League.  It was at the first interstate conference, also, that a committee was appointed to wait upon the American Federation of Labor Executive Board, during the Norfolk Convention in November, 1907.  The Illinois State Committee of the Women’s Trade Union League, whose fine legislative work helped to secure the passage of the present ten-hour law for women, also grew out of the discussion which came up in the Chicago conference.

The lines on which the League is developing can be observed through the work done and reported upon at the biennial conventions of which five have been held.  The first, at Norfolk, Virginia, in 1907, was an informal gathering of but seven delegates, women who had been attending the convention of the American Federation of Labor of that year.  Subsequent conventions have taken place every two years since then.  These have been held in Chicago, Boston and St. Louis and New York respectively.  On each occasion about seventy delegates have reported.  They are certainly a picked lot of girls.  They are trained, trained not in fancy debate, but in practical discussion.  They have met with employers in trade conferences where an error in statement or a hasty word might mean a cut in wages or an increase in hours for two years to come.  They have met with their fellow-workers in union meetings, where, if a girl aspires to lead her sisters or brothers, she has to show both readiness of wit and good-humored patience in differing from the others.

These women are growing too, as all must grow who live on life’s firing line, and shrink not from meeting the very hardest problems of today.  The working-woman, in her daily struggle comes up against every one of them, and not one can be evaded.

Industrial legislation, judicial decisions, the right to organize, the power to vote, are to the awakened working-woman not just academic questions, but something that affects her wages, her hours.  They may mean enough to eat, time to rest, and beyond these home happiness and social freedom.

In two directions especially can the growing importance of the women’s trade-union movement be observed:  on the one hand in the incessant appeals, coming from all over the continent, to the National League, for advice and assistance in organizing women into the local unions of their trade; on the other in the degree in which it is gradually coming to be recognized by public men, by politicians, by business men, as well as by students and thinkers, that it is to organized women they must turn, whenever they want an authoritative expression as to the working-women’s needs and desires.