gumption to have the least idea how to go about it, did it ever
occur to them that things might be radically improved. (And the pity
of it is that so often telling improvements could be made with so
little effort.)

Nor is it anything but feminist sentimentality, as far as I can see,
to argue against special legislation for women. What women can do
intellectually as compared with men I am in no position to state. To
argue that women can take a place on a physical equality with man is
simply not being honest. Without sentimentalizing over motherhood, it
seems allowable to point out the fact that women are potential
mothers, and this fact, with every detail of its complexities,
feminists or no to the contrary, is a distinct handicap to women's
playing a part in the industrial field on a par with man. And society
pays more dearly for a weary woman than for a tired man.

Therefore, why not lunch rooms, and attractive lunch rooms, and good
food, well cooked? Yes, it is good business, and besides it puts a
woman on a much more efficient level to herself and society. At our
tables the girls were talking about different lunch-room conditions
they had come across in their work. One girl told of a glass company
she had worked for that recently was forced to shut down. She dwelt
feelingly on the white lunch room and the good food, and especially
the paper napkins--the only place she had worked where they gave
napkins. She claimed there was not a girl who did not want to cry when
she had to quit that factory. "Everybody loved it," she said. I tried
to find out if she felt the management had been paying for the
polished brass rails, the good food, and the napkins out of the
workers' wages. "Not on your life!" she answered. She had been a file
clerk.

Take dental clinics in the factories. Four teeth on our floor were
extracted while I was at the laundry. For a couple of days each girl
moaned and groaned and made everybody near her miserable. Then she got
Miss Cross's permission to go to some quack dentist, and out came the
tooth. Irma had two out at one dollar each. It was going to cost her
forty dollars to get them back in. A person with his or her teeth in
good condition is a far better citizen than one suffering from the
toothache.

If I had my way I should like to see a rest room in every factory
where women are employed, and some time, however short, allowed in the
middle of the afternoon to make use of it.

Eight hours