enabled the employer to take a 'snap judgment' on his
+journeymen."
+
+After this a wiser policy was adopted by the typographical unions. The
+keener-sighted among their members began not only to adopt a softer
+tone towards their hardly pressed sisters in toil, but made it clear
+that what they were really objecting to was the low wage for which
+women worked.
+
+The first sign of the great change of heart was the action of the
+"Big Six," of New York, which undertook all the initial expenses
+of starting a women's union. On October 12, 1868, the Women's
+Typographical Union No. 1 was organized, with Miss Augusta Lewis as
+president. Within the next three years women were admitted into the
+printers' unions of Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh
+and Boston. Meantime, the Women's Typographical No. 1 was growing in
+numbers and influence, and was evidently backed by the New York men's
+union. It obtained national recognition on June 11, 1869, by receiving
+a charter from the International Typographical Union of North America.
+It was represented by two delegates at the International Convention
+held in Cincinnati in 1870. One of these delegates was Miss Lewis
+herself. She was elected corresponding secretary of the International
+Union, and served, we are told, with unusual ability and tact. It is
+less encouraging to have to add, that since her day, no woman has held
+an international office.
+
+The two contrary views prevailing among men unionists: that of the
+man who said, "Keep women out at all hazards--out of the union,
+and therefore out of the best of the trade, but out of the trade,
+altogether, if possible," and that of the man who resigned himself to
+the inevitable and contented himself with urging equal pay, and with
+insisting upon the women joining the union, were never more sharply
+contrasted than in the cigar-making trade. We actually find the
+International Union, which after 1867 by its constitution admitted
+women, being openly defied in this vital matter by some of its own
+largest city locals. These were the years during which the trade was
+undergoing very radical changes. From being a home occupation, or an
+occupation carried on in quite small establishments, requiring very
+little capital, it was becoming more and more a factory trade. The
+levying by the government of an internal revenue tax on cigars, and
+the introduction of the molding machine, which could be operated by
+unskilled girl labor, seem to have been the two principal influences
+tending towards the creation of the big cigar-manufacturing plant.
+
+The national leaders recognized the full gravity of the problem,
+and met it in a tolerant, rational spirit. Not so many of the local
+bodies. Baltimore and Cincinnati cigar-makers were particularly
+bitter, and the "Cincinnati Cigar-makers' Protective Union was for a
+time denied affiliation with the International Union on account of its
+attitude of absolute exclusion towards women."
+
+In 1887 the Cincinnati secretary (judging from his impatience we
+wonder if he was a very young man) wrote: "We first used every
+endeavor to get women into the union, but no one would join, therefore
+we passed the resolution that if they would not work with us we would
+work against them; but I think we have taught them a lesson that will
+serve them another time." This unhappy spirit Cincinnati maintained
+for several years. The men were but building up future difficulties
+for themselves, as is evident from the fact that in Cincinnati itself
+there were by 1880 several hundred women cigar-makers, and not one of
+them in a union.
+
+As the Civil War had so profoundly affected the sewing trades, so
+it was war, although not upon this continent, that added to the
+difficulties of American cigar-makers. In the Austro-Prussian War,
+the invading army entered Bohemia and destroyed the Bohemian cigar
+factories. The workers, who, as far as we know, were mostly women, and
+skilled women at that, emigrated in thousands to the United States,
+and landing in New York either took up their trade there or went
+further afield to other Eastern cities. This happened just about the
+time that the processes of cigar-making were being subdivided and
+specialized, so presently a very complicated situation resulted.
+Finding the control of their trade slipping away from them, the
+skilled men workers in the New York factories went out on strike, and
+many of the Bohemian women, being also skilled, followed them, and so
+it came about that it was American girls upon whom the manufacturers
+had to depend as strike-breakers. Their reliance was justified. With
+the aid of these girls, as well as that of men strike-breakers, the
+employers gained the day.
+
+To what extent even the more intelligent trade-union leaders felt true
+comradeship for their women co-workers it is difficult to say. The
+underlying thought may often have been that safety for the man lay in
+his insisting upon just and even favorable conditions for women.
+Even under conditions of nominal equality the woman was so often
+handicapped by her physique, by the difficulty she experienced in
+obtaining thorough training, and by the additional claims of her home,
+that the men must have felt they were likely to keep their hold on the
+best positions anyhow, and perhaps all the more readily with the union
+exacting identical standards of accomplishment from all workers, while
+at the same time claiming for all identical standards of wages.
+
+There is certainly something of this idea in the plan outlined
+by President Strasser of the International Cigar-makers, and he
+represented the advance guard of his generation, in his annual report
+in the year 1879.
+
+"We cannot drive the females out of the trade but we can restrict this
+daily quota of labor through factory laws. No girl under eighteen
+should be employed more than eight hours per day; all overwork should
+be prohibited; while married women should be kept out of factories at
+least six weeks before and six weeks after confinement."
+
+But it is a man's way out, after all, and it is the man's way still.
+There is the same readiness shown today to save the woman from
+overwork before and after confinement, although she may be thereby at
+the same time deprived of the means of support, while there is no hint
+of any provision for either herself or the baby, not to speak of other
+children who may be dependent upon her. In many quarters today there
+is the same willingness to stand for equal pay, but very little
+anxiety to see that the young girl worker be as well trained as the
+boy, in order that the girl may be able with reason and justice to
+demand the same wage from an employer.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+WOMEN IN THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR
+
+
+So little trace is left in the world of organized labor today of that
+short-lived body, the Knights of Labor, that it might be thought
+worthy of but slight notice in any general review.
+
+But women have peculiar reason to remember the Knights, and to be
+grateful to them, for they were the first large national organization
+to which women were admitted on terms of equality with men, and in the
+work of the organization itself, they played an active and a notable
+part.
+
+From the year 1869 till 1878 the Knights of Labor existed as a secret
+order, having for its aim the improvement of living conditions. Its
+philosophy and its policy were well expressed in the motto, taken from
+the maxims of Solon, the Greek lawgiver: "That is the most perfect
+government in which an injury to one is the concern of all."
+
+The career of the Knights of Labor, however, as an active force in the
+community, began with the National Convention of 1878, from which time
+it made efforts to cover the wage-earning and farming classes, which
+had to constitute three-fourths of the membership. The organization
+was formed distinctly upon the industrial and not upon the craft plan.
+That is, instead of a local branch being confined to members of one
+trade, the plan was to include representatives of different trades and
+callings. That the fundamental interests of the wage-earner and the
+farmer were identical, was not so much stated as taken for granted.
+In defining eligibility for membership there were certain significant
+exceptions made; the following, being considered as pursuing
+distinctly antisocial occupations, were pointedly excluded: dealers
+in intoxicants, lawyers, bankers, stock-brokers and professional
+gamblers.
+
+Women were first formally admitted to the order in September, 1881. It
+is said that Mrs. Terence V. Powderly, wife of the then Grand Master
+Workman, was the first to join. It is not known that any figures
+exist showing the number of women who at any one time belonged to the
+Knights of Labor, but Dr. Andrews estimates the number, about the year
+1886, when the order was most influential, at about 50,000. Among this
+50,000 were a great variety of trades, but shoe-workers must have
+predominated, and many of these had received their training in trade
+unionism among the Daughters of St. Crispin.
+
+The Knights evidently took the view that the woman's industrial
+problem must to a certain extent be handled apart from that of the
+men, and more important still, that it must be handled as a whole.
+This broad treatment of the subject was shown when at the convention
+of 1885 it was voted, on the motion of Miss Mary Hannafin, a
+saleswoman of Philadelphia, that a committee to collect statistics on
+women's work be appointed. This committee consisted of Miss Hannafin
+and Miss Mary Stirling, also of Philadelphia, and Mrs. Lizzie H.
+Shute, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, who were the only women delegates
+to the Convention.
+
+At the next convention, held in 1886 in Richmond, Virginia, there were
+sixteen women delegates, out of a total of six hundred. Mr. Terence
+V. Powderly, Grand Master Workman, appointed the sixteen women as
+a committee to receive and consider the report of this previously
+appointed special committee of three. The result of their
+deliberations was sufficiently remarkable. They set an example to
+their sex in taking the free and independent stand they did. For they
+announced that they had "formed a permanent organization, the object
+of which will be to investigate the abuses to which our sex is
+subjected by unscrupulous employers, to agitate the principle which
+our order teaches of equal pay for equal work and abolition of child
+labor." They also recommended that the expenses of this new woman's
+department and the expenses of a woman investigator should be borne by
+the order. The report was adopted and the memorable Woman's Department
+of the Knights of Labor was created. Memorable for the purpose and
+the plan that underlay its foundation, it was also memorable for the
+character and achievements of the brilliant, able and devoted woman
+who was chosen as general investigator.
+
+Mrs. Leonora Barry was a young widow with three children. She had
+tried to earn a living for them in a hosiery mill at Amsterdam, New
+York. For herself her endeavor to work as a mill hand was singularly
+unfortunate, for during her first week she earned but sixty-five
+cents. But if she did not during that week master any of the processes
+concerned in the making of machine-made stockings, she learned a good
+deal more than this, a good deal more than she set out to learn. She
+learned of the insults young girls were obliged to submit to on pain
+of losing their jobs, and a righteous wrath grew within her at the
+knowledge. During this hard time also she heard first of the Knights
+of Labor, and having heard of them, she promptly joined. As she was
+classified at the 1886 convention as a "machine hand," it is probable
+that she had by this time taken up her original trade.
+
+For four years Mrs. Barry did fine work. She combined in a remarkable
+degree qualities rarely found in the same individual. She followed in
+no one's tracks, but planned out her own methods, and carried out a
+campaign in which she fulfilled the duties of investigator, organizer
+and public lecturer. This at a time when the means of traveling were
+far more primitive than they are today; and not in one state alone,
+for she covered almost all the Eastern half of the country. We know
+that she went as far west as Leadville, Colorado, because of the
+touching little story that is told of her visit there. In that town
+she had founded the Martha Washington Assembly of the Knights of
+Labor, and when she left she was given a small parcel with the request
+that she would not open it until she reached home. But, as she tells
+it herself,
+
+    My woman's curiosity got the better of me, and I opened the
+    package, and found therein a purse which had been carried for
+    fifteen years by Brother Horgan, who was with us last year,
+    and inside of that a little souvenir in the shape of five
+    twenty-dollar gold pieces. You say that I was the instrument
+    through whose means the Martha Washington Assembly was organized.
+    This is partially true, but it is also true that the good and true
+    Knights of Leadville are as much the founder as I am.
+
+She possessed a social vision, and saw the problems of the wrongs of
+women in relation to the general industrial question, so that in her
+organizing work she was many-sided. The disputes that she was forever
+settling, the apathy that she was forever encountering, she dealt with
+in the tolerant spirit of one to whom these were but incidents in the
+growth of the labor movement. In dealing with the "little ones" in
+that movement we hear of her as only patient and helpful and offering
+words of encouragement, however small the visible results of her
+efforts might be.
+
+But towards those set in high places she could be intensely scornful,
+as for instance when she is found appealing to the order itself,
+asking that "more consideration be given, and more thorough
+educational measures be adopted on behalf of the working-women of our
+land, the majority of whom are entirely ignorant of the economic and
+industrial question, which is to them of vital importance, and they
+must ever remain so while the selfishness of their brothers in toil
+is carried to such an extent as I find it to be among those who have
+sworn to demand equal pay for equal work. Thus far in the history of
+our order that part of our platform has been but a mockery of the
+principle intended."
+
+Mrs. Barry started out to make regular investigations of different
+trades in which women were employed, in order that she might
+accurately inform herself and others as to what actual conditions
+were. But here she received her first serious check. She had no legal
+authority to enter any establishment where the proprietor objected,
+and even in other cases, where permission had been given, she
+discovered afterwards to her dismay that her visits had led to the
+dismissal of those who had in all innocence given her information,
+as in the case quoted of Sister Annie Conboy, a worker in a mill, in
+Auburn, New York. But little was gained by shutting out such a bright
+and observant woman. Mrs. Barry's practical knowledge of factory
+conditions was already wide and her relations with workers of the
+poorest and most oppressed class so intimate that little that she
+wanted to know seems to have escaped her, and she was often the
+channel through which information was furnished to the then newly
+established state bureaus of labor.
+
+Baffled, however, in the further carrying out of her plans for a
+thorough, and for that day, nation-wide investigation, she turned her
+attention mainly to education and organizing, establishing new local
+unions, helping those already in existence, and trying everywhere
+to strengthen the spirit of the workers in striving to procure for
+themselves improved standards.
+
+In her second year of work Mrs. Barry had the assistance of a most
+able headquarters secretary, Mary O'Reilly, a cotton mill hand from
+Providence, Rhode Island. During eleven months there were no fewer
+than three hundred and thirty-seven applications for the presence
+of the organizer. Out of these Mrs. Barry filled two hundred and
+thirteen, traveling to nearly a hundred cities and towns, and
+delivering one hundred public addresses. She was in great demand as a
+speaker before women's organizations outside the labor movement, for
+it was just about that time that women more fortunately placed were
+beginning to be generally aroused to a shamefaced sense of their
+responsibility for the hard lot of their poorer sisters. Thus she
+spoke before the aristocratic Century Club of Philadelphia, and
+attended the session of the International Women's Congress held in
+Washington, D.C., in March and April, 1887.
+
+The wages of but two dollars and fifty cents or three dollars for a
+week of eighty-four hours; the intolerable sufferings of the women and
+child wage-earners recorded in her reports make heart-rending reading
+today, especially when we realize how great in amount and how
+continuous has been the suffering in all the intervening years.
+So much publicity, however, and the undaunted spirit and unbroken
+determination of a certain number of the workers have assuredly had
+their effect, and some improvements there have been.
+
+Speeding up is, in all probability, worse today than ever. It is
+difficult to compare wages without making a close investigation in
+different localities and in many trades, and testing, by a comparison
+with the cost of living, the real and not merely the money value of
+wages, but there is a general agreement among authorities that
+wages on the whole have not kept pace with the workers' necessary
+expenditures. But in one respect the worker today is much better off.
+At the time we are speaking of, the facts of the wrong conditions,
+the low wages, the long hours, and the many irritating tyrannies the
+workers had to bear, only rarely reached the public ear. Let us thank
+God for our muck-rakers. Their stories and their pictures are all the
+while making people realize that there is such a thing as a common
+responsibility for the wrongs of individuals.
+
+Here is a managerial economy for you. The girls in a corset factory in
+Newark, New Jersey, if not inside when the whistle stopped blowing (at
+seven o'clock apparently) were locked out till half-past seven, and
+then they were docked two hours for waste power.
+
+In a linen mill in Paterson, New Jersey, we are told how in one branch
+the women stood on a stone floor with water from a revolving cylinder
+flying constantly against the breast. They had in the coldest weather
+to go home with underclothing dripping because they were allowed
+neither space nor a few moments of time in which to change their
+clothing.
+
+Mrs. Barry's work, educating, organizing, and latterly pushing forward
+protective legislation continued up till her marriage with O.R. Lake,
+a union printer, in 1890, when she finally withdrew from active
+participation in the labor movement.
+
+Mrs. Barry could never have been afforded the opportunity even to set
+out on her mission, had it not been for the support and coöperation of
+other women delegates. The leaders in the Knights of Labor were ahead
+of their time in so freely inviting women to take part in their
+deliberations. It was at the seventh convention, in 1883, that
+the first woman delegate appeared. She was Miss Mary Stirling, a
+shoe-worker from Philadelphia. Miss Kate Dowling, of Rochester, New
+York, had also been elected, but did not attend. Next year saw two
+women, Miss Mary Hannafin, saleswoman, also from Philadelphia, and
+Miss Louisa M. Eaton, of Lynn, probably a shoe-worker. During the
+preceding year Miss Hannafin had taken an active part in protecting
+the girls discharged in a lock-out in a Philadelphia shoe factory, not
+only against the employer, but even against the weakness of some of
+the men of her own assembly who were practically taking the side of
+the strike-breakers, by organizing them into a rival assembly. The
+question came up in the convention for settlement, and the delegates
+voted for Miss Hannafin in the stand she had taken.
+
+It was upon her initiative, likewise, at the convention in the
+following year, that the committee was formed to collect statistics
+of women's work, and in the year after (1886), it was again Miss
+Hannafin, the indefatigable, backed by the splendid force of sixteen
+women delegates, who succeeded in having Mrs. Barry appointed general
+investigator.
+
+One of the most active and devoted women in the Knights of Labor was
+Mrs. George Rodgers, then and still of Chicago. For a good many years
+she had been in a quiet way educating and organizing among the girls
+in her own neighborhood, and had organized a working-women's union
+there. For seven years she attended the state assembly of the Knights
+of Labor, and was judge of the district court of the organization.
+But it is by her attendance as one of the sixteen women at the 1886
+National Convention, which was held in Richmond, Virginia, that she is
+best remembered. She registered as "housekeeper" and a housekeeper
+she must indeed have been, with all her outside interests a busy
+housemother. There accompanied her to the gathering her baby of two
+weeks old, the youngest of her twelve children. To this youthful trade
+unionist, a little girl, the convention voted the highest numbered
+badge (800), and also presented her with a valuable watch and chain,
+for use in future years.
+
+One cannot help suspecting that such an unusual representation of
+women must have been the reward of some special effort, for it was
+never repeated. Subsequent conventions saw but two or three seated to
+plead women's cause. At the 1890 convention, the occasion on which
+Mrs. Barry sent in her letter of resignation, there was but one woman
+delegate. She was the remarkable Alzina P. Stevens, originally a mill
+hand, but at this time a journalist of Toledo, Ohio. The men offered
+the now vacant post of general investigator to her, but she declined.
+However, between this period and her too early death, Mrs. Stevens was
+yet to do notable work for the labor movement.
+
+During the years that the Knights of Labor were active, the women
+members were not only to be found in the mixed assemblies, but between
+1881 and 1886 there are recorded the chartering of no fewer than one
+hundred and ninety local assemblies composed entirely of women. Even
+distant centers like Memphis, Little Rock and San Francisco were drawn
+upon, as well as the manufacturing towns in Ontario, Canada. Besides
+those formed of workers in separate trades, such as shoe-workers, mill
+operatives, and garment-workers, there were locals, like the federal
+labor unions of today, in which those engaged in various occupations
+would unite together. Some of the women's locals existed for a good
+many years, but a large proportion are recorded as having lapsed or
+suspended after one or two years. Apart from the usual difficulties in
+holding women's organizations together, there is no doubt that many
+locals, both of men and of women, were organized far too hastily,
+without the members having the least understanding of the first
+principles of trade unionism, or indeed of any side of the industrial
+question.
+
+The organizers attempted far too much, and neglected the slow, solid
+work of preparation, and the no less important follow-up work; this
+had much to do with the early decline of the entire organization. The
+women's end of the movement suffered first and most quickly. From 1890
+on, the women's membership became smaller and smaller, until practical
+interest by women and for women in the body wholly died out.
+
+But the genuine workers had sown seed of which another movement was to
+reap the results. The year 1886 was the year of the first meeting
+of the American Federation of Labor as we know it. With its gradual
+development, the growth of the modern trade-union movement among women
+is inextricably bound up.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN ORGANIZATION
+
+
+As the Knights of Labor declined, the American Federation of Labor was
+rising to power and influence. It was at first known as the Federation
+of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada,
+and organized under its present name in 1886. For some time the
+Knights of Labor and the younger organization exchanged greetings and
+counsel, and some of the leaders cherished the expectation that the
+field of effort was large enough to give scope to both. The American
+Federation of Labor, being a federation of trade unions, kept well in
+view the strengthening of strictly trade organizations. The Knights,
+as we have seen, were on the other hand, far more loosely organized,
+containing many members, both men and women, and even whole
+assemblies, outside of any trade, and they were therefore inclined to
+give a large share of their attention to matters of general reform,
+outside of purely trade-union or labor questions. It was the very
+largeness of their program which proved in the end a source of
+weakness, while latterly the activities of the organization
+became clogged by the burden of a membership with no intelligent
+understanding of the platform and aims.
+
+But although the absence of adequate restrictions on admission to
+membership, and the ease of affiliation, not to speak of other
+reasons, had led to the acceptance of numbers of those who were only
+nominally interested in trade unionism, it had also permitted the
+entry of a band of women, not all qualified as wage-workers, but
+in faith and deed devoted trade unionists, and keenly alive to the
+necessity of bringing the wage-earning woman into the labor movement.
+The energies of this group were evidently sadly missed during the
+early years of the American Federation of Labor.
+
+The present national organization came into existence in 1881, under
+the style and title of the Federation of Trades and Labor Unions of
+the United States and Canada. It reorganized at the convention of
+1886, and adopted the present name, the American Federation of Labor.
+It was built up by trade-union members of the skilled trades, and to
+them trade qualifications and trade autonomy were essential articles
+of faith. This was a much more solid groundwork upon which to raise a
+labor movement. But at first it worked none too well for the women,
+although as the national organizations with women members joined the
+Federation the women were necessarily taken in, too. Likewise they
+shared in some, at least, of the benefits and advantages accruing from
+the linking together of the organized workers in one strong body. But
+the unions of which the new organization was composed in these early
+days were principally unions in what were exclusively men's trades,
+such as the building and iron trades, mining and so on. In the trades,
+again, in which women were engaged, they were not in any great numbers
+to be found in the union of the trade. So the inferior position held
+by women in the industrial world was therefore inevitably reflected in
+the Federation. It is true that time after time, in the very earliest
+conventions, resolutions would be passed recommending the organization
+of women. But matters went no further.
+
+In 1882 Mrs. Charlotte Smith, president and representative of an
+organization styled variously the Women's National Labor League, and
+the Women's National Industrial League, presented a memorial to the
+Convention of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (the
+Federation's name at that time), asking for the advice, assistance and
+coöperation of labor organizations. She mentioned that in 1880, there
+were recorded 2,647,157 women as employed in gainful occupations. A
+favorable resolution followed. At the convention of 1885, she was
+again present, and was accorded a seat without a vote. On her request
+again the delegates committed themselves to a resolution favoring the
+organization of women.
+
+In 1890 Delegate T.J. Morgan, of Chicago, introduced, and the
+convention passed, a resolution, favoring the submission to Congress
+of an amendment extending the right of suffrage to women. At this
+convention appeared the first fully accredited woman delegate, Mrs.
+Mary Burke, of the Retail Clerks, from Findlay, Ohio. A resolution was
+introduced and received endorsement, but no action followed. It
+asked for the placing in the field of a sufficient number of women
+organizers to labor in behalf of the emancipation of women of the
+wage-working class.
+
+In 1891 there were present at the annual convention of the American
+Federation of Labor Mrs. Eva McDonald Valesh and Miss Ida Van Etten.
+A committee was appointed with Mrs. Valesh as chairman and Miss Van
+Etten as secretary. They brought in a report that the convention
+create the office of national organizer, the organizer to be a woman
+at a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year and expenses, to be
+appointed the following January, and that the constitution be so
+amended that the woman organizer have a seat on the Executive Board.
+The latter suggestion was not acted upon. But Miss Mary E. Kenney of
+the Bindery Women (now Mrs. Mary Kenney O'Sullivan) was appointed
+organizer, and held the position for five months. She attended the
+1892 convention as a fully accredited delegate. Naturally she could
+produce no very marked results in that brief period, and the remark
+is made that her work was of necessity of a pioneer and missionary
+character rather than one of immediate results--a self-evident
+commentary. Later women were organizers for brief periods, one being
+Miss Anna Fitzgerald, of the National Women's Label League.
+
+As years passed on, and the American Federation of Labor grew by the
+affiliation of almost all the national trade unions, it became the one
+acknowledged central national body. Along with the men, such women
+as were in the organizations came in, too. But it was only as a rare
+exception that we heard of women delegates, and no woman has ever yet
+had a seat upon the Executive Board, although women delegates have
+been appointed upon both special and standing committees.
+
+The responsibility for this must be shared by all. It is partly an
+outgrowth of the backward state of the women themselves. They are at
+a disadvantage in their lack of training, their lower wages and their
+unconsciousness of the benefits of organization; also owing to the
+fact that such a large number of women are engaged in the unskilled
+trades that are hardest to organize. On the other hand, neither the
+national unions, the state and central bodies, nor the local unions
+have ever realized the value of the women membership they actually
+have, nor the urgent necessity that exists for organizing all
+working-women. To their own trade gatherings even, they have rarely
+admitted women delegates in proportion to the number of women workers.
+Only now and then, even today, do we find a woman upon the executive
+board of a national trade union, and when it comes to electing
+delegates to labor's yearly national gathering, it is men who are
+chosen, even in a trade like the garment-workers, in which there is a
+great preponderance of women.
+
+Of the important international unions with women members there are but
+two which have a continuous, unbroken history of over fifty years.
+These are the Typographical Union, dating back to 1850, and the Cigar
+Makers' International Union, which was founded in 1864.
+
+Other international bodies, founded since, are:
+
+  Boot and Shoe Workers' Union.                        1889
+  Hotel and Restaurant Employés Union.                 1890
+  Retail Clerks' International Protective Association. 1890
+  United Garment Workers of America.                   1891
+  International Brotherhood of Bookbinders.            1892
+  Tobacco Workers' International Union.                1895
+  International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.        1900
+  Shirt, Waist and Laundry Workers International U'n.  1900
+  United Textile Workers' Union.                       1901
+  International Glove Workers' Union of N. America.    1902
+
+One group of unions, older than any of these, dating back to 1885, are
+the locals of the hat trimmers. These workers belong to no national
+organization, and it is only recently that they have been affiliated
+with the American Federation of Labor. They are not, as might be
+judged from the title, milliners; they trim and bind men's hats. They
+coöperate with the Panama and Straw Hat Trimmers and Operators. In New
+York the hat trimmers and the workers in straw are combined into one
+organization, under the name of the United Felt, Panama and Straw Hat
+Trimmers' and Operators' Union of Greater New York. The Hat Trimmers
+are almost wholly a women's organization, and their affairs are
+controlled almost entirely by women. The various locals coöperate with
+and support one another. But in their stage of organization this group
+of unions closely resembles the local unions, whether of men or
+women, which existed in so many trades before the day of nation-wide
+organizations set in. Eventually it must come about that they join the
+national organization. Outside of New York there are locals in New
+Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut. The parent union is that of
+Danbury, Connecticut.
+
+The girl hat-trimmers, under the leadership of Melinda Scott, of
+Newark and New York, have during the last ten years improved both
+wages and conditions and have besides increased their numbers and
+aided in forming new locals in other centers. They are known in the
+annals of organized labor chiefly for the loyalty and devotion they
+showed during the strike of the Danbury hatters in 1909. They not only
+refused, to a girl, to go back to work, when that would have broken
+the strike, but time after time, when money was collected and sent to
+them, even as large a sum as one thousand dollars, they handed it
+over to the men's organizations, feeling that the men, with wives
+and children dependent upon them, were in even greater need than
+themselves. "Seeing the larger vision and recognizing the greater
+need, these young women gave to the mother and the child of their
+working brothers. Although a small group, there is none whose members
+have shown a more complete understanding of the inner meaning of trade
+unionism, or a finer spirit of self-sacrifice in the service of their
+fellows."
+
+When we try to estimate the power of a movement, we judge it by its
+numbers, by its activities, and by its influence upon other movements.
+
+As to the numbers of women trade unionists, we have very imperfect
+statistics upon which to base any finding. If the statistics kept by
+the Labor Bureau of the state of New York can be taken as typical of
+conditions in other parts of the country, and they probably can,
+the proportion of women unionists has not at all kept pace with the
+increasing numbers of men organized. In 1894 there were in that state
+149,709 men trade unionists, and 7,488 women. In 1902 both had about
+doubled their numbers--these read: men, 313,592; women, 15,509. By
+1908, however, while there were then of men, 363,761, the women had
+diminished to 10,698. Since then, we have to note a marked change,
+beginning with 1910, and continuing ever since. In 1913 the unionized
+men reached 568,726, and the women 78,522. The increase of men in
+the organized trades of the state during the twelvemonth preceding
+September 30, 1913, was twenty per cent., while of women it was
+one hundred and eleven per cent. This enormous increase, more than
+doubling the entire union strength among women, is mainly due to the
+successful organization in the garment trades in New York City.
+
+So far there has been no adequate investigation covering the
+activities of women in the labor world during the last or modern
+period. We know that after the panic of 1893, which dealt a blow to
+trade unionism among men, the movement among women was almost at a
+standstill. We may feel that the international unions have failed to
+see the light, and have mostly fallen far short of what they might
+have done in promoting the organization of women workers; but we must
+acknowledge with thankfulness the fact that they have at least kept
+alive the tradition of trade unionism among women, and have thus
+prepared the way for the education and the organization of the women
+workers by the women workers themselves.
+
+As to legislation, the steady improvement brought about through the
+limitation of hours, through modern sanitary regulations, and through
+child-labor laws, has all along been supported by a handful
+of trade-union women, working especially through the national
+organizations, in which, as members, they made their influence felt.
+
+There were always brave souls among the women, and chivalrous souls,
+here and there among the men, and the struggles made to form and keep
+alive tiny local unions we shall probably never know, for no complete
+records exist. The only way in which the ground can be even partially
+covered is by a series of studies in each locality, such as the one
+made by Miss Lillian Matthews, through her work in San Francisco.
+
+In this connection it must be remembered that those uprisings among
+women of the last century, were after all local and limited in
+their effects and range. Most of them bore no relation to national
+organization of even the trade involved, still less to an
+all-embracing, national labor organization, such as the American
+Federation of Labor. In these earlier stages, when organization of
+both men and women was mainly local, women's influence, when felt
+at all, was felt strongly within the locality affected, and it is
+therefore only there that we hear about it.
+
+Still, twenty-five years ago, the day of national organization had
+already dawned. To organize a trade on a national scale is at best a
+slow process, and it naturally takes a much longer time for women to
+influence and enter into the administrative work of a national union,
+than of a separate local union, which perhaps they have helped to
+found. They are therefore too apt to lose touch with the big national
+union, and even with its local branch in their own city. It is almost
+like the difference between the small home kitchen, with whose
+possibilities a woman is familiar, and the great food-producing
+factory, run on a business scale, whose management seems to her
+something far-removed and unfamiliar. It was not until 1904, when the
+National Women's Trade Union League was formed out of unions with
+women members, that women workers, as women, can be said to have begun
+national organization at all. The account of that body is reserved for
+another chapter.
+
+Meanwhile as instances of the many determined localized efforts among
+women to raise wages and better conditions, there follow here outlines
+of the formation of the Working Women's Society in New York, the
+successful organization of the Laundry Workers in San Francisco, and
+of the splendid but defeated struggle of the girls in the packing
+plants of Chicago.
+
+In 1886 a small body of working-women, of whom Leonora O'Reilly was
+one, began holding meetings on the. East Side of New York City, to
+inquire into and talk over bad conditions, and see how they could be
+remedied. They were shortly joined by some women of position, who saw
+in this spontaneous effort one promising remedy, at least for some of
+the gross evils of underpayment, overwork and humiliation suffered by
+the working-women and girls of New York, in common with those in
+every industrial center. Among those other women who thus gave their
+support, and gave it in the truly democratic spirit, were the famous
+Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. Robert Abbé, Miss Arria Huntingdon and
+Miss L.S. Perkins, who was the first treasurer of the little group.
+Mrs. Lowell's long experience in public work, and her unusual
+executive ability were of much value at first. The result of the
+meetings was the formation of the Working Women's Society. They held
+their first public meeting on February 2, 1888. In their announcement
+of principles they declared "the need of a central society, which
+shall gather together those already devoted to the cause of
+organization among women, shall collect statistics and publish facts,
+shall be ready to furnish information and advice, and, above all,
+shall continue and increase agitation on this subject." Among their
+specific objects were "to found trade organizations, where they do not
+exist, and to encourage and assist existing labor organizations, to
+the end of increasing wages and shortening hours." Another object was
+to promote the passing and the enforcement of laws for the protection
+of women and children in factories, and yet another the following up
+of cases of injustice in the shops.
+
+The Working Women's Society gave very valuable aid in the
+feather-workers' strike. Without the Society's backing the women could
+never have had their case put before the public as it was. Again, it
+was through their efforts, chiefly, that the law was passed in 1890,
+providing for women factory inspectors in the state of New York. It is
+stated that this was the first law of the kind in the world, and that
+the British law, passed shortly afterwards, was founded upon its
+provisions.
+
+Not limiting itself to helping in direct labor organization, and
+legislation, the Working Women's Society undertook among the more
+fortunate classes a campaign of sorely needed education, and made upon
+them, at the same time, a claim for full and active coöperation in the
+battle for industrial justice.
+
+This was done through the foundation of the Consumers' League of New
+York, now a branch of the National Consumers' League, which has done
+good and faithful service in bringing home to many some sense of
+the moral responsibility of the purchaser in maintaining oppressive
+industrial conditions, while, on the other hand it has persistently
+striven for better standards of labor legislation. It was through the
+Consumers' League, and especially through the ability and industry of
+its notable officer, Josephine Goldmark, that the remarkable mass of
+information on the toxic effects of fatigue, and the legislation
+to check overwork already in force in other countries was brought
+together in such complete form, as to enable Louis Brandeis to
+successfully defend the ten-hour law for women, first for Oregon, and
+afterwards for Illinois. The Working Women's Society did its work at a
+time when organization for women was even more unpopular than today.
+It did much to lessen that unpopularity, and to hearten its members
+for the never-ending struggle. All its agitation told, and prepared
+the way for the Women's Trade Union League, which, a decade later,
+took up the very same task.
+
+In the year 1900, the status of the steam-laundry-workers of San
+Francisco was about as low as could possibly be imagined. White men
+and girls had come into the trade about 1888, taking the place of
+the Chinese, who had been the first laundrymen on the West Coast.
+Regarding their treatment, Miss Lillian Ruth Matthews writes:
+
+    The conditions surrounding the employment of these first white
+    workers were among those survivals from the eighteenth century,
+    which still linger incongruously in our modern industrial
+    organization. The "living-in" system was the order, each laundry
+    providing board and lodging for its employés. The dormitories were
+    wretched places, with four beds in each small room. The food was
+    poor and scanty, and even though the girls worked till midnight or
+    after, no food was allowed after the evening meal at six o'clock.
+    Half-an-hour only was allowed for lunch. Early in the morning, the
+    women were routed out in no gentle manner and by six o'clock the
+    unwholesome breakfast was over, and every one hard at work....
+    The girls were physically depleted from their hard work and poor
+    nourishment. Their hands were "blistered and puffed, their feet
+    swollen, calloused, and sore." One girl said, "Many a time I've
+    been so tired that I hadn't the courage to take my clothes off.
+    I've thrown myself on the bed and slept like dead until I got so
+    cold and cramped that at two or three in the morning I'd rouse
+    up and undress and crawl into bed, only to crawl out again at
+    half-past five."
+
+As to wages, under the wretched "living-in" system the girls received
+but eight dollars and ten dollars a month in money. But even those who
+lived at home in no instance received more than twenty-five dollars
+a month, and in many cases widows with children to support would be
+trying to do their duty by their little ones on seventeen dollars and
+fifty cents a month.
+
+In the summer of 1900, letters many of them anonymous, were received
+both by the State Labor Commissioner and by the newspapers. A reporter
+from the _San Francisco Examiner_ took a job as a laundry-worker, and
+published appalling accounts of miserable wages, utter slavery as to
+hours and degrading conditions generally. Even the city ordinance
+forbidding work after ten at night (!) was found to be flagrantly
+violated, the girls continually working till midnight, and sometimes
+till two in the morning.
+
+The first measure of improvement was the passing of a new ordinance,
+forbidding work after seven in the evening. The workers, however,
+promptly realized that the more humane regulation was likely to be as
+ill enforced as the former one had been unless there was a union to
+see that it was carried out.
+
+About three hundred of the men organized, and applied to the Laundry
+Workers' International Union for a charter. The men did not wish
+to take the women in, but the executive board of the national
+organization, to their everlasting credit, refused the charter unless
+the women were taken in as well. Even so, a great many of the women
+were too frightened to take any steps themselves, as the employers
+were already threatening with dismissal any who dared to join a union,
+but the most courageous of the girls, with the help of some of the
+best of the men resolved to go on. Hannah Mahony, now Mrs. Hannah
+Nolan, Labor Inspector, took up the difficult task of organizing. So
+energetic and successful was she, that in sixteen weeks the majority
+of the girls, as well as the men, had joined the new union. It was all
+carried out secretly, and only when they felt themselves strong enough
+did they come out into the open with a demand for a higher wage-scale
+and shorter hours.
+
+By April 1, 1901, the conditions in the laundry industry were
+effectually revolutionized. The boarding system was abolished, wages
+were substantially increased and the working day was shortened; girls
+who had been receiving $8 and $10 a month were now paid $6 and $10 a
+week; ten hours was declared to constitute the working day and nine
+holidays a year were allowed. For overtime the employés were to be
+paid at the rate of time and a half. An hour was to be taken at noon,
+and any employé violating this rule was to be fined. The fine was
+devised as an educative reminder of the new obligation the laborers
+were under to protect one another, and to raise the standard of the
+industry upon which they must depend for a living, so fearful was the
+union that old conditions might creep insidiously back upon workers
+unaccustomed to independence.
+
+The next step was the nine-hour day, and this in good time was
+obtained too, but only as the result of the power of the strong,
+well-managed union.
+
+The union was just five years old, when unheard-of disaster fell on
+San Francisco, the earthquake and fire. Well indeed did the members
+stand the test. Like their fellow-unionists, the waitresses, they
+made such good use of their trade-union solidarity, and showed such
+courage, wisdom and resource, that the union became even more to the
+laundry-workers than it had been before this severe trial of its
+worth. Two-thirds of the steam laundries had been destroyed, likewise
+the union headquarters. Yet within a week all the camps and bread
+lines had been visited, and members requested to register at the
+secretary's home, and called together to a meeting.
+
+Temporary headquarters were found and opened as a relief station,
+where members were supplied with clothing and shoes. Within another
+week the nine laundries that had escaped the fire resumed work, the
+employés going back under the old agreement.
+
+By the time the next April came round nine of the burnt laundries were
+rebuilt, all on the most modern scale as to design and fittings, and
+equipped with the very newest machinery. But still there were only
+eighteen steam laundries to meet all San Francisco's needs, and
+therefore business was very brisk. So in April, 1907, it seemed good
+to the union leaders to try for better terms when renewing their
+agreement. When they made their demand for the eight-hour day as well
+as for increased wages, the proprietors refused, and eleven hundred
+workers went out, the entire working force of fourteen laundries. The
+other four laundries, with but two hundred workers altogether, had the
+old agreement signed up, and kept on working. The strike lasted eleven
+weeks, and cost the union over $24,000. Meanwhile the Conciliation
+Committee of the Labor Council, after many conferences and much effort
+succeeded in arranging a compromise, the working week to be fifty-one
+hours, with a sliding scale under which the eight-hour day would
+be reached in April, 1910. Work before seven in the morning was
+prohibited, all time after five o'clock was considered overtime,
+and must be paid for at time-and-a-half rate. The passing of the
+eight-hour law in May, 1911, suggested to some ingenious employers a
+method of getting behind their own agreement, at least to the extent
+of utilizing their plant to the utmost. They accordingly proposed to
+free themselves from any obligation to pay overtime, as long as the
+eight consecutive hours were not exceeded. The leaders of the union
+saw the danger lurking under this suggestion, in that it might mean
+all sorts of irregular hours, or even a two-shift system, involving
+perpetual night work, and going home from work long distances in the
+middle of the night. After many months of haggling, the union won its
+point. All work after five o'clock was to be paid at overtime rate,
+with the exception of Monday, when the closing time was made six. This
+because in all laundries there is apt to be delay in starting work on
+Monday, as hardly any work can be done until the drivers have come in
+from their first round, with bundles of soiled linen. This arrangement
+remained in force at time of writing.
+
+As regards wages, Miss Matthews estimates the average increase in the
+twelve years since the Steam Laundry Workers' Union was first formed
+at about thirty per cent. With the exception of the head marker, and
+the head washer at the one end, each at twenty-two dollars and fifty
+cents per week, and the little shaker girl on the mangle at seven
+dollars per week at the other, wages range from eighteen dollars down
+to eight dollars, more than the scale, however, being paid, it is
+said, to every worker with some skill and experience. Apprentices are
+allowed for in the union agreement.
+
+The union does not permit its members to work at unguarded machinery,
+hence accidents are rare, and for such as do happen, usually slight
+ones, like burns, the union officials are inclined to hold the workers
+themselves responsible.
+
+All of the steam laundries in San Francisco, now thirty-two in number,
+are unionized, including the laundries operated in one of the largest
+hotels. The union regards with just pride and satisfaction the fine
+conditions, short hours and comparatively high wages which its trade
+enjoys, as well as the improved social standards and the spirit of
+independence and coöperation which are the fruit of these many years
+of union activity.
+
+But outside the labor organization, and at once a sad contrast and a
+possible menace, lie two groups of businesses, the French laundries
+and the Japanese laundries. The former are mostly conducted on the
+old, out-of-date lines of a passing domestic industry, housed in
+made-over washrooms and ironing rooms, equipped with little modern
+machinery, most of the work being done by hand, and the employés being
+often the family or at least the relatives of the proprietor. In their
+present stage it is quite difficult to unionize these establishments
+and they do cut prices for the proprietors of the steam laundries.
+
+But both steam laundries and French laundries, both employers and
+workers, both unionists and non-unionists are at least found in
+agreement in their united opposition to the Japanese laundries, from
+whose competition all parties suffer, and in this they are backed
+by the whole of organized labor. The possibility of unionizing the
+Japanese laundries is not even considered.
+
+The story of the Steam Laundry Workers' Union of San Francisco is an
+encouraging lesson to those toilers in any craft who go on strike. But
+it also holds for them a warning. A successful strike is a good thing,
+for the most part, but its gains can be made permanent only if, when
+the excitement of the strike is over, the workers act up to their
+principles and keep their union together. The leaders must remember
+that numbers alone do not make strength, that most of the rank and
+file, and not unfrequently the leaders too, need the apprenticeship
+of long experience before any union can be a strong organization. The
+union's choicest gift to its membership lies in the opportunity
+thus offered to the whole of the members to grow into the spirit of
+fellowship.
+
+
+A few words should be said here of another strike among
+laundry-workers, this time almost entirely women, which although as
+bravely contested, ended in complete failure. This was the strike of
+the starchers in the Troy, New York, shirt and collar trade. In the
+Federal Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners, Mr.
+W.P.D. Bliss gives a brief account of it. In 1905 the starchers
+had their wages cut, and at the same time some heavy machinery was
+introduced. The starchers went out, and organized a union, which over
+one thousand women joined. They kept up the struggle from June, 1905,
+throughout a whole summer, autumn and winter till March, 1906. It was
+up till that time, probably the largest women's strike that had
+ever taken place in this country and was conducted with uncommon
+persistence and steadiness of purpose. They were backed by the
+international union, and appointing a committee visited various
+cities, and obtained, it is said, about twenty-five thousand dollars
+in this way for the support of their members. Many meetings and street
+demonstrations were held in Troy, and much bitter feeling existed
+between the strikers and the non-union help brought in. The strike at
+length collapsed; the firms continued to introduce more machinery,
+and the girls had to submit. Mr. Bliss concludes: "The Troy union
+was broken up and since then has had little more than a nominal
+existence."
+
+During the nineties there were a number of efforts made to organize
+working-women in Chicago. Some unions were organized at Hull House,
+where Mrs. Alzina P. Stevens and Mrs. Florence Kelley were then
+residents. Mrs. George Rodgers (K. of L.), Mrs. Robert Howe, Dr.
+Fannie Dickenson, Mrs. Corinne Brown, Mrs. T.J. Morgan, Mrs. Frank
+J. Pearson, Mrs. Fannie Kavanagh and Miss Lizzie Ford were active
+workers. Miss Mary E. Kenney (Mrs. O'Sullivan), afterwards the first
+woman organizer under the American Federation of Labor, was
+another. She was successful in reaching the girls in her own trade
+(book-binding), besides those in the garment trades and in the shoe
+factories, also in bringing the need for collective bargaining
+strongly before social and settlement workers.
+
+Chicago has long been the largest and the most important among the
+centers of the meat-packing industry. None of the food trades have
+received more investigation and publicity, and the need for yet
+more publicity, and for stricter and yet stricter supervision is
+perpetually being emphasized. But most of the efforts that have
+been made to awake and keep alive a sense of public rights and
+responsibility in the conducting of huge institutions like the Chicago
+packing-plants, have centered on the danger to the health of the
+consumer through eating diseased or decomposed meat. The public cares
+little, and has not troubled to learn much about the conditions of the
+workers, without whom there could be no stockyards and no meat-packing
+industry. Not that some of the investigators have not tried to bring
+this point forward. It was the chief aim of Upton Sinclair, when he
+wrote "The Jungle," and yet even he discovered to his dismay that, as
+he bitterly phrased it, he had hoped to strike at the heart of the
+American people, and he had only hit them in their stomach.
+
+But that is a story by itself. Let us go back to the brave struggle
+begun by the women in the packing-plants in the year 1902 to improve
+their conditions by organizing.
+
+For a great many years prior to this, women had been employed in
+certain branches of the work, such as painting cans and pasting on
+labels. But towards the close of the nineties the packers began to put
+women into departments that had always been staffed by men. So it was
+when girls began to wield the knife that the men workers first began
+to fear the competition of the "petticoat butchers." The idea of
+organizing the girls, were they painters or butchers, as a way of
+meeting this new menace, did not occur to them.
+
+At this time, in the fall of 1902, the oldest and best workers were
+Irish girls, with all the wit and quickness of their race. Especially
+was Maggie Condon a favorite and a leader. She was an extremely quick
+worker. With the temperament of an idealist, she took a pride in her
+work, liked to do it well, and was especially successful in turning
+out a great amount of work. Quicker and quicker she became till, on
+the basis of the good wages she was making, she built up dreams of
+comfort for herself and her family. One of her choicest ambitions was
+to be able to afford a room of her own. But just so surely as she
+reached the point where such a luxury would be possible, just so
+surely would come the cut in wages, and she had to begin this driving
+of herself all over again. Three times this happened. When her well
+and hardly earned twenty-two dollars was cut the third time Maggie
+realized that this was no way to mend matters. The harder she worked,
+the worse she was paid! And not only was she paid worse, she who as
+one of the best workers could stand a reduction better than most, but
+the cut went all down the line, and affected the poorest paid and the
+slowest workers as well.
+
+Hannah O'Day was not one of the quick ones. Her strength had been too
+early sapped. There was no child-labor law in Illinois when she should
+have been at school, and at eleven she was already a wage-earner.
+Along with the rest she also had suffered from the repeated cuts that
+the pace-making of the ones at the top had brought about. It was
+evident that something must be done. Maggie Condon, Hannah O'Day and
+some of the others, began, first to think, and then to talk over the
+matter with one another. They knew about the Haymarket trouble. There
+were rumors of a strike the men had once had. They had heard of the
+Knights of Labor, and wrote to someone, but nothing came of it. So
+one day, when there was more than usual cause for irritation
+and discouragement, what did Hannah O'Day do but tie a red silk
+handkerchief to the end of a stick. With this for their banner and the
+two leaders at their head, a whole troop of girls marched out into
+Packingtown.
+
+The strike ended as most such strikes of the unorganized, unprepared
+for, and unfinanced sort, must end, in failure, in the return to work
+on no better terms of the rank and file, and in the black-listing of
+the leaders. But the idea of organization had taken root, and this
+group of Irish girls still clung together. "We can't have a union,"
+said one, "but we must have something. Let us have a club, and we'll
+call it the Maud Gonne Club." This is touching remembrance of the
+Irish woman patriot.
+
+Time passed on, and one evening during the winter of 1903 Miss Mary
+McDowell, of the University of Chicago Settlement, was talking at a
+Union Label League meeting, and she brought out some facts from what
+she knew of the condition of the women workers in the packing-houses,
+showing what a menace to the whole of the working world was the
+underpaid woman. This got into the papers, and Maggie Condon and her
+sister read it, and felt that here was a woman who understood. And she
+was in their own district, too.
+
+So it came about that the Maud Gonne Club became slowly transformed
+into a real union. This took quite a while. The girls interested used
+to come over once a week to the Settlement, where Michael Donnelly
+was their tutor and helper. Miss McDowell carefully absented herself,
+feeling that she wanted the girls to manage their own affairs, until
+it transpired that they wished her to be there, and thought it strange
+that she should be so punctilious. After that she attended almost
+every meeting. When they felt ready, they obtained the charter with
+eight charter members and were known as Local 183 of the Amalgamated
+Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America. Little by little
+the local grew in numbers. One July night the meeting was particularly
+well attended and particularly lively, none the less so that
+the discussion was carried on to the accompaniment of a violent
+thunderstorm, the remarks of the excitable speakers being punctuated
+by flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder. The matter under
+consideration was to parade or not to parade on the coming Labor Day.
+The anxious question to decide was whether they could by their
+numbers make an impression great enough to balance the dangers of the
+individual and risky publicity.
+
+The vote was cast in favor of parading. When the day came the affair
+was an entire success. Two wagons gaily trimmed were filled with girls
+in white dresses, carrying banners and singing labor songs. The happy
+results were seen at subsequent meetings of the union, for after that
+other girls from other than the Irish group came in fast, peasant
+girls, wearing their shawls, and colored girls, till, when the union
+was six months old, it had five hundred members. The initiation of
+the first colored girl was a touching occasion. Hannah O'Day had been
+present at one of the men's meetings, on an evening when it had been
+a colored man who at the ceremony of initiation had presented white
+candidates for membership, and the sense of universal brotherhood had
+then come over her as a sort of revelation. And there were others who
+felt with her. One night, Hannah being doorkeeper at her own union
+meeting, a colored girl applied to be admitted. Hannah called out:
+"A colored sister is at the door; what'll I do with her." It was the
+young president herself, Mollie Daley, though she had been brought up
+to think of colored folks as "trash," who, with a disregard of strict
+parliamentary law, but with a beautiful cordiality, broke in with: "I
+say, admit her at once, and let yez give her a hearty welcome." The
+girl who was very dark, but extremely handsome, had been not a little
+nervous over the reception that might await her. She was quite
+overcome when she found herself greeted with hearty applause.
+
+On another occasion, on the question being asked from the ritual: "Any
+grievances?" a sensitive colored girl arose, and said a Polish girl
+had called her names. The Polish girl defended herself by saying:
+"Well, she called me Polak, and I won't stand for that." The president
+summoned them both to the front. "Ain't you ashamed of yourselves?"
+She proceeded: "Now shake and make up, and don't bring your grievances
+here, unless they're from the whole shop."
+
+The girls had good training in union principles from the first, so
+that if their phrases were sometimes a trifle crude, they were none
+the less the expression of genuine good sense. For instance, some
+complaint would be brought forward, and in the early days the question
+would come: "Is this your own kick, or is it all of our kick?" A sound
+distinction to make, quite as sound as when later on, the officers
+having learned the formal phrases, they would put it in another
+way, and say: "Is this a private grievance or is it a collective
+grievance?"
+
+Instead of the old hysterical getting mad, and laying down their tools
+and walking out, when things did not go right, grievances were now
+taken to the union, and discussed, and if supported by the body, taken
+to the foreman and managers by the business agent, Maud Sutter.
+
+From the beginning the women delegates from Local 183 to the Packing
+Trades Council of Chicago were on an equality with the men, and girl
+delegates attended the convention of the National Association at
+Cincinnati and also at St. Louis.
+
+It is sad to record that through no fault of their own, the girls'
+organization met an early downfall. It passed out of existence after
+the stockyards' strike of 1904, being inevitably involved in the
+defeat of the men, and going down with them to disaster.
+
+The Irish leadership that produced such splendid results, is now, in
+any case, not there to be called upon, as the girls now employed in
+the packing-plants of Chicago are practically all immigrant girls from
+eastern Europe. When the present system of unorganized labor in the
+trade is abolished, as some day it must be, it will only be through a
+fresh beginning among an altogether different group, that it will be
+possible to reach the women.
+
+But the spirit that permeated Local 183 has never wholly died in the
+hearts of those who belonged to it, and it springs up now and then
+in quarters little expected, calling to remembrance Maggie Condon's
+reason for pushing the union of which she was a charter member and the
+first vice-president. "Girls, we ought to organize for them that comes
+after us."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE WOMEN'S TRADE UNION LEAGUE
+
+
+One of the least encouraging features of trade unionism among women
+in the United States has been the small need of success which has
+attended efforts after organization in the past, especially the lack
+of permanence in such organizations as have been formed. In the brief
+historical review it has been shown how fitful were women's first
+attempts in this direction, how limited the success, and how temporary
+the organizations themselves.
+
+It is true there is an essential difference between the loose and
+momentary coöperation of unorganized workers aiming at the remedying
+of special grievances, and disbanding their association whenever that
+particular struggle is over, and a permanent organization representing
+the workers' side all the time and holding them in a bond of mutual
+helpfulness. Most of the strikes of women during the first half of the
+last century, like many today, sprang from impatience with intolerable
+burdens, and the "temporary union," often led by some men's
+organization, merely dissolved away with the ending of the strike,
+whether successful or not. But altogether apart from such sporadic
+risings as these, there were, as we have seen, from a very early
+period, genuine trade unions composed of working-women.
+
+The Women's Trade Union League is the first organization which has
+attempted to deal with the whole of the problems of the woman in
+industry on a national scale. As we have seen, there have been,
+besides the many women's unions, and the men's unions to which women
+have been and are admitted, the large body, the Women's National Union
+Label League, and a number of women's auxiliaries in connection with
+such unions as the Switchmen, the Machinists, and the Typographical
+Union. The Women's Union Label League has, however, devoted most
+of its energies to encouraging the purchase and use of union-made
+products. The women's auxiliaries have been formed from the wives of
+men from that particular union. They have often maintained a fund for
+sick and out-of-work members and their families, and have besides
+furnished a social environment in which all could become better
+acquainted, and they would besides take an active part in the
+entertainment of a national convention, whenever it came to their
+city. But except indirectly, none of these associations have aided in
+the organization of women wage-earners, still less have taken it for
+their allotted task. Perhaps earlier, the formation of such a body
+as the National Women's Trade would have been impracticable. But it
+certainly responds to the urgent needs of today, and is, after all,
+but a natural development of the trade-union movement, with especial
+reference to the crying needs of women and children in the highly
+specialized industries.
+
+The individual worker, restless under the miseries of her lot, and
+awakening also, it may be, to a sense of the meaning of our industrial
+system, learns to see the need of the union of her trade. When she
+does so, she has taken a distinct step forward. If an extensive trade,
+the local is affiliated with the international, but neither local nor
+international, as we shall see, as yet grant to the woman worker the
+same attention as they give to the man, because to men trade unionists
+the men's problems are the chief and most absorbing. So what more
+natural than that women belonging to various unions should come
+together to discuss the problems that are common to them all as
+women workers, whatever their trade, and aid one another in their
+difficulties, coöperate in their various activities, and thus, also,
+be able to present to their brothers the collective expression of
+their needs? Upon this simple basis is the local Women's Trade Union
+League formed. Linking together the organized women of the same
+city, it brings them, through the National League, into touch and
+communication with the trade-union women in other cities.
+
+While it is true that organization can neither be imposed nor forced
+upon any group, it is no less true that when girls are ready such a
+compact body, founded upon so broad a basis, can bring about results
+both in the line of education and organization which no other branch
+of the labor movement is equipped or fitted to do. And many labor
+leaders, who have sadly enough acknowledged that the labor movement
+that did not embrace women was like a giant carrying one arm in a
+sling, have already gratefully admitted that such a league of women's
+unions can produce results under circumstances where men, unaided,
+would have been helpless.
+
+For the origin of the Women's Trade Union League, we must go back to
+1874, when Mrs. Emma Patterson, the wife of an English trade unionist
+and herself deeply impressed with the deplorable condition of women
+wage-earners everywhere, was on a visit to the United States. The
+importance of combination as a remedy was freshly brought home to her
+through what she saw of the women's organizations then most prominent
+and flourishing in New York, the Parasol and Umbrella Makers' Union,
+the Women's Typographical Union, and the Women's Protective Union.
+She returned to England with a plan for helping women workers to help
+themselves. Shortly afterwards she and others whom she interested
+formed the Women's Protective and Provident League, the title later
+on being changed to the bolder and more radical British Women's Trade
+Union League, a federation of women's unions, with an individual
+membership as well. It is known to the public on this side of the
+water through the visits of Mary Macarthur, its very able secretary.
+
+This body had been in existence nearly thirty years before the
+corresponding organization was formed in this country. About 1902 Mr.
+William English Walling had his attention drawn to what the British
+Women's Trade Union League was accomplishing among some of the poorest
+working-women in England.
+
+He mentioned what he had learned to others. Among the earliest to
+welcome the idea of forming such a league was Mrs. Mary Kenney
+O'Sullivan, a bindery-worker of Boston, long in touch with the labor
+movement. In the fall of 1903 the American Federation of Labor was
+holding its annual convention in that city. The presence of so many
+labor leaders seemed to make the moment a favorable one. A meeting of
+those interested was called in Faneuil Hall on November 14. Mr. John
+O'Brien, president of the Retail Clerks' International Protective
+Union, presided. Among the trades represented were the Ladies' Garment
+Workers, the United Garment Workers, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters
+and Butcher Workmen, Clerks, Shoe Workers and Textile Workers. The
+National Women's Trade Union League was organized and the following
+officers elected: president, Mrs. Mary Morton Kehew, Boston;
+vice-president, Miss Jane Addams, Chicago; secretary, Mrs. Mary Kenney
+O'Sullivan, Boston; treasurer, Miss Mary Donovan, Boot and Shoe
+Workers; board members, Miss Mary McDowell, Chicago; Miss Lillian D.
+Wald, New York; Miss Ellen Lindstrom, United Garment Workers; Miss
+Mary Trites, Textile Workers; Miss Leonora O'Reilly, Ladies' Garment
+Workers.
+
+The one main purpose of the new league, as of its British prototype,
+was from the first the organization of women into trade unions, to
+be affiliated with the regular labor movement, in this case with
+the American Federation of Labor, and the strengthening of all such
+organizations as already existed. While, as in England, the backbone
+of the League was to consist of a federation of women's unions,
+provision was made for taking into individual membership not only
+trade unionists, but those women, and men too, who, although not
+wage-earners themselves, believed that the workers should be organized
+and were unwilling that those who toil should suffer from unjust
+conditions.
+
+A branch of the National Women's Trade Union League was formed in
+Chicago in January, 1904; another in New York in March of the same
+year, and a third in Boston in June of the same year. With these three
+industrial centers in line, the new campaign was fairly begun.
+
+The first three years were occupied mainly with preparatory work,
+becoming known to the unions and the workers, and developing
+activities both through the office and in the field.
+
+Early in 1907 Mrs. Raymond Robins, of Chicago, became National
+President, a position which she has held ever since. To the tremendous
+task of aiding the young organization till it was at least out of its
+swaddling clothes she brought boundless energy and a single-minded
+devotion which admitted of attention to no rival cause. Being a woman
+of independent means, she was able to give her time entirely to the
+work of the League. She would be on the road for weeks at a time,
+speaking, interviewing working-women, manufacturers or legislators,
+all the while holding the threads, organization here, legislation
+there.
+
+But the first opportunity for the Women's Trade Union League to do
+work on a large scale, work truly national in its results, came
+with the huge strikes in the sewing trades of 1909-1911. To these a
+separate chapter is devoted. It is sufficient here to say that the
+backing given by the National League and its branches in New York, in
+Philadelphia and in Chicago was in great part responsible for the very
+considerable measure of success which has been the outcome of these
+fierce industrial struggles. On the whole, the strikers gained much
+better terms than they could possibly have done unassisted. Almost
+entirely foreigners, they had no adequate means of reaching with their
+story the English-speaking and reading public of their city. The
+Leagues made it their particular business to see that the strikers'
+side of the dispute was brought out in the press and in meetings and
+gatherings of different groups. It is related of one manufacturer,
+whose house was strike-bound, that he was heard one day expressing
+to a friend in their club his bewilderment over the never-ending
+publicity given to this strike in the daily newspapers, adding that it
+was a pity; these affairs were always better settled quietly.
+
+To win even from failure success, to win for success permanence, was
+the next aim of the League, and nowhere has this constructive policy
+of theirs brought about more significant results than in the aid which
+they were able to give to the workers in the sewing trades. In New
+York it was the League which made possible the large organizations
+which exist today among the cloak-makers, the waist-makers and other
+white-goods-workers. The League support during the great strikes, and
+its continued quiet work after the strikes were over, first showed the
+public that there was power and meaning in this new development, this
+new spirit among the most oppressed women workers. The attitude of the
+League also convinced labor men that this was no dilettante welfare
+society, but absolutely fair and square with the labor movement. The
+Chicago League, after helping in the same way in the garment-workers'
+strike which is now in its fifth year, contributed towards bringing
+about the agreement between the firm of Hart, Schaffner and Marx,
+Chicago, and their employés, an agreement controlling the wages and
+the working conditions of between 7,000 and 10,000 men and women, the
+number varying with the season and the state of trade. The plan of
+preference to unionists, which gives to this form of contract the name
+of the "Preferential Shop," had its origin in Australia, where it is
+embodied in arbitration acts, but in no single trade there had it been
+applied on such a huge scale. The Protocol of Peace, which is a trade
+agreement similar to that of the Hart, Schaffner and Marx employés,
+and which came into force first in the cloak and suit industry in New
+York after the strike of 1913, affects, it is stated, the enormous
+number of 300,000 workers.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: In May, 1915, the Protocol was set aside by the cloak and
+suit manufacturers. A strike impended. Mayor Mitchel called a Council
+of Conciliation, Dr. Felix Adler as chairman. Their report was
+accepted by the union and finally by the employers, and industrial
+peace was restored.]
+
+Just as sound and important work is being done all the time with many
+smaller groups. For instance, the straw-and panama-hat-makers of New
+York tried to organize and were met by a number of the manufacturers
+with a black list. A general strike was declared on February 14, 1913.
+The League members were able to give very valuable aid to the strikers
+by assisting in picketing and by attending the courts when the pickets
+were arrested. This strike had to be called off, and was apparently
+lost, but the union remains and is far stronger than before the strike
+took place.
+
+But better results even than this were gained in the strike in the
+potteries in Trenton, New Jersey. The Central Labor Union of Trenton
+and all the trade-union men in the city gave splendid coöperation to
+the strikers. They handed over the girls to the care of Miss
+Melinda Scott, the League organizer, and under her directions the
+inexperienced unionists did fine work and helped to bring about a
+satisfactory settlement. This success gave heart of grace to the
+girls in certain woolen and silk mills of Trenton. Wages there were
+appalling. They varied from two dollars and fifty cents to eleven
+dollars. Many children, nominally fourteen, but looking very young,
+were employed. The owner of the factory at length consented to meet
+the workers with the League organizer in conference at the New York
+headquarters, and after several weeks the strike was settled on the
+workers' terms.
+
+The New York organizer also helped the Boston League in the strike of
+the paper factories of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The cause of the strike
+here was an arrangement under which eight girls could be got to do the
+work of twelve. Here the workers actually stood up for a share of the
+profits under the new arrangement, or else that the discharged girls
+should be reinstated. The manufacturers chose the latter alternative.
+
+The Candy Workers' Union in Boston was also formed through the Women's
+Trade Union League. The girls had walked all over Boston for two days
+asking policemen, carmen and anyone else who would listen to them how
+to form a union. They had no umbrellas, and their shoes were dripping
+with the wet. They were Jewish, Italian and American girls. As a
+result of the organization formed they obtained a very material raise
+in wages, the better allotment of work in the slack season and the
+taking up of all disputed questions between the manufacturers and the
+union.
+
+From experience gained during these gigantic industrial wars, the
+National League has laid down definite conditions under which its
+locals may coöperate with unions in time of strike. These take part
+only in strikes in which women are involved, and then only after
+having been formally invited to assist, and on the understanding that
+two League representatives may attend all executive meetings of the
+strikers' union. It has been found that the lines in which the aid of
+the Women's Trade Union League is of most value to any exploited group
+are these: (1) organization and direction of public opinion; (2)
+patrolling the streets; (3) fair play in the courts; (4) help in the
+raising of funds through unions and allies; (5) where workers are
+unorganized, help in the formation of trade-union organization.
+
+The League workers thus make it their business to open up channels of
+publicity, at least giving the papers something to talk about, and
+reaching with the strikers' side of the story, churches, clubs, and
+other associations of well-meaning citizens, who are not at all in
+touch with organized labor. Allies, in particular, can do much to
+preserve traditions of fair play, in regard to the use of the streets
+for peaceful picketing. By providing bonds for girls arrested,
+lawfully or unlawfully, and by attending in person such cases when
+these come up in court, they are standing for the principles of
+democracy.
+
+In addition, the local leagues are willing to take charge of the
+arrangements under which girls are sent to other unions, asking for
+moral and financial aid. Men trade unionists long ago discovered how
+irresistible a pleader the young girl can be, but they are not always
+equally impressed with the need of safeguarding the girls, often
+little more than children, chosen for these trying expeditions, and
+sent off alone, or at best, two together, to distant industrial
+centers. The working-girl needs no chaperon, but equally with her
+wealthier sister, she does require and ought to receive motherly care
+and oversight. She is perhaps leaving home for the first time, and
+there should be someone to see to it that when she arrives in a
+strange city a comfortable and convenient lodging-place has been found
+for her. She should be shown how to conserve her strength in finding
+her way from one locality to another in following up the evening
+meetings of unions, and she should have some woman to turn to if she
+should become sick. Points, all of these, the busy secretaries of
+central labor bodies may very easily overlook, accustomed as they are
+to deal with mature men, in the habit of traveling about the country,
+who may surely be left to take care of themselves.
+
+The activities of the local leagues vary in detail in the different
+cities. In all there are monthly business meetings, the business
+run by the girls, with perhaps a speaker to follow, and sometimes
+a program of entertainment. Lectures on week evenings, classes and
+amusements are provided as far as workers and funds permit. The first
+important work among newly arrived women immigrants in the Middle West
+was done by the Chicago League, and this laid the groundwork for the
+present Immigrants' Protective League. Headquarters are a center for
+organizing, open all the time to receive word of struggling unions,
+helping out in difficulties, counseling the impulsive, and encouraging
+the timid. When a group of workers see for themselves the need of
+organization, a body of experienced women standing ready to mother a
+new little union, the hospitable room standing open, literally night
+and day, can afford the most powerful aid in extending organization
+among timid girls. If courage and daring are needed in this work,
+courage to stand by the weak, daring to go out and picket in freezing
+weather with unfriendly policemen around, patience is if possible more
+essential in the organizer's make-up. It often takes months of
+gentle persistence before the girls, be they human-hair-workers or
+cracker-packers, or domestic workers or stenographers, see how greatly
+it is to their own interest to join or to form a labor organization.
+Many locals formed with so much thought and after so much pains, drop
+to pieces after a few months or a year or two. That is a universal
+experience in the labor movement everywhere. But it does not therefore
+follow that nothing has been gained. Even a group so loosely held
+together that it melts away after the first impulse of indignation
+has died out is often successful in procuring shorter hours or better
+wages or improved conditions for the trade or shops of their city.
+Besides each individual girl has had a little bit of education in what
+coöperation means, and what collective bargaining can do. The League
+itself is a reminder, too, that all working-girls have many interests
+in common, whatever their trade.
+
+But besides aiding in the forming of new locals, the Women's Trade
+Union League can be a force strengthening the unions already
+established. Each of the leagues has an organization committee, whose
+meetings are attended by delegates from the different women's trades.
+These begin mostly as experience meetings, but end generally in either
+massing the effort of all on one particular union's struggle, or
+in planning legislative action by which all women workers can be
+benefited.
+
+In New York and Boston, Chicago and St. Louis and Kansas City the
+local leagues have in every case had a marked effect upon industrial
+legislation for women. They have been prime movers in the campaigns
+for better fire protection in the factories in both New York and
+Chicago, and for the limitation of hours of working-women in the
+states of New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and Missouri, and for
+minimum-wage legislation in Massachusetts and Illinois.
+
+In every one of these states the Women's Trade Union League has first
+of all provided an opportunity for the organized women of different
+trades to come together and decide upon a common policy; next, to
+coöperate with other bodies, such as the State Federation of Labor,
+and the city centrals, the Consumers' League, the American Association
+for Labor Legislation, and the women's clubs, in support of such
+humane legislation. Much of the actual lobbying necessary has been
+done by the girls themselves, and they have exercised a power out
+of all proportion to their numbers or the tiny treasury at their
+disposal. No arguments of sociologists were half so convincing to
+legislators or so enlightening to the public as those of the girls who
+had themselves been through the mill. "Every hour I carry my trays I
+walk a mile," said Elizabeth Maloney of the Waitresses' Union. "Don't
+you think that eight hours a day is enough for any girl to walk?"
+
+When we turn to the National League itself, if there is less to record
+of actual achievement, there are possibilities untold. Never before
+have all the work of this country had an organization, open to all,
+with which to express themselves on a national scale.
+
+Early in 1905 the Executive Board of the League appointed a committee
+with Mary McDowell chairman to secure the coöperation of all
+organizations interested in the welfare of woman in demanding a
+federal investigation and report upon the conditions of working-women
+and girls in all the principal industrial centers. Miss McDowell
+called to her aid all the forces of organized labor, the General
+Federation of Women's Clubs and other women's associations, the social
+settlements and church workers. So strengthened and supported, the
+committee then went to Washington, and consulted with President
+Roosevelt and the then Commissioner of Labor, Dr. Charles P. Neill.
+
+Miss McDowell, more than any other one person, was responsible for the
+passing in 1907 of the measure which authorized and the appropriation
+which made possible the investigation which during the next four
+years the Department of Commerce and Labor made. The result of that
+investigation is contained in the nineteen volumes of the report.
+
+The first gatherings of any size at which League members met
+and conferred together were the interstate conferences, held
+simultaneously in Boston, New York and Chicago, the first in the
+summer of 1907 and the second in 1908. The former was the first
+interstate conference of women unionists ever held in the United
+States, and it was therefore a most notable event. Especially was it
+interesting because of the number of women delegates who came from
+other states, and from quite distant points, Boston drawing them from
+the New England states, New York from its own extensive industrial
+territory, and Chicago from the Middle West. Inspired by what she
+heard in Chicago, Hannah Hennessy went back to found the St. Louis
+Women's Trade Union League. It was at the first interstate conference,
+also, that a committee was appointed to wait upon the American
+Federation of Labor Executive Board, during the Norfolk Convention
+in November, 1907. The Illinois State Committee of the Women's Trade
+Union League, whose fine legislative work helped to secure the passage
+of the present ten-hour law for women, also grew out of the discussion
+which came up in the Chicago conference.
+
+The lines on which the League is developing can be observed through
+the work done and reported upon at the biennial conventions of which
+five have been held. The first, at Norfolk, Virginia, in 1907, was
+an informal gathering of but seven delegates, women who had been
+attending the convention of the American Federation of Labor of that
+year. Subsequent conventions have taken place every two years since
+then. These have been held in Chicago, Boston and St. Louis and New
+York respectively. On each occasion about seventy delegates have
+reported. They are certainly a picked lot of girls. They are trained,
+trained not in fancy debate, but in practical discussion. They have
+met with employers in trade conferences where an error in statement or
+a hasty word might mean a cut in wages or an increase in hours for
+two years to come. They have met with their fellow-workers in union
+meetings, where, if a girl aspires to lead her sisters or brothers,
+she has to show both readiness of wit and good-humored patience in
+differing from the others.
+
+These women are growing too, as all must grow who live on life's
+firing line, and shrink not from meeting the very hardest problems of
+today. The working-woman, in her daily struggle comes up against every
+one of them, and not one can be evaded.
+
+Industrial legislation, judicial decisions, the right to organize, the
+power to vote, are to the awakened working-woman not just academic
+questions, but something that affects her wages, her hours. They may
+mean enough to eat, time to rest, and beyond these home happiness and
+social freedom.
+
+In two directions especially can the growing importance of the women's
+trade-union movement be observed: on the one hand in the incessant
+appeals, coming from all over the continent, to the National League,
+for advice and assistance in organizing women into the local unions
+of their trade; on the other in the degree in which it is gradually
+coming to be recognized by public men, by politicians, by business
+men, as well as by students and thinkers, that it is to organized
+women they must turn, whenever they want an authoritative expression
+as to the working-women's needs and desires.
+
+Two sets of resolutions discussed and passed by the fourth biennial
+convention of the National Women's Trade Union League, held in 1913,
+were afterwards published broadcast over the country, and have been
+of marked educational value. The one pleaded for the speedy
+enfranchisement of women for these reasons: because the most costly
+production and the most valuable asset of any nation is its output of
+men and women; because the industrial conditions under which more than
+six million girls and women are forced to work is an individual and
+social menace; and because working-women as an unenfranchised class
+are continually used to lower the standards of men. The League
+in particular protested against the ill-judged activities of the
+anti-suffrage women, "a group of women of leisure, who by accident of
+birth have led sheltered and protected lives, and who never through
+experience have had to face the misery that low wages and long hours
+produce."
+
+This stirring, appeal made a profound impression on suffragists and
+anti-suffragists alike, in the labor world, and amid the general
+public. It was of course hotly resented by that small group of women
+of privilege, who think they know better than working-women what are
+the needs of working-women. Its deep significance lay in that it was
+a voice from the voiceless millions. It gave many pause to think and
+catch, as they had never caught before, the vital meaning underlying
+the demand for the vote.
+
+The other series of resolutions expressed no less forcefully the
+women's consciousness of the intimate connection between education and
+labor, and pressed home the fact that organized laboring-women are
+watchful of the work being done in our public schools, and are anxious
+that it should be brought and kept up to the level of present-day
+needs. As is mentioned elsewhere, these resolutions laid special
+stress upon the necessity of making all courses of industrial training
+coeducational, of including in them the history of the evolution of
+industry, and the philosophy of collective bargaining, and of insuring
+that all boys and girls, before they leave school to go to work,
+have a knowledge of the state and federal laws that exist for their
+protection. These resolutions were sent to 1,075 boards of education
+in the United States. Replies have been received from twenty-six
+boards in fifteen states. Of these fourteen already have vocational
+training in their schools, two are planning such training, and six
+referred the resolutions to committees. Of those having training in
+the schools, thirteen have courses open to both boys and girls, and
+one has courses for girls exclusively, but is planning to open a
+school for boys.
+
+The National League for four years published its own magazine, _Life
+and Labor_, with a double function; on the one hand as the organ of
+the League activities, and the expression of the members' views; on
+the other as a running diary of what was happening in the world of
+working-women, for the information of students and of all interested
+in sociological matters.
+
+In the chapter on The Woman Organizer allusion is made to the efforts
+of the League to train women as trade-union organizers. Miss Louisa
+Mittelstadt, of Kansas City, and Miss Myrtle Whitehead, of Baltimore,
+belonging to different branches of the Brewery Workers, came to
+Chicago to be trained in office and field work, and are now making
+good use of their experience. One was sent by the central labor body,
+and the other by the local league. Miss Fannie Colin was a third
+pupil, a member of the International Ladies' Garment Workers, from New
+York City.
+
+A word in conclusion regarding some of the typical leaders who are
+largely responsible for the policy of the League, and are to be
+credited in no small measure with its successes.
+
+After Mrs. Raymond Robins, the national president, already spoken of,
+and standing beside her as a national figure comes Agnes Nestor, of
+Irish descent, and a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, upon whose
+slight shoulders rest alike burdens and honors. Both she bears
+calmly. She is a glove-worker, and the only woman president of an
+international union. She is both a member of the National Executive
+Board of the Women's Trade Union League, and the president of the
+Chicago League, and she has served as one of the two women members of
+the Federal Commission on Industrial Education. She has done fine work
+as a leader in her own city of Chicago, but neither Chicago, nor even
+Illinois, can claim her when the nation calls.
+
+Melinda Scott is English by birth, belongs to New York, and has
+achieved remarkable results in her own union of the hat-trimmers. It
+is not during the exciting stage of a perhaps spectacular strike that
+Miss Scott shines; it is during the weary time when only patience and
+endurance can hold the girls together, and afterwards, when, whether
+the strike is lost or won, enthusiasm is apt to flag, and when
+disputes bid fair to break down the hardly won agreement.
+
+Initiated at sixteen into the Knights of Labor, Leonora O'Reilly took
+the vows that she has ever since kept in the spirit and in the letter.
+After many years spent as a garment-worker, she became a teacher in
+the Manhattan Trade School for Girls. She was one of the charter
+members of the New York Women's Trade Union League and has always been
+one of its most effective speakers. Leonora and her Celtic idealism
+have made many converts.
+
+Russia in America is embodied in Rose Schneidermann. She is the living
+representative of the gifts that the Slavic races, and especially
+the Russian Jew, have contributed to American life. Coming here in
+childhood, her life has been spent in New York.
+
+As an example of her achievements, for four years she worked
+untiringly among the white-goods-workers of New York, until they
+were strong enough to call a general strike, a strike which was so
+successful that they won a great part of their demands, and ever since
+have held their union together, seven thousand strong. Penetrated with
+the profound sadness of her people, and passionately alive to the
+workers' wrongs, Rose Schneidermann can stir immense audiences, and
+move them to tears as readily as to indignation. For her all the hope
+of the world's future is embodied in two movements, trade unionism on
+the one hand and socialism on the other.
+
+[Illustration: IN A BASEMENT SWEATSHOP
+
+Women picking rags collected from households. These rags have neither
+been cleaned nor disinfected and give off dust at every handling.]
+
+[Illustration: GIRL GAS BLOWERS. KANSAS CITY]
+
+The New York League owes much of its success to Mary Dreier, the
+sister of Mrs. Raymond Robins. She was its president for several
+years, and by her perseverance and devotion, did much to build up the
+organization in its early days.
+
+The rest of the League leaders must be summed up even more briefly.
+Mary Anderson, a member of the Boot and Shoe Workers' International
+Board, is of Scandinavian origin, and has all the steadfastness of the
+Swedes. Another very excellent organizer and much-loved trade unionist
+is Emma Steghagen, also of the Boot and Shoe Workers, and for seven
+years secretary of the Chicago League. She may be called the League
+veteran, for her association with trade unionism began with the
+Knights of Labor. Others are Mary McEnerney, Mary Haney, Hilda
+Svenson.
+
+Elizabeth Maloney, she of the snapping eyes and fervent heart,
+marshals her waitresses through strike after strike against grinding
+employers, or she eloquently pleads their cause, whether in the state
+legislature, or with her own International, at the convention of
+the Hotel and Restaurant Employés, if the men show themselves a bit
+forgetful, as they sometimes do, of the girls' interest.
+
+Nelle Quick, bindery woman, has been transferred from her trade-union
+activities in St. Louis to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the state
+of Missouri.
+
+From among clerical workers came into the League women who have
+left their mark, Helen Marot and Alice Bean, of New York, and Mabel
+Gillespie, of Boston, while Stella Franklin, the Australian, for long
+held the reins of the national office in Chicago.
+
+Gertrude Barnum, who graduated into trade unionism from settlement
+work, and Josephine Casey, of the Elevated Railroad Clerks, are two
+who were long actively associated with the Woman's Trade Union League,
+but of late years both have been organizers under the International of
+the Ladies' Garment Workers.
+
+Among the allies, the non-wage-earners, are Mary Dreier, president of
+the New York League, who was also the only woman member of the New
+York State Factory Investigating Commission; Mrs. Glendower Evans,
+notable for her service in advancing legislation for the minimum wage;
+Mary McDowell, of the University of Chicago Settlement, mother of
+the stockyards folk, beloved of the Poles and the Bohemians and the
+Ruthenians, who cross the ocean to settle on the desolate banks of
+Bubbly Creek. Mrs. D.W. Knefler, of St. Louis, did pioneering work for
+girlish trade unionism in that conservative city.
+
+Miss Gillespie, the Secretary of the Boston Women's Trade Union
+League, has been for years its main standby. Working in coöperation
+with the young president, Miss Julia O'Connor, of the Telephone
+Operators, her influence in the labor movement is an important factor
+in the Massachusetts situation. She is a member of the State Minimum
+Wage Commission.
+
+Young as is the League, some most heroic members have already passed
+into the unseen. Adelaide Samuels was a teacher in the public schools
+who, in the day of very small things for the New York League, acted as
+treasurer and chairman of the label committee. In her scant leisure
+she worked patiently towards the end that girls in the poorest trades
+should win for themselves the power of making the collective bargain.
+She died before she could have seen any tangible results from her
+efforts.
+
+Hannah Hennessy, who carried away from the first interstate conference
+in Chicago a vision in her heart of a Women's Trade Union League in
+every large city, a few years later laid down her life as the result
+of the hardships endured while picketing on behalf of the Marx and
+Haas strikers. Her youth had slipped away, and her strength had been
+sapped by weary years as an ill-paid garment-worker, so that exposure
+to cold and wet found her power of resistance gone, and a few weeks
+later she was no more.
+
+At the other end of the social scale, but thrilled with the same
+unselfish desire to better the conditions of the girl toilers, stood
+Carola Woerishofer, the rich college girl, who, once she was committed
+to the cause, never spared herself, picketing today, giving bonds
+tomorrow for the latest prisoner of the strike, spending a whole hot
+summer in a laundry, that she might know first-hand what the toiler
+pays that we may wear clean clothes. And so on, until the last
+sad scene of all, when on duty as inspector of the New York State
+Immigration Bureau, her car capsized, and Carola Woerishofer's brief,
+strenuous service to humanity was ended.
+
+From yet another group came Frances Squire Potter, formerly professor
+of English Literature in the University of Minnesota, who a few
+years ago became profoundly impressed with the unfair and oppressive
+conditions under which working-women live and toil. Thus was she led
+far away from academic fields, first into suffrage work, and later
+into the National Women's Trade Union League. Until her health gave
+way, about a year before her death, she acted as official lecturer for
+the League. Through her unique gifts as a speaker, and her beautiful
+personality, she interpreted the cause of the working-woman to many
+thousands of hearers. She was also departmental editor of _Life and
+Labor_, the League's magazine.
+
+Great have been the vicissitudes of the labor movement among men, but
+for many years now, the tendency towards national cohesion has been
+growing. This tendency has been greatly strengthened by the rapid
+development, and at the same time, the cheapening of the means of
+transport and communication between distant regions of the country.
+
+In the advantages arising from this general growth of the labor
+movement, both in its local activities and on its national side, women
+workers have indeed shared. This is true, both on account of the
+direct benefits accruing to them through joining mixed organizations,
+or being aided by men to form separate organizations of their own,
+and also through the vast assistance rendered by organized labor in
+obtaining protective legislation for the most utterly helpless and
+exploited toilers, for example, the child-labor laws which state after
+state has placed upon the statute book, sanitary regulations, and laws
+for the safeguarding of machinery dangerous to workers.
+
+Still, compared with the extensive movement among men, in which the
+women have been more or less a side issue, feminine trade unionism has
+been but fitful in its manifestations, and far indeed from keeping
+pace with the rate at which women have poured into the industrial
+field. The youth of a large number of the girl workers, and the fact
+that, as they grow up, so many of them pass out of the wage-earning
+occupations, marriage, and the expectation of marriage, the main
+obstacles that stand in the way today in getting women to organize and
+to hold their unions together, furnish also the underlying causes of
+the want of continuity of the trade-union movement among women since
+it first began in the United States in the early part of the last
+century. The too frequent change in the personnel of the members, and
+therefore in the composition of the union itself, means an absence
+of the permanence of spirit which is an essential condition for the
+handing on in unbroken succession of standards of loyalty and esprit
+de corps.
+
+It is continuity that has rendered possible all human progress,
+through the passing on from all of us to our successors, of each
+small acquirement, of each elevation of standard. Where, but for
+such continuity would be the college spirit, that descends upon and
+baptizes the newcomer as he enters the college gates? Where, but for
+continuity would be the constantly rising standards of morality and
+social responsibility? Where, but for continuity would be national
+life and all that makes patriotism worthy? Where, indeed, would be
+humanity itself?
+
+The average man is a wage-earner, and as such a fit subject for
+organization. If extensive groups of men remain unorganized, the
+responsibility lies partly on the trade unions, and is partly
+conditioned by our social and political environment. But either way, a
+man is a trade unionist or he is not. The line is clear cut, and trade
+unions therefore admit no one not actually a worker in their own
+trade.
+
+But it is not so with women. Outside the wage-earning groups there
+is the great bulk of married women, and a still considerable, though
+ever-lessening number of single women, who, although productive
+laborers, are yet, owing to the primitive and antiquated status of
+home industry, not acknowledged as such in the labor market. Not
+being remunerated in money, they are not considered as wage-earners.
+(Witness the census report, which, in omitting those performing unpaid
+domestic duties from the statistics of gainful occupations, does but
+reflect the tragic fact that woman's home work has no money value and
+confirms the popular impression that "mother doesn't work.")
+
+Yet another force to be reckoned with in estimating the difficulties
+which stand in the way of unionizing women is the widespread hostility
+to trade unionism, as expressed through newspaper and magazine
+articles, and through public speakers, both religious and secular. The
+average girl, even more than the average man, is sensitive to public
+opinion, as expressed through such accepted channels of authority. The
+standards of public opinion have been her safeguard in the past, and
+she still looks to them for guidance, not realizing how often such
+commonly accepted views are misinterpretations of the problems she
+herself has to face today. In the middle of the last century, a period
+that was most critical for men's unions in England, a number of
+leaders of public thought, men of influence and standing in the
+community, such as Charles Kingsley, Frederick Denison Maurice and
+others, came to the help of the men by maintaining their right to
+organize. In the United States, during the corresponding stage of
+extreme unpopularity, Horace Greeley, Charles A. Dana and Wendell
+Phillips extended similar support to workingmen. We today are apt
+to forget that women's unions with us are just now in the very same
+immature stage of development, as men's unions passed through half a
+century ago. The labor men of that day had their position immensely
+strengthened by just such help afforded from outside their immediate
+circle. It is therefore not strange that women's unions, at their
+present stage of growth, should be in need of just such help.
+
+To sum up, in addition to all the difficulties which have to be met
+by men in the labor movement, women are at a disadvantage through the
+comparative youth and inexperience of many female workers, through
+their want of trade training, through the assumption, almost universal
+among young girls, that they will one day marry and leave the trade,
+and through their unconscious response to the public opinion which
+disapproves of women joining trade unions.
+
+It is then the lack of permanence, of continuity in spirit and in
+concerted action, produced by all these causes, working together, and
+the difficulties in the way of remedying this lack of permanence,
+which this young organization, the National Women's Trade Union League
+of America, has fully and fairly recognized, and which, with a courage
+matched to its high purpose, it is facing and trying to conquer.
+
+The Women's Trade Union League, while essentially a part of the labor
+movement, has yet its own definite rôle to play, and at this point it
+is well to note the response made by organized labor in supporting the
+League's efforts. It works under the endorsement of both the American
+Federation of Labor and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada, and
+has received in its undertakings the practical support, besides,
+of many of the most influential of the international unions, in
+occupations as different as those of the shoe-workers, the carpenters
+and the miners. The rank and file of the local organizations, in city
+after city, have given the same hearty and unqualified approval to the
+League's pioneering work, in bringing the unorganized women and girls
+into the unions, and in carrying on a constant educative work among
+those already organized. As an instance of this openly expressed
+approval, take the cordial coöperation which the Chicago League has
+ever received from the Chicago Federation of Labor and its allied
+locals. But, owing to the complexity of women's lives, the varied
+and inconsistent demands that are made upon their energies, the
+organization of the League has to be somewhat different from that of
+any body which labor men would have formed for themselves.
+
+Locally the relationship varies. In St. Louis the League has never
+been represented in the central body by its own delegates, but by
+members representing primarily their own organizations, such as
+Bindery Women and Boot and Shoe Workers. In Boston, New York and
+Chicago each League is represented by its own delegates. In Kansas
+City, Missouri, again, not only are the delegates of the League seated
+in the central body, but every union of men in it pays a per capita
+tax into the funds of the Kansas City Women's Trade Union League.
+
+The National League receives a certain amount of financial support
+from the American Federation of Labor, and from a number of the
+international unions, several of the latter being affiliated with the
+League. State federations, city central bodies, and local unions in
+different parts of the country give similar coöperation and money
+support.
+
+As the labor movement is organized, it collects into suitable groups
+the different classes of wage-earners. But the average housekeeping,
+married woman, although both worker and producer, is not a
+wage-earner, although more and more, as the home industries become
+specialized is she becoming a wage-earner for at least part of her
+time. But, as our lives are arranged at present the largest proportion
+of married women and a considerable number of single women are
+ineligible for admission as members of any trade union. Are
+they therefore to be shut out from the labor movement, and from
+participation in its activities, no matter how closely their own
+interests are bound up with it, no matter how intensely they are in
+sympathy with its aims, no matter though as single girls they may have
+been members of a union?
+
+We have noted already how much stronger the labor movement would be
+if the women and girls engaged in the trades were brought in through
+organization. Still further would organized men be advantaged if their
+movement were reinforced by this great body of home-keeping women,
+vast in numbers, and with their untouched reserves of energy and
+experience.
+
+Again, it is only by making room for such women within the labor
+movement that women can be represented in sufficient numbers in the
+councils of labor. As long as there was no recognized way of admitting
+the home woman to even a tiny corner of the labor field, as long as
+entry was restricted solely to the wage-earning woman, there seemed
+no chance of women being ever in anything but a hopeless minority in
+either local or international union, and that minority, too, composed
+so largely of young and inexperienced girls. Is it any wonder, then,
+that the interests of the working-girls have suffered, and that, as a
+ready consequence, workingmen's interests have suffered, too.
+
+The Women's Trade Union League is also bringing into touch with the
+labor movement other women's organizations, and especially winning
+their increased coöperation in the campaigns for legislation. It is
+largely through the ally[A] membership that the Women's Trade Union
+League has been able to reach the public ear as well as to attract
+assistance and coöperation, especially from the suffragists and the
+women's clubs. The suffragists have always been more or less in
+sympathy with labor organizations, while outside labor circles, the
+largest body to second the efforts of organized labor in the direction
+of humanity has been the women's clubs, whether expressing themselves
+through the General Federation, or through local activity in their
+home towns. An immense group of women thus early became committed
+to an active opposition to the employment of children either in
+factories, or under the even more dangerous and demoralizing
+conditions which await mere babies in the street or in tenement homes.
+
+[Footnote A: An ally is a man or a woman of any class not a worker
+in any organized trade who believes in the organization of women and
+subscribes to the following League platform.
+
+1. Organization of all workers into trade unions.
+2. Equal pay for equal work.
+3. Eight-hour day.
+4. A living wage.
+5. Full citizenship for women.]
+
+There is a similar movement going on within the National Young Women's
+Christian Association. The reason for this stand being taken by
+women's organizations was characteristic. The impelling force that
+urged those women on was something far deeper than mere philanthropy.
+It was the acceptance by a whole group of women of the old
+responsibilities of motherhood, in the new form that these must take
+on if new conditions are to be met. It was as if the motherhood of the
+country had said in so many words: "Social conditions are changing,
+but we are still the mothers of the new generation. Society is
+threatened with this calamity, that they will pass beyond our care
+before the needs and claims of childhood have been satisfied. As
+individuals we are now powerless. Let us see what coöperation will do
+to right conditions that are fast slipping beyond our control."
+
+But how unconscious the vast number of women of this type were, either
+of the true nature of the force they were obeying or the point whither
+they were tending, was graphically illustrated at the Biennial
+Federation of Women's Clubs in St. Paul, in 1906, when a woman
+protested from the floor against the appointment of a committee to
+deal with industrial conditions. She added that she was all in favor
+of the Federation working against child labor, but they had no call to
+interfere in industrial questions.
+
+This is an illustration of how the rank and file of the clubwomen
+became committed to industrial reform as part of their program, and
+incidentally, although there were those among their leaders who well
+knew whither the movement was tending. The Women's Trade Union League
+represents one of the forces that is leading on the most conservative
+among them to stand forth for industrial justice consciously and
+deliberately, while the League's special aims are brought the nearer
+to accomplishment by the support of this other group of women.
+
+The Women's Trade Union League is, and as long as it fulfills its
+present function, will surely remain, a federation of trade unions
+with women members, but it finds a niche and provides an honorable and
+useful function for the wives of workingmen, for ex-trade-union women,
+and for others who endorse trade unionism and gladly give their
+support to a constructive work, aiming at strengthening the weakest
+wing of labor, the unorganized, down-driven, underpaid working-girls.
+
+If the League is to be an organization open to, and aiming at
+including eventually the great majority of working-women, it must be
+so flexible as to admit the woman who works in the home without formal
+wages, as well as the woman who works for an employer for wages. Both
+are in many respects upon the same footing in relation to society.
+Both are earners and producers. Both require the help of organization.
+Both should be an integral part of the labor movement. Both therefore
+may be consistently received as dues-paying members into Women's Trade
+Union Leagues, even although we are still too confused and puzzled
+to permit of housewives forming their own unions, and therefore such
+members have to be received as allies.
+
+In thus leaving open a door, however, through which all working-women
+may enter the League, the founders were mindful of the fact, and have
+it embodied in the constitution, that the main strength must lie in
+the increasing number of wage-earning girls and women who are socially
+developed up to the point of being themselves organized into trade
+unions. The League has so far grown, and can in the future grow
+normally, only so far as it is the highest organized expression of the
+ideals, the wishes and the needs of the wage-earning girl.
+
+As for the woman of wealth, I should be the last to question her right
+to opportunities for self-development, or to deny her the joy of
+assisting her sorely driven sisters to rise out of the industrial
+mire, and stand erect in self-reliant independence. But if the League
+is to grow until it becomes the universal expression of the woman's
+part in organized labor, then the privilege of assisting with
+financial help the ordinary activities of the League can be hers only
+during the infancy of the body. No organization can draw its nurture
+permanently from sources outside of itself, although many a movement
+has been nursed through its early stages of uncertainty and struggle
+by the aid of the sympathetic and understanding outsider.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE HUGE STRIKES
+
+
+In September, 1909, the name of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company,
+which has since become a word of such ill omen, was known to few
+outside the trade. The factory had not then been wrapped in the flames
+and smoke of the Asch fire, that was to cut short the lives of one
+hundred and forty-three workers, and to blight the existence and mar
+the happiness of many more.
+
+But by a not altogether inexplicable coincidence, it had been among
+the employés of this very firm that the smoldering flames of human
+discontent broke out, that were to grow into the "Strike of the Forty
+Thousand," a strike that proved to be but the first of a long series
+of revolts among the foreign garment-workers of the largest cities in
+the East and the Middle West.
+
+It is true that in such an extensive trade as that of making
+ready-made clothes, with its low wages and its speeding-up, its
+sweating and its uncertainty of employment, there is always a strike
+on somewhere. At that very time, there were in progress two strikes of
+quite respectable size: one in Boston, under the Ladies' Tailors'
+and Dressmakers' Union, and the other in St. Louis, where the
+long-drawn-out Marx and Haas strike involving the makers of men's
+ready-made clothing, was in its first stage.
+
+But outside of labor circles, these strikes were attracting no
+particular attention. The public were not even aware of what was
+happening, and would have been entirely indifferent if they had known.
+
+The turning out of ladies' ready-made waists is an immense business in
+New York. The trade, like other branches of garment-making, is largely
+in the hands of Jewish employers. The workers are principally recently
+arrived foreigners, Russian and other Slavic Jews, Italians and other
+immigrants from eastern Europe. They are in an overwhelming majority
+women, or, to be more accurate, girls.
+
+During all the earlier part of the year 1909 the Ladies' Waist Makers'
+Union No. 25 had been showing quite undue activity and unwelcome
+persistence in preaching unionism and its advantages among all and
+sundry of these foreign girls, and with quite unusual success. The
+managers of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company awoke one morning to a
+sense of what was happening. To quote from a writer in _The Outlook_:
+
+    One of the firm appeared before the girls and told them in kind
+    phrases that the company was friendly to the union, and that
+    they desired to encourage it, and that they might better give
+    assistance, they would like to know what girls belonged to it. The
+    girls, taken in by this speech, acknowledged their membership;
+    only, instead of a few that the company had thought to discover
+    and weed out, it developed that one hundred and fifty girls were
+    members. That evening they were told, in the same kind way, that,
+    because of a lull in the trade, due to an uncertainty as to
+    fashions in sleeves, there was for the time being no more work.
+    The girls took their discharge without suspicion; but the next
+    morning they saw in the newspaper advertisements of the company
+    asking for shirt-waist operators at once. Their eyes opened by
+    this, the girls picketed the shop, and told the girls who answered
+    the advertisement that the shop was on strike. The company
+    retaliated by hiring thugs to intimidate the girls, and for
+    several weeks the picketing girls were being constantly attacked
+    and beaten. These mêlées were followed by wholesale arrests of
+    strikers, from a dozen to twenty girls being arrested daily.
+
+Out of ninety-eight arrested all but nineteen were fined in sums of
+from one to ten dollars.
+
+With the aid of the police and a complaisant bench the Triangle
+Company had been successful in its attempt to empty the young union's
+treasury, and had likewise intimidated the workers till their courage
+and spirit were failing them. The manufacturers had accomplished their
+object.
+
+At this stage the New York Women's Trade Union League took up the
+battle of the girls. Every morning they stationed allies in front
+of the factory, to act as witnesses against illegal arrest, and to
+prevent interference with lawful picketing. The wrath of the police
+was then turned upon the League. First one and then another ally was
+arrested, this performance culminating in the unlawful arrest of Mary
+Dreier, president of the League. The police were sadly fooled upon
+this occasion, and their position was not in any degree strengthened,
+when they angrily, and just as unreasonably freed their prisoner, as
+soon as they discovered her identity. "Why didn't you tell me you was
+a rich lady? I'd never have arrested you in the world."
+
+This was good copy for the newspapers, and the whole story of wrongful
+discharge, unlawful arrest and insulting treatment of the strikers by
+the police began to filter into the public mind through the columns of
+the daily press. It was shown that what had happened in the case of
+the Triangle employés had been repeated, with variations, in the case
+of many other shops. Respectable and conservative citizens began to
+wonder if there might not be two sides to the story. They learned,
+for instance, of the unjust "bundle" system, under which the employer
+gives out a bundle of work to a girl, and when she returns the
+completed work, gives her a ticket which she can convert into cash on
+pay day. If the ticket, a tiny scrap of paper, should be lost, the
+girl had no claim on the firm for the work she had actually done.
+Again, some employers had insisted that they paid good wages, showing
+books revealing the astonishing fact that girls were receiving thirty
+dollars, thirty-five dollars, and even forty dollars per week. Small
+reason to strike here, said the credulous reader, as he or she perused
+the morning paper. But the protest of the libelled manufacturer lost
+much of its force, when it was explained that these large sums were
+not the wage of one individual girl, but were group earnings, paid to
+one girl, and receipted for by her, but having to be shared with two,
+three or four others, who had worked with and under the girl whose
+name appeared on the payroll.
+
+Monday, November 22, was a memorable day. A mass meeting had been
+called in Cooper Union to consider the situation. Mr. Gompers was one
+of the speakers. At the far end of the hall rose a little Jewish girl,
+and asked to be heard. Once on the platform, she began speaking in
+Yiddish, fast and earnestly. She concluded by saying she was tired of
+talking, and so would put the motion for a general strike of the whole
+trade. One who was present, describing the tense dramatic moment that
+followed, writes: "The audience unanimously endorsed it. 'Do you mean
+faith?' said the chairman. 'Will you take the old Jewish oath,' And
+up came 2,000 Jewish hands with the prayer, 'If I turn traitor to the
+cause I now pledge, may this hand wither and drop off at the wrist
+from this arm I now raise.'" The girl was Clara Lemlich, from the
+Leiserson factory. She did not complain for herself, for she was a
+fairly well-paid worker, making up to fifteen dollars in the rush
+season, but for her much poorer sisters.
+
+The response within that hall typified the response next day outside.
+I quote the words of an onlooker:
+
+    From every waist-making factory in New York and Brooklyn, the
+    girls poured forth, filling the narrow streets of the East Side,
+    crowding the headquarters at Clinton Hall, and overflowing into
+    twenty-four smaller halls in the vicinity. It was like a mighty
+    army, rising in the night, and demanding to be heard. But it was
+    an undisciplined army. Without previous knowledge of organization,
+    without means of expression, these young workers, mostly under
+    twenty, poured into the Union. For the first two weeks from 1,000
+    to 1,500 joined each day. The clerical work alone, involved in,
+    registering and placing recruits was almost overwhelming. Then
+    halls had to be rented and managed, and speakers to be procured.
+    And not for one nationality alone. Each hall, and there were
+    twenty-four, had to have speakers in Yiddish, Italian and English.
+    Every member of the League was pressed into service. Still small
+    halls were not enough. Lipzin's Theatre was offered to the
+    strikers, and mass meetings were held there five afternoons a
+    week.
+
+    Meanwhile committees were appointed from each shop to settle upon
+    a price list. As the quality of work differed in different shops,
+    a uniform wage was impossible and had to be settled by each shop
+    individually. When the hundreds of price lists were at last
+    complete, meetings were arranged for each shop committee and their
+    employers. Again the price list was discussed, and a compromise
+    usually effected. In almost every shop, however, an increase of
+    from 15 to 20 per cent. was granted.
+
+Apart from wages, the contract insured significant improvements.
+Besides calling for recognition of the union it demanded full pay for
+legal holidays, limited night work during the rush season to eight
+P.M., abolished all Sunday work, did away with the inside contracting
+system, under which one girl took out work for several, and provided
+for a fair allotment of work in slack seasons.
+
+After one hundred and ninety firms had signed up, and the majority
+of the strikers had returned to their shops, an attempt was made to
+settle with the still obdurate employers through arbitration, at the
+suggestion of the National Civic Federation.
+
+Meanwhile picketing was going on; the pickets were being punished, not
+only with heavy fines, thus depleting the union's treasury, but with
+terms in the workhouse. Some of these criminals for principle were
+little girls in short skirts, and no attempt was made to separate
+them when in confinement from disorderly characters. But what was the
+result? The leaders saw to it that a photograph was taken of such a
+group, with "Workhouse Prisoners" pinned across the breast of each,
+and worn as a badge of honor, a diploma of achievement, and the
+newspapers were but too glad to print the picture. When that spirit
+of irrepressible energy and revolt once possesses men or women,
+punishment is converted into reward, disgrace transmuted into honor.
+
+This it was, more even than the story of the wrongs endured, which had
+its effect on the public. In the rebound of feeling the illegality of
+the police behavior was admitted. The difficulties put in the way of
+the courageous little pickets led to the forming of parades, and
+the holding of meetings even in a class of society where no one had
+counted on receiving sympathy. The ladies of the rich and exclusive
+Colony Club learned from the girls themselves of the many
+disadvantages connected with waist-making. For instance that in the
+off season there was little regular work at all; and that all the time
+there were the fines and breakages. One girl told how she had been
+docked for a tucking foot, which, as she said, just wore out on her,
+"It wasn't really my fault," she concluded, "and I think the boss
+should look out for his own foots."
+
+Said another: "When a girl comes five minutes late at my shop, she is
+compelled to go home. She may live outside of the city, it does not
+matter, she must go home and lose a day.
+
+"We work eight days in the week. This may seem strange to you who know
+that there are only seven days in the week. But we work from seven
+in the morning till very late at night, when there's a rush, and
+sometimes we work a week and a half in one week."
+
+The socialist women did yeoman service, protecting the pickets,
+attending the trials, speaking at meetings and taking a full share of
+the hard work. The organized suffragists and clubwomen were drawn into
+the thick of the fight. They spread the girls' story far and wide,
+raised money, helped to find bonds, and were rewarded by increased
+inspiration for their own propaganda.
+
+The enormous extent of the strike, being, as it was, by far the
+largest uprising of women that has ever taken place upon this
+continent, while adding proportionately to the difficulties of
+conducting it to a successful issue, yet in the end deepened and
+intensified the lesson it conveyed.
+
+In the end about three hundred shops signed up, but of these at least
+a hundred were lost during the first year. This was due, the workers
+say, partly to the terrible dullness in the trade following the
+strike, and partly to the fact that they were not entirely closed
+shops.
+
+Since then, however, the organization has grown in strength. It was
+one of these coming under the protocol, covering the Ladies' Garment
+Workers, in so many branches, which was agreed to after the strikes
+in the needle trades of the winter of 1913. The name was changed from
+Ladies' Waist Makers, to Ladies' Waist and Dress Makers.
+
+But the waist-makers' strike was not confined to New York. With
+the opening of their busy season, the New York manufacturers found
+themselves hard pressed to fill their orders, and they were making
+efforts to have the work done in other cities, not strike-bound. One
+of the cities in which they placed their orders was Philadelphia.
+It was with small success, however, for the spirit of unrest was
+spreading, and before many weeks were over, most of the Philadelphia
+waist-makers had followed the example of their New York sisters.
+
+The girls were in many respects worse off in Philadelphia than in New
+York itself. Unions in the sewing trades were largely down and out
+there, and public opinion was opposed to organized labor.
+
+When the disturbance did come, it was not so much the result of any
+clever policy deliberately thought out, as it was the sudden uprising
+and revolt of exasperated girls against a system of persistent cutting
+down extending over about four years. A cent would be taken off here,
+and a half-cent there, or two operations would be run into one, and
+the combined piece of work under one, and that a new, name would bring
+a lower rate of pay. The practice of paying for oil needles, cotton
+and silk had been introduced, a practice most irritating with its
+paltry deduction from a girl's weekly wage. Next there was a system of
+fines for what was called "mussing" work. Every one of these so-called
+improvements in discipline was deftly utilized as an excuse for taking
+so much off the girls' pay.
+
+Patience became exhausted and the girls just walked out. Two-thirds of
+the waist-makers in the city walked out. Of these about eighty-five
+per cent., it is believed, were Jewish girls, the rest made up of
+Italians with a few Poles. The girls who did not go out were mostly
+Americans. One observer estimated at the time that about forty per
+cent. of those in the trade were under twenty years of age, running
+down to children of twelve.
+
+When the workers, with no sort of warning or explanation, or making
+any regular preliminary demands, just quit, it upset matters
+considerably. A little girl waist-maker may appear to be a very
+insignificant member of the community, but if you multiply her by
+four thousand, her absence makes an appreciable gap in the industrial
+machine, and its cogs fail to catch as accurately as heretofore. So
+that even the decent manufacturers felt pretty badly, not so much
+about the strike itself, as its, to them, inexplicable suddenness.
+Such men were suffering, of course, largely for the deeds of their
+more unscrupulous fellow-employers.
+
+One manufacturer, for instance, had gained quite a reputation for
+his donations to certain orphanages. These were to him a profitable
+investment, seeing that the institutions served to provide him with a
+supply of cheap labor. He had in his shop many orphans, who for two
+reasons could hardly leave his employ. They had no friends to whom to
+go, and they were also supposed to be under obligations of gratitude
+to their benefactor-employer. One of his girl employés, to whom he
+paid seven dollars a week, turned out for that wage twelve dollars'
+worth of work. This fact the employer admitted, justifying himself by
+saying that he was supporting her brother in an orphanage.
+
+It was a hard winter, and the first week of the strike wore away
+without a sign of hope. Public opinion was slow to rouse, and the
+newspapers were definitely adverse. The general view seemed to be that
+such a strike was an intolerable nuisance, if not something worse. At
+length the conservative _Ledger_ came out with a two-column editorial,
+outlining the situation, and from then on news of the various
+happenings, as they occurred, could be found in all the papers. But
+the girls were unorganized. There was no money, and they faced
+the first days of the new year in a mood of utter discouragement.
+Organizers from the International of the Ladies' Garment Workers had,
+however, come on from New York to take charge. The strikers were
+supported by the Central Labor Union of Philadelphia, under the
+leadership of the capable John J. Murphy, and representatives of the
+National Women's Trade Union League, in the persons of Mrs. Raymond
+Robins and Miss Agnes Nestor, were already on the scene.
+
+In the struggle itself, the New York experiences were repeated. The
+fight went on slowly and stubbornly. Arrests occurred daily and still
+more arrests. Money was the pressing need, not only for food and rent,
+but to pay fines and to arrange for the constantly needed bonds to
+bail out arrested pickets. At length a group of prominent Philadelphia
+women headed by Mrs. George Biddle, enlisted the help of some leading
+lawyers, and an advisory council was formed for the protection of
+legal rights, and even for directing a backfire on lawbreaking
+employers by filing suits for damages. With such interest and
+such help money, too, was obtained. The residents of the College
+Settlement, especially Miss Anna Davies, the head resident, and Miss
+Anne Young, the members of the Consumers' League, the suffragists and
+the clubwomen all gave their help.
+
+These women were moved to action by stories such as those of the
+little girl, whom her late employer had been begging to return to his
+deserted factory. "The boss, he say to me, 'You can't live if you not
+work.' And I say to the boss, 'I live not much on forty-nine cents a
+day.'"
+
+As in New York, the police here overreached themselves in their zeal,
+and arrested a well-known society girl, whom they caught walking
+arm-in-arm with a striking waist-maker. Result, the utter discomfiture
+of the Director of Public Safety, and triumph for the fortunate
+reporters who got the good story.
+
+An investigation into the price of food, made just then by one of the
+evening newspapers came in quite opportunely, forcing the public to
+wonder whether, after all, the girls were asking for any really higher
+wage, or whether they were not merely struggling to hold on to such
+a wage as would keep pace with the increasing prices of all sorts of
+food, fuel, lighting, the commonest clothing and the humblest shelter.
+
+The strike had gone on for some weeks, when an effort was made to
+obtain an injunction forbidding the picketing of the Haber factory.
+This was finally to crush the strike and down the strikers. But
+in pressing for an injunction the manufacturers came up against a
+difficulty of their own making. The plea that had all along been urged
+upon the union had been the futility of trying to continue a strike
+that was not injuring the employers. "For," they had many times said,
+"we have plenty of workers, our factories are going full blast."
+Whereas the Haber witnesses in the injunction suit were bringing proof
+of how seriously the business was being injured through the success of
+the girl pickets in maintaining the strike, and, the money loss, they
+assured the court was to be reckoned up in thousands of dollars. This
+inconsistency impressed the judge, and the strikers had the chance
+of telling their story in open court. "Strikers' Day" was a public
+hearing of the whole story of the strike.
+
+That night both sides got together, and began to discuss a
+working agreement. After twenty-five hours of conference between
+representatives of the Shirt Waist Makers' Union and of the
+Manufacturers' Association, an agreement was arrived at, giving the
+workers substantial gains; employment of all union workers in the
+shops without discrimination; a fifty-two-and-a-half-hour week and
+no work on Saturday afternoon; no charges for water, oil, needles or
+ordinary wear and tear on machinery; wages to be decided with the
+union for each particular shop, and all future grievances to be
+settled by a permanent Board of Arbitration; the agreement to run till
+May 1, 1911.
+
+The workers' success was, unfortunately, not lasting. Owing to the
+want of efficient local leadership, the organization soon dropped to
+pieces. That gone, there was nothing left to stand between the toilers
+and the old relentless pressure of the competitive struggle,
+ever driving the employers to ask more, and ever compelling the
+wage-earners to yield more. The Philadelphia shirt-waist strike of
+1910 furnishes a sad and convincing proof of how little is gained
+by the mere winning of a strike, however bravely fought, unless the
+strikers are able to keep a live organization together, the members
+coöperating patiently and steadily, so as to handle the fresh shop
+difficulties which every week brings, in the spirit of mutual help as
+well as self-help.
+
+These first Eastern strikes in the garment trades, although local in
+their incidence, were national in their effects. There had been so
+much that was dramatic and unusual in the rebellion of the workers,
+and it had been so effectively played up in the press of the entire
+country that by the time spring arrived and the strikes were really
+ended, and ended in both cities with very tangible benefits for the
+workers, there was hardly anyone who had not heard something about the
+great strikes, and who had not had their most deeply rooted opinions
+modified. It was an educational lesson on the grand scale. But the
+effects did not stop here. The impression upon the workers themselves
+everywhere was wholly unexpected. They had been encouraged and
+heartened to combine and thus help one another to obtain some measure
+of control over workshop and wages.
+
+The echoes of the shirt-waist strikes had hardly died away, when there
+arose from another group of dissatisfied workers, the self-same cry
+for industrial justice.
+
+There is no doubt that the Chicago strike which began among the makers
+of ready-made men's clothing in September, 1910, was the direct
+outcome of the strikes in New York and Philadelphia. While the Western
+uprising had many features in common with these, yet it presented
+difficulties all its own, and in its outcome won a unique success.
+Not only was the number of workers taking part greater than in the
+previous struggles, but, owing to the fact of a large number of the
+strikers being men, and a big proportion of these heads of families,
+the poverty and intense suffering resulting from months of
+unemployment extended over a far larger area. Also the variety
+of nationalities among the strikers added to the difficulties of
+conducting negotiations. Every bit of literature put out had to be
+printed in nine languages. And lastly, the want of harmony between
+certain of the national leaders of the union involved, and the deep
+distrust felt by some of the local workers and the strikers for a
+section of them provided a situation which for complexity it would be
+hard to match. That the long-continued struggle ended with so large
+a measure of success for the workers was in part owing to the
+extraordinary skill and unwearied patience displayed in its handling,
+and in part to the close and intimate coöperation between the local
+strike leaders, both men and women, the Chicago Federation of Labor
+and the Chicago Women's Trade Union League. Much also had been learned
+from recent experience in the strikes immediately preceding.
+
+The immediate cause of the first striker going out was a cut in the
+price of making pockets, of a quarter of a cent. That was on September
+22 in Shop 21, in the Hart, Schaffner and Marx factories. Three weeks
+later the strike had assumed such proportions that the officers of the
+United Garment Workers' District Council No. 6 were asking the Women's
+Trade Union League for speakers. The League organized its own Strike
+Committee to collect money, assist the pickets and secure publicity.
+At the instance of the League also an independent Citizens' Committee
+was formed.
+
+In time of sorest need was found efficient leadership. The
+garment-workers of Chicago, in their earlier struggles with the
+manufacturers, had had no such powerful combination to assist them as
+came to their aid now, when a Joint Strike Conference controlled
+the situation, with representatives upon it from the United Garment
+Workers of America International Executive Board, from the Chicago
+District Council of the same organization, from the Special Order
+Garment Workers, the Ready Made Garment Workers, the Chicago
+Federation of Labor and the Women's Trade Union League. The American
+Federation of Labor sent their organizer, Emmett Flood, the untiringly
+courageous and the ever hopeful.
+
+The first step to be taken was to place before the public in clear and
+simple form the heterogeneous mass of grievances complained of. The
+Women's Trade Union League invited about a dozen of the girls to tell
+their story over a simple little breakfast. Within a week the story
+told to a handful was printed and distributed broadcast, prefaced, as
+it was, by an admirable introduction by the late Miss Katharine Coman,
+of Wellesley College, who happened to be in Chicago, and who was
+acting as chairman of the grievance committee. The Citizens'
+Committee, headed by Professor George Mead, followed with a statement,
+admitting the grievances and justifying the strike.
+
+From then on the story lived on the front page of all the newspapers,
+and speakers to address unions, meetings of strikers, women's clubs
+and churches were in constant demand. Here again, the suffragist and
+the socialist women showed where their sympathies lay and of what
+mettle they were made. Visiting speakers, such as Miss Margaret
+Bondfield and Mrs. Philip Snowden, took their turn also. The socialist
+women of Chicago issued a special strike edition of the _Daily
+Socialist_. With the help of the striking girls as "newsies" they
+gathered in the city on one Saturday the handsome sum of $3,345.
+Another group of very poor Poles sent in regularly about two hundred
+dollars per week, sometimes the bulk of it in nickels and dimes. A
+sewing gathering composed of old ladies in one of the suburbs sewed
+industriously for weeks on quilts and coverings for the strikers. Some
+small children in a Wisconsin village were to have had a goose for
+their Christmas dinner, but hearing of little children who might have
+no dinner, sent the price of the bird, one dollar and sixty-five
+cents, into the strikers' treasury.
+
+At first strike pay was handed out every Friday from out of the funds
+of the United Garment Workers. But on Friday, November 11, the number
+of applicants for strike pay was far beyond what it was possible to
+handle in the cramped office quarters. Through some misunderstanding,
+which has to this day never been explained, the crowd, many thousands
+of men, women and children, were denied admittance to the large wheat
+pit of the Open Board of Trade, which, it was understood, had been
+reserved for their use. It was a heart-rending sight, as from early
+morning till late afternoon they waited in the halls and corridors and
+outside in the streets. At first in dumb patience and afterwards in
+bewilderment, but all along with unexampled gentleness and quietness.
+
+At this point, Mr. John Fitzpatrick, president of the Chicago
+Federation of Labor, took hold of a situation already difficult, and
+which might soon have become dangerous. He explained to the crowd that
+everyone would be attended to in their various district halls, and
+that all vouchers already out would be redeemed. This relieved the
+tension, but the Joint Strike Committee were driven to take over at
+once the question of relief, so that none should be reduced to accept
+that hunger bargain, which, as Mrs. Robins put it, meant the surrender
+of civilization.
+
+With such an immense number of strike-bound families to support,
+the utmost economy of resources was necessary, and it was resolved
+hereafter to give out as little cash as possible, but to follow the
+example of the United Mine Workers and others and open commissary
+stations. This plan was carried out, and more than any other one plan,
+saved the day. Benefits were handed over, in the form of groceries on
+a fixed ration scale. As far as we know, such a plan had never before
+been adapted to the needs of women and children, nor carried out by
+organized labor for the benefit of a large unorganized group. Of
+the economy of the system there is no question, seeing that a
+well-organized committee can always purchase supplies in quantities at
+wholesale price, sometimes at cost price, and frequently can, as was
+done in this instance, draw upon the good feeling of merchants and
+dealers, and receive large contributions of bread, flour, coal and
+other commodities. Commissary stations were established in different
+localities. Here is a sample ration as furnished at one of the stores,
+although, thanks to the kindness of friends, the allowance actually
+supplied was of a much more varied character:
+
+  Bread     18 loaves
+  Coffee     1 lb.
+  Sugar      5 lbs.
+  Beans      5 lbs.
+  Oatmeal    2 pkgs. (large)
+  Ham       10 lbs.
+
+For Italians, oatmeal was replaced by spaghetti, and Kosher food for
+those of the orthodox Jewish faith was arranged for through orders
+upon local grocery stores and kosher butchers in the Jewish quarter.
+The tickets entitling to supplies were issued through the shop
+chairman at the local halls to those strikers known to be in greatest
+need.
+
+The commissary plan, however, still left untouched such matters as
+rent, fuel, gas, and likewise the necessities of the single young men
+and girls. Also the little babies and the nursing mothers, who needed
+fresh milk, had to be thought of and provided for. There were certain
+strictly brought up, self-respecting little foreign girls who
+explained with tears that they could not take an order on a restaurant
+where there were strange people about, because "it would not be
+decent," a terrible criticism on so many of our public eating places.
+So a small separate fund was collected which gave two dollars a week
+per head, to tide over the time of trouble for some of these sorely
+pressed ones. There was a committee on milk for babies, and another on
+rent, and the League handled the question of coal.
+
+With these necessities provided for, the strikers settled down to a
+test of slow endurance. Picketing went on as before, and although
+arrests were numerous, and fines followed in the train of arrests, the
+police and the court situation was at no time so acute as it had been
+in either New York or Philadelphia.
+
+The heroism shown by many of the strikers and their families it would
+be hard to overestimate. Small inconveniences were made light of.
+Families on strike themselves, or the friends of strikers would crush
+into yet tighter quarters so that a couple of boys or two or three
+girls out of work might crowd into the vacated room, and so have a
+shelter over their heads "till the strike was over." A League member
+found her way one bitter afternoon in December to one home where lay
+an Italian woman in bed with a new-born baby and three other children,
+aged three, four and five years respectively, surrounding her. There
+was neither food nor fuel in the house. On the bed were three letters
+from the husband's employer, offering to raise his old pay from
+fifteen to thirty dollars per week, if he would go back to work and so
+help to break the strike. The wife spoke with pride of the husband's
+refusal to be a traitor. "It is not only bread we give the children.
+We live not by bread alone. We live by freedom, and I will fight for
+it though I die to give it to my children." And this woman's baby was
+one of 1,250 babies born into strikers' homes that winter.
+
+To me those long months were like nothing so much as like living in a
+besieged city. There was the same planning for the obtaining of food,
+and making it last as long as possible, the same pinched, wan faces,
+the same hunger illnesses, the same laying of little ones into baby
+graves. And again, besides the home problems, there was the same
+difficulty of getting at the real news, knowing the meaning of what
+was going on, the same heart-wearing alternations of hope and dread.
+
+Through it all, moreover, persisted the sense that this was something
+more than an industrial rising, although it was mainly so. It was
+likewise the uprising of a foreign people, oppressed and despised.
+It was the tragedy of the immigrant, his high hopes of liberty and
+prosperity in the new land blighted, finding himself in America, but
+not of America.
+
+By the end of November the manufacturers were beginning to tire of
+watching their idle machinery, and the tale of unfilled orders grew
+monotonous. There began to be grumbles from the public against the
+disastrous effects upon business of the long-continued struggle.
+Alderman Merriam succeeded in having the City Council bring about a
+conference of the parties to the strike "to the end that a just and
+lasting settlement of the points in controversy may be made."
+
+Messrs Hart, Schaffner and Marx, a firm employing in forty-eight shops
+between eight and nine thousand workers, agreed to meet with the
+committee and the labor leaders. After long hours of conferring
+a tentative agreement was at length arrived at, signed by the
+representatives of all parties, approved by the Chicago Federation
+of Labor, and, when referred to the army of strikers for their
+confirmation, was by them _rejected_. Indeed the great majority
+refused even to vote upon it at all. This was indeed a body blow to
+the hopes of peace. For the unfavorable attitude of the strikers there
+were, however, several reasons. The agreement, such as it was, did not
+affect quite a fourth of the whole number of workers who were out, and
+a regular stampede back to work of the rest, with no guarantee at all,
+was greatly to be dreaded. Again, a clause discriminating against
+all who it should be decided had been guilty of violence during the
+strike, gave deep offense. It was felt to be adding insult to injury,
+to allude to violence during a struggle conducted so quietly and with
+such dignity and self-restraint. But a further explanation lay in the
+attitude of mind of the strikers themselves. The idea of compromise
+was new to them, and the acceptance of any compromise was a way out of
+the difficulty, that was not for one moment to be considered. Thus it
+came about that a settlement that many an old experienced organization
+would have accepted was ruled quite out of court by these new and
+ardent converts to trade unionism, who were prepared to go on, facing
+destitution, rather than yield a jot of what seemed to them an
+essential principle.
+
+Organized labor, indeed, realized fully the seriousness of the
+situation. The leaders had used their utmost influence to have the
+agreement accepted, and their advice had been set aside.
+
+What view, then, was taken of this development of these central
+bodies and by the affiliated trades of the city, who were all taxing
+themselves severely both in time and money for the support of the
+strike?
+
+The democracy of labor was on this occasion indeed justified of its
+children, and the supreme right of the strikers to make the final
+decision on their own affairs and abide by the consequences was
+maintained. Plans were laid for continuing the commissary stores, and
+just at this stage there was received from the United Garment Workers
+the sum of $4,000 for the support of the stores. The strikers were
+also encouraged to hold out when on January 9 the firm of Sturm-Mayer
+signed up and took back about five hundred workers. Also, a committee
+of the state Senate began an inquiry into the strike, thus further
+educating the public into an understanding of the causes lying back of
+all the discontent, and accounting for much of the determination not
+to give in.
+
+All the same, the prospects seemed very dark, and the strikers and
+their leaders had settled down to a steady, dogged resistance. It was
+like nothing in the world so much as holding a besieged city, and
+the outcome was as uncertain, and depended upon the possibility
+of obtaining for the beleaguered ones supplies of the primitive
+necessaries of life, food and fuel. And the fort was held until about
+the middle of January came the news that Hart, Schaffner and Marx had
+opened up negotiations, and presently an agreement was signed, and
+their thousands of employés were back at work.
+
+They were back at work under an agreement, which, while it did not,
+strictly speaking, recognize the union, did not discriminate against
+members of the union. Nay, as the workers had to have representation
+and representatives, it was soon found that in practice it was only
+through their organization that the workers could express themselves
+at all.
+
+This is not the place in which to enlarge upon the remarkable success
+which has attended the working out of this memorable agreement. It is
+enough to say that ever since all dealings between the firm and
+their employés have been conducted upon the principle of collective
+bargaining.
+
+The agreement with Messrs. Hart, Schaffner and Marx was signed on
+January 14, 1911, and the Joint Conference Board then bent all
+its efforts towards some settlement with houses of the Wholesale
+Clothiers' Association and the National Tailors' Association for the
+twenty or thirty thousand strikers still out.
+
+Suddenly, without any warning the strike was terminated. How and why
+it has never been explained, even to those most interested in its
+support. All that is known is that on February 3 the strike was called
+off at a meeting of the Strikers' Executive Committee, at which Mr.
+T.A. Rickert, president of the United Garment Workers of America, and
+his organizers, were present. This was done, without consulting the
+Joint Conference Board, which for fourteen weeks had had charge of
+the strike, and which was composed of representatives from the United
+Garment Workers of America, the Garment Workers' local District
+Council, the strikers' own Executive Committee, the Chicago Federation
+of Labor, and the Women's Trade Union League.
+
+This meant the close of the struggle. Three out of the four commissary
+stations were closed the following day, and the fourth a week later.
+
+As regards the great mass of strikers then left, it was but a hunger
+bargain. They had to return to work without any guarantee for fair
+treatment, without any agency through which grievances could be dealt
+with, or even brought before the employers. And hundreds of the
+workers had not even the poor comfort that they could go back.
+Business was disorganized, work was slack, and the Association houses
+would not even try to make room for their rebellious employés. The
+refusal of work would be made more bitter by the manner of its
+refusal. Several were met with the gibe, "You're a good speaker,
+go down to your halls, they want you there." One employer actually
+invited a returned striker into his private office, shook hands with
+him as if in welcome, and then told him it was his last visit, he
+might go!
+
+The beginning of the present stage of the industrial rebellion among
+working-women in the United States may be said to have been made with
+the immense garment-workers' strikes. All have been strikes of the
+unorganized, the common theory that strikes must have their origin in
+the mischief-breeding activities of the walking delegate finding no
+confirmation here. They were strikes of people who knew not what
+a union was, making protest in the only way known to them against
+intolerable conditions, and the strikers were mostly very young women.
+One most significant fact was that they had the support of a national
+body of trade-union women, banded together in a federation, working
+on the one hand with organized labor, and on the other bringing in as
+helpers large groups of outside women. Such measure of success as came
+to the strikers, and the indirect strengthening of the woman's cause,
+which has since borne such fruit, was in great part due to the
+splendid reinforcement of organized labor, through the efforts of this
+league of women's unions.
+
+I need touch but lightly on the strikes in other branches of the
+sewing trades, where the history of the uprising was very similar.
+
+In July, 1910, 70,000 cloak-makers of New York were out on strike
+for nine weeks asking shorter hours, increase of wages; and sanitary
+conditions in their workshops. All these and some minor demands were
+in the end granted by the Manufacturers' Association, who controlled
+the trade, but the settlement nearly went to pieces on the rock of
+union recognition. An arrangement was eventually arrived at, on the
+suggestion of Mr. Louis Brandeis, that the principle of preference
+to unionists, first enforced in Australia, should be embodied in the
+agreement. Under this plan, union standards as to hours of labor,
+rates of wages and working conditions prevail, and, when hiring help,
+union men of the necessary qualifications and degree of skill must
+have precedence over non-union men. With the signing of the agreement
+the strike ended.
+
+January, 1913, saw another group of garment-workers on strike in New
+York. This time there were included men and women in the men's garment
+trades, also the white-goods-workers, the wrapper and kimono-makers,
+and the ladies' waist-and dress-makers. There is no means of knowing
+how many workers were out at any one time, but the number was
+estimated at over 100,000. The white-goods-workers embraced the
+very youngest girls, raw immigrants from Italy and Russia, whom the
+manufacturers set to work as soon as they were able to put plain seams
+through the machine, and this was all the skill they ever attained.
+These children from their extreme youth and inexperience were
+peculiarly exposed to danger from the approaches of cadets of the
+underworld, and an appeal went out for a large number of women to
+patrol the streets, and see that the girls at least had the protection
+of their presence.
+
+The employers belonging to the Dress and Waist Manufacturers'
+Association made terms with their people, after a struggle, under an
+agreement very similar to that described above in connection with the
+cloak-makers.
+
+One of the most satisfactory results of the strikes among the
+garment-workers has been the standardizing of the trade wherever an
+agreement has been procured and steadily adhered to. It is not only
+that hours are shorter and wages improved, and the health and safety
+of the worker guarded, and work spread more evenly over the entire
+year, but the harassing dread of the cut without notice, and of
+wholesale, uncalled-for dismissals is removed. Thus is an element
+of certainty and a sense of method and order introduced. Above all,
+home-work is abolished.
+
+In an unstandardized trade there can be no certainty as to wages and
+hours, while there is a constant tendency to level down under the
+pressure of unchecked competition from both above and below. There is
+too frequent breaking of factory laws and ignoring of the city's fire
+and health ordinances, because the unorganized workers dare not, on
+peril of losing their jobs, insist that laws and ordinances were made
+to be kept and not broken. Also, in any trade where a profit can be
+made by giving out work, as in the sewing trades, we find, unless this
+is prevented by organization or legislation, an enormous amount of
+home-work, ill-paid and injurious to all, cutting down the wages
+of the factory hands, and involving the wholesale exploitation of
+children.
+
+Home-work the unions will have none of, and therefore, wherever the
+collective bargain has been struck and kept, there we find the giving
+out of work from the factory absolutely forbidden, the home guarded
+from the entrance of the contractor, motherhood respected, babyhood
+defended from the outrage of child labor, and a higher standard of
+living secured for the family by the higher and securer earnings of
+the normal breadwinners.
+
+Everywhere on the continent the results of these strikes have been
+felt, women's strikes as they have been for the most part. The trade
+unionists of this generation have been encouraged in realizing
+how much fight there was in these young girls. All labor has been
+inspired. In trade after trade unorganized workers have learned the
+meaning of the words "the solidarity of labor," and it has become
+to them an article of faith. Whether it has been button-workers in
+Muscatine, or corset-workers in Kalamazoo, shoe-workers in St. Louis,
+or textile-workers in Lawrence, whether the struggle has been crowned
+with success or crushed into the dust of failure, the workers have
+been heartened to fight the more bravely because of the thrilling
+example set them by the garment-workers, and have thus brought the day
+of deliverance for all a little nearer hand.
+
+Again, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the public has been taught
+many lessons. The immense newspaper publicity, which could never have
+been obtained except for a struggle on a stupendous scale, has proved
+a campaign of education for young and old, for business man and
+farmer, for lawyer and politician, for housewife and for student.
+It has left the manufacturer less cocksure of the soundness of his
+individualist philosophy. More often is he found explaining and even
+apologizing for industrial conditions, which of yore he would have
+ignored as non-existent. He can no longer claim from the public his
+aforetime undisputed privilege of running his own business as he
+pleases, without concern for either the wishes or the welfare of
+employés and community.
+
+The results are also seen in the fact that it is now so much easier
+to get the workers' story across the footlights in smaller local
+struggles, such as those of the porcelain-workers in Trenton and! the
+waitresses in Chicago; in the increasing success in putting through
+legislation for the limitation of hours and the regulation of wages
+for the poorest paid in state after state. By state or by nation
+one body after another is set the task of doing something towards
+accounting for the unceasing industrial unrest, towards solving the
+general industrial problem. Even if to some of us the remedial
+plans outlined seem to fall far short of the mark, they still are a
+beginning and are a foretaste of better things ahead.
+
+The conferences and discussions on unemployment are an admission,
+however belated, that a society which has, in the interests of the
+privileged classes, permitted the exploitation of the worker, must
+face the consequences, bear some of the burden, and do its share
+towards preventing the continuance of the evil. We do not cure
+smallpox by punishing the patient, nor do we thus prevent its
+recurrence among others. We handle the disease both by treating the
+sick person himself, and by finding the causes that lead to its
+spread, and arresting these. Industrial eruptive diseases have to
+be dealt with in like fashion, the cause sought for, and the social
+remedy applied fearlessly.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE IMMIGRANT WOMAN AND ORGANIZATION
+
+
+The melting-pot of the races is also the melting-pot of nationalities.
+The drama that we are witnessing in America is a drama on a more
+tremendous scale than can ever have been staged in the world before.
+
+By the unawakened and so-called pure American the incoming Italian or
+Jew is regarded as an outsider, who may be graciously permitted to hew
+wood and draw water, to forge steel in a rolling-mill or to sew in a
+factory, to cut ice or make roads for the rest of us, and who may,
+on the other hand, be given the cold shoulder more or less politely,
+generally less, when it comes to acquaintanceship, to the simple
+democratic social intercourse which we share with those whom we admit
+as our equals.
+
+I, too, am an immigrant, although an English-speaking and Anglo-Saxon
+immigrant. Therefore I am accepted among Americans as one of
+themselves. But there comes to me often a bitter sense of separation
+from my fellow-immigrants, a separation by not one wall, but many.
+First, the wall we none of us can help, the wall raised by difference
+of language. Next, the wall raised by different manners and customs.
+This we might try to scale oftener than we do. Again, there are
+separating walls, harder than these either to surmount or to lay low,
+walls of provincial arrogance and crass self-satisfaction, and the
+racial pride that is mostly another name for primitive ignorance.
+
+An ordinary city-dwelling American or an English-speaking foreigner
+earning a living in business or in one of the professions or even in
+some of the skilled trades might live a lifetime in the United States
+and never meet non-Americanized foreigners socially at all. In church
+or club or on the footing of private entertainment these first-comers
+and their friends keep themselves to themselves. And although among us
+such race-defined limits are less hard and fast than, say, the lines
+of class in old European countries, still there they are. The less
+enlightened do not even think about the immigrant within our shores
+at all. Those somewhat more advanced will talk glibly about the
+Americanization of the foreigner that is going on all the time. So is
+it. That is true, but the point here to be noted is that the desirable
+and inevitable process of the Americanization of the foreigner, and
+his assimilation by and into the American nation takes place outside
+the charmed circles wherein these good respectable folks dwell; takes
+place in spite of their indifference; takes place without their active
+assistance, without their coöperation, save and except so far as that
+coöperation is unconscious and unavoidable.
+
+The Americanizing process takes place in the street, in the cars, in
+the stores, in the workshop, at the theater, and the nickel show, in
+the wheatfield and on the icefield; best and quickest of all in the
+school, and nowhere so consciously as in the trade union, for all that
+section of foreigners whom organized labor has been able to reach
+and draw into its fold. Carried out for the most part in crude and
+haphazard fashion the process goes on, only in the vast majority of
+cases it is far slower than it need be.
+
+Too many are but little touched, or touched only in painful ways by
+the Americanizing process, especially the married women who stay in
+their homes. Their lot is so often a tragedy. They have lost their own
+country and yet have not gained another. Even this is not the worst.
+The younger folks are in some fashion made over into American men and
+women. And here comes in the crucial question which concerns something
+more than universality of opportunity, quality of opportunity. These
+little Poles and Ruthenians and Bohemians are finally made over into
+Americans. Their life-contribution will be given to the generation now
+growing up, of which they will form a part. We want that contribution
+to be as fine as possible. They cannot give more than they themselves
+are. And what they are to be in very large part we are making them.
+Will they not be all the finer citizens-to-be if we come closer to
+them and to their parents in the warm friendly social relations of
+life?
+
+The plane of social intercourse is the last to be transformed by
+democracy. Here is it that aristocratic and undemocratic limitations
+hamper us the longest. Here we are still far behind the fine, free and
+admirable planing out of differences, and rounding off of angles and
+making over of characters that is part of the democracy of the street
+and the marketplace. Here between strangers is the closest physical
+nearness. Here the common need to live and earn a living supplies a
+mutual education through the very acts of serving and being served,
+of buying and selling and using the common thoroughfares and means
+of transportation. And that basic democracy of the street and the
+marketplace is all between strangers.
+
+It is the very fact that this blending of peoples, this rubbing off of
+racial angles, takes place in and through the commonplace surroundings
+of everyday life, that blinds most to the greatness and the wonder
+of the transformation and to the pressing importance of the right
+adjustments being made, and made early. But to the observer whose eyes
+are not holden, there comes a sense that he is every day witnessing a
+warfare of Titans, that in these prosaic American communities it is
+world powers that are in clash and in conflict while in preparation
+for the harmony to be.
+
+Upon careful consideration it would appear that the immigrant problem
+is only a slightly varied expression of the general social and
+economic problem. It focuses public attention because the case of the
+immigrant is so extreme. For instance, whatever conditions, industrial
+or civic, press hardly upon the American worker, these conditions
+press with yet greater hardship upon the alien. The alien and his
+difficulties form therefore a first point of contact, the point where
+the social reformer begins with his suggestions for improvement.
+The very same thought unconsciously forms the basis of many of the
+proposed methods of dealing with the immigrant, however startlingly
+these may differ from one another in expression. On the one hand we
+have such suggestions as that of Mr. Paul Kellogg, which he called "A
+Labor Tariff, A Minimum Wage for the Immigrant." It does not take
+very acute reasoning to perceive that if such a proposal were ever to
+become law, it would not be very long before there would have to be a
+universal minimum wage for everyone.
+
+On the other hand, Mr. Edward B. Whitney in his Memorandum appended to
+the Report of the Commission of the State of New York argues thus
+in discussing the claim made by the majority of the Commission that
+certain special help and protection is needed by the alien. He asks
+"whether, if a further extension of this kind of state charity is to
+be made, it would not be better to take up something for the benefit
+of our own citizens or for the benefit of citizen and alien alike."
+Mr. Whitney is entirely logical. Only progress rarely takes place for
+logical reasons, or on lines dictated by logic, but it does in
+almost all cases follow the line of least resistance, and the wise
+progressive accepts gratefully whatever he can get, without being too
+anxious as to whether it seems to be logically the next step or not.
+
+The immigrant has hitherto been used as an excuse to permit the
+dehumanizing of our cities; he has been used industrially as an
+instrument to make life harder for the hardly pressed classes of
+workers whom he joined on his arrival here. That such has been his
+sorry function has been his misfortune as well as theirs. Would it not
+be equally natural and far more fair to utilize his presence among us
+to raise our civic and economic and industrial standards? It is no
+new story, this. Out of every social problem we can construct a
+stepping-stone to something better and higher than was before. The
+most that we know of health has been learned through a study of
+the misadjustments that bring about disease. What has been done
+educationally to assist the defective, the handicapped and the
+dependent has thrown a flood of light upon the training of the normal
+child. Through work undertaken in the first instance for the benefit
+of the exceptions, the minority, the whole community has benefited.
+
+In this connection no one will deny that immigrants, both men and
+women, have their handicaps. In the great majority of instances they
+are handicapped by an upbringing among primitive conditions, by their
+unavoidable ignorance of our language and our customs, and by a quite
+natural mental confusion as to our standards of conduct, to them
+so curiously exacting in some respects as, for instance, where the
+schooling of their children is concerned, so incomprehensibly lax in
+others, say, in the unusual freedom accorded to those same children
+when grown but a little older.
+
+We shall find that whatever we do for the immigrant will be, in the
+end, so much accomplished for the good of all. Let us lessen this
+unfair pressure upon him, as far as we can, and we shall surely find
+that in helping him to help himself, we have, at the same time,
+benefited all workers.
+
+It is easy to see that the great strikes in the sewing and textile
+trades of the last few years have proved a searchlight especially into
+women's industrial conditions, educating the whole public by informing
+them of the terrible price paid for our comfort by the makers of the
+commonest articles of household purchase and use, the sacrifice of
+youth, health, happiness, and life itself demanded by any industry
+which exacts of the employés cruelly long hours of work at an
+exhausting speed, and which for such overwork pays them wretchedly.
+
+These uprisings have besides stimulated to an encouraging degree the
+forming of an intelligent public opinion upon the problem of the
+immigrant, and a wholesomely increased sense of responsibility towards
+the immigrant. And indeed it was time. Miss Grace Abbott, director of
+the Chicago League for the Protection of Immigrants, tells a story,
+illustrating how very unintelligent an educated professional man can
+be in relation to immigrant problems.
+
+"Not long ago," she says, "I listened to a paper by a sanitary
+engineer, on the relation between the immigrant and public health. It
+was based on a study of typhoid fever in a certain city in the United
+States. He showed that most typhoid epidemics started among our
+foreign colonies, and spread to other sections. This, he explained, is
+because the foreigner has been accustomed to a pure water supply, and
+is therefore much more susceptible to typhoid than the American
+who has struggled since birth against the diseases which come from
+polluted water.
+
+"Instead, then, of urging this as an additional reason for giving
+us all decent water, he drew the remarkable conclusion that in the
+interests of the public health, some new basis for the exclusion of
+immigrants must be adopted. In this way," Miss Abbott adds, "most
+discussions on the immigrant are diverted, and leave the fundamental
+problems quite untouched. For whether we adopt a literary and physique
+test, increase the head-tax, and do all the other things suggested by
+the restrictionists, thousands of immigrants will continue to come to
+us every year."
+
+Apart from general considerations, these gigantic industrial
+upheavals have afforded to the public-spirited citizen an unsurpassed
+opportunity of understanding and appreciating the industrial problem
+as it affects and is affected by the immigrant girl and young woman. A
+few of us, here and there, from personal and trade experience knew the
+facts years ago as well as they are generally known today. But not
+all the Government reports, not an army of investigators could have
+imparted this knowledge to the public, and impressed upon them the
+sordid suffering of the working and living conditions of the foreign
+woman in the sewing trades in any great American city.
+
+For in strikes of such magnitude, where whole groups of the
+participators themselves lived for months in a white heat of idealism
+and enthusiasm, life-stories are no longer dragged out of shy retiring
+girls, but are poured out in a burning flood by those very same girls,
+now quite transformed by the revolution through which they have
+passed, and by the new ideas of liberty and sisterhood with which they
+are possessed.
+
+I speak of the woman worker here, because it is she who is my concern
+at present, and in all the now historic strikes she has played a very
+large part. Indeed in the first of these risings, in the shirtwaist
+strikes of 1909-1910 in New York and Philadelphia, very few men
+workers were involved, and in the huge Chicago strike, 1910-1911,
+among the makers of men's ready-made clothing, although there the girl
+strikers numbered only about one-fourth of the whole, even that fourth
+made up the very respectable total of, it is believed, somewhere
+around 10,000 individuals, the population of a small city. Indeed it
+would give most Americans pause to be told that in this same Chicago
+strike the whole of the workers, men and women together, numbered more
+than the troops that Washington was able to place in the field at any
+one time during the War of Independence.
+
+Most of these strikes have been strikes of unorganized workers, who
+did not know even of the existence of a union till after they had gone
+out, and therefore with no idea of appealing to an organization for
+even moral support. In Chicago the strikers belonged to nine different
+nationalities, speaking as many different languages, so it is clear
+that the pressure must have been indeed irresistible that forced so
+many thousands with apparently no common meeting-ground or even common
+means of communication out of the shops into the street. When
+the organized strike, they know why. When the unorganized of one
+nationality and one tongue strike, they can tell one another why. Yet
+these people struck in spots all over the city almost simultaneously,
+although in most cases without any knowledge by one group that other
+groups were also resisting oppression and making a last stand against
+any further degradation of their poor standards of living. Amid every
+variety of shop grievance, and with the widest possible difference
+in race, language and customs, they shared two disadvantageous
+conditions: industrially they were oppressed, and socially they were
+subject races. Therefore they were one people, in spite of their nine
+nationalities. These two conditions acted and reacted upon one another
+complicating and intensifying the struggle. But because of this very
+intensity it has been easier for the onlooker to separate out the real
+questions at issue, easier for the sympathetic American to come into
+wholesome and human relationship with this large body of his brothers
+and sisters. To him they could be one group, for their interests
+were one, and they had been too long separated from him and from one
+another by the accidents of birth and speech.
+
+So the searchlight turned on then on the sewing trades has since cast
+its enlightening beams on industrial conditions in other trades, in
+which, too, one race is perpetually played off against another with
+the unfailing result of cuts in wages and lowering of standards of
+living.
+
+All tests of admission to secure some measure of selection among new
+arrivals are but experiments in an untried field. We have no tests but
+rough-and-ready ones, and even these are often inconsistent with one
+another. For instance, for a good many years now the immigration
+inspectors have taken such precautions as they could against the
+admission of the insane, but it is only recently that modified Binet
+tests have been used to check the entry of a socially far more
+injurious class, the congenitally feebleminded.
+
+Those who have worked extensively among newly arrived foreign girls
+find that they arrive here with, as a rule, much less idea of what
+awaits them, what will be expected of them, and the difficulties
+and even dangers they may encounter, than the men. When the Chicago
+Women's Trade Union League began its immigration department a few
+years ago, it was found that three dollars was about the average
+sum which a girl had in her pocket when she reached the city of her
+destination. Ten dollars was felt to be a fortune, while I have since
+heard of young girls landing alone in a great city, and without a
+single cent with which to leave the depot. It is often said, why do
+their mothers let them go away (sixteen and eighteen are common ages)
+so young, so inexperienced? It must be remembered that many of the
+Polish and Lithuanian girls, for example, come from small villages.
+The mothers themselves have never seen a big city, and have not
+the remotest conception of any place of more than five hundred
+inhabitants, where the distances are short, and where everyone knows
+everyone else. They have no idea of the value of money, when it comes
+to earning and spending it in America. Three dollars a week is to
+mother, as to daughter, an ample sum for the young traveler.
+
+It often happens that many of the young immigrants have had letters
+from those who had preceded them. But we know what human nature is.
+The person who succeeds proudly writes home the good news. The still
+more successful person is able to take a trip home and display the
+visible signs of his or her wealth. The unsuccessful, as a rule,
+either does not write at all, or writing, does not admit the
+humiliating truth.
+
+In the ignorance and inexperience of the young foreign girl the white
+slaver finds his easiest prey, and the betrayer is too often the man
+speaking her own tongue. On this terrible subject the nation, like
+other nations, is beginning to wake up to its responsibilities in
+relation to the immigrant girl as in relation to other girls. This
+special danger to young womanhood is so linked with other social
+questions that I merely allude to it here, because of the certainty
+I entertain that much even of this danger would lessen if the
+trade-union movement among women were so strong and so extensive that
+any woman, young or old, could travel from place to place as a member
+of a truly world-wide organization. Then she would have a better
+chance of arriving well posted as to ways of earning her living, and
+of finding friends in every city and every town and village.
+
+It may be urged that there exist already organizations world-wide in
+their scope, such as the religious associations, for the very purpose
+of safeguarding wandering girlhood. There are, and they accomplish a
+notable amount of good. But their appeal is not universal; they never
+have money or workers enough to cope adequately with a task like this,
+and they are not built upon the sound economic basis of the trade
+union.
+
+The immigrant problem was not encountered by the first factory workers
+here, who were American-born. So we find the earliest leaders in the
+trade organization of women were wholly drawn from the daughters of
+the native settlers. They felt and spoke always as free-women, "the
+daughters of freemen." When this class of girls withdrew from the
+factories, they gave place to the Irish immigrant, in some respects a
+less advanced type than themselves. I have briefly traced some of the
+economic reasons which affected the rise, growth and eventual passing
+away of the various phases of trade unionism among women in this
+country. The progress of these was radically modified by the influx
+into the trades of workers from one nation after another; by the
+passing from a trade or a group of trades of body after body of the
+old workers, starved out or giving way before the recent arrivals,
+whose pitiful power to seize the jobs of the others and earn some sort
+of a living, has lain in their very weakness and helplessness.
+
+So the first Irish girls who came into the factory life of New England
+were peasants, with no knowledge of city life, but quick and ready to
+learn. They went into the new occupations, and picked up the new ways
+of doing things. And by the time they had grasped the meaning of this
+strange industrial world in which they found themselves, they were
+in the relentless grasp of machine-controlled industry. Under
+untold handicaps they had to begin at the very beginning, and start
+rebellions on their own account. From the sixties on we can detect the
+preponderance of Irish names in the annals of early trade unionism.
+When they had adapted themselves to their conditions, for they quickly
+became Americanized, they showed in the trade unions which they
+organized the remarkable qualities for political leadership which the
+Irish and Irish-Americans have ever since displayed in this country.
+The important rôle which Irish and Irish-American men have played in
+the councils of American trade unionism is well known, and their power
+today remains very great. So as regards the women, by glancing over
+the past we can readily trace the influence of the Irish girl, in the
+efforts after organization, unsuccessful as these often were. It was
+Maggie McNamara who led the Brooklyn Female Burnishers' Association
+in 1868. It was during the sixties that Kate Mullaney was leading her
+splendid body of Troy laundresses, and twenty years later we find
+Leonora Barry, another Irish girl, as the leading spirit among the
+women of the Knights of Labor.
+
+Except in isolated instances, no other race has come to the front
+among working-women until recently. We read of German women and
+Bohemian women as faithful unionists. But Germans, Bohemians and
+Scandinavians advanced or lost ground along with the others. By this
+time, moreover, the nation had become more habituated to absorbing
+immigrants from various nations, and the distinction between races
+was less accentuated after a few years' residence. On the part of the
+Germans and Scandinavians, amalgamation has been so speedy, and in the
+end so complete, that most of those who have been here some time, and
+invariably the children of the first-comers, are Americans through and
+through.
+
+With the foreign peoples that we have with us today, the situation
+is somewhat different. Certain general principles are common to the
+course of all these migrations. They originate, on the one hand, in
+economic pressure, complicated not unfrequently with religious wars or
+persecutions, and on the other, in the expectation of better times
+in a new country. They meet the demands of a new country, asking for
+labor, and are further subject to the inducements of agents. Under our
+haphazard social arrangements, the newly arrived often meet wretched
+conditions, and have no means of knowing how they are being used to
+lower yet further wages for themselves and others.
+
+Always, whatever their own descent and history, the older inhabitants
+feel resentment, knowing no more than their unfortunate rivals what
+is the underlying reason of the trouble. Milder forms of antagonism
+consist in sending the immigrant workers "to Coventry," using
+contemptuous language of or to them, as we hear every day in "dago"
+or "sheeny," and in objections by the elders to the young people
+associating together, while the shameful use that is continually made
+of the immigrants as strike-breakers may rouse such mutual indignation
+that there are riots and pitched battles as a consequence.
+
+The first indignant efforts to exclude the intruders are vain. More
+and more do experienced trade unionists admit this, and plead for the
+acceptance of the inevitable, and turn all their energies towards the
+organization of the unwelcome rivals. Scabs they must be, if
+left alone. Better take them in where they can be influenced and
+controlled, and can therefore do less damage. Here is where the help
+of the foreign organizer is so essential to overcome the indifference
+and quell the misgivings of the strangers in a situation where the
+influence of the employer is almost always adverse.
+
+At length the immigrant gains a footing; he is left in possession,
+either wholly or partly, and amalgamation to a great degree takes
+place. A generation grows up that knew not the sad rivalry of their
+fathers, for fresh industrial rivalries on different grounds have
+replaced the old, as sharply cut, but not on race lines.
+
+Every one of these stages can be seen today in all the industrial
+centers and in many rural ones, with one people or another.
+
+While the tendency of the organized labor movement, both in the United
+States and in Canada, is towards restriction, whether exercised
+directly through immigration laws, or indirectly through laws against
+the importation of contract labor, there exist wide differences of
+opinion among trade unionists, and in the younger groups are many who
+recognize that there are limits beyond which no legislation can
+affect the issue, and that even more important than the conditions of
+admission to this new world is the treatment which the worker receives
+after he passes the entrance gate. If it is necessary in the interests
+of those already in this country to guard the portals carefully, it is
+equally necessary for the welfare of all, that the community through
+their legislators, both state and national, should accept the
+responsibility of preventing the ruthless exploitation of immigrants
+in the interest of private profit. Exploited and injured themselves,
+these become the unconscious instruments of hardly less ruthless
+exploitation and injury to their fellows in the competitive struggle
+for a bare subsistence.
+
+Such exploitation could be in some degree checked through the
+authorities assuming control, and especially by furnishing to the new
+arrivals abundant information and advice, acquainting them with the
+state of the labor market in different localities and at different
+times. It is for the authorities also to see that the transportation
+of newly arrived foreigners from place to place is rendered secure;
+to encourage their early instruction in the language and laws of the
+country and the ordinances of the city, along with enlightenment as to
+the resources in time of trouble, which lie open to the poorest, if
+they but know where to turn.
+
+In the first number of the _Immigrants in America Review_, the editor,
+Frances A. Kellor, points out what an unusual opportunity has been
+granted to America to formulate a definite program with reference
+to alien residents. Now is the time, she insists, to perfect laws,
+establish systems and improve conditions, when, owing to the European
+War, but few immigrants are arriving, and therefore, when no great
+rush of people demand expedients. "Now is the time to build, to
+repair, to initiate, so we may obviate the necessity for expedients."
+
+The writer shows that efforts ought to be directed along seven lines,
+and the work on these seven lines should be closely coördinated.
+
+1. _Transportation_. The safe transportation of admitted aliens to
+their destination.
+
+2. _Employment_. Security of employment, and adequate coördinated,
+regulated labor-market organization.
+
+3. _Standards of living_. Making it possible for the immigrant
+to adopt and maintain better standards of living, by removal of
+discriminations in localities, housing and sanitation, and by
+preventing overcrowding.
+
+4. _Savings_. Information regarding savings banks, loan funds,
+agricultural colonies, and legislation regarding the same.
+
+5. _Education_. Reduction of illiteracy, the teaching of civics, and
+extension of opportunity of education and industrial training.
+
+6. _Citizenship_. Higher and simpler naturalization requirements, and
+processes, and placing the legal status of the alien upon a just and
+consistent foundation.
+
+7. _Public Charges_. National and state coöperation in the care of any
+who may become public charges.
+
+No one can suppose that every Greek boy desires to become a shoeblack,
+or that every Scandinavian girl is fitted for domestic service and for
+nothing else; that every Slavic Jewess should become a garment-worker;
+that every Italian man should work on the roads; that the Lithuanian
+and Hungarian, no matter what their training or their ability, should
+be compelled to go into the steel-rolling mills. All this because they
+land speaking no English, and not knowing how to place themselves in
+occupations better adapted to their inclinations and qualifications.
+No one knows how many educated and trained men and women are thus
+turned into hewers of wood and drawers of water, to the ruin of their
+own lives and the loss of the community.
+
+The unregulated private employment office, the padrone and the
+sweat-shop are the agencies who direct the newcomers to jobs, whether
+it be in the city or out in the country camp.
+
+Many of the new arrivals would gladly take up agriculture, if they
+knew where to go, and were safeguarded against imposition--having a
+fee taken, for instance, and then landed several hundred miles away,
+penniless, to find all the jobs gone.
+
+The immigrant on landing is very much like the child leaving school to
+go to work, and requires vocational guidance just as sorely.
+
+The needs of the alien are closely related to the general question of
+unemployment. He suffers in an acute degree from the want of system in
+the regularization of industry, and the fact that we have failed
+to recognize unemployment, and all irregularity of employment as
+a condition to be met and provided against by industry and the
+community.
+
+Americans take credit to themselves that so many immigrants do well,
+succeed, become prosperous citizens and members of society, but wish
+to shoulder none of the blame when the alien falls down by the way, or
+lives under such home conditions that his babies die, and his older
+children fall out of their grades, drift into the street trades or
+find their way into the juvenile court. Americans forget how many of
+all these evil results are due to the want of social machinery to
+enable the alien to fit into his new surroundings, or the neglect to
+set such social machinery agoing where it already exists. In the small
+towns it is not unusual for health ordinances to be strictly enforced
+in the English-speaking localities, and allowed to remain a dead
+letter in the immigrant districts. In Chicago it was in the stockyards
+district that garbage was dumped for many years; garbage, the product
+of other wards, that the residents of those other wards insisted be
+removed from their back-doors. How much of the high infant death-rate
+among stockyards families has been due to the garbage exposed and
+decaying, so carefully brought there, from the fine residential
+districts?
+
+Legally the alien suffers under a burden of disabilities of which he
+is usually wholly unaware, until he has broken some law or regulation
+devised, it would appear, often for his discomfiture, rather than
+for anyone's else benefit. These laws and regulations, in themselves
+sometimes just and sometimes unjust, make up a mass of the most
+inconsistent legislation. State laws, varying from state to state, and
+city ordinances equally individual limit the employment of aliens
+on public work. Peddlers' and fishers' licenses come under similar
+restrictions; so with the owning of property, the right to leave
+property by will, say, to a wife and children in Europe, and the right
+even to protection of life, in violation of treaty rights. "The state
+courts have never punished a single outrage of this kind" [violence at
+the hands of a mob]. The federal government, Miss Kellor states, makes
+a payment to a victim's heirs out of a secret service fund "if the
+ambassador is persistent, and threatens to withdraw from Washington if
+the murder of his countrymen is not to be punished."
+
+These are all most serious handicaps, and certainly the need for
+investigation of all laws, the codifying of many, and the abolition of
+some is urgent.
+
+If some of these handicaps were lifted from the immigrant, complaint
+against under-cutting competition of cheap foreign labor would largely
+cease, and the task of organizers among the foreign workers would be
+much simplified, even while we are waiting for the day when it will be
+possible for all to obtain work without turning others out of their
+jobs, which can only come about when we produce intelligently for the
+use of all, instead of for the profit of the exceptional few.
+
+Here and there work on the lines sketched out is beginning, even
+though much of it is as yet unrelated to the rest. The community is
+making headway, in the acknowledgment by various states, headed by New
+York, of the just claim of the immigrant, once he is admitted within
+our borders, to the protection of the government. For long after
+the Federal authorities took over the control of immigration, their
+concern was limited to some degree of restriction over the entry
+of foreigners, and the enforcement of deportation, when such was
+considered necessary. Quite a fresh departure, however, was made
+in the year 1910, when the state of New York, following the
+recommendations of its State Commission on Immigration (1909),
+established its Bureau of Industries and Immigration, which really
+grew out of the activities of a private society. Other communities
+are also realizing their responsibility. California established a
+permanent Commission on Immigration and Housing in 1913, and the
+Investigating Commissions of Massachusetts and New Jersey recommended
+similar agencies in their reports to the legislatures in 1914.
+
+New York has already accomplished excellent results, and more
+important still, has shown the direction, in which other states may
+both follow and coöperate. A few years more may see us with interstate
+legislation insuring the better care and protection of immigrants all
+over the country, interstate legislation being the curiously
+indirect method which the United States has hit upon to overcome
+the imperfections and deficiencies of its national instrument of
+government. One of these days may even find the Federal House at
+Washington taking over, in other lines besides that of foreign
+workers, the functions outlined for it in the first instance by the
+daughter states.
+
+The United States Government has recently entered a new field in the
+passage of a law, authorizing the protection of immigrants in transit
+to their destination, and providing for the establishment of a station
+in Chicago, where the immigrants will go on their arrival, and will
+thus be protected from the gross frauds from which they have so long
+suffered. The present administration also promises an experiment
+in the development of the Bureau of Information in the Immigration
+Department.
+
+It is not so easy for any of us to give the same dispassionate
+consideration to the problem that is with us as to that which has long
+been settled, and has passed away into the calm atmosphere of history.
+And truly, there are complications in the present situation which our
+fathers had not to face. And first, the much greater dissimilarity in
+training, mental outlook, social customs, and in the case of the
+men and women from eastern Europe, not to speak of Asia, the utter
+unlikeness in language, makes mutual knowledge and understanding much
+more difficult, and the growth of mutual confidence, therefore, much
+slower.
+
+No one has yet analyzed the effects upon the nervous system of the
+migrating worker, of the unsettlement of habits, and the change of
+surroundings and social environment, working in connection with the
+changed climatic conditions, and the often total change in food. This
+is one phase of the immigrant problem which deserves the most careful
+study. And when, as too often in the case of the Russian Jew, this
+complete alteration of life is piled on top of the persecutions so
+many of them have endured, and the shocks so many have sustained
+before leaving their native land, the normal, usual effects of
+the transition are emphasized and exaggerated, and it may take a
+generation or longer before complete Americanization and amalgamation
+is brought about.
+
+The longer such a change is in being consummated, the more is the
+new generation likely to retain some of their most characteristic
+qualities permanently; to retain and therefore to impress these upon
+the dominant race, in this case upon the American nation, through
+association, and finally, through marriage. Especially is this a
+probable result where we find such vitality and such intensely
+prepotent power as among the Jews.
+
+In reference to trade-union organization among women, while each
+nationality presents its own inherent problem, there is equally
+no doubt but that each will in the future make its own special
+contribution towards the progress and increased scope of the movement
+among the women workers.
+
+As matters are developing today, the fulfillment of this promise of
+the future has already begun most markedly among the Slavic Jewesses,
+especially those from Russia. These young women have already brought,
+and are every day bringing into the dreary sweatshop and the
+speeded-up factory a spirit of fearlessness and independence both
+in thought and action, which is having an amazing effect upon the
+conditions of factory industry in the trades where they work. So also,
+supporting and supported by the men of their own race, these Russian
+Jewish girls, many of them extremely young, are inspiring their
+fellow-workers and interpenetrating the somewhat matter-of-fact
+atmosphere of American trade unionism with their own militant
+determination and enthusiasm. With most, the strike has been their
+initiation into trade unionism, often the general strike in their own
+trade, the strike on a scale hitherto unparalleled in trades where
+either the whole or a very considerable proportion of the workers are
+women. Some again, especially among the leaders, approach unionism
+through the ever open door of socialism. If I speak here of the women
+of the Slavic Jewish race, it is not that I wish to ignore the men. I
+have to leave them on one side, that is all.
+
+These girls add to courage and enthusiasm, such remarkable gifts of
+intellect and powers of expression as to make them a power wherever
+they have become awakened to the new problems that face them here and
+now, and to their own responsibilities in relation thereto. They are
+essentially individualists. They do not readily or naturally either
+lean upon others or coöperate with others, nor yet confide in others.
+They come here with a history generations long of ill-treatment and
+persecution. Many thousands of them have witnessed their dearest
+tortured, outraged and killed with the narrowest possible escape from
+some similar fate themselves. To most any return to their native
+country is completely barred, and they do not therefore nurse the
+hope, so inveterately cherished by the Italians, for instance, that
+they may some day be able to go back.
+
+When the Russian Jewish girl first hears of a trade union, she has
+usually been some years in one of our cities, working in a factory or
+a sweatshop, let us say as a garment-worker. The religious and social
+liberty which she has here learnt to consider her due has stimulated
+her desire for further freedom, while the tremendous industrial
+pressure under which she earns her daily bread stirs the keenest
+resentment. One day patience, Jewish girlish patience, reaches its
+limit. A cut in wages, exhausting overtime, or the insults of an
+overbearing foreman, and an unpremeditated strike results. It may be
+small, poorly managed, and unsuccessful. The next time things may go
+better, and the girls come in touch with a union, and take their first
+lessons in the meaning of collective bargaining. (What is passing in
+the minds of the rank and file at this stage I am not certain. The
+obscurities of their psychology are more difficult to fathom.) But I
+am sure that to the leaders of the young protestants it is not so
+much in the light of a tower of refuge that the trade union presents
+itself, but rather as an instrument by means of which they believe
+that they can control a situation which has become unbearable. As
+happens to many endowed with the gift of leadership, they travel much
+farther than they had any idea of when they set out. As time goes on,
+if they are real leaders, they learn to understand human nature in
+its varied aspects, the human nature of bosses, as well as the human
+nature of their fellow-wage-earners. After a year or two as presidents
+or secretaries of their local, you will hear these fiery-tongued
+little orators preaching endurance, in order to gain an end not
+obtainable today, aye, even advising compromise, they to whom the very
+word compromise had erstwhile been impossible. This implies no loss of
+principle, no paltering with loyalty, but merely putting in practice
+the wisdom of the experienced statesman. Nearly all, sooner or later,
+embrace the socialist philosophy, and many are party members. In that
+philosophy they find a religious sanction in their most determined
+struggles after victory, and unfailing support and consolation in the
+hour of defeat.
+
+As for the rank and file, with them, too, something of the same mental
+processes probably goes on in a minor degree; but they are much longer
+in learning their lesson, and meanwhile are often exceedingly hard to
+direct. They are impulsive beyond belief. It used once to be remarked
+that Jewish girls were the easiest of all to organize during a strike,
+and the hardest of all to hold in the union afterwards. This is
+fortunately not so true today, now that there are a few trained
+leaders of their own race, whom they trust, and who understand their
+moods, and know, better than most Americans, how to handle them.
+
+The alien is forever being resented as an obstacle, even if an
+unconscious one, in the way of organization. Yet as far as women are
+concerned, it is to this group of aliens in particular that is due the
+recent tremendous impulse towards organization among the most poorly
+paid women. In the sewing trades, and in some other trades, such as
+candy-making, it is the American girls who have accepted conditions,
+and allowed matters to drift from bad to worse. It is the foreign
+girl, and especially the Slavic Jewess who has been making the fight
+for higher wages, shorter hours, better shop management, and above
+all, for the right to organize; and she has kept it up, year after
+year, and in city after city, in spite of all expectations to the
+contrary.
+
+One of the indirect benefits of the colossal strikes in the sewing
+trades in which these Jewish girls have played so conspicuous a
+part has been the increasing degree in which those of differing
+nationalities have come to understand one another, as men and women
+having common difficulties and common rights, as all alike members
+of the great working people. Through sore trial many have learnt the
+meaning of "class consciousness," who never heard of the word.
+
+The new spirit is beginning to touch the Italian girl, and as time
+goes on, she, too, will be brought into the fold of unionism. To meet
+with large success, we need as leaders and organizers, Italians, both
+men and women, of the type of Arthur Carotti, as capable and devoted.
+The Italian girl is guarded in her home as is the girl of no other
+race, and this works both for good and for evil. The freedom of the
+streets, accorded so unquestioningly to their girls by the parents of
+other nationalities, is conscientiously denied to the Italian girl. No
+respectable family would permit their daughters to go to any sort of
+an evening gathering, to attend church or dance or union meeting,
+unless accompanied by father, mother or brother. While no one can
+help deeply respecting the principles of family affection and
+responsibility which dictate this code of manners, there is equally no
+blinking the fact that it raises a most serious barrier in the way of
+organizing girls of Italian parentage. Nor on the other hand is it
+of the least avail to protect the girl against the evils of the
+industrial system of which the whole family form a part. In especial
+it does not serve to shield her from the injurious effects of cruel
+overwork. In no class of our city population do we find more of this
+atrocious evil, misnamed homework than among Italian families,
+and whether it is sewing, artificial-flower-or feather-making or
+nut-picking, neither grown daughters nor little children are spared
+here. Along with the mother and under her eye, the whole group
+work day after day, and often far into the night at occupations in
+themselves harmless enough under proper conditions, but ruinous to
+health and happiness when permitted to intrude under the family roof.
+For the wrong of home-work is not to be measured even by the injury
+suffered by the workers themselves. All parasitic trades, such as
+these, lower wages in the open market. The manufacturer is continually
+impelled to cut down wages in his shops to keep pace with the
+competition of the ill-remunerated home-worker.
+
+As I have said above, I believe that every race that has settled down
+here in this America has some special contribution to bestow, which
+will work for good to the whole labor movement. I have instanced the
+case of the Slavic Jewess as one who has certainly arrived. From
+others the gift has still to come. From the Italian girl it will come
+in good time, for they are beginning to enter the unions now, and from
+the lips of their own fellow-countrywomen even Italian mothers will
+learn to accept for their daughters the gospel they will not listen to
+from foreigners like ourselves. The most severely handicapped of all
+the nationalities so far, to my thinking, is the Polish. They are what
+is called pure Slavs, that is, with no Jewish blood. They are peasant
+girls and cannot be better described than they are in a pamphlet
+on "The Girl Employed in Hotels and Restaurants," published by the
+Juvenile Protective League to Chicago.
+
+In these places Polish girls are chosen for the following reasons:
+
+1. Because they come of strong peasant stock, and accomplish a large
+amount of work.
+
+2. They are very thorough in what they do.
+
+3. They are willing to take low wages.
+
+4. They are very submissive, that is, they never protest.
+
+5. They are ignorant of the laws of this country, and are easily
+imposed upon.
+
+6. They never betray their superiors, no matter what they see.
+
+What a scathing indictment of the American people is set forth in this
+brief summing up!
+
+The trades that swallow up these strong, patient, long-enduring
+creatures are work in the meat-canning plants, and dish-washing and
+scrubbing in restaurants and hotels. These really valuable qualities
+of physical strength and teachableness, unbalanced by any sense of
+what is due to themselves, let alone their fellow-workers, prove their
+industrial ruin.
+
+It is only when they are fortunate enough to get into a better class
+of work, and when they chance upon some well-organized establishment
+and are drawn into the union as a matter of course that we find Polish
+girls in unions at all. Intellectually they are not in the running
+with the Russian Jewess and the peasant surroundings of their
+childhood have offered them few advantages. One evening, for instance,
+there were initiated into a glove-workers' local seventeen new Polish
+members. Of these two only were able to read and write English, and of
+the remainder not more than half were able to read and write Polish.
+As to what is to be the later standing and the ultimate contribution
+of the Polish girl, I cannot hazard a guess. I only know that she
+possesses fine qualities which we are not utilizing and which we may
+be obliterating by the cruel treatment so many thousands of Polish
+girls are receiving at our hands.
+
+I cannot see any prospect of organizing them in any reasonable numbers
+at present. The one thing we can do to alleviate their hard lot is to
+secure legislation--legislation for shorter hours and for the minimum
+wage.
+
+Their suspiciousness is perhaps the chief barrier in the way of social
+elevation of the Poles. That Poles can be organized is shown by
+the remarkable success of the Polish National Alliance and kindred
+societies. Their capacity for coöperation is seen in their
+establishment of their own coöperative stores.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE WOMAN ORGANIZER
+
+
+The problems that face the woman organizer are many and complex. They
+are the harder to handle, inasmuch as there is very little assistance
+to be had from any body of tradition on the subject among women
+workers. The movement for organization among women is still so
+inchoate. The woman organizer turns to the more experienced men
+leaders, and finds that often, even with the best will in the world,
+they cannot help her. The difficulties she meets with are, in detail,
+so different from theirs that she has to work out her own solutions
+for herself.
+
+It is indeed a blind alley in which she has so often to move. The
+workers are young and ignorant, therefore, by all odds, they require
+the protection of both legislation and organization. Again, the
+workers are young and ignorant, and therefore they have not learnt the
+necessity for such protection. Their wages are in most cases low,
+too low for decent self-support. But just because their wages are so
+inadequate for bare needs it is in many cases all the more difficult
+to induce them to deduct from such scanty pay the fifty cents a month
+which is the smallest sum upon which any organization can pay its way
+and produce tangible benefits for its members.
+
+Left to her own devices, the solution of her financial difficulties
+which the average girl finds is always to lessen her expenses so as to
+manage on the lessening wage that is inevitable in all trades if not
+resisted. To find a cheaper room, to take one more girl into her room,
+to spend a few cents a day less for food--these are the near-hand
+economies that first present themselves to the girlish mind. This is
+on the economizing side. When it comes to trying to earn more, to work
+longer hours is surely the self-evident way of increasing the contents
+of the weekly pay envelope. The younger and inexperienced the worker,
+the more readily is she fooled into believing that the more work she
+turns out, under a piece-work system, the more money will she earn,
+not only in that week but in the succeeding weeks.
+
+To this child-like and simple code of worldly wisdom and of ethics,
+the policy advised by the organizer is indeed entirely foreign. To
+some very good girls, indeed, it seems ethically wrong not to work
+your hardest, or, as they say, do your best, especially when you are
+urged to. To more, it seems a silly, not to say impossible plan, not
+to try and earn as big a wage as possible. But the organizer comes in
+and she approaches the question from the other end. She does not talk
+about a standard of living, but she preaches it all the time. It is
+her business and her vocation to bring the girls to see that the first
+step towards getting more wages is to want more wages, to ask for more
+wages, and then, seeing that the single girl has no power of bringing
+about this result by herself, to show them that they must band
+together with the determination to make their wage square with their
+ideas of living, and not think that they must forever square their
+mode of living with their wage.
+
+In the acceptance into the mind of this idea is involved a complete
+revolution.
+
+It is in making of this ideal theory a living force, by helping girls
+to put it into practice in everyday shop life that the girl organizer
+has her special work cut out for her. And here she necessarily
+contrasts favorably with the average man organizer when he tries to
+deal with girls, because she understands the girl's work and the
+girl's problems better, and the girl knows that she does.
+
+I have taken wages as the prime subject of the organizer's activities
+only because wages form the crux of the whole question. There, without
+any deceiving veils falling between, we come close up to the real
+point at issue between the employer and the employed, between the
+employé and the community, the standard of living that is possible,
+as measured by the employé's share of the product of labor. But in
+practice, money wages form only one element of the standard of living
+problem, although the one around which least confusion gathers.
+
+Whatever form the demands of labor organizations may take, the essence
+of the demand is the same: better terms for the worker always, however
+temporary circumstances or technical details may obscure the issue.
+
+That this holds of reductions in hours of work has become a truism
+among trade unionists, who recognize that any reduction of hours
+of work eventually, though not perhaps immediately, results in a
+readjustment of wages, whether week-workers or piece-workers or both
+be involved, till the original money wage at any rate is reached,
+supposing, of course, that no other influence enters in as an element
+to lessen rates of pay.
+
+The question of equal pay for equal work involves indeed much more
+complicated issues, as regards both the individual worker and the
+whole body of women workers in the trade or branch of the trade
+affected. But even here, the underlying purpose is the same, the
+assuring, to the total number of workers whose labor has gone into the
+production, of a certain amount of finished marketable work, of an
+increased, or at the least, not a lessened share of the product of
+their toil. It is not to be questioned that if women are permitted
+to work at the same operations as men for a lesser remuneration, the
+man's wage must go down. In addition, he may, even at the lowered
+rate, lose his job, as the employer may cherish the not altogether
+groundless hope that he may cut down the women's wage yet further and
+employ yet more women, and yet fewer men.
+
+In the same way the provision of better sanitary conditions, the
+fencing off of dangerous machinery, the prohibition usually of
+dangerous processes or of the use of dangerous materials, such as lead
+or white phosphorus, all involve an addition small or large, to the
+cost of manufacture. If, however, there be in all these instances an
+increase in the cost of manufacture there are also results to the
+well-being of the workers, which, if they could be measured in money,
+would be out of all proportion to the money cost to the employer or
+to the purchasing community. But again, it is the maintenance of the
+workers' ideal standard of living which causes the trade union to
+demand that their share of the product of their toil shall not be
+lessened by needless or avoidable risks to life or limb or health.
+
+I have taken these demands in the order, in which, generally speaking,
+the organizer can induce the young girl worker to consider them in her
+own case. Better pay makes by far the easiest appeal, whether it be to
+the very young girl with her eager desire for a good time or to her
+older sister upon whom, quite surely, years have laid some of life's
+increasing burdens.
+
+Next in order of attractiveness came shorter hours, especially if the
+wage-earners can be assured that wages will stay where they are.
+
+But nothing short of both years and trade experience, apparently, will
+impress upon the worker all that is implied in those words that we
+write so easily and pronounce so glibly--sanitary conditions.
+
+The young girls have all the blessed, happy-go-lucky care-free-ness
+of children, the children they are in years. They start out on their
+wage-earning career with the abounding high spirits and the stores of
+vitality of extreme youth. They are proud of their new capacity to
+earn, to begin to keep themselves and to help the mother and the
+others, and at first it does not seem to them as if anything could
+break them down or kill them. They do not at first associate bad air
+with headaches or sore throats, nor long standing with backaches, nor
+following the many needles of a power sewing-machine with eye trouble.
+The dangerous knife-edge on the revolving wheel, or the belting
+that may catch hair or clothing is to them only an item in the
+shop-furnishings, that they hope may not catch them napping.
+
+All along the progress of labor organization has been exceedingly slow
+among women as compared with men, and has been far indeed from keeping
+pace with the rate at which increasing numbers of women have
+poured into the industrial field. So that it was not strange that
+well-meaning labor men, judging from personal experiences or arguing
+from analogy, came to the conclusion, paralyzing indeed to their own
+strivings after an all-inclusive, nation-wide organization of the
+workers, that women could not be organized. Or if such a labor man did
+not like to put it quite so bluntly, even to himself, he would shake
+his head, and regretfully remark that women did not make good trade
+unionists. If someone less experienced or more hopeful came along with
+plans for including or for helping women, the veteran trade unionist
+had too often a number of facts to bring forward, the bald accuracy of
+which was not to be disputed, of how in his own trade the women were
+scabbing on the men by working for a lower wage, or that they were so
+indifferent about the meetings, or worse still, how that women's local
+did so fine during the strike, and then just went to pieces, and now
+there wasn't any local at all.
+
+"Facts are not to be explained away," he would conclude. No, they are
+not to be explained away, but some facts may be explained, and not
+unfrequently the explanation is based upon some other fact, which has
+been overlooked. With the present question, the one important fact
+which explains a good deal is the youth of so many women workers. This
+by no means disposes of each particular situation with its special
+difficulties, but it does help to explain the general tendency among
+the women to be neglectful of meetings and to let their local go to
+pieces, which so distracts our friend.
+
+This new competitor with men, whom we think of and speak of as a
+woman, is in many cases not a woman at all, but only a girl, very
+often only a child. From this one fact arises a whole class, of
+conditions, with resulting problems and difficulties totally different
+from any the man trade unionist has to deal with among men.
+
+The first and most palpable difficulty is that the majority of workers
+are yet at the play age. They are still at the stage when play is
+one of the rightful conditions under which they carry on their main
+business of growing up. Many of them are not ready to be in the
+factory at all. Certainly not for eight, ten or twelve hours a day.
+And so those young things, after an unthankful and exhausting day's
+toil, are not going to attend meetings unless these can be made
+attractive to them. And the meeting that may appear entirely right and
+even attractive to the man of thirty or forty will be tiresome and
+boring past endurance to the girl of sixteen or eighteen.
+
+Then there are other huge difficulties to encounter. The very first
+principles of coöperative action and mutual responsibility are unknown
+to the great majority of the young workers. Too rarely does it
+happen, that in her own home the girl has learnt anything about trade
+unionism, at least trade unionism for women. The greater number of
+girls are not the daughters of factory mothers. The mother, whether
+American or foreign-born, grew up herself in simpler conditions, and
+does not begin to comprehend the utterly changed environment in which
+her little daughter has to work when she enters a modern factory. If
+American, she may; have married just out of her father's home, and if
+foreign-born she may have been tending silkworms or picking grapes
+in Italy, or at field-work in Poland or Hungary. Very different
+occupations these from turning raw silk into ribbon or velvet in an
+Eastern mill, or labelling fruit-jars in an Illinois cannery.
+
+Again, neither in the public nor in the parochial school are the
+workers-to-be taught anything concerning the labor movement or the
+meaning of collective bargaining. Even if they should have attained
+the eighth grade with its dizzy heights of learning, the little
+teaching they have received in civics has not touched upon either of
+the most vital problems of our day, the labor movement or the woman
+movement.
+
+The mere youth, however, of the girl workers is not in itself the
+chief or the most, insuperable difficulty. If these girls were boys
+we might look forward to their growing up in the trade, gaining
+experience and becoming ever more valuable elements in the union
+membership. But after a few years the larger percentage of the girls
+marry and are lost to the union and to unionism for good. Nay, a girl
+is often such a temporary hand that she does not even remain out
+her term of working years in one trade, but drifts into and out of
+half-a-dozen unskilled or semi-skilled occupations, and works for
+twenty different employers in the course of a few years. The head of a
+public-school social center made it her business to inquire of fifty
+girls, all over sixteen, and probably none over eighteen how long each
+had held her present job. Two only had been over a year at the one
+place. The rest accounted for such short periods as four months, six
+weeks, two weeks, at paper-box-making, candy-packing or book-binding
+with, of course, dull seasons and periods of unemployment between.
+
+In the organized trades conditions are not quite so exasperating, but
+even in these the short working term of the girl employé means an
+utter lack of continuity in the membership of the trade and therefore
+of the union. The element of permanence in men's organizations is in
+great measure the result of the fact that men, whether they remain in
+one particular trade or shift to another, are at least in industry for
+life as wage-earners, unless indeed they pass on into the employing or
+wage-paying class.
+
+But instead of seeing in the temporary employment of so many girls
+only another reason why they need the protection and the educational
+advantages of organization, we have been too contented to let ill
+alone, and all alike, the girl, the workingman, and the community are
+suffering for this inertia.
+
+In this connection the first and most important matter to take up is
+that of women organizers, for women workers will never be enrolled in
+the labor movement of America in adequate numbers except through women
+organizers. And where are these today?
+
+A most emphatic presentation of the practical reasons why the man
+organizer can rarely handle effectively young women workers, and why
+therefore women are absolutely necessary if the organization on any
+large scale is to be successful, was made before the Convention of the
+American Federation of Labor in Toronto in 1909.
+
+The speaker was Mr. Thomas Rumsey of Toledo. He described his own
+helplessness before the problem. He told, how, to begin with, it was
+not possible for a man to have that readiness of access to the girl
+workers when in their own homes and in their leisure hours which the
+woman organizer readily obtained.
+
+"If a girl is living at home," he said, "it is not quite, so awkward,
+but if she is in lodgings I can't possibly ask to see her in her own
+room. If I talk to her at all it will be out on the street, which is
+not pleasant, especially if it is snowing or freezing or blowing a
+gale. It is not under these conditions that a girl is likely to see
+the use of an organization or be attracted by its happier and more
+social side." Then he went on to say that he himself often did not
+know what best to say to his girl when he had caught her. He was
+ignorant, perhaps almost as ignorant as an outsider, of the conditions
+under which she did her work. He might know or be able to find out her
+wages and hours; he might guess that there was fining and speeding up,
+but he would know nothing of the details, and on any sanitary question
+or any moral question he would be utterly at sea. He could neither
+put the questions nor get the answers, nor in any way win the
+girl's confidence. Therefore, Mr. Rumsey concluded, if the American
+Federation of Labor is going to acknowledge its responsibilities in
+the great field of labor propaganda among women it must seriously take
+up the question of organizing women by women.
+
+On a similar basis of reasoning it is easy to see that in the great
+majority of cases the successful organization of the women in any
+particular trade can be best carried out by one of themselves, a
+woman from their own trade. Not only do the girls believe that she
+understands their difficulties better than anyone else, but in most
+instances she does indeed bring to her work that exact knowledge of
+details and processes which gives the girls confidence that she
+can fairly state their case, that she will not, through technical
+ignorance, ask for impossibilities, nor on the other hand permit
+herself to be browbeaten by a foreman or superintendent because
+she does not know anything about the quality of material used, the
+peculiarities of a machine or the local or seasonal needs of the
+trade. Employers and managers also quickly recognize when organizers
+know whereof they talk. They, like the employés, realize that with
+such competent and efficient organizers or business agents they, too,
+are on firmer ground, even though they may not always acknowledge it.
+
+To these sound general rules there are exceptions. There are cases
+where a man organizer can be invaluable, especially in some great,
+even if temporary, crisis. Also, there are in the American labor
+movement a few women who possess a genius for organizing on the very
+broadest lines. So profound is their sympathy with all their sisters,
+so thorough their grasp of general principles, so quick their
+perception of details, so intimate their knowledge of human nature and
+so sound and cool their judgment that they can be sent far afield
+into trades quite foreign to those of which they have had personal
+experience, and make a success of it. But such as these are rare and,
+when found, to be prized and cherished. The ordinary everyday way of
+drawing the women workers into the union and into the labor movement
+would be to have in every trade women from that trade at work all
+the time organizing their fellow-workers and holding them in the
+organization.
+
+When the preliminary difficulties of organization have been met and
+overcome, when the new union has been set on its feet or the old one
+strengthened, there remains for the girl leader to keep her forces
+together.
+
+The commonest complaint of all is that women members of a trade union
+do not attend their meetings. It is indeed a very serious difficulty
+to cope with, and the reasons for this poor attendance and want of
+interest in union affairs have to be fairly faced.
+
+At first glance it seems curious that the meetings of a mixed local
+composed of both men and girls, should have for the girls even less
+attraction than meetings of their own sex only. But so it is. A
+business meeting of a local affords none of the lively social
+intercourse of a gathering for pleasure or even of a class for
+instruction. The men, mostly the older men, run the meeting and often
+are the meeting. Their influence may be out of all proportion to their
+numbers. It is they who decide the place where the local shall meet
+and the hour at which members shall assemble. The place is therefore
+often over a saloon, to which many girls naturally and rightly object.
+Sometimes it is even in a disreputable district. The girls may prefer
+that the meeting should begin shortly after closing time so that they
+do not need to go home and return, or have to loiter about for two or
+three hours. They like meetings to be over early. The men mostly name
+eight o'clock as the time of beginning, but business very often will
+not start much before nine. Then, too, the men feel that they have
+come together to talk, and talk they do while they allow the real
+business to drag. Of course, the girls are not interested in long
+discussions on matters they do not understand and in which they have
+no part and naturally they stay away, and so make matters worse, for
+the men feel they are doing their best for the interests of the union,
+resent the women's indifference, and are more sure than ever that
+women do not make good unionists.
+
+Among the remedies proposed for this unsatisfactory state of affairs
+is compulsory attendance at a certain number of meetings per year
+under penalty of a fine or even losing of the card. (A very drastic
+measure this last and risky, unless the trade has the closed shop.)
+
+Where the conditions of the trade permit it by far the best plan is to
+have the women organized in separate locals. The meetings of women and
+girls only draw better attendances, give far more opportunity for all
+the members to take part in the business, and beyond all question form
+the finest training ground for the women leaders who inconsiderable
+numbers are needed so badly in the woman's side of the trade-union
+movement today.
+
+Those trade-union women who advocate mixed locals for every trade
+which embraces both men and women are of two types. Some are mature,
+perhaps elderly women, who have been trade unionists all their lives,
+who have grown up in the same locals with men, who have in the long
+years passed through and left behind their period of probation and
+training, and to whose presence and active coöperation the men have
+become accustomed. These women are able to express their views in
+public, can put or discuss a motion or take the chair as readily as
+their brothers. The other type is represented by those individual
+women or girls in whom exceptional ability takes the place of
+experience, and who appreciate the educational advantages of working
+along with experienced trade-union leaders. I have in my mind at this
+moment one girl over whose face comes all the rapture of the keen
+student as she explains how much she has learnt from working with men
+in their meetings. She ardently advocates mixed locals for all. For
+the born captain the plea is sound. Always she is quick enough to
+profit by the men's experience, by their ways of managing conferences
+and balancing advantages and losses in presenting a wage-scale or
+accepting an agreement. At the same time she is not so overwhelmed by
+their superiority, born of long practice in handling such situations,
+but that she retains her own independence of judgment and clearness
+of vision, and at the fitting moment will rise and place the woman's
+point of view before her male co-workers. Oh yes, for herself she is
+right, and for the coming woman she is right, too. But the risk is
+rather that she and such as she pressing on in their individual
+advancement will outstep the rank and file of their sisters at the
+present stage while trade unionism among women is still so young a
+movement, and one which under the most hopeful circumstances will
+have to fulfill for many years the task of receiving, teaching and
+assimilating vast numbers of young and quite untrained, in many cases
+non-English-speaking girls.
+
+The mixed local for all mixed trades is, I believe, the ultimate
+goal which women trade unionists ought to keep in mind. But with the
+average girl today the plan does not work. The mixed local does
+not, as a general rule, offer the best training-class for new girl
+recruits, in which they may obtain their training in collective
+bargaining or coöperative effort. To begin with, they are often so
+absurdly young that they stand in the position of children put into
+a class at school two or three grades ahead of their capacity and
+expected to do work for which they have had no preparation through the
+earlier grades. Many of the discussions that go on are quite above
+the girls' heads. And even when a young girl has something to say and
+wishes to say it, want of practice and timidity often keep her silent.
+It is to be regretted, too, that some trade-union men are far from
+realizing either the girls' needs in their daily work or their
+difficulties in meetings, and lecture, reprove or bully, where they
+ought to listen and persuade.
+
+The girls, as a rule, are not only happier in their own women's local,
+but they have the interest of running the meetings themselves. They
+choose their own hall and fix their own time of meeting. Their
+officers are of their own selecting and taken from among themselves.
+The rank and, file, too, get the splendid training that is conferred
+when persons actually and not merely nominally work together for a
+common end. Their introduction to the great problems of labor is
+through their practical understanding and handling of those problems
+as they encounter them in the everyday difficulties of the shop and
+the factory and as dealt with when they come up before the union
+meeting or have to be settled in bargaining with an employer.
+
+But there are other and broader reasons still why it is women who
+should in the main be the leaders and teachers of women in the trade
+union, that newest and best school for the working-women. Women have
+always been the teachers of the race. It was in the far-back ages with
+motherhood as their normal school that primitive women learnt their
+profession and handed on to their daughters their slowly acquired
+skill. Whenever woman has been left to self-development on her own
+lines her achievements have always been in the constructive direction.
+Always she has been busy helping to make some young thing grow,
+whether the object of her solicitous attention were a wild grass, a
+baby, or an art. What does education mean but the drawing forth of
+latent qualities? Is not the best teacher the one who calls these
+forth? Are not women teachers, trained, wise, and patient, urgently
+needed in the labor movement of our day? Just now, when the number of
+young girls in industry is so great, the girls need them, we know.
+Possibly the men also would be the gainers through their influence.
+The labor movement is a constant fight, it is true, but it is also a
+school of development. In the near future we hope it will mean to
+all workers even more than a discipline, a storehouse of culture, a
+provider of joy and of pleasure, of care in sickness, of support in
+adversity, and best of all, a preparation for and a hastener on of
+that coöperative commonwealth for which more and more of us ever watch
+and pray.
+
+The need for the woman organizer admitted, the demand for women
+organizers becomes pressing. And where are they to be found? The reply
+is that they are not to be found, not yet. If the organizers were
+to be obtained such requests would be increased fourfold. But the
+material is ready to hand. The born organizer, with initiative,
+resource, courage and patience exists in every trade, in every city,
+and she comes of every race. But on the one hand she is untrained, and
+on the other cannot stop to receive training unless for a little while
+she is relieved from the pressing necessity of earning her living.
+
+The problem of how to provide women organizers in response to the
+demand for such workers, with its solution, was admirably put by Mrs.
+Raymond Robins, in her presidential address before the Fourth Biennial
+Convention of the National Women's Trade Union League in St. Louis, in
+June, 1913, when she said:
+
+The best organizers without question are the trade-union girls. Many
+a girl capable of leadership and service is held within the ranks
+because neither she as an individual nor her organization has money
+enough to set her free for service. Will it be possible for the
+National Women's Trade Union League to establish a training-school
+for women organizers, even though in the beginning it may be only a
+training-class, offering every trade-union girl a scholarship for a
+year?
+
+The course finally outlined included a knowledge of the principles
+of trade unionism, and their practical application in field-work, a
+knowledge of labor legislation, of parliamentary law, and practice in
+writing and speaking.
+
+In the following year, 1914, the League was able to give several
+months of training to three trade-union girls. Cordial coöperation
+was received from both the University of Chicago and North-western
+University. For the present no further students have been received,
+because of the need of larger financial resources to maintain classes
+in session regularly.
+
+The need for a training-school is attested by the constant demands
+for women organizers received at the headquarters of the League from
+central labor bodies and men's unions, and by the example of the
+thorough training given to young women taking up work in other fields
+somewhat analogous. Such a school for women might very well prove in
+this country the nucleus of university extension work in the labor
+movement for both men and women, similar to that which has been so
+successfully inaugurated in Great Britain, and which is making headway
+in Canada and in Australia.
+
+At the Seattle Convention of the American Federation of Labor held in
+November, 1914, a resolution was passed levying an assessment of one
+cent upon the entire membership to organize women. Efforts were mainly
+concentrated upon workers in the textile industry, to which special
+organizers, both men and women, were assigned. There is no trade
+which has worse conditions, and consequently wages and regularity
+of employment are immediately affected adversely by any industrial
+depression.
+
+Women in the labor movement will have to make their own mistakes
+and earn their own experience. I have dwelt elsewhere upon the many
+advantages that accrue to women and girls from belonging to an
+organization so vital and so bound up with some of our most
+fundamental needs, as the trade union. On the very surface it
+is evident that in such a body working-women learn to be more
+business-like, to work together in harmony, to share loyally the
+results of their united action, whether these spell defeat or success.
+If they err, they promptly learn of their mistakes from their,
+fellow-workers, men or women, from employers, and from their families.
+
+Here, however, is perhaps the place to call attention to one markedly
+feminine tendency, which should be discouraged in these early days
+lest in process of time it might even gain the standing of a virtue,
+and that is the inclination among the leaders to indulge in unlimited
+overwork in all their labor activities. Labor men overwork too, but
+not, as a rule, to the same degree, nor nearly so frequently as women.
+
+Do not mistake. Women do not fall into this error because they are
+trade unionists, or because they are inspired by the labor movement or
+by the splendid ideals or by the aspiration after a free womanhood.
+
+No! Trade-union and socialist and suffrage women overwork because they
+are women, because through long ages the altruistic side has been
+overdeveloped. They have brought along with them into their public
+work the habit of self-sacrifice, and that overconscientiousness
+in detail which their foremothers acquired during the countless
+generations when obedience, self-immolation and self-obliteration were
+considered women's chief duties. Personally these good sisters are
+blameless. But that does not in the least alter the hard fact that
+such overdevotion is an uneconomical expenditure of nervous energy.
+
+When a wiser onlooker, wise with the onlooker's wisdom, urges
+moderation even in overwork, there is put forward the pathetic plea,
+variously worded:
+
+"So much to do, so little time to do it."
+
+I have never heard that hard-to-be-met argument so well answered as by
+a woman physician, who gave these reasons to her patient, one of the
+overdevoted ilk.
+
+"Agreed," she said, "there is so much to do that you cannot possibly
+do it all, nor the half, nor the tenth, nor the fiftieth part of it.
+Furthermore, the struggle is going on for a long, long time, and there
+are occasions ahead when your aid will be needed as badly or more
+badly than today. And when that hour comes, if you do not take care
+of yourself now, you will not be there to furnish the help others
+require. Not that I think you are dangerously ill, but I'm reminding
+you that, at the rate you are going, your working years, the years
+during which your energy and your initiative will last, are going to
+be few, so pull up and go slow!
+
+"You are a leader, and you are so, partly at least, because you are a
+highly trained person. It has taken many years to train you up to this
+pitch of efficiency. You can handle agreements, at a pinch you can
+draft a bill. You are a favorite and influential speaker. You are
+invaluable in a strike, and you have often prevented strikes. We all
+want you to go on doing all these things. Now, tell me, which is
+the most valuable to the whole labor movement, a few years of your
+activity, or many years?"
+
+That puts the matter in a nutshell.
+
+I do not wish to overlook the fact that there are exceptional
+occasions when overwork to the extent of breakdown or even death is
+justified, or to have it supposed that I think mere life our most
+valuable possession, or that there may not be many a time when truly
+to save your life is to lose it. But I repeat that habitual, everyday
+overwork, is uneconomical, injurious to the cause we serve, and likely
+to lessen rather than heighten the efficiency of the indispensable
+leaders when the supreme test comes.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE TRADE UNION IN OTHER FIELDS
+
+
+When we begin! to survey the vast field of industry covered by
+different occupations we get the same sense of confusion that comes
+to us when we look at an ant-heap. The workers are going hither and
+thither, with apparently no ordered plan, with no unity or community
+of purpose that we can discover. But those who have given time and
+patience to the task have been able to read order even in the chaos of
+the ant-hill. And so may we, with our far more complex human ant-hill,
+if we will set to work. The material for such a study lies ready to
+our hand in bewildering abundance; but to make any practical studies
+which shall aid the workers and the thinking public to follow the line
+of least resistance in raising standards of wages and of status as
+well will be the work of many years and of many minds. Even today
+there are some general indications of how the workers are going to
+settle their own problems.
+
+Some foreign critics and some critics at home are very severe upon the
+backwardness of the labor movement in the United States, and in
+these criticisms there is a large element of truth. Yet there is one
+difficulty under which we labor on this continent, which these critics
+do not take into consideration. That is the primal one of the immense
+size of the country, along with all the secondary difficulties
+involved in this first one. There has never been any other country
+even attempting a task so stupendous as ours--to organize, to make
+one, to obtain good conditions for today, to insure as good and better
+conditions for tomorrow, for the wage-earning ones out of a population
+of over ninety millions spread over three million square miles. And
+with these millions of human beings of so many different races, with
+no common history and often no common language, this particular task
+has fallen to the lot of no other nation on the face of this earth.
+Efforts at organization of the people and by the people, are
+perpetually being undermined. Capitalism is nationally fairly well
+organized, so that there has been all the time more and more agreement
+among the great lords of finance, not to trespass on one another's
+preserves. But it is not so with the workers. Even in trades where
+there exists a formal national organization, there will be towns and
+states where it will either be non-existent or extremely weak, so that
+workers, especially the unskilled, as they drift from town to town in
+search of work, tend to pass out of, rather than into, the union of
+their trade. And thus members of every trade organization live in
+dread of the inroad into their city or their state of crowds of
+unorganized competitors for their particular kind of employment. Why,
+if it were Great Britain or Germany, by the time we had organized one
+state, we should have organized a whole country.
+
+But the big country is ours, and the big task must be shouldered.
+
+It is only natural that trade-union organization should have
+progressed furthest in those occupations which, as industries, are the
+most highly developed. The handicrafts of old, the weaving and the
+carving and the pottery, have through a thousand inventions become
+specialized, and the work of the single operative has been divided
+up into a hundred processes. These are the conditions, and this the
+environment under which the workers most frequently organize. The
+operations have become more or less defined and standardized, and the
+operatives are more readily grouped and classified. Also, even amid
+all the noise and clatter of the factory, they have opportunity for
+becoming acquainted, sometimes while working together, or at the noon
+hour, or when going to or coming from work. There are still few enough
+women engaged in factory work who have come into trade unions, but the
+path has at least been cleared, both by the numbers of men who have
+shown the way, and by the increasing independence of women themselves.
+Similar reasoning applies to the workers in the culinary trades. These
+also are the modern, specialized forms of the old domestic arts of
+cooking and otherwise preparing and serving food. The workers, the
+cooks and the waitresses, have their separate, allotted tasks; they
+also have opportunities of even closer association than the factory
+operatives. These opportunities, which may be used among the young
+folks to exchange views on the latest nickel show, to compare the
+last boss with the present one, may also, among the older ones, mean
+talking over better wages and hours and how to get them, and here may
+spring up the beginnings of organization.
+
+The number of women organized into trade unions is still
+insignificant, compared with those unreached by even a glimmering of
+knowledge as to what trade unionism means. The movement will not only
+have to become stronger numerically in the trades it already includes.
+It must extend in other directions, taking in the huge army of the
+unskilled and the semi-skilled, outside of those trades, so as
+to cover the fruit-pickers in the fields and the packers in the
+canneries, the paper-box-makers, the sorters of nuts and the knotters
+of feathers, those who pick the cotton from the plant, as well as
+those who make the cotten into cloth. Another group yet to be enrolled
+are the hundreds of thousands of girls in stores, engaged in selling
+what the girls in factories have made, and still other large groups
+of girls in mercantile offices who are indirectly helping on the same
+business of exchange of goods for cash, and cash for goods, and who
+are just as truly part of the industrial world and of commercial life.
+But the pity is that the girl serving at the counter and the girl
+operating the typewriter do not know this.
+
+Take two other great classes of women, who have to be considered and
+reckoned with in any wide view of the wage-earning woman. These are
+nurses and teachers. The product of their toil is nothing that can be
+seen or handled, nothing that can be readily estimated in dollars and
+cents. But it must none the less be counted to their credit in any
+estimate of the national wealth, for it is to be read in terms of
+sound bodies and alert minds.
+
+Large numbers of women and girls are musicians, actresses and other
+theatrical employés. The labor movement needs them all, and, although
+few of them realize it, they need the labor movement. These are
+professions with great prizes, but the average worker makes no big
+wage, has no assurance of steadiness of employment, of sick pay when
+out of work, or of such freedom while working as shall bring out the
+very best that is in her.
+
+In almost all of these occupations are to be found the beginnings
+of organization on trade-union lines. The American Federation of
+Musicians is a large and powerful body, of such standing in the
+profession that the entire membership of the Symphony Orchestras in
+all the large cities of the United States and Canada (with the single
+exception of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) belongs to it. Women, so
+far, although admitted to the Federation, have had no prominent part
+in its activities.
+
+Nurses and attendants in several of the state institutions of Illinois
+have during the last two years formed unions. Already they have had
+hours shortened from the old irregular schedule of twelve, fourteen
+and even sixteen hours a day to an eight-hour workday for all, as far
+as practicable. The State Board is also entirely favorable to concede
+higher wages, one day off in seven, and an annual vacation of two
+weeks on pay, but cannot carry these recommendations out without an
+increased appropriation from the legislature.
+
+There are now eight small associations of stenographers and
+bookkeepers and other office employés, one as far west as San
+Francisco, while there is at least one court reporters' union.
+
+The various federations of school-teachers have worked to raise school
+and teaching standards as well as their own financial position. They
+have besides, owing to the preponderance of women in the teaching
+profession, made a strong point of the justice of equal pay for equal
+work. Women teachers are perhaps in a better position to make this
+fight for all their sex than any other women.
+
+The fact that so many bodies of teachers have one after another
+affiliated with the labor movement has had a secondary result in
+bringing home to teachers the needs of the children, the disadvantages
+under which so many of them grow up, and still more the handicap under
+which most children enter industry. So it has come about that the
+teaching body in several cities has been roused to plead the cause of
+the workers' children, and therefore of the workers, and has brought
+much practical knowledge and first-hand information before health
+departments, educational authorities, and legislators.
+
+Yet another angle from which the organization of teachers has to be
+considered is that they are actually, if not always technically,
+public employés. Every objection that can be raised against the
+organization of public employés, if valid at all, is valid here. Every
+reason that can be urged why public employés should be able to give
+collective expression to their ideas and their wishes has force here.
+
+The domestic servant, as we know her, is but a survival in culture
+from an earlier time, and more primitive environment. As a personal
+attendant, with no limitation of hours, without defined and
+standardized duties, and taking out part of her wages in the form of
+board and lodging, also at no standardized valuation, she will have to
+be improved out of existence altogether.
+
+On the other hand as a skilled worker, she fills an important function
+in the community, satisfying permanent human needs, preparing food to
+support our bodies, and making clean and beautiful the homes wherein
+we dwell. Surely humanity is not so stupid that arrangements cannot be
+planned by which domestic workers can have their own homes, like
+other people, hours of leisure, like other workers, and organizations
+through which they may express themselves. The main difficulty in
+the immediate future is that the very reason why organization is
+so urgently needed by domestic workers is the reason why it is so
+difficult to form organizations, the individual isolation in which the
+girls live and work. The desire for common action assuredly is there;
+one little group after another are meeting and talking over their
+difficulties, and planning how they can overcome them. The obstacles
+in the way of forming unions of domestic workers are tremendous. What
+such groups need, above all, is a union headquarters, with comfortable
+and convenient rooms, in which girls could meet their friends during
+their times off, or in which they could just rest, if they wanted to,
+for many have no friend's house to go to during their precious free
+days. Such a headquarters should conduct an employment agency. Other
+activities would probably grow out of such a center, and the workers
+coöperating would help towards the solving of that domestic problem
+which is their concern even more intimately than it is that of those
+whom, as things are, they so unwillingly serve. That the finest type
+of women are already awake, and nearing the stage when they themselves
+recognize the need of organization, is evident from the fact that
+in Chicago, Buffalo and Seattle, there lately sprang up almost
+simultaneously, small associations of household workers formed to
+secure regular hours and better living conditions.
+
+There is no class of women or girls more urgently in need of a radical
+change in their economic condition than department-store clerks. To
+this need even the public has of late become somewhat awakened,
+thanks mainly to a troop of investigators and to the writers in the
+magazines, who on the one hand have roused nation-wide horror by means
+of revelations regarding the white-slave traffic, and on the other
+have brought to that same national audience painful enlightenment as
+to the chronic starvation of both soul and body endured by so many
+brave and patient young creatures, who on four, five or six dollars
+a week just manage to exist, but who in so doing, are cheated of all
+that makes life worth living in the present, and are disinherited of
+any prospect of home, health and happiness in the future.
+
+This story has been told again and again. Yet the public has not yet
+learned to relate it to any effectual remedy. Undoubtedly organization
+has done a great deal for this class in other countries, notably in
+England and in Germany, and in this country also, in the few cities
+where it has been brought about. But meanwhile their numbers are
+increasing, and it hardly seems human for us to wait while all these
+young lives are being ruined in the hope that a few years hence the
+department-store clerks succeeding them may be able to save themselves
+through organization, when there is another remedy at hand. That
+remedy is legislation to cover thoroughly hours, wages and conditions
+of work. No one suggests depending exclusively on laws. One reason,
+probably, why the freeing of the negro slave has been so often merely
+a nominal freeing is because he was able to play so small a part
+himself in the gaining of his freedom. It was a gift, truly, from the
+master race. But no one, surely, would use that argument in reference
+to children, and an immense proportion of the department-store
+employés are but children, children between fourteen and eighteen,
+and in some states much younger. One hears of occasional instances
+in which even children have banded together and gone on strike.
+School-children have done it. The little button-sewers of Muscatine,
+Iowa, formed a juvenile union during the long strike of 1911. But
+these are such exceptional instances that they can hardly count in
+normal times. And that such a large body of children and very young
+girls are included among department-store employés adds immensely to
+the difficulty of gaining over the grown-up women to organization.
+
+[Illustration: A BINDERY
+
+Hand folders on platform. Machine folder and hand gatherers below.]
+
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ONE OF THE LARGEST AND BEST EQUIPPED WAIST
+AND CLOAK FACTORIES IN NEW YORK CITY]
+
+Perhaps at some future time children may mature mentally earlier. If
+along with this, education is more efficient, and the civic duty of a
+common responsibility for the good of all is taught universally in our
+schools, even the child at fourteen may become class-conscious, and
+willing to fight and struggle for a common aim. But if that day
+ever comes, it will be in the far future, and let us hope that then
+childish energies may be free to find other channels of expression and
+childish coöperation be exerted for happier aims. The child of today
+is often temporarily willful and disobedient, but on the whole he (and
+more often she) is pathetically patient and long-suffering under all
+sorts of hardships and injustices, and has no idea of anything like an
+industrial rebellion. Indeed overwork and ill-usage have upon children
+the markedly demoralizing effect of cowing them permanently, so that
+in oppressing a child you do more than deprive him of his childhood,
+you weaken what ought to be the backbone of his maturity. But improve
+conditions, whether by law or otherwise, and you will have a more
+independent "spunky" child, a better prospect of having him, when
+grown up, a more wholesomely natural rebel. Indeed more or less, this
+applies to human beings of any age.
+
+As regards the minimum wage, the objection raised by certain among the
+conservative labor leaders has been that it will retard organization
+and check independence of spirit. This reasoning seems quite academic,
+in view of the fact that it is the most oppressed workers who are
+usually the least able and willing to assert themselves. Give them
+shorter hours or better wages, and they will soon be pleading for
+still shorter hours and yet higher wages. Wherever the regulation
+of wages, through that most democratic method, that of wages boards
+composed of representatives of workers and employers, has been
+attempted, organization has been encouraged, and this plan of
+legalized collective bargaining has been applied to trade after trade.
+In Victoria, Australia, the birthplace of the system, and the state
+where it has been longest in force, and more fully developed than
+anywhere else, the number of trades covered has grown in less than
+twenty years from the four experimental trades of shoemaking, baking,
+various departments of the clothing trades and furniture-making to 141
+occupations, including such varied employments as engravers, plumbers,
+miners and clerical workers.
+
+It is hardly necessary to say that minimum wages boards in Australia
+control the wages of men as well as of women. This question, however,
+does not enter into practical labor statesmanship in the United States
+today, but the minimum wage for women is a very live issue, and its
+introduction in state after state is supported by the working-women,
+both speaking as individuals and through their organizations.
+
+The objections of employers to any regulation of wages is partly
+economic, as they fear injury to trade, a fear not sustained by
+Australian experience, or by the experience of employers in trades
+in this country, in which wages have been raised and are largely
+controlled by strong labor organizations. In especial, employers
+object to an unequal burden imposed upon the state or states first
+experimenting with wages boards. This has no more validity than a
+similar objection raised against any and all interference between
+employer and employé, whether it be limitation of hours, workmen's
+compensation acts or any other industrial legislation. It is only that
+another adjustment has to be made, one of the many that any trade
+and any employer has always to be making to suit slightly changing
+circumstances. And often the adjustment is much less, and the
+advantage to the employer arising from having more efficient and
+contented employés greater than anticipated. Competition is then not
+for the cheapest worker, but for the most efficient.
+
+Public responsibility for social and economic justice is likely to
+be quickened and maintained by the very existence of these permanent
+boards created not so much to remedy acute evils as to establish in
+the industry conditions more nearly equitable.
+
+It has ever been found that in regard to ordinary factory legislation,
+organized employés were the best inspectors to see that the law was
+enforced. This principle holds good in even a more marked degree,
+where the representatives of the workers have themselves a say in the
+decision, as is the case during the long sessions of a wages board,
+where all who take part in the discussions and in the final agreement
+are experts in the trade, and intimately acquainted with the practical
+details of the industry.
+
+The very same misgivings as are felt and expressed by employers and by
+the public regarding the effect of legislation for the regulation of
+wages have been heard on every occasion when any legal check has been
+proposed upon the downward pressure upon the worker, inevitable under
+our system of competition for trade and markets. What a cry went up
+from the manufacturers of Great Britain when a bill to check the
+ruthless exploitation of babies in the cotton mills was introduced
+into the House of Commons. The very same arguments of interference
+with trade, despotic control over the right of the employé to bargain
+as an individual, are urged today, no matter how often their futility
+and irrelevance have been exposed.
+
+The question of organization and the white alien has been dealt with
+in another chapter, but organization cannot afford to stop even here.
+It will never accomplish all that trade unionists desire and what the
+workers need until those of every color, the Negro, the Indian, the
+Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindoo are included. The southern states
+are very imperfectly organized, and trade unionism on any broad scale
+will never be achieved there until the colored workers are included.
+In this the white workers, neither in the North nor in the South, have
+yet recognized their plain duty. It is not the American Federation
+itself which is directly responsible, but the national and local
+unions in the various trades, who place difficulties in the way of
+admitting colored members. "Ordinarily," writes Dr. F.E. Wolfe in his
+"Admission to Labor Unions," published by the Johns Hopkins University
+Press, "the unimpeded admission of Negroes can be had only where the
+local white unionists are favorable. Consequently, racial antipathy
+and economic motive may, in any particular trade, nullify the policies
+of the national union." This applies even in those cases where the
+national union itself would raise no barrier. I think it may be safely
+added that there are practically no colored women trade unionists, the
+occasional exception but serving to emphasize our utter neglect, as
+regards organization, of the colored woman.
+
+Yet another world waiting to be conquered is the Dominion of Canada,
+Canada with its vast area and its still small population, yet with its
+cities, from Montreal to Vancouver, facing the very same industrial
+problems as American cities, from New York to San Francisco. The
+organization of women is, so far, hardly touched in any of the
+provinces.
+
+One encouraging circumstance, and significant of the intimate
+connection between the two halves of North America, is the fact that
+the international union of each trade includes those dwelling both in
+the United States and in Canada; these internationals are in their
+turn, for the most part affiliated with both the American Federation
+of Labor and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada.
+
+Whenever, then, the women of Canada seriously begin to unionize,
+advance will be made through these existing international
+organizations. As mentioned elsewhere, the Canadian Trades and Labor
+Congress of Canada has endorsed the work of the National Women's Trade
+Union League of America, and seats a fraternal delegate from the
+League at its conventions.
+
+It can only be a question of time, and of increasing industrial
+pressure, when an active trade-union movement will spring up among
+Canadian women. Among those who advocate and are prepared to lead in
+such a movement are the President of the Trades and Labor Congress,
+Mr. J.C. Watters, Mr. James Simpson of the Toronto _Industrial
+Banner_, Mrs. Rose Henderson of Montreal, Mr. J.W. Wilkinson,
+President of the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council, and Miss Helena
+Gutteridge, also of Vancouver.
+
+The President of the National Women's Trade Union League, in her
+opening address before the New York convention in June, 1915, summed
+up the situation as to the sweated trades tellingly:
+
+    For tens of thousands of girl and women workers the average wage
+    in sweated industries still is five, eight and ten cents an hour,
+    and these earnings represent, on the average, forty weeks' work
+    out of a fifty-two week year. Further, in the report of the New
+    York State Factory Investigation Commission we find that out of a
+    total of 104,000 men and women 13,000 receive less than $5.00 a
+    week, 34,000 less than $7.00 a week, 68,000 less than $10.00 a
+    week and only 17,000 receive $15.00 a week or more. These low
+    wages are not only paid to apprentices either in factories or
+    stores but to large numbers of women who have been continuously
+    in industry for years. Again, the New York State Factory
+    Investigating Commission tells us that half of those who have five
+    years' experience in stores are receiving less than $8.00 a week,
+    and only half of those with ten years' experience receive $10.00 a
+    week. Dr. Howard Woolston of the Commission has pointed out: "Even
+    for identical work in the same locality, striking differences in
+    pay are found. In one wholesale candy factory in Manhattan no male
+    laborer and no female hand-dipper is paid as much as $8 a week,
+    nor does any female packer receive as much as $5.50. In another
+    establishment of the same class in the same borough every male
+    laborer gets $8 or over, and more than half the female dippers and
+    packers exceed the rates given in the former plant. Again, one
+    large department store in Manhattan pays 86 per cent. of its
+    saleswomen $10 or over; another pays 86 per cent. of them less.
+    When a representative paper-box manufacturer learned that cutters
+    in neighboring factories receive as little as $10 a week, he
+    expressed surprise, because he always pays $15 or more. This
+    indicates that there is no well-established standard at wages in
+    certain trades. The amounts are fixed by individual bargain, and
+    labor is 'worth' as much as the employer agrees to pay."
+
+It has been estimated by the Commission that to raise the wages of two
+thousand girls in the candy factories from $5.75 to $8.00 a week, the
+confectioners in order to cover the cost will have to charge eighteen
+cents more per hundred pounds of candy. It is also estimated that if
+work shirts cost $3.00 a dozen, and the workers receive sixty cents
+for sewing them we can raise the wages ten per cent. and make the
+labor cost sixty-six cents. The price of those dozen shirts has been
+raised to $3.06. The cost of labor in the sweated industries is a
+small fraction of the manufacturing cost.
+
+In the face of such evidence is there anyone who can still question
+that individual bargaining is a menace against the social order and
+that education and equipment in organization and citizenship become a
+social necessity?
+
+Women unionists, like men in the labor movement, are continually asked
+to support investigations into industrial conditions, investigations
+and yet more investigations. They are asked to give evidence before
+boards and commissions, they are asked to furnish journalists and
+writers of books with information. They have done so willingly,
+but there is a sense coming over many of us that we have had
+investigations a-plenty; and that the hour struck some time ago for at
+least beginning to put an end to the conditions of needless poverty
+and inexcusable oppression, which time after time have been unearthed.
+
+No one who heard Mrs. Florence Kelley at the Charities and Corrections
+Conference in St. Louis in 1910 can forget the powerful plea she
+made to social workers that they should not be satisfied with
+investigation. Not an investigation has ever been made but has told
+the same story, monotonous in its lesson, only varying in details;
+workers, and especially women workers, are inadequately paid. Further
+she considers that investigations would be even more thorough and
+drastic if the investigators, the workers and the public knew that
+something would come out of the inquiry beyond words, words, words.
+
+Investigation alone never remedied any evil, never righted any
+injustice. Yet as far as the community are concerned, average men and
+women seem quite content when the investigation has been made, and
+stop there. What is wrong? Will no real improvement take place till
+the workers are strong enough individually and collectively to
+manage their own affairs, and through organization, coöperation, and
+political action, or its equivalent insure adequate remuneration,
+and prevent overwork, speeding up, and dangerous and insanitary
+conditions?
+
+In a degree investigation has prepared the way for legislation.
+Legislation will undoubtedly play even a bigger part than it has done
+in the protection of the workers. Almost all laws for which organized
+labor generally works affect women as well as men, whether they are
+anti-injunction statutes, or workmen's compensation acts, or factory
+laws. But there is another class of laws, specially favoring women,
+about which women have naturally more decided opinions than men. These
+are laws as to hours, and more recently as to wages, which are or are
+to be applicable to women alone. A just and common-sense argument
+extends special legislative protection to women, because of their
+generally exploited and handicapped position; but the one strong plea
+used in their behalf has been health and safety, the health and safety
+of the future mothers of society. At this point we pause. In all
+probability such protection will be found so beneficial to women that
+it will be eventually extended to men.
+
+One group of laws in which labor is vitally interested is laws
+touching the right of the workers to organize. Many of the most
+important judicial decisions in labor cases have turned upon this
+point. In this are involved the right to fold arms, and peacefully to
+suggest to others to do the same; the right to band together not to
+buy non-union goods, and peacefully to persuade others not to buy.
+
+One angle from which labor views all law-making is that of
+administration. A law may be beneficial. It is in danger on two sides.
+The first the risk of being declared unconstitutional, a common fate
+for the most advanced legislation in this country; or, safe on that
+side, it may be so carelessly or inefficiently administered as to be
+almost useless. In both cases, strong unions have a great influence in
+deciding the fate and the practical usefulness of laws.
+
+Whether in the making, the confirming, or the administering of laws,
+the trade unions form the most important channel through which the
+wishes of the workers can be expressed. Organized labor does not speak
+only for trade unionists; it necessarily, in almost every case, speaks
+for the unorganized as well, partly because the needs of both are
+usually the same, and partly because there is no possible method
+by which the wishes of the working people can be ascertained, save
+through the accepted representatives of the organized portion of the
+workers.
+
+An excellent illustration of how business can and does adjust itself
+to meet changing legal demands is seen in what happened when the
+Ten-Hour Law came in force in the state of Illinois in July, 1909.
+
+The women clerks on the elevated railroads of Chicago, who had been in
+the habit of working twelve hours a day for seven days a week at $1.75
+a day, were threatened with dismissal, and replacement by men. But
+what happened? At first they had to accept as a compromise a temporary
+arrangement under which they received eleven hours' pay for ten hours'
+work. Their places were not, however, filled by men, and now, they are
+receiving for their ten-hour day $1.90 or 15 cents more than they had
+previously been paid for a twelve-hour day, and in addition they now
+are given every third Sunday off duty. This showed the good results of
+the law, particularly when there was a strong organization behind the
+workers. Mercantile establishments came in under the amended Ten-hour
+Law two years later.
+
+The new law was, on the whole, wonderfully well observed in Chicago,
+and as far as I have been able to learn, in the smaller towns as well.
+There were some violations discovered, and plenty more, doubtless,
+remained undiscovered. But the defaulting employers must have been
+very few compared with the great majority of those who met its
+requirement faithfully and intelligently. The proprietors and managers
+of the large Chicago department stores, for instance, worked out
+beforehand a plan of shifts by which they were able to handle the
+Christmas trade, satisfy their customers, and at the same time,
+dismiss each set of girls at the end of their ten-hour period. To meet
+the necessities of the case a staff of extra hands was engaged by each
+of the large department stores. This was a common arrangement. The
+regular girls worked from half-past eight till seven o'clock, with
+time off for lunch. The extra hands came on in the forenoon at eleven
+o'clock and worked till ten in the evening, with supper-time off.
+Certain of the stores varied the plan somewhat, by giving two hours
+for lunch. These long recesses are not without their disadvantages.
+They mean still a very long day on the stretch, and besides, where is
+a girl to spend the two hours? She cannot go home, and it is against
+the law for her to be in the store, for in the eye of the law, if she
+remains on the premises, she is presumably at work, and if at work,
+therefore being kept longer than the legal ten hours.
+
+That a law which had been so vigorously opposed should on the whole
+have been observed so faithfully in the second largest city in the
+United States, that it should in that city have stood the test, at
+its very initiation, of the rush season, is a fact full of hope and
+encouragement for all who are endeavoring to have our laws keep pace
+with ideals of common justice.
+
+Some time afterwards the constitutionality of the law was tested in
+the courts. Since then, complaints have died away. There is no record
+of trading establishments having been compelled to remove to another
+state, and we no longer even hear of its being a ruinous handicap to
+resident manufacturers. Even reactionary employers are now chiefly
+concerned in putting off the impending evil, as they regard it, of
+an eight-hour day, which they know cannot be very far off, as it has
+already arrived on the Pacific Coast.
+
+If the acquiescence of Illinois employers was satisfactory, the effect
+upon the girls was remarkable and exceeded expectations. During that
+Christmas week, the clerks were tired, of course, but they were not in
+the state of exhaustion, collapse, and physical and nervous depletion,
+which they had experienced in previous years. This bodily salvation
+had been expected. It was what organized women had pleaded for and
+bargained for, what the defending lawyers, Mr. Louis D. Brandeis and
+Mr. William J. Calhoun had urged upon the judges, when the Supreme
+Court of Illinois had been earlier called upon to pass upon the
+validity of the original ten-hour law, although department-store
+employés had not been included within the scope of its protection.
+
+But the girls were more than not merely worn-out to the point of
+exhaustion. Most of them were more alive than they had ever been since
+first they started clerking. They were happy, and surprised beyond
+measure at their own good fortune. Those juniors who could just
+remember how different last Christmas had been, those seniors
+whose memories held such searing recollections of many preceding
+Christmases, were one in their rejoicing and wonderment. They caught
+a dim vision of a common interest. Here was something which all could
+share. That one was benefited did not mean another's loss.
+
+From girl after girl I heard the same story. I would ask them how they
+were getting on through the hard time this year. "Oh," a girl would
+answer, "it wasn't so bad at all. You see we've got the ten-hour law,
+and we can't work after the time is up. It's just wonderful. Why, I'm
+going to enjoy Christmas this year. I'm tired, but nothing like I've
+always been before. Last Christmas Day I couldn't get out of bed, I
+ached so, and I couldn't eat, either."
+
+And yet, while the girls, thanks to the new law, were having something
+like decent, though by no means ideal hours of work, the young
+elevator boys, in the same store were working fourteen hours and a
+half, day in, day out.
+
+So imperfect yet are the results of much that is accomplished!
+
+There are now two states, Mississippi and Oregon, which have ten-hour
+laws, applying to both men and women, and including the larger
+proportion of the workers. There are also federal statutes, state
+laws and municipal ordinances limiting the hours and granting the
+eight-hour day to whole groups of workers, either in public or
+semi-public employ, or affecting special occupations such as mining.
+Thus it is clear, that for both sexes there is now abundant legal
+precedent for any shortening of hours, which has its place in a more
+advanced social and industrial development.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+WOMEN AND THE VOCATIONS
+
+
+The profound impression that has been left upon contemporary thought
+by the teaching of Lester Ward and those who have followed him, that
+woman is the race, has been felt far and wide outside the sphere of
+those branches of science, whose students he first startled with the
+thought. His idea is indeed revolutionary as far as our immediate past
+and our present social arrangements and sex relations are concerned,
+but is natural, harmonious and self-explanatory if we regard life,
+the life of our own day, not as standing still, but as in a state of
+incessant flux and development, and if we are at all concerned to
+discover the direction whither these changes are driving us. It
+indeed may well have been that the formal enunciation of the primary
+importance of woman in the social organism has played its own part in
+accelerating her rise into her destined lofty position, though in the
+main, any philosophy can be merely the explanation and the record of
+an evolution wherein we are little but passive factors.
+
+This much is certain, that the insistent driving home by this school
+of thinkers of woman, woman, woman, as the center and nucleus whence
+is developed the child and the home, and all that civilization stands
+for, and whose rights as an independent human being are therefore to
+be held of supreme importance in the normal evolution of the race, has
+served as an incessant reminder to practical workers and reformers in
+the sphere of education as well as to leaders of the woman movement.
+Especially has this been true when tackling the problems more
+immediately affecting women, because these are the truly difficult
+problems. Whatever touches man's side of life alone is comparatively
+simple and easily understood, and therefore easier of solution. So in
+the rough and ready, often cruel, solutions which nature and humanity
+have worked out for social problems, it has always been the man
+whose livelihood, whose education and whose training have been first
+considered, and whose claims have been first satisfied. For this there
+are several reasons. Man's possession of material wealth, and his
+consequent monopoly of social and political power have naturally
+resulted in his attending to his own interests first. The argument,
+too, that man was the breadwinner and the protector of the home
+against all outside antagonistic influences, which in the past he has
+generally been, furnished another reason why, when any class attained
+to fresh social privileges, it was the boy and the man of that class,
+rather than the woman and the girl, who benefited by them first. The
+woman and the girl would come in a poor second, if indeed they were in
+at the dividing of the spoils at all.
+
+There is, however, another reason, and one of profound significance,
+which I believe has hardly been touched upon at all, why woman has
+been thus constantly relegated to the inferior position. Her problems
+are, as I said above, far more difficult of settlement. Because of her
+double function as a member of her own generation and as the potential
+mother of the next generation, it is impossible to regard her life as
+something simple and single, and think out plans for its arrangement,
+as we do with man's. So in large measure we have only been following
+the line of least resistance, in taking up men's difficulties
+first. We have done so quite naturally, because they are not so
+overwhelmingly hard to deal with, and have attacked woman's problems,
+and striven to satisfy her needs, only when we could find time to get
+round to them. This is most strikingly exemplified in the realm of
+education. Take the United States alone. It was ever to the boy that
+increasing educational advantages were first offered.
+
+In the year 1639 the authorities of the town of Dorchester,
+Massachusetts, hesitated as to whether girls should be admitted to
+the apparently just established school. The decision was left "to the
+discretion of the elders and seven men." The girls lost. In "Child
+Life in Colonial Days" Mrs. Annie Grant is quoted. She spent her
+girlhood in Albany, N.Y., sometime during the first half of the
+eighteenth century. She says it was very difficult at that time to
+procure the means of instruction in those districts. The girls learned
+needlework from their mothers and aunts; they learnt to read the
+Bible and religious tracts in Dutch; few were taught writing. Similar
+accounts come from Virginia.
+
+Was it university education that was in question, how many
+university-trained men had not American colleges turned out before
+Lucy Stone was able to obtain admission to Oberlin?
+
+Harvard was opened in 1636. Two hundred years elapsed before there was
+any institution offering corresponding advantages to girls. Oberlin
+granted its first degree to a woman in 1838. Mount Holyoke was founded
+in 1837, Elmira in 1855 and Vassar in 1865.
+
+That a perfectly honest element of confusion and puzzle did enter into
+the thought of parents and the views of the community, it would be
+vain to deny. These young women were incomprehensible. Why were they
+not content with the education their mothers had had, and with the
+lives their mothers had led before them? Why did they want to leave
+comfortable homes, and face the unknown, the hard, perhaps the
+dangerous? How inexplicable, how undutiful! Ah! It was the young
+people who were seeing furthest into the future; it was the fathers
+and mothers who were not recognizing the change that was coming over
+the world of their day.
+
+If then, for the combination of reasons outlined, women have always
+lagged in the rear as increasing educational advantages of a literary
+or professional character have been provided or procured for boys, it
+is not strange, when, in reading over the records of work on the new
+lines of industrial education, trade-training and apprenticeship
+we detect the very same influences at work, sigh before the same
+difficulties, and recognize the old weary, threadbare arguments, too,
+which one would surely think had been sufficiently disproved before to
+be at least distrusted in this connection. This, however, must surely
+be the very last stand of the non-progressivists in education as
+regards the worker. The ideals of today aim at education on lines that
+will enable every child, boy and girl alike, born in or brought
+into any civilized country, to develop all faculties, and that will
+simultaneously enable the community to benefit from this complete,
+all-round development of every one of its members.
+
+There is one consideration to which I must call attention, because,
+when recognized, it cannot but serve as the utmost stimulus to our
+efforts to arrange for vocational education for girls on the broadest
+lines. It is this. Whatever general, national or state plans prove the
+most complete and satisfactory for girls, will, speaking generally, at
+the same time be found to have solved the problem for the boy as well.
+The double aim, of equipping the girl to be a mother as well as human
+being, is so all-inclusive and is therefore so much more difficult of
+accomplishment, that the simpler training necessary for a boy's career
+will be automatically provided for at the same time. Therefore the
+boy is not likely to be at a disadvantage under such a coeducational
+system as is here implied. For it is to nothing short of coeducation
+that the organized women of the United States are looking forward,
+coeducation on lines adapted to present-day wants. What further
+contributions the far-off future may hold for us in the never wholly
+to be explored realm of human education in its largest acceptance,
+we know not. Until we have learned the lesson of today, and have set
+about putting it in practice, such glimpses of the future are not
+vouchsafed to us.
+
+In such an age of transition as ours, any plan of vocational training
+intended to include girls must be a compromise with warring facts, and
+will therefore have to face objections from both sides, from those
+forward-looking ones who feel that the domestic side of woman's
+activities is overemphasized, and from those who still hark back, who
+would fain refuse to believe that the majority of women have to be
+wage-earners for at least part of their lives. These latter argue
+that by affording to girls all the advantages of industrial training
+granted or which may be granted to boys, we are "taking them out of
+the home." As if they were not out of the home already!
+
+This assumption will appear to most readers paradoxical, if indeed it
+does not read as a contradiction in terms. A little thought, however,
+will show that it is just because we are all along assuming the
+economic primacy of the boy, that the girl has been so disastrously
+neglected. It is true that the boy is also a potential father, and
+that his training for that lofty function is usually ignored and will
+have to be borne in mind, though no one would insist that training
+for fatherhood need occupy a parallel position with training for
+motherhood. But popular reasoning is not content with accepting this
+admission; it goes on to draw the wholly unwarranted conclusion that
+while the boy ought to be thoroughly taught on the wage-earning
+side, and while such teaching should cover all the more important
+occupations, to which he is likely to be called, the girl's
+corresponding training shall as a matter of course be quite a
+secondary matter, fitting her only for a limited set of pursuits, many
+of these ranking low in skill and opportunities of advancement, and
+necessarily among the most poorly paid; these being all occupations
+which we choose to assume girls will enter, such as sewing or
+box-making. Only recently have girls been prepared for the textile
+trades, though they have always worked in these, first in the home and
+since then in the factories. Still less is any preparation thought
+of for the numberless occupations that necessity and a perpetually
+changing world are all the while driving girls to take up. There were
+in 1910, 8,075,772 women listed as wage-earners in the United States.
+Would it not be as well, if a girl is to be a wage-earner, that
+she should have at least as much opportunity of learning her trade
+properly, as is granted to a boy?
+
+Setting aside for the moment the fact that girls are already engaged
+in so many callings, it is poor policy and worse economy to argue that
+because a girl may be but a few years a wage-earner, it is therefore
+not worth while to make of her an efficient, capable wage-earner. That
+is fair to no one, neither to the girl herself nor to the community.
+The girl deserves to be taken more seriously. Do this, and it will
+then be clear that a vocational system wide enough and flexible enough
+to fit the girl to be at once a capable mother-housekeeper, and a
+competent wage-earner, will be a system adequate to the vocational
+training of the boy for life-work in any of the industrial pursuits.
+It is self-evident that the converse would not hold.
+
+And first, to those readers of advanced views who will think that I
+am conceding even too much in thus consenting apparently to sink
+the human activities of the woman in those of the mother during the
+greater part of maturity. Touching the question of personal human
+development, I concede nothing, as I assert nothing, but I accept
+present-day facts, and desire to make such compromise with them as
+shall clear the way for whatever forms of home and industrial life
+shall evolve from them most naturally and simply. We may observe
+with satisfaction and hopefulness that the primitive collection of
+unrelated industries which have so long lingered in the home to the
+detriment of both and which have confused our thoughts as to which
+were the essential and permanent, and which the merely accidental and
+temporary functions of the home, are gradually coming within the range
+of the specialized trades, and as such are freeing the home from
+so much clutter and confusion, and freeing the woman from so many
+fettering bonds. But the process is a slow one, and again, it may
+not even go on indefinitely. There may be a limit in the process of
+specializing home industries. So far as it has gone, different classes
+of women are very unequally affected by it. In the United States,
+where these changes have gone on faster and further than anywhere
+else, the two classes whose occupations have been most radically
+modified have been, first and chiefly, the young girl from fourteen to
+twenty-four, of every class, and next the grownup woman, who has taken
+up one of the professions now for the first time open to women, and
+this almost irrespective of whether she is married or single.
+
+As to the young girl, the transformation of the home plus industries
+to the home, pure and simple, a place to live in and rest in, to love
+in and be happy in, has so far already been effected, that in the home
+of the artisan and the tradesman there is not now usually sufficient
+genuine, profitable occupation for more than one growing or grown girl
+as assistant to her mother. For two reasons the other daughters will
+look out of doors for employment. The first reason is that under
+rearranged conditions of industry, there is nothing left for them
+to do at home. The second is not less typical of these altered
+conditions. The father cannot, even if he would, afford to keep them
+at home as non-producers. If the processes of making garments and
+preparing food are no longer performed by the members of the
+family for one another, the outsiders who do perform them must be
+remunerated, and that not in kind, as, for example, with board and
+lodging and clothing, but in money wages, in coin. And their share of
+the money to enable this complicated system of exchange of services to
+be carried out, must be earned by the unmarried daughters of the house
+through their working in turn at some wage-earning occupation, also
+outside.
+
+The young woman who has entered medicine, or law, or dentistry, who
+paints pictures or writes books, is on very much the same economic
+basis as the young working-girl. She, too, is accepted as part of the
+already established order of things, and the present generation has
+grown up in happy ignorance of the difficulties experienced by the
+pioneers in all these professions in establishing their right to
+independent careers. The professional woman who has married finds
+herself so far on a less secure foundation. Every professional woman
+who has children has to work out for herself the problem of the mutual
+adjustment of the claims of her profession and her family, but so many
+have solved the difficulties and have made the adjustment that it
+seems only a question of time when every professional woman may accept
+the happiness of wifehood and motherhood when it is offered to her
+without feeling that she has to choose once for all between a happy
+marriage and a successful professional career.
+
+Not a few professional women, writers, and speakers, have gone on to
+infer that a similar solution was at hand for the working-girl on her
+marriage. Not yet is any such adjustment or rather readjustment of
+domestic and industrial activities in sight for her. Whatever changes
+may take place in the environment of the coming American woman, the
+present generation of working-girls as they marry are going to find
+their hands abundantly filled with duties within the walls of their
+own little homes. We know today how the health and the moral welfare
+of children fare when young mothers are prematurely forced back into
+the hard and exhausting occupations from which marriage has withdrawn
+them.
+
+Again, the factory conditions of modern industry have been brought to
+their present stage with one end in view--economy of time and material
+with the aim of cheapening the product. The life and the smooth
+running of the human machine, when considered at all, has been thought
+of last, and in this respect America is even one of the most backward
+of the civilized nations. Hence factory life is hard and disagreeable
+to the worker. Especially to the young girl is it often unendurable.
+A girl who has been some years in a factory rarely wants her young
+sister to come into it, too. She herself is apt to shift from one shop
+to another, from trade to trade, always in the hope that some other
+work may prove less exhausting and monotonous than that with which she
+is familiar by trying experience. Two forces tend to drive girls early
+out of industrial life: on the one hand, the perfectly normal instinct
+of self-protection in escaping from unnatural and health-ruining
+conditions and on the other the no less normal impulse leading
+to marriage. But oftener than we like to think, the first is the
+overmastering motive.
+
+Let us now take up the objections of those far more numerous to whom
+the provision of trade-training for girls seems superfluous, when not
+harmful, and who especially shrink from the suggestion of coeducation.
+To satisfy them, let us marshal a few facts and figures.
+
+Of every kind of education that has been proposed for girls, whether
+coeducational or not, we have always heard the same fears expressed.
+Such education would make the girl unwomanly, it would unfit her for
+her true functions, a man could not wish to marry her, and so on. The
+first women teachers and doctors had indeed a hard time. After being
+admitted to the profession only at the point of the sword, so to
+speak, they had to make good, and in face of all prejudice, prove
+their ability to teach or to cure, so as to keep the path open for
+those who were to follow after them. No similar demand should be
+logically made of the working-girl today when she demands coeducation
+on industrial lines. For she is already in the trades from which you
+propose so futilely to exclude her, by denying her access to the
+technical training preparatory to them, and for fitting her to
+practice them.
+
+Take some other occupations which employ women in great numbers:
+textile mill operatives, saleswomen, tobacco-workers, cigar-workers,
+boot-and shoe-workers, printers, lithographers, and pressmen, and
+book-binders. You can hardly say that these are exceptions, for here
+are the figures, from the occupational statistics of the census of
+1910.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: The statement that appeared in the report on
+"Occupations" in the census returns of 1910, that there were but
+nine occupations in which women were not employed, has been widely
+commented upon.
+
+An explanation appearing in the corresponding volume of the census
+report for 1910 shows the great difficulties that enumerators and
+statisticians experience in getting at exact facts, wherever the
+situation is both complex and confused. The census officials admit
+their inability to do so in the present instance, although they have
+revised the figures with extreme care. With all possible allowance for
+error, women still appear in all but a minority of employments. The
+classification of occupations is on a different basis, and the number
+of divisions much larger; yet even now out of four hundred and
+twenty-nine separately listed, women are returned as engaged in all
+but forty-two. On the other hand there is only one trade which does
+not embrace men, that of the (untrained) midwife.]
+
+Textile mill operatives                 330,766
+Saleswomen                              250,438
+Tobacco-workers and cigar-makers         71,334
+Boot- and shoe-makers and repairers      61,084
+Printers, lithographers and pressmen     27,845
+Book-binders                             22,012
+
+Just here we can see a rock ahead. In the very prospects that we
+rejoice over, of the early introduction of public industrial
+training, we can detect an added risk for the girl. If such technical
+instruction is established in one state after another, but planned
+primarily to suit the needs of boys only, and the only teaching
+afforded to girls is in the domestic arts, and in the use of the
+needle and the pastebrush for wage-earning, where will our girls be
+when a few years hence the skilled trades are full of her only too
+well-trained industrial rivals? In a greater degree than even today,
+the girl will find herself everywhere at a disadvantage for lack of
+the early training the state has denied to her, while bestowing
+it upon her brother, and the few industrial occupations for which
+instruction is provided will be overcrowded with applicants.
+
+That women should take such an inferior position in the trades they
+are in today is regrettable enough. But far more important is it to
+make sure that they obtain their fair share of whatever improved
+facilities are provided for "the generation knocking at the door"
+of life. Working-women or women intimately acquainted with
+working-women's needs, should have seats on all commissions, boards
+and committees, so that when schemes of state industrial training are
+being planned, when schools are built, courses outlined, the interests
+of girls may be remembered, and especially so that they be borne in
+mind, when budgets are made up and appropriations asked for.
+
+If not, it will only be one other instance of an added advantage to
+the man proving a positive disadvantage to the woman. You cannot
+benefit one class and leave another just as it was. Every boon given
+to the bettered class increases the disproportion and actually helps
+to push yet further down the one left out.
+
+Among the many influences that make or mar the total content of life
+for any class, be that class a nation, a race, an industrial or
+economic group, there is one, the importance of which has been all
+too little realized. That influence we may call expectance. It is
+impossible for anyone to say how far a low standard of industrial
+or professional attainment held out before the girl at her most
+impressionable age, a standard that to some degree, therefore,
+develops within her, as it exists without her, ends in producing the
+very inefficiency it begins by assuming. But psychology has shown us
+that suggestion or expectance forms one element in the developing of
+faculty, and this whether it be manual dexterity, quickness of memory
+or exercise of judgment and initiative.
+
+In all probability, too, this element of expectance has indirect as
+well as direct effects, and the indirect are not the least fruitful in
+results. To illustrate: it is certain that if we start out by
+assuming that girls are poor at accounts, that they cannot understand
+machinery, that they are so generally inefficient as to be worth less
+wages than boys, any such widespread assumption will go a long way
+to produce the ignorant and incompetent and inefficient creatures it
+presupposes girls to be. But it will do more than this. Such poor
+standards alike of performance and of wages will not end with the
+unfortunate girls themselves. They will react upon parents, teachers,
+and the community which so largely consists of the parents and which
+employs the teachers. Those preëssentials and antecedents of the
+competent worker, training, trainers, and the means and instruments
+of training, will not be forthcoming. What is the use of providing
+at great expense industrial training for girls, when the same money,
+spent upon boys, would produce more efficient workers? What is the
+use of giving girls such training, when they are presumably by nature
+unfitted to benefit by it?
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+WOMEN AND VOCATIONAL TRAINING
+
+
+The United States started its national existence with an out-of-doors
+people. Until comparatively recent years, the cities were small, and
+the great bulk of the inhabitants lived from the natural resources of
+the country, that is to say, from the raw products of the mines and
+the forests, and the crops grown upon the plains by a most primitive
+and wasteful system of agriculture. But the days have forever gone
+when a living can be snatched, so to speak, from the land in any of
+these ways. The easily gotten stores of the mines and forests are
+exhausted; the soil over many millions of acres has been robbed of its
+fertility. The nation is now engaged in reckoning up what is left in
+the treasury of its natural resources, estimating how best to conserve
+and make profitable use of what is left.
+
+The nation might have done this sooner, but there was in the West
+always fresh land to open up and in the East, after a time, a new
+source of income in the factory industries, that were more and more
+profitably absorbing capital and labor. So that although pioneer
+conditions gradually passed away, and it became less easy to wrest a
+living from plain or mountain or mine, the idea of finding out what
+was wrong, improving methods of agriculture, conserving the forest
+wealth by continual replanting or working the less rich mines at a
+profit through new processes, or the utilization of by-products, did
+not at first suggest itself.
+
+When, on the other hand, we turn to the manufacturing occupations,
+we find that they have followed an analogous, though not precisely
+similar, course of evolution. Certainly from the first the
+manufacturers showed themselves far ahead of their fellows in the
+economical management of the raw material, in the adoption of every
+kind of labor and time-saving device and in the disposal of refuse.
+But in their way they have been just as short-sighted. They carried
+with them into the new occupations the very same careless habits of
+national extravagance. They, too, went ahead in a similar hustling
+fashion. This time the resources that were used up so recklessly were
+human resources, the strength and vitality of the mature man, the
+flesh and blood of little children, their stores of energy and
+youthful joy and hope. By overwork or accident, the father was cut
+off in his strong manhood, the boy was early worn out, and the young
+girl's prospects of happy motherhood were forever quenched.
+
+There are now signs of a blessed reaction setting in here, too, and it
+is largely owing to the efforts of organized labor. The principles of
+conservation and of a wise economy, which are re-creating the plains
+of the West and which will once more clothe with forests the slopes of
+the mountains, are at work in the realm of industry. Not a year passes
+but that some state or another does not limit anew the hours during
+which children may work, or insist upon shorter hours for women, or
+the better protection from dangerous machinery, or the safeguarding
+of the worker in unhealthy occupations. Organized labor, ever
+running ahead of legislation in its standards of hours and sanitary
+conditions, provides a school of education and experiment for the
+whole community, by procuring for trade unionists working conditions
+which afterwards serve as the model for enlightened employers, and as
+a standard that the community in the end must exact for the whole body
+of workers.
+
+But more must be done than merely keeping our people alive, by
+insisting they shall not be killed in the earning of their bread.
+Leaders of thought and many captains of industry have at last grasped
+the fact that the worker, uneducated and not trained in any true
+sense, is at once a poor tool and a most costly one. Other countries
+add their quota of experience, to back up public opinion and
+legislative action. Hence the demand heard from one end of the land
+to the other for industrial training. The public everywhere after a
+century of modern factory industry are at length beginning to have
+some definite ideas regarding industrial training for boys who are to
+supply the human element in the factory scheme. (Regarding girls, they
+still grope in outer darkness.)
+
+For many years economists were accustomed to express nothing but
+satisfaction over the ever-advancing specialization of industry. They
+saw only the cheapening of the product, the vast increase in the total
+amount produced, and the piling up of profits, and they beheld in all
+three results nothing but social advantage. Verily both manufacturer
+and consumer were benefited. When the more thoughtful turned their
+attention to the actual makers through whose labors the cloth and
+the shoes and the pins of specialized industry were produced, they
+satisfied themselves that the worker must also be a sharer in the
+benefits of the new system; for, said they, everyone who is a worker
+is also a consumer. Even though the worker who is making shoes has
+to turn out twenty times as much work for the same wages, still as
+a consumer he shares in the all-round cheapening of manufactured
+articles, and is able to buy clothes and shoes and pins so much the
+cheaper. That the cost of living on the whole might be greater, that
+the wage of the worker might be too low to permit of his purchasing
+the very articles into the making of which his own labor had gone, did
+not occur to these _à priori_ reasoners. It has taken a whole century
+of incredibly swift mechanical advance, associated at the same time
+with the most blind, cruel, and brutal waste of child life and adult
+life, to arrive at the beginning of an adjustment between the demands
+of machine-driven industry and the needs and the just claims of the
+human workers. We have only just recovered from the dazed sense of
+wonderment and pride of achievement into which modern discoveries
+and inventions, with the resultant enormous increase of commerce
+and material wealth, plunged the whole civilized world. We are but
+beginning to realize, what we had well-nigh totally overlooked, that
+even machine-driven industry with all that it connotes, enormously
+increased production of manufactured goods, and the spread of physical
+comfort to a degree unknown before among great numbers, is not the
+whole of national well-being; that by itself, unbalanced by justice to
+the workers, it is not even an unmixed boon.
+
+I have tried to follow up the evolution of our present industrial
+society on several parallel lines: how industry itself has developed,
+how immigration affects the labor problem as regards the woman worker,
+and the relation of women to the vocations in the modern world. Let us
+now glance at our educational systems and see how they fit in to the
+needs of the workers, especially of the working-women. For our present
+purpose I will not touch on education as we find it in our most
+backward states, but rather as it is in the most advanced, since it
+is from improvement in these that we may expect to produce the best
+results for the whole nation.
+
+Free and compulsory public education was established to supply
+literary and cultural training at a time when children still enjoyed
+opportunities of learning in the home, and later in small shops
+something of the trades they were to practice when grown-up. I know
+of a master plumber, who twenty years ago, as a child of eleven, made
+friends with the blacksmith and the tinsmith in the little village
+where he lived, and taught himself the elements of his trade at the
+blacksmith's anvil and with the tinsmith's tools. At fourteen that boy
+knew practically a great deal about the properties of metals, could
+handle simple tools deftly, and was well prepared to learn his trade
+readily when the time came.
+
+As the most intelligent city parents cannot as individuals furnish
+their children with similar chances today, we must look to the public
+schools, which all citizens alike support, to take up the matter, and
+supply methodically and deliberately, that training of the eye and
+hand, and later that instruction in wage-earning occupations which in
+former days, as in the case quoted, the child obtained incidentally,
+as it were, in the mere course of growing up.
+
+On the literary side, it is true, schools are improving all the time.
+History is now taught by lantern slides, showing the people's lives,
+instead of by a list of dates in a catechism. Geography is illustrated
+in the garden plot of the school playground. But in responding to the
+new claims which a new age and a changed world are making upon them,
+schools and teachers are only beginning to wake up. The manual
+training gradually being introduced is a hopeful beginning, but
+nothing more. The most valuable and important work of this kind is
+reserved for the upper grades of the grammar schools and for certain
+high schools, and the children who are able to make use of it are for
+the most part the offspring of comfortably off parents, enjoying all
+sorts of educational privileges already. Education, publicly provided,
+free and compulsory, therefore presumably universal, was established
+primarily for the benefit of the workers' children, yet of all
+children it is they who are at this moment receiving the least benefit
+from it. Many circumstances combine to produce this unfortunate
+result. The chief direct cause is poverty in the home. So many
+families have to live on such poor wages--five and six hundred dollars
+a year--that the children have neither the health to profit by the
+schooling nor the books nor the chance to read books at home when the
+home is one or perhaps two rooms. The curse of homework in cities ties
+the children down to willowing feathers or picking nuts or sewing on
+buttons, or carrying parcels to and from the shop that gives out the
+work, deprives them of both sleep and play, makes their attendance at
+school irregular, and dulls their brains during the hours they are
+with the teacher. In the country the frequently short period of school
+attendance during the year and the daily out-of-school work forced
+from young children by poverty-harassed parents has similar disastrous
+results.
+
+Even in those states which have compulsory attendance up to fourteen,
+many children who are quite normal are yet very backward at that age.
+The child of a foreign-speaking parent, for instance, who never hears
+English spoken at home, needs a longer time to reach the eighth grade
+than the child of English-speaking parents.
+
+Chicago is fairly typical of a large industrial city, and there the
+City Club found after investigation that forty-three per cent. of
+the pupils who enter the first grade do not reach the eighth grade;
+forty-nine per cent. do not go through the eighth grade; eleven per
+cent. do not reach the sixth grade, and sixteen per cent. more do not
+go through the sixth grade.
+
+A child who goes through the eighth grade has some sort of an
+equipment (on the literary side at least) with which to set out in
+life. He has learned how to read a book or a newspaper intelligently,
+and how to express himself in writing. If he is an average child he
+has acquired a good deal of useful information. He will remember much
+of what he has learned, and can turn what knowledge he has to some
+account. But the child who leaves school in the fifth or sixth grade,
+or, perhaps, even earlier, is apt to have no hold on what he has been
+taught, and it all too soon passes from his memory, especially if he
+has in his home surroundings no stimulus to mental activity. Poor
+little thing! What a mockery to call this education, so little as
+it has fitted him to understand life and its problems! What he has
+learned out of school, meanwhile, as often as not, is harmful rather
+than beneficial.
+
+The school door closes and the factory gate stands open wide. The
+children get their working papers, and slip out of the one, and
+through the other. At once, as we arrange matters, begins the fatal
+effect of handing over children, body and soul, into the control of
+industry. After a few days or weeks of wrapping candy, or carrying
+bundles or drawing out bastings, the work, whatever it is, becomes but
+a mere mechanical repetition. A few of the muscles only, and none of
+the higher faculties of observation, inquiry and judgment come
+into play at all, until, at the end of two years the brightest
+school-children have perceptibly lost ground in all these directions.
+
+Two of the most precious years of life are gone. The little workers
+are not promoted from performing one process to another more
+difficult. They are as far as ever from any prospect of learning a
+trade in any intelligent fashion. The slack season comes on. The
+little fingers, the quick feet are not required any longer. Once more
+there is a scurrying round to look for a job, less cheerfully this
+time, the same haphazard applying at another factory for some other
+job, that like the first needs no training, like the first, leads
+nowhere, but also like the first, brings in three or four dollars
+a week, perhaps less. A teacher at a public-school social center
+inquired of a group of fifty girls, cracker-packers, garment-workers
+and bindery girls, how long each had been in her present situation.
+Only one had held hers eighteen months. No other had reached a year in
+the same place. The average appeared to be about three or four months.
+
+Worse still is another class of blind-alley occupation. These are the
+street trades. The newsboy, the messenger and the telegraph boy often
+make good money to begin with. Girls, too, are being employed by some
+of the messenger companies. These are all trades, that apart from the
+many dangers inseparable from their pursuit, spell dismissal after two
+or three years at most, or as soon as the boy reaches the awkward age.
+The experience gained is of no use in any other employment, and the
+unusual freedom makes the messenger who has outgrown his calling
+averse to the discipline of more regular occupations.
+
+What a normal vocational education can be, and a normal development of
+occupation, is seen in the professions, such as law and medicine. The
+lawyer and the doctor are, it is true, confining themselves more and
+more to particular branches of their respective callings, and more
+and more are they becoming experts in the branch of law or medicine
+selected. The lawyer specializes in criminal cases or in damage suits,
+in commercial or constitutional law; he is a pleader or a consultant.
+The doctor may decide to be a surgeon, or an oculist, an anesthetist
+or a laboratory worker. And the public reap the benefit in more expert
+advice and treatment. But the likeness between such professional
+specialization and the dehumanizing and brain-deadening industrial
+specialization, which is the outgrowth of the factory system, is one
+in name only as was admirably put by Samuel Gompers, when presiding
+over the Convention of the American Federation of Labor at Toronto in
+1909.
+
+"It must be recognized that specialists in industry are vastly
+different from specialists in the professions. In the professions,
+specialists develop from all the elements of the science of the
+profession. Specialists in industry are those who know but one part
+of a trade, and absolutely nothing of any other part of it. In the
+professions specialists are possessed of all the learning of their
+art; in industry they are denied the opportunity of learning the
+commonest elementary rudiments of industry other than the same
+infinitesimal part performed by them perhaps thousands of times over
+each day."
+
+When the speaker emphasized these points of unlikeness, he was at the
+same time, and in the same breath, pointing out the direction in which
+industry must be transformed. Training in the whole occupation
+must precede the exercise of the specialty. Furthermore, as all
+professional training has its cultural side, as well as its strictly
+professional side, so the cultural training of the worker must ever
+keep step with his vocational training.
+
+The motto of the school should be, "We are for all," for it is what
+teachers and the community are forever forgetting. Think of the
+innumerable foundations in the countries of the old world, intended
+for poor boys, which have been gradually appropriated by the rich. Of
+others again, supposed to be for both boys and girls, from which the
+girls have long been excluded. The splendid technical schools of this
+country, nominally open to all boys, at least, are by their very terms
+closed to the poor boy, however gifted. To give to him that hath
+is the tendency against which we must ever guard in planning and
+administering systems of public education. With many, perhaps most,
+educational institutions, as they grow older, more and more do they
+incline to improve the standards of their work, technically speaking,
+but to bestow their benefits upon comparatively fewer and fewer
+recipients.
+
+I would not be understood to deprecate original research, or the
+training of expert professional workers in any field, still less as
+undervaluing thoroughness in any department of teaching. But I plead
+for a sense of proportion, that as long as the world is either so poor
+or its wealth and opportunities so unequally distributed, a certain
+minimum of vocational training shall be insured to all.
+
+We recognize the need for thorough training in the case of the coming
+original investigator, and the expert professional, and they form the
+minority. We do not recognize the at least equally pressing need for
+the thorough training of the whole working population, and these make
+up the vast majority. In so far as the pre-vocational work in primary
+schools, the manual work and technical training in high schools,
+the short courses, the extension lectures and the correspondence
+instruction of universities are meeting this urgent popular need, just
+so far are they raising all work to a professional standard, just so
+far are they bringing down to the whole nation the gifts of culture
+and expert training that have hitherto been the privilege of the few.
+
+I have often noticed college professors, in turning over the leaves of
+a university calendar or syllabus of lectures, pass lightly over the
+pages recounting the provision made for short courses, summer schools,
+extension or correspondence work, and linger lovingly over the
+fuller and more satisfactory program outlined for the teacher or
+the professional worker. The latter is only apparently the more
+interesting. Take Wisconsin's College of Agriculture, for example. It
+sends forth yearly teachers and original investigators, but quite as
+great and important a product are the hundreds of farmers and farmers'
+sons who come fresh from field and dairy to take their six weeks'
+training in the management of cattle or of crops, and to field and
+dairy return, carrying away with them the garnered experience of
+others, as well as increased intelligence and self-reliance in
+handling the problems of their daily toil.
+
+Anna Garlin Spencer, in her "Woman and Social Culture," points out
+how our much-lauded schools of domestic economy fail to benefit the
+schoolgirl, through this very overthoroughness and expensiveness how
+they are narrowed down to the turning out of teachers of domestic
+economy and dietitians and other institutional workers. Domestic
+economy as a wage-earning vocation cannot be taught too thoroughly,
+but what every girl is entitled to have from the public school during
+her school years is a "short course" in the simple elements of
+domestic economy, with opportunity for practice. It is nothing so very
+elaborate that girls need, but that little they need so badly. Such a
+course has in view the girl as a homemaker, and is quite apart from
+her training as a wage-earner.
+
+When again we turn to that side, matters are not any more promising.
+If the boy of the working classes is badly off for industrial
+training, his sister is in far worse case. Some provision is already
+made for the boy, and more is coming his way presently, but of
+training for the girl, which shall be adequate to fit her for
+self-support, we hear hardly anything. We have noted that women are
+already in most of the trades followed by men, and that the number of
+this army of working, wage-earning women is legion; that they are
+not trained at all, and are so badly paid that as underbidders they
+perpetually cut the wages of men. Nay, the young working-girl is even
+"her own worst competitor--the competitor against her own future home,
+and as wife and mother she may have to live on the wage she herself
+has cheapened."
+
+And to face a situation like this are we making any adequate
+preparation? With how little we are satisfied, let me illustrate.
+In the address of Mrs. Raymond Robins as president of the National
+Women's Trade Union League of America before their Fourth Biennial
+Convention in St. Louis, in June, 1913, she told how "in a curriculum
+of industrial education we find that under the heading 'Science' boys
+study elementary physics, mechanics and electricity, and girls the
+action of alkalies, and the removal of stains. While under 'Drawing'
+we read, 'For boys the drawing will consist of the practical
+application of mechanical and free-hand work to parts of machinery,
+house plans, and so forth. Emphasis will be placed upon the reading of
+drawings, making sketches of machine parts quickly and accurately. For
+the girls the drawing will attempt to apply the simple principles
+of design and color to the work. The girls will design and stencil
+curtains for the dining-and sewing-rooms and will make designs for
+doilies for the table. They will plan attractive spacing for tucks,
+ruffles and embroidery for underwear.' Women have entered nearly three
+hundred different occupations and trades in America within the past
+quarter of a century, three hundred trades and occupations, and they
+are to qualify for these by learning to space tucks attractively."
+
+In the very valuable Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the Commissioner of
+Labor, published in 1910, which is devoted to industrial education,
+there is but one chapter dealing with girls' industrial schools,
+in itself a commentary upon the backwardness of the movement for
+industrial education where girls are affected. It is true that the
+schools included under this heading do not account for all the school
+trade-training given to girls in this country, for the classification
+of industrial schools, where there is no general system, is
+very difficult, and under no plan of tabulation can there be an
+all-inclusive heading for any one type. For instance a school for
+colored girls might be classified either as a school for Negroes or as
+a school for girls, as a public school, a philanthropic school, or an
+evening school, and a school giving trade-training to boys might also
+include girls. The writer of this most exhaustive report, however,
+states definitely that "trade schools for girls are rare, and even
+schools offering them industrial courses as a part of their work are
+not common."
+
+It is impossible to consider vocational training without bearing in
+mind the example of Germany. Germany has been the pioneer in this work
+and has laid down for the rest of us certain broad principles, even if
+there are in the German systems some elements which are unsuitable to
+this country. These general principles are most clearly exemplified
+in the schools of the city of Munich. Indeed, when people talk of the
+German plan, they nearly always mean the Munich plan. What it aims at
+is:
+
+1. To deal in a more satisfactory way with the eighty or ninety per
+cent. of children who leave school for work at fourteen, and to bridge
+over with profit alike to the child, the employer and the community
+the gap between fourteen and sixteen which is the unsolved riddle of
+educators everywhere today.
+
+2. To retain the best elements of the old apprenticeship system,
+though in form so unlike it. The boy (for it mainly touches boys) is
+learning his trade and he is also working at his trade, and he has
+cultural as well as industrial training, and this teaching he receives
+during his working hours and in his employer's time.
+
+3. To provide teachers who combine ability to teach, with technical
+skill.
+
+4. To insure, through joint boards on which both employers and workmen
+are represented, even if these boards are generally advisory, only an
+interlocking of the technical class and the factory, without which any
+system of vocational instruction must fall down.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: As to how far this is the case, there is a difference
+of opinion among authorities. Professor F.W. Roman, who has made so
+exhaustive a comparative study of vocational training in the United
+States and Germany, writes: "In Germany, there is very little local
+control of schools, or anything else. The authority in all lines is
+highly centralized." (The Industrial and Commercial Schools of the
+United States and Germany, 1915, p. 324.) Dr. Kerchensteiner is quoted
+by the Commercial Club of Chicago as saying, in a letter to Mr. Edwin
+G. Cooley, that the separate administrative school-boards of Munich
+form an essential part of the city's school-system.]
+
+5. To maintain a system which shall reach that vast bulk of the
+population, who, because they need technical training most urgently,
+are usually the last to receive it.
+
+Many of the most advanced educators in this country join issue with
+the usual German practice on some most important points. These
+consider that it is not sufficient that there be a close interlocking
+of the technical school and class and the factory. It is equally
+essential that vocational education, supported by public funds, shall
+be an integral part of the public-school system, of which it is indeed
+but a normal development, and therefore that we must have a unit and
+not a dual system. Only thus can we insure that vocational education
+will remain education at all and not just provide a training-school
+for docile labor as an annex and a convenient entrance hall to the
+factory system. Only thus can we insure democracy in the control of
+this new branch of public activity. Only thus can the primary schools
+be kept in touch with the advanced classes, so that the teacher, from
+the very kindergarten up, may feel that she is a part of a complete
+whole. Then indeed will all teachers begin to echo the cry of one whom
+I heard say: "You ask us to fit the children for the industries. Let
+us see if the industries are fit for the children."
+
+Another point in which we must somewhat modify any European model is
+in the limited training provided for girls. A country which is
+frankly coeducational in its public schools, state universities and
+professional colleges, must continue to be so when installing a new
+educational department to meet the changed and changing conditions of
+our time.
+
+The parliament of organized labor in the United States has taken a
+liberal view and laid down an advanced program on the subject of
+vocational training. In 1908 the American Federation of Labor
+appointed a committee on industrial education consisting of nineteen
+members, of whom two were women, Agnes Nestor, International Secretary
+of the Glove Workers' Union, and Mrs. Raymond Robins, President of the
+National Women's Trade Union League of America. Its very first report,
+made in 1909, recommended that the Federation should request the
+United States Department of Commerce and Labor to investigate the
+subject of industrial education in this country and abroad.
+
+The report of the American Federation of Labor itself, includes
+a digest of the United States Bureau of Labor's report, and was
+published as Senate Document No. 936. It is called "The Report of the
+Committee on Industrial Education of the American Federation of Labor,
+compiled and edited by Charles H. Winslow."
+
+Whatever narrowness and inconsistency individual trade unionists may
+be charged with regarding industrial education, the leaders of the
+labor movement give it their endorsement in the clearest terms. For
+instance, this very report, comments those international unions which
+have already established supplemental trade courses, such as the
+Typographical Union, the Printing Pressmen's Union, and the Photo
+Engravers' Union, and other local efforts, such as the School for
+Carpenters and Bricklayers in Chicago and the School for Carriage,
+Wagon, and Automobile Workers of New York City. All trade unions which
+have not adopted a scheme of technical education are advised to take
+the matter up.
+
+On the question of public-school training, the American Federation of
+Labor is no less explicit and emphatic, favoring the establishment of
+schools in connection with the public-school system in which pupils
+between fourteen and sixteen may be taught the principles of the
+trades, with local advisory boards, on which both employers and
+organized labor should have seats. But by far the most fundamental
+proposal is the following. After outlining the general instruction on
+accepted lines, they proceed as follows:
+
+"The shop instruction for particular trades, and for each trade
+represented, the drawing, mathematics, mechanics, physical and
+biological science applicable to the trade, the history of that
+trade, and a sound system of economics, including and emphasizing the
+philosophy of collective bargaining."
+
+The general introduction of such a plan of training would mean that
+the young worker would start out on his wage-earning career with an
+intelligent understanding of the modern world, and of his relations to
+his employer and to his fellow-laborers, instead of, as at present,
+setting forth with no knowledge of the world he is entering, and
+moreover, with his mind clogged with a number of utterly out-of-date
+ideas, as to his individual power of control over wages and working
+conditions.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: History, as it is usually taught, is not considered from
+the industrial viewpoint, nor in the giving of a history lesson
+are there inferences drawn from it that would throw light upon the
+practical problems that are with us today, or that are fast advancing
+to meet us. When a teacher gives a lesson on the history of the United
+States, there is great stress laid upon the part played by individual
+effort. All through personal achievements are emphasized. The
+instructor ends here, on the high note that personal exertion is the
+supreme factor of success in life, failing unfortunately to point out
+how circumstances have changed, and that even personal effort may have
+to take other directions. Of the boys and girls in the schools of the
+United States today between nine and fourteen years of age, over eight
+millions in 1910, how many will leave school knowing the important
+facts that land is no longer free, and that the tools of industry
+are no more, as they once were, at the disposal of the most
+willing-worker? And that therefore (Oh, most important therefore!) the
+workers must work in coöperation if they are to retain the rights
+of the human being, and the status signified by that proud name, an
+American citizen.]
+
+If we wish to know the special demands of working-women there is no
+way so certain as to consult the organized women. They alone are at
+liberty to express their views, while the education they have had
+in their unions in handling questions vital to their interests as
+wage-earners, and as leaders of other women gives clearness and
+definiteness to the expression of those views.
+
+If organized women can best represent the wage-earners of their sex,
+we can gain the best collective statement of their wishes through
+them. At the last convention of the National Women's Trade Union
+League in June, 1913, the subject of industrial education received
+very close attention. The importance of continuation schools after
+wage-earning days have commenced was not overlooked. An abstract of
+the discussion and the chief resolutions can be found in the issue of
+_Life and Labor_ for August, 1913.
+
+After endorsing the position taken up by the American Federation of
+Labor, the women went on to urge educational authorities to arm the
+children, while yet at school, with a knowledge of the state and
+federal laws enacted for their protection, and asked also "that such
+a course shall be of a nature to equip the boy and girl with a full
+sense of his or her responsibility for seeing that the laws are
+enforced," the reason being that the yearly influx of young boys and
+girls into the industrial world in entire ignorance of their own state
+laws is one of the most menacing facts we have to face, as their
+ignorance and inexperience make exploitation easy, and weaken the
+force of such protective legislation as we have.
+
+Yet another suggestion was that "no working certificates be issued to
+a boy or girl unless he or she has passed a satisfactory examination
+in the laws which have been enacted by the state for their
+protection."
+
+In making these claims, organized working-women are keeping themselves
+well in line with the splendid statement of principles enunciated by
+that great educator, John Dewey:
+
+    The ethical responsibility of the school on the social side must
+    be interpreted in the broadest and freest spirit; it is equivalent
+    to that training of the child which will give him such possession
+    of himself that he may take charge of himself; may not only adapt
+    himself to the changes that are going on, but have power to shape
+    and direct them.
+
+When we ask for coeducation on vocational lines, the question is sure
+to come up: For how long is a girl likely to use her training in a
+wage-earning occupation? It is continually asserted and assumed she
+will on the average remain in industry but a few years. The mature
+woman as a wage-earner, say the woman over twenty-five, we have been
+pleased to term and to treat as an exception which may be ignored in
+great general plans. Especially has this been so in laying out schemes
+for vocational training, and we find the girl being ignored, not only
+on the usual ground that she is a girl, but for the additional,
+and not-to-be-questioned reason that it will not pay to give her
+instruction in any variety of skilled trades, because she will be
+but a short time in any occupation of the sort. Hence this serves to
+increase the already undue emphasis placed upon domestic training as
+all that a girl needs, and all that her parents or the community ought
+to expect her to have. This is only one of the many cases when we try
+to solve our new problems by reasoning based upon conditions that have
+passed or that are passing away.
+
+In this connection some startling facts have been brought forward by
+Dr. Leonard P. Ayres in the investigations conducted by him for the
+Russell Sage Foundation. He tried to find the ages of all the women
+who are following seven selected occupations in cities of the United
+States of over 50,000 population. The occupations chosen were those in
+which the number of women workers exceeds one for every thousand of
+the population. The number of women covered was 857,743, and is just
+half of all the women engaged in gainful employment in those cities.
+The seven occupations listed are housekeeper, nursemaid, laundress,
+saleswoman, teacher, dressmaker and servant. No less than forty-four
+per cent. of the housekeepers are between twenty-five and forty-four.
+Of dressmakers there are fifty-one per cent. between these two ages;
+of teachers fifty-eight per cent.; of laundresses forty-nine per
+cent., while the one occupation of which a little more than half are
+under twenty-five years is that of saleswoman, and even here there are
+barely sixty-one per cent., leaving the still considerable proportion
+of thirty-nine per cent. of saleswomen over the age of twenty-five.
+It is pretty certain that these mature women have given more than the
+favorite seven years to their trade. It is to be regretted that the
+investigation was not made on lines which would have included some of
+the factory occupations. It is difficult to see why it did not. Under
+any broad classification there must be more garment-workers, for
+instance, in New York or Chicago, than there are teachers. However, we
+have reason to be grateful for the fine piece of work which Dr. Ayres
+has done here.
+
+The _Survey_, in an editorial, also quotes in refutation of the
+seven-year theory, the findings of the commission which inquired
+into the pay of teachers in New York. The commissioners found that
+forty-four per cent. of the women teachers in the public schools had
+been in the service for ten years or more, and that only twenty-five
+per cent. of the men teachers had served as long a term.
+
+It can hardly be doubted that the tendency is towards the lengthening
+of the wage-earning life of the working-woman. A number of factors
+affect the situation, about most of which we have as yet little
+definite information. There is first, the gradual passing of the
+household industries out of the home. Those women, for whom the
+opportunity to be thus employed no longer is open, tend to take up or
+to remain longer in wage-earning occupations.
+
+
+The changing status of the married woman, her increasing economic
+independence and its bearing upon her economic responsibility, are all
+facts having an influence upon woman as a wage-earning member of the
+community, but how, and in what degree, they affect her length of
+service, is still quite uncertain. It is probable too, that they
+affect the employment or non-employment of women very differently in
+different occupations, but how, and in what degree they do so is mere
+guess-work at present.
+
+Much pains has been expended in arguing that any system of vocational
+training should locally be co-related with the industries of the
+district. Vain effort! For it appears that the workers of all ages are
+on the move all the time. Out of 22,027 thirteen-year-old boys in the
+public schools of seventy-eight American cities, only 12,699, or a
+little more than half, were living in the places of their birth. And
+considering the _wanderlust_ of the young in any case, is anything
+more probable than that the very first thing a big proportion of this
+advancing body of "vocationally trained" young men and women will want
+to do will be to try out their training in some other city? And why
+should they not?
+
+If there has ever been voiced a tenderer plea for a universal
+education that shall pass by no child, boy or girl, than that of Stitt
+Wilson, former Socialist Mayor of Berkeley, I do not know it. If there
+has ever been outlined a finer ideal of an education fitting the
+child, every child, to take his place and fill his place in the new
+world opening before him, I have not heard of it. He asks that we
+should submit ourselves to the leadership of the child--his needs, his
+capacities, his ideal hungers--and in so doing we shall answer many
+of the most disturbing and difficult problems that perplex our
+twentieth-century civilization. Even in those states which make the
+best attempt at educating their children, from three-fourths to
+nine-tenths, according to the locality, leave the schools at the age
+of thirteen or fourteen, and the present quality of the education
+given from the age of twelve to sixteen is neither an enrichment in
+culture, nor a training for life and livelihood. It is too brief for
+culture, and is not intended for vocation.
+
+Mr. Wilson makes no compromise with existing conditions; concedes not
+one point to the second-rate standards that we supinely accept; faces
+the question of cost, that basic difficulty which most theoretical
+educators waive aside, and which the public never dreams of trying to
+meet and overcome. Here are some of his proposals.
+
+    The New Education [he writes] will include training and experience
+    in domestic science, cookery and home-making; agriculture and
+    horticulture; pure and applied science, and mechanical and
+    commercial activities with actual production, distribution and
+    exchange of commodities. Such training for three to six millions
+    of both sexes from the age of twelve to twenty-one years will
+    require land, tools, buildings of various types, machinery,
+    factory sites by rail and water, timber, water and power sources.
+
+    As all civilization is built upon the back of labor, and as
+    all culture and leisure rests upon labor, and is not possible
+    otherwise, so all cultural and liberal education, as generally
+    understood, shall be sequent to the productive and vocational. The
+    higher intellectual education should grow out of and be earned by
+    productive vocational training.
+
+    Hence our schools should be surrounded by lands of the best
+    quality obtainable, plots of 10, 50, 100 and more acres. These
+    lands should be the scene of labor that would be actually
+    productive and not mere play.... In such a school the moral
+    elements of labor should be primary, viz.: joy to the producer,
+    through industry and art; perfect honesty in quality of material
+    and character of workmanship; social coöperation, mutualism, and
+    fellowship among the workers or students; and last, but not least,
+    justice--that is, the full product of labor being secured to the
+    producer.
+
+He plans to make the schools largely self-supporting, partly through
+land endowments easier to obtain under the system of taxation of land
+values that is possibly near at hand in the Golden State, for which
+primarily the writer is planning. The other source of income would be
+from the well-directed labor of the students themselves, particularly
+the older ones. He quotes Professor Frank Lawrence Glynn, of the
+Vocational School at Albany, New York, as having found that the
+average youth can, not by working outside of school hours, but in the
+actual process of getting his own education, earn two dollars a week
+and upward. Elsewhere, Mr. Wilson shows that the beginnings of such
+schools are to be found in operation today, in some of the best reform
+institutions of the country.
+
+For all who desire university training, this would open the door. They
+would literally "work their way" through college. One university'
+president argues for some such means of helping students: "We need
+not so much an increase of beneficiary funds as an increase of the
+opportunities for students to earn their living." This is partly
+to enable them to pay; for their courses and thereby acquire an
+education, but chiefly because through supporting themselves they gain
+self-confidence and therefore the power of initiative.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: "The social and educational need for vocational training
+is equally urgent. Widespread vocational training will democratize
+the education of the country: (1) by recognizing different tastes and
+abilities, and by giving an equal opportunity to all to prepare for
+their lifework; (2) by extending education through part-time and
+evening instruction to those who are at work in the shop or on
+the farm." Report of the Commission on National Aid to Vocational
+Instruction, 1914, page 12.]
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE WORKING WOMAN AND MARRIAGE
+
+
+It is a lamentable fact that the wholesome and normal tendency towards
+organization which is now increasingly noticeable among working-women
+has so far remained unrelated to that equally normal and far more
+deeply rooted and universal tendency towards marriage.
+
+As long as the control of trade unionism among women remained with
+men, no link between the two was likely to be forged; the problem
+is so entirely apart from any that men unionists ever have to face
+themselves. It is true that with a man the question of adhering to
+a union alike in times of prosperity or times of stress may be
+complicated by a wife having a "say-so," through her enthusiasm or her
+indifference when it means keeping up dues or attending meetings; yet
+more, when belonging to a union may mean being thrown out of work or
+ordered on strike, just when there has been a long spell of sickness
+or a death with all the attendant expenses, or when perhaps a new
+baby is expected or when the hard winter months are at hand and the
+children are lacking shoes and clothes. Still, roughly speaking, a man
+worker is a unionist or a non-unionist just the same, be he single or
+married.
+
+But how different it is with a girl! The counter influence exerted by
+marriage upon organization is not confined to those girls who leave
+the trade, and of course the union, if they have belonged to one,
+after they have married. The possibility of marriage and especially
+the exaggerated expectations girls entertain as to the improvement in
+their lot which marriage will bring them is one of the chief adverse
+influences that any organization composed of women or containing many
+women members has to reckon with, an influence acting all the time on
+the side of those employers who oppose organization among their girls.
+
+It has been the wont of many men unionists in the past and is the
+custom of not a few today, to accept at its face value the girl's own
+argument: "What's the use of our joining the union? We'll be getting
+married presently." It is much the same feeling, although unspoken,
+that underlies the ordinary workingman's unwillingness to see women
+enter his trade and his indifference to their status in the trade once
+they have entered it. The man realizes that this rival of his is but a
+temporary worker, and he often, too often, excuses himself tacitly,
+if not in words, from making any effort to aid her in improving her
+position or from using his influence and longer experience to secure
+for her any sort of justice, forgetting that the argument, "She'll
+soon get married" is a poor one at best, seeing that as soon as one
+girl does marry her place will immediately be filled by another, as
+young, as inexperienced as she had been, and as utterly in need of the
+protection that experienced and permanent co-workers could give her.
+The girl, although she guesses it not, is only too frequently made the
+instrument of a terrible retribution; for the poor wage, which was
+all that she in her individual helplessness was able to obtain for
+herself, is used to lower the pay of the very man, who, had he stood
+by her, might have helped her to a higher wage standard and at the
+same time preserved his own.
+
+Again, the probability of the girl marrying increases on all sides the
+difficulties encountered in raising standards alike of work and of
+wages. Bound up with direct payment are those indirect elements of
+remuneration or deduction from remuneration covered by length of
+working-hours and by sanitary conditions, since whatever saps the
+girl's energy or undermines her health, whether overwork, foul air,
+or unsafe or too heavy or overspeeded machinery, forms an actual
+deduction from her true wages, besides being a serious deduction from
+the wealth-store, the stock of well-being, of the community.
+
+Up till comparatively recent times the particular difficulties I
+have been enumerating did not exist, since, under the system of home
+industries universal before the introduction of steam-power, there was
+not the same economic competition between men and women, nor was there
+this unnatural gap between the occupation of the woman during her
+girlhood and afterwards in her married life. In the majority of cases,
+indeed, she only continued to carry on under her husband's roof the
+very trades which she had learned and practiced in the home of her
+parents. And this applied equally to the group of trades which we
+still think of as part of the woman's natural home life, baking and
+cooking and cleaning and sewing, and to that other group which have
+become specialized and therefore are now pursued outside the home,
+such as spinning and weaving. It was true also in large part of the
+intrinsically out-of-door employments, such as field-work.
+
+In writing about a change while the process is still going on, it is
+extremely difficult to write so as not to be misunderstood. For there
+are remote corners, even of the United States, where the primitive
+conditions still subsist, and where woman still bears her old-time
+relation to industry, where the industrial life of the girl flows on
+with no gap or wrench into the occupational life of the married woman.
+Through wifehood and motherhood she indeed adds to her burdens, and
+complicates her responsibilities, but otherwise she spends her days
+in much the same fashion as before, with some deduction, often, alas,
+inadequate, to allow for the bearing and rearing of her too frequent
+babies. Also in the claims that industry makes upon her in her
+relation to the productive life of the community, under such primitive
+conditions, her life rests upon the same basis as before.
+
+As a telling illustration of that primitive woman's occupations, as
+she carries them on among us today, the following will serve. Quite
+recently a friend, traveling in the mountainous regions of Kentucky,
+at the head of Licking Creek, had occasion to call at a little
+mountain cabin, newly built out of logs, the chinks stopped up
+with clay, evidently the pride and the comfort of the dwellers. It
+consisted of one long room. At one end were three beds. In the center
+was the family dining-table, and set out in order on one side a number
+of bark-seated hickory chairs made by the forest carpenters. On the
+other a long bench, probably intended for the younger members of the
+family. Facing the door, as the visitor entered, was a huge open
+fireplace, with a bar across, whence hung three skillets of kettles
+for the cooking of the food. The only occupant of the cabin at that
+hour in the afternoon was an old woman. She was engaged in combing
+into smoothness with two curry-combs a great pile of knotted wool,
+washed, but otherwise as it came off the sheep's back. The wool was
+destined to be made into blankets for the household. The simple
+apparatus for the carrying-out of the whole process was there at hand,
+for the spinning-wheel stood back in a corner of the room, while the
+big, heavy loom had, for convenience' sake, been set up on the porch.
+That old woman's life may be bare and narrow enough in many ways, but
+at least she is rich and fortunate in having the opportunity for the
+exercise of a skilled trade, and in it an outlet for self-expression,
+and even for artistic taste in the choice of patterns and colors.
+Far different the lot of the factory worker with her monotonous and
+mindless repetition of lifeless movements at the bidding of the
+machine she tends. The Kentucky mountain woman was here practicing in
+old age the art she had acquired in her girlhood. Those early lessons
+which had formed her industrial education, were of life-long value,
+both in enriching her own life, and by adding to her economic and
+therefore social value, alike as a member of her own household, and as
+a contributor to the wealth of the little community.
+
+We once had, universally, and there still can be found in such
+isolated regions, an industrial arrangement, soundly based upon
+community and family needs, and even more normally related to the
+woman's own development, better expressing many sides of her nature
+than do the confused and conflicting claims of the modern family and
+modern industry render possible for vast numbers today. And this,
+although wide opportunity for personal and individual development was
+so sadly lacking, and the self-abnegation expected from women was so
+excessive, that the intellectual and emotional life must often have
+been a silent tragedy of repression.
+
+Among our modern working-women in urban localities, we find today no
+such settled plan for thus directing the activities of women to meet
+modern needs and conditions. Neither home nor school furnishes our
+girls with a training fitting them for a rich and varied occupational
+life. The pursuits into which most of them drift or are driven, do
+indeed result in the production of a vast amount of manufactured
+goods, food, clothing, house and personal furnishings of all sorts,
+and of machinery with which may be manufactured yet more goods. Much
+of this product is both useful and beneficial to us all, but there
+are likewise mountains of articles fashioned, neither useful nor
+beneficial, nor resulting in any sort of use, comfort or happiness to
+anyone: adulterated foods, shoddy clothes, and toys that go to pieces
+in an hour.
+
+Certainly the girl worker of this twentieth century produces per head,
+and with all allowances made for the cost of the capital invested in
+factory and machinery, and for superintendence, far and away more in
+amount and in money value than did her girl ancestor of a hundred
+years ago, or than her contemporary girl ancestor of today in the
+Kentucky and Tennessee mountains, or than her other sister, the
+farmer's daughter in agricultural regions, who still retains hold of
+and practices some of the less primitive industries.
+
+But the impulse to congratulate ourselves upon this vastly increased
+product of labor is checked when we take up the typically modern
+girl's life at a later stage. We have observed already that her life
+during her first fourteen years is utterly unrelated to the next
+period, which she spends in store or factory. The training of her
+childhood has been no preparation for the employments of her girlhood.
+She is but an unskilled hand, the last cog in a machine, and if these
+prove but seven lean years for her, it is only what we might expect.
+When they are ended, and married life entered upon, we are again
+struck by the absence of any relation between either of these two
+life-periods and the stage preceding, and by the fact that at no time
+is any intelligent preparation made either for a wage-earning or
+a domestic career. This means an utter dislocation between the
+successive stages of woman's life, a dislocation, the unfortunate
+results of which, end not with the sex directly affected, but bring
+about a thousand other evils, the lowering of the general wage
+standard, the deterioration of home life, and serious loss to
+the children of the coming generation. As far as we know, such a
+dislocation in the normal development of women's lives never took
+place before on any large scale. I am speaking of it here solely in
+relation to the sum of the well-being of the whole community. As it
+affects the individual girl and woman herself it has been dealt with
+under other heads.
+
+The cure which the average man has to propose is pithily summed up in
+the phrase: "Girls ought to stay at home." The home as woman's
+sole sphere is even regarded as the ultimate solution of the whole
+difficulty by many men, who know well that it is utterly impracticable
+today. A truer note was struck by John Work, when addressing himself
+specially to socialist men:
+
+    It would be fatal to our prospects of reaching the women with
+    the message of socialism if we were to give the millions of
+    wage-earning women to understand that we did not intend to let
+    them continue earning their own living, but proposed to compel
+    them to become dependent upon men. They price what little
+    independence they have, and they want more of it.
+
+    It would be equally fatal to our prospects of reaching the women
+    with the message of socialism if we were to give the married women
+    to understand that they must remain dependent upon men. It is one
+    of the most hopeful signs of the times that they are chafing under
+    the galling chains of dependence.
+
+           *       *       *       *       *
+
+    Far from shutting women out of the industries, socialism will do
+    just the opposite.
+
+    It will open up to every woman a full and free opportunity to earn
+    her own living and receive her full earnings.
+
+    This means the total cessation of marrying for a home.
+
+The degree of irritation that so many men show when expressing
+themselves on the subject of women in the trades is the measure of
+their own sense of incompetence to handle it. The mingled apathy and
+impatience with which numbers of union men listen to any proposal to
+organize the girls with whom they work arises from the same mental
+attitude. "These girls have come into our shop. We can't help it.
+We didn't ask them. They should be at home. Let them take care of
+themselves."
+
+The inconsistency of such a view is seen when we consider that in the
+cities at least an American father (let alone a foreign-born father)
+is rarely found nowadays objecting to his own girls going out to work
+for wages. He expects it, unless one or more are needed by their
+mother at home to help with little ones or to assist in a small family
+store or home business. He takes it as a matter of course that his
+girls go to work as soon as they leave school, just as his boys do.
+And yet the workman in a printing office, we will say, whose own
+daughter is earning her living as a stenographer or teacher, will
+resent the competition of women type-setters, and will both resent and
+despise those daughters of poorer fathers, who have found their way
+into the press or binding-rooms. Unionists or non-unionists, such men
+ignore the fact that all these girls have just as much right to earn
+an honest living at setting type, or folding or tipping and in so
+doing to receive the support and protection of any organization there
+is, as their own daughters have to take wages for the hours they spend
+in schoolroom or in office. The single men but echo the views of the
+older ones when such unfortunately is the shop tone, and may be even
+more indifferent to the girls' welfare and to the bad economic results
+to all workers of our happy-go-lucky system or no-system.
+
+I do not wish to be understood as accepting either the girl's present
+economic position or the absorption in purely domestic occupations of
+the workingman's wife as a finality. It is a transitional stage that
+we are considering. I look forward to a time, I believe it to be
+rapidly approaching, when the home of the workingman, like everyone's
+else home, will be truly the home, the happy resting-place, the
+sheltering nest of father, mother and children, and when through the
+rearrangement of labor, the workingman's wife will be relieved from
+her monotonous existence of unrelieved domestic drudgery and overwork,
+disguised under the name of wifely and maternal duties, when the
+cooking and the washing, for instance, will be no more part of
+the home life in the humblest home than in the wealthiest. The
+workingman's wife will then share in the general freedom to occupy
+part of her time in whatever occupation she is best fitted for, and,
+along with every other member of the community she will share in the
+benefits arising from the better organisation of domestic work.
+
+However, this blessed change has not yet come to pass, and of all
+city-dwellers, the wife of the workingman seems to be furthest away
+from the benefits of the transformation. Therefore, in considering
+the connection between the girl's factory life and her probable
+occupational future in married life, I have purposely avoided dwelling
+upon what is bound to arrive some time in the future, and have tried
+to face facts as they exist today, dealing as far as possible with the
+difficulties of the generation of girls now in the factories, those
+about to enter, and those passing out, remembering only, with a
+patience-breeding sense of relief, that the conditions of today may
+not necessarily be the conditions of tomorrow.
+
+I therefore accept in its full meaning domesticity, as practiced by
+the most domestic woman, and as preached by the domestic woman's most
+ardent advocate among men. Nor am I expressing resentment at the fact
+that when a girl leaves the machine-speeded work of the factory, it is
+only to take up the heavy burden of the workingman's wife, as we know
+it. She must be wife and mother, and manager of the family income, and
+cook and laundress and housemaid and seamstress. The improvement of
+her position and the amelioration of her lot can only come slowly,
+through social changes, as expressed in the woman movement, and
+through the widening scope of the principle of specialization.
+
+Even today, without any such radical changes as are foreshadowed
+above, the gap between schooldays and working years, between working
+years and married life, can to some extent be bridged over if we plan
+to do so from the beginning. As has been shown, organized women are
+already advocating some such orderly plan for the girl's school
+training, as should blend book-learning with manual instruction and
+simple domestic accomplishments. But also, in order to deal justly
+and fairly by the girl, any reasonable scheme of things would also
+presuppose such strict control of the conditions of industry, that
+hours would be reasonably short, that in the building and running of
+machinery there should be borne in mind always the safety and health
+of the workers, instead of, as today, expecting almost all the
+adaptation to be on the part of the worker, through pitting the
+flexible, delicate, and easily injured human organism against the
+inflexible and tireless machine. Other essential conditions would be
+the raising of the standard of living, and therefore of remuneration,
+for all, down to the weakest and least skilled, and the insistence
+upon equal pay for equal work, tending to lessen the antagonism
+between men and women on the industrial field. Thus doubly prepared
+and adequately protected the girl would pass from her wage-earning
+girlhood into home and married life a fresher, less exhausted creature
+than she usually is now. Further, she would be more likely to bring to
+the bearing and rearing of her children a constitution unenfeebled
+by premature overwork and energies unsapped by its monotonous grind.
+Again, her understanding of industrial problems would make her a more
+intelligent as well as a more sympathetic helpmate. Hand in hand,
+husband and wife would more hopefully tackle fresh industrial
+difficulties as these arose, and they would do so with some slight
+sense of the familiarity that is the best armor in life's battle.
+
+Besides there is the other possibility, all too often realized, that
+lies in the background of every such married woman's consciousness.
+She may be an ideally domestic woman, spending her time and strength
+on her home and for the Welfare of her husband and children, yet
+through no fault of hers, her home may be lost to her, or if not
+lost, at least kept together only by her own unremitting efforts as a
+wage-earner. It often happens that marriage in course of time proves
+to be anything but an assurance of support. Early widowed, the young
+mother herself may have to earn her children's bread. Or the husband
+may become crippled, or an invalid, or he may turn out a drunkard and
+a spendthrift. In any of these circumstances, the responsibility and
+the burden of supporting the entire family usually falls upon the
+wife. Is it strange that the group so often drift into undeserved
+pauperism, sickness and misery, perhaps later on, even into those
+depths of social maladjustment that bring about crime?
+
+The poorly paid employment of office-cleaning is sadly popular among
+widows and deserted wives, because, being followed during the evening,
+and sometimes night hours, it leaves a mother free during the day to
+attend to her cooking and housework and sewing, and be on the spot to
+give the children their meals. Free! The irony of it! Free, that is,
+to work sixteen hours or longer per day, and free to leave her little
+ones in a locked-up room, while she earns enough to pay the rent and
+buy the food. Ask any such widowed mother what she is thinking of, as
+she plies mop and scrubbing-brush after the offices are closed and the
+office force gone home, and she will tell you how she worries for fear
+something may have happened to the baby while she is away. She wonders
+whether she left the matches out of the reach of four-year-old Sammy;
+and Bessie, who isn't very strong, is always so frightened when the
+man on the floor above comes home late and quarrels with his wife.
+
+The theory on which the poor woman was paid her wages when as a single
+girl she used to draw her weekly pay-envelope, that a fair living wage
+for a woman is what is barely sufficient to support herself, rather
+falls down when a whole household has to be kept out of a girl's
+miserable pay.
+
+All these difficulties would be eased for such overburdened ones, if
+their early training had been such as to leave them equipped to meet
+the vicissitudes of fortune on fairer terms, and if the conditions of
+industrial life, allotting equal pay to workers of both sexes, had
+also included reasonable opportunities for advancement to higher
+grades of work with proportionately increased pay.
+
+Meanwhile, married women, less handicapped than these, are
+experimenting on their own account, and are helping to place the work
+of wives as wage-earners on a more settled basis. The wife of the
+workingman who has no children, and who lives in a city finds she has
+not enough to do in the little flat which is their home. The stove
+in winter needs little attention; there is not enough cooking and
+cleaning to fill up her time, and as for sewing she can buy most of
+their clothing cheaper than she can make it. But any little money she
+can earn will come in useful; so she tries for some kind of work,
+part-time work, if she can find it. In every big city there are
+hundreds of young married women who take half-time jobs in our
+department stores or who help to staff the lunch-rooms or wash up or
+carry trays, or act as cashiers in our innumerable restaurants. As
+half-day girls such waitresses earn their three or four dollars a
+week, besides getting their lunch. Very frequently they do not admit
+to their fellow-workers that they are married, for the single girl
+with her own hard struggle on her hands is apt to resent such
+competition. A worker who is in a position to accept voluntarily a
+half-time job of this sort is one who must have some other means of
+meeting part of her living expenses. A home in the background is such
+an aid. The increasingly large number of part-time workers, lessen,
+the others reckon, the number of jobs to be had by the ones that have
+to work all day, and may tend also to lower wages, since any partly
+subsidized worker can afford to take less than the girl who has to
+support herself out of her earnings. The latter has never heard of
+parasitic trades, and yet in her heart she knows there is something
+not quite right here, something that she blindly feels she would like
+to put an end to.
+
+She is quite right in resisting any lowering of wages, but she will
+have to accept this inroad into the trades of these exceptionally
+placed married women. She will have to throw her efforts into another
+channel, using organization to raise the position of working-women
+generally into dignified industrial independence. For this still
+limited number of half-time married women workers are but the leaf on
+the stream, showing the direction events are taking. As specialization
+goes on, as the domestic industries are more and more taken out of our
+homes, as the gifted and trained teacher more and more shares in the
+life of the child, more and more will the woman after she marries
+continue to belong to the wage-earning class by being a part-time
+worker. To propose eliminating the present (sometimes unfair)
+competition of the married woman with the single girl, by excluding
+her from any or every trade is as futile as the resentment of men
+against all feminine rivals in industry.
+
+We have been observing, so far, how the lives of women have been
+modified, often, not for the better, by the industrial revolution. Let
+us glance now in passing at the old home industries themselves, and
+note what is still happening. One after another has been taken, not
+merely out of the home, where they all originated, but out of the
+hands of the sex who invented and developed them. Trade after trade
+has thus been taken over from the control of women, and appropriated
+and placed on a modern business basis by men. I make no criticism upon
+this transference beyond remarking that you hear no howl about it
+from the supplanted ones, as you never fail to do over the converse
+process, when male workers are driven out of occupations to make way
+for women, whose cheapness makes them so formidable an industrial
+competitor. But whichever way it works, sex discrimination usually
+bodes no good to the lasting interest of any of the workers. When a
+trade passes out of the status of a home industry, and takes on the
+dignity of an outside occupation, women are rarely in a position to
+take hold of it in its new guise. We find men following it, partly
+because they are more accustomed to think in terms of professional
+skill, and partly because they are in the business swim, and can
+more easily gain command of the capital necessary to start any new
+enterprise. Men then proceed to hire the original owners as employés,
+and women lose greatly in their economic status.
+
+This is the general rule, though it is by no means wholly the sex
+line that divides the old-fashioned houseworker from the specialized
+professional, though this habitual difference in standing between
+groups of different sex does tend to blur fundamental issues. The
+economic struggle in its bare elements would be easy to follow
+compared with the complex and perpetually changing forms in which it
+is presented to us.
+
+But the home industries are not yet fully accounted for and disposed
+of. Some of the household occupations, essential once to the comfort
+and well-being of the family, are shrinking in importance, prior to
+vanishing before our eyes, because now they do not for the most part
+represent an economical expenditure of energy. Meanwhile, however,
+they linger on, a survival in culture, and in millions of homes today
+the patient housewife is striving with belated tools to keep her
+family fed and clothed and her house spotless.
+
+Take the cleaning process, for example, and watch what is happening.
+Dr. Helen Sumner draws attention to the fact that we ourselves are
+witnessing its rapid transformation. It is being taken out of the
+hands of the individual houseworker, who is wont to scrub, sweep and
+dust in the intervals between marketing, cooking, laundry-work or
+sewing, and by whom it is performed well or ill, but always according
+to the standards of the individual household, which means that
+there are no accepted standards in sweeping, scrubbing and dusting.
+House-cleaning is becoming a specialized, skilled trade, performed by
+the visiting expert and his staff of professionally trained employés.
+Even if as yet these skilled and paid workers enter an ordinary home
+only at long intervals, when the mystic process of spring cleaning
+seems to justify the expense, the day is plainly in sight when the
+usual weekly cleaning will be taken over by these same visitors.
+At present the abruptness of the change is broken for us by the
+introduction into the market, and the use by the house-mother
+of various hand-driven machines, a vast improvement upon the
+old-fashioned broom, and accustoming women to the idea of new and
+better methods of getting rid of dirt. Few realize the tremendous
+import of this comparatively insignificant invention, the atmospheric
+cleaner, or what a radical change it is bringing about in the thoughts
+of the housewife, whose ideas on the domestic occupations so far have
+been mostly as confused as those of the charwoman, who put up on her
+door the sign: "Scrubbing and Window-Cleaning Done Here." In the same
+way the innumerable electric appliances of today are simplifying the
+labors of the housewife; but their chief value is that through them
+she is becoming accustomed to the thought of change, and being led on
+to distinguish between the housework that can be simplified, and still
+done at home, and the much larger proportion which must sooner or
+later be relegated to the professional expert, either coming in
+at intervals or performing the task elsewhere. And this is true,
+fortunately, of women in the country as well as in the cities.
+
+We have traveled a long way during the last hundred and fifty years
+or so, and in that time have witnessed the complete transference from
+home to factory of many home industries, notably spinning and weaving,
+and soap-and candle-making. Others like the preparation of food are
+still in process of transference. The factory industries are the
+direct and legitimate offspring of the primitive home industries, and
+their growth and development are entirely on the lines of a normal
+evolution.
+
+[Illustration: _Courtesy of The Pine Mountain Settlement_ Primitive
+Industry. Kentucky mountain woman at her spinning-wheel. 1913]
+
+[Illustration: _Courtesy of The Chicago School of Civics and
+Philanthropy_ Italian Woman Home Finisher]
+
+But there is another form of industry that is a ghastly hybrid, the
+"home-work" that has been born of the union of advanced factory
+methods and primitive home appliances. Such a combination could never
+have come into existence, had the working classes at the time of the
+inception of machine-driven industry possessed either an understanding
+of what was happening, or the power to prevent their own exploitation.
+The effects of this home-work are in every way deadly. There is not a
+single redeeming feature about the whole business. Like the spinner
+or the weaver of olden times, the sewing-machine operator or the
+shirt-finisher of the present day provides her own workroom, lighting
+and tools, but unlike her, she enjoys no freedom in their use, nor has
+she any control over the hours she works, the prices she asks or the
+class of work she undertakes.
+
+With the home-worker hard-driven by her sister in poverty, and driving
+her in turn, helpless both in their ignorance under the modern
+Juggernaut that is destroying them, pushed ever more cruelly by
+relentless competition, the last stronghold, the poor little home
+itself, goes down. The mother has no time to care for her children,
+nor money wherewith to procure for them the care of others. In her
+frantic desire to keep them alive, she holds the whip over her own
+flesh and blood, who have to spend their very babyhood in tying
+feather-flues or pulling out bastings. Home-work, this unnatural
+product of nineteenth-century civilization, as an agency for summarily
+destroying the home is unparalleled. Nor do its blighting effects end
+with homes wrecked, and children neglected, stunted and slain. The
+proud edifice of modern industry itself, on whose account homes
+are turned into workshops, children into slaves, and mothers into
+slave-drivers, is undermined and degraded by this illegitimate
+competition, the most powerful of all factors in lowering wages, and
+preventing organization among regular factory hands. The matter lies
+in a nutshell. Industry which originated in the home could be safely
+carried on there only as long as it remained simple and the operations
+thereof such as one individual could complete. As soon as through the
+invention of power-driven machinery industry reached the stage of high
+specialization and division of labor, at once it became a danger to
+the home, and the home a degradation to it. It was at the call of
+specialized industry that the factory came into existence, and only in
+the factory can it be safely housed.
+
+A similar and, if it were possible, a worse form of family and group
+slavery prevails outside of the cities in the poorer farming regions
+and in the cotton states. It is harder to reach and to handle, and
+there is cause to fear that it is increasing. Especially in the busy
+season when the corn has to be harvested or the cotton picked the
+mother is considered as a toiler first, and she is to have her babies
+and look after her poor little home and her children as a mere
+afterthought. The children are contributors to the family support from
+the time they can toddle and schooling comes a bad second in making
+the family arrangements. One reason for this growing evil is the
+threatening degradation and disappearance of the independent farmer
+class, who made up what would have been called in England formerly the
+yeomanry of this country, and their replacement by a poor peasantry
+degraded by the wretched terms upon which they are driven to snatch a
+bare existence from a patch of land to which they are tied by lease,
+by mortgage or by wages, and which they have neither the money nor the
+knowledge to cultivate to advantage.
+
+The Federal Commission on Industrial Relations has brought to light
+some startling facts in this phase of our social life, as in many
+others. I can refer to the evidence of but one witness. She speaks for
+many thousands. This is as it is quoted in the daily press.
+
+  Picture for the moment the drama staged at Dallas.
+  Mrs. I. Borden Harriman of New York is presiding over
+  the commission. Mrs. Levi Stewart, the wife of a tenant
+  farmer, is on the witness stand. Mrs. Stewart is a shrinking
+  little woman with "faded eyes and broken body." She wears
+  a blue sunbonnet. Her dress of checkered material has lost
+  its color from long use. In a thin, nervous voice she
+  answers the questions of the distinguished leader of two
+  kinds of "society."
+
+  "Do you work in the fields?" Mrs. Harriman began.
+
+  "Yes, ma'am."
+
+  "How old were you when you married?"
+
+  "Fifteen."
+
+  "How old was your husband?"
+
+  "Eighteen."
+
+  "Did you work in the fields when you were a child?"
+
+  "Oh, yes'm, I picked and I chopped."
+
+  "Have you worked in the fields every year?"
+
+  "I do in pickin' and choppin' times."
+
+  "And you do the housework?'
+
+  "There ain't no one else to do it."
+
+  "And the sewing?"
+
+  "Yes, ma'am. I make all the clothes for the children
+  and myself. I make everything I wear ever since I was
+  married."
+
+  "Do you make your hats?"
+
+  "Yes, ma'am. I make my hats. I had only two since I
+  was married."
+
+  "And how long have you been married?"
+
+  "Twenty years."
+
+  "Do you do the milking?"
+
+  "Most always when we can afford a cow."
+
+  "What time do you get up in the morning?"
+
+  "I usually gits up in time to have breakfast done by 4
+  o'clock in summer time. In the winter time we are through
+  with breakfast by sun-up."
+
+  "Did you work in the fields while you were carrying your
+  children?"
+
+  "Oh, yes, sometimes; sometimes almost nigh to birthin'
+  time."
+
+  "Is this customary among the tenant farmers' wives you
+  have known?"
+
+  The answer was an affirmative nod.
+
+Let us now once more consider the home, and compare factory operations
+with the domestic arts. There is no doubt that in cooking, for
+instance, the housewife finds scope for a far higher range of
+qualifications than the factory girl exercises in preparing tomatoes
+in a cannery, or soldering the cans after they are filled with the
+cooked fruit. The housewife has first of all to market and next to
+prepare the food for cooking. She has to study the proper degree of
+heat, watch the length of time needed for boiling or baking in their
+several stages, perhaps make additions of flavorings, and serve
+daintily or can securely. There is scarcely any division of housework
+which does not call for resource and alertness. Unfortunately,
+however, although these qualities are indeed called for, they are
+not always called forth, because the houseworker is not permitted to
+concentrate her whole attention and interest upon any one class of
+work, but must be constantly going from one thing to another. Hence
+women have indeed acquired marvelous versatility, but at what a heavy
+cost! The houseworker only rarely acquires perfect skill and deftness
+or any considerable speed in performing any one process. Her
+versatility is attained at the price of having no standards of
+comparison established, and worse than all, at the price of working
+in isolation, and therefore gaining no training in team-work, and so
+never having an inkling of what organized effort means.
+
+Our factory systems, on the other hand, go to the other extreme, being
+so arranged that the majority of workers gain marvelous dexterity, and
+acquire a dizzying rate of speed, while they are apt to lose in both
+resourcefulness and versatility. They do not, however, suffer, to
+anything like the same degree, from isolation, and factory life, even
+where the employers are opposed to organization, does open a way to
+the recognition of common difficulties and common advantages, and
+therefore leads eventually in the direction of organization. In the
+factory trades the workers have to some extent learnt to be vocal. It
+is possible for an outsider to learn something of the inner workings
+of an establishment. Upon the highly developed trades, the searchlight
+of official investigation is every now and then turned. From
+statistics we know the value of the output. We are also learning a
+good deal about the workers, the environment that makes for health or
+invalidism, or risk to life, and we are in a fair way to learn more.
+The organized labor movement furnishes an expression, although still
+imperfect, of the workers' views, and keeps before the public the
+interests of the workers, even of the unorganized groups.
+
+But with the domestic woman all this is reversed. In spite of the fact
+that in numbers the home women far exceed the wage-earners, the value
+of their output has been ignored, and as to the conditions under
+which it is produced, not even the most advanced and progressive
+statisticians have been able to arrive at any estimate. Of sentiment
+tons have been lavished upon the extreme importance of the work of the
+housewife in the home, sometimes, methinks, with a lingering misgiving
+that she might not be too well content, and might need a little
+encouragement to be induced to remain there. What adulation, too,
+has been expended upon the work of even the domestic servant, with
+comparisons in plenty unfavorable to the factory occupations into
+which girls still persist in drifting. Yet in freedom and in social
+status, two of the tests by which to judge the relative desirability
+of occupations, the paid domestic employments take inferior ranks.
+Again, they offer little prospect of advance, for they lead nowhere.
+
+Further, as noted in an earlier chapter in the census reports all
+women returning themselves as engaged in domestic duties (not being
+paid employés), were necessarily not listed as gainfully employed. Yet
+it is impossible to believe that compared with other ways of employing
+time and energy, the hours that women spend in cooking and cleaning
+for the family, even if on unavoidably primitive lines, have no value
+to the community. Or again, that the hours a mother spends in caring
+for her baby, later on in helping with the lessons, and fitting the
+children for manhood or womanhood, have no value in the nation's
+account book. I will be reminded that this is an unworthy way of
+reckoning up the inestimable labors of the wife and mother. Perhaps
+so. Yet personally, I should much prefer a system of social economics
+which could estimate the items at a fair, not excessive value, and
+credit them to the proper quarter.
+
+A well-known woman publicist recently drew attention to the vast
+number of the women engaged in domestic life, and expressed regret
+that organizations like the National Women's Trade Union League
+confined their attention so exclusively to the women and girls
+employed in factories and stores, who, even today, fall so far short
+numerically of their sisters who are working in the home or on
+the farm. The point is an interesting one, but admits of a ready
+explanation. Every movement follows the line of least resistance,
+and a movement for the industrial organization of women must first
+approach those in the most advanced and highly organized industries.
+As I have shown, we really know very much more about the conditions of
+factory workers than of home-workers. The former have, in a degree,
+found their voice, and are able to give collective expression to their
+common interests.
+
+The League recently urged upon the Secretary for Labor, the
+recognition, as an economic factor, of the work of women in the
+household trades; the classification of these occupations, whether
+paid or unpaid, on a par with other occupations, and lastly, that
+there be undertaken a government investigation of domestic service.
+
+In this connection a long step forward has just been taken through
+the inquiries, which during the last two years, the Department of
+Agriculture has been making as to the real position of women on the
+farm, and has been making them of the women themselves. This came
+about through a letter addressed to the Secretary from Mr. Clarence
+Poe, Raleigh, North Carolina, under date of July 9, 1913, in which he
+said: "Have some bulletins for the farmer's wife, as well as for the
+farmer himself. The farm woman has been the most neglected factor
+in the rural problem, and she has been especially neglected by the
+National Department of Agriculture. Of course, a few such bulletins
+are printed, but not enough."
+
+A letter was accordingly sent out from Washington to the housewives of
+the department's 55,000 volunteer crop correspondents, on the whole a
+group of picked women. They were invited to state both their personal
+views and the results of discussions with women neighbors, their
+church organization or any women's organization to which they might
+belong. To this letter 2,225 relevant replies were received, many
+of these transmitting the opinions of groups of women in the
+neighborhood.
+
+The letter asked "how the United States Department of Agriculture can
+better meet the needs of farm housewives." Extracts from the replies
+with comments have been published in the form of four bulletins. Many
+of the letters make tragic reading: the want of any money of their
+own; the never-ending hours; the bad roads and poor schools; neglect
+in girlhood and at times of childbirth. A great many thoughtless
+husbands will certainly be awakened to a sense of neglected
+opportunities, as well as to many sins of commission.
+
+The bulletins contain appendices of suggestions how farm women can
+help one another, and how they may gain much help from the certainly
+now thoroughly converted Department of Agriculture, through farmer's
+institutes for women, through demonstrations and other extension
+work under the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, and through the formation of
+women's and girls' clubs.
+
+It is of the utmost importance to society, as well as to herself, that
+the whole economic status of the married woman, performing domestic
+duties, should be placed upon a sounder basis. It is not as if the
+unsatisfactory position of the average wife and mother could confine
+its results to herself. Compared with other occupations, hers fulfills
+none of the conditions that the self-respecting wage-earner demands.
+The twenty-four-hour day, the seven-day week, no legal claim for
+remuneration, these are her common working conditions. Other claims
+which a husband can and usually does make upon her I leave unnoticed;
+also the unquestioned claim of her children upon her time and
+strength. Marital duties, as they are evasively termed, could not
+be exacted from any wage servant. Moreover, the very existence of
+children whom the married pair have called into being is but an
+argument, on the one hand, for the father taking a larger share in
+their care, and on the other, for the lightening of the mother's
+multifarious burden by the better organization of all household work,
+as well as everything that belongs to child culture and care.
+
+The poor working conditions she suffers under, and the uncertainty of
+her position, reduce many a woman's share in the married partnership
+to that of an employé in a sweated trade. This kind of marriage,
+therefore, like all other sweated trades tends to lower the general
+market value of women's work. This is casting no reflection upon the
+hundreds of thousands of husbands who do their part fairly, who share
+and share alike whatever they have or earn with their wives. How many
+a workingman regularly hands over to his wife for the support of the
+home the whole of his earnings with perhaps the barest deduction,
+a dollar or two, or sometimes only a few cents, for small personal
+expenditures. Many wives enjoy complete power over the family purse.
+Or the married pair decide together as to how much they can afford to
+spend on rent and food and clothing, and when sickness or want of work
+face them, they meet the difficulty together. The decisions made, it
+is the wife who has the whole responsibility for the actual spending.
+
+But though so often a man does fulfill in spirit as in letter his
+promise to support, as well as to love and honor the girl he has
+married, there is very little in the laws of any country to compel
+him. And because the man can slip the collar more easily than the
+woman can, the woman's position is rendered still more uncertain.
+If she were an ordinary wage-worker, we should say of her that her
+occupation was an unstandardized one, and that individually she was
+too dependent upon the personal goodwill of another. Therefore,
+like all other unstandardized callings, marriage, considered as an
+occupation, tends to lower the general market value of woman's work.
+Conversely, Cicely Hamilton in "Marriage as a Trade," points out that
+the improvements in the economic position of the married woman, which
+have come about in recent years, are partly at least due to the
+successful efforts of single women to make themselves independent and
+self-supporting.
+
+But during the process of transition, and while single women are
+forging farther and farther ahead, many a married woman is finding
+herself between the upper and the nether millstone. And unfortunately
+precisely in the degree that the paid domestic worker is able to make
+better arrangements in return for her services, whether as resident or
+as visiting employé, many housemothers are likely for a time to find
+conditions press yet more severely upon themselves. They will soon
+have no one left upon whom they can shift their own burdens of
+overwork, as they have so frequently done in the past. Sooner or later
+they will be driven to take counsel with their fellows, and will then
+assuredly plan some method of organizing housewives for mutual help
+and coöperation, and for securing from society some fairer recognition
+of the true value of the contribution of the domestic woman to the
+wealth of the community.
+
+It is not strange that she with whom industry had its rise and upon
+whom all society rests should be the last to benefit by the forces
+of reorganization which are spiritually regenerating the race and
+elevating it to a level never before reached. The very function of
+sex, whose exercise enters into her relation with her husband, has
+complicated what could otherwise have been a simple partnership. The
+helplessness of her children and their utter dependence upon her,
+which should have furnished her with an additional claim for
+consideration, have only tied her more closely and have prevented her
+from obtaining that meed of justice from society which a less valuable
+servant had long ago won. But in the sistership of womanhood, now
+for the first time admitted and hopefully accepted, fortunate and
+unfortunate clasp hands, and go forward to aid in making that future
+the whole world awaits today.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE WORKING WOMAN AND THE VOTE
+
+
+Olive Schreiner, in "Woman and Labor," lays it down as almost
+axiomatic that "the women of no race or class will ever rise in revolt
+or attempt to bring about a revolutionary readjustment of their
+relation to society, however intense their suffering, and however
+clear their perception of it, while the welfare and persistence of
+society requires their submission; that whenever there is a general
+attempt on the part of the women of any society to readjust their
+position in it, a close analysis will always show that the changed
+or changing conditions of society have made women's acquiescence no
+longer necessary or desirable."
+
+If this be so, it can only be accepted as the application to women of
+a statement which could be made equally of all the down-trodden races
+and classes of humanity. The one reason that makes me hesitate about
+accepting it as a complete explanation of the age-long submission
+of the oppressed is that we are all rather too ready to accept an
+explanation that explains away (shall I say?) or at least justifies
+the suffering of others. The explanation fits so well. Does it not
+fit too well? Probably Olive Schreiner did not intend it to cover the
+whole ground.
+
+In one detail, in any case, I take exception to it. An oppressed class
+or race or sex may often suffer intensely and go on suffering and
+submitting, but not _after_ they have gained a clear perception of the
+intensity of those sufferings, for then the first stage of rebellion
+has already begun. Not one of us who has grown to middle age but can
+remember, looking back to her own girlhood, how meekly and as a matter
+of course women of all classes accepted every sort of suffering as
+part of the lot of woman, especially of the married woman, whether it
+was excessive child-bearing, pain in childbirth, physical overwork,
+or the mental suffering arising out of a penniless and dependent
+condition, with the consequent absolute right of the husband to the
+custody and control of the children of the union. And in all nations
+and classes where this state of affairs still continues, the women
+have as yet no clear intellectual perception of the keenness and
+unfairness of their suffering. They still try to console themselves
+with believing and allowing others to suppose that after all, things
+are not so bad; they might be worse. These poor women actually
+hypnotize themselves into such a belief.
+
+Have you not heard a mother urge a daughter or a friend to submit
+uncomplainingly to the most outrageous domestic tyranny, for is not
+hers after all the common fate of woman?
+
+No clear perception there!
+
+This argument in no way touches the exceptional woman or man,
+belonging to an oppressed class. Such a woman, for instance, as the
+Kaffir woman spoken of by Olive Schreiner in this passage, is the rare
+exception.
+
+But so far Olive Schreiner is undoubtedly right. When the revolt at
+length takes place it is in answer to an immediate and pressing need
+of the whole community. When the restrictions upon a class have become
+hurtful to the whole, when their removal is called for because society
+is in need of the energies thus set free, then takes place a more or
+less general uprising of the oppressed and restricted ones, apparently
+entirely spontaneous and voluntary, in reality having its origin
+partly at least in the claim which society is making upon the hitherto
+restricted class to take up fuller social responsibilities.
+
+When observing then the modern change of attitude among women, towards
+life, we can therefore only conclude that such an immediate and
+pressing need is felt by society today, a claim neither to be ignored
+nor denied.
+
+On this reasoning, then, and observing the eager demand of women
+everywhere for increased freedom and independence, we can only draw
+the conclusion that the whole world is dimly recognizing an immediate
+and pressing need for the higher services of women, services which
+they cannot render unless freed legally, politically and sexually. It
+is this immense and universal social claim which has been responded
+to by the whole organized movement among women, industrial as well as
+educational and political.
+
+In order to understand the relation of the organized suffrage
+movement to the question of improving women's industrial and economic
+conditions and status, we have to consider the changed conditions of
+society under which we live, and we will have to recognize that the
+demand for the vote in different countries and at different times may
+or may not coincide with the same social content. Psychologically,
+indeed, as well as practically, the vote connotes all sorts of
+different implications to the women of today, contemporaries though
+they are.
+
+It was with an appreciation of these complexities that Professor W.I.
+Thomas has pointed out that in his opinion suffragists often place too
+great stress upon primitive woman's political power, and ignore
+the fact that women held an even more important relation to the
+occupational than to the political life of those early days, and that
+in her occupational value is to be traced the true source of her power
+and therefore her real influence in any age.
+
+While agreeing with Professor Thomas that some suffrage arguments do
+on the surface appear inconsistent with historical facts, I believe
+the inconsistency to be more formal than real.
+
+As the centuries pass a larger and still larger proportion of human
+affairs passes away from individual management and comes under social
+and community control. As this process goes on, more and more does the
+individual, whether man or woman, need the power to control socially
+the conditions that affect his or her individual welfare. In our day
+political power rightly used, gives a socialized control of social
+conditions, and for the individual it is embodied in and is expressed
+by the vote.
+
+To go back only one hundred years. The great bulk of men and women
+were industrially much more nearly on a level than they are today.
+A poor level, I grant you, for with the exception of the privileged
+classes, few and small were the political powers and therefore the
+social control of even men. But every extension of political power
+as granted to class after class of men has, as far as women are
+concerned, had the fatal effect of increasing the political inequality
+between men and women, thus placing women, though not apparently, yet
+relatively and actually upon a lower level.
+
+Again, the status of woman has been crushingly affected by the
+contemporaneous and parallel change which has passed over her special
+occupations; so that the conditions under which she works today are
+decidedly less than ever before by purely personal relationships and
+more by such impersonal factors as the trade supply of labor, and
+interstate and international competition. This change has affected
+woman in an immeasurably greater degree than man. The conditions
+of industrial life are in our day in some degree controllable by
+political power so that at this point woman again finds herself
+civilly and industrially at greater disadvantage than when her status
+in all these respects depended principally upon her individual
+capacity to handle efficiently problems arising within an area limited
+by purely personal relationships. To alter so radically the conditions
+of daily life and industry, and not merely to leave its control in the
+hands of the old body of voters, but to give over into the hands of an
+enlarged and fresh body of voters, and these voters inevitably the men
+of her own class who are her industrial competitors, that degree of
+control represented by the vote and to refuse it to women is to place
+women (though not apparently, yet actually and relatively) upon a
+distinctly lowered level.
+
+So that what suffragists are asking for is in reality not so much
+a novel power, as it is liberty to possess and use the same new
+instrument of social control as has been already accorded to men.
+Without that instrument it is no mere case of her standing still. She
+is in very truth retrogressing, as far as effective control over the
+conditions under which she lives her life, whether inside the home or
+outside of it. In this instinctive desire not to lose ground, to keep
+up both with altered social claims of society upon women and with the
+improved political equipment of their brothers, is to be found the
+economic crux of women's demand for the vote in every country and in
+every succeeding decade.
+
+In the course of human development, the gradual process of the
+readjustment of human beings to changed social and economic conditions
+is marked at intervals by crises wherein the struggle always going on
+beneath the surface between the new forces and existing conditions
+wells up to the surface and takes on the nature of a duel between
+contending champions. If this is true of one class or of one people,
+how much more is it true when the change is one that affects an entire
+sex.
+
+There have been occasions in history and there occur still today
+instances when economic conditions being such that their labor was
+urgently needed and therefore desired, it was easy for newcomers to
+enter a fresh field of industry, and give to a whole class or even
+to a whole sex in one locality an additional occupation. Such very
+evidently was the case with the first girls who went into the New
+England cotton mills. Men's occupations at that time in America lay
+for the most part out of doors, and there was therefore no sense of
+rivalry experienced, when the girls who used to spin at home began to
+spin on a large scale and in great numbers in a factory.
+
+It is far different where women have been forced by the economic
+forces driving them from behind to make their slow and painful way
+into a trade already in the possession of men. Of course the wise
+thing for the men to do in such a case is to bow to the logic of
+events, and through their own advantageous position as first in the
+field and through whatever organizations they may possess use all
+their power to place their new women rivals on an equal footing
+with themselves and so make it impossible for the women to become a
+weakening and disintegrating force in the trade. The women being thus
+more or less protected by the men from the exploitation of their own
+weakness it is then for them to accept the position, as far as they
+are able, stand loyally by the men, meet factory conditions as they
+find them, being the latest comers, and proceed afterwards to bring
+about such modifications and improvements as may seem to them
+desirable.
+
+Unfortunately this in a general way may stand for a description
+of everything that has not taken place. The bitter and often true
+complaints made by workmen that women have stolen their trade, that
+having learnt it, well or ill, they are scabs all the time in their
+acceptance of lower wages and worse conditions, relatively much worse
+conditions, and that they are often strike-breakers when difficulties
+arise, form a sad commentary upon the men's own short-sighted conduct.
+To women, driven by need to earn their living in unaccustomed ways,
+men have all too often opened no front gate through which they could
+make an honest daylight entrance into a trade, but have left only
+side-alleys and back-doors through which the guiltless intruders could
+slip in. Organized labor today, however, is on record as standing for
+the broader policy, however apathetic the individual unions and the
+individual trade unionists may often be.
+
+A dramatic presentation of one of these very complicated situations
+is found in the experience of Miss Susan B. Anthony in the printers'
+strike in New York in 1869. By some this incident has been interpreted
+to show a wide difference of outlook between those women who were
+chiefly intent on opening up fresh occupational possibilities for
+women, and those who, coming daily face to face with the general
+industrial difficulties of women already in the trades, recognized the
+urgent need of trade organization for women if the whole standard
+of the trades wherein they were already employed was not to be
+permanently lowered.
+
+While there is no such general inference to be drawn, the occurrence
+does place in a very strong light the extreme complexity of the
+question and the need that then existed, the need that still exists
+for closer coöperation between workers approaching the problem of the
+independence of the wage-earning woman from different sides.
+
+The files of the _Revolution_, which Miss Anthony, in conjunction with
+Mrs. Stanton and Mr. Parker Pillsbury, published from 1868 to 1870,
+are full of the industrial question. Though primarily the paper stood
+for the suffrage movement, the editors were on the best of terms with
+labor organizations and they were constantly urging working-women to
+organize and coöperate with men trade unionists, and in especial to
+maintain constantly their claim to equal pay for equal work.
+
+But just about the time of our story, in the beginning of 1869, Miss
+Anthony seems to have been especially impressed with the need of
+trade-schools for girls, that they might indeed be qualified to
+deserve equal pay, to earn it honestly if they were to ask for it; for
+we find her saying:
+
+"The one great need of the hour is to qualify women workers to _really
+earn_ equal wages with men. We must have _training-schools for women_
+in all the industrial avocations. Who will help the women will help
+ways and means to establish them."
+
+Just then a printers' strike occurred and Miss Anthony thought she saw
+in the need of labor on the part of the employers an opportunity to
+get the employers to start training-schools to teach the printing
+trade to girls, in her enthusiasm for this end entirely oblivious of
+the fact that it was an unfortunate time to choose for making such a
+beginning. She attended an employers' meeting held at the Astor House
+and laid her proposal before them.
+
+The printers felt that they were being betrayed, and by one, too, whom
+they had always considered their friend. On behalf of organized labor
+Mr. John J. Vincent, secretary of the National Labor Union, made
+public protest.
+
+Miss Anthony's reply to Mr. Vincent, under date February 3, 1869,
+published in the New York _Sun_, and reprinted in the _Revolution_, is
+very touching, showing clearly enough that in her eagerness to supply
+the needed thorough trade-training for young girls, she had for the
+moment forgotten what was likely to be the outcome for the girls
+themselves of training, however good, obtained in such a fashion.
+She had also forgotten how essential it was that she should work in
+harmony with the men's organizations as long as they were willing to
+work with her. Though not saying so in so many words, the letter is a
+shocked avowal that, acting impulsively, she had not comprehended the
+drift of her action, and it amounts to a withdrawal from her first
+position. She writes:
+
+    Sir: You fail to see my motive in appealing to the Astor House
+    meeting of employers, for aid to establish a training school for
+    girls. It was to open the way for a thorough drill to the hundreds
+    of poor girls, to fit them to earn equal wages with men everywhere
+    and not to undermine "Typographical No. 6." I did not mean to
+    convey the impression that "women, already good compositors should
+    work for a cent less per thousand ems than men," and I rejoice
+    most heartily that Typographical Union No. 6 stands so nobly by
+    the Women's Typographical Union No. 1 and demands the admission of
+    women to all offices under its control, and I rejoice also
+    that the Women's Union No. 1 stands so nobly and generously by
+    Typographical Union No. 6 in refusing most advantageous offers to
+    defeat its demands.
+
+    My advice to all the women compositors of the city, is now, as it
+    has ever been since last autumn, to join the women's union, for in
+    union alone there is strength, in union alone there is protection.
+
+    Every one should scorn to allow herself to be made a tool to
+    undermine the just prices of men workers; and to avoid this union
+    is necessary. Hence I say, girls, stand by each other, and by the
+    men, when they stand by you.
+
+With this the incident seems to have closed, for nothing more is heard
+of the employers' training-school.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: This illustrates well the cruel alternative perpetually
+placed before the working-woman and the working-woman's friends. She
+is afforded little opportunity to learn a trade thoroughly, and yet,
+if she does not stand by her fellow men workers, she is false to
+working class loyalty.
+
+That the women printers of New York were between the devil and the
+deep sea is evidenced by the whole story told in Chapter XXI of "New
+York Typographical Union No. 6," by George Stevens. In that is related
+how about this time was formed a women printers' union, styled
+"Women's Typographical No. 1," through the exertions of a number of
+women compositors with Augusta Lewis at their head. Miss Lewis voiced
+the enthusiastic thanks of the women when, a few months later, the
+union received its charter from the International Typographical Union
+at its next convention in June, 1869. A different, and a sadder note
+runs through Miss Lewis's report to the convention in Baltimore in
+1871, in describing the difficulties the women labored under.
+
+"A year ago last January, Typographical Union No. 6 passed a
+resolution admitting union girls in offices under the control of No.
+6. Since that time we have never obtained a situation that we could
+not have obtained if we had never heard of a union. We refuse to take
+the men's situations when they are on strike, and when there is no
+strike, if we ask for work in union offices we are told by union
+foremen 'that there are no conveniences for us.' We are ostracized
+in many offices because we are members of the union; and though the
+principle is right, the disadvantages are so many that we cannot
+much longer hold together.... No. 1 is indebted to No. 6 for great
+assistance, but as long as we are refused work because of sex we
+are at the mercy of our employers, and I can see no way out of our
+difficulties."
+
+In 1878 the International enacted a law that no further charter be
+granted to women's unions, although it was not supposed to take effect
+against any already in existence. Women's Typographical No. 1, already
+on the downward grade, on this dissolved. But not till 1883 did the
+women printers in New York begin to join the men's union, and there
+have been a few women members in it ever since. But how few in
+proportion may be judged from the figures on September 30, 1911. Total
+membership 6,969, of whom 192 were women. I believe this to be typical
+of the position of the woman compositor in other cities.]
+
+I have given large space to this incident, because it is the only one
+of the kind I have come across in Miss Anthony's long career. Page
+after page of the _Revolution_ is full of long reports of workingmen's
+conventions which she or Mrs. Stanton attended.[A] At these they were
+either received as delegates or heard as speakers, advocating the
+cause of labor and showing how closely the success of that cause was
+bound up with juster treatment towards the working-woman. Many indeed
+must have been the labor men, who gained a broader outlook upon their
+own problems and difficulties through listening to such unwearied
+champions of their all but voiceless sex.
+
+[Footnote A: Mrs. Stanton's first speech before the New York
+legislature, made in 1854, was a demand that married working-women
+should have the right to collect their own wages. She and the workers
+with her succeeded in having the law amended. Up till then a married
+woman might wash all day at the washtub, and at night the law required
+that her employer should, upon demand, hand over her hard-earned money
+to her husband, however dissolute he might be.]
+
+To the more conservative among the workingmen the uncompromising views
+of these women's advocates must have been very upsetting sometimes,
+and always very unconventional. We find that in a workingmen's
+assembly in Albany, New York, when one radical delegate moved to
+insert the words "and working-women" into the first article of the
+Constitution, he felt bound to explain to his fellow-delegates that it
+was not his intention to offer anything that would reflect discredit
+upon the body. He simply wanted the females to have the benefit
+of their trades and he thought by denying them this right a great
+injustice was done to them. The speaker who followed opposed the
+discussion of the question. "Let the women organize for themselves."
+The radicals, however, rose to the occasion.
+
+Mr. Graham in a long speech said it was a shame and a disgrace for
+this body, pretending to ask the elevation of labor to neglect or
+refuse to help this large, deserving, but down-trodden class.
+
+Mr. Topp said he would be ashamed to go home and say he had attended
+this assembly if it overlooked the claims of the female organizations.
+
+The resolution to include the women was carried with applause.
+
+At the National Labor Congress held in Germania Hall, New York, the
+_Revolution_ of October 1, 1868, had noted the admission of four women
+delegates as marking a new era in workingmen's conventions. These
+were: Katherine Mullaney, president of the Collar Laundry Union of
+Troy, N.Y.; Mrs. Mary Kellogg Putnam, representing Working Women's
+Association No. 2 of New York City; Miss Anthony herself, delegate
+from Working Women's Association No. 1, New York City; and Mary A.
+Macdonald, from the Working Women's Protective Labor Union, Mount
+Vernon, New York.
+
+Mrs. Stanton, after a long and exciting debate, was declared a
+delegate, but the next day, to please the malcontents, the National
+Labor Congress made clear by resolution that it did not regard itself
+as endorsing her peculiar ideas or committing itself to the question
+of female suffrage, but simply regarded her as a representative
+from an organization having for its object "the amelioration of the
+condition of those who labor for a living." "Worthy of Talleyrand" is
+Miss Anthony's sole comment.
+
+The connection between the woman movement and the labor movement is
+indeed close and fundamental, but that must not be taken to imply that
+the workingman and the woman of whatever class have not their own
+separate problems to handle and to solve as each sees best. The
+marriage relation between two individuals has often been wrecked by
+assuming as the basis of their common life that man and wife are one
+and that the husband is that one. And so the parallel assumption that
+all the working-woman's wrongs will naturally be righted by redress if
+their righting is left in the hands of her working brother for many
+years led to a very curious and unfortunate neglect of suffrage
+propaganda among working-women, and on the part of working-women and
+to a no less unfortunate ignorance of industrial problems, also, on
+the part of many suffragists, whether those affecting workingmen and
+women alike or the women only.
+
+It was not so in the early days. The instances given above show how
+close and friendly were the relations between labor leaders and
+suffrage pioneers. What has been said of Miss Anthony applied equally
+to the other great women who carried the suffrage banner amid
+opprobrium and difficulty.
+
+The change came that comes so often in the development of a great
+movement. One of the main objects which the pioneers had had in view
+somehow slipped out of the sight of their successors. The earliest
+move of the advanced women of America had been for equal rights of
+education, and there success has been greatest and most complete and
+thorough. But it was almost exclusively the women who were able to
+enter the professions who gained the benefits of this campaign for
+equal educational and consequently equal professional opportunities.
+
+The next aim of the leaders in the woman movement of the last century
+had been to accord to woman equality before the law. This affecting
+primarily and chiefly woman in her sex relations, had its permanent
+results in reference to the legal status of the married woman and
+the mother, bearing at the same time secondarily upon the safety and
+welfare of the child; hence in the different states a long series of
+married women's property acts, equal guardianship acts, modifications
+of the gross inequalities of the divorce law, and the steady raising
+of the age of protection for girls.
+
+At least that was the position ten years ago. But today the tide has
+turned. Partly is this due to the growth of industrial organization
+among women, a development that has followed the ever-increasing
+need of mutual protection. Trade unionism has helped to train the
+working-woman to listen to the suffrage gospel, though therein she has
+often been slower than the workingman, her better educated brother. On
+the other hand a great many influences have combined to wake up the
+suffragist of our day to the true meaning and value of what she was
+asking. Especially has the work of the National Women's Trade Union
+League and the campaign of publicity it has conducted on behalf of
+the working-woman, both within and without its membership, focused
+attention upon the woman in industry as a national responsibility.
+Then again the tremendous strikes in which such large numbers of women
+and girls have been involved were an education to others than the
+strikers--to none more than to the suffrage workers who coöperated
+with the ill-used girl strikers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and
+Chicago.
+
+An influence of even more universal appeal, if of less personal
+intensity, has been the suffrage movement in Great Britain. That
+movement has educated the public of this country, as they never would
+have been educated by any movement confined to this country alone.
+Inside the ranks of enrolled suffragists it has been an inspiration,
+showering upon their cause a new baptism of mingled tears and
+rejoicing. In calmer mood we have learned from our British sisters
+much regarding policies adapted to modern situations, and they
+have assuredly shown us all sorts of new and original methods of
+organization and education. The immense and nation-wide publicity
+given by the press of the United States to the more striking and
+sensational aspects of the British movement and all the subsequent
+talk and writing in other quarters has roused to sex-consciousness
+thousands of American women of all classes who had not been previously
+interested in the movement for obtaining full citizenship for
+themselves and their daughters. These women also aroused, and men,
+too, have furnished the huge audiences which have everywhere greeted
+such speakers as Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Philip Snowden, when in
+person they have presented the mighty story of the transatlantic
+struggle. There is no difficulty nowadays in gathering suffrage
+audiences anywhere, for the man and the woman walking along the street
+supply them to the open-air speaker in the large city and the little
+country town as one by one city and town take up the new methods.
+
+Even more close to lasting work for all the issues that affect the
+community through placing upon women an ordered civic responsibility
+are the plans for the organizing under different names of woman
+suffrage parties and civic leagues which blend the handling of local
+activities everywhere with a demand for the ballot in keeping with the
+needs of the modern community. No clear-eyed woman can work long in
+this sort of atmosphere without realizing how unequally social burdens
+press, how unequally social advantages are allotted, whether the
+burdens come through hours of work, inadequate remuneration, sanitary
+conditions, whether in home or in factory, and whether the advantages
+are obtainable through public education, vocational training, medical
+care, or in the large field of recreation.
+
+So important does work through organization, appear to me that,
+remembering always that tendencies are more important than conditions,
+it would seem in some respects a more wholesome and hopeful situation
+for women to be organized and working for one of their common aims,
+even though that aim be for the time being merely winning of the vote,
+rather than to have the vote, and with it working merely as isolated
+individuals, and with neither the power that organization insures nor
+the training that it affords.
+
+But with what we know nowadays there should be no need for any such
+unsatisfactory alternative. It would be much more in keeping with the
+modern situation if the object of suffrage organizations were to read,
+not "to obtain the vote" but "to obtain political, legal and social
+equality for women."
+
+Then as each state, or as the whole country (we hope by and by)
+obtains the ballot, so might the organizations go on in a sense as if
+nothing had happened. And nothing would have happened, save that a
+great body of organized women would be more effective than ever. The
+members would individually be equipped with the most modern instrument
+of economic and social expression. The organizations themselves would
+have risen in public importance and esteem and therefore in influence.
+Moreover, and this is the most important point of all, they would be
+enrolled among those bodies, whose declared policy would naturally
+help in guiding the great bulk of new and untrained feminine voters.
+
+In the early days of the woman movement, the leaders, I believe,
+desired as earnestly and as keenly saw the need for legal and social
+or economic equality as we today with all these years of experience
+behind us. But the unconscious assumption was all the time that given
+political equality every other sort of equality would readily and
+logically follow. Even John Stuart Mill seems to have taken this
+much for granted. Not indeed that he thought that with universal
+enfranchisement the millennium would arrive for either men or women.
+But even to his clear brain and in his loyal and chivalrous heart,
+political freedom for women did appear as one completed stage in
+development, an all-inclusive boon, as it were, in due time bringing
+along by irrefragable inference equality on every other plane,
+equality before the law and equality in all social and sexual
+relations.
+
+Looking back now, we can see that whatever thinkers and statesmen
+fifty years ago may have argued for as best meeting the immediate
+needs of the hour, the organized suffrage movement in all the most
+advanced countries should long ago have broadened their platform,
+and explicitly set before their own members and the public as their
+objective not merely "the vote," but "the political, legal and social
+equality of women."
+
+We are not abler, not any broader-minded nor more intellectually
+daring than those pioneers, but we have what they had not, the test of
+results. Let us briefly glance at what has been the course of events
+in those states and countries which were the earliest to obtain
+political freedom for their women.
+
+In none of the four suffrage states first enfranchised in this
+country, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Colorado, in Australia or in New
+Zealand, did any large proportion of women ask for or desire their
+political freedom. In that there is nothing strange or exceptional.
+Those who see the need of any reform so clearly that they will work
+for it make up comparatively a small proportion of any nation or of
+any class. Women are no exception. Note Australia. As the suffrage
+societies there, as elsewhere, had been organized for this one
+purpose, "to obtain the vote," with the obtaining of the vote all
+reason for their continued existence ceased. The organizations at once
+and inevitably went to pieces. The vote, gained by the efforts of the
+few, was now in the hands of great masses of women, who had given
+little thought to the matter previously, who were absolutely unaware
+of the tremendous power of the new instrument placed in their hands. A
+whole sex burst into citizenship, leaderless and with no common policy
+upon the essential needs of their sex.
+
+Except in Victoria, where the state franchise lagged behind till 1909,
+the women of Australia have been enfranchised for over twelve years,
+and yet it is only recently that they are beginning to get together as
+sister women. Those leaders who all along believed in continuous and
+organized work by women for the complete freeing of the sex from all
+artificial shackles and unequal burdens are now justified of their
+belief. New young leaders are beginning to arise, and there are signs
+that the rank and file are beginning to march under these leaders
+towards far-off ends that are gradually being defined more clearly
+from the mists of these years. But they have much ground to make up.
+Only so lately as 1910 there were leading women in one of the
+large labor conferences who protested against women entering the
+legislature, using against that very simple and normal step in advance
+the very same moss-grown arguments as we hear used in this country
+against the conferring of the franchise itself.
+
+Nowadays, it is true, no quite similar result is likely to happen in
+any state or country which from now on receives enfranchisement, for
+the reason that there are now other organizations, such as the General
+Federation of Women's Clubs here, and the active women's trade unions,
+and suffrage societies on a broad basis and these are every day coming
+in closer touch with one another and with the organized suffrage
+movement. But neither women's trade unions nor women's clubs can
+afford to neglect any means of strengthening their forces, and a sort
+of universal association having some simple broad aim such as I
+have tried to outline would be an ally which would bring them into
+communication with women outside the ranks of any of the great
+organizations, for it alone would be elastic enough to include all
+women, as its appeal would necessarily be made to all women.
+
+The universal reasons for equipping women with the vote as with a tool
+adapted to her present day needs, and the claims made upon her by the
+modern community, the reasons, in short why women want and are asking
+for the vote, the universal reasons why men, even good men, cannot be
+trusted to take care of women's interests, were never better or more
+tersely summed up than in a story told by Philip Snowden in the debate
+in the British House of Commons on the Woman Suffrage Bill of 1910,
+known as the Conciliation Bill. He said that after listening to the
+objections urged by the opponents of the measure, he was reminded of a
+man who, traveling with his wife in very rough country, came late at
+night to a very poor house of accommodation. When the meal was served
+there was nothing on the table but one small mutton chop. "What," said
+the man in a shocked tone, "have you nothing at all for my wife?"
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+TRADE UNION IDEALS AND POLICIES
+
+
+Trade unionism does not embrace the whole of industrial democracy,
+even for organized labor and even were the whole of labor organized,
+as we hope one of these days it will be, but it does form one of the
+elements in any form of industrial democracy as well as affording one
+of the pathways thither.
+
+The most advanced trade unionists are those men and women who
+recognize the limitations of industrial organization, but who value
+it for its flexibility, for the ease with which it can be transformed
+into a training-school, a workers' university, while all the while
+it is providing a fortified stronghold from behind whose shelter
+the industrial struggle can be successfully carried on, and carried
+forward into other fields.
+
+If we believe, as all, even non-socialists, must to some extent admit,
+that economic environment is one of the elemental forces moulding
+character and deciding conduct, then surely the coming together of
+those who earn their bread in the same occupation is one of the most
+natural methods of grouping that human beings can adopt.
+
+There are still in the movement in all countries those of such a
+conservative type that they look to trade organization as we know
+it today as practically the sole factor in solving the industrial
+problem.
+
+In order to fulfill its important functions of protecting the workers,
+giving to them adequate control over their working conditions, and
+the power of bargaining for the disposal of their labor power
+through recognized representatives, trade-union organization must be
+world-wide. Organizations of capital are so, or are becoming so, and
+in order that the workers may bargain upon an equal footing, they must
+be in an equally strong position. Now is the first time in the history
+of the world that such a plan could be even dreamt of. Rapid means of
+communication and easy methods of transport have made it possible for
+machine-controlled industry to attract workers from all over the world
+to particular centers, and in especial to the United States, and this
+has taken place without any regard as to where there was the best
+opening for workers of different occupations or as to what might
+be the effects upon the standards of living of the workers of
+artificially fostered migrations, and haphazard distribution of the
+newcomers.
+
+It is sadly true of the labor movement, as of all other movements
+for social advance, that it lags behind the movements organized for
+material success and private profit. It lags behind because it lacks
+money, money which would keep more trained workers in the field, which
+would procure needed information, which would prevent that bitterest
+of defeats, losing a strike because the strikers could no longer hold
+out against starvation. The labor movement lacks money, partly because
+money is so scarce among the workers; they have no surplus from which
+to build up the treasury as capital does so readily, and partly
+because so many of them do not as yet understand that alone they are
+lost, in organization they have strength. While they need the labor
+movement, just as much does the labor movement need them.
+
+More and more, however, are the workers acknowledging their own
+weakness, at the same time that they remember their own strength. As
+they do so, more and more will they adopt capital's own magnificent
+methods of organization to overcome capital's despotism, and be able
+to stand out on a footing of equality, as man before man.
+
+One tendency, long too much in evidence in the labor movement
+generally, and one which has still to be guarded against, is to take
+overmuch satisfaction in the unionizing of certain skilled trades or
+sections of trades, and to neglect the vast bulk of those already
+handicapped by want of special skill or training, by sex or by race.
+I have heard discussions among labor men which illustrate this. The
+platform of the Federation of Labor is explicit, speaking out on this
+point in no doubtful tone, but there are plenty of labor men, and
+labor women who make their own particular exceptions to a rule that
+should know of none.
+
+I have heard men in the well-paid, highly skilled, splendidly
+organized trades speak even contemptuously of the prospect of
+organizing the nomad laborers of the land, recognizing no moral claim
+laid upon themselves by the very advantages enjoyed by themselves in
+their own trade, advantages in which they took so much pride. That is
+discouraging enough, but more discouraging still was it to gather one
+day from the speech of one who urged convincingly that while both
+for self-defense and for righteousness' sake, the skilled organized
+workers must take up and make their own the cause of the unskilled and
+exploited wanderers, that he too drew his line, and that he drew it at
+the organization of the Chinese.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: I am not here discussing the unrestricted admission
+of Orientals under present economic conditions. I merely use the
+illustration to press the point, that organized labor should include
+in its ranks all workers already in the United States. A number of the
+miners in British Columbia are advocates of the organization of the
+Chinese miners in that province.]
+
+Others again, while they do not openly assert that they disapprove of
+the bringing of women into the trade unions, not only give no active
+assistance towards that end, but in their blindness even advocate the
+exclusion of women from the trades, and especially from their own
+particular trade. The arguments which they put forward are mostly of
+these types: "Girls oughtn't to be in our trade, it isn't fit for
+girls"; or, "Married women oughtn't to work"; or, "Women folks should
+stay at home," and if the speaker is a humane and kindly disposed man,
+he will add, "and that's where they'll all be one of these days,
+when we've got things straightened out again." As instances of this
+attitude on the part of trade-union men who ought to know better, and
+its results, the pressmen in the printing shops of our great cities
+are well organized, and the girls who feed the presses, and stand
+beside the men and work with them, are mostly outside the protection
+of the union. Some of the glass-blowers are seriously arguing against
+the suggestion of organizing the girls who are coming into the trade
+in numbers. "Organization won't settle it. That's no sort of a
+solution," say the men; "they're nice girls and would be much better
+off in some other trade." Just as if girls went into hard and trying
+occupations from mere contrariness! It is too late in the day, again,
+to shut the door on the women who are going in as core-makers in the
+iron industry, but the men in the foundries think they can do it. Men
+who act and talk like this have yet much to learn of the true meaning
+and purposes of labor organization.
+
+Wherever, then, we find this spirit of exclusion manifested, whether
+actively as in some of the instances I have cited, or passively in
+apathetic indifference to the welfare of the down-trodden worker, man
+or woman, American or foreign, white or colored, there is no true
+spirit of working-class solidarity, only a self-seeking acceptance
+of a limited and antiquated form of labor organization, quite out of
+keeping with twentieth-century conditions and needs. This does not
+make for advance ultimately in any branch of labor, but is one of the
+worst retarding influences to the whole movement. In former ages the
+principles of democracy could only extend within one class after
+another. The democracy of our day is feeling after a larger solution;
+the democracy of the future cannot know limits or it will be no
+democracy at all.
+
+It has been pointed out many times that the rich are rich, not so much
+in virtue of what they possess, but in virtue of what others do not
+possess. The ratio of the difference between the full pocket and many
+empty pockets represents the degree in which the one rich man or woman
+is able to command the services of many poor men and women. We all
+recognize these crude differences and regret the results to society.
+But after all is the case so very much bettered when for rich and
+poor, we read skilled and unskilled, when we have on the one hand a
+trade whose members have attained their high standing through the
+benefits of years of training, a strong union, high initiation
+fees, perhaps limitation of apprentices? I am neither praising nor
+criticizing any methods of trade protection. All of them are probably
+highly beneficial to those within the charmed circle of the highly
+organized trades. But if, in the very midst of the general state of
+industrial anarchy and oppression which the unskilled workers have to
+accept, it is possible to find trades in which organization has been
+so successful in maintaining good conditions, this is partly because
+the number of such artisans, so skilled and so protected, has always
+been limited. And let us ask ourselves what are the effects of these
+limitations upon those outside the circle, whether those excluded from
+the trade or from the organization because of the demands exacted, or
+those debarred by poverty or other circumstances from learning any
+skilled trade at all. Unquestionably the advantages of the highly
+protected ones are not won solely from the employers. Some part of
+their industrial wealth is contributed by the despised and ignored
+outsiders. Some proportion of their high wages is snatched from
+the poor recompense of the unskilled. Women are doubly sufferers,
+underpaid both as women and as unskilled workers. It is not necessary
+to subscribe to the old discredited wage-fund theory, in order to
+agree with this.
+
+Just here lies the chief danger of the craft form of organization as
+a final objective. If the trade-union movement is ever to be wholly
+effective and adequate to fulfill its lofty aims, it must cease to
+look upon craft organization as a final aim. The present forms of
+craft organization are useful, only so long as they are thought of as
+a step to something higher, only in so far as the craft is regarded as
+a part of the whole. Were this end ever borne in mind, we should hear
+less of jurisdictional fights, and there would be more of sincere
+endeavor and more of active effort among the better organized workers
+to share the benefits of organization with all of the laboring world.
+The more helpless and exploited the group, the keener would be the
+campaign, the more unsparing the effort on the part of the more
+fortunate sons of toil.
+
+Against such a narrow conservatism, however, there are other forces at
+work, both within and without the regularly organized labor movement,
+one of them aiming at such reorganization of the present unions as
+shall gradually merge the many craft unions into fewer and larger
+bodies.[A] This process is evolutionary, and constructive, but slow,
+and meanwhile the exploited workers cry in their many tongues, "O
+Lord, how long!" or else submit in voiceless despair.
+
+[Footnote A: The United Mine Workers are essentially on an industrial
+basis; they take in all men and boys working in and about the mine.]
+
+Is it any wonder that under these conditions of industrial anarchy
+and imperfect organization of labor power a new voice is heard in the
+land, a voice which will not be stilled, revolutionary, imperious,
+aiming frankly at the speedy abolition of organized governments, and
+of the present industrial system? This is the movement known in Europe
+as syndicalism, and on this continent represented by the Industrial
+Workers of the World, usually termed the I.W.W.
+
+Their program stands for the one big union of all the workers, the
+general strike and the gaining possession and the conducting of the
+industries by the workers engaged in them. They deprecate the making
+of agreements with employers, and acknowledge no duty in the keeping
+of agreements.
+
+The year 1911 will be remembered among word-historians as the year
+when the word "syndicalism" became an everyday English word. It had
+its origin in the French word "syndicalisme," which is French
+for trade unionism, just as French and Belgian trade unions are
+"syndicats." But because for reasons that cannot be gone into here
+so many of the French trade unionists profess this peculiarly
+revolutionary philosophy, there has grown up out of and around the
+word "syndicalisme" a whole literature with writers like George Sorel
+and Gustave Hervé as the prophets and exponents of the new movement.
+So the word "syndicalism," thus anglicized, has come to signify this
+latest form of trade-union organization and action.
+
+Although sabotage, interfering with output, clogging machinery,
+blocking transportation and so forth have been advocated and practiced
+by extreme syndicalists, such do not seem to me to form an essential
+and lasting element in syndicalist activity, any more than we find the
+wholesale destruction of machinery as carried on by displaced workmen
+a hundred years ago, has remained an accepted method of trade-union
+action, although such acts may easily form incidents in the progress
+of the industrial warfare to which syndicalists are pledged. Neither
+at Lawrence, Massachusetts, nor later at Paterson, New Jersey, did the
+Industrial Workers of the World, or the large bodies of strikers whom
+they led set any of these destructive practices in operation.
+
+Syndicalism is the latest despairing cry of the industrially
+vanquished and down-trodden, and is not to be suppressed by force of
+argument, whether the argument comes from the side of the employer or
+the fellow-workman. Only with the removal of the causes can we expect
+this philosophy of despair to vanish, for it is the courage of despair
+that we witness in its converts. The spirit they display lies outside
+the field of blame from those who have never known what it means to
+lose wife and children in the slow starvation of the strike or husband
+and sons in the death-pit of a mine, and themselves to be cheated
+life-long of the joys that ought to fall to the lot of the normal,
+happiness-seeking human being, from birth to death.
+
+The syndicalists will have done their work if they rouse the rest of
+us to a keener sense of our responsibilities. When the day comes that
+every worker receives the full product of his toil, the reasons for
+existence of this form of revolutionary activity will have passed
+away.
+
+Of one thing the present writer is convinced. That this newest form of
+the industrial struggle, however crude it may appear, however blind
+and futile in some of its manifestations, is destined to affect
+profoundly the course of the more orthodox trade-union movement. The
+daring assumptions that labor is the supreme force, that loyalty to
+the working world is the supreme virtue, and failure in that loyalty
+the one unpardonable sin, has stirred to the very depths organized
+labor of the conservative type, has roused to self-questioning many
+and many a self-satisfied orthodox trade unionist, inspiring him with
+loftier and more exacting ideals. He has been thrilled, as he had
+never been thrilled before with a realization of the dire need of the
+submerged and unorganized millions, and of the claims that they have
+upon him. Verily, in the face of such revelations, satisfaction in the
+fine organization of his own particular trade receives a check. The
+good of his own union as his highest aim sinks into insignificance,
+though regarding it as a means to an end, he may well go back to his
+workshop and his union card, intending to do for his fellow-craftsmen
+in his shop and in his trade more than ever before.
+
+The very activities of the I.W.W. during the last two or three years,
+side by side with the representatives of the American Federation of
+Labor on the same strike fields, and often carrying out opposition
+tactics, have for the first time in their lives given many furiously
+to think out policies and plans of campaign. From such shocks and
+stimuli are born thinkers and original tacticians, especially among
+the younger men and women.
+
+Wherever syndicalists have actively taken part in labor struggles,
+there has been the bitterest antagonism between them and the regular
+labor bodies. The latter ever bear in mind the risks of a divided
+front, and they have just reason to dread the "dual" organization
+as the most completely disruptive influence that can weaken labor's
+forces, and play into the employers' hands. Of this experience there
+have been too many instances in the United States.
+
+Syndicalists condemn agreements as a device of the enemy. It is true
+that agreements may be so managed as to prove a very weak reed for the
+workers to depend on in time of trouble. We have had many instances
+within the last few years of the disintegrating effect on the labor
+movement of agreements made between the employers and sections of
+their employés, which while protecting these particular sections leave
+other employés of the same firms out in the cold, either because the
+latter have no agreement at all, or because it is worded differently,
+or, most common defect of all, because it terminates upon a different
+date, three months, say, or a year later. It was on this rock that the
+printing pressmen struck during the huge newspaper fight in Chicago
+which lasted the whole summer of 1912, ending in a defeat costly to
+the conqueror, as well as to the conquered and whose echoes are
+still to be heard in discussions between representatives of the
+organizations and the sub-organizations involved. Though the fight was
+lost by the pressmen, the dispute between the unions involved is not
+settled yet, and the two principles at stake, loyalty to the interest
+of their fellow-workers and the duty of keeping a pledge made to
+employers, are as far as ever from being reconciled. The solution
+ahead is surely the strengthening of organizations so that failing
+a common agreement one branch or one craft will be in a position to
+refuse to sign one of these non-concurrent agreements, or any sort of
+agreement, which will leave other workers at a palpable disadvantage.
+
+The demand for the speedy taking over of the direct control of
+industries by the workers appears to me to ignore alike human
+limitations and what we know of the evolution of society. But great
+hope is to be placed in the coöperative movement, with the gradual
+establishment of factories and stores by organizations of the workers
+themselves.
+
+The condemnation of political activity, too, is, as I see it, out
+of line with the tendencies of social evolution, which demands
+organization and specialized skill in managing the affairs of the
+largest community as of the smallest factory.
+
+The strength and value of syndicalism is rather in criticism than in
+constructive results. In almost every paragraph in the platform we
+can detect a criticism of some weak point in the labor movement,
+in political socialism, or in the existing social framework we are
+consenting to accept and live under.
+
+So far in every country where it has risen into notice syndicalism has
+been more of a free-lance body than a regular army, and it may be that
+that is what syndicalists will remain. Up to the present they have
+shown no particular constructive ability. But they may develop great
+leaders, and with development work out plans to meet the new problems
+that will crowd upon them. Even if they should not, and should pass
+away as similar revolutionary groups have passed before, they will
+have hastened tremendously the closer knitting together of all groups
+of trade unionists. On the one hand they have already stirred up
+socialists to a better understanding and more candid admission of
+their own shortcomings in the political field, and on the other, they
+have already made labor more fearless and aggressive, and therefore
+more venturesome in the claims it makes, and more ready and
+resourceful in its adaptation of new methods to solve modern
+difficulties.
+
+Before leaving the syndicalists, I would call attention to a change
+that is coming over the spirit of some of their leaders, as regards
+immediate plans of action. From a recent number of _La Guerre
+Sociale_, edited by Gustave Hervé, the _Labour Leader_ (England),
+quotes an article attributed to Hervé himself, in which the writer
+says:
+
+"Because it would be a mistake to expect to achieve everything by
+means of the ballot-box, it does not follow that we can achieve
+nothing thereby."
+
+Another syndicalist of influence has been advocating the establishment
+of training-schools for the workers, in preparation for the day when
+they are to take over the industries. Vocational instruction this upon
+the great scale!
+
+Ramsay McDonald, by no means an indulgent critic of syndicalism, does
+not believe that Sorel really anticipates the general strike as the
+inauguration of the new order, but as a myth, which will lead the
+people on to the fulfillment of the ideal that lies beyond and on the
+other side of all anticipated revolutionary action.
+
+It is time now to consider the tendencies towards growth and
+adaptation to modern needs that have been, and are at work, within
+the American Federation of Labor, and among those large outside
+organizations on the outer edge of the Federation, as it were, such as
+the brotherhoods of railroad trainmen. These tendencies, are, speaking
+generally, towards such reorganization as will convert many small
+unions into fewer, larger, and therefore stronger bodies, and towards
+the long-delayed but inevitable organization of the workers on the
+political field. Such reorganization is not always smooth sailing, but
+the process is an education in itself.
+
+The combination or the federation of existing organizations is but
+the natural response of the workers to the ever-growing complexity of
+modern industrial life. Ever closer organization on the part of
+the employers, the welding together of twenty businesses into one
+corporation, of five corporations into one trust, of all the trusts in
+the country into one combine, have to be balanced by correspondingly
+complete organization on the part of the workers. There is this
+difference of structure, however, between the organization of
+employers and that of the employed. The first is comparatively simple,
+and is ever making for greater simplicity. Without going into the
+disputed question of how far the concentration of business can be
+carried, and of whether or not the small business man is to be finally
+pushed out of existence, it is beyond question that every huge
+business, for example, each one of our gigantic department stores,
+includes and represents an army of small concerns, which it has
+replaced, which have either been bought up or driven to the wall. In
+either case the same amount of trade, which it once took hundreds of
+separate small shopkeepers to handle, is now handled by the one firm,
+under the one management. Such welding together makes for the economy
+in running expenses which is its first aim. But it also makes for
+simplicity in organization. It is evidently far easier for the heads
+of a few immense businesses to come together than it was for the
+proprietors of the vast agglomeration of tiny factories, stores
+and offices which once covered the same trade area, or to be quite
+accurate, a much smaller trade area, to do so.
+
+But if, at the one end of the modern process of production and
+distribution, we find this tendency towards a magnificent simplicity,
+at the other, the workers' end, we have the very same aim of economy
+of effort and the cheapening of production resulting in an enormously
+increased complexity. The actual work performed by each worker is
+simplified. But the variety of processes and the consequent allotting
+of the workers into unrelated groups make for social complexity;
+render it not easier, but much harder for the workers to come together
+and to see and make others see through and in spite of all this
+apparent unlikeness of occupation, common interests and a common need
+for coöperative action.
+
+Again, take a factory, such as a cotton mill. The one firm, before
+marketing its product, will have employed in its preparation and
+final disposal till it reaches the consumer, groups engaged in very
+different occupations, spinners, weavers, porters, stenographers,
+salesmen, and so on. The industry which furnished employment to
+one, or at most, to two groups, has been cut up into a hundred
+subdivisions, but the workers have still many interests in common, and
+they need to cling together or suffer from all the disadvantages of
+unorganized or semi-organized occupations.
+
+The first unions were naturally craft unions. The men working in the
+same shop, and at the same processes got together, and said: "We who
+do this work must get to know the fellows in the other shops; we must
+just stick together, make common demands and support one another."
+
+As industry became more highly specialized, there slipped in,
+especially during the last fifty years or so, a disintegrating
+tendency. The workers in what had been one occupation, found
+themselves now practicing but a small fraction of what had been their
+trade. They were performing new processes, handling novel tools and
+machinery unheard of before. The organizations became divided up into
+what were nominally craft unions, in reality only process unions. Or
+if a new organization was formed, it was but a mere clipping off the
+whole body of operatives. And these unions, too, would probably have
+their international organization, to which they could turn to come in
+touch with brother workers, similarly qualified and employed. There
+is necessarily involved an element of weakness in any organization,
+however extensive, built up upon so limited a foundation, unless the
+membership has other local and occupational affiliations as well.
+So, to meet this defect, there have been formed all sorts of loose
+aggregations of unions, and almost every day sees fresh combinations
+formed to meet new needs as these arise. Within the wide bounds of
+the American Federation itself exist the state federations, also city
+federations, which may include the unions in adjoining cities, even
+though these are in different states, such as the Tri-City Federation,
+covering Davenport, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois. The
+district councils, again, are formed from representatives of allied
+trades or from widely different branches of the same trade, such as
+the councils of the building trades, and the allied printing trades.
+There are the international unions (more properly styled continental)
+covering the United States and the Dominion of Canada. With these
+are affiliated the local unions of a trade or of a whole industry,
+sometimes, from all over the continent of North America. Among these
+the most catholic in membership are such broadly organized occupations
+as the united mine-workers, the garment-workers, the ladies'
+garment-workers, the iron, steel and tin-plate workers. An
+international union composed of separate unions of the one trade, or a
+state or a city federation of local unions of many trades, bears the
+same relation to the component single unions as does the union itself
+to the individual workers; so we find that all these various and often
+changing expressions of the trade-union principle are accepted and
+approved of today.
+
+Even more significant are other groupings which may be observed
+forming among the rank and file of the union men and women themselves.
+
+Sometimes these groups combine with the full approval of the union
+leaders, local and international. Sometimes they are more in the
+nature of an insurgent body, either desiring greater liberty of
+self-government for themselves, or questioning the methods of the
+organization's leaders, and desiring to introduce freer, more
+democratic and more modern methods into the management of the parent
+organization. This may take the form of a district council, and in at
+least one noteworthy instance, the employés of one large corporation
+send their representatives to a joint board, for purposes of
+collective bargaining.
+
+The railway unions within the American Federation of Labor, one of the
+largest and most powerful bodies of union men in the United States
+feel the need of some method of grouping which shall link together
+the men's locals and the internationals into which the locals
+are combined. This is seen in the demand made by the men for the
+acknowledgment by the railways of the "system federation." The reason
+some of the more radical men were not found supporting the proposal
+was not that they objected to a broader form of organization,
+but because they considered the particular plan outlined as too
+complicated to be effective.
+
+There is one problem pressing for decisive solution before very long,
+and it concerns equally organized labor, governments and public bodies
+and the community as a whole. That is, the relations that are to
+exist between governing bodies in their function as employer, and the
+workers employed by them. So far all parties to this momentous bargain
+are content to drift, instead of thinking out the principles upon
+which a peaceful and permanent solution can be found for a condition
+of affairs, new with this generation, and planning in concert such
+arrangements as shall insure even-handed justice to all three parties.
+
+It is true that governments have always been employers of servants,
+ever since the days when they ceased to be masters of slaves, but
+till now only on a limited scale. But even on this limited scale no
+entirely satisfactory scheme of civil-service administration has
+anywhere been worked out. Of late years more and more have the
+autocratic powers of public bodies as employers been considerably
+clipped, but on the other hand, the ironclad rules which make
+change of occupation, whether for promotion or otherwise, necessary
+discipline and even deserved dismissal, so difficult to bring about,
+have prejudiced the outside community whom they serve against the just
+claims of an industrious and faithful body of men and women. And the
+very last of these just claims, which either governing bodies or
+communities are willing to grant, is liberty to give collective
+expression to their common desires.
+
+The question cannot be burked much longer. Every year sees public
+bodies, in the United States as everywhere else, entering upon
+new fields of activity. In this country, municipal bodies, state
+governments, and even the Federal Government, are in this way
+perpetually increasing the number of those directly in their
+employ. The establishment of the parcel post alone must have added
+considerably to the total of the employés in the Postal Department. It
+cannot be very many years before some of the leading monopolies,
+such as the telegraph and the telephone, will pass over to national
+management, with again an enormous increase in the number of employés.
+Schools are already under public control, and one city after another
+is taking up, if not manufacture or production, at least distribution
+as in the case of water, lighting, ice, milk or coal.
+
+This is no theoretical question as to whether governmental bodies,
+large and small, local and national, should or should not take over
+these additional functions of supplying community demands. The fact
+is before us now. They are doing it, and in the main, doing it
+successfully. But what they are not doing, what these very employés
+are not doing, what organized labor is not doing, what the community
+is not doing, is to plan intelligently some proper method of
+representation, by which the claims, the wishes and the suggestions of
+employés may receive consideration, and through which, on the other
+hand, the governing body as board of management, and the public, as
+in the long last the real employer, shall also have their respective
+fights defined and upheld.
+
+The present position is exactly as if a sovereign power had conquered
+a territory, and proposed to govern it, not temporarily, but
+permanently, as a subject province. We know that this is not the
+modern ideal in politics, and it ought not to be assumed as the right
+ideal when the territory acquired is not a geographical district, but
+a new function. In this connection, moreover, the criticisms of our
+candid friends the syndicalists are not to be slighted. Their solution
+of the problem, that the workers should come into actual, literal
+possession and management of the industries, whether publicly or
+privately owned, may appear to us hopelessly foolish and impractical,
+but their misgivings regarding an ever-increasing bureaucratic control
+over a large proportion of the workers, who are thus made economically
+dependent upon an employer, because that employer chances also to hold
+the reins of government, have already ample justification. The people
+have the vote, you will say? At least the men have. Proposals to
+deprive public employés of the vote have been innumerable, and in not
+a few instances have been enacted into law. There are whole bodies of
+public employés in many countries today who have no vote.
+
+The late Colonel Waring was far-sighted beyond his day and generation.
+When he took over the Street Cleaning Department of New York, which
+was in an utterly demoralized condition, he saw that reasonable
+self-government among his army of employés was going to help and not
+to hinder his great plans, and it was not only with his full consent,
+but at his suggestion and under his direction, that an organization
+was formed among them, which gave to the dissatisfied a channel of
+expression, and to the constructive minds opportunity to improve the
+work of the department, as well as continually to raise the status of
+the employé.
+
+All such organizations to be successful permanently and to be placed
+on a solid basis must join their fortunes with the labor movement, and
+this is the last pill that either a conservative governing body or the
+public themselves are willing to swallow. They use exactly the same
+argument that private employers used universally at one time, but
+which we hear less of today--the right of the employer to run his own
+business in his own way.
+
+Very many people, who see nothing wicked in a strike against a private
+employer, consider that no despotic conduct on the part of superiors,
+no unfairness, no possible combination of circumstances, can ever
+justify a strike of workers who are paid out of the public purse. Much
+also is made of the fact that most of such functions which governments
+have hitherto undertaken are directly associated with pressing needs,
+such as street-car and railroad service, water and lighting supplies,
+and the same line of reasoning will apply, perhaps in even a higher
+degree, to future publicly owned and controlled enterprises. This
+helps yet further to strengthen the idea that rebellion, however
+sorely provoked, is on the part of public employés a sort of
+high treason, the reasons for which neither deserve nor admit of
+discussion. The greatest confusion of thought prevails, and no
+distinction is drawn between the government as the expression and
+embodiment of the forces of law, order and protection to all, as truly
+the voice of the people, and the government, through its departments,
+whether legislative, judicial or administrative, as just a plain
+common employer, needing checks and control like all other employers.
+
+The problem of the public ownership of industries in relation to
+employés might well be regarded in a far different light. It holds
+indeed a proud and honorable position in social evolution. It is the
+latest and most complex development of industry, and as such the heads
+of such enterprises should be eager to study the development of
+the earlier and simpler forms of industry in relation to the labor
+problem, and to study them just as conscientiously and gladly as
+they study and adopt scientific and mechanical improvements in their
+various departments.
+
+But no. We are all of us just drifting. Every now and then the
+question comes before us, unfortunately rarely as a matter for cool
+and sane discussion, but usually arising out of some dispute. Both
+sides are then in an embittered mood. There may be a strike on. The
+employés may be in the wrong, but any points on which they may yield
+are merely concessions wrung from them by force of superior strength,
+for the employing body unfailingly assumes rights and privileges
+beyond those of the ordinary employer. In particular, discontented
+employés are invariably charged with disloyalty, and lectured upon
+their duty to the public. As if the public owed nothing to them!
+
+More democratic methods of expressing the popular will, giving us
+legislation, and in consequence administration more in harmony with
+the interests of the workers as a whole, and therefore in the end
+reacting for the advantage of the community at large, will assuredly
+do much to remove some of these difficulties. This is one reason
+why direct legislation and such "effective voting" as proportional
+representation should be earnestly advocated and supported by
+organized labor on all possible occasions. But that we may make full
+and wise use of such additional powers of democratic expression in
+placing public employment upon a sounder footing, it is necessary that
+we should give the subject the closest attention and consideration
+both in its general principles, and in details as they present
+themselves. If not, satisfaction in the growth of publicly controlled
+industry may be marred through the sense that the public are being
+served at an unfair cost to an important section of the workers.
+
+All of these problems touch women as well as men; and if they are to
+be solved on a just as well as a broad basis women must do their share
+towards the solving. Needless to say, women in industry suffer as much
+or more than their brothers from whatever makes for reaction in the
+labor movement. It is therefore fortunate for the increasing numbers
+of wage-earning women that progressive forces are at work, too. From
+one angle, the very activity of Women's Trade Union Leagues in the
+cities where they are established is to be regarded as one expression
+of the widespread and growing tendency towards such complete
+organization of the workers as shall correspond to modern industrial
+conditions.
+
+Mrs. Gilman is never tired of reiterating that we live in a man-made
+world, and that the feminine side in either man or woman will never
+have a chance for development until this is a human-made world. And
+before this can come about woman must be free from the economic
+handicap that shackles her today.
+
+The organization of labor is one of the most important means to
+achieve this result. It is not only in facing the world outside, and
+in relation to the employer and the consumer that woman organized is
+stronger and in every way more effective than woman unorganized. The
+relation in which she stands to her brother worker is very different,
+when she has behind her the protection and with her the united
+strength of her union, and the better a union man he is himself the
+more readily and cheerfully will he appreciate this, even if he has
+occasionally to make sacrifices to maintain unbroken a bargain in
+which both are gainers.
+
+But at first, in the same way as the average workingman is apt to have
+an uncomfortable feeling about the woman entering his trade, even
+apart from the most important reason of all, that she is wont to be
+a wage-cutter, the average trade-union man retains a somewhat uneasy
+apprehension when he finds women entering the union. As they become
+active, women introduce a new element. They may not say very much,
+but it is gradually discovered that they do not enjoy meeting over
+saloons, at the head of two or three flights of grimy backstairs, or
+where the street has earned a bad name.
+
+Woman makes demands. Leaders that even the decenter sort of men would
+passively accept, because they are put forward, since they are such
+smart fellows, or have pull in trade-union politics, she will have
+none of, and will quietly work against them. The women leaders have an
+uncomfortable knack of reminding the union that women are on the map,
+as it were.
+
+It is at a psychological moment that she is making herself felt in
+the councils of organized labor. Just as the labor movement is itself
+being reorganized, with the modern development of the union and of
+union activity; just as woman herself is coming into her own; just as
+we are passing through the transition period from one form of society
+to another; and just as we catch a glimpse of a distant future in
+which the world will become, for the first time, one.
+
+From the very fact that they are women, women trade unionists have
+their own distinct contribution to make to the movement. The feminine,
+and especially the maternal qualities that man appreciates so in the
+home, he is learning (some men have learnt already) to appreciate in
+the larger home of the union.
+
+In speaking thus, I freely, if regretfully, admit that the rartk and
+file of both sexes are far indeed from playing their full part. We
+have still to depend more largely than is quite fitting or democratic
+upon the leaders as standard-bearers. It is also true that there
+are women who are willing to accept low ideals in unionism as in
+everything else. Their influence is bound to pass. If women are to
+make their own peculiar contribution to the labor movement, it will
+be by working in glad coöperation with the higher idealism of the men
+leaders.
+
+And when the day comes (may its coming be hastened!) that women are
+even only as extensively organized as men are today, the organization
+of men will indeed proceed by leaps and bounds. It will not be by
+arithmetical, but by geometrical progression, that the union will
+count their increases, for it is the masses of unskilled, unorganized,
+ill-paid women and girl workers today, who in so many trades today
+increase the difficulties of the men tenfold. That dead weight
+removed, they could make better terms for themselves and enroll far
+more men into their ranks. What increase of power, what new and
+untried forces women may bring with them into the common store, just
+what these may be, and the manner of their working out, it is too
+early to say.
+
+But the future was never so full of hope as today, not because
+conditions are not cruelly hard, and problems not baffling, but,
+because, over against these conditions, and helping-to solve these
+problems, are ranged the great forces of evolution, ever on the side
+of the workers, slowly building up the democracy of the future.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+
+
+This document, which is the contract under which a union waitress
+works, is typical.
+
+AGREEMENT
+
+Between the Hotel and Restaurant Employés' International Alliance
+Affiliated with the American and the Chicago Federation of Labor.
+
+This contract made and entered into this 10th day of April, 1914, by
+and between the H.R.E.I.A. affiliated with the American and Chicago
+Federation of Labor of the City of Chicago, County of Cook and State
+of Illinois, party of the first part, and:
+
+Chicago,
+
+Illinois, party of the second part.
+
+Party of the first part agrees to furnish good, competent and honest
+craftsmen, and does hereby agree to stand responsible for all loss
+incurred by any act of their respective members in good standing while
+in line of duty.
+
+The Business Agents of the allied crafts shall have the privilege of
+visiting and interviewing the employés while on duty, their visits to
+be timed to such hours when employés are not overly busy.
+
+The second party agrees to employ only members in good standing in
+their respective unions, of cooks, and waitresses, except when the
+unions are unable to furnish help to the satisfaction of the ... which
+choice shall be at the discretion of the above company. Then the
+employer may employ any one he desires, provided the employé makes
+application to become a member of the union within three days after
+employment.
+
+Chefs, and Head Waitresses must be members of their respective craft
+organizations.
+
+WAITRESSES
+
+RESTAURANTS
+
+  Steady Waitresses, 6 days, 60 hours      $8.00 per week
+  Lunch and Supper Waitresses, 7 days, 42
+  hours or less                          6.50 per week
+  Dinner Waitresses, 6 days, 3 hours        4.00 per week
+  Extra Supper Waitresses, 6 days, 3 hours  4.00 per week
+  Night Waitresses, 6 days, 60 hours        9.00 per week
+  Extra Girls, 10 hours a day               1.50 per day
+  Extra Girls, Sundays and Holidays         2.00 per day
+  Head Waitresses, 6 days, 60 hours        10.00 per week
+  Ushers, 6 days, 60 hours or less          9.00 per week
+  Ushers, dinner, 6 days, 6 hours or less   5.00 per week
+  Dog watch Waitresses, 6 days, 60 hours    9.00 per week
+
+BANQUETS
+
+Three (3) hours or less, $1.50.
+
+Any waitress working extra after midnight serving a banquet, dinner,
+etc., shall receive 50 cents per hour or fraction of an hour, except
+the steady night and dog watch waitresses.
+
+Waitresses shall do no porter work.
+
+Overtime shall be charged at the rate of 25 cents per hour or fraction
+of an hour.
+
+Waitresses shall not be reprimanded in the presence of guests.
+
+Waitresses walking out during meals shall be fined $1.00.
+
+Waitresses after being hired and failing to report for duty shall be
+fined $1.00.
+
+Employés shall be furnished with proper quarters to change their
+clothing and there shall be no charge for same.
+
+No profane language shall be used to employés.
+
+There shall be only one split in a ten-hour watch in restaurants.
+
+If employers desire special uniforms they must furnish same free of
+charge.
+
+Employer shall pay for the laundry of all working linen and furnish
+same for waitresses.
+
+No member shall be permitted to leave the place of employment during
+working hours except in case of sickness when a substitute shall be
+furnished at the earliest possible moment.
+
+Employés shall report for duty at least 15 minutes before the hour
+called for. They shall be furnished with good, wholesome food.
+
+All hours shall be the maximum.
+
+Head Waitresses and Head Waiters are required to give business agent a
+list of employés the first week of each month.
+
+Members must wear their working buttons. There shall be no charge for
+breakage unless breaking is wilful or gross carelessness.
+
+It is agreed that waitresses shall clean silverware once a day.
+
+THIS CONTRACT shall remain in effect until May 1, 1916, unless there
+is a violation of trade union principles.
+
+ARBITRATION
+
+During the term of this contract, should any differences arise between
+parties of the first and second part of any causes which cannot
+be adjusted between them, it shall be submitted to an Arbitration
+Committee of five, two selected by the party of the first part and two
+by the party of the second part, and the fifth by the four members of
+said committee, and while this matter is pending before said committee
+for adjustment, there shall be no lockout or strike, and the decision
+of the committee on adjustment shall be final and shall supplement or
+modify the agreement. This CONTRACT shall remain in effect until May
+1, 1916.
+
+--SIGNED--
+
+PARTY OF THE FIRST PART ... PARTY OF THE SECOND PART
+
+
+[NOTE. The dog watch waitress has part day and part night work. She is
+on duty usually from 11 a.m. till 2 p.m., and again from 5 p.m. till
+midnight, in some non-union restaurants till one o'clock in the
+morning. The above agreement calls for not more than one split in a
+ten-hour watch, otherwise a waitress might be at call practically all
+day long and yet be only ten hours at work. A.H.]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II
+
+THE HART, SCHAFFNER AND MARX LABOR AGREEMENTS
+
+[The following brief abstract covers the essential points in the
+successive agreements between Hart, Schaffner and Marx, clothing
+manufacturers, of Chicago, and their employés, and is taken from the
+pamphlet compiled by Earl Dean Howard, chief deputy for the firm, and
+Sidney Hillman, chief deputy for the garment workers.]
+
+
+The conditions upon which the strikers returned to work, as defined in
+the agreement dated January 14, 1911, summed up, were:
+
+1. All former employés to be taken back within ten days.
+
+2. No discrimination of any kind because of being members, or not
+being members, of the United Garment Workers of America.
+
+3. An Arbitration Committee of three members to be appointed; one from
+each side to be chosen within three days; these two then to select the
+third.
+
+4. Subject to the provisions of this agreement, said Arbitration
+Committee to take up, consider and adjust grievances, if any, and to
+fix a method for settlement of grievances (if any) in the future. The
+finding of the said Committee, or a majority thereof, to be binding
+upon both parties.
+
+The Arbitration Committee, or Board, consisted of Mr. Carl Meyer,
+representing the firm, and Clarence Darrow, representing the employés.
+The office of chairman was not filled until December, 1912, when Mr.
+J.E. Williams was chosen. The Board settled the questions around which
+the dispute had arisen, and an agreement for two years between the
+firm and the workers was signed. For some time the Board continued to
+handle fresh complaints, but it gradually became apparent that the
+Board, composed of busy men, could not hear all the minor grievances.
+The result of a conference was the organization of a permanent body,
+the Trade Board, to deal with all such matters, as these arose, or
+before they arose, reserving to both parties the right of appeal to
+the Arbitration Board. The plan can be judged from the following
+clauses in the constitution of the Trade Board:
+
+TRADE BOARD
+
+The Trade Board shall consist of eleven members who shall, if
+possible, be practical men in the trade; all of whom, excepting the
+chairman, shall be employés of said corporation; five members thereof
+shall be appointed by the corporation, and five members by the
+employés. The members appointed by the corporation shall be certified
+in writing by the corporation to the chairman of the board, and the
+members appointed by the employés shall be likewise certified in
+writing by the joint board of garment workers of Hart Schaffner &
+Marx to said chairman. Any of said members of said board, except the
+chairman, may be removed and replaced by the power appointing him,
+such new appointee to be certified to the chairman in the same manner
+as above provided for.
+
+DEPUTIES
+
+The representatives of each of the parties of the Trade Board shall
+have the power to appoint deputies for each branch of the trade, that
+is to say, for cutters, coat makers, trouser makers and vest makers.
+
+APPEAL TO ARBITRATION BOARD
+
+In case either party should desire to appeal from any decision of the
+Trade Board, or from any change of these rules by the Trade Board,
+to the Board of Arbitration, they shall have the right to do so upon
+filing a notice in writing with the Trade Board of such intention
+within thirty days from the date of the decision, and the said Trade
+Board shall then certify said matter to the Board of Arbitration,
+where the same shall be given an early hearing by a full Board of
+three members.
+
+The Trade Board was accordingly organized, with Mr. James Mullenbach,
+Acting Superintendent of the United Charities of Chicago, as chairman.
+
+When the time approached for the renewal of the agreement, the closed
+or open shop was the point around which all discussions turned.
+Eventually, neither was established, but instead the system of
+preference to unionists was adopted. It was thus expressed:
+
+    1. That the firm agrees to this principle of preference, namely,
+    that they will agree to prefer union men in the hiring of new
+    employés, subject to reasonable restrictions, and also to prefer
+    union men in dismissal on account of slack work, subject to a
+    reasonable preference to older employés, to be arranged by the
+    Board of Arbitration, it being understood that all who have worked
+    for the firm six months shall be considered old employés.
+
+    2. All other matters shall be deliberated on and discussed by the
+    parties in interest, and if they are unable to reach an agreement,
+    the matter in dispute shall be submitted to the Arbitration Board
+    for its final decision.
+
+    Until an agreement can be reached by negotiation by the parties in
+    interest, or in case of their failure to agree, and a decision is
+    announced by the Arbitration Board, the old agreement shall be
+    considered as being in full force and effect.
+
+This came in force May 1, 1913.
+
+The chairman of the Arbitration Board, making a statement, three
+months later, in August, 1913, after defining the principle to be
+"such preference as will make an efficient organization for the
+workers, also an efficient, productive administration for the
+company," went on:
+
+    In handing down the foregoing decisions relating to preference
+    which grew out of a three months' consideration of the subject,
+    and after hearing it discussed at great length and from every
+    angle, the Board is acutely conscious that it is still largely
+    an experiment, and that the test of actual practice may reveal
+    imperfections, foreseen and unforeseen, which cannot be otherwise
+    demonstrated than by test.
+
+    It therefore regards them as tentative and subject to revision
+    whenever the test of experiment shall make it seem advisable.
+
+    The Board also feels that unless both parties coöperate in good
+    faith and in the right spirit to make the experiment a success,
+    no mechanism of preferential organization, however cunningly
+    contrived, will survive the jar and clash of hostile feeling or
+    warring interests. It hands down and publishes these decisions
+    therefore in the hope that with the needed coöperation they
+    may help to give the workers a strong, loyal, constructive
+    organization, and the Company a period of peaceful, harmonious and
+    efficient administration and production which will compensate for
+    any disadvantage which the preferential experiment may impose.
+
+The published pamphlet, under date January 28, 1914, concludes:
+
+    There have been no cases appealed from the Trade Board to the
+    Board of Arbitration since January, 1913. During the last six
+    months of 1913 there were not more than a dozen Trade Board Cases.
+    So many principles have been laid down, and precedents established
+    by both of these bodies, that the chief deputies are in all cases
+    able to reach an agreement without appeal to a higher authority.
+    A gradual change has taken place in the method of dealing with
+    questions which present new principles, or which represent
+    questions never before decided. The Board of Arbitration has
+    appointed Mr. Williams as a committee to investigate and report,
+    with the understanding that if an agreement can be reached by both
+    parties without arbitrators, or, if the parties are willing to
+    accept the decision of the Chairman, then no further meeting of
+    the Board of Arbitration will be required. This method has proved
+    to be exceedingly satisfactory to both sides and has resulted in a
+    form of government which has gradually taken the place of formal
+    arbitration. In most cases, the Chairman is able by thorough
+    sifting of the evidence on each side, to suggest a method of
+    conciliation which is acceptable to both parties.
+
+A further experience of the System up till July, 1915, only confirms
+the above statement.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+LIST OF BOOKS AND REPORTS AND PERIODICAL LITERATURE SUGGESTED FOR
+READING AND REFERENCE
+
+ABBOTT, EDITH. Women in Industry. New York, 1909.
+
+ADAMS, T.H., and SUMNER, H.L. Labor Problems. New York, 1909.
+
+ADDAMS, JANE. The Spirit of Youth in City Streets. New York, 1909.
+
+ANDREWS, JOHN B. A Practical Plan for the Prevention of Unemployment
+in America. New York, 1914.
+
+---- and BLISS, W.P.D. History of Women in Trade Unions in the United
+States. Vol. X of the United States Report on the Condition of Women
+and Child Wage Earners.
+
+
+BEBEL, AUGUST. Woman in the Past, Present and Future (Trans.). New
+York, 1885.
+
+BOWEN, LOUISE DE KOVEN. Safeguards for City Youth at Work and at Play.
+New York, 1915.
+
+BRANDEIS, L.D. _Curt Miller_ v. _The State of Oregon_. Brief for
+defendants. Supreme Court of the United States. New York, 1908.
+
+---- _Frank C. Stettler and others_ v. _The Industrial Welfare
+Commission of the State of Oregon_. Brief and arguments for the
+defendants in the Supreme Court of the State of Oregon. Consumers'
+League, New York, 1915.
+
+---- and GOLDMARK, JOSEPHINE. Brief and Arguments for appellants
+in the Supreme Court of the State of Illinois. National Consumers'
+League, New York, 1909.
+
+BRECKINRIDGE, SOPHONISBA P. Legislative Control of Women's Work.
+_Journal of Political Economy_. XIV. 107-109.
+
+BROOKS, JOHN GRAHAM. The Social Unrest. New York, 1903.
+
+BROWN, ROME G. The Minimum Wage. Minneapolis, 1914.
+
+BUSBEY. Women's Trade Union Movement in Great Britain. U.S. Department
+of Labor. Bul. No. 83.
+
+BUTLER, ELIZABETH B. Saleswomen in Mercantile Stores. New York, 1913.
+
+---- Women in the Trades. New York, 1909.
+
+
+CANADA. Department of Labor. Report of Royal Commission on Strike of
+Telephone Operators. Ottawa, 1907.
+
+CLARK, SUE AINSLIE, and WYATT, EDITH. Making Both Ends Meet. New York,
+1911.
+
+CLARK, VICTOR S. The Labor Movement in Australia. New York, 1907.
+
+COMMONS, JOHN R. Races and Immigrants in America. New York, 1907.
+
+---- ANDREWS, JOHN B., SUMNER, HELEN L., and OTHERS. Documentary
+History of American Industrial Society. Cleveland, 1910.
+
+---- and OTHERS. Trade Unionism and Labor Problems. Boston, 1905.
+
+COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA. Legislative Regulation of Wages. Year Book,
+No. 5, 1901-1911. pp. 1065-1069.
+
+COOLEY, E.G. See publications of Commercial Club of Chicago on
+vocational education.
+
+
+DEVINE, EDWARD T. Social Forces. New York.
+
+DEWEY, JOHN. Schools of Tomorrow. New York, 1915.
+
+---- The School and Society.
+
+DORR, RHETA CHILDE. What Eight Million Women Want. Boston, 1910.
+
+
+ELY, RICHARD T. The Labor Movement in America. New York, 1905.
+
+
+GILMAN, CHARLOTTE P. Concerning Children. Boston, 1900.
+
+---- Women and Economics. New York, 1905.
+
+HAMILTON, CICELY. Marriage as a Trade.
+
+HARD, WILLIAM. The Women of Tomorrow. New York, 1911.
+
+HENDERSON, CHARLES RICHMOND. Citizens in Industry. New York, 1915.
+
+HERRON, BELVA M. Progress of Labor Organization Among Women.
+University of Illinois studies, Vol. 1, No. 10. Urbana, 1908.
+
+HILLMAN, SIDNEY, and HOWARD, EARL DEAN. Hart, Schaffner and Marx Labor
+Agreements. Chicago, 1914.
+
+HOBSON, JOHN A. Evolution of Modern Capitalism. London, 1904.
+
+---- Problems of Poverty, London, 1906.
+
+HOURWICH, ISAAC A. Immigration and Labor. New York, 1912.
+
+HUMPHREY, J.R. Proportional Representation. London, 1911.
+
+
+ILLINOIS STATE FEDERATION OF LABOR. Report of Committee on Vocational
+Education, 1914.
+
+
+JACOBI, ABRAHAM. Physical Cost of Women's Work. New York, 1907.
+
+
+KELLEY, FLORENCE. Modern Industry in Relation to the Family. New York,
+1915.
+
+---- Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation. New York, 1906.
+
+KELLOR, FRANCES A. Out of Work. New York, 1915 ed.
+
+KERCHENSTEINER, G.M.A. Idea of the Industrial School (Trans.). New
+York, 1913.
+
+---- Schools and the Nation (Trans.). London, 1914.
+
+KEY, ELLEN. The Woman Movement (Trans.). New York, 1912.
+
+KIRKUP, THOMAS. History of Socialism. London, 1906.
+
+
+LAGERLÖF, SELMA. Home and the State (Trans.). New York, 1912.
+
+LEAVITT, FRANK M. Examples of Industrial Education. Boston, 1912.
+
+LEVINE, Louis. Syndicalism in France. New York, 1914.
+
+
+MACLEAN, ANNIE MARION. Wage Earning Women. New York, 1910.
+
+MAROT, HELEN. American Labor Unions. New York, 1914.
+
+MASON, OTIS T. Woman's Share in Primitive Culture. 1894.
+
+MASSACHUSETTS COMMISSION ON INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION. Reports, 1909.
+
+MATTHEWS, LILLIAN R. Women in Trade Unions in San Francisco.
+University of California, 1913.
+
+MITCHELL, JOHN. Organized Labor. Philadelphia, 1903.
+
+
+NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MANUFACTURERS. Preliminary report on the
+Minimum Wage. New York.
+
+NEARING, SCOTT. Wages in the United States, 1908 to 1910. New York,
+1911.
+
+
+OLIVER, THOMAS. Dangerous Trades. London, 1902.
+
+
+PATTEN, SIMON N. The New Basis of Civilization. New York, 1907.
+
+PEIXOTTO, JESSICA B. Women of California as Trade Unionists.
+_Association of Collegiate Alumnae_, Dec., 1908.
+
+PRESCOTT and HALL. Immigration and Its Effects. New York, 1900.
+
+PUTNAM, EMILY JAMES. The Lady. New York, 1910.
+
+
+RAUSCHENBUSCH, WALTER. Christianity and the Social Crisis. New York,
+1907.
+
+---- Christianizing the Social Order. New York, 1912.
+
+RHINELANDER, W.S. Life and Letters of Josephine Shaw Lowell. New York,
+1911.
+
+RICHARDSON, DOROTHY. The Long Day. New York, 1905.
+
+ROGERS, J.E. THOROLD. Six Centuries of Work and Wages.
+
+ROMAN, F.W. Industrial and Commercial Schools of the United States and
+Germany. New York, 1915.
+
+ROSS, EDWARD ALSWORTH. Sin and Society. Boston, 1907.
+
+RUSSELL, CHARLES EDWARD. Why I Am a Socialist. New York, 1910.
+
+RYAN, JOHN A. A Living Wage in Its Ethical and Economic Aspects. New
+York, 1906.
+
+
+SALMON, LUCY M. Progress in the Household. Boston, 1906.
+
+SCHREINER, OLIVE. Woman and Labour. London and New York, 1911.
+
+SIMONS, A.M. Social Forces in American History.
+
+SNEDDEN, DAVID M. Problems of Educational Readjustment. New York,
+1913.
+
+---- The Problem of Vocational Education. Boston, 1910.
+
+SNOWDEN, PHILIP. The Living Wage. London and New York, 1912.
+
+SOMBART, WERNER. Socialism and the Social Movement (Trans.). New York,
+1909.
+
+SPARGO, JOHN. Socialism. New York, 1909. Syndicalism, Industrial
+Unionism and Socialism. New York, 1913.
+
+---- and ARNER, G.B.L. Elements of Socialism. New York, 1912.
+
+SPENCER, ANNA GARLIN. Woman and Social Culture. New York, 1913.
+
+SUMNER, HELEN L. History of Women in Industry in the United States.
+Vol. IX of the United States Report on the Condition of Women and
+Child Wage Earners. 1910.
+
+
+THOMAS, W.I. Sex and Society. University of Chicago Press, 1907.
+
+
+VAN KLEECK, MARY. Artificial Flower Making. Women in the Bookbinding
+Trade. Russell Sage Foundation publications, 1912.
+
+VAN VORST, BESSIE and MARIE. The Woman Who Toils. New York, 1903.
+
+
+WARD, LESTER F. Pure Sociology (especially Chapter XIV). New York.
+
+WEBB, SIDNEY. Economic Theory of a Legal Minimum Wage. _Journal of
+Political Economy_, Vol. 20, No. 12., Dec., 1912.
+
+---- and BEATRICE. History of Trade Unionism. London, 1907.
+
+WELLS, H.G. New Worlds for Old. New York, 1909.
+
+WEYL, WALTER E. The New Democracy. New York, 1910.
+
+WILLETT, M.H. Employment of Women in the Clothing Trades. Columbia
+University. New York, 1902.
+
+WILSON, JENNIE L. Legal and Political Status of Women in the United
+States.
+
+WINSLOW, CHARLES H.; Editor. Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the United
+States Bureau of Labor, Industrial Training.
+
+WOLFE, F.E. Admission to Labor Unions. Johns Hopkins University Press.
+
+MINIMUM WAGE, THE CASE FOR. By Louis D. Brandeis, M.B. Hammond, John
+A. Hobson, Florence Kelley, Esther Packard, Elizabeth C. Watson,
+Howard B. Woolston. _The Survey_, Feb. 6, 1915.
+
+
+_Periodicals and Reports_
+
+
+_American Federationist, A.F. of L. Newsletter_, and other
+publications of the American Federation of Labor. Washington, D.C.
+
+_American Legislation Review_ and other publications of the American
+Association for Labor Legislation. New York.
+
+_Annals of the American Academy of Political Science_. Philadelphia.
+
+_Child Labor Bulletin, The_ (National), and other publications of the
+National Child Labor Committee, New York.
+
+Commercial Club of Chicago. Publications on Vocational Training.
+
+_Crisis, The_. New York.
+
+_Economic Review_.
+
+_Forerunner, The_. New York.
+
+_Immigrant in America Review, The_. New York.
+
+_Journal of Political Economy, The_. University of Chicago Press.
+
+_Journal of Sociology, The_. University of Chicago Press.
+
+_Labour Leader, The_. Manchester, England.
+
+_Labour Woman, The_, and other publications of the National Women's
+Labour League. London.
+
+_Life and Labor_, and other publications of the National Women's Trade
+Union League of America. Chicago; and of the local leagues in Boston,
+Chicago, New York and elsewhere.
+
+_Masses, The_. New York.
+
+National Consumers' League, Publications of. New York.
+
+National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education,
+Publications of. New York.
+
+_New Republic, The_. New York.
+
+New York State Factory Investigation Commission, Reports. New York.
+
+_New York Sunday Call, The_. New York.
+
+_Political Science Quarterly_. Columbia University.
+
+_Public, The_. Chicago.
+
+_Quarterly Journal of Economics_. Harvard University.
+
+_Survey, The_. New York.
+
+_Union Labor Advocate_. Woman's Department, up to Dec., 1910.
+
+United States Bureau of Education. Bulletins on vocational education.
+
+---- Census of 1910. Occupational statistics.
+
+---- Children's Bureau. Bulletins.
+
+---- Department of Agriculture. Bulletins for Women on the Farm.
+
+---- Department of Labor, Bulletins.
+
+---- Industrial Relations Commission Reports.
+
+---- Women and Child Wage Earners, Report on Conditions of. 19
+Volumes.
+
+_Woman's Industrial News, The_. London.
+
+_Woman's Journal, The_. Boston.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+Abbé, Mrs. Robert
+Abbott, Grace
+Abolition movement
+Addams, Jane
+American Federation of Labor
+Anderson, Mary
+Andrews, John B.
+Anthony, Susan B.
+Ayres, Leonard P., quoted
+
+Bagley, Sarah G.
+Barry, Leonora
+Bean, Alice
+Bergson, Henri
+Biddle, Mrs. George
+Bliss, W.P.D., quoted
+Bondfield, Margaret
+Borden, Hannah
+_Boston Courier_
+Brandeis, Louis D.
+Brown, Corinne
+Burke, Mrs. Mary
+
+Calhoun, William J.
+Canada
+Capital and labor organization compared
+Carey, Matthew
+Casey, Josephine
+Chinese
+Cohn, Fannie
+Collective bargaining
+Collective grievances
+Colored workers
+Coman, Katharine
+_Commercial Bulletin_
+Condon, Maggie
+Conservation movement
+Consumers' League
+Conventions, labor
+Coöperative efforts
+Cost of living
+
+Daley, Mollie
+Dana, Charles A.
+Davies, Anna
+Democracy, and education
+  and public ownership
+  evolution of
+Dewey, John, quoted
+Dickenson, Fannie
+Direct legislation
+Domestic science profession
+Donnelly, Michael
+Donovan, Mary
+Dorchester, Mass., early schools of
+Dreier, Mary E.
+
+Economic basis of trade union
+Economic status of women
+Education, according to grade percentage
+  early, of girls
+  Glynn, Frank L., on, quoted
+  in labor questions
+  of the immigrant
+  poverty the chief check to
+  _See also_ Vocational education
+"Effective voting"
+Efficiency and expectance
+Elmira College
+Employers' associations
+Equal pay
+Evans, Mrs. Glendower
+
+Fitzgerald, Anna
+Fitzpatrick, John
+Flood, Emmet
+Franklin, Stella
+
+General Federation of Women's Clubs
+Gillespie, Mabel
+Goldmark, Josephine
+Gompers, Samuel
+  quoted
+Graham, Mr.
+Grant, Annie
+Greeley, Horace
+Gutteridge, Helena
+
+Hamilton, Cicely, quoted
+Hannafin, Mary
+Harriman, Mrs. J. Borden
+Harvard University
+Health and shorter hours
+Henderson, Rose
+Home industries, development of
+Home-work, and child labor
+  and Italians
+  as social anachronism
+Hours
+  _See also_ Limitation of hours
+Huge Strikes
+  agreements in
+  Citizens' Committee in
+Huge Strikes, close of
+  immigrants in
+  Joint Strike Conference Board in
+  picketing in
+  results of
+  Triangle Shirt Waist Co.
+  United Garment Workers
+  Women's Trade Union League in
+Hull House
+Huntingdon, Arria
+
+Immigrants, Americanization of
+  discrimination against
+  domestic policy regarding
+  education of
+  employment of
+  exploitation of
+  federal and state care of
+  handicaps of
+  haphazard distribution of
+  Juvenile Protective League, quoted, regarding
+Immigrants, League for the
+  Protection of Immigrants
+  Polish girls as, peculiarly exploited
+_Immigrants in America Review_
+Immigration, probable causes of
+Industrial Relations, Federal Commission on
+Industrial rivalry between men and women
+Industrial struggle, new forms of the
+Industrial Workers of the World
+Industry, children and
+  degraded
+  machine-controlled
+  public ownership the latest development of
+  standards in
+Investigations, by City Club, Chicago
+  by Federal Commission on Industrial Relations
+  by Knights of Labor
+  by New York State Factory Investigating Commission
+  Federal (Women and Child Wage Earners)
+  first governmental
+I.W.W.
+
+Japanese laundry workers
+
+Kavanagh, Fannie
+Kehew, Mary Morton
+Kelley, Florence
+Kellogg, Paul
+Kellor, Frances A., quoted
+Kenney, Mary E.
+Kerchensteiner, Georg, quoted
+Kingsley, Charles
+Knefler, Mrs. D.W.
+Knights of Labor
+
+Labor legislation, administration of laws under
+  needed for stores
+  objections to
+  providing for women factory inspectors
+  women affected by
+  _See also_ Limitation of hours; minimum wage
+Labor movement, backwardness of
+  development of
+  Irish in
+_Labour Leader_
+Lemlich, Clara
+Lewis, Augusta
+_Life and Labor_
+Limitation of hours, and department-store clerks
+  and elevated railroad clerks
+Limitation of hours, declared constitutional
+  eight-hour law regarding, in California
+  effects of, on health
+  first law for, in Great Britain
+  for public employés
+  including men and boys
+  organized women support
+  relation of, to wages
+  ten-hour law regarding, in Illinois
+Lippard, George
+"Living-in" system
+Lowell, Josephine Shaw
+Lowell, Mass.
+
+Macarthur, Mary R.
+Macdonald, Mary A.
+McDonald, J. Ramsay, quoted
+McDowell, Mary E.
+McNamara, Maggie
+Mahoney, Hannah (Mrs. Nolan)
+Maloney, Elizabeth
+Marot, Helen
+Marriage, an unstandardized trade
+  and factory life
+  and organization
+Marriage, and the working-woman
+Married woman, as a half-time worker
+  as a wage-earner
+  economic status of
+  incongruous position of
+Married women and the labor movement
+Matthews, Lillian, quoted
+Maud Gonne Club
+Maurice, F.D.
+Mead, George H.
+Merriam, Charles E.
+Mill, John Stuart
+Minimum wage, employers' objections to
+  for the immigrant
+  in Australia
+Mitchell, Louisa
+Mittelstadt, Louisa
+Morgan, T.J.
+Morgan, Mrs. T.J.
+Mott, Lucretia
+Mullaney, Kate
+Murphy, John J.
+
+National and other central labor bodies:
+  Amalgamated Meat Cutters' and Butchers' Workmen of North America
+  American Federation of Musicians
+  Boot and Shoe Workers' Union
+  British Women's Trade Union League
+  Cigar Makers' International Union
+  Daughters of St. Crispin
+  International Brotherhood of Bookbinders
+  International Glove Workers' Union
+  International Ladies' Garment Workers
+  International Typographical Union
+  Massachusetts Working Women's League
+  National Industrial Congress
+  National Labor Congress
+  National Labor Union
+  national trade unions, more than thirty from 1863 to 1873
+  National Trades Union
+  New England Congress, policies of
+  railroad brotherhoods
+  railway unions
+  Retail Clerks International Union
+  Shirt, Waist and Laundry Workers' International Union
+  Trades and Labor Congress of Canada
+  United Felt, Panama and Straw Hat Trimmers
+  United Garment Workers
+  United Mine Workers
+  United Textile Workers
+  Women's Department, Knights of Labor
+  Women's Labor Reform Associations
+  Women's National Labor League
+  Women's state labor unions
+  Women's Trade Union League
+  Women's Union Label League
+  Working Women's Labor Union for the State of N.Y.
+National Civic Federation
+National Consumers' League
+National Young Women's Christian Association
+Neill, Charles P.
+Nestor, Agnes
+New York State Factory Investigating Committee
+_New York Sun_
+Northwestern University
+
+Oberlin College
+O'Brien, John
+Occupations, and locality
+  blind-alley trades
+  boot and shoe workers
+  button workers
+  children's employments
+  department-store clerks
+  dish-washing
+  domestic work
+  dressmakers
+  employés in state institutions
+  garment-workers. _See_ sewing trades
+  glass-blowers
+  hat-workers
+  house-cleaning developments
+  laundry workers and laundresses
+  mine-workers
+  musicians
+  nurses
+  semi-skilled
+  tobacco-and cigar-workers
+  unskilled
+  waitresses
+O'Connor, Julia
+O'Day, Hannah
+O'Reilly, Leonora
+O'Reilly, Mary
+Organization, and minimum wage
+  craft form of
+  eventually international
+  in unskilled trades
+  industrial form of
+  of colored races
+  of department-store clerks
+  of Italians
+  of Orientals
+  of Slavic Jewesses
+  of women, by men
+  of women backward
+O'Sullivan, Mary E. _See_ Mary E. Kenney
+_Outlook_, quoted
+Overwork and fatigue
+
+Pankhurst, Mrs.
+Patterson, Mrs. Emma
+Pearson, Mrs. Frank J.
+Perkins, L.S.
+_Philadelphia Ledger_
+Phillips, Wendell
+Pillsbury, Parker
+Poe, Clarence
+Polish National Alliance
+Popular disapproval of women's trade unions
+Potter, Frances Squire
+Powderly, Mrs. Terence V.
+Powderly, Terence V.
+Power loom, first
+Preferential shop
+Proportional representation
+Protection for young trade-union girls
+Protocol of peace
+Public employés
+Public ownership, the latest development of industry
+Putnam, Mrs. Mary Kellogg
+
+Quick, Nelle
+Quimby, Mrs. C.N.M.
+
+_Revolution, The_
+Rickert, T.A.
+Robins, Mrs. Raymond quoted
+Rodgers, Mrs. George
+Roman, F.W., quoted
+Roosevelt, Theodore
+Rumsey, Thomas
+Russell Sage Foundation
+
+Sabotage
+Samuels, Adelaide
+San Francisco earthquake
+_San Francisco Examiner_
+Sanitation
+Schneidermann, Rose
+Schreiner, Olive
+Scott, Melinda
+Secretary for Labor
+Sewing machine introduced
+Sewing trades, early conditions in war orders for
+  _See also_ Huge strikes
+Shedden, John
+Shute, Mrs. Lizzie H.
+Simpson, James
+Sinclair, Upton
+Slavery, family and group
+Smith, Mrs. Charlotte
+Smith, Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes
+Smith-Lever Act
+Snowden, Mrs. Philip
+Snowden, Philip
+Social advance
+Socialism, and economic independence and socialists
+Sorel, George
+Southern mountain women
+Specialization and economy
+  in home industries
+  in house-cleaning
+Specialization, trade and professional, compared
+Speeding up
+Spencer, Anna Garlin, quoted
+Stanton, Elizabeth Cady
+Steghagen, Emma
+Stevens, Alzina P.
+Stevens, George, quoted
+Stewart, Mrs. Levi
+Stirling, Mary
+Stone, Huldah J.
+Stone, Lucy
+Strasser, President
+Strike, American girl strikebreakers in general
+  Marx & Haas
+  of Danbury Hatters
+  of Fall River weavers
+  of laundry-workers, (S.F.) (Troy)
+  of packing-plant employés
+  of printers
+  work, after
+  _See also_ Huge strikes.
+Sumner, Helen L.
+_Survey, The_, quoted
+Sutter, Maud
+Symphony orchestras
+Syndicalism
+
+Thomas, W. L, quoted
+Topp, Mr.
+Trade agreement
+  a typical
+  Hart, Schaffner and Marx
+Trade unions, aims of, xx
+  and factory inspection
+  and standard of living
+  and women members
+  as training schools
+  conservative and radical compared
+  city federations of
+  craft form of
+  dues of
+  exclusiveness of
+  federation of
+  in other fields
+  industrial form of
+  interstate coöperation of women of
+  juvenile union
+  locals of women's, best training school
+  one big union
+  outside support for
+  relations between labor bodies
+  reorganization of
+  women membership of
+    supported by labor men
+
+United States Agricultural Department
+United States Agricultural Department, and immigration
+  census of, occupations under
+  industrial development of
+  _See also_ Investigations
+United Tailoresses' Society
+University of Chicago
+
+Valesh, Eva McDonald
+Van Etten, Ida
+Vassar College
+Vincent, John J.
+Vocational education, and the immigrant
+  as part of public system
+  A.F. of L. on
+  co-education only solution of
+  Commercial Club of Chicago, on
+  domestic economy
+  ideal plan for
+  in Germany
+  original form of
+  tendencies of experts
+  women's share in, inadequate
+_Voice of Industry_
+Vote, the
+
+Wages
+Wages
+  group
+  N.Y. Commission evidence regarding
+Waight, Lavinia
+Wald, Lillian D.
+Walling, William English
+War orders
+Ward, Lester F.
+Watters, J.C.
+Whitehead, Myrtle
+Whitney, Edward B.
+Wilkinson, J.W.
+Wilson, J. Stitt, quoted
+Winslow, Charles H.
+Winters, Sallie
+Woerishofer, Carola
+Wolfe, F.E., quoted
+Woman, as the organizer
+  as the race
+  double function of
+Woman suffrage, and civic work, and education
+Woman suffrage, and great strikes
+  and industrial struggle
+  and social control
+  indorsed by, A.F. of L.
+  labor conventions
+  movement for, in Great Britain
+  organization of women voters under
+  organized women and
+Women, and vocational training
+  and vocations
+  compulsory underbidders
+  in meat-packing plants
+  non-wage-earning
+Woolston, Howard B., quoted
+Work, John M., quoted
+Working Women's Society
+
+Young, Anne
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Trade Union Woman, by Alice Henry
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11424 ***