ABSTRACT
In the 1850s, writers in The Lily, the first US feminist periodical, welcomed the sewing machine as a new machine which would ease the burden of seamstresses, and give other women more time to enrich their lives and others’ because it would free women from excessive sewing time. In 1860, Godey’s, the popular illustrated journal for women, characterized the sewing machine as ‘The queen of inventions,’ predicting that it would be a revolutionary device:
The Sewing Machine will, after a time, effectively banish ragged and unclad humanity from every class…. In all Benevolent Institutions these machines are now in operation, and do, or may do, a hundred times more toward clothing the indigent and feeble than the united fingers of all the charitable and willing ladies collected through the civilized world could possibly perform. (Quoted in Green 1983, 81-2)
The sewing machine, according to these predictions, would revolutionize the lives of all the women who sewed for long hours for themselves and other members of the households, as well as the women who did ‘putting out’ work. It was also going to provide inexpensive clothing for the indigent. Indeed, use of the sewing machine did change many women’s lives. For example, many home sewers were moved to sweatshops where sewing still remained women’s lowly paid work. (In Great Britain and in the white North American colonies, tailoring was a male skill-but it was the home work of most women, including slave women, since the sexual division in slave work was as strict as among the whites who determined the slave occupations [Matthaei 1982, 91].)
Given the continual sexual division in sewing work in the past hundred years, and given the continual misery of many of the women who did the sewing, I found the recent brief social history of the sewing machine, published in a national news magazine, an astonishingly
‘I’d rather talk sewing than just about anything. It’s the most friendly talk.’
