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 in the morning until sunset, being fourteen hours and a half, with an intermission of half an hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner, leaving thirteen hours of hard labor.”  Out of repeated and vain protests and repeated strikes, perhaps not always in vain, were developed the beginnings of the trade-union movement of Pennsylvania, the men taking the lead.  The women, even where admitted to membership in the unions, seem to have taken little part in the ordinary work of the union, as we only hear of them in times of stress and strike.

The women who worked in the cotton mills were massed together by the conditions of their calling, in great groups, and a sense of community of interest would thus, one would think, be more easily established.  Women engaged in various branches of sewing were, on the other hand, in much smaller groups, but they were far more widely distributed.  One result of this was that meeting together and comparing notes was always difficult and often impossible.  Even within the same town, with the imperfect means of transit, with badly made and worst lit streets, one group of workers had little means of knowing whether they were receiving the same or different rates of pay for the same work, or for the same number of work hours.  So much sewing has always been done in the homes of the workers that it is a matter of surprise to learn that the very first women’s trade union of which we have any knowledge was formed, probably in some very loose organization, among the tailoresses of New York in the year 1825.  Six years later the tailoresses of New York were again clubbed together for self-protection against the inevitable consequences of reduced and inadequate wages.  Their secretary, Mrs. Lavinia Waight, must have been a very new woman.  She, unreasonable person, was not content with asking