its members. At once she tried to show the committee how the vote
would help women in their struggle for higher wages. She had at hand a
perfect example in the unsuccessful strike of Kate Mullaney's strong,
well-organized union of 500 collar laundry workers in Troy, New York.
Aware that Kate blamed their defeat on the ruthless newspaper
campaign, inspired and paid for by employers, Susan asked her, "If you
had been 500 carpenters or 500 masons, do you not think you would have
succeeded?"[223]

"Certainly," Kate Mullaney replied, adding that the striking
bricklayers had won everything they demanded. Susan then reminded her
that because the bricklayers were voters, newspapers respected them
and would hesitate to arouse their displeasure, realizing that in the
next election they would need the votes of all union men for their
candidates. "If you collar women had been voters," she told them, "you
too would have held the balance of political power in that little city
of Troy."

Susan convinced the committee on female labor, and in their strong
report to the convention they urged women "to secure the ballot" as
well as "to learn the trades, engage in business, join labor unions or
form protective unions of their own, ... and use every other honorable
means to persuade or force employers to do justice to women by paying
them equal wages for equal work." These women also called upon the
National Labor Congress to aid the organization of women's unions, to
demand the eight-hour day for women as well as men, and to ask
Congress and state legislatures to pass laws providing equal pay for
women in government employ. The phrase, "to secure the ballot," was
quickly challenged by some of the men and had to be deleted before the
report was accepted; but this setback was as nothing to Susan in
comparison with the friends she had made for woman suffrage among
prominent labor leaders and with the fact that a woman, Kate Mullaney
of Troy, had been chosen assistant secretary of the National Labor
Union and its national organizer of women.[224]

The National Labor Union Congress won high praise in _The Revolution_
as laying the foundation of the new political party of America which
would be triumphant in 1872. "The producers, the working-men, the
women, the Negroes," _The Revolution_ declared, "are destined to form
a triple power that shall speedily wrest the sceptre of government
from the non-producers, the land monopolists, the bondhol