The sewing-machine was one of several factors that about 1860 inaugurated for women another industrial period. From its invention by Elias Howe the sewing-machine properly belonged to 1846, but the business of making and selling them was not fairly started before 1853. Then the sales of all the manufacturers amounted to only 2529. In 1860 they had reached to about 50,000. This increase showed that the sewing-machine results must be dated from the year of its acceptance into popular favor. Mr. Howe’s invention, like all other labor-saving machines, intended to be a blessing by lightening the burdens of workers, proved a curse by taking away their accustomed pursuit from those who depended on the skill by which they drove The patient needle through the woven threads. Brought into competition with machines that could do more and better work in one day than was possible for six women, working twenty hours apiece, to accomplish, these had either to starve, or force their way into some other wage-earning industry. An example of how this displacement affected needle-women can be gleaned from Appleton’s Cyclopædia for 1862, which cites a single establishment in New York, employing four hundred machines and producing about ten thousand shirts a week, whose estimated savings (in wages) were about $240,000 per annum. In the same year, the following sums were saved in wage-time by the sewing-machines in the manufacturing industries: Men’s and boys’ clothing in New York City $7,500,000 Hats and caps 462,500 Shirt bosoms 832,750 Calculating that each machine did the work of six girls, and estimating that one girl operated each machine, there were 73,290 women displaced by the machines on which these savings were made. Contemporary with the general acceptance of the sewing-machine, and intensifying the distress of the wage-worker, was the Civil War, which, in 1860, began to decimate the ranks of men and to convert into wage-earners large numbers of women who had been wage-expenders. Delicate women in the South, reared in affluence, waited upon by slaves, were thrown, by losses of male relatives and property, among the bread-winners. Numbers of these journeyed to Northern cities to hide their poverty as well as to gain entrance into the larger field of industries the North was supposed to offer. But here they were met by thousands of other women, native to the North, who, like their sisters of the South, through the death of those who had hitherto fought the battle of life for them, were obliged to become producers in the place of being consumers.