The wave of organization reached at last the women workers.  In 1830 the well-known Philadelphia philanthropist, Mathew Carey, asserted that there were in the cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore about 20,000 women who could not by constant employment for sixteen hours out of twenty-four earn more than $1.25 a week.  These were mostly seamstresses and tailoresses, umbrella makers, shoe binders, cigar makers, and book binders.  In New York there was in 1835 a Female Union Association, in Baltimore a United Seamstresses’ Society, and in Philadelphia probably the first federation of women workers in this country.  In Lynn, Massachusetts, a “Female Society of Lynn and Vicinity for the Protection and Promotion of Female Industry” operated during 1833 and 1834 among the shoe binders and had at one time 1000 members, who, like the seamstresses, were home workers and earned scanty wages.

Where nearly every trade was in motion, it did not take long to discover a common direction and a common purpose.  This was expressed in city “trades’ unions,” or federations of all organized trades in a city, and in its ascendency over the individual trade societies.

The first trades’ union was organized August 14, 1833, in New York.  Baltimore followed in September, Philadelphia in November, and Boston in March 1834.  New York after 1820 was the metropolis of the country and also the largest industrial and commercial center.  There the house carpenters had struck for higher wages in the latter part of May 1833, and fifteen other trades met and pledged their support.  Out of this grew the New York Trades’ Union.  It had an official organ in a weekly, the National Trades’ Union, published from 1834 to 1836, and a daily, The Union, issued in 1836.  Ely Moore, a printer, was made president.  Moore was elected a few months later as the first representative of labor in Congress.

In addition, trades’ unions were organized in Washington; in New Brunswick and Newark, New Jersey; in Albany, Troy, and Schenectady, New York; and in the “Far West”—­Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville.

Except in Boston, the trades’ unions felt anxious to draw the line between themselves and the political labor organizations of the preceding years.  In Philadelphia, where as we have seen, the formation of an analogous organization, the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations of 1828, had served as a preliminary for a political movement, the General Trades’ Union took especial precaution and provided in the constitution that “no party, political or religious questions shall at any time be agitated in or acted upon in the Union.”  Its official organ, the National Laborer, declared that “the Trades’ Union never will be political because its members have learned from experience that the introduction of politics into their societies has thwarted every effort to ameliorate their conditions.”