Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/66



The attitude of workingmen toward working women has been one of rapid evolution from indifference over opposition and misunderstanding to recognition and co-operation. In the early days of the labor movement, the presence of women was more or less ignored. They were working mainly at occupations not yet sought by men, as in the textile trades, or they were performing some simple part of a manufacturing process in which the skilled and well-paid parts were performed by men, as in the making of shoes. But when men and women began to compete for the same jobs in the same trades, when women began to displace men in some trades owing to the cheapness of their labor power, and began to enter others as strike breakers, the ire of the men was roused, not against industrial conditions but against the women. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, and particularly in those trades in which competition between the sexes was keenest, we, therefore, find many concerted efforts on the part of workingmen to oust the women from their occupations.

At a convention of the National Trades Union in 1835 the following resolution was adopted: "We recommend that the workingmen oppose by all honest means the multiplying of all descriptions of labor for females, inasmuch as the competition it creates with the males tends inevitably to impoverish both." In 1819 the journeymen tailors of New York struck to prevent the employment of women. This incident is particularly interesting because it furnishes an example of men trying to drive women out of a traditional woman's occupation. In 1835 the Boston printers struck against the employment of women as compositors, and Philadelphia printers struck for the same purpose even twenty years later. As late as 1877 we find cigarmakers of Cincinnati united in a final effort to drive the women from their trade. They succeeded temporarily, for after the settlement of their victorious strike all women were discharged from the shops. But still the women