Susan B. Anthony Part 18

[209] _Ibid._

[210] _Ibid._, April 23, June 25, 1868, pp. 49, 392.

[211] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 296-297, 302-303; _The Revolution_, I, Jan. 22, 1868, p. 34.

[212] _The Revolution_, I, Jan. 29, 1868, p. 243.

[213] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 301.

[214] March 18, May 4, 1868, Anna E. d.i.c.kinson Papers, Library of Congress. Susan had a room at the Stantons until they prepared to move to their new home in Tenafly, New Jersey.

[215] Aug. 20, 1868, Higginson Papers, Boston Public Library.

[216] _The Revolution_, II, July 9, 1868, p. 1.

[217] _Ibid._, July 16, 1868, p. 17.

[218] _Ibid._, Aug. 6, 1868, p. 72.

[219] July 10, 1868, Anna E. d.i.c.kinson Papers, Library of Congress.

WORK, WAGES, AND THE BALLOT

In her zeal to promote the welfare of all the people, Susan now turned her attention to the workingwomen of New York, whose low wages, long hours, and unhealthy working and living conditions had troubled her for a long time. Women were being forced out of the home into the factory by a changing and expanding economy, and at last were being paid for their work. However, the women she met on the streets of New York, hurrying to work at dawn and returning late at night, weary, pale, and shabbily dressed, had none of the confidence of the economically independent. They had merely exchanged one form of slavery for another. She saw the ballot as their most powerful ally, and as she told the factory girls of Cohoes, New York, they could compel their employers to grant them a ten-hour day, equal opportunity for advancement, and equal pay, the moment they held the ballot in their hands.[220]

As yet labor unions were few and short-lived. The women tailors of New York had formed a union as early as 1825, but it had not survived, and later attempts to form women's unions had rarely been successful. A few men's unions had weathered the years, but they had not enrolled women, fearing their compet.i.tion. Women were welcomed only by the National Labor Union, established in Baltimore in 1866 for the purpose of federating all unions.

When the National Labor Union Congress met in New York in September 1868, Susan saw an opportunity for women to take part, and in preparation she called a group of workingwomen together in _The Revolution_ office to form a Workingwomen's a.s.sociation which she hoped would eventually represent all of the trades. At this meeting, the majority were from the printing trade, typesetters operating the newly invented typesetting machines, press feeders, bookbinders, and clerks, in whom she had become interested through her venture in publis.h.i.+ng. She wanted them to call their organization the Workingwomen's Suffrage a.s.sociation, but they refused, because they feared the public's disapproval of woman suffrage and were convinced they should not seek political rights until they had improved their working conditions. She could not make them see that they were putting the cart before the horse. They did, however, form Workingwomen's a.s.sociation No. 1, electing her their delegate to the National Labor Congress.

Next she called a meeting of the women in the sewing trades, and with the help of men from the National Labor Union, persuaded a hundred of them to form Workingwomen's a.s.sociation No. 2. Most of these women were seamstresses making men's s.h.i.+rts, women's coats, vests, lace collars, hoop skirts, corsets, fur garments, and straw hats, but also represented were women from the umbrella, parasol, and paper collar industry, metal burnishers, and saleswomen. Most of them were young girls who worked from ten to fourteen hours a day, from six in the morning until eight at night, and earned from $4 to $8 a week.

"You must not work for these starving prices any longer ...," Susan told them. "Have a spirit of independence among you, 'a wholesome discontent,' as Ralph Waldo Emerson has said, and you will get better wages for yourselves. Get together and discuss, and meet again and again.... I will come and talk to you...."[221] They elected Mrs. Mary Kellogg Putnam to represent them at the National Labor Congress.

With Mrs. Putnam and Kate Mullaney, the able president of the Collar Laundry Union of Troy, New York, with Mary A. MacDonald of the Women's Protective Labor Union of Mt. Vernon, New York, and Mrs. Stanton, representing the Woman's Suffrage a.s.sociation of America, Susan knocked at the door of the National Labor Congress. All were welcomed but Mrs. Stanton, who represented a woman suffrage organization and whose acceptance the rank and file feared might indicate to the public that the Labor Congress endorsed votes for women.

The women had a friend in William H. Sylvis of the Iron Molders'

Union, who was the driving force behind the National Labor Congress, and he made it clear at once that he welcomed Mrs. Stanton and everyone else who believed in his cause. So strong, however, was the opposition to woman suffrage among union men that eighteen threatened to resign if Mrs. Stanton were admitted as a delegate. The debate continued, giving Susan an opportunity to explain why the ballot was important to workingwomen. "It is the power of the ballot," she declared, "that makes men successful in their strikes."[222] She recommended that both men and women be enrolled in unions, pointing out that had this been done, women typesetters would not have replaced men at lower wages in the recent strike of printers on the New York _World_. Finally a resolution was adopted, making it clear that Mrs.

Stanton's acceptance in no way committed the National Labor Congress to her "peculiar ideas" or to "Female Suffrage."

A committee on female labor was then appointed with Susan as one of its members. At once she tried to show the committee how the vote would help women in their struggle for higher wages. She had at hand a perfect example in the unsuccessful strike of Kate Mullaney's strong, well-organized union of 500 collar laundry workers in Troy, New York.

Aware that Kate blamed their defeat on the ruthless newspaper campaign, inspired and paid for by employers, Susan asked her, "If you had been 500 carpenters or 500 masons, do you not think you would have succeeded?"[223]

"Certainly," Kate Mullaney replied, adding that the striking bricklayers had won everything they demanded. Susan then reminded her that because the bricklayers were voters, newspapers respected them and would hesitate to arouse their displeasure, realizing that in the next election they would need the votes of all union men for their candidates. "If you collar women had been voters," she told them, "you too would have held the balance of political power in that little city of Troy."

Susan convinced the committee on female labor, and in their strong report to the convention they urged women "to secure the ballot" as well as "to learn the trades, engage in business, join labor unions or form protective unions of their own, ... and use every other honorable means to persuade or force employers to do justice to women by paying them equal wages for equal work." These women also called upon the National Labor Congress to aid the organization of women's unions, to demand the eight-hour day for women as well as men, and to ask Congress and state legislatures to pa.s.s laws providing equal pay for women in government employ. The phrase, "to secure the ballot," was quickly challenged by some of the men and had to be deleted before the report was accepted; but this setback was as nothing to Susan in comparison with the friends she had made for woman suffrage among prominent labor leaders and with the fact that a woman, Kate Mullaney of Troy, had been chosen a.s.sistant secretary of the National Labor Union and its national organizer of women.[224]

The National Labor Union Congress won high praise in _The Revolution_ as laying the foundation of the new political party of America which would be triumphant in 1872. "The producers, the working-men, the women, the Negroes," _The Revolution_ declared, "are destined to form a triple power that shall speedily wrest the sceptre of government from the non-producers, the land monopolists, the bondholders, and the politicians."[225]

One of the most encouraging signs at this time was the friendliness of the New York _World_, whose reporters covered the meetings of the Workingwomen's a.s.sociation with sympathy, arousing much local interest. Reprinting these reports and supplementing them, _The Revolution_ carried their import farther afield, bringing to the attention of many the wisdom and justice of equal pay for equal work, and the need to organize workingwomen and to provide training and trade schools for them. _The Revolution_ continually spurred women on to improve themselves, to learn new skills, and actually to do equal work if they expected equal pay.

When reports reached Susan that women in the printing trade were afraid of manual labor, of getting their hands and fingers dirty, and of lifting heavy galleys, she quickly let them know that she had no patience with this. "Those who stay at home," she told them, "have to wash kettles and lift wash tubs and black stoves until their hands are blackened and hardened. In this spirit, you must go to work on your cases of type. Are these cases heavier than a wash tub filled with water and clothes, or the old cheese tubs?... The trouble is either that girls are not educated to have physical strength or else they do not like to use it. If a union of women is to succeed, it must be composed of strength, nerve, courage, and persistence, with no fear of dirtying their white fingers, but with a determination that when they go into an office they would go through all that was required of them and demand just as high wages as the men....

"Make up your mind," she continued, "to take the 'lean' with the 'fat,' and be early and late at the case precisely as the men are. I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women."[226]

Workingwomen's a.s.sociations now existed in Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities, encouraged and aroused by the efforts at organization in New York. These a.s.sociations occasionally exchanged ideas, and news of all of them was published in _The Revolution_. The groups in Boston and in the outlying textile mills were particularly active, and Susan brought to her next suffrage convention in Was.h.i.+ngton in 1870 Jennie Collins of Lowell who was ably leading a strike against a cut in wages. The newspapers, too, began to notice workingwomen, publis.h.i.+ng articles about their working and living conditions.

Trying to amalgamate the various groups in New York, Susan now formed a Workingwomen's Central a.s.sociation, of which she was elected president. To its meetings she brought interesting speakers and practical reports on wages, hours, and working conditions. She herself picked up a great deal of useful information in her daily round as she talked with this one and that one. On her walks to and from work, in all kinds of weather, she met poorly clad women carrying sacks and baskets in which they collected rags, sc.r.a.ps of paper, bones, old shoes, and anything worth rescuing from "garbage boxes." With friendliness and good cheer, she greeted these ragpickers, sometimes stopping to talk with them about their work, and through her interest brought several into the Workingwomen's a.s.sociation. Looking forward to surveys on all women's occupations, she started out by appointing a committee to investigate the ragpickers, many of whom lived in tumbledown slab shanties on the rocky land which is now a part of Central Park.

This investigation revealed that more than half of the 1200 ragpickers were women and that it was the one occupation in which women had equal opportunity with men and received equal compensation for their day's work. Average earnings ranged from forty cents a day to ten dollars a week. The report, highly sentimental in the light of today's scientific approach, was a promising beginning, a survey made by women themselves in their own interest--the forerunner of the reports of the Labor Department's Women's Bureau.

Cooperatives appealed to Susan as they did to many labor leaders as the best means of freeing labor. When the Sewing Machine Operators Union tried to establish a shop where their members could share the profits of their labor, she did her best to help them, hoping to see them gain economic independence in a light airy clean shop where wealthy women, eager to help their sisters, would patronize them.

However, the wealthy women to whom she appealed to finance this project did not respond, looking upon a cooperative as a first step toward socialism and a threat to their own profits. She was able, however, to arouse a glimmer of interest among the members of the newly formed literary club, Sorosis, in the problems of working women.

She had the satisfaction of seeing women typesetters form their own union in 1869, and this was, according to the Albany _Daily Knickerbocker_, "the first move of the kind ever made in the country by any cla.s.s of labor, to place woman on a par with man as regards standing, intelligence, and manual ability."[227] _The Revolution_ encouraged this union by printing notices of its meetings and urging all women compositors to join. In signed articles, Susan pointed out how wages had improved since the union was organized. "A little more Union, girls," she said, "and soon all employers will come up to 45 cents, the price paid men.... So join the Union, girls, and together say _Equal Pay for Equal Work_."[228]

Eager to bring more women into the printing trade where wages were higher, she tried in every possible way to establish trade schools for them. She looked forward to a printing business run entirely by women, giving employment to hundreds. So obsessed was she by the idea of a trade school for women compositors that when printers in New York went on a strike, she saw an opportunity for women to take their places and appealed by letter and in person to a group of employers "to contribute liberally for the purpose of enabling us to establish a training school for girls in the art of typesetting." Explaining that hundreds of young women, now st.i.tching at starvation wages, were ready and eager to learn the trade, she added, "Give us the means and we will soon give you competent women compositors."[229] Having learned by experience that men always kept women out of their field of labor unless forced by circ.u.mstances to admit them, she also urged young women to take the places of striking typesetters at whatever wage they could get.

It never occurred to her in her eagerness to bring women into a new occupation that she might be breaking the strike. She saw only women's opportunity to prove to employers that they were able to do the work and to show the Typographical Union that they should admit women as members. Labor men, however, soon let her know how much they disapproved of her strategy. She tried to explain her motives to them, that she was trying to fit these women to earn equal wages with men.

She reminded these men of how hard it was for women to get into the printing trade and how they had refused to admit women to their union; and she called their attention to her whole-hearted support of the lately formed Women's Typographical Union.

Some of the men were never convinced and never forgot this misstep, bringing it up at the National Labor Union Congress in Philadelphia in 1869, which Susan attended as a delegate of the New York Workingwomen's a.s.sociation. Here she found herself facing an unfriendly group without the support of William H. Sylvis, who had recently died. For three days they debated her eligibility as a delegate, first expressing fear that her admission would commit the Labor Congress to woman suffrage. When she won 55 votes against 52 in opposition, Typographical Union No. 6 of New York brought accusations against her which aroused suspicion in the minds of many union members. They pointed out that she belonged to no union, and they called her an enemy of labor because she had encouraged women to take men's jobs during the printers' strike. They could not or would not understand that in urging women to take men's jobs, she had been fighting for women just as they fought for their union, and they completely overlooked how continuously and effectively she had supported the Women's Typographical Union. Her _Revolution_, they claimed, was printed at less than union rates in a "rat office" and her explanation was not satisfactory. That it was printed on contract outside her office was no answer to satisfy union men who could not realize on what a scant margin her paper operated or how gladly she would have set up a union shop had the funds been available.

Not only were these accusations repeated again and again, they were also carried far and wide by the press, with the result that Susan was not only kept out of the Labor Congress but was even sharply criticized by some members of her Workingwomen's a.s.sociation.

"As to the charges which were made by Typographical Union No. 6," she reported to this a.s.sociation, "no one believes them; and I don't think they are worth answering. I admit that this Workingwomen's a.s.sociation is not a _trade_ organization; and while I join heart and hand with the working people in their trades unions, and in everything else by which they can protect themselves against the oppression of capitalists and employers, I say that this organization of ours is more upon the broad platform of philosophizing on the general questions of labor, and to discuss what can be done to ameliorate the condition of working people generally."[230]

She was not without friends in the ranks of labor, however, the New England delegates giving her their support. The New York _World_, very fair in its coverage of the heated debates, declared, "Of her devotion to the cause of workingwomen, there can be no question."[231]

The activities of the Workingwomen's a.s.sociation had by this time begun to irk employers, and some of them threatened instant dismissal of any employee who reported her wages or hours to these meddling women. Fear of losing their jobs now hung over many while others were forbidden by their fathers, husbands, and brothers to have anything to do with strong-minded Susan B. Anthony.

To counteract this disintegrating influence and to bring all cla.s.ses of women together in their fight for equal rights, Susan persuaded the popular lecturer, Anna E. d.i.c.kinson, to speak for the Workingwomen's a.s.sociation at Cooper Union. This, however, only added fuel to the flames, for Anna, in an emotional speech, "A Struggle for Life," told the tragic story of Hester Vaughn, a workingwoman who had been accused of murdering her illegitimate child. Found in a critical condition with her dead baby beside her, Hester Vaughn had been charged with infanticide, tried without proper defense, and convicted by a prejudiced court, although there was no proof that she had deliberately killed her child. At Susan's instigation, the Workingwomen's a.s.sociation sent a woman physician, Dr. Clemence Lozier, and the well-known author, Eleanor Kirk, to Philadelphia to investigate the case. Both were convinced of Hester Vaughn's innocence.

With the aid of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's courageous editorials in _The Revolution_, Susan made such an issue of the conviction of Hester Vaughn that many newspapers accused her of obstructing justice and advocating free love, and this provided a moral weapon for her critics to use in their fight against the growing independence of women.

Eventually her efforts and those of her colleagues won a pardon for Hester Vaughn. At the same time the publicity given this case served to educate women on a subject heretofore taboo, showing them that poverty and a double standard of morals made victims of young women like Hester Vaughn. Susan also made use of this case to point out the need for women jurors to insure an unprejudiced trial. She even suggested that Columbia University Law School open its doors to women so that a few of them might be able to understand their rights under the law and bring aid to their less fortunate sisters.

Under Susan's guidance, the Workingwomen's a.s.sociation continued to hold meetings as long as she remained in New York. In its limited way, it carried on much-needed educational work, building up self-respect and confidence among workingwomen, stirring up "a wholesome discontent," and preparing the way for women's unions. The public responded. At Cooper Union, telegraphy courses were opened to women; the New York Business School, at Susan's instigation, offered young women scholars.h.i.+ps in bookkeeping; and there were repeated requests for the enrollment of women in the College of New York.

Living in the heart of this rapidly growing, sprawling city, Susan saw much to distress her and pondered over the disturbing social conditions, looking for a way to relieve poverty and wipe out crime and corruption. She saw luxury, extravagance, and success for the few, while half of the population lived in the slums in dilapidated houses and in damp cellars, often four or five to a room. Immigrants, continually pouring in from Europe, overtaxed the already inadequate housing, and unfamiliar with our language and customs, were the easy prey of corrupt politicians. Many were homeless, sleeping in the streets and parks until the rain or cold drove them into police stations for warmth and shelter. Susan longed to bring order and cleanliness, good homes and good government to this overcrowded city, and again and again she came to the conclusion that votes for women, which meant a voice in the government, would be the most potent factor for reform.