“Make It Yourself”: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890–1930 (review)

Sarah A. Gordon assembles from patterns, fabrics, and stitches a multilayered argument for home sewing as a signifier of gender, an economic strategy, and an expression of individual creativity. Situated in the context of big transformations in culture and society between 1890 and the Great Depression, her innovative history defines unpaid labor as worthy work and, thus, advances a larger feminist project to revalue the domestic. Making It Yourself is neither a conventional business history nor a typical book. Part of the Guttenberg-e series, it is best experienced online as a multimedia event, with images embedded in text and the written word hyperlinked to oral interviews. These enhancements more than provide additional evidence; they make the dailiness of the past palpable.

Enterprising women people these pages—devoted mothers and harried wives; home economists and agricultural extension agents; black, white, and native American schoolgirls; immigrant seamstresses and office workers; bicycle riders and gymnasts; and clubwomen of all sorts—who come alive through their skill and Gordon’s craft. For much of the American past, older women taught younger ones to regard sewing as a measure of womanhood. Still, whether women sewed out of devotion or as a duty, they also enhanced the family economy. While “patternmakers and publishers” framed sewing as “not work but a gift of love” (17), the home sewing industry sought to commodify “domestic virtues” to meet the challenge of better fitting, ever cheaper, and more available ready-made garments during the 1920s. In subsequent decades, women continued to ply the needle for pleasure, if not out of necessity, but never again to the extent that they did earlier in the century.

In five short chapters, Gordon deftly shows that the persistent association of home sewing with ideal womanhood existed alongside of the creation of “boundless possibilities” (28). Drawing upon oral interviews, family papers and diaries, and popular and material culture, Gordon convincingly portrays home sewing as “an important feminine domain. It represented maternal responsibility, financial caution, feminine attractiveness, social connections, and household respectability” (21). It allowed women to improve themselves and others, as some sewed for charity. Sewing came to represent cultural virtues—“discipline, creativity, thrift, and domesticity” (48)—making it even a more important tool for educating women from groups, like immigrants, Native Americans, and former slaves, thought deficient in such qualities.

Gordon is particularly attentive to class, race, age, and geographical variations. African-American women used the length of hems and necklines to express their respectability, while younger women challenged the conventional through making old dresses into new ones. Rural white women gained public recognition for their skill in transforming feedbags into children’s clothing. For those dependent on mail-order catalogues, home sewing offered the possibility of dressing in style. Whether embodied in a wedding dress or a child’s smock, sewing served as a medium for social as well as personal expression.

The ability of clothing “to produce a new conception of what it meant to be feminine” becomes apparent in the case study that ends the book: sewing “clothing for sport” (108). Bloomers and knickerbockers announced the presence of the New Woman and many women made the costumes they would wear at the gym and to the beach. But the meaning of homemade sports clothes varied: some found in their sewing “a degree of agency,” but for those unable to afford to purchase such items, making them “was a painful reminder of class status” (118).

The home producer was also a consumer of trimmings and cloth, patterns, and publications. Sustaining home sewing was a wide range of enterprises: textile and sewing machine manufacturers, tissue pattern makers, novelty producers, and magazine and advice book publishers. Gordon takes pains to distinguish her study from those “focused on the business end of sewing” (xi) and, indeed, she eschews internalist discussions of individual firms. The pattern maker Butterick, for example, enters this narrative as...