and consider these
activities mainly in regard to what has led up to them, nor yet as to
what is their extent and effect today. Far more important is it to try
to discover what are the tendencies, which they as yet faintly and
imperfectly, often confusedly, express.

In the labor movement of this country woman has played and is playing
an important part. But in its completeness no one knows the story,
and those who know sections of it most intimately are too busy
living their own parts in that story, to pause long enough to be its
chroniclers. For to be part of a movement is more absorbing than to
write about it. Whom then shall we ask? To whom shall we turn for even
an imperfect knowledge of the story, at once noble and sordid, tragic
and commonplace, of woman's side of the labor movement? To whom, you
would say, but to the worker herself? And where does the worker speak
with such clearness, with such unfaltering steadiness, as through her
union, the organization of her trade?

In the industrial maze the individual worker cannot interpret her own
life story from her knowledge of the little patch of life which is
all her hurried fingers ever touch. Only an organization can be an
interpreter here. Fortunately for the student, the organization does
act as interpreter, both for the organized women who have been drawn
into the labor movement and for those less fortunate who are still
struggling on single-handed and alone. The organized workers in one
way or another come into fairly close relations with their unorganized
sisters. Besides, the movement in its modern form is still so young
that there is scarcely a woman worker in the unions who did not begin
her trade life as an unorganized toiler.

Speaking broadly, the points upon which the trade-union movement
concentrates are the raising of wages, the shortening of hours,
the diminution of seasonal work, the abolition or regulation of
piece-work, with its resultant speeding up, the maintaining of
sanitary conditions, and the guarding of unsafe machinery, the
enforcement of laws against child-labor, the abolition of taxes for
power and working materials such as thread and needles, and of unfair
fines for petty or unproved offenses--and with these, the recognition
of the union to insure the obtaining and the keeping of all the rest.

A single case taken from a non-union trade (a textile trade, too)
must serve to suggest the reasons that make organization a necessity.
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