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The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America in Cambridge, Massachusetts was founded in 1943 when Radcliffe College, Cambridge, accepted the Woman's Rights Collection (WRC) . The WRC documents several woman's suffrage organizations and includes the papers of Maud Wood Park and other women active in the women rights movement. But it does not end with 1920, the year the federal suffrage amendment was ratified, and it includes the library's first labor collection, papers of Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor, 1933-45, and the first woman in the Cabinet. Thus despite the emphasis on suffrage and women's political and legal rights, labor issues, from the beginning have been an integral part of the Schlesinger Library. At about the time the WRC arrived at Radcliffe, president Wilbur K. Jordan and Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, of the Harvard University's history department decided to make it the centerpiece of a growing research library on women, rather than a static memorial to the suffrage movement. Soon after, in December 1945, another major labor collection arrived, the papers of Leonora O'Reilly. O'Reilly's papers make up one major series in the micropublication, "The Papers of the Women's Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders," a project sponsored by the Schlesinger Library, edited by Edward T. James, and published by Research Publications Inc. in 1981.

Allis Rosenberg Wolfe's publication of five "Letters of a Lowell Mill Girl and Friends: 1845-1846," represents an important contribution to the study of the New England factory women. These letters, sent to the 22 year-old Harriet Hanson by her friends Maria and Lura Currier and H.E. Back and now in the Harriet Hanson Robinson papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, are among the only surviving manuscript materials that document the perceptions of the Yankee mill women of the 1840's. The following remarks are designed to clarify and extend our understanding of the letters' contents, now that they have at last been made more accessible. Wolfe publishes perhaps two-thirds of the letters, an unfortunate if possibly necessary, for reasons of space editing of such rare documents. The portions retained are well chosen, but the general character of the letters is inevitably blurred. In short, all five letters in the Robinson papers must be seen as representing the complex experience of those mill women who went back and forth between factory town and rural community.

Herbert Gutman often prefaced his arguments by pointing out that "little is known" about the particular subject at hand. This certainly was true of women's history during his lifetime. Gutman's work and his presence in the historical profession contributed enormously to altering that fact. Gutman's approach to history did more than any particular study or article to inform and invigorate the field of women's history. The questions he posed, how he posed them, and the way he used sources opened new areas to historical study and freed us to consider the history of those who left no state papers, no archives, and no published documents. With a basically humanistic approach; Gutman considered history part science and part literature. He combined numbers from the census with poems written by slaves and workers. The implications of Gutman's approach proved critical for women's history. By probing sources in a new way, he opened the possibility of new questions as well. Arenas of life previously considered impossible to scrutinize from an historical perspective suddenly became important arenas of investigation. Gutman included women in his vision, not as appendages but on the stage of American life.

The article focuses on the impact of the local conditions and the labor consciousness on the struggles for power among leather workers in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts. Locals of national organizations had little connection with the national unions. Consequently, when they did affiliate with national organizations, local concerns and group loyalty transcended national policies. The important ties with other outside unions were of an informal nature. Ties to nonlocal workers and unions were usually confined to feelings of brotherhood and solidarity, which manifested themselves in aid for union struggles. The paper shows how the workers rallied their community of fellow workers to fight against the companies. Since Lynn's wage earners viewed their city as a community of workers, the strike provides a picture of a community in struggle. The community gave the workers strength and support to resist the employers, their friends and relatives were workers and union members, and their unions controlled most of the shops in Lynn. The same community, however, also gave them a false sense of their power to affect their demands against organized capital.

The article discusses manuscript sources in American radicalism. Scholars interested in American radicalism must be prepared to travel widely if they expect to inspect manuscript sources. Virtually every state, almost every university library of any stature, has some such holdings. Socialists, and other radicals, were prolific writers of letters, memoranda, speeches and pamphlets. They also tended to keep extensive minutes of meetings of branches, committees, national boards, and even of factions. Moreover, most Socialists had a sense of history and preserved their records. Unfortunately, there is no single repository for this Socialist material. At one time it was expected that the Tamiment Institute-then called the Rand School-Library in New York would house the material. But Socialists, in the course of human events, split into innumerable factions, and the leaders of different factions gave their papers to various libraries some of them thousands of miles apart. There were also geographic reasons for the dispersion: the early Socialists of the Nineteenth century lived in Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, and (after 1880) California.

This article presents the journal of S. C. Hewitt, appointed lecturer of the Fall River Mechanics' Association and labor organizer in Massachusetts in the early 1840s. Students U.S. labor movement know that the most important development of the 1840s was the ten-hour movement, and that the organization which spearheaded this demand was the New England Workingmen's Association which came into existence in the fall of 1844 to give support to the shorter workday crusade. The association was largely the product of the mechanics of Fall River, Massachusetts. Early in 1844 these men organized a Mechanics' Association to further the ten-hour day in their community. The association distributed pledge cards binding the signers not to work for more than ten hours and conducted a number of strikes for the shorter working day. In April 1844, the Fall River Mechanics Association set up a publishing committee, headed by Thomas Almy, to print a four-page weekly paper, "The Mechanic," to advocate the cause of the oppressed mechanic and laborer in all its bearings. The Mechanics' Association secure the services of S. C. Hewitt as a lecturer. Readers of "The Mechanic" were already familiar with Mr. Hewitt.