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Some German socialists adopted a feminist stance. Weitling’s Republik der Arbeiter formally acknowledged women’s rights, and the labor societies he led included a few women—among them Mathilde Giesler Anneke, daughter of a wealthy Westphalian landlord and mine owner. Estranged from her class, she married forty-niner Fritz Anneke, arrived in 1852, joined Weitling’s organization, and regularly lectured at workers’ vereins in New York City and Williamsburgh on her view “that the social question could only be solved by the emancipation of women.” Few rank-and-file socialists agreed. The hausfrau should be a companion but stick to guarding the proletarian family. German radicals defended the family wage and scorned feminists as dupes of Manchesterian liberal economics, thus elevating domesticity to the status of scientific principle.

That this stubborn rearguard battle to keep women out of wage-work would prove costly was already evident in the printing trade. Male typesetters were understandably dismayed that mechanization had allowed poorly paid young women to replace highly skilled men, but rather than include them in the union, men argued women should be banned from the business. The result was that in 1853, when the union struck the Day-Book, it had little recourse after the publisher established crash typesetting courses for women and hired graduates as strikebreakers.

“. . . GROWS RICH ON THE HARD LAHORS OF OUR SEX.”

By decade’s end, women’s trade unionism had been obliterated; it would not revive until the twentieth century. With working women unable to speak for themselves, some middle-class feminists proposed to speak for them. “Every woman in misfortune,” wrote Caroline Kirkland, “is the proper object of care to the happier and safer part of her sex.” Indeed, Kirkland suggested, “women should consider themselves as a community, having special common needs and common obligations.” But the effort to throw womanly bridges across the class divide would prove far more difficult than nascent feminists imagined.

In 1845 the all-female editorial staff of the Advocate of Moral Reform, newspaper of the American Female Moral Reform Society, declared that “the ordinary rate of wages for female labor is unjust and oppressive.” They excoriated male employers who “drive the young and unfriended to dens of shame, while they fill their coffers with the avails of unrequited toil.” Catharine Beecher (Henry Ward’s sister) was less flowery and more specific. “Capitalists at the East avail themselves of this excess of female hands,” Beecher wrote. They got work from poor women “at prices that will not keep soul and body together; and then the articles thus made are sold for prices that give monstrous profits to the capitalist, who thus grows rich on the hard labors of our sex.”

In 1848, the Reform Society established a four-story Home for the Friendless and House of Industry, uptown on Fifth Avenue between 29th and 30th streets. Here the “unprotected female whose only crime is poverty and the need of employment” could learn a trade as well as the precepts of religion and morality. The American Female Guardian Society, as it now renamed itself, also established an Industrial School for those too poor to attend public school, which taught sewing and provided free lunches. The idea was quickly replicated at a German Industrial School, a Brooklyn Industrial School, and across the United States.

Even these limited efforts by affluent women to reach out across class lines to their poorer sisters were—as in the case of analogous projects by their male counterparts—hampered by elite fears and prejudices. The notion of laboring women as active and equal partners was unimaginable. The lady class would succor shivering seamstresses, but only if they bore their ills in silence and maintained a grateful and deferential demeanor to their benefactors. Proper recipients, moreover, had to uphold (or at least aspire to) bourgeois domestic standards, keeping their houses and raising their