They are in an overwhelming majority
women, or, to be more accurate, girls.
During all the earlier part of the year 1909 the Ladies' Waist Makers'
Union No. 25 had been showing quite undue activity and unwelcome
persistence in preaching unionism and its advantages among all and
sundry of these foreign girls, and with quite unusual success. The
managers of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company awoke one morning to a
sense of what was happening. To quote from a writer in _The Outlook_:
One of the firm appeared before the girls and told them in kind
phrases that the company was friendly to the union, and that
they desired to encourage it, and that they might better give
assistance, they would like to know what girls belonged to it. The
girls, taken in by this speech, acknowledged their membership;
only, instead of a few that the company had thought to discover
and weed out, it developed that one hundred and fifty girls were
members. That evening they were told, in the same kind way, that,
because of a lull in the trade, due to an uncertainty as to
fashions in sleeves, there was for the time being no more work.
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