In 1891 there were present at the annual convention of the American Federation of Labor Mrs. Eva McDonald Valesh and Miss Ida Van Etten.  A committee was appointed with Mrs. Valesh as chairman and Miss Van Etten as secretary.  They brought in a report that the convention create the office of national organizer, the organizer to be a woman at a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year and expenses, to be appointed the following January, and that the constitution be so amended that the woman organizer have a seat on the Executive Board.  The latter suggestion was not acted upon.  But Miss Mary E. Kenney of the Bindery Women (now Mrs. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan) was appointed organizer, and held the position for five months.  She attended the 1892 convention as a fully accredited delegate.  Naturally she could produce no very marked results in that brief period, and the remark is made that her work was of necessity of a pioneer and missionary character rather than one of immediate results—­a self-evident commentary.  Later women were organizers for brief periods, one being Miss Anna Fitzgerald, of the National Women’s Label League.

As years passed on, and the American Federation of Labor grew by the affiliation of almost all the national trade unions, it became the one acknowledged central national body.  Along with the men, such women as were in the organizations came in, too.  But it was only as a rare exception that we heard of women delegates, and no woman has ever yet had a seat upon the Executive Board, although women delegates have been appointed upon both special and standing committees.

The responsibility for this must be shared by all.  It is partly an outgrowth of the backward state of the women themselves.  They are at a disadvantage in their lack of training, their lower wages and their unconsciousness of the benefits of organization; also owing to the fact that such a large number of women are engaged in the unskilled trades that are hardest to organize.  On the other hand, neither the national unions, the state and central bodies, nor the local unions have ever realized the value of the women membership they actually have, nor the urgent necessity that exists for organizing all working-women.  To their own trade gatherings even, they have rarely admitted women delegates in proportion to the number of women workers.  Only now and then, even today, do we find a woman upon the executive board of a national trade union, and when it comes to electing delegates to labor’s yearly national gathering, it is men who are chosen, even in a trade like the garment-workers, in which there is a great preponderance of women.

Of the important international unions with women members there are but two which have a continuous, unbroken history of over fifty years.  These are the Typographical Union, dating back to 1850, and the Cigar Makers’ International Union, which was founded in 1864.

Other international bodies, founded since, are: