As for the woman of wealth, I should be the last to question her right to opportunities for self-development, or to deny her the joy of assisting her sorely driven sisters to rise out of the industrial mire, and stand erect in self-reliant independence.  But if the League is to grow until it becomes the universal expression of the woman’s part in organized labor, then the privilege of assisting with financial help the ordinary activities of the League can be hers only during the infancy of the body.  No organization can draw its nurture permanently from sources outside of itself, although many a movement has been nursed through its early stages of uncertainty and struggle by the aid of the sympathetic and understanding outsider.

V

THE HUGE STRIKES

In September, 1909, the name of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company, which has since become a word of such ill omen, was known to few outside the trade.  The factory had not then been wrapped in the flames and smoke of the Asch fire, that was to cut short the lives of one hundred and forty-three workers, and to blight the existence and mar the happiness of many more.

But by a not altogether inexplicable coincidence, it had been among the employes of this very firm that the smoldering flames of human discontent broke out, that were to grow into the “Strike of the Forty Thousand,” a strike that proved to be but the first of a long series of revolts among the foreign garment-workers of the largest cities in the East and the Middle West.

It is true that in such an extensive trade as that of making ready-made clothes, with its low wages and its speeding-up, its sweating and its uncertainty of employment, there is always a strike on somewhere.  At that very time, there were in progress two strikes of quite respectable size:  one in Boston, under the Ladies’ Tailors’ and Dressmakers’ Union, and the other in St. Louis, where the long-drawn-out Marx and Haas strike involving the makers of men’s ready-made clothing, was in its first stage.

But outside of labor circles, these strikes were attracting no particular attention.  The public were not even aware of what was happening, and would have been entirely indifferent if they had known.

The turning out of ladies’ ready-made waists is an immense business in New York.  The trade, like other branches of garment-making, is largely in the hands of Jewish employers.  The workers are principally recently arrived foreigners, Russian and other Slavic Jews, Italians and other immigrants from eastern Europe.  They are in an overwhelming majority women, or, to be more accurate, girls.

During all the earlier part of the year 1909 the Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union No. 25 had been showing quite undue activity and unwelcome persistence in preaching unionism and its advantages among all and sundry of these foreign girls, and with quite unusual success.  The managers of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company awoke one morning to a sense of what was happening.  To quote from a writer in The Outlook: