fication of aismissal are not required. As a home trade too, mil- 
linery is unorganized. No correction of the evils attendant upon 
an unregulated trade has been successfully attempted through 
unionization. More than in other needle trades its workers are 
young axd immature. It therefore lacks ballast and reflects in- 
stability of purpose on the part of employees. 
  And yet millinery involves to-day more than 86,000 women in 
the United States and affords opportunity at the top for as high 
if not higher wage than any other trade for women. A trade 
than which none seems more attractive because of its artistic re- 
quirements and its handicraft stage, its demand for creative skill 
and its high remuneration for the best work, it is a trade against 
which the young worker must be warned, and which only those 
of exceptional skill, persistency, or economic resources should be 
permitted to enter. 
  This complexity explains this attempt to discover, portray 
and interpret actual conditions of trade and worker. Demanded 
in the beginning by the board of directors of the Boston Trade 
School for Girls in order that training for millinery might be 
given more intelligently, and children guided more carefully, it 
had financial support from that institution in the year 1909- 
1910, and the advice of Miss Florence M. Marshall, the director 
of the school at that time. In the fall of 1910, Miss Lorinda 
Perry, a graduate of the University of Illinois, 1909, securing a 
Master's degree in 1910, and Miss Elizabeth Riedell, a graduate 
of Vassar College, 1904, were awarded Fellowships in the Depart- 
ment of Research of the Women's Educational and Industrial 
Union and selected for investigation the subject of Milinery as a 
Trade for Women. During the year employers and employees 
were interviewed, and the results secured from the former were 
analyzed and interpreted by Miss Perry, from the latter by Miss 
Riedell. 
  In the years 1911 to 1913, Miss Perry held a Fellowship at Bryn 
Mawr College and under the direction of Dr. Marion Parris 
Smith, Associate Professor of Economics, continued the study of 
the millinery trade in Philadelphia. Miss Perry's discussion of 
the trade in the two cities was accepted by Bryn Mawr College in 
partial fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in May, 
 
 
viii 
 
 
PREPACE