“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.