wages. When the girls learned of this decision at their work they left their looms and spindles and stood together in little, anxious groups, discussing this new problem that was facing them. One girl, bolder and more enterprising than the rest, suggested their walking out, and not resuming work until the old wage scale had been re-established. Her courage and energy roused the others to action, and in a very short while 1,500 girls marched out of the mills. Through the streets of Lowell they marched, arm in arm, singing songs in chorus. The songs they sang were not revolutionary nor appropriate even; but the marching and the singing in themselves were an expression of freedom and self-reliance, an expression of the knowledge of strength that comes with union. The girls marched to the summit of a hill where some of their male fellow workers addressed them. Then it was that something extraordinary occurred: A little slip of a girl—her name has been forgotten—carried away by the enthusiasm of the occasion, set aside all established decorum, and climbing upon a pump, began to address her fellow workers in her turn, telling them to hold out for their rights. Most of her hearers were more shocked than pleased, for it was an unheard of thing in Lowell, with its deeply rooted New England prejudices, for a woman to speak in public. The Lowell mill girls remained out for several weeks, but then they returned, one by one, and accepted the reduced wages, defeated, "almost starved out," as a New York newspaper reported it.
It is a noteworthy fact that all the early strikes and the first attempts of women workers to organize industrially were met with ridicule and contempt by the general public. The same arguments that have since been used against the suffragists were used against the working women who dared to strike or organize. That industrial organization would unsex women was claimed as earnestly and as vehemently, as some persons claim even to-day that the ballot would unsex them. Strike leaders and agitators among working women became objects of the cheapest ridicule, and press and pulpit combined in discouraging the women and exhorting them to submission. Only the few labor papers then in existence formed a praiseworthy exception. Although the great majority of workingmen
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