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Women in the 19th Century - Parisian Garment Workers (Petition Date August 1848)

PARISIAN GARMENT WORKERS (PETITION DATE AUGUST 1848)

SOURCE: Parisian Garment Workers. “The Adult Woman: Work.” In Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, edited by Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen, p. 330. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1981.

In the following petition, written to the Parisian government in 1848, women workers who were losing work to contractors outside of France appeal to lawmakers to intercede on their behalf.

Gentlemen:

Please consider the request of some poor working women. The convents and the prisons take all our work away from us; they do it for such a low price that we can't compete with them. Almost all of us are mothers of families. We have our keep, our nourishment and our lodgings to pay for and we are not able to make enough money to...

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