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This article examines home sewing as both gendered labor and pleasurable art while addressing multiple understandings of women's domestic work. As mass-produced clothing became accessible and desirable and more women worked outside the home, fewer women sewed out of necessity. Nevertheless, sewing continued to resonate with understandings of feminine work, economic need, gender roles, cultural traditions, and artistic pleasure. Depending on the circumstances, dressmaking could be a chore or a choice, a survival skill or a means of personal expression. As social and economic circumstances shifted, home sewing moved beyond its functional role to become a way to articulate personal tastes and challenge assumptions about femininity, family, race, and class.
In 1922, a magazine article urged readers to order a pattern for a "popular, picturesque dress for the girl of sixteen." The dress could be made in a variety of fabrics, with different collars and sleeves. The article claimed this style had "boundless possibilities," a reference to the pattern's flexible design but also a reflection of a particular understanding of home dressmaking.1
A teenager might have sewn her dress for a variety of reasons. Perhaps she did not have the cash to buy one ready-made; it was an assignment for home economics class; she wanted something unlike her friends' outfits; or she enjoyed sewing. Most likely, she made it for a combination of reasons. This article explores those reasons as it examines the meanings of sewing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As massproduced clothing became accessible and desirable and more women worked outside the home, fewer women sewed for survival. Nevertheless, sewing continued to resonate with understandings of feminine work, economic need, gender roles, cultural traditions, and artistic pleasure.
Sewing is laden with understandings of femininity, family, and social class. It evokes ideas about thrift, housekeeping, wifely duty, motherly love, and sexual attraction. From the 1890s through the 1920s, sewing fulfilled white, middle-class ideals of domesticity and provided wage-earning women a way to dress "respectably." Sewing upheld class, race, and gender hierarchies while simultaneously serving as a means to fight discrimination, gain economic power, and challenge notions of correct appearances. Depending upon the circumstances, dressmaking could be a chore or a choice, a survival skill or a means of personal expression.2