On average, a female knitter earns five neugroschen* or 17 Rhenish/South German kreuzer** for a pair of socks, and for this she has to work 2-3 days straight without doing anything else. Since this is the lightest work, it usually falls to children and older women who are incapable of other tasks. The ease of this work, its “on the side” nature, explains why more and more of it is taken on, despite the increasing perfection of the stocking frame, despite the invention and use of sewing machines. But what competition is there apart from the manufacture of stockings? Anyone who knits continuously can earn about 15 to 18 pfennigs or eight Rhenish kreuzer – but who has so many clients? Since knitting is an easy job that can be done while talking, even while reading and walking, hundreds [of women] knit merely to avoid idleness and then sell their work as well.
[ . . . ]
If only you had seen these girls and women from the Upper Ore Mountains! The children, who grow up in stuffy rooms, look like ghosts: pale, with skinny arms and legs and bodies bloated from the only food they have, the potato. The father had either suffered an early death in the cobalt blue works or was travelling throughout the region, peddling articles made of wood and panniers in which to store pine shavings; wife and children have to work at home, as he can’t take care of them! The little girls have to make pillow lace just as soon as they can properly move their tiny hands; they wither away at the same lace-making pillow where their mother also withered away – so much so that she could only give birth to sickly children – that same lace-making pillow where their grandmother went blind! For fixing their gazes on the fine threads, needles, and tiny bobbins deprives the eyes of their sight, and the animated movement of the little bobbins – often 50 to 100 – makes the fingers delicate and tender, the arms weak and skinny, unfit for anything else. And then the clever people come and say: These women could do something other than make pillow lace – it’s crazy that they still insist on doing so. No, when they’ve done nothing but make pillow lace since they were small children, then they can’t do anything else. For they never had a chance to build up their strength and are thus utterly incapable of heavy work – even if one could find it for them.
* A coin worth ten pfennigs – trans.
** A coin worth four pfennigs – trans.
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