“A year ago last January, Typographical Union No. 6 passed a resolution admitting union girls in offices under the control of No. 6.  Since that time we have never obtained a situation that we could not have obtained if we had never heard of a union.  We refuse to take the men’s situations when they are on strike, and when there is no strike, if we ask for work in union offices we are told by union foremen ‘that there are no conveniences for us.’  We are ostracized in many offices because we are members of the union; and though the principle is right, the disadvantages are so many that we cannot much longer hold together....  No. 1 is indebted to No. 6 for great assistance, but as long as we are refused work because of sex we are at the mercy of our employers, and I can see no way out of our difficulties.”

In 1878 the International enacted a law that no further charter be granted to women’s unions, although it was not supposed to take effect against any already in existence.  Women’s Typographical No. 1, already on the downward grade, on this dissolved.  But not till 1883 did the women printers in New York begin to join the men’s union, and there have been a few women members in it ever since.  But how few in proportion may be judged from the figures on September 30, 1911.  Total membership 6,969, of whom 192 were women.  I believe this to be typical of the position of the woman compositor in other cities.]

I have given large space to this incident, because it is the only one of the kind I have come across in Miss Anthony’s long career.  Page after page of the Revolution is full of long reports of workingmen’s conventions which she or Mrs. Stanton attended.[A] At these they were either received as delegates or heard as speakers, advocating the cause of labor and showing how closely the success of that cause was bound up with juster treatment towards the working-woman.  Many indeed must have been the labor men, who gained a broader outlook upon their own problems and difficulties through listening to such unwearied champions of their all but voiceless sex.

[Footnote A:  Mrs. Stanton’s first speech before the New York legislature, made in 1854, was a demand that married working-women should have the right to collect their own wages.  She and the workers with her succeeded in having the law amended.  Up till then a married woman might wash all day at the washtub, and at night the law required that her employer should, upon demand, hand over her hard-earned money to her husband, however dissolute he might be.]

To the more conservative among the workingmen the uncompromising views of these women’s advocates must have been very upsetting sometimes, and always very unconventional.  We find that in a workingmen’s assembly in Albany, New York, when one radical delegate moved to insert the words “and working-women” into the first article of the Constitution, he felt bound to explain to his fellow-delegates that it was not his intention to offer anything that would reflect discredit upon the body.  He simply wanted the females to have the benefit of their trades and he thought by denying them this right a great injustice was done to them.  The speaker who followed opposed the discussion of the question.  “Let the women organize for themselves.”  The radicals, however, rose to the occasion.