six o’clock the unwholesome breakfast was over, and every one hard at work....  The girls were physically depleted from their hard work and poor nourishment.  Their hands were “blistered and puffed, their feet swollen, calloused, and sore.”  One girl said, “Many a time I’ve been so tired that I hadn’t the courage to take my clothes off.  I’ve thrown myself on the bed and slept like dead until I got so cold and cramped that at two or three in the morning I’d rouse up and undress and crawl into bed, only to crawl out again at half-past five.”

As to wages, under the wretched “living-in” system the girls received but eight dollars and ten dollars a month in money.  But even those who lived at home in no instance received more than twenty-five dollars a month, and in many cases widows with children to support would be trying to do their duty by their little ones on seventeen dollars and fifty cents a month.

In the summer of 1900, letters many of them anonymous, were received both by the State Labor Commissioner and by the newspapers.  A reporter from the San Francisco Examiner took a job as a laundry-worker, and published appalling accounts of miserable wages, utter slavery as to hours and degrading conditions generally.  Even the city ordinance forbidding work after ten at night (!) was found to be flagrantly violated, the girls continually working till midnight, and sometimes till two in the morning.

The first measure of improvement was the passing of a new ordinance, forbidding work after seven in the evening.  The workers, however, promptly realized that the more humane regulation was likely to be as ill enforced as the former one had been unless there was a union to see that it was carried out.

About three hundred of the men organized, and applied to the Laundry Workers’ International Union for a charter.  The men did not wish to take the women in, but the executive board of the national organization, to their everlasting credit, refused the charter unless the women were taken in as well.  Even so, a great many of the women were too frightened to take any steps themselves, as the employers were already threatening with dismissal any who dared to join a union, but the most courageous of the girls, with the help of some of the best of the men resolved to go on.  Hannah Mahony, now Mrs. Hannah Nolan, Labor Inspector, took up the difficult task of organizing.  So energetic and successful was she, that in sixteen weeks the majority of the girls, as well as the men, had joined the new union.  It was all carried out secretly, and only when they felt themselves strong enough did they come out into the open with a demand for a higher wage-scale and shorter hours.