Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards

Abstract

Reviewed by: Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards Eva Sheppard Wolf Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Laura F. Edwards. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 433. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-756857-6.) In Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Laura F. Edwards marries [End Page 361] two of her longtime interests: her award-winning work in legal history, including in this journal, and her fascination with needlework and textiles. It might seem an odd combination, but Edwards shows that the law interacted in distinct and important ways with textiles, making it possible for people who had no property rights to produce, buy, sell, trade, invest in, and protect their ownership of textiles. The title refers to women and clothing, but the book actually addresses more capacious subjects—all people without full legal standing or on the margins of the economy, especially white women but also enslaved people and poor white men; and textiles of all sorts, meaning everything one wore or could wear on one’s body as well as household items such as sheets and table linens. Useful as a clearly written, engaging, and often humorous introduction to an aspect of early American material culture, Only the Clothes on Her Back also demonstrates the centrality of textiles to economic and social life, and it reveals how important nineteenth-century changes in law and economy diminished the economic power of those who had previously used textiles to their advantage. In Part 1, “Old Clothes in a New Country,” Edwards describes how, in the late colonial period and early republic, those without full rights relied on a long-standing tradition, barely noted in written law but well understood and respected in local courts, that people owned their clothing and also any textiles they made or purchased for later use. In 1842, when Polly, an enslaved woman in upcountry South Carolina, found that some yarn that she had spun was stolen from her yard, she took the matter to court. Her owner’s name was on the complaint, but Polly asserted that the “spun cotton belonged to her” and the court agreed (p. 21). Although Edwards acknowledges that marginalized people owned items beyond textiles, she does not fully explain her assertion that “textiles were different” from other material goods in law and practice (p. 37). The second section, “Protective Coverings in a Hostile World,” opens up a new view of the early American economy by showing how almost everyone used textiles as money, capital, and credit. Historians have largely missed this story because they have looked for economic activity in ledgers and account books, when it can also be found in women’s diaries, pawnshop records, and criminal court cases, which were open to women and enslaved people who could not bring civil suits to recover property. Although the American Revolution did not change how people used textiles, the rights-based legal principles of that era slowly grew dominant in American law and—along with a changing economy in which textiles became more numerous and their value became less stable—altered the fabric of American life. As described in Part 3, “Rags,” behaviors that had once been common, such as pawning or selling one’s clothes in order to leverage their value, had by the 1850s become suspect. The ability of people on the margins to use textiles to advance their economic interests diminished as their status outside the realm of rights-holders became more important. Women remained without rights the longest and after the Civil War were left with “only the clothes on their backs” (p. 289). Edwards’s historiographical point is that if we want to understand “the actual relationship of most Americans to law and economy,” we need to look [End Page 362] well beyond white male property owners (p. 299). She thus contributes to the recent form of economic history that places ordinary, and often struggling, people at the...