Yet, if a profoundly impressive story, it is also a simple and plain one.  It is so easy to understand because we have the help of history to interpret it to us, a help that fails us completely when, instead of being able to look from a distance and see events in their due proportions and in their right order, we are driven to extract as best we can a meaning from occurrences that happen and conditions that lie before our very eyes.  That we cannot see the wood for the trees was never more painfully true than when we first try to tell a clear story amid the clatter and din of our industrial life.  Past history is of little assistance in interpreting the social and industrial development, in which we ourselves are atoms.  Much information is to be obtained, though piecemeal and with difficulty, but especially as relates to women, it has not yet been classified and ordered and placed ready to hand.

The industrial group activities of women are the inevitable, though belated result of the entry of women into the modern industrial system, and are called forth by the new demands which life is making upon women’s faculties.  We cannot stop short here, and consider these activities mainly in regard to what has led up to them, nor yet as to what is their extent and effect today.  Far more important is it to try to discover what are the tendencies, which they as yet faintly and imperfectly, often confusedly, express.

In the labor movement of this country woman has played and is playing an important part.  But in its completeness no one knows the story, and those who know sections of it most intimately are too busy living their own parts in that story, to pause long enough to be its chroniclers.  For to be part of a movement is more absorbing than to write about it.  Whom then shall we ask?  To whom shall we turn for even an imperfect knowledge of the story, at once noble and sordid, tragic and commonplace, of woman’s side of the labor movement?  To whom, you would say, but to the worker herself?  And where does the worker speak with such clearness, with such unfaltering steadiness, as through her union, the organization of her trade?

In the industrial maze the individual worker cannot interpret her own life story from her knowledge of the little patch of life which is all her hurried fingers ever touch.  Only an organization can be an interpreter here.  Fortunately for the student, the organization does act as interpreter, both for the organized women who have been drawn into the labor movement and for those less fortunate who are still struggling on single-handed and alone.  The organized workers in one way or another come into fairly close relations with their unorganized sisters.  Besides, the movement in its modern form is still so young that there is scarcely a woman worker in the unions who did not begin her trade life as an unorganized toiler.