hose dependent upon him or her, as well as steadiness
of employment, and the guarantee of such working conditions as shall
not be prejudicial to health.

If the community is not to be moved either by pity or by a sense of
justice then perhaps it will awake to a realization of the national
danger involved when so many of the workers, and especially when
so many of the girls and women work under circumstances ruinous to
health, and affording, besides, small chance for all-round normal
development on either the individual or the social side. These are
evils whose results do not die out with the generation primarily
involved, but must as well through inheritance as through environment
injure the children of the workers, and their offspring yet unborn.

The passing away from the individual worker of personal control
over the raw material and the instruments of production, which has
accompanied the advent of the factory system, means that some degree
of control corresponding to that formerly possessed by the individual
should be assured to the group of workers in the factory or the trade.
Such control is assured through the collective power of the workers,
acting in cooeperation in their trade union. One reason why the woman
worker is in so many respects worse off than the man is because she
has so far enjoyed so little of the protection of the trade union in
her work. Why she has not had it, and why more and more she desires
it, is what I will try to show in the following pages.

There is one criticism, to which almost every writer dealing with a
present-day topic, lies exposed. That is, why certain aspects of the
subject, or certain closely related questions, have either not been
dealt with at all, or touched on only lightly. For instance, the
subject of the organization of wage-earning women is indeed bound up
with the industrial history of the United States, with the legal and
social position of women, with the handicaps under which the colored
races suffer, and with the entire labor problem.

In answer I can but plead that there had to be some limits. These
are all matters which have been treated by many others, and I
intentionally confined myself to a section of the field not hitherto
covered.

Though the greatest care has been taken to avoid errors, some mistakes
have doubtless crept in and the author would be glad to have these
pointed out. I acknowledge gratefully what I owe to others, whether
that help has com