The women made a bold demand – being paid the same as men for work of equal skill. It was the first trade union demand for equal pay for equal work. The women were part of the Daughters of St. Crispin, meeting in their 2nd national conference April 12-14th, 1870 in Stoneham, Massachusetts.
RESOLVED by this National Grand Lodge of Daughters of St. Crispin, that we demand for our labor the same rate of compensation for equal skill displayed, or the same hours of toil, as is paid other laborers in the same branches of business; and we regard a denial of this right by anyone as a usurpation and a fraud.
Recognized as the first national trade union for women, The Daughters of St. Crispin hadbeen formed the year before in Lynn, with Stoneham as one of the founding lodges. Lynn and Stoneham were shoe towns, like many towns across eastern Massachusetts.
Jobs in the shoe industry were divided by the sex of the workers. Women were limited to sewing and binding the upper parts of the shoes. Other jobs were only done by men. By 1870, while Stoneham still had some artisan cordwainers who made the entire shoe, most shoes were already produced in increasingly large factories. The process of making a shoe was split into more and more processes requiring less skill for each process and driving down wages for all workers.
The women’s union was modeled after the Knights of St. Crispin, the male shoe workers union. (St. Crispin is the patron saint of shoemakers and cobblers). The Knights were fighting against the deskilling and pay cuts that had come with the industrialization of shoe making in the 19th century.
Women were heavily involved in the 1860 strike that started in Lynn and spread to over 20,000 workers in the shoe industry. Women rarely made more than $1 a week, half of what most men earned. Nonetheless, women joined the strike and marched publicly, to the horror of one Lynn observer named Moses Rogers. A letter of his preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society reads: in part “I will not undertake to give an account of the disgraceful & shameful deeds enacted in this city since the Strike commenced, suffice it to say that I never witnessed anything in my life which appeared so appaling & fearful…In addition to the above number there is a strike amongst the Ladies, who I understand propose parading the streets tomorrow to the number 2000.”
Over 125 years later, women in the United States still only earn 83% of what men earn. (2024 American Community Survey Data, US Census). In 1982, women only earned 65% of what men did; by 2004 the gap had shrunk to 81 cents. It has changed little in the last two decades, although younger women are closer to wage parity at 95 cents for each dollar men earn.
To learn more, see
Ruth Denzell, 1869:The Daughters of St. Crispin, Life and Labor, Vol. 2, Oct. 1912.
The Lynn Shoemakers Strike of 1860 – Massachusetts Historical Society