OCCUPATIONS -
THE DRESSMAKER
The Victorian Seamstress by
Anna Elzabeth Blunden (1854)
The 6th most popular occupation in the Lake Tree is that of the Dressmaker with 196 women employed, within the tree we also have 23 needlewomen, 27 Milliners, 4 seamstresses and 3 shirt makers. So well over 300 women employed in this type of work. Nice gentle ladylike work is what we all think, but think again.
Dressmakers were in the main involved in producing women’s clothing made to order but by the 1840’s the growing middle class created a demand for cheap ready made men’s clothing, a bespoke tailor was simply not affordable. Tailoring therefore had shifted from the labour of the male Tailor, to the cheaper labour of women. To serve this growing market of cheap clothing women would work at home sewing ready made clothing, called, slop or slop work, for very low piece rate wages. The women who sewed slop could be very young but also there were also old or widowed women. Sewing men’s shirts for starvation wages was still preferable to many, than going into service, because it allowed some independence.
In the spring of 1843 a report by the children’s Employment Commission shocked the public with horror stories of cruel and heartless exploitation of needlewomen in back rooms and garrets of London. (a garret is a small attic)
The report had this to say about Dressmaking I quote:
The evidence of all parties established the fact that there is no class of persons in this country, living by their labour, whose happiness, health and lives are so unscrupulously sacrificed as those of the young dressmaker. They are of a peculiarly degree, unprotected and helpless and I should fail in my duty if I did not distinctly state, that as a body, their employers have hitherto taken no steps to remedy the evils and misery, which result from the existing system. It may without exaggeration be stated that, in proportion to the umbers employed, there are no occupations, with one or two questionable exceptions, in which so much disease is produced as in dressmaking, or which present so fearful a catalogue of distressing and frequently fatal maladies”
An English Sweat Shop circa 1890
Apprentices usually started at the age of 14 and they would have to work for two years before being considered satisfactory at their trade to be called experts.
These young women had to pay for their apprenticeships and received no wages although board and lodging in many cases was covered under the cost of the apprenticeship.
The working hours were exceptionally long, starting very early in the morning and sometimes going right through until 2 or 3am the next morning, if the order required it. Days therefore could be as long as 20 hours, if last minute changes were required. Breaks would be 10 minutes for breakfast, 15-20 minutes for lunch, 15 minutes for tea and supper could be postponed until the work was finished.
It wasn’t unusual for some girls to go blind from their years of overwork and in poor light.
Soon after the 1843 report the distressed seamstress became something of a public controversy and newspaper articles, books, short stories, plays and poetry, utilized the information on needlewomen. The most famous of which was the: "Song of the Shirt" by Thomas Hood
With fingers weary and worn
With eyelids heavy and red
A woman sat in unwomanly rags
Plying her needle and thread
Stitch, stitch, stitch,
In poverty hunger and dirt
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang, The Song of the Shirt.
Books by the likes of Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens and Friedrich Engels amongst others all featured the distressed seamstress
A story in the Times Newspaper about a woman who had illegally pawned the clothing she was given to sew, because she and her child were starving, escalated the concern to hysteria. They became the symbol of how poor helpless women were driven to criminal activity and even infanticide by cruel, unfeeling and significantly Jewish Merchants. The Jewish slop sellers were blamed for what was really the cruel progress of capitalism. When the question kept being asked who or what was to blame for the angry, impoverished and potentially revolutionary working class, the life of the distressed seamstress kept re appearing as the focus of public concern and outrage, first in 1843-1844 then again in 1848-1850.
As explained by Beth Harris Asst Professor Fashion Institute of Technology New York.
Sewing was, in many ways, the ultimate sign of femininity. It was sedentary and passive, and it was traditionally done by women only for the care and maintenance of the family and home. In the literature of the period the needle itself often stood for women's "natural" place in the home, and carried powerful associations of domestic bliss and maternal devotion. Where other female workers were seen to develop masculine characteristics, the seamstress remained a "woman" . It is no wonder then that needlework performed by women for the marketplace, for strangers (not unlike prostitution), became a source of intense anxiety. Ideological notions of motherhood, home, morality and national stability all became dislocated when the needle moved from the home to the garret. The impoverished seamstress became, for early feminists, a symbol of the consequences of a hypocritical society that circumscribed women's lives, preached that they should not work (and consequently made almost no occupations open to them), while forcing them, at the same time, to work.
On the 1891 census taken on 5th April, my Great Aunt Alice Amelia Lake, was listed as being a Milliner Dressmaker. She was in Jersey visiting her brother, John William Lake (my grandfather), who had left Guernsey and was working in Jersey and lodging with Peter Taylor and his family at Green Vale near
St Brelades. Peter Taylor was the station master at St Brelade Station on the now defunct Jersey Railway and his daughter Hannah would become John William's wife on 23rd July 1891. This meant that Alice was living with the family for over 4 months that year. So perhaps she was helping with outfits for the wedding we will never know for sure.
Alice's Grandmother Sarah Ann Elworthy was also a dressmaker in 1861 the family were living in Briton Side Plymouth which was near the docks. At the time Sarah had 5 children ranging in age from 2 to 14 and was living next door to a Tailor so perhaps that is where some of her work was coming from.
Sarah Ann Lake nee Elworthy 1823 - 1887
a dressmaker and mother of 9 children