Progress must have seemed at the time, may even seem to us looking back, to be tantalizingly slow, but far oftener than in earlier days do the annals of trade unionism report, “The strikers won.”  Another feature is the ever-increasing interest and sympathy shown in such industrial risings of the oppressed by a certain few among the more fortunate members of society.  One strike of cap-makers (men and women), was helped to a successful issue by rich German bankers and German societies.

The account of the condition of women in the sewing trades during the sixties makes appalling reading.  The wonder is not that the organizations of seamstresses during those years were few, short-lived, and attended with little success, but that among women so crushed and working at starvation wages any attempt at organization should have been possible at all.  A number of circumstances combined to bring their earnings below, far below, the margin of subsistence.  It was still the day of pocket-money wages, when girls living at home would take in sewing at prices which afforded them small luxuries, but which cut the remuneration of the woman who had to live by her needle to starvation point.

It was still the period of transition in the introduction of the sewing-machine.  The wages earned under these circumstances were incredibly low.  The true sweating system with all its dire effects upon the health of the worker, and threatening the very existence of the home, was in full force.  The enormous amount of work which was given out in army contracts to supply the needs of the soldiers then on active service in the Civil War, was sublet by contractors at the following rates.  The price paid by the Government for the making of a shirt might be eighteen cents.  Out of that all the worker would receive would be seven cents.  And cases are cited of old women, presumably slow workers, who at these rates could earn but a dollar and a half per week.  Even young and strong workers were but little better off.  From innumerable cases brought to light $2 and $3 a week seem to have been a common income for a woman.  Some even “supported” (Heaven save the mark!) others out of such wretched pittances.

Aurora Phelps, of Boston, a born leader, in 1869, gave evidence that there were then in Boston eight thousand sewing-women, who did not earn over twenty-five cents a day, and that she herself had seen the time when she could not afford to pay for soap and firing to wash her own clothes.  She said that she had known a girl to live for a week on a five-cent loaf of bread a day, going from shop to shop in search of the one bit of work she was able to do.  For by this time division of work had come in, and the average machine operator was paid as badly as the hand needlewoman.

The circumstance that probably more than any other accentuated this terrible state of affairs was the addition to the ranks of the wage-earners of thousands of “war widows.”  With homes broken up and the breadwinner gone, these untrained women took up sewing as the only thing they could do, and so overstocked the labor market that a new “Song of the Shirt” rose from attic to basement in the poorer districts of all the larger cities.