In the face of such evidence is there anyone who can still question that individual bargaining is a menace against the social order and that education and equipment in organization and citizenship become a social necessity?

Women unionists, like men in the labor movement, are continually asked to support investigations into industrial conditions, investigations and yet more investigations.  They are asked to give evidence before boards and commissions, they are asked to furnish journalists and writers of books with information.  They have done so willingly, but there is a sense coming over many of us that we have had investigations a-plenty; and that the hour struck some time ago for at least beginning to put an end to the conditions of needless poverty and inexcusable oppression, which time after time have been unearthed.

No one who heard Mrs. Florence Kelley at the Charities and Corrections Conference in St. Louis in 1910 can forget the powerful plea she made to social workers that they should not be satisfied with investigation.  Not an investigation has ever been made but has told the same story, monotonous in its lesson, only varying in details; workers, and especially women workers, are inadequately paid.  Further she considers that investigations would be even more thorough and drastic if the investigators, the workers and the public knew that something would come out of the inquiry beyond words, words, words.

Investigation alone never remedied any evil, never righted any injustice.  Yet as far as the community are concerned, average men and women seem quite content when the investigation has been made, and stop there.  What is wrong?  Will no real improvement take place till the workers are strong enough individually and collectively to manage their own affairs, and through organization, cooeperation, and political action, or its equivalent insure adequate remuneration, and prevent overwork, speeding up, and dangerous and insanitary conditions?

In a degree investigation has prepared the way for legislation.  Legislation will undoubtedly play even a bigger part than it has done in the protection of the workers.  Almost all laws for which organized labor generally works affect women as well as men, whether they are anti-injunction statutes, or workmen’s compensation acts, or factory laws.  But there is another class of laws, specially favoring women, about which women have naturally more decided opinions than men.  These are laws as to hours, and more recently as to wages, which are or are to be applicable to women alone.  A just and common-sense argument extends special legislative protection to women, because of their generally exploited and handicapped position; but the one strong plea used in their behalf has been health and safety, the health and safety of the future mothers of society.  At this point we pause.  In all probability such protection will be found so beneficial to women that it will be eventually extended to men.