This small strike took place in July, 1828, in the cotton mills
of Paterson, New Jersey, among the boy and girl helpers over the
apparently trifling detail of a change of the dinner hour from twelve
o'clock to one. Presently there were involved the carpenters, masons
and machinists in a general demand for a ten-hour day. In a week the
strike had collapsed, and the leaders found themselves out of work,
although the point on which the young workers had gone out was
conceded.

It was among the mill operatives of Dover, New Hampshire, that the
first really important strike involving women occurred. This was in
December of the same year (1828). On this occasion between three
hundred and four hundred women went out. The next we hear of the Dover
girls is six years later, when eight hundred went out in resistance
to a cut in wages. These women and girls were practically all the
daughters of farmers and small professional men. For their day they
were well educated, often teaching school during a part of the year.
They prided themselves on being the "daughters of freemen," and while
adapting themselves for the sake of earning a living to the novel
conditions of factory employment, they were not made of the stuff to
submit tamely to irritating rules of discipline, to petty despotism,
and to what they felt was a breach of tacit agreement, involved in
periodical cutting of wages. Although most of them may have but dimly
understood that factory employment required the protection of a
permanent organization for the operatives, and looked to the temporary
combination provided by the strike for the remedy of their ills, still
there was more in the air, and more in the minds of some of the girl
leaders than just strikes undertaken for the purpose of abolishing
single definite wrongs.