come
specialized, and the work of the single operative has been divided
up into a hundred processes. These are the conditions, and this the
environment under which the workers most frequently organize. The
operations have become more or less defined and standardized, and the
operatives are more readily grouped and classified. Also, even amid
all the noise and clatter of the factory, they have opportunity for
becoming acquainted, sometimes while working together, or at the noon
hour, or when going to or coming from work. There are still few enough
women engaged in factory work who have come into trade unions, but the
path has at least been cleared, both by the numbers of men who have
shown the way, and by the increasing independence of women themselves.
Similar reasoning applies to the workers in the culinary trades. These
also are the modern, specialized forms of the old domestic arts of
cooking and otherwise preparing and serving food. The workers, the
cooks and the waitresses, have their separate, allotted tasks; they
also have opportunities of even closer association than the factory
operatives. These opportunities, which may be used among the young
folks to exchange views on the latest nickel show, to compare the
last boss with the present one, may also, among the older ones, mean
talking over better wages and hours and how to get them, and here may
spring up the beginnings of organization.

The number of women organized into trade unions is still
insignificant, compared with those unreached by even a glimmering of
knowledge as to what trade unionism means. The movement will not only
have to become stronger numerically in the trades it already includes.
It must extend in other directions, taking in the huge army of the
unskilled and the semi-skilled, outside of those trades, so as
to cover the fruit-pickers in the fields and the packers in the
canneries, the paper-box-makers, the sorters of nuts and the knotters
of feathers, those who pick the cotton from the plant, as well as
those who make the cotten into cloth. Another group yet to be enrolled
are the hundreds of thousands of girls in stores, engaged in selling
what the girls in factories have made, and still other large groups
of girls in mercantile offices who are indirectly helping on the same
business of exchange of goods for cash, and cash for goods, and who
are just as truly part of the industrial world and of commercial life.
But the pity is that the girl