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 clause permitted longer hours by special contract. Of course employers at once saw their advantage and before the laws went into effect compelled their employees to sign special contracts, pledging themselves to work twelve hours as before. Countless strikes were precipitated to enforce the ten-hour law, but labor was not yet prepared to take up the unequal fight with capital and so the cause was temporarily lost. But these great struggles in which women participated so prominently were a powerful factor in arousing them to class consciousness, and in educating them to an understanding of their own position.

Women's Trade Unions, in separate locals in the principal industrial centers, began to be formed by 1860. Such unions existed among cigar makers, tailoresses, seamstresses, umbrella sewers, cap makers, textile workers, printers, burnishers, laundry workers and shoe workers. Most of these organizations were called into existence under special stress, usually at times of strikes, and went to pieces again when there was no special need for action. Of the national trade unions only two, the printers and the cigarmakers, admitted women to membership, but women shoe makers had a national trade union of their own, the first national women's trade union in the United States, known as the Daughters of St. Crispin. State unions of women were formed in New York and Massachusetts. Two important strikes, involving large numbers of women, occured at this time—that of the shoe workers of Lynn in 1860, and that of the Troy laundry workers in 1869. The Lynn strike led to a compromise with the manufacturers, and to the formation of a union. The Troy strike, though enlisting general public sympathy, was crushed by the combined efforts of employers. Organized workingmen liberally supported the women in both these strikes. During this period the American labor movement had for its central body the National Labor Union that brought together representatives of organized trades in a series of annual congresses. To these congresses women were freely admitted as delegates, and the formation of women's unions was consistently encouraged.