a meeting of women laundry-workers who were on strike. We believed
we could help these women with a legislative measure and asked their
support. "Oh! that stuff!" exclaimed one of these women. "Don't you know
that we women might be dead and buried if we waited for politicians and
lawmakers to right our wrongs?" This set me to thinking--not merely of
the immediate problem--but to asking myself how much any male politician
could understand of the wrongs inflicted upon poor working women.

I threw the weight of my study and activity into the economic and
industrial struggle. Here I discovered men and women fired with the
glorious vision of a new world, of a proletarian world emancipated, a
Utopian world,--it glowed in romantic colours for the majority of those
with whom I came in closest contact. The next step, the immediate step,
was another matter, less romantic and too often less encouraging. In
their ardor, some of the labor leaders of that period almost convinced
us that the millennium was just around the corner. Those were the
pre-war days of dramatic strikes. But even when most under the spell
of the new vision, the sight of the overburdened wives of the strikers,
with their puny babies and their broods of under-fed children, made us
stop and think of a neglected factor in the march toward our earthly
paradise. It was well enough to ask the poor men workers to carry on the
battle against economic injustice. But what results could be expected
when they were forced in addition to carry the burden of their
ever-growing families? This question loomed large to those of us who
came into intimate contact with the women and children. We saw that in
the final analysis the real burden of economic and industrial warfare
was thrust upon the frail, all-too-frail shoulders of the children,
the very babies--the coming generation. In their wan faces, in their
undernourished bodies, would be indelibly written the bitter defeat of
their parents.