Note 482 — Chapter VI

In one other respect the Trade Union expansion of 1872-74 resembled that of 1833-34. Both periods were marked by an attempt to enrol the women wage-earners in the Trade Union ranks. Ephemeral Unions of women workers had been established from time to time, only to collapse after a brief existence. The year 1872 saw the establishment of the oldest durable Union for women only—the Edinburgh Upholsterers’ Sewers’ Society. Two years later Mrs. Paterson, the real pioneer of modern women’s Trade Unions, began her work in this field, and in 1875 several small Unions among London Women Bookbinders, Upholsteresses, Shirt and Collar Makers, and Dressmakers were established, to be followed, in subsequent years, by others among Tailoresses, Laundresses, etc. Mrs. Emma Ann Paterson (née Smith), who was born in 1848, the daughter of a London schoolmaster, served from 1867 to 1873 successively as an Assistant Secretary of the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union and the Women’s Suffrage Association, and married, in 1873, Thomas Paterson, a cabinetmaker. On a visit to the United States she became acquainted with the “Female Umbrella Makers’ Union of New York,” and strove, on her return in 1874, to promulgate the idea of Trade Unionism among women workers in the South of England. After some newspaper articles, she set on foot the Women’s Protective and Provident League (now the Women’s Trade Union League), for the express purpose of promoting Trade Unionism, and established in the same year the National Union of Working Women at Bristol. From 1875 to 1886 she was a constant attendant at the Trades Union Congress, and was several times nominated for a seat on the Parliamentary Committee, at the Hull Congress heading the list of unsuccessful candidates. An appreciative notice of her life and work appeared in the Women’s Union Journal on her death in December 1886; see also Dictionary of National Biography, and Women in the Printing Trades, edited by J. R. MacDonald (1904), pp. 36, 37.