The Waitresses’ Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists, led by a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary of the union.  Miss Maloney and her associates drafted and introduced into the Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day for every woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store, laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for enforcing the measure.

The “Girls’ Bill,” as it immediately became known, was the most hotly contested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during the session.  Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing on the bill to protest against it.  One man brought a number of meek and tired women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their working day made shorter.  Another presented a petition signed by his women employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven hours a day!

Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after learned counsel for the Manufacturers’ Association had argued against the measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak.  The Manufacturers’ Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girls confined themselves to the human side.  Agnes Nestor, secretary of the Glove Makers’ Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two girls who spoke.  Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea:  Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses’ Union, was the other speaker.

They described details in the daily lives of working women not generally known except to the workers themselves.  Among these was the piece-work system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speed is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage.  The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; to consider how many stitches the operator’s hand must guide in a week, a month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease of earning power.

“I am a waitress,” said Miss Maloney, “and I work ten hours a day.  In that time a waitress who is tolerably busy walks ten miles, and the dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred to two thousand pounds.  Don’t you think eight hours a day is enough for a girl to walk?”

Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after that day.  The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too grave for the friends of the workers to overcome.  It was decided to substitute a ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the “Oregon Standard” established by the Supreme Court of the United States.  The principle of limitation upon the hours of women’s work once established in Illinois, the workers could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.