Augusta Lewis Troup

• Augusta Troup
• Born: c. 1848
• Died: September 14, 1920

Journalist and labor organizer, was born in New York City at an uncertain date, probably in 1848. Her parents, Charles Lewis, a native of England, and Elizabeth (Rowe) Lewis of New York City, died when she was an infant. She was raised in the home of Isaac Baldwin Gager, a broker and commission merchant; received her early education from private tutors; attended Brooklyn Heights Seminary; and was graduated with honors from the convent School of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York. As a young woman she was noted for her intelligence, charm, and “unusual comeliness.”

At nineteen she became a reporter for the New York Sun and contributed articles to magazines. She learned typesetting, served an apprenticeship on The New York Era, then joined the New York World. Late in 1867, when the International Typographical Union went on strike, women typesetters, not admitted to unions, remained at work. After the strike, most were quickly dismissed, and Lewis worked for small printing companies and periodicals.

Deciding that women typesetters should be unionized, Lewis, a competent speaker and writer, joined with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—then publishing their women’s rights paper, The Revolution—in the founding of the New York Working Women’s Association.

The association, established on September 17, 1868, attempted to deal with wages and working conditions, as did men’s unions. Lewis believed strongly in the principle of union loyalty, even at the cost of refusing jobs. Although she favored woman suffrage, she did not want the issue brought up to members of the new association because she believed that many were not ready to cope with it and that the cause of economic equality for women, which she considered the first priority, would suffer.

Anthony, who wanted wider work opportunities for women, whether obtained with or without unions, also wanted discussion of woman suffrage in the new association. Lewis and Anthony publicly debated this issue, and their opposing views came into conflict early in 1869 during a New York printers’ strike. Lewis tried to prevent women printers from scabbing, while Anthony urged employers to hire women type-setters to replace the striking men.

As a result of her union activities, Lewis was fired as a typesetter from the shop that printed The Revolution, and that summer New York delegates to the National Labor Union convention blocked the choice of Anthony as delegate of the Working Women’s Association.

In October 1868, Augusta Lewis also helped to organize Women’s Typographical Union No. 1 and served as its first president. The new union had the support of New York Local 6 of the International Typographical Union (ITU) and the local’s corresponding secretary, Alexander Troup, also secretary-treasurer of the international union (Lewis had been introduced to Troup by Anthony). In June 1869 the women’s group received a charter from the ITU. Although now union members, women still faced job discrimination. They not only declined to scab against male union members, but they found that employers still refused to pay wages equal to men’s. Because their lower pay was a threat to the hard-won union scale, women type-setters were resented and many union foremen also refused to hire them.

Nevertheless, in 1870 the ITU elected Augusta Lewis to a one-year term as corresponding secretary. She brought many women into the national union and at the 1872 convention presented a knowledgeable report on conditions of both men and women workers in the printing trades. The struggling Women’s Typographical Union No. 1 was disbanded in 1878 and the ITU voted not to charter any other women’s unions. But the work of Augusta Lewis was not in vain; printers soon began to admit women members into their regular local chapters, and she was the first woman member of Typographical Union No. 6.

On June 12, 1874, Lewis married Alexander Troup, a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in Cold Spring, New York. Troup had left active union work and settled, in 1871 in New Haven, Connecticut, where he founded The New Haven Union. The Troups had seven children: Alexander, who followed his father as publisher of the Union; another son; and five daughters, two of whom died in infancy. Alexander Troup served on the Democratic National Committee, in the Connecticut legislature, and as a federal collector of internal revenue for Connecticut and Rhode Island. He died on September 4, 1908.

Augusta Lewis Troup gave much of her time to charitable work, wrote articles for the Union, and reported on the woman suffrage movement; in her unionist years, she had urged the redress of economic wrongs before the proclamation of voting rights. A convert to the Roman Catholic religion, she was especially involved with helping the Italian community in New Haven. She died in New Haven of heart disease. Several years after her death, the Augusta Lewis Troup Junior High School was built on Edgewood Avenue. A plaque inside the school honors her as the “Little Mother of the Italian Colony.” She is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven.

There is no full-length biography of Augusta Lewis Troup. Information on her life and work is found in Notable American Women (1971); G. A. Stevens, New York Typographical Union No. 6 (1912); and G. A. Tracy, History of the Typographical Union (1913). Copies of The Revolution are in the New York Public Library. For accounts of the Women’s Typographical Union and the Working Women’s Association, see P. S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, vol. 1, From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (1979). Obituaries appeared in The New Haven Evening Register, September 14, 1920; The New Haven Journal-Courier, September 15, 1920; and The Typographical Journal, vol. 57, 1920.