ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the forms in the two aspects of sewing outwork. Girl embroiderers demonstrates their distance from a craft tradition in assessing the relationship between their earnings and their labour by describing the former work as 'good' and the latter as 'bad'. Sewing outwork in north-west Ulster intensified during the second half of the nineteenth century, not only despite, but also because of, the industrialization of the Belfast area. Commentators universally agreed that though families were not dependent on sewing outwork yet it made an important contribution by 'enabling the family to live when it could not live from its other sources of income'. The extent and type of outwork in any community seems to have depended on a combination of geography, local actors and networks. The consistent feature of the rural communities was the level and regularity of men's earnings. The factors served to stave off the tremendous degree of reorganization required fully to adopt powered machine technology.
