Founding mothers of social justice: The Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, 1877-1892

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Summer 1999 by Harth, Erica

Union members were well aware of the strategic necessity to call on husbands and other male connections. Serving on the Protective Committee were Harriet Sewall and Mrs. Tolman Willey. Both women's husbands were lawyers who donated their services to the Union's Protective Department. Harriet's husband, Samuel E. Sewall, was a feminist supporter of women's institutions. He served as a director of the New England Female Medical College, where Lucy, his daughter by his first wife, studied under Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, a member of the Union. When Zakrzewska left the Female Medical College to found the New England Hospital for Women and Children, Sewall served as a director and legal advisor for the new institution.31 (Later, in 1882, Kate Gannett Wells, an anti-suffragist and reluctant feminist, turned to Dr. Lucy Sewall for a medical consultation. She disliked women doctors but felt "loyalty to the cause" of medical training for women.)32

The women, however, may have been ambivalent about leaning so heavily on their men. In 1884, after Kate Gannett Wells expressed the Committee's gratitude to their male lawyers, she proceeded to her real agenda, the empowerment of women through acquisition of the kind of skills they were learning in the Protective Department: "But in the future there may be a firm of Mesdames Sewall & Willey.... One should see the calm persistency of this firm of Sewall & Willey. They listen for hours to tales that could be told in ten minutes. They win the confidence and learn the secret griefs or zealous hatreds of their plaintiffs. They realize that the loss of fifty cents in wages to a girl is equal to the loss of $5 to a retail merchant or $500 to a wholesale dealer."33 Four years later, in fact, a Miss Lelia J. Robinson appears on the list of the Protective Committee's attorneys.4

In the meantime, while the middle-class Union members were working for the empowerment of all women, whatever Dower thev themselves might possess necessarily depended on male connections. In 1880, the Protective Committee delegated two of its members, a Mrs. M. F. Walling and Abby Morton Diaz, to pay a visit to "Mr. Wright" about the enforced standing of women in shops.35 Carroll D. Wright was director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nation's first such bureau (organized in 1869). Diaz and Walling seem to have had no trouble getting to see him.

From its inception, the Union had been concerned about the enforced standing of women in shops. Saleswomen in small stores -- dry goods shops, bakeries, and the like - typically worked a ten to eleven-hour weekday and a half-day on Saturdays. In some shops and bakeries, women also worked on Sundays. The allotted "dinner hour" (our lunch hour) was quite often a half-hour or less. During these long hours, employers did not want the women to sit down while customers were in the shop, which meant that in most cases the women were standing for almost the entire workday.

The results of the meeting between the two WEIU women and Wright have not been recorded, but Wright's fifteenth annual report, for 1884, speaks sympathetically about the difficult working conditions of saleswomen, among other women workers. "A good many saleswomen," we read, "consider their work very hard, and that it has a bad effect on their health; in one instance, a girl says she has paid out over $500 in doctor's bills during the past few years." Wright specifies that enforced standing is one of the hardships of trade: "In bakeries the strain of long hours and standing is especially felt by the salesgirls, while in other branches of business the health of many girls is so poor as to necessitate long rests, one girl being out a year on this account."36