mill. In spite of the fact that they were constantly obliged to rise

at four or five in the morning, in order to reach the factory gates at six o'clock, and on returning home were obliged first to help to do the housework and prepare the evening meal for the rest of the family, these girls were all determined to continue their education, and they regularly attended the Oldham night schools. At the time when we first met Annie, Nellie and Kitty, the two eldest of the sisters, had both worked their way out of the cotton mill. Nellie had become a shop assistant, and had soon proved herself so able that she had been put in charge of two of her employer's shops, whilst Kitty had passed the necessary examinations and had obtained a post as an elementary school teacher, and Jennie, though still in the mill, was studying with the same object. Jessie, who was but sixteen, was learning typewriting and shorthand.

Annie, who was then twenty-five, was unlike her sisters in many ways. She frequently said that she was not so "clever" as her sisters, but when any decisive step was to be taken or any question of principle to be decided, it was always Annie who took the lead. There is not much that is beautiful in a small Lancashire manufacturing town, but what little there was, Annie Kenney contrived to make the most of. She was a regular attendant at the Church, and delighted in the beauty of the music; the Whitsuntide processions, in which she walked with the other Sunday-school children all in their white dresses, being vivid memories with her still. She early commenced to carry on a literary campaign amongst her work-mates and, having come across a copy of the penny weekly paper "The Clarion," in which Robert Blatchford was publishing a series of articles on his "favourite books," contrived to procure some of the works which were there mentioned, and introduced them to her companions.

On the few holidays which fall to the lot of the cotton worker, or when the mills were stopped owing to bad trade, Annie Kenney and her sisters and some of their favourite work-mates would put together a simple luncheon and set off roaming for miles across the moors. The grass and the trees might be blackened with the smoke of the factories, the sight of whose tall chimneys the girls could never leave behind, but, blighted as it was, this was the only country that Annie had ever known, and it was all beautiful to her. When they had walked till they were tired, the girls would lie down on the grass, and then they would read to each other in turn, and Annie would talk to them about the flowers and the sky.

Just as she was intensely alive to all that was beautiful, so too Annie Kenney realised keenly the ugly and sordid side of life. When speaking of her early days to a conference of women in Germany, in 1908, she said:

I grew up in the midst of women and girls in the works, and I saw the hard lives of the women and children about me. I noticed the great difference made in the treatment of men and women in the factory, differences in conditions, differences in wages and differences in status. I realised this difference not in the factory alone but in the home. I saw men, women, boys and girls, all working hard during the day in the same hot, stifling factories. Then when work was over I noticed that it was the mothers who hurried home, who fetched the children that had been put out to nurse, prepared the tea for the husband, did the cleaning, baking, washing, sewing and nursing. I noticed that when the husband came home, his day's work was over; he took his tea and then went to join his friends in the club or in the public house, or on the cricket or foot-ball field, and I used to ask myself why this was so. Why was the mother the drudge of the family, and not the father's companion and equal?

From the first we found Annie ready with excellent ideas for spreading our propaganda. In Lancashire every little town and village has its "Wakes Week." The "Wakes" being a sort of Fair, at which there are "merry-go-rounds," "cocoanut shies," and numberless booths and stalls where human and animal monstrosities are shown and all kinds of things are sold. In every separate town or village the "Wakes" is held at a different date, so that within a radius of a few miles one or other of these fairs is going on all through the summer and autumn. Annie told us that on the Sunday before the "Wakes" almost all the inhabitants of the place go down to the "Wakes-ground" and walk amongst the booths, and that Salvation Army and other preachers, temperance orators, the vendors of quack medicines and others seize this opportunity of addressing the crowds. She suggested that we should follow their example. We readily agreed, and all through that summer and autumn we held these meetings, going from Stalybridge to Royton, Mosely, Oldham, Lees where Annie lived, and to a dozen other towns.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] When the School Boards were abolished, Mrs. Pankhurst became the Trades Council Representative on the Education Committee.

[2] In Booth's classic book, _Life and Labour in London_, the result of a canvass of the then 186,982 women occupiers, shows that of that number 94,940 were wage earners who were divided into the following categories:--

Charwomen, office-keepers, laundresses 30,334 Dressmakers and milliners 14,361 Shirt and blouse-makers, seamstresses 6,525 Waitresses, matrons, etc 5,595 Tailoresses 4,443 Lodging and coffee-house keepers 4,226 Medical women, nurses, midwives 3,971 Teachers 2,198

On the basis of Booth's figures, Miss Clara Collett, the Government's Senior Inspector for Women's Industries, writing in the _Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_ for September, 1908, estimated that the women occupiers of London might be divided as follows:--

Occupied women (who work out) 51 per cent. Housewives (without servants) 38 " Housewives (with one servant) 5 " Housewives (with two or more servants) 6 "

[3] Even a first place is useless if the Government and the Speaker are hostile.