nd
spinning-wheels into the canning factories and garment trades with the
invention of machinery, women simply continued their traditional labor
outside their houses instead of inside them.[42] The accounts of the
laundry, the shirt-waist and the cloak making trades in New York seem to
show that, where men and women engage in the same field of activity,
their work is, by a natural division, not competitive or antagonistic,
but complementary. Indeed, so little is it antagonistic that the very
first spark that lit the fire of the largest strike of women that ever
occurred in this country, the shirt-waist makers' strike, was kindled by
an offensive injustice to a man.

The chronicles of what self-supporting women have given and received in
their work in wage and in vitality, these working girls' budgets obtained
by the Consumers' League, will not have told their story truly unless
they have evoked with their narrative the presence of that impersonal
sense of right instinctive in the factory girls who go year after year to
Albany to fight against the long Christmas season hours for the
shop-girls, in the cloak makers in their effort to stop sweated home
work, in the responsible common-sense of countless working women. So that
the fact that six million women are now gainfully employed in this
country may finally tend to secure wiser adjustments and fairer returns
for the labor, not only of women, but of all the workers of the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 33: Its severity may be indicated by an account of the work a
machine ironer in Illinois regularly performed before the passage of the
Illinois Ten-Hour Law, when conditions in that State were as they now are
in the hotel and hospital laundries of New York. Miss Radway used to iron
five hundred shirt bosoms a day. Holding the loose part of the shirt up
above her head to prevent the muslin from being caught in the iron, she
pressed the bosom in a machine manipulated by three heavy treads--by
bearing all of her weight on her right foot stamping down on a pedal to
the right; then by bearing all her weight on her left foot, stamping down
a pedal to the left; then by pressing down both pedals with a jump. To
iron five hundred shirt bosoms required three thousand treads a day.]

[Footnote 34: State Labor Law, paragraph 81.--Protection of Employees
Operating Machinery: "... If a machine or any part thereof is in a
dangerous condition or is not properly guarded, the use thereof