In the following year, 1914, the League was able to give several months of training to three trade-union girls.  Cordial cooeperation was received from both the University of Chicago and North-western University.  For the present no further students have been received, because of the need of larger financial resources to maintain classes in session regularly.

The need for a training-school is attested by the constant demands for women organizers received at the headquarters of the League from central labor bodies and men’s unions, and by the example of the thorough training given to young women taking up work in other fields somewhat analogous.  Such a school for women might very well prove in this country the nucleus of university extension work in the labor movement for both men and women, similar to that which has been so successfully inaugurated in Great Britain, and which is making headway in Canada and in Australia.

At the Seattle Convention of the American Federation of Labor held in November, 1914, a resolution was passed levying an assessment of one cent upon the entire membership to organize women.  Efforts were mainly concentrated upon workers in the textile industry, to which special organizers, both men and women, were assigned.  There is no trade which has worse conditions, and consequently wages and regularity of employment are immediately affected adversely by any industrial depression.

Women in the labor movement will have to make their own mistakes and earn their own experience.  I have dwelt elsewhere upon the many advantages that accrue to women and girls from belonging to an organization so vital and so bound up with some of our most fundamental needs, as the trade union.  On the very surface it is evident that in such a body working-women learn to be more business-like, to work together in harmony, to share loyally the results of their united action, whether these spell defeat or success.  If they err, they promptly learn of their mistakes from their, fellow-workers, men or women, from employers, and from their families.

Here, however, is perhaps the place to call attention to one markedly feminine tendency, which should be discouraged in these early days lest in process of time it might even gain the standing of a virtue, and that is the inclination among the leaders to indulge in unlimited overwork in all their labor activities.  Labor men overwork too, but not, as a rule, to the same degree, nor nearly so frequently as women.

Do not mistake.  Women do not fall into this error because they are trade unionists, or because they are inspired by the labor movement or by the splendid ideals or by the aspiration after a free womanhood.

No!  Trade-union and socialist and suffrage women overwork because they are women, because through long ages the altruistic side has been overdeveloped.  They have brought along with them into their public work the habit of self-sacrifice, and that overconscientiousness in detail which their foremothers acquired during the countless generations when obedience, self-immolation and self-obliteration were considered women’s chief duties.  Personally these good sisters are blameless.  But that does not in the least alter the hard fact that such overdevotion is an uneconomical expenditure of nervous energy.