First-Class Curlers

In early 1905, Edwin Cawston set out to start manufacturing fashionable fans, boas, hair ornaments, and hat plumes in South Pasadena, California.[1] His factory would be an offshoot of the ostrich farm he had established about twenty years earlier when he imported eighteen birds from South Africa and began breeding them.[2] He had since turned the Cawston Ostrich Farm into a tourist attraction: visitors could ride an ostrich, pose for a photograph on one, or even feed one a whole California orange.[3] 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.[4] With his newest venture, Cawston hoped to challenge the monopoly New York had long held on the market.[5] East coast factories ran 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 the very factories he intended to rival.[6]

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.”[7] Such an expert could transform a natural ostrich feather, with its fuzzy frond-like flues standing on end, into any number of refined forms. The feathers on a fan, for example, had short flues curled into sleek stacks of stretched-out S’s, the ends whipped into tight hooks, whereas the feathers on a boa had long flues whirled in all directions to create a wild and woolly look.[8] 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.[9]

Curling was the most difficult step in the manufacturing process, so difficult that it took anywhere between three months and two years to become proficient.[10] Because of this, one writer explained, a “first-class curler is a prize in any factory.”[11] 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—as far as wages went for 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 too was a seasoned curler. Annually, this would amount to each woman earning at least $1,300 (about $46,000 today).[12] Willis’s husband George also secured an offer from Cawston, to work as a dyer—one of the only roles in a feather factory performed by men.[13] 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.[14] Dyeing was so quick to learn that George doesn’t appear to have needed much, if any, experience: just the year before, he had been working as an insurance broker.[15]

The Willises accepted Cawston’s terms, moved to California, and took up their new positions in May 1905.[16] The promise of a good life in the Golden State, however, turned out to be a false one. By September, both women had been fired for unknown reasons.[17] The next month George developed blood poisoning and died.[18] Facing destitution, Willis did what must have seemed like her only option. She took Cawston to court.[19]

Cawston denied Willis’s allegation that he had breached their contracts, claiming that he had promised them nothing.[20] 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.[21] 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, and 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. 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 these points since the late 1880s, when many were driven to strike after their piece rate and hours were both slashed.[22] From then into the early twentieth century, California farms produced feathers inferior to those from South Africa, owing to the fact that California was not the birds’ native habitat and those whole oranges were not part of an optimal ostrich diet.[23] The disagreements between Cawston management and the feather workers may well have come down to material intelligence. First-class curlers had it. The men at the top didn’t.

Originally published in the “Feathers” issue of Material Intelligence (January 2025)

1. “Cawston Ostrich Farm Prospectus,” [1905], “Cawston Ostrich Farm Business Prospectuses” folder, box 1, Cawston Ostrich Farm Papers, Huntington Library.

2. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 129.

3. Stein, 130-31; Rick Thomas, “Throwback Thursday: The Ride of a Lifetime!” South Pasadenan, 27 June 2019, https://southpasadenan.com/throwback-thursday-the-ride-of-a-lifetime/; “Did You Ever See an Ostrich Eat,” pamphlet, [1900-1920], LP0702.1, Cawston Ostrich Farm Archive, South Pasadena Public Library.

4. Stein, 131.

5. “Cawston Ostrich Farm Prospectus.” Prior to 1905, Cawston bought finished products from New York factories to sell under his own name.

6. Stein, 136.

7. Newark City Directories: 1898-1899, 1899-1900, 1902-1903, and 1903-1904; Los Angeles County Superior Court Case File #52540, 10 July 1906, Los Angeles Area Court Records, 1850-1911, Huntington Library.

8. For examples of this style of fan, see Souvenir of the Cawston Ostrich Farm in California (South Pasadena, CA: Cawston Ostrich Farm, 1903), 27-28, “Brochures, Catalogs, and Pamphlets: Cawston Ostrich Farm” folder, box 5, Cawston Ostrich Farm Papers, Huntington Library. For examples of boas, see Souvenir of the Cawston Ostrich Farm in California, 21-24.

9. The information on ostrich feather curling is based on the author’s own attempts at the craft as well as the following contemporary accounts: “Ostrich Feathers,” Scientific American, 31 July 1852, 362; Marius A. Gouy, “Ostrich-feathers: From the Bird to the Bonnet,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 29, no. 3 (1890): 379; “Trade in Ostrich Plumes,” Indianapolis Journal, 2 August 1891; “The Manufacture of Ostrich Feathers,” Scientific American, 16 March 1901, 164; The Art of Ostrich Plume Making (San Jose: Melvin & Murgotten, 1912), 24, 30-32; Edmond Lefevre, Le commerce et l’industrie de la plume pour parure (Paris: Edmond Lefevre, 1914), 252-53.

10. “Trade in Ostrich Plumes’; “The Manufacture of Ostrich Feathers”; “Feather Curlers Scarce,” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1903; Alexander Paul and Morris Frank, The Practical Ostrich Feather Dyer (Philadelphia: Mrs. Morris Frank, 1888), 96-98; Louise C. Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry: A Study of Conditions in New York City (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1919), 268.

11. Gouy, “Ostrich-feathers: From the Bird to the Bonnet.”

12. This is the figure Lulu Willis claimed in a 1906 court case. Her claim is corroborated by other contemporary sources that describe wages for New York feather curlers. Los Angeles County Superior Court Case File #52540; “The Manufacture of Ostrich Feathers,” 164; “Feather Curlers Scarce;” Third Annual Report of the Board of Mediation and Arbitration of the State of New York (Albany: James B. Lyon, 1890), 136; and “Making ‘Willow’ Plumes,” Los Angeles Times, 20 Aug. 1910.

13. South Pasadena City Directory: 1905-1906; “General Office—So. Pasadena,” list of Cawston Ostrich Farm factory employees, [1909-1920], “Cawston Ostrich Farm Financial Documents” folder, box 1, Cawston Ostrich Farm Papers, Huntington Library; George J. Manson, Work for Women (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 30; “Flower and Feather Manufacture,” Scientific American, 23 June 1894, 392; “The Manufacture of Ostrich Feathers,” 164.

14. “Trade in Ostrich Plumes”; “General Office—So. Pasadena,” list of Cawston Ostrich Farm factory employees.

15. Newark City Directories: 1898-1899, 1899-1900, 1902-1903, and 1903-1904. See also United States Census: 1900.

16. Los Angeles County Superior Court Case File #52540; Los Angeles County Superior Court Case File #62979, 17 May 1908, Los Angeles Area Court Records, 1850-1911, Huntington Library.

17. Los Angeles County Superior Court Case File #52540; Los Angeles County Superior Court Case File #62979.

18. George W. Willis Certificate of Death, California State Board of Health, 13 Oct. 1905, familysearch.org; Los Angeles County Superior Court Case File #52540.

19. Los Angeles County Superior Court Case File #52540.

20. Los Angeles County Superior Court Case File #62979.

21. Plumes, 136; Ernest G. Vatcher to Herbert J. Vatcher, Jr., 16 Aug. 1912, “Ernest G. Vatcher | Herbert J. Vatcher, Jr” folder, box 4, Cawston Ostrich Farm Papers, Huntington Library; South Pasadena City Directories: 1910-1911, 1911-1912.

22. Third Annual Report of the Board of Mediation and Arbitration of the State of New York, 144, 146-47, 150.

23. Stein, 131, 132, 134-35.