them paraded the streets and, according to accounts, "fired off a
lot of gunpowder." In 1836 the women workers in the Lowell
factories struck for higher wages and later organized a Factory
Girls' Association which included more than 2,500 members. It was
aimed against the strict regimen of the boarding houses, which
were owned and managed by the mills. "As our fathers resisted
unto blood the lordly avarice of the British Ministry," cried the
strikers, "so we, their daughters, never will wear the yoke which
has been prepared for us."

In this vibrant atmosphere was born the powerful woman's labor
union, the Female Labor Reform Association, later called the
Lowell Female Industrial Reform and Mutual Aid Society. Lowell
became the center of a far-reaching propaganda characterized by
energy and a definite conception of what was wanted. The women
joined in strikes, carried banners, sent delegates to the labor
conventions, and were zealous in propaganda. It was the women
workers of Massachusetts who first forced the legislature to
investigate labor conditions and who aroused public sentiment to
a pitch that finally compelled the enactment of laws for the
bettering of their conditions. When the mill owners in
Massachusetts demanded in 1846 that their weavers tend four looms
instead of three, the women promptly resolved that "we will not
tend a fourth loom unless we receive the same pay per piece as on
three .... This we most solemnly pledge ourselves to obtain."

In New York, in 1845, the Female Industry Association was
organized at a large meeting held in the court house. It included
"tailoresses, plain and coarse sewing, shirt makers, book-folders
and stickers, capmakers, straw-workers, dressmakers, crimpers,