These shirt-waist makers, all self-supporting, whose income and outlay are described above, were all—­with the exception of Irena Kovalova, who supported a family of four—­living away from home.  Natalya lived with her mother and father.

She did not do her own washing, though she made her own waists and those of her sister and mother.  But her story is given because in other ways—­in casual employment, long hours, unfair and undignified treatment from her employers, and in the conditions of her peaceable effort to obtain juster and better terms of living—­her experience has seemed characteristic of the trade fortunes of many of the forty thousand shirt-waist makers employed in New York for the last two years.

In conditions such as described above, Natalya and other shirt-waist makers were working last fall, when one day she saw a girl, a piece-worker, shaking her head and objecting sadly to the low price the foreman was offering her for making a waist.  “If you don’t like it,” said the foreman, with a laugh, “why don’t you join your old ‘sisters’ out on the street, then?”

Natalya wondered with interest who these “sisters” were.  On making inquiry, she found that the workers in other shirt-waist factories had struck, for various reasons of dissatisfaction with the terms of their trade.

The factories had continued work with strike breakers.  Some of the companies had stationed women of the street and their cadets in front of the shops to insult and attack the Union members whenever they came to speak to their fellow-workers and to try to dissuade them from selling their work on unfair terms.  Some had employed special police protection and thugs against the pickets.

There is, of course, no law against picketing.  Every one in the United States has as clear a legal right to address another person peaceably on the subject of his belief in selling his work as on the subject of his belief in the tariff.  But on the 19th of October ten girls belonging to the Union, who had been talking peaceably on the day before with some of the strike breakers, were suddenly arrested as they were walking quietly along the street, were charged with disorderly conduct, arraigned in the Jefferson Market Court, and fined $1 each.  The chairman of the strikers from one shop was set upon by a gang of thugs while he was collecting funds, and beaten and maimed so that he was confined to his bed for weeks.

A girl of nineteen, one of the strikers, as she was walking home one afternoon was attacked in the open daylight by a thug, who struck her in the side and broke one of her ribs.  She was in bed for four weeks, and will always be somewhat disabled by her injury.  These and other illegal oppressions visited on the strikers roused a number of members of the Woman’s Trade-Union League to assist the girls in peaceful picketing.

Early in November, a policeman arrested Miss Mary E. Dreier, the President of the Woman’s Trade-Union League, because she entered into a quiet conversation with one of the strike breakers.  Miss Dreier is a woman of large independent means, socially well known throughout New York and Brooklyn.  When the sergeant recognized her as she came into the station, he at once discharged her case, reprimanded the officer, and assured Miss Dreier that she would never have been arrested if they had known who she was.