working seventeen and eighteen hours a day, standing
over heavy machines for $3 and $3.50 a week. Six dollars a week
is the average wage of working women in the United States. How
can a woman live an honorable life on such a sum? Is it any
wonder that so many of our little sisters are in the gutter? When
we strike for more pay we are clubbed by the police and by thugs
hired by our employers, and in the courts our word is not taken
and we are sent to prison. This is the respect and admiration
shown to working girls in practice. I want to tell you about
Cornelia as we find her case today. The agent of the Child Labor
Society made an investigation in the tenements and found mothers
with their small children sitting and standing around
them--standing when they were too small to see the top of the
table otherwise. They were working by a kerosene lamp and
breathing its odor and they were all making artificial
forget-me-nots. It takes 1,620 pieces of material to make a gross
of forget-me-nots and the profit is only a few cents.

Four years ago 30,000 shirtwaist girls went on strike and when we
went to Mayor McClellan to ask permission for them to have a
parade he said: "Thirty thousand women are of no account to me."
If they had been 30,000 women with votes would he have said that?
We have in New York 14,000 women over sixty-five years old who
must work or starve. What is done with them when their bones give
out and they cannot work any more? The police gather them up and
you may then see in jail, scrubbing hard, rough concrete floors
that make their knees bleed--women who have committed no crime
but being old and poor. Don't take my word for it but send a
committee to Blackwell's Island or the Tombs and see for
yourselves. We have a few Old Ladies' Homes but with most of them
it would take a piece of red tape as long as from here to New
York to get in. Give us a square deal so that we may take care of
ourselves.

Miss Addams devoted her address to the great change that was taking
place in the conception of politics. She called attention to the
practical investigations which were being made in the education of
children, in immigration, in criminology, in industrial conditions,
and said: "This whole new social work can be translated into political
action, and, with this, p