This installment of the California labor history series is excerpted from the newly released book, From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement by California Federation of Teachers Communications Managing director Fred Glass. Available for purchase via the University of California Press website.

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During a calendar week in which Governor Brown signed a bill, SB 358 (Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara) strengthening pay equity protections for women, information technology may exist helpful to know where and when that struggle started in California, and with whom: Kate Kennedy.

The Pioneer Woolen Mills at Black Bespeak in San Francisco was i of many new fabric and wearable-related businesses employing hundreds of workers by the mid-1860s, including women.  Less than ten percent of the Anglo population of California in 1850, by 1870 white women were over i third of the San Francisco population; most needed to piece of work.

Although records of women's work were very poorly kept, we know that equally women slowly settled in the city they worked in a restricted range of occupations.   These included domestic services—keeping house, washing, cooking, sewing, and tending for children of the well-to-do—and commercial industries offering similar types of work in restaurants, laundries, hospitals, and clothing manufacturing.

Their traditional "nurturing" social role gave women access to another important workplace.  The framers of the 1849 California constitution based their ideas nigh public didactics on the "common schools" concept that supported education in the eastern states through local taxes and sale or rental of public lands. Public school advocates argued that in a self-governing commonwealth, the state must provide gratuitous didactics to all children and then that when they grew up they could participate knowledgeably in public affairs.  But it had taken many local battles across the country to turn these ideas into reality for the children of workers and farmers.

In California public schools proved difficult to maintain outside larger cities until the Gold Rush subsided, although past 1854 more than than 4 thousand children were enrolled in 47 common schools for at to the lowest degree one quarter of the year.

By 1860, San Francisco employed 72 teachers for half dozen thousand registered students.  57 were women, teaching in seventeen schools, including two segregated schools for African American and Chinese children.

One early educator was Kate Kennedy.  Kennedy emigrated from Ireland to New York with a blood brother and sis following the irish potato dearth of the mid-1840s.  She sewed dress in the "sweating" arrangement, in which subcontractors took piece of work from main tailors, and paid women and children to bring materials home to piece of work on.   She and her sister saved enough coin to fund their instruction every bit teachers, and to bring the rest of their family across the ocean.  Kennedy and five sisters moved to San Francisco in 1856 and joined the teaching workforce.  Kennedy as well became a forceful advocate for equal rights for women and equal pay for female teachers.

By all accounts a remarkable teacher, Kennedy was promoted to principal of North Cosmopolitan Grammar School in 1867.  She was infuriated to discover that male principals were paid more she was.  Irish-American politicians helped her write and laissez passer a state police force guaranteeing "equal pay for equal work."  However, to become around the law, school administrators simply kept elementary wages lower, where they congregated women; in secondary schools, pay scales were higher, and they only hired men.

Kennedy found herself, in public education, in a box just like the ane that women confronted in the broader world of work:  what economists call "discriminatory labor market sectionalisation," significant some jobs for women and others for men.

Even so, she didn't practise badly.  Educated, white, and upwardly mobile (inside limits) she endemic her ain home and some modest real manor holdings when she died. Her trajectory was the model shared by many San Francisco working people: work hard, improve yourself, rise in the earth. And similar Kate Kennedy, who joined and participated actively in a number of labor organizations, many saw collective activeness as necessary to their successes as individuals.

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Purchase your ain re-create of Fred Glass'southward historical California Labor collection now!