n the trade unions, and is partly
conditioned by our social and political environment. But either way, a
man is a trade unionist or he is not. The line is clear cut, and trade
unions therefore admit no one not actually a worker in their own
trade.

But it is not so with women. Outside the wage-earning groups there
is the great bulk of married women, and a still considerable, though
ever-lessening number of single women, who, although productive
laborers, are yet, owing to the primitive and antiquated status of
home industry, not acknowledged as such in the labor market. Not
being remunerated in money, they are not considered as wage-earners.
(Witness the census report, which, in omitting those performing unpaid
domestic duties from the statistics of gainful occupations, does but
reflect the tragic fact that woman's home work has no money value and
confirms the popular impression that "mother doesn't work.")

Yet another force to be reckoned with in estimating the difficulties
which stand in the way of unionizing women is the widespread hostility
to trade unionism, as expressed through newspaper and magazine
articles, and through public speakers, both religious and secular. The
average girl, even more than the average man, is sensitive to public
opinion, as expressed through such accepted channels of authority. The
standards of public opinion have been her safeguard in the past, and
she still looks to them for guidance, not realizing how often such
commonly accepted views are misinterpretations of the problems she
herself has to face today. In the middle of the last century, a period
that was most critical for men's unions in England, a number of
leaders of public thought, men of influence and standing in the
community, such as Charles Kingsley, Frederick Denison Maurice and
others, came to the help of the men by maintaining their right to
organize. In the United States, during the corresponding stage of
extreme unpopularity, Horace Greeley, Charles A. Dana and Wendell
Phillips extended similar support to workingmen. We today are apt
to forget that women's unions with us are just now in the very same
immature stage of development, as men's unions passed through half a
century ago. The labor men of that day had their position immensely
strengthened by just such help afforded from outside their immediate
circle. It is therefore not strange that women's unions, at their
present stage of growth, should be in need of just s