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A WOMAN’S “NATURAL” WORK: SEWING AND NOTIONS OF FEMININE LABOR IN NORTHEAST OHIO, 1900- 1930 A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Colleen S. Benoit May 2011 Thesis written by Colleen S. Benoit B.A., Baldwin-Wallace College, 2009 M.A., Kent State University, 2011 Approved by ___________________________________, Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Advisor ___________________________________, Kenneth J. Bindas, Chair, Department of History ___________________________________, Timothy Moerland, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. v INTRODUCTION. 1 CHAPTER I “A Woman’s Paradise”: Women and Garment Industry Labor. 17 CHAPTER II Lessons in Domesticity: Household Science and the Significance of Sewing. 48 CHAPTER III Empowered Sewing: Case Studies of Women Who Sew. 78 CONCLUSION An Activity for all Generations. 107 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 112 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figures 1. Female operatives at Joseph & Feiss, 1907. 2 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis has been nearly a year and a half in the making, and over the past several months, I have become indebted to a number of people. My deepest gratitude is to my advisor, Dr. Elizabeth Smith-Pryor, Associate Professor at Kent State University. Dr. Smith-Pryor listened patiently as I thought out loud during countless meetings and conversations and always encouraged me to think deeper and keep up the great work. She instilled in me a confidence in my own abilities as a writer and historian that I will not soon forget. I extend my gratitude to my committee, Dr. John Jameson and Dr. Rebecca Pulju, both of the Kent State University History Department for their support, ideas, and conversation. Many other members of the Kent State University History Department played a crucial role in my success as a graduate student. Thank you to Dr. Mary Ann Heiss, Graduate Coordinator and Associate Professor for answering all my questions and keeping me on track; to Dr. Kenneth Bindas, Chair of the department, for teaching me to be critical of my sources and write with confidence, even when my writing voice was weary; to Dr. Richard Steigmann-Gall, who taught me to analyze like no one’s business; to Kay Dennis, secretary and life line of the department for holding the answers to all of life’s questions and always greeting me with a smile; to my colleagues in Bowman 205, thank you for the laughs when they were needed most. v I am further indebted to a number of professionals in archives and historical societies across Northeast Ohio. Thank you Edith Serkownek, Special Collections Librarian at Kent State University’s June F. Mohler Fashion Library for your expertise in historic fashion materials and for showing me the many valuable primary source resources living on the shelves of special collections. Thank you to Sandy Halem with the Kent Historical Society and the staff at the Portage County Historical Society for your enthusiasm, amazing resources, and patience with my endless questions. Finally, thank you to the Western Reserve Historical Society for their invaluable documentation of Cleveland’s rich history. On a more personal level, I would like to thank my family and friends, who all know more about sewing than they probably ever hoped to. Thank you to my mother, and my best friend, for always being my biggest cheerleader. To my father, who instilled a love of history in me before I can even remember, and whose antics are always good for a laugh. To my brothers who probably do not even know I wrote a thesis but who are some of my biggest fans. Thank you to Jimmy for everything. I dedicate this thesis to my grandmothers, Margaret Story Benoit, or Nanny as I knew her, and Mary Moore, whom I affectionately call Greeboo, who are my biggest role models. Finally, thank you to Papa; I miss you everyday. vi INTRODUCTION In the first chapter of the 1928 edition of Home Sewing Made Easy, published by the McCall Pattern Company, the author described the ideal “home sewer’s workshop:” It may be a corner of the living room or bed-room [sic], or better still, a room set apart for the worker’s use- a room full of light and sunshine. In the household where there is much sewing to be done, it is desirable, even a necessity, to have such a room, well- equipped with needed tools and appliances at hand to expedite work, and where the worker may at a moment’s notice drop her sewing on the table without the sense of needing to “pick-up” and put things in order, when turning to other tasks, or pausing for times of rest and refreshment. The worker need feel no sense or isolation in her workshop, for if she choose the decoration of the woodwork and walls in good taste, and have one or two comfortable chairs (if space permits), it will become a rendezvous for other members of the family, especially the children.1 Filled with images of comfort, home, and family, the author envisioned the home sewer as busy wife and mother, effortlessly juggling many domestic responsibilities along with her sewing in bright and cheerful fashion. This image may not seem so unusual when considered apart from other historic sewing settings; throughout history and to the present day many women sewed at home for a myriad of reasons. Yet when placed in historical context and compared with other images of sewing from the early twentieth century, the image and symbolic weight of the home sewer becomes complicated. 1 Laura Baldt, Home Sewing Made Easy (New York: The McCall Company, 1928), 1. 1 2 In American culture, sewing had long been viewed as “women’s work,” and was often associated with domestic activity performed by women as part of being a good wife and mother, but also out of necessity as access to clothing was usually expensive.1 In many ways, prior to the turn of the twentieth century, sewing was a symbol for the domestic woman. However, with the growth of industry and the success of the American garment trade, sewing took on a new meaning for women. From the rise of the mechanized and industrialized garment industry, women were employed as machine operators and hand sewers and worked in crowded, dim, loud, and stuffy factories, as seen in Figure 1, conditions quite opposite from the ideal 1920s sewing room. Figure 1: "Postcard of female garment workers, Joseph and Feiss Company, circa 1907"2 1 Sarah H. Gordon, Make it Yourself: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 3. 2 "Postcard of female garment workers, Joseph & Feiss Company, circa 1907," in Teaching & Learning Cleveland Item #523, http://csudigitalhumanities.org/exhibits/items/show/523 (accessed February 25, 2011). 3 The image of rows of women sewing at machines in factories stands in stark contrast to that of the idealized mother sewing in an airy bedroom or of the woman engaging in piecework at home and illustrates the contrast of sewing in the home and factory during the early twentieth century. With the rise of the garment industry, women were no longer just sewing as part of their domestic responsibilities but were moving into factories in record numbers. 3 Despite the rise of industry, sewing still factored in many women’s lives in a variety of ways well into the 1920s. The popularization of the ready-made garments changed the ways in which women accessed clothing but it hardly eliminated sewing from their lives. Rather than function as an essential skill that provided the basic necessities of modesty in clothing, the rise of industry loaded sewing with cultural expectations about how a woman should occupy her time and behave, dependent largely on social circumstances and class status. In short, with the shift in production came a marked shift in the social and cultural significance of sewing. This thesis will explore this apparent shift in the significance of sewing during the early twentieth century and examine how changing economic and social circumstances 3 Eileen Boris, Home To Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 10-12 covers women’s participation in piecework during this time period, which often occurred in a woman’s home for small wages both before the rise of industry and during the height of the garment trade. Piecework was often done by immigrant women and was extremely hard to regulate. I do not mean to suggest that sewing either occurred in the home as domestic labor or in the factory as wage labor. Part of the complexity of studying women’s work is the impossibility of separating waged and unwaged work. Piecework and “sweated” labor are important components in examining women’s experiences with sewing, but they largely fall out of the scope of this project. 4 altered the boundaries of feminine activity and, consequently, necessitated a reinterpretation of how sewing functioned in women’s lives. Situated in the context of the Progressive Era, the successful suffrage movement, and the rise of modernism, between 1900 and 1930, this thesis argues that sewing was given new meaning by women while factory owners and proponents of domestic arts education simultaneously tried to reinscribe the craft as traditional women’s work. The essential question I ask is why sewing was maintained as “feminine work” given the rise of industrialization, modernization, and women’s politicization through the vote during the early twentieth century? And perhaps more importantly, how were gender expectations reflected in these vastly different contexts in which women sewed at home and in the factory? In order to understand how gender expectations are embedded in women’s labor and sewing specifically, ideas about how gender functions as a category of analysis must first be brought to bear.

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