the earliest factory employment to engage large numbers of women was the cotton industry of new england, and the mill hands of that day seem to have been entirely native-born americans. the first power loom was set up in waltham, massachusetts, in 1814, and the name of the young woman weaver who operated it was deborah skinner. in 1817 there were three power looms in fall river, massachusetts; the weavers were sallie winters, hannah borden and mary healy.
the first form of trade-union activity among wage-earning women in the united states was the local strike. the earliest of these of which there is any record was but a short-lived affair. it was typical, nevertheless, of the sudden, impulsive uprising of the unorganized everywhere. it would hardly be worth recording, except that in such hasty outbursts of indignation against the so unequal distribution of the burdens of industry lies the germ of the whole labor movement. this small strike took place in july, 1828, in the cotton mills of paterson, new jersey, among the boy and girl helpers over the apparently trifling detail of a change of the dinner hour from twelve o'clock to one. presently there were involved the carpenters, masons and machinists in a general demand for a ten-hour day. in a week the strike had collapsed, and the leaders found themselves out of work, although the point on which the young workers had gone out was conceded.
it was among the mill operatives of dover, new hampshire, that the first really important strike involving women occurred. this was in december of the same year (1828). on this occasion between three hundred and four hundred women went out. the next we hear of the dover girls is six years later, when eight hundred went out in resistance to a cut in wages. these women and girls were practically all the daughters of farmers and small professional men. for their day they were well educated, often teaching school during a part of the year. they prided themselves on being the "daughters of freemen," and while adapting themselves for the sake of earning a living to the novel conditions of factory employment, they were not made of the stuff to submit tamely to irritating rules of discipline, to petty despotism, and to what they felt was a breach of tacit agreement, involved in periodical cutting of wages. although most of them may have but dimly understood that factory employment required the protection of a permanent organization for the operatives, and looked to the temporary combination provided by the strike for the remedy of their ills, still there was more in the air, and more in the minds of some of the girl leaders than just strikes undertaken for the purpose of abolishing single definite wrongs.
that employers recognized this, and were prepared to stifle in the birth any efforts that their women employés might make towards maintaining permanent organizations, is evident by the allusions in the press of the day to the "ironclad oath" by which the employé had to agree, on entering the factory, to accept whatever wage the employer might see fit to pay, and had to promise not to join any combination "whereby the work may be impeded or the company's interest in any work injured."
also we find that no general gathering of organized workingmen could take place without the question of the inroad of women into the factories being hotly debated. all the speakers would be agreed that the poorly paid and overworked woman was bringing a very dangerous element into the labor world, but there was not the same unanimity when it came to proposing a remedy. advice that women should go back into the home was then as now the readiest cure for the evil, for even so early as this the men realized that the underpayment of women meant the underpayment of men, while the employment of women too often meant the dis-employment of men. but it was not long before the more intelligent understood that there was some great general force at work here, which was not to be dealt with nor the resultant evils cured by a resort to primitive conditions. soon there were bodies of workingmen publicly advocating the organization of women into trade unions as the only rational plan of coping with a thoroughly vicious situation.
meanwhile such a powerful organ as the boston courier went so far as to say that the girls ought to be thankful to be employed at all. if it were not for the poor labor papers of that day we should have little chance of knowing the workers' side of the story at all.
during the next few years many women's strikes are recorded among cotton operatives, but most of them, though conducted with spirit and intelligence, seemed to have ended none too happily for the workers. it is nevertheless probable that the possibility that these rebellious ones might strike often acted as a check upon the cotton lords and their mill managers. indeed the strikes at lowell, massachusetts, of 1834 and 1836 involved so large a number of operatives (up to 2,500 girls at one time), and these were so brave and daring in their public demands for the right of personal liberty and just treatment that the entire press of the country gave publicity to the matter, although the orthodox newspapers were mostly shocked at the "wicked misrepresentations" of the ringleaders in this industrial rebellion.
the 1836 strike at the lowell mills throws a curious light upon the habits of those days. something analogous to the "living-in" system was in force. in 1825 when the lowell mills were first opened, the companies who owned the mills provided boarding-houses for their girl operatives, and the boarding-house keepers had in their lease to agree to charge them not more than $1.25 per week. (their wages are said to have rarely exceeded $2.50 per week.) but in these thirteen years the cost of living had risen, and at this rate for board the boarding-house keepers could no longer make ends meet, and many were ruined. the mill-owners, seeing what desperate plight these women were in, agreed to deduct from the weekly rent a sum equivalent to twelve cents per boarder, and they also authorized the housekeepers to charge each girl twelve cents more. this raised the total income of the housekeepers to practically one dollar and fifty cents per head. as there was no talk of raising wages in proportion, this arrangement was equivalent to a cut of twelve cents per week and the girls rebelled and went out on strike to the number of twenty-five hundred. in all probability, however, it was not only the enforced lessening of their wages, but some of the many irritating conditions as well that always attend any plan of living-in, whether the employé be a mill girl, a department-store clerk or a domestic servant, that goaded the girls on, for we hear of "dictation not only as to what they shall eat and drink and wherewithal they shall be clothed, but when they shall eat, drink and sleep."
the strikers paraded through the streets of lowell, singing,
oh, isn't it a pity that such a pretty girl as i
should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
oh! i cannot be a slave,
for i'm so fond of liberty
that i cannot be a slave.
the girls appealed to the memories, still green, of the war of
independence.
"as our fathers resisted unto blood the lordly avarice of the british ministry, so we, their daughters, never will wear the yoke which has been prepared for us."
with this and many similar appeals they heartened one another. but before the close of october, 1836, the strike was broken and the girls were back at work on the employers' terms. still an echo of the struggle is heard in the following month at the annual convention of the national trades union, where the committee on female labor recommended that "they [the women operatives] should immediately adopt energetic measures, in the construction of societies to support each other."
almost every difficulty that the working-woman has to face today had its analogue then. for instance, speeding up: "the factory girls of amesbury have had a flare-up and turned out because they were told they must tend two looms in future without any advance of wages."
a pitiful account comes from eastern pennsylvania, where the cotton industry had by this time a footing. whole families would be in the mill "save only one small girl to take care of the house and provide the meals."
yet the wages of all the members were needed to supply bare wants. the hours in the mills were cruelly long. in the summer, "from five o'clock in the morning until sunset, being fourteen hours and a half, with an intermission of half an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner, leaving thirteen hours of hard labor." out of repeated and vain protests and repeated strikes, perhaps not always in vain, were developed the beginnings of the trade-union movement of pennsylvania, the men taking the lead. the women, even where admitted to membership in the unions, seem to have taken little part in the ordinary work of the union, as we only hear of them in times of stress and strike.
the women who worked in the cotton mills were massed together by the conditions of their calling, in great groups, and a sense of community of interest would thus, one would think, be more easily established. women engaged in various branches of sewing were, on the other hand, in much smaller groups, but they were far more widely distributed. one result of this was that meeting together and comparing notes was always difficult and often impossible. even within the same town, with the imperfect means of transit, with badly made and worst lit streets, one group of workers had little means of knowing whether they were receiving the same or different rates of pay for the same work, or for the same number of work hours. so much sewing has always been done in the homes of the workers that it is a matter of surprise to learn that the very first women's trade union of which we have any knowledge was formed, probably in some very loose organization, among the tailoresses of new york in the year 1825. six years later the tailoresses of new york were again clubbed together for self-protection against the inevitable consequences of reduced and inadequate wages. their secretary, mrs. lavinia waight, must have been a very new woman. she, unreasonable person, was not content with asking better wages for her trade and her sex, but she even wanted the vote for herself and her sisters. indeed, from the expression she uses, "the duties of legislation," she perhaps even desired that women should be qualified to sit in the legislature. in this same year, 1831, there was a strike of tailoresses reported to include sixteen hundred women, and they must have remained out several weeks. this was not, like so many, an unorganized strike, but was authorized and managed by the united tailoresses' society, of which we now hear for the first time. we hear of the beginning of many of these short-lived societies, but rarely is there any record of when they went under, or how.
innumerable organizations of a temporary character existed from time to time in the other large cities, baltimore and philadelphia. philadelphia has the distinguished honor of being the home of matthew carey, who was instrumental in starting the first public inquiry into the conditions of working-women, as he was also the first in america to make public protest against the insufficient pay and wretched conditions imposed upon women, who were now entering the wage-earning occupations in considerable numbers. he assisted the sewing-women of all branches to form what was practically a city federation of women's unions, the first of its kind. one committee was authorized to send to the secretary of war a protest against the disgracefully low prices paid for army clothing. matthew carey was also held responsible, rightly or wrongly, for an uprising in the book-binding establishments of new york.
all this agitation among workers and the general public was having some effect upon the ethical standards of employers, for a meeting of master book-binders of new york disowned those of their number who paid "less than $3 a week." an occasional word of support and sympathy, too, filters through the daily press. the commercial bulletin severely criticized the rates the secretary of war was paying for his army clothing orders, while the public ledger of philadelphia, speaking of a strike among the women umbrella sewers of new york, commented thus: "in this case we decidedly approve the turn-out. turning out, if peaceably conducted, is perfectly legal, and often necessary, especially among female laborers."
the next year we again find matthew carey helping the oppressed women. this time it is with a letter and money to support the ladies' association of shoe binders and corders of philadelphia, then on strike. shoe-binding was a home industry, existing in many of the towns, and open to all the abuses of home-work.
lynn, massachusetts, was then and for long after the center of the shoe trade, and the scene of some of the earliest attempts of home-workers to organize.
1840-1860
nothing in the history of women's organizations in the last century leaves a more disheartening impression than the want of continuity in the struggle, although there was never a break nor a let-up in the conditions of low wages, interminably long hours, and general poverty of existence which year in and year out were the lot of the wage-earning women in the manufacturing districts.
although based in every instance upon a common and crying need, the successive attempts of women at organization as a means of improving their industrial condition are absolutely unrelated to one another. not only so, but it is pathetic to note that the brave women leaders of women in one generation cannot even have known of the existence of their predecessors in the self-same fight. they were not always too well informed as to the conditions of their sister workers in other cities or states, where distance alone severed them. but where time made the gap, where they were separated by the distance of but one lifetime, sometimes by a much shorter period, the severance seems to have been to our way of thinking, strangely complete, and disastrously so. students had not begun to be interested in the troubles of everyday folk, so there were no records of past occurrences of the same sort that the workers could read. to hunt up in old files of newspapers allusions to former strikes and former agreements is a hard, slow task for the trained student of today; for those girls it was impossible. we have no reason to believe that the names of lavinia waight and louisa mitchell, the leaders of new york tailoresses in 1831, were known to sarah bagley or huldah stone, when in 1845 they stirred lowell. each of the leaders whose names have come down to us, and all of their unknown and unnamed followers had to take their courage in their hands, think out for themselves the meaning of intolerable conditions, and as best they could feel after the readiest remedies. to these women the very meaning of international or even interstate trade competition must have been unknown. they had every one of them to learn by bitter experience how very useless the best meant laws might be to insure just and humane treatment, if the ideal of an out-of-date, and therefore fictitious, individual personal liberty were allowed to overrule and annul the greatest good of the greatest number.
this second period was essentially a seedtime, a time of lofty ideals and of very idealist philosophy. the writers of that day saw clearly that there was much that was rotten in the state of denmark, and they wrought hard to find a way out, but they did not realize the complexity of society any more than they recognized the economic basis upon which all our social activities are built. they unquestionably placed overmuch stress upon clearing the ground in patches, literally as well as metaphorically. hence it was that so many plans for general reform produced so little definite result, except on the one hand setting before the then rising generation a higher standard of social responsibility which was destined deeply to tinge the after conduct and social activities of that generation, and on the other hand much social experimenting upon a small scale which stored up information and experience for the future. for instance the work done in trying out small co?perative experiments like that of brook farm has taught the successors of the first community builders much that could only be learned by practical experience, and not the least important of those lessons has been how not to do it.
the land question, which could have troubled no american when in earlier days he felt himself part proprietor in a new world, was beginning to be a problem to try the mettle of the keenest thinkers and the most eager reformers. and even so early as the beginning of this second period there was to be seen on the social horizon a small cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, which was to grow and grow till in a few years it was to blot out of sight all other matters of public concern. this was the movement for the abolition of slavery. till that national anachronism was at least politically and legally cleared out of the way, there was no great amount of public interest or public effort to be spared for any other subject. and yet were there any, on either side of that great question, who guessed that the passing of that even then belated institution was to give rise to and leave in its train problems quite as momentous as the abolition of slavery, and far more tremendous in their scope and range? by these problems we have been faced ever since, and continue to be faced by them today. to grant to any set of people nominal freedom, and deny them economic freedom is only half solving the difficulty. to deny economic freedom to the colored person is in the end to deny it to the white person, too.
the immediate cause which seems to have brought about the downfall of the labor organizations of the first period (1825-1840) was the panic of 1837, and the long financial depression which succeeded. we read, on the other side of the water, of the "hungry forties," and although no such period of famine and profound misery fell to the lot of the people of the united states, as great britain and ireland suffered, the influence of the depression was long and widely felt in the manufacturing districts of the eastern states. secondarily the workers were to know of its effects still later, through the invasion of their industrial field by irish immigrants, starved out by that same depression, and by the potato famine that followed it. these newcomers brought with them very un-american standards of living, and flooded the labor market with labor unskilled and therefore cheaper than the normal native supply. when the year 1845 came it is to be inferred that the worst immediate effects of the financial distress had passed, for from then on the working-women made repeated efforts to improve their condition. baffled in one direction they would turn in another.
as earlier, there is a long series of local strikes, and another long succession of short-lived local organizations. it is principally in the textile trade that we hear of both strikes and unions, but also among seamstresses and tailoresses, shoemakers and capmakers. new york, philadelphia, pittsburgh, boston, fall river and lowell all contributed their quota of industrial uprisings among the exasperated and sorely pressed workers, with a sad similarity in the stories.
in a class by themselves, however, were the female labor reform associations, which for some years did excellent work in widely separated cities. these were strictly trade unions, in spite of their somewhat vague name. they seem to have drawn their membership from the workers in the local trades. that of lowell, perhaps the best known, originated among the mill girls, but admitted other workers. lowell, as usual, was to the fore in the quality of its women leaders. the first president of the association was the brilliant and able sarah g. bagley. she and other delegates went before the massachusetts legislative committee in 1845, and gave evidence as to the conditions in the textile mills. this, the first american governmental investigation, was brought about almost solely in response to the petitions of the working-women, who had already secured thousands of signatures of factory operatives to a petition asking for a ten-hour law.
the lowell association had their correspondent to the voice of industry, and also a press committee to take note of and contradict false statements appearing in the papers concerning factory operatives. they had most modern ideas on the value of publicity, and neglected no opportunity of keeping, the workers' cause well in evidence, whether through "factory tracts," letters to the papers, speeches or personal correspondence. they boldly attacked legislators who were false to their trust, and in one case, at least, succeeded in influencing an election, helping to secure the defeat of william schouler, chairman of that legislative committee before which the women delegates had appeared, which they charged with dishonesty in withholding from the legislature all the most important facts brought forward by the trade-union witnesses.
other female labor reform associations existed about this period in manchester and dover, new hampshire. the first-named was particularly active in securing the passage of the too soon wrecked ten-hour law. in new york a similar body of women workers was organized in 1845 as the female industrial association. the sewing trades in many branches, cap-makers, straw-workers, book-folders and stitchers and lace-makers were among the trades represented. in philadelphia the tailoresses in 1850 formed an industrial union. it maintained a co?perative tailoring shop, backed by the support of such co?perative advocates as george lippard, john shedden, lucretia mott and elizabeth oakes smith. in 1853 the industrial union published a report of its activities, showing that in two years the business had paid away in wages to tailoresses more than four thousand dollars.
in the men's conventions of this time a number of women besides the redoubtable sarah bagley took an active part, being seated as delegates from their own labor reform associations. at the meeting in 1846 of the new england workingmen's association, for instance, miss huldah j. stone, of lowell, was elected recording secretary, and mrs. c.n.m. quimby was appointed one of the board of six directors. at all the meetings of the new england congress, which met several times a year, the women's point of view was well presented by the delegates from the various trades.
the national industrial congress, organized first in new york in 1845, and which met yearly for the next ten years, was supposed to stand for all the interests of the workingman and woman, but gave most of its attention to the land question and other subjects of general reform. this scattered the energies of the organizations and weakened their power as trade unions. but in the long anti-slavery agitation, which was just then rising to its height on the eve of the civil war, even the land question was forgotten, and the voice of the trade unionists, speaking for man or woman, was utterly unheeded.
imperfect as are the accounts that have come down to us, it is clear that this second generation of trade unionists were educating themselves to more competent methods of handling the industrial problem. the women workers of pittsburgh co?perated with the women of new england in trying to obtain from the manufacturers of their respective centers a promise that neither group would work their establishments longer than ten hours a day—this, to meet the ready objection so familiar in our ears still, that the competition of other mills would make the concession in one center ruinous to the manufacturers who should grant it. this was the crowning effort of the pittsburgh mill-workers to obtain improvement. strikes for higher wages had failed. strikes for a ten-hour day had failed. and now it is pitiful to write that even this interstate co?peration on the part of the girls for relief by a peaceful trade agreement failed, too, the employers falling back upon their "undoubted right" to run their factories as many hours as they pleased.
the women then appealed to the legislatures, and between 1847 and 1851, new hampshire, new jersey and pennsylvania all passed ten-hour laws.[a] but they were not passed simultaneously, which gave the employers in the particular state dealt with, the excuse that under such legislation they could not face interstate competition in their business, and since every law contained a saving clause permitting contracting out by individual employers and employés, all these beneficial acts were so much waste paper. the manufacturers expressed themselves as willing enough to stand for the shorter work-day, but absolutely declined to risk the loss of their business in competing with those rival manufacturers who might take advantage of the "saving clause."
[footnote a: in the same year, 1847, a ten-hour law was passed in new hampshire and in great britain, with, however, very different outcome, for in great britain the law was enforced, there being no complication of state and national control there.]
for nearly fifty years after this period, the right to overwork and the "right" to be overworked remained untouched by legislative interference. and yet the need for labor legislation, restricting hours, and for uniform federal legislation was as clearly evident then as it is to us today, to meet the industrial needs and to satisfy the undoubted rights of the working folk of the twentieth century.
1860-1880
the organization of labor upon a national basis really began during this period. during the ten years from 1863 to 1873 there existed more than thirty national trade unions. of these only two, the printers and the cigar-makers, admitted women to their membership. but in addition the women shoemakers had their own national union, the daughters of st. crispin. women's unions of all sorts were represented in the national labor union.
from this body women's local unions received every possible encouragement. as far as i can understand, the national labor union carried on little active work between conventions, but at these gatherings it stood for equal pay for equal work, although, as it appears to us, inconsistently and short-sightedly the delegates refused to incorporate into their resolutions the demand for the ballot as a needful weapon in the hands of women in their strivings after industrial equality. the need for industrial equality had been forced upon the apprehension of men unionists after they had themselves suffered for long years from the undercutting competition of women. that women needed to be strong politically in order that they might be strong industrially was a step beyond these good brothers.
there were also two state labor unions, composed solely of women, the
massachusetts working-women's league, and the working-women's labor
union for the state of new york.
but most of the organization work among women was still local in character. the new england girl was now practically out of the business, driven out by the still more hardly pushed immigrant. with her departure were lost to the trades she had practiced the remnants of the experience and the education several generations of workers had acquired in trade unionism and trade-union policy and methods.
still, at intervals and under sore disadvantages the poor newcomers did some fighting on their own account. although they were immigrants they were of flesh and blood like their predecessors, and they naturally rebelled against the ever-increasing amount of work that was demanded of them. the two looms, formerly complained of, had now increased to six and seven. the piece of cloth that used to be thirty yards long was now forty-two yards, though the price per piece remained the same. but strike after strike was lost. a notable exception was the strike of the fall river weavers in 1875. it was led by the women weavers, who refused to accept a ten per cent. cut in wages to which the men of the organization (for they were organized) had agreed. the women went out in strike in the bitter month of january, taking the men with them. the leaders selected three mills, and struck against those, keeping the rest of their members at work, in order to have sufficient funds for their purposes. even so, 3,500 looms and 156,000 spindles were thrown idle, and 3,125 strikers were out. the strike lasted more than two months and was successful.
progress must have seemed at the time, may even seem to us looking back, to be tantalizingly slow, but far oftener than in earlier days do the annals of trade unionism report, "the strikers won." another feature is the ever-increasing interest and sympathy shown in such industrial risings of the oppressed by a certain few among the more fortunate members of society. one strike of cap-makers (men and women), was helped to a successful issue by rich german bankers and german societies.
the account of the condition of women in the sewing trades during the sixties makes appalling reading. the wonder is not that the organizations of seamstresses during those years were few, short-lived, and attended with little success, but that among women so crushed and working at starvation wages any attempt at organization should have been possible at all. a number of circumstances combined to bring their earnings below, far below, the margin of subsistence. it was still the day of pocket-money wages, when girls living at home would take in sewing at prices which afforded them small luxuries, but which cut the remuneration of the woman who had to live by her needle to starvation point.
it was still the period of transition in the introduction of the sewing-machine. the wages earned under these circumstances were incredibly low. the true sweating system with all its dire effects upon the health of the worker, and threatening the very existence of the home, was in full force. the enormous amount of work which was given out in army contracts to supply the needs of the soldiers then on active service in the civil war, was sublet by contractors at the following rates. the price paid by the government for the making of a shirt might be eighteen cents. out of that all the worker would receive would be seven cents. and cases are cited of old women, presumably slow workers, who at these rates could earn but a dollar and a half per week. even young and strong workers were but little better off. from innumerable cases brought to light $2 and $3 a week seem to have been a common income for a woman. some even "supported" (heaven save the mark!) others out of such wretched pittances.
aurora phelps, of boston, a born leader, in 1869, gave evidence that there were then in boston eight thousand sewing-women, who did not earn over twenty-five cents a day, and that she herself had seen the time when she could not afford to pay for soap and firing to wash her own clothes. she said that she had known a girl to live for a week on a five-cent loaf of bread a day, going from shop to shop in search of the one bit of work she was able to do. for by this time division of work had come in, and the average machine operator was paid as badly as the hand needlewoman.
the circumstance that probably more than any other accentuated this terrible state of affairs was the addition to the ranks of the wage-earners of thousands of "war widows." with homes broken up and the breadwinner gone, these untrained women took up sewing as the only thing they could do, and so overstocked the labor market that a new "song of the shirt" rose from attic to basement in the poorer districts of all the larger cities.
as early as 1864 meetings were held in order to bring pressure upon the officials who had the giving out of the army contracts, to have the work given out direct, and therefore at advanced prices to the worker. only three months before his death, in january, 1865, these facts reached president lincoln, and were referred by him to the quartermaster with a request that "he should hereafter manage the supplies of contract work for the government, made up by women, so as to give them remunerative wages for labor."
during these years a number of small unions were formed, some as far west as detroit and chicago, but in almost every case the union later became a co?perative society. some of them, we know, ceased to exist after a few months. of others the forming of the organization is recorded in some labor paper, and after a while the name drops out, and nothing more is heard of it.
ten years later, in new york, there was formed a large, and for several years very active association of umbrella-sewers. this organization so impressed mrs. patterson, a visiting englishwoman, that when she returned home, she exerted herself to form unions among working-women and encouraged others to do the same. it was through her persistence that the british women's trade union league came into existence.
if the conditions in the sewing trades were at this period the very worst that it is possible to imagine, so low that organization from within was impossible, while as yet the public mind was unprepared to accept the alternative of legislative interference with either hours or wages, there were other trades wherein conditions were far more satisfactory, and in which organization had made considerable progress.
the collar laundry workers of troy, new york, had in 1866 about as bad wages as the sewing-women everywhere, but they were spared the curse of homework, as it was essentially a factory trade. the collars, cuffs and shirts were made and laundered by workers of the same factories. how early the workers organized is not known, but in the year 1866 they had a union so prosperous that they were able to give one thousand dollars from their treasury towards the assistance of the striking ironmolders of troy, and later on five hundred dollars to help the striking bricklayers of new york. they had in course of time succeeded in raising their own wages from the very low average of two dollars and three dollars per week to a scale ranging from eight dollars to fourteen dollars for different classes of work, although their hours appear to have been very long, from twelve to fourteen hours per day. but the laundresses wanted still more pay, and in may, 1869, they went on strike to the number of four hundred, but after a desperate struggle, in which they were supported by the sympathy of the townspeople, they were beaten, and their splendid union put out of existence.
miss kate mullaney, their leader, was so highly thought of that in 1868 she had been made national organizer of women for the national labor union, the first appointment of the kind of which there is any record. she tried to save what she could out of the wreck of the union by forming the co?perative linen, collar and cuff factory, and obtained for it the patronage of the great department store of a.t. stewart, in broadway.
the experiences of the women printers have been typical of the difficulties which women have had to face in what is called a man's trade of the highly organized class. the tragic alternative that is too often offered to women, just as it is offered to any race or class placed at an economic disadvantage, of being kept outside a skilled trade, through the short-sighted policy of the workers in possession, or of entering it by some back door, whether as mere undersellers or as actual strike-breakers, is illustrated in all its phases in the printing trade.
as early as 1856 the boston typographical union seriously considered discharging any member found working with female compositors. this feeling, though not always so bluntly expressed, lasted for many years. it was not singular, therefore, that under these circumstances, employers took advantage of such a situation, and whenever it suited them, employed women. these were not even non-unionists, seeing that as women they were by the men of their own trade judged ineligible for admission to the union. it is believed that women were thus the means of the printers losing many strikes. in 1864 the proprietor of one of the chicago daily papers boasted that he "placed materials in remote rooms in the city and there secretly instructed girls to set type, and kept them there till they were sufficiently proficient to enter the office, and thus enabled the employer to take a 'snap judgment' on his journeymen."
after this a wiser policy was adopted by the typographical unions. the keener-sighted among their members began not only to adopt a softer tone towards their hardly pressed sisters in toil, but made it clear that what they were really objecting to was the low wage for which women worked.
the first sign of the great change of heart was the action of the "big six," of new york, which undertook all the initial expenses of starting a women's union. on october 12, 1868, the women's typographical union no. 1 was organized, with miss augusta lewis as president. within the next three years women were admitted into the printers' unions of chicago, washington, philadelphia, pittsburgh and boston. meantime, the women's typographical no. 1 was growing in numbers and influence, and was evidently backed by the new york men's union. it obtained national recognition on june 11, 1869, by receiving a charter from the international typographical union of north america. it was represented by two delegates at the international convention held in cincinnati in 1870. one of these delegates was miss lewis herself. she was elected corresponding secretary of the international union, and served, we are told, with unusual ability and tact. it is less encouraging to have to add, that since her day, no woman has held an international office.
the two contrary views prevailing among men unionists: that of the man who said, "keep women out at all hazards—out of the union, and therefore out of the best of the trade, but out of the trade, altogether, if possible," and that of the man who resigned himself to the inevitable and contented himself with urging equal pay, and with insisting upon the women joining the union, were never more sharply contrasted than in the cigar-making trade. we actually find the international union, which after 1867 by its constitution admitted women, being openly defied in this vital matter by some of its own largest city locals. these were the years during which the trade was undergoing very radical changes. from being a home occupation, or an occupation carried on in quite small establishments, requiring very little capital, it was becoming more and more a factory trade. the levying by the government of an internal revenue tax on cigars, and the introduction of the molding machine, which could be operated by unskilled girl labor, seem to have been the two principal influences tending towards the creation of the big cigar-manufacturing plant.
the national leaders recognized the full gravity of the problem, and met it in a tolerant, rational spirit. not so many of the local bodies. baltimore and cincinnati cigar-makers were particularly bitter, and the "cincinnati cigar-makers' protective union was for a time denied affiliation with the international union on account of its attitude of absolute exclusion towards women."
in 1887 the cincinnati secretary (judging from his impatience we wonder if he was a very young man) wrote: "we first used every endeavor to get women into the union, but no one would join, therefore we passed the resolution that if they would not work with us we would work against them; but i think we have taught them a lesson that will serve them another time." this unhappy spirit cincinnati maintained for several years. the men were but building up future difficulties for themselves, as is evident from the fact that in cincinnati itself there were by 1880 several hundred women cigar-makers, and not one of them in a union.
as the civil war had so profoundly affected the sewing trades, so it was war, although not upon this continent, that added to the difficulties of american cigar-makers. in the austro-prussian war, the invading army entered bohemia and destroyed the bohemian cigar factories. the workers, who, as far as we know, were mostly women, and skilled women at that, emigrated in thousands to the united states, and landing in new york either took up their trade there or went further afield to other eastern cities. this happened just about the time that the processes of cigar-making were being subdivided and specialized, so presently a very complicated situation resulted. finding the control of their trade slipping away from them, the skilled men workers in the new york factories went out on strike, and many of the bohemian women, being also skilled, followed them, and so it came about that it was american girls upon whom the manufacturers had to depend as strike-breakers. their reliance was justified. with the aid of these girls, as well as that of men strike-breakers, the employers gained the day.
to what extent even the more intelligent trade-union leaders felt true comradeship for their women co-workers it is difficult to say. the underlying thought may often have been that safety for the man lay in his insisting upon just and even favorable conditions for women. even under conditions of nominal equality the woman was so often handicapped by her physique, by the difficulty she experienced in obtaining thorough training, and by the additional claims of her home, that the men must have felt they were likely to keep their hold on the best positions anyhow, and perhaps all the more readily with the union exacting identical standards of accomplishment from all workers, while at the same time claiming for all identical standards of wages.
there is certainly something of this idea in the plan outlined by president strasser of the international cigar-makers, and he represented the advance guard of his generation, in his annual report in the year 1879.
"we cannot drive the females out of the trade but we can restrict this daily quota of labor through factory laws. no girl under eighteen should be employed more than eight hours per day; all overwork should be prohibited; while married women should be kept out of factories at least six weeks before and six weeks after confinement."
but it is a man's way out, after all, and it is the man's way still. there is the same readiness shown today to save the woman from overwork before and after confinement, although she may be thereby at the same time deprived of the means of support, while there is no hint of any provision for either herself or the baby, not to speak of other children who may be dependent upon her. in many quarters today there is the same willingness to stand for equal pay, but very little anxiety to see that the young girl worker be as well trained as the boy, in order that the girl may be able with reason and justice to demand the same wage from an employer.
