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Mary Dreier was on the commission. She was the most useful girl there ever was. She was a rich woman who lived in Brooklyn Heights. She was a very beautiful woman. Her sister was Margaret Dreier Robins, Mrs. Raymond Robins. They were both very young women at that that time. They had been touched by the idea that there was social misery and poverty. They had worked in hospitals and settlements. They'd seen that things were pretty rough and wanted to do something about it. They were the dedicated type of people. Mary Dreier had interested herself in the little handful of people who were trying to organize the women's trade unions. That was in the beginning of my work with the Consumers' League. The beginning of trade unionism among women and the shirtwaist strike that had come around 1908 or '09 had brought a lot of knowledge to all of us and had brought the first feeble efforts of cooperation among the women who worked in these factories. Up until then the Consumers' League approach had been, “Find the right thing to do out of a high-minded set of principles and then sell it to the employers or get a law to make him do it.”

All these things came about 1907, ‘08 or ‘09. These things all came bunched together. The same people were involved in them. We all became acquainted during these same operations.