Lucy Larcom, a Lowell, Massachusetts, mill worker, recalled that when she was a small child she believed that the "chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind." In her Western world the distaff, used to spin, had long symbolized the female sex; in time "spinster" came to mean a single woman. Not all women were spinners and weavers, but in virtually every culture women have prepared the clothing. In the early nineteenth century an Indian agent concluded that teaching Native American women, proficient at curing animal skins, the arts of carding, spinning, and weaving was essential to their becoming "civilized." Enslaved African women commonly worked as field laborers, but some, including two advertised as "Wenches about 16 or 17 Years of Age, who Understand Spinning and Knitting," were considered especially valuable. Most white women in the North and South did their own spinning. A white colonial diarist observed that "all spin, weave, and knit, whereby they make good shift to cloath the whole family; and to their credit ... many of them do it very completely." Eventually women who previously produced apparel at home were hired to work in the textile factories, which was considered work still in keeping with a woman's central "domestic" role.
The transition to a market economy in textiles and apparel was gradual and uneven. Some women continued spinning at home and traded their yarn for woven goods while others bought factory yarn to weave. The putout system, paying women for home production, continued throughout the nineteenth century.
In 1813 the firs large, integrated textile factories were built in Lowell, Massachusetts, and young women were hired. The Lowell system of strict supervision was widely heralded as a model for organizing female labor. Young women typically worked for several years and controlled their own wages until they married. The resulting sense of independence sometimes prompted protest, including several strikes to demand less control and better conditions. As the textile industry spread south, so did the preference for hiring female workers, although a system utilizing family labor ultimately became more common than the Lowell system.
After they gave up spinning and weaving, women still continued sewing at home. By 1860 the number of working women who were seamstresses ranked second only to domestics. Seamstress work was transformed in the 1850s as a result of the invention of the sewing machine, which allowed women to stop laborious hand sewing but, according to one study, also "provided closer control of workers in the industry and additional opportunities for contractors to cheat them."
The garment industry grew in the Northeast through the late nineteenth century, hiring large numbers of immigrants, especially Italians and Jews, for its female work force. By the turn of the century most women garment workers were employed in sweatshops or small factories, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. In 1909 its workers went on strike to demand better working conditions. Owners made minimal concessions but continued such practices as locking fire escape doors. When a fire erupted there in 1911, 146 women died.
Polish and Slavic women often worked in textile factories in the Northeast. In the South, white women and children made up a majority of the textile industry's work force. Throughout the United States, however, women were denied access to the highest-paying jobs or leadership positions in the unions, including the National Textile Workers Union and the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, which sought to represent them. Women often played key roles in strikes. In 1929 Ella May Wiggins was killed during a textile workers' strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, and became a martyr for the struggle to unionize.
Although New Deal legislation somewhat improved the conditions in mills and sweatshops, the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor documented that poor conditions continued. The proportion of females in the textile industry dropped in the twentieth century until the 1960s, when it rose to nearly 50 percent; the number of African American female textile workers, who had previously been denied employment because of racism, grew almost fourfold. Since World War II the rise of imports from Asia has profoundly affected the textile and apparel industries. The apparel industry, particularly, has looked to female Hispanic immigrants in the Southwest to compete with the low-paid Asian work force. In the early 1970s garment workers at Farah Manufacturing Company in El Paso, Texas, virtually all of them Chicanos and 85 percent of them women, successfully struck for a union contract.
In the 1970s the popular film Norma Rae dramatized the plight of nonunionized textile workers as well as their determination to fight for improvement. The movie ends with their victory; but the reality for the many women today who "make the clothing for mankind" is a continuing struggle.
Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South," Journal of American History Vol. 73 (1986): 354-82.
Bess Beatty
See also
Industrial Revolution; Labor Unions:
Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU); Labor Unions:
International Ladies' Garment Workers Union(ILGWU);
Needle Trades.
