In the vocabulary of those who write and lecture on the self-supporting woman, there is no more misleading phrase than "the poor factory girl." The self-respecting, alert factory-worker—and there are thousands upon thousands of such workers in the United States—neither asks nor merits pity. Many of them make more money in a week than the average mediocre stenographer makes in a month. Thousands of them perform less exhausting work than the girl who stands behind a counter. The vast majority of them have union hours, and each year officials get closer and closer to the heart of factory life, enforcing laws of sanitation and human safety.
When the factory girls have a grievance or are threatened with a reduction of wages, they do not ask rich and charitably-inclined women to open "homes" where they can live on a semicharity basis. They appoint committees, confer with committees from unions for men, and arbi-
