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needle trades workers and millinery workers, who had already been organized into trade unions. The shirtwaistmakers union was one, the skirtmakers another, the dressmakers another. There were quite a good many of them.

I cannot absolutely date the year of the great shirt-waist strike, but it must have been 1909, I think. This was the first time that New York had ever seen women on strike. They were very weak. By no means was the whole of the needle trades workers organized. Only a few of them were. They were probably a minority of all the people who were earning their living in the sewing trades.

I began to work for the Consumers' League as soon as I had completed my thesis that year and completed my work with the West Side project. I went right away to work with the Consumers' League. There I was engaged in looking into conditions for working women - wages, hours, working conditions. I was making reports, trying to improve them. As such I became, of course, closely in touch with the women who were trying to organize in these needle trades and the other trades. The candy trades were organizing a little bit. The bookbinders already had women and they were all right. They were getting the union scale of wages. Whatever it was, the women got it. The upholstery women were trying to organize and they had been