They powered Montreal's garment industry. One woman is trying to honour them

The hands that operated Ida del Pinto Mosesso's bra manufacturing machine are elegant in their old age but riddled with arthritis after four decades of work in Montreal's garment district.

Her right index finger bends away from her, mimicking the curve of underwire as she assembled bra after bra for eight hours a day.

"Now I can see the aftermath," she said, gesturing to her inner thighs. They also curve out from years of straddling the powerful machine.

"Several times at night when I sleep I remember the bras," she said, chuckling. "It's something that's stayed in my memory."

One day, in the late '90s, she showed up to Smart Brassieres Inc. for her shift only to find the doors locked. Just like that, the factory, like hundreds before it on the once booming Chabanel Street, was no more. It defaulted in 1999, according to Quebec's business registry. 

Mosesso, who had spent 35 years doing piecework for the company, was never compensated for her last three weeks of work and lost her vacation pay.

For the last couple years, Margherita Morsella has collected testimonials from Mosesso and other former garment industry workers and used them to push forward the Women of Steel project, or Le Donne d'Acciaio in Italian. 

It's an initiative she runs with a committee of women and community organizations that aims to promote and commission artwork celebrating the contribution of immigrant women to Canada's apparel industry. 

"In our Italian community they give homage to all these business people, all these politicians [but] these women that are their mothers and their grandmothers, the women that raised them and made them become the successful people that they are today, they were never really recognized," Morsella said. 

A first mural was inaugurated on Oct. 18 at the women's centre she helped create in 1978, the Centre des femmes solidaires et engagées (CFSE) in Ahuntsic, the neighbourhood in northern Montreal that borders the garment district.

Another is being planned in Little Italy, and Morsella's ultimate goal is to commission a statue that will stand the test of time.

"Factories have closed, they've become lost, they've been transformed into something else and it's like forgetting history," she said.

For most of the 20th century, the clothing industry was the largest source of manufacturing jobs in Montreal, says Melanie Leavitt, a director with the Mile End Memories historical society. She offers walking tours along St-Laurent Boulevard, tracing the history of the garment industry and the women who organized the workers within it.

"Montreal still is [Canada's] capital of the clothing industry, but it is just a fraction of what it once was," said Leavitt.