The culture of sewing : gender, consumption, and home dressmaking /

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part I. Home dressmaking, class and identity -- 1. Patterns of respectability : publishing, home sewing and the dynamics of class and gender 1870-1914 / Chrisopher Breward -- 2. Made at home by clever fingers : home dressmaking in Edwardian England / Barbara Burman -- 3. On the margins : theorizing the history and significance of making and designing clothes at home / Cheryl Buckley -- 4. Making modern woman, stitch by stitch : dressmaking and women's magazines in Britain 1919-39 / Fiona Hackney -- 5. Home sewing : motivational changes in the twentieth century / Sherry Schofield-Tomschin -- 6. There's no place like home : home dressmaking and creativity in the Jamaican community of the 1940s to the 1960s / Carol Tulloch -- Part II. Home dressmaking and consumption -- 7. Wearily moving her needle : army officers' wives and sewing in the nineteenth-century American West / Julie A. Campbell -- 8. Commodified craft, creative community : women's vernacular dress in nineteenth-century Philadelphia / Kathryn E. Wilson -- 9. Creating consumers : gender, class and the family sewing machine / Nancy Page Fernandez -- 10. Patterns of choice : women's and children's clothing in the Wallis Archive, York Castle Museum / Mary M. Brooks -- 11. The sewing needle as magic wand : selling sewing lessons to American girls after the Second World War / Eileen Margerum -- 12. Virtual home dressmaking : dressmakers and seamstresses in post-war Toronto / Alesandra Palmer -- Part III. Home dressmaking, dissemination and technology -- 13. The Lady's Economical Assistant of 1808 / Janet Arnold -- 14. Dreams on paper : a story of the commercial pattern industry / Joy Spanabel Emery -- 15. Homeworking and the sewing machine in the British clothing industry 1850-1905 / Andrew Godley -- 16. The sewing machine comes home / Tim Putnam -- 17. A beautiful ornament in the parlour or boudoir : the domestication of the sewing machine / Nicholas Oddy -- 18. Home economics and home sewing in the United States 1870-1940 / Sally I. Helvenston and Margaret M. Bubolz -- 19. "Your clothes are materials of war" : the British government promotion of home sewing during the Second World War / Helen Reynolds.

Throughout its long history, home dressmaking has been a formative experience in the lives of millions of women. In an age of relative affluence and mass production, it is easy to forget that just over a generation ago, young girls from middle- and working-class backgrounds were routinely taught to sew as a practical necessity. However, not only have the skills involved in home dressmaking been overlooked and marginalized due to their association with women and the home, but the impact home dressmaking had on women's lives and broader socioeconomic structures also has been largely ignored.

This book is the first serious account of the significance of home dressmaking as a form of European and American material culture. Exploring themes from the last two hundred years to the present, including gender, technology, consumption and visual representation, contributors show how home dressmakers negotiated and experienced developments to meet a wide variety of needs and aspirations. Not merely passive consumers, home dressmakers have been active producers within family economies. They have been individuals with complex agendas expressed through their roles as wives, mothers and workers in their own right and shaped by ideologies of femininity and class.

This book represents a vital contribution to women's studies, the history of fashion and dress, design history, material culture, sociology and anthropology. -- Publisher desciption