Provincial experience.
The Scottish compositors are organised in the Scottish Typographical Association, which has no women members. Women, particularly in Edinburgh and Perth, and to a smaller extent in Aberdeen, have been employed to defeat the ends of the Society.[13]
[13] See p. 45.
The few attempts made to organise women in the printing trades have failed. Women have been introduced into these trades at times of trouble with the men's Unions, and are consequently not likely to form organisations of their own. Their work has been so precarious and so largely confined to the mechanical and lower grades of labour,[14] that they have had no incentive to aspire to high standards of wages or other industrial conditions. The women employed in the actual printing processes do not seem to have regarded their work as their permanent means of livelihood to the same extent as folders, for instance, have done, and have been less interested, consequently, in improving their trade conditions; and, finally, the men's Societies, for various reasons, some well-founded and some groundless, have regarded women printers as a form of cheap labour—"undercutters"—and have looked upon them as dangerous intruders.
[14] Cf. pp. 64-68.
When, however, we turn to the organisation of women in the trades dealing with printed matter, especially folding and bookbinding, we find much greater collective activity and closer co-operation both amongst themselves and with the men. Their Trade Union record is still but scanty, nevertheless, the frequent and persistent efforts of women to act jointly, without establishing a permanent organisation, form one of the characteristic features of the trade. This apparently is almost entirely due to the fact that women's labour in bookbinding, e.g., in folding, was accepted by the men, and that in all workshop matters women were the fellow-workers and not the rivals of the men. This distinction between printing and bookbinding is most marked and requires to be emphasised.