n uncomfortable feeling about the woman entering his trade, even
apart from the most important reason of all, that she is wont to be
a wage-cutter, the average trade-union man retains a somewhat uneasy
apprehension when he finds women entering the union. As they become
active, women introduce a new element. They may not say very much,
but it is gradually discovered that they do not enjoy meeting over
saloons, at the head of two or three flights of grimy backstairs, or
where the street has earned a bad name.

Woman makes demands. Leaders that even the decenter sort of men would
passively accept, because they are put forward, since they are such
smart fellows, or have pull in trade-union politics, she will have
none of, and will quietly work against them. The women leaders have an
uncomfortable knack of reminding the union that women are on the map,
as it were.

It is at a psychological moment that she is making herself felt in
the councils of organized labor. Just as the labor movement is itself
being reorganized, with the modern development of the union and of
union activity; just as woman herself is coming into her own; just as
we are passing through the transition period from one form of society
to another; and just as we catch a glimpse of a distant future in
which the world will become, for the first time, one.

From the very fact that they are women, women trade unionists have
their own distinct contribution to make to the movement. The feminine,
and especially the maternal qualities that man appreciates so in the
home, he is learning (some men have learnt already) to appreciate in
the larger home of the union.

In speaking thus, I freely, if regretfully, admit that the rartk and
file of both sexes are far indeed from playing their full part. We
have still to depend more largely than is quite fitting or democratic
upon the leaders as standard-bearers. It is also true that there
are women who are willing to accept low ideals in unionism as in
everything else. Their influence is bound to pass. If women are to
make their own peculiar contribution to the labor movement, it will
be by working in glad cooeperation with the higher idealism of the men
leaders.

And when the day comes (may its coming be hastened!) that women are
even only as extensively organized as men are today, the organization
of men will indeed proceed by leaps and bounds. It will not be by
arithmetical, but by geometrical progression, that the u