This departure from the custom prevailing among the proletariat to sell their services for wage-hire, was due largely to the demand made in the nineteenth plank of the platform of the Knights of Labor for the abolition of the wage system and a national system of co-operation in lieu thereof. The insertion of such a demand proved the founders of the order to have been thinkers radical enough to go a step beyond the old idea of trades organizations with their petty notions of each trade working solely in its own interests. In comparison with the broad and lofty conception of the Knights of Labor, which sought to include in its benefits all women and men engaged in every department of industrial work, other organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor, which is a mere rope of sand, showed themselves away in the rear-guard of progressive civilization by placing themselves solely on the old competitive and selfish trades union basis. The next largest organization that took women into its body on terms of equality was “The Granger Association of Western Farmers.”[179] Founded in 1870, this association of the agriculturists of the country proposed to do for women on the farms what the societies had done for them in the other industries. They formulated as a principle “that no Grange should be organized, or exist, without women.” This act was held to be the emancipation of women on the farms, as that of the Knight of Labor had been in the trades. In their public meetings, women were invited to take part in the discussions of plans for mutual benefit, for usefulness and culture. The principles of co-operation, which brought them together, extended to the buying of all descriptions of goods in bulk. This, by increasing the purchasing power of limited incomes, increased the comforts and attractions of homes that would otherwise have been deprived of them. The women who entered the Granges held a conspicuous place in the national census of agricultural operators and producers of national wealth. They were engaged in the farm labors of milking, making butter and cheese, raising poultry, preserving eggs, and gathering honey for market and home consumption. Vegetable gardens, fruit orchards, viticulture, berry plants, and shrubs of many millions’ value were largely attended to by them; while planting, weeding, haying, harvesting, tilling the soil, and caring for live-stock were rapidly added to the list of women’s occupations on the farm. To bring a new brightness into the lives of these toilers was an avowed object of the Grange. It proposed, by bringing men and women together with communities of interests, to effect a great moral and social good, and thus elevate them from slaves and drudges into a “better and higher manhood and womanhood.”