This overwhelming sense of the waste in woman’s unused capacity came to me again during a Garment Workers’ strike, when some of the young women involved were sitting in the very chairs occupied so recently by the visitors to the Devil Baby. They brought a curious reminder of the overworked and heavily burdened mothers who had yet been able to keep the taste of life in their mouths and who could not be overborne, because their endurance was rooted in simple and instinctive human affections. During the long strike these young women endured all sorts of privations without flinching; some of them actual hunger, most of them disapprobation from their families, and all of them a loss of that money which alone could procure for them the American standards so highly prized. Through participation in the strike they all took the risk of losing their positions, and yet, facing a future of unemployment and wretchedness, they displayed a stubborn endurance which held out week after week. Perhaps because of my recent conversations with old women I received the impression that the very power of resistance in such a socialized undertaking as a strike, presents a marked contrast in both its origin and motives to the traditional type of endurance exercised by the mothers and grandmothers of the strikers or by their acquaintances among domestic women living in the same crowded tenements. When a mother cares for a sick child for days and nights without relief, the long period of solicitude and dread exhausting every particle of her vitality, her strength is constantly renewed from the vast reservoirs of maternal love and pity whenever she touches the soft flesh or hears the plaintive little voice. But such girls as the strikers represent are steadily bending their energies to loveless and mechanical labor, and are obliged to go on without this direct and personal renewal of their powers of resistance. They must be sustained as soldiers on a forced march are sustained, by their sense of comradeship in high endeavor. Naturally, some of the young working women are never able to achieve this and can keep on with the monotony of factory work only when they persuade themselves that they are getting ready, and have not yet begun their own lives, because real living for them must include a home of their own and children to “do for.”