er needle
to starvation point.

It was still the period of transition in the introduction of the
sewing-machine. The wages earned under these circumstances were
incredibly low. The true sweating system with all its dire effects
upon the health of the worker, and threatening the very existence of
the home, was in full force. The enormous amount of work which was
given out in army contracts to supply the needs of the soldiers then
on active service in the Civil War, was sublet by contractors at the
following rates. The price paid by the Government for the making of
a shirt might be eighteen cents. Out of that all the worker would
receive would be seven cents. And cases are cited of old women,
presumably slow workers, who at these rates could earn but a dollar
and a half per week. Even young and strong workers were but little
better off. From innumerable cases brought to light $2 and $3 a week
seem to have been a common income for a woman. Some even "supported"
(Heaven save the mark!) others out of such wretched pittances.

Aurora Phelps, of Boston, a born leader, in 1869, gave evidence that
there were then in Boston eight thousand sewing-women, who did not
earn over twenty-five cents a day, and that she herself had seen the
time when she could not afford to pay for soap and firing to wash her
own clothes. She said that she had known a girl to live for a week on
a five-cent loaf of bread a day, going from shop to shop in search of
the one bit of work she was able to do. For by this time division of
work had come in, and the average machine operator was paid as badly
as the hand needlewoman.

The circumstance that probably more than any other accentuated this
terrible state of affairs was the addition to the ranks of the
wage-earners of thousands of "war widows." With homes broken up and
the breadwinner gone, these untrained women took up sewing as the only
thing they could do, and so overstocked the labor market that a
new "Song of the Shirt" rose from attic to basement in the poorer
districts of all the larger cities.

As early as 1864 meetings were held in order to bring pressure upon
the officials who had the giving out of the army contracts, to have
the work given out direct, and therefore at advanced prices to the
worker. Only three months before his death, in January, 1865, these
facts reached President Lincoln, and were referred by him to the
quartermaster with a request that "he should hereafter manage the
su