The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking - Dress, Body, Culture

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index; Patterns of respectability: publishing, home sewing and the dynamics of class and gender 1870-1914 / Chrisopher Breward -- Made at home by clever fingers: home dressmaking in Edwardian England / Barbara Burman -- On the margins: theorizing the history and significance of making and designing clothes at home / Cheryl Buckley -- Making modern woman, stitch by stitch: dressmaking and women's magazines in Britain 1919-39 / Fiona Hackney -- Home sewing: motivational changes in the twentieth century / Sherry Schofield-Tomschin -- There's no place like home: home dressmaking and creativity in the Jamaican community of the 1940s to the 1960s / Carol Tulloch -- Wearily moving her needle: army officers' wives and sewing in the nineteenth-century American West / Julie A. Campbell -- Commodified craft, creative community: women's vernacular dress in nineteenth-century Philadelphia / Kathryn E. Wilson -- Creating consumers: gender, class and the family sewing machine / Nancy Page Fernandez -- Patterns of choice: women's and children's clothing in the Wallis Archive, York Castle Museum / Mary M. Brooks -- The sewing needle as magic wand: selling sewing lessons to American girls after the Second World War / Eileen Margerum -- Virtual home dressmaking: dressmakers and seamstresses in post-war Toronto / Alesandra Palmer -- The Lady's Economical Assistant of 1808 / Janet Arnold -- Dreams on paper: a story of the commercial pattern industry / Joy Spanabel Emery -- Homeworking and the sewing machine in the British clothing industry 1850-1905 / Andrew Godley -- The sewing machine comes home / Tim Putnam -- A beautiful ornament in the parlour or boudoir: the domestication of the sewing machine / Nicholas Oddy -- Home economics and home sewing in the United States 1870-1940 / Sally I. Helvenston and Margaret M. Bubolz -- Your clothes are materials of war: the British government promotion of home sewing during the Second World War / Helen Reynolds. Review Quotes: "Sewing, as a fixture of production, consumption, femininity, gentility, home, and work, deserves the serious attention of historians and theoreticians ... the most interesting essays reveal how ... women actually served to integrate the home into commercial life ... This series(dress, body culture) attempts to move specialists out of their professional ghetto while infusing such theoretically "hot"subjects such as dress and bodies with some real material content. Both are welcome goals" --"Business History Review"'A collection of well researched essays ... An interesting book to dip into as each essay is complete in itself. A student of dress would find it useful as it has personal accounts that you wouldn't find anywhere else." --"Costume""This seminal publication contributes to Berg's recent prolific impact on the field of costume studies, and this book will not disappoint those searching for the latest serious academic inquiry into new areas in the field of dress ... The editor's incisive synthesis of the issues underpinning this field of study, as well as those brought out by the authors of the various papers, provides a strong contextual framework for any further work that may be undertaken on this topic ... The extent of the complementary coverage of this topic from different standpoints adds to the strength of this publication." --"Dress"'The Culture of Sewing aptly demonstrates the relevance of home sewing to our collective scholarly lives. Focusing on nineteenth-and twentieth-century Britain and America, it also shows that home sewing has a history far more specific and varied than my adolescent shortsightedness. ... I am not yet ready to take up home sewing. However, I urge readers to take up the best essays in this book. Together they urge us to re-assess relationships between paid and unpaid labor, work and leisure, and perhaps most important, the economy and everyday life.' --"Enterprise and Society"Biographical Note: Edited by Barbara Burman, Winchester School of Art. Publisher Marketing: Throughout its long history, homedressmaking has been a formative experience in the lives of millions of women. This volume is an account of the significance of homedressmaking as a form of American and European material culture, and explores themes including gender, technology and consumption.

Contributor Bio:  Burman, Barbara Burman is Director of the Centre for the History of Textiles and Dress at the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton.