eak to the
girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her
most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on the
other's arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence.

Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a little
of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence.
After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girls
who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members.
Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among
these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's Superintendent
of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a
millionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College,
Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association of
Collegiate Alumnae. These young women went out day after day with girl
strikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered arrest
on more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation of
magistrates who--well, who did not understand.

The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and organizations of
women other than the Women's Trade Union League began to take an
interest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss Gertrude
Barnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial world
of women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike.
They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women in
person.

The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest social
eminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan and
several others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the president
of the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the strikers'
own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. More
than thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozen
women promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers.

A week later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, mother of the Duchess of Marlborough,
leader of a large Woman Suffrage Association, engaged the Hippodrome,
and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators.
Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting.

At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses were
involved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis of
increased pay, a