leaders, approach unionism
through the ever open door of socialism. If I speak here of the women
of the Slavic Jewish race, it is not that I wish to ignore the men. I
have to leave them on one side, that is all.

These girls add to courage and enthusiasm, such remarkable gifts of
intellect and powers of expression as to make them a power wherever
they have become awakened to the new problems that face them here and
now, and to their own responsibilities in relation thereto. They are
essentially individualists. They do not readily or naturally either
lean upon others or cooeperate with others, nor yet confide in others.
They come here with a history generations long of ill-treatment and
persecution. Many thousands of them have witnessed their dearest
tortured, outraged and killed with the narrowest possible escape from
some similar fate themselves. To most any return to their native
country is completely barred, and they do not therefore nurse the
hope, so inveterately cherished by the Italians, for instance, that
they may some day be able to go back.

When the Russian Jewish girl first hears of a trade union, she has
usually been some years in one of our cities, working in a factory or
a sweatshop, let us say as a garment-worker. The religious and social
liberty which she has here learnt to consider her due has stimulated
her desire for further freedom, while the tremendous industrial
pressure under which she earns her daily bread stirs the keenest
resentment. One day patience, Jewish girlish patience, reaches its
limit. A cut in wages, exhausting overtime, or the insults of an
overbearing foreman, and an unpremeditated strike results. It may be
small, poorly managed, and unsuccessful. The next time things may go
better, and the girls come in touch with a union, and take their first
lessons in the meaning of collective bargaining. (What is passing in
the minds of the rank and file at this stage I am not certain. The
obscurities of their psychology are more difficult to fathom.) But I
am sure that to the leaders of the young protestants it is not so
much in the light of a tower of refuge that the trade union presents
itself, but rather as an instrument by means of which they believe
that they can control a situation which has become unbearable. As
happens to many endowed with the gift of leadership, they travel much
farther than they had any idea of when they set out. As time goes on,
if they are real leaders, they le