The social shaping of business behaviour in the nineteenth-century women's garment trades

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1998 by Stana Nenadic

Strategies for securing a livelihood for single women varied according to the occupations, status and connections of the family concerned, and changed over the course of the century as new areas of employment such as office work emerged. One of the key devices was the cultivation of "dovetailed" effort whereby the income-producing activities of one related woman reinforced and supplemented those of another, generally a sister, through the capacity to provide personal contacts or through the acquisition of complementary skills.

This was one of the principal attractions of the garment trades, which allowed sisters, sometimes in conjunction with a widowed mother, an ability to maximize their joint income through a business that incorporated up to three separate and highly skilled areas of production - millinery, dressmaking, and stay and corset making - as well as other tangentially related trades. In the eighteenth century, when the right to practice one of the skilled trades was still tightly controlled by burgh organisations, dressmaking and millinery were the preserve of the single daughters or widows of burgesses.(47) Though entry to business was no longer subject to formal control, the traditional association with single women, particularly those with a family background in business associated with garment making and the cloth trade, remained important, suggesting it had a real utility in the lives and circumstances of these women and their families. The combining of teaching with some aspect of garment making was also a common device, since teaching in private families or in fee-paying schools furnished contacts with potential customers for dressmaking sisters. Widows with large families of grown and unmarried daughters living at home also turned to the garment trades as part of a coordinated income-generating strategy. It was not unusual for a widow to operate a lodging house from the same premises where she and her daughters also ran a dressmaking business.(48) This was seen in the Morris family, in business in Edinburgh between 1870 and 1900. The firm of Misses Morris, milliners and dressmakers was founded by Mary, a spinster aged twenty-eight, and her recently-widowed younger sister Alice Wylie, who was the mother of a two-year old son and had been married to a commercial traveller. Their mother, also a widow, took lodgers into the house, which, with six rooms, was comfortably large. The lodgers tended to be young men, either students or clerks, and each census revealed the presence of one or two. One of these young men, a medical student, eventually, when qualified, married the widowed Alice Wylie, who was four years his senior, and they moved to Lancashire where they raised a large family. In later life, following the death of her mother and departure of Alice, Mary Morris continued her dressmaking firm and the lodgings' side of the family activity was continued by a second widowed sister who had returned to the family home. The business ended in 1900 and Mary died in 1902, at the age of sixty-two years and leaving a fortune of almost five hundred pounds to her nephew, the son of Alice Wylie by her first husband, mostly in the form of bank deposits and shares in public companies.(49)