Needlewomen in the Revolutionary Era

For some years, there has been a call by leading scholars in the field of early American women's history and by historians exploring the history of women's roles in business and entrepreneurship to parse the world of eighteenth-century women's craftwork. British and European scholars had moved ahead of American researchers in uncovering the depth and range of women's business activities, their commercial networks, and the cultural forces that governed them, creating a vivid picture of the eastern side of the Atlantic. Work on British North America has been lively but had not yet developed such great range and depth. Martha Miller's excellent new book is the latest one to fill this critical gap.

Scholars working on this topic have much baggage to wade through. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in her book, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (2001) had to unravel the myths connected to homespun cloth. The myths, she argued, were part of a long tradition of "urban fantasies about rural life" that intensified in the nineteenth century as Americans sought refuge from anxieties about industrialization and other kinds of social and economic change. They found that refuge in images and stories of an idealized past in which virtuous men and women lived in self-sufficient simplicity and harmony, free from the demands of the marketplace and the rough and tumble of modern life.¹

Miller had to overcome a similar obstacle, namely, the part of this myth that imagined a self-sufficient past in which all women were handy with a needle, cheerfully and ably stitching all the many clothes for their households. This myth, of course, is just that and it obscures the length of time required to do sewing tasks, the range of skills required for even simple clothing, the varying skill levels of individuals, and the sheer drudgery of much of the work. And Miller had to overcome another historical obfuscation: the association of only men with artisanal skill and the ubiquitous term craftsmen that eliminated women from the history of skilled labor and business. This gendered vocabulary, together with the myth that sewing was not a specialized skill, has particularly facilitated the disappearance of highly skilled female needle workers from the landscape of early American history. Consequently, the historian who wants to fight the good fight and restore the place of skilled needlewomen in eighteenth-century life and understand the complexity of their lives must first educate the audience about the craft itself and put a woman's face on highly skilled labor.

Miller admirably succeeds in overcoming the related constraints of both these problems. Her study is grounded in the records left by a group of interconnected women who lived in towns along the Connecticut River valley. In the first two chapters, Miller takes the reader into the world of clothing, fashion, and consumer culture in the region and the working of the needle trades and successfully makes the case for the skill of needle workers and the market for their craft. Women of all ranks in the area paid close attention to changes in fashion. Needlewomen themselves were important transmitters of these changes and they and their customers stayed connected to a larger fashionable world by excursions to urban centers or by copying gowns made by others who had been there. "Word of mouth," then, was the primary means by which women heard of new styles and notions (p. 50). Community events, such as election balls and assemblies, were venues where fashionable wear could be displayed and new styles disseminated, as were church services, which, Miller reminds us, "were sartorial as well as spiritual events" (p. 52).

Three key arguments make the case for generalizing from the Connecticut River valley to the rest of British North America and restoring the importance of needle workers in that world. The first is that families...