ABSTRACT
Wage costs mounted, but throughout the war employers found a source of relatively low cost labor in the employment of women on jobs formerly reserved for men. Before the war women workers had been little organized and worse paid. The largest union exclusively for women was the National Federation of Women Workers, founded in 1909 1 and growing to twenty thousand by 1914. There were, however, appreciable numbers of women in the General Workers Union and the textile unions which admitted women members on equal terms with men. 2
