“What about your regular workers?” I asked him. “Oh, they’re different. They’re used to it.” At a munition plant in Hoboken the manager of a department jumped at me as an applicant for work. He was going to “place” me at once, and sent to the office for a pass. The employment manager happened to be in a “cranky” mood, or so the department manager explained to me, and said he could not issue a pass until he had me investigated. I left with the understanding that an investigator would see me that afternoon, and the manager urged me to report early the next morning ready for work. The investigator did see me that afternoon, and because I answered her questions truthfully she learned that I am a college graduate. The next morning the employment manager issued me a pass without question, but when I returned to the office of red-haired Mr. Black, the department manager, he had changed his mind. “Why, you’re a college graduate!” he exclaimed, leaning forward in his swivel-chair and looking for all the world like a big frog ready to hop. “You wouldn’t be happy here a day. You just wouldn’t stand it.” Out in the passageway I chanced upon the girl who had conducted me to Mr. Black’s office. When I told her that he had refused to give me a job she stared, then nodded her head. “I mighter known he wouldn’t take you on. He wants girls he can chuck under the chin and poke in the ribs and call by their first name,” she told me. “He’s foxy, that red-head, he seen he couldn’t make free with you. You come with me. I’ll take you to the employment manager. He’ll give you a job in the office, real Gentile work.” But I’d had enough office work, so I refused her offer. When I applied at Store Beautiful the employment manager apologized for offering me seventeen dollars a week. He was not allowed to pay more for an inexperienced saleswoman, he explained. When I accepted the job he quickly told me that there were many better-paying positions in the store, and if I stayed he would try to fit me into one of them. Remember this happened after the war. Employment managers had learned the value of educated working women. Now I’d as soon try to reason with a herd of jackasses as with a selfish woman. It is because I learned during my four years in the underbrush that American women are not, as a rule, selfish when they understand conditions that I have written this book. It is because I know by experience that American women are, as a rule, unselfishly patriotic that I am adding to the narrative of my experience an expression of my opinion on that condition known as our “labor troubles.” The United States is to-day the most powerful nation in the world. We, its women, are the most powerful half of the nation. Again we, its educated women of native birth and lineage, are the most powerful group in that half.