[Footnote 24: In 1891 the women's Society refused to support the men's in agitating for an eight-hours' day. In 1875 Mrs. Paterson said at the Trade Union Congress that "the more they pressed for additional legislation the greater obstacles they threw in the way of working women. She should rather say let them suffer a little longer the evils of overwork and long hours." The Union's representatives, however, have always pressed for women factory inspectors, and on this matter Mrs. Paterson was for a good many years a voice crying in the wilderness.]
Perhaps the Union has been too willing to make requests to good employers for better conditions, and too timorous in helping to level up the general conditions of the trade. Employers have not been hostile. Mr. B. Collins, the publisher, for instance, presided over the annual meeting for 1891, and Mr. Longmans and other publishers have done the same in other years. "I know an employer," says a writer in the _British Bookmaker_ of September, 1891, "who will give £100 to see a good women's Union established. Why? Because if it could be done, its effect upon other employers would remove the gross inequalities of prices that at present exist to his detriment." But this Union has never reached that point of strength when it could bring pressure to bear on the trade for the mutual advantage of the good employer and the woman worker.
As a consequence, the good relations between the men and the women in the trade have not always been maintained, and there was considerable ill-feeling between the two sections during the eight hours' agitation from 1891 to 1894.[25]
[Footnote 25: It should be noted, however, that the sentiment amongst the women as a whole was friendly during the eight hours' agitation, although the Society was taking no part in it officially. A writer in the _British Bookmaker_ for December, 1891, tells how all the women in the lacing department of Messrs. Waterlow's (Hill Street) struck on a certain job, and how "at another place as I stood with the pickets outside, about five o'clock one cold afternoon, I saw something descending from an upper storey and found it was a quart of hot tea for the benumbed men on duty below, lowered out by a string from the women's shop."]