Petition of the Twenty Thousand: Women Help the War Effort

In late July 1864, 800 Philadelphia seamstresses put their names on a petition addressed to the Honorable Edwin M. Stanton, U.S. secretary of war. Titled “Twenty Thousand Working Women of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania”—so clearly speaking for more than themselves—it protested their abysmally low wages at the Schuylkill Arsenal and the outsourcing of work on government contracts …

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