It was the women
workers of Massachusetts who first forced the legislature to
investigate labor conditions and who aroused public sentiment to
a pitch that finally compelled the enactment of laws for the
bettering of their conditions. When the mill owners in
Massachusetts demanded in 1846 that their weavers tend four looms
instead of three, the women promptly resolved that "we will not
tend a fourth loom unless we receive the same pay per piece as on
three .... This we most solemnly pledge ourselves to obtain."
In New York, in 1845, the Female Industry Association was
organized at a large meeting held in the court house. It included
"tailoresses, plain and coarse sewing, shirt makers, book-folders
and stickers, capmakers, straw-workers, dressmakers, crimpers,
fringe and lacemakers," and other trades open to women "who were
like oppressed." The New York Herald reported "about 700 females
generally of the most interesting age and appearance" in
attendance. The president of the meeting unfolded a pitiable
condition of affairs. She mentioned several employers by name who
paid only from ten to eighteen cents a day, and she stated that,
after acquiring skill in some of the trades and by working twelve
to fourteen hours a day, a woman might earn twenty-five cents a
day! "How is it possible," she exclaimed, "that at such an income
we can support ourselves decently and honestly?"
So we come to the fifties, when the rapid rise in the cost of
living due to the influx of gold from the newly discovered
California mines created new economic conditions.
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