In the men's conventions of this time a number of women besides
the redoubtable Sarah Bagley took an active part, being seated as
delegates from their own labor reform associations. At the meeting in
1846 of the New England Workingmen's Association, for instance, Miss
Huldah J. Stone, of Lowell, was elected recording secretary, and Mrs.
C.N.M. Quimby was appointed one of the board of six directors. At all
the meetings of the New England Congress, which met several times a
year, the women's point of view was well presented by the delegates
from the various trades.

The National Industrial Congress, organized first in New York in 1845,
and which met yearly for the next ten years, was supposed to stand for
all the interests of the workingman and woman, but gave most of its
attention to the land question and other subjects of general reform.
This scattered the energies of the organizations and weakened their
power as trade unions. But in the long anti-slavery agitation, which
was just then rising to its height on the eve of the Civil War, even
the land question was forgotten, and the voice of the trade unionists,
speaking for man or woman, was utterly unheeded.

Imperfect as are the accounts that have come down to us, it is
clear that this second generation of trade unionists were educating
themselves to more competent methods of handling the industrial
problem. The women workers of Pittsburgh coöperated with the women
of New England in trying to obtain from the manufacturers of their
respective centers a promise that neither group would work their
establishments longer than ten hours a day--this, to meet the ready
objection so familiar in our ears still, that the competition of
other mills would make the concession in one center ruinous to the