eading a
strike against a cut in wages. The newspapers, too, began to notice
workingwomen, publishing articles about their working and living
conditions.

Trying to amalgamate the various groups in New York, Susan now formed
a Workingwomen's Central Association, of which she was elected
president. To its meetings she brought interesting speakers and
practical reports on wages, hours, and working conditions. She herself
picked up a great deal of useful information in her daily round as she
talked with this one and that one. On her walks to and from work, in
all kinds of weather, she met poorly clad women carrying sacks and
baskets in which they collected rags, scraps of paper, bones, old
shoes, and anything worth rescuing from "garbage boxes." With
friendliness and good cheer, she greeted these ragpickers, sometimes
stopping to talk with them about their work, and through her interest
brought several into the Workingwomen's Association. Looking forward
to surveys on all women's occupations, she started out by appointing a
committee to investigate the ragpickers, many of whom lived in
tumbledown slab shanties on the rocky land which is now a part of
Central Park.

This investigation revealed that more than half of the 1200 ragpickers
were women and that it was the one occupation in which women had equal
opportunity with men and received equal compensation for their day's
work. Average earnings ranged from forty cents a day to ten dollars a
week. The report, highly sentimental in the light of today's
scientific approach, was a promising beginning, a survey made by women
themselves in their own interest--the forerunner of the reports of the
Labor Department's Women's Bureau.

Cooperatives appealed to Susan as they did to many labor leaders as
the best means of freeing labor. When the Sewing Machine Operators
Union tried to establish a shop where their members could share the
profits of their labor, she did her best to help them, hoping to see
them gain economic independence in a light airy clean shop where
wealthy women, eager to help their sisters, would patronize them.
However, the wealthy women to whom she appealed to finance this
project did not respond, looking upon a cooperative as a first step
toward socialism and a threat to their own profits. She was able,
however, to arouse a glimmer of interest among the members of the
newly formed literary club, Sorosis, in the problems of working women.

She had the satis