“Reduced to Science”: Gender, Technology, and Power in the American Dressmaking Trade, 1860–1910

Abstract

“Reduced to Science”: Gender, Technology, and Power in the American Dressmaking Trade, 1860—1910 WENDY GAMBER “In Germany,” writer-reformer Virginia Penny mused in 1863, “many dress makers are men, and there is one on Broadway, New York.” Penny’s observation—one of many such comments sprinkled throughout her massive Cyclopedia of Woman’s Work—reveals much about cultural distinctions between men’s and women’s work in 19thcentury America. The very incongruity of a “man dressmaker” af­ firmed a rigidly decreed sexual division of labor that assigned the making of feminine apparel to women; indeed, “man milliner” was an epithet leveled not only at men who made women’s dresses and hats but at all who deviated from established norms of “masculine” behavior.1 On the surface, at least, there was little conflict between ideology and reality. Women constituted 98 percent of the nation’s “milliners, dress and mantua makers” in 1870, a proportion that re­ mained largely unchanged as the century drew to a close.2 More often than not, sex segregation has been the bane of wageDr . Gamber is assistant professor of history at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the author of The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860—1930 (forthcoming). She thanks Patricia Cooper, Nancy Page Fernandez, Morton Keller, Glenna Matthews, Carole Srole, and especially Carole Turbin for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, and Patricia Trautman for allowing access to her impressive collection of instructional pamphlets. The research for this article was supported by fellowships from the Women’s Studies Program, Brandéis University; the Smithsonian Institution; the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America; and the Massachusetts Historical Society. 'Virginia Penny, The Employments of Women: A Cyclopedia of Woman’s Work (Boston, 1863), p. 324. See Roscoe Conkling’s comments on reformers, quoted in Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 248. 2According to the census of 1870, there were 92,084 “milliners, dress and mantua makers” in the United States, of whom 90,480 were female and 1,604 male. See A Compendium of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) (Washington, D.C., 1872), p. 612. For 1900 figures, see Statistics of Women at Work (Washington, D.C., 1907), pp. 70, 75.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3603-0001101.00 455 456 Wendy Gamber earning women’s existence, confining them to poorly paid jobs that promised few prospects for advancement.3 But in this respect dress­ making contradicted conventional wisdom. The custom manufacture of feminine apparel (not until the late 1890s did ready-made clothing pose a serious challenge to “bespoke” work) held out rarely equaled opportunities to women of the working classes: highly skilled work, creative labor, relatively high wages, the very real possibility of some­ day opening an establishment of one’s own. For dressmakers labored in a largely female world, one in which the lowly apprentice, the experienced veteran, even the shop’s proprietor (who very likely had never married) were women.4 Ironically, the most “feminine” of trades presented a compelling alternative to the middle-class standard of domesticity and the working-class ideal of the family wage.5 While they often ignored its more radical implications, contempo­ raries attributed this state of affairs to the “natural” consequence of biological factors—after all, was not sewing woman’s “natural” voca­ tion? But as several scholars have demonstrated, sexual divisions of labor are neither fixed nor natural, but are continually redefined.6 3As historians are beginning to recognize, sex segregation did have advantages, for it gave women access to skilled jobs within “their” trades. See esp. Mary H. Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 (Urbana, Ill., 1988), pp. xvi, 104-10, 138-39, 324-25. 4This is not to say that all dressmakers lived lives of prosperity and ease; rather, they enjoyed significant advantages in comparison to other wage-earning women. See Wendy Gamber, “The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1991), esp. chaps...