The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. By Maria R. Miller. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. Pp. 302. Cloth, $80.00; Paper, $24.95.)Reviewed by Jeanne BoydstonAs the field of gender and women's history focuses increasingly on matters of theory, it is easy to lose sight of the ongoing importance of the nuts-and-bolts social history that constantly refreshes and renews our knowledge of the daily routines and material contexts of women's lives in the past. Maria R. Miller's The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution, a study of in the sewing trades in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America, reminds us just how meager that stock of information remains, even about so memorialized an activity as colonial women's needlework. To be sure, the first aim of eloquently written study is simply to reclaim early American needlework from the gauzy myths that have enshrouded it and relocate it firmly and vividly in the workaday world of women's economic and social experience. But Miller is simultaneously engaged in a second, more subtle project: The Needle's Eye is also an argument for the importance of basic social history method not merely as a source of data to test and illustrate theory but as a strategy that can speak meaning as well.Although Miller touches on the unremunerated sewing and quilting that did within their families, The Needle's Eye is really a study of needlework as a paid craft, and of the who performed that work as artisans during the era of the American Revolution. Indeed, latter point, that needlewomen belong in the story of the early American tradition, is the central theme of the book. Miller contends that an ironic combination of gender practices-the tendency to romanticize women's work and the tendency to masculinize pride, ambition and competitiveness-has made it difficult to imagine as artisans . . . [or] artisans as female (4). Thus, historians have been inclined to take notice of women's sewing only within the context of a nostalgic domesticity, suggesting that colonial and early American clothing production occurred chiefly as acts of maternal or wifely devotion-or, as in the (inaccurate) case of Betsy Ross, as peculiarly womanly expressions of patriotism. To the contrary, Miller insists, most sewing took place as a matter of formal economic exchange, organized in needlework shops very much like other shops, performed by who not only depended upon but also trained for, identified with, and took professional pride in their work. In other words, women were there, too. But Miller doesn't stop there. Her point is that there was in fact a different place than we have assumed. She doesn't want to locate in craft as traditionally defined (based on the experiences of males), but rather to use women's experiences to redefine the category itself. Taken as a whole, she writes at the end of her introduction, this book argues that New England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries participated in craftwork in ways that both mirrored and departed from the artisanal culture of their husbands and sons, revealing how the concept of artisanry as it is frequently employed often conceals more than it reveals'1'' (22, italics added). In other words, we need to alter not only our views of women's work but also our (gendered) definition of what constituted a craft.The organization of The Needle's Eye reflects contention. The book is divided into three parts, the first and third of which provide summary historical overviews of needlework in the early republic: Part One reviews the production and consumption of clothing in New England in the latter half of the eighteenth century; Part Three summarizes (somewhat too broadly) the economic and organizational transformations of the trades as a result of the growing market economy in the early nineteenth century. …