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.