Their fashions were reported in news-sheets and cartoons, then copied by the middle classes who shopped for drapes, hats, gloves, dresses in new shops that sold accessories manufactured in the factories of Manchester, often by female and child workers paid half what men earned. The middle classes could now afford servants, usually poor women from the countryside. This contrast encouraged a cult of middle-class women who not only did not work, protected by their industrious husbands, but personified frail, idealized virtue.
