My own eyes were opened to the limitations of political action when, as an organizer for a political group in New York, I attended by chance a meeting of women laundry-workers who were on strike.  We believed we could help these women with a legislative measure and asked their support.  “Oh! that stuff!” exclaimed one of these women.  “Don’t you know that we women might be dead and buried if we waited for politicians and lawmakers to right our wrongs?” This set me to thinking—­not merely of the immediate problem—­but to asking myself how much any male politician could understand of the wrongs inflicted upon poor working women.

I threw the weight of my study and activity into the economic and industrial struggle.  Here I discovered men and women fired with the glorious vision of a new world, of a proletarian world emancipated, a Utopian world,—­it glowed in romantic colours for the majority of those with whom I came in closest contact.  The next step, the immediate step, was another matter, less romantic and too often less encouraging.  In their ardor, some of the labor leaders of that period almost convinced us that the millennium was just around the corner.  Those were the pre-war days of dramatic strikes.  But even when most under the spell of the new vision, the sight of the overburdened wives of the strikers, with their puny babies and their broods of under-fed children, made us stop and think of a neglected factor in the march toward our earthly paradise.  It was well enough to ask the poor men workers to carry on the battle against economic injustice.  But what results could be expected when they were forced in addition to carry the burden of their ever-growing families?  This question loomed large to those of us who came into intimate contact with the women and children.  We saw that in the final analysis the real burden of economic and industrial warfare was thrust upon the frail, all-too-frail shoulders of the children, the very babies—­the coming generation.  In their wan faces, in their undernourished bodies, would be indelibly written the bitter defeat of their parents.

The eloquence of those who led the underpaid and half-starved workers could no longer, for me, at least, ring with conviction.  Something more than the purely economic interpretation was involved.  The bitter struggle for bread, for a home and material comfort, was but one phase of the problem.  There was another phase, perhaps even more fundamental, that had been absolutely neglected by the adherents of the new dogmas.  That other phase was the driving power of instinct, a power uncontrolled and unnoticed.  The great fundamental instinct of sex was expressing itself in these ever-growing broods, in the prosperity of the slum midwife and her colleague the slum undertaker.  In spite of all my sympathy with the dream of liberated Labor, I was driven to ask whether this urging power of sex, this deep instinct, was not at least partially responsible, along with industrial injustice, for the widespread misery of the world.