The chief forces which have tended to improve the condition of working women have been trade unions, industrial education and legislation. In certain industries, especially shoe making, cigar making, printing and collar and cuff making, trade unions have brought about higher wages, shorter hours or better conditions in certain localities. Women shoe-binders, about one thousand in number, won a strike for higher wages at Lynn as early as 1834,[19] and during the sixties and seventies the Daughters of St. Crispin protected the working women of their craft. Women members were admitted into the Cigar Makers’ International Union in 1867 and were prominent in the great strike of 1877. The International Typographical Union admitted women in 1869. Probably no organization of women workers, however, has been more effective than the Collar Laundry Union of Troy, N. Y., the predecessor of the Shirt, Waist and Laundry Workers’ International Union. During the sixties the Collar Laundry Union is said to have raised the wages of its members from $2 or $3 to $14 a week, and to have contributed $1000 in aid of Troy iron molders on strike against a reduction of wages, and $500 in aid of striking bricklayers in New York.[20]
The tailoresses of New York, moreover, were organized as early as 1825, and in 1831 sixteen hundred tailoresses and seamstresses of that city went on strike for an elaborate wage scale covering a large variety of work, and remained out for four or five weeks.[21] Considering that the population of New York in 1830 was under 200,000, this strike bears comparison with the great shirt-waist workers’ strike of 1909-1910. Two years later the journeyman tailors of Baltimore were assisting the tailoresses of that city in a “stand-out” for higher wages,[22] and in the summer of 1844 the Boston tailors aided a large and apparently successful strike of sewing women.[23] In 1851 an effort to assist some six thousand shirt sewers in New York led to the foundation of a shirt sewers’ coöperative union, which prospered for several years.[24] Many other organizations of sewing women have been formed and have conducted strikes, which have sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed.
In the textile industries, too, a long series of efforts by operatives to improve their own situation began with the picturesque strike of four hundred women and girls in Dover, N. H., in 1828, when the operatives paraded the town with flags and inscriptions and the factory agent advertised for two or three hundred “better-behaved women.”[25] The long and bitterly contested but successful strike of the Fall River weavers against a reduction of wages in 1875 was led by women who went out after the Weavers’ Union, composed of men, had voted to accept the reduction.[26]
Many other examples of effective trade-union activity among women workers might be cited. These women’s organizations, moreover, have proved powerful factors in the fight for ten-hour laws.
The industrial schools and business colleges which began to spring up in the sixties and seventies have also furnished important aid to working women. Apprenticeship for girls has always been a farce. Even in colonial days girl apprentices were rarely taught a trade of any kind, and early in the nineteenth century apprenticeship for girls, as well as for boys, came to be generally a means of securing cheap child labor. After the industrial revolution, indeed, the condition of working women, as regards skill and efficiency, was probably distinctly lower than before they became wage earners. Industrial schools, however, have been very slow of development. Business colleges, on the other hand, began during the eighties to receive large numbers of women students, and have materially aided in opening up in the trade and transportation industries remunerative occupations for women.
Some progress, moreover, has been made through legislation. Laws compelling seats for women employees have helped wherever they have been enforced. Sanitary legislation, too, has effected certain improvements, though it is doubtful whether, on the whole, such legislation has as yet more than balanced the ill results of the greater concentration of population and the greater strain of work.
In a number of states legislation has also brought an answer to the prayer of the “unknown factory girl” of 1846,
God grant, that, in the mills, a day
May be but “Ten Hours” long.[27]
But at the same time the speed and intensity of work have been greatly increased. Until about 1836, for example, a girl weaver tended, as a rule, only two looms, and if she wished to be absent for half a day, it was customary for her to ask two of her friends to tend an extra loom apiece so she should not lose her wages. By 1876 one girl tended six and sometimes eight looms. Meanwhile, too, the speed had been increased. In 1873 it was estimated that a girl spinner tended from two to three times as many spindles as she did in 1849.[28] This tendency to multiply the amount of work to be performed in a given time has continued active. Piece wages have meanwhile fallen so that the total earnings of the operatives have not been increased, but, taking into consideration the cost of living, have rather been decreased.
In the sewing trades, too, the intensity of work has been very greatly increased by the use of the sewing machine, particularly when power-driven, by the resulting minute subdivision of labor, and by the sweating system. A certain amount of division of labor was practised, it is true, long before the invention of the sewing machine. Vest making, for example, was a separate and distinct business. But it was not until after the introduction of the machine that much progress was made in dividing the work upon a single garment. The sub-contract or sweating system, too, appears to have originated at least as early as 1844,[29] but probably did not assume an important place until introduced about 1863 by contractors for army clothing. At first, moreover, the work for the sub-contractors was nearly all done in the homes. The need, however, for capital to invest in machines and later in power to run the machines, naturally tended to gather the workers into sweat shops, into small establishments, and then into factories where every possible incentive was offered to the most intense concentration of energies and to excessive speed. As in the textile factories, too, piece-rate wages have fallen automatically with productivity so that, whatever the exertion required and the number of garments turned out, remuneration has remained near the subsistence level.