organizations of women that have formed a new department in the National Educational Association, currently designated as the N. E. A. Department of School Patrons. These organizations aggregate, nominally, more than a million of women and are the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Congress of Mothers, the Council of Jewish Women, the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, and the Southern Association of College Women. Though the youngest and by far the smallest of these organizations, it is the hope of the Southern Association to prove its efficiency in this department by hearty coöperation in proposed lines of work.

As at present outlined, these include the physical betterment of the public school children, the socialization of the public school, and the enactment of the best legislation possible in regard to child labor, birth registration, compulsory education, and juvenile courts. As definitely as possible, it is the desire to increase public sentiment for these things, and it is hoped that every member of the Association will rally about these great movements which are not merely for the South, but for the whole Nation.

The Association has grown to a membership of over four hundred, and the number of its chapters is in the "teens." Graduates of these colleges are eligible to membership in the Southern Association of College Women:

1. George Washington University, Washington, D. C. 2. All colleges and universities recognized by the Southern Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools. Woman's College of Baltimore, Baltimore, Md.; RandolphMacon Woman's College, Lynchburg, Va.; Sophie Newcomb College, New Orleans, La.; Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Ga.; Trinity College, Durham, N. C.; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.; University of Mississippi, Oxford, Miss.; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenn.; University of Alabama, University, Ala.; University of West Virginia, Morgantown, W. Va.; University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo.; University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

3. All colleges eligible to membership in the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ.

By Philip Davis

Formerly National Organizer of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Civic Service House, Boston, Mass.

R

EADERS of THE CHAUTAUQUAN will find Dr. Edith Abbott's "Women in Industry"* an important contribution to their present study of "Woman in the Progress of Civilization." Dr. Abbott's graphic account of woman's share in industrial progress is particularly illuminating when read in connection with the stirring events of the greatest women's strike of this country-that of the 30,000 Shirtwaist Makers of New York. It is entirely an accident, though a good omen for the book, that it should have come out at this time, furnishing a perplexed public with so splendid a perspective for this epoch-making struggle. But in the light of history it is no accident at all that this shirtwaist makers' strike should have happened at this time, in this trade, under such conditions and with such results.

PRESENT STATUS OF WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

That the present is the most critical period in the history of women in industry is best proven by these six words: Thirty Thousand Shirtwaist Makers Strike. Think of it! Thirty thousand girls-not grown-up women, but girls of tender age in one industry of a single city! Moreover, these girls are all "newcomers" charmed away from countries of Europe by the hope of entering some "gainful occupation," only to find that they can't even gain a livelihood.

"Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs; for the first time they are being prized more for their labor power than for their innocence, their ephemeral gaiety!"

*Women in Industry, by Edith Abbott, Ph. D., Associate Director of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. Appleton & Co., New York.

†Jane Addams: The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets.

The shirtwaist trade viewed as a branch of the vast garment industry strikingly illustrates the three-fold effect of industry upon womankind; the garment industry of today, more than any other, brought women out of the home into the factory; out of the country into the city; out of the Old World into the New.

History might help us trace those tendencies from their earliest rise to their present development. But after all, the history of "women in industry," from the crude beginnings of those processes invented by women which now make for the "house in order," to their present position as wageearners, is yet to be written. Some stages are vaguely hinted at by Dr. Abbott, such as the specific contributions of primitive women; of women under the Greek and Roman forms of industry, or in the workshops of the monasteries and the convents, or the arts and crafts which flourished in English factories of the fourteenth century, the domestic or cottage system of industry which prevailed largely in England prior to the industrial revolution, and the household production in America during the colonial period. These historic stages are the steps which finally led up to the system of industry which the nineteenth century painfully evolved and passed on to the twentieth century with all the good and evil characteristic of the present system. The roots of this system as well as its fruits are found in the following masterly summary by another woman writer on women in industry:

*"Little by little the nineteenth century has seen one home industry after another gathered out of its individual relations into a collective impersonal unit. At the beginning of the century, brewing and baking, cooking, cleaning, and sewing, as well as much spinning, knitting and weaving were done within household walls. The family was not only a social but industrial unit. Today the bakeshop, the brewery, the laundry and the garment factory have in a large measure supplanted the housewife's ovens, vats, wash tubs *Butler "Women and the Trades." P. 31.

and sewing baskets. As these industries passed out of the home the women followed them. From being all-round artisans many became, for example, packers of candy, or crackers and fruit, operators of ironing machinery and sewing machines. Others have gone farther. Many who have entered the doors of the factory in following after their home occupations found their way into industries which left the home so long before that the line of descent seemed broken if it ever existed. In Pittsburgh they have gone into the soap and paint factories. They have learned to grind and melt and paint the edges of glassware, to bore and rivet metal, to sort corn for brooms, to put threads in screws and bolts on nuts, to wind coils of electric motors and to tear apart the sheets of tin still faint-red from the furnace heat."

Nor are women today any longer in industry for pin money, as it used to be said, or only in light occupations, or on part time. There are probably two million women wage earners in this country at the present time. According to the twelfth census, women were engaged in 295 out of the 303 separate employments. There are even women wood-choppers. The only class of employment in which women are not found at all is that of street-car employes.

THE GARMENT INDUSTRY OF TODAY

The five leading industries, that is, those employing the largest number of women, are the garment, textile, tobacco, shoe and printing trades. The garment trades are numerically the biggest, that is giving employment to the biggest number of women. They are also the richest, that is, they employ the largest capital, being first in rank of women industries and fifth in rank of the leading industries of the country. Yet, these industries for decades fostered that infamous Sweating System, the lingering traces of which the shirtwaist makers' strike attempted to wipe out.

The sweating system is well named. Its victims, men, women and children alike, have been literally "sweated" for years through a "system" of low wages, long hours and

those working conditions which have made the sweat-shop the nearest approach to Hell. The hours of labor and shop conditions have since been much improved through legislation and legislative control, thanks to the work of powerful organizations of producers as well as consumers aided by the public at large.

But low wages have persisted because the American people, unlike the English, still lack courage to face the most fundamental of all industrial problems-the question of a Living Wage. Hence, the shirtwaist makers' strike, the Philadelphia car-workers' strike and the many others that preceded and are sure to follow these.

CONDITIONS OF LABOR

It is true that this shirtwaist makers' strike was primarily a question, not of the living wage, but of the recognition of the union. That is because this burning issue is always involved in the question of the Living Wage. Since this question has been systematically side-stepped by the 'American people as too "delicate" a matter and thrown on to the unions as their special business, it follows that the recognition of the union is often the first step towards securing a living or minimum wage.

The daughter of a rich manufacturer addressing the last convention of the Women's Trade Union League spoke poetically of the sunshine and fresh air in her father's factories. Someone pertinently asked "What of the wages?" That she did not know. Grant that the conditions of labor are sanitary or that the hours of labor are reasonable, if the wages are in truth "starvation wages"-what's the use? The so-called "Bosses Association" argued that women's wages in the garment industry have risen ten per cent. during the last decade. They might have added that women's wages have risen one hundred per cent. during the last century. Dr. Abbott cites numerous cases of working women in this country being paid as little as four pounds per annum-in the colonial days when the possession of four pounds represented a snug little fortune. Today four pounds.