Garment Industry

Dressmaking in the 1870s
It is important to distinguish between seamstresses and dressmakers. Dressmakers benefited from the complexity of women's dresses and their resistance to uniformity. Men's ready-to-wear clothing was widely available long before women's. Even as late as 1890, women's wear accounted for less than one fourth of the value of all factory-produced clothing. The style of women's fashion - tightly fitting gowns decorated with yards of ruffles, ribbons, and lace - was simply unsuitable for mass production. Consequently, custom dressmaking persisted well into the twentieth century.

Dressmakers and milliners (hat makers) together comprised the fourth most common female occupation in 1870; there were 34,903 female dressmakers in New York City alone. Dressmakers commanded some of the highest wages earned by female workers. They tended to be middle-aged, American-born women, though on the Lower East Side many were, of course, immigrants. Most had been widowed, divorced, abandoned, or simply never married. These women had to earn a good living from their work because few of them had any support from a male wage earner.

During the day, the room facing the street or rear yard (the room with the most light) might be transformed into a fitting room, a bedroom into a waiting room, and the kitchen into a work room. Customers first made a trip to a dry goods store for fabric and a fancy goods shop for the trimmings. The experience was often frustrating because only the largest stores "kept stock", limiting the choices considerably. The customer either brought her own paper patterns or chose from those, which most dressmakers kept on hand.

The availability of paper patterns, sewing machines, and drafting systems by the late 1870s made it possible for many women to become dressmakers, but also threatened the trade with amateurism and a loss of business to home production. By 1885, nearly half of American households had sewing machines. They ranged in price from $19.50 for Demorest's New Family Sewing Machine to $75 for a Wheeler and Wilson. Sewing machines reduced the time it took to do "plain work", such as long straight seams. Many women could now do at least some of the work for their dresses on their own. They would then pay a professional dressmaker to handle the more complicated aspects of the work.