the Federationist, the official organ of the American Federation of Labor.
WOMEN'S TRADE UNION LEAGUE
One of the most potent factors in the present-day labor movement, not only in organizing working women, but also in educating them to an understanding of their needs and to a consciousness of duties and responsibilities in public life, is the Women's Trade Union League. Founded in 1903 for the purpose of uniting in one general organization working women and sympathizers of other classes, it has steadily grown in numbers and in influence until to-day it comprises nine local leagues in leading cities, with national headquarters in Chicago. The biennial national conventions, held in Boston, New York and St. Louis, aroused widespread interest in the condition of women workers among the general public and interest in trade-unionism among the workers themselves. It is a movement for and by working women, one that proves that working women have learned the lesson of co-operation and have evolved the social spirit to a marked degree. The main principles that the league stands for are: organization of all workers into trade unions; equal pay for equal work; the eight-hour day, a minimum wage scale, and woman suffrage. The league not only indorses woman suffrage, it also carries on an active agitation in its behalf by participation in all suffrage demonstrations and through the columns of its official organ, Life and Labor. During the 1915 suffrage campaign in New York State the Women's Trade Union League issued a burning appeal to the organized workingmen of that state, calling upon them to work and vote for the suffrage amendment. So completely have working women changed their attitude toward the suffrage question during forty years, since the days when a trade union delegate declared that working women wanted, "not the ballot but bread."
The modern, enlightened working woman, deeply conscious of a bond of solidarity between herself and her fellow workers, keenly interested in the great, social problems of the hour, and fully aware of the connection between public life and her own personal needs, is the fore-
62
