The tailoresses of New York, moreover, were organized as early as 1825, and in 1831 sixteen hundred tailoresses and seamstresses of that city went on strike for an elaborate wage scale covering a large variety of work, and remained out for four or five weeks.[21] Considering that the population of New York in 1830 was under 200,000, this strike bears comparison with the great shirt-waist workers’ strike of 1909-1910. Two years later the journeyman tailors of Baltimore were assisting the tailoresses of that city in a “stand-out” for higher wages,[22] and in the summer of 1844 the Boston tailors aided a large and apparently successful strike of sewing women.[23] In 1851 an effort to assist some six thousand shirt sewers in New York led to the foundation of a shirt sewers’ coöperative union, which prospered for several years.[24] Many other organizations of sewing women have been formed and have conducted strikes, which have sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed. In the textile industries, too, a long series of efforts by operatives to improve their own situation began with the picturesque strike of four hundred women and girls in Dover, N. H., in 1828, when the operatives paraded the town with flags and inscriptions and the factory agent advertised for two or three hundred “better-behaved women.”[25] The long and bitterly contested but successful strike of the Fall River weavers against a reduction of wages in 1875 was led by women who went out after the Weavers’ Union, composed of men, had voted to accept the reduction.[26] Many other examples of effective trade-union activity among women workers might be cited. These women’s organizations, moreover, have proved powerful factors in the fight for ten-hour laws. The industrial schools and business colleges which began to spring up in the sixties and seventies have also furnished important aid to working women. Apprenticeship for girls has always been a farce. Even in colonial days girl apprentices were rarely taught a trade of any kind, and early in the nineteenth century apprenticeship for girls, as well as for boys, came to be generally a means of securing cheap child labor. After the industrial revolution, indeed, the condition of working women, as regards skill and efficiency, was probably distinctly lower than before they became wage earners. Industrial schools, however, have been very slow of development. Business colleges, on the other hand, began during the eighties to receive large numbers of women students, and have materially aided in opening up in the trade and transportation industries remunerative occupations for women.