The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution

Notes

NOTES Introduction. Early American Artisanry: Why Gender Matters 1. Scot M. Guenter, The American Flag, IJJJ—1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Commodification (London: Associated University Presses, 1990), 101—3; Karol Ann Marling , George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, i8j6—ioo (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jan de Vries, "Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe," in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter, 85-132 (New York: Routledge, 1993). 15. There is a thriving literature on women in artisanal crafts in other parts of the early modern Atlantic world. Some notable contributions that are particularly relevant here include liana Krausman Ben-Amos, "Women Apprentices in the Trades and Crafts of Early Modern Bristol," Continuity and Change 6, no. 2 (1991): 227-52; Anne Buck, "Mantua-makers and Milliners: Women Making and Selling Clothes in EighteenthCentury Bedfordshire,"Publicationsof the Bedfordshire Historical Society 72 (1993): 142-55; Judith Coffin, The Politics of Women's Work: The Paris Garment Trades, ij^o—iyi1 ) (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1996), and "Gender and the Guild Order"; Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, i6j-ipi$ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Gay L. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, ij^o—iS^o (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Martha C. Howell, "Women, the Family Economy, and the Structure of Market Production in Cities of Northern Europe during the Late Middle Ages," in Women and Work inPreindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the IndustrialRevolution, ij^o—iS^o (1930; repr., London: Virago, 1981); K. D. M. Snell, Annuls of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660—1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 270-319; Merry Wiesner, "Spinsters and Seamstresses: Women in Cloth and Clothing Production ," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, 191-205 (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1986), and Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 7. Wilfried Reininghaus, "Artisans: Comparative-Historical Explorations," International Review of Social History 47 (2002): 101-13. 8. Nancy Lynne Locklin, "Women in Early Modern Brittany: Rethinking Work and Identity in the Traditional Economy" (Ph.D. diss., Emory University,2000), 46,121. 9. Clare Crowston traces this "Revolution in Women's Apparel" in Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of OM RegimeFrance, i6j 7-8 10 . Sally Garoutte, "Early Colonial Quilts in a Bedding Context," Uncoverings I (1980): 18—27, es P' !8. Garoutte's article was first delivered as a paper to the American Quilt Study Group at its 1980 organizational meeting; though the article is now more than twenty-five years old, the myths she describes concerning early American quilts as artifacts of economic need common throughout colonial households still thrive. 11. HCMRP, 1770-1800. Of course, probate inventories are an imperfect source: in several instances, assessors lumped these textiles together as "bed and bedding," or "bed furnishings." A handful of inventories listed no textiles at all. SilviaMaulini found similar results in her study ofAmherst; while no family possessed more than one quilt, blankets were owned in abundance. That many were homemade issuggested by one assessor's distinction , "boughten blanket." Maulini, "Women and the Paradox of Patriarchy in Eighteenth -Century Amherst" (honors paper, Mt. Holyoke College, 1980). In the twenty-four yeoman households Laura L.Tedeschi tracked between 1786 and 1810, nine contained no quilts (of those, four list no bedding of any sort, suggesting that something else had happened to all of these textiles before the inventorywas taken). Typically these households owned eight sheets (the most held thirty-three), three blankets (the number ranged from one to thirteen), and two or perhaps three quilts. Some households without quilts possessed a number of coverlets (also called "coverlids") and bed rugs. Tedeschi, "Yeoman Farmers in Post-Revolutionary Deerfield: Class Status and Material Possessions" (seminar paper, Historic Deerfield, Inc., 1992). See also Roderick Kiracofe, The American Quilt: A History of Cloth and Comfort, ij^o—iy^o (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1993), 48; Adrienne D. Hood, "The Material World of Cloth Production and Use in EighteenthCentury Rural Pennsylvania, William and Mary Quarterly 53(1996): 43—66, esp. 62. 12. Catharine Anne Wilson, "Reciprocal Work Bees and the Meaning of Neighbourhood ," Canadian HistoricalReview 82 (2001): 431...