Ready-To-Wear and Ready-To-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York

Linked together by competition and similarity, the fashion centers of Paris and New York make a compelling subject for comparative history. In Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work, Nancy L. Green does an admirable job of laying out the story of the needlework trades, detailing the structure of the industry, the nature of labor relations, and the evolution of unionism and protective legislation in both centers. Her emphasis is on the labor market, the way successive waves of immigrants have used the sewing trades as a foothold in their new countries, and how the particularities of the clothing industry structured the immigrants’ experience of work. Gender segmentation in the industry followed the timeworn tactic of giving male workers the use of new tools, as when the heavy cutting knife replaced the women’s shears in the 1870s and the new pressing machines were labeled too difficult for women in the 1890s. But her more original analysis of job assignment shows that the ebb and flow of males and females into particular aspects of the industry also depended on profitability and the arrival of different immigrant groups to both fashion capitals.

The realm of bespoke clothing found its most effective challenge when the invention of the sewing machine offered the possibility of ready-made clothing for a mass market. After starting in the mid-nineteenth century as a tool of male tailors, the sewing machine quickly became “a female tool” to be used in the home and factory as the sewing workforce became predominantly female by 1900. Men reclaimed precedence by monopolizing the cutting and pressing processes and the more profitable men’s suit and cloak trade. The industry continued to be dominated by women workers, but men were an increasing percentage in the early decades of the twentieth century, and they appeared in small shops, factories, and home ateliers. In another reversal of gender roles and skill definition, today’s cutters and pressers in New York are women while Paris has male Turkish immigrants as sewers. Green shows that the least lucrative jobs, which were designated unskilled women’s work, became the mainstay of successive waves of immigrants. Russian and Polish Jews and Italians took up sewing in the nineteenth century, while Chinese, Turks, Armenians, Yugoslavs, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans from rural areas produced garments in the twentieth.

The constant renewal of immigrant workers provides a workshop to test theories about the dynamics of population movement in industry. Green examines a number of generalizations and shows that the process of carrying on the trade is more flexible than has been thought. Immigrants do follow their co-nationals into particular trades and workshops, but they also land in ateliers with fellow workers and foremen from elsewhere. While familiar language and customs may ease the way, some bosses complain that workers from their home country have lax standards, while some workers perceive directors of their ethnic group to be slave drivers. Ethnicity and gender must be placed in the context of political disability, need, and historic circumstance to be understood. Jobs in ready-to-wear can be considered sweatshop labor imposed by immigrants’ vulnerable situation or the first step on the road to prosperity and naturalization. Nor is using commonly accepted norms the only way to predict the behavior of ethnic groups, as a 1982 strike by “retiring” Chinese female workers demonstrates. Rubbing elbows with workers from elsewhere sometimes exacerbates ethnic irritation, but it also enables workers to join hands across nationalistic lines and press for higher wages or better conditions.

Equally complicated was the division between worker and management in the garment industry, as beginning workers learned the trade and set themselves up as contractors. Their program was extremely flexible: they might set up small workshops, hire enough labor to...