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The 'Romance of Old Clothes "OLD LETTERS and old garments bring us in close touch with the past; there is in them a lingering presence, a very essence of life." These words introduce the final chapter of Alice Morse Earle's 1903 publication Two Centuriesof Costume inAmerica, asurvey ofAmerican clothing from 1620 to 1820.! To Earle's readers—middle-class Victorians unnerved by their rapidly changing world—her vision of early American hearths and homes offered a comforting model of social and cultural change, grounding an unsettling present in a virtuous past.2 Earle titled her concluding essay "The Romance of Old Clothes," and so do I. But while the "romance" of "old clothes" provided Earle and her readers with a tangible connection to their ancestry, for me, the romance assumes a fuller meaning. A century after Earle limned the clothing of distant generations , I wonder how our contemporary perceptions of earlyAmerican women are to some degree still products of her historical creation, shaping subsequent history writing, and maybe history too. Given what we know about the character of needlework as a trade for women in early New England, it is worth considering why that history has become so difficult to see, how it was that early American needlework became so thoroughly suffused with romance . Tom Englehardt and Edward T Linenthal have observed that our shared myths, our cultural fables, revealwhat we as a nation "can and cannot bear to look at or consider at any moment, and why."3 So what was it about early American women's work that became, over the nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth, sufficiently unbearable that romantic revisionings were embraced instead? What did Earle's vision of an idealized past mean at the close of the nineteenth century, and why does it still resonate, if now more familiar in the forms of Betsy Ross and Colonial Barbie, at the turn of the twenty-first? What does it illuminate, and what does it obscure? Scholars have written persuasively about the rise of artisan republicanism and the aggressivelymasculine cast to that culture, so strong that it "utterly obliterated the presence of women in commerce and the trades."4 At the founding of the republic, men whose economic independence was jeopar211 CONCLUSION 212 Conclusion dized by developments in commerce and industry successfully articulated a political vision grounded in male culture and male privilege, limiting women's actual role in artisanal activities while reshaping in dramatic and enduring ways public understanding of what constitutes artisanal life.5 That story need not be retold here, but it provides critical context for another confluence of factors, specific to clothing and needlework, that clouded our historical view. Changes in the garment industry in the nineteenth century gradually took clothing production, first of men's garments and later of women's, out of homes and into factories, gradually removing working women from sight, consciousness, and imagination. Innovations in both home sewing and dressmaking during that same period—most notably, published drafting systems and the sewing machine—conflated the work of custom dressmakers and home sewing, blurring distinctions between professional and amateur sewing, and sewers. Finally, the colonial and craft revivals of the half-century following the 1876 Centennial, responding to those very changes along with others of industrializingAmerica, selectivelyremembered and revived women's earlier work, celebrated the ornamental aspects of needlework , romanticized the tedious, and effaced the remunerative. As EARLY as the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the notion that plain sewing was most appropriately performed by working-class women was firmly planted. Louisa Hall recalled that her aunt "kept a sempstress in the family, and a part of her duty was to make and mend my clothes." Hall was so far removed from the process by which her wardrobe was constructed that when she entered her twenties (in 1822), she "had a fashionable contempt for plain sewing" and could not, she said, "conjecture how a single garment that I wore was cut or made." Hall found such work beneath her; what's more, her "contempt" for plain sewing was "fashionable."6 In 1831, a young Rachel Stearns, under pressure of necessity, recorded her willingness to sew for another household, although she had earlier "thought it quite too degrading " to go out sewing.7 Art and literature echoed concerns voiced by economic and social reformers asthey depicted the sewing women'svulnerability to prostitution.8 In the nineteenth century, as greater amounts of sewing were relegated to waged...

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