Change Everything No 19: Fashion, a history of exploitation by design

How seamstresses go from comfortable shopkeepers to starving turnip-thieves

May 05, 2024

Book news

On Friday I’ll be in the historic Housmans Radical Booksellers talking about Change Everything, the book. Tickets still available for a 7pm start. Wine is involved! Also at the wonderful Five Leaves in Nottingham the following Tuesday.

Exploitation by design - the story of fashion

Okay, a poll. Why not?

We know that the fashion industry is an environmental and social disaster, producing more than 10 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, choking our world with plastics, outrageously exploiting millions of workers, particularly young women, producing a mountain of waste in Chile than can be seen from space. And exploiting workers here in the UK and around the world.

But does it have to be like this? Was it always like this? There’s plenty of quite well-known history of exploitation, the 19th-century poem The Song of the Shirt, the oft-depicted tragic fates of the grisettes and midinettes of Paris. But what about going further back? My weekend (around-the-election) read starts further back and explores the development of “slops” - such an appropriate word for so much ready-to-wear clothing - and how women were gradually driven down the value chain, and into often desperate poverty. But it doesn’t start like that. Or with a throw-away culture.

Lady Anne Clifford, the “patron saint” of my long-running blog Philobiblon, can remind us that cloth was in Jacobean times expensive, valued stuff. On 10 March 1676, less than two weeks before her death, at Brougham Castle she “saw G. Goodgion payd for 249 yards of Linnen cloth that he bought for mee at Penrith, designed for 20 pares of Sheets and som Pillowveres for the use of my house. And after dinner I gave away several old Sheets which were divided amongst my servants”. But the new cloth still needed to be converted into useful items, so a few days that Lady Anne wrote “Margaret Montgomery of Penrith, the Seamstress come hither so I had her in my chamber and kist here and talked with her, and shee came to make up the 20 pares of Sheets and Pillowveres.” It is clear that the Seamstress is a valued, high status worker. No starving in garrets here. (pp. 39-40)

And that continued into the 18th-century, Inder reports. When the Royal Exchange was rebuilt after the Great Fire of London, seamstresses had shops in the first floor galleries, as recorded in the insurance records and newspapers of the time. There they took orders for individually made garments, and sold ready-made goods and linens. (p. 46) “In the St Pancras area of London, Barbara Kay died in 1707… She sold fabrics - cambric, Holland and muslin - and some made goods like stockings and gloves, which were presumably bought in… At the time of her death she was owed £12 in unpaid debts and her estate was valued at £49 0s 6d. Many of these women were able businesswomen and most were literate: female literacy stood at 48% in the 1690s. (pp. 60-61)

By the middle of the 18th century, Inder reports, seamstry was attracting middling sort girls who went into paid apprenticeships, which by the end of the century were numbering 200-300 a year. It was a respectable role, which also prepared the women to be skilled housewives. (p. 65)

But trouble was on the way, in the form of ready-to-wear traders. In the 1580s Birchin Lane in London was already known for them - and their aggressive selling tactics. There were also travelling salesmen who sold clothing at fairs, “men like Samuel Dalling (d. 1699) who regularly visited fairs across the south of England from Bristol in the west to Maidstone in the east, as well as having a shop in London. In his last six months of tradiing, he made in excess of £600, roughly half of it from sales of ready-made clothing at fairs.” They often broke protective laws, and got away with it.

But still many families either made their own underclothing, or regarded a regular seamstress as almost part of the family. Inder tells us of the Reverend Dr William Davenport, Rector of Bredon and Salwarpe in Worcestershire, whose seamstress Mary Berrington regularly appears in his accounts. “She was sufficiently close to the family to be given a Christmas box of five shillings in December 1776.”

But in the next century, things were going to get a lot worse, driven in significant part by war and the state. War - particularly the Napoleonic Wars - led to industrial-scale production of military slops, which got mass production running at scale, and the state encouraged poor houses and prisons to force their inhabitants into at least the bottom end of the trade, undercutting prices. (The more things change - see America today.) Low-paid women workers were set against higher-paid male tailors. “Large numbers of working and lower middle-class men wanted to dress decently; indeed, in many cases, like that of clerks, their employers required them to look respectable at work. Such workers could not afford bespoke suits; ready-made clothing, however shoddily made and badly finished it was, was at least affordable.” (p. 120)

So we get to the 19th-century, entirely accurate, stereotype: “On 29 August 1844 readers of the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette were shocked to read of the attempted suicide by drowning of two sisters, two of the four slop-worker daughters of an unemployed labourer on the London docks. They could make eight shirts a day each and earned 1 1/4d (less the price of thread, so a penny) for each one…. In March 1847 in the Bury and Norwich Post. Six starving women had been convicted of stealing turnips from a farmer’s field; one of them was a seamstress who stitched corsets for which she was paid a mere three farthings… She could earn just six pence a week - no wonder she was stealing. Nonetheless, the magistrates fined her two shillings. We do not know the outcome but the likelihood is that she was imprisoned for failure to pay. At least the prison food would have saved her from starvation.”(p. 153-4)

Behind this too was gender stereotypes and discrimination. “In 1851 there were somewhere between 500,000 and a million more women than men in Britain… many of them became seamstresses because there were so few other jobs open to them.” (p. 258-9)

So we can see the structural forces, the political choices, in action. Just as we can today. States could enforce employment laws, could prevent exports that are grounded on exploitation, could provide more options for women and girls. But it does not.

Which is not to say there was not resistance, but that’s another story…

(From New York - source)

This is a book rich in the detail of women’s (and men’s) lives, so I’ve got to mention my introduction to Lady Grisell Baillie ( “pioneer of management sciences”), a still famous Scottish song writer (fascinating bit of material history here), who kept detailed account books of household expenditure until her death in 1746. This is also where I learnt that Scots money (and measurement) were different to English. “After the Act of Union of 1707 the Scots were required to use English money, though they retained their copper coinage and many of the names for coins, like ‘bawbee’ for sixpence.” (p. 56)

I also loved the report of the arrival of trousers (replacing breeches) from the late 1790s to the 1840s. “Quite garish patterns of stripes and check were popular for leisure wear… A list of items stolen from a Philadelphia seller in 1795 illustrates the range of items such traders sold, and there is no reason to suppose that the stock of their English counterparts was radically different. The list included a pair of cotton trousers striped in purple, yellow and white, three pairs striped in yellow and white, two pairs in red-and-white striped cotton and one in black and white, plus one nankeen pair with a fringe.” (p. 127)

Picks of the week

Reading

Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia: Rosie Bsheer arrived in the kingdom in 2009, at a time of relative openness, and, with, as she acknowledges the help of her US, Ivy League background, got access to archives and sources the state now no doubt regrets, uncovering how it destroyed a huge amount of historic Islamic legacy while seeking to construct a history for the ruling family. But she spoke also to many who are dissidents simply for refusing to enthusiastically and publicly embrace the House of Saud line, as well as more outspoken critics, most of whom, she, rightfully does not name for their own protection. There’s also a brawl over an exhibition of archival documents - not at all dry dusty stuff.

Photo by tasnim umar on Unsplash

Listening

I haven’t managed as much time lately with the New Books Network as I like, but now the elections are over am hoping for more: this podcast with Harry Petitt, author of The Labor of Hope: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt, based on ethnographic fieldwork with young men clinging to the claims of aspiration and personal achievement is fascinating in its own terms - more than 50% of Egyptians are under the age of 25, just part of why theis century may well be the African one - but also for the fact that it reflects many of the conversations I have with young people in the UK. Such precarity is not just found in youthful societies, but among young all around the world. The system is not working for them.

Thinking

I’m as much of a sucker for historical novels set in ancient Rome as many a reader (have been back to Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series several times - and there’s an enormous list of alternatives here). The foundation of that is the amount of surviving written material we have, and the myth that we are somehow part of a continuous tradition stretching back through Rome and Greece, something Naoíse Mac Sweeney has comprehensively debunked.

But a fascinating report in the Washington Post (sorry £) this week reminds us how much we still don’t know about even basic objects, like the bronze dodecahedrons, some 130 of which have been found across Northern and Western Europe. Probably not a military object, since not found over the Roman Empire, probably not a measure or weight, since they don’t seem to be standardised, could they have been used to knit gold chains (probably not), or even a dog treat dispenser! No, for the moment archaeologists are using their go-to option, religion or ritual. Surely there’s a foundation of another historical novel there: time travel anyone?

Researching

It is amazing how much 20th-century reductionism continues to mark animal behaviour studies, researchers twisting themselves in knots to stress they can’t actually prove the cause of observed behaviour. If it walks like cooperation, looks like cooperation, and quacks like cooperation, maybe we can just assume that’s what bees are doing in these fascinating tests? If we can’t explain how insect brains can produce such an effect, perhaps we should just assume that is are artefact of our own ignorance?

Cooperation: it is the foundation of life. Photo by Boba Jaglicic on Unsplash

Almost the end

Okay, got to make the brilliant local election results from last week. Thanks Cllr Jack Lennox for this handy visualisation.

And The Economist for this lovely snarky “compliment”. I’ll take “compelling pitch that appeals to very different types of voters” and “staunch positions on social issues”. You might even call it “an alternative, attractive vision of the future”.

What did you think?

Change Everything