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Henry, Alice, 1857-1943

"The Trade Union Woman"

Here is it that aristocratic and undemocratic limitations
hamper us the longest. Here we are still far behind the fine, free and
admirable planing out of differences, and rounding off of angles and
making over of characters that is part of the democracy of the street
and the marketplace. Here between strangers is the closest physical
nearness. Here the common need to live and earn a living supplies a
mutual education through the very acts of serving and being served,
of buying and selling and using the common thoroughfares and means
of transportation. And that basic democracy of the street and the
marketplace is all between strangers.
It is the very fact that this blending of peoples, this rubbing off of
racial angles, takes place in and through the commonplace surroundings
of everyday life, that blinds most to the greatness and the wonder
of the transformation and to the pressing importance of the right
adjustments being made, and made early. But to the observer whose eyes
are not holden, there comes a sense that he is every day witnessing a
warfare of Titans, that in these prosaic American communities it is
world powers that are in clash and in conflict while in preparation
for the harmony to be.


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