Patience became exhausted and the girls just walked out.  Two-thirds of the waist-makers in the city walked out.  Of these about eighty-five per cent., it is believed, were Jewish girls, the rest made up of Italians with a few Poles.  The girls who did not go out were mostly Americans.  One observer estimated at the time that about forty per cent. of those in the trade were under twenty years of age, running down to children of twelve.

When the workers, with no sort of warning or explanation, or making any regular preliminary demands, just quit, it upset matters considerably.  A little girl waist-maker may appear to be a very insignificant member of the community, but if you multiply her by four thousand, her absence makes an appreciable gap in the industrial machine, and its cogs fail to catch as accurately as heretofore.  So that even the decent manufacturers felt pretty badly, not so much about the strike itself, as its, to them, inexplicable suddenness.  Such men were suffering, of course, largely for the deeds of their more unscrupulous fellow-employers.

One manufacturer, for instance, had gained quite a reputation for his donations to certain orphanages.  These were to him a profitable investment, seeing that the institutions served to provide him with a supply of cheap labor.  He had in his shop many orphans, who for two reasons could hardly leave his employ.  They had no friends to whom to go, and they were also supposed to be under obligations of gratitude to their benefactor-employer.  One of his girl employes, to whom he paid seven dollars a week, turned out for that wage twelve dollars’ worth of work.  This fact the employer admitted, justifying himself by saying that he was supporting her brother in an orphanage.

It was a hard winter, and the first week of the strike wore away without a sign of hope.  Public opinion was slow to rouse, and the newspapers were definitely adverse.  The general view seemed to be that such a strike was an intolerable nuisance, if not something worse.  At length the conservative Ledger came out with a two-column editorial, outlining the situation, and from then on news of the various happenings, as they occurred, could be found in all the papers.  But the girls were unorganized.  There was no money, and they faced the first days of the new year in a mood of utter discouragement.  Organizers from the International of the Ladies’ Garment Workers had, however, come on from New York to take charge.  The strikers were supported by the Central Labor Union of Philadelphia, under the leadership of the capable John J. Murphy, and representatives of the National Women’s Trade Union League, in the persons of Mrs. Raymond Robins and Miss Agnes Nestor, were already on the scene.