The entrance of women in large numbers into labor unions, and into
membership in the Women's Trade Union League is another factor in the
increasing interest of American women in suffrage. After a decision of
the New York Court of Appeals that the law prohibiting night work of
women was unconstitutional, nearly one thousand women book-binders in
New York City made a public announcement that they would thenceforth
work for the ballot. They had been indifferent before, but this close
application of politics to their industrial situation--bookbinding is
one of the night trades--made them alive to their own helplessness.

The shirt-waist strike and the garment workers' strike in New York and
Philadelphia, waged so bitterly in 1910, brought great numbers of women
into the suffrage ranks. Not only were the women strikers convinced that
the magistrates and the police treated them with more contempt than they
did the voting men, but they perceived the need of securing better labor
laws for themselves. The conviction that women of the wealthier classes
would stand by them in securing favorable laws, as they stood by the
strikers in the industrial struggle, was a strong lever to turn them
towards the suffrage ranks.

[Illustration: MRS. HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH]

The Women's Trade Union League building, used as strike headquarters in
all strikes involving women workers, is a veritable center of suffrage
sentiment in New York! One floor houses the offices of the Equality
League of Self Supporting Women, of which Harriot Stanton Blatch is
founder and president. This society, which is entirely made up of trade
and professional workers, claims an approximate membership of twenty-two
thousand. A number of unions belong to the League, and there is also a