Strength in Numbers

Strength in numbers

              Individual women have banded together for success.  In 195, B. C. Roman matrons crowded the Forum, demanded and achieved the repeal of the Oppian Law which forbid women to wear multicolored dresses or drive chariots in town or own more than half an ounce of gold.

              More than a thousand years later, in the middle of the 13^th century, many widows and unmarried women not protected or controlled by recognized church orders banded together with some nuns who were unhappy with church restrictions to create what historians named the Beguine Movement in Europe.  Their aims were self-help and support through weaving, embroidery, nursing, begging alms and prayers. They prayed and meditated on their own terms.  They wandered from place to place, mainly in Belgium, France and Germany.  The Church Fathers were not amused.  The beguines were harassed, forced to enter convents, and if they refused, excommunication, torture and death were the penalties.  The effects of the Beguine Movement, however, can be found to this day in hospitals and homes for the aged which these strong, stubborn women founded.

              As women entered the market economy, creating products for sale by others, they were provided no job protection or decent working conditions.  Men joined guilds but denied admission to women unless they were widows of former members.  In 1485 and again in 1482 more than 1000 women in London who worked in the silk industry, spinning and weaving – demanded protection from foreign competition, protection had given male guilds.  A century later there was an English silk women’s guild.

              Generally, conditions for the poor who labored more than 10 hours a day did not improve in the next centuries.  In 1643 and again six years later, thousands of women petitioned England’s Parliament for jobs, improved working conditions and increased pay.

              Here in America conditions were no better when the industrial age began.  Government and employers were slow to aid male workers and even slower to improve women’s working conditions.  Women resisted first.  In 1834 1000 shoe binders went on strike for 2 months.  Aided by the men’s union they won a raise.  The same year in Lowell, Massachusetts mill women waged a successful strike against a 25% proposed wage cut