The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living/Chapter 5
Dressmaking is a trade of the veriest drudgery at a small weekly wage, or it is a commercial venture which yields very big financial returns. There is no middle ground.
On its altar many a conscientious woman has sacrificed youth, girlish happiness and health. Upon woman's fondness for dress and innate American extravagance, other women have built a competence. Dressmaking will yield large financial returns only to the woman who has the true business or commercial instinct, and who would succeed equally well if she opened a millinery shop, managed a shoe factory, or ran a public typewriting office.
The mere fact that you set dainty stitches will not make you a financial success as a dressmaker. You must have what is known as a "business head." Here is a case in point, rather personal, to be sure, but one for whose truth I can vouch.
During my last year in school manual
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training was just beginning to invade educational circles, and I belonged to what was perhaps the first sewing-class in the high school of a large Eastern city. In September we started setting stitches, sewing seams and making buttonholes. By commencement day, in June, we were expected to be able to cut, fit and make a garment. My dainty stitches and accurate work in the sewing-class helped materially to raise my general average. In fact, my neatly-made percale dress was awarded the highest possible percentage, but later in the summer, when I tried to wear that dress, it looked—well, in a kindly spirit, we will call it queer.
In the same class, almost rubbing elbows with me, was a girl whose sewing nearly drove our dear old teacher distracted. Her stitches wandered over the material at their own sweet will. Her buttonholes were a class scandal. Her garment fell to pieces, unless some of us helped to fasten off the thread-ends. But the little mull dress which she made for her graduation stunt was distractingly dainty, albeit none of us could vouch for the steadfastness of its seams. She was marked very low by the conscientious judges of needlework, but later in the summer, on the boardwalk at Cape May, N. J., that little frock added several scalps to her proposal belt.
A few years later that girl opened a profitable dressmaking establishment, though she had to hire women to set the stiches according to her designs. Later she became buyer for a firm, making semi-annual trips abroad. To-day she is head of a fashion and pattern syndicate,—enjoying a large income, and she is wonderfully happy and satisfied in her work. I might still be making very neat buttonholes in her dressmaking establishment, but if I want an artistic corsage-bow or a smart summer girdle evolved from ribbon, I have to tip a girl at the ribbon counter to make it for me. So you see the girl who received the highest percentage as a mere setter of stitches might have starved, or at least become a tired drudge at dressmaking, while the girl who knew the value of lines, color combinations and effects, although she did make round and ragged buttonholes, has a thriving business, built on the same trade.
There is a small, steady income in ordinary dressmaking. You can make a trifle more than sweat-shop wages if you are a neat seamstress and have good health. But the big money in dressmaking is made by the women who know how to profit by the labor of others, who can catch and hold trade by their original designs, and who are sincerely interested in making their wealthy customers look their best. Make a woman better-looking, whether by massage, hair-dressing, millinery or dressmaking, and the laborer will be considered worthy of her hire.
We will take it for granted that you have fairly good health, strong eyesight, a gift for setting neat stitches and running a machine evenly, and a fair amount of good taste. You think you would like to be a dressmaker, but you have no capital.
You must start as an apprentice or helper, according to your age. If you are a mere slip of a girl, you will start your dressmaking career by running errands, delivering finished work, executing small shopping commissions, and holding a box of pins for the fitter. All of those tasks hold possibilities. Running errands and delivering work will bring you in direct contact with customers and give to you your first training in tactful treatment of patrons. The shopping commissions will prove lessons in values, combinations of color, or of fabrics and trimmings, and the retail markets. By watching the fitter closely, the mere holder of pins gains her first idea of the value of lines and what constitutes failure or success in fitting.
As an errand girl, the apprentice will not re'ceive more than $2 a week. She may have to work several months for nothing. At the end of six months she starts on linings at $4 a week. When promoted to do over-sewing and finishing, she will receive $6 for her week's work. Trimmers on skirts or waists receive $12 to $14 per week. In cities, fitters receive from $15 to $18. After a few years in the establishment of a first-class dressmaker, if the employee has a little reserve fund, a list of probable patrons, the gift of winning satisfied customers and plenty of good courage, she is ready to open a shop of her own.
The girl who lacks business push on a the ability to take the initiative and achieve on original lines should not attempt an independent venture. She can always find a position for about nine months out of the year, perhaps more, at $15 a week in a private dressmaking establishment, or she can enter a department store as alteration fitter in the suit and coat department.
So much for the history of the young girl. Now for her older sister or aunt, who is a fine needlewoman, but who has no knowledge of cutting, fitting or designing. She must enter a shop where the best custom work is done and where her fine stitching will be worth at least a dollar a day to her employer. This means hand-tucking, binding, braiding, etc. Then she advances to the work of trimming and finally to fitting. She escapes only the errand-running and shopping, though if she can get a little of the latter to do, it is good training for her.
Replying to the many questions about schools, I would say that the girl who has it in her to succeed will do so whether she starts as an apprentice at nothing a week, or spends her father's money at a high-priced school for dressmakers. The teachers in a school are perhaps more considerate of your feelings, at so much per week, than the forewoman of the shop who is intrusting to your inexperienced fingers fabrics purchased by her patrons, but the consideration paid for by your father's money will not lead to any royal road in dressmaking lore. That is either born in you, a God-given talent, or you acquire it by honest effort.
Studying designing during the slack season is entirely different. A practical fitter or would-be designer will find a summer or evening course in a good art school most helpful.
It will depend upon yourself how soon you can learn the trade. Forewomen tell me that it takes so many months to perfect oneself on linings, on sleeves, on skirts, on trimmings, but I know that girls who have the right sort of determination and who concentrate on their work can break every time-rule which forewomen have conceived. But when the demon of discouragement takes possession of you, then your chances of emancipation and independence fades.
In selecting a shop in which to work, choose a small rather than a large establishment. This will insure individual attention, or correction, you may call it, and a chance to work on all parts of a gown. In the large shops you are apt to settle down as a maker of sleeves, or vests or panels, some one part of each gown always being turned over to you. Thus your general training is neglected.
Now we will say that you have a fair working knowledge of dressmaking, fitting and designing. You want to be an independent, not a salaried worker. By this I mean that either you wish to establish a house-to-house clientele of your own or a shop with help to execute your orders and carry out your designs. Right here I want to speak of your health. Barring teaching, I doubt if there is another trade or profession which holds so many wrecks, nervous and physical, as dressmaking. This condition exists because the work is confining. In the busy season, dressmakers do not leave their workrooms for weeks at a time, and then they wonder why they have headaches, digestive disorders, neuralgia and nervous prostration. The woman who means to last in this trade must guard her health. A brisk walk night and morning, proper ventilation of the workrooms, regular hours for meals, and relaxation, downright fun after working hours, will save your reason, protect your health, lengthen your period of usefulness to your own sex, and increase your bank account.
Do not expect to defy every rule of hygiene—and sanitation, for many workrooms are unsanitary and germ-laden—and then achieve success and prosperity. Mix a little common sense with your ability to build good gowns, if you have no capital with which to open a shop which will appeal to wealthy customers, and you still wish to be your own mistress and paymaster, then you must specialize—and right here I want to picture some incidents from real dressmaking life in which girls have literally wrenched success from apparent failure by specializing, or creating a demand for their services.
In a city of less than thirty thousand inhabitants there works a young woman who calls herself dressmaker to little people. She makes garments of any sort for children over two and under ten. She would not make a shirt-waist for little Tommy's mother, nor a skirt for Baby Bess' grown-up sister, because she frankly admits that she does not know how. But she makes the cutest little brown-linen suits for Tommy in which he can play comfortably and yet look well dressed, because they fit properly; and she makes Baby Bess the cynosure of feminine eyes when she goes calling or to church with her proud mamma. Moreover, she is paid two dollars a day, and has to fight for a month's vacation during hot weather.
Here was a girl who from childhood could set neat stitches and was accurate. She started to serve an apprenticeship with a dressmaker in her own city. She saw girls break down from close confinement in a poorly-ventilated workroom. She watched her employer's nerves quiver under the trials peculiar to dealing with women customers, and the effort to keep promises which never should have been made. The girl decided that she did not want to be a dressmaker, yet she had to earn her living.
She heard some mothers complaining of how poorly ready-to-wear clothes-for children were put together, and how tiresome it was to do your own sewing. The girl saw her chance and seized it. She offered her services at a dollar a day as a seamstress, working on children's clothes under the direction of the mothers who were glad to have a neat assistant. Then she read up on children's clothes. She bought patterns from various firms until she found one that specialized on raiment for children. She began to design a little frock here, a boy's blouse there. She studied as she sewed, and gradually she could ask a slight advance in her wages. In time mothers found that this girl, whom they had trained and whose faculty for absorbing information had been as rapid as it has been unostentatious, was a specialist in juvenile raiment.
Perhaps some day she will be the proud possessor of a large city shop, because men of money, and women, too, for that matter, are often willing to back a specialist of this sort. Perhaps, being a woman of quiet tastes and simple habits, she may continue to live contentedly on twelve dollars a week. But, best of all, she loves her work and has steady nerves, which means something to those of us who are wage-earners.
Some years ago there came to New York from the Far West, from New Mexico, if I remember correctly, a young woman who painted rather well on china. She opened a studio, but met with indifferent sucess. Finally a day came when she could buy no more china to paint and fire, but that mattered very little, as her stock of finished wares was by no means depleted. Still, her hands must have something td do, so she began to make over her clothes and to ultilize some discarded garments given to her by a well-to-do patron. Among the latter was a green crepe de chine frock, which she cleaned, embroidered in self-tones, and made into a most effective blouse. The patron, calling at the studio one day, could hardly believe her eyes when she was shown the blouse. If she could only find some one who could clean, make over and utilize out-of-date clothes for her in that very artistic fashion!
The girl hesitated a moment, then frankly asked for a chance to do the work, explaining her financial condition. The one-time buyer of ceramics gladly accepted her services as a renovator, cleaner and general utility sewer.
For one whole year that girl did nothing but make old frocks into new ones. There was nothing about cleaning, turning and pressing that she did not master. But all the time she cherished another ambition. At the end of the year she entered the workroom of a firm noted as makers of women's shirt-waists and blouses. She studied their methods, and finally fared forth a specialist in shirt-waist and lingerie blouses. To-day she has a business so thriving that she never gives a thought to her one-time ambition as a painter of china.
From the West Indies came another young woman with rosy visions of learning dressmaking and opening an establishment of her own. She found herself an apprentice in a huge workroom surrounded by girls who had no ambition beyond half-holidays and Sunday at Coney Island. They told her there was no chance to rise. If a forewoman saw you were clever she purposely kept you back, lest you become her rival.
The girl could not endure this. She needed an ambition to sustain her, an objective point toward which she would bend her endeavors. As soon as she felt sufficient confidence, she left the shop and started as house-to-house seamstress at one dollar per day. Sometimes she worked with members of the family who employed her, sometimes with more competent house-to-house dressmakers, but it did not take her long to discover that the problem of the average family was the gowning of the girl who had just reached the awkward age, the age of angles and of hysterical tears over dresses that would not simulate curves.
She began to study the possibilities of the awkward age. What styles of skirts, blouses, girdles and fichus would soften those angles? What fabrics lent themselves best to soft effects, and what trimmings should be avoided? What changes could be made in prevailing style to secure becoming results for unhappy Miss Fifteen? All these problems she studied and worked out with a more than artistic eye—the enthusiasm of the girl with the one idea. To-day that girl commands $2.50 per day. She has all she can do in town during the winter, spring and fall, and her hot-weather days are spent at a resort on the New Jersey coast, where in two wealthy families she makes, early fall finery for growing girls. Thus she has her expenses paid to and from the resort, her daily dip in the sea, her moonlight nights on the sand, her afternoon rest, when the machine no longer whirrs and the scissors lie as idle as their mistress. These privileges are hers, not because she knows a trade, for many of us have a trade and no privileges, but because she has found for herself a special service. She is doing something that few, if any, other women have deemed worthy their attention. She has made a niche for herself.
These instances of successful effort have not been recited for your amusement. I hope they have all gone to prove that it is not the trade, but the use to which you put it, that makes for contentment or big financial returns.
Perhaps you think from what I have written that training, or serving an apprenticeship, is not necessary, that somehow you can escape the monotony of preparation; but I did not wish to give you this impression. In each instance the girl served a hard apprenticeship either before or after entering business for herself. The maker of blouses served a long weary year in a waist factory. The builder of garments for children or of raiment for growing girls founded her individual success on a knowledge of cutting and sewing gained in the hard school of experience.
What I do want to set forth in this article is that the girl who thinks she has only to follow unthinkingly the orders of her employer or forewoman, and who does not plan definitely and enthusiastically for her future, will remain as long as she lives either a workroom drudge or a most indifferent dressmaker to dissatisfied customers.