The millinery trade, which produces women’s hats of straw, wire, buckram, cloth, velvet, and plush, and recently fur, first began on the farms seventy-five years ago. The History of the Cap and Millinery Union136 recounts how women’s hats were made in America in the 1850s:
The inveterate Irish traveler, Thomas Mooney, published a book in Dublin in 1850 called Nine Years in America,137 in which he describes the millinery trade of the day: ‘Much of America’s light industry is produced by women working in farm houses, especially in the New England states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine). In New York and Boston there are large storehouses with straw bonnets that send out agents to the farms. The agents travel around in a large, covered omnibus in which they carry bundles of straw “braids” and samples of the latest style of bonnets. In every village they leave the bundles and the samples with the wives and daughters on the farms. Those women then make the hats with that straw following the style of the samples. Some time later the agents return and pick up the hats, pay the women, and give them more straw and sample hats. All the women in the villages are involved in this trade, including the wife of the doctor and the minister’.
Women’s hats were made this way in New England until the end of the 1870s. At the start of the 1880s some of the large manufacturers opened factories in New York and hired women to sew the hats by hand, just as the farm women had done. No machines were used then to make women’s hats. It wasn’t until 1900 that machines were being used in millinery that could make hats as well-crafted and as beautiful as those that women used to make by hand. The machine-made hats could be sold more cheaply.
136 Weinstein takes this from Jacob M. Budish, Geshikhte fun di kloth hat, kep un milineri arbeter, 22.
137 Weinstein is referring to Thomas Mooney, Nine Years in America: A Traveller for Several Years in the United States of America, the Canadas and Other British Provinces in a Series of Letters to his Cousin Patrick Mooney, a Farmer in Ireland (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1850).
Nowadays women’s hats are made by hand only in the big cities, in what are called “millinery parlors”, but they are very expensive. The overwhelming majority are made by machine. Many cloth hat and cap makers who used to make men’s caps have now gone into millinery and are using Singer sewing machines to produce women’s hats of straw, cloth, and other materials. Those machine operators who moved into millinery eventually realized that they needed to organize a Millinery Workers’ Union as a distinct local of the International Cap Makers’
Union.
According to the census of 1919, there were in the United States 829 factories for trimmed hats and hat frames, employing 22,662 workers, including 7,277 men. The story of the Millinery Workers’ Union is interesting. Local 24 of the Millinery and Straw Operators is only eighteen years old, but it is a brave fighter. It has fought on behalf of the millinery and straw operators for eighteen years, and it hasn’t stopped.
The other millinery locals are the Blockers, the Hat-frame makers, the Trimmers, the Finishers, and the Cutters.
At the start of 1911 the International Cap Makers’ Union issued a charter to a small number of Millinery Operators, Local 24, in the hope that a separate millinery union would make it easier to organize workers of the whole trade, which we calculated to number about 10,000 to 12,000.
But it didn’t turn out so easy to organize all the other workers. The vast majority were women who didn’t know about unions and didn’t want to know. But that small group of brave cap operators who were making ladies’ hats in the millinery shops did not give up the struggle. As of today, eighty percent of the workers in the trade are organized. After eighteen years the three Millinery Union locals, Numbers 24, 42, and 43, total more than 8,000 members in New York.
The millinery operators have replaced piece work with a weekly salary of a minimum of sixty-five dollars a week. The blockers are earning seventy-five dollars or more, but many of them are still doing piece work. The trimmers and the finishers of ladies’ hats are also getting decent wages. All of them are working forty-four hours a week.
Millinery workers are at the mercy of fashion. There are four seasons, but fashion changes every few weeks, so women’s hats are constantly being made of different materials and in different ways. One style may require many operators to be working, while the next style may employ
more blockers, or more pressers, or more trimmers, and so women’s hat styles change from season to season. But the most radical change occurred when women started bobbing their hair and began wearing short dresses with flesh-colored stockings. Big hats went out of style, and so the manufacturers produced small hats, because hair pins wouldn’t hold on to bobbed hair. This change caused a revolution in the millinery trade. Many manufacturers went bankrupt. Companies that had made women’s hats from cloth, buckram, silk, linen, and straw for years closed down their factories, and tremendous competition wracked those that managed to stay in business. Machine operators who ewed cloth, buckram, and silk hats suffered the most from these changes.
Felt hats don’t need to be sewn. They come already prepared.
The blockers just stamp out the felt on wooden blocks and iron them together, then the trimmers adorn them with a different trim every season. The machine operators, who used to account for sixty percent of millinery workers, suffered very high unemployment on account of those felt hats. Their only consolation was their union, which insisted that the work be shared equally among the workers and did a lot for the unemployed. The Millinery and Women’s Hats Union, which is a part of the International Cap Makers’ Union, has inspired a number of young labor leaders. One of the ablest was N. Spector, who has continuously been the manager of Local 24.
Two unions were in conflict, the International Cap Makers’ and the Felt Hat Makers’ International, for ten years following 1913. The crux was that the United Hatters’ Union of America wanted the AFL to let them absorb the millinery workers in women’s hats. And the AFL did decide that the millinery workers should belong to the Hatters, but the millinery workers did not want to abandon their “mother” union, the Cap Makers’, which had organized them. The AFL then expelled the International Cap Makers’ Union for having disobeyed its decision. The Cap Makers’ remained independent for several years. Samuel Gompers, President of the AFL, made peace between the two unions in 1923.
This was the compromise: The millinery workers would belong to the International Cap Makers’, while the United Hatters would absorb the workers in those shops where felt, fur, wool, and straw hats for women were made, as well as Panama straw hats.
In October 1924 the AFL gave back the International Cap Makers’
their charter. It is worth noting that the United Hatters’ Union of America, which had existed since 1854, belonged for a time to the United Hebrew Trades, despite the fact that it had a rather small Jewish membership. That was because the UHT and all the Jewish unions gave it both moral and financial support through its many strikes. The Hatters were especially grateful that the members of all the Jewish unions in America looked for their union label on all hats for men.