“We do not desire to blacklist any firm,” declared Mrs. Nathan, “but we can whitelist those firms which treat their employees humanely.  We can make and publish a list of all the shops where employees receive fair treatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops.  By acting openly and publishing our White List we shall be able to create an immense public opinion in favor of just employers.”

Thus was the Consumers’ League of New York ushered into existence.  Eight months after the Chickering Hall meeting the committee appointed to co-operate with the Working Women’s Society in preparing its list of fair firms had finished its work and made its report.  The new League was formally organized on January 1, 1891.

[Illustration:  Mrs. Frederick Nathan]

THE CONSUMERS’ LEAGUE “WHITE LIST”

The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm names.  The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew the conditions.  Still more disappointing was the indifference of the other firms to their outcast position.  Far from evincing a desire to earn a place on the White List, they cast aspersions on a “parcel of women” who were trying to “undermine business credit,” and scouted the very idea of an organized feminine conscience.

“Wait until the women want Easter bonnets,” sneered one merchant.  “Do you think they will pass up anything good because the store is not on their White List?”

Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for.  Even as far back as 1891 a few women had begun to doubt the efficacy of that indirect influence, supposed to be woman’s strongest weapon.  What was the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the Mercantile Employers’ Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory Department.

The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, and still the next, it obstinately reappeared.  Finally, in 1896, four years after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower House.  In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it.  A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into conditions of working women in New York City.

The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in two large volumes, were sensational enough.  Merchants reluctantly testified to employing grown women at a salary of thirty-three cents a day.  They confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in defiance of the child-labor law.  They declared that pasteboard and wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen;