Tailor Shop in an orphanage

[CJDaley]

From The Nurseries On Randall's Island, by W. H. Davenport: p 18; Harper's new monthly magazine. / Volume 36, Issue 211

A visit to the Tailor Shop disclosed a number of boys working very irregularly in the absence of a master-tailor. The shop had been but recently reopened, having been closed for over a year. All lameboys over twelve years of age will now be taught the trade, working before and after school-hours, thereby being enabled to gain a livelihood when they leave the department. There are many such in the institution. Accommodations are furnished them in the hospitals, though several prefer the society of, and are to be seen with, their more healthful companions, notwithstanding the risks to which they are subjected in the rough sports.

In the year 1863 forty-five boys, under a master-tailor, and working 3 1/2 hours per day, repaired 5397 pieces of clothing, and made 2511 jackets, pants, suspenders, etc. The girls, in their sewing-room, manufactured, during the year 1866, 2420 articles of dress, and repaired 6136. They were so employed two hours before and after school time.

[Silvana Siddali]

Re: Tailor Shop in an orphanage

This is really fascinating. Thanks for the info and image!

One minor point about the fact that Jewish people often entered the needle trades. Jewish religious law doesn't (as far as I know) prohibit property ownership. Russian and German Jews were subjected to a series of discriminatory practices during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They were forbidden to own land or to hold public office. In some countries Jews were forced into ghettos or special provinces(e.g., "beyond the Pale" in Poland and Russia.) As a result, Jews were drawn to certain professions, especially those that were prohibited by religious law to Christians, such as money-lending. I imagine that the needle trades may have been attractive because they didn't require as great a capital outlay as some other skilled professions?

[ElizabethClark]

Re: Tailor Shop in an orphanage

Since I primarily study women's and children's things, perhaps I have a different perspective. There are numerous guides to better dressmaking in the mid-century, though very few are entire volumes. Part of this may be due to silhouette stability--while the "flesh" changed fairly dramatically from the 1840s into the mid-1860s, the bones of the styles didn't, nor did many of the fitting and construction techniques, all of which could be mastered by otherwise non-skilled individuals. Women's clothing, by and large, does not involve the complex understructure of men's tailored garments.

Women's professional dressmaking worked on a similar concept as traditional tailoring: a young person gains a place as a "flunky" in a dressmaking concern, and is taught the various processes over time. Abyssmal working hours, conditions, and pay made for high turnover in seamstressing, and many partially-trained sewists set up their own "dressmaking" shops with variable success and variable skill levels. (Mrs. Pullan's introduction to Beadle's Dime Guide to Dressmaking is particularly instructive as a rant against poor dressmaking.)

The *tailoring* industry largely served half the population (though haberdasheries did work with women's riding habits); the dressmaking industry, through a combination of workrooms, shops, pieceworkers, and home workers, augmented an established home-production realm. Having dabbled in tailoring, and worked far more extensively in dressmaking (both modern and historic) for about 16 years now, the two are very different trades, and while some skills overlap, this is not universal.

Where techniques do overlap (a running seam is pretty much a running seam, after all), there are larger differences in women's figures and fitting issues than will generally be found with men (that is, unless the men develop pronounced breasts and hips.) Tailoring and haberdashery have a longer tradition of "professionalism", however--women's dressmaking seems to have been seen as less complex, and more suited to home production in many cases. Children of five can be taught to run a hem; a girl of 12 can master all dressmaking techniques needed to serve the women and children of her family. Women and children were quite routinely employed in the "flowering trade" (piecework whitework embellishment), which products primarily were used in finished garments for women and children.

Home production of women's and children's clothing often falls into the "busy hands at home" ideal, too--using those "idle hours" to provide clothing for the family. The numerous references to home dressmaking (both as a solitary and social "sport") in diaries, letters, and personal accounts of the mid-century all point toward home production or partial home production of the majority of a female's wardrobe mid-century, while the most frequent male garments I can recall being mentioned are shirts and drawers, and knit stockings.

Silvana, I think you're on the right track with needle trades being attractive to Jews due to the minimal investments needed--similar to the reasons that the textile trades (starting with rag picking and other recycling trades) seem to involve a large Jewish population. With cultural discrimination firmly in place, these were "acceptable" service roles for the "underclass"... servicable, but not likely to rise far in society in many cases. Even should they break the income barriers, there's still the stigma of "service trades" to overcome, so it might feel "safer" to an anti-Semetic person, mid-century, to patronize a Jewish dressmaker or tailor, but not necessarily socialize with them beyond business needs.

Back to orphans: getting the "crippled" boys set up in an indoor trade requiring little physical movement may have been considered a fantastic benefit. They were entering a skilled field, at which they could provide for themselves without community help after their training years, and they would be physically able to do so for quite a few years. A person need not run fast in order to sit on his tailoring table and work thousands of perfect buttonholes, or pad-stitch frock fronts.

Girls in work schools were typically taught plain sewing, so that they, too, might go out into honest work (of course, one could cheerfully and honestly starve to death as a plain seamstress); some schools taught more complex dressmaking and sewing skills, enabling the girls to move into apprentice positions with dressmakers, or set up their own businesses, or just use the skills as wives and mothers.

The girl orphans in Mr. Daley's quote produced "2420 articles of dress"--but there is no indication the intended destination of the clothing, or the breakdown of the clothing in type. Looking at a minimal female wardrobe that could be made by orphan girls in a sewing room, using only running stitch, whip stitch, and buttonholes, that assortment *could* break down to clothing 240 female orphans with a minimal wardrobe for a year (2 each chemises, drawers, petticoats, dresses, nightgowns). Or, it could be a goodly amount of piecework shirts to be sold, or combinations of girl's and boy's clothing, or baby pieces for the foundling section of the orphanage... without the original reporter in 1866 detailing what type of sewing was being done, it's not possible to speculate what portion of the population these orphan workrooms were supplying.