Main on Miller, _The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (May 2007)

Marla R. Miller, _The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of 
Revolution_. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. 
xiv + 302 pp. $25 (paperback), ISBN: 1-55849-545-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Gloria L. Main, Department of History, 
University of Colorado, Boulder.


The title, _The Needle's Eye_, may make some readers think of camels 
and rich men, but the book concerns women who worked as tailors and 
dressmakers in rural New England in the years before mass production. 
Labor historians have showered attention on urban craftsmen in early 
America, celebrating their autonomy and patriotism in the 
Revolutionary and Constitutional eras, but whose skills and 
independence were gradually eclipsed by factories and machines. The 
replacement of skilled artisans by unskilled wage workers has been a 
major declensionist theme in labor history, but that narrative is too 
simple and omits significant segments of the population. Artisans who 
farmed were one such group, female tailors and dressmakers made up 
another. These highly-skilled specialists served a surprisingly broad 
range of early American households. Their stories form the particular 
focus of _The Needle's Eye_.

Female tailors? Yes. One of the major discoveries in historical 
research of the past dozen years is the permeability of borders 
separating the occupations of men and women. As early as the 
sixteenth century, European women began moving into trades that had 
traditionally been dominated by men; meanwhile, men moved into 
certain women's crafts, such as brewing and dairying. Weaving was 
traditionally reserved for men in England, and that continued to be 
the case in the British colonies in North America, but women in New 
England began to take it up early in the eighteenth century. Teaching 
is another calling that started out dominated by men but in New 
England opened increasingly to women as towns were increasingly 
compelled to offer elementary schooling to all. This secular 
re-ordering of the division of labor between the sexes is 
particularly striking in the production of textiles and clothing. The 
mechanization of cotton spinning in late eighteenth-century England 
and early nineteenth-century New England not only sped up the supply 
of yarn to female weavers in the putting-out system but made cotton 
the most important domestically grown and manufactured fiber in the 
United States. It quickly vanquished linen and gradually relegated 
commercial woolen manufacture chiefly to flannels and carpets. 
Americans continued to buy higher-quality textiles from Britain and 
to copy British clothing fashions. Turning bolts of expensive cloth 
into individually-fitted gowns and suits for a status-conscious 
clientele was the task of tailors and gown/mantua makers and 
continued to be so for decades to come.

Marla Miller, associate professor of history and director of the 
Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 
uses the rich collections of diaries, letters, and account books in 
Connecticut Valley repositories to reconstruct a particular community 
of customers and clothing makers in Hadley, Massachusetts and 
environs. At the center of this economic and social network of 
neighbors stood Elizabeth Putnam Phelps, daughter of local gentry. It 
is through her diary and correspondence that we first meet Rebecca 
Dickenson, a single woman ten years her senior, who supported herself 
and her mother by making, fitting, and mending women's clothes. 
Elizabeth's sister-in-law, Catherine Phelps Parsons was a tailor and 
the daughter of a gown maker. A neighbor of Elizabeth's, Easter 
Newton, was a tailoress who became an innkeeper after her husband 
died. (In this region, tailors could be either male or female. Both 
possessed more skills than a "tailoress.") Easter's daughter, 
Tryphena contributed to her parents' income by taking in sewing for 
multiple households, including Elizabeth's. Tabitha Smith was another 
gown maker in Elizabeth's network. Carrying the story forward in time 
from Elizabeth's circle, Miller describes how Polly L'Hommedieu 
Lathrop, a gown maker, switched from private custom work in 1800 to 
making seamen's shirts in a putting-out system that rewarded speed 
over quality. Polly found she could earn more that way because the 
merchant's agent took all she could make. Meanwhile, other young 
women artisans began setting up shops in Hartford and New Haven, 
competing with each other and with male rivals through advertisements 
placed in local newspapers.

Miller's great accomplishment is to place these individual stories in 
the larger context of New England's social and economic development. 
She is able to compare and contrast their experiences as artisans 
with those of their male cohorts and do so in ways which expand our 
understanding of both. The female apprentice to a tailor or gown 
maker, for instance, signed up in her mid-to-late teens for a year or 
eighteen months. In exchange for a fee and her service, she expected 
to acquire a specific set of skills, such as learning how to take 
useful bodily measurements, how to cut the pieces from the cloth 
without wasting any, and fitting those pieces to the body.

_The Needle's Eye_ has twin goals: to put skilled female craft 
workers into the story of American artisans in a changing economy; 
and secondly, to unravel the structures and hierarchies of working 
women and their customers. Although Miller's primary focus is on 
gown-makers and tailors, for whom the period 1760-1830 was a kind of 
golden age of economic opportunity, she does not overlook the 
less-specialized, less-skilled, and lower-paid seamstresses, many of 
whom welcomed the chance for steady work offered by the putting-out 
system. The female economy, alas, was itself not free of class 
divisions and exploitation.

It is an axiom among reviewers that no book, no matter how good, can 
be perfect. Marla Miller's _The Needle's Eye_, however, comes 
remarkably close. She writes fluently and well, digesting a vast and 
varied literature to make sense of a rich set of sources. The result 
is an engaging prosopography of female needle-workers in the 
Connecticut Valley in an era of great innovation and change. The book 
is introduced by a masterful survey of the literature and concludes 
with a superb essay on the diverging paths of men's and women's 
clothing production. The expansion of textile production at first 
created opportunities for female entrepreneurs, but continuing 
technological development eventually closed them down again as the 
sewing machine, paper patterns, and Sears' catalogs brought good 
cheap clothing within reach of all.

_The Needle's Eye_ is a major contribution to both labor history and 
women's history. It neatly melds the two in its depiction of a group 
of women as self-employed, highly-skilled artisans coping with 
shifting tastes and technology in a rapidly changing world.


Gloria Main is recently retired from the Department of History at the 
University of Colorado, Boulder. She is currently at work on a study 
of child labor in New England, 1750-1830.

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