The Washington herald., 1914-04-10
Who's Who Among
Women
Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr. Leader in
the Feminist Movement.
by MARY q. aIuLLETT.
ecopr4rht. lslS)

Ccnpy71ght. isl&l
AZ recent mass meeting, six leaders
ir the woman movement spoke. Each took
as her theme some right" she thought
her sex ought 10 have.
There was the Right Of The Mother 70
Her Own Profession" the Right of q
Woman TO Keep Her Own Name" and
ether rights" more or less novel.
Among these six speakers was a slender.
dark-haired woman, in whose large dark
eyes there was an expression Of remark
able intensity and earnestness. Her topic
was the Right to Work"
Just why any woman should waste
breath demanding the right TO work will
oe n puzzle TO the millions CT her sisters,
who have al they want OF tha: particular
privilege.
and why Rheta ChiIde Dorr, Of all
women, should do it would have amazed
those who know her, II sne had not added
that the right she was contending for
was the right to work "for equal pay
with men"
That put a different face on the matter
Rheta Dorr has warked alongside of both
men and women, and she knows what
she is talking about. She has supported
herself for years. She has brought up
and educated her son. She didn't have
20 ask for the right to work. She had
But some Of the work she has done
has not been from necessity. She did
Il from choice. She wanted to know for
herself the conditions under which other
women and-girls work. She wanted to
tell the world what those conditions
were. She wanted to lecture about them
and to write about them.
Plenty of other people have had the
same desire. For the past ten years
hot hnl5
has been writing about labor conditions.
Everybody that could get a place on a
platform has been talking about them.
They have read reports. They visited
shops and factories. They listened 10
what other people had 10 say. Then
they took their pens in hand and
wrote Iearnedly about what they knew
nothing about, so far as their own eX-
perience went.
That isn't Rheta Childe DORIS way.
She put on her simplest clothes and went
job hunting herself. She got one in
corset factory. Nobody knew that she
was after anything except her weekly
wages. After she had studied the corset
factory all she wanted to, she got job
in a box factory. When the Christmas
rush came, she went into a department
store and sold handkerchiefs.
So she went on from one kind of work
to another. She spent weeks and
months in this way, filling her note
books at night with the facts she had
found out during the day. At the end
of that time she wrote a series of the
most important articles that have ever
appeared on the conditions under which
women work.
Next she undertook to find out just
what the club women of this country
were doing. She believed that the time
had gone by to make a joke of the
woman's club. She made an investiga-
tion covering the entire country. The
result was her book, What Eight Mil
lion Women Want"
That book was a revelation:Neye to
the club women themselves. 1t show
ed that an astonishing number of vital
and important movement had origi-
mated in the women's clubs and had been
nursed to success by them.
Then she went abroad and studied
the Industrial conditions of women in
Europe. She went to Finland after
women because full citizens there and
She spent several months in those