picket in freezing
weather with unfriendly policemen around, patience is if possible more
essential in the organizer's make-up. It often takes months of
gentle persistence before the girls, be they human-hair-workers or
cracker-packers, or domestic workers or stenographers, see how greatly
it is to their own interest to join or to form a labor organization.
Many locals formed with so much thought and after so much pains, drop
to pieces after a few months or a year or two. That is a universal
experience in the labor movement everywhere. But it does not therefore
follow that nothing has been gained. Even a group so loosely held
together that it melts away after the first impulse of indignation
has died out is often successful in procuring shorter hours or better
wages or improved conditions for the trade or shops of their city.
Besides each individual girl has had a little bit of education in what
cooeperation means, and what collective bargaining can do. The League
itself is a reminder, too, that all working-girls have many interests
in common, whatever their trade.

But besides aiding in the forming of new locals, the Women's Trade
Union League can be a force strengthening the unions already
established. Each of the leagues has an organization committee, whose
meetings are attended by delegates from the different women's trades.
These begin mostly as experience meetings, but end generally in either
massing the effort of all on one particular union's struggle, or
in planning legislative action by which all women workers can be
benefited.

In New York and Boston, Chicago and St. Louis and Kansas City the
local leagues have in every case had a marked effect upon industrial
legislation for women. They have been prime movers in the campaigns
for better fire protection in the factories in both New York and
Chicago, and for the limitation of hours of working-women in the
states of New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and Missouri, and for
minimum-wage legislation in Massachusetts and Illinois.

In every one of these states the Women's Trade Union League has first
of all provided an opportunity for the organized women of different
trades to come together and decide upon a common policy; next, to
cooeperate with other bodies, such as the State Federation of Labor,
and the city centrals, the Consumers' League, the American Association
for Labor Legislation, and the women's clubs, in support of such
humane legislation. Much of th