Working-class clothing

“ The enormous establishments of ready-made men’s clothing seem not yet to have made their destined impression in the direction of uniformity. The contrast in dress of the working classes with those of Paris is as conspicuously unfortunate æsthetically, as politically and socially it may be significant; ocularly, it is a substitution of a cheap, faded, and ragged imitation of bourgeois costume for the marvel of neatness and propriety which composes the uniform of the Parisian ouvrier and ouvrière. ”

“ The health inspector shook his head.
"Cheap clothing is not," he said, "because even the cheapest kind of labor is more expensive than machinery, and machine-made clothes are clean. But costly dresses which need hand embroidery are sent to sweatshops to be done. Not all, of course, but enough of them to keep thousands of women and children working day and night the year round. The more elaborate the gown, the longer is it likely to have been in a tenement that the future wearer would not even allow her dog to enter." ”

“ I think it is well for American laboring-men to know that this evidence puts beyond question the fact that the sweating business, while it may begin with the clothing trade, by no means ends there. "The plague of the sweatshop" is not something of interest to the tailors and sewing-women only, but is of equal importance to workers of every class. ”

“ Progress has been rendered even slower by the fact that many workers have a prejudice against such garments, feeling that they show a class distinction. All that is necessary is to create a fashion of wearing such garments, like the fashion of wearing atelier or studio clothes. ”

“ But the old fashions are passing from Europe: the sewing machine and the railway sweep before them the pleasant provincialisms of dress. A shirt with the bosom heavily embroidered, a skirt with a year’s stitching in the hem are not to be imitated by the dealer in ready-made clothing, who offers, instead, cheapness and the brisk variety of the town. ”

“ Comparing the various branches of textile industry together, an interesting light is thrown upon the reactions between capitalistic organisation of labour and women’s economic position.
Upper-class women had lost their unique position in the silk trade, and the wives of wealthy clothiers and wool-merchants appear to have seldom taken an active interest in business matters. Thus it was only as wage-earners that women were extensively employed in the textile trades.
Their wages were lowest in the luxury trades i.e., silk, silver and gold, and in the linen trade. ”

“ The result is that the durable, weather-proof, and health-protecting cheap woolen cloth which the English and Continental working-man can afford to wear, must give way to the short-lived but dressy cotton worsted, which leaves the American workman, compelled to work outdoors in all sorts of weather, poorly protected against its inclemencies. ”

“ Since the sweating in women's industries is so important a subject as to demand a separate treatment, the facts stated here will chiefly apply to male industries.
Tailoring.--In the tailoring trade the best kind of clothes are still made by highly-skilled and well-paid workmen, but the bulk of the cheap clothing is in the hands of "sweaters," who are sometimes skilled tailors, sometimes not, and who superintend the work of cheap unskilled hands. In London the coat trade should be distinguished from the vest and trousers trade. ”

“ And now it is dawning upon the consciousness of a number of women that the way to reform clothing manufacturers, textile manufacturers, etc., the way to cut down insane speeding, overwork, underpay, is to change our insane conception of clothing—to strive to make it a normal, useful thing, instead of a hampering, exotic, extravagant thing, which works one group of women to death at a miserable wage, because a far smaller group of parasitic women wish to be arrayed like peacocks! Knowing this to be true, one naturally turns to the fundamental question, and asks—what is dress—what is fashion? ”

“ To earn seems the inalienable right of any who are willing to work, and the result of methods will never be questioned by employer or employed, unless they are forced to it by more powerful considerations than any at present brought forward.
I have chosen to give these details minutely because they are, practically, the summing up, not only for shirt-making, but for every trade which can be said to come under the head of clothing, whether for men, women, or children,—this including every form of trimming or other adornment used in dress from artificial flowers to gimps, fringes, and buttons. ”

“ It has been taken out of the hands of the American group. The old-fashioned dressmaking and tailor shops have given way to the huge lofts where many factories are turning out clothing for men, women, boys and girls in large quantities. ”

“ Before sewing machines were to be found in every home and ready made clothing in the stores styles did not change so rapidly. Commercial conditions now make it to the advantage of a great army of people that the styles in dress change often and radically. The manufacturers of cloth, the wholesale merchants with their agents, the retailers and their numerous clerks, wholesale garment-makers and their many employes, pattern-makers, dress-makers, milliners and the manufacturers of all minor articles of clothing are all benefitted by this oft recurring change in style. ”

“ Could she not by the employment of her hands increase the income as well as diminish the expense? Why should she be precluded from all lucrative occupation? She soon came to a resolution. She was mistress of her needle; and this skill she conceived herself bound to employ for her own subsistence.
Clothing is one of the necessaries of human existence. The art of the tailor is scarcely less use than that of the tiller of the ground! There are few the gains of which are better merited, and less infurious to the principles of human society. ”

“ Much of the charm that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance the native dignity of a gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use....
The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer’s abstinence from productive employment. ”

“ Nor is the relation between the coat and the labour that produced it altered by the circumstance that tailoring may have become a special trade, an independent branch of the social division of labour. Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor. ”

“ About 75 per cent of unskilled workers are employed, Thus, for instance, an overcoat, a coat, a pair of trousers, a hunting coat, formerly would be made by one man, whilst now the work is divided in 109 parts for an overcoat, 94 for a coat, 43 for a pair of trousers, 90 for a hunting coat, etc. The concentration of the clothing industry has also been brought about to a great extent. In certain towns from 50 to 100 per cent of the total production is centralized in factories. ”

“ In the tailoring trade the wages of female pressers and buttonhole makers average 21s. a week. Dressmakers’ assistants, or ordinary hands, get 26s. a week; the woman in charge anything from £2 to £7; and ordinary machinists, 21s.
As in all countries, the makers of underclothing, or white workers, are the least well paid, averaging only 16s. a week, the people who wash the clothes after they are made having far the best of it, as a fair laundry-hand, or ironer, can easily command £1 a week. Women working in the straw-hat factories are paid from 20s. ”

“ While in colonial days every woman had sewed all the clothes for the members of her family, the rise of industry and commerce led to the establishment of the ready-made clothing business, and it was this particular line of development that made women wage-workers in this particular industry. When a young girl who was skillful with the needle could earn more by sewing shirts for a merchant than she could possibly save by making all the clothes for her father and brothers, she naturally ceased to be an individual producer for her family and became a social producer, a wage-worker. ”

“ On the one hand, there has been the revolution in the popular habits of dress, caused chiefly by the uprising of the cotton manufacture; and, on the other hand, there has been an apparent over-supply of needlewomen, instead of the scarcity which might have been expected. In old times, when the working-classes wore woollen garments, as stoutly put together as our shoes are now, and seldom or never washed; and when the gentry wore costly stout linens within, and woollen or stiff silk fabrics as upper dresses, the sewing was very elaborate and precise, but it was to last for years or for life. ”

“ Improvement in recent years in the machinery employed in combing wool has so changed the character of what are commercially known as worsted cloths that the latter have largely superseded woollen cloths for use as men's wearing apparel. ”

“ The experienced dressmaker, who is at the same time a good business woman, may conduct an establishment of her own which will bring her in anything from one thousand to six thousand a year and over. But she must be able to manage matters of capital and credit, understand buying, and succeed in winning the favour of her clients. Custom dressmaking is being increasingly limited to high-class and exclusive work. The small and highly specialized dressmaking factory is affecting the custom trade. ”

“ Too warm clothes where work requiring high temperature is done, with no provision for adding needed wraps for the trip home; high-heeled shoes where the worker must stand at her task for hours at a time; tight waists and ill fitting skirts, where every muscle should have free play, — these are but examples of hundreds of places where reforms are needed.
Little or no blame attaches to the worker for this state of affairs. Seldom, if ever, does the management attempt to standardize working clothes. ”

“ These comprise the making of men's and women's suits and dresses, coats, hats, shirts, underwear, collars and cuffs, gloves, etc. As we have seen, the making of wearing apparel has always been woman's work. During the domestic period of industry the same hands that spun the thread and wove the cloth also sewed the garments. When spinning and weaving had been taken out of the home and made specialized factory occupations, the making of clothes still remained a domestic occupation because no machinery had as yet been applied to this branch of manufacture. ”

“ If underwear, whether for men or women, has proven itself a most excellent medium for starvation; if suits and dresses in general rank but a grade above; if shirts, whether of cotton or woollen, are a despair; and in each and all competition has cheapened material and manufacture and brought labor to the ‘life limit’ and below, at least it cannot be so bad with cloaks and jackets. ”

“ They do not need our building material, and as for clothing, one American is worth more as a customer than a hundred of these natives. While a few wear rich robes, the mass content themselves with a very scanty costume of very cheap cotton—a costume which someone has described as "a handkerchief around the loins and a table cloth around the head." No shoe manufacturer need send a salesman to these parts, for even the coachman and footmen in livery are barefooted. ”

“ To possess mechanical skill alone is not sufficient. A successful garment depends not only upon the dexterity with which the worker manipulates the actual tools of her craft, but upon all her faculties and her power of applying them. She must have a comprehension of the laws of beauty in dress, construction, ornament, color, selection, economy. The artisan knows the technical part only, and looks upon each dress—each piece of lace and velvet—as so much material to be snipped and cut and sewed, copying from the fashion plate, making gown after gown alike. ”

“ In this confusion and disorganization caused by the influx of foreign skilled labor, the clothing trade suffered more than any other industry. So constant has been the stream of foreign tailors to this country that they have now almost monopolized this occupation. The wage scale has descended to a point where the American can no longer compete, and he has been finally forced out of the business as a workman. A revolution has taken place in the manufacture of clothing. ”

“ In recent years the demand for men’s and women’s ready-made clothes has so increased that now large department stores which formerly sold only cheap grades of ready-made clothes are stocking up with expensive garments in order to cater to the class of customers who used to order their clothes directly from the custom tailor. ”

“ And yet how sensible is the dress of the London milk-woman, of the Irish or Scotch fishwife, of the North-Country factory-girl! An attempt was made recently to prevent the pit-women from working, on the ground that their costume was unsuited to their sex, but it is really only the idle classes who dress badly. Wherever physical labour of any kind is required, the costume used is, as a rule, absolutely right, for labour necessitates freedom, and without freedom there is no such thing as beauty in dress at all. ”