ABSTRACT
The words expressed the writer’s surprise at the novelty of the event, a surprise understandable in light of the fact that those meetings were the earliest attempts by American working women to organize in unions and associations to protect their rights. The seamstresses’ efforts at collective action paralleled the efforts of other laboring groups to have more control over their labor. The cause of the seamstresses was seen by the labor press as part of the cause of all working women and men. The Boston Times expressed this view when in 1844 a meeting by the city’s seamstresses was described in these terms: It was the most animated and glorious gathering and the greatest demonstration in behalf of the rights of the laboring men and women who are oppressed and ground down to the dust by their cruel oppressors among people that has yet been made.
