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Updated: September 26, 2024
"Go go go! or you will be too late!" urged Madame de Fleury, hurrying away. Madeleine hastened to the work-room, and distributed portions of the dress to different needle-women. After giving a number of minute directions, and making known that she would return in a couple of hours to see what progress was made, she retired to write to Mrs. Gilmer.
With the same cruelty, though somewhat more indirectly, the rest of the needle-women of London are exploited. The girls employed in stay-making have a hard, wearing occupation, trying to the eyes. And what wages do they get?
There is Eunoe jammed in a squeeze. Push, you goose, push! Capital! We are all of us the right side of the door, as the bridegroom said when he had locked himself in with the bride. G. Praxinoe, come this way. Do but look at that work, how delicate it is! how exquisite! Why, they might wear it in heaven! P. Heavenly patroness of needle-women, what hands we hired to do that work?
So long as women are often obliged to support themselves and their children, and perhaps their husbands, by their own labor, they have no right to work cheaply, unless driven to it. Anna Dickinson had no right to make fifteen dollars a week by sewing, if, by stepping out of the ranks of needle-women into the ranks of the talkers, she could make a hundred dollars a day.
We hope, however, that the dressmakers and tirewomen of the fair Sybilla, who had expended so much time and invention, were handsomely rewarded by the Prince, since they must have been most accomplished needle-women and handmaids to have got up their young lady in so many costumes and in such rapid succession.
The only reference of which I could now dispose was the recommendation of me by my landlady to a place of business which largely employed expert needle-women. It is needless for me to tell you how miserably work of that sort is remunerated: you have read about it in the newspapers. As long as my health lasted I contrived to live and to keep out of debt.
Now that there was plenty of money in the family purse, she ordered materials just as she pleased, and knit jackets, shawls, mittens, and "wristlets." She was a very grim lady and dressed very plainly; although she never said so, she liked to have the girls sit with her at their sewing. She took infinite pains to teach them to be good needle-women, as her mother had doubtless taught her.
She even tried a slop-shop, but it was full, and her pale face was against her. Her long illness had lost her many patrons, and if one steps out from the ranks of needle-women, it is very hard to press in again, so crowded are they, and so desperate the need of money.
The weekly wage of these sewing-women according to this and according to testimony from many sides, including both needle-women and employers, is 2s. 6d. to 3s. for most strained work continued far into the night. A poor girl who got into this strait and did not know what to do next, drowned herself in a canal in 1844.
Equally distracting, emaciating, and godless, was the condition to which the mere advent of this festival reduced worthy Miss Williams, the dressmaker, who had more white muslin and young ladies on her hands than she and her choir of needle-women knew what to do with.
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