There were in the United States numerous small workshops where a
few tailors or seamstresses, gathered under one roof, laboriously
sewed garments together, but the great bulk of the work, until
the invention of the sewing machine, was done by the wives and
daughters of farmers and sailors in the villages around Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia. In these cities the garments were cut
and sent out to the dwellings of the poor to be sewn. The wages
of the laborers were notoriously inadequate, though probably
better than in England. Thomas Hood's ballad The Song of the
Shirt, published in 1843, depicts the hardships of the English
woman who strove to keep body and soul together by means of the
needle:
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread.
Meanwhile, as Hood wrote and as the whole English people learned
by heart his vivid lines, as great ladies wept over them and
street singers sang them in the darkest slums of London, a man,
hungry and ill-clad, in an attic in faraway Cambridge,
Massachusetts, was struggling to put into metal an idea to
lighten the toil of those who lived by the needle. His name was
Elias Howe and he hailed from Eli Whitney's old home, Worcester
County, Massachusetts.
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