fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of the
union. Others settled later, and under the influence of the "uptown
scum," as the employers' association gallantly termed the Women's Trade
Union League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still others
reluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out of
the five hundred had settled with the union, and only about three
thousand of the workers were still out of work.

Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they would
ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of the
intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all,
that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped
along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was
unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household
labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to
perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was
to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.

Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are becoming
the co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of the
leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the
situation, espouse the cause of their working sisters. The woman in the
factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.

The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury,
Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of
the working women.

That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was
established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew
every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the
women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of
labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and wages
were good enough to compensate for the long day's labor.

The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a
corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few
floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands."

The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated
machinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred times
more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and
nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances
developed. The quality of t