Hannah O’Day was not one of the quick ones.  Her strength had been too early sapped.  There was no child-labor law in Illinois when she should have been at school, and at eleven she was already a wage-earner.  Along with the rest she also had suffered from the repeated cuts that the pace-making of the ones at the top had brought about.  It was evident that something must be done.  Maggie Condon, Hannah O’Day and some of the others, began, first to think, and then to talk over the matter with one another.  They knew about the Haymarket trouble.  There were rumors of a strike the men had once had.  They had heard of the Knights of Labor, and wrote to someone, but nothing came of it.  So one day, when there was more than usual cause for irritation and discouragement, what did Hannah O’Day do but tie a red silk handkerchief to the end of a stick.  With this for their banner and the two leaders at their head, a whole troop of girls marched out into Packingtown.

The strike ended as most such strikes of the unorganized, unprepared for, and unfinanced sort, must end, in failure, in the return to work on no better terms of the rank and file, and in the black-listing of the leaders.  But the idea of organization had taken root, and this group of Irish girls still clung together.  “We can’t have a union,” said one, “but we must have something.  Let us have a club, and we’ll call it the Maud Gonne Club.”  This is touching remembrance of the Irish woman patriot.

Time passed on, and one evening during the winter of 1903 Miss Mary McDowell, of the University of Chicago Settlement, was talking at a Union Label League meeting, and she brought out some facts from what she knew of the condition of the women workers in the packing-houses, showing what a menace to the whole of the working world was the underpaid woman.  This got into the papers, and Maggie Condon and her sister read it, and felt that here was a woman who understood.  And she was in their own district, too.

So it came about that the Maud Gonne Club became slowly transformed into a real union.  This took quite a while.  The girls interested used to come over once a week to the Settlement, where Michael Donnelly was their tutor and helper.  Miss McDowell carefully absented herself, feeling that she wanted the girls to manage their own affairs, until it transpired that they wished her to be there, and thought it strange that she should be so punctilious.  After that she attended almost every meeting.  When they felt ready, they obtained the charter with eight charter members and were known as Local 183 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America.  Little by little the local grew in numbers.  One July night the meeting was particularly well attended and particularly lively, none the less so that the discussion was carried on to the accompaniment of a violent thunderstorm, the remarks of the excitable speakers being punctuated by flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder.  The matter under consideration was to parade or not to parade on the coming Labor Day.  The anxious question to decide was whether they could by their numbers make an impression great enough to balance the dangers of the individual and risky publicity.