J. Pearson, Mrs. Fannie Kavanagh and Miss Lizzie Ford were active
workers. Miss Mary E. Kenney (Mrs. O'Sullivan), afterwards the first
woman organizer under the American Federation of Labor, was
another. She was successful in reaching the girls in her own trade
(book-binding), besides those in the garment trades and in the shoe
factories, also in bringing the need for collective bargaining
strongly before social and settlement workers.

Chicago has long been the largest and the most important among the
centers of the meat-packing industry. None of the food trades have
received more investigation and publicity, and the need for yet
more publicity, and for stricter and yet stricter supervision is
perpetually being emphasized. But most of the efforts that have
been made to awake and keep alive a sense of public rights and
responsibility in the conducting of huge institutions like the Chicago
packing-plants, have centered on the danger to the health of the
consumer through eating diseased or decomposed meat. The public cares
little, and has not troubled to learn much about the conditions of the
workers, without whom there could be no stockyards and no meat-packing
industry. Not that some of the investigators have not tried to bring
this point forward. It was the chief aim of Upton Sinclair, when he
wrote "The Jungle," and yet even he discovered to his dismay that, as
he bitterly phrased it, he had hoped to strike at the heart of the
American people, and he had only hit them in their stomach.

But that is a story by itself. Let us go back to the brave struggle
begun by the women in the packing-plants in the year 1902 to improve
their conditions by organizing.

For a great many years prior to this, women had been employed in