m Workingwomen's Association No. 2. Most of these women
were seamstresses making men's shirts, women's coats, vests, lace
collars, hoop skirts, corsets, fur garments, and straw hats, but also
represented were women from the umbrella, parasol, and paper collar
industry, metal burnishers, and saleswomen. Most of them were young
girls who worked from ten to fourteen hours a day, from six in the
morning until eight at night, and earned from $4 to $8 a week.

"You must not work for these starving prices any longer ...," Susan
told them. "Have a spirit of independence among you, 'a wholesome
discontent,' as Ralph Waldo Emerson has said, and you will get better
wages for yourselves. Get together and discuss, and meet again and
again.... I will come and talk to you...."[221] They elected Mrs. Mary
Kellogg Putnam to represent them at the National Labor Congress.

With Mrs. Putnam and Kate Mullaney, the able president of the Collar
Laundry Union of Troy, New York, with Mary A. MacDonald of the Women's
Protective Labor Union of Mt. Vernon, New York, and Mrs. Stanton,
representing the Woman's Suffrage Association of America, Susan
knocked at the door of the National Labor Congress. All were welcomed
but Mrs. Stanton, who represented a woman suffrage organization and
whose acceptance the rank and file feared might indicate to the public
that the Labor Congress endorsed votes for women.

The women had a friend in William H. Sylvis of the Iron Molders'
Union, who was the driving force behind the National Labor Congress,
and he made it clear at once that he welcomed Mrs. Stanton and
everyone else who believed in his cause. So strong, however, was the
opposition to woman suffrage among union men that eighteen threatened
to resign if Mrs. Stanton were admitted as a delegate. The debate
continued, giving Susan an opportunity to explain why the ballot was
important to workingwomen. "It is the power of the ballot," she
declared, "that makes men successful in their strikes."[222] She
recommended that both men and women be enrolled in unions, pointing
out that had this been done, women typesetters would not have replaced
men at lower wages in the recent strike of printers on the New York
_World_. Finally a resolution was adopted, making it clear that Mrs.
Stanton's acceptance in no way committed the National Labor Congress
to her "peculiar ideas" or to "Female Suffrage."

A committee on female labor was then appointed with Susan as one of