Along with the rest she also had suffered from the repeated cuts that
the pace-making of the ones at the top had brought about. It was
evident that something must be done. Maggie Condon, Hannah O'Day and
some of the others, began, first to think, and then to talk over the
matter with one another. They knew about the Haymarket trouble. There
were rumors of a strike the men had once had. They had heard of the
Knights of Labor, and wrote to someone, but nothing came of it. So
one day, when there was more than usual cause for irritation
and discouragement, what did Hannah O'Day do but tie a red silk
handkerchief to the end of a stick. With this for their banner and the
two leaders at their head, a whole troop of girls marched out into
Packingtown.

The strike ended as most such strikes of the unorganized, unprepared
for, and unfinanced sort, must end, in failure, in the return to work
on no better terms of the rank and file, and in the black-listing of
the leaders. But the idea of organization had taken root, and this
group of Irish girls still clung together. "We can't have a union,"
said one, "but we must have something. Let us have a club, and we'll
call it the Maud Gonne Club." This is touching remembrance of the
Irish woman patriot.

Time passed on, and one evening during the winter of 1903 Miss Mary
McDowell, of the University of Chicago Settlement, was talking at a
Union Label League meeting, and she brought out some facts from what
she knew of the condition of the women workers in the packing-houses,
showing what a menace to the whole of the working world was the
underpaid woman. This got into the papers, and Maggie Condon and her
sister read it, and felt that here was a woman who understood. And she
was in their own district, too.