ten-hour day and for other important labor reforms were fought by the working women of Pittsburgh. Mr. John B. Andrews, in the volume on "History of Women in Trade Unions," published by the government as part of the general report on "Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United States," gives the following description of those severe struggles of Pittsburgh factory women: "It is doubtful if women workers have ever engaged in more bitterly contested strikes than those around Pittsburgh in 1848. It was the culmination of six long years of struggle to secure adequate wages, reasonable hours and fair conditions. In the early forties these women had gone on strike for higher wages and the abolition of the store order system. In 1843 they protested unsuccessfully against an increase in the number of hours of labor without an increase in wages. In 1844 they struck against a reduction in pay. In 1845 they abandoned the attempt to regulate their wages, and united on an attempt to secure the ten-hour day. When starved back to work on the twelve-hour system, they secured a promise from their employers that no objection would be raised against a continuance of the ten-hour agitation, and that when employers elsewhere adopted the ten-hour system the Pittsburgh manufacturers would do likewise."
Having obtained this promise, the working women of Pittsburgh proceeded to inaugurate what was a new departure in the American labor movement. They carried their agitation beyond their city and beyond the boundaries of their State, and combined with the working women of New England factory towns in a concerted effort to win the ten-hour day. The New England women responded eagerly to the call of their Pittsburgh sisters, and together they drew up a document that they very appropriately called their Declaration of Independence, resolving not to work more than ten hours daily after July 4, 1846. The result of all this agitation was that several States enacted ten-hour laws. New Hampshire took the lead in 1847. Pennsylvania followed in 1848, and New Jersey in 1851. Unfortunately these laws were not framed by working men and women, but by representatives of the employing class, and so each of them contained a saving clause—saving for the employers. This
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