The Italians keep their daughters close, and marry them off very early. In the 1909 strike of the New York shirt-waist makers, all the nationalities responded to the union ideal save the Italian girls. More than that, hundreds of them slipped into the strikers' jobs. Mystified by the strange, stolid resistance of the brown-eyed girls to all entreaties, the strike-leaders visited their homes. There they found that the Italian woman, instead of being a free moral agent, is absolutely subject to the will of her nearest male relative, and the man would not take the wife, sister, or daughter out of the shop unless he was well paid for it. East European peasants are brutal in the assertion of marital rights, so when the poor immigrant woman, noticing the lot of the American wife, comes to the point of rebelling against the overlarge family, she runs the risk of rough treatment. Some nationalities are almost Oriental in the way they seclude their women. It is significant that the Ruthenian, Polish, Portuguese, South Italian, and Greek female employees who have lived here from five to ten years are further behind their men-folk in speaking English than the women from northern and western Europe. That the woman's movement in America is to meet with hard sledding cannot be doubted. The yielding conservatism of our East has been buttressed of late by the incorporation of millions of immigrants bred in the coarse peasant philosophy of sex. It may be long before women win in the East the recognition they have won in the more American parts of the country. Recently the school board of New York, on motion of Commissioner Abraham Stern, refused even to allow discussion of a woman teacher's petition for a year's leave of absence without pay in order to have a baby. This moved "_The Independent_," which has been a Mark Tapley on the immigration question, to remark: "The wave of recent immigration has brought with it the Oriental conception of woman's status. A man whose religion requires him every morning to thank God that he was not born a woman is likely to treat women so that they will wish they had been born men. We must not shut our eyes to the fact that in the future the Christian conception of womanhood is not to be maintained in this country without a struggle." THE SOCIAL EVIL From a half to three-fifths of the immigration of the period 1868-88 was male, but the new immigration shows a male preponderance of about three to one. Among those from Austria there are 155 males to 100 females. Among those from Hungary the proportion is 161 to 100; from Italy, 191; from Asiatic Turkey, 210; from European Turkey, 769; from the Balkan States, 1107; from Greece, 1192. A quarter of the Polish husbands in industry, a third of the married Slovak and Italian men, nearly half of the Magyars and Russians, three-fifths of the Croatians, three-fourths of the Greeks and Rumanians, and nine-tenths of the Bulgarians, have left their wives in the old country!