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nearly equal basis in New York. This movement didn't exist really much outside of New York, except for fringes of it here and there.

The next union that the girls tried to organize was the laundry workers. That was fascinating. The laundry workers, I think, began up in Troy as an organization of women headed by Leonora O'Reilly. She was the most beautiful speaker I ever heard in my life. She was beautiful. Her mother had died of tuberculosis working in the laundries in the collar factories in Troy. Leonora had had tuberculosis too. Where she ever got her elegant education, I don't know, but she had that education that you often meet in the Irish - the education of tongue and voice. She could say the most beautiful rounded things and the most beautiful things would pour out from her. She was the most beautiful speaker - moving, very emotional. She would tear you to pieces.

She came down heading a small union upstate. The Woman's Trade Union League and the others backed her. She started to organize the laundry workers of New York in about 1912 or '13, I think. That was a funny kind of movement because most of the laundry workers in New York at that time were great, big, fat, old Irish women standing in the hand laundries. The steam laundries had only just begun. They did hotel laundry and things like that. But most laundries