plained, and not
unfrequently the explanation is based upon some other fact, which has
been overlooked. With the present question, the one important fact
which explains a good deal is the youth of so many women workers. This
by no means disposes of each particular situation with its special
difficulties, but it does help to explain the general tendency among
the women to be neglectful of meetings and to let their local go to
pieces, which so distracts our friend.

This new competitor with men, whom we think of and speak of as a
woman, is in many cases not a woman at all, but only a girl, very
often only a child. From this one fact arises a whole class, of
conditions, with resulting problems and difficulties totally different
from any the man trade unionist has to deal with among men.

The first and most palpable difficulty is that the majority of workers
are yet at the play age. They are still at the stage when play is
one of the rightful conditions under which they carry on their main
business of growing up. Many of them are not ready to be in the
factory at all. Certainly not for eight, ten or twelve hours a day.
And so those young things, after an unthankful and exhausting day's
toil, are not going to attend meetings unless these can be made
attractive to them. And the meeting that may appear entirely right and
even attractive to the man of thirty or forty will be tiresome and
boring past endurance to the girl of sixteen or eighteen.

Then there are other huge difficulties to encounter. The very first
principles of cooeperative action and mutual responsibility are unknown
to the great majority of the young workers. Too rarely does it
happen, that in her own home the girl has learnt anything about trade
unionism, at least trade unionism for women. The greater number of
girls are not the daughters of factory mothers. The mother, whether
American or foreign-born, grew up herself in simpler conditions, and
does not begin to comprehend the utterly changed environment in which
her little daughter has to work when she enters a modern factory. If
American, she may; have married just out of her father's home, and if
foreign-born she may have been tending silkworms or picking grapes
in Italy, or at field-work in Poland or Hungary. Very different
occupations these from turning raw silk into ribbon or velvet in an
Eastern mill, or labelling fruit-jars in an Illinois cannery.

Again, neither in the public nor in the parochial