Origins of women's rights movement

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and DIANE LUTZ It was not until working women began to organize that the women's rights movement discovered the power of mass action. Women's rights sentiment had developed primarily among middle class women who were dissatisfied with their exclusion from production and social respect. But a new factor had to come into play before a women's rights movement could develop, and that factor was the organization of the working class.

The collective organization of working women (and men) was made possible by industrialization and the creation of factories, where workers could discover their similar oppression and their collective power. The earliest factories were textile mills. In this country these were centered in New England. The workers in these factories were primarily young unmarried women: white native-born daughters of New England farmers, who could be paid less than men because their employment was seen as supplemental and temporary. Throughout the first half of the 19th century women dominated the textile industry. In 1831, for example, there were 18,539 men and 38,927 women in the cotton industry.

Because of the difficulty of attracting workers to their factories, mill owners initially offered significant inducements, paying wages that were the highest women could then earn-six times more than they could earn at teaching. In the first 20 years of the mills, many factors worked against the women operatives organizing for better wages and conditions and shorter hours: the paternalism of the mill owners, the relatively better working conditions than other occupations, the temporary nature of most women's work, and the acceptance of the ideal of domesticity even by women workers themselves. Most important, there was not yet a consciousness among the working class that they were permanent proletarians. Men as well as women hoped to work only until they could move onto a farm of their own.

But the relatively good working conditions in the textile mills lasted for only 20 years at the most. Faced with falling profits and increased competition after the depression of 1837, companies cut wages at the same time that they increased hours and demanded more Stephanie Coontz is the coordinator of women's studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Diane Lutz is a union organizer for state workers in Washington.

ctid work from the operatives. Those workers who could get out, did so, and were rapidly replaced by Irish immigrants, who, along with the remaining workers, became a permanent wage-labor force.

"Try Again"

The deterioriation of conditions in the textile mills sparked the first great organizing efforts in that industry. In 1845 the women workers at Lowell formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, the first real union of mill operatives, which adopted the slogan "Try Again." It was led by Sarah Bagley, and its primary fight was for the 10-hour day, for which they immediately launched a huge petition drive. The women gathered thousands of signatures on a series of petitions and sent them to the Massachusetts legislature, which was forced to hold a public investigation of mill conditions-the first ever held in this country. (This achievement becomes amazing when it is remembered that the women worked for 12 to 16 hours a day in the mills and did their signature gathering in their "free time." The commission, however, after admitting the terrible conditions, concluded that no interference was necessary.)

Even though, in most cases, women workers initially accepted the values of domesticity, early women unionists were forced to argue against women's social restrictions just to organize as workers, and were early led to demanding their rights as women. Indeed, it was working women who issued the first call for women's suffrage: The United Tailoresses' Society and the Association of Working People (an early labor party) of New Castle, Del., first demanded the vote for women in 1831—exactly 17 years before Seneca Falls. (Lavinia Wright, the secretary of the UTS, also demanded the right of women to sit in legislatures.)

Throughout the 1840s a growing number of workers, especially textile workers, joined the Abolition movement. In 1832 workers at Lowell had formed the Lowell Female Anti-Slavery Society, and by 1845 they were holding fairs to raise funds and circulating anti-slavery petitions despite hostility from the mill owners. The mill women argued that both free labor and slave labor faced a common enemy: "the lord of the loom and the lord of the lash."

But women in the Abolition movement faced opposition to their full participation. By 1839 the Anti-Slavery Society was split into two factions: those who supported the right of women to participate equally in the organization and its work, and those who denied women the right to speak publicly and hold office. In 1840 the World Anti-Slavery Convention refused to seat the servatism in the second half of the 19th century. This was a period of aggressive capitalist expansion. Jim Crow was institutionalized, the final mopping up campaigns against the Native Americans were undertaken, strikes were brutally attacked, and toward the end of the period, with the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States embarked on its first imperialist ventures. Many observers have documented the ways in which the women's movement adapted to these pressures, formulating racist appeals to give white women the vote, attacking working men, and attempting to ally with reactionary forces. Unfortunately, most of them have also implied that this period of conservatism was essential for the victory of the suffrage movement.

In fact, however, while the women's suffrage movement suffered from beginning to end from the limitations of its white, middle class leadership, the period of its most intense accommodation to conservatism was the period in which the suffrage movement made no significant gains. Only in the wake of populist agitation and radical labor organization did suffrage once again begin to win victories, and the final push for women's suffrage was victorious because the organizers began to reject the elitist tactics of previous years and mobilize working people and women of all classes in mass action directly inspired by the labor The background to this change of orientation was the rapid industrial growth of the 1880s and 1890s, and the growing organization of workers in response to it. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 as a secret fraternal order, discarded its ritualistic aspects in 1881 and became the first union to actively seek to organize unskilled workers, blacks, and women on an equal basis with white men.

Women joined the Knights of Labor all over the country in huge numbers. By 1886 there were 50,000 women in the organization. The 1886 General Assembly of the Knights set up a Department of Women's Work, headed by Leonara Barry. For three years she traveled around the country speaking and organizing women. But the Women's Departfield battles of the 1890s and 1900s.

AFL excludes women

The most important labor organization of this time was the American Federation of Labor, founded in 1880. By 1904 it represented 80 percent of the more than 2 million union members in the United States. The AFL was a much more conservative organization than the Knights of Labor, doing less for women, blacks, and unskilled labor in general. While AFL conventions regularly passed resolutions on organizing women, women were in fact excluded from most of its member unions.

The result of this attitude on the part of the most powerful labor organization in this country was that, despite the fact that from 1890 to 1910 the number of women workers doubled from 4 million to more than 8 million, there was a drop in the number of women in unions, from 4.6 percent of all union members in 1895 to 2.9 percent in 1908. Fewer than 1 percent of women workers belonged to unions. During the period of AFL hegemony there was alienation between the suffrage movement and the union Lewis Hine Garment workers in turn-of-the-century sweatshop.

movement, and this was also significantly a time of stagnation in the suffrage movement.

In 1903 two organizations were formed whose purpose was to help organize the unskilled. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) combated the narrow craft unionism of the AFL, promoting industry-wide organization that included women and even the unemployed. And, perhaps even more importantly for women, the National Women's Trade Union League (NWTUL) was created to bring together trade unionists, socialists, and liberals around the goals of organizing women into unions, persuading unions to organize women, and lobbying for protective legislation for women and children workers. The NWTUL became the major meetingground of middle and working class women, a place where working class techniques of mass mobilization could be absorbed by middle class women.

Organization among women workers proceeded slowly until the first largescale women's strike occurred among the