Echoes of Reconstruction: Immigrant Women Construct the First Permanent Women’s Labor Union
Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog.
Happy Women’s History Month and Irish Heritage Month! This month’s tale involves Irish women immigrants.
When we look at women during the Civil War and Reconstruction laypeople often view the common lot of females as being governed by the “Ideals of Victorian Womanhood,” as though all women sought to nestle inside of a purely domestic sphere of middle class docility. While some upper- and middle-class were confined by the Victorian ideal, large numbers of women were not. In the South, nearly a third of women were enslaved African Americans. In the North, nearly a quarter were immigrant women. In an earlier article I looked at Reconstructing Womanhood during this period, particularly in the Black community. Today, I want to go into greater detail about how immigrant women began organizing themselves in an important Hudson Valley city in New York beginning in 1864.
Suffragist Susan B. Anthony recalled the Collar Laundry Union of Troy, New York as “the best organized” union of women workers that “I ever knew.” The union was started by teenaged Irish immigrants in the burgeoning manufacturing city of Troy during the Civil War. Irish-born Kate Mullany led the union in negotiations with wealthy businessmen and in militant strikes against the exploitation of women workers. Many historians credit Mullany with the founding of the first permanent women’s labor union in the United States. Mullany’s accomplishments would lead to her induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls and to the preservation of her home by the National Park Service.[1]
Susan B. Anthony described her impression of Kate Mullany, whom she met after the Civil War. The women’s rights advocate and the union leader met to discuss the position of women in the workplace. According to Susan B. Anthony, Mullany was a “bright young Irish girl.” While Anthony saw the poor treatment of factory women as the result of gender discrimination, Mullany said that the interests of employers to exploit all wage workers, male and female, could not be ignored by the feminist. Anthony, from the native-born middle class, did not seem to understand Mullany’s argument that while women workers faced special disadvantages in the workplace, they also had much in common with their male brothers in the labor movement. Unity across gender was desirable, but unity of the working class was essential for women workers to make gains.[2]
Troy is now a sleepy companion city to New York’s capital Albany. In the decades of the Civil War and Reconstruction it was one of the most technologically advanced cities in the United States and a destination for immigrants from England, Ireland, Scotland, and French Canada. The city’s Irish workers, in particular, spurred the growth of the labor movement in Troy and statewide.[3]
The first group of workers to form a strong union were the iron molders. These men made the iron stoves and other molded iron products that were part of the new mass production economy. Molders worked long hours under dangerous conditions, but they were relatively well-paid. Unlike Irish men in cities like New York, where immigrants could spend their lives at the lowest economic rung as day laborers, in Troy a poor immigrant could go to work in an iron foundry and earn a modicum of financial well-being and security.[4]
When the Trojan iron molders organized their union they involved broad swaths of the city’s Irish community in its struggles. With three-out-of-five of the city’s residents being either immigrants or the children of immigrants, the mobilization of such a mass of support held political and economic promise. That solidarity was shown at the start of the Civil War when whole groups of members of the Iron Molders’ Union of Troy enlisted together in the Union army. Those who remained behind worked in war-related production. For example, Scottish immigrant Henry Burden’s iron foundry turned out horseshoes for the Union army. It would help propel the union workers to political power.[5]
The mill owners differed significantly from their workers. If most of the workers were Irish Catholic immigrants, eight out of ten owners were not only native-born, but their fathers were native-born as well. The owners did not live in the same communities as their workers, or belong to the same churches or social organizations as their employees did. The wealthy bosses lived lives apart from the workers, often not even being a familiar sight on the foundry floor. In the 1850s, the bosses controlled not only their businesses, but the local government as well. The Irish immigrants resented the monopoly of power in the hands of this elite political power.[6]
At the time, factory work was gender-determined. Jobs were typically considered either “men’s work” or “women’s work.” Irion molding was a man’s job, and laundry and textile work was reserved for women. In most small cities, only one type of work was readily available. For example, in the mill towns of northern Massachusetts, workers were primarily female. This meant that men could not find jobs in these towns, and that meant women workers tended to live alone in boarding houses. Troy was different. It had decent paying jobs for male iron moulders, two thirds of whom were Irish, but it also had plenty of work for women in the “removable shirt-collar” industry.[7]
Removable shirt collars were a Trojan innovation. In the 19th Century nearly all laundering of clothes for a family was done by hand by the women of a household. A woman in Troy came up with the idea of lessening the burden by inventing a collar that could be removed from a shirt to be washed separately. A shirt could now be worn for several days, with a clean fresh collar every day being attached to it. Women were employed in all aspects of this work in Troy. One of the largest groups of women workers were the Collar Laundry workers. These women took the newly made collars, washed them to remove dirt and chemicals, and ironed them preparatory to sale. These jobs were tough, women toiled over vats of boiling water, but they paid among the highest wages in the country for Irish women workers.[8]
By the Civil War, the immigrants lived in solid buildings and had founded churches, clubs, and workers’ groups.[9]
Because the unionized iron molder men and the shirt collar women lived in the same communities and shared the same cultural institutions, and often the same homes, the Irish women workers absorbed the same attitudes towards unionization as their brothers, husbands, and fathers. The women in an Irish family often lived with other women, sisters or mothers, who worked in the mills or laundries, and they discussed together the ways in which they could organize for the same recognition of their rights as workers as the men in their community had achieved.[10]
In February of 1864, Kate Mullany was still a teenager. Her father dead, she was the breadwinner for her mother, and two brothers and two sisters. Women had asked for raises and better treatment by their bosses, but they had been ignored. The men of the molders union had encouraged their “fellow working women” to organize and form a union. Kate decided that she and her friends would do just that.
On February 23, 1864 three hundred women went out on strike at the 14 commercial laundry factories. This was the first strike organized by a permanent women’s labor union in the United States. By February 28 the employers gave into the union. Major raises were put in place and the union won the right to bargain for the workers. In 1866, the women workers struck again and they were successful. They saw their wages rise from $8 per week to $14. The city’s union confederation, the Troy Trades’ Assembly, invited the Collar Laundry Union to join its previously all-male leadership.[11]
In September of 1868, Kate Mullany was one of four women to be delegates to the National Labor Congress in New York City. At the Congress she was selected to hold national office in the labor federation, the first woman to do so.
William Sylvis, the head of the national federation, said during his closing speech: “We now have a recognized officer from the female side of the house – one of the smartest and most energetic women in America; and from the great work which she has already done, I think it not unlikely that we may in the future have delegates representing 300,000 working women.”[12]
Unfortunately, the women’s union decided to take on their bosses by setting up a worker-run cooperative to make shirt collars. It went bankrupt, disrupting the union.
[1] The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many from Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years Vol. 2 by Ida Husted Harper published by Hollenbeck Press (1898) pp. 999-1000; Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 by Daniel J. Walkowitz published by University of Illinois Press (1981); Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864-86 by Carole Turbin published by the University of Illinois Press (1992); The Dawning of American Labor: The New Republic to the Industrial Age by Brian Greenberg published by Wiley (2017); “To Toil the Livelong Day”: America’s Women at Work, 1780-1980 edited by Carol Groneman, Mary Beth Norton published by Cornell University Press (1987); The Daughters Of Maeve: 50 Irish Women Who Changed World By Gina Sigillito published by Citadel Press (2007). National Park Service page on Kate Mullany House; Kate Mullany page at National Women’s Hall of Fame; Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage-earners in the United States U.S Department of Labor Volume 9 (1910) pp. 106-107; America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present edited by Rosalyn Baxandall, Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, Linda Gordon, Susan Reverby published by W.W. Norton (1995); The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600-1900 By Stephanie Coontz published by Verso (2016); Workers in America: A Historical Encyclopedia, Volume 1 By Robert E. Weir published by Clio Press (2013).
[2] The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many from Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years Vol. 2 by Ida Husted Harper published by Hollenbeck Press (1898) pp. 999-1000
[3] Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 by Daniel J. Walkowitz published by University of Illinois Press (1981); Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864-86 by Carole Turbin published by the University of Illinois Press (1992)
[4] Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 by Daniel J. Walkowitz published by University of Illinois Press (1981) pp. 1-13
[5] Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 by Daniel J. Walkowitz published by University of Illinois Press (1981) pp. 13-25
[6] Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 by Daniel J. Walkowitz published by University of Illinois Press (1981) pp. 24-28
[7] Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864-86 by Carole Turbin published by the University of Illinois Press (1992) pp. 33-62
[8] Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864-86 by Carole Turbin published by the University of Illinois Press (1992) pp. 26-28, 33-62.
[9] Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 by Daniel J. Walkowitz published by University of Illinois Press (1981) p. 33
[10] Kate Mullany: A Trade Union Pioneer
[11] Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864-86 by Carole Turbin published by the University of Illinois Press (1992) pp. 110-112; Women and The American Labor Movement From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I by Philip Foner published by Free Press (1979) Page 155.
[12] Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864-86 by Carole Turbin published by the University of Illinois Press (1992) pp. 162; Women and The American Labor Movement From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I by Philip Foner published by Free Press (1979) Page 156.
