If the community is not to be moved either by pity or by a sense of justice then perhaps it will awake to a realization of the national danger involved when so many of the workers, and especially when so many of the girls and women work under circumstances ruinous to health, and affording, besides, small chance for all-round normal development on either the individual or the social side.  These are evils whose results do not die out with the generation primarily involved, but must as well through inheritance as through environment injure the children of the workers, and their offspring yet unborn.

The passing away from the individual worker of personal control over the raw material and the instruments of production, which has accompanied the advent of the factory system, means that some degree of control corresponding to that formerly possessed by the individual should be assured to the group of workers in the factory or the trade.  Such control is assured through the collective power of the workers, acting in cooeperation in their trade union.  One reason why the woman worker is in so many respects worse off than the man is because she has so far enjoyed so little of the protection of the trade union in her work.  Why she has not had it, and why more and more she desires it, is what I will try to show in the following pages.

There is one criticism, to which almost every writer dealing with a present-day topic, lies exposed.  That is, why certain aspects of the subject, or certain closely related questions, have either not been dealt with at all, or touched on only lightly.  For instance, the subject of the organization of wage-earning women is indeed bound up with the industrial history of the United States, with the legal and social position of women, with the handicaps under which the colored races suffer, and with the entire labor problem.

In answer I can but plead that there had to be some limits.  These are all matters which have been treated by many others, and I intentionally confined myself to a section of the field not hitherto covered.

Though the greatest care has been taken to avoid errors, some mistakes have doubtless crept in and the author would be glad to have these pointed out.  I acknowledge gratefully what I owe to others, whether that help has come to me through books and periodical literature or through personal information from those possessing special expert knowledge.  No one can ever begin to repay such a debt, but such thanks as are possible, I offer here.

The brief historical sketch of the early trade unions is based almost entirely upon the “History of Women in Trade Unions,” Volume X, of the “Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States,” issued by the Commissioner of Labor, then Mr. Charles P. Neill.  Dr. John B. Andrews deals with the earlier period, and he shows how persistent have been the efforts of working-women to benefit themselves through collective action.