Still, compared with the extensive movement among men, in which the women have been more or less a side issue, feminine trade unionism has been but fitful in its manifestations, and far indeed from keeping pace with the rate at which women have poured into the industrial field.  The youth of a large number of the girl workers, and the fact that, as they grow up, so many of them pass out of the wage-earning occupations, marriage, and the expectation of marriage, the main obstacles that stand in the way today in getting women to organize and to hold their unions together, furnish also the underlying causes of the want of continuity of the trade-union movement among women since it first began in the United States in the early part of the last century.  The too frequent change in the personnel of the members, and therefore in the composition of the union itself, means an absence of the permanence of spirit which is an essential condition for the handing on in unbroken succession of standards of loyalty and esprit de corps.

It is continuity that has rendered possible all human progress, through the passing on from all of us to our successors, of each small acquirement, of each elevation of standard.  Where, but for such continuity would be the college spirit, that descends upon and baptizes the newcomer as he enters the college gates?  Where, but for continuity would be the constantly rising standards of morality and social responsibility?  Where, but for continuity would be national life and all that makes patriotism worthy?  Where, indeed, would be humanity itself?

The average man is a wage-earner, and as such a fit subject for organization.  If extensive groups of men remain unorganized, the responsibility lies partly on the trade unions, and is partly conditioned by our social and political environment.  But either way, a man is a trade unionist or he is not.  The line is clear cut, and trade unions therefore admit no one not actually a worker in their own trade.

But it is not so with women.  Outside the wage-earning groups there is the great bulk of married women, and a still considerable, though ever-lessening number of single women, who, although productive laborers, are yet, owing to the primitive and antiquated status of home industry, not acknowledged as such in the labor market.  Not being remunerated in money, they are not considered as wage-earners.  (Witness the census report, which, in omitting those performing unpaid domestic duties from the statistics of gainful occupations, does but reflect the tragic fact that woman’s home work has no money value and confirms the popular impression that “mother doesn’t work.”)