The Women’s Trade Union League, whose real general is Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, the most dynamic woman in St. Louis, received its first impetus only three years ago in the idealism of a brilliant young Irish girl, Hannah Hennessy, who died at Thanksgiving, 1910, a victim of exhausting work in a garment shop and of her own tireless efforts to organize the working girls of her city.

Hannah Hennessy was sent by the Garment Workers’ Union to the National Labor Convention of 1907 at Norfolk, Virginia.

There she glimpsed for the first time the inevitable great world march of women following industry as machinery takes it out of the home and into the shop—­saw these women, blind, unorganized, helpless to cope with the conditions offered by organized capital.  The vision fired this Irish girl to a pitch of enthusiasm peculiar to the Celtic temperament.  Back she came to St. Louis with the spirit of the Crusaders, her vision “the eight-hour day, the living wage to guard the home.”

For the first time she saw the broken physical future of women who label three thousand five hundred bottles of beer an hour, and accept their cuts and gashes from the bursting bottles as inevitable; of women who put eyelets on a hundred cases of shoes a day, twenty-four pairs to the case; of women who must weave one thousand yards of hemp cloth a day to hold their job in a mill where the possible speed of woman and machine is so nicely calculated that the speediest person in the factory can weave only twelve hundred and sixty yards a day; where the lint from this hemp fills the air and is so injurious to eyes and throat that the company furnishes medical attendance free.

To undertake the huge task of organizing these thousands of St. Louis women would require not only vision but time and energy.  Hannah’s return meant being engulfed in the vast roar made by rows of throbbing, whirring machines, into one of which she sewed her vitality at dizzy speed ten hours a day.  Vision she had, but training, time, energy—­no!

It was at this point that she met Cynthelia Isgrig Knefler, a leisure-class young woman, who had been gripped by a sense of the unevenness of the human struggle.  Cynthelia Knefler was groping her way through the maze of settlement activities to an appreciation of their relative futility in the face of long hours, low wages, and unsanitary shops.

Then the idealism of these two young women, born on the one hand of hard experience, on the other of a gentle existence, fused, and burned with a white light whose power is beginning to touch the lives of the women who toil and spin for the great Southwest.

Both women possessed fire and eloquence.  Hannah’s special contribution was first-hand experience; Mrs. Knefler’s the knowledge of economic conditions necessary to an understanding of our complicated labor problems.  Wise, sane, conservative, Mrs. Knefler not only helped Hannah to organize branch after branch of the Women’s Trade Union League in the different industries, but set out at once to train strong, intelligent leaders.  She stimulated them to a critical study of labor laws with the evolution of industry for background.