the Fifty-Four Hour bill for the women workers of her state. Unlike Mrs. Bacon, Miss Perkins represented a society-the Consumers League-which asked for this measure, and she was supported in her demand by the Women's Trade Union League and other organizations. The measure would have been defeated, however, as is widely known and acknowledged in New York, had it not been for the personal sagacity and watchfulness of Miss Perkins who captured a senator of dominating power and prevented his escape in a taxi to the station in time to restore him to his seat in the chamberhis vote on the floor bringing with him the votes he controlled. More than one refugee has been escorted back to his duties by women sentinels when legislation on which they were determined has been up for a vote. In such cases the woman's influence lies not in physical force, for she has never been seen to lay hands upon the recalcitrant legislator, but in the occasional subservience of the mind of man to the actual presence of a moral force.

Organized efforts, however, are ordinarily more effective than individual prowess, and women as well as men have learned this fact. Whoever will take the trouble to examine the files of The American Club Woman, the organ of the women's clubs of the United States, which records the doings of women's clubs all over the country, cannot fail to be impressed with the drift of women's activities in the direction of legislative action. Societies formed to study Browning or Shakespeare soon begin to be concerned about local improvements of one kind or another. They become interested, for example, in the inadequate recreational facilities of their town or city, and when they begin to act in the matter they usually find it necessary to secure positive legislation or at least appropriations, and thus they are led into bringing their influence to bear either upon the state legislature or the local council.

Every issue of The American Club Woman contains notices of such activities on the part of local clubs, and these are supplemented by reports of such local associations themselves. Take, for example, the 1913-14 Year Book of the Woman's Club of York, Pennsylvania. The Public Playgrounds Committee of that club announces that in addition to the funds raised by it privately, "the city appropriated $150 to the work, with the result that through excellent management receipts are in comfortable excess over expenditures." The Social Service Committee of the same club states that "in the first

year of its existence, it has done important and effective work. It was largely responsible for the passage of an ordinance by city councils regulating dance halls."

Take, for another example, the 1912 Year Book of the Woman's Municipal League of New York City, selected at random from among a hundred reports of women's associations, and we find recorded on pages 14 to 18 a contest waged by that organization against a certain motion picture ordinance. The report runs:

The members of the Woman's Municipal League were requested to write to their aldermen, urging them to oppose the Folks ordinance. The members heartily responded to this request and almost every alderman received communications on the subject. When the day set for voting upon the Folks ordinance arrived, its sponsors deemed the risk of its defeat too great to warrant them in bringing it to a vote.

Similar activities, both positive and negative, can be discovered in the records of practically every woman's association not organized for purely literary purposes. And even literary societies, as remarked above, are becoming socially minded.

These local clubs, as is well known, are federated into state and national associations, and an examination of the minutes of these larger federations shows that more and more organized women are seeing the importance of agreeing on certain measures of fundamental concern to women and society at large, and pressing them to a successful completion in the legislatures of their respective states. The files of the reports of the national assembly of women's clubs, to be found in any well equipped library, reveal the growing solidarity of women, their increasing concern about social and economic problems, and their increasing agreement on positive measures of legislative action.

In addition to these general clubs and societies, there are special women's organizations, such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Council of Jewish Women, and the Women's Trade Union League. The first of these associations has stood for better protective laws for women and children as well as for measures directed against the liquor traffic. In their warfare upon liquor, women have discovered the relation of wages, overcrowding, long hours, and other economic factors to the consumption of alcoholic stimulants; and are considering preventive as well as prohibitory legislation. The second of these associations, while concerned pri

marily with the safeguarding of Jewish immigrant women and girls, has been drawn more and more into the development of social and correctional legislation. The Women's Trade Union League, in addition to organizing wage working women, devotes special efforts to obtaining protective labor legislation, including an eight-hour day for women and woman suffrage.

It is safe to say, therefore, that in the progress of modern social legislation of all kinds-the extension of educational functions, pure food laws, mothers' pensions, development of recreational facilities, labor laws, particularly for women and children, and measures directed against prostitution-not a single important statute has been enacted without the active support of women, organized and unorganized. This much we may say without attempting to apportion to women the exact weight of their influence.

Important as has been that influence, there can be no doubt that in cases of serious labor legislation affecting large employing interests women's weight has been almost negligible in many instances. Indeed, one of the New York legislators, in a very friendly and confidential talk with the representatives of the Women's Trade Union League, told them that the 35,000 voteless women whom they represented naturally could not carry the same weight as thirtyfive voting men. It was just such frank statements as this that turned Florence Kelley and many leading social workers, who sought legislation in their various fields, into ardent suffragists.

Other social workers, anxious to accomplish immediate results and unwilling to wait for universal suffrage, have discovered that one of the best ways to increase women's influence in legislation is to join associations which include men as well as women, even if they have to do all of the work. How far this is consciously done one cannot say, but it remains a fact that much of women's effective legislative work is done in connection with those organizations which draw no sex lines. The weight of women in such societies is evidenced by the number of important executive positions which they hold in local, state, and national organizations for the promotion of public health, education, recreation, housing reform, and the improvement of labor conditions.

In child labor organizations, hospital organizations seeking larger appropriations for social service, anti-tuberculosis work, labor legislation committees, the prevailing testimony, even from women,

is to the effect that "we consider our greatest strength in the fact that our work is done by the coöperation of men and women." Emily Bissell, president of the anti-tuberculosis society of Delaware, says for example:

All our work on tuberculosis has been done by women and men working together and while the women's clubs have done their part, the men, in their beneficial societies, labor unions, Catholic and Jewish associations, etc., have all had their part, and it will be difficult to disentangle their activities from ours. All this is as it should be, but it makes data more difficult than when restricted to either sex.

Women are more and more loath to accept all the credit for social legislation today and men seem actuated by the same spirit.

In response to hundreds of inquiries made within the past year to societies all over the country for information relative to the specific work of women, came a large proportion of replies to the following effect: "We fear we can give you no help as all our work is done through committees of men and women." The American Civic Association, the National Municipal League, the National Child Labor Committee, the American Public Health Association, the National Labor Legislation Committee, the National Housing Association, teaching and medical societies, make no sex distinctions now in their membership or official leadership. Scarcely a single society for social work or legislation today feels that it can go before the people without the names of Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop or other prominent women printed upon its letter heads. Their appreciation of the worth of these names is vague, yet positive.

With such evidence as we now have before us, we may say truly that women's influence on legislation has grown, is growing, and will grow. This is not very definite in itself, but it marks a long journey from woman's old spheres, the three Ks. And it is interesting to note that those women most actively using indirect influence are coming to prefer direct action on their own account.

WOMEN AND SOCIAL LEGISLATION IN THE UNITED

STATES

BY FLORENCE KELLEY,

New York City.

It was the intention of the writer to outline briefly the contribution to social legislation made by women in our country during the past three-quarters of a century. Instead of this, however, the tragedy of the continent of Europe bids us pause and review, under its shadow, all our social activities. It warns us to test them, to weigh them soberly and, perhaps, to change wholly their direction.

For forty years the rulers of Europe have been steadily preparing this catastrophe. Money needed for bread and for schools has been, decade after decade, spent for guns and ammunition, for barracks, and for maintaining in them millions of young men forced to be idle in their best working years. Today in Europe the social gains of all the weary years since the wars of Napoleon are in peril. Whoever wins in the end, every warring nation will be the poorer in men, in homes, in health, and in hope.

With the honorable exception of the Socialist party, the voters in England, France, Germany and Austria elected to office throughout those forty years the candidates of the militarist parties. The voters thus consciously shared the fatal responsibility. Under the shadow of this world tragedy who stands, today, in Europe with clean hands? Only the women who have no vote, no share in the government-and the children. But when their sons lie buried in foreign soil, and the babes in their arms wilt and starve, what avails it for the mothers in the warring nations that their own personal consciences are clear of all share in preparing these horrors?

Against the gruesome background of the European war stands forth the social fact that, since our own Civil War, followed by the emancipation of four million slaves a half century ago, the most important social legislation achieved in our country has been the enfranchisement of three million women in ten states and Alaska. For the first time in human history three million women can, within their own nation, act with the power of full citizens in relation to