h our future
claims must rest--the growing recognition of the economic value
of the work of women.... There has been a marked change in the
estimate of our position as wealth producers. We have never been
"supported" by men; for if all men labored hard every hour of the
twenty-four, they could not do all the work of the world. A few
worthless women there are, but even they are not so much
supported by the men of their family as by the overwork of the
"sweated" women at the other end of the social ladder. From
creation's dawn our sex has done its full share of the world's
work; sometimes we have been paid for it, but oftener not.

Unpaid work never commands respect; it is the paid worker who has
brought to the public mind conviction of woman's worth. The
spinning and weaving done by our great-grandmothers in their own
homes was not reckoned as national wealth until the work was
carried to the factory and organized there; and the women who
followed their work were paid according to its commercial value.
It is the women of the industrial class, the wage-earners,
reckoned by the hundreds of thousands, and not by units, the
women whose work has been submitted to a money test, who have
been the means of bringing about the altered attitude of public
opinion toward woman's work in every sphere of life.

If we would recognize the democratic side of our cause, and make
an organized appeal to industrial women on the ground of their
need of citizenship, and to the nation on the ground of its need
that all wealth producers should form part of its body politic,
the close of the century might witness the building up of a true
republic in the United States.

Mrs. Florence Kelley, State Factory Inspector of Illinois, showed the
Working Woman's Need of the Ballot.

No one needs all the powers of the fullest citizenship more
urgently than the wage-earning woman, and from two different
points of view--that of actual money wages and that of her wider
needs as a human being and a member of the community.

The wages paid any body of working people are determined by many
influences, chief among which is the position of the particular
body of workers in question. Thus the printers, by their
intelligence, their powerful organization, their solidarity and
united a