The Trade Union Woman | Page 7

to have ended none too happily for the workers. It is nevertheless probable that the possibility that these rebellious ones might strike often acted as a check upon the cotton lords and their mill managers. Indeed the strikes at Lowell, Massachusetts, of 1834 and 1836 involved so large a number of operatives (up to 2,500 girls at one time), and these were so brave and daring in their public demands for the right of personal liberty and just treatment that the entire press of the country gave publicity to the matter, although the orthodox newspapers were mostly shocked at the "wicked misrepresentations" of the ringleaders in this industrial rebellion.
The 1836 strike at the Lowell mills throws a curious light upon the habits of those days. Something analogous to the "living-in" system was in force. In 1825 when the Lowell mills were first opened, the companies who owned the mills provided boarding-houses for their girl operatives, and the boarding-house keepers had in their lease to agree to charge them not more than $1.25 per week. (Their wages are said to have rarely exceeded $2.50 per week.) But in these thirteen years the cost of living had risen, and at this rate for board the boarding-house keepers could no longer make ends meet, and many were ruined. The mill-owners, seeing what desperate plight these women were in, agreed to deduct from the weekly rent a sum equivalent to twelve cents per boarder, and they also authorized the housekeepers to charge each girl twelve cents more. This raised the total income of the housekeepers to practically one dollar and fifty cents per head. As there was no talk of raising wages in proportion, this arrangement was equivalent to a cut of twelve cents per week and the girls rebelled and went out on strike to the number of twenty-five hundred. In all probability, however, it was not only the enforced lessening of their wages, but some of the many irritating conditions as well that always attend any plan of living-in, whether the employé be a mill girl, a department-store clerk or a domestic servant, that goaded the girls on, for we hear of "dictation not only as to what they shall eat and drink and wherewithal they shall be clothed, but when they shall eat, drink and sleep."
The strikers paraded through the streets of Lowell, singing,
Oh, isn't it a pity that such a pretty girl as I Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die? Oh! I cannot be a slave, For I'm so fond of liberty That I cannot be a slave.
The girls appealed to the memories, still green, of the War of Independence.
"As our fathers resisted unto blood the lordly avarice of the British ministry, so we, their daughters, never will wear the yoke which has been prepared for us."
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