therefore only there that we hear about it.

Still, twenty-five years ago, the day of national organization had
already dawned. To organize a trade on a national scale is at best a
slow process, and it naturally takes a much longer time for women to
influence and enter into the administrative work of a national union,
than of a separate local union, which perhaps they have helped to
found. They are therefore too apt to lose touch with the big national
union, and even with its local branch in their own city. It is almost
like the difference between the small home kitchen, with whose
possibilities a woman is familiar, and the great food-producing
factory, run on a business scale, whose management seems to her
something far-removed and unfamiliar. It was not until 1904, when the
National Women's Trade Union League was formed out of unions with
women members, that women workers, as women, can be said to have begun
national organization at all. The account of that body is reserved for
another chapter.

Meanwhile as instances of the many determined localized efforts among
women to raise wages and better conditions, there follow here outlines
of the formation of the Working Women's Society in New York, the
successful organization of the Laundry Workers in San Francisco, and
of the splendid but defeated struggle of the girls in the packing
plants of Chicago.

In 1886 a small body of working-women, of whom Leonora O'Reilly was
one, began holding meetings on the. East Side of New York City, to
inquire into and talk over bad conditions, and see how they could be
remedied. They were shortly joined by some women of position, who saw
in this spontaneous effort one promising remedy, at least for some of