Death at the Needle: The Tragedy of Victorian Seamstress Mary Walkley | Hacker News Reader

Death at the Needle: The Tragedy of Victorian Seamstress Mary Walkley

mimimatthews.com

38 pointsAvawelles10 comments

It's unclear the intent of the author, but for this community it can be taken as a reminder that scandal is often ephemeral - stirring up the press and public but making no lasting change. The tragedy of a Victorian seamstress, the San Bernardino iPhone, Sandy Hook... To effect change requires a concerted, persistent, depressingly long effort to see it through, not just shouting for a bit.

I forget where I read it recently, but there was a piece about how some great strides forward were made not overnight, even though they may have seemed that way (I think the context may have been civil rights), but through decades of constant, vigilant advocacy and activism.

I felt like the author allowed the reader to draw their own conclusions but my takeaways were in the same vein: awareness and outrage don't immediately solve problems.

I feel the same. I don't think that there is an intent other than education on 19th century history and events. The readers get to draw their own conclusions.

Garment-stitching work is notorious for these kind of conditions, it's just moved around the world over the years to places like Bangladesh.

Seemstress = Startup Developer?

I was reminded of the airbnb foundation legend : three designers on airbeds on the floor of an apartment. I also picture rows of developers crouching over macbooks (when any sane employer has keyboards and 2*24' monitors + a decent chair).

No seamstress did not make wages in the top 10% in the richest country on earth while working 7 hour days.

Well...

The seamstresses in the story lived in the richest country in the world (at the time!) And at that time inequality in GB was so eye popping that these poor girls may have actually been close to the top 10%, although a gigantic distance from the top 1% and an unimaginable distance from the top 0.1%

Also startup developers (proper startup developers) do not work 7 hrs, they work 14hrs.

I found some info for the US, I assume England would have similar numbers.

http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2500.pdf page 101 suggests seamstress was making about 1/3 what a carpenters made. Thus seamstresses where far from the to 10%.

The US numbers look for top 10% was ~1/3 of all income top 5% = 20% of all income so 90-95% was ~10% of all incomes. The bottom 40% was 13.6% of all income. Page 32: http://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/cromer/e211_f12/LindertWilli...

So, someone at 90.001 percentile was making about 8x what someone at 20.001 percentile.

PS: Inflation is hard to calculate for this time-span but it was the equivalent of something like 2$ per hour.

Considering that some of these girls were paid so little that they had to turn to prostitution in order to get by, I don't think we can compare them to startup developers of today. At least any ones that I know.

If you are interested, check out Magdalene laundries as well.

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