1840-1860

Nothing in the history of women's organizations in the last century
leaves a more disheartening impression than the want of continuity in
the struggle, although there was never a break nor a let-up in the
conditions of low wages, interminably long hours, and general
poverty of existence which year in and year out were the lot of the
wage-earning women in the manufacturing districts.

Although based in every instance upon a common and crying need, the
successive attempts of women at organization as a means of improving
their industrial condition are absolutely unrelated to one another.
Not only so, but it is pathetic to note that the brave women leaders
of women in one generation cannot even have known of the existence of
their predecessors in the self-same fight. They were not always too
well informed as to the conditions of their sister workers in other
cities or states, where distance alone severed them. But where time
made the gap, where they were separated by the distance of but one
lifetime, sometimes by a much shorter period, the severance seems to
have been to our way of thinking, strangely complete, and disastrously
so. Students had not begun to be interested in the troubles of
everyday folk, so there were no records of past occurrences of the
same sort that the workers could read. To hunt up in old files of
newspapers allusions to former strikes and former agreements is a
hard, slow task for the trained student of today; for those girls it
was impossible. We have no reason to believe that the names of Lavinia
Waight and Louisa Mitchell, the leaders of New York tailoresses in
1831, were known to Sarah Bagley or Huldah Stone, when in 1845 they
stirred Lowell. Each of the leaders whose names have come down to