Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791 (review)

Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791. By Clare Haru Crowston. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii+508. $64.95/$21.95.

Before 1675, clothing manufacture throughout France was the monopoly of the tailors. But, even though they were legally restricted to sewing unshaped body linens and nightwear, some seamstresses succeeded in establishing a reputation for dressmaking. Intolerant of this competition, the tailors retaliated by seeking monetary damages, and by systematically confiscating the fabrics and completed garments that were more often the property of the dressmaker's clients than of the dressmaker herself. The seamstresses persevered even in the light of these assaults and, supported by influential clients, petitioned Louis XIV to allow them to form their own guild. In granting their request (over the strenuous objections of the tailors), the king noted that legalizing the trade would not only provide needlewomen with the opportunity to make an "honest" living, but would also protect the modesty of female clients who preferred to be dressed by persons of their own sex. (There is a French twist to the king's nod to modesty, in that tailors retained sole right to the making and fitting of the boned bodices intrinsic to the elaborate dress worn by aristocratic women at court and on ceremonial occasions.)

Clare Crowston recounts this legitimization of the seamstress in meticulous detail, integrating secondary sources that range from the history of work to the history of costume—but, like the annalistes she emulates, basing her conclusions in archival and primary sources dredged for edicts, tax records, guild proceedings, court records, and police reports. Her study contributes meaningfully to social and cultural history, the history of work, gender studies, and, to a lesser extent, material culture. What it does not do is to contribute to the history of technology: tools and equipment—whether premodern needles or postmodern sewing machines—are largely ignored, as are the techniques required to use them. (The appearance and general construction of typical eighteenth-century garments are nonetheless described and illustrated, pp. 31-47, 114ff.)

French sources are translated (usually by the author), and no original is supplied. Insofar as it is possible to judge, the translations are correct—certainly they are well-phrased—even if one can occasionally quarrel with Crowston's interpretations. Although making selected reference to Rousseau, Crowston ignores his fear and distrust of women, and she is equally oblivious to the misogyny evident in Jean-Félix d'Hénissard's 1727 Satyre sur les cerceaux. . . (Satire on hoopskirts . . .), a rhyming essay that compares women to flies, tarantulas, and two kinds of wasp.

Granted, it was not the author's intent to produce a feminist tract; and, except for these few instances, her lack of ideological (or even gender) bias strengthens her presentation of the processes, difficulties, and triumphs associated with the formation, maintenance, defense, and dissolution of a uniquely female guild. (Even if far too many essentially interchangeable individuals from Crowston's primary sources are identified by name and circumstance, their abbreviated biographies do succeed in giving the flavor of their era and calling.)

Despite the chronological limit explicit in her subtitle, Crowston carries her study beyond 1791. The last chapter traces the degeneration of needlework from profession to occupation through, on the one hand, the emergence of ready-to-wear in the late 1830s and, on the other, survival of the "little dressmaker" into our own era. As might be expected, these trends are covered less thoroughly than the formation and dissolution of the guild; and the account develops without indexed reference to industry, mechanized production, factory exploitation of female workers, or unionization, and only one reference to haute couture. It is here that we discern the dissertation from which the book is derived, and the demand of a thesis director that the study be "rounded out."

Fabricating Women is extremely well-rounded in another sense, however. Crowston's...