Part 17

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?"

"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 pass 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 assistant secretary of the National Labor Union and its national organizer of women.

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."

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 Association 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."

Workingwomen's associations now existed in Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities, encouraged and aroused by the efforts at organization in New York. These associations 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 Washington in 1870 Jennie Collins of Lowell who was ably leading a strike against a cut in wages. The newspapers, too, began to notice workingwomen, publishing articles about their working and living conditions.

Trying to amalgamate the various groups in New York, Susan now formed a Workingwomen's Central Association, 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, scraps 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 Association. 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 class of labor, to place woman on a par with man as regards standing, intelligence, and manual ability." 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."

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 stitching 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." Having learned by experience that men always kept women out of their field of labor unless forced by circumstances 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 Association. 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 Association.

"As to the charges which were made by Typographical Union No. 6," she reported to this Association, "no one believes them; and I don't think they are worth answering. I admit that this Workingwomen's Association 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."

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."

The activities of the Workingwomen's Association 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 classes of women together in their fight for equal rights, Susan persuaded the popular lecturer, Anna E. Dickinson, to speak for the Workingwomen's Association 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 Association 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 Association 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 scholarships 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.

Yet she did not close her mind to other avenues of reform. Seeing reflected in the life of the city the excesses, the injustice, and the unsoundness of laissez-faire capitalism, she spoke out fearlessly in The Revolution against its abuses, such as the fortunes made out of the low wages and long hours of labor, or the Wall Street speculation to corner the gold market, or the efforts to take over the public lands of the West through grants to the transcontinental railroads. Her active mind also sought a solution of the complicated currency problem. In fact there was no public question which she hesitated to approach, to think out or attempt to solve. She did not keep her struggle for woman suffrage aloof from the pressing problems of the day. Instead she kept it abreast of the times, keenly alive to social, political, and economic issues, and involved in current public affairs.

FOOTNOTES:

Feb. 18, 1868, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress.

The Revolution, II, Sept. 24, 1868, p. 198. L. A. Hines of Cincinnati, publisher of Hine's Quarterly, assisted Miss Anthony in organizing women in the sewing trades.

Ibid., p. 204.

Harper, Anthony, II, pp. 999-1000.

The Revolution, II, Oct. 1, 1868, p. 204.

Ibid., p. 200.

Ibid., Oct. 8, 1868, p. 214. A Woman's Exchange was also initiated by the Workingwomen's Association.

Ibid., June 24, 1869, p. 394.

Ibid., March 18, 1869, p. 173.

Ibid., Feb. 4, 1869, p. 73.

Ibid., Sept. 9, 1869, p. 154.

Ibid., Aug. 26, 1869, p. 120.

THE INADEQUATE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT

The Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified in July 1868, but Republicans found it inadequate because it did not specifically enfranchise Negroes. More than ever convinced that they needed the Negro vote in order to continue in power, they prepared to supplement it by a Fifteenth Amendment, which Susan hoped would be drafted to enfranchise women as well as Negroes. Immediately through her Woman's Suffrage Association of America, she petitioned Congress to make no distinction between men and women in any amendment extending or regulating suffrage.

She and Elizabeth Stanton also persuaded their good friends, Senator Pomeroy of Kansas and Congressman Julian of Indiana, to introduce in December 1868 resolutions providing that suffrage be based on citizenship, be regulated by Congress, and that all citizens, native or naturalized, enjoy this right without distinction of race, color, or sex. Before the end of the month, Senator Wilson of Massachusetts and Congressman Julian had introduced other resolutions to enfranchise women in the District of Columbia and in the territories. Even the New York Herald could see no reason why "the experiment" of woman suffrage should not be tried in the District of Columbia.

To focus attention on woman suffrage at this crucial time, Susan, in January 1869, called together the first woman suffrage convention ever held in Washington. No only did it attract women from as far west as Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas, but Senator Pomeroy lent it importance by his opening speech, and through the detailed and respectful reporting of the New York World and of Grace Greenwood of the Philadelphia Press it received nationwide notice.

Congress, however, gave little heed to women's demands. "The experiment" of woman suffrage in the District of Columbia was not tried and nothing came of the resolutions for universal suffrage introduced by Pomeroy, Julian, and Wilson. In spite of all Susan's efforts to have the word "sex" added to the Fifteenth Amendment, she soon faced the bitter disappointment of seeing a version ignoring women submitted to the states for ratification: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

The blatant omission of the word "sex" forced Susan and Mrs. Stanton to initiate an amendment of their own, a Sixteenth Amendment, and again Congressman Julian came to their aid, although he too regarded Negro suffrage as more "immediately important and absorbing" than suffrage for women. On March 15, 1869, at one of the first sessions of the newly elected Congress, he introduced an amendment to the Constitution, providing that the right of suffrage be based on citizenship without any distinction or discrimination because of sex. This was the first federal woman suffrage amendment ever proposed in Congress.

Opportunity to campaign for this amendment was now offered Susan and Elizabeth Stanton as they addressed a series of conventions in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Press notices were good, a Milwaukee paper describing Susan as "an earnest enthusiastic, fiery woman—ready, apt, witty and what a politician would call sharp ... radical in the strongest sense," making "radical everything she touches." She found woman suffrage sentiment growing by leaps and bounds in the West and western men ready to support a federal woman suffrage amendment.