Toronto, between 1890 and 1910, saw not only a sharp expansion of its population but also a vertiginous rise in the demand for ready-to-wear clothing. These were city people distracted and distressed by difficult work and housing circumstances that generally impeded the tradition of making of their own clothes. All this in turn caused intense competition for clothing production, a drop in prices, and a severe but predictable decline in the wages paid to the garment workers who made it. Many of these were poor women, new Torontonians desperate for work and easily abused by “sweaters:” garment manufacturers and their brutal subcontractors uninterested in the quality of life and the home and working conditions of the women they exploited. Consequently, I argue, women’s work-life experience in a callously capitalist Toronto often induced neurasthenia, the term used to explain the era’s precipitous decline in mental health. Neurasthenia was the late-Victorian and Edwardian term for our “anxiety and depression” which, as we know, also leads to somatic breakdown. Unsurprisingly women garment workers, who struggled to mitigate the inhumane work and housing conditions of a spatially pathological and laissez-faire capitalist urban modernity, considered suicide.