the labor movement is more than an economic enterprise or a field for energetic leadership. It has a deep social and spiritual significance. It draws… - Mary Ritter Beard

But when the panic that opened in 1929 spread with devastating sweep over the nation supposedly secure, the question was whether a civilization based on profit-making industry and spoils-dividing politics, so enriching for women of the leisure class and so generous in opportunities for higher employments offered to women of the lower middle class, was not after all a transitory phase of history, notwithstanding its duration of a century or more. That "man's world," in which women had secured a foothold, had been more of a nightmare than a dreamland for millions of working women. This they knew from bitter experience.

Having made the broad change against man, the convention then presented a list of grievances to support it, patterning them on the American men's Declaration of Independence submitted to a "candid" world as well as to the British government in 1776. Though the women found it somewhat difficult to match the exact number of grievances which had been assembled in the men's Declaration of 1776, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton later confessed, they finally accomplished the feat and specified the "abuses and usurpations" of which man was guilty in gaining his object - "the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her [woman]."

Cultural sociology, the larger view, reveals in elaborate studies how, from primitive times to the modern era, societies have been organized with reference to the supreme functions of life-its continuance, care, and protection. Societies that are not so organized, it shows, are robber bands exploiting other societies until inevitable degeneration sets in.