done. But, at
least where women workers are concerned, if we are going to wait till
they are able to do things for themselves we are going to wait,
perhaps, too long for the social good while we are airing our
theories. It is something like saying that children would be better
off and have more strength of character if they learned to look after
themselves. But you can start that theory too young and have the child
die on your hands, or turn into a gutter waif. The child needs entire
looking after up to a point where he can begin little by little to
look after himself. And after he has learned to dress himself it does
not necessarily mean he can select his own food, his hour of retiring,
his habits of cleanliness and hygiene.

I look about at the laundry workers and think: Suppose we decide
nothing shall be done for these girls until they demand it themselves
and then have charge of it themselves. In other words, suppose we let
welfare work and social legislation wait on organization. The people
who talk that way are often college professors or the upper crust of
labor. They have either had no touch or lost touch with the rank and
file of women workers. It is going to be years and years and years, if
ever, before women in this country organize by and large to a point
where they can become permanently effective. What organization demands
more than any other factor is, first, a sense of oppression; second,
surplus energy. Women have been used to getting more or less the tag
end of things for some thousands of years. Why expect them suddenly,
in a second of time, as it were, to rear up and say, "We'll not stand
for this and that"? If we are going to wait for working women to feel
oppressed enough to weld themselves together into a militant class
organization, capable of demanding certain conditions and getting
them, we shall wait many a long day. In the meantime, we are putting
off the very situation we hope for--when women, as well as men, shall
have reached the point where they can play a dignified part in the
industrial scheme of things--by sending them from work at night too
weary and run down to exert themselves for any social purpose. I say
that anything and everything which can be done to make women more
capable of responsibility should be done. But the quickest and sanest
way to bring that about is not to sit back and wait for factory women
to work out their own salvation. Too few of them have the intelligence
or