NEEDLEWORK AS ART, CRAFT, AND LIVELIHOOD BEFORE 1900

Joan M. Jensen

ART. Meditation. Liberation. Exploitation. Needlework has been all these to women. From the time that early woman fashioned her first bone needle to the contemporary sweatshops of the Third World, women have had the primary responsibility for clothing both mankind and womankind. Men have been tailors and factory workers; sailors at sea have sewn their own clothing. But women have most often held the needle, whether for sewing on buttons or for taking the fine stitches that created the great women’s art of quilting. Quilting is now receiving attention long overdue as art, but the everyday craft of sewing and the women who practiced it for a living—their techniques, their tools, their materials, their working conditions, the ways they distributed their work, the changes caused by the nineteenth-century invention of the sewing machine—these have been virtually ignored.

A NEEDLE

In the eighteenth century, to know how to handle a needle well was to possess an important skill. Parents provided in their wills that daughters be taught how to read and sew. And while one wishes the daughters might have been taught to write, as well, so that they could have left better records of their craft, both daughters and their peers apparently held in high esteem the ability to sew well. Afro-American women in the South and Euro-American women in the North counted these skills as valuable avenues to work away from the fields. Elizabeth Ashbridge, one of the few women to leave an account of her sewing in the eighteenth century, recalled her harsh indentureship in New York. Looking for a way to escape from her master, who made her go barefoot in snowy weather and do the meanest drudgery, she began to do extra sewing to buy her freedom. After three years, she bought the remainder of her time “and then fell to my needle, by which I could maintain myself handsomely.”¹

Many articles sewn by eighteenth-century women have survived and are on display in museums. Probably it is the work of the most skillful sewers which has survived, work that can only be described as elegant. With a few simple tools—for her tool kit consisted of needles, scissors, thread, and thimble—the seamstress was able to create clothing both serviceable and ornamental, of such high quality that it was passed on from mother to daughter and, in some cases, from father to son.

Few descriptions of the clothing actually sewn by the ordinary country woman exist. Among them, Ellen Gehret’s Rural Pennsylvania Clothing is the most detailed account of the way in which clothing was made. Gehret estimates that much of the eighteenth-century male clothing, even in rural areas, was made by traveling tailors who visited farmhouses to measure and fit the men of the farm with leather, wool, or linen tow breeches, linen shirts, waistcoats, coats, and great coats. These were carefully made by men who had apprenticed to tailors when young. Occasionally, a woman might also apprentice to learn to make male clothing. Mary Gravely apprenticed in Philadelphia in 1773 for four years to learn the trade of making leather breeches. Usually, however, men learned to sew custom clothes for men, including learning to make buttonholes and covered buttons of bone or cork.²

Buttons and buttonholes seem to have been one of the major differences in the construction of clothing for men and women in the eighteenth century, for women’s clothing almost always fastened with draw strings and pins. This simpler construction allowed women to construct their own clothing and children’s clothing at a time when the button-clad male had to be clothed by a specialist. It was, of course, possible for women to learn these skills along with other types of plain sewing, but women apparently usually did not learn them. Like the skilled cordwainers who sewed leather shoes, tailors early developed themselves into a highly skilled and mobile work force capable of supplying clothing at a price that allowed even rural farmers to hire their services. Women, meanwhile, concentrated on producing linen bedsheets, tablecloths, bed cases, pillowcases, and quilts, along with the clothing they and their children needed.

Most women’s clothing of the eighteenth century was constructed with narrow flat-felled seams. When finished, the seam usually measured only one-quarter inch. With double thread, sewn in small back stitches, these seams were stronger than those later sewn with machine stitch. The strength of these seams accounts for the age of the garments that still exist in collections and for the lists of garments in eighteenth-century wills indicating that clothing did pass from generation to generation until finally it was made over in so many styles and sizes that the fabric could no longer serve for garments requiring large pieces. Whereupon women cut the cloth still smaller, fashioning it into quilts of intricate and subtle designs.³

A woman’s eighteenth-century wardrobe in rural areas involved considerable time and effort to construct. Although most rural people had only two sets of clothing—one for the work week and one for Sunday—work clothes had to be replaced more frequently than Sunday clothes, the latter most often being those treasured garments passing between generations. In Pennsylvania, women sewed for themselves a shortgown—a top, usually long sleeved, sometimes with a fitted bodice and peplum (an extension below the waist). It had no buttons, buttonholes, snaps, or hooks, but instead it closed with a tie and was fastened with a pin. Women also constructed petticoats with drawstrings to wear over what they called under-petticoats, both typically ending six to eight inches above the ground to allow free movement for chores. To these basic garments, the woman added kerchiefs for over the shoulders, aprons without pockets, caps, and separate pockets tied over or under the petticoat. Women usually braided their own summer hats of straw and often made cloaks for winter. Wealthier women might purchase a cloak—the first garment commonly purchased for women outside a household. A store-bought flat beaver hat with a one-half-inch-high crown and a six-inch brim, and a pair of shoes—usually leather soles with cloth uppers—completed a rural Pennsylvania woman’s winter wardrobe. In summer many women went barefoot or wore wooden clogs. The clothing worn by women in other areas was quite similar.⁴

Because shoes were a specialized item requiring the cutting and sewing of leather as well as sewing of cloth uppers on women’s shoes, the shoemaking trade developed early in the colonial period. Even in the eighteenth century, farm families seldom made their own shoes. Traveling cobblers went about the countryside fitting custom shoes and repairing old ones, while gradually certain towns began to combine summer farming with winter shoemaking in what came to be one of the earliest and most important cottage industries. While shoemakers sold shoes from their farm factories in most colonies, New England developed an urban trade that gradually moved many farm families into an industry dependent upon the urban market place. Though factories were in homes rather than in separate locations, these enterprises were among the first sewing establishments to commercialize.

By the late eighteenth century, Lynn, Massachusetts, had become a leading center of the shoemaking industry. As William Mulligan has shown in his analysis of the women shoemakers of Lynn, the family became the basic work unit there, with mothers and daughters sewing the uppers together while fathers and sons attached the sole and heel to the uppers. Until the mechanization of shoemaking after 1850, these skills were handed down from mothers to daughters, and practiced whether the women were single or married. By 1880 the introduction of the sewing machine had drastically changed the life cycle of Lynn women. Single women were moving out of the home into the factory; married women were left economically dependent on husband and wage-earning children, and the home was changed from a locus of production to a unit providing mainly for the reproduction of labor. This shift of the cottage industry from home to factory brought a clear change in the role of married women needleworkers, moving them into a far more domestic role. The relationship between women’s lives and industrialization was nowhere so clearly illustrated as in the lives of the women shoemakers of Lynn.⁵

The first technology to affect the sewing of garments was the introduction of factory-spun yarn and woven textiles. While the sewing process remained essentially unchanged, the availability of factory cloth at low prices quickly revolutionized household production in most areas of the country. As inexpensive cotton yardage became available, farm women phased out their processing of flax and weaving of linen, purchased cloth, and developed new cottage industries that could bring in the cash income needed to purchase the new textiles. Often this new cottage industry was butter making. Even when new cash income was used for purchase of cloth, women had to provide their families with more clothing. It may have been necessary to sew more. Cotton clothing was probably less durable than linen; it also may have soiled more easily, thus wearing out more quickly with more laundering. A greater quantity of clothing was also an important indicator of affluence in the new nation.⁶

The transition from linen to cotton, from homespun to store-bought, is recorded primarily in the account books women began to keep in the early nineteenth century. One of the most complete accounts of this transition may be found in the detailed records kept by Martha Ogle Forman, who, with her husband, managed a large wheat plantation in northern Maryland, worked by over a hundred black bondsmen and women. In 1814 the Forman plantation women hackled flax and spun both flax and wool. Either a male or female weaver usually came in to weave the yarn into cloth, which was then sent out for fulling, bleaching, and dying. Martha Forman and a skilled black seamstress, Rachel Teger, did most of the cutting and sewing. They produced frocks, petticoats, aprons, coarse linen trousers and shirts for the black workers, and also made overalls, waistcoats, and pantaloons for Martha’s husband, General Forman. Long trousers were not yet commonly worn among the upper class gentry: General Forman wore pantaloons, while his workers wore trousers. The women also made up all the children’s clothes, the sheets, the tablecloths, and all other household “linen” necessary on the plantation. In 1818 the plantation women produced over one thousand yards of homespun to make into clothing and domestic items.⁷

The Formans had already purchased some clothing, however. Tailors made General Forman’s better pantaloons and suits, and Martha purchased a “riding dress” in 1816. Outside purchases soon increased. The Formans purchased fifteen tablecloths in Philadelphia in 1818; by 1819 they were buying sheeting at 47 cents a yard for shirts for the men. In 1820 they purchased 88 yards of linen for the women’s and children’s clothing; in 1821, 57 yards of sheeting and thirty yards of domestic cotton; in 1822, 276 yards of material for clothes for the black families. By the 1820s the Formans were regularly buying cotton for their own and their worker’s clothing. By the 1830s entries in Martha’s account books indicate that she was also buying ready-made dresses in Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In 1836 she recorded: “The General and I went to Ceciltown and purchased for Henney a black bambazett frock, a blue domestic frock, two pair of black stockings, three handkerchiefs, a shawl, a straw bonnet, a pair of shoes, three check aprons. We made her three new domestic schemeese with stitched wristbands, five aprons, a flannel petticoat, a pair of corsets, and a workbag, two white aprons.” This entry is an excellent indicator of transition in women’s clothing. While Henney was an upper-class young woman, probably going away to Baltimore to a private school, and much of her wardrobe was still made at home, at least a portion of it was now being purchased ready-made.⁸

Democratization is a theme emphasized by a number of historians who have studied the history of clothing manufacture in the nineteenth century. Usually historians use the term to mean the spread of fashion from upper-class women to other classes through inexpensive mass-produced clothing and patterns. This spread of fashion then becomes the means whereby the great majority of American women can dress in fashions that no longer distinguish them by class. They share a “democracy” of fashion, almost all having equal access to whatever status dressing fashionably may bring.

These changes in clothing did occur, but they brought a leveling of labor as well. The mass production of clothing depended on large numbers of women engaged in sewing under conditions that were often brutal, exhausting, and sex segregated. There was a continual tension between the democratization of clothing and the conditions under which women workers mass produced this clothing.⁹

The term democratization does reflect the reality that in the nineteenth century “fashion” became the concern of middle-class as well as upper-class Americans. This spread of fashion (or styles that changed, rather than repeating traditional modes) probably was due to the ultimately successful experiment in creating accurate standard patterns for clothing the male and female bodies. During the period between 1812 and 1853 the United States government pioneered in manufacturing military garments of predetermined sizes. Centered in Philadelphia, this military garment manufacturing was usually completed by widows and other “meritorious females” who would stitch up the garments by hand in their homes. Meanwhile, tailors were beginning to create ready-mades during slack season for the urban middle-class males who staffed the new commercial sectors of the cities. Other entrepreneurs in such towns as Baltimore were beginning to produce cheaply made men’s clothing for sailors and simple clothes to be sent south for black workers. While black bondswomen such as Rachel Teger had cut and sewn much of the plantation clothing in the early nineteenth century, the spread of textile manufacturing and the increase in cotton prices meant that plantation owners would consider women workers too valuable as field hands to train them as seamstresses. Black women were thus among the first women to be affected by industrialization of sewing. Their sewing skills were no longer valuable; their agricultural work became all-important for the profits of plantation owners. The availability of urban Euro-American northern sewing women desperate for employment made it cheaper to hire them to sew, while sending Afro-American women into the fields.¹⁰

The development of ready-made clothing for middle-class women lagged behind that being sold to working-class and middle-class males. Early clothing, to fit properly, had to be measured and sewn to fit individual women. Upper-class women could afford to hire dressmakers to create new fashionable clothing in response to some group that set the fashion. Among the eighteenth-century elite in Europe and America, men and women abandoned traditional clothing for fashions introduced by the wealthy. Like the housing of the new merchant class, clothing was designed to catch the eye of the beholder, to impress neighbors with the ability of the consumer of these new fashions to deviate from traditional styles. In the later nineteenth century, Thorstein Veblen would label this phenomenon “conspicuous consumption,” and would identify women as the group mainly preoccupied with material culture. The phenomenon, however, began much earlier among the newly rich, and males seemed quite as preoccupied with fashionable display as females, if not more so. Whatever the origins of the phenomenon, people relied increasingly upon material items to help establish themselves in society, and to mark their place visibly in that society’s growing stratifications. The results were a greater demand for fashion and for ready-to-wear that could provide quick changes in style. Male ready-made clothing evolved from earlier sturdy working-class clothing to ready-made “fashion” in the 1870s. Women’s clothing, still crafted by most women in the home, could not be democratized or subject to fashion until more simple ways of fitting the complicated fashions could be devised.¹¹

In the 1880s dressmakers’ drafting systems, touted as magical devices, finally allowed dressmakers and home sewers to improve the fit of women’s clothes. While techniques for cutting men’s suits remained geared to professional tailors, the complicated devices created to assist in the cutting of women’s clothes were designed to serve a dual market—amateur and professional sewing women. The tools of these systems provide an important visual record of attempts in paper, cardboard, wood, and metal to make the work of the sewing women easier in the late nineteenth century.¹²

Traditionally, the terms “tailor” and “seamstress” had described a division of labor in garment construction, in which men cut and women did most of the sewing. Until the end of the seventeenth century, laws in France and England enforced this separation. Gradually, seamstresses began to cut as well as sew. In England, they took the name mantua makers from the popular eighteenth-century dress that had back pleats stitched down to the waist. Later mantua makers were called dressmakers. In effect, dressmakers were tailors who measured and cut the material. Seamstresses usually continued to perform the most time-consuming task, that of sewing seams.¹³

The inch tape measure and proportional drafting systems began to be used widely in the early nineteenth century. Smithsonian curator Claudia Kidwell believes these new tools spread as the result of increased literacy and the decline of secrecy that had surrounded the trades of tailor and dressmaker. Previously, the dressmaker made as many as sixteen measurements for each customer, then used the measure as a guide to cut and sew the garment. The process demanded time and patience on the part of the skilled craftswoman as well as her client. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, an increasing number of urban middle-class women were demanding access to information on how fashionable clothing might be produced and procured. Abigail Adams’s letters as First Lady are full of comments about ordering fabrics and inquiries about the latest styles in Europe and America, as well as descriptions of these styles for her rural correspondents.¹⁴ By the first decades of the nineteenth century, middle-class American women had at their disposal Godey’s Lady’s Book, with its fashion illustrations. By mid-century, women could also find simple pattern diagrams there.

Godey’s was also one of the first magazines to sell full-size patterns. These patterns came in one size only, however, thus necessitating adapting the pattern to the individual woman. The pattern merely provided a shape; the sewer still did all the fitting by traditional methods. At least two factors led to the new drafting systems. The first was the need of an increasing number of women to use sewing as a source of income for themselves and their families. The second was the desire of more women for more tightly fitting clothes. As Elizabeth Gartland, the creater of one new drafting system said in 1884, “The close-skin-fitting busts and sleeves of today require scientific cutting and fitting.”¹⁵

And so professional and amateur dressmakers struggled with ever more complicated systems designed to simplify the process of creating fashionable women’s clothing. After the 1870s, however, these drafting systems became the province of professional dressmakers. Equipped with one of the various drafting systems, women could set up their own businesses in their homes. Often combining millinery with garment making, married women or women who chose to remain single could make a comfortable living as respected and valued members of small towns. The integrity and self-sufficiency of these women was portrayed vividly in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s story “A Mistaken Charity.” Published in 1887, it describes two aging dressmakers who had made a comfortable living in a small New England town, and who refused to accept charity in their old age. Breaking out of the “Old Ladies Home,” the two sisters returned to their own home to continue their life of independence.¹⁶

In cities, women might establish either dressmaking or millinery businesses, cater to the new or old rich, or both, and hire their own assistants. Ellen Louise Curtis was the best known of many dressmaker-milliners who, through dressing their wealthy New York clients, became wealthy themselves. Nearly four hundred dressmakers operated in New York City alone in 1894. Hundreds of other women ran millinery establishments similar to the one described by Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth. Wharton’s character Lily Bart, reduced from high society to making a living with no training, is described in a workroom with twenty other women sewing spangles on hats. The women were, wrote Wharton, “fairly well-clothed and well-paid, but the youngest among them was as dull and colourless as the middle-aged.” Lily, who had imagined herself presiding over “the charming little front shop,” while subordinates prepared the shapes and stitched the linings, was unable to adjust to the life of a work woman; thus, her sewing experience became the final step in the disintegration of a woman unable to find her place in society. Other women did succeed, however. Like the dressmaker, the milliner carved out a place in the business world which gave her status and an income much envied by working-class and lower middle-class women who still dreamed of using needlework skills to create an independent way of life.¹⁷

For the amateur sewer, the mass production of sized paper patterns which began in the 1860s provided a simple and inexpensive alternative to the more complex drafting systems. Ellen Louise Curtis, later married to a merchant and calling herself Madame Demorest, began to publish fashion magazines and then to provide paper patterns to professional dressmakers and to a mass market. Demorest gradually lost out to other pattern makers because she continued to focus on individual haute couture clients. The Massachusetts tailor Ebinezer Butterick was thus the first to capitalize on mass distribution of patterns sized for men, women, and children. By 1871, the Butterick company was producing 23,000 patterns daily. That year, it sold more than six million patterns. Handsome profits for marketing the patterns soon made them widely available in the smallest towns throughout the country. By that time, as Margaret Walsh has said, fashion had become democratized. Women across the nation could now make fashionable clothing without specialized training.¹⁸ Moreover, they were expected to keep up with fashions or suffer social ostracism.

Women would keep sewing in their homes for almost another fifty years. Combined with the spread of home economics classes that would teach working- and middle-class daughters how to cut and sew from patterns in the home, patterns indeed democratized fashion. They also helped preoccupy large numbers of females with fashion as a means of showing their ability to assimilate middle-class urban culture. As urban middle-class women turned more to ready-made clothing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class urban and rural women spent more of their time creating imitation fashions. The Agricultural Extension Service, created in 1914 by the Smith-Lever Act, would develop as part of its federal mission the teaching of farm daughters how to sew fashionable clothing by using standardized patterns. Settlement houses performed the same teaching function for urban immigrants. Democratization also meant “Americanization,” the equipping of all females in America—urban, rural, native born, immigrant, black, Hispanic, and Anglo-Saxon—with standardized clothing. All middle-class and an increasing number of working-class women had access to this clothing, but all now also were subject to a new conformity of style. Dress became as ordered as other aspects of society during this era which historians have labeled progressive.¹⁹

While patterns helped women to conform to national dress norms, new merchandising practices spread both fashion ideology and dress. The department store system, as Deborah Gardner shows in her article on New York, was also an early transitional phase to women’s ready-made clothing. Department stores began their invasion of women’s consciousness by providing urban space that women could, in many ways, consider their own. Although still sold by males, the consumer items appealed mainly to women shoppers. For the wealthier, there were enough material items to occupy their attention for many hours each week. For the less wealthy, there was the beginning of window shopping and bargain clothing. On the upper floors, sewing women were already doing piece work, as managers split work into various functions. Beginning as emporiums for the upper middle class, department stores increasingly provided for a broader-based consuming public. As purveyors of fashion, the department stores provided desirable urban space for women, and through competition for customers, the department store provided more variety in clothing for more women. Although available in fewer standardized sizes than those of men, women’s clothes would soon be available in a large variety of styles. Yet, aside from the shirt waist and walking skirt, the democratization of clothing gave rise to few uniquely American styles in the late nineteenth century. Conformity in dress came with availability of ready-made styles, and European styles still ruled.²⁰

Catalogs, meanwhile, spread the image of the well-dressed man and woman into rural areas. The 1897 Sears catalog still carried a greater variety of men’s than women’s clothing, but enough styles were shown to indicate to rural women what they should be wearing. The sewing machine provided the tool that enabled most farm women to conform to the prevailing fashions of the day.

By late ninteenth century, the sewing machine had spread through most of the country. Women may have delayed the introduction of the sewing machine by fifteen years with their opposition to using an invention that appeared to some at least as capable of putting women out of work. Walter Hunt invented the first practical sewing machine in 1834 and suggested to his daughter Caroline that she manufacture corsets. But, according to one history of Hunt’s invention: “After discussing the matter with older women, experienced in the business, Miss Caroline declined to go into the business and use the new invention to perform the difficult heavy stitching required, for the sole reason that the introduction of such a machine would be injurious to the interests of hand sewers, and would be very unpopular.” Elias Howe found the same opposition when, ten years later, he took his first sewing machine up to Quincy Hall Clothing Manufacturers in Boston. One woman at a Howe machine could sew five seams faster than five women could sew five seams. Yet he made no sales. Not only was the machine too expensive; the Quincy Hall owner said it would put women out of work.²¹

Within eight years, such concern for women clothing workers had disappeared, as clothing manufacturers began to compete for the newly developing ready-made male clothing trade. Machines gave manufacturers a competitive edge. With the Singer Standard No. 1 in 1852, and the introduction in 1856 of an installment plan, sewing became mechanized. By 1865 half a dozen factories were each producing over 25,000 machines a year. Five years later, in 1870, Singer alone was producing nearly 130,000 a year. Companies exported hundreds of thousands of machines to Germany, Great Britain, Cuba, and Mexico. In what was perhaps the first multinational corporation, Singer built a huge plant in Russia to corner the market there. It was one of the plants nationalized by the Russians after the Communist Revolution in 1917.²²

Women stitched on, but now they worked both by hand and with the machine. The bobbin—a word once used to describe a small tube or stick upon which thread for lace-making was wound or a circular wooden pin to hold thread for weaving—now became a term, as the Dictionary of Needlework explained, “employed to denote the small reel on which thread is wound in some sewing-machines.”²³

A BOBBIN

Sewing machines spread rapidly during the Civil War, as the demand for uniforms launched a number of northern capitalists in large-scale clothing factories. Women who sewed by hand now had to compete with those able to work at a machine, the former working for a few cents an hour; the latter, a few dollars a week. The young women of a family might work in a factory; the married women, especially those with children, usually worked at home. Sometimes the whole family stitched at home—mother, father, and children.

The economics of the machine were relentless. In a patent claim occurring in 1860, the Winchester Shirt Factory of New Haven, Connecticut, explained the figures which brought higher wages and higher unemployment of women. Before adopting the sewing machine, the Winchester Shirt Factory made 800 dozen shirts per week by hiring 2,000 hand sewers at about $3 per week. After the introduction of the sewing machine, it could hire 400 women at $4 a week and pay off 400 machines at $150 each in fourteen weeks. The company could sell the shirt more cheaply, and 1600 women were out of work. The United States Commissioner of Labor later estimated that machines reduced labor time by 77 to 93 percent.²⁴

At first, machine sewers in factories seemed assured of better pay and working conditions than those left sewing by hand at home. There was a good deal of public sympathy for the efforts of the hand sewers to gain higher wages, and earliest organizing activities, including those of Susan B. Anthony and other feminists in the 1870s, were directed at these hand sewers. Most organizing efforts were short-lived and unsuccessful, however, as more and more married women turned to home hand sewing to service the expanding factory operations. The availability of thousands of skilled hand sewers and young women desperate for factory jobs eventually lowered the wages of factory machine sewers as well, while an increasingly competitive industry forced owners to push factory workers to produce more, faster, for longer hours.

While working-class urban women struggled to control the new industrialization of their old art, rural middle-class women eagerly sought the new machine to lighten the burdens of their home sewing. During the 1880s, Granges provided buying cooperatives for rural women. In Illinois, for example, the Grange purchased thousands of sewing machines for members. Traveling salesmen of the 1880s bartered sewing machines for poultry or other farm produce, developing the rural market for catalog sales in the 1890s. Farm women not only used the machines for clothing, they sewed sheets, quilts, curtains, and feed sacks. They sometimes also sewed gloves, shirts, and other articles of clothing for country stores. The sewing machine was a versatile tool for the farm woman.²⁵

Democratization can be seen in still other aspects of the sewing machine. Early colonial women divided their sewing into two types—plain sewing, on which we have focused so far—and fancy sewing, that elaborate and largely nonfunctional sewing that mainly displayed a woman’s skill with the needle. No discussion of women needleworkers can overlook fancy sewing, for through it women created and maintained uniquely female artistic forms, now included by art historians in the special category of fiber arts. In colonial times, these fancy works took the form of samplers, some of which displayed complex and beautiful patterns. By the early nineteenth century, according to Susan Swan, the quality of fancy work had declined and the golden age of needlework was over. Upper and middle-class women found other interests. Whereas reading and sewing had been traditional skills, young women now learned letter writing, music, dancing, and other polite occupations at the private boarding schools they attended.²⁶

Yet the artistic needlework tradition in fiber arts never died. It lived on during the nineteenth century in the quilts that American women pieced by the millions, fashioning both traditional and innovative patterns. The great American art, as art historians now designate quilting, lived on into the early twentieth century, passed on by women who refused to concentrate on the newly expanded machine-made “plain sewing.” One Home Extension agent in New Mexico complained in 1918: “New Mexico farm women need to be trained to place higher values upon neat, plain sewing and mending, etc., rather than upon crazy quilts and difficult crochet patterns.” The importance of this sewing is clear from the comments left by early twentieth-century quilters who resisted the efforts of home economists to make their work purely functional. Quilting was something more. Aunt Jane of Kentucky, interviewed about 1900, said:

I’ve been a hard worker all my life, but ‘most all my work has been the kind that “perishes with the usin’,” as the Bible says. That’s the discouragin’ thing about a woman’s work . . . when I’m dead and gone there ain’t anybody goin’ to think o’ the floors I’ve swept, and the tables I’ve scrubbed, and the old clothes I’ve patched, and the stockin’s I’ve darned. . . . But when one of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren sees one o’ these quilts, they’ll think about Aunt Jane, and, wherever I am then, I’ll know I ain’t forgotten.

Another quilter at about the same time put it this way:

I’d rather piece as eat. . . . Whenst I war a new-married woman with the children round my feet, hit ‘peared like I’d git so wearied I couldn’t take delight in nothing; and I’d git ill to my man and the children, and what do you reckon I done them times? I just put down the breeches I was patchin’ and tuk out my quilt squar’. Hit wuz better than prayin’, child, hit wuz reason.²⁷

While rural women clung tenaciously to the joys that fancy sewing could bring into their hard lives, middle-class women found other diversions. At the end of the nineteenth century there was one attempt to reverse the trend toward plain machine sewing. Influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, middle-class women attempted to redefine needlework as art. New Yorker Candace Wheeler organized a Women’s Exchange, where women could sell needlework, and helped professionalize home decoration for women. Art schools added needlework to their curriculum and women formed needlework guilds around the country. While these innovations reinforced the sexual division of art and reinforced domesticity, such groups kept alive an interest in women’s traditional crafts, created places where women could keep their artistic interests alive, and fostered a sense of sisterhood in the arts. For some women, crafts were an important attempt to found businesses, but these attempts ultimately led back to the home and to a second-class status for the needlework practiced by women on the fringes of the male-dominated art world.²⁸

Despite the determination of women to keep alive their traditional arts in the twentieth century, needlework and needleworkers increasingly came to be associated with factory work. The introduction of the sewing machine essentially altered the role of women in the fabrication of clothing. The individual and local markets declined, as a national market based on competitive capitalism demanded low-paid workers to run the new machines. Factories and sweatshops would be the dominant workplaces within which women would work with needle and bobbin.

NOTES

1. “Some Account of the Forepart of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge,” Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College.

2. Ellen J. Gehrer, Rural Pennsylvania Clothing: Being a Study of the Wearing Apparel of the German and English (York, Pa.: Liberty Cap Books, 1976).

3. Ibid., 24.

4. Ibid.

5. William Henry Mulligan, Jr., “The Family and Technological Change: The Shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts, during the Transition from Hand to Machine Production, 1850–1880,” PhD diss., Clark University, 1982. The drastic increase in the total number of women sewers in shoemaking is also documented in Susan E. Hirsch, Roots of the American Working Class: The Industrialization of Crafts in Newark, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 28. The percentage of women in shoemaking dropped from 34 percent in 1850 to 14 percent in 1860.

6. Joan M. Jensen, “Cloth, Butter, and Boarders: Women’s Household Production for the Market,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 12 (Summer 1980), 14–24.

7. W. Emerson Wilson, ed., Plantation Life at Rose Hill: The Diaries of Martha Ogle Forman: 1814–1845 (Wilmington: Historical Society of Delaware, 1976).

8. Ibid., 374.

9. Claudia B. Kidwell and Margaret C. Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1974); and Margaret Walsh, “The Democratization of Fashion: The Emergence of the Women’s Dress Pattern Industry,” Journal of American History, 66 (1979), 299–313.

10. Kidwell and Christman, Suiting Everyone.

11. Claudia B. Kidwell, Cutting a Fashionable Fit: Dressmakers’ Drafting Systems in the United States (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1979), 3.

12. Ibid, has many illustrations of these devices.

13. Ibid., 11.

14. Ibid., 8.

15. Ibid., 45.

16. Mary Wilkins Freeman, “A Mistaken Charity,” in Barbara H. Solomon, Short Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman (New York: New American Library, 1979), 301–311.

17. Walsh, “Democratization,” 302.

18. Ibid., 313.

19. For the urban revival of sewing see Louise J. Kirkwood, Illustrated Sewing Primer, with Songs and Music: For Schools and Families (New York: Ivrson, Blakeman, Taylor, 1884).

20. Paul H. Nystrom, Economics of Fashion (New York: Ronald, 1928), 370.

21. Frederick L. Lewton, “The Servant in the House: A Brief History of the Sewing Machine,” Annual Report, The Smithsonian Institution, 1929 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1930), 563.

22. William Ewers and H. W. Baylor, Sincere’s History of the Sewing Machine (Phoenix: Sincere Press, 1970).

23. Quoted in Gertrude Whiting, Old-Time Tools and Toys of Needlework (New York: Dover, 1971; repr. of 1928 ed.), 202.

24. Grace Rogers Cooper, The Invention of the Sewing Machine (Washington: Smithsonian Insitution, 1968), 58.

25. D. Sven Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867–1900 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1974), 135. The Indiana Grange sold $43,000 worth of sewing machines in 1875.

26. Susan Burrows Swan, Plain & Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1700–1850 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), 159.

27. Mirra Bank, Anonymous Was a Woman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 94, 121. See also Second Annual Report for Year ending June 30, 1916, New Mexico College of Agriculture, New Mexico Extension Service, National Archives Microcopy T876, Reel 1.

28. Yet another tradition, sewing for charity, has not been discussed here. The widow of Grover Cleveland and other antisuffragists were active in the Needlework Guild of America, founded in 1885. See Thomas J. Jablonsky, “The Ideology and Identity of American Suffragists, 1894–1920,” paper delivered at the 1981 OAH conference, Detroit, Mich. For the crafts movement, see Eileen Boris, “Art and Labor: John Ruskin, William Morris and the Craftsman Ideal in America,” PhD diss., Brown University, 1981.