-The entrance of women into the Trade Union
field is a significant feature of modern industry. Denied in many
men's Unions the right of membership and in many fields of work
competing only with those of their own sex, yet obviously in need of
the same declaration of rights and the same class support of each
other in securing better conditions of labor that men realized before
them, the Women's Trade Union members have much the same spirit and
many of the same methods that men have used in similar bodies. They,
as a rule, stand, however, for more protective legislation for women
than men demand for themselves and have one element unique in such
bodies. That element is the membership within Women's Trade Unions of
women of social position, of financial security and even of wealth and
of broadest culture. These women who join the Trade Union League not
to benefit their own class, which is usually the professional or the
employing class, but to help wage-earning women to better conditions,
have often been the laboring oar in the organization and maintenance
of such Unions. Nothing analogous to this is found in the Men's Trade
Union movement in the United States. It bears witness to two elements,
one that women of the so-called privileged classes are growing very
sensitive to the claims of social justice as these are related to
wage-earning women, and the other that the average age of wage-earning
women is so much younger than that of men employed in similar work
that the need for help from without in any effective effort for relief
from bad conditions is more apparent. The transitory character of much
of women's work makes the permanent personnel of any Trade Union
League of women a smaller minority of its membership than in the case
of men. It is said that in any trade where both the men and the women
are well organized the membership of the men's Union will be fairly
stable for twenty years, that of the women's Union will show a radical
change each five years, making almost a complete turn-over in the
twenty years' count. That is, of course, due to the fact that most
women use for wage-earning only the period between leaving school and
marrying, usually about four and a half years. That makes the term
"working-girls" most appropriate and is a contrast to the working
man's longer hold upon his trade.

=The New Solidarity of Women.=--The fact that women of all types of
social advantage and disadvantage are already linked to