Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/489

 WOMEN'S WORK IN LEEDS 467 was more ditcdlt to obtain. The odour here, and also i the shoddy cloth factories where rags are sorted, was most unpleasant. Dirty as the work is, it would be affectation for the Irish to object to it very strongly on that ground. I was taken into several cttages in the district which supplies these ragshops and the flax- mills with hands. It was a bright sunny morning, and the women in many of the streets were sitting on the doorstep and enioying the sunshine. Their children, half-naked and altogether dirty, were playing about, untouched. by soap, water, brush or comb, at eleven o'clock in the morning. Of one modern crime these mothers were, however, quite innocent none of them took work out to do at home. At the beginning of the century a clothier in Leeds was  manufacturer of cloth; at the end of the century a clothier is a manufacturer of clothes. What was the meaning of the term as used in the middle of the century in the census, I do not know. It is about thirty-five years since the sewing-machine was first used in the cap and clothing-shops, and one of the employers who were the first to use it, told me that he induced women and girls earning about 5s. or 6s. at the flax mills, to come as learners; he taught them himself, and declares that at the end of a month any girl who was worth keeping could earn 8s. a week at once. Cutting machines, on the principle of the circular saw, were frrst; adapted to and introduced into the clothing trade by another employer more than twenty-five years ago, and their use gave a great impetus to the trade. The census returns do not, I believe, at all represent the extent to which women were employed in this new industry. By the cutting machine some two dozen double thicknesses were cut out at a time for trousers, the work was fixed and given out to women to do at home. These home- workers would appear in the returns as wives or daughters, or widows with no occupation, and in the census of machinists and finishers in one particular factory of which I give the results, this fact will explain the large number of mothers who are returned as having had no occupation before marriage. The button-hole machine, useless for high class work, was an invaluable aid in the lower class, and the application of steam power to the sewing machine produced another revolution by making the factory system inevitable. HH2