Yet these things are coming.  The scabs of the labor world are becoming the co-workers instead of the competitors of men.  The women of the leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the situation, espouse the cause of their working sisters.  The woman in the factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.

The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury, Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of the working women.

That particular mill is very old and very well known.  When it was established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one.  Hours of labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and wages were good enough to compensate for the long day’s labor.

The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a corporation.  The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few floor superintendents and foremen.  The rest of the force were “hands.”

The whole state of the industry was altered.  New and complicated machinery was introduced.  The shortened work day was a hundred times more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery.  Other grievances developed.  The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn.  Wages, fixed according to the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth.  Women who had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and eight dollars.

The women formed a union and struck.  Some of them had been in the mills as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.

There you have the story of women’s realization of themselves as a group.  Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women.  The Boston Branch of the Women’s Trade Union League, through its secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined the strikers.  Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks of anxiety and deprivation.

The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business before treating with the strikers as a group.  A hand, mind you, exists as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and conferred with.  Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to exist.  An employers’ association is a necessity of business life.  A labor union is an insult to capital.

This was the situation at the end of ten weeks.  One day a motor car stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged.  Mrs. Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay personified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer.  Her powers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercial connections, were sufficient to wring consent from the firm to receive John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers.