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 cooeperative 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 Cooeperative Linen, Collar and Cuff Factory, and obtained for it the patronage of the great department store of A.T.  Stewart, in Broadway.