more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and
nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances
developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so
bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or
manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to
the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women who
had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and
eight dollars.

The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the mills
as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.

There you have the story of women's realization of themselves as a
group. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women.
The Boston Branch of the Women's Trade Union League, through its
secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined the strikers.
Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile
Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks
of anxiety and deprivation.

The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business
before treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, exists
as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and
conferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to
exist. An employers' association is a necessity of business life. A
labor union is an insult to capital.

This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor car
stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs.
Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay