The Trade Union Woman

								


Produced by Josephine Paolucci and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.

THE
TRADE UNION WOMAN
BY
ALICE HENRY
MEMBER OF OFFICE EMPLOY�S' ASSOCIATION OF CHICAGO. No. 12755. AND
FORMERLY EDITOR OF LIFE AND LABOR

ILLUSTRATED
1915

TO
THE TRADE UNION WOMEN OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

PREFACE
This brief account of trade unionism in relation to the working-women
of the United States has been written to furnish a handbook of the
subject, and to supply in convenient form answers to the questions
that are daily put to the writer and to all others who feel the
organization of women to be a vital issue.
To treat the subject exhaustively would be impossible without years of
research, but meanwhile it seemed well to furnish this short popular
account of an important movement, in order to satisfy the eager desire
for information regarding the working-woman, and her attitude towards
the modern labor movement, and towards the national industries in
regard to which she plays so essential a part. Women are doing their
share of their country's work under entirely novel conditions, and
it therefore becomes a national responsibility to see that the human
worker is not sacrificed to the material product.
Many of the difficulties and dangers surrounding the working-woman
affect the workingman also, but on the other hand, there are special
reasons, springing out of the ancestral claims which life makes upon
woman, arising also out of her domestic and social environment, and
again out of her special function as mother, why the condition of the
wage-earning woman should be the subject of separate consideration. It
is impossible to discuss intelligently wages, hours and sanitation in
reference to women workers unless these facts are borne in mind.
What makes the whole matter of overwhelming importance is the wasteful
way in which the health, the lives, and the capacity for future
motherhood of our young girls are squandered during the few brief
years they spend as human machines in our factories and stores. Youth,
joy and the possibility of future happiness lost forever, in order
that we may have cheap (or dear), waists or shoes or watches.
Further, since the young girl is the future mother of the race, it is
she who chooses the father of her children. Every condition, either
economic or social, whether of training or of environment, which in
any degree tends to limit her power of choice, or to narrow its range,
or to lower her standards of selection, works out in a national and
racial deprivation. And surely no one will deny that the degrading
industrial conditions under which such a large number of our young
girls live and work do all of these, do limit and narrow the range of
selection and do lower the standards of the working-girl in making her
marriage choice.
Give her fairer wages, shorten her hours of toil, let her have the