That employers recognized this, and were prepared to stifle in the
birth any efforts that their women employés might make towards
maintaining permanent organizations, is evident by the allusions in
the press of the day to the "ironclad oath" by which the employé
had to agree, on entering the factory, to accept whatever wage the
employer might see fit to pay, and had to promise not to join any
combination "whereby the work may be impeded or the company's interest
in any work injured."

Also we find that no general gathering of organized workingmen could
take place without the question of the inroad of women into the
factories being hotly debated. All the speakers would be agreed that
the poorly paid and overworked woman was bringing a very dangerous
element into the labor world, but there was not the same unanimity
when it came to proposing a remedy. Advice that women should go back
into the home was then as now the readiest cure for the evil, for even
so early as this the men realized that the underpayment of women meant
the underpayment of men, while the employment of women too often
meant the dis-employment of men. But it was not long before the more
intelligent understood that there was some great general force at work
here, which was not to be dealt with nor the resultant evils cured by
a resort to primitive conditions. Soon there were bodies of workingmen
publicly advocating the organization of women into trade unions as the
only rational plan of coping with a thoroughly vicious situation.

Meanwhile such a powerful organ as the _Boston Courier_ went so far as
to say that the girls ought to be thankful to be employed at all.
If it were not for the poor labor papers of that day we should have
little chance of knowing the workers' side of the story at all.