Union League is also bringing into touch with the
labor movement other women's organizations, and especially winning
their increased cooeperation in the campaigns for legislation. It is
largely through the ally[A] membership that the Women's Trade Union
League has been able to reach the public ear as well as to attract
assistance and cooeperation, especially from the suffragists and the
women's clubs. The suffragists have always been more or less in
sympathy with labor organizations, while outside labor circles, the
largest body to second the efforts of organized labor in the direction
of humanity has been the women's clubs, whether expressing themselves
through the General Federation, or through local activity in their
home towns. An immense group of women thus early became committed
to an active opposition to the employment of children either in
factories, or under the even more dangerous and demoralizing
conditions which await mere babies in the street or in tenement homes.

[Footnote A: An ally is a man or a woman of any class not a worker
in any organized trade who believes in the organization of women and
subscribes to the following League platform.

1. Organization of all workers into trade unions.
2. Equal pay for equal work.
3. Eight-hour day.
4. A living wage.
5. Full citizenship for women.]

There is a similar movement going on within the National Young Women's
Christian Association. The reason for this stand being taken by
women's organizations was characteristic. The impelling force that
urged those women on was something far deeper than mere philanthropy.
It was the acceptance by a whole group of women of the old
responsibilities of motherhood, in the new form that these must take
on if new conditions are to be met. It was as if the motherhood of the
country had said in so many words: "Social conditions are changing,
but we are still the mothers of the new generation. Society is
threatened with this calamity, that they will pass beyond our care
before the needs and claims of childhood have been satisfied. As
individuals we are now powerless. Let us see what cooeperation will do
to right conditions that are fast slipping beyond our control."

But how unconscious the vast number of women of this type were, either
of the true nature of the force they were obeying or the point whither
they were tending, was graphically illustrated at the Biennial
Federation of Women's Clubs in St. Paul, in 1906, when a