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a week (unskilled male laborers in other fields got seven dollars a week)—when they could find work at all in this highly seasonal and competitive business. This relegated them to the cheapest rooms in the upper floors of the worst housing, where they often worked without heat or light because firewood and candles were too expensive; they and their children routinely suffered from eyestrain, fatigue, malnutrition, pneumonia, and consumption. Sometimes groups of women banded together, sharing quarters in boardinghouses and turning them into all-female cooperative workshops. Some made ends meet by part-time prostitution. Even Bennett’s Herald, no friend of labor, said in 1853, “We know of no class of workwomen who are more poorly paid for their work or who suffer more privation and hardship.”

The plight of New York garment workers worsened after Isaac Merritt Singer came to the city in the early fifties to build and sell the first practical sewing machine. Raised in upstate New York, where his father was a village millwright, Singer apprenticed at a machinist’s shop, worked briefly in New York in the mid-1830s at Hoe’s press works, then knocked about the country as an actor till discovering his true metier was inventing. In 1850, having produced rock-drilling and type-carving machines, he was solicited by a Boston machine shop owner to help improve the sewing machine, which Elias Howe had invented and patented in 1846. Singer came up with a working model incorporating a foot treadle.

In 1850 Singer moved to New York City, center of the garment industry, to market and manufacture his product. After settling a patent dispute with Howe by pooling their rights, he began production in a twenty-five-by-fifty-foot room over the New Haven Railroad Depot in Centre Street. At first, skilled craftsmen produced almost all the parts by hand, a process that was slow and costly and made each machine unique, thus hard to fix. Then the recently invented milling machine allowed Singer to make precision-measured interchangeable parts and introduce mass-production techniques heretofore employed only in armories. In 1857 I. M. Singer and Company opened a new factory, more advanced than any in Britain, in a six-story building on Mott Street, between Broome and Spring, complete with an up-to-date Badger and Company cast-iron front. Production soared from 2,564 machines in 1856 to thirteen thousand by 1860.

Demand for Singer’s heavy industrial models grew brisk as wholesale clothing manufacturers insisted their subcontractors use them to standardize stitching and increase output: a gentleman’s frock coat took sixteen and a half hours to make by hand, two and a half hours by machine. Contractors in turn demanded that outworkers buy machines. When few seamstresses proved able to afford them, Singer offered another innovation, installment buying, but the women soon discovered that if they fell behind on monthly payments, even if the machine was all but paid for, it was repossessed, and their money was not returned. Most women, and many men, were therefore forced to pay tailors who had managed to acquire machines to do the requisite stitching, shaving their incomes yet farther.3

Some garment manufacturers responded to Singer’s invention by recentralizing production. Detail work (cuffs, buttonholes, sleeves) was put out to homeworkers to sew, and the garments were then assembled by machine operatives in inside shops under tight supervision. Fashion had a hand in this reconcentration, as the new “hoop skirts” required that cloth be sewn onto iron frames made in Connecticut and brought to New York factories for assembly. By 1858 one hoopskirt factory alone employed 350, mainly women, to turn out three thousand skirts a day.

These factories or “sweatshops” tended to hire single girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five who lived either with their families or in boardinghouses. Their wages were higher than those of outworkers, and the work was steadier (owners being reluctant to leave costly machines idle); some even had a little money left over