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