5. Full citizenship for women.
6. All principles involved in the economic program of the American Federation of Labor.
In both its national and its local organizations the league spends much of its energy in the adjustment of labor difficulties among women workers, in giving active assistance in time of strikes and in presenting actual industrial conditions through lectures and literature to universities, churches, clubs and trade unions. It presses home the increasing dangers of industrial overstrain on the health of women, the necessity for collective bargaining, wise labor legislation and full citizenship for women. Through its membership, representing many thousands of working women, the league is able to obtain for the use of social workers, investigators and students actual first-hand information regarding the dangers of wrong industrial conditions.
The reasons why such an organization must be more elastic than a body like the American Federation of Labor, is because of the very different relation in which women stand to organized industry. The connection of the great bulk of women with their trade is not permanent. Seven years is the average duration of women’s wage-earning life. The average woman unionist is a mere girl. An organization of men, in which mature men are the leaders and in which the rank and file join for life, has a solidity and permanence which unaided groups of young girls, groups with membership necessarily fluctuating, can never achieve.
What more right and fitting then that the maternal principle in the community as represented by the motherhood of the country should ally itself with this movement in support of good conditions and happy lives for the future mothers of the country? This is strikingly put in Mrs. Raymond Robins’ address as president at the second biennial convention of the National Women’s Trade Union League: “It has happily fallen to the lot of the Women’s Trade Union League to have charge and supervision of the kindergarten department in the great school of organized labor. It is for this reason that music and merry-making is so essential a feature of our league work, with books and story telling and all that makes for color and music and laughter and that leads to essential human fellowship—a sure foundation for the industrial union of our younger sisters. We know that we need them; they will later know how greatly they needed us.”
A WOMAN’S STRIKE—AN APPRECIATION OF THE SHIRTWAIST MAKERS OF NEW YORK
HELEN MAROT
Women’s Trade Union League, New York City.
The usual object of monographs on strikes which appear in economic journals is to state impartially both sides of the controversy, so that students and a public more or less remote from labor struggles may estimate their merits. Such monographs are presentations of well-defined facts which are reducible at times to mathematical certainties. They recognize that passionate human feeling has swayed action on both sides and the endeavor is to lift labor disputes from the heat of emotion to intellectual consideration. These monographs may give correct estimates of strikes in industries thoroughly organized both as to capital and labor. Strikes in such industries are often the result of bad business management or a slip in judgment on one side or the other. But the great number of strikes occur in industries imperfectly organized; the passion or emotion which swings the battle is as important a factor as is either an extortionate demand for wages or a flagrant exploitation of wage earners. It is well that the public shall estimate this strike and that, but to do so it must also understand the motive forces.
The present article does not attempt to estimate either the moral or the economic factors in the recent shirtwaist-makers’ strike of New York, but to lay before the reader some of those motive forces which may be counted upon in strikes composed of like elements, especially in strikes of women in unorganized trades.