Economy
Saba lace (also known as "Spanish work") is actually drawn thread work, and as of 2013 it is still produced on the island. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Saba lace was a major export. In the 1870s, as a young lady, Mary Gertrude Hassell Johnson, was sent to a Caracas convent in Venezuela for study – where she learned the difficult craft. On her return, lacework spread through the island. The women of Saba began a mail-order business, and would copy addresses of businesses off shipping containers from the United States, and write to the employees. Often they would get orders for the lacework, and it started a considerable cottage industry. By 1928, the women were exporting around $15,000 (USD) worth of lace products each year.
Read more about this topic: History Of Saba
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The basis of political economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)