The first and most palpable difficulty is that the majority of workers are yet at the play age.  They are still at the stage when play is one of the rightful conditions under which they carry on their main business of growing up.  Many of them are not ready to be in the factory at all.  Certainly not for eight, ten or twelve hours a day.  And so those young things, after an unthankful and exhausting day’s toil, are not going to attend meetings unless these can be made attractive to them.  And the meeting that may appear entirely right and even attractive to the man of thirty or forty will be tiresome and boring past endurance to the girl of sixteen or eighteen.

Then there are other huge difficulties to encounter.  The very first principles of cooeperative action and mutual responsibility are unknown to the great majority of the young workers.  Too rarely does it happen, that in her own home the girl has learnt anything about trade unionism, at least trade unionism for women.  The greater number of girls are not the daughters of factory mothers.  The mother, whether American or foreign-born, grew up herself in simpler conditions, and does not begin to comprehend the utterly changed environment in which her little daughter has to work when she enters a modern factory.  If American, she may; have married just out of her father’s home, and if foreign-born she may have been tending silkworms or picking grapes in Italy, or at field-work in Poland or Hungary.  Very different occupations these from turning raw silk into ribbon or velvet in an Eastern mill, or labelling fruit-jars in an Illinois cannery.

Again, neither in the public nor in the parochial school are the workers-to-be taught anything concerning the labor movement or the meaning of collective bargaining.  Even if they should have attained the eighth grade with its dizzy heights of learning, the little teaching they have received in civics has not touched upon either of the most vital problems of our day, the labor movement or the woman movement.

The mere youth, however, of the girl workers is not in itself the chief or the most, insuperable difficulty.  If these girls were boys we might look forward to their growing up in the trade, gaining experience and becoming ever more valuable elements in the union membership.  But after a few years the larger percentage of the girls marry and are lost to the union and to unionism for good.  Nay, a girl is often such a temporary hand that she does not even remain out her term of working years in one trade, but drifts into and out of half-a-dozen unskilled or semi-skilled occupations, and works for twenty different employers in the course of a few years.  The head of a public-school social center made it her business to inquire of fifty girls, all over sixteen, and probably none over eighteen how long each had held her present job.  Two only had been over a year at the one place.  The rest accounted for such short periods as four months, six weeks, two weeks, at paper-box-making, candy-packing or book-binding with, of course, dull seasons and periods of unemployment between.