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Updated: May 29, 2025
By September ten thousand men were rocking and washing for gold round Yale. As in the late Kootenay and in the still later Klondike stampede, American cities at the coast benefited most. Victoria was a ten-hour trip from the mainland. Whatcom and Townsend, on the American side, advertised the advantages of the Washington route to the Fraser river gold-mines.
I was taken out and shown my duties. Also, I was told the terms of my employment a ten-hour day, every day in the month including Sundays and holidays, with one day off each month, with a salary of thirty dollars a month. It wasn't exciting. Years before, at the cannery, I had earned a dollar a day for a ten-hour day.
No marvel was it that Bill and his helper were as grimy as stokers of a furnace. Lenore began to choke with the fine dust and to feel her eyes smart and to see it settle on her hands and dress. She then had appreciation of the nature of a ten-hour day for workmen cutting eighteen acres of barley. How would they ever cut the two thousand acres of wheat? No wonder many men were needed.
The Illinois State Committee of the Women's Trade Union League, whose fine legislative work helped to secure the passage of the present ten-hour law for women, also grew out of the discussion which came up in the Chicago conference. The lines on which the League is developing can be observed through the work done and reported upon at the biennial conventions of which five have been held.
Thus, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington have a ten-hour day in all manufacturing or mechanical employments for women of any age, which in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington extends to mercantile avocations also, in Louisiana only to specified dangerous trades; in Wisconsin, eight hours; and in Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire there may not be more than fifty-eight hours a week, or in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, fifty-six, and in Michigan and Missouri, fifty-four.
"I don't see the use of having that kind of a husband," Phebe observed severely. "You like the kind like me better; don't you, Babe?" "No; I should get sick of having you everlastingly around the house, Billy. I want a man to have hours and stick to them, not keep running in and out. I sha'n't marry. If I did, I would insist on a ten-hour law; then I could be sure of getting some time to myself."
But the mechanics' aspiration for a ten-hour day perhaps the strongest spiritual inheritance from the preceding movement for equal citizenship, had to await a change in the general condition of industry to render trade union effort effective before it could turn into a well sustained movement. That change finally came with the prosperous year of 1835. The movement was precipitated in Boston.
The proprietors and managers of the large Chicago department stores, for instance, worked out beforehand a plan of shifts by which they were able to handle the Christmas trade, satisfy their customers, and at the same time, dismiss each set of girls at the end of their ten-hour period. To meet the necessities of the case a staff of extra hands was engaged by each of the large department stores.
The first concerted demand for the ten-hour day was made by the workingmen of Baltimore in August 1833, and extended over seventeen trades.
They condemned the journeymen on the moral ground that an agitation for a shorter day would open "a wide door for idleness and vice"; hinted broadly at the foreign origin of the agitation; declared that all combinations intending to regulate the value of labor by abridging the working day were in a high degree unjust and injurious to the other classes in the community; announced their resolution to support the masters at the sacrifice of suspending building altogether; and bound themselves not to employ any journeyman or master who might enforce the ten-hour day.
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