In "Make It Yourself": Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890–1930, Sarah A. Gordon uses home sewing to examine domestic labor, marketing practices, changing standards of femininity, and understandings of class, gender and race.

As industrialization made ready-made garments increasingly available, many women, out of necessity or choice, continued to make their own clothing. In doing so, women used a customary female skill both as a means of supporting traditional ideas and as a tool of personal agency.

The shifting meanings of sewing became a contested space where businesses promoted sewing machines as tools for maintaining domestic harmony; women interpreted patterns to suit—or flout—definitions of appropriate appearances; and girls were taught to sew in ways that reflected beliefs about class, race, and region.

Gordon uses established as well as more unusual source materials, including dresses, sewing workbooks and paper dolls, to argue that home sewing is a unique vehicle for understanding larger changes in American culture.

Susan Sews a Skirt: Slideshow

I understand that many readers do not sew nor have they seen anyone else make a garment. While it is not necessary to be familiar with the specifics of sewing to appreciate my arguments, I decided to take advantage of the electronic publishing format and provide a photographic essay of the steps entailed in making a basic garment. My friend Susan Shaw, an artist and avid seamstress, agreed to make a skirt while I took photographs.

This exercise is not a historical reenactment. Susan made a contemporary garment with modern materials and tools. She used a sewing machine that dates from the 1960s, an efficient electric iron and modern components such as fusible interfacing....

Read Make It Yourself: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930 Online

Hardcover: 211 pages
Author: Sarah A. Gordon
Publisher: Columbia University Press (August 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0231142447
ISBN-13: 978-0231142441

Table of Contents

    * Acknowledgements
    * Introduction
    * "Sewed Considerable": Home Sewing and the Meanings of Women's Domestic Work
    * "Boundless Possibilities"
    * "When Mother Lets Us Sew": Girls, Sewing, and Femininity
    * Commodifying "Domestic Virtues": Business and Home Sewing
    * Clothing for Sport: Home Sewing as a Laboratory for New Standards
    * Epilogue
    * Interviews
    * Susan Sews a Skirt: slideshow

Introduction

In 1889, a young teacher named Blanche Ellis read Uncle Tom's Cabin, attended church and a "gym," visited with friends and did housework. Among entries about an "exciting debate with Fred on ‘Women's Rights'" and disciplining her students, Ellis made numerous comments in her diary about her sewing. She was one of millions of turn-of-the-century American women for whom sewing was a part of daily life.

Ellis appears to have been a typical white, middle-class woman of her time, and the effort and money she spent sewing is probably representative of others in a similar socioeconomic position. She had help from family members, occasionally went to a professional dressmaker, recorded the precise amounts she spent on fabric, made over hand-me-down dresses, and took pleasure in her accomplishments. ...

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