In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the stores supported by their patronage.

The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers’ League would concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season.  Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one.  The League stands firm on the point, and up to the present so do the stores.  Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the custom whereby thousands of young girls and women are compelled every holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of uncompensated labor.

No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extorted in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to five months of every winter.  The customer, by declining to purchase after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six o’clock.  She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in the bookkeeping and auditing departments.

That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which strains credulity.  Merely from the standpoint of business economy it seems absurd.  But it is a fact easily verified.

I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of one of the largest and most respectable stores in New York.  In this store, and, according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the accounting force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school, ignorant and incapable—­but cheap.  They work slowly, and as each day’s sales are posted and audited before the close of the day following, the business force has to work until nine and ten o’clock several nights in the week.  In some cases they work every night.

Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the Consumers’ League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.

The Consumers’ League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in this early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity.  City after city, State after State, formed Consumers’ Leagues, until, in 1899, a National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was organized.  The National League, far from being a philanthropic society, has be come a scientific association for the study of industrial economics.

When the original Consumers’ League undertook its first piece of legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their claim.  The New York League and all of the others have been collecting reasons ever since.  To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized collection of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they should not work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in tenements; why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speed of machines should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should be extended; why minimum wage rates should be established.