If it has always been the mission of literature to translate the particular act into something of the universal, to reduce the element of crude pain in the isolated experience by bringing to the sufferer a realization that his is but the common lot, this mission may have been performed through such stories as that of the Devil Baby for simple, hardworking women who at any given moment compose the bulk of the women in the world.

Certainly some of the visitors to the Devil Baby attempted to generalize and evidently found a certain enlargement of the horizon, an interpretation of life as it were, in the effort. They exhibited that confidence which sometimes comes to the more literate person when, finding himself morally isolated among those hostile to his immediate aims, his reading assures him that other people in the world have thought as he does. Later when he dares to act on the conviction his own experience has forced upon him, he has become so conscious of a cloud of witnesses torn out of literature and warmed into living comradeship, that he scarcely distinguishes them from the likeminded people actually in the world whom he has later discovered as a consequence of his deed.

In some of the reminiscences related by working women I was surprised, not so much by the fact that memory could integrate the individual experience into a sense of relation with the more impersonal aspects of life, as that the larger meaning had been obtained when the fructifying memory had had nothing to feed upon but the harshest and most monotonous of industrial experiences.

I held a conversation with one such woman when she came to confess that her long struggle was over and that she and her sister had at last turned their faces to the poorhouse. She clearly revealed not only that she had caught a glimpse of the great social forces of her day, but that she had had the ability to modify her daily living by what she had perceived.

Perhaps, under the shadow of a tragic surrender, she had obtained a new sense of values, or at least had made up her mind that it was not worth while any longer to conceal her genuine experiences, for she talked more fully of her hard life than I had ever heard her before in the many years I had known her. She related in illuminating detail an incident in her long effort of earning, by ill-paid and unskilled labor, the money with which to support her decrepit mother and her imbecile sister. For more than fifty years she had never for a moment considered the possibility of sending either of them to a public institution, although it had become almost impossible to maintain such a household after the mother, who lived to be ninety-four years old, had become utterly distraught.

She was still sharing her scanty livelihood with the feeble-minded sister, although she herself was unable to do anything but wash vegetables and peel potatoes in a small restaurant of her neighborhood. The cold water necessary to these processes made her hands, already crippled with rheumatism, so bad that on some days she could not hold anything smaller than a turnip, although the other people in the kitchen surreptitiously helped her all they could and the cooks gave her broken food to carry home to the ever hungry sister.

She told of her monotonous years in a box factory, where she had always worked with the settled enmity of the other employes. They regarded her as a pace setter, and she, obliged to work fast and furiously in order to keep three people, and full of concern for her old mother’s many unfulfilled needs, had never understood what the girls meant when they talked about standing by each other.

She did not change in her attitude even when she found the prices of piece work went down lower and lower, so that at last she was obliged to work overtime late into the night in order to earn the small amount she had previously earned by day. She was seventy years old when the legality of the Illinois Ten Hour Law was contested, and her employer wanted her to testify in court that she was opposed to the law because she could not have supported her old mother all those years unless she had been allowed to work nights. She found herself at last dimly conscious of what it was that her long time enemies, the union girls, had been trying to do, and a subconscious loyalty to her own kind made it impossible for her to bear testimony against them. She did not analyze her motives but told me that, fearing she might yield to her employer’s request, in sheer panic she had abruptly left his factory and moved her helpless household to another part of the city on the very day she was expected to appear in court. In her haste she left four days unpaid wages behind her, and moving the family took all the money she had painstakingly saved for the coming winter’s coal. She had unknowingly moved into a neighborhood of cheap restaurants, and from that time on she worked in any of them which would employ her until now at last she was too feeble to be of much use to anybody.

Although she had never joined the Union which finally became so flourishing in the box factory she had left, she was conscious that in a moment of great temptation she had refrained from seeking her own advantage at the expense of others. As she bunglingly tried to express her motives, she said: “The Irish—you know I was ten years old when we came over—often feel like that; it isn’t exactly that you are sorry after you have done a thing, nor so much that you don’t do it because you know you will be sorry afterwards, nor that anything in particular will happen to you if you do it, but that you haven’t the heart for it, that it goes against your nature.”

When I expressed my admiration for her prompt action she replied: “I have never told this before except to one person, to a woman who was organizing for the garment workers and who came to my house one night about nine o’clock, just as I was having my supper. I had it late in those days because I used to scrub the restaurant floor after everybody left. My sister was asleep back of the stove, I looked sharp not to wake her up and I don’t believe the Union woman ever knew that she wasn’t just like other people. The organizer was looking for some of the women living in our block who had been taking work from the shops ever since the strike was on. She was clean tired out, and when I offered her a cup of tea she said as quick as a flash, ‘You are not a scab, are you?’ I just held up my poor old hands before her face, swollen red from scrubbing and full of chilblains, and I told her that I couldn’t sew a stitch if my life depended on it.

“When I offered her the second cup of tea—a real educated-looking woman she was, and she must have been used to better tea than mine boiled out of the old tea leaves the restaurant cook always let me bring home—I said to her, ‘My hands aren’t the only reason I’m not scabbing. I see too much of the miserable wages these women around here get for their sweatshop work, and I’ve done enough harm already with my pace setting, and my head so full of my poor old mother that I never thought of anybody else.’ She smiled at me and nodded her head over my old cracked cup. ‘You are a Union woman all right,’ she said. ‘You have the true spirit whether you carry a card or not. I am mighty glad to have met you after all the scabs I have talked to this day.’”

The old woman repeated the words as one who solemnly recalls the great phrase which raised him into a knightly order, revealing a secret pride in her unavowed fellowship with Trades Unions, for she had vaguely known at the time of the Ten Hour trial that powerful federations of them had paid for the lawyers and had gathered the witnesses. Some dim memory of Irish ancestors, always found on the side of the weak in the unending struggle with the oppressions of the strong, may have determined her action. She may have been dominated by a subconscious suggestion “from the dust that sleeps,” a suggestion so simple, so insistent and monotonous that it had victoriously survived its original sphere of conduct.

It was in keeping with the drab colored experiences of her seventy hard years that her contribution to the long struggle should have been one of inglorious flight, nevertheless she had gallantly recognized the Trades Union organizer as a comrade in a common cause. She cherished in her heart the memory of one golden moment when she had faintly heard the trumpets summon her and had made her utmost response.

When the simple story of a lifetime of sacrifice to family obligations and of one supreme effort to respond to a social claim came to an end, I reflected that for more than half a century the narrator had freely given all her time, all her earnings, all her affections, and yet during the long period had developed no habit of self-pity. At a crucial moment she had been able to estimate life, not in terms of her self-immolation but in relation to a hard pressed multitude of fellow workers.

As she sat there, a tall, gaunt woman broken through her devotion, she inevitably suggested the industrial wrongs and oppressions suffered by the women who, forgotten and neglected, perform so much of the unlovely drudgery upon which our industrial order depends. At the moment I could recall only one of her starved ambitions which to my knowledge had ever been attained. When a friend tenderly placed a pair of white satin slippers upon the coffined feet of her old mother who for more than ninety years had travelled a long hard road and had stumbled against many stones, the loving heart of the aged daughter overflowed. “It is herself would know how I prayed for white satin shoes for the burial, thinking as how they might make it up to mother, she who never knew where the next pair was coming from and often had to borrow to go to Mass.” I remembered that as my friend and I left the spotless bare room wrapped in the mystery of death and walked back to Hull-House together, we passed a little child who proudly challenged our attention to his new shoes, “shiny” in the first moment of joyous possession. We could but recognize the epitome of the hard struggle of the very poor, from the moment they scramble out of their rude cradles until they are lowered into their “partial payment” graves, to keep shoes upon their feet. The rare moments of touching pleasure when the simple desire for “a new pair” is fulfilled are doubtless indicated in the early fairy tales by the rewards of glistening red shoes or glass slippers to the good child; in the religious allegories which turn life itself into one long pilgrimage, by the promises to the faithful that they shall be shod with the sandals of righteousness and to the blessed ones, who having formally renounced the world, forswearing shoes altogether and humbly walking on without them, that their bruised and torn feet shall yet gleam lily-white on the streets of Paradise.

I suddenly saw in this worn old woman who sat before me, what George Sand described as “a rare and austere production of human suffering” and was so filled with a fresh consciousness of the long barren road travelled by the patient mother and daughter, that it merged into the Via Dolorosa of the Poor of the world. It may have been through this suggestion of an actual street that my memory vividly evoked a group of Russian pilgrims I had once seen in Holy Week as they triumphantly approached Jerusalem. Their heads, garlanded in wild flowers still fresh with early dew, were lifted in joyous singing but their broken and bleeding feet, bound in white cloth and thrust into sandals of stripped bark, were the actual sacrifice they were devoutly offering at the Sepulchre.

As my mind swiftly came back from the blossoming fields of Palestine to the crowded industrial district of Chicago, I found myself recalling a pensive remark made by the gifted Rachel Varnhagen, a century ago. “Careless Fate never requires of us what we are really capable of doing.”

This overwhelming sense of the waste in woman’s unused capacity came to me again during a Garment Workers’ strike, when some of the young women involved were sitting in the very chairs occupied so recently by the visitors to the Devil Baby. They brought a curious reminder of the overworked and heavily burdened mothers who had yet been able to keep the taste of life in their mouths and who could not be overborne, because their endurance was rooted in simple and instinctive human affections. During the long strike these young women endured all sorts of privations without flinching; some of them actual hunger, most of them disapprobation from their families, and all of them a loss of that money which alone could procure for them the American standards so highly prized. Through participation in the strike they all took the risk of losing their positions, and yet, facing a future of unemployment and wretchedness, they displayed a stubborn endurance which held out week after week.

Perhaps because of my recent conversations with old women I received the impression that the very power of resistance in such a socialized undertaking as a strike, presents a marked contrast in both its origin and motives to the traditional type of endurance exercised by the mothers and grandmothers of the strikers or by their acquaintances among domestic women living in the same crowded tenements.

When a mother cares for a sick child for days and nights without relief, the long period of solicitude and dread exhausting every particle of her vitality, her strength is constantly renewed from the vast reservoirs of maternal love and pity whenever she touches the soft flesh or hears the plaintive little voice. But such girls as the strikers represent are steadily bending their energies to loveless and mechanical labor, and are obliged to go on without this direct and personal renewal of their powers of resistance. They must be sustained as soldiers on a forced march are sustained, by their sense of comradeship in high endeavor. Naturally, some of the young working women are never able to achieve this and can keep on with the monotony of factory work only when they persuade themselves that they are getting ready, and have not yet begun their own lives, because real living for them must include a home of their own and children to “do for.”

Such unutilized dynamic power illustrates the stupid waste of those impulses and affections, registered in the very bodily structure itself, which are ruthlessly pushed aside and considered of no moment to the work in which so many women are now engaged. My conversations with these girls of modern industry continually filled me with surprise that, required as they are to work under conditions unlike those which women have ever before encountered, they have not only made a remarkable adaptation but have so ably equipped themselves with a new set of motives. The girl who stands on one spot for fifty-six hours each week as she feeds a machine, endlessly repeating the identical motions of her arms and wrists, is much further from the type of woman’s traditional activity than her mother who cooks, cleans, and washes for the household. The young woman who spends her time in packing biscuits into boxes which come to her down a chute and are whirled away from her on a miniature trolley, has never even seen how the biscuits are made, for the factory proper is separated from the packing room by a door with the sign “No Admittance.” She must work all day without the vital and direct interest in the hourly results of her labors which her mother had.

These girls present a striking antithesis to the visitors to the Devil Baby who in their forlorn and cheerless efforts were merely continuing the traditional struggle against brutality, indifference, and neglect that helpless old people and little children might not be trampled in the dust. For these simple women it is the conditions under which the struggle is waged which have changed, rather than the nature of the contest. Even in this unlovely struggle, the older women utilize well-seasoned faculties, in contrast to the newly developed powers required by the multitude of young girls who for the first time in the long history of woman’s labor, are uniting their efforts in order to obtain opportunities for a fuller and more normal living. Organizing with men and women of divers nationalities they are obliged to form new ties absolutely unlike family bonds. On the other hand, these girls possess the enormous advantage over women of the domestic type of having experienced the discipline arising from impersonal obligations and of having tasted the freedom from economic dependence, so valuable that too heavy a price can scarcely be paid for it.

This clash between the traditional conception of woman’s duty narrowed solely to family obligations and the claims arising from the complexity of the industrial situation, manifests scarcely a suggestion of the latent war so vaguely apprehended from the earliest times as a possibility between men and women. Even the restrained Greeks believed that when the obscure women at the bottom of society could endure no longer and “the oppressed women struck back, it would not be justice which came but the revenge of madness.” My own observation has discovered little suggesting this mood, certainly not among the women active in the Labor Movement.

I recall the recent experience of an organizer whom I very much admire for her valiant services in the garment trades and whom I have known from her earliest girlhood. Her character confirms the contention that our chief concern with the past is not what we have done, nor the adventures we have met, but the moral reaction of bygone events within ourselves.

As an orphaned child she had been cared for by two aunts who owned between them a little shop which pretended to be a tailoring establishment, but which in reality was a distributing centre for home work among the Italian women and newly immigrated Russian Jews living in the neighborhood. Her aunts, because they were Americans, superior in education and resources to the humble home workers, by dint of much bargaining both with the wholesale houses from which they procured the garments, and with the foreign women to whom they distributed them, had been able to secure a very good commission. For many years they had made a comfortable living, and in addition had acquired an exalted social position in the neighborhood, for they were much looked up to by those so dependent upon them for work.

Although my friend was expected to help in the shop as much as possible, she was sent regularly to school and had already “graduated from the eighth grade,” when a law was passed in the Illinois legislature, popularly known as the Anti Sweat-shop Law, which, within a year, had ruined her aunts’ business. After they had been fined in court for violating the law, a case which obtained much publicity because smallpox was discovered in two of the tenement houses in which the home finishers were living, the aunts were convinced that they could not continue to give out work to the Italian and Russian Jewish women. Reluctantly foregoing their commissions they then tried crowding their own house and shop with workers, only to be again taken into court and fined when the inspector discovered their kitchen and bedrooms full of half-finished garments. They both flatly refused to go into a factory to work, and after a futile attempt to revive the tailoring business, never very genuine, they were finally reduced to the dimensions of the tiny shop itself, which, under the new regulations as to light and air could accommodate but three people. My friend was at once taken from school and made one of these ill-paid workers and the little household was held together on the pittance the three could earn.

It was but natural, perhaps, that as these displaced proprietors became poorer they should ever grow more bitter against the reformers and the Trades Unionists who, between them, had secured the “high-brow” legislation which had destroyed their honest business.

The niece was married at eighteen to a clerk in a neighboring department store who worked four evenings a week and every other Sunday in his determination to get on. The bride moved into a more prosperous neighborhood and I saw little of her husband or herself for ten years, during which time they made four payments on the little house they occupied fully three miles from the now abandoned sweat-shop. Her husband worked hard with a consuming desire to rear his children in good surroundings as much as possible unlike the slums, as he somewhat brutally designated the neighborhood of his own youth. Through his unrelieved years in the cheap department store where, however, he had always felt a great satisfaction in being well dressed and had resisted any attempts of his fellow clerks to shorten their preposterous hours by trades-union organization, his health was gradually undermined and he finally developed tuberculosis. He was unable to support his family during the last decade of his life, and in her desperate need my friend went back to the only trade she had, that of finishing garments. During these years, although she sold the little house and placed her boy in a semi-philanthropic institution, she steadily faced the problem of earning insufficient wages for the support of the family, the pang of her failure constantly augmented by the knowledge that, in spite of her utmost efforts, the invalid never received the food and care his condition required. The clothing factory in which she then worked illustrated the lowest ebb in the fortune of the garment workers in American cities when, the sweat shop having been largely eliminated through the efforts of the factory inspectors, the workers from every land were crowded into the hastily organized factories. Separated by their diverse languages and through their long habits of home work, they had become too secretive even to tell one another the amount of wages each was receiving. It was as if the competition had been transferred from the sweat shop contractors to the individual workers themselves, sitting side by side in the same room, and perhaps it was not surprising that the workers felt as if they had been hunted down into their very kitchens and their poverty cruelly exposed to public view.

My friend shared this wretchedness and carried into it the bitterness of her early experience. She says now that she never caught even a suggestion that this might be but a transitional period to a more ordered sort of industrial life.

She did not tell me just when and how she had come to the conclusion that wages must be higher, that legal enactment for better conditions must be supplemented by the efforts of the workers themselves, but it was absolutely clear that she had independently reached that conclusion long before a strike in the clothing industry brought her into contact with the organized Labor Movement. It was certainly not until the year of her husband’s death that she became aware of the industrial changes which had been taking place during the twenty-two years since her aunts’ business had been ruined.

She was grateful that the knowledge had first come to her through an Italian girl working by her side, for, as she explained, her old attitude toward the “dagoes,” as a people to be exploited, had to be thoroughly changed before she could be of much real use in organizing a trade in which so many Italians were engaged. Even during the strike itself, to which she was thoroughly committed, having been convinced both of its inevitability and of the justice of its demands, she resented the fact that the leadership was in the hands of Russian Jews and, secure in her Americanism, she felt curiously aloof from the group with which she was so intimately identified.

A few months after the strike my friend fortunately secured a place in a manufactory of men’s clothing, in which there had been instituted a Trade Board for the adjustment of grievances, and where wages and hours were determined by joint agreement. When she was elected to the position of shop representative she found herself in the midst of one of the most interesting experiments being carried on in the United States, not only from the standpoint of labor but from that of applying the principles of representative government in a new field. She felt the stimulus of being a part in that most absorbing of all occupations—the reconstruction of a living world.

One evening, at Hull-House, as she came out of a citizenship class she had been attending, she tried to express some of the implications of the great undertaking in which more than ten thousand clothing employes are engaged. She repeated the statement made by the leader of the class that it was the solemn duty and obligation of the United States not only to keep a republican form of government alive upon the face of the earth and to fulfill the expectations of the founders but to modify and develope that type of government as conditions changed; he had said that the spirit of the New England town meeting might be manifested through a referendum vote in a large city, and that it must find some such vehicle of expression if it would survive under changed conditions. Her eyes were quite shining as she made her application to the experiment being carried on in the great clothing factory, with its many shops and departments unified in mutual effort. Evidently her attention had been caught by the similarity between the town meeting in its relation to a more elaborated form of government and the small isolated sweat-shop such as that formerly managed by her aunts, in its relation to the “biggest clothing factory in the world.” She had heard her fellow workers say that the “greenhorn” often found much friendliness in a small shop where his own language was spoken, and where he could earn at least a humble living until he grew accustomed to the habits of a new country, whereas he would have been lost and terrified in a factory. She felt very strongly the necessity of translating this sense of comradeship and friendliness into larger terms, and she believed that it could be done by the united workers.

As she sat by my desk, this woman who had not yet attained her fortieth year looked much older, as if illustrating the saying that hard labor so early robs the poor man of his youth that it makes his old age too long. She seemed to me for the moment to have gathered up in her own experience the transition from old conditions to new and to be standing on the threshold of a great development in the lives of working women.

As if she were conscious that I was recalling her past with which I had been so familiar, she began to speak again. “You know that I have both of my children with me now; the girl graduates from the Normal School in June and hopes to put herself through the University after she has taught for a few years. She reminds me of her father in her anxiety to know people of education, to get on in the world, and I am sure she will succeed. The boy has caught the other motive of pulling up with his own trade and of standing by the organized Labor Movement. Of course, sewing was too dull for him, and besides he grew ambitious to be a machinist when he was in the Industrial School where I put him with such a breaking of the heart when he was only ten years old. He has to admit, however, that even his own Machinists’ Union, with its traditional trade agreements and joint boards, is far behind our experiment. He went with me to the banquet on May Day. We had marched through the Loop in celebration of our new agreement and had stirring speeches at the Auditorium in the afternoon, but it was in the evening that we really felt at home with each other. When he saw the tremendous enthusiasm for our beloved leader—my boy, I am sorry to say, is a little inclined to despise foreigners and also tailors because they aren’t as big and brawny as the members of his dear Machinists’ Union—and really caught some notion of the statesmanlike ability required for the successful management of such a complicated and difficult industrial experiment, and when he realized that the ten per cent increase provided for in the new agreement was to go in greater proportion to those at the lower end of the scale, he suddenly forgot his prejudices and I saw him applauding with his hands and feet as if he had really let loose at last.

“Of course, it hasn’t been easy for me even during these later years to keep Helen in school and to support my aunt who is now too old and broken even to keep house for us. But we have got on, and quite aside from everything else I am thankful to have had a small share in this forward step in American democracy—at least, that’s what they called it at the banquet,” she ended shyly.

The experience of my friend bore testimony that in spite of all their difficulties and handicaps, something of social value is forced out of the very situation itself among that vast multitude of women whose oppression through the centuries has typified a sense of helpless and intolerable wrongs. Many of them, even the older ones, are being made slowly conscious of the subtle and impalpable filaments that secretly bind their experiences and moods into larger relations, and they are filled with a new happiness analogous to that of little children when they are first taught to join hands in ordered play.

Is such enthusiastic participation in organized effort but one manifestation of that desire for liberty and for a larger participation in life, found in great women’s souls all over the world?

In pursuance of such a desire the working women have the enormous advantage of constant association with each other, an advantage dimly perceived even by pioneer women two hundred years ago.

The hostesses of the famous drawing-rooms of the eighteenth century laid great stress on human intercourse as the individual’s best means of cultivation. Certain French women gave as a raison d’etre for their brilliant salons that “people must come together in order to exercise justice,” and they became enormously proud of the fact that by the end of the century “all Europe was thrown into a state of agitation if injustice were committed in any corner of it.”

This hypothesis was gallantly laid down a hundred years before the industrial revolution which, in its consummation, has congregated millions of women into factories all over the world. These myriad women, most of them young and untrained and all of them working under new industrial conditions, are gradually learning to “exercise justice” if only because they have “come together.” Their association has been accomplished under the stress of a common necessity, and they have been tutored in a mass at the hard school of bitter experience.

Were the sheltered drawing-room ladies the forerunners of such contemporary advocates of industrial justice or do we find a better prototype in those simple old women who, having reared their own children and having come to be regarded as a depository for domestic wisdom, dispense sound advice to bewildered mothers which always contains the admonition, “Never be partial to any one of them, always be as just as you know how.”

Possibly women’s organizations of all types are but providing ever-widening channels through which woman’s moral energy may flow, revivifying life by new streams fed in the upper reaches of her undiscovered capacities. In either case, we may predict that to control old impulses so that they may be put to social uses, to serve the present through memories hoarding woman’s genuine experiences, may liberate energies hitherto unused and may result in a notable enrichment of the pattern of human culture.