ating by the cruel treatment so many thousands of Polish
girls are receiving at our hands.

I cannot see any prospect of organizing them in any reasonable numbers
at present. The one thing we can do to alleviate their hard lot is to
secure legislation--legislation for shorter hours and for the minimum
wage.

Their suspiciousness is perhaps the chief barrier in the way of social
elevation of the Poles. That Poles can be organized is shown by
the remarkable success of the Polish National Alliance and kindred
societies. Their capacity for cooeperation is seen in their
establishment of their own cooeperative stores.

VII

THE WOMAN ORGANIZER

The problems that face the woman organizer are many and complex. They
are the harder to handle, inasmuch as there is very little assistance
to be had from any body of tradition on the subject among women
workers. The movement for organization among women is still so
inchoate. The woman organizer turns to the more experienced men
leaders, and finds that often, even with the best will in the world,
they cannot help her. The difficulties she meets with are, in detail,
so different from theirs that she has to work out her own solutions
for herself.

It is indeed a blind alley in which she has so often to move. The
workers are young and ignorant, therefore, by all odds, they require
the protection of both legislation and organization. Again, the
workers are young and ignorant, and therefore they have not learnt the
necessity for such protection. Their wages are in most cases low,
too low for decent self-support. But just because their wages are so
inadequate for bare needs it is in many cases all the more difficult
to induce them to deduct from such scanty pay the fifty cents a month
which is the smallest sum upon which any organization can pay its way
and produce tangible benefits for its members.

Left to her own devices, the solution of her financial difficulties
which the average girl finds is always to lessen her expenses so as to
manage on the lessening wage that is inevitable in all trades if not
resisted. To find a cheaper room, to take one more girl into her room,
to spend a few cents a day less for food--these are the near-hand
economies that first present themselves to the girlish mind. This is
on the economizing side. When it comes to trying to earn more, to work
longer hours is surely the self-evident way of increasing the contents
of the weekly pay envelope.