Within a few days forty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike.
The Women's Trade Union League, under the direction of Miss Helen Marot, secretary, at once took hold of the strike.
There were two things to be done at once.

The forty thousand had to be enrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing to accept the terms of the strikers had to be "signed up." Clinton Hall, one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, and for several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the street outside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and women strikers, anxious and perspiring "bosses," and busy, active associates of the Women's Trade Union League.
The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied the League members undertook the work of picketing the shops.

Picketing, if this activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling the neighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakers are going to and from their nefarious business, and importuning them to join the strike.
Peaceful picketing is legal.

The law permits a striker to speak to the girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on the other's arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence.
Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a little of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence.
After the League took a hand there was none.

Each group of union girls who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members.
Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's Superintendent of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a millionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College, Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association of Collegiate Alumnae.