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The Trade Union Woman by Alice Henry
page 281 of 349 (80%)
somehow slipped out of the sight of their successors. The earliest
move of the advanced women of America had been for equal rights of
education, and there success has been greatest and most complete and
thorough. But it was almost exclusively the women who were able to
enter the professions who gained the benefits of this campaign for
equal educational and consequently equal professional opportunities.

The next aim of the leaders in the woman movement of the last century
had been to accord to woman equality before the law. This affecting
primarily and chiefly woman in her sex relations, had its permanent
results in reference to the legal status of the married woman and
the mother, bearing at the same time secondarily upon the safety and
welfare of the child; hence in the different states a long series of
married women's property acts, equal guardianship acts, modifications
of the gross inequalities of the divorce law, and the steady raising
of the age of protection for girls.

At least that was the position ten years ago. But today the tide has
turned. Partly is this due to the growth of industrial organization
among women, a development that has followed the ever-increasing
need of mutual protection. Trade unionism has helped to train the
working-woman to listen to the suffrage gospel, though therein she has
often been slower than the workingman, her better educated brother. On
the other hand a great many influences have combined to wake up the
suffragist of our day to the true meaning and value of what she was
asking. Especially has the work of the National Women's Trade Union
League and the campaign of publicity it has conducted on behalf of
the working-woman, both within and without its membership, focused
attention upon the woman in industry as a national responsibility.
Then again the tremendous strikes in which such large numbers of women
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