"Make it Yourself": Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930 (review)

Home sewing has a long and, on its face, visible history. The quintessential women's activity, it features prominently in pastoral visions of early American life, the woman bent over her needlework, children at her knees. Yet like many household tasks, sewing is skilled work that became economically invisible. Long recognized for its material value to households, by the early twentieth century sewing was lauded as a way to demonstrate love and nurturing abilities (pastoralized, Jeanne Boydston would say). Yet, historian Sarah A. Gordon argues, sewing also offered "boundless possibilities" of creative expression, including challenging or flouting socio-economic hierarchies. Gordon's "Make It Yourself": Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930, is a study of the changing social and cultural practices, and multiple meanings, surrounding home sewing.

Gordon's study illuminates how an apparently private activity was deeply enmeshed in both cultural norms and the public economy. Ready-made women's clothing sky-rocketed, while the number of women working for wages more than quadrupled to 10.8 million between 1880 and 1930. Economics dictated that many women continue to make at least some of their clothing (and new fashions were easier to sew and required less material), but they sewed for other motives as well. Home sewing became a contested space, sometimes a refuge for traditional gender, race and class ideologies and sometimes a tool women used to challenge them. Widespread sewing classes for young women and girls reinforced certain ideologies about region, race, and ethnicity as well as gender. Once sewing became optional for many, sewing-related businesses sought to maintain sales with explicit appeals to pastoralized womanhood or, sometimes, to flapper style-consciousness.

Despite these influences, Gordon argues, many women fashioned garments to express their individuality, to challenge racist views (of African-American women's alleged immorality), to present a higher class status for themselves and families, to embrace new sporting possibilities, and to gain more power within households (perhaps the least supported argument). One wants more depth in some areas: for instance, she gives most of the credit for redefined femininity to middle-class white women's embrace of sports, without engaging with Joanne Meyerowitz's argument that urban working women pioneered behaviors and styles later associated with the "New Woman." However, this is a minor quibble. Gordon's book fruitfully draws together histories not usually in dialogue, of gender, business, and fashion, and of urban and rural America.

This ranges shows up in her sources: Gordon supplements more traditional sources with material culture items, examples of which are on display in the fascinating on-line version, http://www.gutenberg-e.org/gordon/, which was funded through a Gutenberg-e prize. (A joint project between the American Historical Association and Columbia University Press, Gutenberg-e publishes revisions of promising dissertations, chosen from 1999 to 2004, as online multimedia projects; see http://www.historians.org/prizes/gutenberg/Index.cfm.) Photographs, patterns, paper dolls, sewing journals, oral history recordings (oddly short), a hyper-linked appendix of sewing-related terms, and a slideshow of a contemporary home sewer (to illustrate the steps involved) all enrich the project. Succinct and richly illustrated, it is well suited for classroom use.