ren. But they must run on a twelve-hour schedule to meet
competition from other States. So they attempted to make special
contracts with each employee. The workmen objected to this and struck.
Finally they compromised on a ten-hour day and a sixteen per cent
reduction in wages. Such an arrangement became a common occurrence in
the industrial world of the middle of the century.

In the meantime the factory system was rapidly recruiting women workers,
especially in the New England textile mills. Indeed, as early as
1825 "tailoresses" of New York and other cities had formed protective
societies. In 1829 the mill girls of Dover, New Hampshire, caused a
sensation by striking. Several hundred of 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, fringe and lacemakers," and o