The rank and file of the local organizations, in city after city, have given the same hearty and unqualified approval to the League’s pioneering work, in bringing the unorganized women and girls into the unions, and in carrying on a constant educative work among those already organized.  As an instance of this openly expressed approval, take the cordial cooeperation which the Chicago League has ever received from the Chicago Federation of Labor and its allied locals.  But, owing to the complexity of women’s lives, the varied and inconsistent demands that are made upon their energies, the organization of the League has to be somewhat different from that of any body which labor men would have formed for themselves.

Locally the relationship varies.  In St. Louis the League has never been represented in the central body by its own delegates, but by members representing primarily their own organizations, such as Bindery Women and Boot and Shoe Workers.  In Boston, New York and Chicago each League is represented by its own delegates.  In Kansas City, Missouri, again, not only are the delegates of the League seated in the central body, but every union of men in it pays a per capita tax into the funds of the Kansas City Women’s Trade Union League.

The National League receives a certain amount of financial support from the American Federation of Labor, and from a number of the international unions, several of the latter being affiliated with the League.  State federations, city central bodies, and local unions in different parts of the country give similar cooeperation and money support.

As the labor movement is organized, it collects into suitable groups the different classes of wage-earners.  But the average housekeeping, married woman, although both worker and producer, is not a wage-earner, although more and more, as the home industries become specialized is she becoming a wage-earner for at least part of her time.  But, as our lives are arranged at present the largest proportion of married women and a considerable number of single women are ineligible for admission as members of any trade union.  Are they therefore to be shut out from the labor movement, and from participation in its activities, no matter how closely their own interests are bound up with it, no matter how intensely they are in sympathy with its aims, no matter though as single girls they may have been members of a union?

We have noted already how much stronger the labor movement would be if the women and girls engaged in the trades were brought in through organization.  Still further would organized men be advantaged if their movement were reinforced by this great body of home-keeping women, vast in numbers, and with their untouched reserves of energy and experience.