SEWING MACHINE

The sewing machine made its debut in a culture that, for more than a century, had considered the needle "the woman's tool par excellence." Sewing was far from exclusively female, but since the late seventeenth century women workers, in defiance of long-term historical trends, had successfully laid claim to the guilds within the garment trades that made clothing for women and children. The Enlightenment belief in "nature" as an ordering principle, and thus of gender as a "natural" division of labor, bolstered conceptions that sewing—and making fashion—were inherently feminine, shoring up seamstresses' claims while simultaneously rationalizing women's exclusion from other trades and deeming their work unskilled. During the Industrial Revolution garment-making expanded rapidly, governments across Europe abolished guilds, and clothing manufacturers mobilized "battalions" of workers for increasingly poorly paid labor—work, it was said, fit only for women. By the 1830s the numbers of independent seamstresses had waned and the needleworker had become the very image of poverty, of women's vulnerability, and, for many social critics, of the wrongs of market culture or industrial society.

Small wonder, then, that the sewing machine sparked the hopes and fears evinced in an 1845 exchange between a reader and Barthélemy Thimonnier (1793–1857) (often considered the inventor of the sewing machine) on the pages of a provincial French newspaper. As one historian remarks, the eighteenth century's faith in progress rested on science, the nineteenth century's on mechanization. Machines evoked contradictory images of newfound power and acute powerlessness. They raised the specter of vast increases in productivity but also of changes in the organization of work and in the social and moral order, both of which, as is shown in the exchange, were powerfully symbolized by gender. Many nineteenth-century writers considered machines and femininity to be incompatible and, in characteristically Romantic style, cast industry against nature or demonized automatons against icons of feminine traditionalism: distaff, needle, and spinning wheel.

In the 1840s, however, the sewing machine played very little role in industry. Expensive and cumbersome, it only made sense in trades, such as shoemaking, in which complex production processes could be broken down into specialized tasks and assigned to specific workers. Factories served to coordinate production and ensure that machines were used efficiently, but clothing manufacturers contracted most sewing work out to either well-established subcontractors or small "jobbing" tailors who employed their wives, children, or other workers. After 1870 sewing technology went in two directions, the first toward specialized machines to be used in factories, and the second toward improving and disseminating a small machine to be used in work that was contracted out. Outwork, or homework, saved manufacturers capital investments, it allowed them to skirt factory legislation, and it tapped a labor force willing, for diverse reasons, to accept low wages. By the eve of the war the expansion of homework had produced an international outcry over "sweated labor."

To the Editor,

You have announced to the public in the most laudatory terms the invention of a machine for sewing, due to the learned meditations of Monsieur Thimonnier, tailor from Amplepuis. …Of all the troubles that afflict humanity in our time, perhaps none is greater than the inability of a woman abandoned to herself to earn a living through her labor. Every day the strong sex makes new incursions in the trades which, because of their character, would seem to be the exclusive domain of women.

If the condition of the countless women in cities who spend their lives sewing and who are incapable of doing other work is already the source of moral concern; if, every day, some of these poor creatures, disheartened by poverty, debase themselves, succumbing to the deceptive promises of debauchery and seduction; if those who have the courage to resist the vices suggested by poverty earn a wage we know to be insufficient and find themselves unemployed due to lack of work, what will happen when five in six of these women has lost her only means of existence to a mechanical stitcher?

—a subscriber

Your newspaper this month published a letter from one of your subscribers concerning the sewing machine that is attributed to me …

Why should we consider these machines to be hostile to the female sex? Why not say, instead, that these machines will expand the industrial domain of women, make their forces equal of those of men, and place them at the same level of intelligence?

The industrial world is changing as if by magic, and people believe that the fate of the most interesting half of humanity will depend, forever, on the needle.

Rather than proscribe inventions that are destined to raise the well being of all, let us cry for reform in women's education. Let us create trade schools for working women as well as working men. In that way perhaps we will abolish, or at least reduce commen-surate with their respective needs, the shocking inequalities between brother and sister, in the inequality (disproportion) of their wages.

—B. Thimonnier

Source: Journal de Villefranche, 14 and 28 September 1845.

The sewing machine role's in industry was inseparable from its pioneering role as one of the first consumer durables to be marketed, on credit, to a mass public. In the 1890s sewing-machine salesmen went directly into the European countryside, offering machines on credit payment plans. In some regions they helped clothing manufacturers recruit outworkers for their industry, waiving down payments on the machine and arguing that the work opportunities or higher productivity would more than compensate for the monthly bills. Workers and reformers charged that these practices exacerbated the dynamics of sweated labor. Sewing machines were also sold in the new centers of working-class consumerism in cities. The Dufayel department store on the plebeian boulevard Barbès in Paris featured a department full of sewing machines at the top of its central staircase, just below stained-glass windows engraved with the store's motto, "Saving, Confidence, Abundance, and Work."

Sewing-machine manufacturers, particularly the American firm Singer, poured money into advertising. The advertising imagery was extraordinarily varied, a reflection of the multiple markets for this machine (industrialists, tailors and seamstresses, working-class families, and middle-class women), of the tentative or experimental character of early advertising, and of the knot of anxieties and aspirations tangled around the topics of "work" and "femininity." The decorative metalwork of the machines was sometimes sculpted into odd shapes: squirrels (symbol of frugality) or cupids with drawn bows. In advertisements, magicians conjured machines out of thin air. Elephants clambered onto sewing-machine chairs as they would onto circus pedestals, and monkeys hurtled down roller coasters on sewing machines—caricatures of "dexterity" and speed. Allegorical "liberty" figures danced with machines in their arms. A Singer sewing machine with wings took flight over the Eiffel Tower. Advertisements drew on now-familiar tropes of nineteenth-century domesticity, juxtaposing depictions of sewing-machine factories belching smoke with those of women safely (and industriously) sewing at a machine at home. They also borrowed freely from the imagery of empire and the "civilizing mission"; Singer aimed to reach "every corner of the inhabitable world" and to emancipate all of womankind, whether "white, red, black, or yellow."

Did sewing machines change women's household work? Yes, but not in the ways one might predict. Historians know more about the transformation of industry than they do about the history of unpaid household labor. But research shows that labor-saving domestic technologies were very slow to make their way into European homes. Middle-class women in Europe usually hired servants to do their work, and most working-class and peasant families were too poor to afford specifically domestic appliances. While women routinely spent long hours mending their families' linens and garments, to actually fashion clothing required skills that women usually acquired in industry and only afterward turned to use in their homes. Yet the sewing machine was one of the first widely disseminated consumer durables—by 1914 an estimated one in three European households from Portugal to Russia owned sewing machines—largely because it could be used for wage earning as well as household chores. In a century when the garment industry employed so many women, the sewing machine was almost inescapably hybrid, joining industrial and domestic—an object of desire that literally had to earn its place in the home.

See alsoConsumerism; Industrial Revolution, First; Industrial Revolution, Second.

bibliography

Coffin, Judith G. The Politics of Women's Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915. Princeton, N.J., 1996.

Crowston, Clare Haru. Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791. Durham, N.C., 2001. The best analysis of prerevolutionary developments.

Frader, Laura L., and Sonya O. Rose, eds. Gender and Class in Modern Europe. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.

Giedion, S. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York, 1948.

Green, Nancy L. Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York. Durham, N.C., 1997.

Hausen, Karin. "Technical Progress and Women's Labour in the Nineteenth Century." In The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing since 1945, edited by Georg G. Iggers. New York, 1986.

Liu, Tessie P. The Weaver's Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity in Western France, 1750–1914. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994. Particularly astute on dynamics within working families.

Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York, 1988.

Scott, Joan Wallach, and Louise Tilly. Women, Work, and Family. New York, 1978. Still a classic.

Valenze, Deborah. The First Industrial Woman. New York, 1995.

Judy Coffin