Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [787]
Though Stanton and Anthony hoped the Workingwoman’s Association would in the long run establish unions in every industry employing women and forge a crossclass alliance behind women’s suffrage, in the short term the group provided Anthony with the credentials she needed to join the National Labor Union, whose members she wished to lobby on behalf of women’s rights. The NLU accepted her as a delegate to the New York City convention in 1868, in part because it too was looking for allies. But as soon as Anthony raised feminist issues, it became clear this would be a difficult coalition to cement. The NLU’s base of skilled white craft workers saw working women as competitors. They also believed women were “created” to be “the presiding deity of the home circle,” as one NLU leader argued, there to “console us in our declining years.”
What shattered the alliance was a labor conflict that pointed up the gap between middle-class feminists and working-class unionists. The National Typographical Union, impressed with the new militancy of female printers, moved to placate and incorporate them. They were accepted as an NTU local, and when male printers struck the World, the women refused to replace them. But now Anthony stepped forward as a
The Upstairs Sewing Room at A.T. Stewart’s store on Broadway at Tenth Street, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 24, 1875. While middle- and upper-class women thronged the emporiums of Ladies’ Mile below, regiments of working-class seamstresses toiled under the watchful eyes of male supervisors. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
strikebreaker. She offered the Workingwoman’s Association as a place where publishers could train women to be scabs, arguing (as did employers) that it was only seeking new opportunities for females. Printers at the national convention in 1869 demanded Anthony’s ouster, and got it.
The Workingwoman’s Association did not last much longer, but its existence marked an important development. In the past, the conventional linkages between upper- and lower-class women—charitable enterprises launched by ladies—had been one-sided and condescending. The Workingwoman’s Association, though riddled with mutual misunderstandings, suggested the possibility of a more coequal coalition.
WALKING TO WORK
Even with improved wages, the bulk of the working class—still unable to afford public transportation—had to live near their jobs. For most this meant Manhattan’s rim, the tenement-lined streets leading back from the docks into a mixed terrain of heavy industry and light manufacture. The twenty-five thousand ironworkers walked to great foundries rooted on the East and Hudson river shorelines, near their rail and sea lifelines. Clothing sweatshops sprouted in the Lower East Side wards to be near their cheap labor supplies (some women outworkers rarely left their tenements at all). Bohemian cigarmakers too worked at home now that cigar molds made it possible to do so.
The proximity of community to industry cast a pall over daily life. Admixed with foundries and factories were reeking gasworks, putrid slaughterhouses, malodorous railyards, rotting wharves, and stinking manure piles, which gave the working-class quarters their distinctively fetid quality. In the Lower (predominantly Irish and German) East and West Side wards, the stench was compounded by Tweed’s inaction. The race to develop the uptown wards left scant energy or public capital available to rescue the downtown districts, many built on filled-in swampland. Poorly designed sewage pipes were left to spew their putrefying contents into cobblestoned streets, where they mingled With animal wastes, and where at night homeless children slept in abandoned carts and wagons. Cholera and other diseases devastated such streets. In 1866 the death rate reached 195 per thousand in the worst blocks. Even the cantankerous George Templeton Strong muttered, “It is shameful that men, women and children should be permitted to live in such holes.”
Those who could, moved. Conditions