The activities of the local leagues vary in detail in the different cities.  In all there are monthly business meetings, the business run by the girls, with perhaps a speaker to follow, and sometimes a program of entertainment.  Lectures on week evenings, classes and amusements are provided as far as workers and funds permit.  The first important work among newly arrived women immigrants in the Middle West was done by the Chicago League, and this laid the groundwork for the present Immigrants’ Protective League.  Headquarters are a center for organizing, open all the time to receive word of struggling unions, helping out in difficulties, counseling the impulsive, and encouraging the timid.  When a group of workers see for themselves the need of organization, a body of experienced women standing ready to mother a new little union, the hospitable room standing open, literally night and day, can afford the most powerful aid in extending organization among timid girls.  If courage and daring are needed in this work, courage to stand by the weak, daring to go out and picket in freezing weather with unfriendly policemen around, patience is if possible more essential in the organizer’s make-up.  It often takes months of gentle persistence before the girls, be they human-hair-workers or cracker-packers, or domestic workers or stenographers, see how greatly it is to their own interest to join or to form a labor organization.  Many locals formed with so much thought and after so much pains, drop to pieces after a few months or a year or two.  That is a universal experience in the labor movement everywhere.  But it does not therefore follow that nothing has been gained.  Even a group so loosely held together that it melts away after the first impulse of indignation has died out is often successful in procuring shorter hours or better wages or improved conditions for the trade or shops of their city.  Besides each individual girl has had a little bit of education in what cooeperation means, and what collective bargaining can do.  The League itself is a reminder, too, that all working-girls have many interests in common, whatever their trade.

But besides aiding in the forming of new locals, the Women’s Trade Union League can be a force strengthening the unions already established.  Each of the leagues has an organization committee, whose meetings are attended by delegates from the different women’s trades.  These begin mostly as experience meetings, but end generally in either massing the effort of all on one particular union’s struggle, or in planning legislative action by which all women workers can be benefited.

In New York and Boston, Chicago and St. Louis and Kansas City the local leagues have in every case had a marked effect upon industrial legislation for women.  They have been prime movers in the campaigns for better fire protection in the factories in both New York and Chicago, and for the limitation of hours of working-women in the states of New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and Missouri, and for minimum-wage legislation in Massachusetts and Illinois.