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. In her foundational piece, “Gender: A Useful Category of
Historical Analysis,” Joan Wallach Scott establishes that gender norms are hardly forces of nature, but are instead denotations of “cultural constructions” imposed on men and women as a method of organization, and often, to fulfill social needs.4 In an article celebrating the twentieth anniversary of that now famous piece, Scott clarified her approach and asserted: “gender is about asking historical questions: it is not a pragmatic or methodological treatise. It is above all an invitation to think critically about how the meanings of sexed bodies are produced, deployed, and changed, that finally, is what
4 Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 32. 5
accounts for longevity.”5 If the traits of masculinity and femininity are not natural, the constructions imposed on “sexed bodies” must then reveal an inherent need, desire, or anxiety about how the different genders should and should not function. Embedded in these cultural constructions of appropriate gender identities, we can see how a particular society views men’s and women’s appropriate roles.
Sewing then becomes a significant lens through which to view gender because it has long been associated with particular notions of femininity. The craft has been established in western culture as women’s “natural” work and is often associated with domestic responsibility and maternity. But how were these feminine ties constructed?
Sarah Gordon has offered the most recent monograph of sewing and gender in Make it
Yourself: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930.6 In this work, Gordon analyzes home sewing in early twentieth-century America and argues that the craft could serve as a means of empowerment or a means of oppression depending on a woman’s economic, racial, or class circumstances. She provides an exhaustive study of how the meaning and cultural significance of sewing depended largely on a woman’s social and economic situation, but does not examine how sewing functioned outside of the home, and does not attempt to critically reevaluate the craft’s ties with images of “the good wife” and attentive mother. Nancy Page Fernandez also examines the utility that came with knowledge of sewing for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
“Innovations for Home Dressmaking and the Popularization of Stylish Dress,” Fernandez
5 Joan Wallach Scott, “AHR Forum: Unanswered Questions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December 2008): 1422-1429. 6 Gordon, Make it Yourself. 6
contends that knowledge of clothing construction allowed women to defy traditional boundaries of taste in dress and participate more fully in the public realm. Fernandez informs my understanding of the differences between cultural expectations and social adaptations of sewing, yet she too only examines the craft as it was practiced in the
American home.7 A number of Gordon and Fernandez’s points are supported by articles in Barbara Burman’s edited edition: The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption, and
Home Dressmaking.8 Taken as a whole, Burman’s volume argues that sewing has often been a site of defining and redefining gender identity, but none of her articles seek to answer how sewing represents gender identity when it is removed from the setting of the home.
While these works build a useful historiographical context to examine the different motivations for sewing and to understand how sewing became identified as a feminine pursuit, they do not analyze how these associations with femininity were both challenged and maintained as sewing moved outside of the home and into the factory.
Historian Judith G. Coffin, however, has found that the sewing machine was gendered as
“feminine” in the context of sweated labor and the growing garment industry, in her article, “Consumption, Production, and Gender: The Sewing Machine in Nineteenth
Century France” and fills in an important piece of this historiographic puzzle.9 While her study focuses on an earlier time period and an entirely different continent, her assertion
7 Nancy Page Fernandez, “Innovations for Home Dressmaking and the Popularization of Stylish Dress,” Journal of American Culture 17 (1994): 23-33. 8 Barbara Burman, ed., The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption, and Home Dressmaking (New York: Berg Publishers, 1999). 9 Judith G. Coffin, “Consumption, Production, and Gender: The Sewing Machine in Nineteenth Century-France,” in Gender and Class and Modern Europe, ed. Laura L. Frader (Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 111-141. 7
that the sewing machine became an “icon of modern femininity” in the nineteenth century through a complex marketing scheme is helpful in understanding how the craft of sewing could also be seen as traditionally feminine, even in the context of factory labor.
Coffin argues that the sewing machine was gendered as feminine to dispel fears of women’s wage labor, and asserts: “Manufacturing these machines was men’s work, the advertisements insisted, but operating them was women’s.”10 Coffin’s analysis also highlights the difficulty of separating women’s waged and unwaged work and lays the foundation for my investigation of how sewing could function as a feminine craft in both the private household and masculine workplace. Her arguments that the Singer Sewing
Machine Company, an American based corporation similar in structure to the McCall
Company, which published Home Sewing Made Easy, masterfully crafted an advertisement agenda that gendered all sewing machines as female helps me to tie the circumstances of the European market and garment industry to American circumstances.
Implicit in Judith G. Coffin’s argument is that if the factory sewing machine was gendered feminine, then factory sewing could be a feminine pursuit. How then did moving women’s work from the home to the factory threaten traditional notions of women’s roles in the United States? In order to better understand the consequences of
American industrialization, we must first contextualize how American women’s work itself has been gendered throughout history.
The term “domestic sphere” is one that is perhaps over used and over simplified by historians, but it reflects the ideological boundaries of women’s work throughout
10 Ibid., 125. 8
American history. While certainly women have not been physically tied to the home in their economic pursuits, it has remained the center of women’s work for centuries, if not in practice then in idealized theory. Historian Jeanne Boydston establishes how the binary of domestic labor as a feminine responsibility and wage labor as a masculine pursuit became entrenched in perceptions of American men and women’s labor in Home and
Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic.11 Prior to industrialization in the United States, production took place in the home through the efforts of all family members. However, as Boydston points out, as industry grew and production moved outside the home, it created a society of opposites: the workplace, and the home, each effectively gendered as male and female, respectively. Although simplistic, this binary, Boydston argues, created the perception of the wife and mother as the “non-producer” and added to the notion that housework was an invisible force in the
American economic system. According to Boydston, the ideology of masculine and feminine labor became entrenched with the rise of early industry in the United States
Alice Kessler-Harris adds a new layer to this idea of the gendered workforce and discusses how these traditions were maintained through social and political policies in her study of economic fairness and equality in twentieth-century America. In her book, In
Pursuit of Equality: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-
Century America, Kessler-Harris argues that by the late nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century, ideas about women as wives and mothers, not workers, had been so deeply entrenched in society they helped to create and justify social policies limiting
11 Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 9
women’s economic independence and restricting their work opportunities.12 Using the term “gendered imagination,” Kessler-Harris describes how socially constructed ideas about women’s place in society created boundaries of where they should and should not work. By the early twentieth century, social politics like protective labor legislation institutionalized these ideal gender patterns and conceptions about the proper organization of society. With the rise of industry and the increasing need to recruit women into the work force, protective labor legislation was a tactic used to reinforce traditional order and keep working class women out of the workforce.
Maternalist advocates who celebrated women as the mothers of society especially advocated protective labor legislation because they saw factory work as threatening to the solidarity of the American family. Acting largely out of class interest, not so much in an effort to socially empower women, maternalists tended to be white, Protestant, middle class women who advocated for middle class social rights based on traditional gendered images of work and family and encouraged legislation that limited working class women.
While Kessler-Harris goes on to examine how this tradition of gendered work affected political and social policy through the late twentieth century, her observations of its manifestations in the early years of the century establish a framework around which this study is formed.13
12 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equality: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 13 The maternalist movement will be discussed in more depth in the third chapter, but its exact complexities escape the scope of this thesis. In this brief summary I draw from Alice Kessler Harris’s Pursuit of Equality, 15-16, but Allan Carlson in The “American Way:” Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 41-52 and Theda Skocpal, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992) also inform my understanding of the ironies of 10
As established by the theoretical assertions of Scott and the scholarly works of
Boydston and Kessler-Harris, systems of gendered labor as a social construction used to determine appropriate gender roles is a firmly entrenched tradition in the United States.
On the one hand, gendered expectations of work in the industrial era sought to confine women to the home and eject them from the corrupting forces of the factory, but on the other, technological innovations not only devalued domestic work and rendered it
“invisible” as Boydston puts it, but also necessitated women enter factories to work.14
These two contexts in which women sewed were fundamentally at odds with one another.
Factory sewing threatened the craft’s associations with motherhood and domesticity but home sewing was becoming increasingly unnecessary because of the success of the garment trade. In this context, sewing, as an industrial job and domestic responsibility, becomes a valuable way to view perceptions of gendered work and how these perceptions were maintained and disseminated during the rise of the garment industry in the early twentieth century.
The early twentieth century is an especially significant time to examine how economic and social transitions reinforced traditional terms of gendered labor. The gendered notions embedded in sewing came under especially significant fire during this era, as ready-made clothing became increasingly available in department stores and catalogs for cheap prices. Once sewing was a skill necessary to outfit the entire family, but the success of the garment industry revolutionized the ways in which Americans
maternalism. In the third chapter I will discuss how the ideas of maternalism empowered middle class women to sew as a means of bettering their communities, and I will use it as a framework for analyzing these middle class activities but I recognize the complicated nature of this movement. 14 Boydston, Home and Work, xx. 11
accessed clothing and called on women to enter factories in increasing numbers to work as machine operatives.15
Yet the success of the garment industry and changing patterns of women’s labor were not the only tensions Americans dealt with during this period of time. Historian
Stephen Diner calls the turn of the century an era where “all the rules had changed” in A
Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era.16 With the growth of industry, the rise of modernism, the suffrage movement, unprecedented immigration, and the Great
Migration north, social roles and gender identity was in flux. The social fabric was significantly altered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between the years of 1880 and 1930, some twenty-two million immigrants from eastern and southern
Europe came to the United States, while northern cities like Detroit, Chicago, and
Cleveland saw their African American populations double, triple, and quadruple.17 In the midst of the changing social make-up, women were granted the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the nineteenth amendment.18 When set in the context of growing industry, it is not surprising these dramatic social shifts created intense anxiety among the
American population.
15 Other significant works that inform my understanding of early twentieth century society and industry include: Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995); Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). 16 Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 1. 17 Jeffery E. Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization Education and European Immigrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1; Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 157. 18 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 12
The area of Northeast Ohio captures this significant transition in American social society and industry particularly well. An area composed of sixteen counties, Northeast
Ohio has an even mix of urban, suburban, and rural areas and encompasses the cities of
Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown. Once one of the most significant industrial centers in the Midwest, Cleveland has an especially rich economic history that has been largely overlooked in national scholarship. By the 1920s, Cleveland rivaled New York
City as the country’s top garment producer and was the fifth largest American city in terms of population.19 The city further offers rich immigrant and African American history. In this time frame, Cleveland saw a three hundred and eight percent growth in its
African American population, and had the third largest percentage (thirty percent) of foreign-born peoples of any American city.20 With the social makeup of the city changing at a rapid pace, Cleveland offers a strong example of the social transition occurring in early twentieth-century America.
In addition to social transformation, Cleveland was simultaneously undergoing economic transformation. In terms of industry, the city was a national leader in the automobile and automotive parts manufacturing, iron, steel, and rivaled New York as the nation’s most significant garment producer. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, Cleveland employed more people in its industry than any other American city, except for Detroit.21 With the massive influx of foreign and African American
19 Marian J Morton, Women in Cleveland: An Illustrated History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995) 48; Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism, 7. 20 Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 157; Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism, 7. 21 Darwin H. Stapleton, “Industry,” The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, http://ech.case.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=I4 (accessed February 16, 2011). 13
peoples and the massive growth in industry, Cleveland perhaps best represents both the economic and social transformation of early twentieth century America.
But industry is only part of the story. Growing mechanization changed the ways in which people acquired goods, but also necessitated a change in educational objectives to reflect the changes of the workforce. Established in the midst of the rise of the garment trade was the domestic arts movement. Although the ready-made industry increasingly rendered knowledge of complete clothing construction unnecessary, domestic arts classes taught sewing as a means of transmitting traditional cultural expectations of women’s work as home based, not factory based. While Northeast Ohio’s industrial centers are important, the region was also home to several educational centers and organizations that weigh heavily in this analysis. Founded in 1910 as part of the Lowry Normal School Bill chartering two teacher’s schools in Ohio, the Kent Normal School in Kent, Ohio was originally established as a teacher’s college. With enrollment comprised largely of women for its first few years of existence, the college offered a variety of gender specific courses that reflected the objectives of the domestic arts movement. By mid- century,
Kent Normal transformed into Kent State University, now home to one of the nation’s top fashion design schools and to an impressive collection of sewing records, textbooks, and journals. In addition to higher education, Northeast Ohio also boasts a number of rural and suburban private and public schools that illustrate curriculum standards for working class, middle class, and upper class students. Clubs and organizations are also well represented in the region. With one of the country’s first 4-H extension clubs and a 14
number of middle and working class sewing clubs, Northeast Ohio furthermore has rich organizational history.
The geographical parameters in place, I turn now to details of historical methodology and the chapter layout. This study seeks to use both cultural and social historical analysis. The first two chapters will examine sewing from the top-down and from a cultural perspective. The first chapter will examine how growing mechanization in the garment trades affected women’s work and the ways in which clothing was acquired.
This chapter deals largely with white working class and immigrant women’s experiences in two of Cleveland’s best known garment factories: L.N. Gross, a producer of women’s garments, and Joseph and Feiss, one of the most significant producers of men’s suits in the early twentieth century. These companies and others in the region hired women in record numbers as the “natural” operatives of sewing. However, as this chapter will argue, the assumption that sewing was “natural” women’s work was problematic, as increasing mechanization drastically deskilled the craft and thrust women into the lowest paid and least skilled positions. Furthermore, the growing popularity of ready-made clothing forced skilled dressmakers and milliners out of work. The shift from custom made to ready-made clothing redefined women’s work in the sewing trades from a skilled to a deskilled occupation.
The second chapter builds on this context and examines why, given the growth of ready made clothing and the deskilled nature of the sewing trades, women were still taught to sew in schools. The domestic arts movement was nationally organized in 1899 and quickly became a fixture in American schools. Linked to Progressive reform, the 15
movement’s growth and popularity paralleled the growth of the garment industry.
Although not focused solely on sewing, the classes organized during this movement encouraged young women to master sewing skills at a time when knowledge of clothing construction was becoming rapidly obsolete. Given the fact that the sewing trades had been markedly deskilled, this chapter argues that sewing education did not seek to train young women for work in the sewing trades, but instead trained them to embrace domestic responsibility and adhere to accepted standards of tasteful dress. Here, I engage in a cultural analysis of why sewing remained a fixture in education at this significant moment of history. This chapter examines largely middle class girls’ experiences in public and private schools in Cleveland and the surrounding areas and uses class notebooks, textbooks, and educational surveys to argue that sewing lessons encouraged women to stay out of the workforce and hone their domestic skills.
With the cultural expectations for sewing established, the third chapter examines sewing from the bottom-up. Sewing in the factory and in the classroom had vastly different objectives, but women who chose to sew did not necessarily adhere any of these expectations. This chapter will illustrate how women in different social circumstances were active negotiators in the debate over what sewing would mean and how it would function in their lives. Because it is impossible to make generalizations across class and ethnic lines, I offer three case studies that analyze how African American, rural, and middle class women used the craft to reinterpret cultural conduct codes. Limited to only a few job opportunities, African American women with sewing skills possessed a marked advantage to establish themselves in Cleveland’s growing black professional community 16
and used their skills to climb the occupational ladder. Similarly, for women in rural areas and girls in 4-H clubs, sewing skills were essential for “making due” on the family farm and offered opportunities for personal expression and control over family finances.
Finally, drawing on several historians’ theories of maternalism and the meaning of women’s club activism, this chapter will argue that middle class women involved in clubs used sewing as a means of influencing the civic sphere both before and after women got the vote. Ultimately, I will conclude that while cultural expectations gendered sewing as a feminine and domestic endeavor, women did not always adhere to such boundaries.
From the years 1900 to 1930 the United States underwent a remarkable social and economic transformation, both of which are particularly evident in Northeast Ohio. Yet often in times of transition, the terms of gender are renegotiated. The following chapters will analyze how sewing functioned as an impetus for change among women in varying circumstances in Northeast Ohio. Functioning as building blocks of sorts, the chapters of this thesis build upon one another to show how sewing simultaneously represented cultural tradition and social change.
CHAPTER I
“A Woman’s Paradise:” Women and Garment Industry Labor
Fewer events have had a more profound impact on American daily life than the emergence of the ready-to-wear industry in the late nineteenth century. Ready-made clothes available off the rack in department stores and catalogs freed many women from spending hours sewing apparel for themselves and their families, but it hardly eliminated sewing from their lives.
As shown by the works of historians Sarah Gordon, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jeanne Bodyston, sewing had been established as an essential aspect of women’s domestic responsibility, and garment industry leaders depended heavily upon this assumption of gendered work to justify employing women as machine operatives in factories.1 As apparel production became increasingly industrialized, women were called upon to operate sewing machines and perform handwork finishing and basting garments because sewing was seen as a feminine pursuit.2
1 Please refer to pages 4-5 of the introduction 2 Gordon, Make it Yourself, 2; Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work.
17 18
The rise of the garment industry thus created a tension between traditional views of women’s participation in sewing and the modern application of the craft. Once seen as a home-based and maternal activity, sewing in the context of industry was literally moved out of the home and into a factory setting where young, often single, women operated heavy machinery and participated in very little actual needle and thread work.
Furthermore, the growing industry posed a serious threat to dressmakers and milliners, highly skilled and trained women who earned a living custom making garments for customers. This chapter will argue that the trend towards industrialization and mechanization substantially deskilled sewing, but industry leaders still relied on women to act as the “natural” operatives of the craft.
Origins of the Garment Industry
The American garment industry first emerged in the mid-nineteenth century after massive amounts of young men’s measurements were taken for the production of uniforms during the Civil War. Likewise, need for ready-made sailor’s uniforms, the
Gold Rush, and westward expansion produced homogeneous male markets with little 19
access to tailors or home-sewers and further fueled the young industry.1 Although production of women’s clothing took longer to appear, due in large part to fluctuating styles and the fact that many women made their own clothes, the industry made its debut by the 1870s. By 1910, the United States garment industry boasted approximately
400,000 employees, with sixty-one percent engaged in men’s apparel manufacture and thirty-nine percent in women’s.2 Leading the way as industrial garment production centers were New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, Ohio.3
Because the women’s ready-made industry was significantly younger, as a general rule, in 1910 most women’s garments were still produced in either small shops or at home. Many women had previously participated in clothing production by taking in piecework from manufacturers, which allowed them to work from home and put cutout pieces together into a finished product for little pay. What historian Eileen Boris called
“invisible threads,” these women working from home played a significant role in the industrialization process.4 Although the practice of homework hardly disappeared with the emergence of large factories, by 1916 clothing production had become remarkably centralized with industries employing one hundred to two hundred people, with some employing upwards of one thousand. Due in part to the national trend toward urbanization and massive immigration, Cleveland’s industry saw the largest growth of any city, with the number of garment workers doubling between 1900 and 1910. By
1 Edna Bryner, Cleveland Education Survey: The Garment Trades (Cleveland, OH: The Survey Committee of the Cleveland Foundation, 1916), 17-18; Rob Schorman, “Ready or Not: Custom-Made Ideals and Ready-Made Clothes in Late 19th Century America” Journal of American Culture 19 (1996): 111–112. 2 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 12. 3 Ibid., 18. 4 Boris, Home To Work, 10-12. 20
1916, the city ranked eleventh nationally in the production of men’s clothing and fourth in the production of women’s, making it one of the most notable producers of the
American ready-made apparel.5
Like the rest of the country, Cleveland’s garment industry emerged in the mid- nineteenth century and peaked during the 1920s, when it rivaled New York City as one of the nation’s most significant garment manufacturers.6 During this time period, the industry employed approximately seven percent of the city’s workforce.7 Cleveland was home to many small production shops, but by 1910, boasted twelve that employed between two hundred and one thousand people. Among the most notable shops were
Joseph & Feiss and L.N. Gross. Jewish merchants devoted to the production of men’s suits founded Joseph & Feiss in 1845, which employed about one thousand people at its height in 1920. The company produced around one thousand-eight hundred men’s suits a day when operating at capacity. Louis N. Gross, a Russian immigrant who specialized in women’s shirtwaists founded L.N. Gross in 1913. The shop employed about one thousand-two hundred in Cleveland but also had branch factories in New York City,
Kent, Ohio, and Hartford, Connecticut. L.N. Gross revolutionized women’s ready-to- wear fashion with the “Wirthmor” dress line that sold all over the country for only one dollar.8 The early twentieth century proved to be a watershed era for Cleveland’s garment manufacturers, as eighty percent of the some ten-thousand garment workers in 1910
5 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 19. 6 Morton, Women in Cleveland, 48. 7 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 19. 8 William V. Gross, “History of L.N. Gross” L.N. Gross Company Records, Series II, 1898-1984, MSS 3823, Container 1, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (Hereafter cited as William Gross, “History of L.N. Gross”). 21
labored in large, industrialized shops and made-up the second largest industry in the city behind the manufacture of foundry and machine shop products.9
Industrial Sewing: Women’s “Natural” Trade?: Gendered Notions of Industrial Labor
Clearly, the garment industry experienced significant growth during the period between 1910 and 1920. Yet paramount to this growth was the employment of women.
Edna Bryner’s 1916 Cleveland Education Survey of the garment trades found that for every three men employed in the production of men’s and women’s clothing, five women were employed. The survey further found that no other industry employed more women.10 Various local publications confirm Bryner’s findings and report Joseph &
Feiss’s employment body comprised of sixty-sixty percent women and that L.N. Gross’s
Kent plant employed only female operatives.11 Indeed, by 1890 and the decades beyond, women were entering the labor force in record numbers. Due in part to a decline in birth rates and increase in life expectancy, and in part to technological advances made in household appliances, women entered the labor force as a means of filling their time as
9 Stanley Garfinkel, “Garment Industry,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, http://ech.case.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=GI (accessed June 23, 2010). 10 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 19, 49. 11 Morton, Women in Cleveland, 48; Roger J. Di Paolo, Rooted in Kent: 101 Tales from the Tree City (Kent, OH: Kent Historical Society Press, 2009), 70. 22
well as a means of earning wages to support their families’ material wants in an era of growing consumption.12
The growing garment industry clearly relied on this surge of women’s labor.
Bryner indicated the trend of employing women in positions as operatives was likely because sewing was seen as “woman’s traditional job.” This notion is illustrated by data collected during the 1910 census indicating that one in every five women in Cleveland entered some branch of a sewing trade for at least a short period. The sewing trades included those who worked in factories, but also encompassed dressmakers or seamstresses, milliners, and tailors.13 Although Bryner denied that sewing was
“instinctual,” she indicated that it was “traditional” because it “bears an intimate relation to the home woman’s traditional work of making clothing for the family.”14 Prior to the rise of the garment industry many women certainly did make clothing for their families, but this connection to domestic responsibility is problematic when discussing sewing in a factory setting. As will be discussed in detail later and as Bryner subsequently points out, sewing for the home and for industry required immensely different skills. While the former called for creativity in design and a mastery of a myriad of techniques, industrial work often called for proficiency in only one skill and discouraged implementation of any innovative or unique ideas.15 Furthermore, factory sewing effectively propelled women into a public setting and thus challenged any feminine or maternal ideas
12 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 110. 13 Bryner, Dressmaking and Millinery, 12. 14 Ibid., 13. 15 Many of my sources discussed specialization of factory sewing. The most helpful however was Bryner, The Garment Trades, 24-27 and Daniel E. Bender, “’Too Much Distasteful Masculinity:’ Historicizing Sexual Harassment in the Garment Sweatshop and Factory,” Journal of Women’s History 15 (Winter 2004): 97. 23
associated with home based sewing. Historian Nancy Green highlights how the view of sewing as “women’s work” bears a close relationship to the practice of paternalism, the male ownership of women’s labor, and argues that the garment trade is indeed one of the clearest examples of “capitalism’s use of patriarchal schemas.” She, like many other women’s historians, draws parallels between women’s biology and prescribed roles in society,16 and links women’s reproductive functions with her productive ones help explain how women’s garment work could be gendered a feminine pursuit.17 This binary is helpful in explaining the motivation behind employing women as operatives, but a further discussion of industrial skill sets is necessary to illustrate how gender relationships were formed in a factory setting.
One of the paramount differences between sewing for family and for mass production was the practice of section work, which characterized the way garment manufacture operated by 1916. Section work functioned like an assembly line in an automobile factory. Instead of having one worker complete an entire garment, individual workers might only attach a collar or a sleeve. This method of production called for a high degree of specialization and allowed for significantly less training, saving a factory both time and money, and allowing for more efficient production. An employee need only be proficient in one skill, rather than know how to assemble an entire garment.18
To a large degree, the adoption of the section system drastically deskilled sewing as a discipline and seemed to contradict the idea that the craft was “natural” because of
16 Here, I draw heavily from Gisela Bock’s article: “Women’s history and gender history: aspects of an international debate,” in Gender and History 1 (1989): 7-30. 17 Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work, 162-163. 18 Ibid., 164. 24
women’s previous experiences. The founder of L.N. Gross Company claimed that he had invented the method of section work while working for a company in New York City and introduced it to the Cleveland market when he opened his own factory in 1913. Gross pointed out how before the section system was implemented “few women could be used in the industry, due to their inability to make a complete garment.”19 Ironically, Gross credited this deskilled system of production as the impetus that allowed employment of female operatives. Likewise, Bryner contradicted her own rationalization and suggested
“the increasing use of the section work system indicates that the clothing industry will form a continually expanding field of employment for women.”20 These observations about women’s incompetence for clothing production pose a substantial threat to
Bryner’s original reasoning for their employment in the industry. On the one hand, women were seen as “natural” sewers given their biology and traditional roles in the home, yet on the other, they were seen as inept and could only be incorporated into the factory system once the craft had been markedly deskilled.
An article written by Theresa Young, a member of the Junior Department of the
Kent Woman’s club, appearing in the Kent Tribune further illustrates how the factory significantly deskilled sewing. The report described the operations of Kent’s L.N. Gross plant and focused on each machine, how it operated, and what it produced. Hardly any mention was made about the actual operatives, beyond the fact that there were one hundred and fifty girls employed. Young gave a rundown of nine different machines
19 Louis N. Gross, “The Story of My Life,” L.N. Gross Company Records, Series II, 1898-1984, MSS 3823, Container 1, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (Hereafter cited as Louis Gross, “The Story of My Life”). 20 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 50. 25
ranging from those used for plain sewing, hemstitching, buttonhole making, and embroidery, among others.21 This description of industrial operations insinuated that minimal human labor was required, and employees were there only to run the machine.
Historian Terry Smith discusses the phenomena of replacing human labor with technology during the 1920s and 1930s in his book, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America. Although Smith does not discuss the garment industry specifically, his analysis of Henry Ford’s automobile plants is helpful in seeing how
“workers were adjusted to fit machine requirements or discarded; machines, not people, set the pace…”22 Smith underlines how industry in general was predominately machine oriented, making technology, not people the active producers. This idea muddles the logic behind labeling women as “natural” sewing machine operators. If machines were the agent of production, the gender of the employee should have no bearing on how that production is achieved. Yet women predominately ran machines based on former notions of sewing as a feminine task, despite the fact they were hardly interacting with a needle and thread.
As the section system illustrates, women were increasingly relegated to deskilled positions while men occupied the more skilled jobs. This trend was due in large part to the arrival of Eastern European Jewish men who dominated skilled cutting and designing trades and whose religious codes necessitated a separation of male and female workspaces.23 Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, factory work in garment industries
21 Theresa Young, “Kent is Home of One of Largest Dress Factories,” Kent Tribune, February 2, 1935. 22 Smith, Making the Modern, 32. 23 Bender, “’Too Much Distasteful Masculinity,” 97. 26
was divided into five major positions: designing, cutting, sewing, pressing, and examining. Designing, cutting, and examining, the most skilled positions, were almost always reserved for men, while women made up the majority of machine sewers and hand operatives.24 Bryner notes how the employment of women as designers was often opposed because they failed “to realize that garments must be made of materials of predetermined cost and must not be unduly difficult to make if they are to be sold at a reasonable price.”25 Chief in this complaint is the idea that women lacked knowledge of economy. Yet as will be discussed in subsequent chapters, expertise in thrift and budget planning was heavily emphasized in most domestic arts classes for women and seen as a primary duty for women in the household.
While women were seen as unfit for skilled positions in the garment industry, they were also seen as undeserving of fair pay. Based on the nineteenth century tradition of the “family wage,” the money necessary to support family members, generally earned by male members only, women were paid less in large part because industry leaders assumed, or believed, they should be supported by their families.26 In 1916, approximately seventy percent of women working in Cleveland made between eight and ten dollars a week, while ninety-eight percent of their male counterparts made between fifteen and twenty-five dollars a week.27 Joseph & Feiss reported “pitiful” wages for their female employees, with the minimum per week posted at six dollars and twenty-five
24 Ibid. 25 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 29, 49-51. 26 Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 8. 27 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 58, 61. 27
cents, but the average at ten dollars.28 Alice Kessler-Harris reports in her book, A
Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences, that a woman needed to earn between nine and eleven dollars in 1910 to keep from starving and freezing.29 While the average woman in Cleveland met this minimal standard, their scant pay flirted dangerously close to poverty levels. In large part, such drastic differences in pay were based on notions of what women needed, and were often paid according to their most minimal needs. Industry leaders assumed women were supported by a male family member, be it a husband or father, and often saw paying women smaller wages as a way of protecting family needs by encouraging them to focus on domestic duties, not wage labor.30 These pay differentials not only reveal how women’s wage labor was undervalued, but they also reveal factory owners’ contradictory role in constructing systems of gendered labor by calling on women to sew based on traditional notions of feminine labor while simultaneously discouraging their presence in the factory.
Wages and skill were not the only aspects of industrial work that became gendered by the mid-twentieth century. During the push for unionization in the 1910s and
1920s, leaders increasingly saw female operatives as less threatening than male workers.
In 1917, factory owners in Cleveland described women as more “adaptable” and “easier to manage,” than male employees.31 Several historians describe how women were largely excluded from union activity organized by male employees who saw them as temporary
28 Boyd Fisher, “Clothcraft Shops… Dr. Taylor Gives Credit,” Joseph & Feiss Company Records, 1847-1960, MSS 3886, Container 4, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (hereafter cited as Fisher, “Clothcraft Shops… Dr. Taylor Gives Credit”). 29 Kessler-Harris, A Woman’s Wage, 12. 30 Ibid., 10-11. 31 Bryner, The Garment Trades 49. 28
workers ignoring their primary roles in the home. Further divided by class and ethnic tensions, women had problems being taken seriously as union members and launching successful strikes.32 In 1910 only one and a half percent of female industrial workers were organized in trade unions. Although this number increased six and a half percent by
1920,33 largely thanks to garment workers organizations, women in Cleveland were reluctantly accepted into unions such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers
Union and often separated into gender-specific local groups. While Cleveland women participated in strikes, like the cloakmakers’ walk out in June of 1911 where a thousand women struck along with four thousand men, the strike ultimately failed after nineteen weeks. Despite their participation in such demonstrations, women were seen as secondary members of unions and unlikely agitators. Unlike women in Massachusetts and New
York, who managed to become forceful players in the push for organization, by 1920 the women’s labor movement in Cleveland reached a stage of “relative powerlessness.”34
By the mid to late 1920s, many factory owners around Northeast Ohio saw female operatives as icons of “loyal” laborers. A survey of the Joseph & Feiss Company in the early 1920s noted how there was a “much larger opportunity for social service, through management, in dealing with girl needle-workers than there can possibly be in a plant dealing mainly with husky and oftentimes obstreperous men,”35 referring to the apparent malleability and higher degree of discipline among female employees. One newspaper
32 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 152-153; 33 Ibid. 34 Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 10; Morton, Women in Cleveland, 48-49. 35 Fisher, “Clothcraft Shops… Dr. Taylor Gives Credit.” 29
article appearing in the Kent Tribune in 1930 likened the L.N. Gross plant to “a woman’s paradise,” while another published in 1926 discussed at length how female employees worked in “harmony” and with “fraternal spirit.” Joseph Matthews, the manager of L.N.
Gross’s Kent plant, was quoted in the article stating: “there is not one employee but what is absolutely loyal,” which was undoubtedly “the result of satisfaction because of the treatment given to them, and the desire to reciprocate the courtesy shown to them.”36
These statements refer, in part, to the view that men, not women, were agitators for unionization, but further allude to a growing concern over women’s place in industry.
Given the context of social reform and Progressive regulation, the reference to a factory as a “woman’s paradise” explicitly challenged reformers pushing for protective labor legislation on that grounds that factory work was hazardous to women’s reproductive health and moral integrity, and threatened their roles as mothers and future generations of children who would suffer the consequences of having a working mother.37 Alice Kessler-Harris points out how protective labor legislation was supported by the 1920s as a “compliment to unionization for men.” Male dominated unions hoped government intervention would defend women workers and free labor unions from the task,38 further fueling the desire to limit women’s participation in both industry and unionization. Yet the assertion that the factory was a “woman’s paradise” combated both the threat of protective labor laws and the threat of unionization by suggesting that the
36 “Looking Over Kent Industries,” Kent Tribune, January 3, 1930; L.N. Gross Company Employees Maintain an Unusual Fraternal Spirit and Harmony in Work and Play,” Kent Tribune, Civic and Anniversary Edition, 1926. 37 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 185. 38 Ibid., 204. 30
garment industry was not only a perfectly acceptable, even ideal, place for women to work but furthermore, that employees saw no need for organization because they were so well treated.
Industry and Immigrants
While the trend towards deskilled industrial labor ushered record numbers of
American women into the factory, it also attracted newly arrived immigrants. Between the years of 1890 and 1930 over twenty-two million immigrants came to the United
States, largely from Eastern Europe. By 1920, Cleveland ranked third in the nation, behind only New York and Philadelphia, with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents, slightly over thirty percent.39 Certainly, the success of American mass production owes a great debt to immigrant workers. Many of Cleveland’s shops were founded and owned by Jewish men of Eastern European descent. Hungarian Jews founded H. Black & Co. in late the nineteenth century after adapting European patterns for the ready-made industry. Similarly, Kaufman Koch, a Jewish merchant, founded what would later become Joseph & Feiss.40 Louis Gross migrated to the United States in 1890 from Montasteristch, former Ukraine. The garment trade was a safe choice for
39 Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism, 5. 40 Garfinkel, “Garment Industry,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. 31
immigrants because shops could be set up with little capital, and many had experience as tailors in their home countries. Furthermore, many newly arrived immigrants had family or friends already established in Cleveland and other major American cities, who could get them jobs as laborers, and thanks to the changing nature of the industry, skills needed for employment were learned quickly and easily.41
While immigrant men were largely responsible for opening shops, immigrant and first generation American women were largely responsible for production.42 Edna Bryner found that four -fifths of men and two-fifths of women working in the trade were of foreign descent.43 While the industry clearly relied on foreign labor, more immigrant men than women were employed. The reason for this is likely due to the language barrier and strict schedules employees faced in many factories. As more immigrant workers flooded
American cities looking for work, factory owners increasingly demanded English be spoken in the work place as part of a larger national agenda set on “Americanizing” foreign laborers.44 Joseph & Fiess, who employed predominately immigrant women, insisted English be spoken during working hours. The company collaborated with the
Cleveland Board of Education and arranged for five public school teachers to conduct language classes three nights a week. Foremen ordered those not fluent to attend.45
Furthermore, immigrant women had the option of working in domestic service, the other highest employing occupation in Cleveland. Historian David Katzman argues immigrant
41 Bender, “Too Much Distasteful Masculinity,” 98. 42 Ibid., 98. 43 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 50. 44 Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism, 4-5. 45 “The Service Department, October 17,1914” Joseph & Feiss Company Records, 1847-1960, MSS 3886, Container 4, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (Hereafter cited as “The Service Department, October 17, 1914,” Joseph & Feiss Company Records). 32
women often chose to work as servants because “factory work posed language barriers and was incompatible with raising children.” Furthermore, the shift to live-out, or day work, allowed women to work part time and still have time to fulfill their duties as housewives and mothers.46 Nevertheless, of those immigrant women who did work in industry, most were engaged in hand sewing, rather than as machine operatives. During her survey, Bryner noted how hand sewers were Russian, Italian, and Hungarian, with many Italians performing handwork.47 The reason for this was likely based on previous experience. Machine work was largely reserved for Americans, because they were native speakers of English.
Joseph & Feiss represents one factory reliant on immigrant labor, yet seemingly ambivalent about their capacity as quality citizens. While making employees learn
English was largely a means of promoting efficiency, the company nonetheless saw itself as responsible for transforming immigrants into Americans. One foreman noted how
“foreign people who have come to work immediately upon arriving in this country and who have been noticeably remiss about their personal standards of cleanliness have been observed to respond almost immediately to the influence of a clean factory,” suggesting that the state of the factory inspired them to change their personal habits. Bathrooms with showers were supplied as incentive to wash throughout the day, and discard their
“foreign” habits for American values of cleanliness.48 Along with maintaining good hygiene, women were encouraged to subscribe to American standards of morality. While
46 David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 51-52. 47 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 50. 48 “The Service Department, October 17,1914” Joseph & Feiss Company Records. 33
no formal dress code was imposed, foremen lost no opportunity “to educate employees, especially girls, to sensible standards of dress.” Often times, feminine ideals and behavioral expectations were embedded in clothing choices.49 Immigrant women were subject to American standards of taste, especially when working in a factory, as this was seen as an unnatural and unhealthy place for women.50 Furthermore, the Service
Department at Joseph & Feiss provided female employees with a series of pamphlets meant to help them become better mothers and women. These leaflets included “Lessons in the Proper Feeding of the Family,” and “What Children Should Eat,” and how to become a “Successful Woman.”51 The titles of these publications indicate employers perceived a degree of ineptitude among their female employees and further reflect the company’s anxiety over women’s dual roles in the home and in the factory.
While the company relied on their foreign workforce, they saw immigrant operatives as a group that needed special training outside of their production duties.
Aside from the English classes and pamphlets, the company organized a variety of activities including baseball games and choral lessons, and went so far as to provide their employees with a traditional American lunch of sandwiches, a piece of fruit, and cake.52
Historian Lizabeth Cohen discusses how these “Americanization” tactics were often used in an attempt to break-up worker’s ethnic solidarity between 1910 and 1919.53 The practice of enforcing good hygiene, appropriate dress, and mastery of English was not
49 Jenna Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2001), 2. 50 Carlson, The “American Way,” 9. 51 “The Service Department, October 17,1914,” Joseph & Feiss Company Records. 52 Ibid. 53 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 165. 34
only meant to enhance the company’s efficiency, but was more so a strategy to rid immigrant workers of their ethnic attachments, making them less of a threat to factory owners and to Americans at large.
Yet not all of Cleveland’s garment industries were flooded with foreign laborers.
A study of the operatives at L.N. Gross’s Kent branch shows that most of the employees there were of native parentage.54 Furthermore, company records indicate no such
“Americanization” tactics like those used at Joseph & Feiss and make no mention of immigrant workers. The location of L.N. Gross’s Kent branch likely contributes to the phenomenon of a native majority. Whereas Joseph & Fiess was located only blocks away from the Warehouse District, on St. Clair Street in the heart of Cleveland, L.N. Gross’s
Kent plant was located on North River street in the quiet rural town of Kent. The flood of
New Immigration brought most to urban centers, where it was easier to find employment and where many already had friends and family established. Both Nancy Green and
Lizabeth Cohen discussed how important ethnic neighborhoods were to immigrant survival, and how ethnic enclaves often banded together to ensure none of their countrymen became burdens to American society.55 Cleveland was home to many such immigrant neighborhoods and could provide newly arrived peoples with an instant network of support.
The variation of native and immigrant labor however is not always so cut and dry.
Green’s analysis of immigrant workers in New York City’s garment industry found many
54 "1930 United States Federal Census,” database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestory.com: accessed 4 November 2010) 55 Cohen, Making a New Deal, 30; Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work, 210. 35
immigrant men and women from widely different backgrounds who found employment in the garment trades. She attributes this to the fact that the trade calls for low capital and low labor barriers. But furthermore, she argues employment in the industry can be characterized as a “single-generation phenomenon,” where newly arrived immigrants replace old immigrant workers.56 Green’s examination of immigrant labor in the garment industry stretches over the longue durée, from the very inception of the industry, up to the post World War II era, a tactic which lends itself to the observation of subtle trends.
Such shifts are not apparent in this study, as the time period stretches over only a mere two decades, and bears witness to only one generation of immigrant activity. Her analysis is nonetheless helpful in grounding garment production as a logical “choice” of employment among immigrants because of the wide availability of jobs and the ease of learning the necessary skills, further illustrating the changing nature of sewing in an industrial setting.57
Efficiency: Breeding Consumption and Anxiety
The trend towards deskilled labor allowed Cleveland’s garment industries to play an active role as efficient mass producers of clothing. Joseph & Feiss and L.N. Gross kept
56 Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work, 217-218. 57 Ibid., 184-185. 36
detailed records of their production and took efficiency very seriously. When running at capacity, Joseph & Feiss manufactured eighteen hundred men’s coats a day. The company was so concerned with achieving the highest degree of streamlined production, that they had an efficiency expert come in to examine its manufacturing techniques in the early 1920s. While the report does not indicate whether this was Frederick Taylor, the nation’s preeminent authority on efficiency and advocator of time and motion studies to maximize worker productivity, the expert who did visit the factory called it an “example of modern methods,”58 and an excellent example of Taylorization. In order to encourage their employees to work quickly and stay motivated throughout the day, foremen at
Joseph & Feiss kept scoreboards of their department’s production. These scoreboards recorded the total number of garments completed, along with a daily goal. Quite literally, mass-production became a game for industrial leaders, and the chief players in the game were female operatives.
Like the women who worked for L.N. Gross, those who worked for Joseph &
Feiss participated in section work and were largely machine operators. As established earlier, the nature of this work was increasingly characterized as deskilled or semiskilled and the foremen at Joseph & Feiss preferred employees to have little or no background in sewing because they could “be taught the single operation very quickly and accurately if they [had] no previous work habits to discard.”59 Historian Nancy Green outlines how during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what was viewed as the ideal
“skills” to have for sewing shifted and was often dependent on the type of garment and
58 Fisher, “Clothcraft Shops… Dr. Taylor Gives Credit,” 1. 59 Ibid., 6. 37
styles being created. Despite the varying definitions of “skill,” she notes how increasingly, the term came to mean “speed and accuracy.”60 This is certainly true of those playing the production game at Joseph & Feiss. If we borrow Green’s interpretation of skill in industry, we can see how it also helped production methods in a round about way. Although a couple of days would be spent training new hires who lacked any knowledge of sewing, once they learned the company’s production techniques, and became proficient enough to perform such tasks quickly, they became parts of the well- oiled machine. Furthermore, employing women with no skills reinforced how work in garment factories was markedly different from any “traditional” application of sewing.
Like Joseph & Feiss, company leaders of L.N. Gross were also greatly concerned with efficient production methods. Louis Gross claimed in his autobiography that he developed the section method after observing “how wastefully things were being done and how little ambition existed anywhere to improve on those inefficient ways.”61 Gross began as a garment cutter in 1891 in New York City, and after a couple decades of training, became proficient in the trade. With his years of experience, Gross saw an opportunity to make money by mastering the efficiency and mass-production of clothing.
He moved to Cleveland in 1913, the same year Henry Ford mastered the assembly line technique,62 to open his own factory and “make efficiency [his] life’s work.”63 Likely inspired by growing “Fordism,” Gross was paramount in turning Cleveland’s garment industries into centers of mass-production. When running at capacity, his plants
60 Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work, 177. 61 Louis Gross, “The Story of My Life,” 17. 62 Smith, Making the Modern, 18. 63 Louis Gross, “The Story of My Life,” 18. 38
manufactured over six thousand dresses a day.64 L.N. Gross’s pragmatic production techniques set the pace for other area garment manufacturers and signified the emerging transition from production to consumption in Cleveland.
While Gross masterfully altered his manufacturing methods to reach new heights in efficiency, he did the same with his sales techniques. Traditionally, garment shops sent salesmen to individual retailers to negotiate contracts and receive orders one at a time.
This procedure not only limited the physical region in which a single factory could sell, but it also was incredibly inefficient. Gross implemented a new method of sales and sent letters instead of people to regional merchants. This tactic saved the company both money and time between contracts. With this new method, merchants and store retailers arranged contracts with Gross for an agreed upon shipment of garments each week of the year. Using this technique, Gross claimed his business grew five times in only two years.65
The streamlining of sales techniques echoes the trend of streamlining production techniques and fleshes out the picture of the larger economic transition occurring at the time. Crucial to every mass-producing industry was an effective marketing plan that encouraged consumption of the newly produced goods. Historian David Hounshell describes this phenomenon as the transition from the “American system to mass production” and argues that the perfection of production techniques was only half of the transformation process. In addition to efficient production, Hounshell asserts, an efficient marketing campaign was crucial for selling mass-produced goods. He discusses a
64 Ibid., 5. 65 Ibid., 44-45. 39
successful promotional program implemented by General Motors’ marketing executives in the mid-1920s that emphasized mechanical improvements to their automobiles, introduced annual model changes, and marketed individual products for different income groups to illustrate how manufacturers relied on the creative advertising campaigns to sell their over-produced goods.66
Like the relationship between the assembly line and section work, garment manufacturers also adopted successful marketing techniques used by the automobile industry to sell their clothing. By the late 1920s, L.N. Gross offered a line of children’s clothing and dozens of styles of women’s frocks, in a variety of sizes, prints, and colors.67
His line of “Wirthmor” dresses was the company’s most popular item and retailed for only a dollar under the slogan “one dollar- worth more.”68 This line was first conceptualized in 1914, a period when the women’s ready-made clothing was largely seen as sub-par in quality. Gross sought to earn women’s trust by including coupons that guaranteed quality and offered a full refund if the purchaser was not completely satisfied.
Indeed, during the early twentieth century, the transition from custom-made to ready- made clothing was hardly smooth. Customers were reluctant to sacrifice perfect fit for the sometimes awkward and ill-fitting ready-made style. However, the introduction of half- sizes, long and short cuts, and aggressive advertising changed this.69 The remodeling of
66 David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 8-9. 67 L.N. Gross Scrapbook of Advertisements, 1928-1935, L.N. Gross Company Records, Series II, MSS 3823, Container 2, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (Hereafter cited as “Scrapbook of Advertisements, 1928-1935,” L.N. Gross Company Records). 68 William Gross, “History of L.N. Gross.” 69 Rob Schorman, “Ready or Not: Custom-Made Ideals and Ready-Made Clothes in Late 19th- Century America,” Journal of American Culture 19 (1996): 114-115. 40
both sales and manufacturing sought to increase efficiency on all ends, but most importantly, sought to make garments available to customers as quickly and inexpensively as possible, thus fueling the growing consumer culture.
While it is difficult to say exactly how much Gross’s business grew due to these new techniques, letters from retailers across the country attest to the success and popularity of L.N. Gross’s products. At the height of the “Wirthmor” line in the 1920s, the company sold to three thousand different stores in three thousand different cities in all corners of the country, from California, to Texas, New England, and the Midwest.70
According to a series of letters collected by L.N Gross and incorporated into a pamphlet called “The Proof,” many stores sold out of their products within hours of opening. C.R.
Edwards & Company, located in Spur, Texas, wrote to L.N. Gross demanding “we need more dresses at once!” Similarly, The Emerald, located in Arlington Heights, Illinois, stated the garments “sure brought a flock of women to our store- in fact it was necessary for us to employ additional sales people.”71 Demands for more dresses to appease a
“flock of women” provoke images of frenzied consumption. That dresses would fly off racks at a rapid pace suggests that women were not only consuming ready-made garments, but apparently had an insatiable appetite for them.
“The Proof” provides evidence of L.N. Gross’s success as a clothing manufacturer, but also illustrates the growing trend toward consumption. While women demanded ready-wear clothing, one retailer noted how “your dresses bring us the crowds
70 “The Proof,” L.N. Gross Company Records, Series II, 1898-1984, MSS 3823, Container 1, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (Hereafter cited as “The Proof,” L.N. Gross Company Records). 71 “The Proof,” L.N. Gross Company Records. 41
and we generally manage to sell them other items,” suggesting once crowds entered the store, it was easy to sell a variety of items.72 The emergence of the ready-to-wear industry was not an independent movement, but part of a larger shift toward mass-production of goods for consumption, as Hounsell illustrates with his analysis of the evolution from early Civil War armories to full blown Fordism.73 Although hardly the originators of the trend, Louis N. Gross and the leaders of the Joseph & Feiss Company played a significant role in adapting efficient mass-production techniques to Cleveland’s garment industry.
By advocating efficient production and sales techniques, these factory owners participated in the shift from an economy based on production to one based on consumption, and relied heavily on female machine operatives and consumers to do so.
Yet, inherent in times of transition is an anxiety over shifting societal roles and circumstances. With the emergence of consumer culture, came an apparent apprehension over women’s roles in society. Traditionally, women had been viewed as homemakers, but as more opportunities became available in factories, more women entered gainful employment. While the exact numbers of women who took jobs in Cleveland is difficult to determine, the national trend indicates a steady increase of general employment. The percent of women employed stood at sixteen percent in 1870, grew to twenty-one percent in 1900, and reached twenty-four percent by 1920.74 This shift in the labor force was a national occurrence and came after 1890 due in part to a drop in birth rate and subsequent lengthening of women’s life spans. Women who had shorter child rearing years and
72 Ibid. 73 Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 2. 74 Joseph A. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations: 1870-1920 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1929), 16. 42
outlived spouses turned to work to both fill their time and pay the bills. Improved technology further affected the rates with which women entered the workforce, as household production declined and women saved time and turned to ready-made clothing, groceries, soaps, and candles rather than make such items themselves.75
While certainly working outside of the home was not an entirely new trend, factory leaders in Cleveland expressed unease about the massive numbers of female employees and how they adjusted to the work place. A memo from Joseph & Feiss written in 1914 indicated that when women were employed, they had a mandatory meeting with a member of the Service Department “concerning the organization and her duties towards it, special stress being laid on the unfairness of trying to work in the factory and at home, because of the interference of the latter with the wage of the girl and the production of the firm,”76 as if to suggest women had to choose between running a household and working. Furthermore, leaders of Joseph & Feiss saw this conflict potentially interfering with efficient production. In her survey of the sewing trades, Edna
Bryner notes that many women entered the garment trades before getting married, which allowed them to focus on work and then focus on homemaking upon marriage.77 While this was true for many, a survey of L.N. Gross’s employees indicated that nearly half were married women, suggesting that several did have to find a balance between home
75 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: 109-110. 76 “The Clothcraft Shops, June 11, 1914,” Joseph & Feiss Company Records, 1847-1960, MSS 3886, Container 4, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (Hereafter cited as “The Clothcraft Shops, June 11, 1914,” Joseph & Feiss Company Records). 77 Bryner, Dressmaking and Millinery, 12. 43
and work.78 Nevertheless, increasingly, home was viewed as a place for consumption, while the factory was a place for production. The budding consumer society had yet to figure out how these two forces could merge.
The Decline of Skilled Sewing Trades
While the trend toward deskilled labor, mass-production, and new advertisement schemes helped to set the foundation for mass production and mass consumption, it posed a serious threat to dressmakers and milliners, highly skilled women who ruled the clothing industry before the rise of the ready-to-wear phenomenon. Dressmaking and millinery were seen as highly skilled crafts, unlike machine operation. The trade required years of formal training and apprenticeships, and was often considered a lifelong occupation, whereas factory work was largely viewed as temporary employment. While women employed in industry were generally restricted to machine operation and handwork, in dressmaking and millinery shops, women occupied all levels of employment, from designing, to cutting, and finishing.79 Historian Wendy Gamber describes the dressmaking industry as a “female economy” where “the principle actors-
78 “L.N. Gross Company Employees Maintain an Unusual Fraternal Spirit and Harmony in Work and Play,” Kent Tribune, Civic and Anniversary Edition, 1926. 79 Bryner, Dressmaking and Millinery, 23, 31, 53-54. 44
proprietors, workers, and consumers were women.” Her book, The Female Economy: The
Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930, traces how skilled women were ousted from the fashion industry due to the introduction of “scientific methods” of clothing production, which effectively replaced “feminine skills” with “masculine technologies.”80
A comparison of the 1910 and 1920 census reports confirm this apparent decline in the profession. The 1910 report listed 449,342 dressmakers in the United States, and 127,936 milliners. By 1920 these numbers were drastically reduced. Dressmakers reported
235,855 in the profession; a loss of over 200,000 and milliners reported 73,255, a loss of nearly 60,000.81
Cleveland, like the rest of the country, also showed a marked decline in dressmaking. The 1910 census reported 3,472 dressmakers and seamstresses, while the
1920 census reported 1,763; a nearly fifty percent drop in one decade.82 We can further infer from Bryner’s 1916 report on the dressmaking and millinery industries that business was far from booming. Of the twenty-three shops visited she noted that “several” reported they “were running at much less than their possible capacity because of a lack of good makers and drapers.”83 This was likely the result of women preferring to go into factory jobs, as they required far less training and could offer better pay. A government report of census records from 1870-1920 also noted that dressmaking was an occupation in decline. The reason was attributed to the inclination to buy ready-made clothing, but the report also observed “women are not leaving the occupation, so much as the
80 Wendy Gamber, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930 (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 2, 126. 81 Gamber, The Female Economy, 233. 82 Bryner, Dressmaking and Millinery, 17; Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 205. 83 Bryner, Dressmaking and Millinery, 43. 45
occupation is leaving them.”84 Bryner’s account, however, seems to indicate the opposite.
With a lack of workers and not enough customers, Cleveland’s dressmakers were hard hit to find any support. This pattern created a vicious cycle. Dressmakers could not find customers and could therefore not afford to provide apprentices with any kind of financial support or stipend. As women stopped patronizing private shops, private shops could no longer offer jobs to women who might be interested in the vocation.
Like dressmaking, the millinery trade was also in decline. In 1910 Bryner indicated there were 1,432 milliners and millinery dealers in Cleveland.85 By 1920, that number had dropped to only 766.86 This trade too had to compete with cheaper ready- made products. Similarly, increasing technology allowed for the mass-production of styles that used to be entirely hand-made, thus deskilling the millinery trade as well.
Bryner’s report notes how industry allowed for straw, velvet, and other challenging materials to be “made into hats of the greatest variety of shapes on the speedy power machines and blocked and pressed into perfectly shaped and finished products.”87 Like other skilled sewing trades, millinery took years of experience, schooling, and apprenticeships. However, with the introduction of the ready-to-wear industry, such fine hand skills were lost to machines, and expertly trained women lost their customers to factory-made products.
The decreasing popularity of custom-made clothing further exemplified the shifting economic and social circumstances associated with the emergence of ready-to-
84 Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 35. 85 Bryner, Dressmaking and Millinery, 50. 86 Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 205. 87 Bryner, Dressmaking and Millinery, 48. 46
wear garments. The shift from custom made pieces in small shops to mass produced garments in large factories illustrates the transition from an economy based on production to one based on consumption. Aside from how expensive it was to visit a dressmaker for a custom made gown, small shops allowed for very slow and inefficient production methods. While a dressmaker might take several weeks to design and make one garment for one customer, a factory could produce thousands of garments for thousands of customers in only a day. Nancy Green’s comparison of the garment industries in New
York and Paris is especially helpful in placing the context for the era of mass production and consumerism. She credits wars, the reorganization of work, and the introduction of sewing, buttonhole, and other specialized machines as the impetus towards mass production of clothing.88 Similarly, Terry Smith credits revolutionary labor management techniques, technology, and the drive for profits as the roots of consumerist society in the larger industrial context.89 By 1920, many Americans abandoned allegiances to dressmakers and opted for ready-made garments.
The rise of industry and the ready-to-wear market drastically changed traditional clothing manufacture and effectively diminished the value of female dressmakers’ and milliners’ skills in favor of machine operations. Garment manufacture increasingly called for semi-skilled machine operatives, and factory leaders looked to women to fill these roles because of their ties to domestic sewing. But as the ready-made industry grew in size and force, women hardly saw sewing eliminated from their lives. While many toiled in factories, even more were taught sewing skills in domestic arts classes in public,
88 Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work, 29-39. 89 Smith, Making the Modern, 29. 47
private, and technical schools across the country. Paradoxically, as the production of ready-made clothing grew, so too did the emphasis on sewing in school curriculums.
Why would the craft remain a fixture in education programs when it was becoming increasingly obsolete? As the practical need for a solid knowledge base of sewing skills diminished, the craft nevertheless remained a fixture in schools to convey a very different set of skills. The intersection between mass-production of clothing and the rise of the home economics movement held significant implications for women in the early twentieth century, as will be explored in the next chapter.
CHAPTER II
Lessons in Domesticity: Household Science and the Significance of Sewing
In her “Household Science” class at Kent Normal School in 1917,1 Lillie Sorensen took copious notes about the care and construction of clothing. Her notebook detailed issues of fancy versus plain stitching, the differences between cross and chain stitches, how to tell cotton from flax, construct an apron, treat stains, and sew pockets, among a whole variety of other basic sewing skills. While a notebook containing lessons in sewing is certainly not unusual, the context in which Lillie took her notes was. By 1917, Northeast Ohio was one of the nation’s top producers in the women’s ready-made clothing industry. Clothing off the rack had never been cheaper, or more widely available. The ready-made revolution was steadily gaining ground, yet
Lillie and young women across the country were hardly excused from lessons in clothing
1 Founded in 1910, the Kent Normal School was part of the Lowry Normal School Bill that chartered two teacher’s schools, one in the northwestern part of Ohio and one in the northeastern part of the state. During the first several years of its existence, the school enrolled mainly women. When Lillie Sorensen attended in 1917 the school was still relatively new (William H. Hilldebrand, A History of Kent State University, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998).
48 49
construction. In fact, by the early twentieth century, sewing quickly became part of the core curriculum taught in American schools, and in Northeast Ohio especially, as part of the Domestic Arts movement first begun at the turn of the century.1
While certainly learning basic sewing skills served a practical purpose, Lillie’s notebook reveals an inherent societal anxiety over shifting economic and social circumstances that suggest sewing lessons became a tool to convey much more than just fundamental ability using a needle and thread. Mixed in with practical instruction are issues of responsible consumption, budget keeping, and appropriate dress, all of which allude to the tension between consumption and production as women’s primary responsibilities. By the early twentieth century, in the midst of the Progressive
Movement, the fight for women’s suffrage, and the growth of industry, sewing education became a strategy used by male administrators and reformers to address growing concerns over women’s roles. Lessons taught in schools were not meant to prepare girls to enter any of the sewing trades and were utterly useless for those wishing to work in the garment industry. Instead, such instruction emphasized women’s roles in the home and traditional feminine ideals in a time characterized by social uncertainty. This chapter will explore the parallels between the growing availability of ready-to-wear clothing and the renewed emphasis on sewing lessons to illustrate how behavioral expectations were so often embedded in clothing and clothing construction.
1 Lillie Sorensen, “Household Science” State Normal College class notebook 1917, Kent Historical Society, Kent, Ohio (Hereafter cited as Sorensen Notebook); Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti, eds, Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
50
The Debate Over Domestic Education
The significance of the domestic education movement is a subject greatly debated by historians. In a recent introduction to a collection of essays, historians Sarah Stage and
Virginia B. Vincenti argue that the home economics movement must be understood as more than just a push to train future housewives. Stage and Vincenti assert that other scholars have not accepted a critical view of home economics and have too tacitly agreed that the movement’s purpose was solely to keep women in the home and out of the corrupting workforce.2 Many of the essays included in their publication raise significant points about how the movement was one of the first efforts to professionalize women’s work and allowed women to become teachers at the university level, among other professional positions. While these are valid points, none of the historians included in the publication critically examine sewing lessons specifically, and instead focus on the ways in which the movement sought to bring chemistry and science to the kitchen. Although these revisions highlighting the importance of domestic education to women’s history are important, they do not illuminate our understanding of the purpose and objectives of
2 Stage and Vincenti, Rethinking Home Economics, 2; Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 118, although Stage and Vincenti do not critique Kessler-Harris specifically, her views on the movement oppose Stage and Vincenti’s findings. 51
sewing lessons in particular. I argue that sewing, as a single component of the movement, shared none of the seemingly progressive goals highlighted in Stage and
Vincenti’s volume.
Historians rightly debate the meaning of the domestic arts movement, as its very origins were quite muddled. Ellen Richards, a trained chemist with degrees from Vassar and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, masterminded the movement during a series of conferences held between 1899 and 1909. Named after their location in Lake
Placid, New York, the Lake Placid Conferences aimed largely to “discuss the problems, progress, philosophy, and future” of home economics. While the topics of discussion at each of the ten conferences varied, the most crucial conversations revolved around how domestic arts education would fit into the American educational system, as the discipline
“lacked a body of literature about its aims and philosophy… and a consensus about the proper place in the overall educational system did not exist.”3 Connected in part with the
Municipal Housekeeping and Progressive movements, Richards hoped home economics would echo the larger push for social reform during the era, promote research in the natural and social sciences, and train women for work in science. While Richards had lofty goals for the movement, conference attendees, the public, and state legislators alike saw her ideals as too progressive and in many cases, refused to support or implement such an ambitious agenda. 4
3 Emma Seifrit Weigley, “It Might Have Been Euthenics: The Lake Placid Conferences and the Home Economics Movement,” American Quarterly 26, no. 1 (March 1974): 83. 4 Stage and Vincenti, Rethinking Home Economics, 8. 52
A heated debate over selection of a name exemplified the contested objectives of the movement.5 While some wished to adopt a title of “household arts,” and evoke images of manual home labor, others, including Richards, advocated for “domestic science,” which instead implied kitchen work would be seen as scientific, and emphasized sanitation and nutrition. Still others supported “home economics” because it would reflect the drive for social reform during the time period. Some proposed
“domestic economy” to connect the movement to Catherine Beecher’s nineteenth century publication, Treatise on Domestic Economy, and the growing “servant problem” faced by many middle and upper class women post-1890. Ultimately, home economics was finally chosen as the title with the creation of the American Home Economics Association
(AHEA) in 1909.6
While the selection of a name seems fairly insignificant, the debate over the movement’s title foreshadowed its confused efforts to bring science and reform to the lives of women. Once “home economics” was officially decided upon, the debate about semantics did not go away. At nearly every conference, the issue was brought up again and illustrates the failure of conference goers to arrive at a consensus about the objectives and goals of the movement.7 As Richards attempted to get funding for her program, she found legislators unwilling to provide support for such progressive ideals. Rather than
5 Many scholars discuss the problems with semantics. While the name “home economics” won out as the movement’s official title, a different name was chosen depending on the level of education. For primary schools the title “domestic economy” was selected; for secondary schools the title was “domestic science;” for college level, the courses were to be called “household” or “home economics.” As will become evident later in this chapter, schools did not always hold to the HEA’s recommendations. I have attempted to remain true to the designations made depending on level, but do not always comply. 6 Stage and Vincenti, Rethinking Home Economics, 5. 7 Weigley, “It Might Have Been Euthenics: The Lake Placid Conferences and the Home Economics Movement,” 95. 53
implement Richards’s vision, legislators instead took advantage of home economics’ weak foundation and manipulated the movement to promote particular gender stereotypes. For example, Midwestern land-grant schools played a big role in establishing programs as gender specific and as a promotion for domestic roles for girls. The movement’s lack of a coherent concept from its very origins allowed it to be molded into any form, depending on region and school needs.8
Northeast Ohio was one region greatly influenced by the national domestic arts movement. Cleveland was one of the first cities in the country to implement a domestic arts class in its elementary schools, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.9 Yet much like the national campaign for domestic arts, local program advocates had an equally difficult time defining what purpose such education would serve. Alice C. Boughton, a woman who surveyed Cleveland’s household arts programs in 1916, indicated that interest in the domestic arts was closely related to Cleveland’s “rapid development.”10
Linking interest in domestic science courses with growth of industry suggests that the changing economic circumstances necessitated different roles for women and furthermore, called for renewed educational endeavors to teach women how their positions in society shifted. Historian Alice Kessler Harris’s analysis of women’s wage work in the early twentieth-century America highlights how the growing industrial society necessitated supportive roles in the home to maximize men’s work potential. She argues that the growth of capitalism and a consumer society perpetuated the domestic
8 Ibid., 8-9. 9 Alice C. Boughton, Cleveland Education Survey: Household Arts and School Lunches (Cleveland, OH: The Survey Committee of the Cleveland Foundation, 1916), 11. 10 Ibid. 54
code and idealized women’s roles in the home.11 Kessler-Harris’s explanation helps to establish why Northeast Ohio’s push for domestic arts programs grew in conjunction with the growth of production.
Nevertheless, the goals and objectives of domestic education were unclear from the very start on both a local and national level. Organizers failed to come to a consensus about whether classes offered would provide practical vocational training, or training strictly for the home.
Sewing Education for the Home, Not the Factory
Sewing instruction began in Northeast Ohio schools in the early twentieth century. Despite the region’s early history with home economics programs, cooking was the only training girls received until more formal programs were established in the early twentieth century as part of Richards’s push for a national campaign. By 1916, private, public, and technical schools in the area included instruction in sewing and cooking.
While the objectives and curriculum standards of cooking classes are outside the scope of
11 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 118.
55
this project, sewing classes as an independent element of the home economics movement focused on domestic training rather than vocational training.12
For the most part, courses at both the primary and secondary levels emphasized practical skills for the home, not the sewing trades. A close look at course objectives in
1916 confirms this. One high school in Cleveland stated that sewing courses were meant to “give knowledge of practical sewing which may be of use in the home,” while another technical school asserted such education would “enable girls, as they grow into womanhood, to appreciate the practical economic and artistic value of the various textile materials in their application of dress to home-furnishing.”13 Similarly, college courses at
Kent Normal were also geared toward work in the home. Lillie Sorenson’s notebook reveals that much of their coursework dealt with responsibility of buying, keeping a family budget, and also had practical instruction in how to make an apron, teddy bear, and baby dress.14
Clearly, for educational institutions in Northeast Ohio, sewing classes were not meant to train women for careers in industry. Edna Bryner highlighted this notion in her survey of such courses around Cleveland in 1916. Aside from the obvious fact that the course objectives made no indication of preparation for professional work, all of the practical experience students received were of no use in a factory setting. For one, Bryner noted how classes did not focus on quick, repetitive, and accurate hand or machine work, but instead focused on making a couple of complete garments for personal use.15 As was
12 Boughton, Cleveland Education Survey: Household Arts and School Lunches, 18. 13 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 124-125. 14 Sorenson notebook. 15 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 128. 56
established in the first chapter, factory work called for mastery of one skill, not knowledge of every stage of construction. Furthermore, most schools in the Northeast
Ohio could not afford more than a couple of machines for classroom use. Bryner found that on average, girls got five minutes of practice on a machine each week, which added up to only three hours for the entire year.16 In an era where factory work was characterized by machine use, this training was terribly inadequate for young women going into the sewing industry.
Furthermore, formal sewing courses rested on the assumption that all students could afford to continue their education through high school and did not consider those who would need to leave school for work out of financial necessity. Bryner found that in
1916, those working in the garment industries generally did not stay in school long enough to take high school level courses. In fact, thirty-five percent of working girls in
Cleveland under the age of twenty-one had not been educated beyond the eighth grade level.17 Historian Annelise Orleck’s analysis of New York City garment factories confirms this trend. Although her subjects lived in a different region, she found many families, especially among the immigrant population, could not afford to keep their daughters in school and sent them out to work to supplement the family income.18 With such a large immigrant population, this was true of Cleveland as well. Students who had completed only primary school courses learned only the basics of plain sewing and mending and had even less machine experience than girls who continued on to the high
16 Ibid., 130. 17 Ibid. 18 Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 19-21. 57
school level. Regardless the level of education achieved, girls were woefully unprepared to work in any industrial capacity.
Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of home economics education was its failure to account for the shifting economic circumstances of the early twentieth century. Clothing was available increasingly off the rack, yet girls were still expected to know how to make complete garments for themselves and their families. In her 1916 survey, Edna Bryner emphasized domestic education’s failures to adequately prepare young women for the economic and social circumstances of the era and argued that the craft was:
Brought in as a part of household arts, [and had] not defined for it the legitimate relation, which, in view of the kind of world we are living in 1916, bears towards the rest of housework. Thus [sewing] loses special significance in the large and tends to become something to satisfy a particular personal want of the girl or the girl’s family in the way of clothing.19
Bryner criticized sewing lessons for failing to take the shift from production to consumption seriously. Alice Boughton recognized the same problem in her analysis of domestic arts classes and asked: “Where should the emphasis be put,- on production or use?”20 Educators struggled to decide if the young women of the day needed education in purchasing or making garments. The decline of the skilled sewing trades, such as dressmaking and millinery, and the rise of the factory changed the ways in which women accessed clothing, yet classes made little attempt to reflect this in their objectives. Bryner went on to assert that “present sewing courses in the elementary grades largely fail to take into account the fact that our girls now need education as purchasers of garments far
19 Bryner, The Garment Trades, 126. 20 Boughton, Household Arts and School Lunches, 29. 58
more than they need training in the producing of garments.”21 According to Bryner, sewing courses in 1916 had no merit or educational significance because they neither prepared young girls for work in a sewing trade, nor did they address shifting social circumstances.
While Bryner rightly pointed out this educational void, she failed to discuss how such courses sought to reinforce traditional notions of women’s work as home-based in an effort to combat anxiety of women’s presence in the factory. Indeed, with record numbers of women going to work outside the home, Americans feared for the next generation. Work in factories was not only seen as physically and mentally dangerous for women, but worse yet, it was seen as detrimental to children who would essentially grow up without their mothers. For many Americans during the 1910s and 1920s, industrialism was seen as a threat to the American family and motherhood.22 Historian Alice Kessler-
Harris discusses how protective labor legislation sought to limit women’s capacity as wage earners outside the home in an effort to conserve their bodies and minds for motherhood. Tied into the Progressive and eugenics movements of the early twentieth century, such legislation agitated for preservation of women’s health, morality, and reproductive capacity by cutting hours, providing safer conditions, and excluding women from certain occupations altogether. These laws rested on assumptions that women were best suited for life as homemakers and were unsuited for the competitive nature of the labor market and played a significant role in perpetuating the gendered notions of masculine and feminine workspaces. Ohio was especially active in implementing
21 Ibid., 127. 22 Carlson, The “American Way,” 9. 59
protective legislation and was the first state to pass a maximum-hour for women in 1852, limiting their workday to ten hours.23 Placed in this context, domestic arts classes that emphasized sewing as a home-based activity, spoke to the anxiety created by women working outside the home. Rather than prepare girls for wage labor that would threaten their potential as good mothers, sewing classes encouraged girls to cultivate skills needed for motherhood and thus encouraged them to follow traditional social roles with women’s labor remaining centered on the home at a time when these notions of femininity were being challenged by shifting social circumstances.
Lessons in Domestic Responsibility and Tasteful Dress
Because sewing courses encouraged girls to focus on skills needed for the home rather than the workforce, they emphasized the importance of domestic responsibility and appropriate dress as essential components of femininity. Both formal education courses and at-home sewing guides marketed toward women no longer in school emphasized how sewing ability was a way to express maternal instinct, maintain a strict family budget, and was also a useful tactic in achieving refined style. Historian Jenna Weissman Joselit argues in her book, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America, that
23 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 180-181. 60
thrift and resourcefulness were seen as crucial American attributes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She illustrates how fashion and tasteful dress was associated with morality in an age of unprecedented immigration, the birth of mass- production, the fight for the vote, and social anxiety. Due in large part to these perceived
“threats” to the family unit and a substantial drop in the nation’s birthrate, many
Americans feared for the moral health and future of America.24 Although Joselit’s analysis of fashion as an expression of American virtue examines ready-made clothing, her arguments help in understanding the push for home sewing. Sewing was fast becoming an optional pursuit, but by learning to make garments for themselves and their families, women were not only given practical instruction, but were more importantly educated about American values and social expectations. Sarah Gordon’s work, Make it
Yourself: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930, further supports this argument and suggests that as knowledge of sewing became less critical, it remained in educational centers as a means of transmitting cultural values to women and girls. 25
Domestic Responsibility
Paramount to nearly every home economics course was lessons in domestic responsibility. Young women were expected to know how to keep a family budget,
24 Carlson, “The American Way,” 2. 25 Joselit, A Perfect Fit, 2-5, 18-20; Gordon, Make it Yourself, 2. 61
practice careful consumption, and construct garments for each member of the family.
Perhaps the most crucial aspect of domestic responsibility was understanding how to keep a budget and tight control over family finances. Sarah Gordon argues that budget keeping allowed women some control over family finances, and evidence of this is certainly visible as financial planning was a staple in many courses.26 Texts employed for classroom use across the nation27 agreed that girls must be “well trained in economics nowadays” as they would become the “chief spender[s]” and must also assume responsibility for the “wise or unwise apportionment of the income to the various needs of the family.”28 Like the statements made in sewing textbooks, an entire class period of
Kent Normal’s Household Science course discussed the “responsibility of buying,” and noted “man is [the] producer, woman [is] the one who spends.”29
While budget keeping was certainly a valuable skill, because it was emphasized as a part of sewing lessons suggests sewing was a way to encourage women to spend their husband’s money wisely so they did not need to find work in the labor force. A
1920’s survey of American home economic courses upheld this notion, concluding that older girls should be more concerned with careful consumption, as they would someday
26 Gordon, Make it Yourself, 4. 27 While no evidence exists as to what texts were used in Northeast Ohio, the examples used here represent books that were meant for use in schools. I should note that the McCall Company, a leading pattern making company, published Laura Baldt’s book, Home Sewing Made Easy. Sarah Gordon argued that businesses such as McCall published instructional guides to encourage women to sew and buy their products. For the most part, however, both texts published by businesses and educational institutions encouraged women to sew as means of demonstrating domestic responsibility. 28 The New Dressmaker (New York: The Butterick Publishing Company, 1921), 5; Baldt, Home Sewing Made Easy, 3 29 Sorensen Notebook. 62
be in charge of family financial affairs.30 A textbook written by Household Arts professor, Laura Baldt of the Teachers College of Columbia University, Kent Normal
School’s Household Science class, and the Household Arts class at Hathaway Brown, a private girls’ school in Shaker Heights, an wealthy eastside suburb of Cleveland comprised largely of upper-middle and upper class families, all encouraged young women to keep a budget as part of their education. Although often still single, courses taught students to pay close attention to finances at a young age so that they might become efficient consumers by the time they married.
Putting these lessons into practice, young women around Northeast Ohio were asked to keep a list of their own expenditures and clothing purchases. Lillie Sorensen recorded a budget over a ten-month period, from September 1917 to June 1918 for her
Kent Normal class. She spent $154.63 on clothing,31 about $2,643 today.32 In her textbook published in 1928, Laura Baldt also offered a similar sample budget of $150 for a “business or professional woman.”33 Likewise, in 1923, Hathaway Brown’s Household
Arts class prepared a sample financial plan and published it their school newspaper, the
Hathaway Review. Given their class stature, this budget offered a significantly higher clothing budget of $600,34 equivalent to $7,677 in 2010.35 These financial records reveal
30 Mabel Barbara Trilling et al., Home Economics in American Schools (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago, 1920), 11-12. 31 Sorenson Notebook. 32 United States Department of Labor, “CPI Inflation Calculator,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm (accessed January 5, 2011). 33 Laura Irene Baldt, Clothing for Women: Selection, Design, Construction (Philadelphia, PA: The J.B. Lippincott Company, 1916) 11-15. 34 “A Clothing Budget,” Hathaway Brown Review, March 22, 1923, Container C4-1, Hathaway Brown Archives, Shaker Heights, Ohio. 35 United States Department of Labor, “CPI Inflation Calculator,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm (accessed January 5, 2011). 63
striking similarities, most notable between them is that they depict the spending habits of young, single women who likely planned to work until they married. The 1920 census reveals Lillie was a stock record clerk at the rubber factory in Kent,36 the Hathaway
Brown sample reflects school girls, and the sample woman was labeled as a “business or professional woman” working in a city. While this initially seems to contest the aims of sewing courses to train women to be efficient housewives, the context in which these expenditures were kept reveal that these were likely practice budgets, so that these students might become skilled in financial planning by the time they married.
In addition to illustrating the spending habits of single women, each of the three budget samples included mainly ready-made clothing and few homemade pieces. Lillie indicated only one dress and two undergarments as homemade, while the sample woman sported only ready-made styles.37 Hathaway Brown’s students similarly stated that homemade items were not included on the list,38 suggesting that a single, working woman did not feel the need to sew, but learned how so that once she had a family she would be able to. Yet the fact that sample budgets created for sewing classes were comprised primarily of ready-made garments highlights how domestic science course objectives sought primarily to convey feminine ideals of thrift and domestic responsibility.
Apparently, single women had little use for sewing because of the wide availability of ready-made garments but were expected to sew upon marriage as a means of practicing thrift and expressing maternal love.
36 1920 United States Federal Census," database, Ancestry.com, (http://www.ancestry.com; accessed March 4, 2010), entry for Lillie Sorensen, Kent, Ohio. 37 Sorensen notebook. 38 “A Clothing Budget,” Hathaway Review. 64
Yet according to the textbooks and Normal School records, knowledge of sewing and responsible consumption was important precisely because of the growing popularity and availability of ready-to-wear garments. By having a solid understanding of clothing construction and use of material, women could make better-informed purchases, and ensure they were getting a quality product for their money. Laura Baldt suggested that
“abundant opportunity to learn to become a wise spender awaits in the field of clothing,” and in order to ensure purchase of a quality product four areas must be scrutinized:
(1) Durability and the quality of the materials of which they are made. (2) Their suitability to occasion and wearer (3) The becomingness of color and line (4) The price in relation to her allowance.39
Lillie also focused much of her class time on understanding the quality of different materials and which were considered the best. She took copious notes on how to spot the differences between cotton and flax, the best kind of buttons to use, and “materials appropriate for underskirts.”40
Furthermore, by learning to sew, women could supplement their wardrobes with homemade pieces as a way to save money. In a note that followed the sample budget,
Baldt remarked how “a great saving in cost could be made if some of the undergarments, lingerie waists, skirts, and kimonos, were made at home; a saving also by reason of the use of better materials, insuring longer service than those of the ready-to-wear type.”41
Local department store advertisements in the Kent Tribune confirm this. In 1920, a ready-
39 Baldt, Clothing for Women, 3. 40 Sorensen notebook. 41 Baldt, Clothing for Women, 13. 65
made nainsook chemise from France Dry Goods Department Store sold for $2.50,42 while
Lillie’s similar homemade nightgown made in 1917 cost only $1.90, a savings of $.60, or
$10 today.43 Lillie also noted a savings of $.75 from making a dress herself rather than purchasing one from a department store, further illustrating how homemade garments could produce significant savings.44
Yet keeping a budget was not the only lesson in economic utility. In addition to encouraging the careful planning of expenditures and the purchase of quality products, students also became well versed in strategies to repair and renew old clothing. In her notebook, Lillie dedicated five pages to “cleaning and renovating at home” in which a comprehensive list of stains, ranging from blood to ice cream soda, was recorded along with their treatment. Furthermore, Lillie devoted four pages to the rules of “patching,” and three pages to “darning” as tactics to extend the life of worn garments. Laura Baldt also discussed general rules for care and mending of clothing. She advised that “garments showing possibilities of reconstruction for one’s self or another member of the family, should be ripped and brushed, or cleansed, and then pressed, ready for the remodeling process.” Both Baldt and Lillie’s class suggest that women had the economic responsibility to get the most possible use out of each garment, and therefore get the most wear for their money. By learning to keep budgets and properly care for clothing,
42 Advertisement, Kent Tribune, December 9, 1920. 43 United States Department of Labor, “CPI Inflation Calculator,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm (accessed January 5, 2011). 44 Sorensen notebook. 66
students were taught to sew to become the most efficient consumers possible and furthermore, to be conscientious and economically minded housewives.45
While domestic responsibility was a crucial component of sewing education, girls were also encouraged to sew as a means of maternal expression. Historian Sarah Gordon connects sewing to motherly love and argues that making clothes for baby and the family was a way for women to demonstrate their love and devotion, and was seen as the “duty of a good wife.”46 Although young women enrolled in school were single and without children, they were expected to begin honing maternal instincts. The variety of articles students made best illustrates this. In Kent Normal’s course, Lillie made an apron, baby dress, and teddy bear, all items needed for domestic endeavors in the kitchen and nursery.47 Similarly, according to a 1920’s survey of American home economics classes, students across the country made a plethora of articles that would assist them as mothers.
These items included a laundry bag, bib, four different apron types, and a child’s shirtwaist.48 Sewing articles for children allowed women control over the family budget by saving money on clothing that would likely be out grown quickly and allowed them to express their devotion as mothers. Although these are practical skills, they reflect the domestic art movement’s intentions to teach traditional social roles to young girls in a time of dramatic change and anxiety.
45 Sorensen notebook; Baldt, Clothing for Women, 8. 46 Gordon, Make it Yourself, 15-16. 47 Sorensen notebook. 48 Trilling, Home Economics in American Schools, 15. 67
Tasteful Dress
Perhaps the most important aspect of sewing education was lessons in correct dress. In nearly every textbook, notebook, and instructional pamphlet, no opportunity was lost to discuss “suitability of dress,” and the importance of attractive, neat, and “dainty” appearance.49 Historians Sarah Gordon, Angela Latham, and Jenna Weissman Joselit all explore how feminine ideals and behavioral expectations are often embedded in clothing choices. Although Latham and Joselit analyze ready-made clothing, their works are helpful in understanding why sewing instruction would highlight the importance of making garments that conform to standards of taste. The stress placed on the importance of appropriate appearance reflected the larger social circumstances of the early twentieth century. Many scholars accept that dress is often an indication of cultural values and transcends basic needs of modesty and protection from the elements.50 According to
Joselit, ideas about tasteful dress, like the domestic arts movement and protective labor legislation, were connected to Progressive attitudes about social and moral reform.
Advocates for morality called for tasteful dress because “what one wore was a public construct, bound up with an enduring moral order.”51 Young women and mothers had a
49 Mary Brooks Picken, Miscellaneous Garments (Scranton, PA: The Woman’s Institute for Domestic Arts and Sciences, 1921), June F. Mohler Library Special Collections, Kent State University. 50 Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter, Fashion and Anti-Fashion: Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment (London, England: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 9-10; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgment and Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1. 51 Joselit, A Perfect Fit, 2. 68
social responsibility to represent their families and themselves in tasteful fashion by selecting attire that would not disrupt social norms. Angela Latham’s analysis of flapper fashion in Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the
American 1920’s examines those who flagrantly opposed standards of taste and argues that fashion was one of the most closely monitored sites for female expression in the
1920s.52 Both scholars’ work is helpful in understanding why home sewers were subject to such standards of taste as these historians both connect fashion to greater economic and social anxieties of the Progressive and interwar period. Instructional pamphlets echoed the need for right dress and alluded to women’s duty to conform to socially acceptable notions of taste.
Garments used for sport and swimming were among the most challenging to fit to the forms of appropriate taste. Perhaps the most problematic outfit was the bathing suit.
Angela Latham discusses the anxieties brought on by more revealing bathing suit styles and argues “body-revealing styles of swimwear, although more practical for swimming, were initially opposed by many morally minded Americans who were already concerned that contemporary fashions for women lacked basic decency.”53 A series of instructional sewing pamphlets published and distributed by the Woman’s Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences also addressed issues presented by the bathing suit. The Miscellaneous
Garments issue discussed this apparent apprehension over more revealing styles, and dedicated an entire chapter to advice on strategies for appropriately making and donning
52 Angela J. Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920’s (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 5. 53 Latham, Posing a Threat, 65. 69
a bathing costume. Noting how this particular garment was “affected by fashion changes, where as it would seem right that it should conform closely to the requirements of good taste, comfort, health, and becomingness,” this guide directed women to maintain their modesty while wearing such an outfit. Furthermore, the guide instructed home-sewers to construct a bathing suit with “no unnecessary weight or bulkiness and no close fitting of any part” and stated “individuality in bathing suits may be expressed by means of odd and attractive materials, and styles for the collar, cuffs, and trimmings.” As Latham suggests, inherent in all of these prescriptions about appropriate use of bathing costume was an anxiety over the female body and potential disregard of modesty. In an effort to enforce modes of taste while still allowing for expression of personality, the Woman’s
Institute encouraged individuality, but only from an authorized menu, limited largely to color and adornment. Furthermore, this guide advocated use of bathing caps to “add a distinctly feminine, as well as attractive, touch,” which further asserted the need to uphold femininity even when dressed in the bathing costume.54
Another garment that posed potential problems for standards of feminine modesty was the gymnastics suit. By the early twentieth century many high schools in Northeast
Ohio, including the Laurel School, another private girls’ school in the Cleveland area,
Hathaway Brown, and Kent Roosevelt High School began to incorporate a gym class, and even sports teams, into their curriculums.55 These new activities called for gym uniforms, which could either be bought or made. While no evidence exists as to how
54 Pickens, Miscellaneous Garments, 12, 14. 55 Morton, Women in Cleveland, 87; Ruth Crofut Needham and Ruth Strong Hudson, The First Hundred Years: Hathaway Brown School, 1876-1976 (Shaker Heights, OH: Hathaway Brown School, 1977); “Public School News,” Kent Tribune, January 1, 1920. 70
students of local schools acquired their gym suits, mothers who made their daughter’s clothing had the responsibility to ensure the attire they crafted were appropriate. Like the bathing suit, the Woman’s Institute guides stated that gym suits should “fit loosely and comfortably,” both for practical purposes and to ensure that modesty was maintained. Yet in addition to being loose and comfortable, the guide maintained: “as a general rule, the gymnasium suit consists of a sailor blouse of some type and a pair of bloomers plaited at the waist.”56 The use of sailor inspired garb, generally seen in children’s clothing, as a part of a gymnastic costume revealed anxiety over women’s participation in physical activity and disregard for modesty. Gordon discusses the use of sailor styles for gym and bathing suits and suggests that this does indeed reveal tension over women’s changing roles. She goes on to argue that dressing like children “was a way to reduce the threat of
[women’s] changing behavior.”57 In this sense, the prescriptions made by home-sewing guides encouraged women to maintain standards of traditional femininity by adhering to values of modesty and feminine expression, even when they participated in unconventional activities. Joselit also discusses the gym suit as a controversial and problematic garment. In her analysis of the dress reform movement she highlights how reformers fought an uphill battle against men and women who saw such revealing costumes as a serious offense to morality and feminine virtue. Gym and bathing suits alike were seen as “robbing women of their femininity,” and threatened the ethical integrity of American society. Home sewers and schoolgirls especially were expected to
56 Ibid., 22-23. 57 Gordon, Make it Yourself, 120. 71
understand standards of modesty and make garments that would not disrupt social order.58
If gym and bathing suits posed a danger to traditional notions of women’s righteousness, then the apron represented the push for traditional feminine virtue and values of neatness and daintiness. Constructed by nearly every domestic arts class in
Northeast Ohio, aprons were used to teach girls the “value and attractiveness of personal neatness,” and were often used to keep their clothes tidy during cooking lessons.59 The
Woman’s Institute published an entire pamphlet on “Fancy Aprons” and included instructions for a wide variety of styles from “mothers’ aprons, to economy aprons, and maids’ aprons,” suggesting not just one apron was appropriate for every occasion.
According to the Woman’s Institute, these garments were essential tools for every housewife and best exemplified a woman’s neatness:
Besides having aprons that cover the dress well in doing housework, the woman in the home always finds it convenient to have on hand small fancy aprons she may wear while sewing or while serving guests… such aprons… add greatly to a woman’s neatness and are generally a great source of satisfaction… yet no woman really feels that her wardrobe is complete unless she is the possessor of a few dainty aprons.60
Personal neatness was certainly important for schoolgirls and grown women alike.
Domestic arts teachers emphasized “the value and attractiveness of personal neatness and
[endeavored] to train girls to keep their clothes in good repair…” while students were
58 Joselit, A Perfect Fit, 54-58. 59 Boughton, Cleveland Education Survey: Household Arts and School Lunches, 31. 60 Mary Brooks Picken, Fancy Aprons and Sunbonnets, (Scranton, PA: The Woman’s Institute for Domestic Arts and Sciences, 1920), June F. Mohler Library Special Collections, Kent State University, 2. 72
graded on the “neatness” and “general attractiveness” of their completed garments.61
While strategies were prescribed for maintaining modesty in controversial garments such as the gym and bathing suits, aprons were seen the ideal garment for the housewife and mother.
As seen in the discussion of the apron, the emphasis on personal appearance was a theme that ran throughout many domestic arts classes. A course in sewing and dress creation offered in the late 1920s by Akron-based White Sewing Company, emphasized how sewing allowed women to be “perfectly gowned and always at [her] best.” A
Woman’s Institute guide similarly discussed how the “mature woman owes it to herself, her family, and to the world at large to be as becomingly and appropriately dressed as intelligent effort, skill, and available money permit.”62 Indeed, personal appearance was seen as a primary concern for women. Joselit attributes the focus on “correct” appearance to a national standard where “the nation’s collective identity was bound up in the warp and woof of its citizens’ attire.” Looking tidy and stylish in public was seen as an important American value and was further made evident by the standards of appearance factory owners set for their immigrant employees as part of their Americanization tactics.
During the early twentieth century, both men and women were expected to look their best when out in public, but for women, right dress was tied into their position as the morally superior sex.63
61 Boughton, Cleveland Education Survey: Household Arts and School Lunches, 31; Sorensen notebook. 62 Mrs. A.S LeFevre, White Sewing Machine Company “Sewing and Dress Creation,” course workbook, late-1920’s, June F. Mohler Fashion Library Special Collections, Kent State University; Pickens, Miscellaneous Garments, 27. 63 Joselit, A Perfect Fit, 5. 73
For girls in domestic arts classes around Northeast Ohio and the nation, sewing lessons focused on much more than practical skill using a needle and thread. Perhaps the two most important lessons taught were in domestic responsibility and appropriate dress.
Grounded in an understanding that American virtue called for women to be thrifty, resourceful, and neat, these lessons encouraged young women to participate in sewing as a way to control the family budget and uphold traditional standards of dress, all from the comforts of her home, not the workplace.
Teaching: “Woman’s Natural Profession”
Domestic arts courses clearly had very strict objectives and not surprisingly, were taught entirely by women. As historians Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti argue, education in household science was indeed an opportunity for women to break into careers as educators.64 Kent Normal School offered a course in the “teaching of home economics” as part of a degree in education and household science in 1917, yet also offered a separate degree in only household arts. In 1929, Thomas Woody, author of
History of Women’s Education in the United States, upheld a long standing notion that
“teaching [was] the most natural profession for women,” as they “were the natural
64 Stage and Vincenti, Rethinking Home Economics, 2. 74
teachers of youth,” suggesting that females were good educators mainly because of their maternal capacity.65 While an increasing number of women became professional educators, their training played largely on their potential to become mothers. Alice
Boughton’s survey of domestic education in Cleveland reinforced this idea. She noted how Cleveland’s teachers were “young and attractive; the majority are well under 30, and all have special training for their work.”66 Boughton’s observations indicated that beauty and youth were the two most important characteristics for female educators. Their qualifications were apparently of least significance. Woody and Boughton’s remarks challenge Stage and Vincenti’s assertions that domestic arts training paved steps toward professionalization of women’s work. Women had long been employed as teachers, and although their roles as domestic arts professionals granted them employment in education, it hardly granted them respect as skilled experts. Like women working in factories, teachers of domestic arts were tied to their capacity as mothers and to traditional roles in the home.67
For women who wanted to go into teaching, like those in the garment industry, training in sewing apparently held little value. In the Cleveland School system, only four out of thirty-one domestic arts professionals taught sewing, while twenty-seven specialized in cooking. For the most part, girls received instruction in sewing from their classroom teachers.68 This suggests an assumption that all women knew enough about sewing to teach others and that sewing “professionals” were not regarded with high
65 Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: The Science Press, 1929), 4. 66 Boughton, Cleveland Education Survey: Household Arts and School Lunches, 19. 67 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 117. 68 Ibid. 75
value. Furthermore, teachers were not given the responsibility of designing their own lessons, but were expected to teach according to school curriculum. In her survey,
Boughton found that teachers could not answer why they taught what they did. She indicated that domestic arts teachers in Cleveland had no “perspective” on the classes they taught and seemingly “misunderstood… the general function and purpose of household arts.”69 That teachers had little to say about the purpose of their work not only reflects their compromised status as “professionals,” but also illustrates the weak foundation of the domestic arts movement. The national domestic arts program never developed a central mission statement or values, which made implanting a focused curriculum difficult.
Teaching, like work in the sewing trades, was also becoming increasingly deskilled and usurped by men. Alice Kessler-Harris remarks on how traditionally
“feminine” occupations were increasingly controlled by male administrative bodies as a result of the Progressives’ appeal to expert authority.70 Teachers were unsure about their purpose because they were not given the opportunity to develop their own lessons, as this was left to male principals and school board leaders. A Cleveland principal stated he saw the program as opportunity to teach “girls to be neat and clean of person and about the house” and to “[give] them interest in household affairs, control over details of household management,” echoing the importance of correct dress and appearance as core American values.71 The men who developed the curriculum for domestic arts programs did not see
69 Ibid., 21. 70 Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 117. 71 Ibid., 24. 76
it as a way to bring women into the teaching profession or the sewing trades, but instead as a means of teaching girls to become efficient housewives. Principals of schools with large immigrant populations found that “through cooking and sewing, the girls become acquainted with certain American ways and standards which reach their homes in no other way.”72 Like immigrant women working in garment factories, sewing in schools too was a way to transmit American values and standards of feminine behavior. The men who implemented sewing programs in Northeast Ohio saw them as a means of reinforcing traditional American gender roles. Not only were the aims of such programs defined by men, but the women called on to teach them were hardly seen as professionals.73
While the national domestic arts movement had progressive ideas, these ideas, especially in the case of sewing lessons, failed to be cultivated into a cohesive and unified movement. Legislators unwilling to implement courses that might challenge traditional gender roles allowed the programs to be based on gender stereotypes and perpetuate traditional notions of domestic work as women’s most significant and only viable labor option. Although recent scholarship has made excellent points about the larger movement’s contributions to the professionalization of women’s work, these revisions fail to examine the significance of sewing lessons. With the rapid rise of garment industry
72 Ibid. 73 This is not to say that all women who taught domestic arts courses and sewing in particular possessed little skill or talent. Indeed, a number of women received college in degrees in the field and went on to teach at the high school and university level. Many even published textbooks and how-to guides, as Stage and Vencenti point out. The argument I make here is indicative of the circumstances of Northeast Ohio and is not necessarily the case with other regions and school districts.
77
during the early twentieth century, detailed knowledge of complete clothing construction was becoming increasingly obsolete. Nevertheless, sewing instruction remained a staple in girls’ education as a means of transmitting American values of domestic responsibility and correct dress and women’s primary responsibilities. However, despite these loaded educational objectives, women did not always comply with lessons taught in school. For many women, sewing was hardly a means of adhering to feminine standards but was instead a way to challenge and reinterpret expectations of gendered labor.
CHAPTER III
Empowered Sewing: Case Studies of Women Who Sew
One day in 1924 a young woman named Amanda Wicker opened her very own dress shop and fashion design school on Cedar Avenue in Cleveland. With a college degree in sewing and a year long apprenticeship under her belt, Amanda set out to make dresses for paying customers, but more importantly, sought to teach other women the power and utility of a needle and thread. In 1925 Amanda hosted just one student in her tiny one room shop. By 1940,
Wicker’s dress shop transformed into a school that enrolled hundreds of men and women and had to move into a bigger space a few blocks down Cedar Avenue. Wicker’s school, The Clarke
School of Dressmaking and Fashion Design, enrolled hundreds of students and funded two scholarships each year to young women showing promise in dressmaking and design.1 Her educational mission was so successful that in 1977 Cleveland Mayor Ralph J. Perk dedicated
1 “City of Cleveland, Ralph J. Perk, Mayor, 1977;” “United State Congress Proclamation, 1979,” Clarke School of Dressmaking and Fashion Design Records, MSS 4490, Container 1, Folder 1, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland Ohio.
78 79
March 3 as “Amanda Wicker Day.” Two years later, the Congressional Representative of the twenty-first district of Ohio, Louis Stokes, dedicated March 11, 1979 in honor of her retirement after over fifty years of service teaching sewing to men and women.1
Amanda Wicker’s story may seem paradoxical given the context of the previous two chapters. By the 1920s the dressmaking trade was in steady decline and Cleveland’s ready-to-wear industry was one of the most impressive in the country. Public and technical schools emphasized the cultural significance of the craft and taught sewing as a means of holding together traditional family structures and emphasizing traditional gender roles. As a general rule, such education did not effectively prepare women for work in any of the sewing trades. Yet the success of Wicker’s school defied these trends.
While history is never perfectly cut and dry, one of the major reasons for Wicker’s success as a dressmaker and sewing educator was based on her race. As an African
American, Wicker’s experiences in early twentieth-century Cleveland were vastly different from white experiences, which have largely been the focus of this study thus far.
Deeply segregated from many job opportunities, African American women often relied on different skill sets to find employment. Sewing thus became a way for black women to land in more favorable occupations.2
While some African American women used sewing to climb the occupational ladder, women in other circumstances found that sewing was an essential tool to raise their standard of living. Despite the curriculum objectives of the domestic arts movement
1 “Clarke School of Dressmaking and Design First Fall Fashion Carnival” Program, October 21, 1951, Clarke School of Dressmaking and Fashion Design Records, Series II, 1929-1979, MSS 4605, Container 1, Folder 2, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland Ohio. 2 Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 70; Gordon, Make it Yourself, 53-54. 80
that taught sewing as a means of transmitting cultural values, women usually sewed on their own terms and for their own reasons. While it is impossible to make broad assumptions across racial, ethnic, and class lines or to generalize women’s experiences, a great number of women participated in the craft for reasons opposite of what was expected of them. Despite social expectations, participation in sewing became a way for women of all backgrounds to challenge prescribed roles. This chapter will explore the multifaceted ways sewing served as a means of empowerment for women in different racial, ethnic, and class circumstances during the twentieth century.3
Sewing in Northern Cities: Empowering African American Women
As Wendy Gamber established in The Female Economy: The Millinery and
Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930, by 1920 the dressmaking trade was losing its battle against factory made clothing. While this was true for white dressmakers, African
American dressmakers operated under different conditions and were largely ignored in
Gamber’s account.4 With their work choices limited primarily to domestic service or
3 By the word “empowerment” I do not mean to suggest that women engaged in sewing as a means of asserting feminist ideals or to brazenly defy gender norms. In the previous two chapters I established that cultural expectations of sewing were designed to limit women to either unskilled jobs or as domestic labor in the home, and use the idea of “empowered sewing” to argue that women challenged these limitations. 4 Gamber, The Female Economy, 8. 81
laundry by 1910, African American women who had sewing skills had a marked advantage over others.5 Sarah Gordon argues that such skills offered African American women access to teaching careers or careers as dressmakers, which were among the most desirable jobs. In Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit historian Victoria Wolcott traces the lives and experiences of African American women in Detroit, Michigan and further discusses how sewing skills not only opened a doors to job opportunities for African American women, but were furthermore a tool that crafted community pride. In a time of deep prejudice, dressing fashionably was a way for women to create respectability for the African American population.6 Indeed, dressmakers became crucial members of the community during the early twentieth century. Given the context laid by these scholars and Amanda Wicker’s experiences in Cleveland, sewing can thus be seen not only as a means of empowerment for African American women in a world of severely limited opportunity, but also as a significant source of community pride.7
Cleveland was a city especially rich with opportunity for women like Amanda
Wicker in the 1910s and 1920s. During the Great Migration of African Americans moving from the south to the north between 1910 and 1920, Cleveland experienced a three hundred and eight percent growth in its African American population. Due in part to an economic depression in the south and a need for factory workers during World War
I to replace the stream of unskilled laborers once filled by immigrants, the city’s black
5 Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes, 195; Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 89. 6 Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 89-90. 7 Gordon, Make it Yourself, 53-54. 82
population ballooned from 8,448 in 1910 to 34,451 only ten years later in 1920.8 Like most northern cities, the newly arrived black population experienced deep-seated prejudice and was increasingly divided into separate neighborhoods, schools, and jobs.
However, as historian Kenneth Kusmer points out how, despite increasing segregation, the massive amount of African American people moving to Cleveland between 1915 and 1920 created a large clientele for black professionals and stimulated a number of successful black businesses. While Kusmer does not discuss Wicker in particular, her school of fashion design was certainly an example of these successful businesses. Although the national total of African American dressmakers declined from
38,053 in 1910 to 26,961 in 1920, by the 1920s, African Americans made up a higher total percentage among all dressmakers, white or black, nationwide. Accounting for only
8.5 percent of the total professionals in 1910, by 1920 African Americans represented
11.4 percent of dressmakers in the United States.9 While the profession was in a decline nationally, the decline was apparently more severe among white professionals.
Furthermore, the number of African American dressmakers in Cleveland grew steadily between 1870 and 1930. Likely due in part to the increase in black population, the number of dressmakers living in the city grew from ninety-seven in 1870 to one hundred and thirty five in 1910. By 1920, this number had grown to one hundred and fifty.10
Like many of the newly arrived African Americans in Cleveland, Wicker migrated north from the Deep South. Born to a family of seven children, Wicker grew up
8 Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 157, 160. 9 Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 117, 120. 10 Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape, 287. 83
sewing scraps of cloth together to make clothing for her dolls. While records detailing her early life are sparse, Wicker was able to attend college and graduated from the Tuskegee
Institute with a degree in sewing in 1923. Upon graduation, Wicker moved to
Washington D.C. and spent one year working as an apprentice under a dressmaker named
Addie Clarke, for whom her school was later named. Wicker made her way to Cleveland in 1924 with her husband, McDuffy.11
The Clarke School of Dressmaking and Fashion Design opened in 1924 in
Wicker’s home with only one student. However, after only a few years, her shop grew into a school that educated both men and women in fashion design, basic and advanced dressmaking, and tailoring, all skills that historian Victoria W. Wolcott points out as
“offering autonomy and independence for African American women who could open small shops for themselves or work as seamstresses out of their homes.”12 By 1940
Wicker’s school hosted an annual fashion show that featured student’s work and awarded full scholarships to two girls displaying excellent work and who wished to pursue a career in design or dressmaking, thus empowering other young women to pursue fulfilling careers as dressmakers.
Wicker took her role as a mentor to young sewers very seriously. A biography detailing her life experiences and ambitions as a teacher described how she worked closely with high school teachers and encouraged young women to strive for careers as
11 “A half century of service: Dressmaking school’s founder to be honored,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 28, 1979, Clarke School of Dressmaking and Fashion Design Records, MSS 4490, Container 1, Folder 1, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. 12 Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 28. 84
dressmakers, or at the very least, obtain some form of higher education.13 In a later interview, Wicker stated she founded her school with the hope of “giving inspiration to those who would seek to find a way upward through the trained use of the hands in the creation of beauty in apparel.”14 For Wicker, who faced limited opportunities as an
African American woman in early twentieth-century Cleveland, sewing was a way to move up the occupational ladder and a way to empower others of her same circumstances. Although the major success of her school did not come until after the
Depression, the groundwork was laid in the 1920s.
Yet more than inspiring other young women to make a living by sewing, Wicker became a source of community pride and admiration. In Victoria W. Wolcott’s study, she describes how beauty became political for African American women facing prejudice in urban centers across the United States and how women working in the beauty and fashion industry became powerful members of the community.15 Wicker was certainly one of these powerful women. Not only respected by her students, Wicker was a celebrated member of the African American community and the winner of numerous awards and recognitions. She was a lifetime member and Executive Board Member of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and helped found the
Negro Business and Professional Women’s Club in the mid-twentieth century.16 As
13 “Book of Gold Fashion Show, 1946,” Clarke School of Dressmaking and Fashion Design Records, MSS 4490, Container 1, Folder 1, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland Ohio. 14 “Book of Gold, 1948,” Clarke School of Dressmaking and Fashion Design Records, MSS 4490, Container 1, Folder 1, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland Ohio. 15 Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 89-90. 16 “General Assembly of the State of Ohio Senate,” Clarke School of Dressmaking and Fashion Design Records, Series II, 1929-1979, MSS 4605, Container 1, Folder 2, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland Ohio. 85
Amanda Wicker represents, for African American women, building sewing skills was a way to break out of traditional occupational patterns, defy boundaries, and become valuable members of the community.
Sewing in the Country: The 4-H Movement and Rural Women
While African American women sewed to move up the occupational ladder, women in rural areas sewed predominately out of necessity, but also as a means of keeping up with the latest fashion trends. Despite the rise of the garment industry and the growing availability of ready-made garments, these markets were still largely out of reach for women in rural areas. Northeast Ohio had many such regions and was home to not only booming urban centers, but also miles and miles of farm land. The creation of the Rural Free Delivery system and catalogs such as Sears and Roebuck in the late nineteenth century provided women in the country access to consumer goods, namely sewing materials and some ready-made garments, but still did not guarantee quick access.17 For women out of touch with industrial centers or department stores, sewing was an essential skill that provided the basic necessities of clothing, but also provided
17 Gordon, Make it Yourself, 11. 86
vital life lessons; this was especially visible in the 4-H movement of the early twentieth century.
Many scholars have identified the importance of women’s sewing skills in rural areas. In Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of
Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940, historian Mary Neth highlights how the realities of farm life called for a different way of organizing family tasks. While urban and suburban middle class women’s domestic labor was often considered supplementary, farmwomen’s domestic chores played a fundamental role in making ends meet. Rural women performed any variety of tasks in and around the home, but perhaps their most significant contribution was “making do,” or stretching the farm income as far as possible. Given the volatile crop market and the fact that farmers were paid in lump sums only a couple of times a year, families who farmed through several generations understood the importance of stretching money. Women contributed to the family income by selling their own products in the market and making as many goods as possible at home. According to Neth, often a woman’s entire income was spent on food not produced on the farm, and clothing. Farmwomen who sewed had a marked advantage in
“making do” and were often extremely creative in adapting the latest fashions to rural culture. Women used flour and potato sacks for fabric bits and often made their own patterns from looking at pictures in catalogs. Clearly, women with sewing skills were extremely valuable on the farm.18
18 Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 17- 32. 87
For many farm girls, sewing was learned at a young age and the 4-H movement played a large role in teaching young rural women the utility of sewing. Rooted firmly in
Ohio, the 4-H movement grew out of an agricultural youth organization in Clark County, west of Columbus and represents the importance of sewing to farm families. Albert B.
Graham created what would become the 4-H movement in 1902 while working as the
Superintendent of Springfield Township schools. Graham oversaw eighty-three boys and girls in agricultural experiment clubs, which like other Progressive movements, encouraged youngsters to use scientific methods in their lives and homes. Encouraged to record data on their experiments and present their findings at the Clark County fair, boys and girls honed a number of important life skills in the early years of Graham’s program.
That initial year of club meetings was so successful, Graham sought help from the
College of Agriculture at The Ohio State University to fund and oversee student projects.
The Ohio State responded with a budget of five thousand dollars and offered Graham a position as the agriculture extension superintendent.19
The popularity and influence of agricultural clubs grew over the early years of the twentieth century. By 1904, the movement had grown to sixteen Boys’ and Girls’
Agricultural Experiment clubs in ten counties with membership well over six hundred, many of which were located in Northeast Ohio.20 Revealing the inadequacies of rural schools and the lack of an educational foundation for farmers became Graham’s personal mission. By 1909, Graham had procured twenty thousand dollars for agricultural
19 Robert W. and Virginia E. McCormick, “A.B. Graham’s Dream,” Timeline 13, no. 1 (January/February 1996): 30-43. 20 Ibid. 88
education for adults from the Ohio general assembly.21 While Graham pushed for rural education in Ohio, the national government saw the same need. The passage of the
Smith-Lever Act in 1914, which expanded the network of extension services to rural areas with the support of land grant schools like The Ohio State University, brought education to farms nationally, and most importantly opened new educational avenues for women.22 Fifty years after its creation, the 4-H movement saw organized chapters in seventy-five countries and over eight million youth members.23
Unlike other youth organizations in the early twentieth century that were sex or race specific, 4-H clubs were initially open to children of all races, genders, and creeds.
Graham invited all African American children to learn alongside white children in a time when segregation was the norm. Furthermore, Graham insisted that all programs be coeducational and that girls and boys choose projects that interested them most. Initially at least, boys and girls undertook similar experiments and projects. Unlike gender specific domestic arts programs implemented in public schools during the same time period, Graham saw agricultural experiments as open to both boys and girls, regardless of color.24 This ideal would fall by the wayside as the program was implemented across the country, but the 4-H program’s origins stand in stark contrast to the contested objectives and goals of the domestic arts movement.
21 Ibid. 22 Gordon, Make it Yourself, 13. 23 George C. Crout, “Albert B. Graham: School Days of a School Master,” Ohio History 86 (April 1977): 116. 24 McCormick, “A.B. Graham’s Dream,” 35; The domestic arts movement is discussed in detail in chapter 2 “Lessons in Domesticity: Household Science and the Significance of Sewing.” 89
However, like the domestic arts movement, scholars debate the origins and agenda of agricultural extension programs like 4-H. While some like Mary Neth that argue sewing education and a knowledge of sewing was essential to making ends meet on family farms and gave women significant influence over family finances, others criticize extension programs for enforcing gender divisions and imposing urban, middle class values on farm families.25 In Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-
1963, historian Katherine Jellison examines the push to modernize the farm in the early to mid-twentieth century and argues that the mechanization process largely called for women to retreat from the fields and spend their time in the home. Once essential actors in the crop cultivation process, time-saving machinery such as electricity, washing machines, and sewing machines actually gave more women more domestic responsibilities and limited them to the house more than before.26 Historian Ronald Kline offers a similar conclusion in Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. According to Kline the process of bringing technology into the home created work for women as they “got more done and raised their standard of living.”27
In contrast to Jellison and Kline, Sarah Gordon navigates the intricacies of agricultural extension programs and highlighted how extension, education, and land grant acts like the Smith-Lever Act sought to professionalize rural women’s work and include them in new higher educational initiatives. While many would go on to apply their sewing skills to the home, others were given opportunities to become demonstration
25 Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 30. 26 Katherine Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 2. 27 Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 112. 90
agents and teach women in rural areas “sophisticated” sewing techniques. Gordon asserts such endeavors made an important difference to poor rural women and helped to significantly raise standards of country living.28
4-H programs especially impacted the rural areas of Portage County in Northeast
Ohio. By 1912, Portage County alone was home to over seventy-five boys and girls clubs, which hosted over two thousand members.29 While sources detailing club activity in the area are scarce, we can piece together the contributions such activities made for rural youth using sources from surrounding areas and years. A pamphlet from Warren,
Ohio in Trumbull, County, just east of Portage County, details the projects 4-H club members could participate in and other general responsibilities of members. Although the pamphlet was published in the late 1930s, the mission of the program likely did not change drastically and still holds value for our study of the 1920s. Like many movements founded on Progressives ideals, the 4-H mission was grounded in goals to build better and more educated American citizens. But more importantly, the core mission of the organization was to improve self-confidence, build lasting relationships, and instill an appreciation for life-long learning.30
Involvement in such clubs demanded a great deal of boys’ and girls’ time and energy. Club meetings were held twice a month and members were expected to perform community service projects, participate in a number of physical activities, and most importantly, complete a skill-building project of their choice. Each member of the club
28 Gordon, Make it Yourself, 12-13. 29 “4-H in Portage has Proud History,” Record Courier, May 4, 2011. 30 “A Challenge to Rural Youth, 1938.” Warren, Ohio 4-H pamphlet, Portage County Historical Society, Ravenna, Ohio. 91
kept detailed records of his or her progress, read a series of informational publications on his or her topic, and then reported on his or her projects at the county fair in August.31
Such tasks not only demanded time management and practical organizational skills, but also required that school-aged boys and girls become good public speakers and leaders.
As members progressed from year to year, they were given the opportunity to become mentors to younger members and participate in training and planning committees. 4-H further facilitated educational field trips and other learning opportunities. Not only were
4-H club members building skill sets in their chosen arenas, but they were also building crucial leadership skills.
For young rural girls, sewing was a popular project choice. Warren’s 4-H club pamphlet discusses how sewing projects offered “opportunity for planning, designing, and selecting fabrics and patterns for useful articles and garments, and the development of skill in construction.”32 Unlike sewing lessons in formal domestic arts classes, 4-H assignments gave girls much more freedom in design and creative construction.
Furthermore, girls undertaking such tasks were expected to find their own materials, patterns, and time to complete their garments and were not required to participate in clothing construction. Project expectations were based on the level of skill a girl had achieved and were as basic as making a bean bag or as complex as planning a friend’s wardrobe and making all garments from underwear to outerwear.33 Yet perhaps the paramount difference between 4-H garment projects and domestic arts projects was that
31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 92
skill, not cultural expectations, was emphasized throughout each stage of the 4-H assignment process. Although clothing and home economic projects were directed to girls, they had the freedom to select from a menu of other agricultural tasks and were not limited to sewing or home-based activities based on gender roles.34
For women and girls on farms, sewing was an essential part of life. Largely cut- off from department stores and urban markets, sewing gave women the power to “make do” and play a crucial role in family finances. The emergence of the 4-H club movement emphasized the importance of skill building in both young men and women and gave youth the opportunity to build confidence, leadership skills, and rural life skills. While sewing was still seen as women’s work, it was viewed as an opportunity for creativity and as a way to influence family income. The set of circumstances under which rural women sewed differed greatly from those of African American women, but both represent the ways in which sewing skills helped to raise standards of living and provided a sense of empowerment.
Sewing Bonds: Women’s Clubs and Group Sewing
Although women sewed for different reasons depending on social and economic circumstances, sewing in a group setting was a popular activity during the early twentieth
34 Ibid. 93
century. Sewing circles date back to the nineteenth century,35 but increasingly, women met in organized groups to sew together for recreation, charity, or support of the war effort during the First World War. The rise of the club movement in the 1890s among white and African American women likely fueled the push to organize formal meetings and club objectives. In different but related ways, white and African American women organized sewing activities as a way to influence the civic sphere in both charitable sewing clubs and as volunteers with the American Red Cross and Young Women’s
Christian Association (YWCA).
Scholars debate the meaning and significance of sewing clubs and offer interpretations of club activity that fill a whole range of arguments and range from stirrings of “domestic feminism” to signs of chastity and obedience.36 Certainly both extremes and everything in between are valid depending on a woman’s situation. While broad arguments cannot be made about every sewing club that existed in Northeast Ohio between 1910 and 1930, some stand out as seemingly more dynamic than others.
Furthermore, given the significant moment in history in which these women existed, with rise of the feminist and suffrage movements, the very fact that they still met in groups to participate in sewing is worthy of analysis. Tied in part to the maternalist movement, a branch of Progressive ideals that celebrated women as the mothers of civic society, and to
35 Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the 19th- Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 149-150. 36 Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in Women’s Clubs, 1880- 1920 (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as a Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1980); Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1989); Skocpal, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. 94
the national development of women’s clubs, group sewing cannot be overlooked as a trivial pastime of middle class women.
By the turn of the twentieth century, women’s involvement in clubs blossomed into a national movement. Between 1880 and 1920 over one million white women joined the club movement. First organized in 1892, the Federation of Women’s Clubs operated in all forty-eight states by 1911.37 While participation in clubs was due in large part to the growth of leisure time and was especially popular among middle class women, women of all backgrounds participated in church, literature, charity, and dinner clubs.
Segregated from the Federation of Women’s Clubs, African American women too organized their own national club movement in 1896 with the creation of the National
Association of Colored Women (NACW).38 Historian Anne Ruggles Gere argues club activity not only built unity among women but also allowed them to “see themselves as part of a larger whole,” and “strengthen their perception of their own power to effect changes…”39 Indeed club women became a powerful force in early twentieth-century
America.
To a large degree, club activity gave rise to the maternalist movement by 1910.
Tied closely to Progressive era reform and municipal-housekeeping, maternalist politics were championed by the likes of Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, and agitated for women’s involvement in civic centers as the mothers of society.40 Historian Theda
Skocpol describes how largely white, Protestant, middle class, and highly educated
37 Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 329. 38 Morton, Women in Cleveland, 33. 39 Gere, Intimate Practices, 10. 40 Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 318. 95
women influenced, cared for, and cleaned up civil life by advocating for the extension of domestic ideals into the public sphere.41 Maternalism celebrated women’s maternal instincts by applying their nurturing capacity to badly neglected aspects of American society. While this movement allowed for women’s participation and influence in non- traditional settings, it empowered women while simultaneously limiting them to their capacity as mothers and is a subject contested by historians.42
Historian Allan Carlson elaborates on the complexity of this campaign in his book, The “American Way:” Family and Community in the Shaping of the American
Identity, and links the movement to a middle class desire to regulate the morals of the working classes, who they feared were threatening the integrity of American values. In
Carlson’s view, maternalism was a way for middle class women to police the working class as a means of protecting them from the corrupting forces of the workplace. To be sure, industrialism’s threat to the family was a very real concern during the Progressive era. The anxiety over traditional family structure, in Carlson’s view, drove the maternalist movement.43 In another ironic twist, middle class women occupied the civic sphere and pushed for legislation that would force working class women into their homes.
While the exact complexities of the maternalist movement go beyond the scope of this project, the concept provides a useful framework for examining how sewing clubs used this idea of empowering women as the mothers of community to influence the civic sphere. Many clubs in Portage County participated in sewing for charitable purposes and
41 Ibid., 328-329. 42 Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equality, 15-16. 43 Carlson, The “American Way”, 42. 96
as a way to better their communities. Some of these organizations were church affiliated, but many were not. The Kent Tribune is littered with reports of charitable sewing during the 1910s and 20s and suggests that women looked to clubs to fill their time but to also make an impact in their community. Perhaps the best illustration of a women’s club engaged in charitable sewing in the area was the Hospital Sewing Circle, located in
Ravenna, the county seat.
Organized in 1926, the twenty members of the Hospital Sewing Circle made garments, sheets, and supplies for the Portage County Hospital (later the Robinson
Memorial Hospital). Meeting monthly for lunch and sewing, this group organized under a formal constitution and wrote by-laws. They also kept meticulous meeting minutes carefully documenting business transactions, decisions, and number of garments produced. With a president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, purchasing agent, and chairman of work committee, all elected by a majority vote, the Hospital Sewing Circle offered a variety of leadership roles for its members and sought to be a legitimate organization with clearly outlined goals, objectives, and standards. Mandating an initiation fee of one dollar and monthly dues of ten cents, this club was made up entirely of middle class women, who could both afford the dues and afford to stay at home while their husbands worked. Furthermore, the Hospital Sewing Circle was made up entirely of married women, and echoes Skocpol’s findings of middle class women’s impulses to perform civic duties in their communities.44
44 “Constitution and By-Laws of the Hospital Sewing Circle,” Hospital Sewing Club records, Portage County Historical Society, Ravenna, Ohio; "1920 United States Federal Census,” database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestory.com : accessed 28 February 2010), entries for Elfie Cowles, Mae 97
In the group’s twenty-five-year history, the members performed immeasurable services to the Ravenna community and patients staying at the Robinson Memorial
Hospital. An article appearing in the Record Courier in 1946 celebrated the organization’s twentieth anniversary and commitment to serving the area. The article boasted that in its first twenty years of existence, the women of the Hospital Sewing
Circle completed 6,052 surgical dresses, mended 14,835 articles, and made 7,294 new articles, which included baby gowns, surgical masks, caps, and coats, children’s gowns, and bathrobes. Yet this celebration was not the only time the organization appeared in the paper, as a number of short clips documenting the group’s progress and service can be found in the Record Courier, suggesting that the work these women performed was indeed much appreciated in the community. Furthermore, the Hospital Sewing Circle’s records include a number of personal thank-you notes from patients and more prominent members of the community, including the president of the hospital, who felt as though the group should have received more “official” recognition, thanked them for their
“usefulness” and stated he “hardly [knows] how we could have gotten along without the assistance [they] have given.”45
The gratitude expressed by both recipients and observers of the club’s services suggests that the Hospital Sewing Circle was a valuable asset to the Ravenna community.
Furthermore, by forming around strict laws and codes, the members participated in a quasi-political organization, and asserted themselves as capable and knowledgeable
Fairchild, Gertrude Horr, Ardell Ingleson, Katherine Mann, Charlotte Seymour, Anna Sherwood, Ravenna, Ohio. 45 “Sewing Circle at Hospital Observes 20th Anniversary,” Record Courier, January, 1946; “Meeting Minutes,” Hospital Sewing Club Records, Portage County Historical Society, Ravenna, Ohio; “The H.W. Riddle Properties Letter” January 11, 1937, Hospital Sewing Club Records. 98
political participants, at a time when women’s political legitimacy was questioned, as women had won the vote only six years earlier. According to historian Nancy F. Cott in her examination of women’s political gains and setbacks during this era, after the winning of the vote, women’s political ability came under deep scrutiny by the American press. Due in part to the splintering woman’s movement and low voter turn out rates across the country, many social scientists were quick to conclude that women did not take their new political opportunities seriously and portrayed them as “characteristic nonvoters.”46 Women’s participation in quasi-political organizations like the Hospital
Sewing Circle attempted to challenge such beliefs about this apparent political ineptitude.
That this group was not formed until 1926, well after the ready-to-wear industry took hold in America, holds further critical implications about the use of sewing in white, middle class women’s lives. While it is unknown whether the members of the Hospital
Sewing Circle bought ready-made clothing or made their own garments for personal use, they nonetheless employed sewing as a means of helping their town and asserting themselves as productive and valuable members of the community. Although the sewing quite literally took place in the homes of various members of the club, their craft propelled them into the public arena, as they made several visits to the hospital to donate garments.
Although the Hospital Sewing Circle was organized after the height of the maternalist movement, the club’s contribution to civic Ravenna reflects the movement’s values. While these women did not flagrantly defy any social norms, by becoming the
46 Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 103-106. 99
“mothers” of patients staying at the Robinson Memorial Hospital, they made an impact on their community and facilitated their influence outside the home. Historian Karen
Blair applies the term “domestic feminism” to the American club movement and reasoned that participation in clubs allowed women to invoke “their supposed ‘natural talents,’ [and take] the ideology of the home with them, ending their confinement and winning influence in the public realm.”47 While Blair’s analysis focuses on literary societies, her arguments can be extended to sewing clubs like the Hospital Sewing Circle, as they represent one tactic women used to influence civic society.
Women’s activity on the home front during the First World War further illustrates how middle class women sought to contribute to civic society by sewing. Historian Lettie
Gavin describes how women contributed on the home front in a variety of capacities.
While some served over seas as nurses or in the Navy, the support from the home front was equally important.48 Especially significant among auxiliary roles were those associated with the American Red Cross. Founded by Clara Barton in 1881, the organization received its first Congressional Charter in 1900 with the charge to “give relief to and serve as a medium of communication between members of the American armed forces and their families and provide national and international disaster relief and mitigation.”49 Cleveland and its surrounding areas were organized into its official first chapter not long after in 1905, and became the headquarters of the Lake Division,
47 Blair, The Clubwoman as a Feminist, 4. 48 Lettie Gavin, American Women in World War I: They Also Served (Niwot CO: University Press of Colorado, 1997). 49 “A Brief History of the American Red Cross,” The American Red Cross, http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.86f46a12f382290517a8f210b80f78a0/?vgnextoid=271a2a ebdaadb110VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD&vgnextfmt=default (accessed March 3, 2011). 100
encompassing all of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana by the outbreak of World War I in
1918.50
During the First World War, national participation in the American Red Cross grew tremendously with local chapters growing from only one hundred and seven in
1914 to close to four thousand by 1918.51 Many of these volunteers were women.
Although those who volunteered on the home front did not as brazenly defy gender boundaries like women who served closer to battle, their auxiliary roles were nonetheless significant. Historian Lori D. Ginzberg describes the origins of American women’s aid in war efforts in Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the
19th- Century United States and argues that women first organized sewing societies during the Civil War as a means of contributing to the war effort. Yet rather than provide support for the war effort through sewing because of ideas about feminine moral superiority, Ginzberg asserts women engaged in wartime benevolent work based on ideas of efficiency and order.52 By volunteering with the Red Cross, women used their sewing skills as a display of patriotism, not femininity, and supplied troops with bandages, socks, sweaters, gloves, and bed sheets. Similar to ideas about domestic arts, American Red
Cross activity during World War I seemed to be based on cultural expectations about why women should sew, but Ginzberg’s analysis is helpful in understanding how women themselves viewed their participation in benevolent activities as contributing to the efficiency of the American war effort.
50 “American Red Cross, Cleveland Chapter,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, http://ech.case.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=ARCCC (accessed March 3, 2011). 51 “A Brief History of the American Red Cross,” The American Red Cross. 52 Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th- Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 103-104, 133. 101
During the course of American involvement in the First World War the Kent
Tribune published detailed stories of the Red Cross’s activities and contributions.
Concerned with addressing the humanitarian needs of war, the leaders of the local Red
Cross urged women to join the chapter playing largely on maternalist ideals. One article called on women as “brother’s keepers” and congratulated female volunteers for their noble work “inspired by love… love for all mankind.”53 Leaders asked women to hone their maternal feelings and channel their compassion for humanity by working with the
Red Cross. Much like clubwomen who extended their domestic skills into the civic realm, women on the home front were called on to provide for the wounded and injured troops.
While Red Cross leaders saw women as the natural undertakers of auxiliary work, the women saw their work as “imperative” and as Ginzberg asserts, an extremely crucial aspect of the war effort. One woman who wrote to the Tribune suggested that if their jobs were not done immediately “a serious calamity and national disgrace [was] inevitable.”54
For these Red Cross volunteers and others, sending comforts and bandages to the wounded was not only patriotic, but also a matter of life and death. Like the production of guns and bullets, Red Cross women considered their needles and thread equally important weapons.
Without doubt, volunteers took great pride in their contributions to the war effort.
In addition to sending articles detailing their progress to the Tribune, the Kent Red Cross chapter also held monthly exhibits to display their work. One such exhibit in January of
53 “The Red Cross Women- Sisters of the Red Cross,” Kent Tribune, May 2, 1918. 54 “Red Cross Work in Kent,” Kent Tribune, November 17, 1917. 102
1918 featured half a dozen tables of knitting work, surgical dressings, and comfort items such as pillows, and invited members of the community to learn about the Red Cross’s mission and work. In only eight months, the women of Kent produced and shipped nearly six thousand articles to Cleveland headquarters. Among their materials were nearly two thousand surgical bandages, over seven hundred towels, and more than one hundred sweaters.55 Like the members of the Hospital Sewing Circle, Red Cross women in Kent saw their sewing skills as essential to bettering the community in a time of need.
While white women volunteered with the American Red Cross during the war effort, African American women were largely segregated from this organization.
Historian Nikki Brown calls the American Red Cross “one of the country’s leading segregated charitable institutions” during the First World War and discusses how African
American women were excluded from many charitable institutions during this time period.56 African American women had more success volunteering with the NACW and in doing so, built an impressive network of Hostess Houses stretching from Ohio to
Texas and providing recreational activities and support to African American laborers and soldiers during the war. While sewing was not the main objective in Hostess House activity, Hostesses often made decorative supplies for the houses and oversaw home economics courses as part of their daily duties and figured heavily in their volunteer efforts.57
55 “Red Cross Work in Kent,” Kent Tribune, January 24, 1918. 56 Nikki Brown, Private Politics and Public Voices: Black Women’s Activism from World War I to the New Deal (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 66. Brown mentions that hostess houses were active in Ohio, but no evidence was found of hostess houses active in the greater Cleveland area. 57 Ibid., 79. 103
The Red Cross, Hostess Houses, and Hospital Sewing Circle represent more innovative uses of sewing by women contributing to the betterment civic society, but scholars debate how “progressive” sewing clubs really were. Like the ironies of the maternalist movement, the practice of club sewing is embedded with incongruity as well.
In Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in Women’s Clubs, 1880-1920, Ann
Ruggles Gere highlights how women serious about the club movement frowned upon sewing clubs and often banned sewing from their meetings. Seen as tied too closely to ideals of femininity and chastity, sewing was linked to a notion that the craft could curtail a woman’s sexuality, unlike reading, which might give her immoral impulses.58 While
Gere’s analysis may certainly hold merit in some cases, other historians contest this view.
Scholar Rosika Parker refutes such conclusions and instead argues that the craft has long been the site of ideological struggle. She describes the “dual face of embroidery” and argues sewing functioned both as a “weapon of resistance” and a “source of constraint,” and promoted submission while it was simultaneously used as a means of independence.59 According to Parker, sewing cannot be accepted as symbolizing idealized feminine attributes. The heated debate over the meaning of sewing by scholars emphasizes the problematic nature of this craft and merits further analysis.
The various disputes over the significance of sewing also demonstrate how crucial the context in which women sewed is to understanding their motivations. While women like those in the Hospital Sewing Circle used sewing to extend their influence in the civic world, other clubwomen used sewing as a guise to participate in other more controversial
58 Gere, Intimate Practices, 131. 59 Parker, The Subversive Stitch, xix. 104
activities. According to Gere, many literacy and suffrage groups operated under the title of a sewing circle as a subterfuge for participating in unacceptable activities. While it is difficult to know for certain the motivations behind the organization of a sewing club, by looking at the progression of a club’s activities over time we can surmise that not all groups gathered specifically to sew.
Many clubs in Northeast Ohio were initially chartered as sewing clubs, only to change into literary societies years later. One such club was the Book and Thimble Club,
Cleveland’s second oldest women’s club. First organized in 1890, Book and Thimble began as a neighborhood association of women who gathered to sew and talk. By 1900 the club had transformed into a literacy group of women “looking to better themselves” and joined the Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1918.60 The Fidleles and Fortnightly
Clubs in Kent shared similar histories. According to a local historian, both organizations were originally chartered for sewing and social activities, but by 1919 were chartered as literary societies and joined the Federation.61 Curiously, well into the 1920s the Kent
Tribune still advertised both as sewing groups.62 Yet the General Federation never specifically banned sewing clubs and apparently did not see them as offensive in nature.
In 1896, Article II of their original constitution explained the objective of the organization as “…to bring into communication with each other the various women’s clubs throughout the world, in order that they may compare methods of work and become
60 Miss. Brown, “The Book and Thimble Club,” 1940, Book and Thimble Club Records 1890- 1957: MSS. 3510, Container 3, Folder 1, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. 61 Karl H. Grismer, The History of Kent: Historical and Biographical (Kent, OH: Courier-Tribune Publishing, 1932), 179-180. 62 “The Fortnightly Club…” Kent Tribune, November 25, 1920; “The Fidleles Club…” Kent Tribune, January 27, 1927. 105
mutually helpful.” By 1953, their revised charter still did not ban sewing but mandated clubs be “for educational, industrial, philanthropic, literary, artistic, and scientific culture,”63 suggesting that a sewing club, as an artistic or philanthropic endeavor, could certainly fit into the Federation’s mission.
If Gere is correct that women sometimes deliberately misrepresented their organizations as sewing clubs while they engaged in other activities that might meet with male disapproval, it is possible that aforementioned clubs never saw sewing as their primary objective. While evidence does not indicate what the true organizational objectives were, these clubs perhaps illustrate other ways middle class women used sewing to challenge social expectations. Unlike the Hospital Sewing Circle women who sewed to aid their community, women in the Fidleles, Fortnightly, and Book and Thimble clubs used sewing as a bridge for participation in other activities. Regardless of the differences between these groups, all demonstrate the multifaceted meanings of the craft during an era where women’s place in society was contested anyway.
With the rise of the garment industry and domestic arts movement, cultural expectations about why a woman should sew began to shift in the early twentieth century.
While domestic arts classes marketed sewing to schoolgirls as a way to hone their maternal instincts and domestic responsibility, these were not always the reasons and ways in which women engaged with the craft. Dependent largely on class, racial, and regional circumstances, women and girls sewed for a myriad of reasons that did not always mesh with established cultural expectations of how “feminine” labor should be
63 Mildred White Wells, “Unity in Diversity:” The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, (Washington D.C.: The General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1953), 26, 475. 106
conducted. This chapter has examined a few examples of women’s different motivations for sewing and how they often sewed on their own terms. As illustrated by Amanda
Wicker, sewing for African American women was often a tactic used to obtain more attractive jobs. While sewing as a desirable and skilled occupation was becoming increasingly obsolete for white women, this was not the case for African Americans, especially in Cleveland. Often cut off from urban markets, women in the country sewed largely out of necessity and as a way of keeping up with fashion. Rural girls often engaged in sewing through 4-H club activity, which unlike many domestic arts classes, encouraged creativity and leadership skills. Finally, clubwomen, both white and black, found that sewing together in a group setting was not only a way to build gender solidarity, but also to impact their communities. As evidenced by these case studies, women were active negotiators in the debate over the cultural symbolism of sewing. CONCLUSION
An Activity for all Generations
In 1943, a one-room fabric shop opened in Cleveland, Ohio that sold fabric and sewing supplies to eager customers. Originally called the Cleveland Fabric Store, this small shop blossomed into a wildly successful national corporation known today as Joann Fabrics. While today the store has over seven hundred and fifty locations in every state except Hawaii, its national headquarters still exist in the area of its origin: Northeast Ohio, in Hudson on Darrow
Road.1 The success of Joann Fabrics not only reveals the significance of Northeast Ohio as a center for sewing, but it also suggests that sewing has the ability to transcend time as an important skill and hobby for millions of American men and women.2
1 Adrienne Carter and Jeffery Cane, “Leonard Green Offers $1.6 for Joann Stores,” Dealbook, New York Times, December 23, 2010, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/leonard-green-offers-1-6-billion-for-jo-ann- stores/ (accessed March 14, 2011); According to this article Joann Fabrics is being bought out by Leonard Green and Partners for $1.6 billion. While it cannot be said for certain that the company’s national headquarters will remain in Hudson, that this company is worth $1.6 billion is quite significant. 2 “Sewing and Crafting Decades, Looking Back to Now,” Joann Fabrics Flyer, (Hudson, Ohio: August 8, 2010).
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The rise of ready-made clothing in the early twentieth century eliminated the urgent need to know how to construct garments, but it did not eliminate sewing as a valuable pastime in the lives of Americans. Sewing has survived generations of technological, social, and economic changes in American society to remain a significant fixture in the lives of many. Yet what is perhaps most captivating about this craft is its ability to adapt to different social circumstances and to be transformed by those who engaged with it.
This thesis has offered a number of critical evaluations of how sewing functioned in American society and especially the lives of women between 1900 and 1930 in
Northeast Ohio. Situated during the rise of the garment trade, industrialization, the
Progressive Era, the push for and success of women’s suffrage and massive immigration, this thesis argues that although factory owners employed women as the “natural” operatives of the craft and domestic science classes marketed sewing as the duty of a good wife, women did not always adhere to such prescriptions and sewed for their own reasons and motivations. This thesis has attempted to take a critical look at how sewing functioned in different capacities and in different locations such as factories, schools, and at home in an effort to establish how sewing was used in different ways by women from different classes and races.
In many ways, this thesis has used sewing as a lens to examine how people in different classes and racial locations understood particular notions of femininity. While sewing has been established as a feminine pursuit, the definition of femininity is disputed from class to class. White working class and immigrant women made up the majority of 109
employees in Northeast Ohio’s many garment factories and were called upon as machine operatives and hand sewers because sewing was seen as women’s work. Ironically, women only entered the factory once the section system of garment construction drastically deskilled the trade.1 Yet the belief that women should perform this kind of work remained, despite the fact the work took place outside the home and had little relation to the kind of sewing women did in the home. Furthermore, women working in factories did so in crowded and dangerous conditions and sewed using quick repetitive motions to make a single piece of thousands of garments over and over again. Yet for the working class, sewing was a means of survival and way to make ends meet.
Meanwhile, the rise of the domestic arts movement in 1899 marketed sewing as a maternal and home based activity. Although sewing courses were taught in private, technical, and public schools to a large mix of students, they operated under the assumption that girls would be able to both afford to stay in school long enough to take each year of lessons and that they would be able to stay home as a wife and mother and not be needed to contribute to their family incomes. While this was a reality for middle class and upper class students, girls of lower classes often did not stay in school past the eighth grade and went to work in the factories at a very young age. Furthermore, domestic arts classes in Northeast Ohio did not teach sewing in a capacity that would be useful for employment in any of the sewing trades. The skills emphasized in these classes focused on hand work and construction of garments like aprons, children’s clothing, and teddy bears, not machine work and the quick, accurate movements that were needed for
1 Bender, “’Too Much Distasteful Masculinity,’” 97. 110
work in industry.2 Related in many ways to the middle class maternalist movement that celebrated women as the mothers of society and protected workingwomen’s capacity as mothers by keeping them out of industrial labor, the domestic arts movement idealized sewing as an activity that honed maternal skills and celebrated motherhood.3 Yet this motherhood ideal was a reality only middle and upper class women could achieve.
Despite these varying expectations of how and where women should sew, women often sewed on their own terms. Although still tied to issues of class and social circumstance, sewing was never merely an endeavor used by middle class women to show their domesticity or by working class women to earn their pay envelopes. For
African American women in Ohio during the era of the Great Migration, sewing was a valuable tool used to move up the occupational ladder and obtain some of the most desirable jobs as teachers or dressmakers.4 For rural women in Northeast Ohio, sewing was an essential skill needed to make ends meet, but was also a way to access the latest fashions and have influence over family budgets.5 Finally, clubwomen used sewing in multifaceted ways to better their communities, influence the civic sphere, and aid in the war effort.
Issues of class and work can be especially complicated, but this thesis has added a voice to the discussion of how gendered labor is conceived and maintained through time.
While I have drawn on an extensive body of work concerning women’s work, education, and domestic tradition, I have attempted to examine how sewing functioned in each,
2 Bryner, Cleveland Education Survey: The Garment Trades, 128. 3 Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equality, 15-16. 4 Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 70. 5 Neth, Preserving the Family Farm, 17-32. 111
rather than just examine the craft in terms of domestic labor like many other scholars have.6 By exploring sewing in each of these capacities, I examined how notions of femininity remained tied to the craft even as it moved outside the domestic sphere and permeated all areas of society.
While I have attempted to expand the bounds of sewing and analyze them critically, this is by no means an exhaustive analysis. Much more work is yet to be done on sewing in the early twentieth century, but perhaps more importantly, in the decades beyond. How did notions of sewing as a feminine activity change as the United States entered the Great Depression? I have offered a very topical discussion of sewing as a part of the war effort for the First World War, but how did women’s volunteerism and benevolent activity change with the Second World War? Did more women abandon their needles for power tools and join other Rosie the Riveters in American factories? How did the notion of sewing as “women’s work” fare during the second wave feminist movement? But perhaps the biggest question is how has sewing endured as a valuable activity for centuries? Sewing is a seemingly insignificant endeavor, but when examined closely, as this thesis has done, it reveals much about the social construction of gender.
The craft indeed has the ability to stitch people, friends, and generations together.
6 Gordon, Make it Yourself; Page Fernandez, “Innovations for Home Dressmaking and the Popularization of Stylish Dress,” Journal of American Culture 17; Burman, The Culture of Sewing.
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