First-class curlers

Alison Kowalski

Edward H. Mitchell (Publisher), Feather Factory, Cawston Ostrich Farm, South Pasadena, California. Cawston is the only Breeder of Ostriches in America who manufactures his own product, published 1910-1915. Postcard. banc pic 2017.021: dh3-s:nn (carton 3, box 2). The Bancroft Library, The Berkeley Library University of California Digital Collections, University of California, Berkeley.

In early 1905, Edwin Cawston set out to start manufacturing fashionable fans, boas, hair ornaments, and hat plumes in South Pasadena, California. His factory would be an offshoot of the ostrich farm he had established about twenty years earlier, importing eighteen of the birds from South Africa and beginning to breed them. He had since turned the Cawston Ostrich Farm into a tourist attraction: visitors could ride the ostriches, pose for photographs with them, or even feed them whole California oranges. From his stock, he had also been cultivating raw feathers and selling them to New York factories where they were turned into women’s accessories. With his newest venture, Cawston hoped to challenge the monopoly New York had long held on the US ostrich feather market. East coast factories ran largely on female labor, and because women typically held low-skill positions, Cawston may have assumed it would be easy to assemble his own outfit. But this was not the case. It turned out that feather work, particularly the specialization of feather curling, required so much skill that Cawston was forced to recruit across the country and pluck employees from his intended competitors.

One New York feather worker he courted was Lulu Willis, who had at least six years’ experience and was by her own estimation an “expert curler.” Such an expert could transform a natural ostrich feather into any number of refined forms. The feathers on fans, for example, often had their flues—the straight, frond-like, fuzzy barbs projecting from the central shaft—curled into sleek stacks of stretched-out S’s, the ends whipped into tight hooks. The feathers on a popular style of boa had long flues whirled in all directions to create a wild and woolly look. Whatever the desired effect, a curler began her work by holding a feather over a steam jet for a few seconds, which relaxed any errant flues into alignment and made them more pliant. Then out came the curling knife, a specialized tool with a short, curved blade. Working a few flues at a time, the curler drew them between the inside edge and her thumb; the angle of the knife and the pressure of her thumb determined the style of the curl.

Feather curling knife, Hyde Manufacturing Co.: Cutlery (Southbridge, ma: Hyde Manufacturing, 1914), 19.

Curling was the most skill-intensive step in the manufacturing process, so difficult that it took anywhere between three months and two years to become proficient. Because of this, one writer explained, a “first-class curler is a prize in any factory.” Cawston needed women like Willis to have any hope of competing with New York. And he was going to have to pay up, because curlers were known to make high wages, at least relative to other working-class women.

According to Willis, Cawston guaranteed one year’s employment at New York wages for her as well as her daughter Florence, who was also a seasoned curler. Annually, this would amount to each woman earning at least $1,300 (about $46,000 today). Willis’s husband George secured an offer from Cawston to work as a dyer, one of the only roles in a feather factory performed by men. While we don’t know how much money George was offered, generally dyers could earn up to four times what the best curlers made, even though it was curling that required the real skill. George doesn’t appear to have needed much, if any, experience; just the year before, he had been working as an insurance broker.

Feather workers in the Cawston Ostrich Farm factory, ca. 1905, Courtesy of the South Pasadena Public Library.

The Willises accepted Cawston’s terms, moved to California, and took up their new positions in May 1905. The good life in the Golden State, however, turned out to be a false promise. By September, both women had been fired for unknown reasons. The next month George developed blood poisoning and died. Facing destitution, Willis did what must have seemed like her only option. She took Cawston to court.

Cawston denied Willis’s allegation that he had breached their contracts, claiming that he had promised them nothing. The outcome of the lawsuit is lost to history, but we do know this wasn’t the only dispute between the factory management and feather workers. Seven years later, still importing labor from New York, a foreman complained that once the workers arrived, they rarely lived up to his expectations. The foreman, and Cawston before him, must have been disappointed in the products coming out of the factory or perhaps the rate at which they were made. They blamed the workers. 

The problem, however, was more likely to do with the feathers themselves. As in any trade, low-quality raw materials made labor more challenging and time-consuming. And skill only goes so far. The quality impacted not only the finished products but also the women’s income because they were usually paid by the piece. Feather workers in New York had argued this point since the late 1880s, when many were driven to strike after their piece rate and hours were both dramatically reduced. From then into the early twentieth century, California farms were known to produce feathers inferior to those from South Africa, owing to the fact that the West Coast was not the birds’ native habitat, and oranges—while plentifully available—were not part of an optimal ostrich diet. The disagreements between Cawston management and the feather workers may well have come down to material intelligence. The first-class curlers had it; the men at the top didn’t.

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Alison Kowalski is an assistant professor of design at California State University, Long Beach. Her research focuses on design, fashion, and craft from the late nineteenth century to present day, with attention to issues related to gender and class. She’s also interested in how artifacts get made, how makers learn their craft, and how work is divided and organized. She has a PhD from Kingston University, London; an MA from the Bard Graduate Center, New York; and a bfa from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.