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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 632-634



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Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791. By Clare Haru Crowston (Durham, Duke University Press, 2001) 508pp. $64.95 cloth $21.95 paper

This impressive and thoroughly researched book both challenges some long-standing assumptions and recreates a world. Crowston's study of the seamstresses and their guild constitutes, in fact, several different studies. It is a contribution to the social history of the conditions and techniques of work; it sheds light on the evolution of female fashion; it offers a penetrating analysis of one aspect of the guild as institution; it pursues several strands in the field of women's history in the Old Regime; it adds to our understanding of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution; and it attends to the role of the state, especially as it intruded into the corporate world of the seamstress guild members, thus offering a case study of the relationship between monarchy and society.

Although the preponderance of her evidence came from Parisian archives, Crowston expanded her research horizons to include signifi- cant material from Caen in Normandy and Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles in Provence. The author's commitment to her subject is as infectious as it is impressive. Even readers with less than a burning interest in the seamstresses will find themselves sharing Crowston's fascination with their history, if only from the cumulative effects of her sustained analysis and artful prose. In short, this book, which bridges the gap between [End Page 632] social and cultural history as well as any recent study, should find a wide readership among historians of the Old Regime and beyond.

Fabricating Women is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the relationship between changing female fashions and the rise of the seamstress guild as the primary producer of ladies' dresses. Jean-Baptiste Colbert's reforms of 1675 helped to create the guild, and subsequent changes resulted in the feminization of the garment trade, despite the protests of the male tailors. These developments brought the seamstresses into the very heart of the emerging consumer culture, attracting the kind of moral disapprobation for excess and luxury that implicated women in general: "Seamstresses were themselves seen as essentially sexualized beings possessed of heightened femininity" (143).

Part two treats the institutional history of the guild itself. Crowston confronts the assumption, long supported by women's history, that the institutionalization of labor—and particularly the guild system—meant an erosion of female power in the workplace. The seamstresses' guild, which grew more robust and secure during the period, represents a significant contradiction to this assumption. Women found refuge in the community and self-governance of the guild from their normal, limiting fate as daughters or wives under patriarchal rule. Moreover, as part of a corporate society, the seamstresses played a role on the public scene, interacting with royal officials who routinely intruded into the guild milieu for fiscal purposes, defending their privileges against male competitors and governmental reformers alike. Crowston not only demonstrates the guild leaders' competence and savvy in this realm but also shows that they were treated no differently from their male counterparts.

The book's third part penetrates deeply into the world of the seamstresses, constituting a sort of ethnography of their life cycle. Admission to the craft and apprenticeship, family life, and marriage patterns—"the trappings of daily life"—all come under discussion in this section. The seamstresses, as members of a recognized guild, were not only relatively privileged; they also enjoyed social, economic, and cultural advantages. Their marriage patterns demonstrate a freedom not to marry; indeed, one-third of them did not. In the final chapter, Crowston follows the seamstresses into the Revolution, when their guild was abolished, and into the nineteenth century, when proletarianization became their ultimate fate.

Crowston's book is ambitious, a sort of histoire totale, which, unlike many Annales-inspired histories, never strays from a clear and pertinent line of inquiry. It is not simply a compendium of details. Crowston demonstrates a...

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