On Thanksgiving Day, between the exhausting strain of high-tension work and the zeal of the young reformer, her beautiful life and brilliant fire were burned out.  The committee for the prevention of tuberculosis added her case to their statistics, and the League girls bore her into the lighted church.

In the winter of 1910-11 the leaders of all the labor and social forces of St. Louis, all the organizations for various forms of uplift, united under an able secretary and began their custom of lunching together once a week to discuss the pending social legislation.  They played a good game.  First, there was the educational effect of their previous legislative campaign to build on.  Then there was all the economy and impetus gained from consolidation.  They knew the rules of the game better, too.  Their plans were more carefully laid and executed.

With a more wary and sophisticated eye on the Manufacturers’ Association and a finger in the buttonhole of every legislator, the socially awake of St. Louis have secured more humane child labor legislation, and the Nine-Hour Day for women and children with no exception in favor of shop-keepers.

Knowing the sickening fate of industrial legislation in certain other states when tried before judges whose social vision is fifty years behind the times, the winners of this new bill began to wait tensely enough for its testing.  So far, however, the Women’s Nine-Hour law has not been contested.  It has also been exceptionally well enforced, considering that there are only four factory inspectors for all the myriad shops and mills of this manufacturing city of the Southwest, and only seven factory inspectors for the whole state of Missouri.

Meanwhile St. Louis’s new political wedge, the Women’s Trade Union League, continues to be a perfectly good political wedge.  When there is legislation wanted, all kinds of organizations invariably call upon this league of the working women, whose purpose is a wider social justice.

St. Louis is another American city where the working women are discovering that they can do things if they only think so.

* * * * *

(The Delineator)

Illustrated by two pen-and-ink sketches made by a staff artist.

THE JOB LADY

GIVES THE YOUNG WAGE-EARNER A FAIR WORKING CHANCE

BY MARY E. TITZEL

The Jones School, the oldest public school building in Chicago, is at Harrison Street and Plymouth Court.  When it was new, it was surrounded by “brown-stone fronts,” and boys and girls who to-day are among the city’s most influential citizens learned their A-B-C’s within its walls.  Now, the office-buildings and printing-houses and cheap hotels and burlesque shows that mark the noisy, grimy district south of the “loop” crowd in upon it; and only an occasional shabby brown-stone front survives in the neighborhood as a tenement house.  But in the Jones School, the process of making influential citizens is still going on.  For there the “Job Lady” has her office, her sanctum.