What eight million women want

by Rheta Childe Dorr

There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature years—one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over thirty years—are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?

There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department, forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.

Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up in the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers' League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on the succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three pages of law.

The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was the testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.

"Medical Science has demonstrated," says this most important paragraph, "that while fatigue is a normal phenomenon ... excessive fatigue or exhaustion is abnormal.... It has discovered that fatigue is due not only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue, entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that when artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin causes death. The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to be counteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body. But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not produced fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin."

The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the American Constitution was never intended to shield manufacturers in their willingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. The ten-hour law was sustained.

That the "Girls' Bill" passed, or that it was even introduced, was due in large measure to an organization of women, more militant and more democratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women's Trade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, the League consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organized trades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of these latter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-union principle, but more are women who work in the professional ranks,—teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlement workers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, who ever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federation of Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners, to appear in Labor Day parades.

The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities,—New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland,—is to educate women wage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains and supports organizers among all classes of workers. As quickly as a group in any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. It raises funds to assist women in their trade struggles. It acts as arbitrator between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes.

The Women's Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factory trades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until lately believed themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundred and fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventy stenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers' Federation of Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before the Women's Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated. The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized.

The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League was brilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-waist makers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story of this strike will bear retelling.