During this past week I found the article about the technical progress of women’s labor to be very interesting. What made it so interesting were two separate reasons. The first reason of interest was the fact that the sewing machine meant different things to different classes of women. Before reading the article, I had assumed that the advent of this machine would have been equally appreciated amongst all levels of society. However, I was surprised to learn that , for instance, a middle class woman would not be nearly as open about income supplementing activities as would a lower class woman for whom the job of mending and making clothing was entirely respectable. The reason that this struck me as odd was that it would seem obvious that any person who could add extra income to the family coffers would do so in order to provide a better and more stable life for their family. I suppose, however, that I was simply unaware of the negative connotations that came with making clothing, especially for such a low wage.
The second portion of the article that I found to be particularly interesting was the proverbial hole that was dug when one purchased a sewing machine. The fact that so many women now owned these machines coupled with the relative ease of use seems to have driven down the value of their work. As these machines were quite costly, it thus took a large collective of individual work in order to actually begin to make a profit from the investment. Worse still seems to have been the “hire purchase” system that was offered to many women who wished to earn profits with a sewing machine, but were unable to purchase one outright. For these people, after placing an initial down payment, they were forced to pay for the machine with monthly installments. However, because the wages for sewing were so low, the often could not afford to make these payments, and as a result they lost their machines along with all of the money that they had invested in to the machines. This seems to have been quite unfortunate because the very thing that these women had believed would help to make their lives easier ended up making their lives infinitely harder.
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You are right on Paul. Throw in three crying kids, a grumpy husband, and a decreasing income and you have the perfect recipe 4 disaster for many working and middle class women across Germany. I find it ironic that this quest 4 material possessions never ends... look around you, with people buying houses they have no business buying and then falling into terrible financial troubles as a result. Whether it's the sewing machine or that brand new house, it's just too good to be true.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that you guys got something out of the article (I won't go so far as to say 'liked the article'). I was also drawn to the fact that Hausen really gives yu a sense of the class divisions and sheer economic misery present in the lives of German women in the middle of the 19th Century. Social position and status constrained the lives of women in very real ways; arguably of course lower class women suffered much greater deprivation than middle class women but I liked how the article pointed to both the importance of and the disregard for, women's work in the period.
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