Home Sewing

For most of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, clothing consumption meant custom production for American women. Factory-made men’s clothing was available for purchase starting in the mid-nineteenth century, along with a few articles of women’s apparel. However, the majority of women’s and children’s clothing needed to be sewn at home, either by the woman of the household, by servants, or by dressmakers and tailors. Homemade clothing, produced from patterns or copied from existing garments, often did not fit as well or look as high-quality as professional, dressmaker-created goods. This was due in part to the great complexity of the fashionable styles and the lack of training and skill of the maker. Further, while custom made clothes were often the most fashionable and had the best appearance, workmanship, and fit, they were often prohibitively expensive.[i]

Most women, particularly in rural areas of the United States, created garments for the entire family that were “adapted to the environment, and determined by frugality.”[ii] Garments sewn at home included simple shirts, smocks, caps, baby clothes, and household textile products, as well as the more difficult to sew fashionable dresses. The tasks of sewing, dressmaking, repairing and mending were shared by working- and middle-class women, native-born and immigrant alike. The purposes for home sewing were multi-fold, from personal necessity to acts of charity, and were defined by social and economic needs, motivations, and circumstances. In addition to providing goods for household use and for wear, sewing represented the home, women’s conventional role of caring for her family, and were variously associated with concepts of thrift, leisure, and even sexual morality.[iii]

Despite the transformational shift from clothing “made for somebody” to mass-produced ready-to-wear clothing “made for everybody,” women continued to sew.[iv] A 1926 study by the Bureau of Home Economics (then part of the Department of Agriculture) reported that at least 80 percent of women surveyed made at least some clothing for themselves and their children and three-quarters of the “business class” women spent up to six hours a week sewing and mending.[v]
Motivations for home sewing continued to be many, including necessity and individual expressions of creativity, and originality.

[i] Claudia Kidwell and Margaret Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (Washington: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974).
[ii] Lee Hall, Common Threads: A Parade of American Clothing (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1992), 42.
[iii] Sarah A. Gordon, “Make it Yourself: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930,” http://www.gutenberg-e.org/gordon/chap1.html; Nancy Page Fernandez, “Creating Consumers: Gender, Class, and the Family Sewing Machine,” In The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption, and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman, 157-168, (Oxford: Berg, 1999).
[iv] Kidwell and Christman, Suiting Everyone.
[v] Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929).