But there are other and broader reasons still why it is women who should in the main be the leaders and teachers of women in the trade union, that newest and best school for the working-women.  Women have always been the teachers of the race.  It was in the far-back ages with motherhood as their normal school that primitive women learnt their profession and handed on to their daughters their slowly acquired skill.  Whenever woman has been left to self-development on her own lines her achievements have always been in the constructive direction.  Always she has been busy helping to make some young thing grow, whether the object of her solicitous attention were a wild grass, a baby, or an art.  What does education mean but the drawing forth of latent qualities?  Is not the best teacher the one who calls these forth?  Are not women teachers, trained, wise, and patient, urgently needed in the labor movement of our day?  Just now, when the number of young girls in industry is so great, the girls need them, we know.  Possibly the men also would be the gainers through their influence.  The labor movement is a constant fight, it is true, but it is also a school of development.  In the near future we hope it will mean to all workers even more than a discipline, a storehouse of culture, a provider of joy and of pleasure, of care in sickness, of support in adversity, and best of all, a preparation for and a hastener on of that cooeperative commonwealth for which more and more of us ever watch and pray.

The need for the woman organizer admitted, the demand for women organizers becomes pressing.  And where are they to be found?  The reply is that they are not to be found, not yet.  If the organizers were to be obtained such requests would be increased fourfold.  But the material is ready to hand.  The born organizer, with initiative, resource, courage and patience exists in every trade, in every city, and she comes of every race.  But on the one hand she is untrained, and on the other cannot stop to receive training unless for a little while she is relieved from the pressing necessity of earning her living.

The problem of how to provide women organizers in response to the demand for such workers, with its solution, was admirably put by Mrs. Raymond Robins, in her presidential address before the Fourth Biennial Convention of the National Women’s Trade Union League in St. Louis, in June, 1913, when she said: 

The best organizers without question are the trade-union girls.  Many a girl capable of leadership and service is held within the ranks because neither she as an individual nor her organization has money enough to set her free for service.  Will it be possible for the National Women’s Trade Union League to establish a training-school for women organizers, even though in the beginning it may be only a training-class, offering every trade-union girl a scholarship for a year?

The course finally outlined included a knowledge of the principles of trade unionism, and their practical application in field-work, a knowledge of labor legislation, of parliamentary law, and practice in writing and speaking.