The 1880âs and â90âs were a period of huge and rapid industrial growth. The founding of the Standard Oil Company was followed by more "trusts," at first in the distilling, sugar-refining, and lead industries, later in steel, tobacco, and elsewhere. Railroads spread north and south, in a network all the way to the Pacific Coast, spurred by such financiers as Henry Villard, James J. Hill, and others.
Cheap tractable labor was needed for these giant enterprises: in the decade after 1880, immigration from impoverished European countries topped five million. Women workers were in rising demand, always for the lowest-paying jobs; the 2,647,000 gainfully employed in 1880 grew to 4,005,500 ten years later, from 15.2 per cent to 17.2 per cent of the total working labor force.
Outside of the large number classified as housekeepers, stewards, hostesses, and family servants of all kinds, totaling almost a million, the greatest number were to be found in the same occupations they had carried on at home before the era of industrialization: making cloth and clothing, keeping these clean, and other so-called service occupations. . . .
Although the demand for labor appeared insatiable, soaring immigration enabled employers to keep wages down. The 1880's consequently saw the first really serious attempt to build a national labor organization. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 as a secret fraternal order, discarded the bulk of its ritualistic features in 1881 and began organizing working men and women on an equal basis. . . .
. . . Mrs. [Leonora] Barry herself admitted that in the face of such conditions as she described, the response of women to attempts at organization was disappointing, due to ignorance, apathy, hopelessness, and
the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them, with the pessimistic view of life in which they see no ray of hope. Such people cannot be said to live, as living means the enjoyment of nature's gifts, but they simply vegetate like partially petrified creatures. Every effort has been made to perfect and extend the organization of women, but our efforts have not met with the response that the cause deservesâpartly because those who have steady employment, fairly good wages, and comfortable homes seem to see nothing in organization outside of self-interest, and, because they are what they are pleased to term "all right," do not feel it incumbent upon themselves to do anything to assist their less fortunate co-workers. Again, many women are deterred from joining labor organizations by foolish pride, prudish modesty and religious scruples; and a prevailing cause, which applies to all who are in the flush of womanood, is the hope and expectancy that in the near future marriage will lift them out of the industrial life to the quiet and comfort of a home, foolishly imagining that with marriage their connection with and interest in labor matters end; often finding, however, that their struggle has only begun when they have to go back to the shop for two instead of one. All this is the results or effects of the environments and conditions surrounding women in the past and present, and can be removed only by constant agitation and education.
While this outburst reflects the bitterness of a woman who knew from her own experience that marriage was no guarantee against the problems of a wage earner, it also shows that Leonora Barry understood the source of such illusions. By and large the reluctance of women to join trade unions, and the difficulties encountered in trying to organize them, are still very much with us. In any case, attempts to organize them into the Knights of Labor came to an end when Mrs. Barry resigned her post in 1890, to marry a St. Louis printer, Obadiah R. Lake; she never returned to the labor movement.
-Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Womanâs Rights Movement in the United States
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