Sarah+Monroe



In 1831, she was among the first to mobilize a labor movement in NYC for the tailoresses. The first all-women strike in America was in 1825 among women sewers.

We don’t know much about her life. She could have grown up in an almshouse as most poor women do. The famous reformer Ezra Stiles Ely met many like these. One woman had four children. She was trying to find the husband who abandoned her at the Tavern where he drank away their money. She told him that if only she had half his wages, she could get an apt. where there is more fresh air than in the almshouse. The children were getting sick.

She could have gone to work in the Lowell Mills in new England, making textile and cloth. She could have been an Irish immigrant who most often wound up working as a domestic servant. Instead, she sewed.

She moved past the home, piece work. Most women were stuck at this low paying work. They got the cheapest kinds of needlework that way. In the “sweat shops”, the women sewers earned ½ of men’s wages and still got the plainest, lowest paying needle work, compared to male tailors.

Sarah followed leaders like Frances Wright and Elizabeth Gray. She wrote articles, lead debates and posted notices at a time when women who spoke in public were called “sluts” and had objects thrown at them. She said, “Long have we borne this oppression in silence. Patience is no longer a virtue.” “If we do not come forth in our own defense, what will become of us?” This hint that prostitution was the next and last resort changed the minds of many men who were competing with lower-paid women tailoresses. (20% of NYC girls ages teens to 20s is reported to have resorted to this trade, according to several sources, including Graff, Growing Up in America.) She said in her speech for the Tailoress Society:

Let us bring back to our recollection the scenes of distress that have been exhibited in this city during the past winter…High time it is my friends, high time it is that we awake. High time it is that we are up and doing…let us unite—let us organize ourselves—let us do all in our power to increase our members, for on that the success of our cause demands.

Sarah Monroe Document Packet: