their industrial field by Irish immigrants, starved out by that same
depression, and by the potato famine that followed it. These newcomers
brought with them very un-American standards of living, and flooded
the labor market with labor unskilled and therefore cheaper than the
normal native supply. When the year 1845 came it is to be inferred
that the worst immediate effects of the financial distress had passed,
for from then on the working-women made repeated efforts to improve
their condition. Baffled in one direction they would turn in another.

As earlier, there is a long series of local strikes, and another long
succession of short-lived local organizations. It is principally in
the textile trade that we hear of both strikes and unions, but also
among seamstresses and tailoresses, shoemakers and capmakers. New
York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, Fall River and Lowell all
contributed their quota of industrial uprisings among the exasperated
and sorely pressed workers, with a sad similarity in the stories.

In a class by themselves, however, were the female labor reform
associations, which for some years did excellent work in widely
separated cities. These were strictly trade unions, in spite of their
somewhat vague name. They seem to have drawn their membership from the
workers in the local trades. That of Lowell, perhaps the best known,
originated among the mill girls, but admitted other workers. Lowell,
as usual, was to the fore in the quality of its women leaders. The
first president of the Association was the brilliant and able Sarah
G. Bagley. She and other delegates went before the Massachusetts
legislative committee in 1845, and gave evidence as to the conditions
in the textile mills. This, the first American governmental
investigation, was brought about almost solely in response to the
petitions of the working-women, who had already secured thousands of