You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of the interdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrate into the operating-room of a telephone exchange.  Any hour will do.  Any day in the week.  There are no nights, nor Sundays, nor holidays in a telephone exchange.  The city could not get along for one single minute in one single hour of the twenty-four without the telephone girl.  Her hands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long, silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes of the switch board.  The wires cross and recross, until the switch board is like a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of the telephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of a city.

What would happen if this army of women was suddenly withdrawn from the telephone exchanges?  Men could not take their places.  That experiment has been tried more than once, and it has always failed.

Having seen how well women serve industry, go back to the department store and see how they dominate it also.

The department store apparently exists for women.  The architect who designed the building studied her necessities.  The makers of store furniture planned counters, shelves, and seats to suit her stature.  Buyers of goods know that their jobs are forfeit unless they can guess what her taste in gowns and hats is going to be six months hence.

WOMEN’S DEMAND ON INDUSTRY Woman dominates the department store for the plain reason that she supports it.  Whoever earns the income, and that point has been somewhat in question lately, there is no doubt at all as to who spends it.  She does.  Hence, she is able to control the conditions under which this business is conducted.

You can see for yourself that this is so.  Walk through any large department store and observe how much valuable space is devoted to making women customers comfortable.  There is always a drawing-room with easy-chairs and couches; plenty of little desks with handsome stationery where the customer may write notes; here, and in the retiring-room adjoining, are uniformed maids to offer service.  But these things are not all that the women who support industry demand of the men in power.  They demand that industry be carried on under conditions favorable to the health and comfort of the workers.

Not until the development of the department store were women able to observe at close range the conduct of modern business.  Not unnaturally it was in the department store that they began one of the most ambitious of their present-day activities,—­that of humanizing industry.

It was just twenty years ago that New York City was treated to a huge joke.  It was such a joke that even the miserable ones with whom it was concerned were obliged to smile.  An obscure group of women, calling themselves the Working Women’s Society, came out with the announcement that they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a labor union.