alogue 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 hand,
in much smaller groups, but they were far more widely distributed.
One result of this was that meeting together and comparing notes was
always difficult and often impossible. Even within the same town, with
the imperfect means of transit, with badly made and worst lit streets,
one group of workers had little means of knowing whether they were
receiving the same or different rates of pay for the same work, or for
the same number of work hours. So much sewing has always been done in
the homes of the workers that it is a matter of surprise to learn that
the very first women's trade union of which we have any knowledge
was formed, probably in some very loose organization, among the
tailoresses of New York in the year 1825. Six years later
the tailoresses of New York were again clubbed together for
self-protection against the inevitable consequences of reduced and
inadequate wages. Their secretary, Mrs. Lavinia Waight, must have
been a very new woman. She, unreasonable person, was not content with
asking better wages for her trade and her sex, but she even wanted
the vote