by Clare Hunter
Singer had become a very rich man. He flaunted his success by building a state-of-the-art factory in New York City, the most modern yet seen in the world, eight floors high. Sporting white marble and walnut wood, it was a palace of industry where potential purchasers could view his latest machines in ornate splendour. He drove his family through Central Park in a specially built bright yellow carriage pulled by six black horses. Thirty feet long, it boasted toilets, a bar, smoking room and nursery as well as a comfortable seating area for sixteen passengers. It was an advertisement for how far Singer had come in the world.
But, for all his commercial achievement, Singer was spurned by those he most wanted to impress: the cream of New York society. The newspapers had a field day exposing the minutiae of his legal and romantic entanglements. Not content with a wife and mistress, he had taken up with Mary Eastwood Walters, a machine demonstrator, with whom he had fathered a daughter, then with another of his demonstrators, Mary McGonigal, and then with her sister Kate. He divorced Catharine in 1860 and, when his first son William spoke out in court in his mother’s defence, Singer cast him aside. In 1861 he appeared in court again, this time accused of violently abusing his mistress, Mary Ann Sponsler, and their daughter Violetta. An out-of-court settlement was reached, but Mary remained vengeful and wrote a biography of Singer in which she did her best to destroy his reputation. That same year, 1861, when he was fifty, he met a married nineteen-year old, the French beauty Isabella Eugenie Boyer who, it is said, was the model for New York’s Statue of Liberty. By 1863 she had divorced her husband and married Singer. Edward Clark, always alert to market downfalls and the corrupting influence of bad press, persuaded Singer that he had become a liability, a barrier to commercial growth. Singer left America with a 40 percent stake in Singer shares and remained on its Board of Directors. He and Isabella settled in Paignton in Torquay, where they had six children and where Singer built a 110-roomed palace with a hall of mirrors, a maze and grotto garden. The area became nicknamed ‘Singerton’.
He died in 1875, shortly after his daughter Alice, by Mary Eastwood Walters, walked down the aisle wearing a dress that cost the equivalent of a London apartment. Singer had drawn up his own designs for his interment. There were to be three coffins, each inside the next: an inner coffin made in cedar and lined in white satin, a middle coffin of lead and an outer coffin of English oak decorated with silver filigree, all encased within a marble tomb. Eighty horse-pulled carriages led his cortege to the cemetery, the river of mourners, 2,000 or more, stretched from the seafront to the cemetery.
Twenty of his children were named individually in his will. To his son William, who had spoken against him in the divorce case from his first wife, Catharine, he deliberately left the meagre amount of $500. He died a multi-millionaire, leaving a fortune of over $14 million: a handsome dividend for a man whose life’s work had been to find the most expedient way to speed up sewing.
A shirt could be stitched by a Singer machine in an hour, compared to the fifteen hours it would have taken to sew it by hand. But the machine’s arrival did not bring the expected liberation from toil for hand-stitching pieceworkers. Ready-made clothes still required hand finishing. Sewing machines rather than alleviating exploitation, exacerbated it by churning out more clothes at more speed, all in need of finishing. The glut pushed prices down, which in turn drove down wages for pieceworkers, their numbers swelled by the unemployed garment makers who had been replaced by machinery.
In his book Das Kapital, written in the 1860s, the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx foresaw the devastation the arrival of the sewing machine would wreak on textile workers and railed against its coming:
The hour of the machine has struck for the advent of machinery. The decisively revolutionary machine, the machine which attacks in an equal degree the whole of the numberless branches of this sphere of production, dressmaking, tailoring, shoemaking, sewing, hat-making and many others, is the sewing machine.
Until the invention of the sewing machine, sewing had been companionable. Whether grouped with other women or sitting with the family, a woman could sew and still converse. The advent of the sewing machine changed how and where sewing was done. It became a solitary occupation at home, the silent chore of home workers or the toil of factory workers sewing in places where, amid the clang and clatter of machinery, conversation was impossible. The nature of industrial garment making also changed. Processes were separated: the hemming done on one machine, collars fixed by another. It now required several people to assemble a shirt, each one responsible for just one aspect of its making. Time became more pressurised. Rather than being meditative or mindful, factory machining turned sewing into an activity that was mind numbing, robbed of a stitcher’s satisfaction of producing something from start to finish.
But the domestic sewing machine revolutionised the opportunities for women to have independence and financial freedom. They could now set themselves up in a respectable career as dressmakers and, for a small monthly outlay, run their own business at home, no longer prey to the vagaries and exploitation of employers. In Scotland, by 1861 over 62,000 women were registered as dressmakers, and by the 1890s in America there were over 300,000, 70 percent of whom were single.
Philanthropic ventures proliferated to support impoverished gentlewomen and girls in need of respectable employment as alternatives to factory exploitation. While these focussed on decorative hand-stitching, the sewing machine provided them with the means to manufacture at greater volume, and produce marketable items with profitable potential. The Ladies Work Society was one such charity, established in 1875 to develop a ‘useful and elevating character for ladies dependent on their own exertions’. The Association for the Sale of Works of Ladies of Limited Means and the Co-operative Needlewoman’s Society were among other charitable enterprises. For the women who created them, such organisations gave them a creative and economic role in public life. Women and their needlework moved out of the home and into the public arena under the guise of good works. A plethora of needlework schools followed providing training, sales outlets and reliable employment. Some, however, became almost interchangeable with the sweatshops their charitable founders had so condemned. The only difference being the perceived superiority of their guiding class.
By the late nineteenth century a middle-class culture had begun to dominate the needlework market. Women’s magazines and needlework publications emphasised well-kept interiors, home-making and maternal care. I have a book of the time written by Emilie called Everywoman’s Guide to Home Dressmaking in which she advised new mothers on what to sew in preparation for their babies:
Three sets of vests, long flannels, flannel bands, white petticoats, day gowns and woollen shoes; two sets of binders; four pairs of white sewn shoes; six nightgowns; one silk robe; one woollen shawl; three dozen napkins; one coat; one cloak and one silk bonnet or hat.
As an occupation, needlework became even more nuanced by the class division between women themselves. Middle and upper-class women emphatically dissociated themselves from the toil of functional industrialised stitching and claimed decorative embroidery as their own relaxing pastime. They were encouraged by an expansion of products specifically designed to facilitate their hobby – embroidery made easy – with kits, transfers and cloths pre-stamped with designs. An excess of unnecessary fancy-work began to appear in peoples’ homes: table runners, nightdress cases, handkerchief sachets, bottle wraps and finger napkins.
But by the Second World War the consequences of all this inconsequential sewing were keenly felt. With clothes rationed and textile factories requisitioned to produce fabric and uniforms for army use, the government ushered in fashion austerity. Decorative embroidery was banned on lingerie and sleepwear and the recycling and repairing of clothes was encouraged – a skill, it was then discovered, that many women lacked. The widespread provision of kits and patterns had robbed them of the knowledge of basic sewing. The government launched its Make Do and Mend Scheme t
o reintroduce women to the techniques of simple needlework. With the aim of ensuring that ‘no material should lie idle’ it set up community mending clubs, organised exhibitions of recycled fashion in London underground stations and city high street stores, retrained teachers in sewing techniques and established sewing classes throughout the country. By 1943 there were over 24,000 sewing classes being run in Britain. The 1944 Education Act made it compulsory for girls in state schools to learn practical dressmaking, not as a decorative skill, but as part of their education in home-making, a subject newly termed Domestic Science.
In the Domestic Science Laboratory, as it was called in my all-girls school, a row of old-fashioned treadle sewing machines – dark lines of silent servants – waited for our young hands and feet to put them to work. I dreaded their ominous presence. I couldn’t get the hang of how to co-ordinate my feet see-sawing the heavy metal plate while my hands steadied the fabric through the treadle’s chomping teeth. I would push down determinedly on the footplate, rocking it back and forward for a skitter of stitches, lose momentum and watch in alarm as the wheel rolled into reverse, etching out a crazed path of haphazard sewing. My friend Elizabeth agreed to give me illicit lessons and we would creep into the sewing room during our lunch breaks until, eventually, I thudded my way to treadle mastery.
Looking to the future, in the 1950s the Singer company identified teenage girls as its future consumers. It organised Singer Teen-Age Sewing Classes and mounted advertising campaigns that used the Cinderella story as its key marketing tool, a story in which the sewing machine was a girl’s Fairy Godmother, transforming her lack-lustre wardrobe into wondrous fashions through which she would find true romance. I was one of the many seduced by Singer’s propaganda. From the age of twelve I made most of my own clothes. In what was then, for young people, a fashion-starved Glasgow, if you couldn’t sew your own clothes you were dressed like your mother. I made my own, cutting out a dress one night and sewing and wearing it the next. If time was limited, I would dispense with fastenings altogether and get my sister or mother to sew me into it. At home most evenings, with the family grouped around the television, I was to be found crouched on the floor, pinning paper patterns to bargain-bought fabric. Yards of cheap buttermilk muslin could fashion a float of romance, crisp sprigged cottons be tiered into rustic skirts. When I discovered a shop selling cut-price furnishing fabrics I decked myself out in Jacobean splendour. A friend called it my ‘upholstery period’.
I decided to pursue a career in sewing. I had the dream of becoming a couturier or costume designer perhaps. At my high school, however, the teachers were scandalised when I proffered Art and Domestic Science as my specialist subject choices. If I had the latter, I explained, I could go to Glasgow’s Domestic Science College, called the ‘Dough School’, and study pattern-cutting and dressmaking. The Dough School, they instructed me, was somewhere you went when you had no other options. As a bright student, I was destined for university. Despite my protests, a curriculum was arranged: Italian, Latin, French, History and English. I went to university. It was to be another fifteen years before I reclaimed needlework as a profession. By then I was an arts consultant working in London, using my sewing skills as a second string in community arts projects. But my experience of making banners for the miners’ strike and visiting Greenham Common, where women used needlework to voice protest, developed into an idea to use sewing as a vehicle to publicly promote communities’ unacknowledged creativity. I left London, returned to Scotland and, with the help of the Gulbenkian Foundation, embarked on a feasibility study to explore the potential of establishing a community sewing enterprise. A year later, in 1985, I set up NeedleWorks in Glasgow.
At first it was just a name on a headed piece of paper, my sewing machine, me and the £40 a week provided by the Job Creation Scheme, which supported business start-ups. I became very, very poor, selling my bike and my books to keep myself afloat. The rewarding experience of early community projects, such as those in Leith, strengthened my resolve. Commissions began to trickle in. They caught media interest. NeedleWorks’ reputation began to build. Strathclyde Community Business agreed to fund the enterprise for its first three years. Within eighteen months, NeedleWorks had a constitution, a board, its own professional workshop and its first employees.
An exhibition of community textiles NeedleWorks mounted in 1986 called A Stitch in Time at Glasgow’s local history museum, the Peoples’ Palace, was an unexpected success with over 100,000 people flocking to see it. It proved to me that there was an untapped audience for needlework of scale and meaning. But it was harder work than I could ever have imagined. The team worked flat out to keep up with corporate orders, community commissions and the ambitious projects spawned by the company’s success. Days became blurred with the loading and unloading of sewing machines and sewing tool kits; evenings became filled with machining to get orders completed on time. Sewing through the night became a regular occurrence. The inevitable happened: I collapsed from exhaustion. Shortly after my recovery, NeedleWorks won the ‘Arts Working for Cities’ award of £10,000 from the Arts Council of Great Britain. An official from the Economic Development Unit of Glasgow City Council came to see me. He suggested that rather than producing caviar – his description of the imaginative, large-scale artworks NeedleWorks was making with communities and for corporate clients – what we should have been producing all along was beans, by which he meant high volume, batch-produced goods. I thanked him for his time and advice, inwardly mourning that for all its success, all the fantastic displays of extraordinary needlework created by local people, the enthusiastic media response and the thousands who came to our exhibitions, NeedleWorks was still, in the world of commerce, seen as just women’s work. It was a sobering and disheartening moment.
After a decade of projects and commissions, NeedleWorks was voluntarily liquidated in 1996. It had served its time. It had spent ten years creating public sewing artworks, finding public platforms for the communities it worked with, in museums, shopping malls, community centres and public halls, and in attracting admiration for the skills and imagination of the people most marginalised from civic life. That was its work and the sewing was its medium, re-valued as an expressive narrative of predominantly women’s lives. It provided employment, training and involvement and it was, in the end, a worthwhile venture.
In the aftermath of NeedleWorks, I decided to design, make and market my own range of textiles, to attempt batch production. As I had little experience of how to maximise volume and minimise labour, I went to work as a machinist for a small company that made silk velvet scarves. My job was to sew down the middle seam, sew across the bottom seam, turn the scarf to its right side, carefully hand-stitch the other bottom seam, press and fold. What seemed straightforward turned out to be surprisingly stressful. Each hand-printed scarf was precious, the velvet expensive. Any waste represented a loss of income and time. But a momentary distraction could cause a seam to go awry and it would have to be unpicked. Unpicking left tell-tale perforations on the fabric, which then needed re-seaming a little further in, which meant losing a sliver of the design. One slip of the iron, a setting too high, and the velvet would be indelibly marked. I was not very good at either the sewing or the pressure. I grew bored with the monotony of repetitive stitching at the sewing machine, my back to the workroom. After a few weeks, I handed in my notice and abandoned the idea of batch production.
In 1911, a fire had broken out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. The owners had bolted the doors to keep out inspectors and interfering union members. People watched horrified as sixty-two workers leapt to their death from its upper floors and others were consumed in the blaze; 140 people died. It marked a greater awareness of the need for safer working environments for textile workers. In 2012, the tragedy at the Shirtwaist Factory was echoed when 117 people lost their lives and another 200 were injured in a fire at the Tazreen Fashion Factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The ills of the sweatshop system in t
he west had been transferred to poorer countries in the east.
Throughout the twentieth century, textile companies increasingly set up satellite factories in countries where labour was cheaper and where managers and owners were less exercised by employment laws and workers’ rights. Today, textiles continue to be made by the world’s poorest and most vulnerable – children, women and migrants – people who have no unions to safeguard them from abuse, no means of alternative employment and whose employers have scant regard for their safety. Low pay and poor working conditions continue to haunt the industry. As recently as 2013, it was discovered that many of the 11,000 textile workers in the East Midlands in the UK were being paid as little as £3 an hour, well below the required national minimum wage. That same year, the International Labour Office reported that there were 170 million children working in the textile and garment industries worldwide.
Textile workers, however, have a long history of industrial action, campaigning to improve their conditions and pay with sit-ins, strikes, marches and demonstrations. In 1968 the ‘Dagenham Girls’, women who stitched car seat covers alongside men at the Ford Motor Company Limited’s plant, went on strike. A new pay deal proposed that the women should be paid 15 percent less than their male counterparts for the same work. The women protested and galvanised the support of their fellow-workers. Their three-week strike brought Ford’s car production in Britain to a total standstill. The women’s determination to be awarded the same pay as men was backed by the then Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, Barbara Castle. They won their case. Two years later, in 1970, The Equal Pay Act came into force.