factory, retail store,
laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for
enforcing the measure.

The "Girls' Bill," as it immediately became known, was the most hotly
contested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during the
session. Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing
on the bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek and
tired women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their
working day made shorter. Another presented a petition signed by his
women employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven
hours a day!

Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after learned
counsel for the Manufacturers' Association had argued against the
measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers'
Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girls
confined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of the
Glove Makers' Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two
girls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are
gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a
chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea:
Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses' Union, was the other speaker.

They described details in the daily lives of working women not generally
known except to the workers themselves. Among these was the piece-work
system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speed
is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage.
The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine
whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; to
consider how many stitches the operator's hand must guide in a week, a
month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve
hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease
of earning power.

"I am a waitress," said Miss Maloney, "and I work ten hours a day. In
that time a waitress who is tolerably busy _walks_ ten miles, and the
dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred to
two thousand pounds. Don't you think eight hours a day is enough for a
girl to walk?"

Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after that
day. The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too grave
for the friends of the workers to overcome. It was decided