rd of six directors. At all
the meetings of the New England Congress, which met several times a
year, the women's point of view was well presented by the delegates
from the various trades.

The National Industrial Congress, organized first in New York in 1845,
and which met yearly for the next ten years, was supposed to stand for
all the interests of the workingman and woman, but gave most of its
attention to the land question and other subjects of general reform.
This scattered the energies of the organizations and weakened their
power as trade unions. But in the long anti-slavery agitation, which
was just then rising to its height on the eve of the Civil War, even
the land question was forgotten, and the voice of the trade unionists,
speaking for man or woman, was utterly unheeded.

Imperfect as are the accounts that have come down to us, it is
clear that this second generation of trade unionists were educating
themselves to more competent methods of handling the industrial
problem. The women workers of Pittsburgh cooeperated with the women
of New England in trying to obtain from the manufacturers of their
respective centers a promise that neither group would work their
establishments longer than ten hours a day--this, to meet the ready
objection so familiar in our ears still, that the competition of
other mills would make the concession in one center ruinous to the
manufacturers who should grant it. This was the crowning effort of
the Pittsburgh mill-workers to obtain improvement. Strikes for higher
wages had failed. Strikes for a ten-hour day had failed. And now it is
pitiful to write that even this interstate cooeperation on the part of
the girls for relief by a peaceful trade agreement failed, too, the
employers falling back upon their "undoubted right" to run their
factories as many hours as they pleased.

The women then appealed to the legislatures, and between 1847 and
1851, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Pennsylvania all passed ten-hour
laws.[A] But they were not passed simultaneously, which gave the
employers in the particular state dealt with, the excuse that under
such legislation they could not face interstate competition in their
business, and since every law contained a saving clause permitting
contracting out by individual employers and employes, all these
beneficial acts were so much waste paper. The manufacturers expressed
themselves as willing enough to stand for the shorter work-day, but
absolute