ABSTRACT

In 1886, journalist-investigator Helen Campbell published a series of articles on working women in The New York Tribune—a series that subsequently gained fame when reprinted under the title Prisoners of Poverty. Still, although needlewomen were often used as the very symbol of oppressed Victorian female workers, the stories of actual needlewomen in Albany rarely fit the suffering worker/swindling owner stereotype presented by reformers like Campbell. Although the apparent specificity of statistics and the construction of “typical” needleworkers is appealing, neat percentages obscure the constant quandaries facing an historian who attempts to identify and count the businesswomen in a nineteenth-century city or neighborhood. Most millinery and dressmaking shops were small concerns where owners and workers were one-in-the-same, or where owners and workers were closely related.