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.
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