In the collar laundries of Troy, New York, young women stand from dawn to dark over vats of boiling starch and beds of hot iron, pressing the stiff white collars that every respectable man in America buttons to his shirt. The steam scalds. The pay is eight dollars a week, and the owners set even that.
It is 1864.
She does not just take the wage she is handed. She is about twenty three, Irish, an immigrant, and what she earns in that steam feeds a family with no other income.
She does not just complain to the woman at the next iron. She gathers some three hundred of them, alongside a fellow laundress named Esther Keegan, into a union of their own.
She does not just walk out in February. She holds the line until the owners give in within days and raise the pay.
She does not just win once and go home. She keeps the union standing for years, and after a second short strike in 1866 the members watch eight dollars a week climb toward fourteen.
Her Spark of Liberty was a wage the women set for themselves.
That is the part the country kept forgetting. There had been strikes by working women before, desperate and brief, flaring and gone. This was an organization that formed, won, and then stayed, holding the ground it had taken. It is counted among the first unions of working women anywhere in America to do all three.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
Troy made collars for the whole country. The detachable collar had been invented there, in a kitchen, by a woman tired of washing whole shirts, and the city grew rich on it. The wealth ran on young Irish immigrant women standing in steam, handling bleach and hot iron for twelve and fourteen hours, in rooms where a scalded hand meant a day without pay. The owners considered the arrangement settled. It had never occurred to them that the women counted as anything the market had to bargain with.
Word of what the laundresses of Troy had managed traveled through the young labor movement. In 1868 the head of the National Labor Union rose at its congress and named her assistant secretary. No woman had ever held national office in American labor before. By most accounts she was the first.
She died young, in 1906, and was buried in Troy under a stone that said nothing about any of it. The house she lived in on Eighth Street is a National Historic Landmark now, which is a late and quiet way for a country to admit it was paying attention after all.
The union did not outlive the decade, and her name slipped out of the story the country tells about itself. What she proved did not slip away with it. Women who worked could organize, could strike, could win, and could be trusted to lead.
Her name was Kate Mullany.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
A new Sparks of Liberty story is here. What the Candle Witnessed tells the story of the enslaved boy who taught himself to read and, by candlelight in the summer of 1776, read the anti-slavery passage that Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence. Read it now on Amazon.
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