Rhona told her.  She had worked in Zandler’s shirtwaist factory—­bending over a power-machine, whose ten needles made forty-four hundred stitches a minute.  So fast they flew that a break in needle or thread ruined a shirtwaist; hence, never did she allow her eyes to wander, never during a day of ten to fourteen hours, while, continuously, the needles danced up and down like flashes of steel or lightning.  At times it seemed as if the machine were running away from her and she had to strain her body to keep it back.  And so, when she reeled home late at night, her smarting eyes saw sharp showers of needles in the air every time she winked, and her back ached intolerably.

“I never dreamt,” said Myra, “that people had to work like that!”

“Oh, that’s not all!” said Rhona, and went on.  Her wages were rarely over five dollars a week, and for months, during slack season, she was out of work—­came daily to the factory, and had to sit on a bench and wait, often fruitlessly.  And then the sub-contracting system, whereunder the boss divided the work among lesser bosses who each ran a gang of toilers, speeding them up mercilessly, “sweating” them!  And so the young girls, sixteen to twenty-five years old, were sapped of health and joy and womanhood, and, “as Mr. Joe wrote, the future is robbed of wives and mothers!”

Myra was amazed.  She had a new glimpse of the woman problem.  She saw now how millions of women were being fed into the machine of industry, and that thus the home was passing, youth was filched of its glory, and the race was endangered.  This uprising of the women, then, meant more than she dreamed—­meant the attempt to save the race by freeing the women from this bondage.  Had they not a right then to go out in the open, to strike, to lead marches, to sway meetings, to take their places with men?

Such thoughts, confused and swift, came to her, and she asked Rhona what had happened.  How had the strike started?  First, said Rhona, there was the strike at Marrin’s—­a spark that set off the other places.  Then at Zandler’s conditions had become so bad that one morning Jake Hedig, her boss, a young, pale-faced, black-haired man, suddenly arose and shouted in a loud voice throughout the shop: 

“I am sick of slave-driving.  I resign my job.”

The boss, and some of the little bosses, set upon him, struck him, and dragged him out, but as he went he shouted lustily: 

“Brothers and sisters, are you going to sit by your machines and see a fellow-worker used this way?”

The machines stopped:  the hundreds of girls and the handful of men marched out simultaneously.  Then, swiftly the sedition had spread about the city until a great night in Cooper Union, when, after speeches of peace and conciliation, one of the girls had risen, demanded and secured the floor, and moved a general strike.  Her motion was unanimously carried, and when the chairman cried, in Yiddish:  “Do you mean faith?  Will you take the old Jewish oath?” up went two thousand hands, with one great chorus: