I cannot tell why the price of everything we eat or drink or wear has so
much increased during the last year or two. I have heard many reasons
given, and have read of so many more, all differing, as to lead me to
suspect that no one really knows. Yet there is a general, broad
admission that it must in some way be owing to the war, for every one
knows that such enhancement did not previously exist. But among the
strange, the unaccountable, the utterly heartless facts of this eventful
crisis is the reduction of the wages of the sewing-woman, while the cost
of everything necessary to keep her alive is threefold greater than
before. The salaries of clerks have been raised, the wages of the
working-man increased, in some cases doubled, the labor of men in every
department of business is better paid, yet that of the sewing-woman is
reduced in price.
The heartlessness of the fact is equalled only by its strangeness. Every
article of clothing which the sewing-woman makes commands a higher price
than formerly, yet she receives much less for her work than when it sold
for a lower one. And while thus meagrely paid, there has been a demand
for the labor of her hands so urgent that the like was never seen among
us. A customer, in the person of the Government, came into the market
and created a demand for clothing, that swept every factory clear of its
accumulated stock, and bound the proprietors in contracts for more,
which required them to run night and day. All this unexampled product
was to be made up into tents, accoutrements, and army-clothing, and
principally by women. One would suppose, that, with so unusual a call
for female labor, there would be an increase of female wages. It was so
in the case of those who fabricated cannon, muskets, powder, and all
other articles which a government consumes in time of war, and which men
produce: they demanded higher wages for their work, and obtained them:
the increase showing itself to the buyer in the enhanced price of the
article.
This enhancement became contagious: it spread to everything,--doubling
and trebling the price of whatever the community required, except the
single item of the sewing-woman's labor. Had the price of this remained
even stationary, it would have excited surprise; but that her wages
should be cut down at a time when everybody's else went up excited
astonishment among such as became aware of it, while the reduction
coming contemporaneously with an unprecedented rise in the price of all
the necessaries of life overwhelmed this deserving class with
indescribable misery. Multitudes of them gave up the commonest articles
of food,--coffee, tea, butter, and sugar,--and others dispensed even
with many of the actual necessaries. How could they eat butter at sixty
cents a pound, when earning only fifteen cents a day?
Finally the reduction of sewing-women's wages became so shamefully great
as to raise a wailing cry from these poor victims of cupidity, which
attracted public attention. It was shown that as the price of food rose,
their wages went down. In 1861 the sewing-woman received seventeen and a
half cents for making a shirt, sugar being then thirteen cents a pound;
but in 1864, when sugar was up to thirty cents, the price for making a
shirt had been ground down to eight cents! It was nearly the same with
all other articles of her work, as the following list of cruel
reductions in the prices paid at our arsenal and by contractors will
show.