[Illustration: A Factory or a Home?]
THE
TRADE UNION WOMAN
BY
ALICE HENRY
MEMBER OF OFFICE EMPLOYÉS' ASSOCIATION OF CHICAGO. No. 12755. AND
FORMERLY EDITOR OF _LIFE AND LABOR_
ILLUSTRATED
1915
TO
THE TRADE UNION WOMEN OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA
PREFACE
This brief account of trade unionism in relation to the working-women
of the United States has been written to furnish a handbook of the
subject, and to supply in convenient form answers to the questions
that are daily put to the writer and to all others who feel the
organization of women to be a vital issue.
To treat the subject exhaustively would be impossible without years of
research, but meanwhile it seemed well to furnish this short popular
account of an important movement, in order to satisfy the eager desire
for information regarding the working-woman, and her attitude towards
the modern labor movement, and towards the national industries in
regard to which she plays so essential a part. Women are doing their
share of their country's work under entirely novel conditions, and
it therefore becomes a national responsibility to see that the human
worker is not sacrificed to the material product.
Many of the difficulties and dangers surrounding the working-woman
affect the workingman also, but on the other hand, there are special
reasons, springing out of the ancestral claims which life makes upon
woman, arising also out of her domestic and social environment, and
again out of her special function as mother, why the condition of the
wage-earning woman should be the subject of separate consideration. It
is impossible to discuss intelligently wages, hours and sanitation in
reference to women workers unless these facts are borne in mind.
What makes the whole matter of overwhelming importance is the wasteful
way in which the health, the lives, and the capacity for future
motherhood of our young girls are squandered during the few brief
years they spend as human machines in our factories and stores. Youth,
joy and the possibility of future happiness lost forever, in order
that we may have cheap (or dear), waists or shoes or watches.
Further, since the young girl is the future mother of the race, it is
she who chooses the father of her children. Every condition, either
economic or social, whether of training or of environment, which in
any degree tends to limit her power of choice, or to narrow its range,
or to lower her standards of selection, works out in a national and
racial deprivation. And surely no one will deny that the degrading
industrial conditions under which such a large number of our young
girls live and work do all of these, do limit and narrow the range of
selection and do lower the standards of the working-girl in making her
marriage choice.
Give her fairer wages, shorten her hours of toil, let her have the
chance of a good time, of a happy girlhood, and an independent, normal
woman will be free to make a real choice of the best man. She will not
be tempted to passively accept any man who offers himself, just
in order to escape from a life of unbearable toil, monotony and
deprivation.
So far, women and girls, exploited themselves, have been used as an
instrument yet further to cheapen and exploit men. In this direction
things could hardly reach a lower level than they have done.
Now the national conscience has at length been touched regarding
women, and we venture to hope that in proportion as women have been
used to debase industrial standards, so in like degree as the nation
insists upon better treatment being accorded her, the results may so
react upon the whole field of industry that men too may be sharers in
the benefits.
But there is a mightier force at work, a force more significant
and more characteristic of our age than even the awakened civic
conscience, showing itself in just and humane legislation. That is the
spirit of independence expressed in many different forms, markedly in
the new desire and therefore in the new capacity for collective action
which women are discovering in themselves to a degree never known
before.
As regards wage-earning working-women, the two main channels through
which this new spirit is manifesting itself are first, their
increasing efforts after industrial organization, and next in the more
general realization by them of the need of the vote as a means of
self-expression, whether individual or collective.
Thus the trade union on the one hand, offering to the working-woman
protection in the earning of her living, links up her interests with
those of her working brother; while on the other hand, in the demand
for the vote women of all classes are recognizing common disabilities,
a common sisterhood and a common hope.
This book was almost completed when the sound of the war of the
nations broke upon our ears. It would be vain to deny that to all
idealists, of every shade of thought, the catastrophe came as a
stupefying blow. "It is unbelievable, impossible," said one. "It can't
last," added another. Reaction from that extreme of incredulity led
many to take refuge in hopeless, inactive despair and cynicism.
Even the few months that have elapsed have enabled both the
over-hopeful and the despairing to recover their lost balance, and to
take up again their little share of the immemorial task of humanity,
to struggle onward, ever onward and upward.
What had become of the movement of the workers, that they could have
permitted a war of so many nations, in which the workers of every
country involved must be the chief sufferers?
The labor movement, like every other idealist movement, contains a
sprinkling of unpopular pessimistic souls, who drive home, in season
and out of season, a few unpopular truths. One of these unwelcome
truths is to the effect that the world is not following after the
idealists half as fast as they think it is. Reformers of every kind
make an amount of noise in the world these days out of all proportion
to their numbers. They deceive themselves, and to a certain extent
they deceive others. The wish to see their splendid visions a reality
leads to the belief that they are already on the point of being
victors over the hard-to-move and well-intrenched powers that be. As
to the quality of his thinking and the soundness of his reasoning, the
idealist is ahead of the world all the time, and just as surely the
world pays him the compliment of following in his trail. But only in
its own time and at its own good pleasure. It is in quantity that he
is short. There is never enough of him to do all the tasks, to be
in every place at once. Rarely has he converts enough to assure a
majority of votes or voices on his side.
So the supreme crises of the world come, and he has for the time to
step aside; to be a mere onlooker; to wait in awe-struck patience
until the pessimist beholds the realization of his worst fears; until
the optimist can take heart again, and reviving his crushed and
withered hopes once more set their fulfillment forward in the future.
In spite of all, the idealist is ever justified. He is justified today
in Europe no less than in America; justified by the ruin and waste
that have come in the train of following outworn political creeds, and
yielding to animosities inherited from past centuries; justified by
the disastrous results of unchecked national economic competition,
when the age of international coöperation is already upon us;
justified by the utter contempt shown by masculine rulers and
statesmen for the constructive and the fostering side of life,
typified and embodied in the woman half of society.
No! our ideals are not changed, nor are they in aught belittled
by what has occurred. It is for us to cherish and guard them more
faithfully, to serve them more devotedly than ever. Even if we must
from now on walk softly all the days of our life, and prepare to
accept unresentfully disappointment and heart-sickening delay, we can
still draw comfort from this:
Hope thou not much, and fear thou not at all.
Meanwhile we sit, as it were, facing a vast stage, in front of us a
dropped curtain. From behind that veil there reaches our strained ears
now and then a cry of agony unspeakable, and again a faint whisper of
hope.
But until that curtain is raised, after the hand of the war-fiend is
stayed; until we can again communicate, each with the other as human
beings and not as untamed, primitive savages, we can know in detail
little that has happened, and foresee nothing that may hereafter
happen.
That some of America's industrial and social problems will be affected
radically by the results of the European war goes without saying; how,
and in what degree, it is impossible to foretell.
Meanwhile our work is here, and we have to pursue it. Whatever
will strengthen the labor movement, or the woman movement, goes to
strengthen the world forces of peace. Let us hold fast to that. And
conversely, whatever economic or ethical changes will help to insure a
permanent basis for world peace will grant to both the labor movement
and the woman movement enlarged opportunity to come into their own.
ALICE HENRY,
Chicago, July, 1915.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. EARLY TRADE UNIONS AMONG WOMEN
II. WOMEN IN THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR
III. THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN ORGANIZATION
IV. THE WOMEN'S TRADE UNION LEAGUE
V. THE HUGE STRIKES
VI. THE IMMIGRANT WOMAN AND ORGANIZATION.
VII. THE WOMAN ORGANIZER
VIII. THE TRADE UNION IN OTHER FIELDS
IX. WOMEN AND THE VOCATIONS
X. WOMAN AND VOCATIONAL TRAINING
XI. THE WORKING WOMAN AND MARRIAGE
XII. THE WORKING WOMAN AND THE VOTE
XIII. TRADE-UNION IDEALS AND POLICIES
APPENDIX I AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE HOTEL AND RESTAURANT EMPLOYÉS
INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCE AFFILIATED WITH THE AMERICAN AND CHICAGO
FEDERATION OF LABOR
APPENDIX II. THE HART, SCHAFFNER AND MARX LABOR AGREEMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A Factory or a Home?
In a Basement Sweatshop
Girl Gas Blowers
A Bindery
Interior of One of the Largest and Best Equipped Waist and Cloak
Factories in New York City
A Contrast
INTRODUCTION
It was a revolutionary change in our ways of thinking when the idea of
development, social as well as physical, really took hold of mankind.
But our minds are curiously stiff and slow to move, and we still
mostly think of development as a process that has taken place, and
that is going to take place--in the future. And that change is the
very stuff of which life consists (not that change is taking place
at this moment, but that this moment is change), that means another
revolution in the world of thought, and it gives to life a fresh
meaning. No one has, as it appears to me, placed such emphasis upon
this as has Henri Bergson. It is not that he emphasizes the mere fact
of the evolution of society and of all human relations. That, he, and
we, may well take for granted. It has surely been amply demonstrated
and illustrated by writers as widely separated in their interpretation
of social evolution as Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. But with the
further thought in mind that, alike in the lowliest physical organism
or in the most complex social organism, life itself is change, we view
every problem of life from another angle. To see life steadily and
see it whole is one stage. Bergson bids us see life on the move, ever
changing, growing, evolving, a creation new every moment.
For students of society this means that we are to aim at the
understanding of social processes, rather than stop short with the
consideration of facts; facts are to be studied because they go
to make up processes. We are not to stop short with the study of
conditions, but go on to find out what tendencies certain conditions
encourage. All social and industrial questions therefore are to be
interpreted in their dynamic rather than in their static aspects.
In the Labor Museum of Hull House is shown a very ingenious diagram,
representing the development on the mechanical side of the process of
spinning, one of the oldest of the arts. It consists of a strip of
cardboard, about a yard long, marked off into centuries and decades.
From 2000 B.C. up to A.D. 1500 the hand spindle was the only
instrument used. From 1500 up to the middle of the eighteenth century
the spinning-wheel was used as well. From the middle of the eighteenth
century up till today has been the period of the application of steam
to spinning machinery.
The profound symbolism expressed by the little chart goes beyond the
interesting fact in the history of applied physics and mechanics which
it tells, on to the tremendous changes which it sums up. The textile
industries were primarily women's work, and with the mechanical
changes in this group of primitive industries were inextricably bound
up changes far more momentous in the social environment and the
individual development of the worker.
Yet, if a profoundly impressive story, it is also a simple and plain
one. It is so easy to understand because we have the help of history
to interpret it to us, a help that fails us completely when, instead
of being able to look from a distance and see events in their due
proportions and in their right order, we are driven to extract as best
we can a meaning from occurrences that happen and conditions that lie
before our very eyes. That we cannot see the wood for the trees was
never more painfully true than when we first try to tell a clear story
amid the clatter and din of our industrial life. Past history is
of little assistance in interpreting the social and industrial
development, in which we ourselves are atoms. Much information is to
be obtained, though piecemeal and with difficulty, but especially
as relates to women, it has not yet been classified and ordered and
placed ready to hand.
The industrial group activities of women are the inevitable, though
belated result of the entry of women into the modern industrial
system, and are called forth by the new demands which life is making
upon women's faculties. We cannot stop short here, and consider these
activities mainly in regard to what has led up to them, nor yet as to
what is their extent and effect today. Far more important is it to try
to discover what are the tendencies, which they as yet faintly and
imperfectly, often confusedly, express.
In the labor movement of this country woman has played and is playing
an important part. But in its completeness no one knows the story,
and those who know sections of it most intimately are too busy
living their own parts in that story, to pause long enough to be its
chroniclers. For to be part of a movement is more absorbing than to
write about it. Whom then shall we ask? To whom shall we turn for even
an imperfect knowledge of the story, at once noble and sordid, tragic
and commonplace, of woman's side of the labor movement? To whom, you
would say, but to the worker herself? And where does the worker speak
with such clearness, with such unfaltering steadiness, as through her
union, the organization of her trade?
In the industrial maze the individual worker cannot interpret her own
life story from her knowledge of the little patch of life which is
all her hurried fingers ever touch. Only an organization can be an
interpreter here. Fortunately for the student, the organization does
act as interpreter, both for the organized women who have been drawn
into the labor movement and for those less fortunate who are still
struggling on single-handed and alone. The organized workers in one
way or another come into fairly close relations with their unorganized
sisters. Besides, the movement in its modern form is still so young
that there is scarcely a woman worker in the unions who did not begin
her trade life as an unorganized toiler.
Speaking broadly, the points upon which the trade-union movement
concentrates are the raising of wages, the shortening of hours,
the diminution of seasonal work, the abolition or regulation of
piece-work, with its resultant speeding up, the maintaining of
sanitary conditions, and the guarding of unsafe machinery, the
enforcement of laws against child-labor, the abolition of taxes for
power and working materials such as thread and needles, and of unfair
fines for petty or unproved offenses--and with these, the recognition
of the union to insure the obtaining and the keeping of all the rest.
A single case taken from a non-union trade (a textile trade, too)
must serve to suggest the reasons that make organization a necessity.
Twenty-one years ago in the bag and hemp factories of St. Louis, girl
experts turned out 460 yards of material in a twelve-hour day, the pay
being 24 cents per bolt (of from 60 to 66 yards). These girls earned
$1.84 per day (on the bolt of from 60 to 66 yards). Four years ago a
girl could not hold her job under 1,000 yards in a ten-hour day. "The
fastest possible worker can turn out only 1,200 yards, and the price
has dropped to 15 cents per hundred yards. The old rate of 24 cents
per bolt used to net $1.80 to a very quick worker. The new rate to one
equally competent is but $1.50. Workers have to fill a shuttle every
minute and a half or two minutes. This necessitates the strain of
constant vigilance, as the breaking of the thread causes unevenness,
and for this operators are laid off for two or three days. The
operators are at such a tension that they not only stand all day, but
may not even bend their knees. The air is thick with lint, which the
workers inhale. The throat and eyes are terribly affected, and it is
necessary to work with the head bound up, and to comb the lint from
the eyebrows. The proprietors have to retain a physician to attend the
workers every morning, and medicine is supplied free, as an accepted
need for everyone so engaged. One year is spent in learning the trade,
and the girls last at it only from three to four years afterwards.
Some of them enter marriage, but many of them are thrown on the human
waste-heap. One company employs nearly 1,000 women, so that a large
number are affected by these vile and inhuman conditions. The girls in
the trade are mostly Slovaks, Poles and Bohemians, who have not long
been in this country. In their inexperience they count $1.50 as good
wages, although gained at ever so great a physical cost."
These are intolerable conditions, and that tens of thousands are
enduring similar hardships in the course of earning a living and
contributing their share towards the commercial output of the country
only aggravates the cruelty and the injustice to the helpless and
defrauded girls. It is not an individual problem merely. It is a
national responsibility shared by every citizen to see that such
cruelty and such injustice shall cease. No system of commercial
production can be permanently maintained which ignores the primitive
rights of the human workers to such returns for labor as shall provide
decent food, clothing, shelter, education and recreation for the
worker and for those dependent upon him or her, as well as steadiness
of employment, and the guarantee of such working conditions as shall
not be prejudicial to health.
If the community is not to be moved either by pity or by a sense of
justice then perhaps it will awake to a realization of the national
danger involved when so many of the workers, and especially when
so many of the girls and women work under circumstances ruinous to
health, and affording, besides, small chance for all-round normal
development on either the individual or the social side. These are
evils whose results do not die out with the generation primarily
involved, but must as well through inheritance as through environment
injure the children of the workers, and their offspring yet unborn.
The passing away from the individual worker of personal control
over the raw material and the instruments of production, which has
accompanied the advent of the factory system, means that some degree
of control corresponding to that formerly possessed by the individual
should be assured to the group of workers in the factory or the trade.
Such control is assured through the collective power of the workers,
acting in coöperation in their trade union. One reason why the woman
worker is in so many respects worse off than the man is because she
has so far enjoyed so little of the protection of the trade union in
her work. Why she has not had it, and why more and more she desires
it, is what I will try to show in the following pages.
There is one criticism, to which almost every writer dealing with a
present-day topic, lies exposed. That is, why certain aspects of the
subject, or certain closely related questions, have either not been
dealt with at all, or touched on only lightly. For instance, the
subject of the organization of wage-earning women is indeed bound up
with the industrial history of the United States, with the legal and
social position of women, with the handicaps under which the colored
races suffer, and with the entire labor problem.
In answer I can but plead that there had to be some limits. These
are all matters which have been treated by many others, and I
intentionally confined myself to a section of the field not hitherto
covered.
Though the greatest care has been taken to avoid errors, some mistakes
have doubtless crept in and the author would be glad to have these
pointed out. I acknowledge gratefully what I owe to others, whether
that help has come to me through books and periodical literature or
through personal information from those possessing special expert
knowledge. No one can ever begin to repay such a debt, but such thanks
as are possible, I offer here.
The brief historical sketch of the early trade unions is based almost
entirely upon the "History of Women in Trade Unions," Volume X, of the
"Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United
States," issued by the Commissioner of Labor, then Mr. Charles P.
Neill. Dr. John B. Andrews deals with the earlier period, and he shows
how persistent have been the efforts of working-women to benefit
themselves through collective action.
"Organization," he writes, "among working-women, contrary to the
general impression, is not new. Women, from the beginning of the
trade-union movement in this country have occupied an important place
in the ranks of organized labor. For eighty years and over, women
wage-earners in America have formed trade unions and gone on strike
for shorter hours, better pay, and improved conditions. The American
labor movement had its real beginning about the year 1825. In that
year the tailoresses of New York formed a union."
The history of women in trade unions he divides into four periods: (1)
the beginnings of organization, extending from 1825 to about 1840; (2)
the development of associations interested in labor reform, including
the beginnings of legislative activity, 1840 to 1860; (3) the
sustained development of pure trade unions, and the rise of the
struggle over the suffrage, 1860 to 1880; and (4) the impress and
educative influence of the Knights of Labor, 1881 to date, and the
present development under the predominant leadership of the American
Federation of Labor.
THE TRADE UNION WOMAN
I
EARLY TRADE UNIONS AMONG WOMEN 1825-1840
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 coöperative 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 coöperative tailoring
shop, backed by the support of such coöperative 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 coöperated 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 coöperation 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.