ASK FOR THE MOON
With the coming of the urban “manufacturies” more and more women found themselves performing their “homework” under the direction of a factory owner who would then pay them a wage fixed by himself. It has been estimated that by 1800 roughly a million women and children were involved in English clothing trades, with lace making alone accounting for as many as 100,000 females aged ten and up, mostly in low-skilled occupations that earned approximately half of what males earned for the same work. This was in part due to the all-male guilds of skilled workers seeking to keep their crafts exclusive–the better to keep their wages high–and in part due to the notion that the income of women and children was supplementary to that earned by the man of the family (when there were men in the family).
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It was a system that would become increasingly inhumane as women (and eventually whole families) moved out of the home and into what would come to be called by the diseuphonious name “sweatshop.” The horrors of long working days at pittance wages (sometimes 16 hours or more per day; in 1802, a law was passed limiting children under the age of ten to a 12-hour day, but not until 1833 was another law passed appointing inspectors to enforce it), the fragmented and repetitive tasks, the barriers to advancement in the trade guilds, and the general exploitation of women and children in the escalating production of ready-made goods–this is the background against which Shirley Gee’s Ask for the Moon is set.
This production was cosponsored by the Chicago Commission on Women, created in 1984 under an executive order by the late mayor Harold Washington and made a permanent part of city government in 1987. Its fifth anniversary seems as good an occasion as any to remind us that we–not just working women, but all of us –still have a long way to go.
