Young as is the League, some most heroic members have already passed into the unseen.  Adelaide Samuels was a teacher in the public schools who, in the day of very small things for the New York League, acted as treasurer and chairman of the label committee.  In her scant leisure she worked patiently towards the end that girls in the poorest trades should win for themselves the power of making the collective bargain.  She died before she could have seen any tangible results from her efforts.

Hannah Hennessy, who carried away from the first interstate conference in Chicago a vision in her heart of a Women’s Trade Union League in every large city, a few years later laid down her life as the result of the hardships endured while picketing on behalf of the Marx and Haas strikers.  Her youth had slipped away, and her strength had been sapped by weary years as an ill-paid garment-worker, so that exposure to cold and wet found her power of resistance gone, and a few weeks later she was no more.

At the other end of the social scale, but thrilled with the same unselfish desire to better the conditions of the girl toilers, stood Carola Woerishofer, the rich college girl, who, once she was committed to the cause, never spared herself, picketing today, giving bonds tomorrow for the latest prisoner of the strike, spending a whole hot summer in a laundry, that she might know first-hand what the toiler pays that we may wear clean clothes.  And so on, until the last sad scene of all, when on duty as inspector of the New York State Immigration Bureau, her car capsized, and Carola Woerishofer’s brief, strenuous service to humanity was ended.

From yet another group came Frances Squire Potter, formerly professor of English Literature in the University of Minnesota, who a few years ago became profoundly impressed with the unfair and oppressive conditions under which working-women live and toil.  Thus was she led far away from academic fields, first into suffrage work, and later into the National Women’s Trade Union League.  Until her health gave way, about a year before her death, she acted as official lecturer for the League.  Through her unique gifts as a speaker, and her beautiful personality, she interpreted the cause of the working-woman to many thousands of hearers.  She was also departmental editor of Life and Labor, the League’s magazine.

Great have been the vicissitudes of the labor movement among men, but for many years now, the tendency towards national cohesion has been growing.  This tendency has been greatly strengthened by the rapid development, and at the same time, the cheapening of the means of transport and communication between distant regions of the country.

In the advantages arising from this general growth of the labor movement, both in its local activities and on its national side, women workers have indeed shared.  This is true, both on account of the direct benefits accruing to them through joining mixed organizations, or being aided by men to form separate organizations of their own, and also through the vast assistance rendered by organized labor in obtaining protective legislation for the most utterly helpless and exploited toilers, for example, the child-labor laws which state after state has placed upon the statute book, sanitary regulations, and laws for the safeguarding of machinery dangerous to workers.