When reports reached Susan that women in the printing trade were afraid of manual labor, of getting their hands and fingers dirty, and of lifting heavy galleys, she quickly let them know that she had no patience with this. "Those who stay at home," she told them, "have to wash kettles and lift wash tubs and black stoves until their hands are blackened and hardened. In this spirit, you must go to work on your cases of type. Are these cases heavier than a wash tub filled with water and clothes, or the old cheese tubs?... The trouble is either that girls are not educated to have physical strength or else they do not like to use it. If a union of women is to succeed, it must be composed of strength, nerve, courage, and persistence, with no fear of dirtying their white fingers, but with a determination that when they go into an office they would go through all that was required of them and demand just as high wages as the men.... "Make up your mind," she continued, "to take the 'lean' with the 'fat,' and be early and late at the case precisely as the men are. I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women."[226] Workingwomen's associations now existed in Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities, encouraged and aroused by the efforts at organization in New York. These associations occasionally exchanged ideas, and news of all of them was published in _The Revolution_. The groups in Boston and in the outlying textile mills were particularly active, and Susan brought to her next suffrage convention in Washington in 1870 Jennie Collins of Lowell who was ably leading a strike against a cut in wages. The newspapers, too, began to notice workingwomen, publishing articles about their working and living conditions. Trying to amalgamate the various groups in New York, Susan now formed a Workingwomen's Central Association, of which she was elected president. To its meetings she brought interesting speakers and practical reports on wages, hours, and working conditions. She herself picked up a great deal of useful information in her daily round as she talked with this one and that one. On her walks to and from work, in all kinds of weather, she met poorly clad women carrying sacks and baskets in which they collected rags, scraps of paper, bones, old shoes, and anything worth rescuing from "garbage boxes." With friendliness and good cheer, she greeted these ragpickers, sometimes stopping to talk with them about their work, and through her interest brought several into the Workingwomen's Association. Looking forward to surveys on all women's occupations, she started out by appointing a committee to investigate the ragpickers, many of whom lived in tumbledown slab shanties on the rocky land which is now a part of Central Park.