[Footnote 4:  This worker later, however, in the winter of 1911, considered she had been paid and promoted fairly.]

[Footnote 5:  Macy and Company of New York give to those of their permanent women employees who desire it a monthly day of rest with pay.  The Daniels and Fisher Company of Denver refund to any woman employee who requests it the amount deducted for a monthly day of absence for illness.  This excellent rule is, however, said to represent here rather a privilege than a practice, and not to be generally taken advantage of, because not generally understood.  The present writer has not been able to learn of other exceptions.]

[Footnote 6:  Ninth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, p. 127.]

[Footnote 7:  See page 16 (foot-note), “Scientific Management as applied to Women’s Work.”]

[Footnote 8:  This statement does not include the excellent New York Child Labor Law for children under sixteen, which allows of no exception at Christmas time.]

[Footnote 9:  Italics ours.]

[Footnote 10:  A New York State Commission, appointed for this purpose in the year 1895, through the efforts of the Consumers’ League of the city of New York.]

[Footnote 11:  For fear of a permanent loss of position the saleswomen themselves have never been urged to appear in support of this legislation, nor, except in a few instances where this difficulty has been nullified, have they been present at these hearings.]

CHAPTER II

THE SHIRT-WAIST MAKERS’ STRIKE

I

Among the active members of the Ladies Waist Makers’ Union in New York, there is a young Russian Jewess of sixteen, who may be called Natalya Urusova.  She is little, looking hardly more than twelve years old, with a pale, sensitive face, clear dark eyes, very soft, smooth black hair, parted and twisted in braids at the nape of her neck, and the gentlest voice in the world, a voice still thrilled with the light inflections of a child.

She is the daughter of a Russian teacher of Hebrew, who lived about three years ago in a beech-wooded village on the steppes of Central Russia.  Here a neighbor of Natalya’s family, a Jewish farmer, misunderstanding that manifesto of the Czar which proclaimed free speech, and misunderstanding socialism, had printed and scattered through the neighborhood an edition of hand-bills stating that the Czar had proclaimed socialism, and that the populace must rise and divide among themselves a rich farm two miles away.