Although Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and their colleagues on the paper made important contributions to the cause of working women, they never really accepted the principle of trade unionism. As they had been previously unwilling to concede that Black Liberation might claim momentary priority over their own interests as white women, they did not fully embrace the fundamental principles of unity and class solidarity, without which the labor movement would remain powerless. In the eyes of the suffragists, “woman” was the ultimate test—if the cause of woman could be furthered, it was not wrong for women to function as scabs when male workers in their trade were on strike. Susan B. Anthony was excluded from the 1869 convention of the National Labor Union because she had urged women printers to go to work as scabs.9 In defending herself at this convention, Anthony proclaimed that

… men have great wrongs in the world between the existence of labor and capital, but these wrongs as compared to the wrongs of women, in whose faces the doors of the trades and vocations are slammed shut, are not as a grain of sand on the sea shore.