numbers.  It is they who decide the place where the local shall meet and the hour at which members shall assemble.  The place is therefore often over a saloon, to which many girls naturally and rightly object.  Sometimes it is even in a disreputable district.  The girls may prefer that the meeting should begin shortly after closing time so that they do not need to go home and return, or have to loiter about for two or three hours.  They like meetings to be over early.  The men mostly name eight o’clock as the time of beginning, but business very often will not start much before nine.  Then, too, the men feel that they have come together to talk, and talk they do while they allow the real business to drag.  Of course, the girls are not interested in long discussions on matters they do not understand and in which they have no part and naturally they stay away, and so make matters worse, for the men feel they are doing their best for the interests of the union, resent the women’s indifference, and are more sure than ever that women do not make good unionists.

Among the remedies proposed for this unsatisfactory state of affairs is compulsory attendance at a certain number of meetings per year under penalty of a fine or even losing of the card. (A very drastic measure this last and risky, unless the trade has the closed shop.)

Where the conditions of the trade permit it by far the best plan is to have the women organized in separate locals.  The meetings of women and girls only draw better attendances, give far more opportunity for all the members to take part in the business, and beyond all question form the finest training ground for the women leaders who inconsiderable numbers are needed so badly in the woman’s side of the trade-union movement today.

Those trade-union women who advocate mixed locals for every trade which embraces both men and women are of two types.  Some are mature, perhaps elderly women, who have been trade unionists all their lives, who have grown up in the same locals with men, who have in the long years passed through and left behind their period of probation and training, and to whose presence and active cooeperation the men have become accustomed.  These women are able to express their views in public, can put or discuss a motion or take the chair as readily as their brothers.  The other type is represented by those individual women or girls in whom exceptional ability takes the place of experience, and who appreciate the educational advantages of working along with experienced trade-union leaders.  I have in my mind at this moment one girl over whose face comes all the rapture of the keen student as she explains how much she has learnt from working with men in their meetings.  She ardently advocates mixed locals for all.  For the born captain the plea is sound.  Always she is quick enough to profit by the men’s experience, by their ways of managing conferences and balancing advantages and