The Women's Trade Union League is, and as long as it fulfills its present function, will surely remain, a federation of trade unions with women members, but it finds a niche and provides an honorable and useful function for the wives of workingmen, for ex-trade-union women, and for others who endorse trade unionism and gladly give their support to a constructive work, aiming at strengthening the weakest wing of labor, the unorganized, down-driven, underpaid working-girls.
If the League is to be an organization open to, and aiming at including eventually the great majority of working-women, it must be so flexible as to admit the woman who works in the home without formal wages, as well as the woman who works for an employer for wages. Both are in many respects upon the same footing in relation to society. Both are earners and producers. Both require the help of organization. Both should be an integral part of the labor movement. Both therefore may be consistently received as dues-paying members into Women's Trade Union Leagues, even although we are still too confused and puzzled to permit of housewives forming their own unions, and therefore such members have to be received as allies.
In thus leaving open a door, however, through which all working-women may enter the League, the founders were mindful of the fact, and have it embodied in the constitution, that the main strength must lie in the increasing number of wage-earning girls and women who are socially developed up to the point of being themselves organized into trade unions. The League has so far grown, and can in the future grow normally, only so far as it is the highest organized expression of the ideals, the wishes and the needs of the wage-earning girl.
As for the woman of wealth, I should be the last to question her right to opportunities for self-development, or to deny her the joy of assisting her sorely driven sisters to rise out of the industrial mire, and stand erect in self-reliant independence. But if the League is to grow until it becomes the universal expression of the woman's part in organized labor, then the privilege of assisting with financial help the ordinary activities of the League can be hers only during the infancy of the body. No organization can draw its nurture permanently from sources outside of itself, although many a movement has been nursed through its early stages of uncertainty and struggle by the aid of the sympathetic and understanding outsider.