ut 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 Abbe, 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 de