workers in the textile industry, to which special
organizers, both men and women, were assigned. There is no trade
which has worse conditions, and consequently wages and regularity
of employment are immediately affected adversely by any industrial
depression.

Women in the labor movement will have to make their own mistakes
and earn their own experience. I have dwelt elsewhere upon the many
advantages that accrue to women and girls from belonging to an
organization so vital and so bound up with some of our most
fundamental needs, as the trade union. On the very surface it
is evident that in such a body working-women learn to be more
business-like, to work together in harmony, to share loyally the
results of their united action, whether these spell defeat or success.
If they err, they promptly learn of their mistakes from their,
fellow-workers, men or women, from employers, and from their families.

Here, however, is perhaps the place to call attention to one markedly
feminine tendency, which should be discouraged in these early days
lest in process of time it might even gain the standing of a virtue,
and that is the inclination among the leaders to indulge in unlimited
overwork in all their labor activities. Labor men overwork too, but
not, as a rule, to the same degree, nor nearly so frequently as women.

Do not mistake. Women do not fall into this error because they are
trade unionists, or because they are inspired by the labor movement or
by the splendid ideals or by the aspiration after a free womanhood.

No! Trade-union and socialist and suffrage women overwork because they
are women, because through long ages the altruistic side has been
overdeveloped. They have brought along with them into their public
work the habit of self-sacrifice, and that overconscientiousness
in detail which their foremothers acquired during the countless
generations when obedience, self-immolation and self-obliteration were
considered women's chief duties. Personally these good sisters are
blameless. But that does not in the least alter the hard fact that
such overdevotion is an uneconomical expenditure of nervous energy.

When a wiser onlooker, wise with the onlooker's wisdom, urges
moderation even in overwork, there is put forward the pathetic plea,
variously worded:

"So much to do, so little time to do it."

I have never heard that hard-to-be-met argument so well answered as by
a woman physician, who gave these reasons to her