3. For men and women of the same ability the standard of living, in all classes, is rising. Each year the nation, and especially New York City, grows richer, luxuries become comforts and comforts necessities. Everybody, from immigrant to millionaire, expects to live better today than he did two or three decades ago. Houses, food, clothing, holidays, culture, travel--the son demands all of better quality than satisfied the father. Teachers should share this general rise in the standard of living, or their profession will lose caste, and the rising generation will lose the influence of teachers who command public respect. A survey of the whole situation, then, indicates that the cry “Equal pay for equal work” is as misleading to the teachers, who understand its import, as to the casual hearer, who takes it literally. In the latter it arouses false ideas; in the former false hopes. Like a will o’ the wisp it lures into a morass. Only those who, ignoring its gleam and earnest to make whatever advance is practicable, march steadily along the beaten highway, each year come nearer their goal. WOMEN AND THE TRADE-UNION MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES ALICE HENRY Editor Woman’s Department, _Union Labor Advocate_ of Chicago. The story of woman in the labor movement has yet to be written. In its completeness no one knows the story, and those who know sections of it most intimately are too busy living their own parts in that story to be able to pause long enough to play at being its chroniclers. For to be part of a movement is more absorbing than to write about it. Whom then shall we ask? To whom shall we turn for even an imperfect knowledge of the story, at once great and sordid, tragic and commonplace, of woman’s side of the labor movement? To whom, you would say, but the worker herself? And where does the worker speak with such clearness, such unfaltering steadiness, as through her union, the organization of her trade? In the industrial maze the individual worker cannot interpret her own life story from her knowledge of the little patch of life which is all her hurried fingers ever touch. Only an organization can be the interpreter here. Fortunately for the student the organization can act as interpreter, both for the organized women who have been drawn into the labor movement and for those less fortunate who are struggling on single-handed. Organized and unorganized workers almost always come into pretty close relations in one way and another. Besides, the movement in its modern developments is still so young among us that there is scarcely a woman worker in the organizations who has not begun her trade life as an unorganized toiler.