Answer: The area, and everything in it, became soaked with rain coming down hard.
Explanation:
From the excerpt and the historical context, one can understand that the league of women is constituted by wome from all sorts of different backgrounds, some are "ladies", meaning married women, like Mary Dreier, while others are working class women, like Leonora O'Reilly. This means that <em>the support of weathy league women contributed to the succesful outcome of the female workers' strike. </em>The first option is the right answer.
