Innovations for Home Dressmaking and the Popularization of Stylish Dress

Abstract

Euro-American women writing of their work and lives during the 18th and early 19th centuries described their sewing more than any other domestic labor (Green and Perry 79; DePauw, Hunt and Schneir 48). No wonder scholarship confirms that textiles and clothing made up the greatest proportion of American household manufacture. Interestingly, these areas of women's housework were also among the first to be replaced by consumption responsibilities (Tryon 190; Strasser, An Enlarged Human 31, 45; Strasser Never Done 126, 144).From recent studies we have learned much about the transformation of the middle-class housewife from a producer to a consumer, the creation of housework and e modern housewife and changing ideologies about housework and domestic relationships. Business and labor history have explained much about the garment factory, the rise of ready-to-wear apparel and the exploitation of working-class women(1) Description and analysis of how existing household work practices and patterns interacted with new technologies, however, have received little scholarly attention. Conventional histories of both women's domestic work and garment manufacture overlook the role of housewives, the tools they used in their home dressmaking, how the work changed with the introduction of new sewing aids, and what home sewing may have contributed to transformations in the making and wearing of clothing.(2)During the mid-19th century dressmakers' drafting systems, paper patterns and sewing machines became available to home sewers. These innovations for garment production provided new groups of women access to stylish cuts, transforming their work patterns, appearance and experience of fashionable dress. In order to understand this transformation, we need to examine women's traditional dressmaking and habits of dress, document the impact of new garment production technologies and analyze home sewing's influence on the manufacture of women's clothing and feminine habits of dress.Traditional Habits of Dress and DressmakingDuring the 18th and early 19th centuries, nearly all Anglo-American women, regardless of region or social position, sewed everyday and staple clotHing for themselves and their families. Affluent women employed professional clothiers to make their better dresses. For ordinary women, however, only special dresses were cut and t by a professional dressmaker and a completely new dress was a rarity. Home-made, made-over and second-hand clothing comprised the greater part of most early 19th-century women's wardrobes. Technology and economics combined to discourage fashionable dress for anyone who could not afford the skilled services of a custom dressmaker.Early 19th-century clothing came in essentially five categories: stylish attire made by professional clothiers, second-had finery, less stylish garments made by amateur dressmakers and home sewers, remade clothing, and simple everyday work or night clothes (Kidwell, Rags to Riches 30). Shortgowns, petticoats, aprons and other staples in a woman's wardrobe were most often sewn In the home by the women of the family. Women usually sewed their children's clothing and men's shirts, collars and cuffs as well (Green and Perry 79). Catherine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy contains instructions for making men's shirts and nightshirts and women's chemises, nightgowns and wrappers (381-83). Poor urban women or those living in remote rural areas also sewed their Sunday dresses at home.Both better clothing and the fabric it was made of constituted valuable possessions throughout the 19th century. Evidence from wills shows that garments were passed down from generation to generation (Gehret 31-32). Families also routinely recut and resized garments to accommodate changes in style, worn out or stain-ruined fabric, or a new wearer.' Second-hand garments also might be obtained as gifts from employers or by purchase through used clothing brokers. …