Bildungsromans; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
“I suppose all of us want what these women have,” she answered. “We do
not really want to fight and to stand on our own feet, not when we know
the world. What a woman really wants is a man,” she added shortly.
Sam began talking and told her of a plan that had come into his mind.
He had remembered how Jack Prince and Morrison used to talk about the
appeal of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by
mail order houses.
“We will have a mail order strike here,” he said and went on to lay
before her the details of his plan. He proposed that she, Frank, and
some others of the striking girls, should go about town getting the
names and the mail addresses of the girl strikebreakers.
“Get also the names of the keepers of the boarding houses at which
these girls live and the names of the men and women who live in the
same houses,” he suggested. “Then you get the striking girls and women
together and have them tell me their stories. We will write letters day
after day to the girl strikebreakers, to the women who keep the boarding
houses, and to the people who live in the houses and sit at table with
them. We won’t call names. We will tell the story of what being beaten
in this fight means to the women in your union, tell it simply and
truthfully as you told it to me this morning.”
“It will cost such a lot,” said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.
Sam took a roll of bills from his pocket and showed it to her.
“I will pay,” he said.
“Why?” she asked, looking at him sharply.
“Because I am a man wanting work just as you want work,” he replied, and
then went on hurriedly, “It is a long story. I am a rich man wandering
about the world seeking Truth. I will not want that known. Take me for
granted. You won’t be sorry.”
Within an hour he had engaged a large room, paying a month’s rent in
advance, and into the room chairs and table and typewriters had
been brought. He put an advertisement in the evening paper for girl
stenographers, and a printer, hurried by a promise of extra pay, ran out
for him several thousand letter heads across the top of which in bold,
black type ran the words, “The Girl Strikers.”
That night Sam held, in the room he had engaged, a meeting of the girl
strikers, explaining to them his plan and offering to pay all expenses
of the fight he proposed to make for them. They clapped their hands and
shouted approvingly, and Sam began laying out his campaign.
One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning
and evening.
“I will have other help for you there,” he said. “Before you go home
to-night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am
having printed for you.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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