The wages of but two dollars and fifty cents or three dollars for a week of eighty-four hours; the intolerable sufferings of the women and child wage-earners recorded in her reports make heart-rending reading today, especially when we realize how great in amount and how continuous has been the suffering in all the intervening years.  So much publicity, however, and the undaunted spirit and unbroken determination of a certain number of the workers have assuredly had their effect, and some improvements there have been.

Speeding up is, in all probability, worse today than ever.  It is difficult to compare wages without making a close investigation in different localities and in many trades, and testing, by a comparison with the cost of living, the real and not merely the money value of wages, but there is a general agreement among authorities that wages on the whole have not kept pace with the workers’ necessary expenditures.  But in one respect the worker today is much better off.  At the time we are speaking of, the facts of the wrong conditions, the low wages, the long hours, and the many irritating tyrannies the workers had to bear, only rarely reached the public ear.  Let us thank God for our muck-rakers.  Their stories and their pictures are all the while making people realize that there is such a thing as a common responsibility for the wrongs of individuals.

Here is a managerial economy for you.  The girls in a corset factory in Newark, New Jersey, if not inside when the whistle stopped blowing (at seven o’clock apparently) were locked out till half-past seven, and then they were docked two hours for waste power.

In a linen mill in Paterson, New Jersey, we are told how in one branch the women stood on a stone floor with water from a revolving cylinder flying constantly against the breast.  They had in the coldest weather to go home with underclothing dripping because they were allowed neither space nor a few moments of time in which to change their clothing.

Mrs. Barry’s work, educating, organizing, and latterly pushing forward protective legislation continued up till her marriage with O.R.  Lake, a union printer, in 1890, when she finally withdrew from active participation in the labor movement.

Mrs. Barry could never have been afforded the opportunity even to set out on her mission, had it not been for the support and cooeperation of other women delegates.  The leaders in the Knights of Labor were ahead of their time in so freely inviting women to take part in their deliberations.  It was at the seventh convention, in 1883, that the first woman delegate appeared.  She was Miss Mary Stirling, a shoe-worker from Philadelphia.  Miss Kate Dowling, of Rochester, New York, had also been elected, but did not attend.  Next year saw two women, Miss Mary Hannafin, saleswoman, also from Philadelphia, and Miss Louisa M. Eaton, of Lynn, probably a shoe-worker.  During the preceding year Miss Hannafin had taken an active part in protecting the girls discharged in a lock-out in a Philadelphia shoe factory, not only against the employer, but even against the weakness of some of the men of her own assembly who were practically taking the side of the strike-breakers, by organizing them into a rival assembly.  The question came up in the convention for settlement, and the delegates voted for Miss Hannafin in the stand she had taken.